ZINGERS: Why right-wing Christians can’t stop insulting their enemies

A long time ago, I noticed right-wing Christians’ love for what I called ‘zingers‘: insulting retorts that they think totally own their enemies. Their zingers may mystify their targets, and definitely don’t accomplish what right-wing Christians think they should, but they just can’t stop deploying them. Today, let’s explore this weird compulsion of theirs for insulting the very people their god told them to love.

(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 3/13/2026. They’re both available now!)

SITUATION REPORT: Zingers, zingers everywhere, but not a drop of love to drink

Recently, I ran across a list of zingers that insult atheism. It’s originally from around 2023, I suspect, and it exists online in many screenshots:

The redacted bit concerns anal sex, if you’re wondering. This particular account has been suspended, but don’t worry! Dude made a new account to dodge the suspension, though I’m sure his version of Jesus won’t mind. It’s almost exactly the same avatar and name style, and it posts the same exact political and religious stuff as the first, including retreading this exact post last year.

When I first saw the original post (or OP), I thought for sure it was a satire account. No way, no how would someone seriously present these for real. But my sunny optimism got defeated once again, because yeah, he’s dead serious. He’s what we call a tradbro—a super-hardline, super-conservative Christian who uses his stringent take on Jesusing as a substitute for doing what Jesus commanded.

Surprisingly, he’s not evangelical, though he sure reads as one. (Betcha a donut he converted into his current flavor from evangelicalism, though. I haven’t seen one of these guys yet who hasn’t.) He calls himself “an Orthodox Catholic,” and posts hard-right stuff constantly. If this is a satire account, then its owner is playing a very long game and his followers haven’t caught on at all.

The OP got me thinking about how right-wing Christians engage with their worst enemies right now, atheists. Since the pandemic in particular, their tribalism has shot through the roof. And with it, so has their tendency to abuse people outside their group. Today, let’s explore what’s happening with this trend, and why hardline Christians really are their own worst enemies.

(We’ll be tackling the zingers themselves next time. For today, we’re focusing on the zinger phenomenon itself.)

In the wild: Zingers from right-wing Christians

It sure doesn’t take long to find Christians insulting their enemies. Besides this guy and his two tweets of his list, we also have these fine specimens of love and sacrifice:

Zinglius Redivivus, whose Calvinist blog’s tagline hilariously opines “Should not the judge of all the world do what is just?” before plunging into an August 2025 post about “Atheist Bingo.” It’s just an embed of one of those bingo cards containing Christian zingers, with a condescending “Bless their hearts” added for good measure.

Another “Atheist Bingo” card with different entries, though we don’t know exactly who made this one.

Here’s another common “Atheist Bingo” card making the rounds on social media. Not only did he post the initial card, but he ran several replies to himself marking the card after visiting atheist accounts. He’s very into insulting atheists.

Outside of the “Atheist Bingo” bullshit, here are some Catholics who think atheists are stupid because atheists keep refusing to make atheism a belief system that Catholics can exploit to argue with them. The title of their post is “Are atheists as dumb as rocks?” I can feel the love rolling off this one!

Of course, I’m not the only one who’s noticed this behavior. On Reddit last year, atheists discussed the insulting, condescending manner so many Christians have toward them.

Zingers aren’t new, but something else is

This isn’t new behavior, of course. Way back during the Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars in the 2010s, it wasn’t unusual to find Christians calling atheists “stupid” and “close-minded,” as this 2015 Medium writer does. Or finding even worse insults to fling, as a 2017-ish writer for The Baffler did, calling big-name atheists “catatonic,” “paranoid,” “psychotic,” and “blinded.”

However, something has changed within hardline Christianity since the 2010s:

They’re in the grip of a solid decline that seems impervious to every single attempt they make to reverse it. Back in the early 2010s, they could live in denial of that decline, but by 2015, they knew it was for real.

That’s when hardline Christians began to change how they behaved online. They didn’t become more loving or kind toward their enemies, no. Unfortunately for everyone, that’ll never happen—for reasons we’re exploring in a minute here. Instead, they hunkered down in their own walled citadels. They stopped starting so many arguments with non-believers and began performing for themselves and their own benefit.

This end of Christianity tends to be really tribalistic at the best of times. In other words, they view themselves as an ingroup that is vastly superior to the people they consider their outgroup. The outgroup is evil and nasty, but the ingroup is good and morally clean, etc. Someone in the outgroup can only become acceptable to them through conversion—and if they denigrate their former tribe enough, they may even find popularity in their new ingroup.

