God is Back--life without God didn't work out so well

I'd like to continue summarizing an interesting new book called God is Back.

After the introduction the authors look at what happened to religion in Europe -- the triumph of secularism. The Enlightenment began it all. Two characteristics of this movement were confidence in human reason and confidence in human goodness. Wow, today, of course, we see the flaws in that type of thinking, don't we? The key event that demonstrated believe in reason and goodness was the French Revolution in the late 1700s. Following this event, several intellectual giants chipped away at the foundations of faith. The main challenge came from Charles Darwin, but there were others -- Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud,, and critics who attacked Christianity and the Bible as a historical document.

The authors have an interesting statement by Voltaire that shows down deep what these critics really believed. No matter how he and his kind argued against religion, he knew there was value in it: "I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I think that then I should be robbed and cuckholded less often."

Those that knocked down religious faith felt the need to replace it with some other ideology. One of the most powerful as the call of science. For example, H. G. Wells and others believed that the world should be ruled by a scientific elite. Another religion substitute that flourished in the 19th century was the call of culture (the arts). A third secular ideology was the worship of the nation-state. Finally, the fourth ideology was socialism. In the 20th century many of these new faiths came together under vicious totalitarian regimes--communism and Nazism leading the list. If this political nightmare was the result of these replacement ideologies, we today should not place our hopes in them. But people don't seem to learn.

By the mid-20th century it looked like secularism was a total success. One author in 1968 assured the New York Times that by the 21st century, "religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture." Things did not work out quite that way.

In a following chapter the authors ask why America evolved so differently from Europe. Of course, we know the story of our founding by religious groups. But the authors say America was not born religious -- church members never made up more than one-third of the adult population of New England before the American Revolution. Instead, they assert that America became religious. In the 1740's the land experienced the first of what was called a Great Awakening. And then the American Revolution came along, a unique event in modern history because it was a revolution against an earthly regime but not an exercise in anti-religious sentiment. The colonies embraced religion along with liberty, reason, and popular government.

The Founding Fathers did not want to see an established church like those in European countries, but they did not want to drive religion out of the public square. They believed the answer was making religion a matter of individual conscience rather than statecraft. They argued that the separation of church and state was good for both religion and state. What resulted was a free market in religious forces, which cause clergymen to compete. The result of all this religious energy was spectacular. The proportion of churchgoing Americans rose, another great awakening took place, and a true American ideology developed, which rejected hierarchy and tradition.

American evangelicals took over. They formed societies of all kinds, they provided an inspiration for America's emerging political system, and they swept away the age-old distinction between the clergy and the laity. This accomplished much good, another refutation to those secularists who fear American religious fervor.

But the 20th century saw several setbacks to American religion. First was the split in American Protestantism between liberals and fundamentalists. Protestants also lost battles against drink (Prohibition) and Darwin (evolution). Academic reformers came up with new, secular models for university life, replacing the religious model that emphasized virtue as well as knowledge.

Evangelical America had a resurgence later in the 20th century. Liberals had overreached with court decisions, protest marches, soft-on-crime judges. Billy Graham, Campus Crusade for Christ, Jerry Falwell and other individuals and groups kept religion in the news.

The authors seem fair in their historical analysis. They leave me with a good feeling, knowing that America got it right and avoided the horrors of secularism in control.