Priceton.org

A Postscript

Being paragons of rationality, the enemies of religion affect genuine bafflement as to why anyone would practise it. Whereupon they proceed to enumerate a long list of what are usually evil or ulterior motives. It’s odd. If I were honestly unable to conceive of the reasons for some archaic habit or custom–why people take snuff, let us say–I wouldn’t set myself up as an authority on the subject. Yet atheists profess to know that theists worship God out of some vestigial anxiety to propitiate the forces of nature, or to take out insurance against the contingency of damnation, or, if they are clerics, to wield religion as an instrument of power. They are about as credible on the subject of the origin of religion as The League Of Offended Housewives To Snuff Out Snuff would be if they were to admonish that snuff-taking makes you blind. It is time, it seems to me, for the defenders of religion to begin speculating, mutatis mutandis, on the motives of its enemies.

As Joe Sobran has observed in his essay The Sins of Irreligion:

I can imagine one kind of atheist–let us call him the “pious atheist”–who arrives at his unbelief without joy, simply as an intellectual conclusion. I suppose such a man would regard Christian civilization with the kind of affection and respect a Roman convert to Christianity in Augustine’s day would feel for the dying Roman Empire, for Cicero and Virgil and Marcus Aurelius. He would feel that, although that world had passed away, it had left much of enduring value. We actually do see pious atheists who may regret the Inquisition but who also cherish Dante, Monteverdi, Spenser, Milton, Bach, Handel, and Dr. Johnson. To cease believing in the viability of this Christian civilization is not necessarily either to condemn it or to assume an attitude of enmity toward it.

Yet there is another sort of atheist who does regard himself as Christendom’s enemy. Far from cherishing its past, he condemns it and would wipe out every trace of it: the Catholic Church, the Moral Majority, the inscription “In God We Trust”. He thinks that humanity is now free at last from dogma and superstition, and he would get on with the business of creating a new world on progressive and scientific principles.

No one who cherishes the intellectual, literary, and artistic bequests of religion would object to the first group identified by Sobran. Aligned with them are any number of brilliant scholars of religious history and thought, including some of the most humane and capacious minds of the modern age: Jung, Bultmann, Tillich, Hugo Rahner, Simone Weil, to name just a few.

All such thinkers accept as a brute fact the sceptical scientific spirit of the modern epoch. All agree that a naively literal belief in the affirmations of organized religion is no longer intellectually possible, and plead, instead, for the renewal of a mythic or allegorical approach to sacred narrative that is already native to the Christian tradition.

Of this tradition, however, Dawkins and Hitchens are conveniently ignorant. To carry Christianity’s colours against their hollow challenge, they naturally prefer their own reductive caricature of the Bible-thumping Southern televangelist. When they limn the portrait of a rotten Christianity on such bases, they invite Chaucer’s Pardoner to sit as their model, as though his Parson, Clerk, and Knight were not also on the Canterbury road.

That sort of selectivity alone suggests that Dawkins and Hitchens are motivated by an animus that is less than objective or scientific. Unlike Sobran’s “pious atheists” or the scholarly taxonomists of religious ideas mentioned above, they are less observers of Christianity’s decline and fall than agents who yearn to hasten it. They arrive at their atheist position, not as an intellectual conclusion, but a morally triumphant one. Indeed, it places them squarely on the side the angels–to summon a theistic phrase–in the great millennial struggle between the forces of light and superstitious darkness. Nor does their atheism betray the least willingness to assimilate anything of the legacy of Christianity, not even those elements that Christianity itself willingly assimilated from its pagan past (including symbols as innocuous as Christmas trees).

In this regard, today’s atheists usually see themselves as “free-thinkers” and “progressives”. Save that free-thought is hardly ever progressive, except in the self-congratulatory sense in which that term is used. It cannot be so because, as Chesterton has observed, “it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction.” The only things that have “progressed” have done so by gradual “accumulations of authority”, advancing incrementally “in a certain definable direction”. (Christian Civilization is, in that sense, progressive; by contrast, the atheist desire to undo it is as unprogressive as that of the fantasist who decides to tear up the road by which mankind has advanced and recommend that we grow wings instead.)

Their furious antagonism toward religious tradition in general and Christian Civilization in particular tells us as much about contemporary atheists as it does about the object of their hatred. Sobran identifies the animus of the current militant sect of atheists as a species of that genus of thought which he calls “alienism”, the willful disaffection from the norms and institutions of society typical of Western intellectuals and so-called “minority” groups.

The modern alienist’s sense of estrangement need not, of course, have anything to do with historical oppression or ostracism by an unjust majority (indeed, his embitterment suggests that he wants in). The designation “minority” itself, as Sobran observes, alludes less to a real statistical fact than an ideological posture. Some “minorities” (e.g. women) are in fact majorities. Others, such as “gays”, are hardly condemned to their supposed alienation by the cruel accident of birth (like the victims of racism), but by voluntary choice. Meanwhile, any number of actual numerical minorities are never thought of as such; in this category, Sobran mentions Mormons–whom it is always safe to deride–, to which I would add native born whites in many large North American cities.

However imprecise the term, it invariably irradiates a palpable sense of disaffection, which is presumed to be justified by the minority’s victimization by a homogeneous majority. Historically (at least in the West), that means Christianity, so that “if we look more closely”, as Sobran argues, “we will find that the very idea of a minority in this sense is largely a rhetorical device for covertly attacking what remains of the Christian culture”.

In contemporary identity politics, it is obvious enough that minorities from non-Christian cultures have become stalking-horses for anti-Christian alienism. It was less than fifty years ago that non-Christian communities were expected, if not actively to adopt the beliefs and mores of the Christian Civilization to which they desired admittance, then at least not to object to them. Today, the mere existence of a native Christian remnant constitutes an affront to multicultural sensibilities, if not to the hallowed principles of equality and pluralism. The expectation that minorities should accommodate the dominant culture of their new homelands once seemed only reasonable; now it is the majority that must accommodate the minority.

