In the course of an interview for Frontpage magazine (published on 10 December 2003), Christopher Hitchens made a stunning admission:
"Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose.'
This belated confession added fuel to the already raging fire sparked by Hitchens' full-throated support for the American-led military intervention in Iraq earlier that same year. Even more baffling to his erstwhile comrades on the left is Hitchens’ on-going advocacy of this gruesome war, despite the complete unravelling of the stated grounds for the occupation and in the face of mounting public pressure to withdraw. It is only with the publication of his new book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, that the basis for Hitchens’ unwavering commitment to this cause becomes clear: the struggle in Iraq is but a symptom of the real war now being waged, and that is against religion itself.
This war, to which Hitchens silently pledged himself that day, must be fought wherever the enemy is encountered, whether in the guises of global jihadism and vulgar American fundamentalism, at one extreme, or in the West’s more urbane agnosticism — which amounts to little more than a self-congratulatory 'Dunno', a position lacking both intellectual stamina and moral courage, all the while priding itself on being open-minded — at the other. As he demonstrated in The Missionary Position, a devastating exposé of Mother Theresa (and effectively the prequel to his latest book), neither the most saintly instances of religious belief nor the most seemingly innocuous should be left unopposed because "all religions are versions of the same untruth", and, as such, are "positively harmful."
This same sentiment — one of sheer, unmitigated aggression, the "exhilaration" to which Hitchens referred earlier — drives Richard Dawkins’ contribution to the contemporary assault on religion. The God Delusion emerged from a deep sense of the intolerability of a situation that had been allowed to fester for too long. As he wrote just days after the event in September 2001:
"It is time to stop pussyfooting around. Time to get angry. And not only with Islam … Only the wilfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out."
And this, perhaps, is one of the most striking characteristics of the current wave of intellectual atheism: its affective content, the fact that there is little measured or polite about the way it expresses itself. Even the term 'atheist' seems a little too mild, too respectable a designation for the position occupied by Hitchens and Dawkins (to which list one should also add Ayaan Hirsi Ali). They are anti-theists, opposed in principle to every last attachment to the divine, leading many to accuse them of a kind of inverted fundamentalism, a failure to exhibit the core modern virtue of tolerance or respect for others.
But is this heedless intensity really so bad? It is hard not to be taken by the seriousness of anti-theism, particularly when compared to the suffocating cultural and religious lethargy from which it has emerged. Indeed, it is the very impotence of so much Western Christianity — having long since been content to give succour to people’s basest fears and to acquiesce in the 'spirit of the age' as yet another vendor of personal satisfaction and spiritual meaning — that has created the intellectual space for the current debate to occur.
It is at this point that T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards a Definition of Culture is more important than ever. He forecast that the indiscriminate unification or harmonizing of a culture would achieve naught but its own debasement. In our time, when cultural diversity (to use Francis Fukuyama’s astute formulation) is little more than an "ornament to liberal pluralism", supplying the otherwise dull veneer of Western culture with a certain culinary and aesthetic flair, the multiculturalist refusal to, as Hirsi Ali puts it, "classify cultural phenomena as 'better' or 'worse' but only neutral or disparate" actually reinforces the barbaric treatment of women within Islamic communities. What is called for is not intellectual tolerance and mutually-degrading respect, but rather division.
We should be thanking these anti-theists for picking a fight that we should have started long ago. The only question now is, as Christians, will we have the courage to oppose our common foe — what Barth rightly termed "religion as unbelief" — or will we retreat to the safe-ground of religious obsolescence?