Christopher Hitchens has been abundantly blessed for attacking God.
His outrageous and entertaining book, “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” has become a major bestseller and earned its sardonic author more than a million dollars, according to a recent estimate by the Wall Street Journal.
For any sophisticated religious believer, this powerfully popular work represents a maddening combination of stimulation and sloppiness, erudition and ignorance, provocation and puerility.
The sly distortions and grotesque errors that appear in every chapter of his work demonstrate the author’s carelessness and arrogance. In one especially appalling example (on page 100), Hitchens writes of “the pitiless teachings of the god of Moses, who never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all.” He thereby ignores the most celebrated commandment in the Five Books of Moses, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), identified by Jewish sages (and in Matthew’s Gospel by Jesus himself) as the very essence of the Hebrew Scriptures. Hitchens also fails to acknowledge the innumerable Old Testament injunctions to show loving-kindness and mercy in dealing with widows, orphans, strangers, and the poor. Whether one imputes these teachings to God or to Moses, they hardly qualify as “pitiless” and most certainly emphasize “human solidarity and compassion.”
Beyond its factual errors and obvious misstatements, “god is not Great” (Hitchens makes a point of never spelling the word “God” with a capital “G”) provides a frequently primitive and juvenile characterization of religious belief. Near the conclusion of his book he suggests that “religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskin, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be ‘saved.’” This breezy dismissal obviously misrepresents Christianity (with most denominations considering a relationship with Christ more important to salvation than consumption of magical wafers) but also misses the entire thrust of Judaism, which never mandated circumcision for non-Jews nor limited a share in the afterlife to members of the House of Israel.
The countless quibbles with the book’s shoddy scholarship and clumsy mischaracterizations of Biblical tradition easily could fill a separate corrective volume or take up any opportunity for interview or debate with Mr. Hitchens. On my radio show, I therefore decided to avoid focusing on such details when he agreed to talk with me for two full hours earlier today. Rather than spending precious time proving that he shamefully misquoted the 11th Century sage Moses Maimonides, or challenging his odd insistence (emphatically and tellingly repeated on my show) that a charismatic teacher named Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, I concentrated instead on five core questions to challenge his fundamental argument that “religion poisons everything.”
1. Some 24 years ago Hitchens abandoned his British homeland and chose to make his life in the United States. This April, he proudly took the oath as a naturalized American citizen at the Jefferson Memorial. He has written movingly and persuasively of his love for his adopted country—despite the fact that throughout its history the people of the United States have proven notably more committed to their predominantly Christian faith than their Western European counterparts. A previous visiting journalist named Alexis de Tocqueville described America as “a nation with the soul of a church” and Hitchens conceded that to this day more Americans engage in regular prayer and Bible study than do the citizens of any other advanced Western nation. If religion indeed “poisons everything” then why has it so pointedly failed to poison the United States – producing, instead, a nation that Hitchens himself openly prefers to any other?
2. Throughout his book, Hitchens attacks “religion” in general, regularly dismissing the common fallacies he identifies in all major faiths, assaulting Islam, Christianity and Judaism with comparable gusto. In so doing, he inadvertently lets homicidal and self-destructive Islamo-Nazis off the hook: conflating today’s suicide bombings in the name Allah with medieval pogroms in the name of Jesus, or Biblical accounts of Israelite violence against the ancient Amalekites. The generalized indictment of “religion” fails to acknowledge the unique cruelty and insanity of contemporary Islamism; like leftist apologists for terrorist crimes, he takes the position that “all religions are guilty” so Muslim fanatics bear no unique culpability. In the style of Cold War skeptics who discerned an absurd moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union, he ends up trivializing the monstrousness of current jihadist dogma by comparing it to Christian and Jewish teachings that produce no similarly bloody consequences in today’s world. In the same sense, he specifically likens the hideous, indefensible practice of female genital mutilation in “some animist and Muslim societies,” with the circumcision of baby boys which, unlike clitorectomy, boasts abundant defenders (and practitioners) within the modern medical community. By assailing all religions as similarly barbaric and primitive, Hitchens effectively denies the singular dangers and dementia of Islamism which he has vividly delineated in other contexts.
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