Whom FrontPage welcomes, and whom it excludes

I’ve long considered it one of the most disgraceful things about the American “conservative” movement that it has welcomed within its publications the leftist, hate-filled, anti-Christian bigot Christopher Hitchens, for no reason other than that he supports the “war on terror.” Now FrontPage Magazine, from which I have been barred for my unspecified “racist and offensive” positions, not only publishes this leftist bigot but features him in an interview, presenting his vile anti-Christian message as its own. Here is the headline on FP’s main page:

god Is Not Great
By Jamie Glazov
Christopher Hitchens discusses how religion poisons everything.

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Ben W. writes:

What took me aback about this interview is how warmly Glazov rolled out the welcome mat for Hitchens’s anti-theism attitudes. At the beginning Glazov states how much he agrees with Hitchens’s analysis, and in conclusion he says that much of what Hitchens says is needed. His own counterbalance to Hitchens is rather tepid for one who considers himself a Christian.

From looking at pictures of Hitchens, he comes across as an “intellectual poseur”—the hard drinking, open shirted, ragged hair look—that one came to expect from the stereotypical British sunk-in-the-dumps talk-meisters (like Dylan Thomas) exported to the U.S.

Paul K. writes:

Whatever his faults, I take Hitchens for an educated man, and thus find inexplicable his pronouncement that, “Whereas scriptural authority WAS required, for example, to justify racism and slavery in the first place.”

To what scriptural authority can Hitchens possibly be referring, since both racism and slavery predate any written language by millennia?

By the way, I was struck by the interviewer’s obsequious tone. In awe of Hitchens’s celebrity, media presence, and social status no doubt; unfortunate priorities in an interviewer who identifies himself as religious.

LA replies:

Hitchens probably follows Dinesh D’Souza who defines racism very narrowly as only the Western racism of the last 300 years and thus is enabled to say that only the West is racist.

I am surprised that Glazov identifies himself as religious. I’ve never seen anything in his writing remotely suggesting a religious orientation. Quite the opposite, as he comes across like a secular libertarian.

Paul K. replies:

Here are some Glazov quotes from the interview:

“I was very moved by your book—a very profound and powerful read. A lot of what you said really needed to be said, and I guess it took someone like you to say it in the potent, wise and courageous way that you did. I say this, incidentally, as confusing as it may be to some readers, as a person of the Christian faith. I value and appreciate your slicing attack on the hypocrites and slime who have caused so much pain in the name of religion.”

“I must say that, for me, the existence of God is proven to me every day in almost everything I see. Especially the existence of love. When I see a child crave it’s mother’s and father’s love, and beg for a hug, I see God. When I see our need for love from one another, I see him. Surely our need for love, as one example, is not socially constructed or a reality that was just created by chance or fluke…. And surely evil is a spiritual force as well. This is just my own faith and perspective of course. But what is your perspective on these things?”

“Your point is a strong one. Yes, a non-believer can be as equally moral as a religious person and a person can be moral without being religious.”

“There remains the question of where the notion of “morality” comes from that the non-religious person may engage in. Isn’t it only because of religion that morality exists in the first place? If there is no God, and if there is no belief in God, then does morality even have any meaning?”

“But perhaps these questions are just a reflection of my own personal faith.”

“In any case, our time is almost up my friend. Christopher Hitchens, thank you kindly for joining us. Your book is a valuable intellectual gift.”

LA replies:

Well, Glazov’s statements about seeing God are astonishing to me. He sounds sincere. Still, considering his past paeans to unlimited sexual freedom as the very definition of the West, his self-identification as a Christian remains suspect.

For example, in his FP debate with Dinesh D’Souza just a couple of months ago, Glazov repeatedly insisted that a woman must be “free to do whatever she wants with her body,” mocked the idea that a society should have any constraints at all on sexual and expressive behavior, and even put the word “morality” in scare quotes.

“A woman is free to do whatever she wants with her body,” is a slogan from the hard-core pro-abortion left. Its not what you would expect to hear from a person who calls himself a Christian.

Also, Glazov’s experience of seeing God (and I still can’t get over my amazement of seeing Glazov openly talk this way) is more like Whitman than like Christianity, as in this great passage from Leaves of Grass:

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Now I’m not taking anything away from these beautiful lines, but Whitman of course was not a Christian but a pantheist. And pantheism can operate very readily in conjunction with New Age-ism, Sexual Liberationism, even Hitlerism.

Even more decisive, a person who calls himself a Christian while warmly embracing a book called, “How Religion [meaning Christianity] Poisons Everything,” is, at best, inventing some Christianity of his own.

So, if Glazov is a Christian, maybe it’s some kind of New Age Christianity which gets to define itself as Christian regardless of its actual content, for example, as a Christianity that affirms women’s right to do with her body whatever she wants and wherever she wants; or as a Christianity that affirms that religion poisons everything. After all, to paraphrase what the liberal nominalist Daniel Pipes said about Islam, Christians can define Christianity any way they like.

Rachael S. writes:

It doesn’t surprise me that an agnostic/former-leftist/still-considers-himself-a-classic-liberal would publish a God-Hater on God-hating while publicly despising you.

