Sacred Cows Go To Hitchens's Abattoir

Samuel Butler's 1903 novel, "The Way of All Flesh," offers a lingering image of what he believed the futility of religious belief: A swarm of bees infests a house, and, confusing the floral-print wallpaper for the real thing, attempts in vain to draw pollen from the walls. This they do again and again, "without ever suspecting that so many of the associated ideas could be present, and yet the main idea be wanting hopelessly, and for ever." There is faith; but it is empty, and nothing more.

Christopher Hitchens's new tract, "God Is Not Great" (Twelve, 320 pages, $24.99), recalls those bees in more aspects than one. Certainly Mr. Hitchens, a proudly godless pugilist, approves of Butler's bleak house of worship. Yet his claims are larger, and more clamorous. He savages all varieties of religious experience, which, he writes, are "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." He seeks to prove, as his leitmotif has it, that "religion poisons everything" (italics, needless to say, his).

So we have another atheist manifesto to file on the already groaning shelf, next to recent works from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. These latest polemics build on a genre looping back to the Victorian period, when the foundations of faith were profoundly shaken, most of all by Darwin's theory of evolution. The origin of this atheist species — in terms volubility and stridency — is Bertrand Russell, who in 1927 published a pamphlet, "Why I Am Not a Christian," which was scandalous for its time.

A lot has been published in the intervening years, and by now the atheists tend to be more than a little tedious. Their representative traits: a world-flattening certainty; a school-boy naughtiness; a sneering condescension to the faithful; a catalog of the atrocities committed in the name of religion; an invocation of the menace of fundamentalism; an observation that all religions can't all be right; a trotting-out of theodicy as if it were, so to speak, a revelation … and so forth. Such books often seem as futile and hopeless as the bees on the wallpaper. Their assumptions are mostly addressed to those who already disbelieve.

Mr. Hitchens is susceptible to all these deficiencies. But wait. He has somehow turned out an atheist book that, whatever one's stance on divine providence, is thoroughly enjoyable. "God Is Not Great," in its profane interrogation of the sacred, achieves a kind of joyous impudence. And with Mr. Hitchens's knowledge of huge regions of literature, metaphysics, history, politics, and philosophy, his book is more than we might first suppose.

Not unpredictably, considering his shift to the right after the terrors of September 11, 2001, Mr. Hitchens is very hard on the Islamists (and Muslims) in their confrontation with modernity. But every sacred cow is fed through the abattoir.

The Christian Bible is "full of star-predictions (notably the one over Bethlehem) and witch doctors and sorcerers." The Buddha and the dharma endorse "fascism." A "refined form of Confucianism" is responsible for the depredations in North Korea. Joseph Smith, "a gifted opportunist" and "an illiterate," turned "a plain racket [Mormonism] into a serious religion before our eyes." American evangelicalism is little more than "hucksterism." The appalling (and appallingly popular) eschatology of "Left Behind" novels was "apparently generated by the old expedient of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor."

Rollicking, yes; but such invectives treat theology and faith as though they were something facile, frivolous, and easy to dismiss. More fearsome critics of religion — William James, for instance — have granted it more virtues than Mr. Hitchens. As for the thinkers who have been willing to engage religion on its own terms, and deeply till the fields of belief and doubt, they include Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, Spinoza Jefferson, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein, to name just a few.

Faith, for billions worldwide, is not empty, and the faithful may find "God Is Not Great" abhorrent were they to read it. Yet for the failings in Mr. Hitchens's perspective, one senses that he also has other pursuits in mind. His narrative leans briskly and unrelentingly forward, subverting and unsettling all kinds of complacencies, religious and otherwise. His style backs up what he wants people to do: To look at things squarely, and to detach the imagination from conformities, received doctrines, and false nirvanas. "Allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking," Mr. Hitchens writes. Such a sentiment, at a time when many kneel at the altar of conventional wisdom, always stands in need of reaffirmation.

Mr. Rago is an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal.