Christopher Hitchens

In September 2010, three months after he learned that he had cancer of the oesophagus, Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay for Vanity Fair about the people who were praying for him. Some prayed for his recovery, some for his soul, and some websites said the cancer was God's revenge. Near the end he made a statement for the record. If the cancer reached his brain and he ever called for a priest, he wrote, the frightened person doing the calling would not really be him, and readers should remember that if they later heard any rumour of a conversion.¹²

He was writing his own deathbed in advance, because he knew how often the deathbeds of unbelievers had been rewritten after they died. This chapter asks how a boy who sang in the school choir came to be the most combative unbeliever of his generation, and why the last argument of his life was about what would be said of him after it.

A naval family and a boarding school

He was born in Portsmouth on 13 April 1949, the elder son of a Royal Navy officer, Commander Eric Hitchens, and Yvonne, who had served as a Wren and met his father in 1945. His younger brother Peter was born two years later.³⁴ The household was Church of England in the ordinary, unpressing way. His father had not enjoyed his own strict Baptist upbringing and did not impose religion on his sons, and his mother, as he learned only much later, had reasons of her own for keeping quiet about her family's faith.⁵

At eight he was sent to Mount House, a boarding school near Tavistock on the edge of Dartmoor, where religion was not a matter of choice. There were services morning and evening every day. He did not resent all of it. He liked the hymns and psalms, sang in the choir, read the lesson from the lectern on Sundays, and usually came top in scripture.⁶⁷ On the belief timeline, that compulsory, half-enjoyed Christianity of his schooldays is his faith. No source has him ever believing it in the way his teachers hoped.

Green grass at nine

In the first chapter of god is not Great, written almost fifty years later, he set down the moment he dated the crack from. When he was about nine, a teacher of nature and scripture, Mrs Jean Watts, told the class that God had made the grass green because green is the colour most restful to our eyes. He remembered being appalled. Even then, he said, he knew she had it the wrong way round: our eyes had adjusted to the green of nature, not the other way about. He knew nothing yet of the argument from design, of Darwin, or of chlorophyll.⁸

Other objections followed quickly, by his own account. Why did God need to be praised so constantly? Why heal one blind man and leave blindness in the world? Why did prayer seem to change nothing, and why should a boy confess in public to being a miserable sinner?⁹ Then, when he was nearly thirteen, his headmaster told a group of boys one evening that they would see the point of faith one day, when they started to lose the people they loved. Hitchens felt indignation as well as disbelief, because the headmaster had offered religion as a comfort, not as something true. He had just been shown, he said, a glimpse of Freud's The Future of an Illusion, which argues that religion grows out of wishing.¹⁰

So, by his own telling, before his voice broke he already had the four objections he would make for the rest of his life: that religion gets the origins of humanity and the cosmos wrong, that it combines servility with self-importance, that it is both a cause and a result of sexual repression, and that it rests on wishful thinking. He was careful to add that no one had beaten or bullied the faith out of him.¹¹ That puts his doubt on the timeline unusually early, at about nine, with a second beat at thirteen. It also explains why later he refused to call himself a seeker. He had stopped looking before he was a teenager.¹²

Later he called his own unbelief a Protestant atheism, because his first quarrel had been with the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and he kept a fondness for both. He said that if he went back to Devon he would happily sit quietly at the back of an old country church.⁵¹²

Politics first

From Mount House he went to The Leys, a Methodist school in Cambridge, where, according to a reviewer's account of his memoir, he read Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism at fourteen to get through the boredom of chapel.¹³¹⁴ In the spring of 1967 his brother Peter burned his Bible on the playing fields of his Cambridge boarding school. Peter would later return to Christianity; Christopher never had anything to return to.¹⁵

At Balliol College, Oxford, from 1967 he read philosophy, politics and economics, joined the International Socialists, and, under the influence of the socialist writer Peter Sedgwick, became an anti-Stalinist Marxist.¹⁶¹⁷ For the next twenty years his unbelief was simply assumed. His energy went into left-wing politics and journalism, first in London and from the early 1980s in the United States.¹⁸

Two family events from these years are sometimes woven into accounts of his unbelief, and the sources do not support either link. In 1973 his mother died in Athens in a suicide pact with a lover who had left the priesthood.¹⁹ In 1987, after his father died, he learned through his brother that his mother's family had been Jewish, and from then on he called himself a Jew by descent; Peter, who traced the family tree, put the Jewish line at one thirty-second.²⁰ Hitchens spoke about both events, but no source read for this chapter has him saying that either changed what he believed about God.

