Hunter S. Thompson shot himself yesterday. Thompson was not a religion writer, but he was surely a religious one. He put his faith in the explosive power of revelation and set about dynamiting all that he found unholy, most of which tended to be that which the rest of the world found very holy, indeed. He was, in his way, a pious writer, dedicated without compromise to chronicling the unending jihad between American myth and American corruption. He relied on what new agers might call “spiritual guides,” cut-rate Virgils such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, the “Brown Buffalo.” And he wrote like the Bible’s last John, exiled to Patmos, dreaming of apocalypse and rambling on in feverish prose meant to suggest the end of the world through sanctified hyperbole. There were precedents for his work, but not in the last couple millenia. And his imitators are legion, and awful. His legacy is a generation of vipers, nasty little would-be gonzos lacking not only the wit but also the less-noticed moral fever with which his best writing sliced arteries. No one should try to write like Hunter Thompson. But every journalist — especially those of us mucking around in the intangible swamp of “religion” — ought to read him. He wrote American scripture.

In 2000, The Paris Review interviewed Thompson. “Almost without exception,” the journal noted, “writers we’ve interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs–or at the least what they’ve done has to be rewritten in the cool of the day. What’s your comment about this?”

Thompson’s reply: “They lie… Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation?”