The Rise of the Political Atheist

The belief in Government is ending

The Death of Civic Faith
I used to believe in the system. Not in unicorns or bipartisan kumbayas—just the notion that governance might still function behind the scenes. I believed elections mattered, debates had meaning, and somewhere in the bureaucratic swamp, a few frogs were still swimming toward something that looked like Integrity.

I graduated from Republican orthodoxy to Libertarian purity: self-ownership, private property, limited government, Constitutional sanctity, and the sacred Non-Aggression Principle. I evangelized on Talk Radio, spoke at conventions, hosted icons like Walter Williams, and truly believed we’d cracked the code to save the Republic. Turns out it was just another dialect of dysfunction as I watched the Party regularly implode under the weight of its own purity tests and amateur theatrics. Libertarians are just Republicans with better vocabulary and worse organizational skills.

But Belief has a shelf life. Mine expired after watching Republicans and Democrats re-enacting the same rituals, producing the same rot. Politics, politicians, and process—the holy trinity of American governance—had morphed into a taxpayer-funded escape room: rigged, performative, and absurdly expensive.

What I once saw as civic faith, I now recognize as institutional theater. And like any atheist who’s left the church, I traded reverence for ridicule, hope for a well-earned eye roll, and belief for the cold clarity of disillusionment.

The Political Atheist Defined

The political atheist isn’t an anarchist. He doesn’t reject order—he rejects sanctimony. He doesn’t burn the Constitution—he just stopped pretending anyone reads it. What he rejects is the civic religion: the quaint idea that politics is sacred, that politicians are high priests, and that the rituals of governance deserve obeisance simply because they exist.

Where the religious atheist walks away from divine authority, the political atheist walks away from institutional authority that demand reverence. He’s unmoved by phrases like “sacred duty,” “moral arc,” “soul of the nation,” or the ever-nauseating “for the greater good”—not because he lacks morality, but because he’s seen how those words are used to launder power. He doesn’t pray at the altar of party or process. Instead, he asks who built the altar, who profits from the sermon, and why the pews never change.

Political atheism isn’t nihilism. It’s clarity. It’s the refusal to genuflect before a system that rewards cowardice, punishes dissent, and cloaks dysfunction in ritualized jabberwocky. It’s not the absence of belief—it’s the presence of discernment. The political atheist doesn’t want chaos. He wants accountability. But he’s done imagining accountability lives in a government pulpit.

The Ritual of Cowardice

The system doesn’t demand courage; it requires choreography. Politicians don’t lead; they perform. They rehearse outrage, recite empathy, and bow to optics like altar boys afraid of excommunication. The brave are punished not for being wrong, but for being off-script. The coward is rewarded for staying in character.

Dissent isn’t crushed; it’s drowned in ceremony. The system doesn’t silence critics; it invites them to speak, then buries their words under process. A four-year, multi-million-dollar Special Prosecutor investigation ends with no indictments, no accountability, and no clarity—just a press conference and a shrug. Bipartisan panels promise truth but deliver theater. Hearings generate heat, not light; allegations, not facts. The rituals are elaborate, expensive, and exhausting. They simulate justice but demand nothing from the powerful.

The ritual of dysfunction is always followed by the illusion of reform. A scandal breaks, a committee forms, a bill is introduced with a name so noble it bows deeply—“The Accountability Act,” “The Truth in Governance Initiative,” “The Restoring Trust Commission.” Cameras roll, statements are made, and nothing changes. Reform becomes its own ceremony: a performance of contrition designed to preserve the status quo. Both parties play along, not to fix the system, but to protect it. They weaponize these rituals to shield their own, turning failure into virtue and outrage into a renewable resource. The result isn’t justice; it’s equilibrium. The system absorbs dissent, metabolizes scandal, and - just like that - emerges untouched.

The political atheist doesn’t reject politics because it’s flawed. He rejects it because it’s self-cleansing. Every failure is ritualized, every scandal sanctified, every betrayal rebranded as resilience. The system doesn’t collapse; it renews itself, like a church that canonizes its sinners or transfers a guilty priest, undisciplined, to a distant parish. The atheist has seen too many redemption arcs with no repentance, too many reforms that reform nothing, too many sermons about “for the children” while the rot remains untouched. He doesn’t walk away in anger. He walks away in clarity. Faith is for the pews. He’s looking for proof.

