In theprevious installmentof this impromptu series, I asked somewhat facetiously if it’s “time to bring back New Atheism.” The shrewdly-crafted headline made it especially easy to catch those of you who decided to respond without bothering to read the actual article first, because in the literal opening sentence, I clarified that no, I am not seriously advocating that “we” should somehow magically re-import the peculiar “New Atheism” of the mid-2000s — now a relic of a bygone era anyways. Because whatever “discourse” correction might be necessary today, it would bear little practical resemblance to that obsolete mini-phenomenon of two decades ago. At the same time, plenty of worrying “discursive” trends can be observed in 2026 that are in some sense successors to what “New Atheism” once identified, and in theory assembled itself to counteract. These maladies have only grown more pervasive, updated for recent political and technological developments. Namely the escalating flurry of unchallenged superstition that’s constantly billowing all around us, with increasingly overt political applications, and with no appreciable barrier really existing anymore between the digital and tactile realms. The present predicament would thus seem to cry out for a newly invigorated “secular” intervention, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in delineating how this “intervention” would even work, or if it’s even possible at all.

Take, for instance, a 2021surveyof Americans’ religious attitudes, which found that the demographic by far the most likely to agree with the statement “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings” were self-described Biblical Literalists. Note that this survey was conducted during a relatively more embryonic phase of what has since fully blossomed into a mass-scalePedo Panic— centered, of course, on the belief that the levers of societal power are fundamentally controlled by elite pedophile rings, the ghastly members of which conspire to rule over us all, in furtherance of their pedophilic interests. Systematic mass rape of children, accordingly, is omni-present and deliberately unpunished, as the evildoers are forever shielded from “accountability.” You know the drill —it’s the defining mythos of our age!

Just a few years ago — 2021! — this sort of belief was mainly seen through the lens of wild-eyed internet manias such as QAnon, and therefore understood as the province of the “Populist Right” — an admittedly nebulous political category, but one which, broadly construed, could be reasonably said to correlate with what one might call the more fervid styles of “grassroots” Christianity. Or more specifically, the unlimited varieties of homegrown American Protestantism, subject as they are to no hierarchical constraints around proper biblical exegesis, with no formal clerical authority promulgating any binding doctrinal decrees. Your average local pastor can be his own supreme theologian. The ensuing beliefs are often aggressively “political,” in the sense of Americanized partisan self-sorting — and commonly preached with a distinctively frantic, catastrophist urgency. Disdain for cultural liberalism is the default, and by extension, disdain for the modern Democratic Party. So it’s not a huge stretch for avowed believers in Biblical Literalism to infer that if Democrats are already wreckers of traditional Christian morality, and thus already doing Satan’s bidding, it would naturally follow that they’d likewise be running occult pedo rings out of the Clinton Foundation basement.

Hence, the loose political logic weaving together Biblical Literalism and Pedo Panic is easily explicable. But surely it would have to go deeper than just standard partisan expedience? Surely there must be some more elemental epistemic overlap between 1) Believing in floridly unregulated incarnations of Christianity and 2) Being primed to believe in floridly unregulated theories around demonic pedophile networks. The habits of mind inculcated by the former must be doingsomethingto inculcate the latter… right? Because if you’re willing to accept the literal truth of various primeval myths — such as that millennia ago, after anearthquake purportedly struck ancient Palestine, masses of graves suddenly opened, corpses arose from their eternal slumber, gained some sort of sentience, and were spotted traversing around Jerusalem — you would seem to have embraced certain habits of mind that would foreseeably incline you to embrace myriad modern-day myths, without much regard for the soundness of their evidentiary basis.

A funny thing happened in the years following that 2021 survey: Democrats started embracing their own politically expedient version of QAnon! The DNC and similar organs now routinelytauntRepublicans as the “Pedophile Protection Party,” as though that’s their core, animating mission. What to make of this development from the standpoint of religious versus secular epistemology? Because although religious belief has by no means been expurgated from Left-liberal precincts, Democrats do have the relatively more secularized coalition, among which there are relatively few Biblical Literalists. Yet increasingly, we see even loud-and-proud liberal atheist punditslike Bill Maherstarting to proclaim that as of 2026, they have no choice but to agree that QAnon wasfundamentally right all along— even if Bill might continue to have marginal reservations about the more extravagant side-plots, i.e. the cannibalism and infant sacrifice stuff. Nonetheless, whatever mode of information-processing Bill’s been employing as of late has evidently led him to conclude that yes, wow, it turns out there really are these deviously hidden networks of villainous pedo-traffickers that run everything.

