Dawkins talks about who his audience is on many occasions. Dawkins is going after the type of people who consider themselves religious largely because their parents are... the type of people who haven't read the bible, almost never go to church, and really haven't given religion much thought at all. This is a massive segment of Americans and British people numbering in the 10's of millions. I'm amazed Chomsky can't understand this.
1) This is from 2012. 2) the link to the original Chomsky posting is dead, 3) it's hard to tell that only the part after the "———"s is from Chomsky, 4) once you track down a copy of the more complete text, which is an answer to a lengthy question (see https://medium.com/@behrangsa/noam-chomsky-on-new-atheism-12... ) you'll see it's missing the first paragraph.
That omitted paragraph is specifically about Christopher Hitchens. This is because the question started "The New Atheism and Hitchens". The URL I gave summarizes the exchange as "Chomsky answers a question about the new crop of writers advocating atheism and wars against “Islamofascism” in the name of secularism such as Christopher Hitchens."
This would exclude, say, a Dawkins talk about Mt. Improbable meant for people xexers points out are religious mostly because of their parents but aren't actively religious.
I suspect, (at least partially), it is those who grew up religious and have since "thrown off the shackles", and are looking for validation/confirmation that they made the right choice. And, who hope to convince others to do the same.
As they say, some of the most fervent anti-smokers are those who used to smoke themselves...
Many others also have copies of that text.