An atheist and an evangelical walk into a bar… While probably the opening line of at least one joke, it’s also a recurring image in the new documentary called Collision, which follows atheist pugilist Christopher Hitchens and conservative evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson through a series of debates. The film opens with a scene from one of those debates—in a bar, both men perched comfortably on bar stools, two beer taps jutting up between them. But it seems to me that the the film is misnamed. The thing about collisions is this: when objects collide, they change one another in some non-trivial way. Sometimes it’s a crash, inflicting real damage. Sometimes it’s just a change in trajectory, as in the collision of billiard balls.
But neither Hitchens nor Wilson seems to have been damaged by their meeting, which led to the documentary (however misnamed) and a good deal of public exposure for both. And if the film’s substance is any indication, the exposure was largely positive—especially for Wilson who, prior to these debates, was probably best known for his controversial co-authorship of Southern Slavery: As It Was, which the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a “repulsive apologia for slavery.” Apparently, Wilson’s opposition to homosexuality is so strident that he is prepared to rehabilitate the Bible’s endorsement of slavery just so he can preserve its condemnation of homosexuality.
None of this controversy appears in the film. Perhaps Hitchens didn’t know about it; as he admits on camera, he doesn’t like to research his opponents too much. In any event, the film presents us with two men who appear affable and earnest—the sort with whom one might enjoy having a beer if one likes energetic intellectual discussions. In fact, the relationship between the men is so congenial that I found myself almost wishing Hitchens would follow the unfair route of blaming Christianity for Wilson’s more appalling views. Perhaps, then, there might have been a real head-on crash.
So what about a change of trajectory? Was either man inspired to rethink his conviction in light of their debates? If you take a look at the exchanges that took place in the pages of Christianity Today that bookend the live debates chronicled in the film, the answer would seem to be no.
In those print debates Hitchens claims that Christianity, in addition to having no evidence in its favor, represents the world in ethically unacceptable terms—among other things, as “a celestial North Korea in which liberty was not just impossible but inconceivable.” Wilson ripostes by claiming that Hitchens’ atheist worldview offers no basis for justifying ethical judgments (such as those Hitchens levels against Christianity) or for motivating anyone to care about morality.
At the conclusion of their public debates, Hitchens and Wilson published a much briefer exchange in the Huffington Post. And what do they say at the conclusion of years of interaction and, well, collision? Among other things, Hitchens represents Christianity as offering us a wholly unjustified picture of the world, one in which we live under the claustrophobic thumb of “a never-dying tyrannical father figure.” Wilson retorts by claiming that if one takes atheism seriously, one is forced to conclude that nothing has value or meaning, and that ethical judgments (such as those Hitchens wants to make) cannot have any objective validity.
So what happened in the interim to motivate this total absence of change? The film chronicles a series of intellectual sparring matches in which, among other things, Hitchens accuses Christianity of endorsing or motivating moral horrors, and Wilson responds by claiming that Hitchens cannot meaningfully call anything a moral horror without first believing in God. What, exactly, is going on?
A Sales Script for Young Evangelicals
I think the answer may actually be hinted at in an interview with Wilson conducted after a pre-screening of Collision. His interviewer was the like-minded evangelical writer and preacher John Piper (who made news recently by claiming that a Minneapolis tornado was God’s way of warning the Lutheran Church [ELCA] not to vote in favor of ordaining partnered gays and lesbians). The audience, also comprised of conservative evangelicals, ensured that the interview was predictably soft-serve, and his message is illuminating.
First of all, he told Piper that he engages in apologetic debating for the sake of the faithful. They are his audience. The purpose of his polemics is to help shore up the belief of those whose faith has been made “kind of wobbly” by exposure to atheist arguments. At one point Wilson expresses the hope that “Christians in secular universities who don’t know how to answer their professors would be equipped in how to do that, at least in their heads.”
The last clause here—“at least in their heads”—is particularly illuminating. Wilson clearly hopes that conservative Christian college students (and others), when confronted with intellectual challenges to their faith, will not treat these challenges as invitations to critically reflect for themselves on the merits of their beliefs. Instead, they ought to replay Wilson’s polemics in their heads.
At another point in the interview, Piper asks Wilson about “copiousness,” which turns out to be something Wilson thinks should be cultivated by all Christians who engage in polemical debates with atheists. And what is copiousness? It’s a “storehouse” of prepared answers to various challenges to the faith, such that “when he says something, there’s something right there… from the Scriptures, from Chesterton or Oscar Wilde.”
Put another way, Wilson advocates going into debates armed with a range of rehearsed responses and rejoinders—a flexible script, if you will. I am reminded of the scripts that novice salespeople are given, scripts which including the array of “rebuttals” they’re supposed to use in response to the various reasons customers might offer for not buying a product. For the salesperson armed with this flexible script, the human vulnerability of the single mother (one who expresses concern both for her children’s safety and for her precarious financial situation, for example) becomes a trigger for a set of prepared arguments that will ultimately result in a payment plan for a state-of-the-art, overpriced set of fire detectors.
One of the consequences of such scripts is that you don’t need to engage in an authentically personal way with the other individual and what she is saying. You just have to learn which objections or attacks to pluck from your toolkit in response to various challenges.
When it comes to selling a product, the purpose of such a script is clear: to keep the salesperson focused on making the sale, regardless of what the potential customer might say. But what is the purpose of using such a script in a debate? It certainly isn’t for the debaters to learn from one another, to be challenged by new ideas so that they might rethink and refine their own convictions. In a very real sense, it’s about preventing such transformations. When debaters rely on a flexible script, a challenge never triggers the question, “Could my opponent be right about this?” Instead, it sends them digging in their toolkit for the right retort. And when debaters lose, they are inspired to refine or expand their scripts, rather than the difficult work of revising the beliefs the scripts are intended to defend.
Clearly, Wilson hopes that his debates with Hitchens will provide the faithful with scripted answers for their own toolkits. But is he relying on a script himself? What about Hitchens? In a way, perhaps, but not in the way that novice salespeople regurgitate rebuttals written for them by someone else. Hitchens and Wilson are more like the seasoned salespeople who no longer need such explicit scripts. Instead, their toolkits contain an array of ideas, strategies of argument, and honed debating skills.
But this changes little. Whether their toolkits contain crude instruments or state-of-the-art power tools, the objective remains the same: to secure victory for their own view.
Preaching to Their Respective Choirs
Victory means you don’t need to modify your position—and the nice thing about the sort of contest Hitchens and Wilson pursue is that so long as both parties are well-matched, and so long as they both manage to get in a few good arguments, a few moments of mesmerizing rhetoric, or a few clever put-downs that get the fans cheering, both sides can declare victory. There is no official scoreboard, and each can return to his respective constituencies at the end of the day and spin the contest as a win.
Tags: christianity today, christopher hitchens, documentary, douglas wilson, evangelicals, film, movies, new atheists