What happens when you learned that one of the most vocal atheists of the day is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease? If you were a leader of the church that he so eternally protested, attacked and offended, will you feel sorry for him? Read on as Karen Mains talks about Christopher Hitchens in the latest issue of Soulish Food .
***
Our friend Drew Dyck, an editor at Christianity Today, writes about visiting the atheists club in Wheaton, Illinois as part of his interview process for his new book, Generation EX-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith … And How to Bring Them Back.
Now, I admire this. My tendency is to avoid the opposition however I can and only deal with them when I am caught in unavoidable confrontations. After checking out the group’s Web site (with messages like “looking to meet like-minded individuals in a nation that is cuckoo for Christianity”), Drew discovered what he terms a “whole underworld of doubt.”
This excerpt (quoted with the author’s permission) is his account about attending an atheists club:
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The next meeting would be at a pub less than a mile from my house. I showed up feeling a little jittery. What was I—a Bible-believing Christian since my youth—going to say to atheists? How would they react when they learned that I was a Christian? Would it be all-out war? I intended to observe, ask questions, and then keep my mouth shut … but I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut. And some of them would be expecting me. In my online profile I’d written that I was a “Christian journalist writing a book about ex-Christians…”
I walked over and introduced myself to the young man opposite the table from me. He shook his head.
“I saw your profile. I know who you are.” He let out a mock groan. “Why did I have to sit on this end of the table?”
Not exactly the reception I had hoped for.
Before I could respond, a gray-haired woman smiled warmly in my direction. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. What’s your name?”
“I’m Drew,” I said cheerfully. “I work just across the street at Christianity Today.”
Her brow furrowed. “When did you become an atheist?”
“I didn’t. I’m a Christian.”
The word “Christian” seemed to hang in the air. The conversations around the table died, and I felt twenty-five pairs of eyes fasten upon me.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
This encounter is a marvelous example of the way we all see the world from the place where we stand. That is an axiom that applies to everyone. Few of us take the effort to consider the other side; too many of us don’t even recognize that there is another side. If we enter into any kind of dialogue it is for the sole purpose of proving the other guy (or gal) wrong. Then we demonize the opposition. Sound familiar?—this attitude is a map of our current culture wars.
Drew Dyck makes the point that the new atheism is aggressive, confrontational, angry and militant. “They specialize in dredging up old arguments against God’s existence and peddling them to a credulous public.” Despite this (and knowing how nasty conservative Christians can become when they feel threatened), I have been given an interesting assignment regarding one of the most vocal atheists of our day, Christopher Hitchens, whose commentaries and literary criticism I often enjoy in The Atlantic or other Eastern establishment periodicals. Among an endless list of works, Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Faith and Practice, he disclaims Mother Teresa as a fraud and wishes for her to go to a place he ardently does not believe in. This aside, much of Hitchens’ protests against the church make me feel like a kindred spirit. Often, I read his stuff, admire the intellectual analysis and because I am fond of contrarians, I find myself thinking, Well, I feel exactly the same way. That really bugs me as well. Sometimes he and I are mad about the same things!
What I have been left pondering, however, in this distant juxtaposition of opinions is: Why, given the same irritants, have I landed in the camp of the rabid believers and he in the camp of militant disbelief?
This kind of oxymoronity (in myself and in others) always makes me laugh, and I have often found myself laughing while reading Hitchens—not in scorn, but in delight at having discovered a fellow malcontent, who incongruously happens to be in the other camp. Why don’t you pray for Christopher Hitchens? came the still soft inner word. Not, Pray for his conversion; not, pray that he will stop offending me, his Creator. Just something like, You like him; why don’t you pray for him?
So I did what was in my heart to do—I attended, albeit at a distance, the atheists club. At bedtime (when I am trying to stay awake until 9:00 p.m.), I began to read his collection on various topics first published in national magazines, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays. So far, I’ve read reviews of biographies written about Rudyard Kipling, a reconstruction about popular attitudes toward Churchill, other reviews on books about Trotsky, thoughts about the pertinence of Huxley’s Brave New World, Graham Greene’s body of literature and Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited.
