Criticism from Within the Secular Movement Itself

Stephen LeDrew's history of the modern secular movement traces New Atheism's reception as contested from within organised atheism and humanism itself as much as from outside it, not only a fight between believers and unbelievers. LeDrew documents a fracture within the wider secular movement in the early 2010s, sometimes called the Atheism Plus split, in which a portion of secular activists argued that atheism and humanism needed to be paired explicitly with social justice commitments, feminism and opposition to racism chief among them, while other prominent New Atheist figures and their followers rejected that pairing as a departure from the movement's proper focus on religion and reason alone, a disagreement conducted largely in public online forums and conferences rather than through any formal institutional process. LeDrew situates this fragmentation as evidence that New Atheism was never the unified current its shared publishing moment made it briefly appear to be, a coalition of writers and readers who agreed that religion deserved open, sustained criticism but who turned out to disagree considerably once the conversation moved past that single shared premise to questions of tone, priority and what, beyond criticising religion, the movement's wider social commitments ought to be.