Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

November-December 2007 – On October 12, Dinesh D’Souza visited AFA and was interviewed on American Family Radio programs Today’s Issues and AFA Report about his new book What’s So Great About Christianity.

D’Souza (www.dineshdsouza.com) was called “one of the top young policy makers in the country” by Investor’s Business Daily, and New York Times Magazine named him one of America’s most influential conservative thinkers.

A best-selling author, D’Souza wrote The Enemy at Home, The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9-11, and Illiberal Education. His book What’s So Great About America was first on the New York Times best-seller list in 2002 and stayed there for 15 weeks.

Here’s a compilation of some of the interview questions posed to D’Souza by AFA staff. Questions and answers have been edited for content and length.

AFA: Having been in politics and international affairs, why did you write a book defending the Christian faith?
D’Souza: I began the book in a somewhat narrow way: I wanted to show that many of the core institutions and values of America and the West were formed by Christianity. If we look at things like modern science, modern democracy, property rights, human rights, the idea of human dignity, even the value of compassion which has become an important value in our society, these values are rooted in Christianity. … And my point was that secular people attack Christianity but they don’t appreciate [the fact] that much of what they like is also the product of Christianity.

But while I was thinking about all this, along came these atheist books [like] The End of Faith, The God of Delusion, [and] God Is Not Great. These books began widening the scope of attack: Christianity is irrational, it’s inconsistent with modern science, it’s based on blind faith, blind faith leads to fanaticism, fanaticism leads to violence, religion is responsible for the great murders and crimes of history. So,I realized that this is a much more wide-ranging and bitter critique. [So] I expanded the scope of my book to make it ultimately a comprehensive answer to these atheist books. It [helps] … the ordinary Christian to … answer the arguments made in the secular and in the atheist world … [o]n the basis of reason and the basis of science. Because very often we’re used to making the case for Christianity, but we do it in religious language that puts people off.

AFA: Why do you think there is a growing hostility toward Christianity by some intellectuals and by those in the media?
D’Souza: The philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked, “If you die – and you’re an atheist – but if you die and find yourself before God, what would you say to Him?” And Russell said very pompously, “I would say to Him, ‘Sir, you didn’t give me enough evidence.’” So the atheist always likes to portray himself as a noble follower of the pathway of reason. But I don’t think this is the real motive for the opposition to Christianity. I mean, think of it this way: I don’t believe in unicorns, but I don’t go around writing books on unicorns, I don’t obsess about unicorns. The atheist – in a weird way – it’s not so much he doesn’t believe, [but that] he hates God. He wants to get rid of God. And I think that the main reason for this is that Christianity supplies a moral code – think of the Ten Commandments – as putting demands on us. The atheist ultimately wants to get rid of this idea of moral judgment, and what better way to do that than to get rid of the Judge?

AFA: The country seems to be more accepting of this radical atheism. Are these atheists writing these books at just the right time – because we live in a country that seems to be turning its back on Christianity?
D’Souza: I think Christians bear a little bit of the blame for this because sometimes some of us have abandoned the public square. We basically live in two worlds: we live in a public world that is scientific, rational, driven by skepticism; and then we live in a private world that is shaped by the church and the neighborhood and perhaps a family. And we don’t necessarily connect those two worlds. We kind of hope that the public square will stay neutral and then we can be Christian in our own world. But we don’t realize that the atheists have come galloping into the public square; they want to take it over, they want to proclaim religion to be irrational and dangerous, and drive religious influence out of the public square.

So I think ultimately as Christians we have the responsibility to become bilingual in a way. And by that I mean we have to learn to speak a secular language that meets these atheistic arguments on their own ground. You can’t always resolve a dispute by saying, “Let me tell you what the Bible says about it.” Because the atheist goes, “Well, I don’t accept the authority of the Bible to decide the question. So why are you against gay marriage? And don’t quote the book of Leviticus, just tell me why you are [against it] in a rational way.”

So that’s what my book does. In a sense, it accepts the atheist critique; it challenges on its own terms, which are the terms of reason, skepticism, science. And it shows that in many ways we Christians have become too defensive. That modern science and modern thought support the teachings of Christianity. We can live completely in the modern world; we’re taught in the Bible not to be of the world, but we are certainly in the world. So we shouldn’t relinquish the public square apologetics, which is the ability to defend Christianity outside the orbit of Christianity, [and which] has now become an imperative in today’s society.

AFA: You say in this book that the alleged sins of Christianity – the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the persecution of Galileo, which you call an atheist fable – are vastly overblown. Can you explain that?
D’Souza: Vastly, vastly overblown, yes. It’s interesting, if you look at the crimes attributed to religion. I read a book recently on the Salem witch trials. [When] I went to college, I had this idea that in the witch trials there were hundreds if not thousands of people put to death as witches. [Now] I realize that the number of people executed at Salem was in fact 18. Eighteen! That’s 18 too many, I concede, but it’s not the stereotypical picture of mass executions, witch drownings, and so on.

Then you go on to the Inquisition. Henry Kamen is the leading scholar of the Inquisition writing today, and in his book [on the subject] we discover that the Spanish Inquisition, which was perhaps the worst, killed 2,000 people over a period of 350 years. Again, 2,000 [is] too many. But when you begin to compare the crimes of religion to the crimes of atheism, remember the crimes of religion occurred 500 – or, in the case of the Crusades, 1,000 – years ago, [while] the crimes of atheism occurred within our lifetime, within the 20th century. And within the 20th century, … look at the atheist dictators … [Adolph] Hitler, [Joseph] Stalin, and Mao [Zedong]. These three guys killed about 100 million people.

Now, one of the [current] atheists, Richard Dawkins, says, “Well, yes, but they didn’t do it in the name of atheism.” Oh really? Well, isn’t communism a godless ideology? Wasn’t its explicit goal to create a secular, atheist utopia? Liberated from religion? It was no accident that they targeted the churches, killed the clergy and the priests, persecuted the believers. So this is complete nonsense. The atheists are on very shaky ground now, and when they say we’ve got to be frightened about religion because it does terrible things to society, we should answer, “We should be a lot more frightened of removing religion because look what’s happened in the world when you have societies which have tried to do that.”

AFA: What do you think about a country’s educational system that has largely turned against Biblical Christianity? How do you fight on that front? Is that the parent’s responsibility?
D’Souza: First of all, I think that it puts an added burden on parents to teach their children, not only to believe, but why you believe. Because when you’re sending your son off to school, more importantly to college, you can almost say as a guaranteed matter that their religious and moral beliefs will come under assault. And if they have absorbed [parents’] beliefs unthinkingly, children will be very vulnerable and they will not be able to make their case. So their own beliefs get shaken, let alone being able to convince somebody else. So there’s an apologetics responsibility today for the Christian parent. In fact, this book, in a way, What’s So Great About Christianity, is a kind of a handbook for that. If you’re sending your kid off to college, this is a great tool to send with him or her.

The second point though is that there has to be a fight for what is education. In the biology classroom, to take a classic example, the biologists say, “We’re just teaching science.”

Fine, just teach science. What’s interesting is that I open the biology textbooks and I see, not only science, but an atheistic spin that is given to science. Evolution shows that the God of Christianity is a myth and so I go, “What’s that doing in my [kids’] biology textbook?” I’m less concerned with putting creationist or intelligent design in than with taking the atheism out. In fact, that atheism is a flat violation of the constitutional prohibition which says that you can’t teach religion or irreligion in the classroom. The public schools are violating that.  

What’s So Great About Christianity is available online.