In Search of Comity

Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great

"Atheists with Attitude" is Anthony Gottlieb's review, in the May 20, 2007, New Yorker, of one of several prominent recent books promoting atheism. Christopher Hitchens' god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything now joins Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith on the freethinkers' must-read list of screeds disparaging faith.

In the title of Hitchens' book, the first word is spelled with a small "g": god. That's how in-your-face Hitchens would be toward those who believe the Deity deserves a capital letter. Gottlieb says that, with reference to the books listed above, this one is "both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot":

Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”

Sam Harris, says Gottlieb, is almost as bad. Harris maintains

that religious belief not only aggravates [armed sectarian] conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows.

Whence such an absence of comity among today's "atheists with attitude"? Their quarrel is not with any particular religion, but with religion in general. Hitchens' polemic is a case in point, says Gottlieb:

The tangled diversity of faith is ... no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms — Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point — are helping to sustain the whole.

It is my belief that what militant atheists like Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett are really on about is power — specifically, the abuse thereof by churches and religions since time immemorial. (Gottlieb mentions Voltaire, "one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power," as a notable early freethinker.) Whenever a theology or a theocracy hitches the name of God to an earthly agenda, that yoking together can all too easily become justification for coercion.

Sometimes the coercion manifests itself externally, as when Christian Europe marched (or sailed) to wrench the Holy Land from infidel control during the Crusades. At other times, coercion is internal, as when the Inquisition burned Europe's heretics at the stake. Obviously, the two forms of coercion can go hand in hand.

As I have mentioned recently in To Reason Is Divine, The Pope of Reason, and The Pope and Islam, the current leader of the Roman Catholic faith, Pope Benedict XVI, has gone out of his way to show that reason, friendly persuasion, and comity are actually the heart and soul of Christian tradition — despite the all-too-frequent historical lapses. For, as papal explainer George Weigel has put it, "the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion," is of paramount concern to this pope.

The way the Holy Father talks about rationality makes it clear: to him, reason and coercion are so mutually exclusive, God so intrinsically rational in his very nature, that God's work and Word simply cannot be spread by force. The papal prescription for the future of Western religion is at once a return to tradition and a radical break with home-grown trends that demote reason in favor of the subjective and the downright irrational. If the pope has his way, people in the West and elsewhere will come to their senses and reason thoughtfully together in comity and grace — and the valid objections of atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett to theological abuses of power and religiously "justified" urges to sectarian violence might simply melt away.