“Madam,” I said, very loudly. “Withdraw your bosom from my face!” And rising from my seat I uttered words to the effect that, if I wasn’t allowed to smoke my cigarettes on that plane, she damn well wasn’t allowed to flaunt her religion. As a matter of principle, I additionally demanded that the entire flight crew be replaced before takeoff. The ensuing two-hour delay I whiled away by flicking V-signs at my disgruntled fellow passengers and telling them all to fuck off, but my inner man was restive. Noted public atheist Christopher Hitchens caught humming Christian pop? I hope I do not flatter myself if I say that I could already see the headlines.
Losing my religion — not!
Well, these were trifles, you’ll agree. Virgins on toast. Born-again trolley-dollies. A man who spends as much time as I do refuting the Almighty might expect to accumulate, as an occupational hazard, a small catalogue of such curiosities. (Doubtless you have one yourself.) As it turned out, however, the incidents described above were a warm-up for the main event, which occurred during that night’s debate. My opponent, a meek and intellectually inert Baptist preacher, was ripe for annihilation: his opening remarks contained several errors of logic, three doctrinal imprecisions, and a large dose of wishful thinking. Like Byron’s Assyrian, I readied myself to come down on him “like a wolf on the fold.” The audience scented blood.
But as I smoothed my hair and leered at my victim in a preparatory manner, I was distracted by the sudden appearance, inches above his head, of a large angel. An angel, I might add, of quite breathtaking vulgarity. Six feet tall, radiant from head to sandaled toe, and carrying a harp. He regarded me steadily, his lips fluted in a sort of celestial smirk. The word “otiose,” which I had been preparing to deploy, froze on my tongue. I heard murmurs from the audience. Was this a vision? A seizure? Some species of grand mal? The angel frowned slightly and made a small circular motion with his hand, as if to indicate that I should “get it rolling,” and I found myself suddenly and uncontrollably in full rhetorical spate, castigating and humiliating the unfortunate Baptist. My heart, as you might imagine, was not exactly in it.
I will spare you the confusion of the weeks that followed. Suffice it to say that the angel accompanied me on my book tour with more constancy than the most devoted fan. At every debate, at every reading, in every radio station or television studio, there he was — either hovering superciliously or (far more irritating) cooling his heels in the front row. And that was not the worst of it. Faced with a particularly indignant clergyman in Dallas, I felt my chest flooding with alien sensations of charity, as if I had eaten a curry rather too fast. Filled with fraternal love, I seized the man, embraced him, and promised him that we were all children in the sight of the Lord — I could not tell which of us was the more alarmed. On another occasion, I caught myself giving silent thanks before the glory of a sunset. Compared with these moments, I don’t mind telling you, the presence of a harp-carrying angel at my side was a picnic. I began — dare I say it? — to have doubts about my Doubt. What if . . . ? What if . . . ? Hour by hour, I monitored my unbelief, as a hypochondriac takes his own temperature.
