A dozen years after Hitchens’s death, the movement he championed has given way to a renewed interest in God and a steady stream of high-profile atheist defections. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a member of the New Atheist set, stunned her fellow unbelievers in 2023 by announcing she had become a Christian.

On December 14, Atheism UK and the Origins Project Foundation hosted a “Merry Hitchmas” event at the Royal Geographical Society in London to commemorate the life of atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer in 2011 at the age of sixty-two. Four prominent atheists—physicist Lawrence Krauss, biologist Richard Dawkins, journalist Douglas Murray, and actor Stephen Fry—took the stage to reminisce about Hitchens, discuss literature, and, of course, mock religion. The event was, albeit unintentionally, a memorial not only for Hitchens, but for the New Atheist movement, which did not long survive him. 

Krauss, marshaling all the adolescent wit at his disposal, called religion “the opposite” of wisdom and referred to the “intellectual laziness and pretentious nonsense that encompasses so much of religious faith.” Dawkins noted that atheists lost their “heavy artillery” when Hitchens died, trotted out several of Hitchens’s arguments against divine “tyranny,” and mocked the stupidity of the “tremolo-voiced preacher.” He fondly recalled their “shared fight about religion,” but noted his disagreement with Hitchens about abortion (Hitchens was pro-life; Dawkins has advocated aborting babies with Down syndrome).

Douglas Murray alone looked frequently unimpressed and eventually, when everyone else on stage took turns insulting Jordan Peterson—Fry called him “a man with no teeth giving advice on dentistry”—profoundly irritated. His fellow panelists hastily backed down when Murray defended Peterson’s work.

Despite the unbelieving bravado, Hitchmas was pervaded by a sense of underlying frustration. Hitchens’s favorite anti-theist attack lines were quoted but rang hollow—many of the pithy quips clearly drew their power from Hitchens’s magnificent baritone rather than philosophical profundity. The panelists also bemoaned the ideologies that have rushed in to fill the vacuum left by religious faith, with Dawkins and Krauss insisting that transgender ideology is a “new religion” rather than the latest manifestation of the sexual revolution they enthusiastically support.

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