Person

Christopher Hitchens

British-American journalist, essayist, and polemicist (1949-2011); one of the canonical Four Horsemen of New Atheism; author of the movement's rhetorically defining text, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, 2007). Hitchens was the New Atheism movement's verbal force-multiplier: a Vanity Fair / Atlantic / Slate columnist of extraordinary range whose anti-theism was the most pointed, the most personal, and the most polemically risk-taking of the Four. His death from esophageal cancer (December 15, 2011) is conventionally treated as the inflection point of New Atheism's decline.

Biographical sketch

Born 1949 in Portsmouth, England; raised in a service-class Anglican-cultural household. Mother Yvonne was Jewish (Hitchens learned this only after her suicide in 1973).
Oxford, Balliol College, 1967-70; PPE; became a Trotskyist of the International Socialists tendency.
British journalism, New Statesman, Evening Standard, Daily Express through the 1970s.
Moved to U.S. (1981), The Nation columnist 1982-2002; departed The Nation over the Iraq War.
U.S. citizen 2007.
Vanity Fair / Atlantic / Slate through the 2000s, the platforms where the broad cultural Hitchens persona was constructed.
Died Dec 15, 2011, of esophageal cancer at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas; age 62.

Major works (theology / anti-theology selection)

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, 2007), the canonical New-Atheism Hitchens work; NYT bestseller for 27+ weeks; the subtitle is the thesis.
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (Da Capo, 2007), edited anthology of historical-to-contemporary atheist writing.
Is Christianity Good for the World? (with Douglas Wilson; Canon Press, 2008), printed exchange-debate; later filmed (Collision, 2009).
Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve, 2010), autobiographical.
Mortality (Twelve, 2012, posthumous), Vanity Fair essays from the cancer diagnosis through death.

Plus the broader corpus: The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001), Why Orwell Matters (2002), Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" (2006), Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005), Arguably: Essays (2011).

Core anti-theist positions

Religion poisons everything. The thesis of God Is Not Great: religion is not merely false but actively harmful, to children (through indoctrination and corporal punishment), to women (through patriarchal control), to medicine (through faith-healing rejection of evidence), to sexual ethics (through repression and shame), to civil discourse (through dogma), to war and peace (through religious-license conflict). The case is cumulative: religion's positive contributions, where they exist, are achievable on naturalist grounds; its harms are uniquely attributable.
Hitchens's Razor. "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Refusal to entertain the burden-of-disproof framing.
The North-Korean-as-religion comparison. Hitchens repeatedly argued the Kim dynasty's North Korea functioned as the most thoroughly religious state on earth, eternal leadership, sacred texts, sacred founder, ritual obeisance, anathematized heretics, a reductio against the "religion is private and harmless" framing.
Anti-Islam-specifically. Hitchens was among the most aggressive anti-Islam voices of his era, the Salman Rushdie fatwa (1989) was a formative moment; the Mohammed cartoons (2005-06) and the post-9/11 context shaped his sustained polemic.
Iraq War support (2003). Hitchens's most controversial political position, supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq as anti-totalitarian intervention. Lost him friendships across the Trotskyist-left from which he had emerged. The political-coherence of the Four Horsemen was always strained partly by this position.

Hitchens's apologetic deficits (Christian assessment)

For all his rhetorical force, Hitchens's philosophical engagement with theism was thin. Christian apologists who debated him (William Lane Craig, John Lennox, Douglas Wilson, Larry Taunton) consistently noted:

Selective historiography. Hitchens regularly cited religious atrocity-cases while ignoring the secular atrocity-counter-cases (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, see Atheist Regime Body Count). The asymmetry was rhetorically powerful but factually selective.
No engagement with serious natural theology. Hitchens dismissed cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments without rigorous engagement; ridicule substituted for analysis.
Equivocation on "religion." Hitchens slid between cultural-religion (folk practices), institutional-religion (churches, mosques), and intellectual-religion (theological claims), using the worst aspects of one to indict the others.
No constructive metaphysical positive. Hitchens never developed a substantive positive account of meaning, ethics, or beauty on naturalist grounds; his moral judgments presupposed exactly the transcendent-categories his framework denied (see Stealing from God Argument).

The "deathbed conversion" question

A persistent rumor / hope in some Christian circles: that Hitchens converted on his deathbed. The evidence is clear: he did not. His final published essays (Mortality, 2012) explicitly reject any deathbed conversion possibility, he asked friends and editors to discount any reports of late-stage religious turning. Larry Taunton's controversial The Faith of Christopher Hitchens (2016) suggests Hitchens was more privately wrestling with theism than his public persona admitted, but does not claim a conversion. Hitchens died a committed atheist.

Hitchens's enduring influence

Despite the decline of New Atheism as a unified movement, Hitchens's influence persists:

Hitchens's razor is widely cited in atheist apologetics
The "poisons everything" framing is foundational to ongoing religion-as-harmful arguments
His rhetorical style, the unsparing analytic-with-personal-conviction prose, is a recognizable contemporary atheist-essay register
His Iraq War position made him a touchstone for non-progressive secular intellectuals (the "Intellectual Dark Web" later inherits some of this space)

Christian engagement / debate history

Douglas Wilson, printed exchange Is Christianity Good for the World? (2008) + the Collision documentary (Darren Doane, 2009). Notable for the friendliness and intellectual rigor on both sides.
William Lane Craig, Biola University debate (April 4, 2009): "Does God Exist?", widely judged a Craig-win on philosophical substance.
John Lennox, Birmingham debate (October 3, 2009): "Is God Great?" Lennox's first major U.S. Hitchens engagement.
Larry Taunton, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World's Most Notorious Atheist (Thomas Nelson, 2016), Taunton accompanied Hitchens on a Bible-study tour and documents the late friendship; controversial for its conversion-suggestion implications, which Hitchens's family contested.