Losing my religion

He mightn’t thank me for the comparison, but the fervour with which essayist and journalist Christopher Hitchens goes about proselytising against religion in his new book God Is Not Great has all the piss and vinegar of the evangelising hellfire merchants he so plainly scorns.

Hitchens’s screed against the creeds is invested with an all purpose ire; he directs his jeremiads not just at Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, but also Jewish circumcisionists, Buddhists and neo-pagans. At times he could be Hazel Motes from Flannery O’ Connor’s Wise Blood, an apoplectic crusader for the Church Without Christ, advocating a New Enlightenment based on the tenets of secularism, humanism and reason.
God Is Not Great is certainly a remarkably erudite book, but it doesn’t spare the feelings of the faithful, witheringly regarding all religion as a remnant of humanity’s infant state, a superstitious hangover from the dark ages. The best cure for the Bible, Hitchens contends, is to read it. Ironically, this makes him an engrossing conversationalist on the subject. Unlike many lapsed or a la carte Catholics (and quite a few devout ones) he can critique and quote Biblical exegesis with impunity.
That said, the impact of God Is Not Great is sometimes marred by a condescending, superior tone, its text littered with pejorative terms like “stupid”, “pathetic” and “grotesque”, with Hitchens frequently prevailing upon theologians of every rank and stripe to grow up and discard their credulous nonsense.
None of this will be news to anyone who has read or watched him pour vitriol on everyone from Mother Teresa to George Galloway to Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war campaigner whose son died in Iraq. Surf YouTube for five minutes and you’ll find footage of him laying into the late televangelist Jerry Falwell before he was cold in the grave, flipping the bird to Bill Maher’s Real Time with… audience, and steaming with indignation on Fox and CNN, not to mention the odd candid television interview out-take that depicts him knocking back Scotch and sucking on cigarettes like he’s trying to stoke some inner fire rather than put it out. (In 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough “to kill or stun the average mule.”)
In person, he’s far more deferential and less combative than one might expect, almost plummily accented, apologising for his smoky hotel room. When HP photographer Cathal Dawson calls by with his young boys in tow, Hitchens becomes the very picture of avuncular, offering goodies from the mini bar. He is, however, less than comfortable having his picture taken.
“The ideal thing for me is if I’m photographed while I’m still babbling, while I’m alive rather than dead,” he instructs Cathal. “I’ve already had to stand still a lot this morning, and I can’t tell you how idiotic I look when I do that, believe me. I always look like a stuffed moose. All the decent pictures that have been taken of me are while I’m smoking and talking.”
And the man can talk. Hitchens, as anyone who has tangled with him in a debate will attest, possesses formidable oratorical skill, and the transcription of our interview required a minimum of editing on my part.
Born on April 13, 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Cambridge and Oxford. In the 1970s, he worked at the New Statesman alongside Martin Amis (who dedicated his non-fiction collection The Moronic Inferno to Hitchens and his first wife and son) and Ian McEwan. He emigrated to the US in 1981, where he wrote scathingly about Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. and American foreign policy for The Nation. In his guise as a foreign correspondent and essayist, he has journeyed to over 60 countries, contributed literary criticism to the Atlantic Monthly and New York Times Book Review and was voted one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect magazine. Prior to Hitchens’s defence of the US invasion of Iraq, Gore Vidal declared him his “dauphin”, or literary heir. He has published well over a dozen books (including longform essays on Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell) and is currently a columnist for Vanity Fair.

Peter Murphy: I doubt this is the first time it’s been pointed out, but the predominant tone of God Is Not Great is, strangely enough, evangelical.
