Not Great

Reviewed by James Kirchick

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Chistopher Hitchens
Twelve, 2007, 307 pages.

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Just as religion has compelled people to do horrific things, it has compelled them to do wonderful things as well. But even then, Hitchens argues, it is never religion that really obliges people to treat others justly. One may not require religious instruction to learn proper human relations, but that does not mean religion has no role to play and ought to be banished from the public square. Hitchens boasts that “charity and relief work, while they may appeal to tenderhearted believers, are the inheritors of modernism and the Enlightenment.” Hitchens, himself a well-traveled foreign correspondent, should tell that to the Catholic bishops and nuns clothing, feeding, and educating the wretched of the earth the next time he travels to one of the world’s most blighted lands.

Similarly, Hitchens has a baffling reply to those who argue that the greatest evils of the twentieth century—Nazism and communism—were explicitly atheist movements. “Communist absolutists,” he writes, “did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it.” If one is to believe this line of reasoning, the proper reaction to it is an acknowledgment that insofar as human beings appear to have a tendency toward faith and superstition, that tendency is best channeled toward things like religious worship, as opposed to genocidal mass movements like Nazism and communism. Hitchens is actually making an argument in favor of religious observance, yet he is so blinded by animosity that he does not appear to know it.

He claims, for example, that North Korea represents the modern apotheosis of religious totalitarianism, because it “is a land entirely given over to adulation” of the “Supreme Being and his father,” Kim Jong Il and the late Kim Il Sung. With its “daily movements of ritual” and Big Brother-like horrors, North Korea is “a totalitarian state and also a religious one.” But North Korea is only a “religious state” insofar as Hitchens would like to portray it as such; it is very easy to attack something when you control the means of defining it. This particular assertion is especially fantastical; Kim Jong Il’s North Korea is a country-size totalitarian prison for its citizens, whose “worship” of the Dear Leader is compulsory and inescapable. North Korea’s sinister regime may represent some form of idolatry in its authoritarian excess, but even if we make this logical leap, it is not the sort of religion adhered to by anyone other than the opportunistic family that expounds it and forces its subjects to worship them; it is most certainly not a religion followed by people of genuine, voluntary faith. The other half of Korea, on the other hand, a prosperous, democratic country, is home to a pious population that follows Christianity and Buddhism. Hitchens, of course, ignores the distinction between the Orwellian North and the voluntarily observant South, and offers the lame rejoinder that the latter is the birthplace of the cult leader Sun Myung Moon.

Hitchens, of course, has every right to come up with a theory of what religion really is, and who really is religious. One of the deepest flaws in his polemic, however, is the capriciousness of his definitions. Thus, the true essence of contemporary religion is a totalitarian nightmare state that upholds its Dear Leader as a deity, and decent people who call themselves religious (i.e., Martin Luther King, Jr.) are just deluding themselves when they claim to be working on behalf of their faith. This rhetorical sleight of hand works wonders for Hitchens’ argument, but it studiously avoids tackling the real, crucial issues underlying religion as most self-identified religious people live it. “Unquestioning faith in God—the yardstick by which both atheists and blinkered fundamentalists seem to measure religious commitment—is not the best true sign of religiosity,” write Scott Korb and Peter Bebergal, authors of The Faith Between Us (Bloomsbury, 2007). This is something with which many self-affirming “religious” people would agree, yet is contradictory to Hitchens’ narrow view of what constitutes faith.

As he avoids blaming secular horror shows for their own exceptional origins, Hitchens expediently ignores the astonishing faults of the non-faith-based. For instance, criticizing the Catholic Church for its ineffective policies regarding contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, he opines:

We are not dealing, as early missionaries might have liked to believe, with witch doctors and savages who resist the boons that the missionaries bring. We are instead dealing with the Bush administration, which, in a supposedly secular republic in the twenty-first century, refuses to share its foreign aid budget with charities and clinics that offer advice on family planning.

