Letters

I read a piece – “Short Cuts” – in the March 21 edition of the London Review of Books that made me angry.  It had a certain tossed off air about it, as though the author was taking the chance to write on a long-held opinion without bothering to do any additional research.  The topic was Christopher Hitchens and his circle, sometimes called the New Atheists, and the author was Daniel Soar.  He ended the piece with a shrug saying their concern about religion was uninteresting and bizarre, calling them deranged.  Looking into Soar’s back catalog I noticed he had reviewed a novel by Martin Amis, who was also mentioned in the piece, in 2007.  Interestingly enough ‘the Hitch’ appeared here as well, and even in his brief appearance we can sense a well-established dislike brought on by Hitchens’ apparent conversion to neoconservatism (a vast overstatement).

My inner Herzog was roused and I wrote a letter to the editor.  They responded saying it was being considered for publishing, but alas in the event another letter-writer beat me to the finish line by having a personal Hitchens anecdote to share.  Fair enough.  I was proud of my letter, however, and the diligence I did while putting it together contained some facts that surprised me.  It may not achieve immortality in the archives of the LRB letters section, but I reproduce it here to at least give it a better home that a Gmail inbox.

I would also note that, in a coincidence of timing, a small furor broke out in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives shortly after I wrote this letter.  The House was seating its first ever Muslim member, but beforehand another Congressperson asked permission to deliver a prayer.  It was so overtly hostile that even the attempt to dress it up as thanks to God and blessings from Jesus etc. had no hope of hiding the reality of the utterer’s bigotry and foolishness.  I don’t see any signs of this stopping anytime soon.

To The Editor,

Daniel Soar possesses an admirable ability, much like his subject Christopher Hitchens (LRB, 21 March), to stick to his guns.  Soar precisely matches the tone he used when reviewing a novel by Hitchens’ friend Martin Amis over a decade ago (LRB, 4 January 2007) – a review ‘the Hitch’ appears in only briefly but to the same faintly damning verdict.  Seven years after Hitchens’ death and with books like The Four Horsemen now dedicated to rather than written by him, Soar’s attempt at a definitive view of Hitchens as fixed in history could be the first of a flood tide.  He wonderfully captures the unwilling admiration and jarring notes many descriptions of the polemicist share, but needs correction on one item.

To Hitchens’ audience in the United States, where he lived from 1981 and became a citizen in 2007, religion is emphatically not ‘a question of precisely no interest’ to anyone – perhaps why two of the three remaining Horsemen Soar mentions are Americans Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.  50% of Americans remain deeply religious, while only 33% believe in evolution.  Among evangelical Christians, who make up an estimated one quarter of the total population, those figures are 88% and 4%, respectively.  Over 80% of white evangelical Christians voted for President Trump in 2016.

While ‘godly’ is an adjective few would apply to Trump himself (one of the few might be early supporter Jerry Falwell Jr. – Hitchens would not have been surprised) Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump appointees demonstrate the ongoing potency of religion as a political force.  Religious beliefs accordingly affect American policy on: climate change (Scott Pruitt, the late head of the Environmental Protection Agency, denies climate change and evolution on the same grounds of a lack of evidence); education (Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ comments on wanting to ‘advance God’s kingdom’ through political activity have received wide attention); and health and human services (as a Congressman in 2006 former Secretary Tom Price introduced a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman) to name but a few.  The Supreme Court of the United States continues to rule on religiously-tinged cases, from Masterpiece Cakeshop to the President’s Muslim travel ban, while lower courts confront issues such as prohibitions on nontheists delivering invocations to Congressional sessions.  I appreciate Mr. Soar and his acquaintances being uninterested in religion – such tedious immutability – but he is surely mistaken to dismiss as ‘deranged’ those among us who are acutely interested, not to say worried.

Hitchens’ presence is missed today because he spurred those affected by the rhetoric of his writing and oration – which is to say, nearly everyone who came in contact with them – to get interested and do their own research.  Surely we could use more of that.