Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

The only thing I dislike about Atheist Delusions is its title. A few other reviewers have pointed out that it seems to indicate the book will be a rebuttal of atheist writers like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest. It is not. Indeed, David Bentley Hart asserts that men like them are hardly worth attention because of the infantile level on which they argue. What Hart does, instead, is provide a history lesson for the "fashionable enemies" of Christianity.

The delusions in question, Hart says, are mostly historical ones. One will not discuss religion with an atheist long before history comes up. What of the injustice of the Inquisition? The Crusades? The long-running war of religion against science? The Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion? We hear constantly that religion (read: Christianity) is the most destructive force in human history. It is Hart's purpose to debunk the delusions and historical fabrications that characterize historical arguments against Christianity.

The primary focus of Hart's book, hinted at in the subtitle, is the "Christian Revolution," those first, tense centuries AD when Christianity replaced ancient paganism. The pagan era has been eulogized since in the Enlightenment as an era of peace and progress, of scientific advance that was stymied by the bigoted, book-burning Christians of the "Dark Ages." Hart shows that, while we owe much to the ancient world, it was also an irredeemably ugly place of slavery, infanticide, of callousness and hopeless reconciliation to the whims of cruel fate. Christianity, which he calls the only true revolution in history, changed everything from the bottom up--and since Christianity was first accepted among the lower classes and slaves, it changed everything quite literally from the bottom up.

Christians did not, Hart shows, burn the Library of Alexandria, or torture millions during the Inquisition, persecute Galileo, or wreak havoc across Europe during the Reformation in the name of religion. Christianity gave the world hospitals, modern science, and the moral framework to regard all life as worthy of life. In this coup de grace, Hart even points out that it would not even be possible for men like Dawkins and Hitchens to make their arguments of justice and fairness were it not for the "Christian Revolution," that their concepts of justice and fairness are rooted not just in Western Civilization but in Christianity itself.

The only way in which Atheist Delusions left me wanting was in a discussion of the Crusades. I am a military and medieval historian and so this topic is near and dear to my heart, but Hart only gives the Crusades a paragraph or two at the beginning of one chapter. He claims that the Crusades were not rooted in any Christian doctrine of just war--but they were, and were he to investigate further he would see the reasons the Crusades were considered just. (To take up the slack on this topic, I recommend Thomas F. Madden's New Concise History of the Crusades.)

But that one niggling issue aside, Atheist Delusions is one of the best books I have ever read--and I do not say so lightly. I read through it as quickly as I could and have thought about it daily ever since. I've found more food for thought, more intellectual challenge and stimulation here than in any book I've read in years.

Highly recommended.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009). $28.00, 253 pages.

Over the past five years, atheists--some of whom grandiosely describe themselves as "Brights"--published a number of screeds against religion that, despite being more rhetorical than rational, nevertheless managed to sell briskly and convince (or confirm the pre-existing convictions of) a few people that unbelief is the way to go when it comes to religion.

Well, maybe. Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart admits, "I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general." He seems especially partial to Friedrich Nietzsche, for example.

Then again, maybe not. Whatever the merits of Nietzsche's insights, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are no Nietzsches. Of them, Hart writes: "atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism."

I wish I had written that sentence.

One might mistakenly assume, from what I've written so far, that Hart's book is a point-by-point refutation of the Dawkins-Dennett-Harris-Hitchens Axis of Unbelief. One might be wrong, however. Instead, Hart essays this purpose:

"My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting; how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues."

In other words, the birth of Christianity was a revolution: "a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good."

Negatively, Hart goes on to argue that--contrary to the popular picture of the modern period as an age of liberation from medieval superstitions and oppressions--"the modern age's grand narrative of itself" is vastly overstated and even dangerous, hiding, as it does, the greatest era of barbarity in human history. The self-described atheist "Brights" may dun "religion" for its Crusades and Inquisitions, but those things hold no candle in sheer killing power to the gulag, laogai, and killing field.

