God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

God Is Not Great is considered a seminal work of New Atheism, an early-21st century movement that included Christopher Hitchens and other prominent anti-religious intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Not all New Atheists considered themselves part of a defined movement, but the group is set apart from many earlier public atheists by their belief that religion is not only incorrect, but dangerous. New Atheism appeared primarily among intellectuals in the United Kingdom and United States, with most of the movement’s members having academic careers in subjects such as evolutionary biology, psychology, and politics. Many New Atheists expressed a belief that their atheist worldview was condemned, and even oppressed, by the larger religious minority, and that more people would admit to being atheists if it was more widely acceptable to do so.

Among the New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens was particularly concerned with religion’s effect on world politics, as well as freedom of speech and expression. This viewpoint is clear in God Is Not Great, especially when examined side-by-side with other major New Atheist publications, such as Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. While Dawkins uses a biological and psychological approach to explain how religion came to define human society despite there being no god, Hitchens only briefly touches on the sociological origins of faith and instead focuses on its destructive patterns throughout history.

Hitchens is highly concerned about fundamentalism, often equating fundamentalist versions of major monotheistic religions with religious faith as a whole. The context of the book as a product of the early 2000s is visible in Hitchens’s particular focus on Islam. The author, who had long held a left-wing political stance, became a staunch supporter of the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan following the events of September 11, 2001. This shift in stance surprised many of his peers, but Hitchens believed the response was necessary to combat what he saw as an extreme rise in Muslim fundamentalism. In God Is Not Great, nearly every passage referencing the Muslim faith refers to its most radical elements.

Upon its release, God Is Not Great received both praise and protest. Hitchens was already well-known as a public intellectual and critic of religious faith, and the book quickly became a bestseller, especially among Hitchens’s established fan base. Some reviews of the book asserted that although it was an engaging read for established non-believers, Hitchens’s arguments would be unlikely to draw any new atheists to his viewpoint. Alongside a general pushback from the Christian community, critics accused Hitchens of misrepresenting a number of historical facts. The most common critique, which was leveled even by some fellow atheists such as Curtis White, held that Hitchens presented his argument by way of particularly gruesome anecdotes and fundamentalist, literal interpretations of religious texts, while ignoring nuanced religious scholarship.