Letter to a Christian Nation

by Harris Sam

  *This long-standing civil war is distinct from the genocide that is currently occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan.

  (Muslims vs. Christians), Ivory Coast (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Philippines (Muslims vs. Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Rus-sians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few, recent cases in point.

  And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Most nonbelievers, liberals, and moderates apparently think that no one ever really sacrifices his life, or the lives of others, on account of his religious beliefs. Such people simply do not know what it is like to be certain of Paradise. Consequently, they can't believe that anyone is certain of Paradise. It is worth remembering that the September 11 hijackers were college educated, middle class people who had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and engineers must hit the wall at four hundred miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: in the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy two virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: they don't know what it is like to really believe in God.

  Let us briefly consider where our discordant religious certainties are leading us on a global scale. The earth is now home to about 1.4 billion Muslims, many of whom believe that one day you and I will either convert to Islam, live in subjugation to a Muslim caliphate, or be put to death for our unbelief. Islam is now the fastest growing religion in Europe. The birth rate among European Muslims is three times that of their non-Muslim neighbors. If current trends continue, France will be a majority Muslim country in twenty five years—and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow. Throughout Europe, Muslim communities often show little inclination to acquire the secular and civil values of their host countries, and yet they exploit these values to the utmost, demanding tolerance for their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the religious hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques. Forced marriages, honor killings, punitive gang rapes, and a homicidal loathing of homosexuals are now features of an otherwise secular Europe, courtesy of Islam.* Women are thought to "dishonor" their families by refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, committing adultery, even by being raped or suffering some other form of sexual assault. Women in these situations are often murdered by their fathers, husbands, or brothers, sometimes with the collaboration of other women. Honor killing is, perhaps, best viewed as a cultural (rather than strictly religious) phenomenon, and it is not unique to the Muslim world. The practice, however, finds considerable support under Islam, given that the religion explicitly views women as the property of men and considers adultery a capital offense. Throughout the Muslim world, a woman who reports being raped runs the risk of being murdered as an "adulteress": she has, after all, admitted to having sex outside of marriage.

  Political correctness and the fear of racism have made many Europeans reluctant to oppose the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst. With a few exceptions, the only public figures who have had the courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European society seem to be fascists. This does not bode well for the future of civilization.

  The idea that Islam is a "peaceful religion hijacked by extremists" is a fantasy, and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so—it is so because most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith. Muslims tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with Islam. And Muslims who don't view the world in these terms risk being branded as apostates and killed by other Muslims.

  But how can we ever hope to reason with the Muslim world if we are not reasonable ourselves? It accomplishes nothing to merely declare that "we all worship the same God." We do not all worship the same God, and nothing attests to this fact more eloquently than our history of religious bloodshed. Within Islam, the Shi'a and the Sunni can't even agree to worship the same God in the same way, and over this they have been killing one another for centuries.

  It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world through inter-faith dialogue. Devout Muslims are as convinced as you are that their religion is perfect and that any deviation leads directly to hell. It is easy, of course, for the representatives of the major religions to occasionally meet and agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the common thread that unites all the world's faiths. But there is no escaping the fact that a person's religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like "compassion." There are millions—maybe hundreds of millions—of Muslims who would be willing to die before they would allow your version of compassion to gain a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision? The truth is, it really matters what billions of human beings believe and why they believe it.

  Conclusion

  One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns—about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering—in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Noth-ing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.

  I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still, the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century. Anyone who spoke with confidence about eradicating slavery in the United States in the year 1775 surely appeared to be wasting his time, and wasting it dangerously.

  The analogy is not perfect, but it is suggestive. If we ever do transcend our religious bewilderment, we will look back upon this period in human history with horror and amazement. How could it have been possible for people to believe such things in the twenty first century? How could it be that they allowed their societies to become so dangerously fragmented by empty notions about God and Paradise? The truth is, some of your most cherished beliefs are as embarrassing as those that sent the last slave ship sailing to America as late as 1859 (the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species).

  Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity— birth, marriage, death—without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.

  I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to
denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences—but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature. There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality. You are, of course, right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure and contents of the universe. But this does not make unjusti-fied (and unjustifiable) claims about its struc-ture and contents any more respectable.

  It is important to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and spiritual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis. There are good reasons to believe that people like Jesus and the Buddha weren't talking nonsense when they spoke about our capacity as human beings to transform our lives in rare and beautiful ways. But any genuine exploration of ethics or the contemplative life demands the same standards of reasonableness and self-criticism that animate all intellectual discourse. As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past. Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary func-tion for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impedi-ment to our building a global civilization.

