![]() ![]() ![]() Hitchens described the New Testament as envisioning a “Celestial Dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” As he emphasized in his own writing, no one talks about Hell in the New Testament more than Jesus the New Testament, he wrote, is worse than the Old. Hitchens was unlikely to share that view. The idea of the deathbed conversion raises another question: even if an atheist were to accept a theistic worldview, why should he choose to adopt Christianity, rather than any of the world’s many other religions? Evangelical Christians assume, rather presumptuously, that the natural choice is Christianity. It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again. As wise thinkers, including Laplace, Hume, Sagan, and Hitchens, have often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is, instead, simply a rational decision not to accept the existence of God without evidence. In the end, what evangelists don’t recognize is that atheism is not a belief system like Christianity, from which one might defect after hearing some arguments or having a few sombre conversations. ![]() Attention is focussed, instead, on atheists who are also luminaries, like Hitchens. Evangelicals don’t seem to care what these ordinary Christians think no one tells stories about their achieving a proper understanding of Christianity on their deathbeds. A 2011 survey of declared Christians in the U.K., conducted by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, found that the majority of self-identified Christians either aren’t aware of or don’t accept many fundamental aspects of Christianity for example, only a third of British Christians believe in Christ’s resurrection, and nearly half don’t think Jesus was the son of God. And yet that idea doesn’t fully account for the phenomenon. Perhaps postmortem evangelists hate to think of the people they admire, and in whom they have detected goodness and integrity, being permanently exiled to Hell for lack of faith. There are charitable ways of understanding this proclivity. Catholics have made claims about the “ long conversion” of Oscar Wilde the Mormon Church has gone so far as to baptize dead people who haven’t asked for it-pro-bono conversion, as it were. And evangelical Protestants aren’t the only Christians addicted to the narrative of the deathbed conversion. She pointed out that Cotton-like Taunton, in Hitchens’s case-hadn’t actually visited him during his final days. This claim was shown to be false by none other than Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta Litchfield, who was with him at the end. In 1915, she declared that, thirty-three years earlier, Charles Darwin himself had revealed to her, on his deathbed, his wish to recant the doctrine of evolution in exchange for Christian salvation. In relatively recent history, the most well-known postmortem Christian evangelist is probably Elizabeth Cotton. It raises a worthwhile question: Why do evangelical Christians so often seek to claim converts among the dead? This most recent claim, of course, is just the latest in a long line of similar claims about famous atheist conversions. His civility, it seems, has been misinterpreted. Hitchens loved to engage in generous intellectual repartee, even with those with whom he unequivocally disagreed. That view never changed during his final year of life-a period during which Taunton didn’t even meet with him. (I was honored to be one of Hitchens’s friends during the last five years of his life.) Hitchens saw Christianity as little more than a social virus with interesting literary overtones. Hitchens’s family and actual friends-people who didn’t pay to spend time with him-know that this claim is absurd. Why has a prominent evangelical Christian alleged that Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, was, during the last years of his life, “teetering on the edge of belief”? Photograph by Stephen Voss / ReduxĮarlier this spring, a prominent evangelical Christian named Larry Taunton published a book alleging that Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, had been, during the last years of his life, “teetering on the edge of belief.” Taunton, who claims to have been one of Hitchens’s friends, cites as evidence two conversations he had with Hitchens during car trips on the way to debates about religion and atheism-debates, it must be said, that Hitchens was paid to attend.
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