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August 10, 2010, 11:39 AM ET
A nasty spat has occurred over Christopher Hitchens and his cancer. For those of you who have just spent their summer vacation on Mars (and who forgot to take their Blackberry), the well-known writer and atheist Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, already quite well advanced. He is undergoing treatment; but, as he himself is the first to admit, the prospects are not bright.
Expectedly, this has got the Christian community all fired up. To its credit, few if any are in the business of “God strikes back” or “You’ll be sorry now.” The general reaction has been one of sympathy for a person in trouble, and not a few are praying—for his soul if not for his life. And I really think that most are doing it out of a genuine sense of concern.
Having said this, starting with Hitchens himself, there is somewhat of an interest in how he reacts to such dreadful news. Is he himself going to admit a monstrous mistake, and get onside with the Big Fellow in the Sky? In an interview with a journalist from The Atlantic, he said that while he certainly appreciated the concern of others, including the praying Christians, he was not about to change his views on the God question. If blame is to be attached, it is to himself for boozing and smoking non-stop for many years. But there is an end to it. There is no cosmic significance. Just personal distress.
However, he did admit that there was no telling what he might say or do down the road. If the pressure got too great, even he might convert or whatever. He hastened to say that he wanted to be judged by the present, and not by what might happen under great pressure. Fear and pain should not enter into the equation. “If I convert, it’s not really me.”
Over at the John Templeton Foundation-funded “Big Questions Online,” the director of publications for the Foundation and the editor of BQO, Rod Dreher, commented on this: “How does cancer-stricken atheist know suffering won’t reveal truth to him?” In the light of Hitchens’s stoicism, which Dreher finds admirable, he nevertheless writes:
“I see what he means. A torturer can get most people to say just about anything. There's a reason we don't credit confessions under torture. Similarly, what Hitch says here makes sense at a certain level. And yet, I can't shake the fact that he is about to go on a journey—has already undertaken it, in fact—that will show him things he has never seen, and scarcely imagined. How can he be so certain that what he may see in the near future will not convince him that God exists? Many people come to faith in times of great emotional turmoil and stress. The rich man—and Hitchens, like most of us in the modern West, is a rich man in that he does not lack for material comfort and liberty—has little need for God, or so he thinks. But the poor man finds it easier to see God, because reality from his diminished perspective looks different.”
Dreher then goes on to tell the tale of his aunt, dying of cancer, not a particularly religious woman, lying in hospital delirious with pain and shrieking.
“A nurse, a black Protestant lady, rushed in, took her hand and said, 'Julia! Julia! Jesus loves you and died for you. Do you accept him as your lord and savior?' (This was a Catholic hospital, so this behavior was acceptable.) Julia answered in the affirmative. She then was quiet and at peace for a few minutes, then died. I believe her conversion was true, and effective, and that that nurse, whose name I never learned, was an angel of mercy.”
Expectedly, Hitchens’s fellow atheists have taken great umbrage at this. Typical is University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, who writes a blog “Why Evolution is True.” He tells us that he despises people like Dreher: “I have no compunction about calling Dreher a contemptible little worm.” On a family-friendly enterprise like The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog, I am simply not allowed to tell you what others have said. Goodness, I’m not even allowed to use the word “bum” except when I’m talking about my graduate students.
Speaking now as one who is loathed and detested by the new atheists, mainly because I am a so-called “accommodationist” who thinks that one can reconcile science and religion, and speaking also as one who has received Templeton money in the past and who has (with reservations) defended the Foundation, I have to say that on this issue I am right with Coyne and other critics. I think we should take Hitchens at face value, admire his stoicism, and leave it at that.
There are several reasons why I feel this way, starting with a negative reaction to some of the points made by Dreher. First, I just don’t see why in this day and age anyone dying of cancer has to be in pain, any pain, and certainly not to the extent that they are screaming so loud that others in different rooms can hear. If Hitchens is going out with the tide, then I hope that tide is so laced with drugs that all he senses is a nice warm feeling and little more. At least, when my time comes, I hope that that is all I will sense, and I have no more religious belief than he.
Second, I am appalled that a health professional, whatever the hospital, is allowed to come in and proselytize. Appalled but not altogether surprised. When my wife Lizzie was in hospital earlier this year with heart trouble, the evangelizing ghouls were circling. She had to be really quite rude to a couple to get them to back off. After that she noted a significant chill in the air coming from the nurses’ station. I guess that is pretty minor, but it does make a point. We don’t want you to change your minds. What right have you to try to change our minds?
Third, with Hitchens I simply don’t see that deathbed conversions, especially those done in fear or pain, are worth a thing. They have about as much validity as a confession forced out through waterboarding. I have often wondered, when I am on a plane, if it were announced that it was hijacked and we were on the way to the White House or whatever, what then would I do? Would I tell Jesus that I am sorry? I confess that I might. But if Jesus thinks that that is worth anything, then he loses my respect entirely. (Actually, like a lot of non-believers, I quite respect Jesus. It is the followers who give me trouble.) Frankly, under pressure, I might even agree to vote Republican! (Don’t laugh. My very first vote as an American this fall might be for a Republican. Our Republican governor, Charlie Crist, having been edged out by a Tea Party type candidate, is now running as an independent. As of now, he looks like the best of the bunch.)
And this brings me to the fourth and most important point, which starts with Dreher but goes beyond. There is a reason why people are in the conversion business and it goes back to Saint Paul and his Epistle to the Romans.
"But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law." (Romans 3:21-31)
Protestants, Luther and Calvin particularly, picked this up and made it the basis of their religion. You get into heaven by faith, not by good works. Luther had a lot of wriggling to do when he felt he had to include the Epistle of James in the canon. The demand for good works as well as, even rather than, faith, is explicit: “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” (James, 2, 17)
Now, I can understand why Paul thought as he did. He had spent his early life persecuting Christians—he held coats while Stephen was stoned to death and, when he had his conversion experience, he was on his way to Damascus to do more harm to the Christians. He had done nothing to merit salvation. All he had was faith. I can understand why Luther and Calvin thought as they did. They saw the corruption of the Catholic Church, especially selling indulgences to buy off time in Purgatory and pave the way to Heaven. They wanted to nip that one in the bud by making it theologically worthless.
I can also see that given faith that doesn’t mean you should do nothing more—Paul and Luther and Calvin would have been amazed at that implication. There is the Lord’s work to be done. To their great credit, no one works like evangelicals—“justified by faith”—to help the poor and suffering. The medical workers just killed in Afghanistan were not new atheists.
But the flip side is this theologically and morally unhealthy obsession with conversion. Entirely forgotten is Jesus on the subject, that helping the poor and suffering is precisely to show faith in him, whatever your explicit beliefs.
"Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25)
And that is why I find Rod Dreher’s piece not just wrong but somehow unclean.
Stories like this reaffirm my belief that religion is the root of all evil.
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