  This letter is the product of failure—the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it, the failure of our schools to announce the death of God in a way that each generation can understand, the failure of the media to criticize the abject religious certainties of our public figures—failures great and small that have kept almost every society on this earth muddling over God and despising those who muddle differently.

  Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well—by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement—and, perhaps, of a little hope.

  TEN BOOKS I RECOMMEND

  1. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

  2. Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett

  3. Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman

  4. Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg

  5. The End of Days by Gershom Gorenberg

  6. Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby

  7. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

  8. Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

  9. God, the Devil, and Darwin by Niall Shanks

  10. Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation.

  He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience.

  His work has been discussed in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, The Globe and Mail, New Scientist, SEED Magazine, and many other journals.

  Mr. Harris makes regular appearances on television and radio to discuss the danger that religion now poses to modern societies. He appeared in the 2005 documentary film, The God Who Wasn’t There, and he is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post and Truthdig . The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Several foreign editions are in press. Mr. Harris lives in New York City.

  He can be reached through his website at http://www.samharris.org

  http://www.myspace.com/lettertoachristiannation

  NOTES

  PAGE viii

  Dozens of scientific surveys: There is no shortage of polling data attesting to the depth and breadth of American piety. PEW (www.people-press.org) and Gallup (www.gallup.com) remain some of the best sources of this information. According to a recent Gallup poll: www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu _content_id=loo2l547O4.

  heretics should be tortured: P. Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 116-17.

  or killed outright: Summa Theologica, Article 3 of Question 11 in the Secunda Secundae. Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated: W. Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), passim.

  "What God sanctioned": F. G. Wood, The Arro-gance of Faith (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1990), p. 59. most Americans seem to think: Seventy-two per-cent of Americans approve of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property (http://pew forum.org/press/index.php?ReleaseID=32).

  26 The vaccine produced: "Forbidden Vaccine," The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2005 (editorial).

  27 One study found: M. Goldberg, Kingdom Com-ing: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 137.

  28 The rate of gonorrhea: N. D. Kristof, "Bush's Sex Scandal," The New York Times, February 16, 2005.

  28 Reginald Finger: M. Specter, "Political Science," The New Yorker, March 13, 2006, pp. 58-69.

  32 In fact, several states: "The States Confront Stem Cells," The New York Times, March 31, 2006.

  32 If one experiments: www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/bioethic/statelaw.htm.

  35 Christopher Hitchens: "Mommie Dearest," 10/20/03, www.slate.com/id/2090083/.

  36 "The greatest destroyer": http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html.

  37 In El Salvador: J. Hitt, "Pro-Life Nation" The New York Times Magazine, April 9,2006.

  38 20 percent: C. P. Griebel et al., "Management of Spontaneous Abortion," American Family Physi-cian, vol. 72, no. 7 (October 1, 2005), pp. 1243-50.

  42 The Vatican itself: J. I. Kertzer, "The Modern Use of Ancient Lies," The New York Times, May 9, 2002.

  43 According to the United Nations': P. Zuckerman, "Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns," in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Michael Martin, ed. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, forthcoming).

  44 The same comparison: G. S. Paul. "Cross-Nationai Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies," Journal of Religion and Society, vol. 7 (2005); R. Gledhili, "Societies Worse Off 'When They Have God on Their Side,' " The Times (U.K.), September 27, 2005.

  44 While political party affiliation: http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=i03.

  45 Of the twenty-five: www.morganquitno.com/cito6pop.htm#25.

  45 three of the five most dangerous: www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.

  45 Of the twenty-two: www.itaffectsyou.org/blog/?p = 200.

  46 Countries with high levels: www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp#ForeignAidNumbers inChartsandGraphs; www.oecd.org.

  46 Consider the ratio: www.nybooks.com/articles/17726. 48 "not in the power": www.thetablet.co.uk/sample04.sh.tml.

  57 we know on the basis of textual evidence: See J. Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); A. N. Wilson, Jesus: A Lif
e (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and B. M. Metzger and M. D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Compan-ion to the Bible (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 789-90.

  58 The Gospels also contradict: There are many secondary sources that point out such contradic-tions. Burr's Self-contradictions of the Bible (1860) is a classic.

  62 "At the root": National Academy of Sciences, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (1998), p. 58; www.nap.edu/catalog/5787.html.

  70 Meanwhile, high school students in the United States: L. Gross, "Scientific Illiteracy and the Parti-san Takeover of Biology," PLoS Biol 4(5): e167. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040167 (2006); http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv?request=get-document&doi-io.i37i/journal.pbio.0040167 .