Vigilantism: The Illegality of Moral Urgency

The American colonists didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t petition the Crown for a more favorable interpretation of ‘tyranny’. They broke laws. They sabotaged supply lines. They fired on soldiers. To the British Crown, they weren’t patriots, they were insurgents. Their moral urgency didn’t make their actions legal; it made them dangerous. They declared authority where none had been granted. And we call it ‘founding’.

But strip away the marble and myth, and what remains is guerrilla warfare. Decentralized militias. Irregular tactics. A moral calculus that said: If justice won’t come from above, it must be seized from below.

This isn’t unique to America. Every revolution begins as vigilantism. The French stormed the Bastille. The Haitians burned the plantations. The Bolsheviks overran the Winter Palace. Legality was not the starting point—it was the aftermath. First came urgency. Then came rupture. Only later did the victors write laws to sanctify their defiance.

So what makes today different? Why is moral urgency now dismissed as extremism, while past insurgencies are enshrined as heroism? If colonists were justified in breaking laws to pursue justice, who gets to decide when that justification applies now?

If they could declare authority, why can’t we?

The political atheist doesn’t romanticize violence. He recognizes its inevitability when systems refuse to self-correct. He sees vigilantism not as a solution but as a warning; a sign that legitimacy isn't a fixed state but a fragile agreement. Break the deal, and the governed will take control themselves.

The whistleblower is the system’s internal vigilante. He doesn’t plant bombs; he reveals truths. But the response is the same: prosecution, exile, character assassination. Edward Snowden didn’t sell secrets; he exposed surveillance. Reality Winner didn’t sabotage democracy; she revealed its vulnerabilities. Their crime wasn’t betrayal; it was impatience. They refused to wait for institutional reform that never came.

At the border, vigilantes patrol the desert with rifles and radios, convinced that the state has abdicated its duty. They aren’t sanctioned, but they are tolerated because their urgency aligns with the power’s narrative. Their illegality is quietly absorbed, even as it violates the same laws they claim to defend.

Then there’s January 6. A grotesque eruption of grievance, delusion, and performative patriotism with criminal government interference. But beneath the flags and fury lies a familiar psychology: the belief that the system has failed, and that moral urgency justifies illegal action. The political atheist doesn’t excuse it, but he recognizes the pattern. When institutions lose credibility, people don’t wait. They act. Often recklessly. Sometimes violently. Always urgently.

The system’s response is revealing. Snowden is exiled. Border vigilantes are ignored. January 6 rioters are prosecuted—but not uniformly. The message is clear: moral urgency is tolerated when it serves power, and criminalized when it threatens it.

Illegality vs. Illegitimacy: What Power Really Fears

Illegality is a nuisance. It can be prosecuted, pardoned, or ignored. It’s manageable. But illegitimacy is existential. It questions the very right to govern. That’s why the system tolerates certain crimes and panics at certain truths.

A corrupt senator can violate campaign finance laws and remain in office. A whistleblower can reveal mass surveillance and be exiled for life. The difference isn’t the crime, it’s the threat to the narrative. Power survives broken laws. It doesn’t survive broken myths.

This is why January 6 was prosecuted not just as a riot, but as a heresy. It wasn’t the violence, it was the symbolism. The breach of the Capitol was a breach of sanctity. It exposed the fragility of legitimacy, and that’s what had to be punished.

The Liberal Counterpart: Narrative as Narcotic

Liberals don’t patrol borders or storm buildings. Their vigilantism is rhetorical. They weaponize the narrative to preempt urgency, to anesthetize the public with stories of progress, process, and patience.

When institutions fail, the liberal instinct isn’t rupture, it’s reassurance. “Democracy is resilient.” “The arc of history bends toward justice.” These aren’t observations. They’re incantations designed not to describe reality, but to delay confrontation with it.

This is why the liberal media obsess over norms, decorum, and the “return to civility.” It’s not about truth; it’s about tempo. Keep the public calm. Keep the system intact. Keep the urgency at bay. Urgency is rebranded as extremism. Defiance becomes disinformation. The narrator becomes the gatekeeper.

