Peter is the author of four books, including The Abolition of Britain<\/em>, a major seller in that country, and the recently published The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith<\/em>, which he wrote to counter Christopher\u2019s book God Is Not Great<\/em>. A British journalist, author and broadcaster, he currently writes for The Mail on Sunday<\/em>, where he is a columnist and occasional foreign correspondent. He is a\u00a0contributor to (among others) The Spectator<\/em>, Prospect<\/em>, Standpoint<\/em>, The Guardian<\/em>, The New Statesman <\/em>and the American Conservative<\/em>. Once an atheist, he attributes his return to faith largely to his experience of socialism in practice, which he witnessed during his many years reporting in Eastern Europe and his nearly three years as a resident correspondent in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. This year, he won the Orwell Prize for Journalism for foreign reporting.<\/p>\n\n View video highlights from the event.<\/a><\/p>\n\n Speakers:<\/strong>\nChristopher Hitchens, Author, Contributing Editor to The Atlantic<\/em>, Columnist for Vanity Fair<\/em>\nPeter Hitchens, Author, Columnist for The Mail on Sunday<\/em><\/p>\n\n Moderator:<\/strong>\nMichael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center<\/p>\n\n Navigate This Transcript:<\/strong>\nChristopher Hitchens\u2019 Opening Remarks<\/a>\nPeter Hitchens\u2019 Opening Remarks<\/a>\nOn the Decline in Civilized Society<\/a>\nOn the Brothers\u2019 Relationship<\/a>\nChristopher on Prayers of Support<\/a>\nOn Nietzsche and Human Will<\/a>\nOn the Separation of Church and State<\/a>\nWhere Does Morality Come From?<\/a><\/p>\n\n LUIS LUGO, PEW FORUM ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE:<\/strong> Good afternoon and thank you all for coming. And a special thanks to Christopher and Peter Hitchens for being with us today. I\u2019m Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. We are a project of the Pew Research Center<\/a>, which is a nonpartisan organization that does not take positions on issues or policy debates \u2014 not even on the question of the existence of the Almighty. This event is part of the Pew Forum luncheon series in which we bring together journalists and important public figures for serious discussions on topics at the intersection of religion and public affairs.<\/p>\n\n Our format at these events is really very, very simple. We ask our guests to speak for about 10 minutes or so. Then we invite the rest of you to join in the conversation. I should point out that this event is on the record and we are taping it. And our friends at CNN, as you can see, are also videotaping it. So just be aware of that.<\/p>\n\n At this time, I would like to introduce Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who is an advisor to the Pew Forum. Mike did all the heavy lifting in pulling the panel together, and so for that, he gets the privilege of moderating this event.<\/p>\n\n We have a few out-of-town journalists listening in via conference call, and I would like to welcome them as well. Those of you on the call who would like to take part in the discussion \u2014 and we encourage that \u2014 please e-mail your questions. We\u2019ll make sure to work your questions into the queue.<\/p>\n\n Again, it\u2019s great to have all of you here and via phone with us. We welcome you to the Pew Research Center. Mike, over to you.<\/p>\n\n MICHAEL CROMARTIE, ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER:<\/strong> Thank you, Luis, and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. If you have a bio right in front of you, which I know you do, I am not one of those moderators who then turns around and reads that bio to you. I think that you know why you\u2019re here. You know both these men by reputation, and their biographies are in front of you. What I would like to do, though, is just give an anecdote or two about our speakers.<\/p>\n\n Christopher, as many of you all know, has a new book out now called Hitch-22: A Memoir<\/em>. I went back and looked at some reviews of the book, and I thought I would try to find something in the reviews about Christopher. In The New York Times,<\/em> the reviewer highlights Christopher\u2019s great capacity for friendship. He\u2019s very moved by the fact that in this autobiography Christopher has such wonderful things to say about his lifelong friends. In fact, the reviewer says<\/a>, \u201cHe is also devoted to friendship. Hitch-22<\/em> is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one\u2019s friends \u2026 I\u2019ve ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens\u2019s personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Then in another review in The New York Times<\/em>, the reviewer says<\/a> this: \u201cThe truth is, by Hitchens\u2019s standards, his examination of how he and the left parted company is surprisingly unstrident and nonpolemical. It is, in fact, almost melancholic. He\u2019s not claiming with his typical adamantine force that the balance sheets work out. And perhaps the strongest theme in Hitch-22<\/em> is just this \u2014 that sometimes the balance sheets are an unholy mess.