Musings on the Philosophy of Religion META

It's Not Great

It’s fashionable to dunk on atheists in the year of Someone’s Lord 2025. I think this has been true for some time, but it’s more pronounced now. For the philosophy of religion, it’s the Most Effective Tactic Available (META) for attention on social media.

Here are some reasons for why I think this is the case.

Young People Of Every Generation Have A Countercultural Streak.

When I was a student about 15 years ago, being an atheist or advocate of secular reasoning made you countercultural. Now, that outlook is pervasive and normal, so people 10+ years younger than me are coming out against that.

Probably 60% Of This Is Indirectly Attributable To Alex O’Connor.

The most prominent Atheist (he would identify Agnostic in his wiser age) YouTuber, Alex O’Connor, has a collegial relationship with many people he doesn’t agree with, including Christians.

O’Connor has a theology and philosophy degree from Oxford and has disavowed some crude aspects of New Atheism. He constantly engages with Christians in civil conversations and shows encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible.

This gives Christians the wrong impression: that the whole atheist movement is backing down from its core principle (that atheism is correct). They further have the impression that New Atheism isn’t cool and that Christian Apologetics is ascendent.¹

What makes this even more funny is that it leads many Christians to think that O’Connor is imminently converting to Christianity. After all, how could one be so educated in the intellectual side of Christianity and not be a Christian? Obviously, this is a crazy logical leap by those Christians, but the point is they are emboldened.

Many “New Atheists” Grew Out Of It…But Are Still Convinced Atheists

Many former new atheists/anti-theists maintain their atheism and most of their strong opposition to religion while still adopting a tolerant temperament. A good example of this is the second biggest atheist creator, Genetically Modified Skeptic.

This demographic has studied religion long enough to recognize that it’s a part of culture, neither inherently good nor bad. They’re still very progressive and have a net-negative view of religion, but their deeper philosophy isn’t much different from what it was 7 years or so ago. They just have different views of the sociology and politics of religion. They don’t hate it as much, even if they think it’s wrong.²

The reason why someone like GM Skeptic has less subscribers than Alex O’Connor is probably because he doesn’t have as much patience for Apologetic arguments and the yucky views some of them have.

In this way, many atheist content consumers are a little smarter than they were a decade ago. They don’t emit “debate me bro” energy, and they won’t defend the mean and unserious atheist memes, even if they agree with some anti-theist beliefs in principle.

This is the bulk of where the former “New Atheists” are now. They haven’t stopped being atheists, they just grew up and stopped acting like teenage boys because they ceased to be teenage boys. Now they’re grown men, and are more well adjusted. But in the content space, this looks like a retreat.

There Are Very Smart Agnostics On YouTube.

Okay, maybe it’s just Joe Schmid.

Schmid is an interesting counterpoint to the YouTube atheism of the last decade. Schmid is, as they say, wicked smart (A Princeton PhD candidate!), and I wouldn’t want to get in an argument with him for or against God. As an agnostic, he goes on pretty much any YouTube channel and says good things and bad things from both perspectives.

A smart agnostic counterbalancing online atheism was bound to happen. After all, agnosticism is a defensible position and there are countless perspectives on God. Schmid is just the one who first filled that role.

Having said that, when he says silly things like not knowing what an atheist means when they say “I don’t have good evidence for God,” I kind of roll my eyes a bit. But Christians probably hear him say that and it confirms their priors about atheists having unreasonably high standards of evidence.

Atheists Are Terminally Online And Will Take The Bait

In marketing, it used to be said that “sex sells.” The new saying should be “rage engages.”

I don’t have any social science to prove this, but I think more atheists are terminally online than theists, because theists are usually embedded in some sort of religious community, while atheists are inclined to find their community online. What’s more, when you leave religion or belief in God, you’re in a vulnerable, anxious position, where you’re looking for answers, very sensitive to the excesses of religion, and defensive about your beliefs (this is why New Atheism became popular in the first place).

In the social media sphere this means that it’s easy to get clicks, views, and engagement to provoke atheists. Arguably, this is the opposite of the META 15 years ago, when one got that engagement by being anti-theist or anti-Christian.

I don’t personally care to watch an edgy video by Capturing Christianity saying he doesn’t take atheism seriously. Cool story bro, I hope the video helps pay your mortgage. But many less-secure atheists, or people who can’t help but click on something that will make them angry, will.

As far as I can tell, rage bait is more common among the big Christian creators than it is among the big atheist creators. Oh really, you think that atheism leads to nihilism, or that atheism is a religion or yawwnnnnn… oh sorry about. This content is so stale for me, but some people can’t not take the bait.

It’s possible that I’m cherry-picking here, but if you look at the two biggest atheist channels, O’Connor and GM skeptic, there’s a noticeable absence of rage bait.

Meanwhile, content like this is pretty common on apologist channels, even if they’re not this explicit.

Now, there are some atheist creators that post bait. For instance, I would consider this title and thumbnail bait, even if it’s for an otherwise interesting video overviewing how science disproves a fundamentalist reading of Noah’s Ark.

The difference is that Holy Koolaid is not a top five atheist creator, while if you look at top five Apologist creators (or just apologists with a bigger platform than HK), you’ll see this kind of content in abundance: calling out atheists, implying things about their character and reasoning.

In contrast, it’s pretty much absence from Alex O’Connor and GM skeptic’s catalogue. Put another way, bait is likely a core element of the Christian content strategy, but for atheists, after a certain level of growth, it ceases to be effective.³

Many Christian Apologist Are Just Content Farmers

Content farming, for those of you who don’t know, is the practice of reacting or responding to someone else’s original content with your own responses and rebuttals in a fair use way. It’s derivative, but many people (including myself) find it entertaining!

