Il fait lever son soleil sur les méchants et sur les bons, et il fait pleuvoir sur les justes et sur les injustes. Jésus
La science sans la religion est boiteuse, la religion sans la science est aveugle. Einstein
Mais où est-ce qu’ils sont tous? Fermi (1950)
Cela ressemble bien aux Américains d’inventer un big bang à l’origine de nos univers. Julien Green (écrivain franco-américain)
L’univers a été réglé très précisément pour l’émergence de la vie et de la conscience. Le réglage initial est d’une virtuosité époustouflante: on pourrait le comparer à l’habileté d’un archer qui réussirait à planter sa flèche au milieu d’une cible carrée de 1 centimètre de coté, éloignée de 15 milliards d’années-lumière… Trinh Xuan Thuan
La révolution copernicienne « nous » a fait perdre « notre » place au centre de l’Univers. La révolution darwinienne « nous » a remis à « notre » place de simple espèce biologique parmi d’autres. Trouver de la vie extra-terrestre serait une troisième révolution montrant que « notre » vie terrestre n’est que l’un des multiples exemples de vies. Pierre Thomas
Si d’un coup de baguette magique on transportait la Terre au-delà de l’orbite de Mars, les fleurs et les petits oiseaux disparaîtraient bien sûr. Mais la vie dans le sous-sol profond, près des sources hydrothermales mantelliques et dans les lacs sous-glaciaires persisterait. Notons que cette vie serait très difficile à détecter « de l’extérieur ». Pierre Thomas
Si la Terre avait été seulement un petit peu plus proche du Soleil, elle aurait pu connaître le même sort que la suffocante Vénus. Un soupçon plus loin, et elle serait devenu un désert glacé semblable à Mars. Et malgré tout, la Terre s’est retrouvée pile au bon endroit, et qui plus est avec les bons ingrédients pour permettre à la vie de croître et embellir. Les scientifiques des années 70, perplexes, en conclurent que nous étions ” au pays de Boucles d’Or ” Mais ce pays de cocagne s’étendait sur une portion remarquablement limitée de l’espace. Il ne recouvrait même pas toute la Terre. À cette époque, les formes de vie connues se confinaient dans des limites bien définies : pas plus froid que l’Antarctique (les pingouins), pas plus chaud que l’eau frémissante (les lézards du désert), pas plus haut que les nuages (grands rapaces), pas plus bas que certains puits de mines (microbes) Et cependant dans les 30 dernières années, notre connaissance de la vie dans les milieux extrêmes a littéralement explosé. Les scientifiques ont découvert des microbes dans les réacteurs nucléaires, d’autres qui se gavent d’acide, d’autres encore pour lesquels l’eau bouillante est un agréable jacuzzi. Des écosystèmes complets ont été découverts autour de cheminées hydrothermales du fond des mers où la lumière du Soleil ne pénètre jamais, et où l’eau qui jaillit de ces cheminées est à la température du plomb fondu. Le pays de Boucles d’Or est beaucoup plus grand qu’on ne l’avait initialement pensé. Science Nasa
Il existe un codage extrêmement précis de l’Univers. Il suffit de l’observer pour constater qu’il est gouverné par des lois parfaitement réglées. Aujourd’hui, la plupart des scientifiques étudient ces lois sans se poser -du moins publiquement – la question de leur origine. Pourtant, ces lois ont de façon troublante les propriétés habituellement atribuées à Dieu. Elles sont universelles. Elles sont absolues car elles ne dépendent ni de la personne qui les étdie ni de l’état du système observé. Elles sont éternelles et intemporelles . Grâce à ces machines à remonter le temps que sont les télescopes, nous constatons que les propriétés des galaxies lointaines vues dans leur enfance peuvent s’expliquer avec les mêmes lois physiques que les galaxies proches vues dans leur maturité. Elles sont omnipotentes puisque rien dans l’Univers, du plus peti atome au plus grand amas de galaxies, n’échappe à leur emprise. Enfin, elles sont omniscientes: les systèmes physiques dans