Why waste time analyzing a book by Sam Harris? Because I can. Also because when someone writes a book called Letter to a Christian Nation, posturing as an intellectually superior rationalist explaining the truth to a bunch of gullible rustics, someone else should call fraud by pointing out the numerous ways he reasons fallaciously and substitutes for actual logic mere showy rhetoric.
First, let me say that in writing this book, Sam Harris speaks in two voices. Speaking as an ethicist, Harris makes some good points, especially when criticizing those evangelicals who cannot distinguish following Christ from following the Leader of the Republican Party. However, when dealing with more general matters philosophical—not to mention theological—Harris shows himself to be theologically ill-informed and logically untrained (or at the very least, lazy).
The first step of any debate is the definition of terms. If one is going to criticize something, one owes it to one’s audience, if to no one else, to understand and properly define the thing one is criticizing. Sam Harris, in so far as he ever defines Christianity, only shows that he does not understand what it actually is—not even the simple-minded Evangelical Christianity which he mistakes for the whole of the faith (lumping together all that do not fit his straw man description as practitioners of “religious liberalism and religious moderation,” and saying simply, “I have written elsewhere about the problems I see with” those sorts of religion—but he does not tell us where he has so written, or what his thesis was[1]).
Harris begins his book with one of the simplest of fallacies, the straw man fallacy—in fact, it is the essence of his error. His book is aimed at criticizing Christianity, but what he attacks, from the very beginning, is not Christianity, but a reductive caricature of it. He lists three things he says Christians believe:
1. The Bible is the Word of God
2. Jesus is the Son of God
3. Only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death
All of that is stated in his first sentence, which starts with, “You believe…” Expressed this way, his statement looks close enough to describing some of the beliefs of those Christians who call themselves “Evangelicals,” that he likely has many in his target audience tacitly agreeing with him at this point. However, taken as describing Christianity as a whole, his claim is actually underdetermined linguistically, inaccurate historically and exegetically, and poorly constructed both logically and epistemologically.
It is true that most Christians throughout history have referred to the Bible as “the Word of God”—but what, exactly, does that mean? Well, if a certain unfamiliar expression is used by certain people, perhaps we should ask them what they mean by it, rather than merely assuming we know, but this Harris does not do. Instead, he leaves the expression “Word of God” unexplained and undefined, allowing him to later impose expectations upon the text of the most absurd sort, such as no faithful Jew or Christian would have ever reasonably expected.
As one reads the rest of Harris’ book, it becomes clear that Harris believes that these three doctrines constitute the heart—if not the total—of Christian belief. Furthermore, it also becomes clear that he sees them as part of a process of logical entailment which, if fleshed out, would run something like this:
1. The Bible claims to be the Word of God.
2. I accept this claim as true (probably through the fallacious circular reasoning of appealing to the authority of the Bible, which as God’s Word, is correct in what it claims).
3. The Bible claims that Jesus is the Son of God, and I believe this claim on the Bible’s authority.
4. Jesus says—the Bible tells me so—that “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). I accept this as true on the authority of Jesus as the Son, which I accept on the authority of the Bible as the Word of God.
5. I read this idea to mean that only those who place their faith in Jesus as their savior can be saved; all else—quite literally—be damned.
Clearly, Christian faith, if so constructed and construed, is quite a logical house of cards. But it is not so. Throughout this book (as well as his book The End of Faith) Harris uses the word “science” to mean anything based on or grounded in reason and evidence, and “faith” to mean believing something without any real evidence at all. It is because this is what he thinks faith is that he construes Christian faith this way.
The mistake made here is two-fold: first, faith is not an epistemic leap in the dark; rather, it may well be based on a great deal of evidence and experience. Second, Christian faith is primarily a matter not of believing certain intellectual propositions true, but of putting one’s trust in the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Both of these mistakes are common among critics of Christianity (and let’s face it, also among many Christians); the second of these mistakes—failure to perceive the nature of Christian faith as personal commitment—has been made by such very educated Jewish scholars of religion as Martin Buber and Harold Bloom.
