Science Talk

Ramabriga · Guest

Author Chris Hedges

“The new atheists are secular fundamentalists”
Author Chris Hedges has an issue with the "new athiests," namely that they're no better than
those they profess to oppose, the Christian fundamentalists. Muslims and other religious
minorities are often stuck in the middle.
By Wajahat Ali, June 29, 2008

Opposites attract

For many Americans, the rise of religious fundamentalism rides shotgun in the Republican
bandwagon. The Evangelical movement, in particular, has emerged as an influential and lucrative
voice throwing considerable weight in the political arena. To appease concerns that a
politician lacks “piety,” both Republicans and Democrats, including John McCain and Barack
Obama, stress their “faith” and “Christian values." Recently, a growing wave of
“anti-religious” texts, most notably those authored by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, has
emerged to combat the arrogance of religiosity while making a case for atheism and secularism.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Chris Hedges, who received the 2002 Amnesty
International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, has spent several years researching
both groups and concludes that although their ideologies differ, their shared elitism,
ignorance and reactionary rhetoric is soaked in bigotry, racism and exclusivity. In his book
American Fascists, Hedges tackles the poisonous marriage of extremist, right wing religious
narrative with big money politics. In his latest work, I Don’t Believe In Atheists, Hedges
condemns the “New Fundamentalists,” such as Hitchens and Harris, as profiteers who “trade
absurdity [religious extremism] for absurdity [fundamentalist secularism]” and justify foreign
invasions, the Iraq War, and racism under the guise of secular enlightenment. Chris Hedges
spoke with altmuslim Associate Editor Wajahat Ali to discuss these issues in detail.

Congratulations on the publication of your new book, “I Don’t Believe in Atheism”. Let’s start
off with that and bridge into the themes of your previous book, “American Fascist”

HEDGES: I spent almost 20 years abroad as a foreign correspondent and 7 of those years in the
Middle East as bureau chief of the New York Times. But before I went into journalism, I began
as a freelance reporter covering the war in El Salvador. I was a seminary student, having
graduated from Harvard Divinity School. And I met a man there named James Luther Adam, who had
actually been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 working for the so-called “confessing church,” this
group of individuals – Martin E. Muller, Bonhofer, Albert Schweizer. And he was eventually
picked up by the Gestapo and thrown out of Germany.

When I was a student in the early 1980’s, it was the beginning of this rise of this Christian
movement that wanted to take political power and create a so-called “Christian nation,” which
was something going back to 1740. And Adams told us that when we were his age, which was 80,
that we would all be fighting the Christian facists.

I came back to the United States and saw how these groups had moved from the margins of
American society to literally the epicentre of power in the legislative, executive, and
judicial branches of government. They had set up powerful systems of indoctrination through
Christian radio and television as well as Christian schools.

I’ve been primarily a war correspondent (mentions book) and knew that I really had to turn my
attention to the Christian right. They reminded me very much of this sort of proto-fascist
movements that I covered, for instance, in the former Yugoslavia, the ethnic nationalist
movements of the Serbs, the Croats in particular. So I spent 2 years researching this book. I
travelled all over the country. I sat in pro-life weekends in Pennsylvania and creationist
seminars and conversion workshops and came away with the belief that the radical Christian
right is the most dangerous mass movement in American history.

And my book is fierce – it’s called American Fascists. Now, I finished that book as a
three-year project and one of the things that disturbs me most about this movement is its
racism, bigotry, and intolerance, not only towards Muslims, but towards gays and lesbians,
women, and immigrants. The language they use from the inside of the movement is terrifying. It
is really an attempt to dehumanise, to take away the legitimacy of people who have other ways
of believing or being. And that’s part of my anger towards the movement, that they cloak this
in religious language.

