Brothers Divided: Christopher vs. Peter Hitchens and the War of Worldviews
Christopher vs Peter
Brothers Divided: Christopher vs. Peter Hitchens and the War of Worldviews
Few sibling rivalries in modern intellectual life have captured the public imagination like that of Christopher and Peter Hitchens. Both men were journalists, polemicists, and keen observers of the moral and political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Yet they could not have stood further apart in worldview — one an avowed atheist and radical humanist, the other a Christian moralist and social conservative.
Their story isn’t merely a domestic quarrel that spilled into print. It’s a lens into the deeper philosophical divide running through Western culture itself — between belief and disbelief, meaning and materialism, rebellion and repentance.
Two Paths From the Same Beginning
The Hitchens brothers grew up in postwar Britain — a society still rebuilding its institutions, but already drifting away from the certainties of faith and empire. Their early experiences were strikingly similar: grammar school education, political engagement, an appetite for books and debate.
Yet as young men they diverged. Christopher Hitchens, brilliant and provocative, was drawn toward Marxism, atheism, and the revolutionary left. He made his name as a contrarian writer in London and later Washington, D.C., skewering religion and nationalism with acid wit.
Peter Hitchens, by contrast, moved rightward over time — rejecting the countercultural liberalism of his youth. After years as a foreign correspondent, he returned to Britain disillusioned with socialism and skeptical of secular progress. His journalism and books championed Christian ethics, traditional values, and national identity.
The Atheist and the Believer
For Christopher, religion was not merely mistaken — it was poisonous. In his 2007 bestseller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he argued that faith corrupts morality, breeds intolerance, and infantilizes the mind. His atheism was not passive; it was militant, a crusade against what he saw as humanity’s oldest delusion.
Peter, on the other hand, came to see atheism as a moral void. In The Rage Against God, his reply to his brother’s polemic, he confessed that abandoning faith in his youth had left him spiritually impoverished. For Peter, Christianity offered not superstition but — the moral architecture without which liberty collapses into chaos.