Harris’ tendentious use of “faith” and his assumption that Christian belief is based on a naïve Biblicism and an appeal to the authority of “the Word” allows him to assume an epistemic equivalency between those who accept the Bible as the Word of God and Jesus as his Son, and those who accept the Koran as the eternal, uncreated message of God, and Muhammad as his prophet. He then says:
Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you
have for being a Christian. And yet you do not find their reasons compelling.
The Koran repeatedly declares that it is the perfect word of the creator of the
universe. Muslims believe this as fully as you believe the Bible’s account of itself
[actually, the Koran is a good deal more insistent about its divine status than the
Bible is]…// Why don’t you lose any sleep over whether to convert to Islam? Can
you prove that Allah is not the one, true God? Can you prove that the archangel
Gabriel did not visit Muhammad in his cave?[2] Of course not…”[3]
And on he goes. It is all rhetorical smoke and mirrors. At no point does he seek to do the first thing a critic of something should seek to do: determine what the thing actually is. This is the same man who in his book Waking Up observed that “religion is a term like sports[4]”—echoing Wittgenstein’s observation that two things can both be “games” without having a single actual property in common—and yet, he seems to feel no compunction here against conflating together both Christianity and Islam as common examples of “faith” and suggesting that both are equally blind and equally absurd.
Of course, in doing this, he is misrepresenting both religions; for while there may be versions of Islam, and even versions of Christianity, that do indeed operate this way, attacking the weakest version of an idea, like attacking your opponent’s weakest argument, is a cheap way to create the illusion of victory without doing the difficult work of actually winning.
But that, unfortunately, is the tenor of Harris’ entire book. He reduces Christianity to his triad of doctrines, with each dependent on those before it and the first dependent on a foolish and credulous circularity of thought. He then proceeds to attack the Bible itself and the blind faith that he believes undergirds all this. But, as I said before, this is all one big straw man argument.
The three doctrines with which Harris begins his book are not all the Christian pillars he believes them to be. Nor are they as logically and epistemologically dependent on each other as he implies they are. In fact, of these three doctrines, only one is so central to the faith that it is incorporated into the traditional early creeds of the Church: Jesus Christ as the Son of God. The scriptures served their purpose, as part of the liturgical proclamation of the Gospel, but until the great shivering of Western Christendom known as the Protestant Reformation, using the scriptures alone to inductively derive doctrine without reference to its cultural, historical, or linguistic context—a major part of that context being the continued life and living tradition of the Church—was generally the practice of those who were rebuked as heretics (the most successful of those heresies, as Hillaire Belloc reminds us, was Islam itself[5]).
The scriptures record God’s difficult relationship with the nation called Israel; it is the story of his attempt to turn a people from a polytheistic, idol worshipping, child sacrificing environment of violence and war into a civilized, agrarian tribal confederacy, free of idols and gods (for, as the captain said, they “find the One quite adequate”), where “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4.3-4). The words and actions, commandments and revelations, whereby God sought to achieve these ends were both historically contingent and continually evolving, just as the teaching of any good parent is.[6] When Harris quotes passages of Old Testament law, or even New Testament epistle, as if they were timeless revelations of the eternal perfection of God’s moral character, he is forcing the Bible onto the procrustean bed of a certain type of fundamentalist Islam, which sees the Koran as uncreated, an eternal aspect of God himself. But this is neither the only Muslim way of viewing the Koran (nor the oldest), nor does it in any way resemble the Church’s view of the Bible.
Harris even tries to recruit Jesus in support of his misreading of the scriptures. He quotes Jesus’ words about the Law of Moses, “till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven…” (Matthew 5:18-20). Of course, if Mr. Harris had bothered to ask any of the Christians in this “Christian nation” (or anywhere else, for that matter), they would probably have told him—most, likely, with a hint of exhaustion at his not already understanding this—that all was “accomplished” at the Crucifixion, where Christ cried “it is finished!” This, along with the decision made at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) not to bind the Law upon Gentile converts, undercuts the arguments made by the likes of Harris that consistent Christians ought to call for the stoning of adulterers and disrespectful children (Oi vey, the Ancient Near East was a rough neighborhood!)
