God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything
By Christopher Hitchens
(Twelve Books, 320 pages, $24.99)
Watching Christopher Hitchens on television after Jerry Falwell
died, it was clear the celebrated writer was beyond irked. Rather
than politely disagreeing with the deceased preacher’s doctrine,
Hitchens smeared on gobs of spite, from “it’s a pity there isn’t a
hell for him to go to” to “if you gave Falwell an enema, he could
be buried in a matchbox.”
Why the clear psychological torment? For starters, he no doubt
played it up to promote his new book, God Is Not Great It’s a case for atheism,
and he states his reason for writing it (and presumably by
extension, for lashing out at Falwell) thusly:
I would be quite content to go to [my religious
friends’] children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic
cathedrals, to ‘respect’ their belief that the Koran was
dictated…. I will continue to do so without insisting on the
polite reciprocal condition — which is that they in turn leave
me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing.
As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are
in their different ways planning your and my
destruction.
Very dramatic, particularly the clever shift between his friends
(whom he wishes would leave him alone, apparently) and terrorists.
And it’s certainly true that some religious fanatics threaten their
fellow human beings. But are Hitchens’s friends the threat he makes
them out to be?
I DON’T RUN in his circles, but I have had the rare experience of
seeing American religion from two sides. As a teen I left
Catholicism for agnosticism, much to the chagrin of some of my own
peers. Some advised me I’d go to hell. Another remarked aloud in
class, “Don’t say the word ‘Bible’ in front of Bobby. He’ll
melt.”
Still others — the vast majority, I should note — were quite
decent about the whole thing.
Then I headed off to college, where (to put it mildly) things
were different. I held prevalent enough religious views that not
once did I have to defend them in a debate. I forgot the talking
points I’d developed in high school.
If anything, I found myself on the religious right. In an op-ed
for the conservative campus newspaper, I argued that anthropology
professors should address the problems Intelligent Design theorists
purport to find in evolutionary theory — not teach ID, just
explain why it’s wrong. On came the “ignorant” label accompanied,
as were the denunciations of my high school classmates, with some
genuine argument.
The truth: If you don’t want to face religious tension, move
somewhere your beliefs are common. In other words, neither
Christians nor secularists are perfectly tolerant, so segregate
yourself. Hitchens lives — as I do now — in the D.C. area, where
even conservatives aren’t all that pious. (National
Review’s John Derbyshire calls them “Metro Cons”, a category I fit into to some
degree.) So in everyday life, it’s almost certain that Hitchens
dishes out as much hatred as he takes. He can’t use his own
persecution to justify his condescension.
STILL, THAT CONDESCENSION abounds in God Is Not Great. The
book is chock-full of loaded terms like “pathetic,” “baseless” and
“awful.” Hitchens refuses to capitalize the word “God,” even when
it’s a proper noun. For some reason, he gets a kick out of labeling
those he dislikes “mammals,” or redundantly, “human mammals.”
Religion comes from the “infancy of our species.” In short, he
insults the religious too much to ever convert them, settling for
ginning up his relatively small base of unbelievers. That’s not too
much of a loss, though, as his case isn’t that convincing. He
starts with the thesis that religion is evil, then finds all the
evidence he can for it, rather than weighing competing bits of
evidence against each other. He ignores or dismisses ideas he
doesn’t like.
Sometimes that’s quite explicit. For example, he mentions he
doesn’t believe Mary, if she existed, gave birth as a virgin. Fair
enough. But then he makes the startling claim that if someone could
prove Mary did exist, and that she had given
birth as a virgin, and that no other human had done so before or
since, “it would not prove that the resulting infant had any divine
power.” And he singles out the faithful for their willingness to
ignore evidence.
The problem goes deeper than specific examples of malice and
adamant denials that any evidence at all could, even
hypothetically, support the idea of God. Throughout the book,
Hitchens depicts the good that religious people do as
non-religious, and the bad that secular people do as —
well, religious. Regarding the former, see his discussion of Martin
Luther King, Jr. Hitchens points out correctly that one does not
need religion to oppose bigotry. He also points out,
equally correctly, that the Bible verses King often cited (the
Moses story especially) don’t actually support civil rights in the
modern sense. It was “let my people go,” not “let all people
go.”
But the notion that religion didn’t largely inspire the civil
rights movement is simply absurd. King was a reverend, after all,
who used his pulpit for advocacy. He used the Scriptures, in
context or out, to sway whites and energize blacks. The churches
provided a community to organize and a means of doing so.
Hitchens’s treatment of Nazism and communism is similar, though
slanted in the opposite direction. He points out some interesting
examples where religious groups aided these trends, but more
bizarre is his assertion that totalitarianism derives from
religion. He quotes “British socialist Richard Crossman” from
The God That Failed: “The Communist novice, subjecting his
soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt something of the release
which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and
worried by the privilege of freedom.”
