My God's Bigger Than Your God

Now that the war in Gaza has brought chaos to college campuses across the United States and in Europe too, whose God will bring the solution that works for everyone?

Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments, 1956. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

In 2007, the New Yorker magazine published a cartoon that depicted a woman in an armchair reading a newspaper as a man with a gigantic lightning bolt stuck in his back flings open the front door.

“I told you not to write that book,” she says in the caption.

The cartoon was a direct reference to God Is Not Great, a bestselling book by British-American author, journalist, and educator Christopher Hitchens.

At the time, the cartoon was funny.

But just a few years later, it was not.

In 2010, while in New York to promote another book, Hitchens was rushed to the emergency room, where he was treated for a pericardial effusion, an abnormal accumulation of fluid around his heart. A short time later, he postponed his book tour to undergo treatment for cancer of the esophagus. By 2011, he was dead.

The once funny cartoon now seemed vaguely ominous, a portent of God’s retribution for the author’s blasphemous mockery.

For those who view the world this way

—like televangelists who blame natural disasters on sinfulness—it made sense that God might strike down a writer with hubris enough to question His authority. Not with a lightning bolt like Zeus or in that New Yorker cartoon, but with cancer and heart disease.

However, this was not a view that would have troubled the author. Christopher Hitchens was an atheist—or rather, an anti-theist as he put it.

Although he argued for that philosophical position in God Is Not Great, his primary concern was not with God but with religion. The book was originally published with either of two subtitles: The Case Against Religion and How Religion Poisons Everything.

One of most compelling arguments

in God Is Not Great can be found in Chapter Two: “Religion Kills.” At the time, the fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie was very much on Hitchens’s mind. So was September 11th. This chapter described social and political tensions in Belfast, Baghdad, Bethlehem, Beirut, and Belgrade—all of which Hitchens felt could be traced back to religious conflicts.

We don’t need Hitchens to remind us of the Crusades, the witch hunts, the Inquisition, or the centuries-long support of slavery by so-called Christians. These dark chapters of human history certainly lend credence to his argument. Religion kills.

But did religion drive Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or Pol Pot to mass murder? Was it religion that murdered, raped, and tortured Israelis on October 7th? Is it religion that has killed thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza?

Is it religion that has turned dozens of college campuses across the United States and Europe into chaotic opposites of academic discourse? Is religion forcing Palestinian protesters to face-off against Jewish counter-protesters as students on both sides fear for their safety?

Hitchens may have been right that religion kills. But this is something else.

What’s happening now is the human equivalent of global warming. As Salman Rushdie observed during a recent interview with Jon Stewart, the temperature has gotten too high. Maybe the social heat is the result of algorithms and social media. Maybe it’s due to echo chambers and silo thinking. But regardless of the cause, it’s time to turn the temperature down.

Thirty-four years ago, when Ken Burns released his award-winning documentary on the American Civil War, he stated that such a thing would be unthinkable today. But that was 1990. This is 2024, and thanks to a new film called Civil War, which imagines a dystopian American future, people are in fact thinking the unthinkable. A second American Civil War.

The new film is being reviewed in major newspapers. Talking heads are chatting about it on television. They are all injecting this intolerable and unthinkable idea into public consciousness.

Some call the movie a cautionary tale.

Others imagine that such a conflict would not involve full-scale battles like Shiloh or Gettysburg, but pockets of violence with armed marauders roaming neighborhoods to kill other Americans—those who harbor opposing views.

Some of the current tension in the United States is fueled by religious zealots eager to impose their views on the rest of the country. The zealots attack abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism. They want prayer in public schools and an end to the separation of church and state. They fight for these things in the name of God. But God has nothing to do with it, though they may quote the Bible till the dodo bird returns from extinction.

Today, you can get a degree

in conflict resolution from several major universities. Despite evidence to the contrary, we are smart enough to deescalate the tensions that threaten the safety of our students, our communities, and our democracy.

But so far, none of the smart people seem to be making a difference. People like Professor Robert Pape, founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He recently told Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan that there are several tools beyond crowd control for handling the current campus protests.

Instead, we get House Speaker Mike Johnson telling reporters at Columbia University that he would call in the National Guard and the New York Police to remove protesters from that campus.

Mike Johnson is a religious man.

But one wonders if his God would handle the situation that way.

One also wonders if the God of Moses would condone the genocidal attacks on Gaza. Or whether the founder of Islam would have ordered the October 7th attack on Israel. If so, then the solution to the current “War in the Holy Land” comes down to whose God is bigger—Isaac’s or Ishmael’s.

But none of these conflicts is about God.

They’re about the will to power. They’re about who has the loudest mouth and the biggest guns.

As history repeats itself in the Middle East and on college campuses, maybe it’s time to stop blaming God for our wars and other hate-fueled conflicts. Time to stop forcing our beliefs on those who don’t share those beliefs.

Maybe it’s time to stop believing in God—and get to know God instead.

God is not dropping bombs on Gaza.

God is not calling for the killing of all Jews. God is not spitting on students at Columbia or throwing rocks at them. God does not eat Ken-L-Ration or carry an AK47. Because God is not a big dog or a big gun.

In this world where the temperature has gotten entirely too hot, any child can tell you who God really is. God is love. Imagine that.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading/listening.