Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

by David Bentley Hart

In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious “histories” offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists’ misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.

Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.

Genres: Religion, Theology, Philosophy, History, Christianity, Nonfiction, Christian

253 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator, is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in South Bend, IN.

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book and did enjoy it as a discussion of Christian history, but as a rebuttal directed towards the so-called "New Atheists". Well, it wasn't. The "New Atheists" are popularizing atheism and directing it towards the masses. Their works are hardly nuanced enough to take the criticism of most academics, even those in agreement. But this can be true for other arguments too. It wouldn't be hard to pick a popular book on Christian apologetics written for laymen and tear it apart. So in my mind this book is like a stage for the great warrior to kill the rabbit. Sure, this book has a particular audience in mind, too. There's nothing wrong with that, but the arrogance that comes through for the "New Atheist" project does grow tiresome (that's not to say the "New Atheists" can't be guilty of arrogance too). Besides if all arguments became academic monographs, who in the masses would actually read them anyway. There is a place for such "popular" arguments and discussions. But academics, if anything, should recognize the difference, and the tone of their books, in my opinion, would be better if they reflected this. Maybe all parties can at least agree that it's refreshing to see an broad interest in such important questions.

But more importantly, this book only covers criticisms directed towards Christian history, which for anyone who has actually read the "New Atheists" would recognize isn't a significant (or read convincing) part of their argument anyway. To a large extent the "New Atheists" are only rehashing popular post-Enlightenment strains of thinking about Christianity. They are hardly adding anything new to the argument (which isn't surprising since they aren't historians). The argument is old, but anyone who knows much about history would recognize that interpretation can never be divorced from the interpreter's viewpoint and context. Hart is no different in how he frames his argument. Despite how one writes the history of the church, whether one chooses to demonize Christians or not, the fundamental argument of the "New Atheists" about the existence of a personal God and the value of faith/belief (or danger of faith/belief as Harris might argue) remains unanswered by Hart's argument.

This is too bad, because at times Hart does make reference to the "New Atheists" terrible understanding of philosophy and theology, but he never elaborates on what he means here. But it is here that something important can be said against the "New Atheists." And, perhaps, Hart's interpretation of Christian history can feed this, but in the end it just never does. He could have just as easily taken up the argument for a different interpretation of Islamic history, too, but he still wouldn't have challenged the core of the "New Atheists" argument that there is no personal God. To make matters worse, the history reads of Western nepotism (Centrism would work here too although I like the negative implications, biases and all implied by nepotism). Should we really be surprised to find so many good contributions from Christianity in Western history when Christianity has dominated Western history for so long, including the present and it's values, all this despite one's view of modernity and post-modernity? Even to a large extent Western atheism is a contribution of Western Christianity. A more honest comparison would be looking into the history of the East too. What really was the difference? Is charity really one of them? What about science? Some might consider this more a curse than a blessing.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing that immediately jumps out at me upon reading this book is what an intellectual mismatch David Bentley Hart is with the "New Atheist" philosophers of our contemporary popular culture. He doesn't so much as deconstruct their contentions as much as pull the rug out from under them with a few deft strokes. They're simply not making any serious arguments and it doesn't seem like they think they even need to. Hart evinces the erudition and knowledge of both a classical philosophical and theological education. The people he's critiquing would charitably be described as charlatans, and some of them are even worse.

The "Christian Revolution" alluded to in the book's title doesn't refer to a coming event, but the revolutionary arrival of Christianity several centuries ago which transformed a formerly pagan world. Our prevailing secular liberal society today tends to disparage (quite vociferously) Christianity as being a force which imposed backwardness and darkness upon Western civilization, and from which we have now "awoken" ourselves to a world of reason, rationality, and an improved conception of freedom.

Needless to say this popular understanding is not really true; more of a legend we have concocted to glorify ourselves in the present. As a great empire Christendom had its share of crimes and excesses, but it also transformed the world and helped give rise to Western civilization's conception of what it means to be human today. More fundamentally, it gave the idea that each human life has intrinsically divine and infinite value of its own, and that there is thus necessarily a higher morality required of us than simply the needs or desires of the moment. Secular concepts such as "human rights" would be incomprehensible without concepts which are themselves borne out of and inextricably tied to Christianity.

Now that we have more or less discarded Christianity in the West, what solid basis will we have for continuing to carry these ideas into the future? While they may exist independently within themselves for awhile, once the animating underlying principle (the religious conception of the value of life) is no longer seen as credible how long until we slip into entirely new beliefs?

Nietzsche for one seemed to grasp the stunning magnitude of the contemporary "Death of God". Our current crop of disbelievers on the other hand seem to be cheerfully unaware or unconcerned about what may fill this gaping moral vacuum. Not just that, they evince an inexplicable and unsubstantiated optimism which happens to fly in the face of the secular 20th century - the single bloodiest period of time in human history.

What is particular disturbing to me is that some of the loudest proponents of the new "enlightenment" are actually arguing for an outright return to barbarism, although they may term it "utilitarianism". Sam Harris (my particular bete noire) has for instance argued in favor of the utilitarian revival of torture. After all, if there's no more God that we take seriously and the idea of the infinite value of each human life is now quaint - why not use torture when we feel we need it? Why not even contemplate nuclear warfare or other forms of undiscriminating mass violence if the moment seems to call for it as well? This is a return to the primordial view of the world, a blank slate where there is no fundamental reality; nothing more than the exigencies, requirements and prejudices of ones present circumstances. Needless to say, this is a call for a return to the most basic and utter primitivism, that in our modern age of confusion and ignorance is absurdly masquerading as "progress". In other words, we spent millenia refining these high concepts of the value of man, only to toss them out the window on the backs of a few undergraduate level NYT bestsellers. This is the behavior of a trivial and confused culture.

