Feature
Faith of the Faithless
Why Sam Harris Can’t Stamp Out My Religion with His Own by Graeme Hunter
Many Christians will be aware of a stepped-up attack on the Christian faith in the recent secular press. As one observer says, “They estimate that the time is ripe and that professed believers have lost the will to resist.” One example is Sam Harris’s recent book The End of Faith. Having reached the New York Times bestseller list, won the PEN/Martha Albrand award for nonfiction, and sold upwards of 300,000 copies, it has made the author famous and a good deal richer as well.
Harris’s main contention is that our weapons of mass destruction have made tolerating intolerant faiths—Christianity as well as Islam—an unaffordable luxury. “Given the power of our technology, we can see at a glance that aspiring martyrs will not make good neighbors in the future. We have simply lost the right to our myths, and to our mythic identities.”
No Appeal to Faith
Harris makes a few interesting points, but I should confess to finding his book to be one of stupefying banality. To have come to such a globally negative judgment about a book is normally reason never to mention it in public, but I make an exception in this case because it has appealed to so many thousands of readers and so many learned reviewers in respected journals.
It is not surprising that Harris gives few details about his plan for ridding the world of faith. He confines himself to a few words near the conclusion of his book. “It is a matter,” he writes, “of finding approaches to ethics and to spiritual experience that make no appeal to faith and broadcasting this knowledge to everyone.”
Totalitarian implications lurk close to the surface here. Who is going to find the “approaches” of which he speaks, the ones not based on any faith? How are these sages going to be appointed, and with whose authority would they be invested?
In countries where sizable majorities adhere to some religion or other, there will be no democratic way of appointing a committee to suspend religious faith. Yet those countries (the United States and Iran, to name two) are precisely the ones in which, from Harris’s point of view, such measures would be needed.
Next, one must ask how such a committee’s report could ever be established as “knowledge.” Whatever they put forward as the truth about “spiritual experience” would amount to a committee-created religion. Would it not be derided as such by adherents of old religions and by militant secularists alike? There is no sanctioned procedure in the areas of morality and religion for determining what is knowledge and what is mere ideology.
If there is a broad social consensus about some propositions, such as the golden rule, it has been built up slowly over generations, and these propositions still lack the universal acceptance Harris’s new religion would try to impose. How does he imagine achieving such acceptance, except through totalitarian means of stifling dissent?
Finally, what does Harris mean when he speaks of his new religious ideology being “broadcast to everyone”? Advertisers know how difficult it is to reach everyone, even with the slickest advertising techniques.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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