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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
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