After the publication of the book, Religion News Service tweeted this misleading headline: “A controversial new book claims a dying Christopher Hitchens accepted God.” RNS subsequently retracted the headline, but it was too late. Christopher Hitchens’s agent, Steve Wasserman, vociferously denounced the book.

On December 15, 2011, Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer. Some remember him as a man of the left who, after 9/11, converted to a kind of neoconservatism; others remember him as an atheist provocateur and serial blasphemer. For me, Christopher Hitchens was much more than either of these things. He was, as he put it, my “debate partner” and friend. This relationship, largely hidden from view, was a surprise to no one more than me. I am, after all, an Evangelical Christian. Even so, after his diagnosis of cancer in 2010, it was my privilege to take two lengthy road trips with the celebrated atheist. The first was from his home in Washington, D.C., to mine in Birmingham, Alabama. The second was through Yellowstone National Park. In both instances, we studied the Bible together and discussed the Great Questions. This relationship is the subject of my recent book The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist.

The book received ample praise, with Booklist calling it “loving” and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews hailing it as “beautiful.” The Gospel Coalition declared it “an instant classic” and recently named it a 2016 Book of the Year winner. At the same time, however, the book evoked fierce denunciations by a number of the so-called New Atheists. They seized upon the title as proof that I claim Hitchens made some sort of last-minute conversion. As any reader of the book can tell you, this is not so. I say as much in the opening paragraph. But just in case the reader missed it, in the final chapter I emphasize that it is unlikely that Hitchens became a Christian. The subtitle makes it clear that I believe that Christopher was, in fact, an atheist, albeit a restless one.

That was not enough for the atheist critics of my book. University of Chicago biologist and professional atheist Jerry Coyne published a review on his whyevolutionistrue.com website titled “A vulture spreads the false rumor that Hitchens accepted God at the end.” The false rumor comes from Coyne himself, since my book says nothing of the kind. When those who had actually read The Faith of Christopher Hitchens accused Coyne of not reading it, he posted this update: “Because people have suggested that I wrote this entire piece without having read any of Taunton’s book, I read the six pages about Hitchens given on the [New York] Times site, and, after writing it, have read substantial sections of the book that someone sent to me.” Six pages? So much for the scientific method.

Coyne was not alone. I was invited to appear on BBC’s Newsnight along with atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss. Newsnight’s host, James O’Brien, hostile from the start, said that I didn’t really know Hitchens but was just “trying to flog a few books off the back” of his reputation. Didn’t know him? I had never claimed to be a part of Christopher’s inner circle, but our acquaintance was much more than slight. “[Christopher] spoke very warmly, publicly, of our friendship,” I told him. “This is on film, James. I’m not inventing anything here.”

Unmoved, O’Brien teamed up with Professor Krauss, who pressed the same point, claiming that I was simply exploiting the dying atheist. “He’s trying to make money off of Christopher’s name,” he said. “Christopher was paid to spend time with this man.” He went on to pronounce authoritatively about a relationship of which he knew nothing and about conversations of which he was not a part.

But Krauss was not finished. He subsequently published an article in the New Yorker titled “The Fantasy of the Deathbed Conversion”: “[Taunton’s book] is just the latest in a long line of similar claims about famous atheist conversions.” Not only does my book state exactly the opposite—“the Christian faith did not need Hitchens’s public conversion anymore than it needed Darwin’s”—but the entire last chapter was written in anticipation of silly charges like Krauss’s. Fantasy conversion, indeed. An atheist fantasy about what he imagined I said in a book that he—and the fact-checkers at the New Yorker—never read.

Before it was published, I shared the manuscript of The Faith of Christopher Hitchens with the atheist author Michael Shermer. Shermer is editor of Skeptic magazine and a columnist at Scientific American. According to Shermer, he was, in his youth, a fundamentalist Christian, but abandoned the faith in his twenties and became an atheist. He is now a leading figure in questioning religious claims. I sent the draft to him because he had expressed interest in the book and I thought him trustworthy.

One cannot accuse him of not reading the book. He did and offered this gracious assessment: “You’re a very elegant and powerful writer, Larry. I very much enjoyed reading much of this manuscript. I hope the book does well. It deserves to.” He then wrote a strong endorsement: “This book should be read by every atheist and theist passionate about the truth, and by anyone who really wants to understand Hitch.”

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