To argue his thesis--in both its positive and negative aspects--Hart takes us on a historical journey of the Patristic Era, when the clash between Christian theism and Greco-Roman paganism first occurred. He shows us the Pauline demystification of the powers and principalities that peppered the pagan universe. He contrasts the tragic pagan spirit with the comic Christian spirit, the former filled with resigned despair at the cruelty of fate, the latter infused with hope in a God who saves. He shows, through a fascinating discussion of early Christian theological debates over Trinity and Incarnation, how the patristic theologians created the modern conception of personhood, and how Christian theology endowed even the lowliest of persons with dignity, unlike pagan ideology. He demonstrates that Christian theology liberated history from a chronicle of endless cycles of rises and falls and imbued human action with moral import and eschatological trajectory. And over and over again, he demonstrates how love animated Christians' actions in the world, at least in theology, if not always in actual practice.

In a sense, Hart's book is a historical representation of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, although this time in its defense of that same religion. Nietzsche slammed Christianity for undermining the pagan "Superman" with its insipid love of the low-born, uneducated, sick and needy. He despaired lest the triumph of Christianity leave a post-Christian era of "Last Men" without the wherewithal to traduce Christian values, having become so enslaved to them. Nietzsche knew that one could not dispense with Christian metaphysics and yet retain Christian morals. Hart knows this too. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens don't. They want to retain the good effects of the Christian revolution without their cause. Hart won't let them.

If you want Christian morals--a concern for rights, for the poor, for the wellbeing of the weak and innocent--you must have Christian metaphysics. Christianity created the modern concept of human being. A post-Christian world is a post-human one as well.

Atheist Delusions is well-written, even if its sentences can run to several lines. It is historically insightful, even if it wears its historical learning lightly. And it is utterly devastating to the standard atheist claim that the history of Christianity is a history of irrationality and oppression. Christians have, no doubt, had their moments. But the original revolution of Christian theology in the first four centuries of the Common Era lives on, ironically, in the moral aspirations and moralistic critiques of the atheists who don't understand or are unwilling to take their metaphysics to their logical conclusion.

Somewhere, Nietzsche is rolling over in his grave that he's stuck with such insipid thinkers as Dawkins et al, while the best advocate of his understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Western culture believes in the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

Apparently David Bentley Hart had two mandates when writing this book. The first is to refute or at the least undercut the current, intellectually shoddy popularisers of atheism barnstorming best-seller lists. The second is to propose a metanarrative of Western history, AD, that attributes the chief virtues of its character and institutions to Christianity: "Much of modernity should be understood not as a grand revolt against the tyranny of faith, not as a movement of human liberation and progress, but as a counterrevolution, a reactionary rejection of a freedom which it no longer understands, but upon which it remains parasitic" (p. 108). Although the book begins and ends with the cold logical contemptuous verve of scholarly dismissal for which Hart has become justly notorious, he is far far more interested in the second purpose than the first.

This should not surprise. His opinion of atheists is so low that he cannot stomach subjecting himself to discussion on their terms. So his chapters often have a characteristic twin structure. At some point within the chapter he will engage the work of a notable atheist, point out flaws in the argument that appear to him significant (not necessarily insurmountable), then dismiss the entire discussion (including his own response) as tangential to his main thesis, that is to say, what he thinks is really going on. The rest of the chapter will tackle his second purpose. His problem with atheists is not (merely) that they argue badly (cf Christopher Hitchens in my favourite sentence of the book, "whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic" and whose recent book "raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method" [p. 4]) but that they are arguing using entirely wrong presuppositions and categories. They are climbing ladders up the wrong trees. They are headed with speed in fruitless directions, inhabiting meaningless topoi. Such a rhetorical posture is exhilarating. Perhaps only Hart among contemporary Christian thinkers has the Messianic confidence to swim against the strong current of contemporary scholarship all by himself and take a reader with him. The thrill of reading these pages is gnostic. Hart alone has the truth and is revealing it to you.