<\/p>\n\n \u201cBy the time he got to Oxford, he was quite accustomed to \u2018keeping two sets of books,\u2019 passing out leaflets at car plants by day and racing off in fancier dress to the Gridiron Club by night. Christopher Hitchens may long to be a cogent man of reason, and he can certainly be a pitiless adversary. But he knows there are two sides to any decent match, and it\u2019s touching in Hitch-22<\/em> to see how often he\u2019ll race to the other side of the court to return his own serve, which may explain why, though he tries to be difficult, he\u2019s so hard to dislike.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Ladies and gentlemen, I give you someone who, even when you disagree with him politically or religiously, is so very hard to dislike. Christopher?<\/p>\n\n CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:<\/strong> Oh, is it my turn already?<\/p>\n\n CROMARTIE:<\/strong> You\u2019re on.<\/p>\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:<\/strong> I want to say that I was very impressed while reading Peter\u2019s latest book \u2014 to which I commend your attention \u2014 to see that he had written a particular \u2014 (audio break) \u2014 long before he can have read a book I hope you will also all be reading, which is Diarmaid MacCulloch\u2019s extraordinary history of Christianity. I don\u2019t know how many people here have tried it yet. But it\u2019s really an admirable, beautifully written book.<\/p>\n\n It\u2019s argued from the viewpoint of a fairly faithful Anglican, whatever that may turn out to be. It\u2019s written, anyway, from a Christian perspective and with an absolutely extraordinary control of scholarship and prose. One of the things it says \u2014 very sobering for a Christian reader, I would suppose, to read is this:<\/p>\n\n There used to be a word which could be used unironically, and it was used, really, until not much more than a century, a century-and-a-half ago. People could say, and mean what they said when they said the word, Christendom. There was a Christian world. It had been partly evolved, partly carved out by the sword, partly defended by the sword, at some points giving way, at other times expanding. But it was a meaningful name for a community of belief and value that endured for many, many centuries \u2014 and has many splendors to its name.<\/p>\n\n And it\u2019s all gone; no one could use that term now without either great nostalgia or some degree of irony. It\u2019s all gone for the reason \u2014 MacCulloch gives exactly the reason Peter gives in his book. It destroyed itself, Christendom, and it destroyed itself by the tremendous criminal act of urging its members to kill each other in the outbreak of the Great War, as it was then known \u2014\u00a0but it wasn\u2019t known that it would lead to a huge and even worse part two \u2014 in 1914, where the king-emperor of the British empire, who was also the head of the Church of England, and the Russian czar, who was also the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and you follow the road \u2014<\/p>\n\n There\u2019s a partial exemption to be made here for the French empire, which didn\u2019t precisely go to war in the name of its religion. But all the others did, and they leveled Christian civilization, European civilization, to a point where we still have no idea how much we\u2019ve lost and how greatly our development as a species and as a society has been retarded. Out of the ruins of it, and striding across those poisoned ruins, came the great totalitarianisms that very nearly put an end to what remained of what could be called, by then certainly not Christendom, but of European and Russian civilization.<\/p>\n\n So this discussion that we\u2019re having is by no means a new one and doesn\u2019t involve such a new thought. We\u2019ve had to wrestle for a very long time with the idea, what will we do about civilization; what will we do about values, ethics, morals; how will we teach them; how will we learn to live with one another in the absence of any real religious authority, any credible one, any one that\u2019s worthy of the name, worthy of respect? This absence has been felt for a very, very long time, long before I was able to start writing about it.<\/p>\n\n I would just add, because I think it\u2019s of extraordinary interest, that most of those empires have since passed away. Some of them won the war, nominally, and some of them lost it, nominally. They\u2019ve more or less accepted the implied defeat in the long run, but two of them are in a rather sinister way, in my judgment, in the process of recrudescing \u2014 the Ottoman Empire, the caliphate, which very ill-advisedly went to war on the side of Wilhelmine German and Austro-Hungarian imperialism, throwing its own empire into the ring and declaring a world jihad from the throne of the caliph himself in Constantinople, making it obligatory on all the faithful to kill at least two nonbelievers as long as those nonbelievers were not German, Austrian or Hungarian, since it was the German, Austrian and Hungarian treasuries that were actually paying for the promulgation of this jihad.