51 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Topical, perceptive, and well-written, April 8, 2009
This is the latest of several topical, perceptive, and well-written books by Micklethwait and Wooldridge of The Economist. They take on the difficult and complex subject of how religion and politics relate throughout the world, and they argue persuasively about the compatibility of modernity and religion in the twenty-first century. Their analysis of religion in America is particularly brilliant, certainly the best explanation I've read of the rise of Evangelicalism and the popularity of megachurches. As in their previous books, Micklethwait and Wooldridge write with a combination of erudition and wit - vignettes of places like the Golgotha Fun Park in Kentucky make God Is Back an enjoyable read. I can fault the book only for its lack of photographs and other illustrations.
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36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Be Prepared to Learn a Lot, May 24, 2009
One of the authors is a Catholic and the other an atheist. Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of The Economist and Wooldridge is head of that periodical's Washington desk.
The book is a study of the relationship between modernity and religion. According to the authors, there are two main models for the future of this relationship -- which takes on added importance given the modernizing of India, China, S. America and parts of Africa. One is American the other is European. In the European one, modernity has crushed religion. Europe is highly and aggressively secularized. Religion may be tolerated as a very private affair, but is viewed with suspicion, its demise anticipated, and has no place in the broader culture (and especially not in politics). In America, on the other hand, religion and modernity not only co-exist, they are interrelated, bestowing benefits on each other. Religion remains a vital force in American culture, including in the political arena, though Americans have a more formal separation of church and state than Europe.
Western academics have assumed that the European model was the future and that as the rest of the world modernized, they would become as radically secular as Europe. America, it was believed, was an aberration and was likely just lagging behind the Euro phenomenon. The authors reject this conclusion and believe that the American model is likely to be the prevailing model.
The authors attribute much of this success to the American founder's solution to the "religion problem," by separating formally church and state and allowing religions to compete with each other but without excluding religious sentiment and expression from the public square. The result is competition and a religion that empowers its practitioners. The authors also note that in the U.S. churches provide billions of dollars in social services that in Europe are viewed as the exclusive domain of the state.
In Europe, churches have been identified with the power of the monarch and other oppressive forces and accordingly were viewed with suspicion and hostility when revolutions displaced such authorities. Europeans also are much more likely to identify religion with the cause of strife and war given the history of religious wars on that continent. A history with which the U.S. has nothing to compare. Indeed, in the U.S., religions not only has placed a vital role in the delivery of social services but has also been identified with noble goals, such as the Abolitionist Movement and the Civil Rights Movement.
The history of Christianity and modernism is tracked throughout America's history, as well as its present interaction throughout the world. Want to learn about how Christianity is doing in China? Well covered. The spread of Pentacostalism in South America? Also discussed. What are Christians up to in South Korea? Read about it here. Each is not exhaustive of course, but it is a great place to get a flavor of what is going on in so many places.
Islam is also covered, including its spreading influence in Europe, though its interaction with modernity less a match made in heaven than is Christianity's. Hinduism and Buddhism are also discussed, but in much less detail.
I highly recommend this book. In addition to helpfully examining the big picture, God is Back is full of anecdotes and witty observations that never fall to the level of condescension. A few comments seem under informed and some sections seemed a forced fit, but these are minor drawbacks of a highly informative and well written book.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Very Uneven-- Some Is Worthwhile, Some Isn't, October 13, 2010
This review is from: God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Hardcover)
It's not necessarily easy to review this book because of its biggest weakness: a lot of it is basically a meandering mess, incredibly uneven in the quality of its writing and research. It leaves you wondering what on earth happened to the editor before it was allowed out of Penguin Press, because there's not much evidence than one ever had much input on it. Actually, this is the kind of book that needs an editor most, because the real problem isn't that it's too long, it's that it tries to pull together so much information from so many disciplines-- history, religion, sociology, science, psychology-- but loses its focus all the time and varies wildly in how well it's actually accomplishing anything it sets out to do. Be warned that this review may not sound very organized-- but it's trying to track the book, and that's why!
The first hundred pages try to outline the history of the American way of combining and separating religion and politics, and this is the most unfortunate part of the book, because the quality of the research would have earned a good grade for a freshman high school civics paper-- but that's about it. The authors needed to do more than just regurgitate what others had written about this kind of history, and that's all they did. The section on late 20th century history is so bad that it's just embarassing (on pg 93, they think they're proving how religious people were after WWII by listing the titles of popular songs!) Then, they start going through "Bush, Blair, Obama and the God Gap", which is interesting. But not only is this a strange place in the book to put this section, but it just reads as a lift from their earlier book, *The Right Nation.*
Then we have a section on the ways that megachurches are supposedly taking the place of the vanishing social safety net in America. There's certainly a lot of truth to this, but the authors could still have done more here, because we end up with the distinct impression that this is both inevitable and a good thing. The most convincing argument to be made in favor of churches helping people in this way is regarding African-American churches in Philadelphia, where social programs simply aren't going to fill the gap no matter what, but what about all of those suburban megachurches? Isn't that just another excuse for people to retreat even further from the responsibilities of living in the public sphere, and to surround themselves only with others who look and act exactly like them?
Well, anyway... "The God Business" is a very good section, but "Empire of the Mind" is just embarassingly misinformed. I would say that these authors appear to have never heard of the entire discipline of higher Biblical criticism, except that they do at least mention it in passing elsewhere. But they seem to be convinced that almost any kind of intellectual interest in religion suddenly appeared in about the last twenty years, at most. And they just don't understand anything at all about the bases on which different types of theologies are built. The funniest passage in the entire book has got to be on page 194, when they hilariously lump Paul Tillich in with Billy Graham (!!!!) Then we do have some good sections which examine American Christianity in the context of the rest of hte world. "Exporting America's God" is one, and then there's actually a very long, interesting section examining modern-day Islam. It's more nuanced than what Sam Harris has to say, for sure.
But the real problem at the end of the book, I think, is tied up with the central difficulty of disorganization that's been a constant theme all along. The authors come to the conclusion that "the secularists" (whoever they are, exactly" have been wrong to claim that "modernity and religion are incompatible". But they've been so all over the place with their claims, arguments, and information that we as readers can't be sure that they've even supported this argument. They've brought up too many other ideas that they've never followed up on, and there are too many things that were glaringly ignored. A huge section devoted to the ills of Islam, for instance, and never a word-- not ONE-- about sex scandals in the Catholic church. Nobody yet knew exactly how completely the guilt of the upper hierarchy would be proven, IN WRITING, at the time the book was published, but enough was known to warrant the inclusion of that information. One of these authors is a Catholic, and maybe that's why there wasn't anything about that. And from what the authors themselves have presented, I, for one, can't avoid the conclusion that the more noise is made about Christianity, the less that anybody is running anything according to any of the actual teachings of Jesus. This would have been something worth saying. But instead, the authors retreat into vague noises about religion and modernity.
Overall, this is worth reading, no matter what you believe (or don't.) But if you approach it without a religious agenda, it isn't likely to convince you that "God is back." The fact that lots of people are making lots of noise doesn't prove that. If anything, it tends to provide evidence for the argument put forth by Bishop John Shelby Spong (another theologian who doesn't appear in the index of this book): that as a religion dies, its followers get more hysterical than ever before, and that if we want religion to live, we have to change it into something else that is better.
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