Christopher Hitchens: Well, that’s the nicest way it’s been put to me. I mean, there is this attempt at present by some rather doltish people to say that people like myself are also fundamentalists, which I think is silly. We aren’t. What we believe is not a dogma, we only believe in free inquiry. To say that the book is an attempt at something like a conversion wouldn’t be utterly untrue. I’d hoped for two things from it. One was that it would cheer up the atheist community (laughs) and perhaps supply them with some ammunition. And the other was that it would get in among the faithful and get them to quarrel with me and perhaps with each other. And actually it succeeded better than I thought it would in both respects. When I took it on tour, mainly in the south of the States, I had a debate at every stop with some priest or other, and got invited onto the Christianity Today website, I’ve been invited to debate the main Anglican theologian, Alistair McGrath.
My impression is that the strength of religion in America is nothing like as great as people suppose. When you test people on how much they believe and how strongly they believe it, you’ll find it’s pretty individual and eclectic. I think they say here in Ireland people are a la carte Catholics. There’s cafeteria religion in America too. In theory I’d have to write a different book for every person I’ve met.
In the acknowledgments at the back of the book, you mentioned your old friend Ian McEwan, whose body of fiction you said “shows an extraordinary ability to elucidate the numinous without conceding anything to the supernatural.” Therein lies my main bone of contention with the book: your disdain for the supernatural, even in the arts. But if we remove the uncanny from literature, we have to abolish Stoker and Poe and take the witches out of MacBeth.
I actually have always found ghost stories boring. But the examples you give, I’m just trying to think… What if the witches aren’t in MacBeth? No, we are the poorer I have to admit. I think the ghost in Hamlet is a big mistake though. There should be some other way in which the plot isn’t given away so soon. I remember the very first time I saw it, it almost spoiled it for me right away. Even though the speech made by the ghost is unbelievably brilliant. Hmm… I have to brood about this!
I would argue that religious texts contain a repository of images that have informed countless works of art. Without hell, there’s no Dante, no Bosch.
Well I do say that the King James version of the Bible is literature to me. If you haven’t read it, you won’t understand quite a lot of Shakespeare, obviously not Milton, John Donne, George Herbert wouldn’t make any sense, so that would be a loss.
I’ve always had a soft spot for John’s Revelation, even though it’s a very problematic book.
The Book of Revelation I think is the least good, just as the Book of Job is the most stupid. Even though in there it says, “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” There are many elements of beauty. But also I think it’s a great insurance against belief. A lot of it is deeply shocking, self-evidently contradictory and extremely thin ethically, there’s very little precept in it.
One of the main problems with any religious text is that, taken literally, it can be used as justification for cranks intent on fulfilling their own interpretation of Creationism, or indeed, the Apocalypse. Having grown up in a climate of nuclear paranoia in the ‘80s, it gave me great comfort when I discovered that not only was Revelation’s authorship in question, but that there were substantial arguments that it was plagiarised from a pre-Christian Jewish text. In fact, DH Lawrence read it as a codified political manifesto, the many-headed beast referring to the Roman Empire and so on.
I learned quite a lot writing the book – which is one of the points of authorship, to be self-educated – but I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which plagiarism has played such a role, especially in the evolution of Islam. It’s very consoling, very confirming to find that out, because the imprint of manufacture is so strong.
For me, that human fingerprint helped dispel some of the voodoo. As Catholics, we never really studied the Bible in school, it was almost skimmed over.
That’s what the Protestants always say about you guys. You’re not really made to look at it. I can see why.
You wrote a piece for Vanity Fair a few years ago, which argued that George W. Bush is not an apocalyptic.
No, he’s not. He’s a Methodist of a fairly ordinary kind I think. I don’t believe that he is a very devout person at all. He doesn’t go on about the End of Days, as Reagan did. It’s amazing, reading the Reagan diaries, he keeps on and on, “I really believe we’re seeing the Last Days.” Especially when there’s any fighting in the Middle East, it gets to him like that. I don’t think Bush has got the imagination for one thing. For another, he can say if he likes that Jesus got him off the booze, but I’m as sure as I can be that his wife said, “If you pull that stuff again, I’m leaving.” You can call that Jesus if you want. “It’s me or Jack Daniels, asshole,” is what actually happened. I even know the date and the place that it occurred, because I’m very well informed. I doubt he prays very much. When he was asked, “Would you ever consult your father?” I thought it was quite witty of him to say, “I’ve got a higher father than that.” It was a great way around the question. And he’s not completely witless, Bush. He can be, in a rather cheap way, swift. And all he’s ever said is, “You get to a certain point and then it’s all in the hands of God.” He’s a fatalist. He would make a perfectly good Muslim, and indeed would be a devout Muslim if he’d been born in a Muslim country.