<\/p>\n\n [Ataturk]<\/p>\n\n\n It\u2019s a real movement, and we\u2019re going to be living with it for the rest of our lives. And those who think that faith-based is the prefix to something positive have a lot of argument, I think, ahead of them when they confront people who really mean it like that.<\/p>\n\n The second of the two empires that took part in this hecatomb of civilization in the name of their own religion, I mean the Russian one, shows real signs also of imperial nostalgia. No one here, I suppose, will have forgotten the moment when George Bush first met Vladimir Putin, who had chosen for the day to decorate his chest with his grandmother\u2019s ornate Russian Orthodox crucifix, enough for the president to be convinced and to say that just to look into those beautiful limpid eyes was enough to see that he was a person of deep spirituality and sensitivity.<\/p>\n\n I think, by the way, in a fairly strong field, that\u2019s one of the stupidest things any president has ever said. But now you don\u2019t have to use much of your imagination when you see at the inauguration \u2014 when Putin wants to make someone prime minister, and when he says, how can he make himself czar again down the road \u2014 all these inaugural ceremonies are attended by black-cowled patriarchs swinging their incenses, demanding and getting in return privileges over other churches and other religions in Russia, restoring the same political and clerical balance, roughly, that did underpin Russian absolutism and autocracy until the great catastrophe of 1914.<\/p>\n\n And that\u2019s coming back, too, and I think we don\u2019t pay anything like enough attention to this fusion of traditional great Russian chauvinism and police regime with the clerical bodyguard and prop and stay and ally that it\u2019s appointed for itself. But now it goes without saying that I\u2019m speaking to the question of, how compatible is civilization with religion?<\/p>\n\n But so far, those are the only two empires that do show this sign of religious revival. It\u2019s equally true to say that in huge parts of what we might call the industrialized modern world, tens of millions of people, in effect, live in a post-religious society. It\u2019s hard to argue, I think, that they lead conspicuously less-civilized lives than their predecessor generations, than the ones of 1914 or 1939.<\/p>\n\n We haven\u2019t yet conquered the problem of alienation or of anomie or of spiritual waste or of the fear of death. That has to be worked on. And we have a problem with moral relativism, that religion in its \u2014 inaudible \u2014 supremacy equally failed to solve. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s really true to say that we live less-civilized a life than those of our predecessors who felt that there was a genuine religious authority that spoke with power.<\/p>\n\n It\u2019s actually more than half a century since George Orwell wrote that the problem of civilization would be exactly this. He said, how will we now inculcate ethics, teach morality, to the people, to the majority, in the absence of a spiritual authority that commands respect and that has innate presence, that has the respect? With this decline in the authority of religion, how shall we teach ethics and morals?<\/p>\n\n It remains a very, very good question. I\u2019d pause to mention that George Orwell himself, a very convinced atheist with a very strong and rooted respect for liturgy and for scripture and for tradition, made quite a good shot, in living his own life and evolving his own writing, in showing how, in fact, it is possible to lead an ethical existence without supernatural support or any appeal to it. But that might be choosing a rather too-favorable example to my own argument.<\/p>\n\n The truth is that if we just look at our own society, what do we really find? I was very interested to see the recent findings of our hosts today about how much Americans really know about their own religion \u2014 how few Catholics really know what the sacrament is, for example, how very few Protestants know who Martin Luther was, how very few \u2014 I was very surprised by this \u2014 how very few Jews appear to know that Maimonides was one of them \u2014 a Jew, as you will \u2014 and so forth.<\/p>\n\n But it shouldn\u2019t really have surprised me, I don\u2019t think. Thomas Jefferson said in what I used to think of as a disastrously non-prescient letter \u2014 I think it was to his nephew, Peter Carr \u2014 that there isn\u2019t a young American born today who will not die a Unitarian.<\/p>\n\n Well, that\u2019s one of the things T.J. didn\u2019t get exactly right. But if you go around the public halls and the provincial theaters, as I do whenever I can, and engage with belief and the believers, you\u2019ll find to an extraordinary extent that a kind of ethical humanism with a vague spiritual content is extremely commonplace. I can take 10 bucks off most Catholics by asking them the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. I\u2019ve known all about how to do that long before Pew alerted me to the opportunity \u2014 (laughter).