The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris

By Chris Hedges, Free Press. Posted March 22, 2008.

The following is adapted from the new book by Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe in Atheists (Free Press, 2008).

I flew to Los Angeles in May of 2007 to debate Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, in UCLA's cavernous Royce Hall. I debated Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God is Not Great, two days later in San Francisco. I paid little attention, until these two public debates, to the positions of the new atheists, writers that also include Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet. Those are many people of great moral probity and courage who seek meaning outside of formal religious structures, who reject religious language and religious ritual and define themselves as atheists. There are also many religious figures that in the name of one god or another sanctify intolerance, repression and violence. There is nothing intrinsically moral about being a believer or a nonbeliever.

These New Atheists attack a form of religious belief many of us hate. I wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I am no friend of Christian radicals. We dislike the same people. We do not dislike them for the same reason. This is not a small difference.

The New Atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists. They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason. The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving towards collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment. Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress. They turn their particular good into a universal good. They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil, not for evil's sake but to make a better world.

I started Harris' book when it was published but soon put it aside. His facile attack on a form of religious belief I detest, his childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs, as well as his demonization of Muslims, made the book tedious, at its best, and often idiotic and racist. His assertion that the war in the former Yugoslavia, for example, was caused by religion was ridiculous. I was in the former Yugoslavia, including in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo when it was under siege, as the Balkan bureau chief for the New York Times. While religious institutions and their leaders enthusiastically signed on for the slaughter directed by ethnic nationalist leaders in Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo, religion had nothing to do with the war.

The war had far more to do with the economic collapse of Yugoslavia than religion or ancient ethnic hatreds. His assertion that Muslim parents welcome the death of children who die as suicide bombers -- or that suicide bombers are the logical result of a belief in Islam -- could have been written only by someone who never sat in the home of a grieving mother and father in Gaza who has just lost their child. I did not take Harris seriously. This was a mistake.

I was raised in a church where my father, a Presbyterian minister, spent his career speaking out, often at some personal cost, in support of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam anti-war movement and the gay rights movement. The religious figures I knew, and the ones I sought to emulate when I was a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School, included Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and Father Daniel Berrigan. It was possible to admire these men and women and what they stood for, and hold in little regard institutional religion. It was possible to find in the Christian faith meaning and purpose while acknowledging the flaws in the Christian system and rejecting the morally indefensible passages in the Bible.

The institutional church has often used its power and religious authority to sanctify cruelty and exclusion. The self-righteous smugness and suffocating piety of religious leaders, along with the habit of speaking on behalf of people they never meet, are characteristic of many liberal and conservative churches. The church often likes the poor but doesn't like the smell of the poor. I graduated from seminary and decided, largely because of my distaste for the hypocrisy of the church, not to get ordained. I left the United States to report on the conflicts in Central America. I rarely go to church now, and when I do, often roll my eyes at the inanity of the sermons and the self-righteousness of many of the congregants, who appear to believe they are "honorary" sinners.

The liberal church, attacked by the atheists as an ineffectual "moderate" religion and by the fundamentalists as a "nominal" form of Christianity, is, as their critics point out, a largely vapid and irrelevant force. It may not support the violent projects of apocalyptic killing championed by atheists such as Harris or Hitchens and these Christian radicals, but it also does not understand how the world works or the seduction of evil. The liberal church is a largely middle class, bourgeoisie phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialization, the American empire and global capitalism. They often seem to think that if we can be nice and inclusive everything will work out.

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Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is the author of "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (Free Press, 2008) and other books. He was the Middle East bureau chief for the "New York Times."

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