Christopher Hitchens was not merely an atheist but, as he described himself, a militant antitheist. It was in his home, at his invitation, that the group known as “The Four Horsemen of New Atheism” first convened. Born in 1949 in postwar England, Hitchens was shaped by the politics and intellectual currents of the 1960s.
He attended the University of Oxford, where adopting counter-cultural ideologies was de rigueur for students. Among the leftist options available, he chose Trotskyism and became a vocal activist against the Vietnam War. From that time on, Hitchens developed a confrontational and adversarial approach that defined his career. In his writings, he often positioned himself as a David battling the Goliath of religious, political, or cultural systems.
While it is easy to understand his championing of the underdog, one might ask: How did this empathy evolve into the transformation that made Hitchens one of religion and God’s fiercest critics? Part of this journey is revealed in his memoir, Hitch-22, where he shares insights into his formative experiences. Eager for her son to join the societal elite, Hitchens’ mother persuaded his father to send him early to an elite boarding school, one that, by the conventions of the time, was exclusively for boys.[1] Of slight build, Hitchens endured bullying but discovered that words gave him the power his arms lacked. With this newfound strength, he learned to dominate his tormentors through wit and rhetoric. Realising the potency of this skill, he began wielding it against those he saw as suppressing individuality.
As Hitchens recounts in his memoir, he discovered that words could function as weapons—not only to dismantle flawed reasoning but also to hold others accountable. Determined to refine this skill, he sought to sharpen his wit and develop a polemical style capable of disarming opponents.[2] The culture of debate ingrained in British education provided fertile ground for this ambition, and these abilities would later make him one of the most formidable debaters of his time. To Hitchens, the ultimate bully was religion and its representatives, whom he viewed as hypocritical for their arrogance in claiming absolute truths, crushing individual convictions, and victimising minorities of all kinds.[3]
He once recounted a childhood episode in which, after hearing his religious studies teacher discuss God’s intention to make greenery pleasing to the eye, he thought to himself, at just nine years old: What nonsense! This early scepticism became a defining feature of his worldview.[4]
A target of choice
While Hitchens appreciated Christianity’s cultural legacy—admiring its art and valuing its Protestant ethos—organised religion, particularly Christianity, became his favorite target for critique. He saw it as rife with contradictions, hypocrisy, and an impediment to human progress.[5]
Hitchens’ antitheist outlook reached its most public expression with the 2007 publication of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which became an international bestseller. In this work, Hitchens examines the central thesis that while religion may have played a useful role in human history—by alleviating fear of the unknown and offering psychological resilience in the face of the inexplicable—it now does more harm than good. With science and the scientific method available as tools for understanding the world, he argued, continuing to uphold religious beliefs is not only unnecessary but actively detrimental.[6]
Hitchens advances his thesis and systematically presents arguments to support it: the hypocrisy of Christianity, the cruelty of its wars, and its regressive thinking. In his drive to fundamentally dismantle Christianity, he targets the person and role of Jesus. Hitchens argues that the Gospels cannot be considered historically reliable accounts. He points to discrepancies among their narratives, the lack of corroboration for key details of Jesus’s birth in extra-biblical historical records, and the weak evidence for His resurrection. These issues, he asserts, leave him with “no reason to believe that Jesus existed.”[7] For Hitchens, Jesus is less a historical figure who walked the Earth and more a mythical construct.[8]
Hitchens’ perspective on Jesus aligns with his broader critique of religion as a system that exploits myth for power. He contends that the New Testament is rife with contradictions and inconsistencies, portraying Jesus as an amalgamation of stories reverse-engineered to fulfil ancient prophecies.[9]
Moreover, he challenges the moral teachings attributed to Jesus, dismissing some as absurd or even immoral. He questions the coherence and ethics of Jesus’s messages, emphasising what he sees as logical inconsistencies or practical shortcomings in His ethical vision. For instance, Jesus’s admonition to “not worry about tomorrow” strikes Hitchens as emblematic of a fundamentally impractical and even reckless worldview that undermines human progress and responsibility.[10]
At the same time, Hitchens presents Jesus as a figure burdened by magical thinking, particularly in relation to miracles and prophecies. The virgin birth, for instance, is for Hitchens not evidence of divine intervention but a reflection of religious mythology, where “miracles” serve to prop up a fabricated belief system. Thus, in his view, the depiction of Jesus remains an exaggerated construct crafted by His followers at a later time.
Critics of the critic
Hitchens’s critiques are not without their flaws. His irreverence and adversarial tone, perhaps adopted for rhetorical impact, often led to a reductionist approach that lacked sensitivity to nuance and depth. Moreover, his arguments failed to foster a genuine and balanced debate with Christianity, as he frequently targeted its weakest points—whether fundamentalist extremes or superficial expressions—while excluding intellectually robust practitioners from the conversation.[11]
Hitchens’s critique often overreached and did not engage with serious theological scholarship. His arguments were largely rooted in a populist critique of religion, aimed more at a general audience than at those involved in rigorous theological discourse. He rarely interacted with the work of prominent theologians, preferring instead to dismantle weaker or outdated arguments. This lack of engagement with rigorous theological research left his criticisms feeling incomplete.
