--- title: "Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011)" date: "2026-10-09T16:25:36+01:00" modified: "2026-10-09T16:25:37+01:00" url: "https://heritage.humanists.uk/christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/" post_id: 14590 categories: ["Atheism", "Freedom of Speech", "LGBT", "Secularism"] tags: ["Atheism", "Journalism", "LGBTQ rights", "Secularism"] --- # Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) > ‘One of the great advantages of humanism is precisely that it doesn’t need a priesthood.’ > > Christopher Hitchens, interviewed by Laurie Taylor, *New Humanist*, Autumn 2002 Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and polemicist, and one of the best-known atheists of his generation. A member of the [British Humanist Association](https://heritage.humanists.uk/the-union-of-ethical-societies/) (today’s Humanists UK) and an Honorary Associate of the [Rationalist Association](https://heritage.humanists.uk/rationalist-press-association/), which published *New Humanist*, he carried arguments for secularism, free speech, and freedom of thought to audiences around the world, most famously in *God Is Not Great* (2007). When he died, the BHA mourned him as ‘a great loss to humanism’. ![Christopher Hitchens in January 2007](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2025/04/Christopher-Hitchens.jpg) *Christopher Hitchens in January 2007. Photo by [José Ramírez (ensceptico)](https://www.flickr.com/photos/54613395@N00/404073505/), licensed under [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).* ### Oxford, love, and friendship Hitchens went up to [Balliol College, Oxford](https://heritage.humanists.uk/balliol-college-oxford/), in 1967 to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and spent much of his time there as a left-wing activist and Trotskyist. He was also, by his own account, bisexual. In his memoir *Hitch-22* (2010) he wrote frankly about his relationships with men at school and at Oxford, recalling that even after he had become ‘fixed on the pursuit of young women’, the odd ‘mild and mildly enjoyable relapse’ occurred, including with two young men who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s government. He declined to name them. The revelation, first published in extracts in the *Sunday Times*, set off a guessing game in the British press about which of Thatcher’s ministers he meant. Hitchens refused to play, telling *Out* magazine that he had decided to include the passage because, ‘even in an oblique form, it was a sort of solidarity’. A long-standing supporter of LGBT rights, he wrote equally openly about his intense friendship with the novelist Martin Amis, and dedicated the memoir to his Oxford friend, the poet James Fenton. He married twice, first to Eleni Meleagrou and then, from 1991 until his death, to the writer Carol Blue, and had children from both marriages. ### The case against Mother Teresa Hitchens’s most famous provocation was his assault on Mother Teresa of Calcutta, then one of the most admired people in the world. In the Channel 4 documentary *Hell’s Angel* (1994) and the book *The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice* (1995), he called her ‘a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud’ and argued that her saintly image had been manufactured, beginning with Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1969 film *Something Beautiful for God*, and sustained by a public who wanted to believe someone was relieving suffering on their behalf. His central charge was that she glorified suffering rather than relieving it. She taught that suffering was a gift from God, bringing the sufferer closer to Christ, and Hitchens argued that this theology shaped the care in her homes for the dying: minimal diagnosis, reused needles, and little pain relief for patients in agony, while the images of their suffering became the foundation of a global brand that drew millions in donations. ‘MT was not a friend of the poor,’ he wrote. ‘She was a friend of poverty.’ Later researchers, including a 2013 Canadian study of her homes, reached similar conclusions about the lack of painkillers and basic medical care. > ‘She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.’ > > Christopher Hitchens, *Slate*, October 2003 He also accused her of hypocrisy. While her patients in Calcutta were denied modern treatment, she herself, when she fell ill, was treated in some of the most advanced hospitals in the world: as Hitchens put it, ‘she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself’. He pointed out that she accepted money from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, whose rule she praised, and from the fraudster Charles Keating; that her order never published accounts; and that she campaigned around the world against contraception and abortion, the means by which the poorest women might escape poverty. Reviewing *The Missionary Position* for *New Humanist* in 1996, the veteran secularist [Barbara Smoker](https://heritage.humanists.uk/barbara-smoker/), who had been vilified for calling Mother Teresa a ‘sacred cow’ back in 1980, welcomed it as ‘a real eye-opener’. She singled out the book’s account of a fifteen-year-old boy with a curable illness, left to die in a home for the dying because, as Mother Teresa reportedly said, ‘If you did it for one, you’d have to do it for all’, and a photograph of her with a rich donor against a backdrop of Calcutta’s poor, which turned out to have been taken in a studio, with the poor added later. When the Vatican began the process of making her a saint, Hitchens was, by his own account, the only witness it called to argue against her. She was beatified in 2003, after the Church declared a miracle in the case of Monica Besra, a Bengali woman whose abdominal tumour was said to have vanished after a medallion that had touched Mother Teresa’s body was placed on it; her doctors credited the medical treatment she had received. She was canonised as a saint in 2016, after the Church declared a second ‘miracle’: the recovery of a Brazilian engineer from multiple brain abscesses in 2008, after his wife placed a relic of Mother Teresa on his head and prayed for her intercession. ### A contrarian in print Not every target was a religious one, and *New Humanist* did not always agree with him: in 2002 its reviewer dismissed his case against Henry Kissinger as sensational. In 2002 he also talked to Laurie Taylor for *New Humanist* about his book *Orwell’s Victory*. He argued that [George Orwell](https://heritage.humanists.uk/george-orwell/) had simply found it self-evident that God is made by men, not men by God, and that ‘people can come to it themselves as a logical conclusion’. He also admitted that he no longer called himself a socialist, joking that on American television it was easier to say you were a Marxist than an atheist. Asked by a conservative broadcaster whether he would feel safer meeting a group of men late at night if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting, he replied that he had been lost in Belfast, Belgrade, and Beirut, and that it would have been no reassurance at all. ![](https://heritage.humanists.