Reading Christopher Hitchens' much discussed book against religion, I was reminded of the Chaser’s War on Everything on ABC TV. It has the same good humoured and rather likeable style of presentation, the same manic energy, and the same breadth of scope. It also offers a good check-list of the arguments that can be brought against different forms of religious belief, many of them compelling. But I found it unpersuasive. Not because it was against religion, but because I find the wide-screen polemical style unpersuasive — especially when it is used to defend religion.
Christians have been as good at dishing out as copping criticism. In the early church, Christian writers took apart Pagan beliefs, Jewish practice and heretical theological systems. Subsequently Catholic and Protestant preachers demolished each other’s theological frameworks, and representatives of both traditions took with vigour to the post-Enlightenment world. Not all this critical writing was polemical, of course. Polemic characteristically avoids entering enquiringly your opponents' inner world, preferring to present their ideas masterfully in the worst possible light.
The much commented-on recent books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have reintroduced a broad brush anti-religious polemic. It has much in common with religious polemic against the secular world. Christian polemic is more often conducted through sermons, speeches and essays on particular topics than through comprehensive books. But as in the extended works of Dawkins and Hitchens, it characteristically contains two elements: an argument made in very broad terms showing the wrongness and inferiority of the ideas that the writer opposes, and some anecdotes which demonstrate the truth of this large argument.
Religious polemic likes large terms. Culture is analysed through categories like reason, faith, religion, science, democracy, modernity, postitivism, secularism, individualism, Marxism, post-modernism etc. These terms are related in a way that tells a story about the origins of the evils being opposed, the nature of those evils, and the remedy for them. In early twentieth century Catholic polemic, the integrated world of medieval Catholicism was ruptured first by the religious self-assertion of the Reformation and then by the rational self-assertion of the Enlightenment. This fragmentation played itself out in the anti-Christian Liberal movements. The way back lay through acceptance of the authority of God and of the Church.
This large story is normally supported by smaller stories that illustrate the argument. Polemic about religious belief might include improving stories about the soldier in the fox hole who