<\/p>\n\n There are people who combine a sort of Anglicism with a kind of Buddhism \u2014 it\u2019s not at all uncommon \u2014 or Hinduism. I would say that the American Jewish population is in its majority effectively post-religious. It has, I would prefer to say, transcended its monotheism and become an ethical humanism. Certainly in the Reform, and to a great degree the Conservative congregations, that\u2019s already the case, and everybody knows that on non-scriptural but, as it were, moral matters the American Catholic community has what is called by them a cafeteria Catholic, or an \u00e0 la carte manner to it. In other words, it picks and chooses what might or might not be convenient to believe.<\/p>\n\n This is shallow, to be certain, and it\u2019s thin, but I\u2019m not sure if it isn\u2019t preferable to a more decided, enforced orthodoxy, in connection with which, because I know I\u2019m trespassing on your time, I\u2019ll try and put it in the form of a question. It\u2019s a thought experiment, if you like, which I\u2019ll leave you with. Notice how in your daily newspaper intake, media intake, the much-maligned word secular has acquired on some pages of the newspaper, namely the international ones, almost the character of a positive. It has lost its pejorative character almost entirely.<\/p>\n\n In other words, suppose you were to read today that the new prime minister of Iraq was the leader of a secular force that didn\u2019t have any religious allegiance. Would you be, A, terribly upset, B, enormously relieved or, three, thrilled beyond measure? (Laughter.) Ought you to be thinking this, those of you of faith?<\/p>\n\n What if someone was to say a leader would emerge in Iran, an opposition leader, with genuine support among the intellectuals and \u2014 inaudible \u2014 and the downtrodden workers and peasants, who was to say, you know what? I\u2019ve never believed a word of this story about the upcoming 12th<\/sup> imam and his reappearance and his bringing of a reign of peace and redemption to the whole human race. I think that\u2019s an absolute fairy story; I think that\u2019s got about as much chance of being true as Santa Claus. Would you not be rather relieved to hear that there was such a person? I submit that you most certainly would.<\/p>\n\n If you heard today that Bibi Netanyahu on yet another of his fraudulent trips to Washington to humiliate our president and our Congress had dispensed with the services of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the religious partnership in his coalition, who calls for God to smite the Palestinians with a plague, for example \u2014 that this man no longer appointed the person who is in charge of housing and settlements, which a matter of fact, he does. Would you not think that was a step in the right direction? I submit that you would.<\/p>\n\n So it may be rude to leave you with a question rather than proposing an answer, but I think you\u2019ll see why I have done so, and I now make way for a younger and more principled generation.<\/p>\n\n CROMARTIE:<\/strong> Thank you, Christopher. A biography of Peter is in front of you, but I would just call your attention to something that he wrote in his new book, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith<\/em>. In April 2008, they had a debate in Grand Rapids, Mich., on the existence of God \u2014 Christopher and Peter did \u2014 and he wrote this:<\/p>\n\n \u201cSomehow on that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, our old quarrels were, as far as I am concerned, finished for good. Just at the point where many might have expected \u2014 and some might have hoped \u2014 that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not. At the end I concluded that while the audience perhaps had not noticed, we had ended the evening on better terms than either of us might have expected. This was, and remains, more important to me than the debate itself.<\/p>\n\n \u201cSomething far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when Christopher and I had met in his Washington, D.C. apartment. If he despised and loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasn\u2019t showing it. To my astonishment, Christopher cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven\u2019t got over it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Edward Lucas of The Economist<\/em> described Peter as \u201ca forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. Readers with long memories may remember his extraordinary coverage of the revolution in Romania in 1989, or more recently his intrepid travels to places such as North Korea. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behavior at home and abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Hitchens.<\/p>\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n PETER HITCHENS:<\/strong> Thank you. The question, first of all, is what civilization might be. I doubt whether we can agree on that very quickly, since we probably can\u2019t even agree on how to spell it on either side of the Atlantic. I would really like to start by explaining what it isn\u2019t and to recount some experiences of mine in places where it had ceased to be.