What is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything about?

God Is Not Great is Christopher Hitchens' comprehensive polemic against religion, published in 2007 as part of the wave of "New Atheist" books that included Dawkins' The God Delusion, Harris' The End of Faith, and Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Hitchens brings to the project a literary sensibility, a journalist's eye for the particular, and a combativeness that distinguishes his contribution from the others. His argument is not only that God probably doesn't exist but that religion — considered as an institution, a set of practices, and a way of thinking — has on balance been harmful to humanity.

The book moves through a catalog of religious crimes and absurdities: the complicity of religious institutions in slavery, colonialism, and child abuse; the epistemological irresponsibility of treating ancient texts as authoritative on matters of science and history; the psychological damage done by inducing guilt and shame in children; the political dangers of theocracy and the alliance of religion with totalitarianism. Hitchens is particularly strong on the Middle East, on the specific damage done by the monotheistic religions to sexual ethics, and on what he calls "the tawdry secret of religion" — that it did not originate in ethics but in fear and ignorance.

Hitchens distinguishes his position from simple materialism: he values art, music, literature, and ceremony, and he defends the study of religion as a serious intellectual and cultural enterprise. What he opposes is the claim that religion provides moral authority, that its supernatural claims are credible, or that the harm it has done is outweighed by the good. His alternative is "the Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and human solidarity" — a secular humanism that he traces through Spinoza, Jefferson, Paine, and Darwin.

The book is written to persuade and provoke rather than to offer balanced analysis. Hitchens acknowledges this; he does not write as a neutral observer. The charges he levels are frequently fair and documented; the rhetorical energy sometimes carries the argument past the evidence. Reading it alongside a serious theological response is more illuminating than reading it alone.