Why the “New Atheists” Are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy

Robert Wright, Alternet, July 16, 2009

It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?

Actually, the chances were pretty good. When it comes to foreign policy, a right-wing bias afflicts not just Hitchens’s world view, but the whole ideology of “new atheism,” especially as seen in the work of Hitchens allies Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.

Atheism has little intrinsic ideological bent. (Karl Marx. Ayn Rand. I rest my case.) But things change when you add the key ingredient of the new atheism: the idea that religion is not just mistaken, but evil — that it “poisons everything,” as Hitchens has put it with characteristic nuance.

Consider Dawkins’s assertion, in his book The God Delusion, that if there were no religion then there would be “no Israeli-Palestinian wars.”

For starters, this is just wrong. The initial resistance to the settlements, and to the establishment of Israel, wasn’t essentially religious, and neither was the original establishment of the settlements, or even of Israel.

The problem here is that two ethnic groups disagree about who deserves what land. That there was so much killing before the dispute acquired a deeply religious cast suggests that taking religion out of the equation wouldn’t be the magic recipe for peace that Dawkins imagines. (As I show in my new book The Evolution of God, zero-sum disputes over land and other things have long been the root cause of the ugliest manifestations of religion, ranging from Christian anti-semitism in ancient Rome to bloodthirsty xenophobia in the Hebrew Bible to the Koran’s gleeful anticipation of infidel suffering in the afterlife.)

The Israeli and American right join Dawkins in stressing religious motivation in the Middle East, and there’s a reason for that. The people there whose political grievances are most conspicuously caught up with religion are Muslims. If the problem is that Muslims are possessed by this irrational, quasi-autonomous force known as religion, then there’s no point in trying to reason with them, or to look at any facts on the ground that might drive their discontent. And there are facts on the ground in the West Bank that the Israeli and American right don’t want to talk about. They’re called settlements.

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