It is because secular intellectuals have lost their own belief in progress and liberation that they are turning venomously on those who retain a vision of the good society: the religious.
by Michael Fitzpatrick
When I first came across Christopher Hitchens’ diatribe against Mother Teresa I enjoyed its knockabout exposure of this unctuous old fraud and her preposterous celebrity networking (1). But I increasingly found myself wondering why it was that such an able polemicist of the old left had been reduced to taking on such a trivial and demeaning target. The question ‘Why bother?’ returned with greater insistency when I discovered the recent flurry of popular anti-religious books by a range of atheists, agnostics and secular humanists (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, who are now referred to collectively as ‘The New Atheists’), to which Hitchens has now added his own contribution: God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion (2).
Readers of these books will learn little about religion; they are much more revealing about their authors’ own insecurities. Lacking much knowledge of religious faith, its contemporary critics focus on its superficial aspects and extreme manifestations (notably, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism). Once-influential radicals, now condemned to the margins of society, tend to exaggerate the importance of religious authorities, who in reality have little more legitimacy than the politicians who patronise them, in the (often mistaken) belief that they provide links to the masses. Having lost their own belief in progress and liberation, secular intellectuals are irked by their encounters with people who, on whatever basis, retain a vision of the good society and a commitment to realising it. They clearly feel rebuked by the undaunted practice of those who have not given up. Indeed, in their own state of confusion and demoralisation, old radicals give too much credit to religion, in this respect, and furthermore, they often misinterpret as religious fervour popular affiliations that are largely pragmatic and instrumental.
Moving from his childhood alienation from conventional Christianity to his adult disillusionment with Marxism, Hitchens leaves little doubt that this book is not so much about religion as about himself. His current state of bewilderment is profound. On one page he confesses that his ‘own secular faith has been shaken and discarded’, only to tell us a couple of pages later that he has ‘not quite abandoned’ Marxism. He admits that ‘those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic’. Hitchens here makes a conventional nod towards the ascendancy of Stalinism (though this was a terminus that many of us, including Hitchens himself, never accepted). However, this statement could also serve as a characterisation of his personal apostasy - culminating in his notoriously dogmatic endorsement of Western military intervention in Iraq.
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