religious freedom

Egypt’s Copts Suffer More Attacks

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The Corner | Nina Shea

Copts in Egypt are begging for Egyptian Armed Forces protection today after a Muslim mob of several thousand attacked their church in the village of Soul, about 30 kilometers from Cairo, last night. The Church of St. Mina and St. George was torched, and its clergy are unaccounted for. The fire department and security forces failed to respond to Coptic pleas for help during the arson attack.

According to a report from the Washington-based Coptic American Friendship Association, the mob, chanting “Allahu Akbar,” pulled down the church’s cross and detonated a handful of gas cylinders inside the structure. The ensuing fire destroyed the church and all its contents, including the sacred relics of centuries-old saints. It is reported that a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, which sharia forbids, and the refusal of the woman’s father to kill her to restore the community’s “honor,” aroused the Muslim ire. An account of this incident is here. (I also received a message from a Coptic friend that this week members of the Muslim Brotherhood, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” stormed a Christian school on Thabit Street in downtown Asyut and attempted to take it over. Egyptian security forces, including an army unit, intervened and routed out the Brotherhood members. The school had been built by Presbyterian missionaries in the early 1900s, and is now directed by Presbyterian Pastor Naji. Christian leaders from this southern area expressed a deepening sense of insecurity as the Muslim Brotherhood emerges from the underground.)

This incident follows separate brutal attacks by armed forces using heavy machine-gun fire against two monasteries, ostensibly for zoning problems, on February 23. Compass Direct, an American-based Christian news agency, reported that one monk and six church workers were shot and wounded when the Egyptian Army attacked the Coptic Orthodox Anba Bishoy Monastery in Wadi Al-Natroun, 110 kilometers north of Cairo, in order to destroy a wall monks had built to defend their property from raiders. On the same day, it reported that, in a similar incident, the army also attacked the Anba Makarious Al Sakandarie Monastery in Al Fayoum, 130 kilometers southwest of Cairo. Under an Egyptian law carried over from Ottoman times, state permission is required to build or repair church property and such permits are rarely issued.

There are growing concerns that Egypt’s 10 million or so Coptic Christians are being targeted under the cloak of political chaos during these uncertain times. A friend reports that the local Egyptian police have abandoned their posts in the provinces and thus many churches no longer have armed guards protecting them as they did following the al-Qaeda-inspired church bombing of New Year’s Day in Alexandria. Egypt’s army is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid.

Nina Shea is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.

Abp. Chaput: The American Experience and Global Religious Liberty

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Read the essay below and you will understand why Orthodox Triumphalism is a dead end. The author is a Roman Catholic Archbishop and has an incisive grasp of American cultural and political history that applies as easily to American Orthodox as it does to American Catholics. We Orthodox don’t really grapple with what it means to be Orthodox in America, not much anyway. Instead we substitute ideas about ethnic affiliation or Orthodox supremacy or other impoverished notions thinking that that they will be enough to sustain the Church in the end. They won’t.

Affirming the good where ever we find find it is a fundamental tenet of Orthodox thinking and that includes the positive good that Protestants in particular and Catholics after them have contributed to American culture. And there is much good worth considering in Abp. Chaput’s analysis below.

Source: Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver | Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

March 1, 2011 – Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Denver, addressed the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University.

A friend once said – I think shrewdly — that if people want to understand the United States, they need to read two documents. Neither one is the Declaration of Independence. Neither one is the Constitution. In fact, neither one has anything obviously to do with politics. The first document is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The second is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Celestial Railroad.

Bunyan’s book is one of history’s great religious allegories. It’s also deeply Christian. It embodies the Puritan, Protestant hunger for God that drove America’s first colonists and shaped the roots of our country.

Hawthorne’s short story, of course, is a very different piece. It’s one of the great satires of American literature. A descendant of Puritans himself, Hawthorne takes Bunyan’s allegory – man’s difficult journey toward heaven – and retells it through the lens of American hypocrisy: our appetite for comfort, easy answers, quick fixes, material success and phony religious piety.

Bunyan and Hawthorne lived on different continents 200 years apart. But the two men did share one thing. Both men – the believer and the skeptic — lived in a world profoundly shaped by Christian thought, faith and language; the same moral space that incubated the United States. And that has implications for our discussion today.

In his World Day of Peace message earlier this year, Pope Benedict XVI voiced his concern over the worldwide prevalence of “persecution, discrimination, terrible acts of violence and religious intolerance.”ⁱ In reality, we now face a global crisis in religious liberty. As a Catholic bishop, I have a natural concern that Christian minorities in Africa and Asia bear the brunt of today’s religious discrimination and violence. Benedict noted this same fact in his own remarks.

But Christians are not the only victims. Data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life are sobering. Nearly 70 percent of the world’s people now live in nations — regrettably, many of them Muslim-majority countries, as well as China and North Korea — where religious freedom is gravely restricted.ⁱⁱ

Principles that Americans find self-evident — the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of conscience, the separation of political and sacred authority, the distinction between secular and religious law, the idea of a civil society pre-existing and distinct from the state — are not widely shared elsewhere. In fact, as Leszek Kolakowski once said, what seemed self-evident to the American Founders “would appear either patently false or meaningless and superstitious to most of the great men that keep shaping our political imagination.”ⁱⁱⁱ We need to ask ourselves why this is the case.

We also need to ask ourselves why we Americans seem to be so complacent about our own freedoms. In fact, nothing guarantees that America’s experiment in religious freedom, as we traditionally know it, will survive here in the United States, let alone serve as a model for other countries in the future. The Constitution is a great achievement in ordered liberty. But it’s just another elegant scrap of paper unless people keep it alive with their convictions and lived witness.

Yet in government, media, academia, in the business community and in the wider culture, many of our leaders no longer seem to regard religious faith as a healthy or a positive social factor. We can sense this in the current administration’s ambivalence toward the widespread violations of religious liberty across the globe. We can see it in the inadequacy or disinterest of many of our news media in reporting on religious freedom issues. And we can see it especially in the indifference of many ordinary American citizens.

In that light, I have four points that I’d like to share with you today. They’re more in the nature of personal thoughts than conclusive arguments. But they emerge from my years as a Commissioner with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and I believe they’re true and need to be said. The first three deal with the American experience. The last one deals with whether and how the American experience can apply internationally.

Here’s my first point: The American model of religious liberty is rooted in the thought-world and idea-architecture of the Christian humanist tradition. We cannot understand the framework of American institutions — or the values that these institutions are meant to promote and defend — if we don’t acknowledge that they grow out of a predominantly Christian worldview.

Obviously our laws and public institutions also reflect Jewish scripture, Roman republican thought and practice, and the Enlightenment’s rationalist traditions. But as Crane Brinton once observed with some irony, even “the Enlightenment [itself] is a child of Christianity – which may explain for our Freudian times why the Enlightenment was so hostile to Christianity.”^iv

Whatever it becomes in the future, America was born Protestant. And foreign observers often seem to understand that better than we do. As many of you know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran scholar and pastor murdered by the Third Reich, taught for a time in New York City in the 1930s. He came away struck by the differences between the American and French revolutionary traditions, and the Christian character of American ideals.

“American democracy,” Bonhoeffer said, “is not founded upon the emancipated man but, quite on the contrary, upon the kingdom of God and the limitation of all earthly powers by the sovereignty of God.”^v

As Bonhoeffer saw it, the American system of checks and balances, which emphasizes personal responsibility and limited government, reflects fundamental biblical truths about original sin, the appetite for power and human weakness.

Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic scholar who helped draft the U.N.’s charter on human rights, said much the same. He called our Declaration of Independence “an outstanding lay Christian document tinged with the philosophy of the day.” ^vi

He also said: “The [American] Founding Fathers were neither metaphysicians nor theologians, but their philosophy of life, and their political philosophy, their notion of natural law and human rights, were permeated by concepts worked out by Christian reason and backed up by an unshakeable religious feeling.”^vii

That’s my point. At the heart of the American model of public life is a Christian vision of man, government and God.

Now, I want to be clear about what I’m saying here — and also what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying that America is a “Christian nation.” Nearly 80 percent of our people self-describe as Christians. And many millions of them actively practice their faith. But we never have been and never will be a Christian confessional state.

I’m also not saying that our Protestant heritage is uniformly good. Some of the results clearly are good: America’s culture of personal opportunity; respect for the individual; a tradition of religious liberty and freedom of speech; and a reverence for the law. Other effects of Reformation theology have been less happy: radical individualism; revivalist politics; a Calvinist hunger for material success as proof of salvation; an ugly nativist and anti-Catholic streak; a tendency toward intellectual shallowness and disinterest in matters of creed; and a nearly religious, and sometimes dangerous, sense of national destiny and redemptive mission.

