Christianity didn't defeat "new atheism". It failed to win the war. It failed to win a single battle.
"New atheism" was defeated by the most powerful force in politics, which has dominated human history since before we learned to bang the rocks together, and which will dominate human history while we explore the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
New atheism was defeated by horny.
The sex drive of the young human male is the supreme force of civilization. It invented the technologies, it fought every war, it founded every nation, it built every empire.
It drove new atheism to great heights, up until the moment new atheism declared war on it.
Then it smashed the new atheism without mercy.
Young men declared allegiance to atheism because they chafed at the restrictions of religious law which made it harder for them to get sex. And they would continue that allegiance so long as they believed that a world with Christianity overthrown would be a world where they could get laid.
Rebecca Watson singlehandedly triggered the cascade that ended all that.
When she summoned an internet lynch mob to punish a generic standard young male atheist for daring to make a pass at her in an elevator, this was an attack on two fronts.
First of all, it aligned atheism, publicly, with the idea that a man pursuing sex is committing an offense, that even a verbal advance is, or at least often can be, a predatory, "problematic" act.
Secondly, everyone knew that Generic Standard Young Male Atheist would not have been subjected to this treatment had she found him attractive.
The first prong of this attack informed all the Generic Standard Young Male Atheists that their efforts to get laid would be scrutinized, not just for gross offenses against a woman's personal autonomy, but for anything and everything that accidentally gave her the ick.
If he failed to read her accurately, the fault would be entirely his, and the punishment unlimited.
The second prong of the attack created the widespread stereotype of the Generic Standard Young Male Atheist as an unattractive, stinky, socially awkward neckbeard.
Now, the Christians had been trying to do this for some time, but without any real success. Young men did not care if boomer preachers with suspiciously expensive homes, or married church Karens, called them neckbeards. They were not trying to be attractive to either of these groups.
They were trying to be attractive to young atheist women.
The moment the young atheist women began to publicly feed the stereotype, it might as well have been carved on the cornerstone of the universe in flaming letters eleven light years tall.
Now, most Generic Standard Young Male Atheists were not stinky neckbeards. They were just ordinary tribeless young men who didn't quite fit in.
So long as they had the dream that a world dominated by secular atheist liberty of conscience would provide them with girls who were sometimes willing to have sex with them, they would support the movement.
But now, in one stroke, Rebecca Watson revealed that atheist women did not desire them, and were perfectly willing to throw them under the bus for social status or google ad clickthroughs.
Suddenly, saying "I am an atheist" at parties went from meaning "I am an independent sort of person who's not very religious" to meaning "I am socially awkward, unattractive, and cannot even groom myself properly".
It didn't matter if all of these things were visibly untrue. Women are very susceptible to group suggestion in what they find attractive.
So all the young men left the movement.
They didn't suddenly start believing in god, or want to join a church, but they stopped pulling the chariot, drifted away, and began describing themselves as "not really religious" at those same parties.
Which meant the same thing in terms of their personal beliefs, but meant something very different about who they would show up and fight for.
You cannot go to war with horny.
You can go to war with degenerate. You can go to war with promiscuous. You can go to war with perverted. You can even go to war with hedonistic.
But you cannot go to war with horny.
You will lose.
Your movement, whatever it is, will fail if you do not offer young men a clear, understandable, viable path to women they actually want.
The details don't matter. You can offer them inexpensive prostitutes, a hedonistic society full of sluts, or one adoring virgin bride.
But you have to offer them something other than shame, celibacy, and the longhouse.
Or they will spurn you as you would spurn a rabid dog.
This post is not about the atheist movement.
Wrong. This woman killed New Atheism.
If you're not familiar with Rebecca Watson, she's a tenth-tier atheist blogger who kicked up a stink back in 2011 when she went to an atheist conference in Dublin and some dude hit on her in the elevator. She ranted endlessly about how "creepy" he was and how "unsafe" being asked out on a date made her feel and the incident was dubbed "Elevatorgate."
Richard Dawkins waded into the fracas and suggested that being hit on in an elevator wasn't the end of the world. He asked you out, Becky, you weren't interested, end of. This caused everyone to FREAK OUT at Dawkins' "misogyny" and about the supposed problem with "misogyny" in atheism in general, leading large numbers of prominent atheists such as PZ Myers and Jen McCreight to split off into Atheism Plus. Atheism Plus was atheism with a rape whistle, its adherents more focused on fighting da patriarchy then with stuff that...actually has to do with atheism.
That's why atheism collapsed in on itself as a sociopolitical force. The left, per usual, ate themselves alive.