It’s worth mentioning that content farming is substantially different from being a response channel. Response channels are often heavily researched, and not talking off the cuff. For more info, check this footnote.⁴

The main difference I see between atheist and Christian content is that atheists typically respond to Christian content that is explicitly Apologetic or calling out atheists.⁵

But on the Apologist side, we see slimier tactics. Namely, they’ll watch random interviews with former Christians and Destroy Them With Facts And Logic. I’m old enough to remember when atheists cherry picked every rando’s belief in God for logical fallacies was cringe.⁶

But this is basically what we saw recently with Alex O’Connor’s interview with Rhett McLaughlin. I was originally going to post a montage of clips of how many Apologists responded to this podcast, but Paulogia illustrated it more humorously in the first few minutes of this video⁷ (you can listen to it as a podcast if you think it’s too long):

Maybe this is just my own cultural biases talking, but I think it’s silly, rude, and in bad taste to rebut someone’s conversion, deconversion, or deconstruction story if they are not explicitly a professional advocate of that position. This may come as a shock for my fellow internet debate bros, but not every public assertion is an invitation for an argument.

There’s something substantially different from, say, Alex O’Connor responding to Wes Huff and Capturing Christianity responding to Rhett Mclaughlin. The former is a professional apologist and academic making specific claims about the world, theology, and so on. It’s his job to invite criticism. The latter is just someone explaining his personal experience with religion, which is often messy, emotional, and hard.

It’s one thing if you or I or any viewer comes to judgment about him for those things, but to make money off of him, by making a video arguing against him, is just slimey.

There Are More Christians Than There Are Atheists On The Internet.

This may come off as a hot take! But it’s undeniably true just because atheism, by all measures, is a minority position. Though internet atheists may have had upwards of a decade head start on popular internet forums (YouTube, Reddit, etc), we’re seeing a rebalancing where the representation of Christian Apologetics actually reflects the culture.

It was weird for a decade that a view held by less than 10% of the population (maybe even 5% by some measures) was dominant relative to a view that was held by 50%+.

There’s pent up demand, and some creators are benefiting from that. For this reason, pretty much every change in algorithmic promotion can be explained by “because the Christians wanted it.” This has been commented on before by James Fodor, when watching a stream of Joe Schmid and Cameron Bartuzzi talking about mistakes atheists make. Namely, commenters on Bartuzzi’s stream are much nicer to Schmid than they are to an atheist. It’s because they view atheists as close minded.⁸

Now, that stream took place like three years ago, but I still think it’s indicative of the META. Christians are becoming more active in religious debates. That’s fine! But it seems like this reality is tilting the norms of debate, where atheists are seen as close minded and not as reasonable as whacky, unhinged homophobes.

What’s This All Mean?

This post was just an overview of social media dynamics for philosophy of religion. Namely, one is rewarded by the algorithm for being critical of atheism, even if that criticism is shallow. You can get away with saying some rather mean things and doing some slimey content practices. Atheist viewers take the bait and give these people engagement, and atheist creators are typically silent, allowing stereotypes to proliferate.

This post is a primer for my next few posts defending lacktheism (the position that one doesn’t believe in God because they don’t lack good evidence). I think lacktheism is a completely permissible philosophical position to take, it’s just been stigmatized by Christians.⁹ These social dynamics have further made it uncool to be a lacktheist.

I don’t think atheists should surrender ground here. Read my next post to see why!

1. Justin Brierly even wrote a whole book on Christianity making a comeback and the evidence was just…vibes? I haven’t read it, but apparently there’s no counterpoint to the consensus that western societies are growing more secular.

2. FWIW I consider myself in this crowd, though I’m not as progressive as GMS

3. Because, again, the New Atheists of yesteryear tire of this lack of nuance, but Christian content watchers crave it!

4. If you want to get an idea of a channel’s derivative content is farming versus if it’s a quality response, content farming is usually responding to content as if it were a livestream, where there’s lots of pausing and talking off the cuff. What’s more, content farming usually involves videos that have already gotten popular. If you realize that Apologist channels are just content farms, it makes sense how they hang on every word of Alex O’Connor’s latest podcast that mentions Christianity. It’s silly but also somehow annoying.

5. Paulogia and Rationality Rules are good examples of this kind of atheist creator. Heck, they sometimes pay for apologist courses or rebut arguments made by professional apologists through paywalls. That’s not passively monitoring the algorithm, that’s going above and beyond. That’s putting a lot of thought and intention in the content you create.

6. It’s a weird double standard that this is okay now! The reason why it’s “okay” is because it’s theologically important for Christian Apologists to demonstrate that non-Christians aren’t denying Christianity for good or rational reasons. If it can be demonstrated that rational, sincere people can know all the facts apologists do and still be non-believers, it calls to question their beliefs about God and salvation.

7. This video is a good example of a response video to a bunch of content farmers. Paulogia watched 7+ hours worth of content, condensed the relevant bits and added his own responses in commentary. That’s good quality work and good, quality content. Content farming would be what the apologists did who did the original response (lazy).

8. Because they must! See footnote 6.

9. It’s socially permissible to dunk on atheists or appeal to Joe Schmid or an esoteric proof by an obscure Apologist philosopher without having a serious conversation about why atheists believe as they do. I agree with many criticisms of the online atheism of the 2010s, but I think we're overcompensating and being too harsh on atheism. My next few posts will dive into the philosophical and social reasons atheists embrace lacktheism