None of these sins however – and yes, some of our nation’s sins have led to very bitter suffering both here and abroad — takes away from the genius of the American model. This model has given us a free, open and non-sectarian society marked by an astonishing variety of cultural and religious expressions. But our system’s success does not result from the procedural mechanisms our Founders put in place. Our system works precisely because of the moral assumptions that undergird it. And those moral assumptions have a religious grounding.

That brings me to my second point: At the heart of the American model of religious liberty is a Christian vision of the sanctity and destiny of the human person.

The great Jesuit scholar, Father John Courtney Murray, stressed that: “The American Bill of Rights is not a piece of 18th-century rationalist theory; it is far more the product of Christian history. Behind it one can see, not the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the older philosophy that had been the matrix of the common law. The ‘man’ whose rights are guaranteed in the face of law and government is, whether he knows it or not, the Christian man, who had learned to know his own dignity in the school of Christian faith.”^viii

I believe that’s true. It’s a crucial insight. And it’s confirmed by other scholarship, including Harold Berman’s outstanding work in the history of Western law, and his study of religious liberty and America’s founding.^ix My point here is that the institutions and laws in what we call the “Western world” presume a Christian anthropology; a Christian definition of the meaning of life. In the American model, the human person is not a product of nature or evolution. He is not a creature of the state or the economy. Nor, for that matter, is he the slave of an impersonal heaven. Man is first and fundamentally a religious being with intrinsic worth, a free will and inalienable rights. He is created in the image of God, by God and for God. Because we are born for God, we belong to God. And any claims that Caesar may make on us, while important, are secondary.

In the vision of America’s Founders, God endows each of us with spiritual freedom and inherent rights so that we can fulfill our duties toward him and each other. Our rights come from God, not from the state. Government is justified only insofar as it secures those natural rights, promotes them and defends them.

And this is not just the curious view of some religious shaman. Nearly all the men who drew up our founding documents held this same belief. Note what James Madison said in his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” in 1785:

“[Man’s duty of honoring God] is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation to the claims of civil society. Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe.”

That is why religious freedom is humanity’s first and most important freedom. Our first governor is God, our Creator, the Governor of the universe. We are created for a religious purpose. We have a religious destiny. Our right to pursue this destiny precedes the state. Any attempt to suppress our right to worship, preach, teach, practice, organize and peacefully engage society because of our belief in God is an attack not only on the cornerstone of human dignity, but also on the identity of the American experiment.

I want to add one more thing here: The men who bequeathed us the American system, including the many Christians among them, had a legion of blind spots. Some of those flaws were brutally ugly – slavery, exploitation of the Native peoples, greed, and ethnic and religious bigotry, including a crude anti-Catholicism that remains the most vivid religious prejudice this country has ever indulged.

But the American logic of a society based on God’s sovereignty and the sanctity of the human person has also proven itself remarkably capable of self-criticism, repentance, reform and renewal.

This brings me to my third point: In the American model, religion is more than a private affair between the individual believer and God. Religion is essential to the virtues needed for a free people. Religious groups are expected to make vital contributions to the nation’s social fabric.

For all their differences, America’s Founders agreed that a free people cannot remain free and self-governing without religious faith and the virtues that it fosters. John Adams’ famous words to the Massachusetts militia in 1789 were typical: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

When the Founders talked about religion, they meant something much more demanding and vigorous than the vague “spirituality” in vogue today. Harold Berman showed that the Founders understood religion in a frankly Christian-informed sense. Religion meant “both belief in God and belief in an after-life of reward for virtue, and punishment for sin.”^x In other words, religion mattered – personally and socially. It was more than a private preference. It made people live differently. People’s faith was assumed to have broad implications, including the political kind.

From the beginning, believers – alone and in communities – have shaped American history simply by trying to live their faith in the world. As Nathaniel Hawthorne saw so well, too many of us do it badly, with ignorance and hypocrisy. But enough believers in every generation have done it well enough, long enough, to keep the animating spirit of our country’s experiment in ordered liberty alive.

Or to put it another way, the American experience of personal freedom and civil peace is inconceivable without a religious grounding, and a specifically Christian inspiration. What we believe about God shapes what we believe about man. And what we believe about man shapes what we believe about the purpose and proper structure of human society.

The differences among Christian, atheist, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim thought are not “insurmountable.” But they are also not “incidental.” Faith, sincerely believed or sincerely refused, has consequences. As a result, theology and anthropology have serious, long term, social and political implications. And papering those differences over with a veneer of secular pieties does not ensure civil peace. It ensures conflict — because religious faith touches on the most fundamental elements of human identity and destiny, and its expression demands a public space.

This brings me to my fourth and final point: I believe that the American model does work and that its principles can and should be adapted by other countries. But with this caveat. The Christian roots of our ideals have implications. It’s impossible to talk honestly about the American model of religious freedom without acknowledging that it is, to a significant degree, the product of Christian-influenced thought. Dropping this model on non-Christian cultures – as our country learned from bitter experience in Iraq – becomes a very dangerous exercise. One of the gravest mistakes of American policy in Iraq was to overestimate the appeal of Washington-style secularity, and to underestimate the power of religious faith in shaping culture and politics.

Nonetheless, I do believe that the values enshrined in the American model touch the human heart universally. We see that in the democracy movements now sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. The desires for freedom and human dignity live in all human beings. These yearnings are not culturally conditioned, or the result of imposed American or Western ideals. They’re inherent to all of us.

The modern world’s system of international law is founded on this assumption of universal values shared by people of all cultures, ethnicities and religions. The Spanish Dominican priest, Francisco de Vitoria, in the 16th century envisioned something like the United Nations. An international rule of law is possible, he said, because there is a “natural law” inscribed in the heart of every person, a set of values that are universal, objective, and do not change. John Courtney Murray argued in the same way. The natural law tradition presumes that men and women are religious by nature. It presumes that we are born with an innate desire for transcendence and truth.

These assumptions are at the core of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Many of the people who worked on that Declaration, like Jacques Maritain, believed that this charter of international liberty reflected the American experience.

Article 18 of the Declaration famously says that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief; and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

In a sense, then, the American model has already been applied. What we see today is a repudiation of that model by atheist regimes and secular ideologies, and also unfortunately by militant versions of some non-Christian religions. The global situation is made worse by the inaction of our own national leadership in promoting to the world one of America’s greatest qualities: religious freedom.

This is regrettable because we urgently need an honest discussion on the relationship between Islam and the assumptions of the modern democratic state. In diplomacy and in interreligious dialogue we need to encourage an Islamic public theology that is both faithful to Muslim traditions and also open to liberal norms. Shari’a law is not a solution. Christians living under shari’a uniformly experience it as offensive, discriminatory and a grave violation of their human dignity.

A healthy distinction between the sacred and the secular, between religious law and civil law, is foundational to free societies. Christians, and especially Catholics, have learned the hard way that the marriage of Church and state rarely works. For one thing, religion usually ends up the loser, an ornament or house chaplain for Caesar. For another, all theocracies are utopian – and every utopia ends up persecuting or murdering the dissenters who can’t or won’t pay allegiance to its claims of universal bliss.

I began this talk with John Bunyan for a reason. To this day his major work — The Pilgrim’s Progress — is the second most widely read book in the Western world, next only to the Bible. But the same Puritan spirit that created such beauty and genius in Bunyan also led to Oliver Cromwell, the Salem witch trials and the theocratic repression of other Protestants and, of course, Catholics.

Americans have learned from their own past. The genius of the American founding documents is the balance they achieved in creating a civic life that is non-sectarian and open to all; but also dependent for its survival on the mutual respect of secular and sacred authority. The system works. We should take pride in it as one of the historic contributions this country has made to the moral development of people worldwide. We need to insist that religious freedom – a person’s right to freely worship, preach, teach and practice what he or she believes, including the right to freely change or end one’s religious beliefs under the protection of the law – is a foundation stone of human dignity. No one, whether acting in the name of God or in the name of some political agenda or ideology, has the authority to interfere with that basic human right.

This is the promise of the American model. The Founders of this country, most of them Christian, sought no privileges for their kind. They would not force others to believe what they believed. Heretics would not be punished. They knew that the freedom to believe must include the freedom to change one’s beliefs or to stop believing altogether. Our Founders did not lack conviction. Just the opposite. They had enormous confidence in the power of their own reason — but also in the sovereignty of God and God’s care for the destiny of every soul.

