Christianity: The antidote to poison in the world

I appreciate the comments from those who read my opening statement in a 2007 debate with Christopher Hitchens at The University of Texas at Austin: We posted it as part of our Saturday Series on Aug. 27.

Hitchens, who died in 2011, was summarizing the argument he made in his best-selling God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books, 2007), so his argument is readily available. Mine is not, since I haven’t published it elsewhere, but some of what I presented may be helpful to others, so here are the rest of my comments: a 10-minute response to the Hitchens opening statement, and a 10-minute closing comment.

Response

Christopher, I can tell you one bad thing some Christians have done: Somewhere along the way, they gave you a misapprehension of what the Bible is all about.

Maybe you learned that the Bible is a book of rules about what we should and should not do. Sure, the Bible has some rules that show us how the world works, but the Bible isn’t mainly about rules and what we should do. It’s about what God has done.

Let me give you and folks here a quick summary. God created the world and it was very good—but it wasn’t perfect. The very good apparently wasn’t good enough for human beings who sought what they thought was perfection. A renegade angel, Satan, tempted the humans to rebel. Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lies and the world changed. It’s not very good any more. Evil exists in our hearts and decay mars the creation. Death has come into the world.

The story is about what God did after evil came into the world. He was not content to let the world decay and rot. Even as He pronounced the consequences of sin, He also made a promise: that one day a special human being would outwit and defeat Satan, and that the earth would one day be restored. The rest of the Bible is the story of how this works out.

First, God forms a people and protects them against enemies. They sometimes fight wars, but they survive. They keep messing up, but He doesn’t abandon them. He shows this people His character. He teaches them about evil and the need for sacrifice. He shows them their inability to keep the law. They keep messing up, committing spiritual adultery, but God never abandons them. They are often unlovable but He always loves them.

It’s a story of love and rescue, promise and deliverance. Of the blind, the lame, and the lost being plucked to safety by a Redeemer. Of a love so terrific that God willingly sacrificed His own Son to make redemption possible for these people.

Yes, Christians have done ugly things. Yes, many non-Christians have done wonderful and charitable things. Sin still exists in the world. Sin still exists in the hearts of man. Until Christ comes again, creation still groans. But we see glimmers of the promised redemption. We see examples of self-sacrificial love. Tastes of undeserved kindness. Glimpses of holiness.

That’s what the Bible is about. It’s a garment, but you want to keep tugging on it, searching for a loose thread that you can pick at and pull on.

I could take up a lot of time discussing each thread, but I’ll just look at one. So you can’t say I’m dodging the tough questions, I’ll take up your toughest accusation.

You don’t like the warfare of the Israelites and the Amalekites. I agree it sounds horrible. But the Amalekites were the al-Qaeda organization of the time. God was saying these terrorists are so bad that you have to do what you normally do not do: kill civilians alongside combatants. That’s sad, and I don’t like it, but the Bible depicts a God who shows great mercy at times. When He doesn’t, I’m not so quick to say he’s wrong.

You don’t like the warfare of the Israelites and the Amalekites. I agree it sounds horrible. But the Amalekites were the al-Qaeda organization of the time.

The whole issue of warfare on civilians is a miserable one. Was it right for the U.S. and Britain to bomb German cities in WWII, leveling whole neighborhoods and killing men, women, and children, civilians? It was treating them like the Amalekites. Were the people who gave the orders, were the pilots and bombardiers, evil people? They did terrible things, but they thought that was the way to end a terrible war, and maybe they were right.

Historians still debate the dropping of atomic bombs. President Truman and his advisors believed that if they did not do something horrible there would be horror even worse—hand-to-hand fighting on the island of Japan in which millions would die. We can still debate that decision, but I’m not ready to jump on it 62 years later and say it was unquestionably wrong. I also do not want to react in a knee-jerk way to an event that occurred 3,000 years ago.

It’s horrifying to look at the bombing of German or Japanese cities in isolation. It’s horrible in context also, but it is rationally defensible as part of a larger war. Israel’s battles with the Amalekites only make sense if we see them in context, as part of an over-arching cosmic war on the greatest terror ever seen.

