The Kingdom Within
On reading the Gospels with fresh eyes, and finding myself bewildered
I want to say something that will make some of my readers uncomfortable. Not the religious ones — I suspect they will recognize what I am describing, even if they have learned not to say it out loud. The readers I expect to unsettle are the ones who share my formation. The rationalists. The empiricists. The people who, like me, came of age in a Cartesian world and found in Christopher Hitchens something that felt, at the time, like liberation.
Here it is: I have read the Gospels. For the first time, as an adult, with fresh eyes and no institutional instructions for how to proceed. And I cannot understand — I mean this as a genuine statement of bewilderment, not a provocation — why Christians embrace organized religion at all.
Not why they embrace Jesus. That, I think I understand. What bewilders me is the gap. The vast, apparently unbridgeable gap between what I found in the text and what the institution built on that text has been teaching for two thousand years.
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Let me tell you how I got here, because the path matters.
I grew up in a Cartesian rationalist world. The world of the scientific establishment, of empirical method, of if you cannot measure it you cannot trust it. It was a good world in many ways. It gave me rigor. It gave me tools. It gave me a healthy suspicion of claims that exceeded their evidence.
And then, in my twenties, I read Christopher Hitchens.
God Is Not Great was an intellectual awakening for me. I want to be honest about that, because I think the honest accounting of what Hitchens gave me is essential to understanding where I eventually went. He gave me the courage to say, clearly and without apology, that organized religion had caused enormous harm. That the subjugation of women in the name of God was monstrous. That the sexual abuse of children by priests was a civilizational indictment. That theocracy, in any form, was the enemy of human dignity. These moral arguments stand. I have not revised them. I do not expect to.
Hitchens was morally virtuous, even if he got the metaphysics wrong. And that distinction — between the moral seriousness and the metaphysical framework — is the thread I want to pull on in this essay.
Because what Hitchens could not give me, and what his framework was constitutionally incapable of giving anyone, was somewhere to go. He was a magnificent demolisher. The New Atheist project succeeded completely at what it set out to do: it made the moral condemnation of organized religion not just thinkable but speakable, in public, by serious people. That was a necessary task. I am glad it was done.
But demolition is not orientation. And a framework that knows only what to face away from does not know which way to face.
