Not So Docile Sheep

Hitchens, Christopher, Free Inquiry

In late March, I accepted a challenge from William Donohue of the Catholic League to debate him in New York. The motion before the audience, which gathered in the Lincoln Hall of the Union League Club, was that "The American Intellectual Elite is Hostile to Religion in General and to the Catholic Church in Particular." Mr. Donohue's task was the more difficult one, since it was as easy for me to maintain that the proposition was untrue as it was to argue that it would be nice if it were true.

The event took place in the week of the pope's very generalized and vague "apologies" for the innumerable past sins of the Church and was sponsored by the Catholic group Christe Fidelis, which hopes to mount further events "in the spirit of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc." It taught me a good deal about the different strands of belief that secularists …

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Publication information: Article title: Not So Docile Sheep. Contributors: Hitchens, Christopher - Author. Magazine title: Free Inquiry. Volume: 20. Issue: 3 Publication date: Summer 2000. Page number: 8. © 1999 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group.

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