Customer Reviews

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World

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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.

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.

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.

God is, indeed, back, with a vengeance, in this well-researched and well-written analysis of the rising again of religious faith from the ashes of the wave of secularism of the last few decades. Mr. Micklethwait and Mr. Wooldridge have done an admirable job of telling us how modern civilization, which was supposed to bury religion, instead helped to revitalize it.

From upper-middle class "house church" meetings in China, to the fierce march of Wahhabist Islam, to the joyful passion of Evangelical Christianity in the United States and, increasingly, overseas, the authors show us conclusively how wrong the "God is dead" crowd of the 60s was. And what they said seemed to make so much sense, to be so logical -- in the 60s. Just shows how a few decades can change our perception of the world completely -- even change the world itself, significantly.

My only quarrel with the book -- the reason I gave it four stars instead of five -- is that the concentration seemed to be a little too heavily on the Evangelicals, and the Muslims, with a moderate amount of space devoted to the Roman Catholics, much more limited treatment of the fading mainline Protestant churches, and little more than a few passing mentions of Christian Orthodoxy, especially in America. The various Orthodox churches are growing, not spectacularly but steadily, in this country as many disaffected Protestants, Catholics or non-religious seek a different way to worship God and His Son Jesus Christ, and find it in the oldest and second-largest of all the Christian denominations.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) gets a little ink, but not as much as it dserves, in view of not only the growth of the church in the U.S. but its ceaseless missionary work all over the world.

Treatment of the Jews is also sparing, considering the huge influence they have had, and are still having, on world history. The Hindus are discussed only in the one chapter in which they are pictured as the "bad guys" in India, "persecuting" the minority Muslims. Buddhism gets only a few scattered mentions.

Still, despite these omissions, Micklethwait and Wooldridge have compiled a comprehensive, highly readable book on a topic that is seldom treated in this fashion on the TV networks or the best-seller lists. It is well worth a purchase and a read.

The authors, who are journalists by trade, do an excellent job of summarizing recent findings in the sociology of religion that are challenging the long held assertions of secularization theory. More importantly, this book is a good answer to Trinity College's American Religious Identification Study (ARIS)making big headlines recently. The ARIS Study claims that the number of "non-religious" (poorly defined) has doubled since 1990, reaching 15% of the US poplation. This result, based upon bad sampling methodology and poor interpretatin of open-ended questions, is at odds with nearly every other survey showing the "non-religious" (who are not atheist or agnostic) as hovering around 10% of the population give or take a percentage point or two.

This book reviews some of the sociological findings supporting the thesis that religious activity is alive and well in the US and around the world. Moreover, they also pepper the book with interesting anecdotes and fun stories that make the book read more like a "human interest" story in the newspaper.

This is a book well done by a bunch of British chaps who are supposedly more intelligent and secular than us rednecks across the pond!

When Adrian Wooldridge was an undergraduate at Oxford he was not well known for his sympathy towards Christianity, so it was a pleasure to learn so much about the faith from his pen.

Every page is worth reading, but the best part of the book was on Christianity in America. As the authors end their section on the decline of faith in Europe, we are introduced to a young American student in Oxford in the 1960's who `shared none of the careless atheism of his British contempories or Oxford students'. Indeed the future President Clinton, much maligned by the religious right, was a very genuine Christian. He shared none of the 1960's `careless atheism', because by and large, his country did not. While the authors rightly focused on the separation of religion from the state as providing the overall context for Christianity's success in the USA, they did not ignore the impact of the revivalists and preachers. All the famous ones, past and present, receive attention: Jonathan Edwards, Dwight Moody, William Seymour, Aimee McPherson, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberson, James Dobson, Rick Warren Bill Hybels, and others.

And not only the famous: there is a fascinating section on the unknown Pastor Richard Smith who started preaching aged fifteen and now works in a rough area of Philadelphia. It's obvious that one of the authors, probably Adrian Wooldridge since he used to be based in Washington, has spent time with Richard Smith. Crusading atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins view people like Pastor Smith as peddlers of medieval poison. While Wooldridge elsewhere in print has said he is still an atheist (when, interestingly, writing about Jesus Christ as the most important figure in world history), it is clear he shares none of Hitchens' or Dawkins' dogmatic hostility to the Christian faith, as it is also clear he admires the work of Richard Smith, and by implication, thousands of others like him. This hands on knowledge of the American Christian scene, combined with the confident thesis that religion there has thrived because the pluralism created by the separation of faith from the state, makes this main section of the book one of the best pieces of writing on American Christianity around today.

When the authors got onto other religions, the buzz of the book was not so strong. There was the irritation of Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity all having the same God. And then the `God is Back' theme only works for the Christian West. There has been no comparable decline of religion in the Middle East or Asia due to secularism. Even the seemingly modern feel of the Shah's Iran in the 1960's and 1970's was a mirage, only appearing in the cities. In the thousands of small towns and villages people were solidly religious. And finally there was a mixed message on Islam. We have this odd assertion, `The idea that Islam is incompatible with the modern world is clearly untrue', followed later by a reminder that apostasy is a punishable crime in Islamic countries. The authors could have added that the punishment in question is death for the male apostate and life imprisonment for the female, unless she repents. If modern means free choice, Islam with its apostasy laws is not compatible with the modern world.

In some ways the book would have been purer if it had just focused on the success of American Christianity. The authors return to this success in their conclusion, arguing convincingly that it is something that both believer and secularist can celebrate because it depends on the oxygen of liberalism: individual free choice. The authors then aptly end with a quote from Benjamin Franklin: `when a religion is good...it will support itself....', but if it needs state support, this is a `sign...of it being a bad one.'

