An Interview with Dinesh D'Souza

Interview Conducted by Christopher Blankenship and Charles Dunn

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Recently, several influential writers and thinkers—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—have claimed that religion is not only fictitious and naïve but actually dangerous and toxic to the health of modern society. Do you think religion is inherently harmful?

It is impossible to deny that harmful crimes have been committed in the name of religion. Yet I think that these crimes are often assigned disproportionate attention. The historical record shows that the crimes of religion, and specifically Christianity, are minute compared to the crimes of atheist regimes. Often when people mention the crimes of Christianity they refer to the Inquisition. There is now a reliable body of scholarship on the Inquisition and one of its leading scholars is Henry Kamen. If you read Kamen’s work, you discover that in the Spanish inquisition, which lasted some 350 years, approximately 2000 people were killed. 2000 deaths over 350 years works out to roughly six people killed per year. On a micro-scale, all destruction of innocent human life is egregious. But on the macro-scale, the Inquisition hardly amounts to a world historical crime.

By contrast, if you look at the crimes of atheist regimes, they are monstrous. I am not even talking about Mao in China or Stalin in Russia or the Nazis in Germany. It is true that these regimes alone in the space of five decades killed an excess of one hundred million people. But even if you take a “junior league” atheist like Pol Pot in Indochina you find that his regime too killed approximately two million people in the space of a few years.

Atheist regimes have killed more people in the twentieth century than have all the religions in the world since the beginning of the historical record. It is also important to realize that the crimes that are alleged against Christianity are ancient, having occurred many centuries ago. Authors such as Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins draw a disproportionate amount of attention to these ancient offenses, which are essentially unrepeatable today. At the same time, they are ignoring crimes that are quite recent, many of which occurred in my lifetime and in some cases are still continuing.

Richard Dawkins argues in The God Delusion that Christians killed in the name of Christianity, but many tyrants who happened to be atheists did not kill in the name of atheism. From a historical point of view this is unsupported. All you have to do is read The Communist Manifesto and look at the behavior of Communist countries to see that their atheism wasn’t incidental at all. On the contrary, the whole idea was to create a new man and a new utopia liberated from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality.

Is government-sponsored atheism inherently dangerous?

What is dangerous about government-sponsored atheism is that it has no notion of cosmic accountability. Life is unfair sometimes: the bad guy comes out on top and the good guy comes to grief. It is the premise of religion that we live in a legal universe and that in a sort of final accounting, what goes around does come around. In Christianity, this is called last judgment. In Hinduism it is called reincarnation. If you are a really bad guy in this life, you might be a cockroach in the next life. You get what you deserve. The point is that if you are a believer you have to take into account the possibility that you will have to pay for your sins. Even the inquisitors who were rapacious and cruel had to consider the possibility that they would one day meet their Maker and have to give an account for what they had done.

This is why I don’t believe that even in his worst day a Torquemada could approximate the crimes of a Pol Pot. Atheist regimes are motivated by the idea that since God does not exist, everything is permitted. There is no moral accountability. There is nothing to keep you from doing what you want except for the possibility that you might be caught or the possibility there might be some force political, judicial or military that can stop you. But of course, if you are Stalin and there is no such force, there is absolutely no limit to the amount of blood you can spill if you feel so inclined.

A central tenet of Christianity is the claim that human nature is corrupt and that we are incapable of virtue without God. Some popular morality denies this, claiming that our nature is fundamentally good and that our actions can indeed be innately virtuous. Which claim have you found to be most consistent with human experience?

Catholic writer Cardinal John Henry Neuman wrote that the doctrine of the fall or the corruption of human nature is one of those propositions of Christianity that requires no revelation but merely an observation of human experience to see that it is correct. I would argue that if human nature were wonderful, if human nature always expressed itself at its best, then you wouldn’t need the economic, political and social structures that we have in Western civilization today.

For example, one of the core ideas of liberal government is separation of powers, which includes the idea of checks and balances and the broader notion of rule of law. All of these are based on the notion that if you let people have too much power they will use it badly. But why? Why does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Shouldn’t absolute power in the hands of a really great guy lead to marvelous results? The liberal assumption is that it doesn’t matter who has the power. Chances are it is going to be used poorly and the reason it is going to be used poorly is that Immanuel Kant was right when he said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

This idea, which is common to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is indeed born out by experience. Even Eastern religions agree with that the self is the source of evil. There is no major religion that upholds the goodness of human nature. That has been reserved for secular liberalism. And even secular liberalism excuses its mistakes by saying, “We are only human.”

The great champion of secular liberalism was the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But even Rousseau had to acknowledge that there were a lot of bad things done in the world. He became the great excuse maker for the bad things in the world and he developed the idea that essentially “society made me do it.” According to Rousseau, man is originally good but has been corrupted by societal artifice and convention but hidden within man is a sort of pure human nature that is incorrupt and that is genuinely good. So the blame is shifted away from the individual onto society. And so the assumption becomes that if I could only shake off this skin of convention and return to the sort of pure nature that lies buried within me I can achieve self-fulfillment. You can see how these philosophical ideas have broken into mass culture in the 1960’s. And now they have become part of our popular imagination.

In your most recent book, What’s So Great About Christianity, you claim that Christianity is “believable in the face of the discoveries of modern science and modern scholarship.” What convinced you to put your faith in Christ?

I learned my Christianity from my parents in India, but it was a very simplified Christianity. I have before referred to it as “Crayon Christianity,” as it could not give an account of itself. When I came to the U.S. at the age of sixteen and arrived at Dartmouth a year later, I found that my Christian beliefs were subjected to skeptical questioning and in some cases outright attack. How could you defend the concept of miracles in the age of science? Or isn’t it true that religion is simply a product of upbringing? How do you know that your religion is true?

When I was seventeen and nineteen I didn’t have answers to these kinds of questions. My mind began to become an obstacle to my Christian faith, and I found myself pulling away from my Christian beliefs and swinging into political conservatism. For the last fifteen or twenty years my career has focused on making the intellectual and moral arguments in the political arena and it is only now, with my book on Christianity, that I have moved into the arena of apologetics. I think that what happened is that over time my Christian faith deepened and slowly began to converge with my intellectual interest. All of this happened at a time when a spate of atheist books was coming out, and I felt inspired or called to jump into the ring and take on the new fundamentalist atheism.

Do you have any thoughts you would like to share with the Dartmouth community?

When I arrived at Dartmouth in 1979, I was a foreign student looking to major in economics and go to business school. My horizons were narrow, but at Dartmouth I was exposed to a much wider world. It shifted the whole focus of my career and the way I spent my time. It exposed me to a broader of interests than I had previously had. It is something that dramatically changed my life. I always look upon Dartmouth with a tremendous sense of gratitude.

Dinesh D’Souza ’83, a former White House domestic policy analyst, is currently the Rishwain Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of several best selling books. Recently, D’Souza has directed his attention to defending Christianity against a number of atheist books, which denounce theism in general and Christianity in particular. In 2007 he released his comprehensive apologetic What’s So Great About Christianity?. In His New York Times Best Selling book, D’Souza challenges the notion that “Christianity is obsolete,” and he affirms that “an intelligent, educated person, can really believe in the God of the Bible.” His defense has led him to debate several prominent atheist scholars including Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. On April 21, 2008, D’Souza returned to his Alma Mater to debate Dartmouth philosophy professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on the question, “Can we be good without God?.” Prior to his arrival in Hanover, Mr. D’Souza graciously granted this publication an interview.

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