Hitchens is absolutely correct on the latter point, both on the factual matter of the Bush administration’s foreign aid policies and on the substance of its ineffectiveness. But considering his deftness at exposing any and all forms of pseudoscience and quackery, how can Hitchens possibly ignore the mind-numbing offenses to humanity and common sense offered up by the African National Congress-led government of South Africa, which has prevented the distribution of anti-retroviral drugs, incorporated “witch doctors” into its national health policy (administered by a health minister urging aids sufferers to eat beetroot and garlic as alternatives), and whose president, Thabo Mbeki, entertained the theory that HIV does not cause aids? These were the doings not of the dreaded Christian right, but rather the socialist, avowedly secular liberation movement to which Hitchens has been partial ever since his Oxford days as an anti-apartheid activist.

Considering Hitchens’ lineage, it is not hard to see where his modicum of respect for Judaism comes from. In a 1988 essay, “On Not Knowing the Half of It,” in the now-defunct literary quarterly Grand Street, Hitchens wrote of the revelation that his mother was Jewish: “On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.” His matrilineal line was traced to the English Midlands via Breslav, Poland. In England, it was “easy to visualize the retarding influence of the Rotary Club, and perhaps Freemasonry and the gold club, on the aspirations of the Jewish dentist or hatter.” Thus, his mother’s parents anglicized their last names. “But I was glad to learn that, while they sought to assimilate, they did not renounce,” Hitchens professes.

Hitchens discovered that his mother hid her (and thus, his) Judaism so that her exceptionally bright son could get into Oxford. This fact (and Hitchens’ frequently expressed revulsion towards anti-Semitism) may explain part of his animosity toward religion writ large: Not so much for monotheism’s origins in the Jewish faith and the continuance of those traditions into the present day, but for the divisions that religion inspires, building up schisms in our common humanity. If there were no Judaism (and for that matter, no Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.) there would be less reason to discriminate. In other words, if there were no Judaism, there would be no anti-Semitism.

But this is silly logic—it is a not-so-distant cousin of the commonly expressed view that Jews, by their “clannishness,” uncritical support for Israel, and other traits are themselves responsible for anti-Semitism—and discredits Hitchens’ own contention that “Judaism might turn out to be the most ethically sophisticated tributary of humanism.” Not for nothing does Judaism—at least as it is believed and practiced today—emerge relatively unscathed from this book. What angers Hitchens is what ought to anger anyone who believes in secularism, freedom, and human rights: The use of religion to sow hatred among peoples; to justify bigotry, murder, and the subjugation of women; and to smite the individual. Islam, as it is practiced in whole swaths of the world, does this. Judaism does not.

In this light, perhaps Hitchens now finds himself part of the great tradition of secular Jewish thinkers who, whatever their beliefs about God, used the Jewish tools of criticism and questioning to further human knowledge. Throughout the book, Hitchens’ delight in castigating religious Christians and Muslims is evident. Yet there is a grudging respect for Judaism and Jews throughout. Even though he scorns particular Jewish rituals and ancient beliefs, Hitchens admires men like Albert Einstein, who “preserved what he could of ethical Judaism and rejected the barbaric mythology of the Pentateuch.” Such acknowledgment of “ethical Judaism,” however, seriously undermines Hitchens’ argument that “religion poisons everything.”

Hitchens’ nearly twenty-year-old essay about the discovery of his Jewish heritage is a far more serious, nuanced, and respectful meditation on what religion means than God Is Not Great, and there are several reasons for this. It is likely that the rise in religious fundamentalism in the past decade has affected Hitchens’ atheist sensibilities to the point of overreaction. But there is now a huge market for this anti-religious stuff, as evidenced not just by the many months Hitchens’ tome has spent on the New York Times best-seller list, but by the popularity of other anti-religious books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Reading his 1988 essay and his latest work, one gets the sense that Hitchens is ignoring the tougher questions about religion to take advantage of this anti-religious fad. God Is Not Great is, therefore, something of a cop-out.

Irrespective of its intellectual laziness, God Is Not Great is a delight to read. Hitchens is among the funniest of today’s political writers, his humor marked by the outrageous treatment of fact. For instance, he opens a paragraph with this declaration: “In 2004, a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus was produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson.” Creationism, masked as “intelligent design theory,” is “the inculcation of compulsory… stupidity.” Gandhi is a “fakir and guru.” Easy targets all, and deliciously skewered by a brilliant man. It’s just too bad he didn’t sit and think longer about the bigger questions.

James Kirchick is on the editorial staff of The New Republic. His last contribution to AZURE was “Going South” (AZURE 29, Summer 2007).

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