“Religion poisons everything.  As well as a menace to civilization, it has become a threat to human survival … As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won attainments [I am touching upon].  Religion poisons everything.”

Thus Christopher Hitchens, the British-born commentator and polemicist, in his immensely readable and provocative book published last year entitled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  What are we to make of such a trenchant claim?  Are we to put it down to the nature of the polemicist’s art, staking out the most extreme opposing ground possible and slug it out from there?  Or should we take him at his word?  Is he right?  I want to start by suggesting that he is not right, obviously.  Religion, like sex or food, can be used or abused.  We don’t find anyone in Austria calling for the state to legislate its way into the bedroom because one of its deranged citizens sexually assaulted his own daughter.  We don’t ban fish and chip shops just because some fanatics of the fat-fry choose to carry out suicide strikes on their own bodies. 

Religion, I would suggest, has a chequered but also a glorious track record.  But Hitchens’ view is that all – not just some – major geopolitical crises and conflicts afflicting the world today can be resolved by starting a conflict against religion.  This – quite apart from being self-contradictory – seems to me to be demonstrably false.  The fact of the matter is that religion is sometimes a negative factor in world affairs and sometimes a positive one.  I was struck the other day by a survey which National Geographic conducted on levels of religious adherence in countries around the world.  The results indicate that in fact religion has no discernible impact one way or the other on a country’s toxicity to the rest of the world or on the quality of life of its people.  It found that Afghanistan is the most religious country in the world, with a 99.99% religious-adherence rate whilst the least religious country – measuring both professed atheists and the non-religious – was North Korea at 71.3%.  Two states which, in terms of their threat to the world order, would of course usually be placed in the same basket.

But religion, Hitchens wants us to know, is wholly pernicious to the very health of society; again, a casual glance through the newspapers would challenge this.  Last Friday, for instance, his fellow atheist, Simon Jenkins, wrote in the The Guardian: “I am told that the Church of England reckons it saves the taxpayer some £5bn in unpaid social work.  Whenever I have visited poor places,” he continues, “and wondered to whom the desperate turn in time of need, the finger points to the church – of all voluntary institutions those based on religion are the most present and the most committed.  St Martin’s [-in-the-Fields] offers a one-stop urban welfare state, at an annual cost of £4m. Where, one is tempted to ask, are Westminster and Camden councils?  As an atheist I might wish it were not so.”

Let me be clear what I am not suggesting – I am not suggesting that establishing the benefits of a religion is the same thing as establishing its truth.  The converse of that move – religion is poisonous therefore it must be false in all its forms – is – it hardly needs saying – decidedly dodgy logic which some (though not all) anti-religionists are guilty of.  These arguments are emphatically not one along the lines of the new Mayor of London’s claim that (quote) “voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3”.  Yup, he really did say that.  And yet: I think it’s extremely important to clear away the rubble from the paths of those who want to think more deeply about religion but for whom such a sweeping condemnation might throw up real obstacles.

So there we have two or three question marks at least hovering over the notion that religion harms everything it touches, that it is, in the words of Hitchens fellow anti-religionist Professor Richard Dawkins, “the root of all evil”.  It’s a point made with increasing frequency, isn’t it, that the extremity of these views does seem to mirror the extremity of the very views which these writers so busily denounce.  But the more I read of them, the more firmly I find myself believing that.  I’d even question whether it’s meaningful to say anything about such disparate and culturally-conditioned phenomena as those to which we attach the label “religion” – it’s a notoriously elusive creature to define.

To conclude the rubble-clearing, I wanted to take a brief look at some historical snap-shots of three figures, drawn deliberately from different eras, different backgrounds and completely different corners of the Christian tradition. 

The first is Bartolomé de Las Casas, a 16thC Dominican priest who witnessed at first hand the genocidal imperialism of the conquistadores as they tightened the grip of Hispanic rule in the Americas.  He quickly became the staunchest defender of the indigenous people, arguing in a famous show-down debate at Vallodolid in 1550 that the conquered Indians should be treated with dignity and respect.  One secular writer makes the point that Las Casas’ writings are shot through with the language of the Gospel, portraying the Native Indians as being imbued with simplicity and innocence, free from the intoxication with gold and power which drove their oppressors to such barbarism.  The crimes committed, frankly too repugnant for me to describe here, were, he argued, committed against human beings made in the image of God, whether they accepted this description or not.  In a letter to Prince Philip of Spain, he set out what is one of the earliest manifestos for what would eventually become the global human rights movement: “The natural laws and rules and rights of men,” he wrote, “are common to all nations without any difference ... All the Indians to be found here are to be held as free: for in truth they are, by the same right as I myself am free.”

For our next hero let’s fast forward 200 years to an earnest, dishevelled and slightly strange young man by the name of Thomas Clarkson, the great unsung founder of the abolitionist movement at the end of the 18thC here in England.  Clarkson wrote a prize-winning Latin essay as an undergraduate at Cambridge which, it is not an exaggeration to say, was to change the course of history.  He argued angrily against Britain’s involvement in the slave trade – and the essay quickly became the founding charter for abolition.  And what did he argue?  “Christianity”, he wrote, “taught, ‘that all men were originally equal; that the Deity was no respecter of persons, and that, as all men were to give an account of their actions hereafter, it was necessary that they should be free … slavery is contrary to reason, justice, nature, the principles of law and government, the whole doctrine, in short, of natural religion, and the revealed voice of God.’”  A few years after writing this, Clarkson convinced William Wilberforce, a fellow Evangelical, to join his cause, and I probably don’t need to take that story any further here.