When the book came out and I was asked to go, in May a year ago, to UCLA to debate Sam Harris,
who had written Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith. Two days later, I flew to
San Francisco and went to Berkeley to debate Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God is Not Great.
I hadn’t paid attention to these so-called “new athiests.” They’re not a political threat the
way the radical Christian right is. Athiesm has a long and honored tradition in Western
intellectual thought. Most of the great theological reformers, both philosophical and religious
were in their day attacked as atheists and heretics – from Spinoza to Martin Luther. No serious
student of religion can ignore the writings of Nietschze or Sartre or Camus. I mean, Nietschze,
who was a mixture of brilliance and insanity, understood the moral consequences of a world
where God was dead – the moral nihilism that it engendered.

So I actually came fairly predisposed to accept that there’s nothing dangerous about people who
don’t believe in God. And I have lived in enough cultures to know that there are many people of
great moral probity and courage who rise to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed who
don’t resort to religious language, religious ritual or other meaning in religious symbols.
Just as there are many people who use religion as a cloak to play out acts of bigotry,
oppression, and intolerance.

But when I sat down and read their work, and then of course had to debate them in a public
forum, I was appalled at how they essentially co-opted secular language to present the same
kind of chauvinism, intolerance, and bigotry that we see in the Christian right.

Is that why you labelled them the “New Fundamentalists”?

They are. They’re secular fundamentalists. They divide the world into us and them – those who
are worthy of moral consideration and those who are not. They externalise evil. Evil is not
something that you struggle with within yourself. Evil is embodied in religion. And therefore,
once you eradicate religion and religious believers, you take a huge step forward in terms of
human progress.

I find that it’s, like the Christian right, a fear based movement. It’s a movement that is very
much a reaction to 9/11. The kinds of things that they write about Muslims could be lifted from
the most rabid sermon by a radical fundamentalist. I mean Sam Harris, in his book The End of
Faith, asks us to consider carrying out a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. He has a long
defense of torture. Christopher Hitchens is an apologist for pre-emptive war and also speaks in
the crude, racist terms that Harris uses to describe 1 billion people – one fifth of the
world’s population.

You’re right, and yet they’re deemed the new intellectuals of the 21st century by certain
proponents. Why have they emerged as these “intellectuals” who defend what many say is a
defenseless war?

Well, they’re not intellectuals, that’s the whole point. They’re culturally, historically,
linguistically illiterate. They don’t know anything about the Middle East. They don’t speak
Arabic. They don’t know anything about Islam. They have a cartoonish vision of Islam and the
Muslim world that is, from somebody who spent 7 years living there, is untrue. Of course, this
is a quality they share with the fundamentalists. They don’t need to investigate other ways of
being, thinking, other cultures, because they have adopted this repugnant moral superiority
that our way is the best and either you are converted to our way of believing and thinking or
you should be eradicated. And that’s what the Christian right does.

So you have, within these new athiests, a convergence, a political convergence with the
Christian right who, supposedly, they’ve set themselves up against. If you look at the kinds of
things that Christopher Hitchens writes and says about the Muslim world, it could be lifted
from the most rabid sermon from a Christian fundamentalist.

It’s appalling. What stunned me was how they have seduced so many people on the secular left
with what is garbage. They even corrupt science, saying to the proponents of science that what
they have done is corrupt evolutionary biology. I mean, Darwin never argued that we were
morally advancing as a species. In fact, Darwin argued the opposite and, I think, correctly
that humans are victims of our irrational, animal nature. Darwin was just too good a scientist.
He knew the species accrued mutations, but never knew where it ended up.

Well, these people have distorted evolutionary biology to argue that we can morally advance as
a species and that there are human impediments to progress - in this case, they go after
Muslims, in particular – and that we have to remove these impediments to advance forward. It’s
just a naïve, utopian vision that is embraced by the radical Christian right and the reason
it’s so frightening is because they think they have a right to use violence in order to achieve
this form of self delusion, which is a more perfect world.

And that’s what terrifies me. These people are apologists for catastrophic, apocalyptic
violence wielded against people that they have dehumanised, people who no longer have human
qualities, people who are just abstractions of hate and evil who have to be done away with. And
while I don’t see that the athiests as a political threat the way that the radical Christian
right is a political threat, what worries me is that – I spent a year of my life covering Al
Qaeda for the New York Times and every intelligence team I ever interviewed never used the word
“if” we would suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, but “when.”

