The End of Faith

I don’t know if you have come across the author Sam Harris yet on the nightly talk shows. He is making the rounds to promote his new book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. If he pops up while you are flipping through the channels some night, take a listen.



He is an atheist, and proud of it. He lets us know what we are up against. He makes clear that we are not overreacting if we get the impression that leading figures in the media and the academy harbor a deep and abiding contempt for people of faith.

It would not be fair to charge Harris and the secular liberal elites with being counterparts of the revolutionaries in France, Spain and Mexico, who killed priests and nuns by the thousands. Things aren’t that bad. Not even close. But there is no question that the mainstream American secularizers are seeking to isolate traditional Christianity onto the periphery of societal life.

In the November issue of First Things, Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, describes the secularists’ goal as an effort to place religious believers in a condition that “will come to resemble dhimmitude — the status of non-Muslims in a number of Islamic countries. The dhimmi is tolerated as long as his religion is kept private and his public acts do not offend the state religion.”

Precisely. They will treat us civilly and let us pray our rosaries, as long as we keep quiet about matters like abortion and gay marriage. When we speak out on those issues we become religious fanatics and a threat to American values — the “American Taliban.” The angry reaction of the media and academic elites to the “Evangelicals” in the red states who voted for George Bush is part of the syndrome.

I have not read Harris’s The End of Faith. There are too many other titles on my reading list for me to get to it. But I think we can trust the account of his thesis in Publisher’s Weekly:

“Harris calls for the end of religious faith in the modern world. Not only does such faith lack a rational base, he argues, but even the urge for religious toleration allows a too-easy acceptance of the motives of religious fundamentalists. Religious faith, according to Harris, requires its adherents to cling irrationally to mythic stories of ideal paradisiacal worlds (heaven and hell) that provide alternatives to their own everyday worlds. Moreover, innumerable acts of violence, he argues, can be attributed to a religious faith that clings uncritically to one set of dogmas or another. Very simply, religion is a form of terrorism for Harris. Predictably, he argues that a rational and scientific view — one that relies on the power of empirical evidence to support knowledge and understanding — should replace religious faith. We no longer need gods to make laws for us when we can sensibly make them for ourselves.”

Admittedly, atheists have been pushing this proposition for centuries now. But Harris is a clever fellow. He has packaged the atheists' case in a way that has the potential to disarm modern Americans who have not thought through the implications of the First Amendment’s “no establishment of religion” clause. Let me give you an example. Recently, on one of the talk shows — I am not sure; it may have been Hannity & Colmes or Scarborough Country — I heard him complain that the Bush White House is “honeycombed” with Christian prayer groups that meet before the workday and during lunch breaks to pray for guidance as they conduct the nation’s business.

Your first reaction probably will be, “So what? If these people are praying when they are off the clock, what business is it of Sam Harris?” But, Harris knows that will be your reaction. Before anyone else on the panel with him on the show could register that objection, he cut them off at the pass. “If you think that is OK,” he said, “what would be your reaction if I told you that large numbers of the White House staff were meeting every day to pray to Zeus or to Allah?”

He has a point. He could have also asked what our reaction would be if we learned that large numbers of the White House staff were meeting daily to pray to Wicca goddesses or engage in satanic rituals. Remember, the question is not what we would think if we learned that an isolated individual on the White House staff was praying to some pagan god. Most Christians could shrug that off. The question is how we would react if we learned that large numbers of the White House staff were meeting daily for Islamic prayer or pagan rituals. I don’t think there is any doubt that it would not sit well with us.

Harris’s point is that non-Christians in America react the same way when they discover that the Bush White House is honeycombed with Christian prayer groups. “Honeycombed” is not a precise term, but I don’t doubt that the Bush administration contains enough practicing Christians for it be plausible that more than a few Christian prayer groups meet regularly inside the White House. Evangelical Protestants have a fondness for these expressions of faith. They are counterparts to a devout Catholic’s daily Mass.

So, how do we answer Harris? Why do we think it permissible — even commendable — for Christian prayer groups to convene inside the White House, when we would object if there were numerous Muslim prayer groups meeting in the building, to say nothing of satanic cells? Does not the First Amendment, at the very least, require that our government be genuinely neutral toward all forms of religious belief? Do we think that Christianity is different?

Yes, we do think Christianity is different. The problem is how to say that, while at the same time paying respect to the First Amendment and without being ill-mannered toward our fellow citizens who are not Christian. Christian scholars and journalists have shown us how to do it. Robert Bork and Father Richard John Neuhaus come to mind. They have demonstrated in scholarly language that the First Amendment was not written to remove religion from the “public square”; that the Founding Fathers and American judicial scholars, until the last half of the twentieth century, saw nothing inappropriate about the Christian values of the vast majority of the American people making an impact on our laws and public policy. “Blue laws” and Sunday closings were once as American as apple pie.

The problem is that we are not all scholars. Ordinary Christians are left disarmed when confronted with the charge that they are “imposing their religious beliefs” on their fellow citizens when they take a position on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. Or when they are confronted with Sam Harris’s complaints about all those Christians praying in the White House.

I don’t know if it is possible for someone to come up with a sentence or two — the bumper sticker phrases, if you will — that encapsulate why it is not “un-American” for Christians to seek to shape American public policy in accordance with their moral convictions, any more than it is un-American for secular intellectuals to seek to shape public policy on the basis of their reading of Marx or the deconstructionists. But we are likely to lose the culture wars if someone doesn’t come up with them. We will get an America to the liking of Sam Harris.

James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.

(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)

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