Of all the ideologies that reject the Christian God, atheism seems the most difficult to answer. How should we respond to its professed monopoly on reason or its withering tirades? Yet that intellectual exterior, as Peter Hitchens shows us, is just new paint on regular old rebellion.
Upon realizing that Peter is the brother of the famous, now deceased atheist Christopher Hitchens, I mentally shelved The Rage Against God under “Christian Celebrity Marketing: Too Dull to Read.” But Hitchens (a journalist, author, and broadcaster) knows a well-crafted sentence – and atheism – better than most people ever will. Like his brother, Hitchens’s disillusionment led him far from the church doors of Britain into the arms of atheism. Unlike his brother, he returned.
“I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school,” Hitchens writes, but it did not “as I had hoped, blaze fiercely and swiftly.” Atheism was still uncommon when Hitchens left the faith of his childhood. But soon, whole generations of Brits began to abandoned religion, disillusioned by Britain’s post-war hangover and sick of the church who poured them the patriotic drink in the first place. As Hitchens writes, “the Christian church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars.”
This book is as much a cultural analysis as it is a memoir. Hitchens explains deep philosophical truth with the trains and ships and great men of his childhood. But he does so in a way that sneaks up on you – Hitchens believes the best arguments for God come in “the unexpected force of poetry.” (His own return to faith began, not with ironclad arguments, but seeing a painting of Judgment Day.)
In the second half of the book, Hitchens answers what he sees as the three failed arguments of atheism: that conflicts in the name of religion are about religion, that morality does not require God, and that atheist states are not really atheist. As with the first section, he draws on personal experience to make his point – this time from communism.
Hitchens was once a socialist himself, but his experiences as a journalist in Moscow ruined that. He saw that “Soviet power was – as it was intended to be – the opposite of faith in God.” It was the atheists’ experiment, and they cannot easily explain the scars of its failure.
Readers expecting a primer on Christian apologetics won’t find it here. But Hitchens gives us something better: the story of a real person who experienced real transformation. Those who listen will finish Hitchens’s book better equipped to respond to those far from God.