As Alister McGrath has pointed out, Hitchens’s tendency to focus on “straw man” versions of Christianity deliberately sidestepped the depth of the Christian intellectual tradition. In doing so, he missed the mark in critically addressing theological thought in a substantive way.[12]
Christian theologians and apologists such as N.T. Wright and John Lennox have argued that Hitchens’s interpretations of Christianity and Jesus are overly simplistic. Hitchens focused primarily on literalist readings of Scripture, disregarding the rich and nuanced theological traditions that have emerged from centuries of meticulous analysis of these texts. Furthermore, his refusal to engage with more sophisticated arguments on topics such as atonement, love, and salvation weakened his position and, in the eyes of those familiar with the depth of Christian thought, left much of his critique superficial.
Even some of Hitchens’s partial allies, such as Bart Ehrman—now an agnostic—contend that he failed to adequately consider historical arguments or the scholarly consensus regarding the existence of Jesus.[13] Hitchens’s dismissal of Jesus as merely a composite of ancient myths seems more like an overcorrection to society’s excesses of magical thinking and fanaticism, rather than a serious engagement with the historical evidence for Jesus’s existence. Always polemical and iconoclastic, Hitchens approached the figure of Jesus with the same irreverence and biting rhetoric he wielded in his broader critiques. This tendency likely led him to dismiss counterarguments hastily, with insufficient introspection.
From a moral standpoint, Hitchens regarded the substitutionary atonement of Jesus—the idea that Jesus died for humanity’s sins—as both irrational and ethically troubling. Yet, in this critique, he adopted a presentist stance, imposing a modern, secular moral framework on ancient theological concepts. It is surprising that Hitchens seemed to overlook the notion of legal solidarity—a parent’s legal responsibility for their minor child, for instance, could have provided a lens for better understanding these theological ideas.
For Christian thinkers, atonement is deeply tied to notions of love, sacrifice, and forgiveness—qualities central to Christian ethics and understood in the context of the existential relationship between humanity and God.
Hitchens’s facile dismissal of core Christian doctrines on the grounds of moral doubt fails to convince. On the contrary, this approach undermines his arguments, as these themes have been seriously addressed within Christian thought, and the principles of Christian ethics have proven their viability over time. This brings us to another major gap in Hitchens’s critique: his neglect of the profound positive impact of Jesus’s teachings throughout history and the societal transformations they have inspired.
While his critiques of institutional religion may have some validity, Hitchens’s reductive portrayal of Jesus as merely a mythic figure overlooks the cultural, social, and moral influence He has wielded. The teachings of Jesus have inspired movements for justice, charity, and human rights, shaping countless individuals and societies. Closer analyses of Hitchens’s debates and arguments reveal that he often ignored this dimension, focusing exclusively on the perceived harms of religion. As a result, his perspective offered a one-sided and incomplete account of Christianity’s legacy.[14]
Hitchens’s failure to engage with the complexity of historical research on Jesus, his selective reading of Christian doctrine, and his omission of Jesus’s positive influence on the moral and cultural development of the West suggest that his critique of Jesus was ultimately flawed. While his intellectual bravado and sharp rhetoric earned him attention, they frequently left deeper questions about Jesus Christ unanswered for those genuinely seeking spiritual understanding.
Facing mortality: the legacy
In his final years, as he faced esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens chronicled his experience in Mortality, a work of candid and unsentimental reflections. One of his greatest fears during this time was the potential loss of his voice—his most valued asset as a public speaker. Despite the severity of his illness, Hitchens remained unwavering in his atheism, rejecting any notion of a deathbed conversion. His wife, Carol Blue, and close friends affirmed that he held steadfastly to his beliefs until the end.
Carol Blue also shared access to his final notes, written shortly before his death. Hitchens was aware that many Christians were praying for him and often reflected on September 20, a day dedicated to collective prayer on his behalf, a detail he mentioned in his last interviews. He contemplated what it might mean if he had been miraculously healed, and whether those praying for him would interpret such an event as evidence of divine intervention—a perspective he found difficult to navigate.
Faith emerged indirectly in his final musings. Hitchens had resolved to revisit the works of Nietzsche as well as those of G.K. Chesterton. Prayer, which he had once dismissed with scorn, lingered in his thoughts, as he turned existentially to a passage from Alfred Tennyson—a fictional prayer of King Arthur. Adapting it to his circumstances, he wrote: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils himself in many ways and soon, I suppose, I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumor…”[15]
Hitchens’s impact on the world of publishing cemented his reputation as a towering figure in literature and debate. However, his views on faith, particularly Christianity, reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of its core principles. Though celebrated as one of the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism,” the Christian heritage he critiqued arguably deserved a deeper engagement, one that matched the historical and intellectual depth of the tradition.
To examine Hitchens’s anti-Christian thought with both recognition of his intellectual breadth and his social influence, one must undertake a thorough analysis of the assumptions underlying his critiques. This includes a careful scrutiny of the examples he often cited, which tended to be selective, as well as a more attentive consideration of the responses offered by the faith he so famously opposed.
The intricate subtleties of existence cannot be overlooked, particularly when many of these faith-based answers were articulated by his own brother, Peter Hitchens, who overcame his own scepticism.[16]
Laurenţiu Nistor observes that, despite his rhetoric, Christopher Hitchens’ rejection of God lacked the rigor and humility deserving of such a subject. His encounter with faithful opponents stimulated him to reassess his arguments, but his premature death prevented him from completing this journey.