The chapter in your book entitled ‘A Short Digression On Pigs’ mentions one of your heroes, George Orwell, specifically Animal Farm and the indelible image of the pigs trying to stand on their hind legs. Orwell, as an atheist, seemed to be employing a form of literary ju-jitsu, using the loaded associative religious imagery of the pig, the demonic eyes and cloven trotters and so on, to drive home an allegorical point about Soviet totalitarianism.
Well, he had a strong personal dislike for pigs because he tried to farm the fuckers, and they are nasty, they look cruel a lot of the time. There’s a very devastating sentence where Napoleon first appears, having taught himself to stand on two legs, and it says, “He carried a whip in his trotter.”
That line gave me chills.
Fuck, he was good. He was very good. But there’s an anthropomorphic problem, I’m convinced of it, with these critters. Have you ever read The Jungle, Upton Sinclair? Famous book, worth reading. It was written as a serial, like Dickens, and it’s about labour conditions in the stockyards in Chicago in the ‘20s, he wrote it for the newspaper of the American Socialist Party. It was designed to expose conditions under which the workers were made to live in these slaughterhouses, but the descriptions were so horrific they had the opposite effect, they made people worry about what they were eating. He said, “I aimed at the public’s heart and I hit it in the stomach!” That’s what set up the Food & Drug Administration, because of the unbelievable mixture of ordure and meat. Read it, it’s really sickening. There’s one scene, the assembly line comes along with the pigs, they put a chain around the left hind trotter, hoist them up into the air, cut the throat and on it goes down the line, bleeding and squealing, and then they hoist another one. And the two reasons why it’s very impressive - still is - it’s a precursor of the idea of mechanised slaughter, a Final Solution kind of thing. Then there’s the squeal, the scream, it’s too human. And even the guys who are quite hardened to it, there’s something about the squeal that isn’t right. It sounds like a baby.
It’s interesting that one of the reasons pigs are so reviled in religious texts is because of tapeworms in undercooked pork, which certain scholars believe accounts for many references to serpents in the Bible. Leviticus and Deuteronomy advocate avoiding swine because they are “unclean” and “harbour abominations”. Many Christians could not countenance God creating such hideous creatures, especially as all beasts were believed to have been made in His image.
Exactly. And also, how could he give us dominion over them? No way, we don’t have dominion over them. Of course, some of them when looked at through a microscope are oddly beautiful. In fact there’s a great moment in Doctor Zhivago, the film, they’re looking through a microscope and you can see what they’re seeing, and it’s probably leukemia cells or something, and they’re saying it’s funny how beautiful they are, considering how deadly. Just like a nuclear explosion is a marvelous thing to see. But the microorganisms rule. And there were none of them on the ark. Well, there were, but they didn’t know they were fucking there!
Facetious question.
Please.
When you flipped Bill Maher’s audience the bird and said, “Fuck you” during a TV debate on Bush, was it panto for the cameras?
Oh no. It’s a little world of pumped up applause and bogus rancour that can be switched on and off. They keep the audience pumped up in the break, they don’t let them sit there, there’s someone working on them and keeping them engaged. And I once said to Bill, and to Jon Stewart, when this began to dawn on me, “Do you want to try having a debate with me without an audience, just one-on-one. I’ll rip your fucking lungs out!” I didn’t say that of course, but I mean, they can just press a button and there’s a conditioned reflex. I don’t like that feeling at all. A tiny hint of a Nuremberg. Let’s exaggerate, a micro Nuremberg for a micro megalomaniac. My quarrel is always with populism; it’s not with the elite so much. It’s always with the crowd, the mob. It would have been easy to do that to Bill, but I wanted to say to the audience, “You’ll fucking clap anything.”
