Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its fashionable enemies

By David Hart
Reviewed By Tony Evans

One of the smaller books published by that prolific British historian, AL Rowse (1903-1997), was entitled The Use of History. The work was directed mainly at young people to encourage them to study history, listing among its many virtues the necessity of a knowledge of history on entering many of the professions, its pleasures, and how a knowledge of history is the key to understanding the behaviour of humans when confronted by challenging situations. History helps us to understand ourselves.
Rowse’s little book appeared immediately after World War ll and, although the author himself was known as a querulous, arrogant academic, his colleagues generally were, at that time, a fairly peaceful lot and confined their polite disagreements to relatively minor matters. 
The study of history was then enjoying a peaceful interlude ruffled only by Rowse’s more controversial book claiming to prove the identity of the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Hugh Trevor-Roper’s erroneous claim that the Hitler Diaries were genuine.
But that serenity and polite discourse associated with history studies was about to change. The Cold War, the Berlin Wall, and the awful truth of Stalin’s Gulag and concomitant propaganda, showed that history could be used as a powerful weapon employed to support a chosen ideology.  This certainly was not one of the uses of history that Rowse would have had in mind.
With the publication of George Orwell’s 1984 in the same year as Rowse’s book, the predictions of ‘Big Brother is watching you’, ‘Newspeak’, and government control of history, entered the language as ominous bywords.  The famous quotation from the book, ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ was recognised as a truism.
History would be no longer a disinterested study conducted in a gentlemanly fashion; from 1984 and beyond, much history became imbued with relativist theory; teachers, feminists, politicians, journalists, as well as many historians, would either carelessly, or deliberately, reinterpret past events to suit their prevailing ideology.  Inevitably, war broke out – the ‘history wars.’ 
Upright, but severely wounded in the wars, has been Christianity, or more specifically, the Catholic Church, battered and bleeding from the writings of fashionable atheists whose ignorant and often-deliberate misuse of history, appeals to a vast, credulous public.
Attacks on Christianity, published in novel or non-fiction form, are as old as the invention of printing itself, but the latest round in the long campaign was launched with the appearance of Dan Brown’s notorious Da Vinci Code (described by one reviewer as ‘barely literate’).
Then came Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, followed by Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. 
The latest salvo is fired by Professor of Philosophy, Daniel C Dennett, with a work entitled Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. 
No doubt they will keep coming.
Each of the above-named (with the possible exception of Dennett’s book) is popular and easy to read, and – including Dennett – uses false history as a weapon with which to attack religion, and, specifically, the Catholic Church.  The authors cite the usual suspects – the calumnies always aimed at the Church by popular sceptics: the treatment of Galileo, the ‘true nature’ of the Crusades, the bloodthirsty Inquisition, and the burning of heretics and witches and, lumping all religions together, accusing ‘religion’ of being at the heart of all wars and strife.  The constant barrage of anti-Catholic propaganda (for that is what it amounts to) is bound to inflict injuries on those without sufficient historical knowledge to launch a counter-attack.  In mixed social  gatherings, one or other of these books is bound to be discussed.
For those caught in the crossfire and, indeed, anyone who merely wants a learned,  authoritative response to the ‘professional atheists’ accusations, I recommend most strongly Professor David Hart’s new book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Here indeed is the counter-attack we have been waiting for. As Catholic lay apologist George Weigel puts it, ‘This is Hart in full, all guns firing and the band playing on the deck.’
Hart contends that much of today’s popular anti-Catholic writing is based not only on profound conceptual confusions but also upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance. He supports each of his counter-arguments with impressive erudition arguing that Christianity was the most radical revolution in Western history – a revolution, which transformed the ancient world.  Compassion, pity, and charity as we understand them, he states, are not objects found in nature like trees or butterflies but are historically formed by cultural convictions that, without Christianity, need never have arisen at all.
This is a book soundly recommended to battle-scarred Catholics. Hart rallies the faint of heart, like Henry V before Agincourt: He shows how, in case after case, atheist publicists have misused history to bolster their creeds.
He calls them ‘the bad, popular historians’ who repeat or invent the myths they perpetrate.  The simplifications they promote, he laments, tend to determine how most of us view the past. 
“Christians ought not to surrender the past” he writes, “but instead should deepen their own collective memory of what the Gospel has been in human history.  Perhaps more crucially, they ought not to surrender the future to those who know so little of human nature as to imagine that a society ‘liberated’ from Christ would love justice, or truth, or beauty, or compassion, or even life”.
David Hart is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Theology, Providence College, in the USA. He writes often with a touch of humour. 
He deplores the decline in standards of contemporary religious criticism.  Much of it, he thinks, is inconsequential and rubbishy but has to be answered because of its popular appeal.
Towards the end of the book, Hart admits he doubts the survival of Christianity in Europe and looks ever hopefully towards Africa, Asia, and the Far East where rescue may be found.  
He writes that although for centuries the Christian story shaped and suffused our civilisation but ‘now, however, slowly but relentlessly, another story is replacing it and any attempt to reverse the process is probably futile.
This touch of gloom does not detract from Hart’s fighting spirit. His fearless counter-attack and his erudition, his disrespect for shoddy history, cannot but raise the spirits of those of us who tend to ‘sit by the waters of Babylon and weep’. Rowse, and even the agnostic Orwell, might have approved.
Order the book now …