Christopher Hitchens and the Christian conversion that wasn’t [View all]
‘To claim Christopher Hitchens posthumously for evangelical Christianity is to defame a man who was a champion of the Enlightenment.’
In 2016, the ultimate celebrity endorsement is posthumous. The remain and the leave campaigns have both claimed that Margaret Thatcher would have supported their respective arguments in the EU referendum. The same treatment has been meted out to Churchill, and even Shakespeare.
In this respect the trail was blazed by the world’s great religions, which routinely claim recruits among the dying. Indeed, the faithful have form when it comes to falsifying deathbed conversions – notoriously so in the case of Darwin. In 1915 the evangelist Elizabeth Cotton, better known as Lady Hope of Carriden, declared that the great scientist, readying himself for the end in April 1882, had repudiated his life’s work (“How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done”) and asked her to gather an audience so he could “speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation”.
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This was preposterous, and quickly dismissed as such. Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, was with her father at his deathbed and insisted that Lady Hope had not even visited him during his last illness. None of his family believed a word of her testimony.
Almost as flimsy is the Catholic church’s claim that Antonio Gramsci returned to the faith and died taking the sacraments. Though a former Vatican official maintained that the Marxist philosopher embraced Catholicism afresh shortly before his death in Rome in 1937, none of the official or personal documents relating to his last days support this extraordinary account.
It is in this context that one should consider the meretricious new book by Larry Alex Taunton, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/29/christopher-hitchens-christian-conversion-book
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