Christopher Hitchens. Photo by ensceptico
Christopher Hitchens, author of “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” has been debating religious leaders for a good long while now, traveling from campus to campus, auditorium to auditorium, arguing the (I think ludicrous) point that faith is an unqualified, unrepentant force for evil.
But perhaps, in spending so much time with real flesh-and-blood people, Hitchens may be ever-so-slightly softening. Look at this line from a column he recently wrote for Slate:
I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.
I doubt Hitchens will ever decide he’s been wrong all these years and convert to Christianity (or another religion). He now has, in fact, all sorts of public and financial incentives for remaining the staunch atheist he is. But I’m encouraged that, while he may not agree with what we believe, he perhaps sees a glimpse of the people who we are: Christians are no longer people of the “they,” but people who he’s met with, talked with, perhaps even eaten with.
I think it’s much harder to hate a group of people once we meet them. Hitchens, to his credit, has met us where we live. And perhaps, in so doing, there resides a faint flicker of hope that Hitchens and his fellow “angry atheists” may not stay quite so angry.
