Harris has no sense of history, and no understanding of the traditional role of religious argumentation in promoting liberalized versions of faith. Harris buries his rasping, potentially valuable critique of genuinely obscurantist ideas beneath undiscerning attacks on people he calls “religious moderates.” Both The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation reject the liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, liberal Muslims, and so on, who could be Harris’s strategic allies. Reviewer after reviewer has treated Harris’s books as not worth systematic refutation because the author can’t tell the difference between Jerry Falwell and Peter Gomes, and can’t distinguish between the Muslim fanatics who attacked the World Trade Center and the liberal Muslims written about in Jytte Klausen’s The Islamic Challenge. Harris accuses religious moderates of serving as covers for more outrageously irrational versions of the faith. Yet these religious moderates are, like him, inheritors of the best features of the Enlightenment, and are thus his natural allies. Harris reveals no understanding of the historical circumstances that have led many highly intelligent and well-educated people to espouse religious faith, or of the range of ideas that have passed as religious. The popular novel by Marilynne Robinson Gilead explores a liberal religious culture with strong roots in the United States, yet Harris is altogether oblivious to the character of this culture. Harris’s logic is similar to that of the communist international’s theory of social fascism as advanced in the early 1930s, when social democrats in Germany, the United States, and other nations were said to be functionally indistinguishable from fascists simply because they had not renounced bourgeois reform in order to side with the communists.
(David A. Hollinger, "Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?," Representations 101 [winter 2008]: 144-54, at 151 [endnotes omitted])
