God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Hitchens suggests that the concept of miracles arose early in religious history, when people first began to understand the workings of the cosmos. Any ancient person who had gained understanding of some natural system could trick their community into believing that they had a mystical insight that others did not possess. Thus, they could “miraculously” predict eclipses, floods, and other phenomena. Like the concept of intelligent design, Hitchens believes this type of thinking to be inappropriate in the modern, scientifically-literate world. He suggests two options for anyone who believes they have seen a miracle: “The first is that the laws of nature have been suspended (in your favor). The second is that you are under a misapprehension, or suffering from a delusion” (141). To Hitchens, all miracles inherently fall into the latter category. Descriptions of miracles long in the past must be viewed with even more scrutiny. Hitchens compares miracles to the concept of alien abductions and reincarnation. Although many people claim those concepts to be true and often relay stories about them in great detail, no scientific evidence of either extraterrestrials or people raised from the dead has ever been found.

Hitchens offers several examples of easily-refutable miracles from historical accounts. He relays his own experience as the dissenting voice (formerly called the Devil’s Advocate) during the hearing about Mother Teresa’s potential beatification. One of the reported Miracles surrounding Mother Teresa involved the interior of her House of the Dying, which was very dark, being miraculously illuminated when photographed by a documentarian. Hitchens reports that the documentarian himself stated that the quality of his film was responsible for the good-quality images. A divine origin of the light became a popular story, though, and soon the cameraman found himself being interviewed as a witness to a miracle. Hitchens was also allowed to view testimony about a second miracle, involving a woman cured of a tumor through contact with one of Mother Teresa’s medals. In this instance, the words of Catholic nuns who treated the woman were recorded, while a team of doctors who had treated her with conventional methods was ignored. Hitchens compares this “miracle” to other “miraculous” cures, and invites the reader to again apply Ockham’s razor: People often happen to recover from illnesses they were not expected to survive, but this does not prove that divine intervention is at play.

In contrast to miraculous recoveries and other positive divine intervention, Hitchens gives examples of natural disasters that have been attributed to God. When the island volcano Krakatoa erupted in the 19th century, many people in nearby Indonesia saw it as a sign to convert to Islam. An Israeli rabbi blamed Hurricane Katrina on the choice to remove Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip. Several American Evangelical Christian leaders saw the September 11 attacks as punishment for the United States’ decline into sin, and especially blamed supporters of gay rights and abortion. 

Hitchens chooses three relatively recent religious movements to paint a picture of the way religions are founded. The oldest and most well-established church covered in this chapter is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), or Mormons.

The Mormon church was founded in the mid-1800s in upstate New York by Joseph Smith. New York at the time was rife with self-proclaimed mystics and religious con artists. Before starting his successful venture as the leader of the Mormons, Smith was a low-level scam artist and was convicted of fraud in 1826. Less than a year later, he claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni, who told him where to find a set of golden tablets that contained the written history of the ancient United States. He translated the tablets with a set of seer stones, also provided by Moroni. Since like many prophets Smith was illiterate, his neighbor was recruited to write the translation as Smith read it aloud. Eventually, this text would become the Book of Mormon.

Hitchens points out several reasons why this process appeared fraudulent from the very start. For one, Smith claimed that no one else could view the tablets or the stones, saying they were transported back to heaven immediately after the translation was finished. Second, his neighbor’s skeptical wife stole the book partway through the translation, stating that if the book were legitimate Smith would be able to recreate it perfectly. Smith was unable to do so, but claimed that the theft had angered God, who feared that the pages would end up in Satan’s hands. Because of this, the book would be translated from a second set of plates that contained a different record of events, so the story’s wording and details would not be exactly the same.

Despite these suspicious beginnings, the LDS church flourished due to Smith’s charismatic leadership. Hitchens also credits its success to the fluid nature of Mormon doctrine. Unlike many religions, in which the word of God was handed down many years ago and is unchangeable, the LDS church has a living prophet at all times, who serves as the church president. Due to this, the Mormon God is able to give new revelations at any time. This was particularly helpful during the Civil Rights Movement. The original Book of Mormon explicitly stated that dark skin was a punishment from God and banned Black people from all levels of church leadership. Just as overt racism was becoming less acceptable in the United States, the prophet received a revelation that reworded this doctrine, and Black people were allowed into the Mormon hierarchy.

Along with Mormonism, Hitchens gives two examples of smaller faiths founded through corrupt means. Around the time of the Second World War, the residents of certain remote Pacific islands were met with American military forces seeking to build landing strips. They often brought gifts to appease the island residents. The people interpreted the Americans as their ancestors and began to build makeshift airstrips to encourage them to return with cargo planes loaded with supplies. On the island of Tana, the residents even claimed a specific soldier named John Frumm as their redeemer and created a pseudo-Christian worship system around him. Hitchens’s second example involves an Evangelical cult built around a young boy named Marjoe Gortner. When Gortner was four, his parents began to tell other Evangelical Christians that he was a messenger from God, and he began to give sermons. He became famous around the country and his parents profited greatly from his work. As an adult, Gortner made a movie explaining all of the tricks employed by charismatic Evangelical preachers to make their followers feel divinely moved.

In contrast to Chapter 11, Chapter 12 explains how certain religious movements have died out. Hitchens begins with the story of Sabbatai Sevi, a 17th-century Jewish Kabbalist who gained a large following by promising them he was sent to lead them back into the Holy Land. Sabbatai’s legitimacy was doubted by many, but as he traveled around the Mediterranean and Middle East claiming to be a new messiah, he gained a strong following of prominent Jewish allies. Eventually, Sabbatai was imprisoned in Constantinople and charged with heresy by Muslim authorities. He was offered a trial by ordeal, in which he would be shot at with arrows. If the arrows missed him, he would be accepted as a legitimate godly messenger. Rather than risking his life to prove his holiness, Sabbatai renounced his claims and pledged allegiance to Islam, which gave him his freedom.

Sabbatai was later exiled to a remote part of the Ottoman empire and died a short time later, supposedly on Yom Kippur at the exact hour that Moses was said to have died thousands of years earlier. His following was greatly diminished by this point, but those who still believed divided into a number of camps. Some denied that he even would have converted to save himself, or that he was still a messiah despite becoming a Muslim. Others believed that he continued to live in disguise, and some believed he had miraculously been transported to Heaven. Today, there is still a small group of Sabbatai followers in Turkey. Hitchens believes that if Sabbatai had chosen to be put to death, his following would have continued to grow. He uses the example of Sabbatai to argue that many small religious movements had the potential to become major denominations, and that the success or failure of a religion can largely be attributed to luck.