Spring Break
A lecture on how religion is poisoning everything
Hitchens: U.S. may be exception
Issue date: 9/20/07
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With a reputation for sparking controversy and a scathing wit, Christopher Hitchens kicked off this year's MSE Symposium with a bang.
Hitchens, a journalist and political critic, has spent his career attacking everything and everyone from the Vietnam War to Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton. But the main focus of his speech on Tuesday night was religion and his recent book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
The evening started with a nearly packed house, surprising for a man less commonly known than some of the previous speakers who had not drawn crowds as large. After a brief introduction, Hitchens took the stage and immediately set the tone for the evening with a quick-witted, politically charged joke about Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who recently was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's bathroom.
He then began his speech on a more somber note: "When I was coming here today … I was oppressed with a very slight sense of depression and I soon realized what that was. It was because the rubric of my talk was supposed to be 'renewing American culture' … and I thought, 'I really hope the United States isn't in such bad shape that it requires my advice.'"
A recent citizen of the U.S. (born in England, he became a citizen in April), Hitchens described the respect he had for our founding fathers' principles. He told a story of Benjamin Franklin walking down a street in Philadelphia after the constitutional convention had ended. A woman approached him and asked what he had accomplished in his days of meetings. Franklin responded, "Madam, a republic - if you can keep it." Hitchens revealed that he has been recently plagued with the question of whether Americans valued the principles upon which their republic was founded.
"The thing that makes the American republic different from and superior to all other subject experiments … is quite simply this: It was the first time in history that a written, provable document … established a separation of the church from the state ... [That was something] unique in its time and remains unique," he said.
Hitchens, a journalist and political critic, has spent his career attacking everything and everyone from the Vietnam War to Mother Theresa and Bill Clinton. But the main focus of his speech on Tuesday night was religion and his recent book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
The evening started with a nearly packed house, surprising for a man less commonly known than some of the previous speakers who had not drawn crowds as large. After a brief introduction, Hitchens took the stage and immediately set the tone for the evening with a quick-witted, politically charged joke about Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who recently was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's bathroom.
He then began his speech on a more somber note: "When I was coming here today … I was oppressed with a very slight sense of depression and I soon realized what that was. It was because the rubric of my talk was supposed to be 'renewing American culture' … and I thought, 'I really hope the United States isn't in such bad shape that it requires my advice.'"
A recent citizen of the U.S. (born in England, he became a citizen in April), Hitchens described the respect he had for our founding fathers' principles. He told a story of Benjamin Franklin walking down a street in Philadelphia after the constitutional convention had ended. A woman approached him and asked what he had accomplished in his days of meetings. Franklin responded, "Madam, a republic - if you can keep it." Hitchens revealed that he has been recently plagued with the question of whether Americans valued the principles upon which their republic was founded.
"The thing that makes the American republic different from and superior to all other subject experiments … is quite simply this: It was the first time in history that a written, provable document … established a separation of the church from the state ... [That was something] unique in its time and remains unique," he said.
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