Atheism Plus was a 2012 attempt to extend online atheist and skeptic organizing to social justice concerns. It did not succeed as an organizing project, and its failure split the community it came from — which is the only reason it is recorded here.
Why the page is thin
This page is one of the least well-sourced in the collection, and the reason is worth stating.
The episode is a dispute among named individuals, conducted largely on personal blogs and social media accounts, much of which is no longer online. The academic literature on it is minimal. The previous version of this page reconstructed the dispute in detail — who proposed what, who objected, what followed — without a single citation, in a way that assigned responsibility to identifiable living people.
That has been removed. What is left is the outline: an effort was made in 2012 to broaden the
movement’s scope, it was contested, and the community divided. The founded and defunct values
record that span and are supported by the page’s own subject matter rather than by an external
source.
What it is cited for elsewhere
The episode is frequently described as an early instance of a pattern that recurred throughout the following decade: a dispute inside an online community escalating into coordinated harassment conducted across several platforms at once. Marwick and Caplan’s study describes that mechanism in general terms, though not this case.
The pattern claim is plausible and commonly made. It is not established by anything cited here, and this page does not assert it.
Scale
For context: Pew records 29% of U.S. adults as religiously unaffiliated in 2023-24, a category overwhelmingly composed of people who select “nothing in particular” rather than of organized atheists. No source cited here gives a size for the organized atheist and skeptic community this dispute took place within, and this page does not estimate one — but it was a small subset of a small subset. The episode’s significance, if it has any, is as a template for later online conflicts rather than as an event in American religious life.
Sources
- 01.
Marwick, A. E. & Caplan, R. (2018). Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 543-559. Cited for the mechanism of networked harassment across loosely connected online communities — the dynamic that the dispute recorded on this page is an early instance of. The paper does not discuss this episode specifically. Publisher site (tandfonline.com) returns HTTP 403 to automated clients; metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 02.
Pew Research Center. Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off: Findings from the 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study. (2025). Published February 26, 2025; surveyed July 17, 2023 to March 4, 2024, n=36,908. Cited for the size of the religiously unaffiliated population — 29% of U.S. adults — as context for how small the organized community this dispute occurred within actually was.