White Atheist Nationalism Is a Dead End

I have a bone to pick with Jason Kessler.

At the outset, I want to stress that it is nothing personal.

There has always been White Nationalists who share Jason Kessler’s dismissive view of Christianity. When I first stumbled across the White Nationalist movement in 2001, there were already established leaders in the movement who had their own personal race-based religions.

Matt Hale was the leader of the World Church of the Creator which was based on Ben Klassen’s religion of Creativity. Dr. William Pierce of the National Alliance offered something which he called Cosmotheism. White Nationalists have created innumerable naturalistic, race-based religions in this vein over the years. Pagans have also been a perennial feature of the White Nationalist movement. The belief that “Christ-Insanity” is a Jewish religion and that “Aryans” are better off without it is a view that has been around for many, many decades. It has always been a fixture in our comment section.

Needless to say, religious skeptics and pagans have always been overrepresented in the online White Nationalist space, especially in top leadership positions. This was true in White Nationalism 1.0. It was true in the Alt-Right years. Back in the 2000s, I went through a Nietzschean and New Atheist phase myself. I spent years arguing against Christianity on online forums. I read Andrew Dickson White. I read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I was also very much influenced by this culture.

In any case, the purpose of this article is not to pick a fight with Kessler, but to illustrate why rightwing, anti-Christian White Nationalism is a self-defeating, self-marginalizing internet ghetto.

Graphs About Religion:

I don’t think I need to provide a huge theoretical justification for why this is a weird combination of factors. The Republican party is basically 85% Christians right now. So to be an atheist who also identifies with the GOP puts you in a really small subset of the population. Let me start by just showing you that – this is the share of Democrats and Republicans who identify as atheist/agnostic over the last several election cycles. ...

85% of Republican voters are Christians.

5% of Republican voters are atheists / agnostics.

Of that 5%, the vast majority of rightwing atheist / agnostic Republicans are either liberal conservatives, moderates or libertarians. Only a fraction of 5% are far right secular White Nationalists and an even tinier number are pagan White Nationalists. Who is supposed to be the audience for an anti-Christian White identity movement? How can such a movement succeed in American politics when it is rejected by the Left for being racist and by the Right for being too anti-Christian?

For Republicans, it’s much more modest – from 3% to 5%. One in twenty Republicans are atheists or agnostics. It’s one in five Democrats. There are four Democrat atheist/agnostics for every Republican.

1 in 20 Republicans are atheists or agnostics.

Of that 1 in 20, the vast majority of them are liberal conservatives, moderates and libertarians. How many of them are anti-Christian White Nationalists? Is there enough to even register in a survey?

However, those same figures for Republicans who are low attenders are much different. Among those who are seldom/never attenders, 56% of them say that they are Protestant or Catholic – that’s twice the share as the Democrats. Meanwhile, only 11% of low attending Republicans are atheist/agnostic – compared to 35% of Democrats. Pretty strong evidence here that when Democrats are far from religion, they have little hesitancy in embracing the atheist/agnostic label. Not so for Republicans.

11% of Republicans who do not attend religious services are atheists / agnostics.

56% of non-attenders are Protestants or Catholics who vote like Protestants and Catholics.

For instance, McCain only got 82% of the atheist/agnostic Republican vote in 2008. But, Romney did a whole lot better in 2012. His percentage jumped up to 89%. However, Trump did really poorly with this group in his first campaign in 2016. He only got 80% of Republicans who identified as atheist/agnostic. It’s interesting that the remaining 20% was fairly evenly split between Clinton (12%) and third party candidates (8%). However, in 2020, Trump did much better with this group – getting back to near Romney levels. This may have something to do with the fact that third party candidates were not as viable in that election cycle.

John McCain (82%) in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 (89%) outperformed Trump in the atheist / agnostic Republican vote in the 2016 election. Trump actually lost ground with that constituency. Undoubtedly, this is because McCain and Romney had greater appeal to liberal and moderate conservatives in the suburbs who identify as atheist or agnostic Republicans.

