/lit/ - Literature

>What went wrong
Nu-atheism is a response to American protestantism, both blind evangelicals and lightweight 'spiritualists' that barely even attend church. In the aggregate, people that got into nu-atheism were not looking for refutations to canonical arguments for God from the catholic church, they were young people fed up with their lunatic pastors calling them devil worshippers for thinking homosexuality isn't a "choice."
Nu-atheism is itself pretty lightweight, as tearing open the hypocrisy and lunacy of American evangelicals is child's play. But because that protestant spirit is baked into conservative American suburbia, discovering nu-atheism is for many people their own version of a spiritual awakening. It allows them to shatter the natural order they grew up in and follow a 'secret' truth that most of those around them are blind or hostile to.
>Why did they become reactionaries
Making money. Youtubers beat American religion like a dead horse, the book is basically closed. When they were introduced to feminism and shit through buzzfeed they realized they could make fun of shitty Buzzfeed "manspreading" articles just as easily as they could debunk deranged online evangelicals. Then they felt dug in and stuck to their guns shooting down popular facsimiles of important topics and branding themselves 'skeptics' while never actually engaging with experts on those issues.