The trouble is the word 'religion'. This is an eighteenth-century western category -- divorced at that stage from the rest of real life in a way it had never been before -- and bears little relation to any isolated reality that societies before then, or indeed most people in today's wide world, would recognize. For most of history, and for most people today, what the west currently calls 'religion' is woven tightly in with home and family, politics and government, music and art and a thousand other things.

What's more, few people prior to the eighteenth century would have doubted that 'religion' in general could be allied with the behavior patterns which Hitchens describes. Most people, in fact, would have said 'but that's simply normal human behavior, however regrettable'. The proof of the pudding is that, with the last two centuries in our mind, we could substitute the word 'atheism' for 'religion' in Hitchens' quote and it would still work (think: French Revolution, Gulag, etc etc).

The question might then be put: granted that 'religion' is now a fairly useless category, and that indeed much mainstream Christianity has been deeply suspicious of 'religion' as such precisely because it doesn't seem to have the life-changing property it's supposed to, is there another dimension, another depth, which is life-changing, peace-loving, and so on? The New Testament insists that there is . . . granted of course that a great many who claim to follow it collapse back into 'ordinary religion' given half a chance . . .