Copyright. Permission to reprint required.


Essay. Is the outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens also a man of faith? In his controversial best-seller god is not Great, Hitchens employs the lowercase g for God throughout the book as an apt symbol for his fierce atheism. He is no fan of any religion. And he is equally fearless about declaring what he does believe, in lieu of religious belief, about the ultimate nature and meaning of life. But isn't that also a faith? (Back to Articles.)

Christopher Hitchens, Man of Faith
by Charles Strohmer

I am not by temperament a fan of polemical writing and sardonic wit, but I will set that aside for Christopher Hitchens, whom I enjoy reading. A skilled and thoughtful essayist who writes on politics and literature with a journalist's persistence for unearthing known unknowns, he has gained a reputation for being his own man in the cause of full disclosure. In the February and March 2001 issues of Harper's, Hitchens unleashed his considerable skills in the role of political provocateur, arguing that Henry Kissinger was worthy of being tried as a war criminal. In 2002, he broke with many friends and colleagues with his zealous defense of the war about Iraq, as he likes to call that U.S. effort at regime change. His argument hinged not so much on WMD as on humanitarian issues and the spread of democracy, a position he still vigorously represents. In Love, Power, and War, to note but one of his books, you will find an intellect well-traveled and full of piss and vinegar, having the courage to hammer on issues favored by the left or the right, or to call anyone into the dock, from Michael Moore to Mother Teresa.

Hitchens speaks to me in part because he knows that how we think is at least as important as, if not more important than, what we think. He also stretches our thinking with fresh insights from the altered realities he creates with his known unknowns, thus urging us to reconsider issues that we may have judged settled. He brings to mind the kind of person admired by Rabbi Heschel when he wrote: "An answer without a question is devoid of life." His views in support of America and its constitution, for instance, helped rescue me from turning cynical about my homeland during a particular dark patch a while back (The American revolution is the only revolution that still resonates — his words). Aid from that quarter may seem ironic, for Hitchens is English. Never mind. Some of my dearest friends are Brits, and I learn more from them than from many Americans I know. (I think I can say why this is so, but it's a topic that must wait til another time.) Bullish on America, the Oxford-educated Hitchens has lived in the States since 1981, raising his family, and he recently became an American citizen, having waited years for the system to process his application due the backlog of piled up paperwork since 9/11. His byline can be found virtually any month in any one of dozens of publications, including Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books.

I did wonder, however, if his provocative new book, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, would speak to me. That's not a typo. Hitchens employs the lowercase g for God throughout the book, and its appearance front and center on the cover is an apt symbol for the fierce atheism inside. A tamer sampling: "God did not make man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilizations."

With this book, Hitchens, a self-described life-long anti-religionist, has joined a small but noisy club of plain-speaking, metaphysical gamblers whom Anthony Gottlieb calls atheists with attitude, citing Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, whose recent best-sellers wield an amped-up rationalism to argue from within a naturalistic worldview that God is a myth, that religion is manmade, and God help those who don't get that. For his own outing, Hitchens poured all religions (pagan, Eastern, Western) into a large tub and stirred. Repulsed by what he saw, he pulled the drain and left the room. Little, if anything, of religion remains appreciated by him.

In god is not Great, Hitchens uses his power of rhetoric to recall the sillinesses, abuses, and atrocities that the history of religion is infamous for, from the Aztecs to al Qaeda. He has said in interviews that he put thirty years of work into the book, and it shows. The three hundred pages are enough of an iceberg to chill the bones of some believers, certainly enough to make atheists of agnostics. His refrain, religion poisons everything, just keeps coming at you.

Everything? Even some atheists might not buy that, including his friend Salman Rushdie, for whom it does not appear that religion poisons everything. In a talk at King's College Chapel in Cambridge, Rushdie, who read History at King's, said, "To stand in this house is to be reminded of what is most beautiful about religious faith. Its ability to give solace and comfort and to inspire." When asked in an interview with Bill Moyers why he, Rushdie, an atheist, would make such a statement, Rushdie replied, "I do believe that religion at its best has given people profound solace in the travails of life." "As for consolation," Hitchens writes in god is not Great, "since religious people so often insist that faith answers this supposed need, I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends."  

