Godless: The Church of Liberalism

2006 book by Ann Coulter

Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a book by best selling author and American far right columnist Ann Coulter, published in 2006. The book is an argument against American liberalism, which Coulter claims is anti scientific, faith based, comparing it with primitive religion, purported to have "its own cosmology, its own explanation for why we are here, its own gods, and its own clergy." Coulter argues that "the basic tenet of liberalism is that nature is god and men are monkeys." The book drew criticism for its statements on the Jersey Girls, alleged plagiarized content, the promotion of pseudoscientific intelligent design, its incoherence, and its factual inaccuracy.

Christopher Hitchens noted that Coulter implied neoconservatives and Jews are one and the same: In response to Coulter's citing of Jonathan Wells' arguments concerning peppered moth evolution, Ian Musgrave argues that Coulter misrepresents the significance of the peppered moth experiments, makes a number of factual errors, and a "wildly ignorant misrepresentation of evolution." James Downard criticized Coulter's favoring of secondary sources over primary sources, saying "she compulsively reads inaccurate antievolutionary sources and accepts them on account of their reinforcement of what she wants to be true." Media Matters for America responded to Coulter's strawman arguments against evolution by noting 11 types of distortions in her writing and going into detail explaining why her claims are false, pseudoscientific and contrary to science. A satirical account of Coulter's take on evolution was written by probabilist Peter Olofsson, whose tongue in cheek argument was that Coulter had in fact written a veiled criticism of the intelligent design movement, much like Alan Sokal did to the postmodern movement in his famous hoax.

Christopher Hitchens, in a critical review of Godless for The Liberal, pointed to the book's incoherent prose and factual inaccuracy. John Barrie, creator of iParadigms, LLC's plagiarism detection software, found in the book three instances of what he claims to be plagiarism. The Rawstory website claims that she used text taken from the Illinois Right to Life website, making only slight changes for the book. The TPM Muckracker website provided a "complete" list of examples of alleged plagiarism discovered so far in all of Coulter's works. Coulter's publisher Crown Publishing Group has since characterized the charges as being "as trivial and meritless as they are irresponsible."