Christopher Hitchens
It is high time to attempt to explain the black sheep of the New Atheist family, the sexually obsessed, sibling-rival, left-wing radical turned right-wing Jihadist, and one of the least pleasant commentators on the current scene, Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestseller God Is Not Great. As best as I can figure him, Christopher Hitchens hates God for two reasons. First, because (judging on the basis of what he’s written and is quoted as having said) he likes sex and thinks religious people don’t. Second, because (judging on that same basis), he loathes his younger brother Peter Hitchens, also a well-known writer and a rival political commentator, with whom Christopher Hitchens has had a long and bitter feud over theology and politics. Peter Hitchens is a practicing and devout Anglican and a convert from the far, far loony Trotskyite British left that both he and Christopher Hitchens once embraced.
The fact is, I “get” Christopher Hitchens’s obsessions and his bizarre rationales for his aggressive atheism and anti-clericalism. I get his split with his religious brother Peter Hitchens too. I understand this chemistry all too well, because my leaving the evangelical/fundamentalist fold was—for a time—a break with my siblings too, one that infuriated my parents’ right-wing fundamentalist followers. I get the sex bit too. Sex is all over my novels too. I get Hitchens.
God Is Not Great is an entertaining book. On the other hand it’s so skewed that, unlike Daniel Dennett’s serious and beautiful Breaking the Spell, Hitchens’s book adds little to the discussion of religion besides a kind of furiously demented anti-God entertainment, an odd mix of philosophizing combined with working out the author’s very particular psychological problems.
Hitchens describes how he converted to religion in order to marry. He joined the Greek Orthodox Church to please the family of his first wife. Then he divorced and abandoned that faith. But apparently Orthodoxy meant something more to him than mere convenience, because he writes about how wonderful it felt to shout out “Christ is risen!” at the Easter services, and how he was swept up in that experience. Hitchens also says, “There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb.” Maybe he’s talking about those Easter services, or perhaps he’s talking about his old Trotskyite certainties.
As Hitchens summarizes his book’s argument, it comes to this: “The first [problem] is that religion and churches are manufactured. . . . The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith. The third is that religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.”
What, according to Hitchens, are religion’s sins? Religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and . . . children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
Hitchens also got sick of expressing gratitude. “Why if god [he uses the lowercase ‘g’ to make a point] was the creator of all things, were we supposed to ‘praise’ him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally? This seemed servile, apart from anything else.”
Why thank God when “Religion,” Hitchens writes, “spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago.” And what should Hitchens’s readers make of religious people who have been seduced by those “inspiring words” and then been mistaken for heroes? Consider Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. Well, it turns out that Bonhoeffer’s religious heroism was actually a type of humanism, if properly understood.
A couple of pages after Bonhoeffer is dealt with, Hitchens pens a line that could serve as Hitchens’s epitaph: “The person who is certain, and claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” In which case, what about Hitchens’s certainties, or, more to the point, what about Martin Luther King Jr.? He seemed to be in possession of a “divine warrant” or thought he was.
“Anybody,” writes Hitchens, “who uses the King legacy to justify the role of religion in public life must accept all the corollaries. . . . Even a glance at the whole record will show, first, that person for person, American free thinkers and agnostics and atheists come out best. The chance that someone’s secular [thinking] or freethinking . . . would cause him or her to denounce the whole in¬justice was extremely high. The chance that someone’s religious beliefs would cause him or her to take a stand against slavery and racism was statistically quite small.” So Martin Luther King Jr. really must have been some sort of secularist too, because it’s just so abnormal for anyone to be both religious and good.
When it comes to the sins of atheism, Hitchens turns to George Orwell for reassurance that somehow, no matter what it looks like, atheism is not true to itself when being bad but, rather is authentically atheist only when it’s good. The rest of the time it may appear that atheism fails from time to time, but that’s not so. “George Orwell . . . whose novels gave us [a] picture of what life in a totalitarian state might truly feel like, was in no doubt about [the fact that] ‘a totalitarian state is in its effect a theocracy.’”
