Watching again the 2007 recorded debates of Christopher Hitchens, arguing the case for anti-theism against the simplistic conceptions of American fundamentalist Christians, is still enjoyable for the elegant ease with which he outstripped them intellectually. But the spectacle now also comes with greater recognition of what might have been Hitchens’s ulterior motives, and what that means about public debate today. It also invites entirely new conjecture about whether his arguments still apply in a contemporary Western cultural environment, infected as it is with dismaying ‘post-truth’ conspiracy theories, disconcertingly re-energized science-denialism, and menacing populist, neo-fascist political tendencies.
Hitchens was a British-born, Oxford-educated journalist and non-fiction author with a left political orientation who made a name for himself as an engaging critic of orthodox perspectives on world affairs, with a literary flavour to his prose. During the 1980s, he became a frequent contributor to American publications, eventually moving to Washington, and taking up American citizenship in 2007. Since the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the USA, he adopted opinions sometimes derided as ‘Neocon’, including support for war against ‘Islamofascists’. His most passionate polemics were devoted to denouncing totalitarianism, including especially the religious kind. In 2007 he published the book, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and headlined public debates with American religious apologists as part of his promotional book tour.
God is not great ...
I came to the debate videos again via a random social media post, and then some self-indulgence on YouTube, where most of those recordings are still readily available. If memory serves, on my first reading of it, god is Not Great did not strike me as Hitchens’s most lyrical, literary work. The prose didn’t quite flow as smoothly as in some of his other works, and the chapters didn’t succeed each other as effortlessly. Perhaps the polishing, editing phase was hurried. Maybe there wasn’t time to smooth out the discontinuities between the anecdotes and his theme. But it strikes me now that he may have deliberately dumbed-down his work to make it more accessible to a wider audience than a more sophisticated treatment might have been. A pragmatic assessment of his biggest potential market?
The book consists of a series of raconteur anecdotes with which Hitchens relates personal experiences of the world as it is, not as some others would prefer to imagine it, and informing his insights into Judaeo-Christianity, Islamism, and Eastern mysticism as the inventions of ancient, ignorant, barbarous tribespeople, turned into rigid, though factionally fractious ideologies, conspicuously used by criminally insane zealots to engender the most horrendous atrocities—in the name of God. Hitchens’s arguments are lucidly rational and difficult to deny, especially since he didn’t attack faith, or the possible existence of the divine per se, choosing to carefully isolate for his target the inevitable tendency of religionists to abuse the power they derive from the pretence they are doing God’s work. Hence the subtitle: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Why creationism is a poor theory
A formulaic preference for the American Protestant apologists Hitchens debated was to argue the post hoc ergo propter hoc (after, therefore because of) fallacy that the universe could not have come from nothing, and that sophisticated combinations of elements must necessarily have had an ‘intelligent designer’. It seemed as if the religionists (notably Dinesh D’Souza and Frank Turek) simply couldn’t comprehend Hitchens’s argument that our inability, so far, to explain cosmic origins, isn’t sufficient reason to impose a supernatural explanation. Especially not given the history of our species to progressively address previously inexplicable phenomena with ever more sound scientific explanations, and the complete absence of proofs for the existence of supernatural interventions in the universe. Nor did it seem to prevent a repetitive syllogistic dishonesty–proposing two unproven assertions as proof of a third–or the dogged insistence that the Bible represents empirical evidence.
It simply isn’t rational to say ‘nothing comes from nothing’ (or first there was nothing, then there was the universe), and that therefore some supernatural force must have been at work. Hitchens didn’t say so directly, but there is no evidence that the Big Bang was preceded by nothing rather than, say, by a singularity, of which quite a number also appear to exist in the post-Big Bang universe, even if they might well be different kinds of singularity.
Hitchens was at pains to concede that maybe our species has a genetic predisposition to search for patterns, and to answer as yet unexplained questions with even preposterous placeholders, rather than admit to not knowing. Not being able to explain. However, a little reflection should reassure even unsophisticated thinkers that we are rapidly dispelling such gaps in our knowledge. As a species that may have existed for as long as 250,000 years, but maybe only half that time, it is only in the past two hundred years that the West has seriously embraced again the efforts made in ancient Greece to rationally explain our universe. Efforts that were suppressed for 2000 years of Christianity, and with notable exceptions of a century here and there, in other cultures too. The point being that we have made quite astonishing discoveries about our universe in the scant period since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and on even just the scale of our existence, not to mention cosmological epochs, we can confidently anticipate ever more revealing discoveries to help us narrow down unanswered questions, and, more importantly, discuss convincing theories and answers to explain away remaining unknowns.
If our species survives long enough.