America was born, in James Madison’s words, to be “an asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion.”^xi Right now in America, we’re not acting like we revere that legacy, or want to share it, or even really understand it.

And I think we may awake one day to see that as a tragedy for ourselves, and too many others to count.

+Charles J. Chaput is a Capuchin Franciscan and the Archbishop of Denver. He served as a Commissioner with the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), 2003-06. In 2005 he served as part of the official United States delegation to the Cordoba, Spain, conference on “Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance,” sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe (OSCE).

i. Benedict XVI, “Religious Freedom: The Path to Peace,” January 2011

ii. “Global Restrictions on Religion,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 2009

iii. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (U. of Chicago, 1997), 146

iv. Clarence Crane Brinton, Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought (Prentice-Hall, 1963), 295

v. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (Macmillan, 1978 edition), 104

vi. Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (U. of Chicago, 1951), 183–184.

vii. Maritain, Reflections on America (Scribner’s 1958), 182–183.

viii. John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths (Image, 1964), 50.

ix. Harold Berman, Law And Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard, 1983); Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2006); “Religion and Liberty Under Law at the Founding of America,” Regent University Law Review 20 (2007): 32–36; “Religious Freedom and the Modern State,” Emory Law Journal 39 (1990): 149–164.

**Note that Berman does not deny or diminish the role of Deism and the Enlightenment in the modern legal tradition, nor their influence on American institutions. As he acknowledges, Jefferson and Franklin were Deists, while Adams, Wilson and Madison were practicing Christians. What Berman does do is relocate the roots of Western law to their real origin in the Papal Revolution of the 11th and 12th Centuries, the Catholic Code of Canon Law, and the various Protestant Reformations. For Berman, the seminal role of Christian faith in the development of the Western legal tradition cannot be ignored. See also his essays, "Judaic-Christian versus Pagan Scholarship," "The Crisis of Legal Education in America," and "Is There Such a Thing — Can There Be Such a Thing — as a Christian Law School?”, all collected in Faith and Order: The Reconciliation of Law and Religion (Eerdmans, 1993).

x. Berman, “Religion and Liberty,” at 32.

xi. James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance,” 9.

Russian Orthodox Leader Stands for Principle

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Here we see it unfolding. Orthodox Christianity has much to give the world, and it begins with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and a vigorous defense of biblical teaching through the wisdom and experience of our Orthodox tradition. And the teachings must be clear on the foundational issues that determine whether a culture and people lives or dies: the sanctity of life, marriage and family, sexuality, and the moral principles people have held to for centuries. This must be the message of Orthodox leaders. There is no other.

Source: American Thinker

The "great man" theory of history — that strong, unique, and highly influential individuals shape history (for good or ill) through their commanding personal characteristics that imbue them with power and influence over a specific period of time or during certain circumstances — may not be as widely accepted today among professional historians as in the past, but for many of us there is no denying what our own experience shows us: An individual’s influence can have dramatic impact in specific situations or historic eras.

One contemporary leader who has that potential is Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev of Moscow, who serves the Patriarch of Moscow as chairman of External Relations for the Russian Orthodox Church. His education and training has prepared him for profound impact on the church and culture; Metropolitan Hilarion is the author of more than 300 publications, including numerous books in Russian, English, French, Italian, German, and Finnish. In addition to a doctoral degree in philosophy from Oxford, he also holds a doctorate in theology from St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris.

His experience, too, has prepared him for a significant role, not only in his own church but throughout Europe and the United States as well. It was a moment of high drama three years ago this month when then-Bishop Hilarion burst into the consciousness of many American Christians. Thanks mainly to a report from the Institute on Religion and Democracy (the IRD), we know about the bold statement he made at a meeting of the liberal World Council of Churches (WCC) in which he challenged the WCC on the most important moral issues of our day, particularly abortion and modern attempts to redefine marriage. According to the IRD, he asked: "When are we going to stop making Christianity politically correct and all-inclusive?" … "Why do we insist on accommodating every possible alternative to the centuries-old Christian tradition? Where is the limit, or is there no limit at all?" And this: "Many Christians worldwide look to Christian leaders in the hope that they will defend Christianity against the challenges that it faces. … Our holy mission is to preach what Christ preached, to teach what the apostles taught, and to propagate what the holy Fathers propagated."

The IRD’s observer summarized it perfectly: One could almost imagine a "Preach it, brother!" ringing out from the evangelical amen corner.

To say that it was "bold" for Hilarion to take such a stand in such a place somehow doesn’t do it justice. It had the "holy boldness" people remember of St. Nicholas. No, not the modern secular derivation, "Santa Claus," but the real, live St. Nicholas, better remembered for extravagant generosity and such strong Gospel-faithfulness that one tradition says he boxed the ears of the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicea.

Just recently, Metropolitan Hilarion came to D.C. to meet with evangelicals who are concerned about family values and support the sanctity of life. Along with fifteen other evangelical leaders, CWA’s Dr. Janice Crouse joined the Metropolitan at a luncheon at the Russian-American Institute. Others attending the luncheon included: Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Larry Jacobs of the World Congress of Families, Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute, and Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

The Metropolitan heard from each of those attending and addressed both theological and social issues. While he made it clear that he wanted to build bridges with representatives of different and varied theological positions, he was firm in stating that productive dialogue with religious groups is impossible with those who hold to non-Biblical beliefs. As a case in point, he noted that the Orthodox Church could no longer dialogue with the Episcopal Church because of its new practice of ordaining practicing homosexual clergy.

He discussed the common challenges facing the different faiths, especially the destruction of the family by secular society and negative influences of the media on morality. He was especially concerned about the values crisis — the decline in marriage and the increase in divorce and cohabitation — and the undermining of the moral principles that people have held for centuries. He lamented the fact that political correctness is replacing personal convictions and Biblical orthodoxy.

Clearly, Metropolitan Hilarion’s consistent animating principle is fidelity to Christ and the truth of the Christian gospel. Therein lie the unfailing wellsprings of charity, mercy, and saving grace. CWA looks forward to working closely with this influential Christian leader.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D. is director and senior fellow, The Beverly LaHaye Institute, Concerned Women for America. George Tryfiates is Executive Director, Concerned Women for America

The Hidden Anti-Semitism of Christopher Hitchens and the New Atheists

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Roman soldiers carrying the Golden Menorah as plunder.

Source: OrthodoxyToday.org | George C. Michalopulos

Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the most famous of the New Atheists, has spent the better part of the past year engaging in a series of well-publicized debates, inveighing with his typical eloquence against theism in all its forms. Most of his correspondents have been Christians. Men such as Dinesh D’Souza, Bill Dembski, Tony Blair, and even his brother, Peter have debated him in public forums. (Interestingly enough, another atheist, David Berlinski, has debated him as well, taking him to task for his inability to see the carnage that atheism inevitably leads to.)

Although Hitchens is suffering from esophageal cancer, he continues to speak with his customary eloquence and wit. Unfortunately, as of late much of his argumentation is devoid of rigorous logic. Instead he has taken an emotional tone, one based on resentment of the concept of a Deity and what He stands for rather than the cold and precise voice that is called for in justifying the alternate belief in materialism. His pronouncements are increasingly dogmatic and devoid of any of the skepticism that is expected to be found in rationalist precincts. It’s not too much to say that in these latter days of his life, he eschews the rationality of his beliefs and even relies on secular myths in order to buttress his faith in non-faith. The pose of the wounded lover is all-too-apparent. This is confusing, as he’s still very much the moralist who appears to believe in good and evil. Not seeming to understand that rationalism is morally neutral, he has the decided mien of a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher.

Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens’ rationales for anti-theism of late provide much fodder for criticism. My purpose at present is to concentrate on one aspect of his argumentation, specifically his present invective against the Old Testament. Although his hatred of Christianity is palpable, I have come to believe that there is another, more subtle, hatred at work as well. One that predates the institution of the Church and which arises out of paganism itself. What I am talking about is nothing less than a species of anti-Semitism. Is it possible as one critic has recently stated that Hitchens has a “Jewish problem,” one that “has been an open secret for years”?ⁱ

Although distinctions have been drawn between anti-Semitism as a racialist phenomenon and anti-Judaism (certainly Hitchens relies upon them), in reality it is difficult if not impossible to divorce these two hatreds. It is my contention that Judaism and Semitism are two sides of the same coin. To postulate what I am saying in a positive fashion, I would state that for all practical purposes Semitism is the vehicle of monotheism throughout history and constitutes a proof of Providence-–evidence for God, so to speak. This was achieved because the Jews as a people were receptive to the very words of God Himself, and that they transmitted them to humanity. It was by this mechanism (revelation) that human civilization evolved from paganism and naturalism to monotheism and morality. As I shall strive to prove in what follows, it is my contention that Hitchens’ anti-theism cannot be divorced from his virulent anti-Judaism. Indeed, the latter invariably leads to the former.

