Christopher Hitchens, a Goliath of an author, and Adam English, a David of an academic, stage a holy war of wordsJ. Peder Zane, Staff Writer
The News & Observer
13 May 2007
Tuesday is fight night at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Raleigh. The pre-bout buzz suggests two likely scenarios: Either we'll see the lamb to the slaughter or an upset on the order of David and Goliath. In one corner will stand Christopher Hitchens, the famous columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate who has used his vast erudition and slashing wit to eviscerate subjects from Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa. Pugnacious and polemical, he believes that the only thing the meek will inherit is the wind.
In the other corner will be Adam C. English, an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Campbell University in Buies Creek. He's already predicting defeat.
"I'm going to lose or at least certainly not win," English said. "Hitchens is a very skilled debater who's had every question thrown at him."
English, however, believes he has one almighty advantage: He has God on his side.
That may (or may not) prove decisive given the topic of their debate: the arguments Hitchens advances in his new book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (Twelve, $24.99, 307 pages). A lacerating and irreverent attack on all forms of faith -- especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- Hitchens' book details why he considers religion a "dangerous fantasy" that produces far more evil than good.
Christopher Hitchens
To promote his book, Hitchens, 58, who was reared in Britain but became a U.S. citizen last month, has arranged a series of confrontations with believers in various cities, including London, Washington, San Francisco, Seattle and New York, where he squared off with the Rev. Al Sharpton.
"I haven't written a book to help atheists win the argument," Hitchens said during a phone interview, "though that is the principal purpose of it. I have written a book that I hope will discomfort the faithful. So it seemed necessary to make myself available to them, to see if they want to challenge me in turn."
English, 33, a scholar who also serves as an interim minister at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Willow Spring, welcomes that challenge.
"Christians have a responsibility to hear the other side," he said in a phone interview. "If we are convinced we have the truth, then we should be open to anyone questioning that truth. ... I don't think God is afraid of questions or people seeking the truth. If we have the answers, that will come out; if we don't, that will as well."
Atheists push back
"God Is Not Great" is part of a spate of high-profile books that have challenged religious belief -- "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" by Sam Harris (2004), "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins (2006) and "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel C. Dennett (2006). Hitchens says he and those authors call themselves "the four Musketeers," who are leading "a resistance, a push-back to an excess of clerical and religious bullying and stupidity in the recent past by a lot of people who have had enough of it. ...
"For too long, atheists have been told to keep their views to themselves," he said. "I didn't come to America to keep my mouth shut."
During the interview, Hitchens listed a series of events that galvanized him: The Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa calling for the assassination of his dear friend, the writer Salman Rushdie; the rise of the religious right in America; the unwillingness of politically correct leftists to confront most religious extremism; religious opposition to stem cell research, Darwinism and the distribution of condoms to fight AIDS in Africa; the attacks of 9/11; and the war in Iraq, which Hitchens vocally supports as a battle against the type of sectarian religious violence now destroying that country.
His book enumerates other acts: the burning of witches, the Spanish Inquisition, the genocide in Rwanda, the Taliban's reign of terror in Afghanistan, the Catholic Church's pedophile priest scandal, and what he calls religion's historic support for racism and sexism and opposition to science and free inquiry.
"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," he writes.
To Hitchens such evidence debunks the claim that religion makes us better, more moral people.
"Ethics and morality are quite independent of faith," he writes, "and cannot be derived from it." If parts of the world have become kinder and gentler, they are enjoying the blessings of secularism and Enlightenment values, not religion.
Broad strokes
English conceded Hitchens' litany of evil done in the name of religion.
"There's no excuse for it," he said. "I don't think God is pleased with those things."
Adam English
But, he argued, Hitchens makes several fundamental errors. First, he lumps all religions together, failing to distinguish among the major faiths and the sects within them. To equate extremist suicide bombers with quiet churchgoers, he said, is misleading and inflammatory.
Hitchens also fails to distinguish between God and religion. Hitchens' God, he said, is an authoritarian busybody who demands that people comply with rigid laws decreed thousands of years ago and controls the day-to-day world.
English's God allows people to chart their own destinies. This freedom makes faith flexible, allows it to evolve with human knowledge and experience -- to accept Darwinism, the Big Bang and the changing role of women.
