A quick peep at the Vanity Fair website will yield, to the interested seeker, a slideshow of journalist Christopher Hitchens getting his teeth capped and his balls waxed. All this is done in the name of self-improvement and, surely, journalistic pay dirt. But thanks to some strategic towel placement, the slideshow isn’t a crude series of photos by any means – all we really see is Hitchens looking, by turns, Satanic, impish, babyish, clever, and tremendously pained. In the ball-waxing shots, Hitchens lies prostrate on a medical-style examination table, a profusion of hair and pallid flesh. Flanking him are two blasé spa professionals in the midst of administering a sanga, the male version of the dreaded Brazilian bikini wax. The sanga, as Hitchens informs us, is known to those in the waxing industry as the ‘sack, back, and crack.’

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Between the Hitchens-haters and the Hitchens-obsessed, Dinkelspiel is packed, which in itself is unusual, given that said auditorium is usually only entered by flute enthusiasts and the intensely bored. There are throngs outside in the drizzle, hoping to join the audience, which comprises an unimaginable variety of the Stanford-and-nearby-area population. There are the enthusiasts sitting in tizzied cliques, hopping into the aisles to pass out pamphlets. There are piqued professors, enthused professors, strangely eager older people from Palo Alto, and the Atheists of Silicon Valley society. There are apathetic students, pathetic students, super-godly youth, pagan youth, and, most noticeably, and the kids who are organizing the thing – young minions from the anally conservative Stanford Review, a club called IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness), and Vox Clara, a Christian journal. These young things are whippersnapping about in their best suits, checking tickets, fixing mics, closing doors.

A painfully clean-cut theist leaps onstage and shuts everyone up. He’s hosting the televised broadcast of the debate, which is being done through the Christian Communication Network. As Theist Man tells the audience to look normal and ignore the cameras, everyone immediately stares straight into the lenses with manic glee. The already-heady apprehension coursing through Dinkelspiel is reaching fever pitch, something like the pre-match anticipatory excitement that is surely felt by WWE patrons. Teasing the tension to fever pitch, our celebrity guest shuffles his be-sneakered way onstage.

Decked out in a suit, pink Oxford, and tan sneakers, Ben Stein is functioning in the dubious capacity of ‘host.’ One may remember Stein’s infamous cameo in the film Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, which features Stein as a soporific econ teacher droning on about ‘voodoo economics.’ This is also the same Ben Stein of Win Ben Stein’s Money and Turn Ben Stein On. Also the same Ben Stein who wrote speeches for Nixon and is, as it turns out, a pretty militant theist. He elicits applause. But why is Ben Stein here? One wonders.

The man who is being sent into the arena to grapple with Hitchens is the mild-mannered Jay Richards, a research fellow and the media director at the Acton Institute, a Michigan-based foundation that combines a frankly odd mix of Christianity and rampant capitalism. Their website announces, “It is our hope that by demonstrating the compatibility of faith, liberty, and free economic activity, religious leaders and entrepreneurs can contribute by helping to shape a society that is secure, free, and virtuous.” Although Richards handles Acton’s media, he’s certainly also qualified to talk about God; he has a number of degrees, including a combined PhD in philosophy and theology. But he’s not a scientist. For that matter, neither is Hitchens. And it seems frankly odd that “the scientific evidence of intelligent design” should even be on the table. Why bring in two philosophy-types to talk evolution? Why not bring in Richard Dawkins instead and let him chat up a Catholic biologist? Knotty questions indeed, but more on this later.

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Summoned into the ring by the drawling Stein, Richards and Hitchens enter and station themselves at their faux-wood podiums. Richards is a tall, bounding, gangly Aryan specimen with a leonine shock of blonde hair, and he looks so wholesome. At times, he almost resembles a bespectacled, string-bean-y Ellen Degeneres. Hitchens, on the other hand, looks haggard. He’s short-ish, pudgy, silver-haired, a bit hunched, and his expression is one of rapt, unflinching attention. With his sharp features, graying skin, and peak-y eyebrows, one might almost say he looks Mephistophelean. Hitchens is called upon to make the first rhetorical move by Michael Cromartie, the debate moderator. Cromartie was, incidentally, President Bush’s choice for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and is, predictably, a staunch theist.

Hitches begins his opening remarks by mocking Stanford, mocking Ben Stein, and scoffing, “I can’t imagine it’ll take me fourteen minutes to demolish intelligent design, as I refuse to call it.” He then launches into a rapid-fire précis of his atheistic treatise, God is Not Great. The book was published in May of 2007, almost a year after Richard Dawkins (his bosom friend) published The God Delusion, which covers much the same territory as Hitchens’ treatise. The two much-celebrated books are both anti-God, both anti-religion, and both written by suave, heathenish Brits. Dawkins makes an elegant case, drawing parallels between Darwinian evolution and the coming-into-being of the universe, after which he sets in on the evils of religion. Hitchens is a far sight bitchier than Dawkins, and more flamingly anti-religious. He devotes few pages to disproving the existence of God, choosing rather to anecdotally enumerate religion’s varied crimes against humanity. Read together, Dawkins & Hitchens are a nice good cop/ bad cop pairing.

