Hitchens, when he runs up against the authentic religious life, withers. He tries vainly to deny its existence, since its recognition punctures his pronouncement that “religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited.” He writes of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that “in no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian.” He disparages the faith of Abraham Lincoln and insists that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor put to death by the Nazis for resistance, was the product of a religious belief that had “mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism.”
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