TONIGHT
E-mail a friendChris Hedges
original airdate April 15, 2008
Working for such publications as The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges has spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He's also the best-selling author of such books as American Fascists, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and, his latest, I Don't Believe in Atheists. Hedges holds a master's degree from Harvard Divinity School and is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute.
Chris Hedges
Tavis: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-wining journalist and author whose previous "New York Times" bestseller was called "American Fascists." His latest is a response to the spate of recent books critical of religion, and is called "I Don't Believe in Atheists." Chris Hedges, nice to have you on the program.
Chris Hedges: Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: I started by acknowledging, as I said a moment ago, this recent spate of all these books declaring that there is no God, or I don't believe in God. What's happening that the agnostics and the atheists are not just writing books but in fact getting on the best seller list consistently?
Hedges: I think it's a reaction to the chauvinism and bigotry of the hard religious right in this country. Unfortunately, these atheists have adopted a system that is just as intolerant and just as anti-intellectual and just as utopian as the people they go after, and that's not a solution.
I'm no friend of the radical Christian right. As you mentioned, with "American Fascists," I find these people - I think they constitute perhaps the most dangerous mass movement in American history. But I was appalled when I came out to Los Angeles to debate Sam Harris at UCLA and then went up to Berkeley to debate Christopher Hitchens, who wrote "God is Not Great," when I read through their work and when I debated them, to find how they had really replicated, in secular terms, the radical Christian right.
Tavis: What about that do they not get? Because you're right, these very people would decry - have, in fact, decried just about anything and everything connected to - wrong hand. They've decried just about anything connected to the religious right, and yet to your point they're taking the same kind of tactic - that is to say, being as rabid in their point of view as they criticize the religious right for being. They're too smart to not get that, are they not?
Hedges: Well, I don't think that they're very - that they know much about religion. I think that they - let's take the issue of Muslims, for instance. The kinds of things that Sam Harris or Hitchens write about Muslims could be lifted from the most rabid sermon by a Christian fundamentalist. They demonize Muslims not for being led by Satan or the antichrist, but for being sort of irrational religious hordes that are impediments to human progress.
And you have in Sam Harris' book, "The End of Faith," a call for us to consider a nuclear first strike against the Arab world. This isn't rational. This is insane. And I think that the convergence of the political agenda of these new atheists - remember, these people, certainly Hitchens and Harris, are apologists for preemptive war, defending torture, talking about the use of violence as a kind of cleansing agent - especially the use of catastrophic violence in order to move human society forward - replicates the dangerous ideology of the radical Christian right.
Tavis: So that even, Chris, even if you think that the radical Christian right has gone too far, we still live in this country that says, at least, that in God we trust. So what is it about these books that Harris and Hitchens and others write that put them on the bestseller list? You don't get on the top of these lists without somebody buying what you're putting out.
Hedges: Well, I think one, it is a reaction, as I said before, to the radical Christian right, but also I think at its core this is another form of self-exultation. This is a way of elevating us as atheists or secularists above others; of relegating ourselves to a moral level and denigrating others to a lower sort of plane of morality.
And the kinds of things - when you debate a new atheist like Hitchens or Harris, and I've debated Christian fundamentalists, there's no difference. You can tell - I grew up in the church, I graduated from seminary, yet if I debate a Christian fundamentalist I'm an enemy of the Christian nation, I'm a secular humanist, I want to destroy God and family, and they will pound home these kind of clichés no matter what you say.
The same is true for the new atheist. I don't believe in an anthropomorphic god, I don't believe in a physical heaven and hell, I don't believe in miracles, I understand that there are morally indefensible passages in the bible, and yet I become a defender of superstition, magic, and witchcraft. They can't go beyond that paradigm.
What they have done, in the same way the Christian right has done, is externalize evil. They don't understand that evil is something that lurks in every human heart, including our human heart. They write naively and childishly, and I spent seven years in the Middle East, I'm an Arabic speaker, I was the Middle East bureau chief for "The New York Times," that suicide bombers are caused by Islam, by reading the Qur'an.
This just flies in the face of all serious investigations into motives of suicide bombing, which is caused by collective humiliation, repression. And to somehow blame it on religion and think that if we eradicate religion and eradicate those people who are fervent believers, we will make a step towards if not a perfect, a more perfect world, is self-delusion.
Tavis: Talk to me about the audience of those who are buying into this atheist, agnostic message that these writers are putting forth.
Hedges: Well, what worries me about the audience is that they are appealing to the secular left, to I think the same sort of myopia and bigotry of the secular left that we see in the religious right. It is a belief that the world out there is not made up of complex, nuanced forces that we must investigate. The fact is these people, when they write about the Muslim world, they're culturally, historically and linguistically illiterate - something, of course, they share with the radical Christian right.
