Peter Hitchens: Leftist gadfly who found wisdom in fear of God
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Inevitable judgment
“I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged,” he wrote later. “It has ever after been obvious to me.”
That recognition did not produce instant conversion. But it changed him. A year later, faced with a private moral decision, he found himself held back — by the same fear of doing wrong. “Without Rogier van der Weyden,” he wrote, “I might have done that thing.”
Hitchens did not return to Christianity for comfort. His account of faith is unsentimental, grounded in the belief that moral reality is not something we create and certainly not something we can escape.
The latter fact can chafe, leading to a rejection of God that is nowhere near as rational as its proponents would like to think. Instead, argues Hitchens, it amounts to a wishful thinking no less deranging than any “pie in the sky” sentimentality.
The most urgent question
That conviction has shaped his public life ever since.
Today, Hitchens defends Christianity not as a private belief or cultural artifact, but as the foundation for any coherent understanding of justice, responsibility, and human worth. Remove it, he argues, and what remains is not freedom but confusion — and, eventually, coercion.
The two brothers — one a leading “New Atheist” and author of “God Is Not Great”; the other the most outspoken defender of Britain’s disappearing Christian heritage — may not seem to to have had much in common.
But what they did share is a willingness to challenge a sacred assumption of modern life: that faith is optional, interchangeable, and purely subjective.
To both Peter and Christopher Hitchens, the question could not be more urgent. To ignore it leads to hell — either here on Earth on in eternity. Wherever we think we’re headed, the beginning of wisdom is to undertake the journey with our eyes open.
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