By the middle of the 2010s New Atheism had lost cohesion. Its audience dispersed in two directions: toward the social-justice politics that Atheism Plus had proposed, and toward the anti-progressive and contrarian commentary that later organised itself under other names. Several of its most prominent figures ended up on opposite sides of that division from one another.
Attrition did the rest. Hitchens, the movement's most effective public performer, died in 2011. Dennett died in 2024. Dawkins accumulated a long series of public controversies, had the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award revoked in April 2021 over statements on gender identity, and subsequently described himself as a cultural Christian, a phrase that would have been unimaginable from the author of The God Delusion in 2006.
The lasting effects are real, and are mostly not the ones the participants intended. Public disbelief became sayable: the taboo on stating plainly that one thinks religious claims false weakened substantially across the English-speaking world, and it has not been restored. The religiously unaffiliated grew markedly over the same period in North America and Europe, though the causes of that are demographic and social, and the books were at most a small contributor.
What did not happen was the disappearance of religion, which several of the movement's participants expected and predicted. Global religious affiliation has continued to grow in absolute terms. The claim that religion is false and the expectation that it is therefore going away turned out to be independent, and the second has not held up.