As these laws passed, cosmopolitans who wanted to demonstrate their Seriousness through fair-minded respect for the right were happy to spew chaff: They warned their readers not to dismiss Sarah Palin and the Tea Party on intellectual grounds. State legislatures passed a score of “anti-Sharia” laws forbidding judges to rule from the bench based on secret allegiances to the Koran hundreds more were proposed, and these were often written or backed by evangelical-aligned groups like the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and anti-Muslim groups like Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. Politicians ran for office and won by declaring that Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya. evangelical figures, the war became a charnel house for actual Iraqi Christians – fighting Islam at home became part of the catechism of Republican politics. Once the horror of the Iraq war curdled evangelical enthusiasm for it – though supported by many leading U.S. But the partnership served conservative white Christians, who spent the Obama era in deep fear of Muslims, very well.
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THE SALUTARY EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SECULARISM of this Christian/atheist alliance have blunted somewhat in the years since Hitchens declared victory.
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It was one of the many points of agreement the two men found. (This should be understood as a compliment.) Wilson, too, was concerned about creeping Sharia in his own homeland. Wilson wrote a glowing obituary for Hitchens in the pages of Christianity Today that ends with a lengthy fantasy about Hitch’s potential for a deathbed confession. Wilson is the author, with fellow Christian minister and former League of the South board member Steve Wilkins, of Southern Slavery: As It Was (which described chattel slavery as “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”). By the time he died in 2011, at least a few understood what allies he and like-minded pundits had been.Įvangelical theologian Douglas Wilson traveled the US debating Hitchens, the Generals to Hitchens’ Globetrotters, and the men became friends there’s a documentary about it. Despite Hitchens’ august reputation, there is no rigor or heft in writing like God Is Not Great, only charming demagoguery and wry anecdote, which many found pretty insulting in a book that purported to undo their entire religion. Here was a man whose sympathy for the Iraqis was expressed in his zoological mourning of “ the pitiless destruction of the independent habitat of the marsh Arabs near Basra” while in the same breath deploring creeping Sharia in “ Londonistan.”Ĭonservative Christians disliked the New Atheist movement – especially Hitchens, who was clearly unserious in his criticism. armed forces – have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.” To advance “secularism,” in his telling, was to destroy Muslims, whom Hitchens claimed to be liberating from the scourge of their faith. “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian,” he crowed in 2004, “but he – and the U.S. Bush, as the natural ally of his brand of militant cosmopolitanism. His distaste for Catholics was widely read as a generalized dislike of Christians, but that simply wasn’t the case: he saw American folk theology, like that of George W.
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Hitchens was perhaps the most perfect example of this tendency. To people like Christopher Hitchens, “fascism with an Islamic face” was the enemy of the Western liberal’s “emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.” For all that they sparred publicly, white elite Christians and white elite Atheists shared a mysterious bond.
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Their shared enemy was a fantasy of militant Islam: something they saw not as a minority sect trying to increase its market share through violence, but as the very essence of the religion – an insidious presence always on the cusp of doing another 9/11. ONE OF THE ODDER ALLIANCES of the pre-Trump epoch in the War on Terror was between secularist public intellectuals and the strident white Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists who formed the bedrock of the Republican Party.