I happen to think Hart is right, on the whole, chiefly because he is much smarter than I am and says quite well things that I have already intuited. I am on his side and therefore love this book. Whether you will love it remains to be seen. Much depends upon whether you share certain of his/our presuppositions. I am not sure what power of persuasion this book has. At the least, it seems to me to show that, if you are willing to accept (even for the sake of argument) the presupposition that the Christian God is at work in history the way the Christian Bible says He is, a historiography that hangs together and makes sense is possible. Not certain, not inevitable, but possible. Whether a similar atheist or Islamic metanarrative is possible is a question far beyond the scope of this book, no matter what snide remarks Hart may make to the opposite effect. Its persuasion may stand or fall on its vigorous use of historical facts. The pages are jammed with anecdotes and the occasional generalized statistic, most of which are not footnoted. Historians may pick holes in his interpretations, but if his facts are what he says they are he has a strong case to make. Within my own areas of expertise, his reading of the medieval period is on a much stronger footing than his reductively political reading of the Reformation.

Although the books are far different in many ways (not least in tone!), reading this book was for me an experience much like reading G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. Someone smart, entertaining, and rhetorically aware compiles a case that Christian historiography makes sense. In order to do that you must jettison or marginalize most contemporary readings, a task Hart takes up with relish. But in the end, Hart's emphasis is exactly right: any lasting value of this book must come from its second purpose. Shake what can (and ought to) be shaken all you want, but only so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

I had high hopes for David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions after reading his excellent book The Experience of God. He is unquestionably an extremely talented writer.

Beware of the title of this book. The book has next to nothing to do with atheism or Theism. There are small sections scattered throughout where he criticises various ideas like naturalism, materialism, the major new atheist writers etc, but he makes no argument for the existence of God or Christian faith whatsoever. This is predominantly a "Historical Essay"- as he says in the introduction.

On my copy, the recommendation quoted on the front cover from New Republic claims that "Anyone interested in taking the debate about God to the next level should read and reflect on Hart's spirited brief on behalf of Christian truth". One can only assume that the reviewer at New Republic barely even opened the book and that the editors at Yale University Press are preoccupied with the idea of selling books, at the expense of their own integrity because as I said, the book's thesis has nothing to do with defending Christian Truth or the Debate about God. It is purely a polemic arguing for a specific understanding of History and Christianity's shaping of the world we live in.

Hart's basic idea is that history has been rewritten: Christianity's historical sins have been blown out of all proportion. The Wars of History, the relationship between Christianity and Science, the intolerance of Christian civilisation and the treatment of dissenters and heretics, slavery- in all of these areas, Hart seeks to set the record straight.

In actual fact, Hart claims, Christian moral ideas have had an overarching, immeasurable impact on civilisation in certain key areas. For example the idea of charity towards those whom the giver doesn't know and has no purely rational reason to help, or the notion of humans being of infinite value purely because they are human.

Why have I given this book only 3 stars? Because Hart doesn't support his ideas well enough. Footnotes are few and far between. There are about 84 of them- one every 3 pages or so. But actually, this is nowhere near enough because of the kinds of statements Hart makes and huge amount of territory he covers in this book's 17 chapters. He consistently makes big statements about huge eras of history or about a certain topic and it's place in a civilisation, or what have you. And if the reader wants to find out more about that particular topic, too often they're left in the dark without any further resources to look at. And keep in mind the earlier parts of my review, above- I listed only a handful of the many topics that Hart covers in this book- this book is more or less supposed to be a rebuttal to those who claim Christianity had a negative impact on about 1,000+ years of history and a counter argument that Christianity had a positive impact- if you want to cover that much ground then you owe it to your readers to give them more in the way of supporting evidence and explanations.

Yes, I am aware of Hart's statements in the book about my complaint- in the introduction he admits that "Summary is always perilous" and that it is merely an "extended meditation upon certain facts of history" rather than a historical work, per se. But this doesn't get him off the hook in my eyes, because it leaves me as the reader in the unfortunate position of, far too often, finding it difficult to assess the validity of Hart's thesis. One does get frustrated reading huge statement after huge statement and wondering what's behind it. If Hart had taken the extra time to write more comprehensive footnotes and give more supporting references then I could've easily seen myself giving this 4 or 5 stars, but as it stands I cannot.

Bravo! Hart writes a much needed answer to the modernist self-congratulatory narrative being sold by the new atheists. Hart corrects the historical record of the late Roman Empire and Medieval periods.

If the new atheists want to write polemics against Christianity they are entitled to. But they are not entitled to their own historical facts. Hart's main message it that despite its many short comings, the Christian church has made the world a much better place for all of humanity; and its waning influence is to the world's detriment.