What's So Great About Christianity

by Dinesh D'Souza - published by Regnery Publishing, 2008

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

In his new book What's So Great About Christianity, Dinesh D'Souza stakes his claim as one of the great Christian apologists. D'Souza writes from California, where he has been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and is author of a string of bestsellers that began with Illiberal Education, a salvo in the counterattack on "political correctness" on college campuses.

In his preface, D'Souza writes: "Christians are called upon to be 'contenders' for their faith. This term suggests that they should be ready to stand up for their beliefs, and that they will face opposition. The Christian is told in 1 Peter 3:15, 'Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reasons for the hope that is within you.' But in order to give reasons, you must first know what you believe. You must also know why you believe it. And you must be able to communicate these reasons to those who don't share your beliefs. In short, you must know what's so great about Christianity.

Of course, Christians have been composing defenses of their faith throughout the history of Christianity, but new attacks and the great strides in theoretical and scientific technology have provided new challenges. People of Christian faith in the past century have had such outstanding apologists as the Protestant C.S. Lewis with his Mere Christianity and Catholics G.K. Chesterton and Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Along with their 19th century forefather John Henry Newman, they had and continue to have a huge impact in the defense of Christianity and the winning of new converts to the faith.

More recently we have seen a resurgence of militant atheism, with best-selling books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and Christopher Hitchens, among others. These efforts are noteworthy not so much for their reasoned arguments as for the shrill vehemence with which they blame virtually all evil in the world on belief in a God who does not exist.

D'Souza's style in meeting this new onslaught is clear and pugnacious and his method logical. Examining the current scene from a historical Christian perspective, he traces the root of the problem to the centuries-long decline of the partnership of faith and reason. When properly related, faith and reason constitute the "two wings" that carry the mind to truth and ultimately to God. This partnership was the central theme of the late John Paul's encyclical Fides et Ratio and also of Pope Benedict's challenging speech to Catholic educators in his recent visit to the U.S.

Scholars disagree on how far back we must go to trace the beginnings of the decline of this partnership. Thinkers like Richard Weaver have located the onset of this downward spiral toward "the dictatorship of relativism" in the nominalism of Occam in the late Middle Ages; others cite the separation of faith from a teaching authority other than the Bible during the Protestant Reformation; still others credit the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who retreated to a Deism (at best) that logically led to the modern atheistic ideological systems of Freud, Marx, and Darwin. Although such atheistic systems are now largely discredited, their practical applications caused the death of tens of millions in the case of Marx, moral chaos in the case of Freud, and atheistic naturalism in the case of Darwin. Today, belief in such systems has largely been replaced in the secular world with belief in an unguided evolution. This destroys both ethics and metaphysics, placing hope solely in scientific progress and a pantheistic worship of the environment.

D'Souza writes, "My modus operandi is one of skepticism, to view the claims of religion in the same open-minded way that we would claims of any other sort. The difference between me and my atheist opponents is that I am skeptical not only of the allegedly irrational claims of religion but also of the irrational claims made in the name of science and skepticism itself." And in truth, D'Souza's volume is more an attack on atheism than a defense of Christianity. In 26 chapters organized under eight separate subject headings, the author deals with every imaginable challenge to the truth of Christianity, not only demonstrating Christianity's essential goodness but also profusely describing its manifest benefits to mankind.

Modern-day atheists have mounted their attack not only on God and his followers but indeed on the culture that is known as the West. In one chapter D'Souza discusses "The Spiritual Basis of Limited Government" in the context of St. Augustine's distinction between the differing but interlocking spheres of religion and the secular. D'Souza explains: "Augustine argued that during our time on earth, the Christian inhabits two realms, the earthly city and the heavenly city. (Only at the end of time will God integrate the two into a single majestic kingdom ruled by Him.)" Therefore, we must conclude that "the claims of the earthly city are limited, that there is a sanctuary of conscience inside every person that is protected from political control, that kings and emperors, however grand, cannot usurp authority that rightly belongs only to God."

In perhaps his most convincing chapter, D'Souza examines "A License to Kill: Atheism and the Mass Murders of History." Here he challenges Richard Dawkins's assertion that "'what matters is…whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence it does.'" D'Souza points to the 100 million or so deaths inflicted by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao (all professed atheists) during the 20th century, which surely qualify as "bad things." On the other hand, the deaths produced by more than 500 ostensibly Christian undertakings of religious warfare or internal persecution, such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, and witch burnings, amount to only one percent of the body count accumulated by the atheistic ideologies of Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. In D'Souza's words, "It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the main source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history."

D'Souza, a Catholic, has managed to make this book both useful and palatable for Reform Christians as well as Catholics. He simply ignores differences between Reform Christians and Catholics that are indeed substantial but nevertheless do not affect the power of his arguments, a clever and generally pleasing way to address his major antagonists— both ideological atheism and religious ignorance. (Although I must admit that using the founding father of philosophical subjectivism, Kant, to make arguments for Christianity will prove irritating to any healthy Aristotelian/Thomist of the strict observance. On the other hand, Protestants may find the defense of some Catholic doctrines and elements of Church history that provoked the Protestant revolution—Reformation—somewhat dismaying. ) In any case, D'Souza has written a book that both Chesterton and Lewis would have appreciated and that perhaps even Billy Graham and Pope Benedict XVI could agree is a masterpiece of modern apologetical writing destined to set the standard for years to come.

First appeared in The American Spectator, July/August 2008.