The title says it all — a new classic of the polemical form
Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is an apotheosis (to use a religious word) of the sort of stringent secularism that would, among a large percentage of the U.S. population, pass for blasphemy. Unabashed and unapologetic, Hitchens doesn’t write as if he has something to prove. He’s just the narrator — both literally and figuratively — of his own logical argument: belief in a higher power of any sort is not just foolish, it’s dangerous, damaging and irresponsible. God Is Not Great is a book-length essay, and a new classic of that polemical form, organized in topic-based chapters, from “Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings,” to “Is Religion Child Abuse?”

First published in 2006, the year Hitchens pinpoints as the peak of the Bush administration’s attempt to transform the United States into a Christian theocracy (exemplified by former attorney general John Ashcroft’s statement that “the United States has no king but Jesus” — a claim Hitchens says is “exactly two words too long”), God Is Not Great positively vibrates with life-or-death urgency. One of the book’s most moving passages is Hitchens’ recollection of the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini, then the Iranian head of state, issued a fatwa — “a simultaneous death sentence and life sentence” — against the novelist Salman Rushdie. Hitchens spoke out early, and at great personal risk, in defense of his longtime friend, “for the crime of writing a work of fiction.”

While Hitchens tends to see all religions as gigantic cults of death, he does sometimes acknowledge both the beauty in religious texts, as well as the tragedy of the destruction of holy sites (churches during the Spanish Civil War, the Taliban’s explosion of the twin Buddha statues at Bamiyan). These works are important “cultural artifacts,” however, rather than inspiration for religious belief. Ultimately, Hitchens concludes, “the findings of science are far more awe-inspiring than the rantings of the godly.”