{"id":207,"date":"2011-12-16T13:08:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T13:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/2011\/12\/stanley-hauerwas-david-bentley-hart-christopher-hitchens\/"},"modified":"2011-12-16T13:08:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T13:08:00","slug":"stanley-hauerwas-david-bentley-hart-christopher-hitchens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/2011\/12\/stanley-hauerwas-david-bentley-hart-christopher-hitchens.html","title":{"rendered":"Stanley Hauerwas, David Bentley Hart, & Christopher Hitchens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

It\u2019s been interesting to watch my Twitter and Facebook accounts light up with tributes after the news that renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens died of cancer. I once heard Miroslav Volf say that he thinks Christians should read the great atheists \u2013 by which he meant Nietzsche, Freud, Marx \u2013 not Christopher Hitchens. His argument was they help us to strip away what is not central to our faith, and force us to think more deeply about what we are saying about God. Volf\u2019s brilliance is living proof that this approach works. I have yet to hear of a quality theologian or philosopher who thinks that Hitchens comes anywhere close to distinguishing himself as a \u201cgreat atheist\u201d alongside those names. <\/p>\n

Yet, perhaps this was not Hitchens\u2019s fault. Maybe he was just a product of a very boring and saccharine age. Stanley Hauerwas once said in an interview, \u201cWhat\u2019s killing Christianity in America is not atheism. If only we could produce some interesting atheists. I mean the recent spate of people like Hitchens and Dawkins\u2026 all that does is show how dumb the secular has gotten. And that\u2019s partly our fault because we\u2019re not interesting enough to make them study why it is that such a people [Christians] are so odd. What\u2019s killing the church in America is not atheism, but sentimentality.\u201d [see also, my article on sentimentality from the Huffington Post<\/a>] David Bentley Hart\u2019s critique of Hitchens and the other neo-atheists is that , \u201cTheir popularity stems from the ignorance of their readers.\u201d If Hitchens wasn\u2019t great, maybe it\u2019s not his fault; maybe it\u2019s ours.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a stunning indictment \u2013 made by both Hauerwas and Hart \u2013 to say that the reason Hitchens could be at once so famous and so terrible at his job is that Christian culture is so boring & facile that we can\u2019t even produce a good atheist, while at the same time the secular culture has become so wholly ignorant that someone like Hitchens can become so famous by being terrible at what he did. Here\u2019s an interesting video of David Bentley Hart talking about this reality.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qlYXohl0szo?version=3<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been interesting to watch my Twitter and Facebook accounts light up with tributes after the news that renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens died of cancer. I once heard Miroslav Volf say that he thinks Christians should read the great atheists \u2013 by which he meant Nietzsche, Freud, Marx \u2013 not Christopher Hitchens. His argument was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nStanley Hauerwas, David Bentley Hart, & Christopher Hitchens<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s been interesting to watch my Twitter and Facebook accounts light up with tributes after the news that renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens died of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/2011\/12\/stanley-hauerwas-david-bentley-hart-christopher-hitchens.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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