Kurtz comes at the social problem of atheism from a different angle:
Conservatives like George Weigel (The Cube and the Cathedral), Claire Berlinski (Menace in Europe), and Mark Steyn (America Alone) argue that Europe is being slowly killed off by its secularism. These authors root demographic decline, and the reluctance to stand up to Islamist foes, in a secular presentism, unconcerned with the existence or fate of future generations. I think Weigel, Berlinski, and Steyn have got a point, but it can certainly be debated.
Take a look at Russia, however, and you see a country with decades more experience of atheism than Western Europe, and a far more advanced case of demographic decline. To be sure, there are plenty of confounding factors that need to be acknowledged and accounted for. But as a candidate for the case that atheism has serious real-world costs, Russia is at the top of the list.
It is significant, I think, to note that Harris happened to leave out all of the countries of Eastern Europe from his discussion of social health in “Letter to a Christian Nation”. While he brings up the examples of France and the Scandinavian countries as being shining paragons of atheist paradise, the omission of those countries where atheism has been established longer and more powerfully is so obvious as to approach the appearance of disingenuousness at a minimum.
If it were someone else, one would have to give them the benefit of the doubt. But Harris has been caught out so often, and so badly, in making factual errors and engaging in deceptive spin, that it’s more likely more intellectual dishonesty on his part.