And Rightly So

July 3, 2009

On first sight, David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies fits neatly into a category familiar to the conservative book reader. It's a smashing refutation of the Christianity-bashing books of the last few years. You've heard their titles even if you haven't read the books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris; God Is Not Great (How Religion Poisons Everything) by Christopher Hitchens. Quite a few book-length answers to these attacks have been published in the past couple of years, and some of them have provided valuable counterarguments. They pointed out, for example, that most of the arguments that put the "village atheists" on the bestseller list are not new; they're dumbed-down rehashes of challenges that have been flung at (and answered by) Christians since the Enlightenment. Authors have also made the case that religion hardly "poisons everything": Is the world really worse off with, for example, hospitals and universities (both of which are inventions of Christianity)? And earlier authors have made the telling point that the record of atheist mass murderers in the twentieth century (e.g., Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) dwarfs the historical violence that fans of atheism chalk up to Christianity.

But Atheist Delusions begins where the other books leave off. David Bentley Hart's defense of Christianity is much richer in detail; he makes the points the earlier authors have made, but with new fresh and interesting examples. And he does the big picture better, too -- providing a remarkable account of what he calls "the Christian revolution": the radical transformation of civilization that faith in Jesus Christ wrought, overturning the values of the ancient pagan world and giving us a new respect for the dignity of human beings that we forget, at our peril, is a gift of faith in the God become Man.

On the details, here's just one memorable example. It's often been pointed out -- in fact, C. S. Lewis used this fact in answering the Dawkinses and Hitchenses of his day -- that the heyday of witch burning in Europe was not the Middle Ages but the seventeenth century, the dawn of the Enlightenment. But Hart's more detailed account of the medieval Church's dealings with witchcraft is highly informative. Far from sniffing out and burning witches, it appears that religious authorities in the Middle Ages were bent on proving that witchcraft was a scam: one cleric chased a supposed witch around a locked room to prove that she couldn’t (as she claimed fly through the keyhole.

Atheist Delusions also adds texture and weight to the argument about Christianity's historical responsibility for violence. Like witch burnings, "wars of religion" aren't characteristic of the Middle Ages; they began to heat up in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, just as medieval Christendom was breaking up into modern nation states. Hart shows how the real impetus behind the violence wasn't so much religious belief as it was secular rulers' push for something closer to absolute control (than the medieval Church had allowed them) within their national borders.

Hart handily demolishes the "religion poisons everything" position. But the chief virtue of Atheist Delusions is in the positive case it makes for "the Christian revolution." In the book's most compelling passages, Hart shows how two events reported in the Bible -- Peter's weeping when the cock crows after he's denied Jesus, and Jesus' trial before Pilate -- reveal the radical transformation Christianity brought about in the classical world view. In classical culture before Jesus, the moral failings and bitter disappointment of a poor fisherman would have been a matter for cruel comedy only; given Jesus Christ, the world can see Pilate's cynical, brutal exercise of power for the mockery of true justice that it is.

Atheist Delusions leaves the reader enlightened and inspired about our past -- but disturbed about the future. Our "village atheists" have no understanding of the civilizational achievement they're bent on destroying -- any more than Attila the Hun knew understood Rome’s sophisticated urban infrastructure. Clueless barbarians were quite successful in leaving Rome in ruins; let's hope the pseudo-sophisticates trying their best to bring down Christianity don't leave universal respect for human dignity in the same state.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com