Christopher Hitchens and his fellow secular fundamentalists – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. – are having a field day. And who can blame them? Terrorists claim the mantle of God in peddling their destruction. Girls and young women undergo genital mutilation for “religious” reasons. The government here in the United States is headed by a man who claims to be called by God – and whose administration will very likely be remembered as the most morally bankrupt in American history.
No wonder Mr. Hitchens is in high dudgeon.
But one of the characteristics of fundamentalism everywhere, including the secular fundamentalism that Mr. Hitchens articulates, is an unrelentingly dualistic view of the world – good versus bad, black versus white – a refusal to see nuances and ambiguities. Have people who claim to be religious engaged in unseemly behavior? Of course they have. But people of faith have also been responsible for much good in the world: poverty relief, feeding the hungry, marching for civil rights or against war. How many hospitals in America, to take only one example, were founded by religious groups? Mercy Hospital or Presbyterian Hospital or Methodist or Jewish or Baptist.
Mr. Hitchens shares with other fundamentalists a blindness to shades of gray. He prefers to deal in dualistic categories – religion = bad; secularism = good – rather than expend the effort and take the trouble to move beyond such facile generalizations.
It would be like asserting, on the basis of Mr. Hitchens himself, that all secular fundamentalists are rude, bombastic, and intellectually lazy. That generalization is patently absurd.
So are Mr. Hitchens’s statements about religion.
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