The Old Testament: Fact or Fiction?

In the past, atheists have often denigrated Christianity as a Hellenized Judaism, a hybrid cult not unlike the ancient Greco-Oriental mystery religions. Examples would include the cults associated with Mithras, Orpheus, or Dionysius. This of course would mean that like these other demigods, Jesus was a mythical figure as well, with absolutely no historical foundation whatsoever. This was even the official view of Soviet historiographers for a time.ⁱⁱ

Unfortunately for the holders of this view, documentary evidence for the historicity of Jesus exists outside of the New Testament, ranging from the positive to the scurrilous. Most atheists therefore today concede that the evidence for His existence is too great to be denied and have chosen instead to denigrate the miraculous aspects of His life.

For Hitchens this isn’t good enough. In his recent books, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he makes the claim that all religion is evil, bar none. Not only is religion in all its forms evil, it cannot in his mind have any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Not content to merely revile Islam and Christianity, he goes to great lengths to castigate Judaism as well. Thus in his mind, the process by which the mohel circumcises an infant boy is accorded the same horror that is attendant when the jihadi straps on his suicide vest and blows up a pizzeria. This is clearly a perspective that lacks any proportion. It is as delusional as comparing the Boy Scouts to the Hitler Youth.

This is indeed ironic as Hitchens is part Jewish on his mother’s side. How then does he square this circle? Simple: in Hitchens’ mind, there is nothing at all special about being Jewish. Indeed, according to him, the Jews as a distinct people don’t exist. Like Christianity which in his mind is similarly a made-up religion, Hitchens posits that Judaism –both the people and the religion—arose gradually over the centuries. He believes that many of its foundational structures are pure fantasy. Somehow, individual people and tribes who happened to live in Canaan chose somehow to coalesce into a people that retroactively created an Abrahamic ancestor and all the accoutrements associated with him, including the sagas associated with his descendants, the Exodus from Egypt, and of course the Mosaic Covenant. To his credit, he won’t go so far as modern Islamic fantasists have gone and denied the existence of the Second Jewish Commonwealth or the origin of the Jews in Palestine itself, but one can’t help but wonder that he could wish them away if he could, seeing as how Israel has become a proxy for all that is evil about the West, including colonialism and imperialism.

Roman soldiers carrying the Golden Menorah as plunder.

One reason why he can’t venture into Islamist denialism is that the existence of the Second Jewish Commonwealth is well-attested in the historical record. Coins from the Hasmonean dynasty literally dot the landscape of modern Israel. The Arch of Titus famously depicts Roman soldiers carrying the golden menorah of the Temple as plunder. The writings of Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius, clearly attest to the existence of an independent Jewish kingdom which was alternately a dependency, colony, and protectorate of the Roman Empire. This is all undeniable.

The pre-Hasmonean kingdoms of Israel and Judah likewise boast impressive historical credentials. Things get dicey however when we get further back in the mists of time. Evidence outside the Bible for the history of Israel in the pre-monarchic period –the time of the Judges—is rather scant. And the further back one goes –to the Mosaic period in particular—then one must rely almost exclusively on the Old Testament itself, specifically the Pentateuch and later secular documents. These five books, which are ascribed to Moses contains significant anachronisms, most famously a description of the death of Moses, its putative author.

Therefore, the Exodus is a particular sticking point for Hitchens. In a recent debate with Bill Dembski, he labels the Exodus as a complete fantasy. For proof of this assertion, he cites Israeli archaeologists who were supposedly given a mandate by David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, to search for evidence of it in the Sinai Peninsula once it had been captured from Egypt following the Six-Day War of June, 1967. According to Hitchens, they were completely unable to come up with any evidence for an ancient flight from Egypt whatsoever.ⁱⁱⁱ Therefore, because these archaeologists were unable to do so, then we must believe that this ancient story is demolished because it failed the argument for interest.

Hitchens did not come to this conclusion on his own. In fact, it is the reigning orthodoxy of a wide band of archaeologists, some of who are Jews themselves. Names like Ze’ev Hertzog and Israel Finkelstein are accorded an almost papal-like infallibility when they dogmatize on the complete fictitiousness of the Exodus in all its particulars. One of the sacred texts (as it were) of this revisionism is The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.^iv Its authors, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, are clearly within the modernist/secularist view. According to these authors there is absolutely no trace of a mass migration in the Sinai Peninsula. For proof they categorically state that given that “modern archaeological techniques are quite capable of tracing even the meager remains of hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads.”^v The Sinai we are told contains no such evidence.

Hitchens takes such dogmatism literally and runs with it. Unfortunately, this puts him on a precarious limb, one which Finkelstein and Silberman shy away from in certain crucial respects (as shall be pointed out in due course). For one thing, he is ignorant of the controversies which range about in modern archaeological circles. Quite simply, one generation’s certitudes very often become the next generation’s laughingstocks. This is especially true in the field of Biblical archaeology. One has only to engage in the area of Dead Sea Scroll studies to realize that researchers looking at the exact same document can come to completely different conclusions.^vi Even the nature of the community found in the Qumran caves is far from a settled matter. Be that as it may, the discipline of archaeology cannot be viewed with blinders. If all we had to go on were artifacts, then our understanding of history would be dim indeed. Usually it is documents and actual knowledge of historical events (or folkloric remembrances of the same) which guide the interpretation of archaeology. That is why Heinrich Schliemann could spend his vast wealth uncovering the ruins of Mycenae and Troy, not because he was a philhellene who had money to burn while on vacation but because he believed that the Homeric epics were not fictitious. In the main, he was largely correct.

The king-list in the temple of Sethos I at Abydos, showing Old Kingdom names

In regards to historicity of the Exodus, revisionists often find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Unlike Hitchens, precious few of them disbelieve in the antiquity of the Israelite nation or its interaction with ancient Egypt. For one thing, the concept of a people called Israel and their wars with Egypt was known to the Egyptians, who gave it their own spin. Manetho, a Greco-Egyptian priest who flourished in the third century BC writes about the expulsion of the Hebrews in triumphant, nationalistic tones. Likewise, the Mernaptah Stele, which is dated to no later than 1210 BC, talks about punishing raids on the Israelites by Mernaptah, the son of Ramses II, the Great. Interestingly, the wording on the stele lists several nations destroyed by Merneptah, Israel among them. However, unlike the other nations mentioned, Israel is not considered a nation-state but a people. Although this designation accords quite well with what we know about the people of Israel in the time of the judges, it also shows that they were not in Egypt and certainly not slaves, but powerful enough (even as a loose confederation of tribes) to challenge the might of the Egyptian nation.

How then did the Israelites acquire the story of their Exodus from Egypt? And why did they view themselves as slaves in this saga instead of the powerful nation that they might have been (at least comparatively speaking)? Further, if the events depicted on Mernaptah’s stele not coincident with the Exodus, does it mean that the ancestors of the Israelites were never in Egypt or in subjugation to the Egyptians during a previous time?

As mentioned above, Manetho’s account largely agrees with the rough particulars of the Exodus with some important exceptions. For him, a group of savage Semites from the East burst into Egypt as interlopers, attained great station, and then subjugated the natives. During their time there, great famines and plagues were visited on the land. However, thanks to a rebellion led by a native subject-king, they were driven out and the Egyptian nation was restored. Tacitus, writing much later in his Histories, concentrates on the issue of the plagues and the subsequent expulsion. So too does the Ipuwer Papyrus. In fact, the story of Semites living in Egypt as isolated groups of wanderers seeking to water their herds, or as migrant laborers, mercenaries, or even statesmen is not controversial at all. Finkelstein and Silberman for one certainly don’t discount it. As they themselves state, the plenteous water of the Nile valley long made Egypt the destination of choice for the semi-nomadic Semites of Canaan who struggled with uneven rainfall in their native lands.

Bust of Antiochus IV at the Altes Museum in Berlin.

As mentioned, the most famous Semitic group which flourished in Egypt were the Hyksos, who were finally driven out of Egypt in a massive pogrom in 1570 BC. According to Manetho, the term hyksos was a Greek word which meant “shepherd kings.” (Curiously this word is nowhere found in any ancient Greek lexicon.) Regardless, this story as recounted by Manetho is not unlike the picture that the Book of Genesis paints of Abraham and his descendants –pastoralists of great wealth who eventually came to vast power in Egypt, only to have their descendants leave in defeat some time later.