Atheists function in this regard as a non-Christian “minority”. Because they once were so, Dawkins and Hitchens see atheists as permanent victims. It’s a truism, of course, that when public opinion finally rouses itself in indignant protest against the victimization of this group or that, their victimization is largely a thing of the past. When minorities are really being mistreated by majorities–systematically murdered, enslaved, lynched, or discriminated against–public opinion either fails to notice or actively colludes with what it regards as merely normative. Once the public gets around to expressing its collective moral outrage, one can be assured that it is already safe to do so.

So it is, of course, with those who now imagine theocrats hiding under every bed, and stand eternally vigilant in the defence of the temporal state against the phantom encroachment of spiritual powers: they are permitted to complain against “theocracy” only because there are no theocrats about with the power to silence them. (In the Middle Ages, Dawkins and Hitchens might have had a point, but no one could have heard them making it beyond the confines of their prison cells.)

If anything, the contemporary incarnation of the Spanish Inquisition is run by the priests of a militant secular orthodoxy who can abide no dissent from what they regard as religious heretics (i.e., heretics whose sin is believing in religion per se, rather than false religion). In the past several decades in Canada, every vestige of Christian symbolism has been extirpated from the public square, Christian teaching in schools has been officially proscribed by the State, and dozens of supposedly free citizens have been arraigned before our official human rights tribunals for professing their religious beliefs. Notably, during the same period, not a single atheist has had to appear before these human rights constabularies. If anyone has a right to fear the “establishment of religion”, it is the victims of the new secular orthodoxy.

Today, Christians remain one the few identifiable groups against which it is legitimate to be bigoted. When alienist intellectuals tell us that “the white race is the cancer of history”, or accuse Europeans of wholesale and deliberate genocide in the New World, or malign the masculine gender as war-mongering rapists–using “white race”, or “European”, or “male” as obvious proxies for historical Christendom–, “we are hearing something other than the voice of the disinterested intellect. We are hearing an expression of nihilistic hatred.” Mere intellectual dissent from the credenda of religion does not, as Sobran observes, inspire “this kind of fanaticism.”

Sobran wonders reasonably enough why we have been so slow to recognize and declaim against this sort of fanatical hatred as a real social problem, if not a psychopathology. The terms of alienist bitterness and grievance are by now epidemic in our language–“racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “anti-Semitism”, “nativism”, “Eurocentrism”, “Christocentrism”, “ethnocentrism”, “xenophobia”, “bigotry”, “prejudice”, “discrimination”, “stereotyping”. Even the word “hatred” itself has taken on the same victimological and anti-majoritarian connotations, though it should be entirely possible that enmity between social groups can have the opposite valency. Can minority races, cultures, or religions never be guilty of prejudice or hatred against majorities? If so, as Sobran points out, “we have no specific vocabulary at all to suggest this reciprocal possibility”.

Until recently, alienist hatred was recognized as a dangerous toxin, destabilizing not only to society but to the moral and psychological health of the subject. Sobran mentions Shakespeare’s villains Edmund and Iago–whose villainy consists precisely in their obsessive hostility to all social norms and traditions. “Almost without exception”, Sobran observes, “Shakespeare’s ‘alienated’ characters are villains”. Both Shakespeare and his audience evidently still considered such attitudes dangerous and deranged, and felt that Civilization had every right to defend itself against them. Thus, “The assumptions embodied in the very structure of these plays are directly opposed to the assumption that hatred and hostility are always to be imputed to society. The imputation itself expresses hostility, and we do well to raise our guard against it.”

We do well, that is, to expose and condemn the militant hatred of Christendom expressed by atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens as a poison just as lethal as any majoritarian “ism”.

Imagine…

With the puer aeternus John Lennon, Dawkins invites us to “imagine a world without religion”. All right. Then imagine it without architecture, sculpture, painting, or poetry. Imagine it without music, and inasmuch as Western music – even the insipid doggerel of the Beatles – is the product of an ancient liturgical tradition, imagine it without Lennon.

On the Singing Sage of Liverpool, it is hard to resist quoting the bravely non-conformist comments of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson:

But what did he mean by “no religion”, anyway? No religious institutions? Everyone but the personality-disordered anarchist understands that institutions are necessary.

No religious experience? Lennon constantly sought religious experience, through mysticism and psychedelic drug use.

No beliefs, of ultimate value? But Imagine claims that peace, brotherhood and unity are of ultimate worth, and that a heavenly utopia would arise, if they were properly valued.

Lennon’s beautiful [sic] song is, therefore, conceptually incoherent. Its lyrics also expose a lack of appropriate humility: How dare a multimillionaire satirize those who cannot imagine “no possessions”?

With what would Lennon replace religion, precisely? Atheists never deign to specify the nature of the godless order that would succeed Christian Civilization. Instead, they dare us to be sufficiently free-spirited and unconventional as to “imagine” how peaceful and beatific it would be, hoping that we will forget the inauspicious beginnings it had in Robespierre’s France or the gigantic prison of the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, Lennon was himself a fulsome sycophant of the Marxist-Leninist regime and ideology, a crime for which he ought to have spent the rest of his life seeking absolution from the ghosts of its former inmates, if not from God. But apparently atheists have faith, even when it is flatly contradicted by the evidence of things seen.

Chesterton once wrote that for a reformer to be credible he must first accept and appreciate at least certain aspects of the prevenient “form”. But like their progressive and revolutionary brothers, atheists have never been comfortable with the helter-skelter, unregulated (i.e., natural) way in which human society has evolved over the millennia. It is odd that they who confer so much dignity upon an agency as mysterious as natural selection do not pause to consider that a similar mechanism is certainly at work in anthropology, especially in the sphere of social traditions and institutions (marriage, the family, worship). Since these have surely “evolved” with man over every stage of human development, you would think atheists would put some trust in the wisdom of that process rather than pronounce Nature an abject failure and wish that She had never begun the experiment in the first place. No less than raccoons, squirrels, and other noxious pests, I suppose, homo Christianus represents the culmination of untold centuries of adaptation and refinement; yet, while few Darwinian atheists would want to “imagine a world” without the former, they would be insouciantly delighted to see Christian Civilization die without a trace.