Provenance
While Hitchens did not dwell on the provenance of the Bible the way he might have, mentioning forgeries and deliberate re-writing, nor the bewildering array of contemporary translations and editions–there are more than 150 complete and partial versions–he did question the historical proofs for key biblical figures and events. In particular, he scoffed at insistence on resurrection, which, in some scriptures also included mass resurrections at the same time as that of Jesus. Hitchens argued that a much more simple explanation was that such stories were the inventions of ignorant and superstitious men at some historical remove from any of the miracles they described. His interlocutors had no way to counter this proposition, except to blink and repeat their assertions of the literal truth of biblical passages cited.
God, the ur-dictator?
Hitchens was devastatingly effective in denouncing the idea of an almighty God as totalitarianism of the worst kind, in which we are all condemned to be imperfect, are spied on for every second of our lives, are commanded to obey some quite arbitrary and ridiculous rules, and then face condemnation to either an eternity of more of the same, or eternal damnation in the agonies of a sadistic hell.
In particular, Hitchens was at his oratorical best when comparing this conception of a divine dictatorship with the North Korean regime, in which a dead man (Kim Il Sung) remains President, while his ‘reincarnation’, Kim Jong Un (a North Korean Jesus?), is supreme ruler, whose praise must be incorporated into every public utterance in speech, print, on radio and television, and even in rare public performances of plays or operas. The ‘dear leader’ governs a state in which any slight deviation from his commandments means imprisonment or execution.
This terrifying comparison made it difficult to counter Hitchens’s excoriation of religionism as advocating a debasement of humankind that obliterates individuality, liberty of any kind, and even a possibility for ethics or conscience, as opposed to unquestioning obedience of fixed rules in an abject state of slavery.
Ethics and morality
Most monstrous of all religionist claims was and remains the one about morality. That no person would behave ethically if there were no commandments from God. The implication is profoundly perverse: only a command, backed by threat of eternal damnation, prevents anyone from raping, pillaging, murdering, and committing all sorts of other crimes. One could speculate, as Hitchens did, that by their own admission, as contained in this argument, religious people must actually be abominable psychopaths, held in check only by fear of God and eternal damnation.
Hitchens repeatedly expressed outrage at the proposition that he was deemed incapable of arriving at ethical judgements simply because he did not have religious beliefs. That he would automatically behave like an unrestrained barbarian. It is quite difficult to rebut that position. It would require challenging the entire basis of secular liberal democracies, from Thomas Hobbes’s social contract on, to legal systems designed around man-made laws, subject to amendment and change as circumstances and popular will demand.
But what about the Holocaust and the Soviet genocides?
In the same irrational vein, Hitchen’s interlocutors claimed that the ethical disasters of Nazism and Soviet communism occurred because of their atheist nature. Hitchens was able to counter with ease that historical fascism always had the support of the Catholic Church, and that the Russian Orthodox Church remained a mainstay of the civil obedience apparatus in the Soviet era. Hitchens also made the point that George Orwell had observed decades ago that totalitarianism is in fact theocracy (George Orwell, 1945, ‘The Prevention of Literature’). Hitchens did not dwell on the point that the terms ‘Christofascism’ and ‘Islamofascism’ for movements and regimes aiming to impose theocratic authority via political activism exist to describe precisely that overlap between ideology and theology.
The close correspondence between religionism and ideology seems especially difficult to convey to people exposed to a lifetime of anti-communist rhetoric, no matter that it’s really not that hard to recognize the parallels: religion and ideology both rely ultimately on unquestioning faith in their doctrines, for which rational proofs must always fall short. Totalitarian regimes, like religions, all have an iconography of living gods and saints: portraits of the current leader as messianic or already divine, and similar depictions of a coterie of idolized angels, saints, or demi-gods. For example, the emblematic depiction of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Lenin, together, (a trinity not unlike the Catholic version) was ubiquitous, and can still be seen in the former Soviet Union, but also as far afield as contemporary Vietnam and China. Possibly the most telling giveaway to the religionism-ideology concordance is that the only persistent claims to absolute certainty about any given topic are made by religionists and ideologues. Everyone else, unable to rely on that doctrinal faith, has to admit to a degree of doubt and uncertainty when proposing secular humanist or scientific arguments.
The Hitchens debates covered a wide range of other arguments, with many finer points that were addressed specifically in his book, but those exceed a capacity to summarize here.
Terminology
At this point, a brief digression into terminology seems fitting.
