My brother reminded me Friday that, back in 1996, I'd given him a signed copy of Christopher Hitchens' The Missionary Position for a birthday present. The slim polemic took what seemed to many like a preposterous stance--that Mother Teresa was not a holy person, or even a particularly good one--and laid out a carefully researched and brilliantly stated argument that was hard to ignore, let alone refute. By pushing so hard against conventional wisdom, and marshaling the facts to support its contrarian position, that book, my brother said, "taught me to think for myself." I like to believe that's the kind of legacy Hitchens, who died last Thursday night of complications from esophageal cancer, would be most proud of.

Earlier this year, the New York Times described Christopher Hitchens as "the country's most famous unbeliever," which is true; it's no accident that the hashtag that spread across Twitter late last Thursday night and early Friday morning to acknowledge his death was #GodIsNotGreat, the title of his bestselling argument for atheism. And yet many religious faithful, such as Times columnist Ross Douthat or evangelical author Larry Alex Taunton, remember him warmly as a good friend. "We enjoyed lively discussion with people who didn't take opposition to a given opinion personally," Taunton recalls, "and we both found small talk boring."

Hitchens expressed himself with Character Approved passion and eloquence on many subjects besides religion. I first discovered him as a political commentator on Comedy Central in the early 1990s. (He once shot a pilot for the cable network, Everything You Need to Know, that was basically an even more acerbic precursor to The Daily Show.) Later, he would become one of the most prominent liberals to attack Bill Clinton--and, later still, he would break with many of his friends on the left over his support of the invasion of Iraq. It wasn't just his political and religious opinions that got him into trouble, either; his 2007 column arguing that women weren't funny became a flashpoint for arguments among feminists and comedians. But these were his beliefs, and until somebody could prove him wrong, he stood by them.

Even after death, Hitchens provoked controversy: Once #GodIsNotGreat became a trending topic on Twitter, many people rushed online to refute the sentiment... some of them less coherently and more violently than others. Had he been around to see it, he might have seen the kneejerk threats as one last ironic proof of his thesis... and a last bit of disturbing evidence of what happens when people don't learn to think for themselves.

[Image: AP]