I think part of the reason for this finding is not the fact that Republicans are just a whole lot more religious than Democrats, it’s that Republicans just don’t like that atheist/agnostic label that much. So, they may be functionally non-religious but they would never want to call themselves a term that they believe to be repugnant like atheist or agnostic. The empirical evidence for that is pretty clear when you limit the sample to people who report their religious attendance as seldom or never and then calculate the religious composition of those low attenders.

There is some evidence that atheist / agnostic Republicans are undercounted, but that is because negative stereotypes of atheism are so strong on the Right that even rightwing atheists do not want to be associated with the label. Being loudly and aggressively secular and anti-Christian appeals to certain personality types. It doesn’t resonate though with its own intended audience.

If there are so few rightwing atheists, why do they seem to be so loud online? It is because no one else in the country is more politically engaged. Atheists are more likely to be activists.

According to this data, about three percent of the adult population were atheists in 2008. This number has slowly risen over the last fifteen years. It was five percent in 2014, then increased to 6% by 2016. What’s striking is that there hasn’t been any appreciable increase between 2015 and 2022; it’s remained around six percent.

Atheists are 6% of the population.

While the number of Nones has exploded, atheists ceased growing in 2015.

In Alabama, for example, atheists are 3% to 5% of the population.

In Vermont, which is the opposite of the Bible Belt, atheists are only 7% to 11% of the population.

In much of the South, more people report being gay than being atheists.

Among college students, only 55% of atheists and 53% of agnostics describe themselves as straight.

White Atheist Nationalists are quick to attack Christian nationalism. And yet, there are more people in California and Vermont who report being sympathetic to Christian nationalism than who identify as atheists and the vast majority of those people are liberals are moderates.

Atheism is clearly negatively correlated with rightwing politics.

Atheism is also negatively correlated with having children.

If your goal is to produce more self-absorbed, childless libtards, then I can see a case for making atheism the sine qua non of your political movement. How do you propose to win though with a view of religion in which over 95 out of 100 atheists end up politically on the Left? The rightwing, far right White Nationalist atheist who identifies with his race is an extreme outlier.

If 85% of the American Right is Christian, wouldn’t it makes sense for a White identity movement to appeal to Christians? Isn’t that necessary to succeed in rightwing politics? 

Finally, the most damning number of all is that White Atheist Nationalism doesn’t appeal to most White Americans who have a positive view of their racial identity or who are pro-White. Few of those people see their religious identity as being opposed to their racial identity. They are not extremely online. The typical White American who is measurably racist in some way is a Christian.

Ultimately, the Christian Question in White Nationalism is a microcosm of a broader problem in American society. Anti-Christian secular nationalists are vastly overrepresented online while the typical American “racist” offline is much more likely to identify as a Christian. Educated elites in both parties are more secular while the people who they claim to represent are more religious.

Inside the >3% online ghetto of rightwing far right atheism, you will encounter all sorts of delusions. One of the most popular delusions is that America in 2024 can be or ought to be Nazi Germany in the 1930s and somehow this can be willed into existence. Some people think of themselves as citizens of their own private fantasy world like the Northwest Republic. Another is angrily expecting the world and especially the broader American Right which is 85% Christian to conform to your own personal cult.

None of this is to say that people who are secular or irreligious are either 1.) unwelcome or 2.) unable to succeed in influencing the American Right. Look no further than Donald Trump and his famous speech on Two Corinthians at Liberty University. Trump could have never gotten to where he is today though by beating the drum against Christianity. He simply ridiculed and diminished people like David French and Russell Moore as losers while positioning himself as a champion of Christians.

Who? How?

These are basic questions which are left unanswered by this crowd. There is no realistic path to where they want to go. There is no constituency to get them there. They have no use for practical politics. This is what is so irritating about them. They masquerade as a political movement, but are far less interested in political goals than in self expression.