An Unmerry Hitchmas: Christopher Hitchens and the collapse of New Atheism

On December 14, Atheism UK and the Origins Project Foundation hosted a “Merry Hitchmas” event at the Royal Geographical Society in London to commemorate the life of atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer in 2011 at the age of sixty-two. Four prominent atheists—physicist Lawrence Krauss, biologist Richard Dawkins, journalist Douglas Murray, and actor Stephen Fry—took the stage to reminisce about Hitchens, discuss literature, and, of course, mock religion. The event was, albeit unintentionally, a memorial not only for Hitchens, but for the New Atheist movement, which did not long survive him.

Krauss, marshaling all the adolescent wit at his disposal, called religion “the opposite” of wisdom and referred to the “intellectual laziness and pretentious nonsense that encompasses so much of religious faith.” Dawkins noted that atheists lost their “heavy artillery” when Hitchens died, trotted out several of Hitchens’s arguments against divine “tyranny,” and mocked the stupidity of the “tremolo-voiced preacher.” He fondly recalled their “shared fight about religion,” but noted his disagreement with Hitchens about abortion (Hitchens was pro-life; Dawkins has advocated aborting babies with Down syndrome).

Douglas Murray alone looked frequently unimpressed and eventually, when everyone else on stage took turns insulting Jordan Peterson—Fry called him “a man with no teeth giving advice on dentistry”—profoundly irritated. His fellow panelists hastily backed down when Murray defended Peterson’s work.

Despite the unbelieving bravado, Hitchmas was pervaded by a sense of underlying frustration. Hitchens’s favorite anti-theist attack lines were quoted but rang hollow—many of the pithy quips clearly drew their power from Hitchens’s magnificent baritone rather than philosophical profundity. The panelists also bemoaned the ideologies that have rushed in to fill the vacuum left by religious faith, with Dawkins and Krauss insisting that transgender ideology is a “new religion” rather than the latest manifestation of the sexual revolution they enthusiastically support.

I couldn’t help contrasting Hitchmas with the triumphalism of a nearly identical 2011 event in London titled “Stephen Fry and Friends on the Life, Loves, and Hates of Christopher Hitchens.” The man himself watched from his sickbed as his comrades rejoiced that his anti-theist work had not just been significant, but successful. Religion was on the run and the Age of Reason was upon us. Fry praised Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything as a salvo in the fight for the Enlightenment. Richard Dawkins called religious education “the subversion of young minds.” When Fry mentioned that many Christians were praying for Hitchens’s recovery and conversion, Dawkins said that the response to “I’ll pray for you” should be “I’ll think for you!” Everyone chortled with delight, and Dawkins and Fry looked characteristically pleased with themselves.

In retrospect, that event was the peak of the New Atheist moment; their “apocalypse” revealed a world very different than they expected. The transgender movement blasted fault-lines right through the atheist community. Less than two weeks after Hitchmas, in fact, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, and Richard Dawkins resigned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation after the organization removed and apologized for a column by Coyne defending the concept of biological sex. Dawkins, for his part, had his “Humanist of the Year” award rescinded by the American Humanist Association for his opposition to transgender ideology in 2021.

A dozen years after Hitchens’s death, the movement he championed has given way to a renewed interest in God and a steady stream of high-profile atheist defections. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a member of the New Atheist set, stunned her fellow unbelievers in 2023 by announcing she had become a Christian. Attempts by Richard Dawkins to persuade her otherwise—including an open letter—failed. Her husband, historian Niall Ferguson, followed suit last year, revealing in an interview that he had become a “lapsed atheist,” gotten baptized, and joined the Anglican Church. Other agnostic intellectuals, such as Tom Holland, Charles Murray, and Jordan Peterson, have become unlikely advocates of Christianity.

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