God Help Us

The Rage Against God

How Atheism Led Me
to Faith
by Peter Hitchens
Zondervan, 224 pp., $22.99

People of faith have long assumed that the Devil’s principal stratagem is to tempt his victims with thoughts of revenge, deceit, lust, pride, and other deadly sins. In his diabolical classic The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis suggests a very different approach: “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds,” explains Screwtape, a senior demon advising his protégé. “In reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

If true, this insight helps explain the radically divergent paths of the British-born author-brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens. Both men rejected the Christianity of their youth and turned to Trotskyism and secularism. Christopher eventually abandoned Marxist ideology and transformed his atheism into a sideline of book publishing and public debates. A stint as a Moscow correspondent helped Peter shed his leftist illusions as well. Yet he eventually returned to the Anglican faith because he couldn’t keep certain ideas—provocative, chastening, awful ideas—out of his mind.

In The Rage Against God he delivers a spirited defense of Christianity that is a mix of memoir, cultural critique, and history lesson. He is well-positioned for the task: A columnist for the Mail on Sunday, Hitchens has reported from all over the world and in 2010 won the Orwell Prize for foreign reporting. He has written several books on the moral and political decline of Britain. His latest work, with its candor about the failings of Christianity there, may not endear him to members of the church establishment; nevertheless, his treatment of the social and spiritual threat of the new atheism—what he calls “the League of the Militant Godless”—should be required reading for people of all faiths.