God is back

I remember seeing, quite some time ago, a two-panel cartoon. The first panel showed Nietzsche, the well known German philosopher, pointing towards a tomb. The tombstone read "God is dead" accompanied by the year when the philosopher launched his idea. The second panel showed God pointing towards another tomb. "Nietzsche is dead", read the tombstone accompanied by the year of his death.

Believers and unbelievers united against religion

The attacks on the belief in God and on religion took different forms before, and since, then. Marx called religion the opium of the people and Freud described is as a neurosis. God is our creation and not vice versa, he believed. The belief in God, for others, had a negative effect on human progress since the more time that man has for God the less time man has for other men.

Nazism persecuted Jews and Christians. The religious persecutions by Communists are too close to merit description. Dictators on the right - Franco and Pinochet to name just two - persecuted many Christians although they pretended to be the paladins of a Christian culture. Consumerism with its concomitant values of instant gratification and materialism did a sweet kind of persecution. It does not frontally attack the existence of God and the need for religion. It tries to make them irrelevant.

Moreover, believers did their best to put religion and the god they believed in into disrepute. Catholics and Protestants killed each other in Northern Ireland in the name of God. In addition, fundamentalist Moslems massacred innocent people in His name. With the passage of time, the "holiest" of believers committed in the name and for the glory of God the most horrible atrocities.

Little by little, it became fashionable to celebrate the burial of God and to consign religion to the rubbish heap of history. More and more scholars were saying that as societies become more rational and modernised, the social significance of religion would decline. The Economist edition of the millennium went so far as to publish an obituary of the Almighty!

He who laughs last

However, it seems the He is going to have the final laugh.

John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; and Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist's Washington correspondent have just published a book titled: God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. This is an interesting duo since one is a Catholic and the other one is an atheist. I have not read the book but I read quite a lot about it. The following comments are based on reading abut this book which affirms that from Christians in Shanghai to Muslim televangelists in Cairo, we are in the middle of a global faith revival.

The following snippets and comments based on the book give an indication:

• China will be the world's biggest Christian country by 2050 - at the latest - and already the country has more churchgoers than members of the Communist party.
• Religious people are healthier, wealthier and happier than the non-religious.
• Almost everywhere you look, from the suburbs of Dallas to the slums of São Paulo to the back streets of Bradford, you can see religion returning to public life.
• One poll in 2006 - fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet regime - discovered that 84 percent of the Russian population believed in God while only 16 percent considered themselves atheists.
• Atatürk's Turkey is now in the hands of an avowedly Islamist party. The president's wife, like many cosmopolitan women, wears a headscarf, once regarded as a symbol of backwardness.
• For most of the past decade, India has been controlled by the Hindu nationalist BJP Party, which owed its ascendancy partly to the issue of the Ayodhya Temple, a fiercely contested place of worship for both Hindus and Muslims.
• George Bush began each day on his knees and each cabinet meeting with a prayer. Barack Obama has talked as well as and as eloquently about God as any Republican leader has. This is an interesting phenomenon. It's the first time, really, since Carter that the left has really been comfortable talking about God.
• The single most frequently used noun in the 2008 Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was "God."
• In France, the fastest growing creed is the most American of all, Pentecostalism. Before becoming president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy published La République, les religions, l'espérance, in which he called for a greater role for religion in public life.
• Poland's Law and Justice Party was elected on the promise of a "moral revolution," based on the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
• In much of South and Central America, exuberant Pentecostal churches, where worshippers catch the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, continue to spread, challenging the Roman Catholic tradition
• Islam has its own version of televangelists, some of them spectacularly successful.
• Up till a few years ago it was said that European politicians do not "do God." This is what Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spokesman, once angrily told an American magazine. To-day Tony Blair says that he was always a "praying person," and converted to Catholicism shortly after leaving office. His successor, Gordon Brown, claims that he learned his socialism listening to his preacher father's sermons.

This is not a triumphalistic book about religion. It also presents the less rosy side of this revival. They also cite faith as being at the heart of the world's worst flashpoints of violence. Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, the Middle East.... The list goes on.

The basis hypothesis of the writers is that modernity with its emphasis on pluralism and individual choice led to an increase in adherence to faith. A discussion of this thesis and also the author's explanation is beyond the scope of this blog. If you google the name of the book you will find a lot of interesting material.

It seems that there is more truth to the Nietzsche and the tomb stones cartoon than perhaps meets the eye at first glance!