When the journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens died last week after a prolonged, painful and public illness, many good things were said about him by friends and antagonists alike. He was by all accounts a brilliant writer and communicator, a passionate advocate of unpopular causes, but also an outspoken critic of institutional religion. He had, for example, made excoriating comments about the missionary work of Mother Teresa, and (with Richard Dawkins) successfully debated religious issues in public with the great and the good, including Tony Blair. His most popular book was “God is not Great“, published in 2007.
So no friend of the church, except insofar he may have forced us to hone our debating skills to take the Christian apologetic argument to the masses.
Conventionally, funeral eulogies avoid controversy and skip over awkward issues, while obituarists are allowed to make more balanced judgements. Where does a newspaper cartoonist fit into this spectrum of taboos? This one, again from my daily paper today, seems to have overstepped the mark. While awarding Hitchens a unbegrudged halo, it denigrates his beliefs in as crude and unsympathetic a manner as would the hell-fire preacher of old. Let us not complain when the Atheist Review gives as good as it gets when it’s our turn to queue at the pearly gates.
