Some commenters accused me last week - rather unfairly, I thought - of lacking a sense of humour. With that in mind, I thought it appropriate to start this week's piece by drawing your attention to something that left me in fits of laughter.
In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens recounts the tour to promote his new book, God is not Great:
"I asked my publishers to arrange my book tour as a series of challenges to the spokesmen of the faithful, and to send me as far as possible to the south."
Throughout the tour, he engages in hilarious disputation with all kinds of religious leaders and thinkers.
God is not Great is a devastating critique of fundamentalist religion. Riding high at the top of the bestsellers list, for once it shows that robustness and seriousness needn't be an obstacle to public attention. But there's a massive blind-spot, one that seems to be shared by a number of writers who have published anti-religious texts recently, embodied in the following excerpt from the diary:
"A three-hour debate with the Reverend Mark Roberts ... The Rev doesn't accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about: indeed, he's very civil about the book. At one point I ask him if he believes the story in Saint Matthew's gospel about the graves opening in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, and the occupants walking the streets. Doesn't it rather cheapen the idea of resurrection? He replies that as a Christian he does believe it, though as a historian he has his doubts. I realise that I am limited here: I can usually think myself into an opponent's position, but this is something I can't imagine myself saying let alone thinking."
This inability to imagine fatally flaws much of Hitchens' thesis. The argument presented by the reverend may seem incoherent. But it doesn't take much effort to understand that he is presenting a perfectly reasonable way of looking at the world, and one that may not be as far from Hitchens' own world view as he might think. I am not and have never been a Christian, although I was an observant Jew for a couple of years. Now I'm as secular as they come. But I still think I can empathise with Mr Roberts' position.
The reverend accepts that it is almost impossible to prove the historicity of the story Hitchens refers to. To be less kind, it simply didn't happen. But he doesn't need to shape his moral universe according to what did or didn't happen. Instead, he does this as a mythologian, in this case, as a purveyor of Christian myths. For him, the accuracy of the events recorded is insignificant when compared with the contribution the myth makes to the Christian view of the world
I'm less interested here in assessing the morality of that worldview than assessing its coherence. The Hitch can't even imagine himself saying such a thing. But is the reverend's position really so far from Hitchens' own? However much he might protest to the contrary, it would be a mistake to define Hitchens as an ultra-rationalist. For Hitchens has frequently and vigorously promoted the idea that religion has been replaced, not by science, but by literature:
"We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books."
Amen to that. But one wonders if Hitchens is really aware of the implications of what he's saying. What are Shakespeare and co giving us if not "mythical morality tales" themselves? And is our relationship to those texts really that different from that implied by Mr Roberts? In literature, we have a vast repository of wisdom that is presented in the form of fiction. Now, we might not bleed that repository dry for a precise guide of what to do with our lives, as a Rabbi might to the Talmud, but what we do is not that dissimilar.
Literature is as antithetical to science as is religion. The idea of reading a novel dispassionately is a preposterous one. As EM Forster says: "The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and anything else which we cannot define." We encounter the novel, like a friend or a lover, in order to be changed through our relationship with it, and we often do this in an incredibly complex way in which the "truth" of the text is simply irrelevant.
And there are vast numbers of people out there who hold a similar relationship with religious texts. Yes, they are in a vast minority, but that does not justify their near-total exclusion from the flurry of anti-religious polemics that have recently been published. During my observant days, I moved in some of these circles, where people live in a constant relationship with their texts, a relationship that is not affected by whether or not the events described in the text are historically accurate. This experience has been extremely influential on me since I have begun seriously reading literature.
Madeline Bunting touched on the issue last week:
"There's a fascinating debate to be had between atheists and people of faith and, often, they can find the gulf between them is not nearly as wide or unbridgeable as is often suggested."
This is my challenge to Mr Hitchens: if you find it so difficult to empathise with the duality laid out by Mr Roberts, try and meet with more people like him. It's all too easy to get your publisher to send you to the deep south to meet with the Falwell clones. At least on strongest case grounds, seek out the most sophisticated religious thinkers there are. Until you take these people into consideration, your critique of religion will never be complete.