As Hart points out our new modern view of the world is in fact the literal definition of nihilism. There is no underlying reality, and our modern conception of freedom is simply the freedom of the will to respond to each of its whims without obstruction. There is no higher calling, or higher purpose to strive for. And since the will itself is being exercised by a being (us) that has been stripped of any divine or infinite value, then it is not "anything" in and of itself either. Its simply meaningless impulses acting out within a world itself devoid of meaning. Our conception of reality is nothing acting upon a vast canvas of nothingness, simply the will being pulled this way and that at any given moment. This is much different than the classical conception of freedom which was freedom from the desire to commit sin, or to act against ones best nature. "Freedom" was the freedom to be who you are meant to be, and to act in harmony with your divine calling. As I've mentioned before, this idea is embodied in the Islamic concept of fitra, and ones lifelong struggle to act in accordance with it.

Indeed, most of us don't actually manage to fully live like this and many of us are either still believers in God in some manner or otherwise we find distractions (pursuit of wealth, nationalism) to fill the cavernous void that the public demise of religion has opened up. But lurking beneath is this disturbing reality; a reality which has allowed us to be alternately banal and at some times monstrous on a scale never before seen in human history. We have refined our ability to be cruel to one another past anything we've ever seen. By reducing the world down to its mechanical spare parts it has allowed us to kill with wanton abandon. While in the past people killed for various types of chauvinism, the new amorality of the time has opened the door for atrocities of a scale ("industrial") and type ("scientific") never seen - and we've walked through this door time and again. Curiously enough, we never seem to step back and reflect upon the significance of this fact.

A lot of this book is a recap of Christian history intended to be a rebuttal of the popular modern characterization of it as one huge shameful mistake. Hart is obviously frustrated and it comes out in his tone, and I can entirely empathize. To be lectured to by a group of people who would best be described as anti-intellectuals in the most condescending and arrogant manner is aggravating to say the least. The history of monotheism has been far from a utopia, but it also happened to give us the best of the underlying moral sensibilities we have today. Simply put all of the most cherished values of modernity (pity, charity, compassion) have religious origins. Rejecting "religion" as an unmitigated evil would lead to the incomprehensible (but it seems rapidly approaching) condition of looking at the world as one giant playground of biological machines, subject to nothing more than their mutual and collective wills.

Having said all this I don't want to upend secular modernity; my conservatism leads me to be wary of any type of revolution - even if its a revolution back towards conservatism. It's not impossible to picture a Christian (or for that matter Islamic) theocracy that is an improvement upon our present circumstances, but I wouldn't like to take that gamble and would prefer to fight to preserve truth and goodness within a secular context. Doing this however requires honest and complete knowledge of the past, and specifically knowledge of how we got here today.

Hart is a gifted writer, and clearly the product of an intellectual tradition utterly removed from the mass market paperback writers he addresses at points. The history was interesting even if it was not why I picked up the book in the first place. There were sections where I felt he was too zealous in making his point and also a few legitimate contradictions I found (specifically regarding the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria) but nonetheless I considered it to be an admirable and edifying exercise.

One thing he does particularly entertainingly is torch the pasted-together "spiritualism" of secular modernity, a partly consumerist phenomenon that seeks to put together bits of old pagan beliefs with a few concepts here and there taken from Buddhism. It's tragic and comic at the same time, the exercise discarding of Christianity only to seek a superficial type of solace in Wicca or something - an effort that almost invariably pierces only skin deep and winds up as a type of ornamentation at best. It brings to mind that Rabindranath Tagore specifically predicted that Westerners would end up doing this to cope with the inhuman "machine civilization" he saw them building in the late 19th century. Sam Harris is like a parody of these types of wayward people (with a nauseating level of hubris thrown in) though he is assuredly oblivious to this.

My intention here was less a review than a summary of my thoughts and takeaways from this book, but needless to say it was a worthwhile, clearminded work of rare quality. Hart makes the argument that we are militantly forsaking what made us "good" without even realizing who we are, how we arrived at this point in the first place, and what is keeping us from sliding into the abyss. He's sober and realistic in making this case, and its compelling. The cause of remembering is important and its rare and valuable to find writers who can champion it so eloquently. Recommended.

[Paul H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's just unfair, really -- four adorably shallow "public intellectuals" (Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett) with zero theological training versus one of the most learned human beings on the planet. Hart basically wins the argument against atheism in the introduction and then just systematically demolishes all of the weak and/or fallacious critiques put forward by so-called "New Atheists" (albeit with a little too much pretentiousness/bombast, but that's just par for the course with Hart, unfortunately). It's certainly possible to be an intelligent atheist (cf. Nietzsche, Celsus) but no one in the past century has really managed it.


Pages 102-103:

Modern men and women find certain of the fundamental convictions that our ancestors harbored curious and irrational; but this is not because we are somehow more advanced in our thinking than they were, even if we are aware of a greater number of scientific facts. We have simply adopted different conventions of thought and absorbed different prejudices, and so we interpret our experiences according to another set of basic beliefs -- beliefs that may, for all we know, blind us to entire dimensions of reality.