The political atheist sees through this. He knows that a narrative without consequence is sedation. That reassurance without reform isn’t comfort, it’s betrayal. And that sometimes, the most radical act is refusing to wait.

The Collapse of Permission

In healthy systems, patience is a virtue; in broken ones, it’s a trap. The system doesn’t ask for obedience; it demands patience. The citizen is told to wait for the next election, the next investigation, the next reform. Wait for the ‘process’ to play out. But waiting is not passive; it’s performative. It signals belief in a system that no longer deserves it. And in a broken system, it’s complicity.

The political atheist has stopped waiting. He’s done mistaking delay for dignity. He’s watched whistleblowers punished, vigilantes tolerated, and narrators rewarded for keeping the public sedated. He’s seen urgency criminalized and illegality selectively enforced. And he’s reached the only conclusion left: permission is a myth. Because when the system no longer delivers justice, the refusal to act becomes an endorsement. The collapse of permission is not the collapse of order; it’s the collapse of the illusion that order ever ruled.

Waiting Becomes Complicity

Passivity is the default posture of the governed. It’s safe, polite, and endlessly renewable. It asks nothing of power and offers everything in return: time, silence, legitimacy. But defiance is different. Defiance doesn’t seek chaos—it seeks consequence. It’s the moment the governed stop lending credibility to institutions that have squandered it.

The political atheist doesn’t necessarily reject governance. He rejects its sanctification. He doesn’t oppose law. He opposes its selective enforcement. And he doesn’t demand revolution; he demands accountability. When accountability is denied, defiance becomes rational. Not violent. Not reckless. Just inevitable.

This is the collapse of permission: the moment when the governed stop asking, and start declaring. When legitimacy is no longer granted, but earned. And when the system, stripped of its rituals and narratives, must face the one question it fears most: Who gave you the right?

Authority and the Myth of Consent

When the law protects the powerful and punishes the principled, what remains isn’t justice—it’s theater. And when theater fails, the audience doesn’t just leave. Sometimes, it storms the stage. In a societal context, it’s an inevitable response when the rule of law becomes a tool of selective enforcement

Power calls this Vigilantism—because it fears what it cannot choreograph. It’s declared illegal by the same government that exempts itself from its own laws. Where is the moral legitimacy in that? What else could the colonists, guerrilla fighters, and resistance movements of American history be called that isn’t synonymous with “vigilantes”? The Founding Fathers would be hanged today just as they risked in 1776. What did the Revolution truly change, besides the names of those who claim authority? Vigilantism is the shadow of failed justice

The Political Atheist’s Declaration

If the political atheist were to post a declaration, it would read like this. It’s not a call to arms. It’s a refusal to kneel:

I do not worship institutions.
I do not bow to parties, platforms, or pundits.
I do not mistake civility for courage, or optics for outcomes.

I believe in consequence.
I believe in accountability without exception.
I believe that legitimacy must be earned, not inherited.

I reject the theater of consensus.
I reject the narcotic of narrative.
I reject the idea that waiting is wisdom when urgency is truth.

I do not seek purity.
I seek clarity.
I seek systems that serve, not stories that soothe.

I am not loyal to power.
I am loyal to principle.
And when power betrays principle, I do not comply. I do not wait. I act when truth demands it

The Mirror

Thanks for reading this far. That’s something.

Maybe you nodded along. Maybe you muttered, “Exactly!”
Maybe you felt a flicker of righteous clarity.

Congratulations! You’re officially aware.

But Awareness isn’t absolution.
Awareness is cheap.
It costs nothing to recognize the rot.
It costs everything to stop pretending it’s fertilizer. It’s the currency of the comfortable.
It lets you feel principled without being inconvenienced.

You’ve waited. You’ve complied.
You’ve mistaken hesitation for humility.
You’ve mistaken patience for principle.
You’ve told yourself that defiance is for extremists—for people who don’t understand how things work.

But defiance isn’t a posture. It’s a pivot.
From spectator to skeptic.
From loyalist to witness.
From waiting to acting.

And now you’re wondering if silence still counts as virtue.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
It never did.

The question isn’t whether you agree.
It’s whether you’re ready to stop lending your silence to the lie, the system’s favorite disguise for obedience.

BW