Foolishness to the Greeks

Chapter Three is “A Short Digression on the Pig; or, Why Heaven Hates Ham.” Since it is a brief chapter, it warrants a comparable response. In this chapter, Hitchens has a case of the cutes — there is a lot here to make fun of, this is something he is good at, and so he veers away from his unfolding argument to let us know why heaven hates ham.

In addition to this religious preoccupation with avoiding some foods, Hitchens points out that the pig comes in for special treatment. Not only do Jews avoid it, but also (ironically) so do the Muslims.

There are three problems with this brief chapter. The first is the architectural problem with his argument, and it is the same one we encountered in the previous post. He is right that food restrictions are a very common feature of world religions. The one notable exception is the Christian faith — Christ declared all foods clean, and this declaration is a notable type of the gospel being offered to all nations, as St. Peter discovered. But even though this is the case, it is still true that the perennial human desire to restrict certain foods has crept back into Christianity in various ways and guises. Hitchens cites the now lapsed Catholic deal of fish on Fridays, but plenty of Protestants have gone in for various food fads as an aid to combating the sinful desires within — corn flakes and Graham crackers being just a few examples of edible aids to sexual purity. But here is the structural problem with Hitchens’ argument. Is this something that religion does (uniquely), or is it something that people do? A universal tendency toward a certain practice will usually take on religious trappings in religious societies, but a brief look around us today should reveal to us that secularists who have lost their faith in God have certainly not lost their faith in the ability of foodstuffs to align them to the world properly. Allow me to invite your average secularist devotee of the Food Coop over for lunch. I will fix him a sandwich — Skippy peanut butter out of a jar purchased at Safeway, a couple slices of Wonder Bread — the puffy white kind, and brown sugar. I bet I can get them to look at it the way a rabbi would eye a BLT. And it would be a perfectly good lunch too.

A second problem is that Hitchens reveals here (not that we didn’t already know) that he believes in evolution. Speaking of the pig, he says, “I hope that you have guessed by now what we know in any case — that this fine beast is one of our fairly close cousins. It shares a great deal of our DNA . . .” (pp. 38-39). It should just be noted here that the obvious commonality is being taken as evidence for common ancestry, when it could just as easily be taken for the desire of a common Creator to use certain ideas over again. To argue that the Ford Taurus evolved from the Model T because they each have four tires is a dubious procedure. Maybe four tires is just a good idea, and anybody who wants to build a car should use it. Maybe a pig liver does the same thing that a human liver does, and for similar reasons. A Chevvy and a Ford both have tailpipes, and I am entirely in favor of this. There is no doubt a common reason for it, and we need not resort to the explanation that the two cars are cousins, sharing a common ancestor.

And last, Hitchens is to be faulted because, without knowing it, he almost stumbled into the gospel. He explains our fascination with the pig as an example of simultaneous attraction and revulsion.

Hitchens relies (in part) on Sir James Frazer, and his out-of-date anthropology. The out-of-dateness is reflected in Hitchens’ treatment of this business, having that breathless debunking spirit that Victorian infidels exhibited when they tried to rattle Christians by pointing out that pagan temples had spires too, just like churches. In this instance, Hitchens expects us to be astonished beyond measure when we discover that human sacrifice was the foundation for ancient animal sacrifices. But of course it was. The entire gospel is based on human sacrifice. Apart from the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin, and the blood that needed to be shed was human blood. Animal sacrifices were always a pale substitute for this, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is the declaration of God that all foundational murders have had the self-justifying cover ripped off of them for good.

I would recommend in the future that Hitchens rely on anthropology that is not a century or more in the rear view mirror — not because his point here is an invalid one, but rather because it is a point that does not go nearly far enough. He apparently believes that Christians will recoil, aghast, when he informs us that animal sacrifice was a stand-in for human sacrifice. Of course it was; that was the whole point.

Moreover, throughout the Old Testament, this story is always told without flinching, and in the New Testament, the death of Christ is told from the standpoint of the victim of the judicial murder. Hitchens needs to read a little Girard. This is the story that will be told to the end of the world, and it is the story that annihilates human sacrifice. Contrast this with the peaceful, mythic stories of the ancient infidels, who could always be counted on to draw a thick veil over their foundational murders, calling it their serenity and peace. The Bible is a bloody book, all right, but it is blood that deals with our sins — as opposed to the blood that has to be covered up with various edifying and inspiring stories. This is the gospel — death and resurrection, front and center. If Hitchens wants us to be embarrassed about this, this too is a fulfillment of Scripture. This message is foolishness to the Greeks, among whom we may certainly number Mr. Hitchens.