Certainly we moderns should not be too quick to congratulate ourselves, or to imagine ourselves as having embraced a more rational approach to the world, simply because we are less prone than were ancient persons to believe in miracles, or demons, or other supernatural agencies. We have no real rational warrant for deploring the 'credulity' of the peoples of previous centuries toward the common basic assumptions of their times while implicitly celebrating ourselves for our own largely uncritical obedience to the common basic assumptions of our own. . . . There are still today entire cultures that -- on irreproachably rational grounds -- find the prevailing prejudices of Western modernity almost comically absurd. I know three African priests -- one Ugandan and two Nigerian -- who are immensely educated and sophisticated scholars (linguists, philosophers, and historians all) and who are also unshakably convinced that miracles, magic, and spritual warfare are manifestly real aspects of daily life, of which they themselves have had direct and incontrovertible experience on a number of occasions. All three are, of course, creatures of their cultures, no less than we are of ours; but I am not disposed to believe that their cultures are somehow more primitive or unreasoning than ours. . . . There is no remotely plausible reason -- apart from a preference for our own presuppositions over those of other peoples -- why the convictions of an African polyglot and philosopher, whose pastoral and social labors oblige him to be engaged immediately in the concrete realities of hundreds of lives, should command less rational assent from us than the small, unproven, doctrinaire certitudes of persons who spend their lives in supermarkets and before television screens and immured in the sterile, hallucinatory seclusion of their private studies.

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other. In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if she or she should encounter any problem -- logical or experiential -- that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will forgo the standard adjectives that came to mind when I read this book: brilliant, stunning, breathtaking. That is a given when one reads David Bentley Hart. This book is a combination of alternative history, apologetics, and smash-mouth theology.



Hart claims the Christian faith represented a revolution in the story of humanity (ix). It shattered the pagan cosmology (115) and introduced new categories of reality, the dimension of the human person for one. However, Hart's thesis is more subtle than that. He is not simply saying "Christianity has done a lot of good to the world; therefore, you need to belive,"--that would be a variant of the genetic fallacy that Hart so masterfully refutes. Rather, Christianity has its own telling of the story, a telling that reworks the categories of human existence within the framework of its own story.



Over against the story is the narrative of modernity. Modernity's telos is that of freedom. Its highest ideal is putting trust in the absence of a transcendental. Its freedom is nihilistic. Modernity's current defenders, and this is the first half of Hart's book, retell the Western story in a way to demonize Christianity in their defense of modernity. Therefore, Hart meticulously shows how Christianity did not impede science (the chapter on Galileo is hilarious), burn witches (the Inquisition, despite its bad moments, actually limited the bloodiness of the State's persecution of heretics), or fight religious wars (the Crusades are actually a different case, worthy of a conversation but not under this topic).



Conclusion:

Like all good things, this book must end. Not only does one have the privilege of being smarter after reading this book, one also has an amusing privilege as well: Hart's in-your-face rhetoric is hilarious and refreshing. May this book enjoy many printings.

[[Name Redacted]]

I was going to dismiss this book as annoying polemic until I did a little further research. It is not, actually, a rebuttal directed at Dawkins & Hitchens & co. It is, actually, more of a rebuttal to Gibbons & Clarke & co. The author examines many of the myths about the history of Western civilization, detailing how much more complex it is than we are usually willing to admit, and how much of what we "know" is more akin to the tale of George Washington & the cherry tree than it is to hard, objective historical fact. For instance: Christian mobs did not burn the library of Alexandria; Christianity didn't suppress and/or destroy the original Greek texts of Aristotle's works, but rather preserved them; Galileo & co. were tearing down hellenistic (ie: pagan) pseudo-science which had been limiting Western scientific inquiry for so long that it had come to be adopted as religious dogma. Many of these points are pet-peeves I have when talking with others about the history of religion and the West, and I'm interested to see where this book takes things. Unfortunately its inflammatory and baffling title will invalidate it in the eyes of the very people who, it seems, NEED to read it.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The counter-narrative to the Enlightenment and modern one; that is against the popular narrative that religion - in particular Christianity - suppressed reason, liberty, human emancipation, science, and in general progress for more than one thousand years. Nietzsche, despite his attacks on Christianity, is brought in this book as witness and also provides the prophetic and theoretical framework to understand the disaster that will follow the dismissal of Christianity, the shallowness of modernity, the metaphysical assumptions and limitations of science, the will to will, and the eventual collapse of the modern man into nihilism. The decline of Christianity is attributed to its own success, institutionalization, and complaisance; and not to the confrontation with the materialistic sciences and definitely not to the attacks of the new-Atheists. In the same spirit as Dostoevsky, Hart hopes that some new form of Christian monk will retreat from both the secular and popular Christian society and will rekindle and retain the true spirit of Christianity for when the man will need it again. The book is far too historical for my taste, but when it comes to philosophy and ideas it is great.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretty much "god exists, he told me so". I'd say the medication is too little.

[David Withun · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second Read (November 2019) - A long time ago (in this same galaxy, hehe), there were a group of men who were deemed the "New Atheists." Mostly what was new, at least as I recall, was the certainty of their views and the evangelistic attitude that came with such certainty. They sounded more like fundamentalist street preachers then rational writers. And few people are as certain of their belief (or lack thereof) as fundamentalists (atheist or Christian).

Of course, Christians specifically, and theists in general, rushed to write responses. One such response I came across was written by a historian and theologian, David Bentley Hart. I read the book and was impressed with his historical knowledge. He did not attempt to refute the New Atheists point-by-point as much as he worked to tell a more accurate story of both the rise of Christianity and the beginnings of the modern world. The biggest take-away from that book, for me, was that a person may be brilliant in their field (biology or chemistry, for example) but this does not make them adequate in some other field (history or philosophy). It seemed as if these New Atheists were being viewed as a sort of new priesthood, experts on everything. In this they were taking the place of priests of old who. To be one who studies science, we were being told, was to be one who was rational and objective and could be trusted in everything.