<\/p>\n\n The first one, picture me, if you will, in a blue suit and polished leather shoes sitting on top of a pile of cargo in a retired Soviet aircraft \u2014 rather, Soviet aircraft which ought to have been retired \u2014 landing at Mogadishu Airport one winter\u2019s afternoon shortly before sunset. I won\u2019t explain quite how stupid I had been to get myself into this position, but I was working at that time for a daily newspaper which had accepted a suggestion of mine, unexpectedly, that I should go to Mogadishu just before the U.S. Marines arrived, as they thought, to rescue the Somalis from famine and chaos.<\/p>\n\n Arriving at Mogadishu Airport is an experience some of you may have had and some of you may not. What I can tell you is this: There is no passport control. There is no baggage reclaim. In fact, as you land, sitting on top of the baggage, it slides the length of the aircraft as the brakes go on, which has made me take aircraft safety precautions with a total lack of seriousness ever since. It\u2019s rather enjoyable, actually, when the baggage slides down the whole length of the plane.<\/p>\n\n You\u2019re met at the end of the runway by a man from The Associated Press who is collecting all the water and supplies for his bureau, and by about 15 young men with AK-47s, who approach you and say, do you want a bodyguard? And you turn to the man from The Associated Press and you say, do I want a bodyguard? And he says, yes you do. If you don\u2019t have a bodyguard, you\u2019ll be dead and stripped by morning.<\/p>\n\n So we hire, myself and my colleague, John Downing, we hire one of these \u2014 in fact, two of these bodyguards \u2014 and a car with no upholstery, and we drive into Mogadishu just in time to see the departing ranks of the gangs and tribal formations which are supposed to be driven away by the arrival of the U.S. Marines. They are, in fact, going. They\u2019re going into the sunset with their machine guns and their bandannas \u2014 they look like heavily armed rock stars \u2014 because they know that there is no point in being there when the Marines arrive, and they intend to come back later and do whatever it is they do.<\/p>\n\n We circle around, looking for some time for somewhere to spend the night. And only by great good fortune, because departing around a corner, my colleague sees somebody he knows from Sarajevo, do we find anywhere to spend the night. We are allowed into a compound which has been rented by some German television people, who share with us their camel stew and allow us to sleep on their concrete floor. I go to sleep listening that evening to the cries of dying people and the chatter of gunfire outside and hearing, in effect, what would have happened to me if I hadn\u2019t found my way into the German compound.<\/p>\n\n The following day I find people to take me round; we\u2019re nearly murdered on one occasion because my interpreter is from the wrong tribe. I see a scene of complete desolation. Every building has bullet holes, or indeed, shell holes in it. The main street is completely stripped bare of every feature of modern civilization. It\u2019s just a stretch of mud with potholes in it with loping persons on it carrying weapons and no guarantee that they won\u2019t use them on you. All the physical features of civilization and all the, as it were, intangible features of civilization \u2014 civility, safety, the ability to rely on your neighbor, the passing person, for any kind of kindness or consideration \u2014 have gone.<\/p>\n\n Eventually, with great relief, I got out of Mogadishu and I got home and was shown a few weeks afterwards a photograph of the same street which I had seen on that evening and on the following morning. Mogadishu having been an Italian colony, the street scene was actually rather Roman: pleasantly dressed people strolling along well-kept sidewalks, expensive cars gliding up and down a smooth road, telephone kiosks, pavement cafes.<\/p>\n\n The distance between that and what I saw was approximately 20 years, and it came to me and it has stayed with me ever since, whenever I walk down a pleasant street in Oxford, where I live, or indeed roam around Dupont Circle here or any major civilized city, this is not permanent. This is not here automatically. It is not as the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is as a result of certain unusual conditions which do not always exist and which have come about only for a very short period of time in a very limited number of places, and which even having been established, can come to an end.<\/p>\n\n This experience came on top of two years living in what, when I arrived, was the capital city of the Soviet Union and what, when I left, was the capital city of the Russian Federation. And there I also saw a very curious civilization which was not a civilization. That is to say, there was very little civility on the street between people. I was always struck by this. I would go down into what we\u2019re always told in the tourist manuals is the magnificent Moscow Metro.<\/p>\n\n Because of the horrendously ruthless climate, the stations are guarded by very heavy wooden swing doors, or were in those days, and I would hold them open for people as they came into the stations behind me, and they would step back with a look of mistrust on their faces, as if I was playing a sort of joke on them. They were completely unused to the idea that anyone might do this. There wasn\u2019t even that level of consideration. Nobody in any kind of public dealing would trust you. Almost everything had to be obtained through whispered threats and bribes.