For ten years, Sam Harris was an intellectual hero of mine. As I transitioned out of evangelical Christianity into atheism at eighteen, Sam’s books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation were exactly what I needed to make sense of the doubts I had been having about my religion for some time. Those books spoke to me and sparked an intellectual curiosity in me that led to years of inquiry into the subjects of science, religion, atheism, and humanism. I’ve paid to see Sam speak three times; I’ve watched nearly every YouTube video of him I could find, and I’ve read every book and article he has ever published. I’ve even listened to nearly all of his podcast episodes. I was a devout Sam Harris superfan for a decade, but over the past few years, I’ve seen him move to the right on various social issues while developing a following of Alt-Right zealots in the process, and as a humanist, and thus progressive, this has had the effect of gradually putting me off until I finally reached a breaking point and cut Sam out of my life altogether. I unsubscribed from his podcast earlier this year and vow never to purchase a book of his again as long as he remains on the regressive path that he’s been on.
If you continue to follow Sam’s work, you’ll know that relentlessly criticizing the social justice movements of the Left has become a primary focus of his. Sam has pushed criticism of religion to the side and has made it a mission to fight “identity politics,” a term he uses as a pejorative. He claims to hate all identity politics, tweeting shortly after the Charlottesville tragedy that “all identity politics is detestable, but surely white identity politics is the most detestable of all,” but he overwhelmingly fixates on progressive identity politics in his work. He can’t seem to get through a podcast episode or a speaking event without lambasting what he perceives as a “moral panic” and irrational obsession with identity and political correctness that has taken over college campuses and much of the Left. He thinks it would be best for progressives to drop their focus on the issues associated with identity because he believes this focal point is dangerous and unnecessary. He’s wrong.
Take, for instance, Sam’s views on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In a 2017 episode of his podcast, Sam asserted, “I think Black Lives Matter is a dangerous and divisive and retrograde movement, and it is a dishonest movement. I mean, that’s not to say that everyone associated with it is dishonest, but I find very little to recommend in what I’ve seen from Black Lives Matter. I think it is the wrong move for African Americans to be organizing around the variable of race now. It’s obviously the wrong move. It’s obviously destructive to civil society.” Here is a profoundly privileged white man condescendingly telling African Americans what is best for them in the era of Trump. He completely minimizes the very real issues that African Americans uniquely face and claims that the movement to ameliorate said issues is actually destructive, and he doesn’t even explain why he has come to this conclusion. The level of ignorance Sam shows here is truly mind-boggling. Never mind that black men are being slaughtered in the streets and even in their own backyards, as seen in the recent murder of Stephon Clark, forget that African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white people, and don’t even think about the fact that hiring discrimination remains a serious issue for people of color in America, because Sam Harris wants you to shut up about your oppression, and stop destroying civil society.
It goes without saying that Sam’s stance on BLM is a deeply conservative and regressive one. Any serious progressive knows that BLM is an overwhelmingly positive movement that is necessary in fighting the epidemic of police brutality, systemic racism, and violence against black people in America. In order to achieve racial justice, we need to talk about racial identity. This is how progress happened during the civil rights movement, and that is how progress will happen now. To ignore the effects that race has on the way people are treated in society is to throw our hands in the air and give up on trying to fix the disparities and injustices that black people, and all people of color, face in American society. I hope the atheist community is better than that. If you question the legitimacy of BLM, then I urge you to watch the dashcam video of the murder of Philando Castile, an upstanding black man who did absolutely nothing wrong, but was murdered in cold blood anyway in front of a four-year-old child. Watch that and know that instances like this happen all too frequently to black people, but not whites, then watch the video of the daughter of Castile’s girlfriend trying to comfort her grieving mother in the back of the squad car driven by the man who just killed her mom’s boyfriend. If that doesn’t convince you that BLM is necessary, then you’re probably a lost cause.
