John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, New York, Penguin Press, 2009, 405 pages.
OVERVIEW.
God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, by Micklethwait and Woolridge, is a long, but easy-to-read and fascinating book.
Authors
Micklethwaite and Wooldridge are editors for The Economist.
They take a journalistic rather than academic approach, although the authors'
Oxford University background emerges in their philosophical and historical
commentary.
The authors
first show the gradual rise of secularism from the ashes of the Wars of
Religion in Europe in the 1600s. From that trend toward secularism arose the
secular thesis, the expectation that modernity—the advent of democracy, respect
for reason, rising prosperity, and advancing technology—would marginalize
religion, pushing it gradually into a private realm and out of the "public
square." Europe exported this secular view through colonialism and trade.
The worldwide secular movement peaked in the 1950s and has been slowly
retreating in the face of renewed enthusiasm for religion among Christians,
Muslims, and others. This enthusiasm could lead to new wars of religion, but
now on a global scale. The book does not stop with description of resurgent
religion. It goes further.
When religionists force their ideas onto other individuals, they attack individual rights. Politically that is the problem commonly caused by resurgent religion. The solutions that
the authors offer range from proven to failed. The most sensible prescription
by these two British authors is their recommendation to adopt the American
ideal of separation of Church and State, a relationship that leaves religious
movements free to compete with each other for adherents. The authors' faulty
prescriptions are many. Essentially they consist of applying religion as a
solution to the problem of religious threats to liberty: Seeking compromises
with religionists and "interfaith dialogues" between religionists,
for example, do not work to protect individual rights. In a nutshell, the value
of the book is in its descriptions, not in its prescriptions.
ORGANIZATION
OF THE BOOK. The complexity of the book is demonstrated by the
authors' own description of the plan of the book:
The
first part of the book tries to explain why Europe and America have evolved in
such different ways over the past two hundred or so years. The second part
examines the way that religion (and especially [religious] pluralism) is
thriving in today's America—as an economic force, an intellectual catalyst and
a political influence. The third part examines how America is exporting its
version of religion. The fourth part examines the spread of wars of religion,
in various guises, from the battles for people's souls to culture wars to
terrorism and violence. In the conclusion we look for the best formulas for
avoiding future explosions. (p. 26)
In the
Introduction, the authors make a rapid but vivid tour of religious developments
around the world, but the heart of the book is about religion in America. The
authors propose an ironic theme: Separation of Church and State leads to
vibrant religious movements.
The
Founding Fathers' clever compromise over religion not only allowed God to
survive and prosper in America, it also provided a way of living with religion—of
ensuring that different faiths can coexist, and of taming a passion that so
often turns the religious beast to savagery. This was one of the Founders'
greatest gifts to man: getting rid of the established church, establishing a
firm distinction between public reason and private faith, and consigning
theocracy to the past along with monarchy and aristocracy. Our instinct is that
this is a lesson that people the world over—believers, atheists and agnostics—need
now more than ever. (p. 27)
Besides
geographic breadth, the book has historical depth too. In the four chapters of
Part One, "Two Roads to Modernity," the authors examine the long
roads that have led to today's religious and secular movements, roads that
started back 300 years in the Enlightenment and ran in diverging ways through
European and American history up to today. For the authors, the milestones
along the way were the thinkers and their thoughts: Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson,
Comte, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and others. To the authors of God
is Back, ideas matter because ideas lead individuals to actions. Ultimately,
actions are the authors' main concern: positively, the freedom for individuals
to pursue their religious interests, and, negatively, avoiding wars of religion
that range from verbal conflicts to slaughter.
