Yeah, we're on roughly the same page there. Perhaps what was new wasn't just the fearlessness of the doubters, but that scientists came to dominate the public face of atheism, whereas before philosophers took the lead in shaping public opinion about the implications of skepticism towards religion.

I like to think of "new atheism" as a media creation. A tribe formed, complete with leaders. But what did the tribe hold as sacred in the Durkheimian sense? Reason, science, progress, but not philosophy in the old, radical sense. The Nietzschean aspect of atheism was toned down, and atheism was connected only to feel-good secular humanism.