You might reasonably ask: Wait, doesn’t this throw a monkey wrench into my whole thesis? That there’s an overriding need for some full-throated “secular” corrective, in view of the baleful discursive problems currently plaguing us? Because I certainly couldn’t blame “religion” as such for Bill Maher and his liberal fellow-travelers, themselves (mostly) irreligious — or at least nottraditionally“religious” — peddling such crank conspiratard nonsense. Right?

Well, here’s one way to think about it: certain haywire beliefs, and the habits of mind underpinning them, have a way of percolating outward from their religious progenitors, especially when aided by the pulsating vortex of modern techno-innovation. All must bow before the Almighty Algorithm. Or in other words, beliefs which might have once been largely confined to a Biblical Literalist fringe can progressively infiltrate other sectors of the epistemic landscape. And the next thing you know, nominally “secular” folk end up just as blinkered by scatterbrain “religious” prophecies — perhaps with some light modifications added to accommodate their pre-existing worldviews. Presumably, Bill Maher has not yet come to believe that the harrowing elite pedo-rings are supernaturally engineered by Satan in a grand cosmic plot to sabotage Christianity. However, the basic elements of the belief Bill has adopted can still be traced back to the dysregulated patterns of thought that strongly correlate with, and in large measure derive from, exactly the sorts of fervid religiosity that Bill would otherwise claim to deplore.

Maybe a healthy dose ofirreligiosity, or at least aversion to disordered mythological thinking, would’ve been helpful as the internet frenetically trawled through the latest rounds of “Epstein Files.” Because yeah, that definitely felt like a situation where widespread impairment of critical faculties was less than ideal. Scores of social media users were flooded with a tsunami of scandalous-seeming government records, and voila: an overnight online consensus emerged that these “files” contained rock-solid proof of rampant pedo-raping activities. Everyone’s worst fears about secret occult sex rituals were true! Email participants were totally speaking in code — communicating their depraved plans by winking reference to random foodstuffs. Yadda yadda yadda.

How might some “irreligious” intervention have supplied a useful corrective here? The “files,” of course, did not contain the sensational pedo-crime evidence that the internet uniformly agreed they contained. But what’s that got to do with monotheism, you ask? How does this have any connection to the tenets of Christianity or Islam? Well, for one thing, if you were delving into those poorly-organized archives with an eye toward rooting out material that would validate your pre-existing belief in a certain supernatural mythos — such as that Satan is actively interceding in human affairs, and can take possession of corporeal bodies, whereby the demonically-possessed hosts are beguiled into performing graphic child sex rituals — you’re probably not starting off on the soundest empirical footing as you embark on your document analysis journey.

Given the reality of algorithmic incentives, and the baseline human credulity that exists anyway since time immemorial, foregrounding a “religious” analytical method for evaluating Epstein Files can bleed out rather easily into “non-religious” interpretive paradigms — that is, sublimated by people who may not even consciously affirm any belief in a supernatural “Satan” entity. But they still encounter and absorb, at extraordinarily high volumes, the epistemic habits of the quintessentially “religious” — insofar as it’s a quintessentially religious conviction that demons are the proximate cause of perceived political and social troubles. A well-founded “corrective” intervention would thus undertake to explain the rather big flaws in a Satan-based framework for processing important information, such as the evidentiary prerequisites for bringing criminal charges. Emphasis might be placed on the special pitfalls of this uninhibited superstition amidst a giant free-for-all social media firestorm. The resulting lessons would be applicable whether or not any particular individual is a conscious believer in monotheism. Because legions of unsuspecting internet users are consuming these ascendant Podcastological theories — their habits of mind increasingly molded by epistemic tendencies which are “religious” in the first instance, even if those individuals would never personally self-describe as believers in Biblical Literalism.

Source: Michael Tracey