The Rage Against God [Paperback]

Not perhaps what I expected - less a tightly argued polemic than an occasionally argumentative memoir. Thankfully, like The Broken Compass, it happens to be some of the best biographical writing around today - much as Hitchens would probably disown such a judgement.

For all his image as a snarling conservative, Hitchens' written persona is a joy to spend time with. Fiercely but properly original (his observations all have solid premises, rather than being cheap shocks), curmudgeonly but graceful, and with winning depths of earnestness and nostalgia; he is never boring, frequently compelling, and usually provocative and sympathetic in equal measure. The trouble is, there are so few people out there actually writing down proper thoughts in proper sentences anymore. Most writing today is just the wisdom of the age in the clichés of the time: dislocated, tedious and hollow. It's like reading through mental smog. So I'm sure those who do not agree with a drop of Hitchens' politics or religion would still find the sheer clarity and warmth of this book's prose engaging.

I think one or two of its points are so striking that a little more tracing out of their foundations and implications would have been enjoyable. The death of faith in England, and the likely conclusion of atheism, are perhaps the two most important subjects when looking at the past century and looking ahead in the present one. But the book's subtle approach to its subject is haunting and memorable even without this. And much of its message is perhaps more powerful for being unspoken.

Probably the best English political writer since Orwell. And certainly the least self-satisfied, most interesting autobiographer writing in England today.

I'm about the same age as the author, so can very much relate to the lost world he describes. He writes well in any easy readable style. This isn't a high flown philosophical treatise, to be valued mainly for its powerful arguments. On the other hand it does give some insight into the motivations of the militant atheists whose anger and intolerance so mystify those who disagree with them.

I liked the epilogue best where the author describes the beginnings of a restored relationship with his brother despite their great differences

"The Rage Against God" isn't a conventional work of apologetics. There are already plenty of those out there. This book is less about theory than about practice. Why do people really reject or accept God? Why is their rejection of God often so very virulent? What part has religion played in recent English history? How important was atheism to the history of communism, and to the cultural revolution that swept through the Western world in the last few decades?

The first part of the book-- essentially a memoir of Peter Hitchens's changing attitudes to religion-- is the most readable. Hitchens is at his best when he's evoking the England of his childhood. (At one point he apologises for indulging this tendency. He shouldn't.) I relished his description of Evensong ("the very heart of English Christianity"), of his boyhood feelings of utter security while lying in bed and listening to the sirens of ocean liners in Portsmouth harbour, of the austere and stoical Remembrance Sunday ceremony ("No outsider could possibly have penetrated its English mystery, or imagined that we were in fact enjoying ourselves, But we were.".)

But the very particularity of this book, though it makes it a powerful memoir, somewhat limits its importance as a tract. Hitchens is writing primarily about English Christianity, and its long decline (which, he shows, long predated his own childhood). As an anglophile and an admirer of Hitchens's writing, I found it enthralling. As an Irish Catholic, I found it of limited relevance. Hitchens devotes a long section to criticising (affectionately and reverentially) the surrogate religion of English patriotism. He's also scathing about the modernising tendencies within the Church of England. One is led to wonder why he feels compelled to remain within a church that has disillusioned him so much, whether he is in fact letting his patriotism decide his denomination.

The book becomes less compelling, but of wider relevance, when he goes on to examine the role of atheism in the USSR and in the psychology of social liberalism (and Hitchens is surely justified in tracing a continuity between them). He gives the lie to the canard that atheism was somehow incidental to the Soviet regime, showing that it was absolutely central to the communist project. (How anybody can doubt this is mystifying.) As he points out, the USSR changed its policy on many subjects over the decades-- swinging from sexual liberalism to puritanism and back, tolerating private enterprise in the NEP era, and cultivating nationalism during the Great Patriotic War-- but its persecution of religion remained constant and unwavering. He shows, too, how successful this secularisation proved-- the predicted resurgence of Russian Orthodoxy when communism fell was a cosmetic phenomenon. A generation had been denied religious education, and the spiritual void has never been filled. Rather chillingly, he goes on to describe how Richard Dawkins and his sympathisers aim to inflict the very same materialist indoctrination on today's children.

I believe he is absolutely right, too, in his claim that atheism is at the very heart of the social liberal/cultural revolutionary project. (This was brought home to me with particular force when Channel 4 allowed the president of Iran to deliver its "alternative Christmas" message in 2008. Why would Channel 4 give a platform to the president of a country which discriminated against women and persecuted homosexuals? Didn't they care passionately about human rights? Apparently not; insulting Christianity always trumps other considerations. It appears to be the very essence of the social liberal project.)

The book is perhaps too short-- perhaps Hithens might have included some essays on a related theme to fatten it out. But altogether, it is a worthy, courageous and timely contribution to the most important subject there is. Hats off to Peter Hitchens!