God Is Back: Religion's Revival and Its Global Impact

Religion is reasserting itself globally, John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, argue in God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World. The pair have coauthored four books, covering subjects like globalization, U.S. politics, and business. Wooldridge recently spoke to U.S. News about the religious revival's roots and implications. Excerpts:

So God is back. Did God go somewhere?
This book is not a work of theology, clearly. It's a work of contemporary history. But, yes, he went somewhere. In the 19th century, the most influential thinkers predicted that modernity and secularization would go hand in hand. Throughout most of the 20th century, it looked as if that was the case. The one exception is the United States, really, because it continues to be very religious and also very modern. But most thinkers tend to regard the United States as a freak of nature, like a duck-billed platypus, and they think it will go the way of the rest of the world.

So what changes?
You get a radical change in the late 1960s and 1970s whereby religion begins to reappear in the public square, in the people's lives. This is a historical change. [It's] a sense that many of the secular "isms" have reached the point of exhaustion.

Is it a cosmic coincidence, or is there a deeper reason for it?
The basic assumption of secularization theory is that religion and modernity are antagonistic and mutually incompatible. What you're seeing in the 1970s and 1980s is various religious communities disproving this because they've learned how to use the tools of modernity to their advantage. They've learned how to use technology to get their message across. They've learned how to use democracy, the democratic political process. They've learned that modernization is their friend.

And you argue that there is a distinctly American flavor to this revival.
You've had two sorts of versions of modernity competing with each other, both stepping from the Enlightenment, one stepping from the French Revolution, the other from the American Revolution. The European version is: The more modern a country becomes, the less religious it becomes. The American version is: So long as you separate church and state and create a free market of religion and don't have an official church, the two things can coincide. You get competition between various religious groups, and religion can therefore become a friend of democracy, a friend of technology, a friend of all the things you see in the modern world. What you're beginning to see is the American approach to things becomes quite universalized. It is the slow spread of an American model whereby religion is a choice, not just something that's just inherited, and different religious groups compete for souls.

How important is the communications revolution in this revival?
It's incredibly important. For a long period in Latin America, for example, Jimmy Swaggart is one of the most recognizable people. The televangelists are huge around the world. There are two things here. One is that America gets to the future first, and the other is that America exports its own way of doing things. The American churches are the first people to really see modern technology as a huge opportunity.

So why should readers care about this?
Religion is having a big impact on politics and international relations. The only way we can understand modern politics and public life is to understand the role of religion. And the only way we can solve a lot of the most important conflicts that we see around the world is by using religious leaders. If you think about where America's next big foreign-policy problem may be, religion is probably going to be part of it. [For example,] it's quite possible that by 2050 China could be the world's biggest Muslim country and the world's biggest Christian country. Even if you look at home, in America, a lot of the issues that are most divisive in politics are issues which are fundamentally ethical and fundamentally religious: the abortion debate, the gay marriage debate, stem cells. We can't get away from religion. It keeps intruding.

It sounds as if we should have hoped God would stay away.
We're not saying God is good; we're not saying God is bad. We're trying to look at the way religion has become a factor in public life—foreign affairs, politics, all around the world—and chronicle what's happening. We document in great detail in this book the downside of the return of religion, particularly the detrimental impact, really, on foreign policy. But there is an upside and a very significant upside. Religion can exaggerate the bad side of man, and it can exaggerate the good side.