Harari's Humanist Horror Story:
Why History Matters
8. Why Misrepresentation Matters
It might be said that all this is merely a scholar's quarrel over labels. It is not an idle worry as Harari's concocted history could feed malicious rhetoric against humanists of today. Given Harari's status as a professor of history and his reach of millions through his international best-sellers, the risks of persecution are real. The raw materials for such scapegoating are already in circulation. I give you three examples.
Voddie Baucham was an American Reformed Baptist pastor, author and educator. He was Dean of Theology till 2024 at African Christian University in Zambia and founding president in 2025 of Founders Seminary in Florida. In his series on The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, Baucham [2006] demonized humanism as nihilistic consumerism: 'Who am I? According to secular humanism, I'm nothing. Why am I here? To make the most of it, to consume and enjoy while I can.'
Timothy LaHaye was an American Baptist evangelical Christian minister, political activist and author. He founded a number of conservative Christian advocacy groups, including the Council for National Policy, Californians for Biblical Morality and the American Coalition for Traditional Values. He was a co-creator of the highly influential Moral Majority. Alarmingly, he demanded the removal of all humanists from public positions of authority:
Most people today do not realize what humanism is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country---and one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism . . . We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders.
[LaHaye 1980: Introduction]
David Noebel is founder and former director of Summit Ministries in the U.S., a Christian leadership training organization. In Noebel's [2009] piece on The Worldviews of Destruction in the 20th Century, humanism is cast as a prime villain:
The 20th century has been the century in which various humanistic worldviews vigorously and systematically eradicated the biblical Christian worldview from the public square. If this continues into the next century one can expect the same results — death and destruction.
In that same article, he warns that public acceptance of the humanists' view of human evolution 'would bring with it a brutalization of the human race such as it had never seen before' and blames this acceptance for the rise of 'Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin'. When a writer of Harari's stature and reach hands this kind of demonization a veneer of scholarly respectability, he is not merely making an academic error. He is feeding a narrative that has real targets—the living humanists who work in our universities, schools and public institutions.