It's not as if Rushdie is soft on religion. In Grand Rapids a couple years ago I happened to be among a group to whom Rushdie was shedding light on why, in India, the name of the problem has been religion. Why pick on religion? someone asked. Rushdie had seen why, as a child in India when dreadful massacres broke out and continued between Hindu and Muslim families over the partitioning of India and Pakistan. It was a violence made all the more grievous because these interfaith communities had lived peaceably together for decades, intermarrying and looking out for one another, but religion "as a totalizing force," Rushdie explained, had resulted in horrific, ongoing violence and death. Of this period, Rushdie said to Moyers, "You can see how ugly religion can get." To us in Grand Rapids, he said, "Religion is poison in the blood of India."  Hitchens has taken that image to the four corners of the earth, with his religion poisons everything. 

Certainly religion has long business of documentable nastiness, but that verdict can be read out also about every other dimension of life. Should the plug be pulled on all politics, or on education, or the courts, or commerce, or industry just because books could be written disclosing solely their dark sides? Even atheists, who spend time thinking about what life might be like in a world without religion, might have a hard time imagining human life in a world without all the dimensions. It would be much less a world than even the one Hobbe's famously described as a state of nature, in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Even if religion were one hundred percent damnable, one would need to judge its source, for religion did not invent itself. Its source, according to Hitchens, is man. It is fair to say therefore that humankind is more fundamentally the problem. People are the mis-managers, if not managers, of all structures and their institutions. As a force shaping human society, religion can be directed to good ends as long as its proper function is obeyed. Certainly there is no excuse for the evils that people commit in the name of their religions, and Hitchens argues the case shockingly well, but it would take more time than I have, here, to recall the good that has arisen in the name of religion just from charitable donations, philanthropic enterprises, and individual acts of mercy. Too, millions of people of faith do not go about conspiring to harm or to kill people. They abhor human violence. They live peaceably enough in the world, though they know there is always room for individual improvement. They would say that when they are found to be sinners, they take responsibility and try to repair the damage they've done. One either shoulders the blame or sloughs it off.

It was the events of 9/11 that crystalized the threat of religion for Hitchens. "I could sense that religion was beginning to reassert its challenge to civil society," he writes, "long before the critical day of September 11, 2001," but the "nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond doubt the most sincere believers on those planes." That acted as a change agent for him. He interpreted the incendiary conduct of those men, and not without good and sufficient reason, as a great portent of destructive events that could be inflicted on the world from religious fanatics, should they get their mitts on the Bomb. In god is not Great, however, he has expanded the specific future threat, the one from the submit or die ideologues of Islamist militancy, into a general thesis covering all religions. For he seems to see in any religion the potential to become a madly destructive force in the world.

It should also be noted that Hitchens has religious friends, albeit with them he has "real and serious differences." When he visits mosques he respectfully removes his shoes. In synagogues he covers his head. And he decries the destruction of religious sites. "This is something that no secularist, no atheist, would ever ever allow," he told Charlie Rose (May 4, 2007). "It horrifies me. We have a natural resistance in ourselves to desecration." And, back in the book, he gives a slight but decidedly qualified nod to several notables of faith, such as to the Franciscan William Ockham, the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Baptist Martin Luther King Jr.

These minor and qualified concessions are, however, few and far between and they pale before his fierce atheism, which has apologists of many faiths jumping on his chest to see who is best, in book reviews, interviews, and debates (Hitchens has set himself a demanding itinerary in the U.S. and the U.K. debating priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, whomever). As with Dawkins and others in the new club, Hitchens seeks to disprove the veracity of all religion chiefly by citing arguments from modern science and the theory of evolution. This approach, for anyone interested in irony, mirrors that of literal creationists, who use a religious text (the early chapters of Genesis) in support of their "scientific" views about a six-day creation scheme.

Not to disappoint, but readers of this essay will have to look elsewhere to find any of the many and varied approaches used by apologists against the content of god is not Great. For having brought God into the dock, Hitchens has opened the door to a most important personal issue, faith and its implications, the significance of which, as far as I know, has been ignored by the apologists and passed over with slight comment by Hitchens. In the chapter on secularism, near the end of the book, he writes: "Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are fundamentalist, and, as we now say, ‘faith-based'." About Einstein: "It is quite clear ... that he put his ‘faith,' as always, in the Enlightenment tradition." In the chapter on miracles, he writes that "it takes a certain ‘leap' of another kind to find oneself asserting that all religion is made up by ordinary mammals and has no secret or mystery to it." And early in the book: "[t]he argument with faith ... is the beginning — but not the end — of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature." By "argument with faith," I take him to be including his own argument against (religious) faith, the subject of his book; and by "a certain ‘leap' of another kind," if I understand him correctly, he is including his own leap.

