Hitchens, who died in 2011, took part in several televised debates with Christians

As the 18th-century hymn says, “God moves in a mysterious way”, but a spiritual awakening of arguably the world’s most famous atheist was perhaps too much to expect — or was it?

In 2007 the journalist Christopher Hitchens eclipsed even the atheism of Richard Dawkins when he published God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and then issued a challenge to Christians: he would debate them in public “anytime, anywhere”.

Several prominent Evangelical Christians in America accepted and in 2008 Hitchens — who died of oesophageal cancer in 2011 — toured the American South expecting “lunk-headed evangelicals to come creeping out so that he could deliver them the drubbing they deserved”.

What happened next was so unexpected that it inspired a recently published book