This past week, the man known as “The Atheist Pope,” Christopher Hitchens, lost his long battle with cancer. Now, not everyone who follows politics is familiar with Christopher Hitchens. So if I had to pick just one book to sum up the man, I would pick Hitchens’s “God is Not Good” as a pretty accurate place to start. The problem is that Hitchens is actually a lot more complicated than that.
He’s a devout, vocal atheist but he was a blind, avid defender of President W. Bush and the Iraq War. He supported the War on Terror, yet allowed himself to be water-boarded and admitted it was torture. He’s willing to alienate any of the religious rightwing as he makes priceless jokes like “If Jerry Falwell received an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox,” yet he would seemingly support any war they could devise. The man was a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher (where Bill also likes to poke fun at religion) and should have been in his element, but I can remember him shooting the audience a bird and yelling at them after receiving boos.
Hitchens is a complicated guy that few people whole-heartedly liked because of his paradoxical religious and political stances. [Not to mention his slightly holier-than-though British arrogance, in direct contrast to his vehement disbelief in piousness.] And yet, there he is, being called “The Atheist Pope,” as he becomes (very) arguably the most famous atheist on the planet and certainly one of the most vocal.
So now the question remains: Where does this leave the anti-cause of having a more secular world? An argument could be made that Hitchens’s death makes it weaker…and an argument could be made that his death makes it stronger.
On the one hand, most atheists are so closeted that having literally anyone in the public eye as the counter-point to the Christian majority is better than nothing. [Christians are such an all-encompassing majority that people have actually convinced themselves Tim Tebow is being persecuted just when someone makes fun of him…as they do all professional athletes.] And with Hitchens gone, there are only a handful of informative, credible atheists even remotely visible in the media (even Bill Maher and myself are agnostic, not atheists). I mean…nobody really wants to hear what Penn from Penn and Teller has to say about religion.
On the other hand, Hitchens was kind-of a dickhead. I mean, I don’t like talking ill of the dead and I won’t dwell on this point too much, but even people that should have liked him, didn’t. I respect the man’s bravery on religion, but there were a hundred other topics where he was a coward (including the Iraq War)…as a liberal fire-brand, he was neither liberal nor much of a real fire-brand. Too often, he came off like an aggravated blowhard with a childish temper more than someone who really had anything new to say.
So that being said, you have to wonder if Hitchens’s personality alienated more potential members to secularism than he really attracted. [It doesn’t hurt that Bill Maher and Penn Jillete are funny, charming guys who can get people to like them even when they’re insulting them.] Still, I found Hitchens’s tendency to cause trouble wherever he goes enjoyable, and I do think his death is a loss for those closeted millions of non-religious out there seeking a voice. Whether or not Hitchens really had anything useful to say, the world will be a little less interesting now that he’s not around to say it.