If however Finkelstein, Hertzog, and others are correct that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence whatsoever for an Exodus from Egypt, then how did this story arise? It is here that the revisionists ask us to believe something improbable. According to these revisionists, “the Bible may reflect a New Kingdom reality.”^viii That is to say that the entire history of pre-monarchic Israel was manufactured out of whole cloth during the time of King Josiah of Judah in the seventh century in order to serve as a vehicle for his ambitious program of national renewal. As for the Exodus story itself, it was nothing more than military propaganda which was used by Josiah in his war against a resurgent Egypt, one needed in order to whip up Jewish anger against the Egyptians as a type of pre-war hysteria. In other words, Josiah and his propagandists somehow came to appropriate the history of the Hyksos as their own. Not only that, but they had to distort it completely; now the Hyksos/Hebrews were the oppressed rather than the oppressor during their sojourn in Egypt. Once that was complete, then Josiah and his minions brainwashed the Jewish people into accepting it without question. Leaving aside the improbability of such a happenstance, the implications do not stop there. In fact what follows is almost too fantastic to believe: armed with this new myth, the historically ignorant people of Judah willingly went to war against the most powerful nation on earth.

Finkelstein and Silberman however cannot bring themselves to accept the full implications of this theory, which begins and ends with the proposition that the Exodus is a complete fantasy. In walking back from the precipice, they try to have it both ways. For them,

…the saga of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt is neither historical truth nor literary fiction. It is a powerful expression of memory and hope in a world in the midst of change. The confrontation between Moses and pharaoh mirrored the momentous confrontation between the young King Josiah and the newly crowned Pharoah Necho. To pin this biblical image down to a single date is to betray the story’s deepest meaning. Passover continues to be not a single event but a continuing experience of national resistance against the powers that be.^ix

Though poetic and indicative of a larger truth, this summation is unsatisfying –one could say little more than wishful thinking on the authors’ parts. Quite simply, it leaves unanswered many basic questions and relies on too many glib assertions. Given such presumptions, one should be reluctant to disregard the primary documents of the Exodus narrative simply because the archaeological evidence is (supposedly) so scant. Finkelstein seems to be aware that he is on the horns of a dilemma; he therefore gives himself some wiggle room. Rather than accept the Cecil B DeMille-like numbers of a massive migration of hundreds of thousands of people tramping across the desert for forty years, the authors concede that the expulsion from Egypt could have been a far smaller event and that the larger numbers of the traditional tale reflects instead the typical attribute of exaggeration to which later generations are prone. They go on to say that perhaps what is recounted in a grandiose fashion was not a singular, massive migration but a series of minor migrations that transpired over many generations. Regardless, somehow we are to suppose that during the period in question, the Israelites acquired a unique understanding of themselves and their national deity, which they later codified in the famous Mosaic covenant.

Jews cross Red Sea pursued by Pharoah. Fresco from Dura Europos synagogue

Be that as it may, this interpretation of the meaning of Passover is largely correct, at least in the theological sense. The Exodus is very much the story of a group of despised outcasts standing up in the face of brutal oppression and submitting themselves to a transcendent God who is more than a mere force of nature. He is in fact their very savior. In this respect, Finkelstein and Silberman choose to view it the way theologians throughout the centuries have done. They admit as well that the “main outlines of the story were certainly known long before the [the time of Josiah].” For proof of the traditional understanding of the Exodus, the authors point for example to the prophets Hosea and Amos, who told the story of the Exodus a full century before the time of King Josiah and his alleged fantasists.^x Although by this admission, they display a generosity to tradition, this is still rather confusing.

To answer this dilemma, Finkelstein and Silberman state that they agree with other scholars who speculate that the turbulent story of the Hyksos and their violent expulsion from Egypt resonated with all the Semites of Canaan for centuries, so much so that it became “[the] central, shared memory of the people of Canaan.”^xi This may be true but they offer no evidence that the many other Semitic nations viewed the expulsion of the Hyksos with horror or that they likewise appropriated it as their own historical myth (this assumes that the Israelites did so as well). What about the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or the Phoenicians? What writings have they produced which shows them to be the persecuted descendants of the Hyksos (or for that matter, the savage conquerors of the mighty Egyptians?) Be that as it may, why did the Israelites, alone among all Semitic nations, do so, or at least choose to appropriate the expulsion of the Hyksos (if not their earlier triumph) as their story? And how could they distort the actual facts so completely, particularly that the Hyksos were not the oppressors but the oppressed?

We can go even further. Quite simply, a generalized remembrance and/or appropriation of this atrocity—if true—cannot explain the origin of the Sinaitic covenant and the necessity which compelled the Israelites to view themselves as “a people apart.” Instead, Finkelstein and Silberman revert to talk of the Passover being a metaphor for an estranged people who stood up to violent oppression (which it certainly is to a very great extent) without giving any inkling into how it came about in the first place. The onus is upon the revisionists who believe that the Exodus story is a “complete fantasy.”

Unfortunately, the generous view of the Passover narrative as offered by these authors is not accepted by the New Atheists, who in their worship of all things reductionist, cannot accept the moral imperative of the Decalogue handed down to Moses by God. For them, the adherence to materialism is so absolute that nothing less than complete nihilism will do. As far as they are concerned, the paucity of evidence for the Exodus is all that matters. More disturbingly, Hitchens’ vaunted championship of all things anti-colonialist stops at the door of the Jews, who set the template of an oppressed people overthrowing colonialist overlords during the Maccabean revolt. For Hitchens, the steadfastness of the Jews in the face of the extermination of their culture (which he calls “tribal Jewish backwardness”) was nothing less than a crime against humanity. Thus, the crimes of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, an ancient monster (who was probably delusional) are wiped clean and this ancient king is exonerated because all he wanted to do was “[wean the Jewish people] away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith.” (That modern Palestinian Arabs espouse essentially the same mindset if of no consequence to Hitchens, who goes out of his way to sympathize with the sentiments that give rise to their exterminationist rhetoric of all things Jewish.)^xii

Is there a “Biological” Judaism?

To be sure, Hitchens is not the first person to throw cold water on the concept of the distinctiveness of the Jewish people. Certain Jewish and Israeli scholars such as Arthur Koestler, Frank Makow, Israel Shahak, and Schlomo Sand have long been barking up this tree with the same questionable results. As mentioned above, Finkelstein and Silberman have concocted a narrative of Israelite formation that was much more diverse, heterogeneous, gradual, and far later than what is commonly believed. They go on to say that the Torah is essentially nothing more than a myth, propagated in the seventh century by the Judean king Josiah to fashion a historical pedigree for his resurgent kingdom which was otherwise rather parvenu. In other words, the Israelite nation simply arose over many centuries, in which several different nations and tribes living in and around Palestine simply coalesced into a new nation. They somehow accepted the Hyksos story as their own and horribly distorted its particulars. In order to account for the origin of the Hyksos, they created a foundational myth using several insignificant figures –and not a few mythical ones—from the dim past as templates.

But why stop there? Why not take this revisionism to its logical conclusion? If there was no Exodus, no Decalogue, no theocracy under the Judges, and no Davidic kingdom, then why should we believe that the Jews are who they say they are? Hitchens of course cannot completely go down this road –he’s far too intelligent for that. However others have, and before the onset of DNA technology, a cottage industry arose which was able to throw considerable water on the idea of the concept of Jewish distinctiveness, at least for a considerable number of people of a curious disposition.

As such, not only are the tales of the Old Testament fantasy, but the uniqueness of the Jewish people themselves is as well. Before we can address these claims, a brief history is in order. Presently, the Jewish people, who are mainly the remnants of the Southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin (and the Levites who lived among them), can trace their ancestry back to the Roman dispersions that followed the First and Second Jewish Wars (AD 70 and 135, respectively). Depending on their point of final destination, they are denominated as Sephardim (those who migrated to Iberia/North Africa), Mizraichim (Egypt and the Levant), and Ashkenazim (Eastern European) Jews. An earlier group, the Romaniotes, settled in Greece some two centuries before the great diaspora of AD 70. Presently, the Ashkenazim constitute the overwhelming majority of modern Jewry, some 80 percent or greater according to some estimates.

It is among the Ashkenazim that the greater part of the demythologizers and revisionists have concentrated their fire. For them, the Jews of Eastern Europe are not really descendants of the Jews of Palestine but an interloper race of Khazars, a Turko-Mongolian tribe that inhabited the Crimea during the Middle Ages. As such, they are not racially related to the Sephardic, Mizraichic, or Romaniote Jews. In other words, they are not even of Palestinian origin at all.