Your friend Salman Rushdie has just received a knighthood, having lived under the threat of fatwa for the best part of a decade. Is this the British establishment’s attempt at recompense for not having backed him at the time?
Well no, ’cos the British government, for all its faults, was actually pretty good about it. I mean there was a lot of grumbling about paying the cost (of security) and a lot of evil populist talk of that sort, but they did step up to the plate, and they did keep on taking it up with the Iranians and mobilising the European Union until they got them to drop it.
Has your criticism of Christian and Islamic faiths exposed you to any serious death threats?
No, not really. My answer to that is to say that every American was hit with a fatwa by Bin Laden, and I take my share in that maybe more personally than most people do, but I mean we’ve all got one. So I consider myself included. I’m an American citizen now.
Since your 58th birthday, earlier this year. Why now?
I decided to do it after 2001 basically, out of solidarity. There came a point, it was in the argument over Iraq in fact, where conventionally in our great profession, you had people referring to the ‘American’ view of things as opposed to the ‘European’ view, which is silly, because a lot of Europeans agreed with the administration and a lot of Americans did not. But to the extent that it was true I realised, “Well, if there’s going to be a distinction, I’m thinking the American way,” It was a general identification with the United States against its enemies.
Before 9/11, a lot of atheists might have reasoned that if religion functioned as a comfort for people, fair enough. The escalation of fundamentalism over the last 10 years, not to mention the Church child abuse scandals, changed all that. Hence the current popularity of books like yours and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
Colm (Toibin) wrote a wonderful piece, I think it was in the New York Review of Books a few years ago, about how fast the secularisation of Ireland occurred, an amazing change, an almost unrecognisable country in that respect. And I suppose that the child abuse thing had a lot to do with it. As it has had a huge effect in America too. But a thing like that doesn’t happen unless there are other pre-conditions waiting to be catalyzed I think. I have a feeling also people got very fed up with the North.
The erosion of the church’s control of education hasn’t really been explored as a factor in this country’s economic prosperity. It’s hardly a coincidence that the current generation of 20 and 30-something entrepreneurs and go-getters are the first that came of age without the burden of Catholic fatalism. Maybe because they hadn’t grown up being shouted at or made to feel worthless on a daily basis, they emerged from the educational system with their nerves and spirit intact, and seemed to accept almost as manifest destiny the opportunities to travel and make money.
That’s very interesting. I think you must be right. And people stopped emigrating as well. That cheers me up! I have not been here since the ‘70s, I hardly recognise the place. It’s a bit too much like everywhere else in some respects. I went just across the bridge to some restaurant the other night, and you could have been practically anywhere, the sort of music and the menus, but it’s quite a high standard everywhere now, quite cheerful. There’s nothing fucking spiritual about poverty.
The Vatican asked you to play the role of Devil’s Advocate – even though the position had officially been abolished – in the beatification of Mother Teresa, of whom you’d been a harsh critic.
Yes, representing the devil pro bono.
Were you led through veiled crypts and made to utter secret codes before descending into the depths of the Vatican City?
It’s nice of you to make it seem so portentous, but what I realised quite quickly was it was a box they had to tick. Part of getting the thing fast-tracked through was to have assured themselves they’d fulfilled this condition. In the absence of the advocatus diaboli, you’ve got to solicit opinions from those who disagree. I don’t know who else they asked, for all I know I was the only one, but they broke their word.
How?