"Religion is not static and monolithic because humans change," he said. "Does the Christian faith look the same, espouse the same beliefs in every detail as it did in 1750? Of course not. But it bears a resemblance. As the theologian Nicholas Lash said: Each generation must tell the gospel differently, without telling a different gospel."
Thus English can accept one of Hitchens' central claims -- "that religion poisons everything" -- because "religions are human institutions and people are flawed and rebellious. I don't know of any religion that would hold God responsible for our screw-ups."
English added that Hitchens might just as easily have titled his book "Law and Order Is Not Great: How Governments Poison Everything" because he could have found innumerable examples of atrocities perpetrated by them. "Does that mean we should do away with all governments?" he asks rhetorically.
But even if religion could be exonerated from the misdeeds committed in its name, Hitchens holds that it would still be a dangerous institution. Religion demands that people believe the unbelievable -- the existence of God and such miracles as the parting of the Red Sea and the Virgin birth.
Devotees may counter that these are questions of faith and that miracles operate outside natural laws. Hitchens responds that these phenomena are related to us through scared texts -- especially the Bible and the Quran -- that are riddled with absurd contradictions. The four Gospels of the New Testament "disagree wildly about the Sermon on the Mount, the anointing of Jesus, the treachery of Judas, and Peter's haunting 'denial,' " Hitchens writes. "Most astonishingly, they cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion or Resurrection."
"Either the Gospels are in some literal sense true," he adds, "or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that."
Choosing to believe
Hitchens acknowledges that many churchgoers draw sustenance from their faith despite its troubled past and textual lapses. They pick the aspects of religion that work for them while discarding its harder and more irrational elements. To Hitchens' thinking, such people don't take their faith seriously enough, for they deny its plainly stated tenets.
Worse, they support a sinister institution that's open to misuse. As the history of Christianity and Islam make clear, he asserts, a worldview that trumpets faith over reason "provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and thus is one of humanity's great vulnerabilities."
For English faith is a path to truth; Christianity pushes us toward reality. He acknowledges the contradictions in Scripture but ascribes them to the fact that the Bible "is a divinely inspired yet fully human text." Still, he maintains, "we see that it is fully God's word -- it is what he wants to say to us."
Through those words, English says, his faith answers three 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."
English says the power and truth of those answers have helped sustain faith against constant assaults. He notes that anti-religious tracts are hardly new; Hitchens supports his arguments with quotes from ancient Greek and Roman skeptics as well as Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell.
Nevertheless, Hitchens believes America may be on the cusp of change. While noting the dramatic decline of faith across Western Europe, he asserts that unbelief in also widespread in America -- a fact suppressed by mainstream culture, which pays "undue deference" to faith and marginalizes nonbelievers. Their ranks will swell as atheists legitimize their views by vigorously challenging religious beliefs.
English counters that the "rabid, radical and intolerant attacks on religion" by atheists such as Hitchens suggest not strength but weakness; it is their camp, he says, that fears it is losing the argument.
And on the argument goes. Given the cosmic question in play, it is unlikely that Tuesday's debate will settle much. Still, each side has hopes. While troubling the faithful, Hitchens hopes to inspire other atheists to speak out. While parrying his opponent's biting barbs, English says he will try "to be faithful, to the word of God and to the faith."
"Religion is always going to be a soft target. Religions have been around for thousands of years, they have accumulated thousands of years of atrocities. The sheer number of religious people means there will always be plenty who will do bad things. I won't excuse that, but I won't blame that on God."
Adam C. English
Religion and Philosophy scholar
"It's easy to see contradictions in Scripture. I would not try to refute them. But I would say that the Bible is a divinely inspired yet fully human text, so we shouldn't be surprised that there are misspelled words or bad grammar or contradictions, in some ways that lends to its authenticity."
Adam C. English
Religion and Philosophy scholar
"Religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. And this is to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made."
Christopher Hitchens
Author
"The order to 'love thy neighbor' is mild and yet stern: a reminder of one's duty to others. The order to 'love they neighbor as thyself' is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed ... urging humans to be superhumans on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement."
Christopher Hitchens
Author
Staff writer J. Peder Zane can be reached at peder.zane@newsobserver.com.
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