When Christopher Hitchens decided to qualify the title of his 2007 magnum opus God is not Great with the caption ‘How religion poisons everything’, he probably wasn’t thinking specifically about Australia’s chances of getting to the final of the 2019 Rugby World Cup. But in the years following the book’s publication it was more often the absolutism of the subtitle than the brazenness of the title that Hitchens was asked to defend, and if he’d lived long enough to write a foreword to a 2019 imprint, he would have been hard-pressed to find a field of human endeavour with less...