[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Faith in the future

[Bill Totten]

Contrary to what evangelical rationalists preach, it is perfectly
possible both to be modern and to believe in God. But there is no reason
to assume that the American religious model will prevail

by John Gray

New Statesman (May 21 2009)


God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Is Changing the World by John
Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Allen Lane, 2009)


"Religion is proving perfectly compatible with modernity in all its
forms, high and low". This conclusion by John Micklethwait, editor of
the Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the magazine's Washington bureau
chief, seems calculated to enrage secular rationalists of all stripes.

Whether Marxian or Millian, socialist or liberal, secular rationalists
have held one tenet in common: religion belongs to the infancy of the
species; the more modern a society becomes, the less room there is for
religious belief and practice. Never questioned, this is what lies
behind the hot-gospel sermons of evangelical atheists: if you want to be
modern, say goodbye to God.

At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is a
confession of faith. No amount of evidence will persuade secular
believers that they are on the wrong side of history, but one of the
achievements of God Is Back is to show how implausible, if not
ridiculous, their view of history actually is.

The notion that modernity and religion are at odds is a generalisation
from the experience of some parts of Europe. Europe is now largely
post-Christian and the majority no longer follows any conventional
creed, but things are otherwise in much of the rest of the world, and
notably so in the US, which, during most of its history, has been
intensely religious and self-consciously modern.

European Enlightenment thinkers have tended to see the US as the
exception that proves the rule - an unexplained lag in a universal trend
towards secularisation.

Against this view, Micklethwait and Wool­dridge show that modernisation
and an increase in religiosity go together in much of the world. Some of
the most powerful sections of the book feature narratives of religious
communities in improbable places - prosperous, highly educated Chinese,
among them scientists and academics, coming together in contemporary
Shanghai to read and discuss the Christian Bible, for example.

If there is any trend that can be discerned in the parts of the world
that are most rapidly modernising, it is that secular belief systems are
in decline and the old faiths are being reborn.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge aim to do more than show that modernity and
religion are compatible, however.

Arguing that "the great forces of modernity - technology and democracy,
choice and freedom - are all strengthening religion rather than
undermining it", they go on to claim that one version of modernity is
spreading nearly everywhere. "The world is generally moving in the
American direction, where religion and modernity happily coexist", they
write. At this point the authors - one Catholic, the other atheist, we
are told - emerge as missionaries for the American Way, and the argument
becomes distinctly implausible.

It is one thing to argue that the model of universal secularisation is
mistaken, and to show - as the authors do very effectively - that the
decline of religion in Europe is not going to be repeated worldwide. It
is another thing altogether to suggest that an American kind of
religiosity is spreading nearly everywhere.

One problem is the conception of religion the authors deploy.

Nearly always, religion for them means monotheism - more specifically,
Christianity and Islam. Polytheistic and non-theistic religions such as
Hinduism and Buddhism are allowed a few pages, but only in order to
argue that "American methods can work" even for them.

Another is their assumption that modernity is a Good Thing. Like so many
western commentators, the authors berate the Muslim world, supposedly
stuck in medieval torpor, for its failure to modernise. One had hoped
that it was now understood that Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were not
throwbacks to the Middle Ages. In their different ways, all three were
radically modern - just like al-Qaeda today. If a certain type of
pluralism appears only in modern times, the same is true of
totalitarianism. There are many ways of being modern, some of them far
from benign.

A larger problem is the authors' Americocentric world-view. It might be
argued that this does not matter, as the book is plainly directed
chiefly at American readers. Yet it does matter if the authors aim to
say something useful about the way the world is actually moving.

A part of their argument is the claim that religions have done well by
adopting modern corporate practices.

Religion has become a competitive business, they point out, with faith
entrepreneurs actively creating and serving their customer base. They
describe a Hindu temple in Bangalore that "uses every modern method to
entice and service believers", including "a website that is as
user-friendly as that of any American mega-church".

No doubt these are valid observations, but the authors use them to argue
for "American-style pastorpreneurship" as a universal model. They
acknowledge that although the American way of religion is spreading
faster than the European, "that does not mean it will conquer every
corner of the world".

They are nonetheless insistent that the American model is better adapted
than any other to the modern world.

Here Micklethwait and Wooldridge repeat the canonical fallacy of
American theorists of globalisation such as Thomas Friedman. It is true
that some American business methods have been widely adopted. That does
not mean humankind is embracing an American model of capitalism, or of
religion.

Hypermodern Japan has many new religions, some of them very obviously
organised as businesses, but it remains a country still largely
untouched by individualism. Hinduism is now practised worldwide, but in
India its revival has been linked with nationalism rather than
pluralism. The same is true of the revival of Orthodoxy in Russia, and
the resurgence of Confucianism that is under way in China.

Religion is advancing in many parts of the world, but it is no more
likely that a single dominant model of religious practice will emerge
from this process than that a single version of capitalism has emerged
from globalisation.

Modernity can coexist with religion in many ways, none of which is going
to be adopted universally. The authors promote a US-style secular
constitution as a global panacea and shake their heads sternly at
Britain's archaic religious establishment, not pausing to ask whether it
may have played a part in protecting us from the fundamentalism that has
poisoned the American political process.

More generally, they assume that ideas which emerged from within western
Christian traditions can be applied anywhere. But as energy and power
flows eastwards, the secular ideologies that developed from Christianity
are likely to dwindle in influence.

Rightly, Micklethwait and Wooldridge note that the grand secular belief
systems of the past two centuries continued Christian ways of thinking:
"Marx found it impossible not to think in terms of grand eschatologies
... He employed numerous religious tropes - communists are latter-day
gnostics, communism is heaven on earth, the revolution is the Last
Judgement, workers are saved and capitalism is damned".

In other words, God never really went away, for secular political
projects were continuations of Christianity by other means. But if
Marxism is a post-Christian creed that is now obsolete, why should
liberalism - in its militant, proselytising form - be any different? In
fact, it has been in decline for some time, a process that began with
the fall of communism.

The Soviet collapse was hailed as a triumph for the west. But communism
is a prototypical western ideology, and there was never any prospect
that Russia - a country which has always straddled Europe and Asia -
would convert to neoliberalism, another western confection. It was naive
to expect that post-communist Russia would embrace a western model of
government and the economy in the 1990s, and it is even more misguided
to look forward to the Americanisation of religion at the present time.

If it is true that faith is now a branch of business, religion may opt
to follow the money - a journey that no longer leads in the direction of
the United States. While there will be no universal pattern, the
rediscovery of Confucianism is probably a better clue to the way the
world will look a few decades from now than the proliferation of
mega-churches.

God Is Back may not show that the American way of religion is uniquely
well suited to the modern condition. Where this urgently relevant book
succeeds triumphantly is in demolishing the myth of an emerging secular
civilisation.

Evangelising rationalists will continue to deny the fact, but religion -
in all its varieties - is shaping the future, much as it shaped the past.

_____

John Gray's latest book is Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (Allen
Lane, GBP 20). He will be in conversation with John Micklethwait on 1
June at the London School of Economics, London WC2


http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/05/religion-american-modern-world


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