⛪ Tie Your Mother Down...
The Crime: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
The Guilty Party: Christopher Hitchens
Overview: A world-class iconoclast directs his ire at one of the most revered then-living religious figures on the planet and delivers an overly catty disorganized rant.
Why I Hate It...
Let's get this out of the way right at the top: I'm not here to defend Mother Teresa. That is not what's happening here. Even a cursory glance at the criticism section of her wikipedia page will let you know that this woman was highly problematic. If someone wants to take her down a peg by highlighting her decades of misappropriating funds, denying care to the needy because she thought suffering would be good for their souls, and converting them without their consent, I'm here for it. I was eager and excited to read this book. Here's the thing, though. If you're going to aim your pen at such a beloved and iconic figure, you need to have a clearly delineated argument with specific, relevant lines of evidence that are well-documented and neatly organized.
Hitchens does not do that.
I read somewhere (and for the life of me I can't remember where, so feel free to treat this as apocryphal) that Hitchens never revised his work. That was one of the things that made him so prolific. And after reading this book, I absolutely believe it. In fact, I'm kind of surprised anyone bothered to publish it. At this point in his career, Hitchens was primarily an essayist, and this book has the feel of a long-form essay that just kept going, resulting in a book that's only 5 chapters and barely 100 pages long, dense with ideas but bereft of structure or thematic cohesion.
Hitchens expounds on topics as they flit into his mind. I wish I were exaggerating. He opens with a lengthy description of the stuff on his table as he's writing. That is his launch point for this book. He doesn't provide any background or history of Mother Teresa up front, instead counting on the audience to have already done their homework, I guess. In fact, it's a good 80 pages or so (read as: 4/5 of the total length) before he bothers to give any kind of backdrop for the woman at all, and when it finally happens, he assumes that the audience already has a hefty familiarity with the political climate in Albania in the 1930s. If your goal is to make the subject matter as inaccessible as possible in such a slight volume, you'd be hard-pressed to do a more thorough job.
It's just so much rambling dreck. There's probably only about fifteen pages in the middle where he really gets into the meat of an argument, and those fifteen pages are absolutely worth reading. But then they all seem to be in service of a thesis that I find extremely difficult to swallow. Hitchens asserts that Mother Teresa's actions were all in hopes of seeing herself beatified some day. And I'm sorry, but no. Nobody knowingly does bad things because they want to be made a saint. That makes not a lick of sense to me, and there's a much stronger thesis just sitting there that aligns much more cleanly with Hitchens' other work on religion. What if, instead, Mother Teresa was doing horrible things because she was an exemplary Catholic, and because Church doctrine as written--if not necessarily as practiced by most practitioners--is kind of god-awful? I mean, wouldn't that be just the smoking-gun, final-nail-in-the-coffin, mike-drop kind of argument that would appeal to a man who's best-known book is called God is not Great?
In the end, I'm not mad at this book, I'm just disappointed with it. Controversial as he was--and he was very controversial--Christopher Hitchens was an important thinker and has written some amazing volumes. His final book Mortality is a heartbreaking memoir and thoughtful meditation on death and dying, and one that I will recommend to anyone. And yet this hatchet job, this over-stuffed and under-nourished screed, feels like a missed opportunity at best and a fool's errand at worst. Mother Teresa, now 25-years dead, has become an institution. The world needs cultural critics who can look at someone revered as a saint and point out that she was, in fact, just a human, and therefore capable of doing evil, whatever her motives may have been.
Tune in next week for Atonement, an honest-to-god good movie that I really hated.
In CONSUMED WITH HATE, Kurt is revisiting media that he absolutely did not like one bit. See more posts.
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