In other words, to Hitchens, Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot and their ilk were more to be understood as bad popes than as bad atheists. Evil atheists are not real atheists. Real atheists are by definition free thinkers who do wonderful things, much like Dawkins’s real scientists, who are, also by definition, all atheists, or wish they had been, or would have been if only they could have had a chat with Dawkins.
He may call himself an atheist but Christopher, like his brother Peter, is also a perennial convert. In Christopher Hitchens’s case, though, conversion was not to an ancient religion (except briefly to curry favor with his in-laws) but, early in life, to the political religious cult of extreme Marxism and then, late in mid life, to neoconservatism and jingoistic American exceptionalism. He made this last conversion to the far right after 9/11, when, after a career as a left-wing anti-imperialist, Christopher became a leading advocate and supporter of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
This angered his old friends on the left. So Christopher threw them a sop, his Johnny-come-lately jump onto the New Atheist bandwagon. His peace offering was God Is Not Great. He got to kill two birds with one stone: attempted reconciliation with the (often) atheist American left, and another way to stick it to his brother Peter.
Hitchens’s shot at lefty redemption didn’t work. With a “friend” like Hitchens, smart lefties feel they need no enemies. What to do with a man who in a May 2008 Slate article on Michelle Obama (in the wake of L’Affaire Reverend Wright), alleged that her view of America was the same as that of Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan?!
Here is how Alexander Cockburn, Hitchens’s former, pre–Iraq War colleague at the lefty Nation magazine (from which Hitchens dramatically departed in 2005 after he became a shill for Bush on Iraq), has described how people on the left feel about Hitchens:
What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan [a mother who turned peace activist after her soldier son was killed in Iraq] as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel. She lost a son? Hitchens (who [given Hitchens’s support for Bush’s war] should perhaps be careful on the topic of sending children off to die) says that’s of scant account, and no reason why we should take her seriously. Then he brays about the horrors let loose in Iraq if the troops come home, with no mention of how the invasion he worked for has already unleashed them.
Besides having converted to the war-solves-everything far, far jingoistic neoconservative right, Hitchens seems to have some weird hangups, including ones about Israel, maybe related to his basic God phobia and/or his late-in-life claim that he is a Jew via his mother’s side of the family—whatever. According to Cockburn, “In 1999 Edward Jay Epstein publicly recalled a dinner in the Royalton Hotel in New York where Epstein said Hitchens had doubted the Holocaust was quite what it’s cracked up to be.”
Here’s a guy that may or may not be a closet Holocaust denier but who publicly proclaimed that he’d refuse to care for his brother’s children, should his brother Peter die. As quoted in the Guardian in 2005, Christopher said, “The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith.”
James Macintyre, who has known both Hitchens brothers for years, dissected their ugly relationship in the June, 11, 2007, issue of The Independent: “Christopher revealed that after he discovered his mother died in mysterious circumstances—apparently a suicide pact with a boyfriend in Athens—he found a note his mother had addressed only to ‘Christopher.’ He has since been quoted as saying, ‘If you were the mother of Christopher and Peter, who would be your secret favorite?’”
It’s hard to imagine a less appealing way of expressing sibling rivalry than citing one’s mother’s suicide note.
The Washington Post reviewer of Hitchens’s book pegged Hitchens’s ignorance about religion. In his May 6, 2008, review, Stephen Prothero (chair of Boston University’s Religion Department) wrote,
What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself. . . . [he] assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naïf. . . . Readers with any sense of irony—and here I do not exclude believers— will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion. . . . I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens’s pet themes—the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.
The question: Why is Hitchens so “maddeningly dogmatic”? The answer, again: sex.
What I don’t get is why Hitchens believes that the freedom to have sex is tied to freedom from religion. Who in his circle (or, for that matter, who anywhere) is not having sex these days because of the anything the Pope says? What does Hitchens think all those Muslim sheiks are doing to their twelve-year-old brides in Riyadh? And given the high statistical rates of adultery and divorce in North American evangelical/fundamentalist circles, and (according to studies) the higher-than-average numbers of church-going porn addicts in the Bible belt, who today does Hitchens think is suffering dangerous sexual repression because of a belief in God?