The flower-childish mind that can imagine a world without religion is obtusely credited with “idealism”, when the imaginer is ideationally savouring an act of gross vandalism – one that would tear down every Church and temple in the civilized world, and empty every museum. The imaginers are the epochal heroes of modernity, but consider the deeds that their imaginings have already fathered. The agents of the Terror must have first imagined a world without aristocrats, the Bolsheviks, without property owners. Our G-20 anarchists feel justified in breaking windows, no doubt, because they have imagined a perfect world without retail or banks. (Under full disclosure, I must confess to having imagined a world without pontificating rock musicians.) Lurking behind the “idealistic” face of reform is usually the adolescent desire to smash the form to bits.

Today, radical Islam has in common with Lennon that it has likewise imagined a world without religion: specifically, without Christianity and Judaism. In their avidity to eradicate every vestige of Christian culture, from crucifixes in hospitals to Christmas trees in public squares, atheist visionaries have allied themselves more closely with the Old Testament Prophets, the seventeenth-century Puritans, and the Taliban than they care to admit. In their defence, the Prophets, Puritans, and Taliban have been intolerant of only certain kinds of religion; the atheist is intolerant of every kind.

Yet the vaunted tolerance of secularists is invariably contrasted with the intolerance of believers. This is surely one of the falsest dichotomies and most self-serving myths of our time. One can hardly conceive of a more rigidly and comprehensively intolerant dogma than Marxist atheism, which sentenced its refuseniks to the work camp for a proliferant range of heresies none of which would have discomposed the sleep of even the most paranoid of inquisitors. C.S. Lewis made the point long ago that Christians have always recognized at least the partial truth of every other religion – Platonism, Stoicism, Mithraism, the Eleusinian mysteries, the cult of Isis and Osiris – in competition with it. Atheists, on the other hand, confidently declare that every religion throughout history has been completely wrong.

It was Chesterton again who remarked that the real crime of suicide is not killing oneself but killing the entire world. The suicide arrogantly and ungratefully consigns to oblivion everything and everybody else as worthless. The deicide consigns to oblivion not only the sensible world but the entire metaphysical cosmos of gods, spirits, and daimons, of myths, images, and symbols, with which man has co-existed and through which he has contemplated the perennial questions from the beginning. In dismissing them as worthless, the atheist imagines that he is wiser and better than the vast majority of all men who ever lived, including mankind’s greatest luminaries and benefactors; and with such invincible hubris, he would abolish the Civilization that religion has engendered, and start again.

The atheist order has given us labour camps, psychiatric prisons, AIDS, and abortion clinics. We are still waiting for it to bring forth its Homer, Dante, Michelangelo, or Bach. Atheism has produced no lasting literature or monumental art (besides the tawdry propaganda of Pravda or the colossal statues of Lenin, Mao, and Kim Jong-Il). The atheist idea has never inspired anything remotely like a sculpture by Praxiteles, a Gothic cathedral, or a fresco by Raphael. Its intellectual seed has nowhere blossomed into a fifth-century Athens, a twelfth-century Paris, or a fifteenth-century Florence. Anyone who travels to Moscow need only visit one of its Byzantine churches and then walk past a Stalinist apartment block to decide whether medieval theocracy or modern secular humanism is more intellectually vibrant or humane.

It is a measure of its cultural and intellectual barrenness that Dawkins and Hitchens must invoke the relatively obscure Pre-Socratic cosmologist Democritus as atheism’s founding Prophet, notwithstanding that Democritus’ own disciples, Epicurus and Lucretius, effectively conceded that the Master’s atomism was still-born without some galvanizing spiritual principle. Atomism turned out to be as still-born a philosophical movement as it was a cosmogonic theory, and so Dawkins and Hitchens are forced to turn to such better-known names as Jefferson and Einstein, whom they borrow on short-term lease from Deism, or Occam, whom they steal outright from Christianity. With such a sparse and undistinguished field of candidates, it is no wonder that as a party atheism has languished on the fringes.

To slightly update a question that Malcolm Muggeridge once asked, who would not rather be wrong with Plato, Plutarch, Origen, Augustine, Eckhardt, and Pico, than right with Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Wells, Huxley, Dawkins, and Lennon?

Is there no relation between the fruit and the tree? Hitchens seems to think that it is possible to appreciate the genius of Dante, Monteverdi, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton while abominating their religious beliefs, as if their art came to birth not because of but in spite of their embarrassing Christianity. It’s his version, I suppose, of hating the sin and loving the sinner. But it does put one in a logical bind to have to explain how the most magnanimous, erudite, and humane minds (perhaps Hitchens will give me permission to call them spirits in this context) in the history of mankind could have simultaneously believed in and evangelized so risible and cruel a fraud as Christianity. How could the person who wrote Hamlet and Lear have subscribed to a faith so infantile as to have preached the Incarnation and Virgin Birth, and a moral doctrine so retrograde as to have condemned abortion and homosexuality as sins?

Like the rest of us, I have no knowledge as to whether or not God exists. I am considerably more certain that the image projected upon him by his various cultists has only a tenuous relation to his esse. The only truth of which I am absolutely convinced is that religion is the truest thing in the world. The best and most beautiful that man has ever wrought in the desert of human history has been nurtured, if not by God, then by the belief in God. If that is a delusion, then let us hope that we remain deluded. If recent history is any indication, the alternative is a dessicated wasteland.

Organized Irreligion…

and…

The Undergraduate History of Christianity…

In a brilliant essay, the late Joseph Sobran wonders why Christians, who have been incessantly “belabored” about the sins of organized religion, “have been so slow to turn the argument around and point to the record of what we may call ‘organized irreligion’ “.