BLM and racial justice issues aside, there are plenty of other areas of social concern that Sam has trivialized and ridiculed, such as gender injustice and LGBTQ+ rights. Last year, mathematician James Lindsay and A Manual for Creating Atheists author Peter Boghossian published a hoax paper in a pay-to-publish, low-status journal in an attempt to mock and discredit the field of Gender Studies. The paper proved to be nothing more than an “adolescent attack” against a legitimate field of study, but Sam shared it with his followers on Twitter anyway, going on to gleefully read parts of it on his podcast while praising the authors for their “nice work.” He failed to mention that this paper was rejected by a higher-status, scholarly, Gender Studies journal before it found its home in a journal of low repute with no relevance to Gender Studies at all. Historically, conservatives and religious fundamentalists are the groups that have taken issue with Gender Studies due to the field’s liberal take on gender and sexuality, but Sam has apparently joined the ranks of the Christian Right in viewing the field as something less than serious and valuable.
As someone who studied Human Rights and took various Gender Studies courses at Columbia University, I can affirm the profoundly crucial work of this progressive field of study. Gender Studies examines the complexities of gender and the ways in which it intersects with race, class, and sexuality, and how these intersections affect people’s lives and shape the world we live in. Its research has been used in the legal sphere, giving us legislation fighting sexual harassment, and it has been deeply connected with all sorts of social justice activism, helping to organize activists and educate them on how to bring about social progress. To belittle this field would be a mistake for any progressive.
The straw that finally broke the camel’s back for me, triggering my decision to stop consuming Sam’s work, was what he said in a podcast episode with religious fundamentalist, far-right pundit Ben Shapiro about the pending Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case that will determine whether or not creative business owners can legally turn away customers on the basis of their religious beliefs. The particular incident that led to this case had to do with a Christian baker denying a wedding cake to a same-sex couple planning on getting married. The homophobic baker believes that his religion should take precedence over anti-discrimination laws, hence the pending case. Ben Shapiro, unsurprisingly, told Sam on his podcast that business owners should be able to turn away whomever they want because “you don’t get to make demands on my time or on my labor because that is tyranny.” Sam, surprisingly, agreed with Shapiro, stating, “forcing people to bake a cake seems ridiculous to me, morally and politically.” Here we have the supposedly liberal atheist Sam Harris siding with a radically conservative, right-wing pundit as well as the entire Christian Right over American Atheists, Center for Inquiry, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the whole progressive movement.
As a gay man, this is personal for me. I grew up in an extremely homophobic family, and I was bullied relentlessly throughout my childhood because I was effeminate. I attempted suicide at seventeen. Eventually, I decided that I would no longer stand for homophobia in my life, and siding with the Masterpiece Cakeshop is a homophobic act. It’s more than that, it’s just pro-discrimination in general. If Masterpiece Cakeshop were to win this case, it would bring us back to a time before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when businesses had signs up reading “Whites Only.” We would undoubtedly see Christian businesses with signs declaring “Heterosexuals Only,” and it wouldn’t stop with sexual orientation. According to the ACLU, “it could open the door to discrimination against people of minority faiths, against women, against single parents, and more.” It’d only be a matter of time before we started seeing “No Muslims Allowed” signs popping up. Is this really the world we want to live in? I certainly don’t. This kind of prejudice was a major reason why I left Christianity in the first place.
What Sam Harris and the anti-social justice contingent of the atheist community don’t seem to understand is that identity politics have existed since the dawn of civilization, and the identity politics of the Left are a more modern version of identity politics that is a response to the Christian, white, male, cisgender and heterosexual (cishet) identity politics that have oppressed millions throughout the world for centuries. In colonial America, Native Americans were slaughtered by white men because they were dehumanized based on their race; African Americans were enslaved on account of their race, and women were second-class citizens with virtually no legal existence apart from their husbands entirely because of their gender. Cishet, white, male hegemony has continued into these modern times, and all of the social justice movements that have surfaced over the years, from the feminist movement, to the gay rights movement, to Black Lives Matter, have grown because women and minorities have decided not to take the injustice and all of the violence and suffering that goes with it anymore.
If progressives took Sam’s advice and dropped all issues related to identity, then we’d be left with only Christian, cishet, white, male identity politics, and that has never worked out well for most of us. It would preserve the status quo, reinforcing the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal institutions and norms that result in the dehumanization and oppression of women and minorities. It wouldn’t eliminate identity politics; it would only exclude progressive identity politics and bolster conservative identity politics.
