The opinionated, and often divisive, journalist on how he talked himself out of faith…and then back into it
The hated Peter Hitchens (I’m not being rude – it’s a phrase coined by his own family and inspired by common caricatures of him) arrives at Premier Christianity’s offices looking a little world-weary. When I greet him with a breezy: “Good morning”, he replies (with a grunt): “It’s too early to tell.”
The encounter is symptomatic of what follows, as my attempts to cheer him up fail dramatically. Hitchens is equal parts grumpy and witty. There’s an endearing charm to him, and he often makes me laugh during our interview. As he’ll soon tell me: “Pessimism is a very humorous attitude towards the world.”
The Mail on Sunday columnist is employed to be opinionated and direct (“Name one thing the Conservative party has done that’s conservative?” he demands at one point). His career has included public arguments on TV programmes such as Question Time and Newsnight, where he’s debated the rights and wrongs of illegal drugs policy, Covid vaccines and the EU. Maybe he’s unaccustomed to a friendlier questioner like me; his mood permanently stuck on ‘defensive’.
For all his foibles, there’s something refreshing about Hitchens. And you never quite know what he’s going to say next. He’s a free thinker, and while he describes his own back-and-forth journey to Christian faith as “clichéd”, I disagree. How many teenagers do you know who tried to burn their Bible?
Your Christian upbringing came through your school more than your parents, didn’t it?
Completely. We were given lessons in the Bible, we had religious services at the beginning of the day and short prayers at the end. We would sing hymns daily. These are tremendously powerful ways of instilling in you a certain way of looking at the universe, which I’ve never really lost.
Do you wish these religious elements of schooling were more prevalent today?
You could wish it if you wanted to, but it would be futile.
Having hymns such as ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’ as the background music of your life would, in many ways, be better for you than the sort of rubbish which now seeps out of our radios and televisions.
Like many teenagers, you left your faith behind and became an atheist.
It’s such a cliché. Anybody who doesn’t go through this moment of: Perhaps all this is rubbish seems to me to not have been paying attention.
You’re bound to go through this. And then you grow up and realise that, actually, you hadn’t been quite so clever in your teens as you’d thought.
I’ve read a story about you, aged 15, burning a Bible…
I tried to burn it, but it’s surprisingly hard to do.
So what happened?
Well, I was showing off.
It sounds like you were having a strong rebellion against the Christian faith.
No, a ‘strong rebellion’ is where you risk getting your head blown off. I wasn’t taking any material risk. A lot of so-called ‘rebellion’ is just riskless posturing.
I LOVE BEING A PESSIMIST AND I THINK I’M QUITE GOOD AT IT
So, was abandoning your Christian faith not well thought-out?
It was reasonably well thought-out. It was based on a desire to be entirely commanded by myself. The first and only command of atheism is: ‘do what thou wilt’, which meshes very well with the modern belief in personal autonomy – no one can tell me what to do with my own body. Atheism is very liberating, if that’s what you want to do.
What brought you back to faith?
It’s another set of boring clichés. I got married and had children. It’s both extremely obvious and deeply personal. So I don’t discuss it.
But you must have some kind of explanation as to what prompted your return to faith?
Both of them [Christianity and atheism] are opinions, which you arrive at by reason…
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