God is back

Why won’t religion just go away?

GOD IS BACK
How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Allen Lane. 406 pages. £25.00
ISBN 978-0-713-99902-0

And the intelligentsia said, ‘Man has grown up; let religion disappear’.

And behold, religion flourished and became mighty in all the earth.

This is the situation explored in this fascinating book. John Micklethwait is the editor of the Economist and Adrian Wooldridge is its Washington bureau chief. One is a Roman Catholic, the other an atheist, though they’re not saying which is which. A central tenet of the French Enlightenment was that modernity would kill religion, i.e. as man became enlightened, ancient superstitions, such as religion, would die out. In fact, the opposite has happened. Religion, and its influence, is growing around the world, and not only religion, but full-strength religion, e.g. Pentecostalism and Islamic fundamentalism. Not only that, but the most modern nation on the planet, America, is one of the most religious.

In China, only 11% toe the Maoist line that religion is not at all important. A conservative guess is that there are at least 65 million Protestants in China. In Russia, one poll found that 84% believe in God, and this despite 75 years of official atheism. In Africa there were ten million Christians in 1900 and 400 million today. In America, 92% believe in the existence of God and 40% participate in prayer groups or Bible study groups at least once a week. Tony Campolo says of Bill Clinton: ‘I don’t think I’ve met him where we both didn’t pray’. George Bush began each cabinet meeting with prayer.

The secular fury of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al comes partially from exasperation. Things aren't going their way. The authors conclude: ‘Man, whether the neo-atheists like it or not, is a theotropic beast: given the option, he is inclined to believe in a God’. How is it that the secularisation thesis has failed so badly? How is it that God has fought his way back into the modern world? Those are the issues this book sets out to explore.

Europe and America

Europe has pursued a radically different path from America. In France, the three pillars of the ancien regime were the aristocracy, the monarchy and the clergy. When the revolution swept the first two away, the third perished with it. Diderot commented: ‘Man shall not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest’. Freud, Marx and Darwin did much to finish the job. In Britain, the white working class has become almost totally secularised. Tony Blair had to keep his faith under wraps for fear of being thought ‘a nutter’.

America is different, and the largest sections of the book are devoted to exploring American evangelicalism. ‘The American Revolution was a unique event in modern history — a revolution against an earthly regime that was not also an exercise in anti-clericalism.’ The stroke of genius of the Founding Fathers was to separate church and state, i.e. to get government out of the religion business. That, the authors feel, introduced choice, competition and innovation to religion, was good for both the church and the state, and created the environment in which Christianity flourished in America. Thus Christianity and modernity were never enemies in America. Tocqueville commented: ‘In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country’.

America goes global

American evangelicalism, after a century of growth, over-reached itself on the issue of evolution. After the 1925 Scopes trial it retreated into a cave for half a century. It was only in the 1970s, with the rise of the religious right, that evangelicalism began to reassert itself on the national stage. Now it is rampant. The book provides vivid descriptions of empires such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, ‘pastorpreneurs’ such as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, the suburban mega-churches, and the vast media and publishing networks of evangelical America. The authors also acknowledge that there has been something of an intellectual revival, a long overdue opening of the evangelical mind.

Their analysis is intriguing. They feel that American evangelicalism is as different from the faith of the Protestant Reformation as the Protestant Reformation was from Roman Catholicism. They also assert that ‘just as (Billy) Graham took the barbed-wire fundamentalism of his youth and reshaped it for the post-war era of two-car garages and upward mobility, (Rick) Warren took post-war evangelicalism and reshaped it, yet again, for the world of suburban anomie and the search for meaning’.

Why should you care about things American? Because American evangelicalism is setting the agenda for Christianity throughout the world. Pentecostalism, which began in Los Angeles, is the great numerical success story of the 20th century, with 500 million calling themselves Pentecostal or charismatic. It is spreading faster than Islam in parts of Africa, provoking Islamic resentment. It is growing like crazy in Latin America, threatening the Roman Catholic monopoly. Five of the world’s biggest churches are in South Korea and their culture is deeply American. Several American pastorpreneurs have global networks dedicated to training local pastors and churches.