It’s not as though atheism is sine macula. According to the highest estimates, the Inquisition claimed fewer than two thousand lives, and those over several centuries. In seventy years, by comparison, the guardians of Soviet atheist orthodoxy liquidated a hundred million of their own citizens for ideological impurity or belonging to a proscribed economic class.

Just or unjust, as Sobran notes, the Inquisition passed sentence against individuals for personal crimes, not membership in a group. Its authority was to that extent confined to the Christian-theological sphere, as opposed to caste, level of education, ancestry, ownership of property, private entrepreneurship, domestic arrangements, friends and associates, opinions about politics, and virtually everything else.

Given that all the drowned witches and burnt heretics in history have not yet come up to the foothills of the mountain of corpses heaped up by the post-religious Marxist State, one would think that the apostles of the atheist utopia and abominators of religion would have the decency to shut up. But as Sobran suggests, the narration of Christendom’s crimes against humanity has been for some time now a major cultural industry, especially in the media and the academy.

As a teacher in the university, I have been personally “belabored” on occasions beyond number by students retailing what I have come to call “the undergraduate history of Christianity”. It usually begins with the Evangelists’ defamation of the Jews (“endemic Christian anti-Semitism”), continues with the hierarchy’s suppression of doctrinal dissent and establishment of an “arbitrary” canon (“Christian theology as the instrumentality of political power”); moves on to the exclusion of women from the priesthood (“patriarchal misogyny”); next, we hear of forced conversions and baptisms; then the Crusades (“religious intolerance”); followed by the Inquisition; followed by Galileo’s heresy trial; followed by the Salem witch hunts (more misogny, as well as all of the above); followed by papal collusion with the Nazis (the Church’s congenital anti-Semitism, again); concluding with the sex-abuse scandal (“pedophilia”, but unrelated to homosexuality).

These, and only these, junctures in Christian history – for they know of no others – are recited by students with the alacrity of an incantational formula. When the undergraduate history of Christianity is repeated by writers of popular fiction such as Dan Brown and James Cameron – one is tempted to include Dawkins and Hitchens in this category –, one knows that one is in the presence of a contemporary culture-myth.

As others of their critics have observed, in enjoining its civilizational advantages, Dawkins and Hitchens never get beyond atheism as a Platonic concept, against which the inevitably mixed historical record of religion can hardly measure up. They make the same argument about atheism as that which Marxists have always made about socialism: like “true socialism”, atheism has apparently never been tried. Yet, even leaving aside the officially atheist Marxist State, the entire post-Enlightenment epoch has been a protracted experiment in organized irreligion.

Its record is not obviously more benignant than that of pre-modern theism. During those two centuries, more people died of unnatural causes than in the entire history of man’s inhumanity to man before them. I have already mentioned that the most murderous wars in history have been fought since the Enlightenment, and over anything but religious differences. As for the Church’s putative tyrannizing over private lives, her authority was always trifling by comparison to the tentacular grip and reach of the modern post-religious Welfare State. With their pitiful tithes, Byzantine Emperors and Patriarchs could only dream of the divine right of modern tax collectors to help themselves to more than fifty percent of a man’s labour. And at least the Inquisition’s thought police confined themselves to matters of theological doctrine, as opposed to our own human rights constabularies, who can arraign citizens for the crime of “offending” the orthodoxy of any interest group that demands immunity from criticism.

It is the oddly naive faith that (like “never-tried” socialism), “never-tried” atheism, once implemented, will usher in a world without end of tolerance and justice, that demands the absurd disavowal by Dawkins and Hitchens of any connection between atheism and the post-Enlightenment secular order, including Communism. Hitchens, for instance, dilates upon the rites and dogmas associated with the Communist cult of personality, and concludes that Communism was in fact just another religion(!) (Thus, even the atrocities of an officially atheist ideology can be imputed to a credulous belief in God.)

Hitchens’ argument is typical of the tortured logic of the anti-religious polemic, but in a way – one that Hitchens doesn’t understand, of course –, it’s rather compelling. Communism really was a religion (as Solzhenitsyn noted long ago), and atheism really is untried (and will continue to remain so.)

As Jung demonstrated over a lifetime of scholarship, the religious function of the psyche is a perennial and inalienable human endowment; what everything depends upon is its being authentically and salubriously engaged. Psychic energies that are not invested in the the linking back (i.e., religio) of the conscious ego with an immanent metaphysical order go dangerously underground, until they erupt into individual or collective neurosis. When they do, they propel into the empyreum everything from trivial earthly personalities to tawdry political ideologies. With the attrition of authentic religious forms, such as Christianity, the alternative isn’t atheism, but some ersatz theism – Marxism, Darwinism, or environmentalism –, with their ersatz saints and saviours – Mao, Kim, or Al Gore. Deracinated from the archetypes of an otherworldly heaven and hell, the post-religious consciousness attempts to create heaven on earth, and ends up, inevitably, reifying in the here and now the hell in which it no longer believes. How many more millions of lives would have been snuffed out in the cause of establishing the earthly paradise had it not been for the insistence by religions such as Christianity that the Kingdom of God is not of this world?

If the twentieth century was an experiment in post-religious political organization, it evidently failed. What that failure argues for is hardly the redemption from religion that Dawkins and Hitchens exhort and promise, but its opposite: a long-overdue liberation from the atheist delusion, with its deadly utopian fantasy of creating heaven on earth.

Atheism…

The “Zeitgeist”…

and…

The Church of Progress…

The modern atheist’s hatred of religion is one species of a generalized hatred of the traditions of the West, which for liberals is bred in the bone. Dawkins’ chapter on “The Moral Zeitgeist” is an impeccable example, while being a textbook statement of the supreme article of faith in the Church of Progress: that human society becomes ineluctably more enlightened and just with the march of time (and the converse: that erstwhile traditions and attitudes are noxious in direct proportion to their antiquity).

What follows is my best attempt at an epitome of Dawkins’ anti-religious reasoning: In the old days (when men still believed in God), slavery, racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, even hunting for sport, were normative and uncontroversial. Even those who were “ahead of their time”, such as Lincoln, H.G. Wells, and Huxley, held views that would have retrospectively horrified them, had they been born and educated in our time. As late as the “swinging sixties” people still objected to their young daughters reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover (!). “How swiftly the Zeitgeist changes – and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world. Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social consciousness come from?…Certainly…not from religion.”

