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I was raised in a religious community and I marvel at how many of today's social justice advocates are literally the same people who were the nosy church ladies in decades past. Not just the same sorts of people--the same specific people. Some of them are still church ladies, too--but those who have stopped being church ladies did not ride out on a wave a new atheism. Instead they rode out on a wave of righteous indignation concerning gay marriage or some other social issue they saw their church as being "out of touch" on. Thinking through my extended family, this category covers about a third of the women, but not one man in ten.
Actually, now that I'm drawing up tallies, I'm realizing with a dull non-surprise that none of the formerly-religious men in my extended family who took up atheism in the last, oh, three decades or so have adopted any "social justice" views as a result, while far more than half of the women (a smaller absolute number) who severed ties with their churches are now extremely vocal leftists. This harmonizes with demographic reports I've seen but I'd never before sat down and really thought about it.
It's hard for me to model such a complete lack of principles without referencing the NPC meme. But the best I can manage is just that these are people who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to enforce social expectations to the best of their ability. One day they woke up and saw that the social expectation that they go to pride parades was stronger than the social expectation that they go to church potlucks, so they stopped making casseroles and started making rainbow flags. Charitably, social cohesion is just the point for them; less charitably (but maybe more accurately from an evopsych perspective), the opportunity to snub others while raising one's own status in the most powerful in-group may also be an attractive position.
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