BOOK OF THE DAY: God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the Worldby John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Allen Lane; 373pp, £25
IN ITS edition of December 23rd, 1999, the Economistpublished an obituary of God. It opened with the words: "After a lengthy career, the Almighty recently passed into history." Now, the editor and the Washington bureau chief of the Economisthave written what amounts to a 373-page retraction.
The opening section contrasts what it terms, in very broad brush strokes, the European and American responses to modernity. "Europeans saw atheism as the necessary accompaniment of enlightenment while Americans didn't," might serve as a summary of the first 140 pages. The ignoring of marginal or alternative traditions – one thinks of figures like Pascal or Newman - within broad categories such as "European" is characteristic of the book; the men from the Economistare only interested in winners.
There follows an extended reflection on the impact of religion on the development of the America we know today. The global impact of this religiously-influenced evolution through the exercise of American foreign policy is then considered. The final section of the book treats of the culture wars with particular but, it has to be said, idiosyncratic focus on Islam.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s co-authored book is their fifth such collaboration. In this current offering, an attempt to cover the global canvas of religion with all its political and societal manifestations, they have over-reached themselves.
Early in the introduction, we are informed that: "To understand the competitive mechanism behind religion's revival, you need to consult only two sacred texts". Go to the back of the class if you immediately assumed that we are here discussing the Bible and the Koran. No, our authors' sacred texts are Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nationsand the American constitution. This comes a few pages after a declaration that the 60-year (sic) conflict over Palestine was until recently a largely secular affair. Such explosions of invincible ignorance are, regrettably, characteristic of a work with no bibliography and a skimpy 16 pages of notes; notes wherein one is more likely to encounter a reference to Atlantic Monthlythan to any serious work on the history, philosophy or sociology of religion.
God is Backis not a work without insight. A concluding section which is more pithy than much of what precedes it does provide two crystalline insights: the secularists were wrong to see religion as the enemy and secularism as the inevitable accompaniment to enlightenment. It is pluralism, not secularism, that is the outcome of enlightenment and it is the conjunction of religious establishment and power that is its enemy. A corollary insight asserts that all the religions have work to do to realise that religion itself flourishes best in a world characterised by free choice.
In the early 20th century the polymath Albert Schweitzer, who counted theology as one of the strings to his considerable bow, declared memorably how 19th-century liberal Protestant theology spent much time looking for the historical Jesus and, each time, discovered him to be a perfectly acceptable liberal Protestant gentleman. One recalls Schweitzer as one observes Micklethwait and Wooldridge espousing an Adam Smith-inspired pluralism with little sense of the complexity of inter-faith dialogue as practised by religious believers whose view of themselves runs deeper and different to that of the Economist. One closes the book feeling that this is pluralism à la Bagehot. It might have been better to publish a short retraction.
God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the Worldby John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Allen Lane; 373pp, £25
Dr Pádraic Conway is director of the UCD International Centre for Newman Studies and UCD vice-president for university relations
