The Rage Against God

by Peter Hitchens

  However, the new anti-theism is emphatically not just an opinion seeking its place in a plural society. It is a dogmatic tyranny in the making. I can see no purpose in the suggestion that religion is itself child abuse, apart from an attempt by atheists to create the atmosphere in which religious instruction of children can be regulated and perhaps prevented by law.

  The Totalitarian Intolerance of the New Atheists

  This is not speculation on my part. Professor Dawkins is surprisingly explicit about his own intolerance. He returned to the same theme in an article entitled “Religion’s Real Child Abuse.”11 In this he provided a strong clue to his own convictions when he enthusiastically advertised an astonishing lecture delivered by a man he plainly regards with approval. Dawkins writes:

  “What shall we tell the children?” is a superb polemic on how religions abuse the minds of children, by the distinguished psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. It was originally delivered as a lecture in aid of Amnesty International, and has now been reissued as a chapter of his book, The Mind Made Flesh, just published by Oxford University Press. It is also available on the worldwide web and I strongly recommend it.12 Humphrey argues that, in the same way as Amnesty works tirelessly to free political prisoners the world over, we should work to free the children of the world from the religions which, with parental approval, damage minds too young to understand what is happening to them. He is right, and the same lesson should inform our discussions of the current paedophile brouhaha. Priestly groping of child bodies is disgusting. But it may be less harmful in the long run than priestly subversion of child minds.

  Turning to Mr. Humphrey’s lecture, we find the standard introduction always given by those who demand a restriction on freedom of speech. That is, he proclaims his strong support for freedom of speech, except in this one little case:

  Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people’s words do, but not by censoring the words as such.

  And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I’d expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture tonight to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.

  I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed—even expected—to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are.

  Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon. That’s the negative side of what I want to say. But there will be a positive side as well. If children have a right to be protected from false ideas, they have too a right to be succoured by the truth. And we as a society have a duty to provide it. Therefore we should feel as much obliged to pass on to our children the best scientific and philosophical understanding of the natural world—to teach, for example, the truths of evolution and cosmology, or the methods.13

  Like all repressive arguments advanced by supposedly liberal minds, this one is repellently slippery. Note how moral and religious education are immediately characterized as dogma and superstition, dismissed automatically as “narrow.” Note how Bible literalism is assumed and then equated with astrology. Note how a few words later this is bracketed with the knocking out of teeth and imprisonment in a dungeon. Note the assertion that those ideas he disapproves are “false.”

  Further on in the same diatribe come the other confusions so beloved of the anti-theist front. Before we know where we are, the guilt-by-association smear has been deployed once again and we are on to female genital mutilation and alleged censorship:

  Let’s suppose indeed that this is a lecture about female circumcision. And the issue is not whether anyone should be permitted to deny a girl knowledge of Darwin, but whether anyone should be permitted to deny her the uses of a clitoris. And now here I am suggesting that it is a girl’s right to be left intact, that parents have no right to mutilate their daughters to suit their own socio-sexual agenda, and that we as a society ought to prevent it. What’s more, to make the positive case as well, that every girl should actually be encouraged to find out how best to use to her own advantage the intact body she was born with.

  First, the suggestion seems to be that religious people support genital mutilation. Then such mutilation is equated with denials of the knowledge of Darwin—which Christians do not seek to bring about smear upon smear upon smear.

  I cannot reproduce the whole monstrous thing here (it is readily available through two clicks of a computer mouse), but I feel I should reproduce Humphrey’s attempt to counter the doubts that some of his audience might have.

  “Let me catch the question from the back of the hall, which I imagine goes something like this: “How’d you like it if some Big Brother were to insist on your children being taught his beliefs? How’d you like it if I tried to impose my personal ideology on your little girl?” I have the answer: that teaching science isn’t like that, it’s not about teaching someone else’s beliefs, it’s about encouraging the child to exercise her powers of understanding to arrive at her own beliefs.”14

  So there. His belief, as my brother also insists, is not a belief. He is not Big Brother. That is some other person. How can we know? It is just the blindingly obvious truth. So why can’t you see it, you unteachable moron? Which has been the starting point of the secret policeman and the Inquisition merchant (see, I’m against the Spanish Inquisition, too, as any English school-boy reared on tales of Drake and Raleigh and Grenville must be) down all the centuries.

