The gauntlets are separated in this electrical exchange, originally hosted by Christianity Today, where pioneering atheist Christopher Hitchens (author of God Is Not Great) and Christian apologist Douglas Wilson (author of A Letter from a Christian Citizen) compete head-to-head on this divisive question. The result is both amusing and provocative - a glimpse into the ongoing debate.

Douglas Wilson, a devout Christian, believes that Christianity is true and good. Christopher Hitchens, a no less devout atheist, believes Christianity is entirely untrue and ultimately not good. I fall somewhere in the murky middle, though I will confess my sympathies are more with Wilson, whom I do not know, than they are with Christopher, whom I consider a casual friend. As a non-Christian, I cannot claim that I believe that Christianity is unalloyed truth.

As a fairly secular Jew who happens to believe in God as well as the positive role of both religion and Christianity, I'm undoubtedly ill-suited to adjudicate this thoughtful, passionate, and well-informed debate. Fortunately, that's not my assignment here. Rather, I'm simply here to get things started, to awaken the reader's palate for the meal ahead. Christopher Hitchens is nothing if not an anti-totalitarian. As such, he sees his battle with religion as merely another front, or perhaps more precisely the central front, in his own very personal war on terror. His comparison of the Judeo-Christian God to 1984's Big Brother is telling.

In Orwell's dystopia men are told to worship their leader, Hitchens observes, and in the Old Testament they are told to worship the creator of the heavens. But the celestial Big Brother is even more oppressive than the manmade one. Whatever you make of the comparison, one might object that the relationship is more complicated than Hitchens suggests. Voltaire's famous declaration (in a debate with an atheist, no less), "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him," gets close to the matter. Christopher would certainly dispute that God made us in his image, but he might well concede that men have a terrible habit of trying to remake themselves in the image of God.

He would blame religion, at least in part, for this bloody habit. But the cruelest God players, at least in the last century, have often been those most eager to destroy biblical religion and replace it with their own. The Jacobins were keen on bending what Robespierre correctly dubbed the "religious instinct" to their revolutionary needs. The Bolsheviks promised a "heaven on Earth." The Italian Fascists pursued the sacralization of politics. The Nazis sought to replace Christianity with a kind of pagan selfworship. Wilson and Hitchens discuss the moral consequences of atheism with considerably more insight
and sophistication than I could. But both men certainly agree that atheism doesn't require evil any more than faith alone bequeaths goodness. But it is worth pondering that Hitchens' quest for a religionless world of peace and comity is as utopian as the quest for universal Christian love.

The yearning for a religious order is innate to mankind—even if some individual spiritual albinos find themselves missing the gene. Should Christopher succeed in burning Christianity to the ground, he will not be able to stop humanity from building a new temple in its place. And even if the proselytizers of the new faith call themselves atheists or worshippers of Reason, history shows that's no guarantee against industrial scale cruelty, inhumanity, and unthinking dogmatism.