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The Sanctimony of the Atheists
 The
most beautiful religious movie
I’ve ever seen is the 1947 French film Monsieur
Vincent, which dramatizes the later life of St. Vincent de Paul, best
known for his organizational genius in ministering to
the  poor.
It
ends with a wise insight. The dying priest, played by the great Pierre
Fresnay, tells a young nun always to keep her lovely smile: “Unless the
poor know we love them, they will never forgive us for helping them.”
Excellent advice. I’ve known devout but obtuse Christians who
have soured their own works of charity by unconsciously humiliating the
people they meant to help — with scolding or moralism, or by wounding
their fragile self-respect. No need to act morally superior to a starving
beggar.
Sometimes I think the other side could use a bit of the same counsel.
Too often today, the high and holy cause of unbelief is threatened by the
smug sanctimony of the atheists.
Consider Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book God Is
Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, whose title is perhaps
self-explanatory. Religion poisons everything? Everything? Bach and Mozart?
Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman?
And what about atheists like Stalin? Hitchens is ready for that one,
citing Orwell: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.”
Besides, we may note, Stalin went to a seminary, where maybe he picked
some bad thinking habits, which he couldn’t shake off when he stopped
believing in God. Even bad atheists, it seems, can be chalked up to religion.
Now Hitchens himself, born English and naturalized American, is a
learned and eloquent man. (I’ve debated him on politics, and I have the
scars to prove it.) But when he gets on the subject of religion — any
and all religion, mind you — he turns plain silly. Like so many of his
breed, he seems to think he can settle an argument with a combination of
British suavity and British snot. After reading him, I’m always surer I
know whom he hates (or, less often, loves) than what he thinks.
![[Breaker quote for The Sanctimony of the Atheists: Christopher Hitchens's faith]](2007breakers/070508.gif) And
being erudite, he argues with impressive inductiveness, citing the usual
horrors and then some — crusades, inquisitions, wars, jihads, Jim
Jones, Jimmy Swaggart, 9/11, et cetera, filing them all under the same
heading, Religion, as if they were all instigated by the same agency. (And
let’s not forget the Scopes trial.)
It
may seem ironic that Hitchens, a fierce defender of the Iraq war, blames
religion for war, when the last two popes have opposed both Iraq wars; but
then, he also seems to blame the popes for opposing them. As Huck Finn
might put it, and as Hitchens would surely agree, popes is mostly a bad lot.
When you come right down to it, Hitchens’s case against
religion is a more impersonal form of the old Phil Donahue argument, which
may be summarized thus: Mean old nuns whacked my knuckles with a ruler,
ergo God does not exist. This is less inductive reasoning than simple free
association with a grudge. Religion reminds Christopher Hitchens of a lot of
bad memories, even if they are historical rather than autobiographical. That
is, they are bad things he’s read about, not necessarily experienced
himself. Somehow I’d expected a more rigorous argument.
Now taking the broad view, I agree that, as a historical matter, a lot
of boys, over the centuries, have had their knuckles whacked by a lot of
nuns. But, waiving the question whether some of those boys brought it on
themselves (especially if religion has an inherent tendency to produce bad
boys like Donahue), we still await a demonstration that mean nuns can be
traced to the Sermon on the Mount. And here, unless I am mistaken, lies the
fatal lacuna in Hitchens’s thesis.
And here I return to the practical problem. If you really think belief in
God or gods has always caused so much suffering (such as the Trojan War, a
quagmire which I, as a Catholic, would have opposed from the start), then it
seems to me that you ought to propagate atheism seriously — not just
out of vanity to show how clever you are, but out of those same
humanitarian motives to which you say religion is repugnant, and by which
you claim to be driven. No need to humiliate the poor believers, is there?
But
Hitchens still believes in Darwin and the Iraq war. Me, I still run with the
popes, but I must say I admire his faith.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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