  Fearing God and Nothing Else

  Which brings me neatly back to the Soviet state, which also crushed liberty of thought in the name of enlightenment. In answering the question, “Why did the Soviet state not compromise with religion?” I must also challenge the linked idea that the worship of human power is identical to the worship of almighty God. This is often stated by my brother, who claims that North Korea’s leader worship is identical to religion, except that “at least you can die in North Korea.” How does it differ? Quite fundamentally.

  Roger Scruton, commenting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bizarre Festival of the Supreme Being, remarked that the “supreme Being” seemed to be conveniently similar to Robes-pierre’s idea of the Revolution in its character and demands—whereas the Christian is “answerable for his soul to God and to no earthly master.”15 Edmund Burke similarly once said that one who truly feared God (admittedly quite a difficult thing to do) feared nothing and nobody else. At least you can get to heaven from a North Korean labor camp or torture chamber. You may also be able to arrive in hell from a North Korean palace. And if you believe that, then the Great Leader has no power to control you. According to the believer, God’s commandments and requirements exist outside time and cannot be amended even by Kim Il Sung. If we love the thing that God commands and desire the things he promises, then we too can live outside time and beyond the reach of Stalin, Kim, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, or the rest—as their dung
eons prove.

  Even unbelievers have to recognize that God, whether he exists or not, predates earthly dictators and tends to survive them. God’s laws and Christian morals do the same. If God is not dethroned and his laws not revoked, he represents an important rival to the despot’s authority, living in millions of hearts. If he cannot be driven out of hearts, total control by the state is impossible. This may seem trivial to us in our secularized societies still benefiting from the freedoms that flowed from centuries of Christianity. We have forgotten how we arrived at our civilized state. Religion has retreated to far fringes of daily life, and death, its great ally, is hidden behind screens. But it was certainly not so for the Russian revolutionaries or Western European Marxists, who recognized early on that there would be no equivalent of the Bolshevik takeover in Germany, France, Italy, or Britain—because the peoples of the European continent, well-informed about revolution, were too much in love with Christianity, liberty, and legality to believe in any utopia.

  Robespierre disagreed with his fellow revolutionaries about how to replace the church, and it is arguable that they murdered him in case he began to think that he was himself God. By doing so, they murdered the French Revolution, since Robespierre embodied the state. Thus the state, being all-powerful and vested in him, could not survive his death. But Robespierre, being mortal, did not rise again, nor did the French Revolution, which has been worshiped in theory and ignored in practice ever since by Frenchmen who know only too well what “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” really mean in practice. The more ordinary Jacobins—especially Jacques Hebert and Joseph Fouche—wanted to extirpate religion while they reinvented the world as a kingdom of decimalized reason, in which everything could be divided by the number of toes a man has, and in which God did not exist because he could not be divided by ten or charted by an astrolabe. Both Hebert and Fouche demonstrated in bloody practice that they believed that laws were dead, humans were mammals rather than made in the image of God (and so expendable), and man was in a state of nature where he could do what he liked in the name of the revolution.

  It is clear from the history of Soviet persecution of Christianity that the Bolsheviks were extirpators too. Stalin was certainly a new Tsar, in that he was all-powerful and the foundation of the state. But he could not be a new God, because the revolution had deliberately killed God and made any other deity impossible—thoroughly and intentionally. So when Stalin died in 1953, that state had nothing but force and fear, sausage, vodka, medals, and wartime patriotism to keep it alive. And when the force failed and the fear weakened, and the sausage and the vodka ran out, and nobody wanted medals any more, that state died. Since its failure, attempts to rebuild it as a proper civil society have failed. There are many reasons for its descent into crude autocracy, its continuing reliance on the Lenin cult, and the prevalence of organized crime, drunken disorder, universal dishonesty, cultural decay, devastated family life, and corruption. But one of the most important must be the absence of conscience and self-restraint among even its educated people, and the vacuum where the rule of law ought to be.

  The League of the Militant Godless had done their work too well. In the names of reason, science, and liberty they had proved, rather effectively, that good societies need God to survive and that when you have murdered him, starved him, silenced him, denied him to the children, and erased his festivals and his memory, you have a gap that cannot indefinitely be filled by any human, nor anything made by human hands.

