LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION: A Challenge to Faith
by Sam Harris
Bantam Press £10
AMERICAN FASCISTS: The Christian Right and the War on America
by Chris Hedges
Cape £12.99
Barack Obama, the charismatic US Democrat hopeful, recently felt moved to tell
voters how the holy spirit of Jesus Christ fell upon him as he knelt in
humble obeisance at a church in Chicago. Invoking the Lord is pretty much
obligatory for any aspiring American politician — especially so, I suppose,
when Heartland USA might otherwise assume you to be a pinko commie Muslim.
As Sam Harris puts it, in his short and not wildly convincing essay, “no
other developed nation can match America for her piety”. Only about one in
10 American citizens believes that life on earth evolved naturally, and —
frighteningly — a clear majority believe that the earth was created 5,000 or
6,000 years ago, some time after the Sumerians invented glue (as Harris
dryly notes). America is immensely powerful, then — and also immensely
ignorant. Away from the coasts, God holds dominion — and He is not a
terribly pleasant God, either, but one consumed with an obsessive vengeance
and prone to acts of despotic violence.
Liberal atheists in America have, of course, long bemoaned this fact. But now,
with a particularly God-fearin’ White House incumbent who seems, on the
surface, to embody all the worst traits of the evangelistic far right — a
penchant for smiting, possessed of implacable conviction and, frankly, a few
parables short of the full gospel — the complaints have become howls of
outrage.
Harris’s book is addressed to the most devout and obdurate believers in
fundamentalist Christianity, and perhaps for this reason it is not pitched
at a particularly high level. It takes the form of a demolition of literal
biblical truths and the efficacy of faith. For example: “Somewhere in the
world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill
her . . . this girl’s parents believe, as you believe, that an all-powerful
and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to
believe this? Is it good that they believe this? No.”
So, God allows little girls to die, does he? Gee, Sam — as a Christian, that
supposed paradox never occurred to me. A little later, the logic-chopping
becomes unintentionally hilarious: “In two places . . . the Good Book states
that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3:1. As
an approximation of the constant pi, this is not impressive . . . modern
computers now allow us to calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like.”
The point Harris is trying to make is this: if the Bible is the word of God,
it should have told us absolutely everything there is to know about the
world, including a more precise definition of pi. That, I would argue, is a
palpable absurdity.
But from a more pragmatic perspective, the main problem afflicting this essay
is that it comes exclusively from an unreconsti-tuted left-liberal position.
That’s fine by me, but it will estrange the very people whom Harris is
attempting to reach. He defends those crucial touchstone issues — abortion
and stem-cell research — when he might have been better advised to offer
rigorous and respectable atheistic opposition to them (of which there is
plenty), much though that would have simply gone against his grain. As it
is, he confirms the stereotype of the east coast, godless liberal.
There is a similar problem with the journalist Chris Hedges’s book, American
Fascists, not least its title (which he spends an awful lot of time
attempting to justify). He is as convinced and partisan as the quite
appalling collection of fundamentalist Christians he masterfully exposes.
For example, he argues that right-wing, Christian Republican states have the
worst levels of poverty, violence, crime and marital breakdown; there is a
causal link here, he implies: right-wing policies have created the problem.
But the remainder of his book suggests that the causal link is precisely the
other way around: that social and economic despair drive a disconsolate
population towards the easy certainties of the church and vindictive
right-wing politics.
That being said, this is a cogently argued polemic, and full to the brim with
quite exceptional reportage. Hedges signs up to an evangelists’ seminar
given by one Dr D James Kennedy, who advises recruits not to carry a large
Bible when out doing a spot of converting. Keep a small one hidden in your
pocket, he says: “Don’t show your gun until you’re ready to shoot it.”
And there are the endless poor, huddled masses who have turned to Christ after
some form of misery (economic, social or physical) has been inflicted upon
them, and who, as a consequence, need someone else to victimise —
homosexuals, single mothers, Muslims, atheists. And there are the filthy
preachers and radio talk-show hosts who exploit this despair for all it is
worth, trousering vast sums of money into the bargain. This is all terrific
stuff, a snapshot of an alienated population as vivid in its way as Thomas
Frank’s recent and more nuanced What’s the Matter with America? Frank,
though, at least allowed for the possibility that the fundamentalists had a
legitimate sense of grievance, and that some of those on whom they turned
their “guns” were, indeed, guilty.
Incidentally, the foreword to Harris’s essay is provided by a certain Richard
Dawkins. “Letter to a Christian Nation will stir you . . . Read it if it is
the last thing you do. And hope that it isn’t,” he concludes, somewhat
apocalyptically. You can depend upon Dawkins. Wherever an atheist is doing
battle, Richard is ready to wade in with his great big cudgel. He has
metamorphosed from eminent scientist to preeminent atheist, the most devout
of all believers in nonbelief. When the Rapture comes and the true believers
in Christ are lifted up to God’s side and the earthly world is left to the
benighted not-saved, the sinners branded on their foreheads with the mark of
the beast, Richard will make an agreeably erudite and charming Antichrist.
Apocalypse now
America’s Christian right doesn’t simply pray all day — it reads, too. The
Left Behind novels, a series of Christian apocalyptic thrillers, are among
the bestselling books in America, with more than 62m copies in print.
Highlights include a final battle between Christ and the forces of the
Antichrist, with “bodies bursting open from head to toe at every word that
proceeded out of the mouth of the Lord”. The good guys go to heaven,
naturally. And the bad guys? “Their flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and
their tongues disintegrated.” Available at the Books First price of £9
(Harris) and £11.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Read on...
books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Bantam Press £20)
Hard-hitting rebuttal of religion
