According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. In his “Note to the Reader,” he writes: Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris boldly challenges the influence that faith has on public life in our nation. In the course of his argument, he addresses current topics ranging from intelligent design and stem-cell research to the connections between religion and violence.

Using rational argument, Harris offers a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. Unlike theistic societies such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, we are still free to express our individual religious beliefs or disbeliefs.In response to The End of Faith, Sam Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in God. So despite the fashionable promotion of “alternative facts” by conservative elements of American society, the United States is not now, and never has been, a Christian nation. Moreover, the original Treaty of Tripoli, signed by John Adams and ratified unanimously by Congress in 1797, explicitly declared that “the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. The Constitution explicitly prohibits the establishment of Christianity or any other religion by the government, and it prohibits religious tests for holding public office. Even references to a god figure in the Declaration of Independence are couched only in vague, deistic terms. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution contains any reference to Christianity.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, was attacked vehemently as being an atheist by the Philadelphia clergy.īut even if we concede that most of these men had at least some nominal Christian affiliation, it only sharpens the distinction they wanted to maintain between individual conscience and a state-imposed religion.

However, he fails to distinguish between the self-identification of individuals and the constitutional basis on which the republic rests. His identification of all the Founding Fathers as Christians is a simplistic assertion that disregards the deistic leanings and lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus that informed the outlooks of many. Is the United States a Christian country? A recent letter writer thinks it always has been a Christian nation.

Letter to a christian nation