‘God Is Not Great’ is not great.
Or even good. So says Paul Baumann in his review of Christopher Hitchens’s latest book, which appears in the June issue of the Washington Monthly. Regretably, it’s not online. But maybe someone with better Intertube skills than I can crack their confusing Web site. In the meantime, here’s a snippet to whet your appetite.
Finally, beyond identifying this or that particular enemy, the larger question remains: Is ridding the world of religion the best way to preserve secular pluralism and freedom of conscience? Would the world in fact be a better, freer place without religion? I doubt it. In the history of the United States alone, for instance, committed religious believers were instrumental in the struggle for independence and a constitutional democracy, the abolition of slavery, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the victories of the labor and civil rights movements. In Poland and elsewhere in Europe, meanwhile, the victims of totalitarianism found solace and a focus for resistance in the surprisingly empowering “illusions” of religion. So have many devout Chinese.
Like any other enduring human activity–science, sex, baseball–religion can be misused, and Hitchens is in good company when he denounces religious violence, intolerance, and obscurantism. But his contention that religion has always and everywhere been the enemy of civilization and human dignity is absurd.
For the rest, hunt down a copy of the WM at your nearest newsstand.
And look for Eugene McCarraher’s review of the book in the June 15 Commonweal. It doesn’t disappoint.
I know I am a contrarian, I haven’t read the book, and I don’t usually agree with Hitchens, but I still find reviews of the type that you quoted to be offputting. Just to take one example, women’s suffrage, and the role played by religious groups in promoting it — how can you possibly cite that as a net positive for religion without even mentioning the role of religion in maintaining female inequality, historically, as in most Christian denominations, or currently, as in Islam and not a few Christian denominations. It’s so facile and superficial — doubtless like the book under review — in its effort to make grand sweeping gestures at the expense of real analysis. Plus, it seems rather a sleight of hand to equate “committed religious believers” with organized religion as such (as the review seems to). Lots of committed religious believers strive for goals that other committed religious believers abhor and their organized institutional backers usually equivocate.
I found it interesting that the Sunday NY Times published an obsequiesly positive review, but the letters to the Editor the following week, obviously not all from deeply religious folk, were unanimously negative.
Barbara, maybe you tell it like it is. It is astonishing and shameful what organized religion has done with the message of Jesus.
Organized religion hails the Crucified Jesus yet crucifys anyone who will imitate him.
Seminaries have been the bedrock of mediocrity with the emphasis mainly on obedience to Rome over and above the gospel.
The treatment of women is one example in addition to the poor. There are great bodies like Catholic Relief Services and countless words.
But the hierarchy in general travels along a path of aristocratic royalty.
Having read the book, I found the Giles Harvey review on Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/05/10/hitchens_god/) to be the most insightful of the several I’ve seen so far.
Harvey’s main point, with which I agree, is that because of the underlying anger in Hitchen’s bill of indictment, he falls short when dealing with the nature of individual belief. To quote from the Harvey review
“Iris Murdoch gives a far more persuasive and imaginatively generous account of religion when she writes, “God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive of him does exist and is constantly pictured. That is, it is real as an Idea, and also incarnate in knowledge and work and love.”