Dawkins includes amongst the catalysts of the progressive Zeitgeist activist judges, stand-up comics, and the script-writers of soap operas. Such avatars of enlightenment ought to make any thinking person nervous. But he is nevertheless gung-ho for the “Zeitgeist progression”:

Some of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the twenty-first century are are bunched together but way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages, or in the time of Abraham, or even as recently as the 1920s. The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century…would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century. Of course, the advance is not a smooth incline but a meandering sawtooth. There are local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s. But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistakable….Whatever its cause, the manifest phenomenon of the Zeitgeist progression is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good.

Dawkins appears to be as much in awe of this force for good as Calvin was of an inscrutably benign Providence. He calls it a “mysterious consensus”, admits that he can’t explain how it is constellated, and certainly has a more supine faith in Its Benevolence than I, for one, have in the biblical God. He can hardly imagine that someone could regard anything as ethically wrong (homosexuality, adultery, sexual promiscuity, abortion, for example) that this onward-moving “mysterious consensus” has lately sanctified. There is no doubt that for progressives what Dawkins calls the Zeitgeist (its demotic name is Public Opinion) is an almighty deity. What offends them is that the Deity of Christianity refuses to genuflect before It and “move on”. (The Zeitgeist is a jealous God indeed).

A writer of crude polemics might well deride those who blindly follow the Zeitgeist as “fundamentalists” or “absolutists”. They are certainly guilty of the “failure of imagination” of which Dawkins invariably indicts theists. We may rejoice that we are no longer guilty of racism and discrimination against Jews and other minorities, but regret the fact that the Zeitgeist has institutionalized them in the form of affirmative action, and that modern identity politics and multiculturalism have repristinated tribalism as a virtue. We may celebrate our sexual liberation, but take pause that the popular culture has made us slaves to sex itself. Surely it is credulous in the extreme to imagine that “the advancing wave of the changing moral Zeitgeist” is a good fairy, who brings only blessings, while exacting no payment in return.

Naturally, anyone whose whole philosophy of history and life can be encapsulated in Bob Dylan’s puerile Bolshevist lyric “The times they are a-changing…Get out of the new road if you can’t lend a hand”, is unlikely to be able to comprehend the difference between morality and moral fashion. Try to imagine Plato, Aristotle, or Kant defining virtue as conformity to whatever temporary “consensus” upon which Public Opinion has most recently conferred its imprimatur. (Strike Socratic reason; forget the categorical imperative; let’s just go with the Zeitgeist.) The whole idea of ethics is that it distinguishes the rationally necessary “ought” from the merely contingent “is”. It’s bizarre that Dawkins can’t see that, just as he can’t comprehend that blindly trusting in the wisdom of an ever-moving Zeitgeist would have made him a slaver and a misogynist had he lived but a hundred years ago. The problem with the Zeitgeist is that it is self-annihilating. Today’s moral Zeitgeist is tomorrow’s detestable ‘ism.

Some might describe “The Zeitgeist” as just a prettified term for the mass mind. If progressives wish to worship a potency of such brutely capricious unconsciousness, by all means, let them do so. But then, they ought to stop accusing the religious of being slaves to “irrational faith”.

Dawkins and Hitchens ask Rhetorical Questions:

Does Religion Makes Us Better People?…

Does Atheism Make Us Worse?

As should be obvious by now, both Dawkins and Hitchens start from the premise that religion is comprehensively malignant, and set out to “prove” it. Though it’s a rather unscientific methodology, it would be less objectionable if they simply owned up to the fact that they are writers of anti-religious propaganda, instead of affecting to be heroically independent minds following wherever reason and the evidence lead (by contrast to the slaves and dupes of “faith”).

It is easy, once you get the hang of it, to impute evil to religion and good to anything else. War is bad (unless you are a conservative funny-man like P.J. O’Rourke), and so religion must be its principal cause. In an age of Islamist jihad, Dawkins and Hitchens can rely on those who know little about history to nod in assent. (In spite of their liberal sensibilities, they are not above exploiting a little post-9/11 anti-Muslim hysteria in the religion-equals-war sections of their books.) And once again, it serves them all too well to blur the shades of religious militancy into a single monochromatic specter. The Islam of Al Qaeda and the Taliban represents a regression to the Age of the Prophet, whose own bellicose sectarianism was a regression to the tribalism of the Neolithic. Christianity, on the other hand, ceased to be a Church Militant nearly a millennium ago (though against the Church, Dawkins and Hitchens bear a particular animus).

In fact, the most murderous wars in history (the American Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam) have had nothing whatsoever to do with religion. (Neither have the bloodiest conflicts of antiquity: the Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, the Roman Civil Wars). These, like most military conflicts, have been fought over social and political status, land, and empire. They have been incited, that is, by man’s congenital appetite for power and wealth, against which such otherworldly religious movements as Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity have provided the only persuasive moral and intellectual arguments. In any case, the highest mountain of corpses in the history of man’s inhumanity to man was heaped up during International Communism’s seventy-year long war against its own citizens, a crusade prosecuted by the Party in order to defend the doctrinal purity of official State Irreligion.

The sort of contradiction that ensnares Dawkins when he denies religion’s Darwinian advantage–while having little choice but to admit its universal “survival”–, besets both authors throughout their discussions of the relationship between faith and morality. In parallel chapters, they ask rhetorically if religion makes us better human beings (Dawkins, “The Roots of Morality: Why Are We Good?”; Hitchens, “Does Religion Make People Behave Better?”). Their answers come as foregone conclusions. We are good not because of, but in spite of religion; in fact, religion makes us worse. (An aside: When did it become obligatory to put chapter titles in the interrogative? And if there really is a question, why pretend that the matter is settled beyond doubt?)

