Questions of Faith
A conversation between Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell and infamous atheist Christopher Hitchens
Hear the full audio interview:
Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything has made him arguably the nation’s most notorious atheist. Already renowned as a political columnist for Vanity Fair, Slate, and other magazines and known for his frequent punditry on the political TV circuit, Hitchens’s barbed manifesto against religion has earned him debates across the country, often with the very fundamentalist believers his book attacks.
But as a precursor to his upcoming January 5 appearance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland Monthly invited Hitchens to an encounter more befitting the Rose City: a conversation with a liberal believer—Marilyn Sewell, the recently retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland. A former teacher and psychotherapist and the author of numerous books, Sewell, over 17 years, grew Portland’s downtown Unitarian congregation into one of the largest in the United States.
Marilyn Sewell: Your book God Is Not Great is a sweeping indictment of how religion has perpetuated war, exploitation, and oppression throughout history. What inspired you to turn from critiquing politics to critiquing religion?
Christopher Hitchens: My political life has been informed by the view that if there was any truth to religion, there wouldn’t really be any need for politics. A crucial element in the way I write, as well as what I write about, has been informed by my atheism. Why this book at this time? By the early part of this century, I became convinced that religion was back in a big way with the parties of God—as they dare call themselves—not just in Iran and among Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, but with Messianic Jewish settlers trying to steal other people’s land in the name of God to try and bring on Armageddon with help from Christian forces in the United States. These forces overlap with the Christians who want pseudoscience taught to American children with taxpayers’ money and with the Vatican saying, “Well, AIDS in Africa may be bad, but condoms would be worse.” I thought that the moment had arrived when enough people might be willing to fight back. I and others—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris—all came to the same conclusion independently. It seems we weren’t completely wrong.
Sewell: In God Is Not Great you write that you began to question religion when, at age 9, you experienced the ignorance of your scripture teacher, Mrs. Watts, and then later, when you were 12, your school’s headmaster tried to justify religion as a comfort when facing death. It seems you were an intuitive atheist. But did you ever try religion again?
Hitchens: No. I think I may belong to what is a significant minority of human beings, those who are—as Pascal puts it in his Pensées, his great apology for Christianity—“so made that they cannot believe.” As many as 10 percent of us just never can bring ourselves to take religion seriously. And since people often defend religion as natural to humans, the corollary holds, too: there must be respect for those who simply can’t bring themselves to find phrases like “the Holy Spirit” more meaningful.
Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is a generally fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
Sewell: Let me go someplace else. When I was in seminary, I was particularly drawn to the work of theologian Paul Tillich. He shocked people by describing the traditional God—as you might, as a matter of fact—as “an invincible tyrant.” For Tillich, God is “the ground of being.” It’s his response to, say, Freud’s belief that religion is mere wish fulfillment and comes from humans’ fear of death. What do you think of Tillich’s concept of God?
Hitchens: I would classify that under the heading of Statements That Have No Meaning—At All. Christianity, remember, was really founded by Saint Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the most unhappy. If none of that’s true, and you seem to say it isn’t, I have no quarrel with you. You’re not going to come to my door trying to convince me. Nor are you trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to have it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were like you, I wouldn’t have to write the book.
Published: January 2010
Dear Portland Monthly,
Before reading Questions of Faith in your January issue, I wanted to deeply dislike outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens. As a longtime follower of Jesus, I felt I knew who’s side of the article I would fall.
I commend Mr. Hitchens for his directness in his convictions. He quickly exposed the beliefs of Marilyn Sewell as a fraud. His statement that Sewell is really not in any meaningful sense a Christian is correct. You cannot be a follower of Christ without believing is Christ. Jesus is not a metaphor.
I would have preferred Portland Monthly choose a more committed counter argument to Hitchens beliefs. A better story could have been told.
Where Hitchens and I differ is in my belief that Jesus did rise from the dead as an atonement for our willful seperation from the Father. Quite simply, I believe in Jesus, he does not. Sewell cannot make up her mind.
I couldn’t agree more with the comment by Andrew and had nearly the same conclusions. It’s interesting, he almost knows more about what a Christian should believe more than some Christians I have known. Also, it’s almost as if he has experienced everything about what religion is and what it is “supposed” to be, however, unfortunately, he has never experienced Jesus himself; the biggest component of what a religion should be (and religion never defines your experience, nor vice-versa). Christianity as a religion by itself is just a system, prone to distortion by man. But couple it with the experience of knowing Jesus and you get what Jesus intended. That experience changes everything and what was so “foolish” before now has all the perfect sense in the world. Try explaining to a single person with no kids what it’s like to be a father or mother and you might start to begin to describe to someone what knowing Jesus is like. You won’t know the experience until you live it.
I may not agree with Hitchens, but I certainly respect him for knowing what he believes and why he believes it and would be honored to meet him.
Hitchens seems like a blunt but nice guy. However, for being an atheist he sure seems to import a lot of meaning to life that naturalism can’t provide. He speaks of “convictions” but what is a conviction in the mind of an atheist? And if there is one, it isn’t universal or right or wrong, but merely chemical, and thus nonsense. The same goes with ethics. Upon what ground can natural humanism anchor ethics without importing “oughts” into the conversation. Mr. Hitches seems to speak out of both sides of his mouth and poor Mrs. Sewell, as confused about herself as she is, she isn’t able to point it out to him.
It was an interesting read, but it would have been better if the person opposite Hitchens was a person of Christian ‘conviction.’ But it was funny that he knows what a Christian is, while she doesn’t even realize that she isn’t one.
It’s really difficult for me to take Hitchens and his ilk seriously, even though they make good arguments (as someone with a Christian background and familiarity with the Bible, I cannot understand how someone can be Christian who doesn’t believe in Jesus), because when they talk about religion or spirituality they usually ignore any faith but the Abrahamic religions. When they do talk about other belief systems they accuse the adherents of superstition and ignorance. I’d like to know how this squares up with the fact that Christians used to say the same things about indigenous people as an excuse to wipe them out. Would atheists do the same thing, given enough world power? If you truly believe religion is the basis of all human evil, then as a person of conscience you could not do anything else. And the track records of the Stalins and Pol Pots of the world really worry me.
I guess part of what I’m saying is that if someone kills me because I don’t practice their faith, at least I can write them off as a loony just before I die. But if an atheist kills me because I practice any faith, even though I never have and never will harm anyone over my beliefs… well, that’s something else again.
As for the Christian commenters here… shakes head One thing about this modern culture, both East and West (honestly, their differences are superficial at this point), is that it truly believes it is the one right way to live. I place the blame squarely at the feet of the various salvationist religions, of which Christianity is but one. There are other modes of spirituality which hold that they are the right way for the people practicing them but may not fit with any other people. Classical Greek pagan religion is an example with which readers here will be familiar. It was common practice for Greeks to salute the gods of foreigners they visited, even as they retained belief in their own. It’s not a matter of monotheism vs. polytheism either, since Hindus believe only their faith is the true one; although they have incorporated foreign deities such as Jesus, that is only because they see them as new facets of their own deities. This is unheard of outside of what Daniel Quinn calls “Taker” cultures. (If you haven’t read him, you should.)
Some of us don’t want other modes of belief forced upon us, most particularly not modes of belief which hold that only they are true and correct. Atheism is as guilty of this mode of belief as is Christianity. Anyone thinking it’s “superior” because it’s “rational” is totally missing the point—never mind that the concept of human “rationality” or “reason” is essentially meaningless, since we are but one animal on one tiny planet in a great big universe and are nowhere near understanding everything about it yet. Can we just agree to disagree and move on, please? The insults are not necessary nor productive.