What does it mean to live ‘in the shadow of God’? In his book, The End of Faith , the neuroscientist and anti-religious campaigner, Sam Harris , instructs us: to understand, look to history .

Look to the medieval Inquisition which systematically tortured and murdered vast numbers of people simply for doubting the Christian scriptures, or for the crime of being Jewish, or because they were believed capable of witchcraft . Look to the Holocaust : six million dead because of a religious hatred ingrained so deeply into European society that it poisoned even the secular cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Look to history and understand that in the shadow of God resides ignorance and fear, hatred and oppression, violence and the implacable will to destroy on the basis only of what one thinks, but does not know, about the world. ¹

To many secularists such an argument requires little more than an agreeing nod of the head. The image of the deranged inquisitor, or of the innocent ‘witch’ burning at the stake, are so fixed in our culture that we need only a single word to trigger a cascade of associations and moral judgements. Harris is elaborating upon a truth that we believe we already know. If we are surprised momentarily by his juxtaposition of the Holocaust with the Inquisition , he need only remind us that without religion there would be no Jews to murder, and that the pursuit of a racial utopia was an act pure unreasoning faith . It takes a mind (mis)shaped by the intellectual habits of religion to believe totalitarianism ’s ‘outlandish dogmas…working ineluctably like the gears of some ludicrous instrument of death .’ ²

But beneath the apparent familiarity this is, in fact, a remarkably assertive use of history . The Inquisition and the Holocaust , Harris explains, allow him to ‘intimate, in as concise a manner as possible, some of the terrible consequences that have arisen, logically and inevitably, out of Christian faith .’ ³ Religion ’s drive towards the ‘depths of human depravity’ is innate, inescapable and unparalleled. It is history that records the crimes perpetrated when faith was the dominant cultural force. It is history , then, that shows us religion in its natural state, not only what it can be, but what it will be unless acted on by some external restraining influence. We see what fundamentalism is, and what lurks within ‘moderate’ faith . The God debate is conceptualised as a literal battle between past and present, between a modernist secularism striving to fulfil humanity’s potential for rational progress and the leaden anachronism of the supernatural, philosophically impotent but still wielding enormous power. Understand Islam , then, ‘as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world.’ ⁴ Harris’ language is often the most intemperate of the ‘New Atheists’ , but his sense of history , of religion as history , and of its polluting the present, is quite typical.

What is also remarkable, then, given the scale of the historical claims being made here on their behalf, is how few secularists have seriously asked whether Harris or his colleagues are right.