Now, even if you can’t get into the idea of supporting social justice movements out of compassion and a humanistic need to make the world a better place, you should still support them because you’re an atheist. That’s right. Social justice is an atheist issue, not just for progressive atheists, for all atheists. Marriage equality, death with dignity, abortion, and embryonic stem cell research are great examples of issues where religious laws encroach on all of our lives. These incursions on our human rights and very ownership of and control over our bodies, health, and livelihoods are almost completely religiously incited, yet these laws are secular, impacting all of us. We can pretty much all agree in our community that we don’t want religion imposed on us in any way. If progressives abandoned women’s rights activism, LGBTQ+ rights activism, and all other forms of progressive activism based on identity, that would leave the Christian Right to run roughshod all over us, imposing their beliefs and theocratic laws on us, reinforcing Christian privilege and bringing them closer to their end goal, which is making Christian doctrine the law of the land. It would not stop with overturning Roe v. Wade and passing anti-gay laws; it would leave them with the power to tear down the wall separating church and state, inevitably putting non-Christians in an inferior, oppressed place in American society. Progressive identity politics keep the Christian Right in check, and all atheists should practice them.
Despite what he may think, Sam Harris has used identity politics to his benefit for his whole career. He built his career on his identity as an atheist, becoming one of the most prominent figures in the community. Now, he masterfully plays the cishet, white, male identity politics game, as he minimizes progressive social movements like Black Lives Matter and amplifies the voices of people who are actively hostile to social justice causes, like prejudiced polemicists Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. In 2017, Sam released a podcast episode with conservative author and political scientist Charles Murray, a man who published the infamous book The Bell Curve in 1994, in which he posits that, on average, black people have lower IQs than white people, and there is a genetic basis for this. Needless to say, this claim sparked enormous controversy and left a taint on Murray’s name ever since. Sam later justified this invitation, saying he “felt a moral imperative to provide [Murray] some cover” from his vociferous critics on the Left.
Whether or not Murray’s claims about genetics and IQ are correct is irrelevant here (though many scholars have argued against his claims). Charles Murray’s career has remained strong since he published The Bell Curve, but Sam felt the need to come to his rescue and defend him from his critics anyway, as if that was necessary in a time where we have a blatant racist as president and a major problem of law enforcement officers executing black people in the streets. What about providing some “cover” for the activists fighting police brutality and systemic racism? Why not invite someone like Shaun King, a prominent writer and activist in the BLM movement, on to his podcast to discuss racial justice and his issues with the movement? Charles Murray is a man of immense success and economic privilege, and his reputation is not a more important matter than the plague of systemic racism that is worsening in Trump’s America. It was incredibly tone-deaf and unnecessary to have this conversation in these times. It really reveals where Sam’s priorities lie, and they are certainly not with the plight of minorities. He is more concerned with the reputations of the rich and powerful. This is telling about his character.
When I think back to all of the speeches, interviews, and writings I have absorbed of Sam’s, a quality that seems to be severely lacking is compassion. He maintains that stone cold stoicism with impressive consistency, save for a few times where he got angry and defensive, and while I used to think this was just a tactic he would utilize to come across as rational and judicious, I now think it is because he is almost, if not completely, devoid of compassion. In order to bring about social justice, compassion is crucial. Empathy plus action is what leads to progress in social justice and human rights movements. As atheists, we need to be concerned with broadening our community, being more inclusive and diverse. We should project an image that invites people in without judgment, essentially an image that is polar opposite to that of the Christian Right. Sam Harris is not that image. As shown throughout this letter, he has become hostile to social justice causes and even secular causes, taking to siding with far-right theocrats over the leading atheist organizations. If we want secularism and atheism to eclipse theocratic lawmaking and Christianity in America, we must create a community that makes women and minorities feel welcome and safe, which means, as much as it pains me to say it, Sam Harris and figures of-the-like in the atheist community must be abandoned, at least until they wake up and stop fighting against progressive, humanist, and indeed atheist causes.
* You can follow Sean Avolio on Instagram at @feminist_atheist_humanist *