Christopher Hitchens on Slate -- wrong wrong wrong

Especially the part at the end.

Christopher Hitchens published an article on November 9 in Slate called "Bush's Secularist Triumph: The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them." He's got some very wrong-headed ideas in there.

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll* or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.

It's clear that, at the very least, the human race has a fairly common "religion gene." Apparently Hitchens doesn't have this gene, and I don't either, but between the two of us secularism is not going to defeat religion. What secularism might hope to do is defeat extremist religionism, and unfortunately the way that's going to work is by being nice. One of the essential ways that extremists multiply is via demonizing an oppressor -- remove the oppressor and often the moderates are much more able to moderate. At any rate that's a theory as reasonable as Hitchens' about killing all the extremists.