The book has won much attention and some praise. Chris Matthews, who frequently hosted Hitchens on MSNBC, interviewed Taunton and urged all his viewers to read his “beautifully written” book. David Horowitz, who knew Hitchens over a lifetime, called it “a literary gem, which no honest reader could mistake for an ideological tract.” The religion column of the New York Times publicized Taunton’s claim in a headline: “Christopher Hitchens Was Shaky in His Atheism, New Book Suggests.”

This is bold, to put it mildly. In the months before he died, Hitchens repeatedly and emphatically warned that claims like Taunton’s would be forthcoming and should be disbelieved.

“It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people whom you don’t know, but who are unbelievers, and say: ‘Now are you going to change your mind?’ … As you know, there’s a long history of fraud about this. People claim that Darwin had a deathbed recantation. They made up lies about Thomas Paine. It goes on all the time. It’s a very nasty little history… They’ve even tried it on me, when I’ve had not the vinegar I’d like to have had, in a hospital bed. ”

But there are plenty of others! Here’s Hitchens talking to Charlie Rose, in the same vein, to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and finally here, to my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg:

I asked Mark Oppenheimer—the author of the New York Times piece—why he had not mentioned or acknowledged any of these statements by Hitchens himself in his story. He answered at some length by email, and I quote his concluding paragraphs:

I actually think the stakes of one person's late-life religious musings, or the absence thereof, are pretty low. Christians will disagree, as they believe somebody's soul is at stake; atheist activists will disagree, as Hitchens was important to their movement; and those who knew and loved Hitchens will disagree, as they have an interest in seeing their friend or relative remembered accurately. But my interest was in the debate that has surrounded the book, which was one thing that I felt I could accurately report on.

Are the stakes in this matter indeed so low? Taunton’s book does not merely claim that a famous atheist felt some attraction to religious faith. It claims—in literally so many words—that a man admired by many was in fact a hypocrite, a liar, and a coward, motivated primarily by vanity and avarice. There is no way to report accurately on that controversy without scrutiny of the truth or falsity of the underlying assertions—and it’s an important media dereliction that more than a month after the book’s publication, this scrutiny has to date been lacking.

Taunton’s arraignment of Hitchens’s character is so harsh that it demands to be quoted in full, lest anyone suspect that I somehow exaggerate:

Publicly, he had to play the part, to pose, as a confident atheist—that was the side of the debate he’d been given, the one that made him both famous and rich. Privately, however, he was entering forbidden territory …

Taunton again:

My private conversations with him revealed a man who was weighing the costs of conversion. His atheist friends and colleagues, sensing his flirtations with Christianity and fearing his all-out desertion to that hated enemy, rushed to keep him in the fold. To reassure them, Christopher, for his part, was more bombastic than ever. But the rhetoric was concealing the fact that even while he was railing about God from the rostrum, he was secretly negotiating with him. Fierce protestations of loyalty always precede a defection, and Christopher had to make them. At least he had to if he was to avoid the ridicule and ostracism he would surely suffer at the hands of the very same people who memorialized him. To cross the aisle politically was one thing. There was precedence for that. Churchill had very famously done it. But Christopher well knew that whatever criticisms and loss of friendships he had suffered then would pale in comparison to what would follow his religious conversion. Hatred of God was the central tenet of their faith, and there could be no redemption for those renouncing it. And it is here that his courage failed him. In the end, however contrary our natures might be, there are always a few people whose approbation we desire and to whose standards we conform.

What evidence does Taunton have for this claim that Christopher Hitchens believed one thing and said another in order to make money and to avoid “ridicule and ostracism”?