Peter Hitchens - The Rage Against God Peter Hitchens and his brother Christopher, the Trotskyite turned neoconservative fellow traveller, are often compared to Cain and Abel. The mutual antagonism is in some respects surprising. Both brothers have moved from left to right, though Christopher Hitchens's politics defy simple definition. Peter Hitchens's trajectory has been especially stark. Also a former Trotskyite, he now calls himself a "palaeo-con". On religion, Christopher's atheism has remained implacable. Peter exchanged secularist certainties for the Christian sort in the mid-1980s. The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation by Peter Hitchens This sketch of sibling rivalry accounts for The Rage Against God's unusual structure. It is a memoir, as well as an assault on Christopher Hitchens's popular but poorly argued God Is Not Great (2007). In 2008, the brothers engaged in a public discussion about the coherence of religious belief. Peter reveals that they almost came to blows on that occasion, and that he has vowed never to debate with Christopher under the spotlight again. The Rage Against God is meant to be a grown-up substitute for more shouting matches. Within limits, the project is a success. Though Hitchens sometimes slips into the strident register characteristic of his Mail on Sunday columns, his new book is largely a sober piece of work. On the whole, it is religion's cultured despisers, not Christian apologists, who now display greater shrillness. As the author argues in his foreword, "the difficulties of the anti-theists begin when they try to engage with anyone who does not agree with them, when their reaction is often a frustrated rage that the rest of us are so stupid. But what if that is not the problem? Their refusal to accept that others might be as intelligent as they, yet disagree, leads them into many snares." Hitchens does not seek to mount a comprehensive defence of Christianity. He is wise to avoid deeper philosophical and theological waters, because his strengths lie elsewhere. His more manageable aim is to expose what he holds to be three major fallacies underlying God Is Not Great: that conflict fought in the name of religion is really always about faith; that "it is ultimately possible to know with confidence what is right and what is wrong without acknowledging the existence of God"; and that atheist states are not actually atheist. The first and third of these propositions are indeed mistaken. Faith differences are often exploited in conflicts that are essentially based on land, ethnic differences and access to resources. The destruction or sidelining of religious voices was a key aim of the vilest 20th-century despots. Hitchens should nevertheless have been more open about the role of faith in fomenting conflict. This would have placed him in a stronger position to emphasise that the remedy for bad religion is good religion, not no religion at all -- especially as there is not the slightest prospect that faith will wither away anytime soon. Good religion promotes peace. Bad religion promotes discord. Jonathan Sacks rightly likens faith to fire -- "and like fire it warms but it also burns". Hitchens's claim about a link between conscience and belief in God is more questionable. Conscience is reasoned judgment. Most strands of Christianity have always maintained that good actions are good in themselves, not because God commands them. Perhaps the strengths and weaknesses of Hitchens's position come over most clearly when he writes that "the concepts of sin, of conscience, of eternal life and divine justice under an unalterable law, are the ultimate defence against the utopian's belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative. They are safeguards against the worship of human power. Now, that conflict is made sharper still, by the alliance between political utopianism and the new cult of the unrestrained self . . ." Secularists, especially, will protest that the Enlightenment is overlooked in this sombre world view. Much that is good about modern life derives from secular thought, as well as from Judaeo-Christianity. And while applauding some of his arguments, many believers will jib at Hitchens's neglect of Jesus's social radicalism. As a teenager during the early 1960s, Hitchens rejected the complacent, jingoistic Anglicanism peddled in many public schools. Yet he describes his return to the church two decades on in the context of marriage, fatherhood and an embrace of his inheritance as an "English gentleman". Authentic Christianity is as subversive of social convention as of the God-as-celestial-headmaster caricature on which so much atheist polemic is based. A fuller account of the creed would make more of love than of law or judgment, and have plenty more to say about the figure of Christ. Hitchens's picture is lopsided in important ways. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/17/rage-against-god-peter-hitchens

• published: 18 Dec 2013
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