Hitchens gives atheism a bad name

Controversialist Christopher Hitchens, formerly notorious as perhaps the most articulate of self-described progressives still in favor of of America's forcible removal of Saddam Hussein and his sons from power, has now developed a sideline on the lecture circuit: He tours the country as a celebrity atheist, arguing in support of his new book, whose thesis is that religion poisons everything.

Most of the people who dispute that contention in public debates with Hitchens are Christians, and most of them are not as expert rhetorically as he is. When you go up against a man who once trashed Mother Teresa in a volume impishly titled "The Missionary Position," you ought to be prepared. Unfortunately, Hitchens has been collecting speaking fees for crossing swords with the likes of Al Sharpton in New York and Adam English in North Carolina.

On the Web site of Christianity Today magazine, Hitchens has an ongoing debate with evangelical Christian theologian Douglas Wilson. Wilson at least is not intimidated by Hitchens, but reading the transcript of their exchange so far, I kept wishing that Hitchens had the wherewithal to meet a formidable Catholic opponent like Richard John Neuhaus, Benedict Groeschel, Peter Kreeft, Stanley L. Jaki, George Rutler, George Wiegel, or John Corapi. Five of the seven aforementioned men are priests, but that's incidental to the fact that any one of them could make Hitch work for his points. Ditto the "B-team" of Karl Keating, Christopher Buckley, Thomas Howard, Edward T. Oakes, Amy Welborn, J.A. Gray, and Benjamin Wiker.

Sadly, Hitchens is not likely to debate any of those people. Most of them have better things to do, and so we have to settle for the fight cards we actually have.

I thought it would be instructive (check that: I'm Irish-- I thought it would be fun) to review a typical pair of debates, examining chinks in the Hitchensian armor whom the Christians he's chosen to spar with sometimes miss. I have no particular qualifications for this exercise, beyond an interest in the subject and two years of tag-team interscholastic debate under Coach Kimura where Byron Kitagawa and I won more contests than we lost.

Let's start with the debate between Christopher Hitchens and Adam English, which actually takes place tonight at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Raleigh, NC. If J. Peder Zane's feature story previewing their match is at all fair, English walks into this match expecting defeat. That's a weak way to champion the value of theism for civilization.

Consider, too, the venue hosting their debate: Unitarian Universalist emphasis on inclusion to the point of incoherence makes it a poor sparring partner in debates with the kinds of militant atheists whom Hitchens represents. Right off the bat, Unitarian Universalism concedes too much, because as an exuberantly non-creedal religion, it must: some 19 percent of Unitarian Universalists agree with Hitchens that there is no God.

Not that Professor English himself is a Unitarian. In fact, he's an interim minister at a local Baptist church. But what I mean to underscore is that even the venue for his debate with Hitchens can hardly be called neutral.

Oddly, English accepts Hitchens' central claim, that religion poisons everything, but by way of riposte points out that no religion holds God responsible for human screw-ups. He also tries to show the unwieldiness of Hitchens' "God is Not Great" thesis by suggesting that the pundit could as easily have written a book saying "Government is Not Great."

When Hitchens makes sport of apparent contradictions in the Christian scriptures, English demurs by saying -- correctly but timidly-- that scripture is God's word mediated through human authors, because the bible is a "divinely inspired yet fully human text." Through the words (and contradictions) of the bible, English says, his faith answers three important questions: "Where do we come from? We come from God. What are we supposed to be doing now? Loving one another, loving God. Where do we go in the final end? To God."

On the whole, it is, and promises to be, a yeoman effort. English also wins points by highlighting the fallacy of acting as though all religions are the same, the way Hitchens does. That's a strong argument, as is the comparison of religious over-reaching to more pernicious statist over-reaching. I do think English should harp more on that than he does, however: it's not religion that "poisons" society; it's human frailty, or fanaticism (which, I hasten to add, is not the same as piety).

With regard to apparent contradictions in the bible, I think English dropped the ball, in spite of saying more about the bible than transcript notes show that Rev. Al Sharpton did in his debate with Hitchens. The differences in accounts of the crucifixtion and resurrection that Hitchens uses to call both episodes fables are not "wild," as he claims: they're precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to see in accounts of the same events by different eyewitnesses (Rashomon, anyone? Courage Under Fire?)

Hitchens appears to think that exact parallelism is the sole criterion for truth, which implies that he hasn't thought very much about point of view, or read a police report that involved the statements of multiple witnesses. English would have done well to remind both Hitchens and the reporter previewing the debate that the bible is a multi-volume history of salvation written over many generations for different audiences, not a court transcript.

Were religious faith incompatible with humanism, as Hitchens seems to imply, we would never have heard of Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Sienna, Thomas More, William Wilberforce, John Newton, Karol Wojtyla, or even Flannery O'Connnor. While you do not have to be pious to be moral, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind could combine with a dollop of intellectual curiousity to wonder at the architect of Natural Law. Worse, Hitchens styles himself a great fan of the Western rationalist tradition, but seems incurious as to the Christian origins of the university, for example. Instead, he damns organized religion generally as ""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." He even imagines himself as a victim, telling a reporter that "for too long, atheists have been told to keep their views to themselves."

His indictment is broad-brush bunk, all of it, and any Christian refutation of that laundry list of slanders could do worse than start with the Sermon on the Mount, but I fear that Professor English is not up to the task.

Douglas Wilson fares a little better. I'll use a followup post to review Wilson's exchange with Hitchens.

(Part Two of this series can be found here)

(Part Three of this series can be found here)

(Part Four of this series can be found here)

The Anchoress provides a gracious link and some welcome context.