Protesting too much

Christopher Hitchins writes with exuberance and a sense of the great emancipation which he supposes modern knowledge offers humanity. ‘Scepticism and discovery have freed them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair mad scientist,’ he says of religious believers, whom he invites to abandon their faith and to embrace ‘reason’ — though should they choose not to do so, he insists, they are at liberty to believe whatever they like, ‘as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion’. This book is a lengthy denial of religious belief, and an advocacy of atheism rendered in the familiar tones of evangelical assurance. Both the content of Hitchins’ critique, as it happens, and the amusing polemical verbiage in which it is delivered, are strangely old-fashioned, however, and are presumably derived from the works of Thomas Paine, whose strident atheism provoked horror 200 years ago (but fails to do so now). Hitchins has published a study of Paine, and plainly regards him as a species of role model; Paine’s thoughts, he admiringly notes here, were ‘almost the first time that frank contempt for organised religion was openly expressed’.
It would be mistaken, though, to dismiss Hitchins’ analysis as simply an updating of the fly-blown freethinking of the last two centuries. He may regard belief in religion as a lingering inheritance from the infancy of human social consciousness, but he also invests such passion in his assault upon it as to indicate a persistent fascination out of proportion to the contemptible nature of what he observes of its claims. There are, in this book, some very acute and truthful deconstructions of the religious explanations once offered for the way in which material reality has its being, and it does not take a genius to recognise the non-religious conditioning which induces people to adhere to religious ideas.