What I'm on about is this. It is not that atheists make a leap of another kind with their beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality. It is a leap of the same sort. It is a leap of faith, albeit the object of faith is different than that of believers. For all arguments against faith are arguments ultimately from faith, spring how they may from a believer or an atheist.

We are given a personal glimpse into this "beginning" that is faith when Hitchens, heart on sleeve, tells the following story from his childhood. It begins with "a good, sincere, simple woman, of stable and decent faith, named Mrs. Jean Watts," who aptly instructed Hitchens in lessons about nature and the Christian scripture when he was a boy of about nine, attending a school on the edge of Dartmoor. Coincidentally, my friend Louise Grocott, who lived one step from Dartmoor until her death, disabused me of Conan Doyle's fictionalized, spooky characterization of the shrubby moor on a walkabout through its dense gorse, purple moor grass, and bracken ferns, which were not to be outdone by the yellow flowering heather. I can imagine the young Hitchens and his fellows thrashing about in this fantastically otherworldly beauty, under the spell of Mrs. Watts's nature lessons, some of them described in the book. Hitchens writes that he liked Mrs. Watts, an affectionate and childless widow who had a friendly sheepdog. The "pious old trout," he writes, "would invite us for sweets and treats after hours to her slightly ramshackle old house near the railway line."

Under her instruction, Hitchens frequently "passed ‘top' in scripture class," where he excelled in looking up assigned verses from the Old or New Testament, and then telling the class or the teacher, orally or in writing, what the story and the moral was. "I used to love this exercise.... It was my first instruction in practical and textual criticism. I would read all the chapters that lead up to the verse, and all the ones that followed it, to be sure that I had got the point of the ‘original' clue.... However, there came a day when poor, dear Mrs. Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said, ‘So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the tress and the grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple or orange, how awful that would be.'....

"I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of nine I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. The secrets of the genome were as hidden from me as they were, at the time, to everyone else. I had not then visited scenes of nature where almost everything was hideously indifferent or hostile to human life, if not life itself. I simply knew [his emphasis], almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way round."

The adult Hitchens looks back on this moment of intuitive knowing and gives it the high register of an "epiphany" (his word for it). Recognizing that he does not "remember everything perfectly, or in order" after it, he writes that he began to notice "other oddities" about religion, which he briefly describes. Then came a time when he was "presented with" what he took to be a large objection to religion. It was, evidently, another deep knowing moment, and it came from the headmaster, who led the daily services and prayers. He "was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one evening. ‘You may not see the point of all this now,' he said. ‘But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones.' Again, I experienced a sheer stab of indignation as well as disbelief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible. I was nearing thirteen, and becoming quite the insufferable little intellectual. I had never heard of Sigmund Freud — though he would have been very useful to me in understanding the headmaster — but I had just been given a glimpse of his essay The Future of an Illusion."

Of this period of his life, Hitchens writes that he had discovered, before his "boyish voice had broken," that religious faith "wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, " which "is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." He seems pretty firmly set on this, and in god is not Great explains why.

In Grand Rapids, Rushdie revealed his own knowing moment. After giving us the wink that we were dealing with "a dreadful old atheist," he pictured his childhood in a Muslim home in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his grandfather was a devout believer and his father was a scholar of Islam but not religious. The home was a model of intellectual openness, he said, and friendly to lively debates about religion: the young Rushdie venting his agnosticism and never receiving answers that he considered sufficient to justify the horrible violence occurring nearby, year after year, between Muslims and Hindus in the name of their religions. At age 14, he was sent from Bombay to Rugby School in England. There, Rushdie had his own knowing moment. He explained that everyday in Latin class (I think it was; apologies for reconstructing this from the handwritten notes I scribbled that day) he would get bored and stare out the window across the green to "the ugliest chapel I had ever seen." He said that after seeing this ugly sight for many weeks, he asked himself, What kind of God would let his followers build such an ugly house to Him, why would God want to live in such an ugly house? "After class I ate a ham sandwich for the first time in my life," he told us, "and there were no thunderbolts. That day I became a disbeliever in God."