So when we suffer another attack, what I worry about is a convergence of two apocalyptic,
fundamentalist movements within American society who call for horrific bloodletting, especially
against the Muslim world, if it’s deemed that this terrorism came out of the Muslim world. As
well as I believe that a persecution of 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. I
think my anger towards the Christian right and my anger towards these new athiests is at its
core really a plea for complexity, for more understanding, for empathy, and for an
understanding of our own complicity in acts of atrocity.

I mean, the idea that someone reads the Quran and becomes a suicide bomber is naïve and
frighteningly ignorant of the reality of oppression. What is it that goes into creating an act
that desperate? It’s the long, slow drip of abuse, repression, indignity, collective
humiliation and until we understand what it is that creates these kinds of activities, we won’t
be able to deal with them.

I think we also have to understand, as someone who has stood in Gaza as Israeli pirated F-16
jets dropped 1,000 lb iron fragmentation bombs on refugee camps – something that even the
apartheid regime in South Africa didn’t do – we have to begin to face the fact that we do not
represent virtue and good and nobility many times. Certainly we don’t in Iraq.

Iraq, by the way, is a perfect example of the danger of utopian vision. If you took the 1,000
to 10,000 Arabists in this country – and by that I mean people who speak Arabic and who have
lived for a long period of time in the Middle East – you could not have found probably more
than 10 that thought invading and occupying Iraq was a good idea. The idea that we would be
greeted as liberators, the idea that the oil revenues would pay for reconstruction, the idea
that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and emanate outwards to transform the Middle East
was a non-reality based belief system. And that’s why utopian visions backed by violence are
dangerous. They’re not connected with reality. Athiests and the Christian right are essentially
violent, utopian movements.

As a Muslim-American who actually went to an all-boys Catholic school, believe it or not, for
four years and read the Bible… after reading the Bible, I always felt perplexed by the actions
and rhetoric of those who claim that America is a “Christian” nation or a “secular” nation. Why
are humbleness, conciliation, apology, admitting ones mistakes – even with the new foreign
policy in Iraq – seen as such signs of weakness when in the Bible, these are seen as acts of
virtue.

Well, let’s be clear. There are passages in the Bible that are morally repugnant. You know, God
blesses acts of righteous genocide in Exodus. The Gospel of John has very raw anti-Semitism.
Paul’s letters are filled with misogyny and homophobia. There’s a great line by the theologian
Reinhold Lieber, “Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” You
can find anything you want to justify any moral action you want. That’s true of every religious
text, from the Quran to Bible to the Bhagavad Gita. That’s true.
And so, the Christian right will pull these repugnant passages from the Book of Daniel, the
Book of Revelations – which are bloody books about apocalyptic violence – and use it to promote
an ideology that is immoral and, I think, deeply at its core, anti-religion.

But I’m not naïve about the Bible. I spent many years studying it. I think what’s most
frightening is what this movement has done – the Christian right – is that they have fused the
iconography and language of Christianity with the iconography and language of American
nationalism. Once you do that, you essentially create a fascist ideology, which is what they’ve
done.

And what’s fascinating about the new athiests is that while they hate the Christian right,
their ideology is no different. It is an ideology that really seeks to dehumanise everyone
who’s not like us. Is it anti-religious? Of course. It’s anti-Muslim, it’s anti-Christian, it’s
anti-Hindu, it’s anti-Jewish, if you look at what are the core values of authentic religious
belief. But there’s no shortage of people who have used religion – in the Islamic world, in the
Christian world, in every religious tradition – to countenance abuse and violence.

The Christian right talks often about acculturating America with the Christian religion. What
they’ve done, in fact, acculturate the Christian religion with the worst aspects of American
capitalism and American imperialism. Whatever you think of Jesus, he was clearly a pacifist.
I’m not a pacifist, by the way, but Jesus clearly was. The idea that Jesus would somehow exhort
us on to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq is, as you frankly point out, a phenomenal misreading of the
Four Gospels.

Why does religion seem to be such a susceptible and successful vehicle for selfish political
ideologies to hijack.