<\/p>\n\n By contrast, if you were invited into the homes of Russians, you were immediately led into a warm and entirely civilized circumstance of complete mutual obligation and trust in that very, very narrow and very, very small society. It was the family and the immediate friends where people knew whom they could trust and to whom they could show obligation and from whom they could expect it.<\/p>\n\n Now, you may say that this has to do with the climate or the economic conditions. I don\u2019t happen to believe this, and if any of you would be kind enough to take a look at my book, I hope I have explained to some extent how this had come about. These two experiences, one on top of the other, persuaded me that it was worthwhile to think of what it was in our civilization that we ought to value.<\/p>\n\n There was one other thing, and Christopher will be slightly familiar with part of this. When we were growing up in the early 1960s and late 1950s, we lived for a short while in a very pleasant suburb of what was then the British naval base at Portsmouth. Now that we no longer have a navy, it is no longer that but it was then, and it was a very secluded, soft, comfortable, safe place in which we could wander about unsupervised for hours. Our parents could send us off and not worry about what would become of us. I can\u2019t imagine, actually, anywhere more typical of English suburbia at the time.<\/p>\n\n While I was in Moscow, I had access to an immensely elaborate precursor of the Internet, the wire services that my newspaper received, one of them being the Press Association, the domestic one. And I was astonished one evening to be reading the wire services and to see the name of this suburb, Alverstoke, come up in a story. In that story what had happened was that somebody had been involved in an altercation with a group of people going past his front yard who had been kicking his garden fence in. As a result of trying to tell them to stop doing this, he had been kicked to death. And I thought: Alverstoke \u2014 kicked to death \u2014 what has happened to the country that I grew up in?<\/p>\n\n When I got back, I found that there was more and more of this sort of thing going on. Any of you who are interested, I urge \u2014 I haven\u2019t got time to go into the cases now \u2014 to Google the cases of two people, one, Fiona Pilkington and her daughter, strangely named Francecca, and the other, a man called Garry Newlove, Garry with two R\u2019s, and you will see that in large parts of England, particularly in the poorer parts, the behavior of individual human beings towards one another has sunk to levels not far distant from the Stone Age.<\/p>\n\n Mr. Newlove did very much as the person in Alverstoke did. There were people misbehaving in the street outside, and he went and remonstrated with them, and they beat him to the ground \u2014 and this phrase occurs very often in newspaper reports in Britain \u2014 they then kicked his head as if it were a football until he died.<\/p>\n\n In the case of Fiona Pilkington, her daughter was disabled and not very well-favored to look at, and as a result, they were ceaselessly persecuted by their neighbors. Their house was pelted with eggs and flour; they were shouted at and screamed at until their lives became a total misery. Mrs. Pilkington eventually snapped under this pressure, took her daughter with her out into the country, set fire to the car and burned them both to death in a hideous murder and suicide of a type which I hope is unimaginable to any of you but which seemed to be a reasonable conclusion to her troubles.<\/p>\n\n In both cases, they found it almost impossible to get the attention of the authorities, though, of course, after the events became highly public, the authorities began to take some interest and notice. But in fact, this kind of thing is so common at a low level in the grimmer suburbs of English cities that it is actually normal for a lot of people.<\/p>\n\n This was not the case until quite recently. How has this decline in civilization come about? Well, I think it has come about at least partly \u2014 and I\u2019m not a single-cause person \u2014 but at least partly because there is no longer in the hearts of the English people the restraint of the Christian religion, which used to prevent this sort of behavior.<\/p>\n\n I think it would be completely idle to imagine that the two things were unconnected. I haven\u2019t come here to say that civilization\u2019s impossible without religion or indeed without Christianity. There are non-Christian civilizations. There are civilized countries which aren\u2019t really based upon religion at all, such as Japan, which I think any visitor there will agree is an intensely civilized place.<\/p>\n\n But the extraordinary combination, which you in this country and I in mine used to enjoy and may for some time continue to, of liberty and order seems to me only to occur where people take into their hearts the very, very powerful messages of self-restraint without mutual advantage, which is central to the Christian religion.