They were, and when Christopher was contacted, he quickly agreed as well. That online exchange attracted some attention, and the debate was made into a small book Is Christianity Good for the World? The short promotion tour for the release of the book was a series of debates that Christopher and I held in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, which were filmed for the documentary Collision.
As a result of all this, we were thrown together in a number of situations. One time we shared a panel in Dallas, and I told the crowd there that if Christopher and I were not careful, we were in danger of becoming friends. During the time we spent together, he never said an unkind thing to me—except on stage, up in front of everybody.
After doing this, he didn't wink at me, but he might as well have. So we got on well with each other, because each of us knew where the other one stood. Eugene Genovese, before he became a believer, once commented on the tendency that some have to try to garner respect by giving away portions, big or small, of what they profess to believe. I intend no offense, but it takes one to know one. And when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow unbelievers" The Southern Front , pp.
Ironically, the branch of the faith most interested in getting the "cultured despisers" to pay us some respect is really not that effective, and this is a strategy that can frequently be found on the pointed end of its own petard. Respectability depends on not caring too much about respectability.
Unbelievers can smell accommodation, and when someone like Christopher meets someone who actually believes all the articles in the Creed, including that part about Jesus coming back from the dead, it delights him.
Here is someone actually willing to defend what is being attacked. Militant atheists are often exasperated with opponents whose strategy appears to be "surrender slowly. Chesterton once pointed to the salutary effect that the great agnostics had on him—that effect being that of "arousing doubts deeper than their own. He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it.
This worked well, or appeared to, for a time. But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone. I think. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot.
Christopher knew that faithful Christians believe that it is appointed to man once to die, and after that the Judgment. He knew that we believe what Jesus taught about the reality of damnation. He broke with the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal who, before a congressional committee, denied spreading calumnies about Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens, earning himself the sobriquet "Snitchens", signed affidavits testifying that Blumenthal had, in his hearing, indeed smeared the president's lover.
His rightwing brother, Peter, also a journalist, was put on non-speakers for several years after revealing a pro-red joke that Christopher once made in private. But his friendship with Amis never wavered. Amis, in turn, spoke of "a love whose month is ever May" and described his friend as a rhetorician of such distinction that "in debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes".
Hitchens's love affairs with alcohol and tobacco were equally constant. He smoked heavily, even on public occasions and even on TV, long after the habit — for everyone else — became unacceptable. Despite reports in that he had given up, a reporter found him getting through two packets of cigarettes in a morning in May As for alcohol, he drank daily, on his own admission, enough "to kill or stun the average mule".
Technically, he was probably an alcoholic but, he pointed out, he never missed deadlines or appointments. Regardless of condition, he wrote fast and fluently, if with erratic punctuation. Only rarely did alcohol make him a bore, blunt his wit or cloud his arguments. The journalist Lynn Barber rated him "one of the greatest conversationalists of our age". Inebriated or sober, he could charm almost anybody. He could also, with what the New Yorker's Ian Parker called "the sudden, cutthroat withdrawal of charm", wound deeply and unnecessarily.
In the summer of , during a promotional tour for Hitch, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer, a disease that had killed his father at a much more advanced age. He inhabited "Tumourville", as he called it, with rueful wit and little self-pity. But he never repented of his convivial lifestyle — on the contrary, he continued to take his beloved whisky, having received no medical instructions to the contrary — and nor did he turn his rhetorical skills to persuading others to eschew his example, confining himself, in a TV interview, to the observation that "if you can hold it down on the smokes and cocktails, you may be well advised to do so".
He continued, as well as giving valedictory newspaper and magazine interviews, to write, broadcast and participate in public debates with no discernible diminution of vigour or passion. He confronted the Catholic convert Tony Blair before an audience of 2, in Toronto and, by general consent, won with ease. He gave early notice that there would be no deathbed conversion to religion. If we ever heard of such a thing, he advised, we should attribute it to sickness, dementia or drugs.
When believers prayed for him, he politely declared himself touched, but resolute in his atheism. He stood by the author Salman Rushdie during the furore that followed the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.
Writing on Twitter after the announcement of Hitchens' death, Mr Rushdie said: "Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment and brilliance. He said: "Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea.
He loved words. The publication of his book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist.
He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises. The source of this optimism until the end? According to Blue, "an enormous zeal and love of life, he adored every second of it. He had to continue living as if he might not be close to the end, but he also had to prepare to die and think of what that might mean.
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