Obit

Douthat: Hitchens, The Believer's Atheist

His blasphemy couldn't keep Christians from loving him.

As the English-speaking world mourns Christopher Hitchens, the New York Times' resident Catholic Ross Douthat speaks for a surpsing niche of Hitchens fandom: Christians, who couldn't get enough of him despite his best efforts at blasphemy. "Some of this reflected his immense personal charm, his willingness to debate with Baptists and drink with Catholics and be comradely to anyone who took ideas seriously," Douthat writes. But it went deeper. "American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens — by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to W. H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism."