Politics needs God! Shock Horror!
It's a rare thing to find a book from the liberal intellectual tradition that is so fair-minded towards religion in general and Christianity in particular. It's rarer still to find a British book which argues that faith might not only be a presence to be welcomed in the public forum of ideas, but a presence necessary to its health and stability. However, with splendid journalistic and intellectual integrity John Micklethwait, the Economist's Editor in Chief, a Catholic, and Adrian Wooldridge, the chief of its Washington Bureau, an atheist, have produced just such a volume.
God is Back surveys the global state of religion across a vast array of current religious practice, but its aim is to explore the relationship that religion and the state should have in the contemporary world. It starts by setting the current rise and rise of vibrant faith in every continent, except Europe and Antarctica, in the context of a penetrating analysis of how the apparently terminally sick man of faith has not only survived the assaults of modernity but has now come to thrive in it.
Indeed, only a decade or so ago the cadres of atheism must have thought that the long battle against the divine illusion was being won but now, oh now, oh, how the mighty presuppositions of the liberal elites have fallen. For most of the twentieth century, liberal intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the Channel, assumed that God was not only dead but would soon be expunged altogether from the thinking of rational, educated people the world over. Secularism would triumph in the West and assert its self-evident, logical hegemony over every nation that could provide its people with three meals a day, a decent education and decent health care. The twin titans of prosperity and reason would kill off the need to invent a God who cared for people and would snuff out the need for the dream of an idyllic afterlife to carry people through the nightmares of daily existence.
But the atheists and the sociologists were proved wrong. And proved wrong in America, where prosperity, high educational standards and scientific brilliance should surely have won the day but where belief in God thrives. They failed to identify the difference between the role and history of religion in America and Europe, and they failed to predict modernity's championing of choice. In Europe, religion had primarily been associated with compulsion and compromise with state regimes. In America, however, religion, protected from an unhealthy Siamesic union with the state, was planted in the rich mulch of freedom of choice and conscience.
Human beings, after all, are endowed with free will, and are created to make choices for themselves. Modernity emphasised that freedom of choice and therefore undermined the stultifying monoliths of state-enforced or state-sponsored beliefs - whether Christian, Islamic or Totalitarian. Three things have now become clear:
1. When you give people freedom of choice more and more of them are choosing faith.
2. When people are free to choose faith, more and more of them are choosing Christianity. There are probably well over 100 million Christians in China, 86% of Russians identify themselves as Christian and the Pentecostal movement has swept through South America.
3. More and more people don't see Christianity as the enemy of a prosperous, free, functional society but as its ally and necessary foundation.
How many Christians in the UK really believe that?
Still, you don't have to be a Christian to affirm it. Recently, Matthew Parris, a self-avowed atheist, notoriously wrote in The Times that the only hope for Africa was evangelism. He was not referring simply to Christian engagement in social action, but to the transformation that Christian faith brought to people and communities. He'd seen it. Wooldridge, a fellow atheist, seems to agree. Interviewed in The New Humanist, he argued:
Care is actually better if it is provided in a faith context. If you look at social services you have to fill in forms, people are antagonistic or they do it because they have to, whereas if you go to church for help you know you are talking to another human being who actually cares. It's not just in the US - the same is true in China or Russia and part of the Middle East... Most people who become welfare dependent do so because of lack of skills, lack of opportunities, but also because of a lack of self-worth or a lack of a sense of meaning or purpose. These are things that religion is very good at, that bureaucratic systems can't do.
Of course, Micklethwait and Wooldridge are fully aware of the terrible things that have been done in the name of religion in general and Christianity in particular, but they refuse to allow themselves to be drawn into stereotypical oppositions - science vs faith, reason vs religion - or to tar the whole history of the Church or indeed Islam with, respectively, the Inquisitorial or Jihadist brush. Religion and the modern world are not in their view incompatible, though they recognise the much greater difficulties that Islam faces in adjusting to modernity.
Still, the point of God is Back is not only that God is back but that he is here to stay. Religion is on the agenda - in science, in medicine, in sexuality, in politics. It may too often be on the agenda for reasons that very few people, other than suicide bombers, like, but it is there. Indeed, in areas of conflict, whether the newly stoked embers of sectarian hostility in Ireland or the violent conflicts of the Middle East or the Sudan, religion is part of the conflict. And if religion is part of the conflict, the conflict is unlikely to be resolved unless religion is also part of the solution.
All that said, God is Back is primarily about seeking to plot a path forward for a positive and realistic relationship between religion and the state. For a long season, the US ignored religion, blundering in Iraq and with Iran, precisely because high level policy-makers suffered from woeful levels of ignorance about Islam. Despite those mistakes, Micklethwait and Wooldridge find a clear, if not entirely smooth, way forward in the American model of separation of church and state which for them is the basis for a flourishing civil society.
The US system enshrines freedom of religion but has never demanded that its politicians or presidents are free from religion. As they put it, 'America does a better job than any other country of combining religious vitality with both religious diversity and religious toleration. Religious groups that were once persecuted for heresy - Quakers, Catholics, Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Southern Baptists - have all groomed men who have ended up in the White House.' It won't surprise you to learn that Micklethwait and Wooldridge are strongly in favour of disestablishing the Church of England - for its own good, as they see it.
That be as it may, but the overall issue of religion and government is critical. In Romans 13 Paul exhorts the Christian community to pray for those in authority, seeing government's role as critical in creating a context for shalom and restraining evil. Interestingly, Paul does not call for a Christian theocratic state. We do not seek power but opportunities for service, and we have a duty to contribute all we can to bringing shalom in our nation and in our world. What Micklethwait and Wooldridge have done is to make our case to an influential section of our society that have long believed the world would better off without us and all gods, never mind the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanks boys.
Mark Greene
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