And yet they make these sweeping statements about Islam, about one-fifth of the world's population, only 20 percent of whom are Arabic speakers, and it's a kind of frightening demonization and I think it's borne out of fear. I think these are both fear-based movements.
Harris began writing his book right after 9/11. We fear what we don't understand and then we reach out to the tools of violence in order to eradicate people who are not really human in our eyes but are abstractions of human beings - people who represent hate and violence who we must get rid of. And that kind of childish view of the world, especially when we come from an imperial power like our own, is terrifying, because you end up only being able to speak in the language of violence.
You lose the capacity for empathy. You don't understand. And to understand is not to condone, but we can't create a world community, we can't build relationships, if we don't take time to investigate the other and recognize and accept that there are other ways of being, other ways of believing, other ways of existing that are as legitimate and virtuous as our own.
Tavis: Let me set aside their argument for the moment against Islam - the argument they make, at least, against Islam - and talk specifically and quickly here about Christianity. Given, again, the spate of these books from these authors like Harris and like Hitchens, is Christianity in trouble? Put another way, is God in trouble?
Hedges: Well, what is God? There's a show for you. (Laughter) I think of God more as a verb than a noun. Religious - God is a human concept, religious systems are human concepts, theological systems are human creations, and they are as flawed and as imperfect as all human creations.
There are morally indefensible passages in the bible - you know, the anti-Semitism in the gospel of John, the blessing of righteous genocide in Genesis, on and on and on, as there are in every religious text. So I think religiosity is a way of being. I look at the radical Christian right as heretics - as Christian heretics - because they have fused the iconography and language of Christianity with the iconography and language of American nationalism.
I saw that - I covered the war in the former Yugoslavia and I saw that toxic mix embodied by ethnic warlords like Slobodan Milosevic. So I think that those of us who care about tolerance, who find in the religious life meaning and purpose, need to be a little more virulent about going after those extremes, both secular and both religious, that are really forms of self-worship.
Tavis: But I guess what - I respect that answer and I'm glad you gave it to me. The other part of that answer that I want to get to is whether or not you think that there is a burgeoning growth of these persons who take on in America this secular point of view, this Harris, this Hitchens point of view that might somewhere down the road even challenge the very notion of Christianity in this country. This notion of in God we trust.
Hedges: I don't think they're that powerful.
Tavis: Okay, that's what I wanted to get at.
Hedges: Clearly the most potent sort of mass movement in contemporary society is the radical Christian right, and they have -
Tavis: But they've fallen off of late, though, that's what I'm trying to get at here.
Hedges: Well, but I believe that they won't fall off until we address the root causes that propel people into this movement, and that's personal and economic despair. And after Pat Robertson's 1980 presidential bid, everybody wrote these people off. That's a mistake. I think we have to look at what it is that is pushing people into the arms of these demagogues and charlatans, and that is the disenfranchise it, the virtual Weimarization of the American working class, coupled with now the assault on the middle class.
That instability, the stripping away of state and federal assistance program. There are parts of - go to former manufacturing centers, as I did in Ohio. There are parts of the United States that for which the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. And I think that it is that despair, which was also true in the war in Yugoslavia, that propels people into the arms of these non-reality-based belief systems.
Tavis: Let me offer, then, as an exit question the question that we could have wrestled with at the very beginning of this conversation, which is what you mean to suggest, then, by the title of the new text "I Don't Believe in Atheists."
Hedges: Well, Martin Luther said, "We all have gods; it just depends which ones you pick." I think these new atheists, it's a classic form of self-worship and of idolatry. Creating little, I think, squalid belief systems that are in the service of their own power.
Tavis: These debates that you have with these persons like Harris and like Hitchens, for the audience, what's your sense of what these debates actually turn on? Are peoples' minds - is it just a good debate? Are peoples' minds actually swayed by these conversations? What does the debate typically, you find, turn on for people who get a chance to see you guys do this in person?
Hedges: I don't think it's a debate, because they are incapable of grappling with - outside of their own sort of characterization of religion, cartoonish vision of religion, which is a kind of believe system I hate and have fought against. And they're theologically illiterate. They've never read theology, nor do they believe that they should.
They find a reaction among certain segments of the audience that come who delight in that kind of put-down of religion because it is a form of, I think - it fosters a sense of superiority over others.
Tavis: Well, on that note we will close by thanking God for PBS then. (Laughter) I couldn't resist. The new book from Chris Hedges is called "I Don't Believe in Atheists." Chris, nice to have you on the program.
Hedges: Hey, thank you.
Back to April 15, 2008