Letter to a Christian Nation (review: 3.5/5)

Atheism seems to have caught a little buzz in recent years, I’m not sure how. There was that unfortunate survey, and books by Dawkins and others made a little splash, and there’s the cover story on a recent issue of Wired magazine, in particular. Sam Harris’ extended essay, Letter to a Christian Nation, joins the crowd with a missive to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms.”
Harris has some really great moments in this book, and it’s a pretty compelling read. He starts with a heavy does of scripture, analyzing the Christian moral paradigm, delighting in the Bible’s weaknesses and cherry-picking the incriminating and contradictory parts. I’m certainly (absolutely) not a Bible scholar, but I think he’s a bit too reliant on quoting from the Old Testament, where Big Bad God and the harshness and shortcomings of ancient civilizational mores are far too easy to pick on. You have to keep in mind that he’s targeting the literalists more so than religious liberals and moderates. But there’s also some interesting sociological examination of religion: “Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/ out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.”

I think he’s effective when he’s talking about the practical, day-to-day implications of religion more so than his examination of the particulars of doctrine. He has a nice section on the ethics of life, discussing abortion, cloning, and biomedical research. And of course, there’s an obligatory passage on evolution and intelligent design. Here’s one line that really got me: “The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it’s intellectual honesty.”

The last section is a gloomy look to mankind’s future on an increasingly religious, conflict-ridden planet.

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.”

Practically, is there really room for tolerance? He wraps up with a big, brilliant question, “How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision?” The stakes are indeed very high.