So when we see these zingers, understand that they’re just tribalism in action:

These are an ingroup performance, not attempts to engage the outgroup. The people performing this way aren’t expecting to convert or persuade their enemies with these zinger attempts. Hell, they’re not even expecting their enemies to see what the performance. They act this way for the sole benefit of themselves and their tribe.

Social Identity Theory, outgroup derogation, and domain matching

In Social Identity Theory (SIT), people construct their sense of identity from their various group memberships. From there, they begin thinking of everyone around them as part of “us” or “them.” Us becomes their ingroup. Them is the outgroup. People tend to exaggerate the similarities and virtues of their ingroup, while exaggerating the differences and imagined deficits of the outgroup.

The researchers who study SIT call this last bit social comparison. Social comparison helps ingroup members maintain a sense of validity and superiority over the people in other groups. And once any particular group gets labeled as an outgroup then it will require social comparison. Once that process starts up, the two groups will be locked in conflict and competition for a long time.

One important type of conflict/competition is outgroup derogation. Here, the ingroup insults the outgroup. The ingroup may paint the outgroup as threatening somehow, or as significant obstacles to the ingroup’s goals.

When you see outgroup derogation, pay attention to who’s doing it and who’s receiving it.

Domain matching via zingers

Here’s where SIT gets really interesting: Domain matching. When an ingroup member derogates the outgroup, but uses a characteristic that matches someone else in the ingroup, that ingroup person will start feeling very upset about it. So, for example, if a liberal calls Donald Trump a fatass, that’s going to alienate every single other liberal who is overweight.

In similar fashion, the derogation we see here, which attributes all sorts of beliefs to “atheists” alone, understand that a lot of Christians know why those assertions are perfectly valid objections to hardliners’ claims. Those folks are going to be sore about these zingers. (We’ll be hearing from them in the very next section, in fact.)

Moreover, the doubters in the ingroup who know these objections are valid will be massively alienated too. What else are their ingroup members wrong about? They won’t enjoy learning that the answer is “absolutely everything.”

Meanwhile, the outgroup will only have more reasons to reject the ingroup. As Augustine of Hippo wrote centuries ago:

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

In a very real sense, the positive benefits from outgroup derogation accrue only to the true believers: greater sense of superiority, tightened bonds with other members of the group, etc. And that’s completely okay at this stage of Christianity’s decline, to these guys. Their need to feel superior to the outgroup is far more important than evangelism success.

Generally speaking, the outgroup derogation we see from hardline Christians against atheists isn’t really attacking atheism itself. It’s attacking claims about the world that many other Christians know are true. So quite a few people hearing these zingers will domain match and feel upset.

So we should expect to see pushback from Christians against these insulting talking points—and whaddya know, we certainly do!

Holding back a tidal wave of hate

For people who think a god of love and redemption inhabits them, these hardline Christians sure must be told often not to behave in hateful, hypocritical ways. Against this rising tide of contempt and sneering disgust, there’ve always been other Christians trying to slap a used bandage on the huge, growing cracks in their tribe’s façade.

The guy who writes the blog Strange Notions, which itself is a collection of baffling strawman arguments and logical fallacies, advised his fellow Christians in the 2020s never to “openly mock or belittle those who question God.” In 2023, a writer for Radically Christian advised his readers to “stop saying ‘I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.'” And a guy at the forums of BioLogos, a Christian anti-Creationism site, certainly didn’t like seeing apologetics based on insults and condescension.

None of it matters to the ingroup performing the outgroup derogation, however. They’re getting their desired reward. If they even notice that it’s other Christians trying to rein them in, they’ll likely only call them fakey-fake Christians anyway.

“Hamburgers?” The real-world effect of zingers

There’s a funny Stonetoss comic that I’ve taken the liberty of adapting for this situation:

Remember, always, that these Christians need us far more than we need them. They’re selling a product, albeit as ineptly as humanly possible. (The product is active membership in their groups.) Without vastly increasing sales, their groups can’t survive.

So when they act in insulting ways toward their potential recruits, they are ensuring that their own decline can only continue. And more than simply alienating their potential new customers, they’re alienating every other Christian who understands these zingers’ errors and/or finds outgroup derogation hypocritical and distasteful.

In the long run, they’re really only hurting themselves when they try to use zingers as derogation tools.

That said, it’s a good thing none of these tradbros ever listen to me or any of the Christians trying to sharpen their iron. After all, nobody wants to interrupt awful people while they’re making a catastrophic mistake!

NEXT UP: Let’s actually examine the totally-for-realsies-stupid reasons these Christians think we shouldn’t reject their recruitment attempts. See you soon! <3

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