Christopher Hitchens in the 2020s: 1/ Whatever happened to New Atheism?

Looking back on writers who once enthralled you is like looking back on old loves. You can remember them with affection or wonder how you ever fell for their charms. Christopher Hitchens once enthralled me, and continues to enthral many to this day. Mention any outrage on the left or right and you can guarantee someone will say “I wish I could hear Hitch’s take”.  

This is the first of a three-part series on how his work stands up almost 12 years after his death.

I begin with the cause that meant the most to him: atheism.

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It’s not even 1pm on an autumn day in Soho, and my guest sits down at a table in the Gay Hussar, which at that time, in the early 2000s, was a safe space for politicians and political journalists to gossip, plot and booze.

“Would sir like a drink?” the waiter asked.

“Large whisky please, and I will be needing refills.”

Lunch with Christopher Hitchens was never a meal to be entered into lightly, and my memory of the occasion is a little fuzzy.

But I remember this. Hitchens had just met a minister in the then Labour government and was furious. “He said he believed in religious schools,” Hitchens spat, his voice taut with incredulity. His fury took me aback. The politician in question was a harmless man. He was indeed a professed Christian. But the mission that drove him was a public-spirited desire to encourage the Labour party to ease congestion by building as many new railway lines as possible.

Christopher Hitchens needed to be right. His vast reading and range of reference masked his dogmatism. As did his wit and conviviality – dogmatists don’t as a rule combine high-mindedness with earthy humanity.  Above all other beliefs, he was convinced that “the person who is certain, and claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

Or as he put it more pithily in the subtitle to his book God is not Great from which I quoted, “religion poisons everything”.

We read political writers after their deaths because they carry news from beyond the grave. George Orwell was right about communism, and built a dissection of totalitarianism that has passed into the consciousness of humanity. Hitchens thought religion was totalitarian, but that idea, which once aroused such fervour, feels dated today.  Understanding why the new atheism flourished as an all-consuming concern in the early years of the century and then almost disappeared takes us to the heart of modern struggles against irrationality and complacency.

It is difficult to convey the intellectual excitement atheism generated almost two decades ago. In 2004, Cardinal Paul Poupard, then the President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, deluded himself into believing that atheists were enemies Catholics could ignore.

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