Praying For Christopher Hitchens
by
Daniel W. Morgan
A chief instigator in
the recent atheist war of words on religion, Christopher Hitchens, has spent
many years rising to his own challenge to go anywhere to debate anyone in
order to establish the superiority of atheism to any religion. From stages
all over the world, Hitchens has engaged in formal debate with dozens of
advocates of religion, purposefully stepping on as many toes as possible.
“Christopher Hitchens can be smart, acerbic, funny, mean, insightful, and
thick. He defends Western Civilization while, via his outspoken atheism,
semantically chipping away at the Christian pillars that support it,” Pat
Archbold, a Catholic writer who has disputed Hitchens on stage, wrote in the
National Catholic Register on July 1. “In short, Christopher Hitchens
is a frustrating person. Christopher
Hitchens is also very sick.”
Archbold wasn’t making a nasty crack about Hitchens’ sanity, he was
reflecting on the early June announcement that the polemicist was suffering
from Stage Four esophageal cancer. What followed that announcement was
striking, even to Hitchens: an outpouring of public statements from
religious figures who told the world that Hitchens was in their prayers.
“Hitchens seeks by means of specious argument, insinuation, and sometimes
plain smear-tactics to undermine religion,” the Rev. Robert Barron, a
Catholic priest from Chicago, wrote in a June 15 column posted on CNN’s
website. “He ought to be opposed, vigorously, with counter-argument and
clarification of fact. But all the while, he ought to be respected.”
There were so many stories, blogs, and statements from religious folk about
Hitchens and his illness, that Hitchens himself wrote an article in the
October Vanity Fair reflecting on the paradox and expressing his
profound indifference to the prayers others were uttering on his behalf.
“Even if my voice stops before I do, I will continue to write polemics
against religious delusions,” Hitchens wrote.
At
some level, this outpouring of religious sentiment—especially from
Christians—reveals believers seizing an opportunity to do publicly what
their faith requires of them: love their enemy. More than that, it gave
Christians a chance to pray for Hitchens’ “imperiled” soul. “We are, to be
sure, concerned for your health, too, but that is a very secondary
consideration,” blogger Larry Taunton was quoted by Hitchens in the
Vanity Fair piece. “For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole
world and forfeits his own soul?’ [Matthew 16:26.]”
Characteristically, Hitchens scorned gestures like Taunton’s: “If I were to
announce that I had suddenly converted to Catholicism, I know that Larry
Taunton and Douglas Wilson would feel I had fallen into grievous error. On
the other hand, if I were to join either of their Protestant evangelical
groups, the followers of Rome would not think my soul was much safer than it
is now, while a late-in-life decision to adhere to Judaism or Islam would
inevitably lose me many prayers from both factions.”
There are, of course, those who desperately hate Hitchens, and even some who
discern divine justice in his diagnosis. One Christian blog cited by
Hitchens in Vanity Fair read: “Who else feels Christopher Hitchens
getting terminal throat cancer was God’s revenge for him using his voice to
blaspheme him?. . . It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his
body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used
for blasphemy? . . . He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away
to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real
fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.”
However, encomia like Rabbi David Wolpe’s, delivered in the July Atlantic,
were much more common. “I would say it is appropriate and even mandatory to
do what one can for another who is sick; and if you believe that praying
helps, to pray,” Wolpe wrote. “It is in any case an expression of one’s deep
hopes.
So yes, I will pray for him, but I will not insult him by asking or implying
that he should be grateful for my prayers.”
Hitchens, it appears, has a rare gift for friendship, perhaps especially
unlikely ones. As Michael Gerson put it in his October 5 column in the
Washington Post, “The ferocious critic of Christianity accepts and seeks
the company of Christians. Friendship is a particular talent. One review of
his memoir, Hitch-22, described it as ‘among the loveliest paeans to
the dearness of one’s friends…I have ever read.’”
Hitchens emerged from the love fest as a beloved adversary, respected and
admired by those who disagree with him, a contemporary version of Robert
Ingersoll, the 19th-century orator and freethinker, who gloried
in the nickname “the magnificent infidel” and a man whom his peers loved to
hate.
This is remarkable
because Hitchens, utterly unlike Ingersoll, plays rough: He likes to think
of himself as a professional scoundrel. When debating Orthodox Jews, for
example, he frequently stirs the pot by sneering references to Orthodox
circumcision ritual, referring to the mohels who conduct the ceremonies as
“bloodsucking pedophiles.” (This refers to the traditional practice known as
mezizah, in which the mohel sucks blood from the circumcision wound.)
Hitchens committed this particular rap to prose in a piece in the August 29,
2005 edition of Slate: “If another man of that age were found to be slicing
the foreskins of little boys and then sucking their penises and their blood,
he would be in jail—one hopes—so fast that his feet wouldn’t touch the
ground.”
If
Hitchens was indifferent to the news that the world was praying for him,
other self-identifying atheists and atheistic polemicists rose quickly to
defend him from the indignity of prayer. On October 27, one leader of a
university atheist student group wrote in the Rocky Mountain Collegian,
“The prayers all-too-publically defame and admonish his beliefs as an
atheist.”
And
then there are those religious folks who have risen lately to embrace
Hitchens under the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This
applies especially to conservative Protestants who spent much of 2010
savoring Hitchensonian jabs at Islam, which are only a degree or two sharper
than his putdowns of Christianity.
“As
the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens recently noted, ‘Islamophobia’ is a
dangerous concept because the word implies irrational fear or dislike,”
conservative columnist Bradley C. Glitz wrote in an August 29 Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette column. “But he argues, ‘Islamic preaching very often
manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no
means irrational.’”
But
what many religious individuals may fail to appreciate is that the sword
cuts harshly both ways—as Hitchens reminded everyone in his February 19,
2007 article in Slate: “‘See how the Christians love each other!’ This used
to be the secular response to the fratricide between Catholics and
Protestants, let alone the schisms within the Catholic Church and the
vicious quarrels between different schools of Calvinism.”
Returning to the
self-made spectacle, the man himself, Hitchens responded this way when asked
in a November 26 Newsnight interview whether or not he was afraid of death:
“Well of death, no. Of dying, yes. I feel a sense of waste about it because
I’m not ready. I feel a sense of betrayal to my family and even to some of
my friends who would miss me. Undone things, unattained objectives. But I
hope I’d always have that, if I was 100 when I was checking out.
“But
no, I think my main fear is of being incapacitated or imbecilic at the end.
That of course, is not something to be afraid of, it’s something to be
terrified of.”
Hitchens on Religion
Religion is “making a living out of lying to children. That’s what the
priesthood do. And if all they did was lie to the children, it would be
bad enough. But they rape them and torture them and then hope we’ll call
it ‘abuse’” — Debate with his brother, Peter Hitchens,
carried on CNN on April 3, 2010.
“If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.”
— On Hannity and Colmes, June 6, 2007.
“I would say that millions of people are much worse off for [Mother
Teresa’s] efforts. On an Irish radio show on a recent Sunday morning, I
said, ‘I wish there was a hell for the bitch to go to’.”
— July 19, 2007, GetReligion.org.
“Religion is made up by a primate species which is one step evolved from
the chimpanzee, and it shows.”
— Toronto Globe and Mail, October 23, 2010.
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