I attempted to see the world not from where I stand. Authentic prayers (the inner nudge, though gentle, is always persistent) for Christopher Hitchens demanded that I attempt to see the world from where he stands.
I noticed an ad, maybe in that progressive rag The Nation, in which Zondervan Publishers pushed a book by Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s brother, titled The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. This all had occurred of course, before my prayers began their feeble passage heavenward as did the cancer of the esophagus national
media reports he has contracted. “Stage-four cancer,” he told Steve Kraft in a 60 Minutes interview two weeks ago (which I happened to catch while waiting for David to finish getting ready for a concert we were attending). “There is no stage five.”
Interestingly, I still don’t feel led to pray for his conversion—perhaps I don’t believe that will happen, given his position of adamant disbelieve. I just pray for the man. I pray suspecting that he protests too much. I pray because I delight in much of what he writes. Isn’t it ironic that the God who Hitchens proclaims does not exist so gently and mercifully reminds me to hold him tenderly in my heart?
Of course, being a leader of a cadre of publishing-industry atheists (more of Hitchens’ titles include The Portable Atheist: Essential Reading for the Nonbeliever and God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist—you get the point), he certainly isn’t going to recant and consider the state of his soul at this time in his career (life). And he must know he is dying. But I am praying for him. If I can laugh at the man—certainly he can’t be serious; he’s over the top with an ingenious marketing scheme for attracting reviews and readers—then God must see the humor in his “there is no God/I hate him” incongruity (and the offending further incongruity of a brother coming to faith because of militant atheism). Irony upon irony; they are belly-gripping in their dead seriousness.
So, David dragged me away from the 60 Minutes interview, not wanting to be late to the chamber music concert, saying I could catch the audio broadcast on WBBM radio in the car (we were at least ten minutes early). “Who is Christopher Hitchens?” my husband inquired. I explained. And we listened, just in time for me to hear Hitchens tell his interviewer that one of the things that has touched him deeply are all the messages and e-mails telling him that people are praying for him.
Obviously, I am not the only one a loving gentle God is nudging to pray.
Oh how hard it is, atheists and believers alike, to view the world from where the other guy stands.
***
Our friend Drew Dyck, an editor at Christianity Today, writes about visiting the atheists club in Wheaton, Illinois as part of his interview process for his new book, Generation EX-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith … And How to Bring Them Back.
Now, I admire this. My tendency is to avoid the opposition however I can and only deal with them when I am caught in unavoidable confrontations. After checking out the group’s Web site (with messages like “looking to meet like-minded individuals in a nation that is cuckoo for Christianity”), Drew discovered what he terms a “whole underworld of doubt.”
This excerpt (quoted with the author’s permission) is his account about attending an atheists club:
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The next meeting would be at a pub less than a mile from my house. I showed up feeling a little jittery. What was I—a Bible-believing Christian since my youth—going to say to atheists? How would they react when they learned that I was a Christian? Would it be all-out war? I intended to observe, ask questions, and then keep my mouth shut … but I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut. And some of them would be expecting me. In my online profile I’d written that I was a “Christian journalist writing a book about ex-Christians…”
I walked over and introduced myself to the young man opposite the table from me. He shook his head.
“I saw your profile. I know who you are.” He let out a mock groan. “Why did I have to sit on this end of the table?”
Not exactly the reception I had hoped for.
Before I could respond, a gray-haired woman smiled warmly in my direction. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. What’s your name?”
“I’m Drew,” I said cheerfully. “I work just across the street at Christianity Today.”
Her brow furrowed. “When did you become an atheist?”
“I didn’t. I’m a Christian.”
The word “Christian” seemed to hang in the air. The conversations around the table died, and I felt twenty-five pairs of eyes fasten upon me.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
This encounter is a marvelous example of the way we all see the world from the place where we stand. That is an axiom that applies to everyone. Few of us take the effort to consider the other side; too many of us don’t even recognize that there is another side. If we enter into any kind of dialogue it is for the sole purpose of proving the other guy (or gal) wrong. Then we demonize the opposition. Sound familiar?—this attitude is a map of our current culture wars.
