Why would a major corporation invest big money in a gratuitous insult of millions of potential customers who, according to the company’s own figures, represent a clear majority of the American public?

That’s the obvious question raised by a splashy full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times that appeared on September 24th under the attention-grabbing headline:

“RELIGION=MADNESS?”

Along with a vaguely familiar but unmistakably menacing image of a looming, slightly askew church steeple, the layout asked: “Ready to challenge religious dogma? Read LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION by Sam Harris…The courageous new book that arms all rational Americans with powerful arguments against their opponents on the Christian right.”

At the bottom of the page, the ad features a series of statistics clearly meant to alert the reader to a growing peril and to force all “rational Americans” to protect themselves by buying the new book. “DID YOU KNOW,” the text explains, “44% of Americans think Christ will return in the next 50 years….73% of Americans believe in the existence of Hell * More than 50% of Americans have a “negative” or “highly negative” view of people who don’t believe in God * 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be ‘strongly religious.’”

This hugely expensive book promotion (such a prominently placed full page in the New York Times often costs more than $100,000) goes out of its way to assault and insult people of faith, drawing a clear dividing line between the “rational Americans” it hopes to reach and the benighted masses who believe in God, the importance of religious belief, or even the existence of hell. You might expect this sort of partisan, opinionated declaration of non-faith from some activist group like “Move On.org” or “People for the American Way” or even the American Civil Liberties Union. But the ad came from Alfred A. Knopf, one of the world’s most distinguished publishing imprints and a prominent segment of the mighty Random House empire, which also releases the work of prominent conservatives including (through its Crown Forum division) Ann Coulter, Fred Barnes and me.

Of course, one could explain their full page ad equating religion with madness as a smart, hard-headed business decision, cunningly designed to connect a new book with its atheistically-inclined audience and “Letter to a Christian Nation” is, indeed, riding high on national bestseller lists. Nevertheless, the uncompromising language employed in the text expresses such obvious contempt for religious believers as to suggest a deep-seated distaste and resentment that go well beyond commercial calculation. For instance, in advertising the explosive Ann Coulter bestseller “Godless,” Random House never placed an ad describing: “The courageous new book that arms all decent, patriotic, God-fearing Americans with powerful arguments against their opponents on the Satanic, atheist left.”

Moreover, the fanfare for the Sam Harris book (including a spirited debate on the Michael Medved show) followed similar backing by the publishing industry and major media for a seemingly unending parade of similarly themed books, including, “The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right,” “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America,” “Jesus is Not a Republican: The Religious Right’s War on America,” “With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America,” “With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy and Democracy in George W. Bush’s White House,” “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us,” “Why the Christian Right is Wrong,” “Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternative Version of American History,” “An Outline of the Bible: Why the Religious Right Can’t Call Itself Christian,” “The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,” “American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money,” “Hijacking of the Christian Church: Voices of the Religious Right,” and many, many more.

Think of all the innocent and beautiful trees cleared from the landscape and pulped into paper to feed this raging epidemic of major book releases meant to indict and expose Christian conservatives! On the Keith Olbermann “Countdown” show on MSNBC, the shrill leftist Chris Hedges announced his own forthcoming project: “American Fascist: The Coming of a Theocratic Dictatorship in the United States.”

In order to cash in and surf to shore on this trendy publishing tidal wave, it may be time to write: “Christian Killers and Cannibals: How the Religious Right Plans to Burn Your Homes, Rape Your Women and Eat Your Babies.” This attention-getting title counts as only slightly more ridiculous and more extreme than many others proudly published by major corporations. Sam Harris, for instance, suggests that “eradicating” religion represents an urgent priority that should engage the efforts of all good people—a moral necessity comparable to the abolition of slavery. “I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good,” he writes on page 87 or “Letter to a Christian Nation.” “Still, the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century….The truth is, some of your most cherished beliefs are as embarrassing as those that sent the last slave ship sailing to America as late as 1859 (the same year that Darwin published The Origin of Species).”

Meanwhile, the ecstatically positive reviews that greeted the alarmist documentary film “Jesus Camp” (which explicitly compares an enthusiastic Christian summer program for kids to a terrorist training ground) show the genuine horror of religious revival that pervades much of the secular establishment. In reviewing the film for the New York Times, a horrified Stephen Holden unambiguously equated young Evangelical believers to Communist mass murderers. “It wasn’t so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, turned the world’s most populous country inside out,” he wrote. “Nowadays, the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched.” Continued...