The dish

What Robbins, and by extension you and Nick Spencer, seem to want is a Christian monopoly on “good values” – charity, humility, self-sacrifice, concern for the downtrodden; essentially liberal humanism with the theological scaffolding still attached – such that an anti-Christian (opposite of Christian) morality is by definition against all of these things and for “bad values.” Nietzsche, for all his brilliance and insight, was a fiercely anti-democratic elitist who hated weakness and had no use for social justice (Ayn Rand aped much what Nietzsche was doing, but with far less wit and humor). Presumably Robbins wishes contemporary atheists would own up to this and get down with their bad selves. In value-neutral terms, he thinks Christianity is a cat and Atheism is a dog and modern “New” atheists are dogs that eat cat food.

This is wrong for at least two reasons. First is Nietzsche’s gross misreading of social history and his own time. He castigates Christianity for glorifying weakness and poverty across millennia, without noting that Europe’s nations and their institutionalized Christianity, whatever their rhetoric of altruism, operated by the values he extols: aristocracy, patriarchy, indifference to suffering. It was the conditions created by these values and systems that birthed socialism and communism, largely atheistic movements that Nietzsche loathed.The other, related reason Robbins is wrong is his ‘no true Christian’ assumptions. The Christianity of doubt that you and he seem to both favor is a lovely little thing, but it has little truck in the popular consciousness. Mainstream Christianity, especially that which is most influential in our politics, is as it ever was in Nietzsche’s time: mouthing pieties of love and sacrifice, while in practice giving cover to a plutocratic status quo, and holding contempt for anyone that doesn’t fit its definition of humanity.