Hitchens and Hitchens make up, sort of
Peter Hitchens, extracted in the Daily Mail from a new book, hints that the fifty year rift between himself – a committed and very public Christian – and his brother, Christopher Hitchens – a vocal and very public atheist – has mellowed.
However, his description of Christopher’s atheism (bricked up in a tower with “slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful”), and the signs he refers to as indicating the changing tide (Christopher cooked a supper, “a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it”) do not seem calculated to enhance the thaw.
Something far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when Christopher and I had met in his Washington DC apartment. If he despised and loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasn’t showing it.
We were more than civil, treating each other as equals, and as brothers with a common childhood, even recalling bicycle rides we used to take together on summer days unimaginably long ago, which I did not even realise he still remembered.
To my astonishment, Christopher cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it. He had even given up smoking.
I am not hoping for a late conversion because he has won the battle against cigarettes. He has bricked himself up high in his atheist tower, with slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful, and would find it rather hard to climb down out of it.
I have, however, the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault, and that religion does not poison everything.