Unless we grasp the context of a terrible war going on, we are pulling out threads from a sweater instead of looking at it all. Here’s a suggestion: Let’s not immediately condemn God. Instead, we should read, study, and think. When we read Shakespeare and do not understand a word or the motivation of a character, do we immediately say, “This is garbage. Shakespeare is an idiot”? No, because Shakespeare has a lot of credibility. How much more credibility does the God of the whole universe have?

Let’s look at the context of what you find incredible, like Christ’s birth to a virgin or His resurrection. Extraordinary, yes, but what about the origin of life? A chance of 1 out of a trillion is considered a virtual impossibility, but when DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick calculated the possibility of a simple protein sequence of 200 amino-acids (much simpler than a DNA molecule) originating spontaneously, his figure was 10 with 260 zeroes after it.

Three decades ago Frank Salisbury of Utah State described the odds this way: Imagine 100 million trillion planets, each with an ocean with lots of DNA fragments that reproduce 1 million times per second, with a mutation occurring each time. In 4 billion years it would still take trillions of universes to produce a single gene-if they got lucky.

So the really odd story is that we are here at all. Since those odds have not inhibited your defense of macroevolution, adherents to the less unlikely possibility of Christ’s birth and resurrection should not be dismayed. If God created the entire world, resurrection or other miracles are easy tasks.

That’s the context. One other thing: Even in the midst of horror, like the horror of Hurricane Katrina, God’s grace shines through. We’ve heard a lot about the folly of FEMA, but the view of Ronnie Harris, mayor of Gretna, La., was typical: “Church workers were the first volunteers on the ground. It is churches that made the difference in Hurricane Katrina recovery.”

The work of Christian volunteers was so impressive that one atheist wrote a column about them in your British left-wing Guardian Weekly. He wondered why Christians “are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others.” You can almost see the synapses sparking in the writer’s brain: “It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity a la carte. Yet … it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand.”

Impossible? Evidently, he had not learned at the feet of Christopher Hitchens.

Closing comment

Christopher, you’ve identified a problem. Something poisons everything. Agreed. You wander through the world and see the statues to those you think are troublemakers: Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, and many others. And you also create one with a plaque, to an unknown god, because you generalize: Religion poisons everything. Well, that last one should have on its plaque one little-letter word: sin. That’s what you’re really spotlighting. How sin spoils everything. But Christianity is the religion that offers the antidote: God loved the world so much that Christ took those sins upon Himself and died for us, in that way forgiving our sins without abandoning God’s holiness.

You’ve tried to blow up that history by attacking it from lots of different directions. I could go one by one through all your attacks, but to show that they all can be reasonably replied to I’ll offer just one—that the Gospels were written long after the fact and were propaganda booklets. Two reasons to the contrary: First, if the Gospels are fictional, their authors were idiots for giving women vital roles in the founding of a religion. Showing women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb would add to suspicion as to whether Christ truly rose from the dead. Overall, it’s worth comparing the positive New Testament view of women with the negative one that dominated ancient Greece and Rome.

Reason 2: Precision in specific detail shows that the first three gospels were composed soon after the death and resurrection of Christ. Here’s a rough parallel: Five years ago, archeologists pulled up from the ocean bottom the USS Monitor, the famous Civil War ironclad. Experts were surprised to find undocumented braces on the gun turret and mustard bottles where the crew ate. If we found in some musty library a document asserting that the crew had added some braces and braced their taste buds by pouring mustard on otherwise inedible biscuits, we would be much more likely to give that manuscript an origin stamp of 1870 rather than 1970. Same deal with the Gospels: amazing specific detail.

Same deal with the Bible overall. Your attacks on it are not new. They were common in what is called the Golden Age of Freethought in the late 19th century. Robert Ingersoll was a powerful figure within the Republican Party and probably the leading orator in America. He also said openly that he was an implacable enemy of Christianity. He called God an “eternal fiend.” He held God “in abhorrence and contempt.” He attacked God’s “infinite malice” and His “infinite lie.” He said that both John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards were “insane.”

Ingersoll predicted, as did lots of others, the imminent demise of religion in general, or Christianity in particular. Ingersoll said things similar to what you write—that when religious groups had an educational monopoly it was hard to mount an attack on the concept of revelations and miracles, but “Now that religion’s monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see those evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are.”

