"Chris is not Great:  How Hitchens Poisons Everything"

A review of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything (New York, Twelve, 2007)

            In an already old collection of her lectures and addresses, the ever humane and decorous Helen Darbishire, former principal of Somerville College, Oxford, remarked that we all wish to be remembered and assessed on the basis of "the best qualities we possess, by the good and strong strands that run all through our characters, by our best actions rather than our worst" (Somerville College Chapel Addresses and Other Papers, London: 1962, p. 45).  She is right; and when it comes to assessing others, we ought to extend to them the same good will and charity for which we hope.
            Not so Christopher Hitchens, who unabashedly renders the harshest and most withering critique of his ideological opponents, uncharitable and false though it might be.  In this book, indeed, is very much that is uncharitable and false.  His volume is an ideological Potemkin village -- mostly façade and chicanery, designed to look like what it is not, designed to fool and to obfuscate -- behind which stands very little of substance, almost nothing at all.  Hitchens offers turns of phrase as argument, tendentious reconstruction as fact, and sneering condemnation as insight and critique.
            But it will not do.  For his book to be successful, Hitchens needed to come to grips with the arguments of the best thinkers on the other side, and refute them.  But he did not -- not once.  He does not mention, address, or refute either William Lane Craig's Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, or Craig's explanation of middle knowledge in defense of God's goodness.  He does not mention, address or refute Alvin Plantinga's argument for justified belief.  He does not mention, address or refute N. T. Wright's, Gary Habermas', or William Lane Craig's defense of the resurrection, or Kenneth Kitchen's impressive research in support of the Old Testament's historical reliability. Jonathan Wells' case against Darwin isn't refuted; it’s simply dismissed as "laughable" and "unlikely even to rate a footnote in the history of piffle" (p.249). In the same regard, Michael Behe rates not even a mention, let alone an insult.  Rather than engaging and refuting the best the other side has to offer, Hitchens dismisses and ridicules it, often in contorted and surrealistic ways, as when he talks about that portion of Christian apologetics he considers "dreary and absurd." "[H]ere," he says, "one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis" (p. 7).  One could fairly say many things about Lewis, but "dreary and absurd" are not among them.
            Or to put it differently, in his case against religion, Hitchens cites exactly one religious thinker born in the last two hundred years: C. S. Lewis, whom he quotes twice, both times to undermine religion.  Naturally, I find this tactic unconvincing in the extreme.  I'm trying hard to imagine how atheists would respond to a Christian who wrote a book about how evolution spoiled everything, and managed to quote only one scientist born since 1800, and who quoted that scientist (say, Stephen J. Gould), simply to show that evolution was false and could not be believed.      
            In a similar flight from reality, Hitchens declares that in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Christianity "mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism." But not even the most careless reader would conclude that Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship (or his Ethics) was merely nebulous humanism. Few twentieth century theologians were as intentionally Christocentric as Bonhoeffer.  Further, according to Hitchens, Bonhoeffer was hanged "for his refusal to collude" with the Nazis.  No:  He was hanged because he aided Jews in their escape to Switzerland and because he plotted to assassinate Hitler after returning to Germany from a safe haven in America, because, as Bonhoeffer himself said, "I will have no right to assist with the restoration of Christian life after the war in Germany if I do not share the tests of this period with my people" -- hardly the act of a nebulous humanist (Renata Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Brief Life, Minneapolis, Fortress, 2004, p. 54).  Indeed, according to Bonhoeffer biographer Renata Bethge, "His political resistance derived solely from his church resistance" (ibid), and not from nebulous humanism.  But for whatever psychological or ideological reason, Hitchens cannot give proper credit to religion, to religious persons, or to religious motivations as he would if truth were his quest.  Only someone as untutored in theology as he would suggest that Arianism has anything at all to do with "two incarnations of the same person" (p. 248).  Arianism refused to recognize even the incarnation of one divine person, let alone two.  In other words, this volume is long on verbal veneer and short on scholarship. It is long on bravado and short on fact. It is a book-length pose.  Posing and superficial cleverness are no substitute for fact checking, much less for serious argument or authentic expertise.