<\/p>\n\n Without that, you reach a kind of, what I term, practical atheism, which is not a term which would be used by the people who actually engage in it because they probably could neither spell nor pronounce atheism, but which does seem to me to be a fair summary of the way in which people behave. If we can agree even to begin to agree here that there might be some truth in any of that, then some discussion can take place.<\/p>\n\n What I\u2019ve found objectionable about a great deal of the attack upon religion that\u2019s been taking place on both sides of the Atlantic in the English-speaking world in the past few years has been the dismissal and the contempt and the scorn and even what seems to me to be the dislike expressed over and over again for the Christian faith and for the good things that religion does and the unwillingness to accept that there are any of those good things, that the turning of the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just is something which could conceivably be obtained together with liberty by some other method.<\/p>\n\n I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true, and I think in a serious argument about it, then the atheists would need to concede that it wasn\u2019t entirely true, and in conceding that, might be willing to hold the argument on a slightly narrower field from the one where they currently hold it. I\u2019ll leave it at that.<\/p>\n\n CROMARTIE:<\/strong> Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Christopher, well, we\u2019ll get you in, in a minute. Peter David?<\/p>\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n PETER DAVID, THE ECONOMIST<\/em>:<\/strong> Peter, if I could respond to what you just said. You gave two very telling examples of societies or places where there has been an utter loss of moral compass. One was Mogadishu and the other was your former suburb in Portsmouth. But what struck me is that in the Portsmouth case you seem to argue that it is secular values or at least the loss of religious values that is at least partly to account for what had happened, whereas I would have thought that Somalia was quite a pious country, albeit not a Christian country.<\/p>\n\n PETER HITCHENS:<\/strong> The point I make about Somalia is, actually, here is a place where civilization was and is not. To go into the history of the foreign interventions in Somalia which largely led to that is a different issue. The only point I was making here was that civilization can cease to exist when forces either from inside or from outside can bring it to an end.<\/p>\n\n I think almost certainly in the case of a country such as Britain or even possibly the United States the threat is much more likely to be internal. But the questions which really arise here are: What is the source of authority? Why should people behave better than they need to? Why should there ever be a situation in which the strong should be under the control of law? Why should law ever, ever trump power in any system? And why should that restraint exist?<\/p>\n\n Why should people be brought up to have manners and to show restraint and civility to others? How is it going to happen that they will do so? And if it ceases to happen, how quickly will you reach the stage where it will be wiser to stay inside your house at night than to go out, which is pretty much the state that we were in, in the 13th or 14th century?<\/p>\n\n What I often get in response from people when I say that things are getting pretty bad in Britain is, well, if you look at the records of Oxford in the 14th century, it was just as bad as it is now. I say, yeah, absolutely. But we have had an interval between now and the 14th century when we thought we were making progress, and now we\u2019re traveling rather rapidly backwards.<\/p>\n\n CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:<\/strong> Just \u2014 only on the Hitchensian stuff, if I may, because otherwise that precious fragment might get lost. Say, of course, that law is being reestablished in parts of Mogadishu. Already, the law is called shari\u2019a; the people enforcing it are called the al-Shabab. They know exactly how much people want government rather than anarchy, and they\u2019ve had a plan for this for a long time. Anarchy is originally part of that plan, by the way. Create the anarchy first, then people will call for your law. That\u2019s how the Taliban took power. This is just another way of rephrasing the problem of the faith-based.<\/p>\n\n As to my memories of Alverstoke, I have to say I\u2019m shocked to hear that story, even at this remove. Even in those days, we knew we were lucky. Our parents would not have said you can go into Portsmouth and hang around the railway station or the docks any old time of day or night. No, in fact, we were constantly being enjoined to beware of the rough and the lumpen element that was noticeable in English life.<\/p>\n\n Then there were cities where you couldn\u2019t even imagine, where everyone \u2014 your school friends \u2014 would talk about, do you know what happens in Glasgow on the housing estates? This is in exactly the \u201950s and \u201960s when the authority of the Church of England was much greater than it is now. Glasgow, you\u2019d get your eyes cut out with a broken bottle if \u2014 inaudible \u2014particular students looked at you. It was partly true. Glasgow, the most religious city in the country, where people would kill you over what kind of Christian you were, as a matter of fact.