Finally, almost another two hundred years afterward we find that irrepressible, iconic champion of human freedom, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose assassination we commemorated last month.  To his credit Hitchens doesn’t underplay Luther King’s achievements; indeed they pose something of a problem of him, which he stumbles over uncharacteristically, but cheerfully picks himself up again with the rather daring claim that Luther King was “in no real as opposed to nominal sense ... a Christian”.  I beg to differ, and let the record speak for itself: in an interview he gave in 1957 a questioner asked, “Can a man be a Christian and a staunch segregationist too?”  Too which the preacher replied, “All men, created alike in the image of God (that phrase again), are inseparately bound together.  This is at the very heart of the Christian gospel.  [This] makes segregation morally evil.  Racial segregation is a denial of the unity which we have in Christ.  Segregation is utterly unchristian.”      

So far, so good you may be thinking.  But having argued that religion does poison everything, I would now like to argue that it does.  I want to agree with Christopher Hitchens.  Religion poisons – if not everything – then virtually everything.  Hitchens is absolutely right, and I draw my authority from some of the earliest denunciations of religion in the Western canon – this passage, for instance, from the opening of the book of Isaiah:

“’Stop bringing meaningless offerings!’ says the Lord, ‘Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations – I can’t bear your evil assemblies … your appointed feasts my soul hates.  Stop doing wrong, learn to do right!  Seek justice, encourage the oppressed.  Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.’”  There are verses like this almost anywhere one turns in the Old Testament.  Here – pretty much at random – is another passage, this time from Amos, later to be immortalized by Martin Luther King himself: “I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies … I will not listen to the music of your harps.  But let justice roll down like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.’” 

Such sentiments saturate the New Testament as well.  In the Gospel of Matthew we hear Jesus saying to the Pharisees “Woe to you, teachers of the law, you hypocrites!  You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are … You give a tenth of your spices … But you have neglected the important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness … You blind guides!  You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”

Strong stuff.  And with that in mind I’d like to take a closer look at the circumstances in which our three heroes found themselves.  Who was it that Las Casas had to stand up against in the great debate of 1550?  None other than one of the most august and powerful bishop in the Spanish church, Bishop Juan de Sepulveda.  It was a Spanish bishop who stood in the way of Las Casas’ attempts to reform the system.  Which institution refused to support Clarkson in his fight against slavery?  The Church of England, not least because of its extensive financial interests in the slave colonies of the West Indies and elsewhere.  And we’re familiar, I think, with the shameful support for segregationists which was shown by many churches in the southern United States, not to mention that ghastly sub-Christian perversion, the Ku Klux Klan.

The point I want to make is that Christianity down the centuries has shown itself time and again to be its own best critic.  In all of those instances, a permanent and global revolution in social thought was achieved by Gospel-driven individuals fighting against the forces of religion which stood in their way.  Though I do not have the time to argue this here, this is true too of literature and philosophy: Dostoevsky’s great treatments of the problem of suffering and evil in the world will always ring truer than the poems and parodies of Voltaire; Pascal’s titanic wrestling with the God of Abraham sink deeper somehow than Bertrand Russell’s deft fencing matches with the God of the philosophers.  The most powerful antidote to bad religion in the world today, ladies and gentlemen, is not anti-religion, but authentic religion.

Scholarly consensus suggests that the word “religion” derives from the Latin word “religare” meaning to bind back and it’s thought that the image lying behind this word is of man being restored into relation with the gods.  But I like to see it in a more negative sense – religion for its own sake, empty religion, locks us, binds back into a way of life which makes it extremely difficult for any authentic encounter or relationship with the living god, which in my view – though, again, I do not have the chance to argue that here, the living God of Christianity.  How are we to free ourselves from these bonds?  Well, as the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out a few weeks ago, “the Gospels are about an initiative from elsewhere: breaking through a deadlock in human existence which human beings can’t break for themselves.”

And so in closing, I would like to say to those Christians amongst us that we lose our credibility from the outset if we do not accept the poisonous effects which our religion has had on the world, both in the past and today.  This isn’t to suggest abject surrender to our critics; on the contrary, it seems to me that some of the accusations traditionally leveled against our faith – the so-called “Wars of Religion”, the influence of anti-semitism on National Socialism – are a very long way indeed from painting a fair and complete picture.  But the best way to respond to these seems to me to align ourselves afresh with the profound suspicion expressed - both in our own scriptures and in our own tradition - of the terrible dangers of empty religion and its reckless compromising with earthly powers. 
And to those skeptics amongst you, I would simply say this: don’t let the rhetoric of the anti-religionist outrun reality.  Don’t let it turn you into a spiritual refugee.  Because it just isn’t the whole story.  True religion is the most powerful detox available for states and souls burnt out on the poison of power-hungry religion.