Hart's book showed that historians do well at history and that even rational scientists are susceptible to error when straying outside their area of expertise.

Whether the New Atheists are still a thing is beyond me, but since reading this book, I have tackled many of Hart's other works. He has become my favorite theologian with books such as The Experience of God and The Beauty of the Infinite. Further, his essays are delightful whether a collection of short ones (A Splendid Wickedness) or long ones (The Hidden and the Manifest). Of course, more recently he wrote a book defending universal reconciliation.

That last book reveals that Hart's Christian supporters sure do like when he shoots barbs at his atheist foes, but they don't like it so much when he turns his poison pen on the problems he sees with traditional Christian views of hell.

Anyway, I went back to reread this one just because I read it so long ago and I was curious how it sounded now that I am familiar with Hart. I found it more brilliant than I did the first time. There is a need for good history and Hart provides it. He pushes back on all sorts of myths, arguing that the Christian revolution was (mostly) good and that the rise of the modern secular world is not as good as it seems (its much more violent, for one thing). This is a fantastic book to read alongside of Hart's The Story of Christianity, as he dives deeper into the more controversial parts of the story.

Finally, I was watching an interview recently where Hart noted that he does not allow publishers to touch his work, but they choose his titles. This title is unfortunate. Not that Hart would not call his atheist foes (some of them, not all) "delusional", for he enjoys a bit of sarcasm and a good zinger. But it seems less serious than someone of Hart's status would desire. It is the sort of title you would expect from a cheap Christian apologetics book more interested in style than substance. I suppose it is meant to be similar to Dawkins' The God Delusion (which seems to be the sort of book arguing against God with more style than substance). I don't know, maybe its a good title.

Overall, a great work of history.



First Read: Hart does not systematically respond to the "New Atheists" here, instead he focuses on aspects of their attack on Christianity relating to history. The general myth in our culture, promoted not just by new atheist but older critics of Christianity as well, is that the ancient world was a place of reason and prosperity until Christianity came along and replaced it with dogmatic faith, plunging western culture into centuries of "dark ages" from which we only emerged in the modern period with the Enlightenment and a return to reason. Hart shows that every point in this story is wrong. Most important is the recognition that the rise of Christianity was so revolutionary and changed western culture so thoroughly in positive ways (hospitals, charity, view of humanity, etc.) that these ideas have become so ingrained in our culture to the point we forget they were new with the Christians. In the final chapter Hart rightly asks, if we lose Christianity, why should we retain, as many atheists simply assume we will, these good things? Overall this book is not really a defense of Christianity as a shattering of the modern myth and retelling of the story. Hart does write with biting sarcasm, even coming off as mean at times, but if the reader can forgive him that we end up with a thorough, needed and great book.

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished (finally). Two thoughts:

The first hundred pages or so of this book are just grand. Hart's bombastic and over-the-top rhetoric is in some of his other work pretty obtuse, perhaps unintentionally, and in other books one wonders how much intellectual flexing is going on. And perhaps there are works of his where it is just part of the jargon of doing philosophy in our world. But whatever the case, Hart's rhetoric is perfect for laying out the new atheists. He mocks them, harasses them, and generally has a great time of showing how their history and reasoning and logic are about as complex and meaningful as a six year old on a playground. There is some really useful historical work in this book as well, countering some of the more common claims that Christianity generally introduced anti-intellectualism, tyranny, and the mistreatment of women and slaves into the world. Hart handily dismantles various attempts at this and frequently shows that the reverse is actually the case. And he does this without glossing over various failures and problems in the story as well.

On the flip side, the book ends rather bland. While it doesn't quite reach shrill, his tone is far more tragic as the pages go on. Where he begins almost triumphalistically, calling the new atheists cowards and buffoons, he fears that their popularity is a symptom of a broad and grand sweeping change in the modern intellectual and religious landscape that signals the overwhelming retreat of Christianity from western culture. He cites the monastic movement as perhaps something of what the modern Church has to look forward to. And this tragic, retreatist conclusion was the most disappointing. While it's absolutely true that the Lord may have His people in a period of decline, and the scenery may change significantly as this occurs, this retreatist mentality is exactly what got us here in the first place. Now Hart is most certainly not advocating "running away," and his book is a clear example of cultural engagement. But his book begins as a rallying call, looking back at the progress of the gospel down through the centuries, despite many weaknesses and failures on the part of believers. But when it comes to the present, Hart fails to see the same possibilities, the same gospel leaven at work, and one gets the sense that Hart is something of a romantic, looking back in longing for the old days and rather bewildered by the modern world he faces.

Definitely worth the read, but also definitely disappointing, especially after such a fun start to the book. I see that I apparently rated this book before I finished it. Given the ending, I'm taking back one of those stars. Only three stars.

[Frederick Heimbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was frustrated with the book in the early pages because it made a lot of assertions without offering evidence. I urge anyone also bothered by this to press on. The fat middle of this book is where the thesis is really developed.

The thesis is simply that Christianity is the greatest revolution the world has ever seen; that it is, in a sense, the only revolution (because it was a quiet revolution from below); that therefore only Christianity has been capable of truly altering hearts and minds; that Christianity is unique in the extent it motivates charitable institutions such as hospitals and orphanages; and that, above all, the Christian vision introduced an understanding of universal human dignity which forever after made it impossible to "innocently" engage in cruelty toward the weak and the lowly.

On this last point, the author's bold claim is that we in the West, having grown up in a culture still immersed in Christian attitudes (even if we have begun to turn away from it) are unable (without the author's erudition, naturally) to imagine how different pre-Christian attitudes were toward slaves, beggars, and the like--that it was natural for the rich and mighty to view themselves as utterly deserving and to view others with contempt. Of course, if a change of fortune brought about a chance of status, there could be no recovery, especially if one's humiliation came by the hand of an enemy. There was no rooting for the underdog, no narrative of redemption and rebirth. There was only winning and losing--and you had better make sure you won.

