Review of Christopher Hitchens' Book: "God is Not Great"

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (New York: Twelve Books, 2007). It’s one of a half-dozen or so atheist screeds that have been making the rounds since our communal 9/11 scare in America, in the new world order where fear and finger-pointing are the new gold rush territory for hucksters. After my review, I quote a few of the reviews which closely examine Hitchens’ naïve argument for an Enlightenment utopia.

As a deconstructionist, Hitchens presents some well-worn arguments that monotheistic faith is based on fables used to explain a pre-scientific understanding of human existence as if he discovered them. He presents the argument that the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8 and the ending of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts as “shocking” (p. 122) and “astonishing” (p. 142). Yet even translations of the New Testament published by conservative publishing houses have acknowledged these facts in the texts themselves for decades. Hitchens, who only quotes the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, apparently did not know this until he read Bart Ehrman, who Hitchen’s credits with the “astonishing finding” of the short ending of Mark (in Ehrman's 2005 book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.).

Other reviews comment on similar factual blunders, or on Hitchens’ presentation of editorial gloss as fact in this work purported to be a paean to reason, Truth, and enlightened discourse. Which raises a problem when considering Hitchens’ other arguments and factual claims, covering a huge swath of human history, theology, and scientific inquiry. From a macro perspective, his argument that religious expression has been tainted with atrocity in the course of human history sounds plausible enough. Yet to leap with Hitchens to the conclusion that all religious expression must be so tainted (the thesis of his book) requires faith that his patchwork anecdotal claims are both representative and accurate. And close examination of many of these claims would strain all but the most blind faith.

His commentary on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures "covers" a bare 26 pages. The Qur’an gets another 13 pages. Søren Kierkegaard examines the story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) in over 100 pages of his 1843 book, Fear and Trembling. Hitchens claims to cover the “plain meaning of this frightful story” in a paragraph. In this, Christopher Hitchens shares far more in common with Christian fundamentalists than he cares to acknowledge (and who for him represent the sum total of Christian experience). Here lies Hitchens’ argument’s greatest flaw in rationale: straw-man arguments can only be a strong as the version of their adversary’s claim they attempt to undermine.

As a Christian pastor and theologian, I don’t need an atheist to make me aware of the misdeeds of the church throughout history. Nor do I need him to point out for me the discoveries of scriptural textual scholarship, criticism and archaeology. Hitchens trots forward the archaeological research works of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (page 102) as evidence that the "Mosaic myths" of the Exodus and conquest of the promised land "can be safely discarded". I have read their books with fascination. They have enriched my reasoned faith in God and in the patchwork stories of generations of people who have sought to know and worship God and serve each other in love. I have used Bart Ehrman’s books on New Testament textual criticism in my sermons at Skyline UMC. So many of the “show-stoppers” Hitchens employs as proof that religion and the "god" of religion are no longer useful in a technologically advanced world are for me but another sign that the church is a curious incarnation of the divine and humanity at our best and worst.

Here’s an amazing news flash for anyone convinced by Hitchens’ anecdotal arguments: religion is neither the cause nor the cure for the human capacity of evil and of goodness. Neither is religion some monolithic reality, in its bewildering variety of expressions and practices throughout human history. It can claim no monopoly on morality or truth, or freedom from error. What it can demonstrate is a vast collection of human experience of love, truth, and striving after the ever-elusive goal of escaping the bounds of self in search of unity with a reality that encompasses and transcends the mystery of life.

A man of letters can surely appreciate the power of metaphor where the sum of observable facts cannot begin to do justice to the reality to which they only hint. Religion is itself a grand metaphor – a collaboration of the human tribe throughout time that persists not merely because of our desire for spiritual comfort but precisely because of our insatiable thirst for knowledge and inquiry. No human discipline or tradition holds a monopoly either on epistemology or pedagogy, including science, reason, art or any other human expression of understanding and contemplation. That Hitchens claims that his own pedagogy and experience qualify as the pinnacle of human understanding seems more than a little absurd – and dogmatic.

At times, he asks to be left alone. For the most part, Hitchens lives in an imaginary world where it would be possible to divorce human understanding from religious experience and understanding. He frequently resorts to name-calling (“stupid” and “boobie” are his favorite epitaphs for anyone who disagrees with his assessment of religious experience, which he repeatedly boils down to a fear of death). Which brings me to a final point.

Christopher Hitchens wears his personal religious experience like some chest of cub scout achievement awards, which he believes gives him the street cred to critique Christian Protestantism, in particular, from within. That his grandmother was Jewish does not, however, give him some sort of inside track on understanding religious experience, any more than does his abandonment of the Anglican expression of Christianity at the age of 9 (when his tutor, Mrs. Jean Watts, overstepped her understanding of theology on a nature walk – see pages 1-3). Basing his understanding of Christianity on his dogmatic (his claims to the contrary notwithstanding) re-reading of anecdotal history and a 9-year old experience of Anglican faith is like calling his baptism into the Greek Orthodox Church in order to marry his first wife a conversion.