It’s not just religion. I think any essentially fundamentalist view that divides the world into
us and them and externalises evil – evil is embodied in those who are outside of us – you can
do that through communism, fascism, Baathism – any system can do that. Religion has certainly
been used like that many, many times. I think what is effective about it is that you sanctify
yourself, you sanctify your group. And by sanctifying your group, you give yourself the right
to carry out sacred violence. That’s why the mixture between religious belief and violent
utopian projects is so frightening. We see it here and we see it in the Middle East. These
people are, frankly, cut from the same cloth.

We’ve heard again and again - religion is the opiate of the masses or without religion there
would be no global warfare, separation, and hatred. Yet we all see examples of widespread chaos
with “secularists” such as Mao, Stalin…

Of course. But the danger is not religion, the danger is the human heart. People will misuse a
religious system to commit genocide and if it’s not religion, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot will find
other religions. That’s part of my anger with the new athiests. The idea that religion is the
core of these acts of evil is just childish and stupid. Religious institutions have certainly
lent themselves enthusiastically often to these projects.

But it’s not the fault of religion, it’s the fault of human nature. There’s frankly nothing in
human history or human nature to suggest that we’re advancing morally as a species. I’d argue
it’s the opposite. Certainly, technology, science, and industry made advances and they have
been used to preserve and conserve and nurture life in many ways, but it’s also creative forms
of industrial killing that have never been seen before on the planet. It is science and
technology and industry that is destroying the very ecosystem that sustains the human species.

The tools change, human nature remains the same. That is something that neither the Christian
fundamentalists or the new athiests understand. They adopt this vision that they can reform
human nature into something that it’s not. And what it doesn’t reform into ways they deem to be
moral and good, they abrogate for themselves the right to use violence.

I want to discuss the bridging of religion and intellectualism in an age of, what I’ll just
call, materialism. You’ve heard that religion is a crutch for the weak, but why is the
spiritual crutch so mocked by those who consider themselves enlightened or “the left,” when it
seems that all human beings use some semblance of a crutch to make sense of the complexities of
life?

I don’t look at religion as a crutch. I look at fundamentalism as a crutch. But the religious
impulse is like the artistic impulse – and let’s separate religious institutions, which are
about their own power and their own perpetuation. To be religious is a way of looking at the
world. Great religious thinkers out of all traditions have called us to a kind of humility, a
kind of introspection, self-criticism, an acceptance of mystery. When one accepts the mystery
of the Divine, the strangeness of life, the fact that there are so many things that we will
never control, our place as infintessimal beings in this infinite universe – this is not about
self-aggrandizement.

Certainly, religion has been used to self-aggrandize. But I think religion is a way of
stripping away the crutches and exposing our meekness and our human flaws and, to use a
religious term, to expose sin. The fact that we are – all of us – captive to irrational,
subliminal forces, many of which we don’t understand. The narratives we tell about ourselves
are fictions and the narratives we use to explain ourselves to others are fictions. That’s what
religion at its core does. Religion is an attempt to deal with non-rational forces. Not the
irrational, but non-rational. By that I mean love, beauty, grief, alienation, our own
mortality. These are all real and powerful, but they’re not quantifiable. We can’t measure
them. It’s why Freud could never write about love.

At its best, religion – like art – is an attempt to create wisdom. In the Buddhist tradition,
you can memorise as many sutras as you want, you will never be wise. Wisdom doesn’t come
through knowledge. It comes through intuition. It comes from that ability to lead human nature,
human society, and the world around us.

In all the polls, compared to European nations, everyone is amazed at how religious the US
population professes itself to be. And now, with the upcoming 2008 election, Democrats – who
were apparently lagging in the religious card – are now amping up their own religiosity. What’s
the sincerity of both – the US population and the political parties – in professing “piety?”

What surprises me is that most Americans who profess a kind of piety are Christian
fundamentalists. There’s no shortage of great theologians who describe piety as a belief system
as a form of idolatry – essentially a form of self-worship. And that’s what I believe this
movement is about. I think, in fact, it’s deeply anti-Christian. It is about self-exultation.
It is about embracing the darkest aspects of American imperial power and sanctifying that.

