For those who know me, it may seem rather odd to read me continually defending religious believers since I am myself openly irreligious. Like most people who define themselves as atheists, I have never found any convincing evidence for any sort of “god” at all, and I am all but certain that there is no anthropomorphized god-figure acting in the world. But I also recognize the possibility that my own way of understanding the world around me is so strongly conditioned by the modern, secular, rational world that I simply cannot perceive the divine acting upon us.

This, I believe, is what true skepticism looks like. Skepticism cannot be simply holding militantly to your own beliefs and forcing others to provide a burden of proof. It is also constantly questioning your own beliefs and worldview as well. And this holds equally to religious and non-religious people.

Christopher Hitchens has long been one of my favorite journalists. Not only is he an engrossing writer willing to criticize sacred cows, but he is a drunken curmudgeon from a bygone era of drunken public intellectuals—he is a gin-soaked, high-brow Andy Rooney with actual wit but without the unseemly dementia and eyebrows. And like any good public intellectual, his best quality is the ability to piss everyone off, myself included. His support for the Iraq War has been problematic at best, his tendency toward misogyny is distasteful and, most importantly for this discussion, his association with the so-called “New Atheists” is unfortunate.

To be fair, it should be noted that Hitchens has been far less shrill in his criticism of religion than the insufferably smug certitude of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—elite snobs so obnoxious they thought to label themselves “Brights” (a label even Hitchens finds distasteful). While Dawkins spends the majority of The God Delusion essentially arguing that religious people are inherently dumb people, Hitchens’ book god is not Great (while not entirely eschewing this tendency) tends to focus more on certain religious practices that are clearly abhorrent to modern liberal sensibilities. So I was disappointed to see him pen a recent article on Slate arguing that “the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” I have two brief points to make.

First, what does it mean to “tame and domesticate” religion?

Talal Asad has suggested that defining anything as “religious” is really a way of marking it distinct, and therefore necessarily separate, from other forms of public life. Many Americans, even religious Americans, easily keep their private religious lives largely separate from their public life. But others may not so easily draw a clear distinction between private religious beliefs and the rest of their everyday lives. Many religious people both in the United States and outside it inhabit a world in which the sacred is omnipresent and omniscient; they interpret the events of their lives through the lens of religious texts; and they may hold values and desires that differ dramatically from secularists.

So, from a rational viewpoint it might be easy to mock someone who sees the Virgin Mary in a sunspot on the window of a tacqueria. But for someone with a particular way of understanding the world around them, this is perfectly reasonable and expected. And while American culture is obsessed with the prevention of suffering, many religious people believe that enduring pain is a necessary element of redemption (Catholics, for instance). And as Saba Mahmood explains, Western critics may understand veiled Muslim women as victims of patriarchal religious authority, but many of these women actually choose to veil themselves—not because they “don’t know any better,” but because they live in a world in which piety is more important than liberal notions of “freedom” or “choice.”

My point is that religious people often inhabit dramatically different worlds than Hitchens or I do. What he is really promoting, I think, is the elimination of religious ways of living in the world that don’t conform easily to secular, liberal values. “Taming and domesticating” religion really means privatizing religion and making certain practices and beliefs more palatable to secular observers. Hitchens and his ilk are essentially arguing to forcefully integrate religious people into a secular, rational, scientific, nationalistic, democratic, capitalist world. And this is, in reality, a form of colonialism.

Such an argument is premised on the uncritical belief in the superiority of what Hitchens terms “civilization.” While he is absolutely correct that many religious practices and beliefs are utterly abhorrent to any reasonable liberal observer, can we honestly say that science, nationalism, or capitalism have proven themselves any less prone to violence or any more democratic than religions have? 

Mainstream science has long been central to racism and colonialism; homosexuality used to be defined as a mental illness “cured” with electroshock; transorbital lobotomies were once considered a solution to even minor problems. What contemporary scientific practices will seem utterly barbaric in fifty years? Capitalism is responsible for millions of deaths through conquest and war, it has created unbelievable social inequality and suffering, and has increasingly deracinated the world of any meaning beyond the accumulation of consumer goods and personal wealth. And the modern-nation state has proven itself time and time again to be the most efficient vehicle for the wholesale slaughter of humanity ever conceived.

As Asad questions in On Suicide Bombing, why are we so repulsed by individual acts of religious terrorism, but completely accepting of even more destructive forms of state terrorism? Americans continue to believe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow justifiable, but would be utterly horrified if the same action was perpetrated by a non-state actor. Why? This is not to defend religious terrorism by any means, but simply to ask why we are increasingly so quick to criticize abhorrent religious practices but so accepting of the equally (if not more) destructive practices of “civilization”?