Beyond the
historical background and the geographic survey, the main value of the book is
the author's skill in selecting individuals, past and present, who represent
ideas in action, and then in presenting a concise, vivid profile of each. The
reader meets Wang, a management consultant living in an apartment in a gated
community in Shanghai. He is also the organizer of a quasi-legal Christian
"house church," a group of rising, mostly young professionals who
meet to discuss passages from the Bible, and, along the way, to denounce
homosexuality and the theory of evolution. (pp. 1-2)
The reader sees
Bill Hybels, a "pastorpreneur" who applied business techniques to
founding Willow Creek Community Church, an Evangelical group that has built a
"church" that contains food courts, basketball courts, coffee shops,
parking spaces for 3,850 cars, meeting rooms for specialized groups such as
Christian motorcyclists, and large auditoriums for sermons. (pp. 183-185)
The reader meets
Amr Khaled, the world's most popular Islamic preacher:
Amr
Khaled is an even more American [influenced] figure. He turned himself first
into Egypt's most popular [Muslim] preacher and then into Islam's answer to [Christian
evangelist] Billy Graham by eschewing almost everything associated with
traditional imams. He has no official religious credentials or position. He
dresses in Western clothes—suits and polo shirts mostly—rather than religious
robes. He performs on television and in cavernous conference chambers rather
than in mosques—and he puts on a dramatic performance, raising and lowering his
voice and sometimes bursting into tears.… He urges his audience to take control
of their lives and make sure that they succeed in business.… Hopeful Westerners
regard Khaled as a possible bridge to the Islamic world. But in fact, much as
with Billy Graham, there is a hard core to his soft-edged faith. He tells
people that Allah loves them… [b]ut he also insists on the literal truth of the
Koran. He talks about women's empowerment. But he also supports sharia and is
an important force behind the growing fashion for the veil. (pp. 240
and 241)
THEMES.
What is the point of the authors' descriptions of the individuals,
organizations, and movements that are reviving religion today? The authors
emphasize several subthemes throughout the book. These subthemes lay the
groundwork for the authors' final conclusions. First, the authors emphasize the
failure of the theory long held by secular intellectuals, that modernity—which
the authors define as the culture of secularity, technology, the marketplace,
and material prosperity—will steadily displace religion from the public square
and into the sphere of private belief, if any.
Today
an unsettling worry nags at Western liberals: what if secular Europe (and for
that matter secular Harvard and secular Manhattan) is the odd one out? They are
right to be worried. It now seems that it is the American model that is
spreading around the world: religion and modernity are going hand in hand, not
just in China but throughout much of Asia, Africa, Arabia and Latin America. It
is not just that religion is thriving in many modernizing countries; it is also
that religion is succeeding in harnessing the tools of modernity to propagate
its message. The very things that were supposed to destroy religion—democracy
and markets, technology and reason—are combining to make it stronger.
(p. 12)
The authors do
demonstrate that "democracy," (representative government respecting
basic rights), adoption of business techniques for spreading ideas, and the use
of technology created in a market economy are fueling the growth of
enthusiastic religious movements. The authors do not demonstrate that reason—as
distinct from mysticism—is making religion stronger. However, the authors do
show that the Evangelical movement, formerly noted mostly for its
"hot" behavior, that is, its emotional displays, is now moving toward
more intellectualism. (That is bad news for advocates of reason; a veneer of
intellectualism laid over mysticism gives mysticism an unearned place in public
discussion.)
The authors'
portrait of King's College, an evangelical school located in the Empire State
Building at the time of writing the book, is one piece of evidence the authors
use to show the intellectualism and ambition of the growing religious movement.
The authors quote Stan Oakes, the chancellor of the college, to show the
movement's ambition in activism:
The
stated mission of King's College is to create 'ambassadors of Jesus Christ to
lead and serve the world': it wants its students to leave with a biblical
worldview but also prepared to beat the best and brightest from the secular
world. It offers two majors, business and what Oxfordians call PPE (politics, philosophy
and economics). It focuses on 'three freedoms', spiritual freedom, political
freedom, and economic freedom. Indeed Oakes is almost as enthusiastic about
Adam Smith as he is about the Almighty. (pp. 352-353)
King's
College deliberately brings young Christians to the heart of the beast. 'Every
sin in the world is within five blocks of The Empire State Building', [Oakes]
says. Where better to strengthen your faith than a city that is rife with
temptations? And where better to train people to exercise influence on the
world than the capital of the media and financial world, not to mention the
home to the United Nations? (p. 353)
Another subtheme
of the book is the authors' view that global capitalism, which the authors
appear to support in a vague way, inevitably causes problems—but religion can
solve those problems, the authors say. One of the problems is "quest for
community in an increasingly atomized world." Throughout the book the
authors show that successful churches create an active social life for the
religious. A second problem that the authors think arises from global
capitalism is the religionists' "desire to counter-balance choice,"
which the global market brings in great abundance, "with a sense of moral
certainty" (p. 139) which is missing from conventional, relativistic
secular culture. The authors explain:
In a
world of greater competition, displacement and opportunity, faith has become a
useful (though obviously not necessary) attribute for prosperous people. But
religion also fulfills a role lower down in society, providing support for
those who have lost out in global capitalism or feel bewildered by it. Faith
acts as a storm shelter. (p. 145)
The authors seem
to be unaware of a third alternative: neither relying on mysticism (faith,
revelation, holy scripture) for moral guidance, nor abandoning absolute
morality through relativism, but an absolute morality drawn by reason from
observation of man and the world.