That Hitchens' argument with religious excess is justified goes almost without saying. As a Christian ordained minister, I fight against misogyny, bigotry, racism, homophobia, and nationalism that masquerade as religiosity. Though I treasure, study, and regularly preach on passages of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures, I do not worship them by treating the translations or manuscripts as "infallible" – or stoop to such a transparent way of privileging my interpretation over any other. I apply the many understandings of textual criticism not to undermine but to understand this collection of human experience and wisdom about the search for and experience of God. As a pastor, I don’t threaten children or adults with hell or any other kind of punishment, though I have many times personally and corporately experienced the power of God’s forgiveness in Jesus the Christ.

I am not planning anyone’s demise in Hell, as Hitchins claims I am. I am a follower of the Way of Jesus the Christ because I have, since before and long after I was 9 years old, repeatedly experienced in myself and witnessed in others the transforming power of the new life an experience of Christ's presence makes possible. For me, and for the community of Christ-followers with whom I am privileged to serve, our experience of the religion of Christianity, not merely in our own time but for many generations preceding us, has been a calling to live in ways that recognize our lives and the lives of others as a gift from God. We experience this faith practice intellectually and spiritually. The most common expression of our faith is our daily response to God’s call to relinquish a subjective delusion and empathize (in thought and action) with the human community.

That we or other followers of Christ sometimes get this maddeningly and sinfully wrong does not stop us from daily striving to keep faith with God and with each other. That is the leap we make every day. For us, the doctrine of the atonement does not so much represent a gruesome get-out-of-jail-free card as it does an invitation to see our lives as a sacrifice of love to others – particularly to others in need. Every Sunday, we gather not “to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness” (p. 6), but to celebrate life itself as a magnificent gift we can choose to offer to others – and thereby to God.

Hitchens joins a long line of prophets, priests and believers (notably Isaiah and Jesus) in naming some of the sins of the church. His conclusion that these sins constitute sufficient rationale that “religion poisons everything” betrays his own myopic hubris and naiveté concerning the human capacity of evil and goodness. He is, after all, a reporter of human suffering, and claims some mythic objective stance from which to judge the compass of human striving for knowledge and understanding. He mistakes inquiry for wisdom, and does not practice or value the very real need for empathy in his writing.

Here are some quotes from other reviews of the book I found particularly interesting:

I write in the book [I Don't Believe in Atheists] that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

…I think part of the problem is people who create a morality based on their own experience, which is what of course the New Atheists and the Christian fundamentalists have done.
…I think people who start dividing the world into us and them fail to have empathy.
…I'm not a cultural relativist. I don't think that if you live in Somalia, it's fine to mutilate little girls. There is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand, but when we take a moral stand and then use it to elevate ourselves to another moral plane above other human beings, then it becomes, in biblical terms, a form of self-worship. That's what the New Atheists have, and that's what the Christian fundamentalists have.

(Chris Hedges, in a March 13, 2008 interview with Charly Wilder on Salon.com)

Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."

This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.

(Ross Douthat – The Claremont Institute for the study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, July 9, 2007)

What Hitchens really wants to toss into the pyre is religious coercion, whether it is parents scaring children into belief with the idea of Hell, American religious groups attempting to ban stem cell research or foist creationism into the classrooms, the Catholic Church bewailing that condom-use is worse than AIDS, or the Islamic fanatics who are trying to impose their more militant brand of religion on the rest of the world.
…Hitchens closes his book with a chapter called "The Need For a New Enlightenment," in which he asks us to eschew blind credulity; to resolve our ethical dilemmas not with outmoded religious texts but with the literature of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Schiller and Dostoyevsky; to pursue unfettered scientific inquiry; and to divorce sexual life from fear and tyranny. Well over a century ago, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for a similar new enlightenment, yet the century that followed his was plagued by blind credulity which in turn hoisted dangerous wannabe demigods to the helms of several nations.
Today, when our personal freedoms are stronger than ever, we are seeing a resurgence of this dangerous credulity.

…Hitchens' subtitle, while catchy, is misleading. It is a statistical fact that the majority of religious people support the separation of church and state and practice their religion in an innocuously personal way. Religion also enriches people's lives and gives them hope in their darkest moments. When Hitchens says religion "poisons everything" or is a "threat to human survival," he is only half right. He certainly gives us egregious examples of religious people or religious teachings that would cause any sensible person to recoil. But one wonders how much of what Hitchens takes to task is religion as a motive or religion as an excuse.

— Jeremy Carlos Foster (jcarlosfoster@gmail.com)
Flak magazine