They told me I would be given a record of the proceedings, either a tape or a transcript, and they refused afterwards to do that for me. They rattled through it as fast as they decently could. What happened was I got a call from the Archdiocese in Washington telling me that the Vatican wanted this. And I was hoping to go to Rome to do it; I think Vanity Fair would have paid the freight. If they wouldn’t have done, I would have. But that wasn’t necessary, alas, they’d been asked to convene a hearing in Washington, so I went along to the Archdiocese. There was a closed room, a sort of mini boardroom with a long table, a Bible and a tape recorder, and a monsignor, a deacon and a priest. They asked me to swear on the Bible, which I thought it would be silly not to do on this occasion, if I’m going to show up I might as well abide by the etiquette. And then there’s a long questionnaire that comes from Rome for these occasions. They have to go through it, and they can’t depart from it, it’s not a conversation.
What kind of questions were you asked?
It began by asking what evidences did I have of the holiness manifest in the childhood of the slave of God, Agnes Bojaxhiu of Skopje in Macedonia, so I said, “I’ve nothing to offer under that heading.” And it went on, how much do I know about good works done in her early years, and so I said, “Can we just take all of these as read? I can’t shed any light there.” They wouldn’t let me keep the damn questionnaire either, which I hoped they would, so I’m doing this very freehand, but it’s put in an odd liturgical manner: “Could it be said of her that she was guilty of the sin of pride or hypocrisy?” or something of this sort. And I said, “Well, look gentlemen, I’m not of your faith and it’s really not my business who you make a saint, but in so far as the word ‘saintly’ has a secular meaning, I could answer those questions.” And so I described her associations with crooks and villains and exploiters of the poor, the Duvalier family in Haiti, Charles Keating, from whom she took money she knew had been stolen. I said she was a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor. All they did was listen to this, they’d occasionally prompt me, but they weren’t supposed to comment, let alone argue with me.
Did you say anything that gave them cause for reconsideration?
I made one point, and I forget what it was, but the monsignor gave me a look down the table as if I’d suddenly made him think of something and he wasn’t sure he knew the answer to it. Good moment. But I can’t remember what prompted it now, it’s a few years back, it’s better described in print. If you’re really interested in this I’ve written it all up, it’s in my book Love, Poverty And War, a collection of essays, I have a full account of it in there.
You took a bit of a shine to Diana Spencer. When you met in the mid ‘80s, you said something like, “We Republicans have to stick together.”
And she laughed in her pretty, tinkling way, as she probably did at every remark that was made to her, you can never really tell. Yes, I met her twice. She did more to undo the monarchy than any Republican has. Tina’s book (The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the short-lived Talk magazine) is actually very, very, very brilliant. It made me interested in a way I hadn’t been before. It really does a job on Mohamed al-Fayed. It also made me feel sorry for the kid. The description of the last night of her life fills you with this piercing pity, the aimlessness and misery of it. What a fucking awful way to go out.
Is it true that you were the inspiration for the Peter Fallow character in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities?
No, no. I don’t mind you asking, because there is a story behind it, which I’ll tell you quickly. Fallow is a society journalist type, he isn’t like me in any respect, even though my friends say that I occasionally have one too many. It is a very exact description of one person who everyone in New York knows named Anthony Haden-Guest, and that happens to be my fault. I wanted to do a hatchet job on Wolfe once for Mother Jones, a leftist magazine on the West Coast, and I thought the way to do it, as well as to review some of his stuff, was to do to him what he’d done to Leonard Bernstein in Radical Chic and eavesdrop on a conversation and make him look like a fool. So I said to Anthony, “Listen, I’ve long wanted to meet your friend Mr. Wolfe, and if you get the chance I’d like to be included.” And Anthony was very sweet about it, so we had dinner with him at Elaine’s. Wolfe was in the process of starting to write the book as a serial in Rolling Stone which didn’t work out, he had to abandon it. That was his idea of being Dickensian. And he actually said a lot of other quite pissy things, and every now and then I’d go off to the men’s room and write them down. Anthony wasn’t in on it of course. So then the piece came out, and to my horror, Wolfe took it out on Anthony. I mean, I couldn’t apologise enough to him; I didn’t think this would happen. He dropped Anthony and then put him in the book in a very, very identifiable manner, causing Anthony to be briefly quite cross with me, which I couldn’t really complain about, I felt shitty. I was willing to be never spoken to by Wolfe again, that was a small price to pay, but I didn’t think Anthony would suffer. But anyway, it is indirectly because of me that the Peter Fallow character exists at all. In fact, I may have helped him write the fucking novel, because he was in the doldrums with it. He had to stop, the Rolling Stone excerpts didn’t work, nobody liked them, so he had to start again. I may have given him the energy by accident. So that is the true and complete story of that rumour.