            Some of Hitchens' defenders try to stave off criticisms like the one above by saying that he was writing an historical account of religion's failures, not a theological account.  But that defense is weak sauce indeed.  You can no more write a non-theological critique of religion than you can write a non-political critique of monarchy, a non-economic critique of Marxism, or a non-scientific critique of geology.
            I am not saying anything so benign or banal as that Hitchens mistakes rhetoric for argument.  That would be to discredit both argument and rhetoric.  Hitchens doesn't so much argue as sneer, and sneering is no more authentic rhetoric than a belch is music.  Something other than rhetoric leads him to say such silly and contradictory things about himself and his fellow anti-theists as "Our belief is not a belief," or to utter such patent falsehoods as that he and they "do not hold [their] convictions dogmatically" (p. 5).  He insists that "Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind," apparently ignoring the great portion of Western literature sustained by Scripture.  Arrogance, not rhetoric, leads him to boast that even before he reached puberty he had recognized the "four irreducible objections to religious faith."  He claims that he discovered these and other damaging facts about religion even "before [his] boyish voice had broken," a claim that (in unintended and delicious irony) he arrogantly asserts is not arrogant (p.4).  For his many false and baseless assertions, and for his self-deluded and chest-beating braggadocio, rhetoric is not to blame. 
            Perhaps you'll notice that most of the failings I have cited so far occur in but the first few pages of Hitchens' book.  They are not the worst, just the first.  Given their excess and overstatement, you might be surprised to learn that they come from a chapter called "Putting it Mildly."   
            To return to Helen Darbishire for comparison:  While she finds ways and reasons for extolling the Jews and their deep sense of human dignity (pp. 49, 58-59), rooted as it is in the image of God, and while she finds ways and reasons for extolling the supremacy of the moral law in texts like the Ten Commandments, Hitchens considers the religion of the Jews -- as well as the God and Hebrew scriptures from which it springs -- a nightmarish Hell hole of murderous iniquity and insufferable arrogance (ch. 7, passim), an evil superceded not by Lenin or Stalin (whom he inexplicably sometimes seems to admire), but by Jesus and the New Testament (ch. 8, passim) -- a conclusion he bolsters by quoting C.S. Lewis (pp. 118-120).  His misreading (and misapplication) of Lewis here is as egregious as his misreading of the Bible, a penchant he displays without embarrassment time and again.  For example, he insists that even as a child he "would read all the chapters that led up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it, to be sure that [he} had got the point.  I can still do this" (p.2), but then demonstrates that indeed he does not get the point and cannot do it because, on the very next page, he demonstrates a deep misunderstanding both of Jesus healing a man born blind and of Jesus casting demons out of a possessed man and into a herd of nearby pigs.  In other words, just as Hitchens does not bother himself to deal with the best Christian or Jewish apologists, he does not bother himself with the best Biblical exegetes, whose careful work corrects his neophytish hermeneutical blunders at nearly every point.
            Read Hitchens' statement again:  He says he read "all the chapters that led up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it."  If by "all" he means one or two, then his word choice is singularly inept and radically overdrawn -- as is much of his book.  If by his unqualified "all" he means all, then we are to understand that he read the entire Bible every time he interpreted a single verse, and that is simply false -- as is much of his book.  He vacillates erratically between excess and error.  But he has no choice.  If you want to prove religion poisons simply everything, you must make frequent recourse to fiction.
            Some of Hitchens' fictions beggar the imagination, as when he declares as that the four gospel writers "cannot agree on anything of importance" (p. 111), or as when, in reference to those he labels "the Orthodox Jews," he insists that "by claiming to be 'chosen' in a special exclusive covenant with the Almighty, they invited hatred and suspicion and evinced their own form of racism" (p.250).  The anti-Semitism of this volume is jaw-droppingly wicked. Despite his defamatory assertions, the Jews did not "invite" persecution, and they are not racists. In short, while I have occasionally found myself in sincere agreement with Christopher Hitchens on some issues, and in some contexts, his view of the Jews, their history, their religion, their Scriptures, and their motives, is simply shameful, which is why, to me at least, his outrage at Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism rings hollow (p. 110).
