The bland inquisitor.(Letter to a Christian Nation)(Book review)

Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation. Knopf, 112 pages, $16.95

If an author who has written a bestselling book then releases, a scant year later, another book on the same topic, it is fair to pause a moment to ponder why the second book got written. Perhaps he wishes to correct a flaw in the first book; perhaps he wants to expand its scope. Now, Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation is so much in agreement with and so much more limited in scope than last year's bestselling The End of Faith that he could only have produced it because he believed the original work wasn't condescending enough.

His premise, briefly stated, is that religion is bad and ought to be eliminated. (The special focus on Christianity is a nod to the American reader.) The entire book is written in the second person, ostensibly to a Christian; in this way Harris time and again gets to declare what "you" believe, how "you" should be able to support this belief, and why "you" have failed to support it properly. Since the anonymous "you" is, by definition, a fiction ("a statistic" Harris might claim, or perhaps "a pastiche"), all Harris's arguments are straw man arguments. And he keeps calling the straw man "you" which has got to qualify as one of the most grating conceits a book has ever been built around.

Many of Harris's arguments are irrefutable, but many are just irrelevant. While it's true that from an atheistic perspective the first four Commandments "have nothing whatsoever to do with morality" as Harris puts it, from a theistic perspective they certainly do. But even though this is a book allegedly written for theists, Harris simply asserts the atheistic standpoint and moves on. Much of the book could be replaced with the sentence: "I mean, come on, you don't actually believe this stuff, do you?" Harris is too choked on bile, or at best incredulity ("we stand dumbstruck by you," he says, italics and all) to admit that his addressees are worth speaking with. This is in part because his chosen antagonist is "Christianity at its most divisive, injurious, and retrograde" even though it's questionable whether anything was ever accomplished by attacking a system at its most "retrograde."

But Harris is more than happy to save some contempt for religious "liberals and moderates" (his term). As he puts it: "Although liberals and moderates do not fly planes into buildings or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they rarely question the legitimacy of raising a child to believe that she is a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew" There are two true clauses here, but it's unclear why Harris has linked them together into a sentence. He goes on to explain that, in the face of human suffering, "liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is: the sheerest of moral pretenses. The theology of wrath has far more intellectual merit:' He refers, of course, to the problem of evil, and it's strange that Harris believes it to be an unanswerable question when every Christian apologist, perhaps without exception, has believed he successfully answered it. But Harris is not very interested in what Christians actually believe. When he writes, "Either Christ was divine or he was not" it may appeal to objectivists, but it also flies in the face of two thousand years of Christology that, for better or for worse, has sought a more nuanced answer than that. Does Harris not know? Or does he just not care?

Probably a little of both. There are many parts of the book where Harris is simply unable to grasp how much he is unable to grasp. His lengthy digression on slavery is a good example. On the face of it, this is the familiar cocktail-party gambit of invoking Hitler at the first opportunity: Surely you don't disagree with me? Surely you're not in favor of ... Nazis? But while, no, Sam Harris, no one here is in favor of slavery, the fact that the Bible permits or condones it is hardly a moral catastrophe. For a nomadic tribe three or four millennia ago, ...