Into this horrible zero sum game came the story of a peasant who died in contemptible humiliation who was also, somehow, the Son of God, and whose life and death dignifies every person no matter how humble. That is the story which overturned the old order. And today we can't see how different our thinking is--unless we read this book. Which I recommend.

[Jamie Howison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost wish that Hart had foregone the opening section of this book, in which he gets as scrappy and aggressive as those he's challenging (Hitchens, Dawkins, and company), because by the time he really hits his stride it becomes not really about the new atheism at all, but rather a soaring portrayal of how the Christian faith transformed what it means to be human. That part of his book is gorgeous (and is worth five stars), while his argumentative beginning is frankly not all that appealing.

[Nelson Brubaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book simultaneously with a reread of Hitchens’ God Is Not Great was just a wonderful experience. I realize it’s not really fair, DBH is just on a different level than the people he’s tearing apart, but for someone who has struggled with faith but found the New Atheists’ popular books tremendously underwhelming, condescending and tedious, Hart’s thorough, gleeful evisceration of these guys was so tremendously satisfying.

[Rasheed Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing.

What a frustrating person. One look at the size of David’s forehead will tell you we’re dealing with a thinking man. He knows his way around a syllogism, has an impressive breadth and depth of historical knowledge, writes fluidly at all levels, and has the vocabulary of the Sorcerer Supreme. (“Europe’s become crepuscular !”) But we’ll come back to his politics later.

While reading, I couldn’t help but think, ”God, there’s so much history in this book. Can we get back to the philosophy/theology lessons please?” But looking back on it, there are a lot of fun turns of philosophical phrases that bookend the book’s historical core. And the history lesson is needed. What the New Atheists fail to understand is that morality does not appear in a vacuum. Aside from the ethical implications from fideist material empiricism (e.g., what stops me from putting a bullet in my neighbor’s head for kicks and giggles if all that exists is the atom anyway?), David shows that what we understand as a human and the inalienable rights that a human has was borne from the Christian tradition.

To the literal classes of late antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping [after denying Christ three times] would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man’s sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone’s notice. (p. 167)

All men are created equal specifically because all men, rich or poor, male or female, Enlightened or NPC, Jewry or Goyim, are of the image of God, full stop, point blank, period. This is not a fact that can be derived by scientism, but by the mystery of our existence in this Reality. All scientism provides is solipsism. Everything and everyone else can be analyzed and manipulated by materialist forces, except for my own consciousness, of course. So let’s start eugenics movements to burn the fodder from the grain, surgically alter another person’s genitalia into Cthulhu tentacles, and prescribe 10 different psych medications at once to angsty teenagers.

David makes the case that the New Atheist movement is but another form Gnosticism, where society is composed of “the somatikoi, soulless brutes for whom death is simple dissolution [NPCs], and the psychikoi, who posses higher faculties of will and intellect in addition to their physical nature but are nonetheless subjects of the demiurge (p.140).” Depending on the flavor of Gnosticism, the secret knowledge can vary, but in the case of scientism, that knowledge is just scientific knowledge, the magical inner workings of material. Those poor people with no internal dialogue seriously believe in a transcendent God. How silly. Oh! A new episode of Rick and Morty is on!. And it’s usually not even knowledge of differing scientific studies but whatever the New York Times and Bill Nye the Science Guy says to believe in.

David's issue, though, is he’s not trying to change hearts and minds educationally. I want to call him the male Ann Coulter with his sassiness, but given he’s a socialist that would just be retarded. New Atheists are responding against fundamentalist Christian’s (or at least the strawman fundamentalist Christian’s) idea of God where He is basically buff Santa Clause in a white robe. David doesn’t do much to make a distinction between the deistic conception of God versus the conventional metaphysical God, though he does in his First Things article promoting the book, so New Atheists will still not be able to come to terms with him.

But further, David is not trying to change hearts and minds politically.

We become free, that is, in something of the same way that (in Michelangelo’s image) the form is “liberated” from the marble by the sculptor. This means we are free not merely because we can choose but only when we have chosen well. (p.24)

Post-liberalism and post-capitalism has become in vogue in many right and left-wing circles respectively, where the Enlightenment project of individual autonomy has in turn spread moral relativism and narcissism across the West. David at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study along with, more known in this area, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame’s Dept. of PoliSci are both Christian harbingers of these movements. Proposed remedies to institutional selfishness are scant, ranging from Falangism to, in David’s case as a member of the DSA, “Christian socialism.”

Most purely ideological reconstructions of the past are too crude to be especially convincing–for instance, the Marxist reduction of history to material dialectic and class warfare. (p. 31)

[Christian socialism] was not a rejection of free enterprise, but rather a critique of a system of enterprise that had destroyed the free guilds of late medieval Europe, disenfranchised individual craftsmen, produced a system of wage slavery, allowed the large-scale division of labor into a commodity to be traded or a natural resource to be exploited… [et, as they say, cetera] (“Three Cheers for Socialism”, Commonweal Magazine)

And I am painfully aware that the male Fox commentariat nurtures its sickly obsession with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez partly because they resent her cleverness, charisma and moral vitality [that’s right, no Oxford comma], but mostly because they suspect that in high school she was one of those girls they had no hope of getting a date with (though, really, she comes across as someone who could look past a face of even the purest suet if she thought she glimpsed a healthy soul behind it). (“Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?”, New York Times)

This is a 60-year-old man.

