Get Thee to a Church!

Fraysters crack back on Slate's resident nontheist, Christopher Hitchens.

Modern secular liberalism is built upon the principles of Enlightenment humanism, but it is also a rather clear, linear outgrowth from the more radical aspects of the Christian message. When Germans beat their swords into plowshares, learned to love their neighboring nations, and built social services to care for their citizens, they were led not by secular revolutionaries, but by a party known as the Christian Democrats. When Abolitionists railed against slavery, and when Civil Rights marchers challenged the hierarchy of racism, they were led by Christian ministers. The very core of modern Western Civilization is composed of a trust in reason and science, tempered by a faith in the values of peace, compassion, and brotherly love, and a humility regarding our role in the universe that precludes absolutism.

The latter half of this equation is the legacy of Christian theology. And it's the latter half that Hitchens and his Trotskyite-cum-Neocon fellow travellers so conspicuously lack…