From unbeliever to campaigner

What changed was not his belief but its temperature. A Daily Telegraph profile in 2010 named two events that turned a long-time atheist into a campaigner against organised religion.²¹ The first was the fatwa of February 1989 calling for the death of his friend Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses. Hitchens later told how Rushdie stayed in his Washington flat over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1993, and how afterwards a State Department official warned him of intercepted talk of revenge on him and his family.²¹

In between came his first book-length attack on a religious figure, The Missionary Position (1995), a polemic against Mother Teresa of Calcutta.²²

The second event was 11 September 2001. In the Telegraph's account, he resolved after the attacks to stay coldly angry until those responsible had been brought to account.²¹ Six years later, in May 2007, he published god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, the book that marks the declaration on his timeline.²³

The book does not argue only that God does not exist. In one chapter he called his position antitheism: not merely the absence of belief, but the view that one ought to be glad that the religious stories are not true.²⁴ Elsewhere he proposed a rule that became attached to his name: that a claim made without evidence can be set aside without evidence.²⁵ He called himself an infidel and grouped himself with atheists, agnostics and secular humanists, and he disliked the label "New Atheist" that was soon attached to him and to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, on the grounds that there was nothing new about it.²⁶²⁷

He took the argument on the road. He exchanged letters with the Christian pastor Douglas Wilson in Christianity Today, debated the philosopher William Lane Craig at Biola University in April 2009, and in April 2008 debated his brother Peter at Grand Rapids, after which the brothers, long estranged, made peace.²⁸²⁹ He told a reporter in 2010 that he differed from Dawkins in one respect: he had no wish to convert everyone.²⁷

The brother who believed

The most serious of his opponents was in his own family. Peter Hitchens, a journalist, had been an atheist as a young man and came back to the Church of England. He said that what turned him was seeing socialism in practice in Eastern Europe and Moscow, and in 2010 he answered his brother's book with one of his own, The Rage Against God.¹⁵ His case, put in person in Washington in October 2010, was that a civilisation needs the restraint of Christian belief, that most people already live as practical atheists, and that unbelievers should face Nietzsche's conclusion that without God there is no absolute right and wrong.³⁰

Christopher said in June 2010 that he still could not work out why his brother held a conviction about the supernatural, even after reading his book.³¹ The essayist Theodore Dalrymple, himself not a believer, reviewed both brothers' books together and sided with Peter: in his reading, the real division between them was whether human beings can live by reason alone.³²

The test

In June 2010, on the tour for his memoir Hitch-22, he woke in his New York hotel unable to breathe and was taken to hospital. The cancer had begun in his oesophagus and spread to a lymph node and a lung. It was the disease that had killed his father at seventy-nine.³³³⁴

He wrote about the illness in public, in a series of essays for Vanity Fair. Believers wrote to say they were praying. Douglas Wilson prayed that he would fight the disease and make himself right with eternity; the evangelical writer Larry Taunton said salvation mattered more than health. Hitchens, who asked them what exactly they were praying for, reported their answers without scorn.¹ His geneticist friend Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and a believing Christian, advised him on the science of his treatment. Hitchens called him one of the greatest living Americans and noted that Collins never suggested prayer.¹³⁵

On 12 October 2010 he and Peter appeared together at the Pew Forum in Washington. He said that knowing he probably did not have long to live had only increased his contempt for the consolations religion forces on the dying, that he resented the idea that a dying man should abandon the principles of a lifetime, and that the deathbed conversions once attempted on Thomas Paine, and the stories later told about Darwin, were contemptible.³⁶ He had made the same argument in god is not Great, where he set Paine and Hume, who declined consolation at the end, against the invented story of Darwin's deathbed return to faith.³⁶ In November, five months into treatment, he debated the former prime minister Tony Blair in Toronto on whether religion is a force for good in the world.²⁸

He died of pneumonia, a complication of the cancer, at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston on 15 December 2011. He was sixty-two.³⁷ His last essays were collected as Mortality in 2012, and a reviewer called much of it a last, defiant and reasoned defence of unbelief.³⁸ At his memorial in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York in April 2012, Collins played the piano and said he had prayed for his friend. A film clip showed Hitchens, bald from chemotherapy, saying he would never change his mind about an afterlife, then adding that he did like surprises.³⁹

Accounts differ, as he said they would

In 2016 Larry Taunton published The Faith of Christopher Hitchens. Drawing on two long car journeys during which the two men had read and discussed the Gospel of John together, he argued that Hitchens had been privately weighing conversion and had lacked the nerve to go through with it.⁴⁰⁴¹ The journalist David Frum replied that the book offered no words or actions of Hitchens to support its central claim, that Taunton had admitted part of it was speculative, and that Hitchens had warned, repeatedly and in public, that exactly such a claim would be made.⁴²⁴³

Accounts differ, then, and this chapter does not settle them. What can be said is what Hitchens himself said, in print and while still lucid: that he had never been a seeker, that he did not expect to become one, and that any report of a late conversion should be doubted. His unbelief had begun at nine with a question about green grass, and the last thing he did with it was to defend it in advance against those who would tell his story after him.

Richard Dawkins, whose argument from biology Hitchens shared and whose wish to convert everyone he did not, has his own chapter in this book.