Divided by God, united by truth
Divided by God,
united by truth
Christopher Hitchens, the celebrated author and polemicist, never got on with his younger brother, Peter. Some siblings, spawned from the same genetic pool but vastly different in character, temperament and outlook, just don't.
Famous for his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Christopher has become a champion of atheism and secular liberalism. He came to Australia this month to promote his memoir Hitch-22, an enticing prospect for readers who know something of his extraordinary life, wit and command of language. But at the same time that Hitch-22 hits the shelves, so does The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, Peter Hitchens's personal response to his older brother's attack on God and all things religious.
The younger Hitchens, also a noted journalist and author, was once an atheist (and radical socialist), but returned to faith in his 30s and has remained a believer ever since. This course of events has no doubt added to existing tensions between the two, although the truth is they would have lived very separate lives anyway.
Christopher decided upon the folly of religion at a very early age. It's not hard to see why his early experience of Christianity was a turn-off. Sent to boarding school at age eight, he entered a brutal ''Tom Brown's school days'' world where a sadistic and spartan regimen came to be, in the mind of the young Hitchens, closely associated with the religious trappings of the institution.
Peter's own youthful rejection of the faith was followed by years embracing a secular creed and international socialism. He writes that he passed through the same atheist revelation his brother and many self-confident members of his generation experienced as they rejected a sagging postwar establishment, where the sheen had somehow been rubbed off everyone from the policeman to the vicar, the local MP to the school headmaster. Engrossed in modernity and technology, his generation came to see God as a nuisance and religion as an embarrassment.
But the accidental concord with his brother's sensibilities was not to last. In The Rage Against God he directly counteract the arguments of the New Atheists by drawing attention to what he sees as logical flaws, inconsistencies and blind spots.
Are conflicts fought in the name of religion always about religion? The younger brother sees such an idea as "a crude factual misunderstanding". Is it ultimately possible to know what is right and wrong without acknowledging the existence of a deity? He insists that, to be effectively absolute, a moral code must be beyond human power to alter.
And he rejects his brother's strident claim that teaching religious concepts to children is a form of child abuse. Believers and non-believers should be free to raise their children as they wish, but it would be ridiculous to pretend, says Peter, that it is a neutral act to tell a child "the heavens are empty, that the universe is founded on chaos rather than love, and that the child's grandparents on dying have ceased altogether to exist''.
So what brought the prodigal back into the fold? His personal 'rage against God' came to an end when he hit marriage and fatherhood - "a cliche of discovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private and unique to discuss with strangers", he writes.
His experiences living and reporting from Russia and eastern Europe profoundly shaped his view of the world. Having lived in Moscow at the close of the Soviet era, and having witnessed other atheistic regimes in full flight, he refuses to accept his brother's evasion of what he sees as an organic link between atheism and the most notorious modernist experiments of the 20th century.
It is this experience that appears to shape his concerns for society. He believes Christianity is under attack today because it remains the most coherent and potent obstacle to frightening and ruthless idealism: "The concepts of sin, of conscience, of eternal life, and of divine justice under an unalterable law are the ultimate defence against the utopian's belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative. These concepts are safeguards against the worship of human power."
In Hitch-22, Christopher describes Peter, with uncharacteristic gentleness, as "to outward appearances almost tragically right-wing". There will be some who would be tempted to dismiss Peter's arguments because of this. But his literary quarrel with his brother brings into the light some important counter-arguments to the New Atheist claims. And through his experiences in the Soviet Union he does provide profound observations and warnings about a culture that has banished God from every area of public life.
He longs for an argument from atheists that "recognises the possible attractions to the intelligent mind of the religious explanation rather than denouncing all religious belief as stupid". Of course many non-believers are not in that camp. No doubt he is thinking of his brother, whose disdain for all religion remains intractable.
But as Peter makes clear, it is not really arguments that will win the day or change the heart of a person so sure of a godless universe and the singularly negative impact of religion. "'Those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case which is most effectively couched in poetry," he writes. Ultimately shrill and often ugly arguments for and against the existence of God mask something deeper and more personal.
Peter describes a 2008 public debate with Christopher in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the existence of God in which, despite the hopes of the gathered throng, both men refrained from a public mauling of each other. Somehow it didn't feel right. He says it was as if the longest quarrel of his life was over. "On this my brother and I agree: that independence of mind are immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so."
Simon Smart is the head of research and communications at the Centre for Public Christianity.
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