Islam

The other major player is, of course, Islam, especially Islamic fundamentalism. The authors give a stimulating and insightful account of the rise of Islamic extremism. Reaction to America and all things American has been a big factor. Sayd Qutb, the spiritual godfather of al-Qaeda, studied in America from 1948-1950. He was appalled: ‘The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. … She knows it lies in the face and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs …’ That is an extraordinary example of fantasising and condemning at the same time! One wonders how common that theme is in Islamic rage. One quarter of Osama bin Laden’s wider family have studied in the States. The authors describe Islamists as living ‘in a hybrid world — the world of their imagination, in which Islam was pure and Arab culture great, and the sordid world around them, where Arab countries had fallen to ruin and where most Muslims lived in rural poverty or in sordid slums’. They note ‘the phenomenon of alienated Arab youths across Europe dressing in jeans and baseball caps while also dreaming of the time when a purified Islam ruled the civilised world’.

Which future?

Does the future lie with Islam or with Christianity? Which faith is better able to thrive in the face of modernity? Islam has made undeniable gains in Europe. Nevertheless, the authors reckon that Islam still lags far behind. The territory controlled by Islam has been shrinking ever since the Ottomans were turned back at the gates of Vienna in 1683. The GDP of the Arab League, containing 22 countries and 300 million people, is about the same size as that of Spain. The annual ranking of the world’s top universities includes not a single Arab institution, whereas Israel has six. ‘There is depressingly little evidence of internal cultural creativity, and even less of curiosity about the outside world. More books are translated into Spanish ever year than have been translated into Arabic in the past millennium.’ ‘For every gleaming tower in Dubai, you can find a hundred examples of Muslim economies falling behind.’ The authors don’t say it in so many words, but their implication is that the only advantages of Islam are oil and violent fanaticism.

The authors acknowledge that there are many reasons why many Muslims should be hostile to the modern world. ‘But there are still reasonable questions a dispassionate observer of any faith or none should be asking. Why does Islam make so little room for freedom of conscience? Why is Islam involved in quite so many modern wars of religion? Why have so many Muslims coped so badly with modernisation? Bad luck cannot explain all of this.’ They conclude that Islam has a serious problem with the notion at the heart of Western modernity: individual conscience. They quote Benedict XVI’s statement that Islam must, first, accept religious freedom as an inalienable right and, second, draw some separation between church and state. ‘It is a mark of how far Islam still has to go that this was immediately rejected by many Muslims.’

The new wars of religion

For the foreseeable future, many of the world’s conflicts will have a religious dimension. This includes the truly terrifying possibilities of an extremist Islamic regime gaining control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal or Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth, as well as the intractable problem of the ‘overpromised’ land. It also includes the ‘culture wars’, of which they single out four: (1) life, specifically the issue of abortion; (2) family, specifically gay marriage; (3) science, including biotechnology and creationism; and (4) church and state, specifically the place of Islam in the public square — headscarves, shari’a courts, etc. Many are wondering why society tries so hard to tolerate Islam’s intolerance.

The authors conclude that ‘the great forces of modernity — technology and democracy, choice and freedom — are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it’. They feel that where there is a problem, it is not with religion itself, but with the fusion of religion and power, something that America’s Founding Fathers understood but which Europe was slow to get and Islam never has. They feel that the world is moving in an American direction, in that religion is becoming a matter of choice. They want secularists to understand that the enemy is not religion, but the union of religion and power. On the other hand, religious people must understand that faith flourishes best when it operates in a world of choice.

Conclusion

This is a fascinating and important book, a goldmine of well-researched information, full of astute observations and assessments. For a book on such a contentious subject it is remarkably fair-minded. Full marks to the authors. Highly recommended.

Reservations? I have three. First, the authors scarcely engage with the content, the basic doctrines, of the various faiths. They seem to regard the teachings of a faith as irrelevant to the shape that faith has taken and how it functions in the world. I wonder whether this reflects the old view that all religions are basically the same.

Secondly, other than a brief section on the ‘Disneyfication of Christianity’, they do not do enough to make a distinction between engaging with the modern world and compromising with or being seduced by the modern world.

Thirdly, the Reformation does not get the credit it should. It is arguable that the Reformation brought Christianity back to its biblical roots, and in so doing helped create many aspects of the modern world, including that which the authors consider most central, liberty of conscience.

Barry Seagren,
retired pastor and L’Abri staff member, Liss, Hampshire

How the global rise of faith is changing the world