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Review of: Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great:
How Religion Poisons
Everything, (Twelve, New York: 2007), 308
pp., $24.99
Everything
I needed to know about religion I learned in first grade at St. Luke’s,
a Roman Catholic elementary school.
There, the nuns taught faith, hope, and charity by inflicting
fear, humiliation, and violence.
How,
I wondered, could God love us (First question and answer in our
standard
text,
the Baltimore Catechism: “Why did God make me?” “God made me because He
loves
me”) when His representatives on Earth hated us?
Then
and now, “hate” seems the only word to explain the stinging slaps and
lusty thrashings that inevitably followed the most minor infraction of
the most petty rule. Refusing,
at one point, to kiss the proffered right hand of the nun who had just
hit me -- a kiss meant to signal acceptance of the punishment and
repentance for my forgotten misdeed -- I was struck about the ear with
her left hand. Those who taught
God’s mercy possessed none.
At
the time I did not realize that the nun and I were re-enacting, in a
minor way, the obscene drama of the Inquisition. I did, though, understand the choice
offered to me -- submit or suffer -- and even at a young age I knew
that a faith sustained by victimization and violence was hollow to the
core.
The
Church made me a nonbeliever and a rebel.
Today,
the methods of coercion may be more subtle, but coercion remains. It’s the quality essential not
merely for priests and pope, but ministers, preachers, rabbis, and
mullahs alike. All offer the
faithful a bargain: compulsion now, consolation later.
In
his new book, god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens takes up the age-old
debate of the existence and nature of God. In unsparing prose, he
condemns religion -- East and West -- for creating or exacerbating
social conflict and for crippling the mind. Arguing with logic and reason, basing his examples on contemporary
politics and world history, Hitchens shows that religion is not just an
outdated or harmless folly but a malignant force in the modern world.
“I
think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions,”
Hitchens
writes. “The first is that religion and the
churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to
ignore. The second is that
ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be
derived from it. The third is
that religion is -- because it claims a special divine exemption for
its practices and beliefs -- not just amoral but immoral” (p. 52).
Hitchens
develops these accusations by examining the doctrines of the major
religions, exposing their flaws and contradictions. He responds to the religious
criticisms of Darwinism and evolution and rebuts the “argument from
design,” the religious assertion that the workings of the natural world
are in themselves evidence of a Supreme Being.
Hitchens
also employs simple common sense to good effect. Of the Old Testament, Hitchens notes
“…the context is so oppressively confined and local.
None
of these provincials, or their deity, seems to have any idea of a world
beyond the desert, the flocks and herds, and the imperatives of nomadic
subsistence. This is forgivable
on the part of the provincial yokels, obviously, but then what of their
supreme guide and wrathful tyrant?
Perhaps he was made in their image, even if not graven? (p.
107).
The
ideas which are the foundation of god is not Great are hardly new. Hitchens bases himself on the work
of Thomas Paine, David Hume, Sigmund Freud, and, to a lesser extent, the
young Karl Marx. To cite the lack of originality in
Hitchens’ book is not to disparage it.
At this stage in human knowledge, fresh scientific discoveries
or philosophical insights are not to be found. And, even if they were, the results
would likely be denied by true believers of all kinds.
The
importance of this book is that it raises again the significant
arguments against the delusion and falsehood that make up religion in
general.
Just
as great literary works are retranslated for modern readers, so must
the worthy
criticisms
of the past be restated, based on the experience of modern history and
politics.
Yet,
objections must be raised with Hitchens’ overall critique because it is
not political enough. Hitchens
quotes Marx’s insight: “Religious distress is at the same time the
expression of real distress and the protest against real distress,” but
he does not do the idea justice.
Take one instance, the phenomenon of “liberation theology.” Against the hierarchy of Roman
Catholicism, local priests throughout Central and South America have
cited the example of Jesus to organize social struggles on behalf of
the poor. Hitchens’s backhanded
dismissal -- in less than a paragraph! -- of “liberation theology” is
simply not adequate.
Marx’s
idea of religion as protest provides a better understanding of Dr.
Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Hitchens refers favorably to this
work, which formed the ideological basis for the non-violence wing of
the civil rights movement, and rightly calls it “a model of polemic.” But Hitchens’ analysis of the
“Letter” leads him
to a false conclusion: “In no real as
opposed to nominal sense, then, was he [Dr. King] a
Christian.
It
certainly is true that one can struggle for civil rights on a secular
basis. In “The Ballot or the
Bullet,” Malcolm X showed how the movement for Black freedom could be
fought without religion and the divisions that religion might bring,
divisions which would only weaken the struggle.
Nonetheless,
in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” ( a polemic, remember against
Christian ministers) Dr. King based his strategy for the civil rights
movement squarely on a religious foundation. There is no denying the fact.
It’s
not only that Dr. King compared himself first to St. Paul and then
Jesus. Dr. King’s entire
argument rests on the nature of God and His law.
In
the “Letter” Dr. King makes a distinction between “two types of laws:
just and unjust.” There is a
moral responsibility to obey the former and disobey the latter. But, of course, a question
arises. “How does one determine
whether a law is just or unjust?”
King provides an answer that only raises deeper questions. He says, “ A just law is a man-made
code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.
But
this distinction begs the question.
Who decides what is moral and what is God’s law? Christians have given contradictory
replies to that question.
Advocates of American slavery found their justification in the
Bible, and Christian abolitionists cited Biblical authority, too. Though Dr. King does not answer
explicitly, he believes that he himself can interpret God’s law and act
on it to further the cause of civil rights.
The
flaws in this theory are obvious.
If Dr. King interprets the will of God one way, then Sheriff
“Bull” Connor may well interpret it in another, and both can credit the
same God for opposite and irreconcilable opinions.
Yet,
the fact remains that Dr. King clearly tried to position his point of
view within the mainstream tradition of Christianity. Given the popularity of his
“Letter,” it is clear that he succeeded. Dr. King, who explicitly rejected Marxism, used
Christianity as, in Marx’s words, “the protest against real
distress.” Hitchens cannot
accept that a fruitful text, one that advances the struggle for human
freedom, can also be a Christian one; Marx showed how this is possible.
Other
flaws can be found in god is not Great. Hitchens’ side remark about the 1917 socialist revolution
in Russia and
Bolshevism as “the new religion” is one such blemish, and the comment
is not worthy of him. A former
Marxist, he is sufficiently well versed in socialist theory to
understand that Marxism is a doctrine of class struggle and
revolutionary change based on the study of the scientific laws of
historical development.
The
Russian Revolution of October 1917 established the world's first
anticapitalist regime, but it did so under extremely difficult
circumstances. As the
revolutionary tide in
Western
Europe rolled
back, and as fascism swept over Europe after 1923, a
bureaucracy
crystallized and hardened in the Soviet Union. Leon
Trotsky later
analyzed
these developments in The Revolution Betrayed and showed, among other
points,
how the degeneration of the revolution brought about a degeneration in
Bolshevism
from a critical, emancipatory doctrine to a compliant, worshipful one
that preached the worship of Stalin.
Hitchens
comes from a Marxist tradition that traces its origins to Trotsky's
work, albeit critically. He
knows that comments about Marxism and Bolshevism as any kind of
religion are shallow and wrong.
Of
course, since Hitchens has become an advocate of the Iraq war and
received
invitations
to the White House, a derisive remark about Marxism will bring no
rebuke from his current traveling companions.
Yet,
these weaknesses make up only a small part of the book. Overall, Hitchens’ work is timely
and necessary. The false claims
of religion still need to be contested. Even a good and heroic man like Archbishop Desmond Tutu
resorts to evasions and half-truths when he says that “no religion has
ever sanctioned murder. No
religion has sanctioned the oppression of another” (Vanity Fair, July
2007). When one of
Christianity’s most enlightened and liberal defenders speaks so
disingenuously, then the need for a book like god is not Great is
obvious.
Hitchens
evaluates the role of religion in the world, past and present, and
finds much to condemn: “Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to
racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to
free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children:
organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
god
is not Great concludes with a call for “a renewed Enlightenment” which
will dispose of sacred texts.
Reading this book is step toward that beneficial end.
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