The Khazars are certainly an interesting case study. As an empire, they flourished ca AD 700-1000. The importance of their empire to Byzantium can be discerned by the protocols which the Byzantines attached to its khagans, whom they deemed second in rank to the Caliph of Baghdad among the non-Christian potentates of the world.^xiii Intermarriage between the royal houses of Byzantium and the Khazars was practiced as well: Leo VI, the Wise, is often called Leo the Khazar because of his mother, who was a Khazar princess. Be that as it may, it was widely known that their khans converted to Judaism in order to keep a studied but respectful neutrality between the Orthodox Byzantines and the Baghdad Caliphate, both of whom brought exceeding pressure to convert them to their respective religions. It is assumed therefore that their boyar class likewise embraced Rabbinic Judaism. What is unknown is to what extent the rest of the population did so.

Some modern revisionists assume that the Khazars converted to Judaism en masse. Clearly the Byzantines were worried about such a scenario coming about. We know for example that St Cyril was sent to the royal court of the khagans in order to somehow steer them away from Judaism. As such, he undertook an intense study of Hebrew in order to debate with the rabbis who were then advising the Khazar nobility. Although his missionary effort failed, his knowledge of Hebrew came in handy during the later (and more successful) missionary effort in Moravia, when Cyril and his brother Methodius devised the so-called Cyrillic alphabet for the Slavonic language. (Although the Cyrillic alphabet is predominantly Greek, it contains at least five letters which are clearly Hebrew in origin.)

The most famous proponent of the Khazar mass-conversion into Eastern European Jewry was the late Arthur Koestler (who was himself Jewish). In his last work, The Thirteenth Tribe, he lays out an impressive case for this alleged event. Since then, other historiographers and revisionists have taken up the cause of the Khazars as the progenitors of the Jewish people. Unlike Koestler however, many who do so are of an unsavory nature and use this myth to buttress their antipathy to the Jews as a whole. In their febrile imaginings, the necessity of the Khazar origin for the Ashkenazim wipes away the taint of anti-Semitism because the modern Jews are not really Semites at all but a Turkic people who somehow finagled their way into the stock of Abraham, not unlike the ancient inhabitants of Palestine who we are told by other revisionists somehow created the Abrahamic foundation of Israel for reasons that we cannot ascertain. Hence the necessity for the state of Israel as a safe haven for the Jews is negated by this ploy.

Unfortunately for the revisionists, the belief that the Jews are an agglomeration of other peoples that somehow chose to merge into an insignificant (and persecuted) tribe with a curious and unnatural religion is no longer tenable. Thanks to modern DNA technology, we now know that the common descent of Jews all over the world is an established fact.^xiv This is not to say that the Jews are a “pure” race or that they don’t carry the genes of other nations, but that the high incidence of common genes found in isolated Jewish groups the world over proves to a reliable degree that their foundational “myth” is largely true.

At this point a further digression is in order. One of the strongest evidences for Jewish antiquity is found in the priestly caste of cohanim. Males who bear the name Cohen, Kagan, Kahn, etc., bear a common genetic mutation on the Y chromosome (which is only passed from father to son). This mutation is found in Jews throughout the world, even among populations which vary widely in physiognomy such as the Lemba of southern Africa who have predominantly negroid features. The frequency of mutation in this gene indicates a chronology which pinpoints the common ancestor of this caste who flourished in Canaan over three thousand years ago, roughly the time in which Aaron, the first high priest of Israel is traditionally believed to have lived. Therefore traditional Jewish impetus for endogamy is borne out by the genetic evidence –often not in their favor, given the high incidence of genetic diseases which Ashkenazic Jews are prone to.

Often, the study of DNA leads to some interesting (and unsettling) detours. For example, there is a high incidence of Jewish ancestry among a significant minority of Palestinian Arabs, especially among those families which have maintained a long, multi-generational existence in Palestine (as opposed to the majority who are descendants of migrants from other lands). Likewise, many of the Arab royal houses have some Jewish ancestry. This should be expected since most Arabic nobility is descended from Mohammed, who according to a well-established tradition, was married to at least one Jewess.^xv

Of course, there are significant hiccups in this tale of racial homogeneity. It is clear that the various physiognomies that exist among Jews throughout the world tell a tale of intermarriage with host populations. This is obvious. But much of this phenomenon can also be explained by genetic drift as well as by intermarriage (and rape). Genetic drift results when certain genetic traits become intensified due to isolation from a host population. These traits are usually part of a “founder effect,” which are augmented over time in endogamous populations. (The founder effect of the Ashkanazim indicates an original population of predominantly Jewish males from Palestine and a significant percentage of native European wives. The Sephardim and Mizrahim on the other hand were founded mainly by Jews who migrated as families from Palestine.) In any event, genetic drift underscores the presumption of endogamy –which in turn augments physiognomic differences—and of which the Jews have long been accused.

Therefore despite the febrile imaginings of many anti-Semites, the common descent of Jews throughout the world is not seriously in dispute. In the end all modern technology has done is catch up with the tradition and folklore. Hitchens, in his disdain for theism, feels instead nothing but derision for tradition, no doubt because his atheism demands it. Hence his insistent acceptance of the gradualist, heterogeneous origin of the Israelite people in the first millennium before Christ.

Think about it: if Hitchens is wrong and the Jews are who they say they are, then this raises unsettling questions about the impetus that compelled them to set themselves apart throughout their history. This begs a further question: why, especially, since it often was not in their national interest to do so? Indeed, the entire history of the Jewish people can be characterized on one level as one long, studied fight to resist assimilation, often against great odds and against people to whom they were culturally inferior. In addition, if the revisionist narrative of natural, heterogeneous growth is false, then what driving force compelled the Jews to view themselves as a people apart? The Bible tells us that this was the command of God, who spoke through His prophets. The improbability of the revisionist position clearly demands that we look at the reality of revelation, something that Hitchens and the other New Atheists cannot do.

The History of God

It is my contention that what exercises Hitchens and others like him is that the Jews are by their very existence as a nation evidence of divine providence, quite literally God working in history. The history of the Jews is more than a mere metaphor for the history of monotheism (though it is certainly that as well). Unlike the pagans whom they displaced in Canaan, the Israelite nation in its essence, its culture, and even religious taboos, created a whole different way of looking at the universe. For these people, life had meaning, history had a purpose –time was linear, not cyclical. This is not natural in the sense that Yahwism doesn’t conform to nature as it was then understood.

The peculiarities did not stop there. Their creation narrative was singular in that it established the fact that Yahweh, their God, actually spoke the universe into existence. For most pagans, the universe was eternal and their gods nothing more than primal forces of nature who somehow arose out of the elements of nature. Living with such expectations, Yahweh could not have been a mere tribal deity, but literally the God of gods. This certainly was unsettling to the Israelites who wanted nothing to do with the other nations; to their neighbors such presumption was nothing less than a cause for undying enmity. In any event, the exclusivity which Yahwism demanded from the Israelites mandated the exclusivity which they practiced. On a materialist level this leads to the unfortunate conclusion that Judaism is nothing less than a type of racialism. Indeed, according to some Darwinists, Judaism is nothing more than an evolutionary imperative which allows Semites to displace and overtake host populations.^xvi

The Prophet Jonah being thrown into the Sea. Catacomb of Saint Peter and Saint Marcellino, Rome, Itally, (4th century?).

Unless one is committed to materialism (which Darwinian naturalism requires), then we can confidently state that this exclusivity is not something that the Israelites chose for themselves. Even with the Temple cult firmly in place, they constantly relapsed into paganism, often due to the influence of the indigenous population which they conquered. Once their kingdom was destroyed and they were exiled to Babylon, they hoped that by retreating inward, then their dedication to Yahweh would somehow protect them as a nation and prevent them from paganism. Hence the post-exilic disdain for political nationhood and reliance instead upon the protection of Yahweh alone. Paradoxically, this led to a fundamental dichotomy in that if Yahweh were truly the only God, then He could not by rights be confined only to their race. And yet the evolution of monotheism took a decidedly tribal detour during this time, in which the Jews believed that Yahweh was indeed a God only for them. The prophet Jonah even thought that he could escape His dictates if he took off for Iberia, where he believed that the God of Israel had no power. (This view of Yahweh as the god of a people or place is more correctly called henotheism or monolatry.) Unfortunately for Jonah, he soon learned that God’s writ extended to the whole world, not just Palestine. Therefore, Jonah’s mission to the Ninevites , urging them to repentance was logical, even if he himself see the logic of it. There was no room for error: if Jonah failed, or if the Ninevites rejected his preaching, then they risked utter destruction. The dire nature of his mission presupposed the universality of God on several levels, not the least of which was that concern for the Ninevites was as vital to Yahweh as His concern for the Hebrews.

