God Makes a Comeback

J ohn Micklethwait, editor of The Economist, has about him the excited air of a man who has made a considerable discovery in a place people said he was crazy even to look. It turns out that religion, whose gradual disappearance has for a long time been an article of faith in European university circles, is making a major comeback, and in precisely the way that the experts have long insisted it could not—as an adjunct of modernity. The book Micklethwait co-authored with his colleague Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin, 2009), has come to bury the secularization thesis. According to the authors, it is not true that as the world becomes more modern it becomes less believing. It was never true of the United States—a rather large exception—but now it turns out not to be true almost everywhere.

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