I'm not going to disagree that some people are alienated by Dawkins' approach, and I'm not in any way an 100% apologist. He's far from being a flawless role model for a "rationalist" movement. But he does convert people. He absolutely does. It's not a matter of your opinion - we're not just spitballing about what might or might not work - the existence of people converted by Dawkins is incontrovertible. I know such people, and they know more. It's a real phenomenon.

Now, are Dawkins converts people who probably swallowed religion 100% before this? Usually not. And I do get why it's easy to think of Dawkins as simply "preaching to the converted." But what that assessment fails to recognize is that in lots of places - and the US was one until fairly recently - there practically are no converted. When I was younger it was still entirely possible to grow up in the United States, independently reach the conclusion that religion was bad and should be rejected, and have absolutely no idea that explicit atheism was even an option. There are still places all over the country where you'll never meet an atheist, where even people who mostly think religious practices are hooey strongly identify as religious. If you live in one of those places and you're starting to think along atheist lines The God Delusion is a fucking bombshell. For a lot of people it is the first book that ever says "you can reject religion root and branch, as an entire system of thought, not just shuffle uncomfortably around the beliefs and practices you don't agree with. You don't have to apologize for not buying into this shit." I'd never really heard that until I encountered Dawkins, and while my atheism doesn't look much like his anymore it's hard for me to pretend that his role in my intellectual development is unimportant.

As I said, this isn't a wholesale defense of everything Dawkins represents. I understand the misgivings people have about him. But it's simply false that he doesn't convert people, and the reasons he does so are important in and of themselves.