So the collective trauma reaction against the Church, so deep for those of us coming from the tradition of the European Left, alienates us from those indigenous comrades of ours who refused to let their identities be erased. It alienates us from Black and Latin American comrades who, in some cases, have subverted that same religion from a tool of oppression to a tool of resistance.
It also alienates us from our pagan, Jewish, and even Christian ancestors. Rather than a rejection of the genocides, crusades, and pogroms carried out to solidify the hegemony of the Church, a chauvinistic atheism affirms it under another name. Likewise it affirms the patriarchs who burned witches and destroyed midwifery to shift power over to male doctors.
The "Enlightenment" paradigm of "Reason," that led through secularism to the anti-religious antagonism of Bill Maher and the New Atheists, is laced with an Islamophobia and anti-Semitism rooted in the same church they claim to reject. And anyone who has been paying attention can see that it opens the door to the far right anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that also grows from that same root...