In August 1997, Princess Diana died in a car accident.  A few days later, Mother Teresa died.  The death of Diana prompted an enormous outpouring of emotion.  One writer, who had delivered a drunken diatribe against Mother Teresa during ABC’s televised coverage of her funeral, was unmoved, describing Diana as “A simpering Bambi narcissist” and Mother Teresa as a “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf.”  When that writer, Christopher Hitchens, died in December 2011, the reaction among the chattering classes was as mawkish and embarrassing as anything that followed the death of “the People’s Princess.”

To take just two examples: Frum Forum contributor Sean Linnane described Hitchens as “quite possibl[y] the greatest thinker of our modern age,” and another Frum Forum contributor, Kapil Komireddi, wailed that “For every young writer—and every victim and opponent of authoritarianism—there is now darkness.”  One suspects that if David Frum could sing, we would now be hearing him warble a new version of “Candle in the Wind” in honor of his friend.  Such extravagant praise of Hitchens was far from unique.  Steve Sailer counted 26 separate tributes to Hitchens at the online magazine Slate, and Lucas Shaw of Reuters noted that “the news of [Hitchens’] death has elicited a universal outpouring of grief and respect from the journalistic community.”  I counted only three commentators—Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, and Alexander Cockburn—who avoided hagiography in their obituaries of Hitchens.

Part of this, of course, was simply celebrity worship.  There is little doubt that the young writers whom Komireddi feels are now plunged into darkness by Hitchens’ death would like to be on television as often as Hitchens was.  Part of it also reflected the high regard writers have for themselves.  As Rod Dreher commented at The American Conservative after relating a story from Christopher Buckley about how Hitchens was focused on writing until the end, “How can you not forgive a guy like that most anything?”  But Hitchens’ death was also a reminder that there is an Establishment centered in Manhattan and Washington helping to shape opinion in America, and that Establishment remains deeply hostile to traditional conservatism, including the part of the Establishment that presents itself as conservative.  Hitchens’ open love of Trotsky and hatred of God was no impediment to his membership in that Establishment.  Indeed, Hitchens was lauded for his hatred of religion.  As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times tweeted, “RIP Christopher Hitchens, brilliant essayist with the chutzpah to attack Mother Teresa and God.”

Of course, it actually takes more chutzpah to defend Mother Teresa and God in the New York Times than it does to attack them.  Hitchens was widely praised as a courageous “contrarian,” but brave men who swim against the currents of the day are not praised the way Hitchens was at his death.  When they died, both Sam Francis and Joe Sobran were either reviled or ignored, even though each wrote at least as well as Hitchens did.  The difference was that Hitchens celebrated fashionable causes, including hatred of religion and the neoconservatives’ global democratic revolution.  By contrast, Francis championed the American nation and Sobran championed the U.S. Constitution, both deeply unpopular among those shaping opinion in this country.

Hitchens’ Bolshevism and hatred of religion also did nothing to harm his standing on what passes for the American right.  National Review Online was buzzing with tributes to Hitchens, including a laudatory review by Ronald Radosh of Hitchens’ memoirs; a column by Jonah Goldberg analyzing what Goldberg saw as Hitchens’ conservative traits, even though Goldberg reluctantly concluded that Hitchens could not be regarded as a man of the right; and tributes from Cliff May, Mario Loyola, Daniel Foster, and Seth Leibsohn, who dubbed Hitchens “Our Best Writer.”  Even more egregiously, NRO featured a slide show on Hitchens’ life, which included as highlights the publication of Hitchens’ attack on Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, and of Hitchens’ attack on God, god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  (A very crude man, Hitchens delighted in the vulgar title he gave his book attacking Mother Teresa.)  William F. Buckley, Jr., had many flaws, but it is impossible to imagine him giving his magazine over to praise for a man whose entire political outlook was shaped by his hatred of religion and tradition.  Even normally sensible magazines succumbed to Hitchensolatry.  Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative ran an essay describing Hitchens as “an ornament of Anglo-American literary journalism” and praised Hitchens as “a writer first and ideologue [sic] a distant second,” a judgment that might have been defensible if Hitchens had been a novelist or a poet but which seems bizarre when applied to a political essayist.  Not to be outdone, Rod Dreher wrote three posthumous love letters to Hitchens on The American Conservative’s website, although Dreher regretted his praise for Hitchens after belatedly discovering that the deeply anti-Christian Hitchens approved of Lenin’s murderous suppression of Russian Orthodoxy, a fact that was clear from my 2005 American Conservative essay on Hitchens and for which I provided more evidence in my 2007 review of god Is Not Great.

Most embarrassing of all, though, was the praise heaped on Hitchens by numerous Christian writers.  This phenomenon was so widespread that Ross Douthat of the New York Times wrote a column about it, noting that “Intellectually minded Christians, in particular, had a habit of talking about Hitchens as though he was one of them already—a convert in the making, whose furious broadsides against God were just the prelude to an inevitable reconciliation.”  Needless to say, we have no evidence of such a reconciliation, and no sane person ever expected Hitchens to recant a lifetime of antireligious invective.  After all, Hitchens is the man who said of Mother Teresa, “I wish there was a hell for the bitch to go to,” and who said of believers generally, “I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity . . . I mean, that to me is a horrible, repulsive thing.”  High among Hitchens’ heroes were the Russian Bolsheviks and the Spanish Republicans, who both unleashed murder and terror on Christians, and there is no reason to believe that Hitchens would have acted differently, had he ever attained political power.  Indeed, Hitchens told PBS that “One of Lenin’s great achievements . . . is to create a secular Russia.  The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.”  Hitchens was also quite happy to contemplate the violent suppression of contemporary Christians, telling Radar in April 2007 that, if the Christian Right came to power in America, “It wouldn’t last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part.”  The Christian praise for Hitchens illustrated not charity and forgiveness, but masochism.

None of the many Christians praising Hitchens on his passing appeared to consider the possibility that such praise might encourage readers to delve into Hitchens’ antireligious writings and that some might, as a result, lose their faith.  Nor did any of them comment on a significant fact of Hitchens’ life, his habit of writing vicious obituaries for people he hated, a category that included not just Mother Teresa and Princess Diana but Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, and even Bob Hope.  So important were such obituaries to Hitchens that he wrote after being diagnosed with cancer that one of his chief regrets was that he probably would not live long enough to write obituaries for such “elderly criminals” as Benedict XVI and Henry Kissinger.  This habit of Hitchens illustrated one of the fundamental problems of his atheism.  A person who does not trust in either divine mercy or divine justice is likely to feel impotent hatred at the passing of someone he despises.  Hitchens’ only hope is that at his passing God showed him more mercy than Hitchens’ philosophy could allow.