Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

Yale University Press, February 2010. Paper Back. New. The recent bestselling broadsides of the 'new atheists'-e.g. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, even literary figures like Philip Pullman and Dan Brown-cause our author to long for Old Atheists (or if not atheist, certainly anti-Christian cousins), such as Celsus, Diderot, Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, and Nietzsche, all of whom Hart evokes as at least intellectually respectable. So Hart only spends a chapter or two dismissing the arguments of Dawkins and Co. His attentions are much more drawn to that which is expressed in the subtitle of this magnificent book: the Christian Revolution. Along the way, he historically deconstructs the material evidence of what might be called the Enlightenment consensus about the evils of Christianity: intolerance, suppression of scientific progress, championing of ignorance. The Christian revolution with which Hart is fascinated concerns the radical and unprecedented nature of the Church's insistence on the infinite value of each human person in the context of the ancient world. Here, where women, slaves, and the common laborer counted as nothing, came a proclamation and a practice-especially in the Church's worship, care for the poor, and theology-- that effectively annihilated distinctions of class, gender, and ethnicity. When all due qualifications are made for early Christianity's lapses-Hart is bracingly honest here-its rise, triumph, and transformation of the Roman world must be considered without parallel in the history of the West. Hart can pack more erudite content into sometimes perfect sentences than almost any writer we know, and his chapter, 'The Face of the Faceless,' is simply a masterpiece, tempting us to predict an immortal brilliance within its setting comparable to Dostoevsky's 'Grand Inquisitor' in <i>The Brothers Karamazov.</i>