A 2004 New York Times best-seller by Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason placed its author, a graduate in philosophy from Stanford, in the forefront of the forefront of anti-theists in America. In his latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation, published in September 2006, Harris brings his heavy artillery as close as he can to the walls of the church. His intention, he writes, is “to destroy the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.” Welcome to the tradition of Voltaire, Engels, and an eccentric Soviet magazine founded under Lenin called The Godless.
The Christian faith has survived more learned and eloquent assaults than those of Sam Harris, and will doubtless continue to do so.
Harris does trigger some alarms, however, in considering religious thought not harmless but dangerous, and by advocating nothing less than its suppression, presumably, in the end, by the deployment of state power. If that ever becomes reality in the U.S., American society will quickly resemble the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao Zedong.
Harris ignores altogether the fact that America’s Founders, although sometimes openly skeptical of Christian orthodoxy, saw political liberty itself as indissolubly linked to the virtues deemed to be rooted in Christian ethics. As Thomas Jefferson himself, who said that he could not find in orthodox Christianity “one redeeming feature,” put it, “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” Perhaps the Founders, who had studied the constitutions of dozens of previous attempted republics, knew a truth about theism when they saw it.
Harris, however, though a hard-core secular anti-theist, is by no means himself an orthodox political liberal. In fact, on a blog site one day before the publication of his Letter to a Christian Nation, he wrote that he is frankly as “wary” of his fellow liberals as he is of “demagogues on the Christian right.” He goes on, “This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that ‘liberals are soft on terrorism,’ and they are.” He adds, “A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world—for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a ‘war on terror.’ We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.”
If these were the words of a recognized neo-con or religious conservative, they might be considered by liberal readers typical and even predictable. But coming from an atheist they are striking and sobering, a tocsin warning of an enemy at our very gates. A healthy civilization, after all, ought to have room for people of multitudinous faiths and non-faiths. It may take an atheist to recognize the point when the very notion of civilization is under attack from those who hate the very idea of freedom of conscience.
Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.
1 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Thu 30 Nov 2006
The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making.
Dorothy L. Sayers, "Why Work?"
