SOURCE: McDonald, Marci. “The Messianic Atheist.” Maclean's (25 December 1995–1 January 1996): 76.

In the following essay, McDonald discusses Hitchens's career, his attack on Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position, and his religious background.

In the smoking section of a Toronto bistro, Christopher Hitchens settles over a double gin, a button in his blazer lapel boasting “All the right enemies.” For Hitchens, 46, it is no idle claim. Even before he launched his provocative one-man crusade against Mother Teresa as “an abject phony” and “the ghoul of Calcutta”—not to mention the epithets he hurls at her in his new book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice—he had already won notoriety as the bad boy of transatlantic journalism for tackling cant and conventional wisdom in high places, usually those of a right-wing persuasion.

A onetime regular in the London weekly The Spectator, he ran afoul of conservative press lord...