Book Review of Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great by Michael Patrick Leahy

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Review of Christopher Hitchens' new book God is not Great, by Michael Patrick Leahy, author of Letter to an Atheist

As an Evangelical Christian, and the author of Letter to an Atheist, a response to atheist Sam Harris’ own Letter to a Christian Nation, I found Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God is not Great, to be an intellectually honest, delightfully readable, and highly entertaining travelogue of one man’s journey along the road of atheism. Hitchens has been a non-believer since the age of nine, when his teacher, a childless widow of whom he was very fond, told his class “ So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the color that is most restful to our eyes.” Hitchens recalls “I was frankly appalled by what she said … I simply knew, 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 about.”

I confess to being kindly disposed to anything Mr. Hitchens writes. His merciless skewering of the fatuously pompous over the past two decades has provided me with untold hours of amusement. What could be more fun than to watch the loquacious Mr. Hitchens, bloodshot eyes scanning the room for signs of alcoholic beverages to consume, smoke from his cigarette curling up around him, as he wittily dispatches yet another self congratulatory and empty headed blowhard ? Anyone with the intellectual clarity to start his professional life as a Trotskyite, as did Mr. Hitchens, and subsequently be open minded enough to recognize the threat to Western Civilization posed by fanatic Islam, becoming along the way one of the most ardent defenders of the West in that generational struggle in which we find ourselves embroiled, is to be admired.

Professor David P. Barash of the University of Washington, in a recent article on “The DNA of Religious Faith” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, called Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Carl Sagan “the four hoursemen of the current antireligious apocalypse…passionate advocates of reason, committed to the proposition that religion is essentially unreasonable.” Some in the press have begun to refer to Mr. Hitchens as the natural replacement for Dr. Sagan in this quartet of non-believers.

Combining the eminently reasonable Mr. Hitchens with the intellectually dishonest Mr. Harris (who repeatedly claims that 50% of all Americans believe the universe is only 6,000 years old, when all the facts indicate that 18% at most harbor such beliefs) and the unbearably arrogant Professors Dawkins and Dennett ( who insist in their self aggrandizing and irritating manner on being called “brights” ) does a disservice to Mr. Hitchens’ literary accomplishments, however. Unlike Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, who advocate a series of actions to limit the freedom of religion and the participation of Christians in the political process, Mr. Hitchens merely wishes to be left alone in his atheism, a desire which I am most happy to accommodate, and for good reason. It is the same wish I have about my Christian faith, and one which I direct towards the unholy trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, who seem to revel in persistent and unfounded attacks on that faith.

Mr. Hitchens’ approach is much more civil.

Most of his ire is aimed at the institution of religion, rather than at faith itself, though he does take a chapter to address what he refers to as the evils of the New Testament. In this chapter, he rejects Christian faith largely on the basis of what he regards to be historical inconsistencies within the four gospels, as well as his disdain for the prophecies of the Old Testament and Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. It’s an entertaining chapter, but one that will do little to shake the faith of any Christians.

While Mr. Hitchens is intellectually honest, his argument is selective and disjointed, reflective of his literary training as opposed to a more comprehensive objective evidence based approach that might be characteristic of a true academic. The nineteen chapters that make up his book could best be described not as an overall case against Christian faith, but instead as the recording of nineteen unique lunches or dinners with Mr. Hitchens, in which his natural talkativeness is allowed to soar amidst great food, a full pack of cigarettes, and copious amounts of wine.

Surprisingly, Mr. Hitchens’ book is weakest in certain areas of history, which should be his strong suit. He shows an odd unwillingness to acknowledge the historical authenticity of Jesus, especially given the voluminous documentation of his existence available through such reputable secular historians as Josephus, Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus. He also ignores the fundamental role the Evangelical Christian William Wilberforce played in the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself within the British Empire, misunderstands the role of Christian faith in American slavery, and fails to acknowledge the depth of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian faith and the significance of that faith in the 1960’s struggle for civil rights.

As personal as some elements of his book were, I found myself wanting to learn more about Mr. Hitchens’ personal experiences with faith. What, for instance, was the impact of his mother’s tragic suicide when he was in his twenties on his thinking ? How has his estrangement and subsequent semi-rapprochement with his younger brother, Peter Hitchens, a believing Christian, and well respected journalist in his own right, influenced him ? The answers to such questions apparently await Mr. Hitchens’ next effort on this topic. I look forward to reading it.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the author of Letter to an Atheist, published by Harpeth River Press in April, 2007. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Leahy has an MBA from Stanford and works in technology marketing. He lives in the Nashville, Tennessee area.

Copyright 2007 by Michael Patrick Leahy

If you want to read an article by Michael Patrick Leahy on the threat of Islamic fanaticism, click here to read "The Fools on the Hill."

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