Rage against GodMarcia Segelsteinonenewsnow.com"The Rage against God is loose and is preparing to strip the remaining altars when it is strong enough." – from The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens is famously known as the brother of the infamously outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens. For a time, both brothers held a common disbelief in God. In his new book, Peter describes his falling away from faith that mirrored that of so many in his generation, including his brother. Now back in the fold of Christianity, he sees with frightening clarity the ills that have been loosed on society as a result of its ever-increasing secularization.
Some of what Hitchens describes is specifically about the England in which he grew up, and the diminished England in which he now lives. But much of it applies just as well to America and most of western civilization.
Of his turning away from the faith of his childhood Hitchens writes: "We were sure that we, and our civilization, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels, and heaven. We had modern medicine, jet engines, the welfare state, the United Nations, and 'science,' which explained everything that needed to be explained." Growing up for him, and for so many of his generation, meant no longer falling for those "myths."
There was also the stumbling block of submission, a generalized dislike of authority that was almost endemic to the times. And while Hitchens blames no one but himself for his actions, he does wonder aloud about the effects of growing up in a post-war world. He writes, "Perhaps it was because they brought us up too kindly, convinced in the post-war age that we should not endure the privation, danger, and strict discipline that they had had to put up with, so we turned arrogant. I certainly did."
Educated society in Britain began to look down its collective nose at the faithful, just as what Dan Quayle dubbed the cultural elite began to mock traditional values in America. Hitchens quotes Virginia Woolf's reaction to T.S. Eliot's conversion to Christianity: "I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward...I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God."
Hitchens wonders aloud whether the real emotion behind those passionately intense words was fear that believers like T.S. Eliot might be right. The same could no doubt be wondered about the heated virulence of many outspoken atheists, like his brother.
Hitchens lived in the former Soviet Union for several years, and spent time as a journalist in other places devoid of religion. In retrospect at least, he'd begun to sense a direct correlation between the absence of faith and the absence of basic human civility. He'd also begun to see clear evidence of what he calls "the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection," in places where "man set himself up to replace God with the state."
Having experienced it himself, Hitchens is perhaps especially apprehensive about Western civilization's drift toward enforced secularization. He believes the dissolution of Christian education is a real possibility. He fears that an "intolerant utopianism" will drive out the remaining traces of Christianity from the public squares of Europe and North America. And he worries about "an ever more powerful state" raging against God.
The concerns he voices are frightening to contemplate, but sadly imaginable as Christianity is driven from public life and religion is all too often a source of derision. But perhaps there's hope to be gleaned from his personal story of belief re-born. He returned to a faith which wouldn't hold his years of doubt and unbelief against him. We can hope and pray the same for the world.
G. K. Chesterton, in his famous book Orthodoxy, touches on the subject of doubt in a discussion about the story of Christ's Passion. "When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."