            Hitchens also disingenuously declares that secular totalitarian regimes like Stalin's and Kim Il Sung's went badly wrong partly because they pursued their programs religiously, and sometimes in overtly religious words and ways.  For more on Hitchens' assessment of tyrants like Stalin, see Koba the Dread, a book about Stalin's massive evils written by Hitchens' long time friend Martin Amis, a book in which Hitchens' views are eloquently and memorably refuted by reason and by fact.  Amis' book is a serious and successful attempt to debunk Stalin and Stalinism. By comparison, Hitchens' book is not serious, and in its wake religion stands unvanquished, almost unassailed.  You might as well attack Gibraltar with a squirtgun as try to undercut 20 centuries of Christianity with a sneer.
            Unlike Hitchens' volume, serious books and serious arguments make careful note not only of their opponent's weaknesses, but also of their successes, their virtues.  But in a book like this, which foolishly offers to explain how religion poisons everything, one must search both long and carefully for anything beyond the most reluctant, niggardly, and understated acknowledgment of religion's contribution to human life and the amelioration of suffering and evil.  In other words, this volume is radically truth-deficient.  Missing is the more fair and balanced way that scholars like theologian Harold O. J. Brown (whose book I happened to be reading when Hitchens' came across my desk) summarize the checkered history of the faith:  "Christianity tolerated slavery for hundreds of years, after a Christian emperor had come to power.  But it was Christians who began the abolition of slavery and put an end to the slave trade.  The beginnings of hospitals, orphanages, and countless other works of human compassion go back, in large measure, to Christian impulses.  The missionaries to Africa and Asia went with the colonizers -- but for all of that, they took schools, and medicine, and a new concept of human dignity, along with the news of the Son of God who was not ashamed to call men his brethren" (The Protest of a Troubled Protestant, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970, p. 67).

Hitchens is reluctant to tell the truth, reluctant to be fair to the other side, reluctant to be respectful, and reluctant to give credit where credit is due. (Indeed, he cannot even bring himself to capitalize the word "god.")  In this twisted volume, you'll not find Hitchens carefully acknowledging about religion and about religious people what serious scholars acknowledge about them.  For example, with reference to the way religion makes people more loving and more generous than their secular counterparts, Arthur C. Brooks writes,  "When we look only at gifts of time and money to explicitly secular causes, how do religious and nonreligious compare? . . .  Religious people are more charitable in every measurable nonreligious way -- including secular donations, informal giving, and even acts of kindness and honesty -- than secularists" (Who Really Cares?:  The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism, New York: Basic Books, 2006, p. 38). But rather than playing fairly and arguing even-handedly, telling both the good and the bad about religion, Hitchens invests an entire chapter implausibly arguing that religious instruction for the young is child abuse.
            The mere mention of that scurrilous absurdity brings to mind both its refutation and its antidote:  The first time I heard Dennis Prager speak, he addressed the L'Chaim Society at its facility in central Oxford.  He spoke about the good effects of religion, especially on young persons.  I paraphrase:
             "Imagine yourself," he said, "walking alone down a dark alley in south central Los Angeles, when a gang of about 10 young men suddenly and loudly emerge into the alley from between two garages, and walk directly toward you.  Each one is holding something in his hand, but because of the darkness you can't tell what it is.  Your heart beats faster; your breathing gets shallower and more rapid; your eyes dilate; your mind races.  You wonder fearfully what they will do."
            "Wouldn't you feel better, Prager asked his audience, "if you knew they had just come from a Bible study?"
            Not Christopher Hitchens (p. 18), if we are to believe him. 
            I do not. 
            According to Prager, the account Hitchens gives here of Prager's question and of Hitchens' answer to it during their debate is both self-serving and untrue.  In other words, it's of a piece with the rest of this book.   
           

date modified:
5 July 2006