Almost everyone knows how elder brother Christopher feels, which was laid out in his bestselling book God Is Not Great. In it he wrote that “religion poisons everything,” that it has been the cause of nearly every evil through to this very day, and so awful is religion that teaching it to children should be considered a form of “child abuse.”

Less well known are the views of Peter Hitchens, a conservative columnist for the The Mail on Sunday in London, who was inspired to write his latest book, The Rage Against God, because of the “dangerous” teachings of men like his brother.

In the introduction he writes: “[I]t would be absurd to pretend that much of what I say here is not intended to counter or undermine arguments [Christopher] has presented in his own book.”

The two men were estranged for years: not because of their differences over religion — at one time Peter, too, was an atheist — but just in the way that families will sometimes drift apart for really no sensible reason.

They reconciled a few years ago after a debate in Michigan but there is no sense that they are now close.

“For a long time I’ve said we aren’t as unlike as people think we are,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Oxford. “We both have an independent mind, which is the phrase I would use, but that will not always lead you to the same place.”

The Rage Against God is not a faith book, at least not in the conventional sense of defending doctrine or even making a philosophical case for God. The book is devoid of “faith talk”; the name Jesus does not appear once in the book.

“Remember, I’m an ex-Trotskyite — so I’m quite suspicious of the man of total conviction and certainty. What I did not want, coming away from Marxist utopianism, was to find another mirror image of utopianism,” he said.

“The argument I’m making for religion is largely a negative one: if you get rid of [God] you will be in a tremendous fix.”

Even the Church of England is presented as much as his inheritance as an Englishman than as part of some ecstatic born-again experience. He said the “coolness” of the faith, the lack of heat and fury, is what he finds so attractive.

“I’ve had it with heat and fury.”

Mr. Hitchens sees Christianity as not just a set of religious beliefs but as essential to shaping western culture — from law to music to architecture — as well as the essential bulwark against tyranny.

So the danger with his brother and the cadre of “new atheists” is that they not only deny the link between religion and culture “but argue for its repudiation” — much as atheist communist revolutionaries argued repeatedly in the 20th century.

“Soviet society was disgusting,” said Mr. Hitchens, who spent several years in Moscow as a reporter. And what you saw in the former Soviet Union was the work of “70 years of government led by atheists.”

“These were exactly the kind of people who are now the new atheists; they are recognizably the same. The same passions, the same ideals and the same belief in their own goodness — which is always the most fatal thing.”

What concerns him now is that atheists present themselves as benign, claiming that they would never persecute anyone or stamp anyone out and deny any connection between what they believe and the descent into dictatorship as occurred in Russia.

In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens almost seems to argue that communism got its impetus from religion, implying that a religious culture let to totalitarianism.

“Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it.”

But Peter Hitchens said the experiment of atheistic states, whether fascist or communist, proved otherwise.

“Atheists will always say it’s not in our nature to persecute people we don’t agree with, to force our will on others, to stamp things out. But eventually atheists will find an intellectual justification for censorship and persecution.”

Meantime, Mr. Hitchens’ take on Christianity as a faith, as opposed to cultural bulwark, is unconventional but honest.

He is very clear, too, that what Christianity demands at times seems super human. It is a notion that atheists have used to “prove” that the Gospels were flawed because they ask people to behave in a way that is unnatural.

Such ideas as turning the other cheek and forgiveness, he said, seem beyond his ability.

“Some are virtually impossible and some I am reluctant to try,” he laughs. “The demands are very heavy and we walk away with a heavy heart thinking I can’t do this. But that doesn’t cause us to say, ‘Well, in that case, it was wrong for it to be demanded.’ ”

He believes as St. Augustine wrote that “thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee” and so the pull of God is irresistible.

Of course, his brother would disagree, and will likely leave this world not giving in to any sort of divine pull.

Mr. Hitchens is not expecting a deathbed conversion by Christopher and nor does he think that his brother will lack for solace because he has turned away from God.

“Because he has a very rich philosophical and literary life which enables him to cope with great trials and tribulation. I don’t doubt that will stand him in some stead. He’s not alone with nothing facing a void. Not in that sense. It would just be plain wrong to imagine that. I don’t claim to know him particularly well because we’ve been separated a long time. But I do know him in ways that others never will because we’re brothers.”

END