The American Spectator

Among the Intellectualoids

Bad Faith Bestseller

By Jeremy Lott on 12.21.07 @ 12:06AM

(Page 2 of 2)

THERE ARE RATIONAL replies one could make to that question ("If Christopher Hitchens gave a speech and there were four different accounts, how could you get back to the Hitchens of History...") but they are beside the point. The purpose of this book is not so much to make the case against God as to offer assurances to the unbelievers, to the lapsed, to the non-conformists, and to the noncommitted souls who are uncomfortable around public displays of religiosity.

Of these groups, the latter three are vital to the book's success. The number of genuine atheists in the U.S. is vanishingly small. A recent poll found that voters would be less hostile to a Muslim candidate for president than a potential atheist commander-in-chief. The real numbers, where book sales are concerned, are those people who are uncomfortable with this country's quasi-established religion for some reason -- ranging from general distaste for Godtalk to disagreements over sexual mores to vaguely spiritualist yearnings to a vestigial and often conspiratorial anticlericalism.

god is not Great is not great because it tries too hard to affirm its target readers in their okayness. Hitchens even manages to put in a kind word for the new agey Gnostics. He finds the Gospel of Judas "fractionally more credible then the official account" because "it maintains…that the supposed god of the 'Old' Testament is the one to be avoided, a ghastly emanation from sick minds."

More pandering: Notoriously cheap freethinkers can take some solace in Hitchens's preachment that "charity and relief work, while they may appeal to tenderhearted believers, are the inheritors of modernism and the Enlightenment." The religious are rendered more violent than the secular by a neat trick of blaming Communist slaughters on a religious-like impulse. Why, according to George Orwell, every single "totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy."

Even better, for those readers who want to admire some religious leaders while rejecting the source of their inspiration, this is the book for you. Hitchens unbaptizes Martin Luther King, Jr. -- that would be the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. --, claiming his legacy for the ungodly. King wasn't vengeful and went light on the hellfire and brimstone, so "[i]n no real, as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian."

The author confesses to having been "a guarded admirer of the late Pope John Paul II" but contrasts the venerated pope with his terribly flawed Church, and points out that the late pontiff issued a series of apologies to Jews, Muslims, and the Orthodox for past bad behavior by Catholics.

Jesus is a dealt with rather gingerly. After much hemming and hawing, Hitchens admits that there probably was a Jesus, and even has some kind words to say about the Son of Man, at least as regards the story of the adulterous woman whose life he saved. But Hitchens insists that the Gospels are unreliable and that this rabbi could not have been who his misguided followers later claimed that he was. Since there is no God, then no man can be God, QED.

Playing to his audience, Hitchens feigns some tolerance for religious believers. He would not "prohibit" religion, "even if I thought I could." He isn't so much bothered by the fact that people believe in daffy things. He just wishes the religious would reciprocate his generosity by "leav[ing] me alone."

The sentiment behind those three words was responsible for tens of thousands of book sales, at least. Certain people are made massively uncomfortable by religious people even talking about their faith. Any discussion of such things seems to them oppressive, and possibly sinister. Hitchens offers them plenty of faux arguments, half-baked half-truths, and stale Britty witticisms to make them feel more comfortable with their discomfort.

CURIOUS, THOUGH, in this reviewer's experience the one part of Hitchens's target audience that isn't usually so standoffish is genuine atheists. Several friends and acquaintances who do not believe in God and who know that I do (short version: I'm a believer who tried to become an atheist but ended up a Catholic) have complained to me bitterly about my lack of effort to convert them.

There is a weird and poignant sincerity to those complaints that I find to be utterly absent from in god is not Great. Hitchens claims that it's a work that is deeply important to him but if that were the case he would have written a much better book. God knows, he's capable of it. Refutations may be in order but where the author is concerned, at least, they seem like wasted effort.

Jeremy Lott would like to wish his family, friends, and colleagues -- including the atheists -- a very merry Christmas.

Letter to the Editor

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