Although this was certainly troubling to Jonah, we can perhaps see why this narrative would be upsetting to the non-Jews who increasingly came to resent the presumption of the Jews, a nation of little accomplishment by way of architecture, culture, or political institutions. Hence the ancient, almost Darwinian imperative that seems to drive anti-Semitism; an impulse by the way, which predates the Church as we can see by the violent interaction between the Greeks and Jews during classical antiquity. Quite simply, the Jews are not only a metaphor for an eternal God, but living proof that this God works in the universe and demands adherence to timeless moral imperatives.

This rather elevated view that the Jews had for themselves was not one that was borne lightly. Indeed, it was just as upsetting to them as well as to their enemies. Why? Perhaps we can answer this question by restating the logical implications of true monotheism: if Yahweh was the God of the universe, then they could not reasonably keep God to themselves. True monotheism therefore demanded an exacting witness based on moral rectitude which was reinforced by the taboos normally associated with the Mosaic Law –taboos incidentally which were reinforced by the generous application of the death penalty. This inadvertently led to a type of evangelism, in which gentiles who had become disgusted with the mores of paganism eagerly responded to. Be that as it may, this was something that never before existed. The problems were intractable: how does one nation evangelize other nations? By what right did one nation feel that they had to convert other nations to their religion? This was simply unheard of. The Jews of the inter-testamental period certainly didn’t know how. And for our purposes, it’s not necessary to catalogue their efforts, many of which resulted in false starts, forced conversions (of Canaanites to Judaism), and philosophical disputations that all-too-often resulted in the acceptance of Hellenistic concepts. The one Jew who did understand that the God of Israel was universal and that His Temple was a house of prayer for all nations was killed for His efforts.

This is not insignificant. It is difficult to imagine in an anthropological sense which came first: the hundreds of cultural taboos of the Mosaic code or the universality of Yahwism. The Old Testament of course tells its own story of how this all came about. As much as Hitchens may not like it, he cannot seriously denigrate the fact of Yahwism and its activity upon the Israelites and their subsequent influence upon humanity. It is profound, so profound in fact, that it is nothing less than the very history of human civilization. Here, in a little area of the world, on the barren edge of the world’s first civilization, an insignificant, semi-nomadic, and savage group of tribesmen of no great accomplishment, chose somehow to segregate themselves from their pagan neighbors and forge a national consensus devoted to a singular, jealous Deity who demanded that they view the world in a way that no other group of people could conceive. The Israelites alone among all nations broke free of the iron hand of fate which governed all societies at that time. For them, time was linear, it had a purpose. Life had consequences, either in this world or the next. For the pagans an iron fate governed all; there was no meaning —and certainly no hope—prayer was merely ritualized bribery.

Not even the Greeks, for all their sheer brilliance could break the bonds of a cruel fate which nature had imposed on them. Despite their devotion to rationality and philosophy, Greek civilization invariably reverted to the prevailing paganism. The astronomy of Anaxogoras devolved into astrology; the science of Aristotle into alchemy; and the philosophy of Socrates into sophistry. The wise men of the Greeks, who came up with philosophy as a way of giving some meaning to the ubiquitous despair of paganism were the exception in Greece, not the rule.

Mars Hill (Areopagus), where the Apostle Paul addressed the Athenian philosophers (Acts 17).

It was not for want of trying however. Thoughtful Greeks of the post-Socratic period came to question the validity of the Olympian pantheon. Why worship beings that were no better than flawed humans albeit on an immortal, superhuman scale? For some of these rationalists, there had to be a supreme being, eternally existent, one who was just in His essence, not merely powerful. Otherwise, justice had no meaning. This was the concept behind the “unknown god” that Paul preached to the Athenians about on Mars Hill (Acts 17). Think of it: in a boisterous, cosmopolitan city like Athens, the intellectual capital of the Roman Empire, a group of disgruntled and questioning men sought permission from the city fathers in order to erect an altar to this unknown god, on a site in which the supreme court of Athens met to deliberate the great events of the day. Yet for all their brilliance and erudition, the Greeks could only, just barely, peer beyond the veil and discern the idea of true monotheism. Try as they might, they couldn’t let go of their own heroic pretensions. How can a God become a servant and die the horrible death of a criminal for all men—even barbarians even no less? The Greeks never believed that all men were deserving of equality, nor did they worry about concepts such as salvation. That the high priest of the Jews had to go into their national temple and offer sacrifice to God on behalf of the sins of the entire nation was incomprehensible. For all men, even servants? And what is sin? How can it cut off man from God? (After all, the gods themselves engage in sin, therefore to the Greeks there really couldn’t be any such a thing as sin, just loss of virtue, which marked a man for life.)

Instead, it was a nation of semi-nomadic Semites whose peculiarities were legend, who were able to view their God as a God for all men, even for the despised of the world. Such a concept could only arise from revelation, an uncomfortable prospect for Hitchens whose virulent anti-theism cannot brook such a prospect. Regardless, the Jews certainly believed in revelation. Their nation began with the Exodus and their law was codified by the revelation on Sinai. Even their most powerful kings were brought to heel by renegades who claimed to speak for Yahweh. Quite simply, the taboos of the Mosaic covenant were the first in history to take into account the very concept of sin and its debilitating effects on the people as a whole. Sacrifice was not offered to appease God, but to atone for the sins of the people. Outside of this ethos, there is no way that the prophetic corpus makes any sense. Leaving aside this theological view of history and concentrating instead on a rationalist view, there is nothing in the historical achievements of the Israelite people—meager as they were—that would lead us to believe that they could formulate such concepts on their own.

And if there is no God, then why did the Israelites alone among all the nations of the world develop such concepts as sin, atonement, and moral rectitude?

Is the Holocaust also a Fable?

Hitchens is unaware of how perilous his naivete is, how it plays into the hands of other revisionists at this point. His belief-system is based in part on a superficial understanding of archaeology, but given his sanction, its logic can be turned to nefarious purposes. Consider: if there is no evidence for the Exodus, and if the Jews are a made-up people of no common origin, then why must one believe in the Holocaust? To be sure, the folk-memory for the Holocaust is vast. In addition, it occurred within living memory. Yet like the Exodus, revisionists have been able to pour much cold water on the particulars of that event to an unsettling extent. Some have gone so far as to examine the physical structures of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald that remain and come to the conclusion that although mass murders certainly took place there, the limited physical space, the paucity of roads and railways leading to them, and the overstretched German war effort in general made it unlikely that upwards of twelve million people could have been killed in the concentration camps, of which six million were Jews and half a million Gypsies. Instead much smaller numbers are usually proffered: in the range of a quarter of a million to 2 million at the outside.

The gates of Dachau

Certainly Hitchens would bristle at such a comparison. Unfortunately, in watching Hitchens argue against the Exodus, one can see an uncanny (if unwitting) resemblance in the argumentation of many Holocaust deniers. In both cases, the reliance on historical reductionism is paramount. A doubt raised here, an event discounted there, is often all that is necessary to throw dust on a cherished narrative. Hitchens himself is guilty of whitewashing tyrants who tried to eradicate Judaism. He only turned against Saddam Hussein when the latter chose to embrace Islamofascism, otherwise, he championed this brute during the First Gulf War which took place in 1991. Saddam’s previous depredations were seemingly of no consequence, including the complete eradication of the Jewish presence within Iraq.^xvii This is of a piece with his fawning adulation of Antiochus, the Greco-Syrian king who tried to abolish all vestiges of Judaism some twenty-three centuries ago (as noted earlier). To put not too fine a point on it, the fact that he goes on to regret the fact that the Jews refused to succumb to Antiochus’ tyranny calls into mind his mental balance.^xviii To my mind this is as reprehensible as reading the diatribes of Holocaust-deniers who often refer to a more recent tyrant as “Adolf Hitler of blessed memory.”

The bad faith displayed by most Holocaust deniers is apparent. Many are haters, pure and simple. Others (mostly Arabs who are Semites themselves), bear an animus to the state of Israel, which they feel with some justification is a creation to assuage the guilt of the West in its treatment of the European Jewry. Some of the more virulent anti-Semites believe that the entire narrative was created out of whole cloth in order to give rise to the necessity for the Jewish state in the first place. And of course, it wasn’t really Jews who were killed there but Khazars. The incoherence of this position can be best summed up by the witticism leveled against the present Islamofascist regime of Iran: “The Holocaust never happened, now kindly ignore us as we prepare for the next one.”