‘Atheism’ is a pejorative word devised in 16th century France as a less crude formulation of ‘godless heathens’, ‘infidels’, or ‘pagans’. But it has become a lazily dishonest label. As Hitchens pointed out, there are no words for people who don’t believe in ‘Father Christmas’, or the tooth fairy, or astrology, and so on. Why do we need a word to signify people who don’t believe religious superstitions? It seems the sole motivation is to reify an opposition to religionist power, so that it can be demonized, and so that individuals can be singled out and targeted as if they represented some larger menacing entity. It is a means of scapegoating—a word literally referring to the blood sacrifice of goats to expiate imagined sins. A means to ruin or even kill people for shamefully dishonest reasons, the way it was done during the 1950s anti-communist witch-hunts to so many people not guilty of being communists at all. I can’t help but draw a parallel also with an arbitrary contemporary social media ‘cancel culture’, pursued more as blood sport than challenge to powerful but objectionable people.
I regard it as more important than Hitchens to refute that ‘atheists’ (or anti-theists) are somehow an organized body with a distinct ideology. Utter nonsense. The absence of a belief unifies no great body of people, let alone lead to the coalescence of widely diverse views into some fixed and purposely directed ideology. While it is possible for some people with no religious faith to come together for militant opposition to religionism, that’s hardly proof of some universal given. Nor can it be said that any nominally secular or ‘atheist’ government (regime?) makes atheists of all its members or subject populations. No more so than a rhetorical assertion that ‘America is a Christian country’ makes Christians of all Americans. Substitute the name of any country and any religion and consider how axiomatic this basic observation becomes. We can see some of this numbskullery today in identity politics, which permits the malice of asserting that one group of people can legitimately bracket anyone else as belonging to some disfavoured group. Sadly, that kind of identity politics actually weakens all attempts at a coherent politics to the left of the extreme right wing.
Hitchens insisted he did not deny the possibility of a deity, or multiples of them; he merely argued that proof of their existence was absent, and quite unnecessary to explain nature, or to govern the affairs of the human species. Therefore, ‘anti-theism’, meaning opposition to god worship, is a better term for his position. That distinction is reflected also by me referring to ‘religionism’ as the concrete public manifestations of religious faith: churches, priestly castes, power hierarchies, abuses of power, flow of money and influence, and so on. Like Hitchens, I don’t see it as important to oppose private beliefs, but it becomes impossible to ignore their public manifestations, in direct relationship to their propensity to translate into the totalitarian ambitions of the more zealous of their advocates.
To ensure I’m not seen to be making the very same egregious generalizations of which I accuse others, and to illustrate that my terminology is not fanciful or gratuitous, I rely in this essay on a definition of Christofascism as described by Steven Foertsch, Rudra Chakraborty, and Paul Joosse, and of fascism itself, including neo-fascism, as described by Umberto Eco.
Profit motive and public debate
Beyond the arguments themselves, the debates always conveyed more subtle meanings, some of which left a deeper impression this time around than in the 2000s. One of those was the likely shrewd calculation with which Hitchens recognized that American religionism is essentially a gargantuan racket, channelling billions of dollars to a few individuals, and delivering to them an immensely powerful political influence. ‘Why,’ I can almost hear Hitchens reasoning, ‘don’t I combine one of my favourite pursuits with a business strategy to tap into some of that fundamentalist cash?’ And so, a career-long sideline in arguing the case for anti-theism turned into a book, and into the long book tour that all but forced even die-hard religionists to buy the product, if only to condemn it! After all, serious religious apologists entertained the Hitchens declarations, and even praised him as an eminent intellectual worthy of respect.
What does my suspicion about Hitchens’s commercial motivations really mean? It is a roundabout confirmation of my own perception that political economy–the politics of how wealth is distributed–explains most everything there is to understand about human behaviour in our societies. And it raises the question whether serious public debate is possible only when it is also driven by profit motives. I wonder how that question might be answered by an Elon Musk or a Lachlan Murdoch.
What does it all mean today?
Christopher Hitchens’s assertions about the toxicity of religion were never convincingly rebutted, but he couldn’t persist and update them. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 diverted public attention from all other issues, and Hitchens fell ill in 2010, dying of pneumonia, as a complication of œsophageal cancer, on 15 December 2011. It seems almost as if the entire public controversy about totalitarianism in the guise of religion disappeared with him, though the existential threat of it never did. Right wing Christian activists–Christofascists–remain steadily active at the fringes of political right wing extremism. They never abandoned their hold over the American Republicans, and in Australia we need to look no further than the steady infiltration of Liberal Party state branches by shadowy Protestant religionists, modelling their activities closely on American examples. They seem to be ready allies of all the charlatans promoting ‘fake news’, unhinged science denialism, and a bewildering array of conspiracy theories.
Brutopia
We’ve already had a preview of what government by Christofascists might look like during the Morrison prime ministership of 2018-2022. That government was characterised by audacious and continuous mendacity, especially by the prime minister himself, and an ideological class warfare, underpinned by the Pentecostal ‘prosperity gospel’, culminating in the fraudulent Robodebt extortion scam, and the unashamed, and still unpunished, misappropriation of public funds to underwrite a party political re-election campaign. Morrison and some of his minsters publicly prided themselves as devoutly religious, yet their government appeared to eschew all ethics or nominal Christian morality, and was also highly visible for its callous misogyny, and other bigotries.
