Christopher Hitchens, journalist and author of his new memoir “Hitch 22,” poses for a portrait outside his hotel in New York June 7, 2010. Already infamous for being the socialist who called Margaret Thatcher sexy and as the contrarian who loved George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Hitchens now wants to rewrite the Ten Commandments. Picture taken June 7, 2010. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES – Tags: SOCIETY) – RTR2EWKF

Source: The Atlantic

By DAVID FRUM

Even Christopher Hitchens’s detractors would concede him two great qualities: honesty and bravery. Hitchens spoke the truth as he understood the truth, without regard to whom he might please and whom he might offend. What Hitchens wrote of his intellectual hero, George Orwell, was the epitaph he would have wished for himself:

By his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage.

Yet this is the epitaph that a new book about Hitchens seeks to deny him. Larry Taunton is an evangelical publicist and promoter who became friendly with Hitchens during the writer’s final three years of life. Earlier this spring, Taunton published a new book that alleged that Hitchens was not as committed to his atheism as Hitchens publicly insisted—that, indeed, Hitchens had approached the verge of a Christian conversion.

Taunton based this astounding claim on two conversations with Hitchens during car drives to speaking events sponsored by Taunton’s foundation. During the longer of those drives (13 hours from Hitchens’s home in Washington, D.C., to Taunton’s in Birmingham, Alabama), the two men read aloud and discussed the Gospel of St. John. Taunton directed Hitchens’s attention to the Gospelist’s promise of eternal life, which Hitchens—according to Taunton—described as “not without its appeal to a dying man.”

The book has won much attention and some praise. Chris Matthews, who frequently hosted Hitchens on MSNBC, interviewed Taunton and urged all his viewers to read his “beautifully written” book. David Horowitz, who knew Hitchens over a lifetime, called it “a literary gem, which no honest reader could mistake for an ideological tract.” The religion column of the New York Timespublicized Taunton’s claim in a headline: “Christopher Hitchens Was Shaky in His Atheism, New Book Suggests.”

This is bold, to put it mildly. In the months before he died, Hitchens repeatedly and emphatically warned that claims like Taunton’s would be forthcoming and should be disbelieved.

“It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people whom you don’t know, but who are unbelievers, and say: ‘Now are you going to change your mind?’ … As you know, there’s a long history of fraud about this. People claim that Darwin had a deathbed recantation. They made up lies about Thomas Paine. It goes on all the time. It’s a very nasty little history… They’ve even tried it on me, when I’ve had not the vinegar I’d like to have had, in a hospital bed. ”

But there are plenty of others! Here’s Hitchens talking to Charlie Rose, in the same vein, to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and finally here, to my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg:

I asked Mark Oppenheimer—the author of the New York Times piece—why he had not mentioned or acknowledged any of these statements by Hitchens himself in his story.

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