In any case, Hart’s mind seems to have the secret knowledge of True Socialism ™ and doesn’t trust the ability to change hearts and minds of the plebs through reasoned debate and education nor the faith that we all, in being in the image of God, can be led to the True, Good, and Beautiful.

Whether or not freedom entails specifically the ability to choose well… we still need options to choose from. David thinks he can say that True Socialism removes power from the government and corporations and places it into the hands of the poor, but we would still need a government to represent the poor no matter how granular his perfected version of democracy appears. Politics will always be reduced to some actors having more political power and influence than the other. But truly winning souls is not a matter of vying for political power, but in seeing an individual person as a child of God who was redeemed by the Easter miracle. If we’re unable to spread the Word in a way that moves each person’s spirit, I’m not sure how long he’ll expect his socialist utopia to last.

And also, just come one, one of the most learned men is still stuck on the labor theory of value?

Anyway, back to the main purpose of the book, what got me out of my edgy atheist phase was this probably perfect Amazon review (sometimes the Amazon reviews are better than the Goodreads) of Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary, in which Kenneth Daniels details how he lost the faith.

[Gavin Long · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book should have been called Harts delusions - what a boring compilation of utter drivel by an author completely comfortable with a belief in supernatural twaddle without seeing the need to provide a shred of objective evidence for his stance. I bought the book because I had heard how eloquent Hart is - well, nothing wrong with his language skills but something terribly wrong with his logic. Waste of money.

[Nathan Schwartz · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book will probably appeal greatly to people who think that atheists are simpletons motivated by a desire to sin without regret. He is, at least, upfront about his goal to imitate the worst parts of polemical atheist writers like Hitchens or Dawkins, but, sadly, he doesn’t put much into imitating their wit or style.

[Cameron Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, I'm not sure how this book's silly title got past Hart. (I blame some too-clever copywriter our there.) "Atheist Delusions" is much less about atheism than how Christianity revolutionized the West. And for that it is spectacular.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. So deep, so wise, so edifying, so prophetic.

[Travis K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Legitimately hilarious to me that the New Atheist crowd—allegedly the unhappy object of Delusion’s rhetorical splendor—is engaged with or even mentioned in only four of the seventeen chapters, as if Hart’s aspirations are loftier than even polemics against his targets can sustain, and mere association with them is enough to drag the whole project down into disreputable cretinism. Christian charity gets its due praise here, but I won’t deny feeling a deeply vindictive delight at the utter carnage Hart wreaks on the prosperity gospel equivalent of nonbelief, which by the second chapter gets swallowed by the very ground it chooses so confidently to stand on.

[Adam Birch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite its polemical title, this book contains interesting information both for Christians and non-christians. Western culture has revised the history of religion to the point where many facts have been done away with in favor of fairy tales designed to stroke the modern ego. Hart digs into the real history of religion, paganism, and secularism and strives to clear up misconceptions about each with the intention of creating an accurate fundamental understanding of history upon which real dialogue can be based.

[M.G. Bianco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both entertaining and enlightening. Hart really does give it to the new atheists, and he does it by correcting false assumptions from history, theology, and the role of Christianity in both. But, he does it by not glossing over human failings, Christian failings, and the institutional church's failings.

[Bluenote · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just really terrible. It's supposed to be a refutation of the new atheism, and it isn't.
What it is, is a blowhard arrogant poison monger interminably going on at length mostly about history. If he had any (better) arguments the book would be half as long. He doesn't. He's a terrible writer and a worse thinker for the outline of this book. Just terrible. Not worth reading.

[C. C. I. Fenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read David Bentley Hart’s ‘Being, Consciousness, and Bliss’ earlier this year. I found it to be utterly compelling in every way. He did a phenomenal job of making the case for theism by looking at some of the fundamental aspects of human life. As I finished that book, I wanted more of Hart’s acerbic wit and smart arguments. So, when I came across his book ‘Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies’, I couldn't help myself. Though it isn't quite as good as ‘Being, Consciousness, and Bliss’ (and it isn’t really what I was expecting), this is a book that is well worth a read.

It's broken up into four parts. In the introduction, Hart recognizes that this is not a history book. He’s not attempting to write an exhaustive chronicle of events that show how Christianity has had a positive impact on Western civilization. He doesn't attempt to systematically pull back the curtain on atheism's sordid history. Instead, he calls this book an extended essay where he looks at some of the things that have happened throughout history – politically, economically, and religiously – that hint at the idea that Christianity has been a powerful force for good in the world. Now, this might sound like foolishness to those who have been convinced that Christianity - and religion in general - are poisons in the modern mind. For example, we've been taught that Christianity plunged the Western world into a thousand-year dark age. We've been taught that religion led to the persecution of minorities and religious dissidents, leading to the deaths of millions and millions of people. We've been taught that Christianity has an undeniable and eternal vendetta against science and scientific discovery. But we’ve been taught wrong. These are myths that are part of the modern consciousness. The Enlightenment has led many to believe that if we could just shed every vestige of religion, the world would be filled with peace and happiness for all. And yet, the histories of atheistic regimes like the Soviet Union and Communist China show that atheism has issues of its own.

In chapter one, Hart looks at the case put forward by many New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. His conclusion is that their reputation far exceeds the weight of their arguments. Though he doesn't attempt to take down their positions in detail, he does make a number of good counterpoints to the arguments they make. After looking at their ‘gospel of unbelief’, he looks at modernity and the way that "to be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing." By this, he means that we moderns have placed ourselves at the highest point in our hierarchy of values. And though he acknowledges that very few people are completely modern, he does point out that this is the way our culture is moving. And this idea shapes the way that we think about a myriad of things, whether we realize it or not.

