Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British-American journalist, essayist, and literary critic who became one of the most visible public atheists of the early twenty-first century. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he wrote for the New Statesman, The Nation, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate, and produced books on Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa. His 2007 polemic God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything argued that organized religion is anti-rational, violent, sexually repressive, and morally corrosive, and made him, alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, one of the so-called 'Four Horsemen' of New Atheism. He also edited The Portable Atheist (2007), an anthology of unbelief from Lucretius to Salman Rushdie. Hitchens combined rhetorical bravura with broad literary culture rather than systematic philosophy of religion, and critics—including Terry Eagleton, John Haught, Marilynne Robinson, and David Bentley Hart—argued that his treatment of theology was caricatural and that his arguments from religious harm relied on selective historical examples. Defenders responded that his target was institutional religion and scriptural authority rather than refined philosophical theism. His political trajectory—from Trotskyist left to vocal support for the 2003 Iraq War—remains contested. He died of esophageal cancer in 2011; the posthumous memoir Mortality records his reflections on dying as an atheist.