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When NY Times starts investigating this page and wants to interview me as the one sympathetic-to-their-audience 'progressive' venturing into the lions den, I promise to tell them y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms. Probably the best I can do.
This is actually a debate space to make progressives better at debunking alt-right trolls. TheMotte plays a critical part in deprogramming radicals.
(this isn't even necessarily untrue)
It is untrue because there are no progressives here…
My best guess is Christianity/traditionalism are popular arguments here, mainly because they act as a foil for progressivism -- the benefits of radically different systems put the costs of progressivism into sharper relief.
I suspect the vast majority of our community would have been against white nationalism/Christianity/traditionalism before the 1960s, and would be against it today if it actually regressed to that point. I think they'd change their tune quite quickly once millions of Mexicans were living in tents across the border, or teachers were telling their kids they have to believe in God or they'll go to hell, or their daughters weren't allowed to go to college.
Whether they don't bring this up because those scenarios are so unlikely they're not worth mentioning, or because it ruins their catharsis while railing against leftists, is probably more a narrative question than a factual one, but I really doubt the readers here were pro-Christian when Christians were more influential and (e.g.) trying to stop Evolution from being taught in schools.
In that sense, it's probably more true to say that this forum hates ideologies that are currently messing with their lives (Progressivism is seen as the primary culprit today), rather than that it hates Progressivism or likes Christianity specifically.
There do seem to be a fair number of genuine Christians here. I've made a few posts here before in which I wondered why Christianity usually doesn't get the same kind of merciless skepticism here that progressivism does. It seems to me that it is basically because:
(This is basically what you already said above) Most people on The Motte live in parts of the world where Christianity has little power, so they do not feel much of an urge to criticize it.
Christians on The Motte rarely try to argue that Christianity is literally true. When they do, they usually do actually get a lot of pushback.
Christianity as a cultural influence aligns decently well with the mild social conservatism of what seems to be the average Motte poster.
As an atheist Motter, I'll add another - arguing with Christians is just not what I'm here for. We did the whole arguing religion thing a couple decades ago, and it's just kind of stale. I have softened quite a bit on the virtues of religion, but I really haven't changed my mind on the specifics at all. Believing that transubstantiation happens every Sunday in Catholic churches around the world still seems so ridiculous to me that it's hard to believe that serious thinkers believe it, but oh well, it is what it is and it's easier for me to just respect that this really is their stance and move on to something more interesting.
I'll add that as an Atheist, Ive concluded that politics has become everyone's new religion and I hate it, and I especially hate the progressive/leftist religion. To my mind, I'm the last New Atheist, being a stubborn prickly contrarian against smug sanctimony and moral panic regardless of the mask it wears.
Yeah, I think the time I started noticing this was happening was when Atheism+ happened and New Atheists started saying that merely being against religion wasn't enough, that we had to stand for something. My response was and is that no, my lack of religiosity doesn't have downstream implications about what I should support politically. At the time, I didn't realize that this was going to be the manifestation of a religion-replacement, but I suppose I should have.
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