And so, when I read those polls… I’ve debated Christian fundamentalists, I’ve debated these new
athiests, and they both seek to de-legitimise my own religious tradition, which is one that
comes out of real social activism. My father, who was a Presbyterian minister, worked in the
civil rights movement, the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war, even though he himself had
been a veteran of World War II, and the gay rights movement.

They may not like it, both the Christian right and the new athiests, but it’s a real tradition.
But of course the Christians describe me as a secular humanist who wants to destroy Christian
America. And the new athiests say that’s not really religion, because they argue against their
own narrow definition and are incapable of discussing religious complexity. Religion is like
art. It takes a long time to do well. I spent many years of my life studying Christian ethics
and the notion that grappling with moral ambiguity is somehow easy is possible only when you
are as ignorant as these people are.

What do you think about this whole Democrats and Republicans - the candidates Obama and McCain
– bending over backwards to prove to everyone that we are indeed truly religious? Why the need
to profess their piety?

They’re pandering to the movement, which I find frightening. It’s a very peculiar form of
religion and one that I detest. They’re not trying to reach out to people like me. They’re
trying to reach out to a bunch of homophobic, bigoted racists. That’s what constitutes the core
of Bob Jones University. These people rose out of racism, first primarily towards African
Americans.

The kinds of stuff that they say on Christian radio and television and within their own
gatherings about Muslims is deeply disturbing. Unfortunately, that kind of demonization of
Muslims has infected mainstream discourse. What terrifies me about it is that when you get
people to speak in the language of violence and hate, it’s a short step to get them to act in
the language of violence and hate. I saw it in the former Yugoslavia. There are too few people
standing up and confronting these people with their racism, which is a cancer. It’s poisoning
our civil and political discourse.

Last question, Chris. Something on a hopeful note. You’ve been a reporter who actually has
lived in the Middle East and actually talked to Muslims and seen them first hand. You have this
rich tradition of learning Christianity, Christian morals, Christian ethics and seen the rise
of the American Christian fascist movement. What can be done, on a global scale, perhaps, for
Muslims and Christians – well intentioned ones – to wrest away the control of their religiosity
and religions by self interested political individuals, like the ones you’ve mentioned. What
can be done to reclaim the faith?

Well, I think the churches have failed us in that they don’t stand up and confront this racism.
The media has failed us because it no longer reports how others see us or other ways of being.
It’s all trivia, gossip, it’s news for entertainment. The kind of war hysteria that grips the
country makes a voice like mine very difficult to be heard. You know, my opposition to the war
in Iraq saw me receive death threats on my phone system at the New York Times. I was shouted
down, heckled. And I wasn’t offering a political position, I was trying to offer the
accumulation of knowledge of someone who has spent a lot of time in Iraq and many, many years
in the Middle East. It was very difficult to be heard.

So, I think the major institutions that are tasked with offering to Americans different
viewpoints have failed us. And we’re paying a huge price for that. These institutions are
largely bankrupt and we are becoming a country of children with vast weapons systems. I don’t
have to tell you or many of your readers but turn on the television and hear the kind of crap
people spew out on the Muslim world. They’ve never been there, they’ve never lived there, they
don’t speak Arabic – only 20% of Muslims speak Arabic anyway. It’s as if I would get up and
start talking about China, a country I’ve never been in.

I think the kinds of things we say about Muslims now – and I’m not talking about the fringe –
would not be acceptable to say about any other ethnic or religious group in the United States.
Having seen what happens when you demonise a group in, for instance, the former Yugoslavia – I
was in the Balkan territory for the New York Times during the war there – this kind of
language. Language is not benign. This kind of language is terrifying and there has to be a
concerted effort on the part of institutions that are tasked with defending democracy and
plurality, and they’re not doing it.

Wajahat Ali is a Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is
associate editor of altmuslim.com, a playwright, essayist, humorist, and attorney at law, whose
work, “The Domestic Crusaders,” (http://www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the first major play
about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at
http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com.

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