It ought to be a problem for Dawkins and Hitchens that study after study has demonstrated that the religious are healthier, longer-lived, more prosperous and content, more likely to donate to charities, while less prone to drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, adultery, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and absentee fatherhood, incarceration, and any number of related social pathologies. Religious genes tend, moreover, to out-replicate those hosted by atheists. One would think that a Darwinian would concede the superiority of the religious life on that ground alone.

Both Dawkins and Hitchens are oblivious of this body of research on the moral and psychological benefits of faith, nor do they put forward any to support their contrary claims. Dawkins reproduces a slim paragraph from Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation which purports to show that rates of violent crime are higher in Republican states (whose inhabitants are more devoutly Christian) than in states that vote Democrat. Even a non-statistician will object that there are other variables involved here, which vitiate or at least qualify any simple correlation; but now compare Dawkins’ nuanced response to the monstrous crimes committed by Stalin and his atheist comrades: “We are not in the business of counting evil heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity.” Indeed we are not. We’re in the business of counting evil heads and compiling a single roll call of iniquity.

Where evidence is lacking Dawkins never fears to tread, relying instead on his own subjective intuition: “I’m inclined to suspect”, he writes, “that there are very few atheists in prison.” I’m inclined to suspect that there are even fewer Mennonites, but I should be embarrassed as a putative man of science to base any such assertion on personal suspicion. Dawkins must be privy here to “evidence of things not seen” (St. Paul, call your office; you have another “faith-head” in your waiting room.)

Hitchens’ chapter similarly eschews the hard facts that he otherwise demands of his religious opponents, and falls back instead on picturesque anecdote and heartfelt emotion. His answer to the question of whether religion makes us “better behaved” focuses on Lincoln and Martin Luther King, two of the best-behaved idols of modern liberalism. A perceptive historian of the religious imagination might be struck by the devotion with which these charismatic figures have been revered and exalted into demi-gods by their uncritical cultists, notwithstanding their feet of clay. Hitchens himself confesses his veneration of King, making a point of his being moved to tears whenever he reads his sermons. He calls King’s speech before the striking garbage workers in Memphis a “transcendent moment”. (Are atheists allowed to have transcendent moments?)

The problem for Hitchens is that King’s speeches and sermons swarm with references to Moses, the Exodus, Sinai, and the Promised Land. (If King were not one of the saints of the Church of Progress, one might expect Hitchens to sneer at his megalomaniacal delusion–or his hypocritical opportunism–in casting himself in the role of a latter-day Moses. He doesn’t, of course. He reserves that contempt exclusively for traditional Catholics and conservative Evangelicals.)

King poses a real moral dilemma for Hitchens, and for his Manichean atheist-good, theist-bad world-view. He is, after all, not merely good, but transcendently good. Hitchens resolves the dilemma by pretending that “in no real as opposed to nominal sense was he a Christian”; that “his legacy has very little to do with his professed theology”; that his biblical allusions were merely “metaphors and allegories”, which had been “forced upon him” by the circumambient biblical culture; that it was not Christianity that inspired King’s dream but his inner circle of “secular Communists and socialists who had been manuring the ground for a civil rights movement for decades”. (Similarly, while Lincoln paid lip-service to God, Hitchens notes that he had read Paine and other freethinkers, and was “privately an unbeliever”.)

Having studied the Christianity of the Fathers for some time, I am certainly prepared to believe that King’s religion was thin gruel by comparison, just as I am convinced that the “social gospel” preached to modern liberal Protestant congregations has more to do with political ideology than religion. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that King’s message of liberation would have been cast upon barren soil had his auditors in the Black Churches not had a deep connection to the the Exodus narrative. Perhaps for King it consisted in only “metaphors and allegories”. So what? For many of the most fervent and spiritually vigorous Christians, Scripture is gloriously fecund with metaphors and allegories. Notwithstanding the caricature of literal-mindedness that Hitchens projects upon his theist enemies, Christians know metaphors and allegories when they hear them (their Redeemer had a certain talent for them, after all), which is more than one can say for scientific rationalists and atheists. To paraphrase a sentence from a Robertson Davies novel, I have encountered many atheists in my lifetime, and they all fall down on metaphor.

It’s almost poignantly ironic to recall that the casual observation by King’s critics of his Marxist proclivities – as of any of his other intellectual impostures and moral dissipations – has automatically evinced from liberals charges of “racism” or “McCarthyism”. Hitchens, while impeccably liberal, is willing to concede the point, because it magically conjures King into an “atheist”, and makes secular humanism, rather than Christianity, the mother of civil rights. Conversely, Stalin’s atheism is, according to both Hitchens and Dawkins, equally “nominal”, and thus equally irrelevant to his murderous reign of terror. Stalin, as Hitchens notes ominously, attended seminary in his youth as an aspirant to the Orthodox priesthood. That’s where he learned to be an “authoritarian”, I suppose.

Isn’t it rather too conspicuously expedient for our authors to demote to the status of “nominal” Christians those whom they can’t help but admire, and exonerate as merely “nominal” atheists those they can’t help but revile? In the section of his book dealing with slavery and abolition, one would have thought that Hitchens might have mentioned William Wilberforce; but then this Evangelical’s Christianity was evidently too potent a brew for even Hitchens to rhetorically dilute into insipid nominalism.

Are atheists really “better behaved” than believers? Leaving aside the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the question itself is unedifying. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously conceded the possibility that believers might be less virtuous than non-believers. The Gospel, as he notes, has always attracted the poor, disaffected, and troubled of heart, populating the Church with sinners in disproportionate numbers. The relevant comparison is thus not between church-goers and atheists, but between the moral condition of the lives of people before and after they have embraced religion. As Lewis observes, patients in a doctor’s waiting room are less healthy on average than the general population; but that is hardly an indictment of medicine.

