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 message of the gospel is not a ‘spiritual’ thing, but good tidings applied to man’s entire existence. . . . The true New Testament expectation includes the new earth, and the present life is founded on and proceeds from this expectation. Only with an eye to God’s future can one understand the richness of life in the present.”
G. C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ (1972)
on 2006 12 04
Dr. Aikman presents another thought-provoking essay, and although he touches upon acknowledging the threat of Islamofascism as a redemptive aspect of the thought and writing of Mr. Harris, I’m not inclined to be so generous and complementary.
It never ceases to astound me, the degree to which the small thinking of the secularists and leftists is so one-dimensional. Mr. Harris is not unlike any other number of left-leaning alarmists who gravely predict that the United States either is or will soon become a theocracy. They issue dire warnings that the “religious right” has a grand plan to transform the country into some police state, without being able to substantiate who exactly the religious right is, or how they’ll pull this off. But rest assured, they see the threat.
Any person with nominal brain activity can produce evidence that indeed the United States is a primarily Christian nation, and has been since its inception. The irony is particularly exquisite—and not to mention disturbing—that the very freedoms that people like Mr. Harris enjoy are the product of the Christian foundation of our Republic . . . that they seek to destroy.
Mr. Harris comments rather candidly on the Democrats, but his assessment of the rest of the left leaves me a little uninspired. I’m reminded of Whittaker Chamber’s revelations in Witness that while many Communists relied on the left for support, they held them to a great degree in contempt for their cowardice in not being more like the ardent Communists; they truly viewed the left in America as useful idiots.
To the degree Mr. Harris gets it right on the threat of Islamofascism is akin to the conventional wisdom that even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then; assigning moral clarity, therefore, to that particular world-view is a natural mistake that people often make. Simply because we find agreement on one topic doesn’t mean we should impute to others what we see in ourselves.
Best Regards,
Michael Tams