How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World

Wars of religion. Democracy. Church & State. Evil Empire. Effective Secularisation.
Quoting Kissinger, Cromwell, Adam Smith and Madeleine Albright.

Arguing for religious pluralism, Wooldridge & Micklethwait present amazing first hand observations about religion in everyday politics, social services and relationships around the world. It's not just about homosexuality, religious cartoons, head scarves and bioethics. It's about the core of the human spirit, how that spirit is expressed and where identity and values come from.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge,

The following is an excerpt from a fascinating talk given to The Carnegie Council. I heard Wooldridge myself at the Auckland Writer's & Readers Festival and was impressed with the treatment of religion and it's importance in the everyday life of society. Read on . . . . then check out the transcript at the above link or via the audio or video links.

Comment here, whether you agree or disagree with their observations.

"I thought we would start with a recent speech that, you could argue, almost encapsulates many people's fears about religion and politics. It's by Iran's president to the Parliament there. In it, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posed two questions: First, who are our enemies? Secondly, why do they hate us?

His answer was that Iran was faced by an "axis of evil," with all its enemies being all the wicked men in the world, whether abroad or at home. The root cause of their hatred, he argued, was religious—a hatred, a loathing of whosoever should serve the glory of the Prophet. Having gone through all, as he saw it, of George Bush's atrocities, he told the cheering MPs, "Truly your great enemy is the American, through the enmity that is in him against all that is of God in you."

Fortunately, he argued, Iran wouldn't fight alone, because Muslims all around the world would rally to it. "Be bold," he told the MPs, "and you will find that you act for a very great many people who are God's own."

In fact, that speech was not made by Ahmadinejad, but by Oliver Cromwell in 1656, and the cheering MPs were English Puritans and the Great Satan was not America, but Catholic Spain. That was the last great era of wars of religion. The previous Thirty Years' War had brought more death and destruction to Europe than the Black Death.

Shortly after his speech, Cromwell invaded Ireland. Religion had also dominated domestic politics. You could argue that the gap between Cavalier and Roundhead was, in part, one between those who thought the king should run the country and those who thought God should. It was also a culture war between those who watched or, arguably, lived the 17th-century equivalent of Sex and the City and the then-moral majority.

I think if Cromwell looked around the modern world, he would find much that was familiar. God is very much back in combat, we see, not least because 19 young Muslims attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. If you name the conflicts that America could get dragged into beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, it could indeed be Iran or it could be Pakistan and India or it could be Israel-Palestine, a once secular squabble which now has plenty of zealots on both sides of an extremely Cromwellian nature, or it could be West Africa, where you see this huge struggle between Islam surging southwards and evangelical Christianity pushing northwards.

It doesn't just have to be negative either. This book begins with a description of a house church in China. China, we argue, is on the way pretty quickly to becoming the world's biggest Christian country. More people go to church each Sunday in China than there are members of the Communist Party.

I think that's a wonderful expression of religious freedom. But if you are the Chinese government, it poses an almighty challenge: Is religion the glue that is going to bind your new country together or is it the source of discontent and revolt against the regime?

So the return of God and his effect on public life is the subject of this book. It's, above all, a piece of reporting, wandering around the world, looking at it. But first, I think, we have to deal with at least part of our title.

We argue that God is back. And that, I think, to some extent, implies that he went away, because even if he did not fade quite as far into the background as many people thought, or indeed hoped, the fact is, I think, that he did disappear more from public life. To some extent, we are dealing with a world that many people, certainly 20 or 30 years ago, did not expect could exist."

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