"God is Back" - says book by Economist journalists

darjeeling

"God is Back", or so say The Economist's editor John Micklethwait and Washington chief Adrian Wooldridge in a new book.

On Monday's Start the Week (BBC Radio 4, here until Monday), Micklethwait outlined the thesis.

At the outset, he says he's not getting involved in the God Delusion debate over the evidence for gods and their questionable benificence. He just says that humans are 'theotropic' (turn towards god) and leaves it at that.

Micklethwait says that 18th Century America paralleled Britain's religious decline, but this ended with the American revolution and its constitutional separation of church and state. The resulting market place in which churches competed for souls (he cites free-market thinker Adam Smith here) brought about a religious revival that persists to this day. In Europe, established churches with religious monopolies didn't respond to what the faithful wanted, and congregations slumped. Micklethwait argues that European post-Enlightenment thinkers who foresaw religion's demise were really looking only at old, state-sponsored religion, and not thinking of the free-market, consumer-driven US model.

He points out that religiosity in the US has gone in waves as denominations replaced each other - methodists, baptists, and now pentecostalists - with a renewal of fervour each time (the next wave in the US may be due, he thinks). This pattern is beginning to spread worldwide, with pentecostalists making converts in Latin America, Africa and China. The converts are often amongst the better-off and educated - people that the traditional post-Enlightenment view said would reject religion. Part of the reason is that, with young, upwardly mobile people joining, the churches offer an environment conducive to getting ahead in life. Also, according to an NYT review (here):

Hanna Rosin, NYT wrote:

Instead of raging against modern life, [U.S. churches] sold themselves as easing the way for the harried middle class. Church became a place to form social bonds, get dates, meet fellow moms isolated in suburbia, lose weight.

Micklethwait finds that this new religion can be beneficial or harmful: church provision of social services in the US on the one hand, on the other, the proxy conflict in Nigeria between US-funded Christianity and Saudi-funded Islam that has killed 30,000.

Hanna Rosin, NYT wrote:

Despite the dark side, the authors ultimately conclude that “God is back, for better.” By this they mean that religion is now a matter of choice for most people, and not a forced or inherited identity. But if that choice can lead you to either buy a sweatshirt or blow up a building, the conclusion itself seems a little forced. The reality is that God is back, for better or worse.

So perhaps we can expect a continuing uptick in charismatic Christianity here. If so, we may at least expect it to support the kind of secular society that has apparently served it so well.

Worth a listen, anyway - it's the first 15 mins or so of the programme (here's the link again).

DublinWriter

I listened to this too and found it interesting in terms that his work was almost a comparative critique of modern Christian religions.