God Is Back

"Well, there are many distinctive and interesting things going on in America, many things that make it religious. It’s certainly not just the relatively low life expectancy and so on. It’s other things too. And these other things are discussed quite a lot in the last book on my list—a book by two British journalists, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, called “God is Back: How the Global Revival in Faith is Changing the World”. It came out a couple of weeks ago, the title is fairly self-explanatory, and what they argue is that religion is back, or that it certainly isn’t in decline. The book’s quite careful and subtle, and there are various strains in it, but the main thrust is that modernity brings not necessarily secularism but rather pluralism—in other words a lot of freedom to adopt and adapt the religion of your choice. What makes this book valuable is that it has up to date research from Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa where there are all sorts of unexpected religious developments. The huge growth of Pentecostalism, for example, in Latin America; the rise of Christianity in Africa; the coming battles between Christianity and Islam in Africa. God is certainly back in the headlines, 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalism saw to that. But that’s not all. Religion is for various reasons in the headlines. One of the other reasons is mobility. Immigration brings clashes of separate cultures, including religious cultures. When you get a lot of immigrants practicing their own religion, the natives tend to practice their religion even more vehemently. So there’s a lot of religious activity going on. In a limited sense, perhaps. He’s in the headlines, as I said. And he’s certainly bouncing back in formerly communist countries. So it is probably true that there are fewer unbelievers now than there were when communism had not yet begun to collapse. But the secularism thesis, I think, still holds true, and the long-term trend is against religion: in the course of the 20th century, unbelief (though it is still globally very much a minority position) has grown much faster than any religion. However, over the next 100 years, we may see a rise in believers in wealthy countries: this will not be because of people rediscovering God or changing their minds, but because of migration from poorer countries and because believers tend to have more children than unbelievers. I think the authors of God is Back believe that the secularisation thesis is just plain wrong, whereas I believe it is broadly correct. But the continuing decline of religion, as economies develop, will undoubtedly be a long and rocky road, and I certainly don’t think that religion will ever disappear completely. There may be many factors that delay the decline of religion. But I think that’s where we’re heading."