Dawkins and Hitchens may sneer in stereo at Dostoyevsky’s famous remark in The Brothers Karamazov that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted”, but they and other atheists clearly recognize that Christians at least accept its truth. Why else would they mock them for being virtuous only because they fear hell-fire and anticipate rewards in heaven? Ancient pagan and Christian philosophers alike insisted that virtue ought to be an end in itself, wholly autonomous of such external, accidental considerations; but it is hardly consistent to mock Christians for behaving themselves under imperfect motivation and then assume that they would continue to do so after their raised consciousness ceased to believe in the myth of a retributive afterlife.

As self-anointed consciousness-raisers, both Dawkins and Hitchens write as though atheism exists only in some pristine theoretical order (against which they compare the inevitably mixed record of religion in practice). Someone should tell them that their battle has been won. The godless state was inaugurated some time ago, and it has brought us Robespierre’s terror, totalitarianism, council houses, drug wars, and abortion clinics. In Europe and North America (formerly known as Christendom), the twentieth-century ushered in the most protracted and extensive experiment in state secularism ever mustered in history, at a cost of upwards of three hundred million lives.

It may be the case that the monumental “misbehaviour” of the twentieth century does not follow directly from its denial of the existence of God. But the historical reality is nonetheless of an evil unprecedented in degree and scope–and in an epoch when, for the first time, the term Christendom ceased to have any meaning. As Marxists are wont to argue, there are no accidents in history. If it is fair to hold theism responsible for the putative crimes of Christendom–the Spanish Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, the Salem witch hunts, and all the other sins with which Christians are regularly belaboured–then it is equally fair to hold secularists and atheists responsible as well.

Dawkins and Hitchens conveniently ignore the wretched moral record of the post-Christian secular state. One wishes they had done the same for the officially atheist regimes of the Communist world. Their attempts to deny the connection between atheism and the murder of one hundred and fifty million of global Communism’s own citizens for ideological heresy are not merely hypocritical but obscene. According to Dawkins, “What matters is not whether…Stalin [was an atheist], but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does…Stalin was an atheist…Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” One wonders why, then, in the opinion of Dawkins and Hitchens, “individual Christians” who do wrong always do so as faithful exponents of Christian teaching. (Does either really believe that the Church’s squalid accommodation with the Nazis was “systematically influenced” by its theism, as they allege?) Indeed, there is not the “smallest evidence” that Christian doctrine influenced the preponderance of the crimes with which Dawkins and Hitchens inculpate it (unless you call its corruption an influence).

It tells you something about the arrogance of liberals that, while they would be horrified at anyone’s denial of the connection between racism and slavery, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, or fossil fuels and global warming, they are agnostic about the connection between atheism and the Gulag. It’s hard to believe that Stalin’s wholesale persecution, torture, and murder of Orthodox priests and nuns, his desecration of churches, or Mao’s elimination of every last vestige of Buddhist belief and culture, had nothing to do with atheism. If we lived in an age of genuinely equitable justice, this sort of denial would lead to prosecution or at least social ostracism. Is there any comparison more odious than Hitchens’ characterization of the extermination of religion under Marxism as one of a series of “anticlerical phases” in which ecclesiastical corruption is periodically purged (as under Henry VIII or Cromwell)?

Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ Fab Theories

of the Origins of Religion

Throughout the three-thousand-year history of the study of religion, philosophers, theologians, anthropologists, psychologists, and political cranks have posited innumerable explanations for the genesis and worship of the gods: fear (Petronius; cf. Isidore of Seville); innate and universal ideas (Stoics; Platonists); veneration of history’s great and powerful (Euhemerus); homeopathic rituals to encourage agricultural fecundity (Frazer); totemic ancestor worship (W. Robertson Smith); the awe of the numinous (Otto); the projection of the tribal group-soul (Harrison; Cornford); consolation for misfortune and injustice (the Marxist opiate idea); subjugation of the underclass by the “power structure” (contemporary Deconstructionism). In the second century A.D., the brilliant Middle Platonist and father of the modern novel, Apuleius, affirmed the need for a multiplicity of religions on the grounds that no single one could express the inexpressible totality of the Divine. In the fifteenth century, the Christian mystic Nicholas of Cusa expressed the same idea in his formula, Una religio in varietate rituum (one religion in a variety of rites). So, it seems, the multiplicity of religious aetiologies suggests that no one of them could possibly be adequate to explain so ancient, fundamental, and mysterious a human endowment as religion itself. But at least the traditional theories, however narrow and reductive, are psychologically and anthropologically plausible, which is more than one can say for the bizarre confabulations of Dawkins and Hitchens.

Both anti-theists purport to explain the origins of religion on the principle that poisonous fruit can only fall from a poisonous tree. Hitchens’ chapter (” ‘The Lowly Stamp of Their Origin’: Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings”) is an embarrassingly incoherent rant on the corrupt beginnings of: the Mormonism of Joseph Smith (early nineteenth century); the footnote religion of the infant prophet Marjoe Gortner (early twentieth century); modern American televangelism; and the so-called second-world-war “cargo cults” of the Pacific Islands, in which American GI’s bringing trinkets in the holds of their marvelous flying machines were worshiped as gods and redeemers by the Melanesian natives. Through no small hermeneutic effort, the reader may eventually divine that the unifying features of these religions is their founders’ monstrous avarice, which they satisfied by resort to the gross fraudulence of their claims to supernatural revelations or powers. To slightly alter the favourite predicatorial text of Chaucer’s Pardoner, Radix religionis est cupiditas. The Pardoner, by the way, reminds us that faithful Christians were aware of the clerical temptation to venality and mischief, and publicly denounced them, six hundred years before Hitchens exposed this open secret. Being rather more realistic than Hitchens, medieval Christians recognized that avarice and dishonesty are the universal condition of fallen man, and by no means limited to the religious. If they excoriated ecclesiastical corruption more ruthlessly than any other kind, it was because they demanded a higher standard of probity from priests and monks than the generality of mankind. It was the high-minded religious ideal of virtue, that is, that made religious vice scandalous.