In part two, Hart examines how secular people have rewritten the past to make it seem as though Christianity has been little more than a hindrance to progress. He deals with the supposed conflict of faith and reason, as well as the idea that Christianity sent the West into a dark age. Many of the ideas that he expounds on in this section are echoes of what Rodney Stark writes in his book, ‘The Triumph of Christianity.’ In that book, Stark makes many of the same points as Hart, including the power of the Christian worldview for birthing reason, the fact that pre-Christian West was not rational in the modern sense, and the number of myths about Christianity stamping out any sort of disagreement or dissent. He goes on to take down the myth that Christians tried to destroy all pagan learning. This is something that’s often repeated and yet has almost no warrant.

After dealing with the so-called Dark Ages, Hart looks at the birth of science and discusses the way that many of the stories told about how Christians have opposed scientific discovery are flat-out false. For example, there was a conflict between Galileo and the Pope, but it didn't really have anything to do with the battle between science and faith. Hart also argues that many of the ideas popular among the Greeks during the pagan era would have been a hindrance to scientific discovery. It was the Christian belief in a transcendent, omnipotent God that paved the way for understanding the universe as an orderly system that works by certain laws of nature. Hart persuasively makes the case that Christianity has been the handmaiden of science, not its persecutor.

Speaking of persecution, Hart goes on to look at the myths surrounding Christianity's intolerance and persecutions. This is one of those topics that gets brought up often by atheists and detractors of the Christian faith. "What about the Inquisition? What about all of the pagans that the church killed in its early years? What about witch-hunts?" But Hart goes through each of these objections and shows that they are largely mischaracterizations and, at times, complete myths. With that said, Hart does not act as though the church, in its institutional forms, has always had clean hands. Anyone with a history book can see that there have been moments when the church has acted in profoundly unChristlike ways. But when she acted in those ways, she was acting contrary to her founder’s wishes. Not in accord with them. In this chapter, Hart uses much of the same literature used by Rodney Stark in his book ‘Bearing False Witness’ (a book that examines the many myths about the Catholic Church).

After looking at the ideas of persecution, Hart goes on to examine some of the ‘religious’ wars that plagued Europe during the middle of the second millennium. He shows that most of these wars were not really fought over religious ideas at all. They were fought along political lines. Though the players often used religious differences to achieve their ends.

In part three of his book, Hart goes back to the beginning of Christendom. He looks at the major changes that Christianity required from people in its earliest years. He examines the revolution and ideology that had to take place for the Roman Empire to become ‘Christian.’ This is a fascinating chapter because it puts on display the unlikelihood of the Christian Revolution. In addition, it reveals just how much Christianity and Christian ideology helped to shape the West from its earliest years. Throughout the chapters in section 3, Hart looks at these major revolutions in ideology. He examines the way that Christianity elevated love to a place that it had not occupied in the pagan world. This wasn't just a matter of elevating love for one's peers but also elevating the idea of love even for those who were beneath you. Hart spends an entire chapter looking at the way that Christianity elevated those in the dregs of society and not just those who were at the top. This was a major change and it’s one that has stayed with us. Though they might not want to admit it, it's worth wondering whether all of the popular movements of the past 200 years could've existed in the pagan world.

Towards the end of this section, Hart wonders whether a culture built on Christian ideals can continue to sustain those ideals without the Christian undergirding. This is a question that Nietzsche asked a hundred some years ago. It's a question that we all ought to wonder as we face a world that is growing increasingly fractured. Can the ideals of tolerance and universal brotherhood continue when the story that gave us those ideas has been removed? This is the question that Hart leaves us with. And it’s a question worth asking (whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Atheist, or apathetic).

In the fourth section, Hart looks at secularism and its fruit. In particular, he shows that when secularism was let loose in the twentieth century, it wreaked havoc. It sought the same thing Christianity sought: a renewed creation. But it tried to force that renewed creation on the world, rather than trusting God to bring it about. This led to utopian projects that have done untold damage to individuals and communities. Hart concludes his book by asking what the answer is for Christians who hold to faith in a world that is growing increasingly hostile to such things. He wonders aloud whether there might be a new sort of monasticism needed. I couldn't help but think of Rod Dreher's book, ‘The Benedict Option.’ I don't know whether such a thing is needed or not. But I do know this: Christians must think outside the box as the culture we find ourselves in continues to change. We cannot simply go on with the same old, same old. It will not work. And if we're going to find an answer, there are worse places to look than in our own past and the way our faith has dealt with hostile cultures.

May ‘The Atheist Delusions’ call us to reflect on our past, our problems, and our responses to them, that we might walk into the future God has prepared for us.

[Jack Naylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart never fails to provide. Naturally, this is a more popular level book and doesn't approach the profundities of some of his other work, but it is brilliantly written, well argued, and says what it needs to say. The book is largely an attempt to rebuff moral and historical accusations that have been levelled against the Christian faith - the two processes that support this task are the parsing out of historical particularities from the Christian worldview and the more careful delineation of the Christian worldview with respect to secularism and paganism. Tom Holland has written a mid-tier book that tries to accomplish similar goals, but it is largely composed of talk about historical particularities, and thus lacks all the conviction that makes this book a good read.