Hitchens’s preoccupation with sex is woven throughout his book and articles. As he pushes into old age, Hitchens’s writing tends to circle back to sex, the wanting and the getting of sex in a schoolboy wanker-style. When asked by an interviewer from the Village Voice (March 18, 2008) to speculate on why New York’s (then governor) Elliott Spitzer risked his career by going to whores, Hitchen’s answer unintentionally revealed his own bottom line (no pun) concerning men given to acting the part of the alpha male. The interviewer asked,
So what in the wide world was Eliot Spitzer thinking? “Oh, that’s easy,” Christopher Hitchens said from his Washington apartment . . . “You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that was available to you. That is what you do. . . . You don’t do it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor, for fuck’s sake.” During the 1992 presidential primary season, Hitchens pointed out, the day that Clinton won the endorsement was the very day he hit on Paula Jones. “He said, ‘Wait—I could be the next president. . . . Now, where’s the next cutie? Because I need that now, much more than I did 10 minutes ago,’” Hitchens speculated. And likewise with JFK: “With Kennedy, it’s really all over the guy for everyone to see,” Hitchens said. “From dawn till dusk, from soup to nuts, from everything he does to the last day he dies: ‘I do this to get laid.’ What’s the point of all this if I don’t get an orgasm now? What’s the point of being an alpha male? Anyone who doesn’t get this,” [Hitchens] concluded, “doesn’t know.”
Besides obsessing over his brother Peter, why does Hitchens bother writing? Take a wild guess. Here’s Hitchens’s answer as offered in his article on “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in Vanity Fair of January 2007. “The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex.” Hitchens explains that his method to get into bed with women is to make them laugh “with their mouths wide open.” That, he claims, is his best shot. He concludes, “If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women.” In other words, men are funny in order to impress humorless women into having sex with them.
According to Hitchens, women are humorless because they make babies, and he notes that that’s why “episiotomy jokes” fall flat with women and advises would be seducers to avoid dead child jokes too.
Hitchens gets to the nub of his grudge against God when he lashes out against what he calls “the three great monotheisms.” Hitchens says that the concept of God is a “totalitarian belief.” He ends his book with this statement on the all-important last page:
Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment. . . . The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolution¬ize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse.
Hitchens is also fascinated by the temporary marriages offered by religious leaders in Iran and then tells us that:
The relationship between physical health and mental health is well understood to have a strong connection to the sexual function, or dysfunction. Can it be a coincidence, then, that all religions claim the right to litigate in matters of sex? To survey the history of sex¬ual dread and proscription, as codified by religion, is to be met with a very disturbing . . . extreme repression. Almost every sex¬ual impulse has been made the occasion for prohibition, guilt, and shame . . . oral sex, anal sex, non-missionary-position sex. . . . Clearly, the human species is designed to experiment with sex.
Sex and brother Peter aside, Hitchens’s views strike me as a version of the no-elephant pebble story. A man says that carrying a particular magic pebble in his pocket keeps elephants out of the room. He always carries the pebble, and there never are any elephants in any rooms he walks into! Hitchens treats religion as his pet “pebble”: People are bad, and religion is always lurking about, so there¬fore, religion is making people bad.
But does religion make people worse than they would be without religion? Twenty-first-century Britain is more atheistic than ever, yet crime has gone up. Iran became a theocracy and more religious than ever, and crime went up there as well (not to mention state-sponsored terror). What do the atheist Britons and religious Iranians have in common? They’re human. Whatever they say they believe, and they evolved from the same tribe of marauding murdering monkeys we all descended from.
Whatever the merits of his arguments, to put it mildly, Hitchens ideas don’t seem to have worked out too well for him personally. If Hitchens being Hitchens is an example of those “hardwon human attainments,” the rest of us would do well to avoid them. If Dawkins messianic/commercial website is the future of atheism, we might just be entering a new age of religion pushed there by the reaction to the reaction against religion.
