Sam Harris
Letter to a Christian Nation.
Knopf, 112 pages, $16.95
If an author who has written a bestselling book then releases, a scant year later, another book on the same topic, it is fair to pause a moment to ponder why the second book got written. Perhaps he wishes to correct a flaw in the first book; perhaps he wants to expand its scope. Now, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is so much in agreement with and so much more limited in scope than last year’s bestselling The End of Faith that he could only have produced it because he believed the original work wasn’t condescending enough.
His premise, briefly stated, is that religion is bad and ought to be eliminated. (The special focus on Christianity is a nod to the American reader.) The entire book is written in the second person, ostensibly to a Christian; in this way Harris time and again gets to declare what “you” believe, how “you” should be able to support this belief, and why “you” have failed to support it properly. Since the anonymous “you” is, by definition, a fiction (“a statistic,” Harris might claim, or perhaps “a pastiche”), all Harris’s arguments are straw man arguments. And he keeps calling the straw man “you,” which has got to qualify as one of the most grating conceits a book has ever been built around.
Many of Harris’s arguments are irrefutable, but many are just irrelevant. While