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/10/hitchens-new-humanist-2002-p12-694x1024.jpg)‘Puritan Atheist’: Hitchens in conversation with Laurie Taylor, *New Humanist*, Autumn 2002. ### A friend of *New Humanist* When *New Humanist* marked its 120th birthday in 2005, Hitchens sent a message arguing that religious fanaticism always relies on either ‘the argument of force or the argument of fraud’, whether a bomb on a bus or a demand for ‘equal time’ for pseudoscience, and that magazines like it were part of the response. > ‘Magazines like the *New Humanist* are part of the arsenal with which we must mount an unapologetic—and perilously overdue—resistance.’ > > Christopher Hitchens, *New Humanist*, November 2005 *God Is Not Great* made him a leading figure of the ‘new atheism’ alongside Richard Dawkins, and in his last years he took on religious leaders in public. In 2009 he and Stephen Fry argued against the motion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world at an Intelligence Squared debate in London, and in 2010 he debated religion with Tony Blair in Toronto, after his diagnosis with cancer. ### Iraq, and other provocations The attacks of 11 September 2001 marked a turning point. Hitchens broke with much of the left, which he had belonged to all his adult life, and became one of the loudest advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a position he never recanted. Critics called him a neoconservative, a label he rejected, and the war estranged him from many former allies. When *New Humanist* reassessed him in 2021, his support for the war stood at the centre of the case against him. He also courted outrage on other fronts. His 2007 *Vanity Fair* essay ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ argued that women had less evolutionary need than men to make others laugh, and dismissed most successful female comedians as ‘hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three’. It was widely condemned as sexist, prompted *Vanity Fair* to run a rebuttal the following year, and has been cited ever since by women in comedy as the argument they set out to disprove. *New Humanist*’s own tribute in 2012 listed ‘whether women can be funny’ among the subjects on which, as it put it, he was ‘always trying to provoke’. ### Hitchens versus Hitchens One of his most formidable religious opponents was in his own family. His younger brother, Peter Hitchens, two years his junior and later a columnist for the *Mail on Sunday*, had followed him into the far left and into atheism, burning his Bible at boarding school as a teenager, before returning to the Church of England and to conservatism. The brothers clashed in print for decades, and a public falling-out in the early 2000s led to years of estrangement. When *God Is Not Great* appeared, Peter answered it, arguing among other things that his brother’s charge that religion does ‘wicked and terrible things in the name of goodness’ fitted the Iraq War, which Christopher supported and Peter opposed. The two met on stage for the first time in April 2008, at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to debate God, war, and politics. Beforehand, to his brother’s surprise, Christopher invited him to his home in Washington and cooked him dinner. Peter said afterwards that he would not debate him again, though they shared a platform once more in 2010 on whether civilisation can survive without God. That year each published a memoir: Christopher’s *Hitch-22*, which described Peter as ‘to outward appearances almost tragically right-wing’, and Peter’s *The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith*. ‘If we weren’t brothers,’ Peter once said, ‘we wouldn’t know each other.’ ### Death and legacy Hitchens died on 15 December 2011. Paying tribute for Humanists UK, its Chief Executive Andrew Copson said that he had been ‘fearless in his challenges to authority, orthodoxy and conformity’, and that his steady refusal of a god or an afterlife in his final months had become ‘an extra inspiration for non-religious people’. *New Humanist* devoted part of its next issue to him, calling him ‘a valued supporter of the humanist cause’ and adding: ‘There was always plenty to argue with in his writing, but that was the point.’ Humanists did argue with him. In 2007 the philosopher Richard Norman warned in *New Humanist* that the new atheists over-generalised about religion, and urged humanists to work with believers who shared their values. A decade after his death, James Robins assessed his legacy in the same pages, from his drift away from socialism to his influence on later online atheism, while acknowledging the brilliance of much of his writing. He wrote books on [Thomas Paine](https://heritage.humanists.uk/thomas-paine-1737-1809/), Thomas Jefferson, and Orwell, and like them he is remembered as much for the arguments he started as for those he won. --- Sources include *New Humanist*, February 1996, Autumn 2002, November 2005, November 2007, November 2009, March 2012, and March 2021, the BHA’s statement of 16 December 2011, Hitchens’s ‘Mommie Dearest’ in *Slate* (20 October 2003), coverage of the brothers’ 2008 debate by Grand Valley State University and Religion News Service, and coverage of *Hitch-22* in *PinkNews* (March 2010), the *Daily Mail* (March 2010), and *Out* (July 2010). The *New Humanist* archive is available via [Exact Editions](https://shop.exacteditions.com/new-humanist). Subscribe at [newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe](https://newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe). See also ---------- - [ George Orwell ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/george-orwell/) - [ Bertrand Russell ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/bertrand-russell/) - [ Balliol College, Oxford ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/balliol-college-oxford/) - [ Rationalist Press Association ](https://heritage.humanists.uk/rationalist-press-association/)