It’s true that humans often strive for something beyond
themselves — something to devote themselves to fully, something
through which to strive for perfection. But it’s a logical fallacy
to claim that because religion and communism both utilize that
urge, and because religion came first, communism is in essence
religious.
In fact, in countries that reasonably separate church and state,
where religious groups cannot use physical coercion, religion is a
quite healthy way of channeling that impulse.
AS HITCHENS SAYS, proof that religion does more good than harm is
not proof that religion’s claims are true. (Said claims are a
discussion for another time.) But the fact is that God Is Not Great
chronicles religion’s evils — even purporting to show how religion
doesn’t really “make people behave” when addressing MLK — without
weighing them against its benefits. Bear in mind again that
Hitchens’s book is targeted at a modern American audience. It
cannot prevent the massacres depicted in the Bible by converting
the slayers to atheists. Would that it could shake Osama bin
Laden’s faith, but it won’t. The fact is that, in America, religion
does a lot of good. For an example, see Arthur Brooks’s book about
charity, Who Really Cares. The media made much of
Brooks’s finding that conservatives donate more than liberals do,
but the underlying reason isn’t ideology but religion. Indeed, he
finds that secular conservatives donate even less than secular
liberals do.
Brooks writes:
People who pray every day (whether or not they go to
church) are 30 percentage points more likely to give money to
charity than people who never pray (83 to 53 percent). Simply
belonging to a congregation — whether one attends regularly or not
— makes a person 32 points more likely to give (88 to 56 percent).
And people saying they devote a “great deal of effort” to their
spiritual lives are 42 percent more likely to give than those
devoting “no effort” (88 to 46 percent). Even a belief in
beliefs themselves is associated with charity: People who
say that ‘beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good person’ are
dramatically less likely to give charitably (69 to 86 percent) and
to volunteer (32 to 51 percent) than people who think that beliefs
do matter.
There are many other areas where religion may help people. Some
studies have found links between religiosity and physical or mental
health, for example. Others have shown correlations between church
membership and crime. These are controversial areas — they are
difficult to measure, with plenty of people wanting the results to
slant one way or the other.
Hitchens, to his credit, avoids the questions rather than simply
citing studies he agrees with. But at the very least, Hitchens goes
too far in claiming to debunk the notion that religion “makes
people behave,” and it’s shocking he didn’t address Brooks’s
work.
Yet if there’s one way God Is Not Great is useful, it’s
as an encyclopedia of religion’s downsides. It’s worthwhile to
mitigate religion’s evils, even bearing in mind there’s good as
well.One could go on for days (and many have) about controlling
religious conflicts around the world. So here, let’s focus on
religion’s problems in America. Further, let’s ignore controversial
areas (should the Ten Commandments adorn public buildings?) and
concentrate on practices that are undeniably problematic. These
typically involve parental beliefs foisted upon innocent children.
(The squeamish should skip the following three paragraphs.)
Some members of Church of Christ, Scientist, for example, refuse
to treat their children medically. Hitchens writes of Hasidic
fundamentalists who use mohels to circumcise children — a mohel
“take[s] a baby boy’s penis…cut[s] around the prepuce, and
complete[s] the action by taking his penis in [his] mouth, sucking
off the foreskin, and spitting out the amputated flap along with a
mouthful of blood and saliva.”
And with a wave of Third World immigration, primitive rituals
like female circumcision are finding their ways onto American soil.
To be absolutely clear here, Hitchens describes female circumcision
like this:”[It] involves the slicing off of the labia and the
clitoris, often with a sharp stone, and then the stitching up of
the vaginal opening with strong twine, not to be removed until it
is broken by male force on the bridal night. Compassion and biology
allow for a small aperture to be left, meanwhile, for the passage
of menstrual blood.”
One obvious way to combat female circumcision is to cut back on
immigration from these cultures. But barring that, the U.S. can
take some serious steps against multiculturalism. There’s a great
American tradition of leaving religion to its own devices, but that
need not come with the expense of death and torture.
One positive sign is the case of Khalid Adem, an Ethiopian
immigrant who circumcised his own daughter. Late last year he was
sentenced to 10 years in prison, followed by five years of
probation, in Georgia.
When reprehensible behavior is excused on religious grounds,
believing Americans give people like Hitchens ammo. But then again,
Hitchens gives plenty of ammo against atheists. After his
anti-Falwell tirade, Mary Grabar opined:
That’s the thing about atheists: They greet death with
great relish and glee. Along with their loss of an overall sense of
sanctity goes their respect for the sanctity of the occasion. I
imagine they have the neighborhood gossips giving the dirt over
their own mothers’ ashes. Or upon the death of a spouse, perhaps
they quickly dispense of the body and resume the pursuit of their
next pleasure, which is the only solace they have in their little
kingdoms of one.
She’s wrong, but you’d never know it from reading
God Is Not
Great.
