With a reputation for sparking controversy and a scathing wit, Christopher Hitchens kicked off this year's MSE Symposium with a bang.
Hitchens, a journalist and political critic, has spent his career attacking everything and everyone from the Vietnam War to Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton. But the main focus of his speech on Tuesday night was religion and his recent book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
The evening started with a nearly packed house, surprising for a man less commonly known than some of the previous speakers who had not drawn crowds as large. After a brief introduction, Hitchens took the stage and immediately set the tone for the evening with a quick-witted, politically charged joke about Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who recently was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's bathroom.
He then began his speech on a more somber note: "When I was coming here today ... I was oppressed with a very slight sense of depression and I soon realized what that was. It was because the rubric of my talk was supposed to be 'renewing American culture' ... and I thought, 'I really hope the United States isn't in such bad shape that it requires my advice.'"
A recent citizen of the U.S. (born in England, he became a citizen in April), Hitchens described the respect he had for our founding fathers' principles. He told a story of Benjamin Franklin walking down a street in Philadelphia after the constitutional convention had ended. A woman approached him and asked what he had accomplished in his days of meetings. Franklin responded, "Madam, a republic - if you can keep it." Hitchens revealed that he has been recently plagued with the question of whether Americans valued the principles upon which their republic was founded.
"The thing that makes the American republic different from and superior to all other subject experiments ... is quite simply this: It was the first time in history that a written, provable document ... established a separation of the church from the state ... [That was something] unique in its time and remains unique," he said.
As a recent immigrant, Hitchens appreciates America's founding principles he believes we often forget. In America, "thanks to secularism, thanks to those who had studied the enlightenment tradition we were spared [routine religious intolerance] and said no there will be no religious test of governance," Hitchens said.
But he also warned the audience, saying "I think this is now under threat." Calling all Americans to arms, he declared in his low, British voice, "This is the most important battle that any civilian, citizen, man or woman in this republic can possibly now be taking part of - and why it's very urgent that people begin to think about signing up."
Then he attacked American cooperation with Russian president Vladimir Putin. In a jocular tone bordering on a sneer, Hitchens recounted the story of President Bush deciding to trust Putin because he saw he was wearing a cross.
"Could it be," Hitchens asked the crowd, "that his advisers said to him, 'Listen, sir, if you just put on a crucifix President Bush is such a sap that that should do it.'"
He then went on to question the effects religion has on American politics:
"Do we like it that our country is such a pushover for this kind of propaganda? Do we like it that it would be actually quite difficult to get that criticism into the newspapers or onto the television because [in America] one mustn't criticize faith? Are we not endangering ourselves by the indulgence we pay to faith?"
Hitchens discussed how oppressive religion can become. "It tells us that we could not arbitrate our most essential integrity - the difference between right and wrong - if we were not afraid of the celestial dictatorship. A dictatorship that tracks us while we sleep, that can convict us of thought crimes, because it knows what we're thinking before we think it ... This is the origin of totalitarianism - the unending fear of someone who you must fear and are ordered to love: fear what you are compelled to love, compulsory love and obligatory fear and no escape and no freedom and no privacy."