<\/p>\n\n We hadn\u2019t then realized how bad the situation was in Northern Ireland, where constant violence, incivility, sadism, combined with all the things that go with clerical rule and politics \u2014 backwardness, stupidity, unemployment, low standards of education and hygiene. The place was a complete slum. And what distinguished it from the rest of the United Kingdom? The fact that the priests had authority there and people were willing to swing a boot or a bottle in the name of faith. That\u2019s what made the difference.<\/p>\n\n PETER HITCHENS:<\/strong> May I make a brief riposte? Part of the problem that we had with the rough parts of town was \u2014 I\u2019m afraid that our mother, particularly, was a bit of a snob. I do remember one occasion. We had the groceries delivered and in the box which had come from the grocers was a jar of peanut butter, which I seized on and began to eat before \u2014 my mother was out when the delivery came. When she came back, she said, what\u2019s this? Peanut butter? We don\u2019t have that in this house! And she rang the grocers and demanded they come and take it back and forbade me to eat any more because it was not the kind of thing that the children of a naval officer ought to eat.<\/p>\n\n When we lived in an even more salubrious part of the country, on the edge of Dartmoor, there was a small estate of prefabs inhabited by people who were known as the rough boys, with whom we were not allowed to associate. I don\u2019t think the danger from them was actually very great. The main danger was we might have picked up their accents.<\/p>\n\n I do think that the other thing Christopher does tend to do is to surge off into the wider and more political side of this matter. Yes, of course, the Northern Irish problem and indeed in Glasgow a similar problem of Protestant and Catholic sectarianism is, was and, I fear, for many years will be great. But in terms of the lives which people led, the way in which they behaved towards their neighbors, the way in which children were brought up, the manners which people displayed, I don\u2019t think you will find that the effect of Christian upbringing was small in the 1950s or 1960s.<\/p>\n\n What\u2019s happened to Northern Ireland and indeed to Scotland and indeed the whole of Britain in that period is the invasion of trash culture and the collapse of all that kind of teaching. And there\u2019s an enormous amount of protection racket, gangster-ish thuggery there carried on in the name of religious factionalism, but not, I think, generally by people who are enthusiastic churchgoers or ever were.<\/p>\n\n There is this problem with the utopian view of the world, which I don\u2019t share, that you do like to concentrate on the big things. Can we bring democracy or civilization to X? Can we defeat such and such all around the world rather than can we actually construct, in the square mile around where we live, a civil society in which people can live in freedom and order? Which seems to me to be, actually, just as important if not more so and often rather harder in execution than launching missiles or sending armies to the other side of the world with dubious consequences.<\/p>\n\n BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR:<\/strong> I\u2019m going to turn this to the personal, if I might. I was listening to a BBC \u2014 a Radio 4 \u2014 interview with both of you back from 2007, and it appeared to be fairly acrimonious between the two of you. Do you remember that one?<\/p>\n\n PETER HITCHENS:<\/strong> If it\u2019s the one I\u2019m thinking of, it was very brief.<\/p>\n\n BRADLEY HAGERTY:<\/strong> Well, not by NPR standards.<\/p>\n\n PETER HITCHENS:<\/strong> Yeah, but with the BBC, unlike your own wonderful organization, if you\u2019re me and you\u2019re interviewed by it, you know you\u2019ve got 15 seconds before they interrupt you. So you\u2019ve got to be quick.<\/p>\n\n BRADLEY HAGERTY:<\/strong> What was interesting about listening to this kind of three-way, as we would call it at NPR, is that it was really fairly acrimonious. I didn\u2019t hear a lot of brotherly love in that. It was hard to detect that. I\u2019m just wondering if there has been a change in the way you all view each other, view your arguments about, say, the existence of God or life after death, that kind of thing, the necessity of religion to have a moral civilization. Has any of that tenor changed since, Christopher, you have been diagnosed?<\/p>\n\n CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:<\/strong> I don\u2019t think my own tenor has changed. The relationship I have with Peter is very well encapsulated in the fragment of his book that Michael read at the beginning. I mean, if you want to know, if anything, my contempt for the forced consolation of religion has increased since I became aware that I probably don\u2019t have very long to live. But it\u2019s not a thing I want to make a particular point on in this argument.<\/p>\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n
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