A former policy analyst for the Reagan Administration, Dinesh D’Souza is one of America’s most influential conservative thinkers. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a frequent contributor to major magazines and newspapers, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Review. Dinesh is also a committed believer. With his wife and twelve-year-old daughter, Dinesh attends Horizon Christian Fellowship in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

Most recently, Dinesh has authored the New York Times bestseller What’s So Great About Christianity and debated prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens. In the midst of a hectic fall 2007 book tour, Dinesh D’Souza took the time to talk to FamilyFans author Dr. Timothy Paul Jones (author of Misquoting Truth), about his hopes for his book, his perspective on why people become atheists, and his views on the future of Christian faith.

Care to listen in?

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FamilyFans: Thanks for sharing your time with us today. Let's start off with an easy one. What inspired you to write What’s So Great About Christianity?        

Dinesh D’Souza: To be honest, I’ve prepared for this book my entire life. Other books I’ve written have been about secular subjects—markets, politics, education, and so on. I actually began this book in a very secular way: My point was to say, “Look, atheists, even if you don’t accept Christianity, you’ve got to admit … that [Christianity has] done much good from which you benefit. At least, acknowledge the greatness of Christianity.” Then, all the atheist books hit the bestseller lists. Letters to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, and The God Delusion from Richard Dawkins. These books went beyond anything that atheists had done before, linking Christian faith with fanaticism and ignorance. This was a new form of atheism—and they specifically made it clear that they wanted to win over people to their beliefs. After that, I wanted to help Christians to be more confident about their faith, to produce something that would respond to what the atheists were saying.

FamilyFans: In the first chapter of What’s So Great About Christianity, you state, “God has come back to life.” What did you mean by that?

Dinesh D’Souza: That was my challenge to the proposition of [atheist philosopher] Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared, “God is dead.” What I was saying was that, if anyone thought that God was dead, He’s back. Here’s the proof that I see: If you look around the world, religion is growing. And, despite the claims that Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion, it isn’t! From a global perspective, Christianity remains the fastest-growing religion in the world—Islam is second, and it’s growing primarily through reproduction, because of the size of Muslim families. Christianity is growing both by reproduction and by conversion. Even in the West—with a secularized Europe and an America that’s divided between people of faith and secularists—Christians are having larger families than secular people. So, by virtue of these numbers alone, Christianity has the upper hand.

FamilyFans: In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins suggests that any resurgence of interest in God is simply evidence of people’s lack of critical thinking. If persons were more reasonable—according to Dawkins—they would recognize that faith in God is a delusion. How would you respond to this claim?

Dinesh D’Souza: If we looked at the world and saw that all educated people rejected the idea of God while all uneducated people embraced the idea of God, the atheists might have a valid point. But that’s not, in fact, what we see. In the vast majority of nations, educated people are every bit as likely as the uneducated to be people of faith. From an historical perspective, Dawkins’s claim is even weaker. The majority of the brightest and best-educated people throughout history have been people of faith. … Dawkins is a scientist—but he’s no Johannes Kepler or Galilei Galileo, both of whom believed in God! Such claims, really, are atheist propaganda, aimed at students who are young and bright. What the atheists are claiming is that the way to be intellectually sophisticated is to deny the existence of God. … Many young people come to assume that there is a conflict between their faith and their mind, and they end up choosing reason over faith—never recognizing that reason and faith were never contradictory in the first place.

FamilyFans: When depicting Christianity as anti-scientific, atheists inevitably appeal to the case of Galileo, the scientist who was supposedly persecuted by the church for proclaiming scientific truth. Is this a valid example of an anti-scientific bias in Christianity?

Dinesh D’Souza: [The atheist] case for the conflict between faith and science … inevitably hinges on a couple of cases—Galileo and Darwin. Darwin … was never persecuted for his beliefs. But what about Galileo? [In] the atheist mythology, Galileo is portrayed as a secular saint, refuting the ignorance of Christians. … The church—in the atheist myth—dogmatically harasses the noble Galileo, but the brave scientist refuses to be silent. It is a beautiful narrative with a single, serious problem: It’s all false.

FamilyFans: What do you mean?

While Galileo did get it right that the earth moved around the sun, his reasoning was completely wrong. Galileo’s “proof” was the movement of the ocean; he said that the tides came in and out because they were sloshing around on a spinning earth. Of course, we know now that that’s not actually what causes the tides at all. He was never tortured, and he wasn’t convicted in court because of scientific irregularities. It was because he lied under oath. He was exiled to a luxuriant villa where he carried out scientific research until the day of his death.

FamilyFans: Apart from the influence of theism, what would be the status of human rights in our world?

Dinesh D’Souza: From the beginnings of humanity, there has been belief in some sort of God—the shape of this faith has changed, but it’s almost impossible to imagine humanity without some influence from belief in God. Friedrich Nietzsche admitted this fact when he said that even if you kill God, God’s shadow remains. When I debated Christopher Hitchens [atheist and bestselling author of God Is Not Great], he said it’s shameful to think it’s because of God that people give blood to help others or that we write a check to assist tsunami victims. He said you don’t need God to be a good person. The problem with his line of reasoning is that, whenever there is a disaster like a tsunami, … the primary [people who come to the rescue] are believers in God, and people who live in cultures—such as Europe and the United States—that have been profoundly influenced by Christian faith. I would go so far as to say that, when Christopher Hitchens writes a check to help someone less fortunate, he is influenced by his Christian heritage. … That is the ingratitude of the atheist, to deny the positive influences of a heritage of faith upon his ethics.

FamilyFans: You refer to unbelief as "the opiate of the morally corrupt." What do you mean by this?

Dinesh D’Souza: As you know, Karl Marx famously described religion as “the opiate of the masses”—“opiate” referring to a drug. What he was saying was that religion dulls people to social injustice. In fact, religion historically has made people more sensitive to social injustice; so, I wanted to turn that idea around. What I asked myself was, “Why is anyone attracted to unbelief?” … What atheism provides … is not intellectual satisfaction but moral license. It’s a release from moral accountability and ultimate responsibility. … The atheist releases himself from moral justice by denying the existence of a judge. So, his beliefs do become “the opiate of the morally corrupt.”

FamilyFans: What makes Christianity different from the other religions of the world?

Dinesh D’Souza: All religions attempt to solve the same sorts of questions about meaning and goodness and life. That’s because every human being has some sense of goodness but can’t seem to attain this goodness. We’re always chasing after this goodness, this happiness, but we can’t achieve it. … The question becomes, “How do I close this gap between my ideals and reality?” Other religions try to build a ladder from our reality up to our ideals, a ladder from man to God. Christianity completely turns it around. Christianity recognizes that it’s not like trying to climb a ladder; it’s more like trying to pole-vault over a mile-high mountain! Some people get closer than others, but no one can actually make it. So, in Jesus Christ, God reaches down to man, to do what we could not.

FamilyFans: What are your hopes for What’s So Great About Christianity?

Dinesh D’Souza: At one time, people in Western society lived in a culture in which the Bible was assumed to possess a certain authority. In a secular culture, though, they don’t feel as if they can necessarily appeal to Luke’s Gospel or Daniel’s prophecies as authoritative. As a result, Christians … assume that they have nothing to say. They feel intellectually naked in their culture—thinking, “If I can’t appeal to Scripture, what can I appeal to?” I want Christians to recognize that they do have something to say even to a secular culture, because there is a rational foundation for their beliefs.

FamilyFans: Thank you for taking time to talk with us!