Religion is on the rise, religion makes you happy. It may seem bad manners for we atheists to say it, but so do pets
By David Aaronovitch
On a desk in my school, long ago, some past sixth-former had written four words: “God is dead – Nietzsche”, followed by four more: “Nietzsche is dead – God.” Even as a juvenile atheist I could see that the idea of the mad German getting his comeuppance from the unbelieved Almighty was funny.
And some readers today might similarly be enjoying the contents of a new book, God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World, written by the Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, John Micklethwait, and his colleague Adrian Wooldridge. “You thought God had gone,” they seem to chant in the direction of the national grandstand where sits the secular elite, “you were wrong, you were wrong.”
Not surprisingly the geist that gibbers in this straitened zeit is a pessimist. Articulated by a small army of declinists, the dominant sentiment is that it’s all gone to the dogs in the West: community, spirituality, morality – and left us in a state of alienation, of anomie, eating apart in front of American Idol, obesely exercising on our Wiis, leading unsatisfactory lives of consumption and envy.
At least a couple more new books this week have suggested that our etiolated and weakened sense of higher self is consequently no match for rampant, self-confident Islam. We are the new late Romans and the Muslims are the new equivalent of Gibbon’s destroying religious army. “Man is a theotropic beast,” argue the authors of God is Back: we will have Jehovah – or Allah – one way or another.
This is an enjoyable thesis, and well argued, even if a more accurate title would be “Oh Look, God Hasn’t Gone Away as Quickly as Some Folk Expected”. In this country, for example, the British Social Attitudes Survey showed that 74 per cent of Britons belonged to a religion and attended services in 1964, but only 31per cent did so in 2005.
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