Yes, I hope the article makes that clear to people. I'm describing the phenomenon that led us to this point, not endorsing it.

I'd say that that's not an indication of a lack of a problem but more just a more mature way of approaching the issue, which is natural in specific social and cultural contexts where leftists are under more pressure to recognize the facts of religious majorities in politics, the deep, culturally and socially conservative religiosity of their working classes.

Obviously this doesn't only apply outside the West, given the importance of religion in many USAmericans' lives and the fact that if you simply trash their spirituality in the process of trying to radicalize them well then well done you blew it. As you note, in practice you are just insulting and alienating them and driving them towards right-wing (in particular religious) forces. White atheists in the West are also empowered by (at least implicit) white (including culturally) supremacy.

I'm not speaking just about this crude, insulting, arrogant and ineffective way that is characteristic of white, western interest atheists, but of how to relate to religion in general. I mean more broadly how communists should relate to religion, including when we are in positions of political hegemony. The discussions around secularism are thoroughly poisoned because in the West what this means has had little to do with any real concrete obstruction of the role of reactionary religious influence in politics (see USA), or because it has been used hypocritically as a cudgel as one state-mechanism among many for the oppression and dehumanization of minorities, above all Muslims (see, above all, France). But in a situation of communist political hegemony, how should you try to combat a variety of reactionary facets of the religions in your society? There will be inevitable backlash. Obviously the situation now is not hegemonic for us, so broad fronts and support are absolutely necessary and progressive, but honestly alot of this can at best be justified as critical support and even then I think only with certain groups. Also I'd add, to avoid the situation where certain westerners (especially the yankies), incl. on here doing their classic of larping as islamists or defending a non-western Communist Party of X just because they're called communist, that alot of communist parties, not only in the West, are deeply compromised wrt issues like reformism, corruption, opportunism, and sticking to undisputably reactionary social and cultural positions (above all wrt gender, sexuality, and race). The Russian and Greek communist parties are good examples of groups that have been deeply reactionary in these respects. This social conservatism can also afflict communist parties in countries under imperialist boots, and I think it worth bearing in mind when considering how they relate to religious groups.

It reminds me of an argument on here a few months ago about a US professor who was fired for showing a medieval Persian painting showing Mohammad in a class on the history of religious art and having alerted the students innumerable times that it would be shown, and the influence of modern liberal identity politics was (imo, unfortunately) very present (even on here) in justifications on the broad 'left' media sphere of the firing of this professor. This is obviously a more benign, less materially important example but it's symptomatic of the fact that, in general, the left has not been able to properly conceptualize its correct relation to the political claims, rights and obligations of religious groups.