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After Hitchens works his magic, Richards begins his remarks in vaguely Midwestern tones, pitching his address to “Mr. Hitchens,” who has incidentally hardly deigned to look at Richards, let alone mention him. As Hitchens stares into space, Richards attempts to administer a little swat to Hitchens’ proverbial nose: “A sneer is not an argument,” pouts Richards. Well, yes, Hitchens has been sneering, but the audience loves it. Hitchens has ignited blood lust. So why won’t Richards sneer back? Come on, Richards, you can be funny! But, no. Richards is not funny. He is sweet. And he is smart and earnest, but he cannot argue. Instead, he spends his fourteen minutes expounding a rambling “list of facts” about our world that makes theism ‘a better fit’ than atheism. His logic rests heavily on the concept of an innate morality ‘written on our hearts,’ which Richards cites as evidence for the existence of God.

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During the heat of the debate, Cromartie, the moderator, doles out questions on Darwinism, evolution, and the ‘cause’ of the universe. Never mind that neither of the debaters is a scientist; both have done their research, and they are able to dip into science-chat with ease. The debate boils down to the weary question of irreducible complexity: is there, or is there not, some facet of the natural world that cannot be explained through Darwinian evolution? The former-favorite example used to be the human eye, which, until its evolutionary development was explained, was considered an example of something so complicated and ingenious that it could not possibly have developed through evolution; only that wily God fellow could have fashioned it.

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As Hitchens performs his rhetorical aerobics, Ben Stein sits antsily on stage left, barely able to cope with the discussion. He gets incensed just asking a question of Hitchens. So he deals with his alternating boredom and fury by doodling on his notepad and consuming, in slow succession, a large cup of coffee, a bag of chips pulled out of his briefcase, and a peppermint, which he unwraps perilously close to his mic. Why is Ben Stein here? We find out as soon as the broadcasted portion of the debate ends. Clean-Cut Theist springs onstage and announces that those watching the CCN will, for the next 90 seconds, be viewing a preview of Ben Stein’s upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Further investigation reveals that the film, released in February of this year, follows Ben Stein as he ‘investigates’ the university-level stigma against questioning intelligent design. With the song Bad to the Bone playing in the background, one trailer for Expelled features Ben Stein interviewing a small, balding Scottish man who pipes cheerily, “Just stand up and question Darwinism, and you’ll find out how risky that is.” Another trailer simply shows Stein in knee socks and a schoolboy uniform looking impish.

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As Dawkins and others have opined, living without God isn’t always a party. Christopher himself admits it’s a bummer that he’s not going to live forever, but he presses on stoically. As he says, there simply isn’t evidence for God and heaven and angels, and he simply isn’t going to be a self-deluder. But, one must wonder: God and religion are removed, how can we fill the God-shaped emptiness? It takes most atheists a great deal of thought (and in many cases liquor) to come to peace with their own nonbelief and find solace in secular sources of ‘wonder.’ In God is Not Great, Hitchens writes that he has the marvels of the arts, literature, nature, etc. to keep him going. But is this voyage of replacing-God-with-other-things a journey that humanity is ready or willing to take en masse? When that comfortable little bath mat of hope is pulled out from under the world’s feet, what next? Are large chunks of the polis capable of replacing Jesus with Tristan Und Isolde or The Sound and the Fury?

At the conclusion of God is Not Great, Hitchens calls for a secular enlightenment in which humanity will become independent from religion’s efforts to ‘poison everything.’ And we may well ask, ‘What then?’ But perhaps it is enough that Hitchens has brought his readers and his faithful to this place, where the ‘hows’ are not quite worked out, but the ‘whys’ are abundantly clear. And, like it or not, Hitchens has made his smoker’s rasp heard. Yes, he has turned off herds of theists and atheists alike by being snarky and abrasive, but perhaps his bitchiness isn’t gratuitous. He is, after all, living and writing in a country where the religious vote is astoundingly powerful and only abut 5% of citizens identify as atheist or agnostic. And bitchiness is an understandable reaction to the smothering evangelical right. But Hitchens doesn’t need his excuses made for him. He is knowingly, unabashedly Christopher, and one suspects that he has always been this way, that he popped out of the birth canal with a G&T in one hand and a Marlboro in the other. Perhaps this is his truly redeeming quality: by being himself, Hitchens has drawn people into debate, into thought. He is tirelessly shouting his message, and – if his audience’s attentive giggles are anything to judge by – people are listening.

Download “The Wicked Hitch” as a PDF.