IT'S official: God is back. In a brilliant instance of miraculous irony, news of His Resurrection has been brought to us, not by some latter-day John the Baptist, but by a pair of economists. In their fifth book together, John Micklethwait and Adria
n Wooldridge, both stalwarts of The Economist magazine, argue that there is a massive and unacknowledged rise in global religious feeling and practice, and that this poses serious questions that nations, politicians and sneering intellectuals are going to have to address if they are to keep pace with how their 21st century societies are developing. In making their case, they have produced a book which is deliberately controversial, often obtuse and muddleheaded, but nevertheless fascinating and important.
Take China, for instance. The Chinese government's own figures reveal that the number of Chinese Christians has risen from 14 million in 1997 to 21 million in 2007. But this excludes both "house churches", where small groups assemble for worship and discussion, and the underground Catholic Church, which is bigger than the official one. So at a conservative guess there are at least 65 million Protestants and 12 million Catholics in China today, more believers than there are members of the Communist party. And let's not forget Chinese Muslims, of which there are at least 20 million.
This makes the Muslim community in China almost as big as Saudi Arabia's, and nearly twice as big as that of the European Union. By 2050 it is estimated that China could be the world's biggest Muslim nation as well as its biggest Christian one. No wonder that in changing the Communist party's constitution in 2007, President Hu urged its members to "rally religious believers in making contributions to economic and social development".
In this appropriation of religious feeling for political, communal and national ends, the West lags far behind, with the exception of America. George Bush's famous dismissal of the religious right as "a bunch of whackos" belied the efforts his administration put into both pandering to and exploiting that support. As Obama knows, it is still impossible to get elected in America without religious credentials. One of the triumphs of his campaign, argue Micklethwait and Wooldridge, is the way in which, despite the scandal of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he managed to win over the religious vote.
It's Europe that's the problem. Here, religious feeling remains something of an embarrassment, as all who contemplated Tony Blair will agree. While acknowledging the depth of his belief, Blair rarely talked about it, and when he did, he had the look of a man who was losing votes. Meanwhile, even though two million British people have taken the Alpha course, Richard Dawkins' peroration against God is a best-seller, and only 6 percent of Britons attend church on a Sunday. To understand why this is so, Micklethwait and Wooldridge delve into the religious and social history of Europe, focusing on the Enlightenment and the legacy of anti-clerical secularism it has bequeathed us. They argue that European revolutions, from the French to the Bolshevik, were as much about getting rid of religion as anything else. By contrast, the American revolution was simply about taxation and those nasty Brits. Europe, therefore, struggles with the pluralism that is enshrined in the American constitution, and because it has ended up with various state churches, like the Church of England, it has failed to separate religion from power.
The merits of this thesis, like much else in the book, is debatable. Churches and State in the US are, nominally, completely separate. It hardly means that religious belief does not feed into the lineaments and character of American power. Nor is it strictly accurate to say that Enlightenment rationality expunged religiosity from the national or political character of Europeans. As the political philosopher John Gray has demonstrated, it still finds expression in other, different kinds of absolutisms, not least the liberal pluralism so beloved by America. But Micklethwait and Wooldridge are deaf to these kinds of nuance and irony. They are also completely uninterested in the character of religious belief. The field of religion is just another market ripe for exploitation. A sensible politician wouldn't make the same mistake, perhaps. Because in politics, as in religion, sincerity is still a value.
The full article contains 731 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
