Atheist Books Intensify Battles in Cultural Wars

[krsna]

 

 

 

BY: RACHEL POMERANCE

 

 

Jun 14, ATLANTA, GEORGIA (COX)

 

 

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When journalist Christopher Hitchens thumbed his nose at religionists last month in the Bible Belt, the response came as a bit of a surprise. He packed the Margaret Mitchell House, where a second show was scheduled for hundreds curious to hear Hitchens defend his down-with-God best-seller.

 

 

This week, wrapping up a month of crowded debates with clergy and scholars across the country over his bluntly-named book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," Hitchens says his book's popularity reflects a shift among Americans, who are newly willing to take on religion.

 

 

"I think there's a zeitgeist change going on, and it's long overdue," he says in a phone interview from Los Angeles, adding the sort of acid-tongued rejoinder that has made him famous. "These fools and demagogues are not the only people that can have revivals."

 

 

The British-born Hitchens appears right about the zeitgeist change, but whether it has to do with his brand of thinking is less certain.

 

 

There is indeed a prominent conversation about religion and politics taking place in American media, much of it a direct response to the so-called "trinity" of atheist authors - Hitchens joins Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, whose recent landmark books, "The End of Faith" and "The God Delusion," respectively, lambaste religion as both preposterous and dangerous while science and reason empower humans with saving grace.

 

 

Now come the reprisals. Book publishers are preparing to unleash salvos by the believers such as "The Dawkins Delusion," by Alister McGrath, an Oxford University professor of historical theology.

 

 

But why all the hubbub? Why the sudden flurry of books trashing religion and the broad-based scrutiny of belief in God?

 

 

The short answer: culture wars.

 

 

The books widely are considered backlash to the perceived power of America's Religious Right in America, experts say.

 

 

But shifting demographics created something of a powder keg.

 

 

John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life, says America's "nonreligious population" - agnostics, atheists and those who don't identify with organized religion - doubled in the past decade to roughly 13 percent. In the last two decades, atheists grew from less than 1 percent to up to 2 percent - roughly the size of the country's Jewish population and three to four times larger than its Muslim populace.

 

 

While the intermingling of religion and politics is as old as America, the linkage between a party with a distinct religion is new, according to Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University's religion department, who says today's Republican Party is "starting to look more like an old-fashioned Christian political party in Europe. We haven't really had that before."

 

 

Hitchens' motivation for writing his latest book is the increasing clash of religion with politics, the latter held hostage to the former in fear, he says, noting, for example, diplomatic silence amid the Danish cartoon riots. Referring to Iran's nuclear arms race, he asks, "What happens when a messianic ideology meets an apocalyptic weapon?

 

 

"We have an alternative" to faith-based movements, which threaten to destroy civilization with irrationality, says Hitchens, who takes down the moderates along with the fundamentalists. In his definition of "religious," the many Americans who consider themselves faithful but don't to all the central tenets of their religion are therefore not religious.

 

 

Prothero cautions that the controversy being played out is more flash than substance - a sensational feud between secularists and religious conservatives who each, incorrectly, think the other is usurping American control in spite of a broad middle ground. And the popularity of reading and debating these ideas is evidence of the "religious vitality in America.

 

 

"The culture wars make it look like there's a lot of Jerry Falwells and a lot of Christopher Hitchens in the United States," says Prothero. "There's one Christopher Hitchens and now there's zero Jerry Falwells."

 

 

Just the same, the spate of recent books has spawned new interest in atheism and given comfort to those who say they felt afraid to "come out" as nonbelievers.

 

 

David Koepsell, executive director of the New York-based Council for Secular Humanism, says the atheist group's newsletter has received an 80 percent increase in new rs since the publication of Dawkins book. That translates to thousands of "people who might have felt silenced or pressured as a minority" and are "sort of coming out of the closet thanks to the courage of a vocal few."

 

 

To underscore his point and analogy, Koepsell says atheists ranked below gays in a recent Gallup Poll asking Americans who could potentially earn their vote for president. The opening sentence of Nica Lalli's recent atheist memoir, "Nothing," gets to this point: "Muslims? They've got it easy. Gays? Relatively speaking, life's a party. You know who the true outsiders are in American society? Nonbelievers."

 

 

After Sept. 11, 2001, Lalli, a New Yorker, decided to write about growing up "nothing" because of her resentment at the way public officials often framed the attack in religious terms and after years of fighting her Christian in-laws, who constantly called her wrong for not accepting Jesus.

 

 

And yet, critics charge the Hitchens-Harris-Dawkins club with expressing the same sense of smug superiority.

 

 

That is why Krista Tippett, the host of American Public Media's "Speaking of Faith" has refused to invite any of them on her show.

 

 

"I haven't interviewed any of them for the same reason that I never interviewed Jerry Falwell, because they are voices who have all the answers, not just for themselves but for all the rest of us, and in that sense they have just created another pole counter to the religious, fundamentalist, extremist pole."

 

 

A one-sided approach "just sets back the cultural discourse and engagement that we need to be having around this subject," says Tippett, who argues that the authors ignore the positive value of religion.

 

 

Even Hitchens, who extols his Jewish heritage (his mother was Jewish and now his daughter is), said he celebrates a Passover seder for its intellectual and cultural value and will teach his daughter the King James Bible for the sake of cultural literacy.

 

 

But whether religion is inherently evil or God exists may be somehow beside the point. After all, Nazism and Communism, two movements devoid of religion, were responsible for the greatest bloodshed in recent times, notes the Rev. Victor Pentz of Peachtree Presbyterian Church.

 

 

The way Pentz sees it, humans are "incurably religious," so it's a matter of examining the path one takes: "Does the God you believe in motivate you to be more loving and to be a positive and productive member of society, or does the God you believe in lead you down a path to destruction and hatred?"

 

 

Rachel Pomerance writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.