Drew Dyck makes the point that the new atheism is aggressive, confrontational, angry and militant. “They specialize in dredging up old arguments against God’s existence and peddling them to a credulous public.” Despite this (and knowing how nasty conservative Christians can become when they feel threatened), I have been given an interesting assignment regarding one of the most vocal atheists of our day, Christopher Hitchens, whose commentaries and literary criticism I often enjoy in The Atlantic or other Eastern establishment periodicals. Among an endless list of works, Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Faith and Practice, he disclaims Mother Teresa as a fraud and wishes for her to go to a place he ardently does not believe in. This aside, much of Hitchens’ protests against the church make me feel like a kindred spirit. Often, I read his stuff, admire the intellectual analysis and because I am fond of contrarians, I find myself thinking, Well, I feel exactly the same way. That really bugs me as well. Sometimes he and I are mad about the same things!
What I have been left pondering, however, in this distant juxtaposition of opinions is: Why, given the same irritants, have I landed in the camp of the rabid believers and he in the camp of militant disbelief?
This kind of oxymoronity (in myself and in others) always makes me laugh, and I have often found myself laughing while reading Hitchens—not in scorn, but in delight at having discovered a fellow malcontent, who incongruously happens to be in the other camp. Why don’t you pray for Christopher Hitchens? came the still soft inner word. Not, Pray for his conversion; not, pray that he will stop offending me, his Creator. Just something like, You like him; why don’t you pray for him?
So I did what was in my heart to do—I attended, albeit at a distance, the atheists club. At bedtime (when I am trying to stay awake until 9:00 p.m.), I began to read his collection on various topics first published in national magazines, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays. So far, I’ve read reviews of biographies written about Rudyard Kipling, a reconstruction about popular attitudes toward Churchill, other reviews on books about Trotsky, thoughts about the pertinence of Huxley’s Brave New World, Graham Greene’s body of literature and Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited.
I attempted to see the world not from where I stand. Authentic prayers (the inner nudge, though gentle, is always persistent) for Christopher Hitchens demanded that I attempt to see the world from where he stands.
I noticed an ad, maybe in that progressive rag The Nation, in which Zondervan Publishers pushed a book by Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s brother, titled The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. This all had occurred of course, before my prayers began their feeble passage heavenward as did the cancer of the esophagus national
media reports he has contracted. “Stage-four cancer,” he told Steve Kraft in a 60 Minutes interview two weeks ago (which I happened to catch while waiting for David to finish getting ready for a concert we were attending). “There is no stage five.”
Interestingly, I still don’t feel led to pray for his conversion—perhaps I don’t believe that will happen, given his position of adamant disbelieve. I just pray for the man. I pray suspecting that he protests too much. I pray because I delight in much of what he writes. Isn’t it ironic that the God who Hitchens proclaims does not exist so gently and mercifully reminds me to hold him tenderly in my heart?
Of course, being a leader of a cadre of publishing-industry atheists (more of Hitchens’ titles include The Portable Atheist: Essential Reading for the Nonbeliever and God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist—you get the point), he certainly isn’t going to recant and consider the state of his soul at this time in his career (life). And he must know he is dying. But I am praying for him. If I can laugh at the man—certainly he can’t be serious; he’s over the top with an ingenious marketing scheme for attracting reviews and readers—then God must see the humor in his “there is no God/I hate him” incongruity (and the offending further incongruity of a brother coming to faith because of militant atheism). Irony upon irony; they are belly-gripping in their dead seriousness.
So, David dragged me away from the 60 Minutes interview, not wanting to be late to the chamber music concert, saying I could catch the audio broadcast on WBBM radio in the car (we were at least ten minutes early). “Who is Christopher Hitchens?” my husband inquired. I explained. And we listened, just in time for me to hear Hitchens tell his interviewer that one of the things that has touched him deeply are all the messages and e-mails telling him that people are praying for him.
Obviously, I am not the only one a loving gentle God is nudging to pray.
Oh how hard it is, atheists and believers alike, to view the world from where the other guy stands.
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