So what happened? Why is Christianity so strong in the U.S. now? Why is it expanding rapidly in Africa and South America, and especially in China? To answer that, we should turn your accusation on its head. It used to be that atheists could talk about the unique evil of church dictatorships and no one could show that the problem was broader than religion, because we didn’t have a track record of secular dictatorships. Now we do.

Let’s do a thought experiment: Imagine that in the 20th century, in the biggest country by land area and also in the biggest country by population, leaders knocked off Christianity and taught atheism in all schools, would things get better? Oh, you say we don’t have to do a thought experiment? That the Soviet Union and China did establish atheism, and the results were not pretty? Oh.

I’m not bringing up this evidence to say that Christians are good and atheists are bad—but to say that religion poisons everything, with the assumption that other things do not poison, is clearly wrong. You write, “It is horrifying to remember how many people were tortured or killed” over arguments about the Trinity, or the Muslim’s hadith.” You’re right. It is horrifying. It appears that the Inquisition over the centuries killed 5,000 people, which in my view is 5,000 too many. But Stalin and Mao killed not 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million but at least 50 million.

Keeping that Soviet and Chinese experience in mind, it’s remarkable that you write about atheists respecting free inquiry and open-mindedness and not excommunicating each other. Maybe—the 20th century was a century of atheists resolving their disputes not by excommunication but by murdering each other.

What’s the antidote? Grace. John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” was a slave trader. He became a Christian, finally realized the evil he had done, and could with confidence fight against slavery despite his past, because he knew his sins were forgiven.

What’s the antidote? Grace.

You talk about religion in general and lump all religions together, but Christianity differs from other religions in its emphasis on grace. Lots of religions are bargaining religions: “I’ll do this for you, God, or Allah, or Vishnu, and you’ll do something or me.” Bargaining religions can sometimes cause big trouble, but Christianity is about grace. We can’t buy God off. We can’t trade with Him. Folks who get this find it’s enormously liberating.

John Newton mentored a young member of Parliament, William Wilberforce. That name is becoming familiar to some people this year because it’s the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade. Wilberforce fought for that for 20 years. He and other Christians in Britain led the way, and Parliament finally agreed in 1807. Then the fight to abolish slavery in the British Empire took on new intensity, and Wilberforce fought that fight all the way to 1833, when Parliament took that step. Wilberforce died soon after.

How did he persevere? He got it. It’s all about grace. Christopher, I don’t know what teaching you absorbed, but it wasn’t John Newton or William Wilberforce. When we understand that God is our Father, we don’t have to win His love by mortifying our flesh or giving some money to religious authorities. We cannot lose His love by asking hard questions. The eyes of Texas are upon us, and so are the eyes of God, but it’s not a police state or banana republic, it’s love. I wish you could get that.

Religion poisons everything? No, our fallen, sinful human nature poisons everything. The question is: How can we change? We talk about changing the world, but when the Times of London asked G.K. Chesterton to write an essay describing “What’s wrong with the world?” he responded with two words: “I am.”

In conclusion, let’s say my journalistic and historical research, and that of others, is all wrong. Keep in mind Chesterton’s response about what’s wrong with the world: I am.” Throw out everything else, and I can still tell you that religion doesn’t poison everything.

Since I’m the guy defending Christianity, I’ll end with another confession. Both Christopher and I were married and divorced before our second marriages, which then lasted. I don’t know Christopher’s experience but I do know mine. When I was an atheist in my early 20s my marriage lasted two years. I was a lousy husband. I became a Christian and my marriage has lasted 31 years. I’m obviously not saying that only religious people have long marriages. I am saying that in my own case Christianity didn’t poison anything because Christianity was the antidote to the poison that was within me. I’m still selfish but not utterly selfish. Without Christianity this marriage would not have lasted.

I know that Christianity doesn’t poison everything because I have four fine sons. Before I was a Christian I favored abortion. If I hadn’t come to believe in God some or all of those sons would not exist. Christianity doesn’t poison everything. In my own case and in the case of millions of people it’s the antidote to poison.

So you can say, Christopher, that religion poisons lots of things, and I’ll agree with you—but not everything. I’ll also suggest that atheism poisons lots of things. There’s plenty of poison to go around. We desperately need the antidote.