Letter to a Christian Nation

Sam Harris, a neuroscience researcher and author of The End of Faith, writes this polemic in direct response to thousands of hostile letters he received from Christians after that book's publication. Published in 2006, Letter to a Christian Nation takes the form of an open letter addressed to a conservative Christian who holds, at minimum, that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that only those who accept the divinity of Jesus Christ will be saved after death. Harris states that his purpose is to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of committed Christianity and to arm secularists against the Christian Right, the conservative Christian political movement in the United States. He frames his urgency with polling data: 53 percent of Americans are young-earth creationists who believe God created Earth only thousands of years ago, only 12 percent accept unguided evolution, and 44 percent believe Jesus will return within 50 years. Harris calls this confluence of belief a moral and intellectual emergency.

Harris opens by establishing common ground with his Christian reader. Both sides agree the stakes are binary: The Bible is either the word of God or it is not. He acknowledges that if Christianity is correct, he has squandered his life in the worst possible way, yet this prospect does not worry him, which he says should indicate how inadequate he finds the evidence for Christian belief. He dismisses religious liberals and moderates as largely irrelevant to the debate, arguing that the respect they demand for their own beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths.

To illustrate the arbitrariness of religious conviction, Harris draws an analogy between Christianity and Islam. Every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that the Christian has for being a Christian, yet the Christian finds those reasons unpersuasive. Harris contends that Christians already know what it is like to be atheists with respect to Islam, and that he simply extends the same skepticism to all religions.

Harris then challenges the Bible's status as a moral guide. He catalogs biblical passages that command parents to beat disobedient children, stone people to death for heresy and adultery, and kill family members who worship other gods. Against the common claim that Jesus abolished Old Testament law, Harris quotes Matthew 5:18–19, where Jesus appears to endorse every detail of it. He concedes that Jesus spoke profoundly about love but notes that earlier teachers, including Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Confucius, offered the same instruction centuries before. He holds up Jainism, an ancient Indian religion centered on nonviolence, as a counterexample, noting that Martin Luther King Jr. acquired his commitment to nonviolence from Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu, who in turn drew on Jain principles. The Bible's contradictory teachings, by contrast, enabled influential Christian theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to endorse the torture or killing of heretics.

Harris devotes particular attention to the Bible's treatment of slavery, quoting passages in which God explicitly permits buying and owning slaves and regulates the sale of daughters into sexual slavery. Jesus never objects to slavery in the New Testament, and the apostle Paul instructs slaves to obey their masters. Harris argues that while nineteenth-century abolitionists were morally right, pro-slavery Christians had the stronger theological argument. He also critiques the Ten Commandments, noting that the first four concern only religious observance, the next five express moral intuitions found across human cultures and even among other primates, and the tenth is strikingly trivial.

Harris contends that objective moral truths do not require a lawgiving God: If there are better and worse ways to seek happiness, knowledge of psychological and social realities can ground morality without scripture. He then argues that religion divorces morality from the reality of human suffering. He accuses Christians of expending more moral energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide and of prioritizing embryos over the lifesaving potential of stem-cell research. He notes that Christian conservatives opposed a vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection linked to cervical cancer, despite the vaccine's demonstrated efficacy, because the virus served as a deterrent to premarital sex. He cites data showing that abstinence-only sex education correlates with dramatically higher rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases compared to other developed nations. On abortion, Harris describes El Salvador, where the practice is illegal under all circumstances, and women face up to 30 years in prison for terminating a pregnancy, a policy promoted by church leaders.

Harris presents the problem of evil as decisive evidence against a benevolent, omnipotent God. He uses Hurricane Katrina as an extended example: Over a thousand people died and nearly a million were displaced, yet God provided no advance warning; only science did. He surveys additional catastrophes, including the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, arguing that no disaster has proved capable of shaking the world's faith. He frames the problem of theodicy—the question of why an all-powerful, loving God permits suffering—as resolved: If God exists, He is either impotent or evil. The most reasonable explanation, Harris concludes, is that the biblical God is a fiction.

Harris further argues that Christians use their own moral intuitions to judge which parts of scripture are wise and which are barbaric, then turn around and claim that humans cannot rely on those same intuitions. This circular reasoning, he contends, undermines the project of grounding morality in the Bible.

Addressing the claim that religious faith is necessary for charitable behavior, Harris contrasts Christian missionaries, who sometimes preach against condom use in AIDS-devastated African communities, with secular organizations like Doctors Without Borders, which provide medical aid without proselytization or misinformation. He discusses Mother Teresa as a case study, acknowledging her compassion but arguing that her religious commitments led her to declare abortion the greatest destroyer of peace. He challenges the notion that atheists are immoral, noting that 93 percent of National Academy of Sciences members reject the idea of God yet are at least as law-abiding as the general population. He counters the charge that dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong sprang from atheism by arguing that these figures embraced quasi-religious personality cults and political dogmas, and he traces Nazi anti-Semitism to its roots in medieval Christianity. Drawing on the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), he shows that the least religious nations, including Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, and Sweden, score highest on measures of societal health, while the most religious nations score lowest.

Harris argues that the conflict between science and religion is unavoidable, since religions make specific factual claims on poor evidence that intrinsically conflict with scientific findings. He attacks biblical prophecy, tracing the doctrine of the virgin birth to a mistranslation: The Hebrew word 'almâ in Isaiah 7:14 means "young woman," not "virgin," as the Greek rendering suggests. He argues that a genuinely omniscient author would have included knowledge far beyond what any first-century person could produce. He defends evolution as settled fact, notes that the United States ranked 33rd out of 34 countries in acceptance of evolution in a 2005 survey, and dismantles intelligent design as religious advocacy masquerading as science. He catalogs examples of poor biological design: over 99 percent of species are extinct, the human respiratory and digestive tracts share plumbing that causes thousands of children to choke each year, and the female pelvis is poorly suited for childbirth, a deficiency that can cause obstetric fistulas, injuries from prolonged obstructed labor that affect over two million women worldwide.

In his final sections, Harris argues that competing religious doctrines have fractured the world into hostile moral communities, listing conflicts from Palestine to Northern Ireland to Kashmir. He contends that the September 11 hijackers were motivated not by poverty but by genuine belief in Paradise. He warns of Islam's rapid growth in Europe, arguing that some Muslim communities resist secular values while exploiting tolerance to maintain religious hostility, anti-Semitism, and misogyny.

Harris closes by comparing the project of overcoming religious faith to the abolition of slavery, which once seemed equally impossible. He insists that billions of people across all traditions have had transformative spiritual experiences, demonstrating that such experiences do not validate the truth claims of any particular religion. The letter, he writes, is the product of failure: the failure of previous critiques, of schools, and of media to hold religious certainties to honest scrutiny. He ends with tentative hope.