Last night, in lieu of playing Metroid, I punched down Sam Harrises' teensy little book, Letter to a Christian Nation. It was such a quick read that I found myself thinking: is this even a book? It rings in at under 100 pages, which are spaced and fonted as generously as that five-pager for ES 102 that you started at two in the morning the night before it was due. I'm pretty sure I've read longer blog entries. So it isn't really a book in that sense, but to be fair, it might be considered a book in the Biblical sense. It is, after all, an epistle. An epistle...(cue shrieking slasher movie violins)...FROM HE-E-E-E-E-E-LLLL!!!! Ahem.
From the very first sentence, it's clear: This letter was not written to me. Harris makes it clear that liberal and moderate Christians are not his target audience. Why? Well, for two reasons. First, he considers us essentially irrelevant. Americans Christians are almost entirely fundamentalist, says Harris, and progressive evangelicals and the remnants of the mainline denominations are just not where it's at.
Second, the very existence of moderate people of faith doesn't jibe with the dualistic worldview that he shares with fundamentalism. In another example of that peculiar co-dependence between literalism and atheism, everything is couched in terms of either-or, black or white, good and evil. Subtlety, nuance, and an awareness of the complexity and depth of faith are not to be found.
That binary approach is very rhetorically convenient, because it permits Harris to develop his arguments in a simplistic way. His approach demands that faith be defined very narrowly as fundamentalism, something that he does repeatedly. Those who are not fundamentalist, says Harris with a wink to his presumed literalist audience, "..don't know what it is like to really believe in God." As my friend Bugs would say...
Comments (2)
I know exactly that false dichotomy to which you refer. I see some of friends embodying that.
Hadn't thought about the interdependence of literalism and atheism, there's a lot there.
Now whenever I see your avatar picture I'll imagine he's screaming "FROM HEEEELLL!"