  Must we discover this all over again? I fear so. A new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from the laws and constitutions of Europe and North America. This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and now inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation. This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and—like all such codes—full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups. These must then be policed by an ever more powerful state. A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against the possession of narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to license its own comfortable, padded indulgence, and it therefore permits the same freedoms to the poor, who suffer far more from this dangerous liberty than do the rich.

  Inevitably, it is the Christian churches who are the last strongholds of resistance to this change. Yet they are historically weak, themselves infiltrated by secular liberalism, full of uncertainty and diffidence. The overthrow of Christian education is a real possibility in our generation. The removal of Christianity from broadcasting and public ceremonies is almost complete. Expressions of Christian opinion or prayer in public premises can be punished in Britain under new codes that enjoin a post-Christian code of “equality and diversity” on all public servants. Secularists are equating the teaching of religion with child abuse and laying the foundations for it to be restricted by law. Britain’s next monarch is likely to be crowned in a multi-faith ceremony whose main significance will be that it will be the first Coronation not to be explicitly Christian in more than a thousand years. The Rage against God is loose and is preparing to strip the remaining altars when it is strong enough.

  * * *

  1God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve, 2007), 246.

  2Uncommon Knowledge, “National Review Online” (August 2009), http:// tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge. See Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2009).

  3In a PBS interview for the “Heaven on Earth” series, 2005.

  4A description of my departure from this view can be found in my 2009 book The Broken Compass.

  5The Nation (July 31, 1920).

  6God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve, 2007), 246.

  7From a speech on November 6, 1933.

  8The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).

  9It is interesting that this was not the case in either Christopher’s childhood or mine, in which religion was always associated with school and authority rather than with our home.

  10Page 315.

  11Published on “RichardDawkins.net” on May 15, 2006.

  12I recommend it as well, but for different reasons.

  13The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 291.

  14Ibid., 316.

  15The Times, London, 10 July, 1989. See www.alor.org/Britain/…and www .vanguardnewsnetwork.com/letters/100304letters.htm.

  Epilogue

  I end this book in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with some thoughts on the unsatisfactory debate that I had there in April 2008, with my brother Christopher, about the existence of God and the goodness of religion. I had decided before it took place that I would not take part in such a debate again, on this or any other subject.

  Christopher and I have had over the past fifty years what might be called a difficult relationship. Some brothers get along; some do not. We were the sort who just didn’t. (Parents of such siblings will know about this.)

  Who knows why? At one stage—I was about nine, he nearly twelve—my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame, and angrily erased my signature before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever since, and heaven knows what happened to the sad little document.

  On that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, however, the old quarrel was—as far as I am concerned—finished for good, whatever it was about. Just at the point where many might have expected—and some might have hoped—that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not. Both of us, I suspect, recoiled from such an exhibition, wh
ich might have been amusing for others, because we were brothers—but would have been wrong, because we are brothers.

  I had already concluded, as my train nosed westward in the spring twilight through the lovely, wistful mountain and river country that lies between Harper’s Ferry and Pittsburgh, that I did not want to do anything of the kind. Normally I love to argue in front of audiences. This time I seemed to have no taste for it.

  Something far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when Christopher and I had met in his apartment in Washington, D.C. If he despised and loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasn’t showing it. We were more than civil, treating each other as equals—and as brothers with a common childhood, even recalling bicycle rides we used to take together on summer days in the Sussex Downs, unimaginably long ago, which I did not even realize he still remembered. And here is another thing. When our Grand Rapids hosts chose the date of April 3 for this debate, they had no way of knowing that it was the sixty-third anniversary of our parents’ wedding—an optimistic, happy day in the last weeks of what had been for both of them a fairly grim war. Not all the optimism was justified, and with the blessed hindsight of parenthood, I cannot imagine that our long fraternal squabble did much for their later happiness. They are, alas, long gone, but my brother and I had both independently become a little concerned at how we should conduct ourselves on such a day.

  We had each reached the conclusion, unbidden, that we did not want this to turn into a regular traveling circus, becoming steadily more phony as it progressed around the circuit.