Just because the Church acknowledges the Bible as “the Word of God,” it does not follow that each line of scripture must be read as if it were dictated directly by God and filled to the brim with Eternal Truth. So what if the writers of Kings and Chronicles gave values for the circumference and diameter of Solomon’s “molten sea” that suggested they were reckoning using “3” as a value for pi? Why should they use more precision when, for their purposes, a round number will do? Rather than inquire what the Church, or even the Bible itself, means by the term “Word of God,” Harris takes the term out of context and imposes a meaning upon it derived from a late version of its younger sister religion, and hopes that we will not notice or object to what he is doing.
Now, as to the idea that only those who believe in Jesus as the Christ will be saved: this is a common but far from universal reading of Christian teaching. The Nicene Creed, recited by so many Christians at every Mass and every liturgy, reads “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” It also says that this is accomplished by the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who did all “for us men and for our salvation.” Thus, the Creed affirms salvation by Christ, but it is the salvation of “us men” (“us humans” being a less patriarchal rendering of the Greek original), not “us Christians.” Similarly, the scriptures affirm that “there is no other name [than that of Jesus] under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4.12). It therefore follows that all who are saved are saved by Jesus, but the Church—starting with Jesus himself, who when asked whether the saved would be few or many, dodged the question with the more practical command “strive to enter in” (Luke 13.24)—has long been reluctant to pronounce positively about how far the salvation which Christ brings extends, and to whom. It is true that Jesus did say at one point “Unless you believe that I am, you shall die in your sins” (John 8.24), but we do violence to the text if we read this as an abstract statement directed at an abstract audience. This statement was a pointed rebuke—so similar to the rebukes of previous prophets—of his fellow Jews, specifically the Pharisees, for not recognizing who it was that was speaking to them: a prophet, their Messiah, their God and King.
In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, where Christ gives us an image of the Last Judgment, the criterion for discriminating one group from the other is not some abstract acknowledgement of Jesus as the Son of God, but the showing of mercy to “the least of these.” While there have often been Christians who have comforted themselves in being among the saved, while dismissing others, Christians and non-Christians, as the damned, again we must say that this sort of thinking is not solidly grounded in either scripture or tradition. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence—scriptural, traditional, theological and philosophical—that, not only might salvation reach beyond any narrowly defined group of the “elect,” defined as Christians or any subset thereof, but that, perhaps, in the end, it may turn out true That All Shall Be Saved.[7]
Bottom line: the version of Christianity Sam Harris criticizes is not the faith of the approximately 1.75 billion Catholics and Orthodox on Earth, nor of many versions of Protestantism. Still, given his target audience, which is mostly the “Evangelical Christians” who make so much noise about this being a “Christian nation,” and who by their noise bring so much embarrassment upon the Church of Christ however it manifests—most lately by their blind adulation of a demagogic blowhard who seems on the verge of fulfilling the prophetic words of Louisiana governor Huey Long—perhaps there is something we can learn from Harris’s book, after all.
[1] Pg. 5
[2]Of course, I don’t have to prove it; even if it did happen, I must reject that teaching. St. Paul told the Galatians “But should we, or [even] an angel from Heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached to you…which ye have received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1.8-9). Having accepted the teachings of the Church, and of the Scriptures (Old Testament and New) she preaches, I find this single exhortation sufficient grounds for rejecting Later-Day revelations that contradict said teachings, such as Mormonism and Islam.
[3] Pg. 6
[4] Waking Up Pg. 19.
[5] See chapter 4 of his book The Great Heresies. The Muslims, of course, claimed to have their own scripture, the Koran.
[6] Anyone who wishes to explore this point further should consult Matthew Curtis Fleischer’s excellent book The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence (yes, you read that right: nonviolence).
[7] The title of a recently published book by David Bentley Hart, arguing for exactly what the title says.