Some of the former members of that government now expect to be re-elected as if nothing untoward happened on their watch. Nor have they disavowed the onslaught of hatespeech, divisiveness, conspiracy theories, science denialism, and anti intellectual cretinism of all sorts that we might collectively label ‘brutopianism’, after a word originally coined by Carl Barks in 1957, for a Walt Disney Donald Duck cartoon, to label a hostile country bent on world domination. It seems oddly appropriate to aggregate the braying mob as akin to cartoon characters, and their motivations as a kind of world domination by imbecility. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’, as American right wing populist Steve Bannon put it.
The Overton Window
Bannon’s flooding strategy is neither new nor isolated. It traces back at least as far as the ‘Overton Window’, named after American conservative think tank executive Joseph Overton, who solicited donations from business and wealthy individuals on the basis that his organization would produce studies and reports confirming donor politically economic preferences, and push these out to media in order to shift public attitudes on what sort of opinions and policies would be seen as acceptable. In other words, he promised to help normalize an ever increasing range of unacceptably antisocial, sociopathic viewpoints. It is a strategy pursued by right wing think tanks throughout the Western world, and reinforced considerably where media barons can use their own assets to propagandize particular economic and political points of view. That was precisely the point made by former Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull when they supported the call for an inquiry into News Corporation. To be fair, though, Christopher Hitchens was doing the same thing, albeit on a much smaller scale, when he sought publicity for his book and his debates.
Today’s brutopianism is amplified by social and traditional media like never before, including through the deliberate weaponization for social division of anti-intellectualism by vainglorious tycoons and malicious anti-Western counter-intelligence agencies—notably Russia and China running social media troll farms to influence elections in Western nations as a much cheaper way of destroying their power than open warfare.
It is possible to nominate media conglomerates that amplify disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies, from X to News Corporation, with mercenary politicians on the right wing fringes, and others, parroting those lies. The common thread among them is only divisiveness and vandalism: the intent to undermine and destroy civilization and civilizing institutions. Why? For people like Elon Musk, the Murdoch family, and their minion politicians, for example, it is possibly about perceived financial advantage arising from an imagined libertarian utopia (also labelled a brutopia, by Kevin Rudd, for reasons different but complementary to my own use of the term) that would arise after a mob of malcontents, suitably manipulated by the media, destroy liberal democracy. That certainly seemed to be the Fox News agenda leading up to the 6 January 2021 Washington insurrection. Some others, coming from rage and ignorance, appear to earnestly yearn for the religious ‘rapture’, or an Armageddon showdown, like an ultimate gunfight at the OK Corral. Still others, perhaps adding mental illness to rage and ignorance, appear intent on nothing more complicated than the sadomasochism of making their perceived enemies suffer, even if it means their own suffering as a consequence.
Political economy
How did all these people get to be brutopians? The most logical explanation seems to be disaffection caused by the broken promises of Western neoliberal political economy, sometimes un-ironically referred to as ‘trickle down economics’. All the evidence weighed against overstated claims show the principal feature of neoliberalism to be the progressive and accelerating concentration of wealth and power in ever fewer hands, creating larger and larger numbers of people struggling financially, losing the power to control their own lives, and giving them no stake in their societies. This growing underclass has no reason to support civic values, to respect rationality and expertise, to collaborate in their own further impoverishment, or to obey the laws of the societies that appear to have abandoned them. These are not outlandish or radically left ideas, but are recognized, for example, in investment banking global strategist Viktor Shvets’ new book The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured 1930s to Today’s Crisis Culture–How to Avoid a World on Fire.
Our responsibilities?
Neither Hitchens nor I have any prescriptions for resolving problems arising from political economy, but Hitchens’s arguments do apply to a wider scope of influences than just religionism. His informed, rationally directed critique of dictatorial authority and claptrap doctrines is as relevant to social and political debates as to religion. The example he sets is to be informed with facts, not superstitions, to do one’s own thinking, to reach one’s own judgements, to come to one’s own ethics, to accept that doubt and uncertainty is much more healthy and rational than any claim to absolute certainty, and to be on guard every time someone offers glib, easy ‘answers’.
In that context, Christopher Hitchens’s arguments from 2007 remain a powerful reminder of the responsibility we all have to stand against the balefulness of a renewed barbarism, in which Western civilization, along with the secular liberal democratic state, is under threat. Difficult and sometimes even dangerous as it might be, it means those of us who prefer liberal democracy to more authoritarian politics have to be seen and heard opposing brutopian assertions in whatever small way we can in our daily lives. Silence is always a tacit form of consent.