I no longer think much about my own knowing moment, which long ago became a given for me, but Hitchens spoke to me about its significance through his own story. Mine counterposes his, and since I have always found it safer to illustrate a point by using my own experience whenever possible, rather than citing intermediary accounts, which by default are filtered through the perceptions and biases of second or third parties, perhaps you allow me to wear my heart on my sleeve for a minute.

My story begins with the Catholic Church, which loomed large in my life throughout childhood. At age five I was fed into the Catholic elementary school system in Detroit, where in each classroom my teacher was that austere figure of the nun who demands meticulous attention and conformity. Every subject was thus taught by these formidable figures, whose task included our religious education and enforcing our attendance at mass, year after year, every weekday morning before classes began. Having to spend what amounted to nearly an entire working day every week (the required Sunday mass added the additional hour) tied down with a ritual that was completely unintelligible to me, and not just because it was conducted in Latin, hung round my neck rather like a millstone than anything inspirational. The whole Catholic experience wore on me. By the time I had reached nine or ten years old, Rome had distanced me so far from belief in God that I might as well have been raised Protestant! After all, the nuns had given me to understand that none of my Protestant friends were going to heaven when they grew old and died. The notion struck me as inconceivable. After all, they attended church on Sundays just like I did. 

Sometime during this period of my life (I was probably nine or ten), I was taken on my first visit to the Detroit Zoo. I don't remember if it was a school field trip, or one of those neighborhood, weekend outings, but its effect on me, that I vividly recall. Having traipsed across the parking lot, we were excitedly queueing up at the entrance, an imposing concrete archway. Above our heads, running right the way across the arch of the entryway, some artwork caught my attention. I didn't get it. I remember stopping to stare at the odd sight, trying to take in its meaning. What was going on here? Suddenly it hit me and I was stunned. The zoo expected me to believe that? No way. I suddenly knew beyond doubt that the zoo had got it wrong. That wasn't how we had got here. I had been staring at a huge installation of the "ascent of man," or so I later learned the name of this illustration of human evolution. >From out of the biotic soup we rose, up a gently sloping hill in various stages of bent progression until, voila, man upright. Suddenly it was the silliest thing in the world to me that anyone, especially a trusted institution like the zoo, believed that there was no God who had made us.

I now suddenly believed God existed, but of course I could not have explained how this now-real-to-me God had placed us here. Nor did I seek any theological understanding about this God's nature. And I did not report the experience to my teachers or parents. I was pretty introverted (shy or quiet were the words adults used of me) and kept the knowing moment to myself. The experience did not open me to Catholic religious life, which like attrition warfare finally did me in, but producing opposite to the desired effect. When opportunity arrived to attend a public school when I was 14, or switch to another Catholic school, I fled. The doctrines of religion gave way to a love for the crack of the bat against a well-pitched fastball and a part-time job after school pumping gas. I had no compact with religion. It wasn't religion that had "proved" God's existence to me. 

Both Hitchens and I, at about the same time in our lives (we're the same age), had a powerful moment of intuitive knowing that we interpreted as enlightenment about the nature of ultimate reality. For him, the material universe. For me, God. Of this, it is frequently said of believers that ours is the faith assumption. When this is said with a whiff of knowing superiority, and not infrequently is it so said, there's often an implied innuendo: you should know better than to be staking your life on a faith assumption — as if nothing about life's ultimate nature or meaning is faith-based in the nonbeliever's worldview. We believers openly admit that ours is a faith-based assumption, but the atheist's argument against religion is also an argument ultimately from faith. It may be an atheist's faith, but it's still faith, the highest kind of faith, if I could put it like that. It is not a faith in technology (I'll trust the tensile strength of the steel cable that is hauling me up from street level forty stories in my highrise). It is not a faith in people (I'll arrive safely at the subway platform, after the ten block walk from my highrise, because it's statistically probable that most people are decent enough). Rather, it is a faith about where we came from, who we are, and where we are going.