More recently, you’ve cited the gloating over Paris Hilton’s return to prison as further example of the cretinisation of the media.
It made me cross. I thought, “Now I’m gonna have to write about her.” Which I would’ve backed myself never to do. Do you know that one of the people who took that picture of her weeping was the guy who took the famous photograph of the Vietnamese girl burning with napalm? But the way there were grown men laughing on chat shows, just terrible. And something nasty underneath it too, they want to see her flogged or something like that. When I saw the famous video, I thought the worst thing about it was the total lack of facial expression. It was as if she was doped or something.
I haven’t seen it.
You haven’t missed anything, I promise you. In some countries where they used to censor things like Penthouse, they were allowed to go on sale but the censor would go through it with a magic marker and put a big X on the pudenda, which had an obscene look to it of course. But in India they would not do that, they’d black out the face, then no one wanted the pictures. Very clever. If you’re not what Kingsley Amis called a “face fetishist”, then you’re not functioning properly! And she had a completely zombie look. It was a feigned cheerfulness, very unsettling.
I see you’ve contributed a piece on Tunisia to the current edition of Vanity Fair, guest edited by Bono.
My new best friend! We had some editorial meetings; he was very good I have to say. Very easy in my case, he didn’t ask to change a thing, but I think in fact he’s more interested in and more knowledgeable of the sub-Sahara, so he was maybe prepared to take my word for it on Tunisia, I don’t know. But at the meetings he was very non-megalo to work with. He was always full of suggestions and didn’t mind if people said, “No, that wouldn’t work.” He terribly wanted to call it Fair Vanity for that issue, and I pointed out that it would only be funny for a very short time, if at all, and most people wouldn’t notice. Graydon (Carter, editor) said, “We’ll only do it if you call yourself 2U.”
I imagine it required a bit of knuckle biting on Graydon Carter’s part in terms of putting George W Bush on one of the covers.
There’s a concession on this that I don’t like to make either, which is that it’s largely thanks to evangelical conservatives in America that the Darfur thing has been kept going, ’cos they’re very passionate about the Sudan in general. Partly, it’s true, because there are a lot of Christians there, but they’ve also been very good in keeping the North Korea issue alive, you have to give it to them. Bono and Mr. Geldof too have both given Bush quite high marks on Africa.
Final question: are you happy to be described as “atheist” or “agnostic”?
I wish the word agnostic had not been coined by the otherwise great Mr. Thomas Huxley (the English biologist, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’) because it gives people a default position and allows them to postpone the reckoning. Jonathan Miller (theatre and opera director, and writer-presenter of BBC 4’s Atheism: A Rough History Of Disbelief) came to Washington the other day and we had lunch. And he says he doesn’t like the word “atheist” because you don’t have a word for saying why you don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas, so why do you need a word for this? And I thought it was a good point in a way, except that the Tooth Fairy believers don’t come around to your house and try to convert you, and the Santa Claus fans don’t blow themselves up at the airport or build settlements on the West Bank. Religion is originally a philosophy, an attempt to explain things with very, very little information or knowledge, so you have to have some engagement with it and say, “Look, religion can take you this far, but then you have to get off the track and start thinking for yourself.” But in a sense, if you take it at all seriously, you wouldn’t be any kind of a Christian if you could let a friend go to hell.

God Is Not Great is published by Grove Atlantic.