Christopher Hitchens was one of the most prominent of the “new atheists,” but a book by evangelical author Larry Alex Taunton who travelled with him says that after his diagnosis of terminal cancer, which killed him in 2011, he was reconsidering his atheism and may have come close to converting to Christianity. And that there is the unlikely possibility that, on his deathbed, he did.
Taunton studied the Bible with Hitchens, who talked about his “divided self.”
A sympathetic review in the New York Times after the jump, which also cites deathbed conversions that I didn’t know about (Wallace Stevens, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wayne, et al.).
From Mark Oppenheimer, Christopher Hitchens Was Shaky in His Atheism, New Book Suggests – The New York Times:
Of all that can transpire in a bedroom, nothing can be as titillating to the religious, or those of us who write about them, as a dying man’s conversion.
Oscar Wilde’s deathbed baptism remains a coup for the Roman Catholic Church 116 years later, and an embarrassment for those who cherish his legacy of hedonism. In his new biography of the poet Wallace Stevens, Paul Mariani repeats the claim that Mr. Stevens was baptized by a priest as he lay dying in a Hartford hospital.
There are others. Karen Edmisten, in her 2013 book “Deathbed Conversions: Finding Faith at the Finish Line,” recounts, with varying degrees of historical support, the putative deathbed conversions of Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wayne, the gangster Dutch Schultz and the mathematician John von Neumann.
The latest controversy about a late-in-life religious turn involves Christopher Hitchens, one of world’s most prominent atheists. In his new book, “The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist,” the evangelical writer Larry Alex Taunton writes about his friendship with Mr. Hitchens, the witty and impious author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” who died of esophageal cancer in 2011. Mr. Taunton describes intimate talks that occurred during drives the two took together, which left him wondering if a dying Mr. Hitchens was edging toward belief in God. Unsurprisingly, evangelicals have celebrated the book, while some of Mr. Hitchens’s secular friends have winced.
[Keep reading. . .]
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In