GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (TWELVE BOOKS)
Hitchens’s slashing polemic sets the stage for Lilla’s more measured account of how religion and politics resumed their combustible union after Hobbes tried to break them up. Hitchens shows why Lilla’s sometimes convoluted history matters; Lilla shows why Hitchens’s arguments so often fall on deaf ears. Hitchens hasn’t exactly been the flavor of the month since he came out in favor of the Iraq war (which he has called “a critical front in a much wider struggle against a vicious totalitarian ideology”).
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“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar,” he writes in what could be a tribute to Hobbes. “They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” Hitchens presents the familiar case that supernatural belief adds nothing to our understanding of the world, as well as the slightly less familiar case that it’s inimical to morality. Take the Ten Commandments—please. As he observes, they say nothing against rape, child abuse, slavery, or genocide, and passages that turn up nearby in the Bible mention some of these practices approvingly. “In verse 2 of the immediately following chapter [Exodus 21],” Hitchens notes, “god tells Moses to instruct his followers about the conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves (or bore their ears through with an awl) and the rules governing the sale of their daughters.” Though Hitchens doesn’t say so, these days many Christians, Jews, and Muslims are happy to disregard large chunks of their holy books. Many more know them only from selective lectionaries that omit inconvenient verses.
Catholics and Protestants in the 1600s disagreed on how God wants us to live together, and their differing political theologies led to wars that made a wasteland of central Europe. The very idea of political theology itself is key to Lilla’s book but unfamiliar to most Americans, even the devout—which is why he wrote it. Religious Americans may oppose war or abortion for reasons of faith, but when our political process produces wars or permits abortions, they just campaign harder—they don’t condemn democracy itself as ungodly and take up weapons. That would be political theology.
After the pointless catastrophe of World War I, few could maintain with a straight face that the society that produced it was the best possible one. But the idea of political theology was already loose again, ready to be adopted by the post-liberal, post-WWI crowd in the far less benign environment of Weimar Germany. “The stillborn God of the liberal theologians could never satisfy the messianic longings embedded in biblical faith,” Lilla contends. “So it was inevitable that this idol would be abandoned in favor of a strong redeeming God when the crisis came.”
Mon 11/12, 6:30 (reception 5:30) PM, Spertus Institute, 618 S. Michigan, 312-322-1773, $30.