I quite liked the ways Hart impressed upon his reader the moral vacuity of paganism in the Roman Empire - one certainly comes away feeling that Christianity is a superior creed, greater than any fanatical vision of paganism could stir up. This conviction is most strongly felt through the example of Julian "the Apostate" - as it turns out, everything that was admirable about his paganism was derived from Christian values. Even the rebellious pastor's son, Nietzsche, would probably find the real face of Greco-Roman paganism aesthetically repugnant - that is, even taking into account all his blustering about Dionysian revelry. Hart accomplishes much the same for the secular worldview, forcing it to carry the weight of all its violence, and depriving it of the stolen scientific and technological valor it so wishes to own. He most helpfully diagnoses the modern condition in light of the erosion of the Christian moral framework - a diagnosis, with which I would like to end this review: "When the aspiring ape ceases to think himself a fallen angel, perhaps he will inevitably resign himself to being an ape, and then become contented with his loy, and ultimately even rejoice that the universe demands little more from him than an ape's contentment."

Secularism is not a liberation of the infinitely free will, but a crushingly uninspiring call to live without vigor or conviction, or boldness. It is a call from the void to retreat into an inward self-nihilation.

[Nat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart's book seeks to challenge the modern atheist take on Christian history, which sees Christianity as regressive and unethical. Hart is thorough and erudite in his telling of the history of early Christianity, and in his discussion on later medieval and early modern controversies. It is also a deeply helpful book in seeing Christianity for what it is, against many current and popular claims today.

[Harley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars; Hart's intellectual prowess is evident, although a point by point rebuttal of the new atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris) is not to be found in this volume; you are, however, treated to a thoroughly argued treatise on church history and theology.

[Don Phillipson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Author of another book subtitled "The Aesthetics of Christian Truth," this florid polemic avoids the essential points of modern atheism, that the essential elements of the Christian creed (and the Moslem equivalent, I suppose) are judged incredible by such rational critics as Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Sam Harris. They cannot believe in a creator God, immortality, original sin, a Last Judgment and so on. Prof. Hart's enjoyment of the abundant romantic history and mythology of the early church, stimulated by its encounter with other religions, avoids addressing the essentials specified in the Catholic and Protestant creed.

His argument is that religion was inevitably important, and the Christian religion revolutionized history: it is not in defence of the truth of the theological doctrines of the organized churches; and Hart ignores this difference, let alone bridge it.

The basic question is which comes first: timeless theological propositions (or those we are told are timeless) or the role of religion(s) in history, that is religion's influence on wars, political ideology and charity, missionaries and crusaders, and so on. The latter is a huge and intricate tapestry of events, so intrinsically enthralling it enraptures many, among whom Hart is the most accomplished rhetorician. All this fails to confront modern atheists' denial of the theological propositions (a creator god with a personality, however ineffable and unknowable, and the immortality of each personal soul.) Several rival religions include these propositions, and have rich histories: but that richness does not prove the truth of their logical claims about god and man.

We thus have two sorts of evangelists today. Those at one extreme advance Tertullian's proposition, that the mysterious and marvellous must be believed; others focus on the observable dynamic of religion in society, to convince us that only fools would fail to join in. Hart is the latter, but his enjoyable literary skill (classical "apologetics") avoids the Creed, and thus avoids tackling the atheists who find its essential points incredible. Christianity might indeed be the best for mankind of the few competing religions that attempted to take over the whole world: but that does not make its Creed true; (and it does not address Judaism and possibly other non-competing religions, that themselves deny most of the essential propositions in the Christian creed.)

All this may be good theology but it is bad philosophy, compared with that of Whitehead and Hartshorne, who attempted to find a god without assuming beforehand either the Christian narrative or the familiar attributes of personality, creation, and so on.

[Aeisele · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is a little unfortunate, since really it's not so much about "delusions" as simply DB Hart narrating the revolution in human values (Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values") brought about by the advent of Christianity within the ancient world, and his thesis that modernity is a counter-revolution. In some ways, he locates Nietzche's thesis that Christianity represents a slave-morality, affirms this thesis (of course, with a positive gloss, rather than a negative one), and gives some historical details to show it.
He also affirms another of Nietzsche's theses, which is that the "scientism" of the 19th century was really parasitic on Christian values (this is the substance of Nietzsche's "death of God" argument: modern humans destroyed God and did not understand the significance of this, but still pretended they could use Christian values without God).
Along the way he takes aim at a lot of mis-informed historical narratives about the past, especially in regards to ideas such as the supposed "dark ages," where (as the story goes) Greek science was lost until the brave (and persecuted) Galileo broke the mold. That of course is non-sense, and for those who have actually read history will know that modern science was in fact developed despite the Greeks, and in fact was developed most by very devout Christians in the well-endowed universities of the middle ages.
Hart can be pretty acerbic at times, but if you're an atheist, I would really recommend this book. If you can read Hart you'll get a chance to sharpen your arguments against a really good mind. It's always best, as it were, to be able to disagree with the best of an argument. So try it.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are considering reading this book, you should be aware that the title is not Hart's, nor does it well represent what he is doing in this book. Hart's chosen title was the subtitle, but his publisher, to the confusion of a great many empassioned readers, displaced it with the provocative "Atheist Delusions." In short, don't read this book if you are looking for a thorough apologetic engagement with the New Atheists.
On the other hand, I think everybody should read this book. Hart's real goal, as I see it, rather than debating with Richard Dawkins and co. is to help all of us, believer and unbeliever alike, to reconsider the modernist telling of history. Most have been taught, in school and elsewhere, that human history (or, rather, European history) is the story of reason's eventual triumph over superstition, and the human liberation that follows. Suffice it to say that Hart goes to work persuasively inverting this history, reminding his readers of just how much the Christian revolution actually achieved, imperfect though it has been, and to what degree the so-called triumph of reason actually constitutes profound cultural, intellectual, and moral loss.
But I'm a poor substitute for Hart. Just read the book.