by J. Pharoah Doss, For New Pittsburgh Courier
The late Christopher Hitchens was the leading public intellectual of the New Atheist movement and considered their fiercest critic of the Abrahamic faiths. He wrote books with blasphemous titles such as: “The Missionary Position,” “Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” and “God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything.” Hitchens didn’t promote “God is Not Great” in bookstores across the country. The “God is Not Great” book tour consisted of Hitchens crisscrossing the bible belt debating theologians, professors of religious studies, and pastors about whether or not morality came from God.
During this book tour Hitchens issued his famous challenge to believers.
He’d instruct an audience to think of a heinous act that can be attributed to religious belief, or was committed in the name of God, then he’d inform them that he knew their minds conjured up a list of atrocities without hesitation because history was full of religious wars and religious bigotry.
The audience normally laughed in agreement.
Then Hitchens asked the audience to name a moral act that a religious person can do through faith that can’t be done by an atheist because of non-belief, then he’d bet the audience they couldn’t name one action. Hitchens was challenging the notion that the absence of religion equaled an absence of morality.
After the book tour Hitchens boasted no one came close to answering his challenge. (At least not to his satisfaction, an unspecified stipulation.) The most common answers to his challenge were “praying for someone” and forgiveness. Hitchens dismissed praying for someone. He didn’t consider begging a fictitious deity to intervene in human affairs for the selfish reasons of the believer a moral action, but Hitchens was offended by the notion that religion was a requirement for forgiveness. He insisted that a nonbeliever could forgive in the same fashion as a believer. But Hitchens was wrong.
In 2018, Amber Guyger, a Dallas police officer who is White, mistakenly entered Botham Jean’s apartment thinking it was her own. When Guyger saw a man in the apartment she assumed he was a burglar and shot him dead.
Jean was Black.
Recently, Guyger was convicted of murder, but after she was sentenced to prison something unexpected happened in the courtroom. The victim’s younger brother, Brandt Jean, forgave Guyger. He told her, “I personally want the best for you…I don’t even want you to go to jail…Give your life to Christ. I think giving your life to Christ is the best thing Botham would want for you.” Then Brandt Jean asked the judge if he was allowed to give Guyer a hug. The judge allowed it and the two embraced.
Hitchens would have ridiculed this example, then provided a list of non-believers who forgave criminals for committing acts of violence against them. Hitchens was a man of reason. His definition of forgiveness came from the field of psychology. Psychology Today says forgiveness is the release of resentment. It replaces negative feelings often harbored toward offenders with neutral feelings. The act of forgiveness is for ourselves. It allows us to move on and not let anger and bitterness disturb our emotional well-being. Here, forgiveness is a demonstration of emotional maturity and the intent is self-healing, but the perpetrator can go to hell.
But when Brandt Jean hugged his brother’s killer, he demonstrated a form of spiritual maturity non-believers can’t contemplate. He already trusted God for his own psychological healing, but he felt compelled by his faith to help initiate Guyger’s psychological healing process by encouraging her to give her life to Christ, and he turned a sentencing hearing into an altar call. Whether this is moral or not can be debated, but it’s an act a non-believer doesn’t have the maturity to perform.
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