It most certainly is true, however, that the initial knowing moment is not the end of the matter. In the years that follow the initial knowing moment, both atheists and believers will struggle with life's big questions, both inside their own heads and with adversarial positions from opposing camps. Some may eventually switch camps as a result. Hitchens has not switched camps, but throughout god is not Great he discloses the running battles he has had, and why these confirmed him in what he calls "his own secular faith," which for many years was Marxism. He is no longer a Marxist, and in a section of the book where he discloses how he reached the end of that faith, he describes how Marxism corresponded to religion. It included, he writes, its own martyrs and saints, its schisms and inquisitions, its dissidents and prophets, even its messianic element, though it had no supernatural dimension and was organized around the concept of historical and dialectical materialism. "But there came time," he writes of this agonizing personal period, "when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus." His "secular faith [had] been shaken and discarded."

Whereas after his knowing moment Hitchens grew into and then out of a Marxist faith, I never arrived at a satisfactory theology surrounding the nature of this God I usually believed existed. This came into sharp focus when I began to contend philosophically with my knowing moment after I left college, not one, twice, and set out on a self-imposed course of light reading--the world's great philosophers. I started from antiquity and finished up with Nietzsche, who tried hard to sponge away the horizon but could not.

During those years I became an occasional agnostic, but never an atheist, and the gist of it was that the philosophical eclecticism left me intellectually unfulfilled, as did the daily practicum of New Age philosophy that I had committed to, which had me trying to be God. The hallucinatory effects of that worldview ended for me in July, 1976, as a major cultural event was taking place, the celebration of America's bicentennial. While everyone from Bar Harbor to Laguna Beach was partying heartily, egged on by politicians, the media, and event hucksters, I had fallen into a blue funk and was completely oblivious to celebrations of any sort. Believing in God, but by a thread, I was now completely unchurched and unphilosophised, between jobs, and living by myself in southern California. At 11.59, when the original knowing moment at the zoo appeared to have run its course, just the opposite occurred. It was confirmed through an unlooked-for knowing moment that I can only described as absolute and providential. I might as well by done with it and admit that I understood it afterward as a power-encounter with God. Now I knew not only that God was, but that the message of the gospel was true. It was like being born. How am I supposed to deny that? More than thirty years later, despite heavy weather, it remains as strong and as relevant to me as the day.

Mine, therefore, has become a Christian faith. As to what Hitchens would call his post-Marxist faith, I admit to not knowing. For, here, god is not Great is opaque, which is not like the usual way in which Hitchens writes. Curiously, Hitchens seems to be indicating that he now holds a worldview that is sans faith; that since he discarded Marxism, his atheistic naturalism is not a faith. If I understand him aright, he now believes that he adheres to a secularism that does not involve him in making faith assumptions about the ultimate nature and meaning of life, because it comprises no religious trappings or rituals. His comment that "it takes a certain ‘leap' of another kind" lends itself to this notion, as do other of his comments. And yet in the book one finds ambivalence on the issue.

This may have arisen quite naturally, commendably, in the writing of the book, for Hitchens has always struck me as being an honest writer. This may explain certain passages. For instance, he writes: "And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith." That's pretty conclusive. But then he hedges. He follows those words immediately with: "We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason." (That faith and reason are fundamentally in conflict is a big contention of his. But I, for one, have never found faith in God to be in principle against reason.) He also writes, "When I was a Marxist I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered." I do not know how this squares with: "[my] secular faith [in Marxism had] been shaken and discarded." And he commiserates with a person's "loss of faith," noting that it can be "compensated by" the mysteries and wonders of the natural world and the discoveries of science, "as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy and Proust."
 
Perhaps because, as a worldview, atheistic naturalism concerns itself only with what is seen, and with what of life can be seen to end with death (We are reconciled to living only once — his words), Hitchens has concluded that it requires no faith to believe or to preach. Yet even the very statement "we are reconciled to living only once" is a faith assumption about the ultimate nature and meaning of life.

Atheists may not wish to call their beliefs about ultimate reality a faith, and it really doesn't matter what they are called, because by any other name they would still function principally the same in the drama that is human life and death. There is no way to prove — in the way that atheists would assuredly like to be right (by scientific investigation) — that faith in naturalism is going to be the end of the matter when each of us is confronted with the most absolute fact of life, death. Some may believe that it will be the end of the drama, and that is the great gamble. (Charles Strohmer is the author of seven books and has published in magazines and journals in the U.S. and the U.K. He is writing a book on U.S. relations with the Middle East. www.charlesstrohmer.com/wisdomproject.html.)

(Back to Articles.)