Why Christians Loved Christopher Hitchens

Christians are commanded to love all men, but Ross Douthat explains why they had a particular and surprising affection for one of their most unrelenting antagonists:

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.

Recognizing this affinity, many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens’s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who  loved the King James Bible  and “ Brideshead Revisited ” surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science.

That sounds about right to me. The rest of Douthat’s column is well worth a read.