This is a wonderfully optimistic view, indeed a very American view, that if people support something, then it is probably good. And it asks the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins to calm down, trust people more, and be less arrogant towards believers. In the context of the debate between believers and atheists in the West this book comes up with the best answer: let's all say `Amen' to the importance of free choice.

But that shared `Amen' between believers and secularists only makes sense in the West, in civilisations moulded by Christianity and the enlightenment which guarantee the centrality of the individual. There is no such `Amen' from the minarets of Muslim lands, or the temples of India where the identity of the community is much more important than the individual. And if the Allah of Islam is back with his apostasy laws or the gods of Hinduism are back with their caste system, then the `Amen' for individual choice will have to wait until more Christians give their lives to spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For wherever that Gospel has gone, individual freedom has flourished. Where the Gospel is rejected, as in Afghanistan or North Korea, there is no individual freedom.

This is an excellent book with an excellent thesis, but it needs to be taken further: individual freedom makes for a happier society, and Christianity has proved to be a strong anchor for individual freedom. So, publications like the Economist, advocates of liberalism, should be more open in supporting the faith that has done more than any other movement in human history to give man freedom: Christianity.

This book is a nice corrective to the general view that the world is becoming more secular. In fact, as the book shows, Christianity is growing, and much of the growth is in places like China--grown and persecution in the same locale! The authors observe that, despite the popularity of atheist books by Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, etc., man is essentially a "theotropic" being inclined by nature to believe in a Divine Power. In fact, Europe and the U.S. (or, at least, the opinion-shapers in the U.S.) are the exceptions to the rule--secular exceptions in a religious world. This isn't all good news for Christians, however, since resurgent Islam and Hinduism have bred more than a few violent fanatics.

Aside from surveying the contemporary world scene, the book has some delightful historical tidbits - such as
Thomas Jefferson's very wrong prophecy that Christianity would inevitably die out to be replaced by liberal Unitarianism, or the fact that evangelist Lorenzo Dow, a truly bizarre character, was so popular in the 1800s that Lorenzo briefly became a popular name for boys.

One beef: the two authors--one a Catholic, one an atheist--don't understand evangelical Christians very well. For example, they mention Thomas Nelson as "the main" publisher for evangelicals, apparently unaware that there is no "main" anything for evangelicals, as there is no central organization. It would have been more correct to refer to Thomas Nelson as "one of the largest evangelical publishers." The book refers to Virginia Beach as headquarters for both Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, while Falwell in fact worked in Lynchburg, VA. These are fairly minor matters, of course, and overall this is an enjoyable and edifying read.

An interesting and convincing explanation of how secular Europe (Western Europe at that) is really the anomaly and religion fixates the remainder of the world (Thank God for the Europeans!).

This book explains the presence and the popularity of religion in the U.S. But I feel the authors paint the U.S. as overly religious and zealot. Are there not vast tracts of secularism on the East and West coasts? Some have said that the U.S. is the most religiously diverse nation on the planet. And the authors are convincing in the plurality of religions competing for a marketplace in the "Land of the Free".

Many religions are anti-science with their ever so "Sacred Texts" contradicting geology and all aspects of biological development and evolution. Religion in the U.S. encroaches on education - and I don't just refer to school prayer. Ignorance arises when it permeates all levels of society from business, education, the media and political campaigns when candidates must profess their religious beliefs. When candidates for political office believe dinosaurs existed 5000 years ago what are his/her educational policies going to add to improve learning.

The authors fail to point out the dangers of this religious overflow into general society. They are over-generous about the presence of religion. Or how religion contradicts or impedes the advancement of society. Europe has had over 60 years of peace since the end of their cataclysmic upheavals from two Worlds Wars. They are starting to outdistance the U.S. culturally and scientifically in many areas.

The authors are correct in pointing out that religion is hard-wired into most of the world. They are also accurate in that modernity has not impeded religion - and indeed religious groups are very adept in using technology to spread the "word". This book is excellent and interesting in pointing how religion has thrived in what many consider the most advanced and democratic society on the planet. Or put another way - it is revealing how religion is flourishing in the world's largest democratic state.

This is an interesting book, and the evidence it presents will have the evangelical atheists (e.g.The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion) and their followers wailing, and gnashing their teeth.

There are very few books that manage to present world wide perspectives on phenomena, but this one shows a breadth and depth of knowledge of what is happening in terms of people's religious beliefs across the world. The picture it presents is an interesting and surprising one and certain key ideas emerge:-

1. God has never actually gone away for most people in the world- man seems to be a "theotropic" creature- whether this is an evolutionary relic or a sign that actually there is a God to seek.
2. Religion seems to thrive the further away from state patronage it is. The Church of England is declining. The free churches are increasing in size and influence, especially in the American, and some European and UK "megachurches." The economic model of service provision to meet people's needs sits well alongside active churches that try to meet those needs.
3. Increasing education and knowledge does not necessarily lead from "primitive superstitions" to the "rigorous light" of atheism, materialism and scientism. The secularisation hypothesis is shown to be false by the evidence presented in this book.
4. The utter failure of secular religions such as communism is well described.
5. Religious belief in Western Europe is following a different pattern from that in the rest of the world.
6. Religious belief is perfectly compatible with modernity, and may well help flourishing within it.
7. Religious belief is a strong force, that needs to be channelled and accommodated well. The key feature of modernity is pluralism, and many religious beliefs sit well within this variety, and in fact are stronger for being in a marketplace of ideas.
8. Religion is not about to disappear any time soon.

I can recommend this book to readers both religious or atheistic who wish to understand how religion is working in the modern world and work out how best to understand and work with it.

I hope the author differentiate faith from the religiosity and main stream of faith from fanatics.
It is a good book. I read it twice and I will read it onece more when I have time to do.