But besides its incoherence, Hitchens’ chapter is a crashing disappointment, even by the meager scholarly standards to which readers would have become inured by this point in his narrative. While his title promises a universal theory of the origins of religion, it delivers yet another smirk at relatively recent cultic ephemera. If Hitchens affects to account for the origins of the ancient mystery religions of the Great Mother, Isis and Osiris, Orpheus, Demeter and Persephone, Dionysus, Hercules, Mithras, or Christ, on the grounds that, like Marjoe Gortner or Joseph Smith, they all secretly forged their own “revelations” and peddled them using slick theatrical effects, one should like to see his evidence. Hitchens provides none. Instead, he merely invites us to indict all religions by analogy to the most larcenous, primitive, and short-lived examples he can find. Should you wish to see dishonesty and legerdemain in action, look no further than the cynically staged arguments of writers who, by rhetorical sleight of hand, show gullible readers the compliant facts, while keeping the inconvenient ones up their sleeves.

Curiously, a common theme of both books is the aforementioned “cargo cults”, a relative neologism in the jargon of anthropology and the history of religion, whose prominence in our authors’ discussions of cultic origins suggests that they borrowed the term and thesis from one of the earlier anti-theistic manuals on which they so heavily depend (but which they rarely cite, not wishing to admit the gross unoriginality of their polemics). Or perhaps the appeal of the cargo cult theory is its sci-fi topicality, inasmuch as such astrophysical mystics as Carl Sagan have fixed in the popular imagination the vision of “billions and billions” of potentially habitable galaxies, which seems to have given new life to the early twentieth century fantasy that the gods we worship are extra-terrestrials who visited the earth during the infancy of our species. Dawkins devotes a significant part of his chapter “The Roots of Religion” to recounting how the flying machines and magical boxes that glowed with light and emitted strange noises, along with the uniforms and marching rituals of the white-skinned aliens who brought them, so impressed the natives of the Pacific Islands that they worshiped them as gods. For Dawkins, the speed with which these cults spread and their extraordinary geographical range confirm A.C. Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Dawkins concludes that “the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed”. But he does not tell us with what superior technological marvels Jesus mesmerized and purchased the reverence of his disciples–indeed, if Jesus really had possessed anything like the modern radio or airplane, perhaps he really was a God–nor from what advanced civilization he interloped into Palestine. Like Hitchens, Dawkins provides not a shred of evidence to support his risible hypothesis; rather, he asks his readers to accept it holus-bolus on, well, faith.

Since for Dawkins evolution is all the law and the prophets, his own contribution to the study of cultic origins is his theory of religion as a product of (you guessed it) natural selection. In dragging evolution into everything, Dawkins reminds one of the comically persona-ridden physician Euryximachus, an interlocutor in Plato’s Symposium, who when asked to discourse on the theme of love, defined it as “the health of the body”.

The problem for Dawkins-the-Darwinian, however, is explaining how a behavioral trait that is so “time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking…anti-factual, [and] counter-productive” as the worship of God could have become so universally naturalized within the human species that “no known culture lacks some version” of it. Shouldn’t religion have long ago been “selected out”? Indeed, as the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin insists, “That is the one point which I think all evolutionists agree upon, that it is virtually impossible to do a better job than an organism is doing in its own environment.” The human organism is ubiquitously religious, and by his own logic, the evolutionist ought to conclude that, along with other universally human modes of adaption (e.g., reasoning, planning, tool-making, negotiating, co-operating), religion is a positive and essential contributor to man’s biological survival and thrift.

But then, predisposed as he is to the proposition that religion is pernicious, Dawkins is forced to introduce a bit of “dialectical prestidigitation” (to recall his mockery of the ontological argument) that would have made Anselm proud. Religion, he says, is an unfortunate “by-product” of a more generally successful evolutionary strategy: viz., the prudent imperative for a child to obey his parents. “Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival.” But the by-product of it is gullibility, and the inability to distinguish between worldly wisdom and nonsense. “The child cannot know that ‘Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo’ is good advice but ‘You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail’ is at best a waste of time and goats.” As virus-like “memes”, religious doctrines thus infect the gullible brains of children and metastasize throughout the gene-pool, or rather “meme-pool”. Like genes, memes are selfish and reproduce only for the benefit of themselves, rather than their individual hosts or collective species. Each religion is a complex of such self-replicating “memes” or cultural complexes. “Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one”, Dawkins speculates.

But once again, he offers no empirical evidence to support such fascinating speculations. Nor does it really matter. The theory may be plausible enough that childish credulity and obedience (in themselves, making excellent Darwinian sense) have led to the propagation from generation to generation of religious nonsense, but it tells us nothing about religious origins. Why did parents and tribal elders conceive these fantasies about God and the soul in the first place? It will not do to say that they accepted them credulously from their own parents when they were children; for this is merely to kick the causal can down the road–and Dawkins has only contempt for that sort of intellectual sloppiness when it is exhibited by Creationists. (The triumphantly unanswerable question, “Who designed the Designer”, is one of Dawkins’ rhetorical tics.) So, what Darwinian Imperative first planted the God hypothesis in the brains of parents and tribal elders, in every part of the inhabited globe, during the nascency of humankind? And why was that particular species of nonsense, more than any other, so universally “selected” and propagated?

According to the very criteria to which he regularly appeals, Dawkins’ theory is preposterous. Both he and Hitchens are fond of invoking the principle of Occam’s razor to refute the assumption of the existence of God. According to Occam, the simplest explanation is always the truest, and thus for modern science, the God hypothesis, being wholly superfluous to the explanation of the existence and evolution of the cosmos, is false. (Not surprisingly, Occam is the one Christian theologian whom both Dawkins and Hitchens admire.) Well, isn’t it “simpler” for a Darwinian to infer that the universality and perdurance of religion means that it has been “selected” because it is a successful human adaptation? Remember Lowentin’s point that “it is impossible to do a better job than an organism is doing in its own environment”. For humans, that environment has ubiquitously and perennially included religion. Dawkins’ Byzantine speculations about religion as a “misfiring” of an otherwise sound evolutionary mechanism rather needlessly complicates things.