What Christopher Hitchens Understood About Religion but His Critics Persist in Saying He Didn’t

A couple years ago, I took an interest in writer, intellectual and renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens about the time he was touring for the release of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. On December 15, 2011, Hitchens died of esophageal cancer, and the world has lost a singular commentator on religion, politics, history and literature.

Hitchens’s death makes it easier for his critics to attack him. An example is “Having Faith: What Both Hitchens and Fundamentalists Don't Get About Religion” by Tim Padgett on Time.com. The piece claims that Hitchens, in his efforts to vilify religion, focused on the actions of religious fanatics and fundamentalists and ignored “the silent majority of Christians who aren't hatemongering zealots but who derive hope and humane inspiration from our beliefs.”

This is a tired defense of religion--one I used to employ myself--that draws a distinction between the conception of a perfect God and his imperfect believers and between the horrible things done in the name of religion and the true message of faith. In other words, sure there are Christians like those from Westboro Baptist Church who picket funerals with signs reading “God Hates Fags”, but there are also little old ladies in the local church’s knitting circle who have never harmed a fly. 

Hitchens showed that this evasion is unsatisfactory. In fact, religion’s problems run throughout its history, involve everyday believers as well as clergy, and extend even to official church doctrine and the very basics of faith that no believer would disavow. The Ten Commandments are revealed as forbidding thought crime (“Thou shalt not covet.”), the New Testament exalts human sacrifice (vicarious redemption--the very core of the Jesus myth), and the clergy at the highest levels condone beliefs such as, to use one of Hitchens’s favorite lines, “AIDS is bad but condoms are worse.”

This last is one of the many reasons Hitchens so strongly disliked Mother Theresa--beatified and under consideration for sainthood. She started AIDS care centers and fed the destitute, but preached against measures, like condoms, that would cut down on AIDS incidence and, indirectly but no less surely, poverty. Giving women control over their rate of reproduction, Hitchens said, is the one thing proven to improve living conditions, but religion removes this solution from the table.

The poison runs deep and wide in religion. It even seems to drive otherwise good people to do horrible things, like mutilate the genitalia of children, or to hold ridiculous or repugnant beliefs. The nice old lady in the knitting circle, while of sterling character in many areas of her life, must, if she is to be a member of her religious community in any meaningful sense, hold some beliefs against her better nature. She may believe, for example, that anyone goes to Hell who is non-Christian, which includes a good percentage of the world’s population and some who have never even heard of Christianity.

Hitchens could go on about this at great length. For Padgett to suggest that Hitchens didn’t “get” that religion is a good barrel of apples into which a few rotten ones have slipped suggests only that Padgett has paid little attention to Hitchens’s statements about religion. Hitchens understood that claim all too well and disagreed. For him, religions are the bad apples that are spoiling the rest.

In the post-Hitchens world, the shrugging off of religion’s crimes as the acts or beliefs of a fringe minority of wackos is inexcusable, for those crimes have been clearly delineated as embedded in religion itself and as perpetrated by its highest proponents. In the post-Hitchens world, however, there is one less voice to continue raising those crimes to scrutiny. As Hitchens himself noted on occasion, the fight of free minds against religious tyranny is one that biological evolution does not win for us--each new generation must fight it anew.