To Mr. Frontpage, and others like him, liberalism overarches all. You painstakingly craft an objective argument against liberalism based (deep down) on God; which is an anathema to Mr. Frontpage.

Even though he was stabbing you in the back for a year by not publishing you and calling you a racist, you had been fighting him and his entire ideology from the beginning, because you see liberalism as what ails us.

He is trying to get people to return to a kinder, gentler liberalism (a chimera much like moderate Islam).

For you the first-mover of your struggle is God. For Mr. Frontpage it is the Self.

Such players cannot be comrades in arms.

LA replies:

Leaving aside the specific behavior of Mr. Frontpage (who, let us not forget, published many worthwhile traditionalist articles that no other mainstream conservative editor would have published), it is my belief that religious Westerners, which basically means Christians and Jews, can and must be allies with non-believing Westerners in defense of our common civilization. However, if the Christian West and the non-believing West are to work together, one of them must be the more dominant party. And that dominant party must be Christianity, not non-belief. The non-believing must defer to the religious, and the religious must tolerate the non-believing, on the condition that the non-believing defer to religion. What I mean by deference is not that everyone must kow-tow to any religious statement; religious figures and denominatons say and do objectionable things and they can be criticized like anyone else. Rather, what I mean by deference is that religion as such, Christianity as such, is not publicly disrespected or attacked. It means that someone who wrote a book called “How religion poisons everything” would have been ridden out of town on a rail. Basic deference toward religion, meaning essentially Christianity plus Judaism, was the way of our society at least up through the end of World War II, and we were a vastly healthier society politically than Europe.

Equality between religion and non-belief is not possible, because one or the other will be dominant. If the dominant party is non-belief, the society sinks, and we end up with a vicious religion hater like Hitchens as a respected figure. Again, can you imagine a Christopher Hitchens in America in, say, 1960? Mainstream society, even liberal mainstream society, would not have tolerated him. He would have been shoved off into the dark corners where he belongs. Yet now he is a figure celebrated by “conservatives,” even (to take Jamie Glazov’s self-description at face value) by “Christian conservatives.”

Rachael S. replies:

I agree with you that religion and non-belief cannot be equal, but I disagree that we must be allies with non-believers. At best there can only be a cease-fire between them and us. What is to force them to “defer” to religion? In the 1960s mainstream society was probably just beginning to see the fruits of decades of non-belief surfacing in the media; small forays of disrespect that were not tolerated immediately (John Lennon’s comment about being “bigger than Jesus” comes to mind) but nevertheless eroded respect for religion (and in turn, family, marriage, authority, etc). I doubt that we can make liberals defer to religion again in the way they did before, because liberalism (the political side of the Self that turns away from God) has self-actualized, and will not willingly become subordinate as far as I can see. How do you think that would be realized?

LA replies:

By people on our side saying something like what I said above: that we need to support certain measures to save our civilization, so we’re in this together, but it cannot work if the secualists are carrying out an anti-Christianity campaign. So all we’re really demanding is that they cease the anti-Christianity and return to the pre-Sixties deference to religion, a very modest and undemanding requirement really.

Laura W. writes:

You imagine a world where faith receives the deference of non-believers. Hard to conceive unless Christianity becomes beautiful again. I have a lot of sympathy for the simple aesthetic revulsion many non-believers carry toward Christianity, with all its guitar-strumming, Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul corniness. I can challenge them on a theoretical level, but not here. Judging from the sheer lack of originality in his arguments, I don’t think Christopher Hitchens really has thought about Christianity that much. He may just think it’s all so hideously tacky, it couldn’t possibly be true. Faith once brought the faithless such beauty it silenced them.

LA replies

> You imagine a world where faith receives the deference of non-believers. Hard to conceive unless Christianity becomes beautiful again.

Excellent point.

But your objection is the same objection that can be made and is made to everything I say. Everything I talk about requires and assumes a revivification and restoration that in pragmatic terms is very unlikely. Without that R&R, all the negative developments will continue leading to destruction.

After all, what does it mean to say that liberalism is the dominant belief of the West, that liberalism is destroying the West, and that we must renounce liberalism, unless it means that the existing order must be turned over if we are to survive? The very horribleness of our situation means that only events on the order of the miraculous can help us.

As I’ve said before to other readers, the objection that my ideas are very unlikely is to me not an objection but rather the starting point of everything I’m saying. We’re starting at some point half way down in the pits. We either reverse direction and start to rise, or we continue to sink.

But to return to the present issue, I’m not not expecting that non-believers bow down to Christianity, but that they accept and respect the basic Christian background and character of our society and stop calling for the further secularization of society (which is already very secularized, though not as much as in Godless Europe).

Laura replies:

I never said your ideas were very unlikely at all. In fact, I believe the return of beauty and deference will happen. I said that your idea of non-believers showing deference to believers won’t happen unless there is a return of beauty.

Laura continues:

That Roosevelt prayer, filled as it is with thousands of years of conviction and refinement, is a good example. Could you imagine the Christopher Hitchens of the world speaking so boorishly if prayers like this were uttered in public by our leaders?

LA replies:

Wonderful insight.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2007 09:38 AM | Send