Christopher Hitchens was a ‘heretic’ of the New Atheist cause

The late Anglo-American journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) referred to himself as a contrarian. By this he meant that he did not fear adopting opinions that were contrary to orthodoxy if he believed that the evidence warranted it. Within a religious context, he might have earned the name heretic. As a Marxist, he rejected Stalinism because of its totalitarianism and adopted Trotskyism. Once established on the American Left after having immigrated to the US in 1981, Hitchens surprised his left-wing allies by supporting George Bush Jr’s war on terrorism and demarche against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. In matters of religion Hitchens was no different. Though one of the four de facto leaders of New Atheism and probably the most effective proselytiser of its anti-theist gospel, Hitchens held two opinions on religion that astonished his fellow New Atheists. It is important, therefore, that when Christian apologists write and speak about Christopher Hitchens that they do so accurately by recognising this.

Contrary to his fellow New Atheist leaders, Hitchens did not think that religion would disappear, or at least not for an exceptionally long time. For Richard Dawkins, the most famous New Atheist, religion is a meme which is hard to eradicate, but which will eventually be cured when science becomes the dominant worldview. For Hitchens, religion would remain, for there must have been at some point in human evolution a survival value to religious belief and so the propensity to be religious is embedded in humanity.

It is ironic that Hitchens, the journalist, used an evolutionary argument for religion’s durability, whereas the evolutionary biologist, Dawkins, uses the cultural argument of a ‘thought-virus’ to predict religion’s extinction. 

Religion is ‘useful’

It is one thing to assert that religion is ineradicable, but it is more controversial among New Atheists to say that it is undesirable that religion disappears, but that is what Hitchens also believed. In contradiction to the subtitle of his book god is not Great, which is How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens conceded that there was some use for certain religious beliefs. He thought that the religious belief that there are limits to human understanding and that there is a Creator far greater prevented human hubris. Behind many great works of art, such as the eloquent King James Bible and the sublime choral music of Bach, Hitchens detected the religious impulse.

During a meeting of New Atheism’s leaders at his apartment in Washington, DC, Hitchens surprised the assembled Daniel Dennett (1942-2024), Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins by saying he wanted the argument with religious people to continue because you learn from others by disputing with them and that because he enjoyed this. Dawkins was aghast at this opinion-and Dawkins is particularly good at being aghast as many God-believers know. Surely, Dawkins argued, we do not need to have debates with religious people, as it is possible, for instance, to have enlightening and enjoyable debates with those who differ from us on political grounds? Dawkins was right and Hitchens conceded the point, but Dawkins’ rebuttal did not change Hitchens’ conclusions that religion will not and ought not to disappear.

This was revealed at the end of the documentary DVD Collision made about Hitchens’ series of debates with Pastor Douglas Wilson in America’s Bible Belt. Hitchens and Wilson appear to be returning in a chauffeur-driven car back to their hotel after an evening debate. Wilson looks as if he just wants climb into bed and sleep, but Hitchens, who was known to be a night owl, is happily chatting away. Hitchens confirmed to Wilson that he would not drive religion out of the world if he could. For Hitchens, it was not just that there would be no more religious ideas and religious people to debate, but what other reasons he had for refusing to expunge religious belief, he could not identify. I would suggest this possibility: that as, by his own admission a lifelong opponent of both right and left wing totalitarianism, Hitchens was unable to countenance the totalitarian act of expunging religion. 

The ‘taming’ of religion

If Hitchens did not think or want religion to disappear but also considered it to be irrational and immoral, what did Hitchens want to do with it?

Hitchens distinguished between extremist religions and moderate religions. The extremists, he asserted, must be defeated militarily. Of moderate religion, it was Hitchens’ view that it had to be unceasingly tamed and domesticated through a secular separation of state and religion so that religious convictions played no part in the running of society or in its public discourse but retreated to the private sphere. The public sphere was therefore an enlightened space in which the average person could learn from and participate in scientific inquiry and engage in discussing ethical question through the study of literature and poetry, and not sacred texts such as the Bible. Hitchens was optimistic that such a society was within the reach of everyone for the first time in history because of the Internet and the easy access to vast amounts of knowledge it provided.

As well as a separation of state and religion, this process of taming and domesticating religion was, according to Hitchens, to be achieved through the restrictions the democratic, secular state would place upon what religious people can and cannot do. The secular state would therefore operate from an independent moral base to that of religion, though if the two did collide, it was the state’s moral code that would have the final word on what was permitted. As justification, Hitchens gave the examples of the American state’s prohibition of Mormon polygamy and the outlawing of the denial of blood transfusions by Jehovah Witness parents to their offspring.

Although Hitchens himself was not always accurate in his description of his Christian opponents’ arguments and the Bible, it is important that we Christians do not misrepresent our opponents’ views, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Let us call that the principle of charitable understanding which harmonises perfectly with the Christian ethic of love. As one who spent a decade reading, watching and listening to everything that Hitchens ever wrote and said on the subject of religion (probably) and during that time wrote a PhD about Hitchens’ beliefs about God and religion and finally published a book about them, it is important to me that Hitchens is properly understood. It is not only for the integrity of Christian apologists and my sensitivities’ sake for which I seek correction; it is also out of respect for Hitchens whose views deserve to be presented faithfully. 

Dr Peter Harris is the author of The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens was Wrong.