FLAWS.
God is Back contains other flaws. They range from the
particular, such as misidentifying philosopher Immanuel Kant as a supporter of
the Enlightenment instead of marking him as a destroyer of it (p. 33), to
misunderstanding concepts crucial to a free society. For instance, the authors say:
"Americans have surprisingly little difficulty in reconciling their
[religious] faith with their country's secular creed of individualism. More
than one in four American adults (28 percent) have swapped the religious
tradition in which they were raised for another tradition (e.g., Catholicism to
Protestantism or Judaism to 'no religion')" (p. 132). Having the freedom
to change one's religion, a worldview that holds that God or some supernatural
dimension is sovereign, is not the same as individualism, which is the ethical
view that the human individual is sovereign in making decisions about his own
life.
Some of the
authors' proposed solutions to the foreign policy problems raised by revived
religion are seriously flawed. For example, the authors suggest that Islamist
groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood (which is now bringing sharia to Egypt)
should be part of the discussion of the future of the Middle East: "The
cost of excluding Islamist groups from discussion is often higher than that of
letting them in" (p. 364). The authors also recommend "interfaith
dialogue" (pp. 364 and 365-366) as a way to reduce conflict between
religious groups. The authors seem to downplay an Islamist threat when they
object to calls for military action against Iran because, they say, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, "has closer relationships with
secular-minded populists in Latin America, particularly Hugo Chavez [dictator
of Venezuela], than he does with coreligionists next door [to Iran]" (p.
363). Also, the authors see a "substantial difference" between
"nihilist groups like Al Qaeda, with whom there is little room for
compromise" and the "more territorially minded ones like Hamas"
(361), which continues to attack Israel, an ally of the United States.
VALUE
FOR PRO-REASON ACTIVISTS. What matters most about God is
Back is not the authors' prescriptions for dealing with the renewal
of religion but their descriptions of the modern religious mentality, in its
various forms, the movements that are competing for followers, and the intellectual
basis that the modern religionists have for their aspirations and their
demands. All of that provides useful background to those who are consistently
pro-reason and working for a completely secular political system.
In particular, God
is Back aids secular activists who want to learn to be more effective in their
activism by selectively adopting techniques that have worked for religionists
and probably will work as well for their opponents. For example, the authors
explain the quiet but long-term rise of "theocons" in the decades
after World War II. An example of a theocon is Michael Novak, author of The
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982). Novak "argued that capitalism is
based on theological underpinnings" (p. 201).
The
theocons started from a tricky position. As Americans, they were treated with
suspicion by the curia in Rome; as Roman Catholics, they were treated with
suspicion in America by both the Evangelicals, who dominated the religious
right, and the secular Jews, who wielded growing influence on the intellectual
right. Yet again, like the neocons, they succeeded in making their influence
felt both nationally and internationally by founding magazines and think tanks,
by writing books, by forging working alliances with other conservatives and,
above all, by producing new ideas. (pp. 200-201)
[O]ne
of the theocons' achievements was to fashion a nondenominational language that
allowed conservatives to talk about religion and morality in the public square.
This was an area where Evangelicals had struggled. [Christian activist Jerry]
Falwell found it hard to discuss a political issue like gay rights without
bringing in scripture and indeed sin almost immediately. [Theocon] Richard John
Neuhaus discussed it in terms of philosophy and social policy. This made it
more difficult for secularists to hide behind [Harvard philosophy professor]
John Rawl's idea that religion was too private and personal to influence public
debate. And it made it easier for Jews and Christians, Catholics and
Protestants, to make their way back into the public square together.
(p. 203)
CONCLUSION. God is Back is worth reading for anyone who is a serious student of global and particularly U.S. culture today. Secular activists—in fields ranging from philosophy to "bioethics" to politics—will gain doubly, partly from knowing better the nature of today's general religious revival, and partly from analyzing the techniques that religious "renewalists" have used to push their way back into the "public square." They may talk about their religion in general or they may campaign for particular issues such as a ban on abortion, but the underlying principles of religious activism are always the same: supernaturalism and mysticism.
