No earthly good

Peter Hitchens writes a stern column most weeks in the Mail on Sunday. It expresses disdain not only for today’s politicians but also for those of us who vote for them. The weekly Hitchens can leave even his fellow right-wingers feeling demoralised. He argues that David Cameron’s Tories are no better than Gordon Brown’s clowns. Anyone who swallows campaign promises from Wesmtinster’s stinking fraudsters — a plague on all their second houses — is, in his view, a fool.

Hitchens is brave and clever. He writes fluently, with the eye of a shrewd reporter. The best newspaper columnists have always been contrarians, but surely few have been so consistently against everybody with such Old Testament hotness. His unyielding lack of trust in our rulers — his un-negotiable refusal to believe them even just once in a while — can appear vehement to the point of unreason. How can anyone be so lacking in faith in all his fellow human beings?

His new book offers an explanation of sorts. He does have faith, but it is in a higher kingdom than the sorry thing the atlas still calls Great Britain. The Rage Against God is a magnificent, sustained cry against the aggressive secularism taking control of our weakened culture. It is informed by the years the author spent in Russia shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. That posting showed him the emptiness of a society without God and encouraged him to study the way the revolutionary Bolsheviks ostracised Christianity.

Citing F. A. Mackenzie, a British writer who lived in Communist Russia in the early 1920s, Hitchens describes how Christianity was driven from Soviet schools. The state insisted on a mono- poly of welfare. Religious symbols were banned from public buildings.