God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Christopher Hitchens was born in 1949 in England and attended private schools throughout his childhood. He attended the University of Oxford, graduating in 1970 with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He enjoyed writing from an early age. He began his career as a journalist for The International Socialist, and held strong left-wing political views throughout his youth. His political opinions would become more right-wing over time, although he consistently claimed he was not a conservative. After September 11, he became an advocate for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, citing an opposition to totalitarianism in the Middle East.

Hitchens worked as a foreign correspondent for much of his early career, mostly covering Cyprus. He moved from England to Washington, DC in the 1980s to write for The Nation, and quickly became a popular public intellectual in the United States as well as Europe. He often wrote critical analysis of American foreign policy, and was an especially harsh critic of President Bill Clinton. In 2008, Hitchens was inducted as a fellow at the Hoover Institute, a public policy think tank. Hitchens’s journalism often centered on politics, but he also published works on culture and literature. He wrote for The New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair and published over 30 books.

Hitchens’s relationship to religion was complex. He was a lifelong skeptic, but self-identified as Jewish after discovering as an adult that his mother was Jewish. He was baptized into the Anglican Church as a child, and later became a member of the Greek Orthodox Church during his first marriage. By the time he wrote God Is Not Great, Hitchens identified not only as an atheist but as an “anti-theist”. The difference, he said, was that while an atheist could theoretically deny God but wish for God to exist, an anti-theist opposes any idea of a conscious higher power and would not want any deity to exist. He believed that religion held back human progress, although he was always a strong advocate for religious freedom and never suggested that belief should be banned.

In 2010, Hitchens was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer, an illness he attributed to a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. He wrote Mortality, a book about his sickness and treatment, which was published posthumously. He died in December of 2011 and his body was donated to medical research.