Hitchens' God Not So Good

Christianity has often profited from listening to its severest critics. Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus--all have perceived and expressed uncomfortable truths about religion, truths that believers needed to hear even when they were combined with much that was unpalatable. On the evidence of this desultory and sophomoric diatribe, Christopher Hitchens will not be joining that select company of Christianity's benefactors. He will no doubt be relieved to hear it.

Hitchens, the British-born American pundit, has always cultivated the image of a fierce and contrarian debater. Long a lion of the left, he broke ranks politically with his colleagues by attacking Bill Clinton and later by supporting the American invasion of Iraq. An early entry into the religion wars came with his scathing attack on Mother Teresa of Calcutta, tastefully titled The Missionary Position. Now he joins fellow evangelists of unbelief Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett in an all-out attack on religion as intellectually vacuous, morally bankrupt, and politically pernicious.

Like his hero H. L. Mencken, Hitchens can often be a delight to read, both for his wit and for his savagery, even when one deplores his views. Also like Mencken, however, there is often less to Hitchens than meets the eye; on closer inspection, his arguments tend to unravel and his evidence turns squidgy. In God Is Not Great, his wrath against religion waxes so hot that he can barely focus on a line of thought long enough to complete it. In places, the book seems to lurch from one non sequitur to the next.

For instance, in Chapter 6, "Revelation: The Nightmare of the Old Testament," the reader expects a carpet-bombing of Yahweh's strange commands and genocidal furies, and we do get a little of that. Inexplicably, though, a third of the chapter (104-106) is devoted to evidence for the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Hitchens seems to think this will come as shattering news to believers; it is, of course, neither news nor shattering. Similarly, although "The New Testament Exceeds the Evil of the Old One," according to the title of Chapter 7, he hardly finds much evil there, dwelling instead on random "contradictions and illiteracies." To pad out his material he is reduced to dropping another bombshell--that the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8 was probably not part of the original gospel (120-122). This stunner he takes as a juicy revelation from Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, although he could have found it in any copy of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible--if he had bothered to look.

Nor can he be bothered to check facts, so that few pages go by without an other howler. Most are inconsequential, although they don't inspire confidence in his grasp of the field. A few matter; for example, when he attributes to Thomas Aquinas the phrase "I am a man of one book" (presumably Hitchens assumes the Bible is meant), when what Aquinas said was "I fear a man of one book." Because Hitchens assumes that Aquinas was a mere biblicist, he never bothers to recognize, much less interact with, Aquinas's sophisticated view of the relationship between faith and reason. It is enough to note that Aquinas held erroneous views of reproductive biology in order to dismiss him as a religious crank, even though those views were widely shared in the pre-microscopy era, and were in any case not derived from his religious beliefs. Augustine is similarly dismissed as "an earth-centered ignoramus," apparently on the assumption that his fellow fourth-century Romans had all made the transition from Ptolemy to Copernicus, and only Augustine refused to look through Galileo's telescope (63-64).

This is just childish, and no stylistic elegance can disguise its silliness. But one need not read far into the book to realize that Hitchens's view of religion is frozen in adolescent pique. In the first chapter, he relates how his doubts about religion began at the tender age of nine, when he saw through a bit of lame natural theology offered by his Bible teacher, Mrs. Watts. There soon followed in his mind an avalanche of questions, which he accurately calls "childish and faltering," but which he nonetheless blandly asserts to have been "insuperable" and "inescapable" (3). What some would regard as an invitation to move toward a deeper and richer understanding of the faith was for him a motivation to reject the whole racket with revulsion and contempt.

That's fine, but then he should not expect the resulting tantrum to be received as reasoned argument. Without any indication that Hitchens has read widely among a religion's best thinkers and thought carefully about their ideas, that he can distinguish between nuanced and naïve versions of theology, that he possesses even the minimum of empathy needed to enter into someone else's understanding of the world, and that he does his homework before he spouts off, why should anyone take him seriously?.