Is Hitchens is an anti-Semite? Certainly he is not a Holocaust denier. That being said, when it comes to theism he uses the same type of bad faith as the assorted cretins that constitute the vast majority of anti-Semites the world over. Of this there can be no doubt. Even when it comes to Judaism his words provide cover to anti-Semites. Consider this particular diatribe:

…Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam.^xix

And of course his facile dismissal of the Old Testament and his inability to see that the narrative of Israel –which is the story of God working in space and time—proves to my mind that he can’t see it, or won’t see it. Other revisionists certainly see this. Consider this statement from Finkelstein, who writes that the story of the Bible is radically unlike the royal sagas and epic myths of the other nations. What is different about the Old Testament is that,

…It offers a complex yet clear vision of why history has unfolded for the people of Israel –and indeed the entire world—in a pattern directly connected to demands and promises of God. The people of Israel are the central actors in this drama. Their behavior and adherence to God’s commandments determine the direction in which history will flow. It is up to the people of Israel…to determine the fate of the world.

Unfortunately, such laudatory words about the Bible and the Jews are anathema to Hitchens. For Hitchens his lodestar is the uber-rationalism of Socrates, the alleged “founder of his school” of skepticism. In his eyes, it was Athens, not Jerusalem, rationalism, not revelation which made scientific inquiry possible. Unfortunately, even here, Hitchens’ understanding of history is flawed. To be sure it was the West where science arose, but not in the Academy of Plato or the Lycaeum of Aristotle; it was instead in the monasteries of the Franciscan Order of the High Middle Ages that that the scientific method was first proposed, in the intermissions between the various liturgical offices while Gregorian hymns were being chanted in the background. It was the synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem which was found only in Christendom that made the Enlightenment—Hitchens’ golden age—possible.

In the pell-mell rush to demean the Bible and its moral code, Hitchens doesn’t realize that he won’t able to have his cake and eat it too. His admirable humanism, even his tenacious moralism, is a direct consequence of the prophetic corpus of the Old Testament. There were no Hebrew philosophers and no Socratic dialogue in Israel or Judah. There was no natural imperative which called the ancient Hebrews to view all of their people as being equally sons of God. But there was morality, and this was given to the prophets by God. The story of Israel is the story of human civilization and the morality which makes civilization possible. As admirable as Athens was, it could never spread its gospel of reason past the Greek world. Its own civilization could not withstand immorality and it fell to the barbarians. Had it not been for the Jews, then paganism would be the order of the day. Because God exists, and because the Jews strove to follow His commandments (however imperfectly), mankind was redeemed from the iron grip of a remorseless fate. The miraculous trumped the magical and moral conscience triumphed for all time.

If Hitchens strives to maintain his rigid adherence to belief in good and evil, then he cannot logically do so based on Darwinism or any such materialist presuppositions. The very concepts themselves arise outside the physical order itself. They presuppose transcendence. The murderous rage of the anti-Semite is the revenge of pagan nature against Yahweh, who is not a force of nature but the Creator of it. The very existence of the Jew is physical proof of the God of Israel and that He works in space and time. This of course is not the animating principle of the New Atheism but it will be the murderous reality of the real atheists, whose materialist instincts see Hitchens’ moralism for what it is: an illogical conceit that cannot withstand the inevitable lex talionis that governs nature and for which they yearn.

The irony is palpable: Hitchens’ anti-Judaic diatribes may yet prepare the way for another Holocaust. And the moralism to which he subscribes will prove to be thin gruel indeed to those who hunger for reasons to fight such a horrible outcome.

ENDNOTES

i. Benjamin Kerstein, “Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem,” (Dec 13, 2010, www.jewishideasdaily.com).

ii. Ian Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), p 51.

iii. Nov 18, 2010, Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas. “Debate with Bill Dembski.”

iv. Israel Finkelstein and Neal Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (Touchstone: New York, 2001).

v. Ibid. p 65.

vi. A good place to start would be The Dead Sea Scrolls in History, edited by Herschel Schanks (Puttnam: New York, 1977).

vii. Op. Cit.

viii. Ibid. pp 70-1.

ix. Ibid. p 68.

x. Ibid. p 69.

xi. Kerstein, Op cit.

xii. Dmitri Ouspensky, Byzantium and the Slavs, (Crestwood: SVS Press, 199), pp 40-42.

xiii. The field of genetic Judaism is a fertile one. For an introductory overview that is comprehensible to laymen, see for example Nicholas Wade, “New Light on Origins of Ashkenazi in Europe” (www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/ science/14gene.html?pagewanted=print) and David Storobin, “Palestinian Genes Show Arab, Jewish, European, and Black-African Ancestry” (www.physicsforums.com /archive/index.php/t-58322.html).

xiv. The field of crypto-Judaism is a fascinating one. It appears that many historical figures (such as Christopher Columbus) may have had Jewish ancestry, at least in part. This also includes certain unsavory figures such as Fidel Castro, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and even Adolf Hitler.

xv. See for example the collected works of Kevin MacDonald, including The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analsysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (2001), Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (2003), and A People that shall Dwell Apart: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy with Diaspora Peoples (1994). The primary thesis of MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, is that Judaism is an evolutionary survival mechanism that Jews have employed in order to dominate others by degrading host nations. Willis Carto, a founder of the Institute for Historical Review (the leading Holocaust denial institution), has stated essentially the same position as well. To be fair to MacDonald, he is no denialist nor does he self-describe himself as an anti-Semite, yet his Darwinian presuppositions force him to see not only the racialism inherent in his understanding of Judaism, but the inevitable backlash that such xenophobia and exclusivity causes –backlashes which take the form of pogroms and outright genocides. As such, MacDonald exonerates anti-Semitism by the same materialistic token that supposedly gives rise to Semitism in the first place.

xvi. As recently as the 1940s, Jews constituted almost 40 percent of the population of Baghdad.

xvii. Kerstein, Op cit. Kerstein goes up to the edge of the precipice and all but labels Hitchens an anti-Semite. Though I cannot agree, Hitchens has made it difficult for his admirers (of whom I am one) to defend his tactics at times. To put not too fine a point on it, Hitchens has all-too-often displayed a type of sophistry that goes out of its way to excuse the worst Nazi-philic excesses and outright racism as it is practiced by Palestinians. His defense of Voltaire (who was a notorious anti-Semite) is particularly troubling, but explains much in the way of his love for the Enlightenment of which Voltaire was a leading light.

xviii. Ibid.

George C. Michalopulos

George C Michalopulos, is a layman in the Orthodox Church in America. He was born in Tulsa, OK where he resides and works. George is active in Church affairs, having served as parish council president at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and as Senior Warden at Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church. Together with Deacon Ezra Ham, he wrote ‘American Orthodox Church: A History of Its Beginnings‘ (Regina Orthodox Press: 2003). He is married to Margaret and has two sons, Constantine and Michael.

Peter and Helen Evans: Bishops wont act? Ask for a blessing, then do it yourself!

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Peter and Helen Evans edit the Politics and Prayer website.

We read comments on this blog and also hear people complaining that “the Bishops should proclaim…” a Day of Prayer or March for Life or any number of semi-public events. Let us suggest that we don’t have to wait for a proclamation. We don’t have to wait to be told what to do. Various cities around the United States are having their own March for Life, people regularly dedicate a day for prayer and fasting or hold vigil outside an abortion clinic, and invite anyone who wants to pray – even non-Orthodox – to join in. When you think about it, you probably don’t want the Church council, or any other committee, involved to water down the event.

Therefore, organize the event yourself, and then ask for a blessing. We Orthodox can stand in church, the public square, in municipal buildings and witness our faith, then ask for a blessing. We do not have to wait for a proclamation, just ask for a blessing.

In the coming months are several events including the National Bible Marathon (http://www.dcbiblemarathon.org/Home.html). You can plan one in your state capitol, city hall or even town flag pole and then ask for a blessing. Start out with just a few people and it will grow. You might even help grow your church!

The National Day of Prayer is coming up in May (http://nationaldayofprayer.org/). We must not let prayer be driven out of the public square. Plan your own and then ask for a blessing. Advertise in your church bulletin but also in Craigslist, Facebook and your other favorite social networking sites, on bulletin boards in supermarkets and coffee shops, pass out flyers to friends. Your event will grow over time. If you plan an event for the National Day of Prayer, post it on their website, it will definitely draw people.

The Spirit moves in our lives from the inside outwards, not just from the top down. Don’t wait for a proclamation, ask for a blessing.

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