If atheists or anti-theists have the good fortune to live in a society still governed by religious belief, or even its afterglow, they may feel free from absolute moral bonds, while those around them are not. This is a tremendous liberation for anyone who is even slightly selfish. And what clever person is not imaginatively and cunningly selfish?

The Hitchens brothers, Peter and (the late) Christopher, both famed journalists, were divided not only by temperament (Peter says they’d never actually been close), but by their attitudes to God. Their childhood home practiced no religion at all, and both brothers enthusiastically embraced atheism. But Peter changed his mind and joined the Church of England as an adult, a decision Christopher found inconceivable. Christopher wrote a bestselling book called God Is Not Great, arguing that religion was the root of most of the world’s evil, and Peter responded with the book I’m reviewing now – The Rage Against God.

There’s an element of spiritual pilgrimage narrative in this book, in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions and C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Then it proceeds to a well-informed critique (offered from the perspective of a former fellow traveler) of the whole modern social construct of the West, based on the ruins of Communism, which stand on the ruins of Christendom.

Peter Hitchens tells us that his first boyhood faith was British patriotism, swelled by pride in his country’s clean victory over the evil Germans in World War II. In time he would learn that that victory was not as clean as he’d been taught, and that faith died.

Then he embraced Communism. But a few years in Moscow as a journalist, observing the actual workings of that tottering monument to arrogant incompetence, disillusioned him with prejudice.

And so, with time, he came to reexamine the religious faith he’d rejected, pro forma, without a hearing. He noted that, in contrast to his brother’s rejection of the greatness of God, our present culture is based on an even less plausible premise – that Man is great. If there’s little evidence for the first, there’s no evidence at all for the second. He surveys the wrecks that surrounds us, and offers some melancholy hope, or at least a call to courage.

He also spends considerable time refuting Christopher’s argument that the Russian Soviet failure was not a failure of atheism, because Russian Communism was essentially a religion.

I can hardly deny that I found The Rage Against God a congenial read, confirming opinions I already held dear – though the author’s criticisms of the neo-cons and their nation-building wars stung a little in my own case.

To be fair, I suppose I ought to read Christopher’s book too, but I expect I won’t. It’s not as if the arguments against God are unfamiliar or hard to find – while a book like this offers – I think – fresh ideas for the majority of our contemporaries.