l’Univers n’ont pas à les informer de leurs états particuliers pour que ces lois agissent sur eux. Elles savent à l’avance. (…) La nature semble parler le langage des mathématiques. (…) nous vivons dans un Univers où la difficulté du code cosmique semble ajustée à l’aptitude du cerveau humain à le comprendre. (… L’Univers semble réglé de façon précise dès sa naissance pour l’apparition de la vie et de la conscience. (…) par ailleurs, un “princie créateur” ne signifie pas pour moi un Dieu personnifié qui crée ex nihilo l’Univers, mais un principe panthéiste omniprésent dans la nature, tel que l’entendaient Spinoza et Einstein. Trihn Xuan Thuan
Mais on ne sait même pas si l’univers a un début car le temps a été créé avec l’univers. Trihn Xuan Thuan
En 1968, le sociologue de la religion Peter Berger assura le New York Times que ‘d’ici le 21ème siècle, on ne trouverait probablement plus de croyants que dans de petites sectes, blottis les uns contre les autres pour résister à une culture séculaire mondiale’. Parmi les prédictions les plus spectaculairement fausses, celle-ci n’est pas loin de celle du journaliste de la vieille aristocratie de gauche britannique qui assura les Européens qu’Al-Qa’eda ne représentait aucune menace pour l’Europe le jour même où celle-ci assassina 200 banlieusards à la station d’Atocha de Madrid. Pour ce qui est de Berger, il a au moins depuis rectifié le tir puisqu’ il a reconnu l’ ‘erreur de catégorie’ que représentait le fait de confondre modernisation et sécularisation, forme de prise de ses désirs pour la réalité qui remonte d’ailleurs aux Lumières. The Telegraph
Qui se souvient que le principaux modèle d’explication de l’origine de l’Univers vient en fait du terme ironique qu’avait choisi, pour moquer l’hypothèse d’un curé belge (postulant par ailleurs, excusez du peu, “l’expansion de l’univers” et un “écho disparu de la formation des mondes”), un scientifique britannique tenant d’un modèle d’état stationnaire et d’un univers ”éternel et immuable”?
Particule Dieu? Zone de Boucles d’or? Fenêtre d’habitabilité? Théorie de la Terre rare? Lois de l’univers parfaitement réglées? Universelles, absolues, éternelles, intemporelles, omnipotentes et omniscientes?
Incroyable dosage de conditions (masse, distance, longévité, allumage, gravitation, composition, température, présence d’eau liquide, lumière, protection contre rayonnements et météorites), de forces physiques fondamentales (gravitation, force électromagnétique, forces nucléaires électro-forte et électro- faible) et de constantes universelles (vitesse de la lumière, constante de Planck, constante de gravitation) ?
Alors qu’à l’aube d’une nouvelle année et après le moment fatidique où depuis la nuit des temps les peuples se sont demandés s’il allait bien revenir (du moins pour l’hémisphère nord), la plupart d’entre nous a pu à nouveau constater, soulagé, le retour du Sol invictus s’apprête …
Et où, alors qu’un Dieu annoncé mort depuis près d’un siècle n’en finit non seulement pas de mourir mais semble reprendre du poil de la bête et redeviendrait même, si l’on en croit, un numéro double du Point, ”tendance” …
Pendant que, semblant confirmer l’angoissante singularité de notre proptre planète, nos astronomes continuent leur recherche chaque jour un peu plus vaine d’autres planètes habitables à défaut d’habitées …
Comment ne pas s’étonner, pendant que de son côté l’art apparait de plus en plus antichrétien, de cette sorte d’effacement progressif des frontières entre science et théologie à laquelle nous semblons assister?
Et notamment au-delà de la “suite de coïncidences improbables d’évènements et de circonstances astrophysiques et géologiques qu’il semble devoir imaginer pour que notre monde se crée tel qu’il est et qu’y ‘émerge une vie multicellulaire complexe …
De ces incroyables conditions de possibilité de notre présence, entre eau liquide, atmosphère respirable et quantité adaptée de rayonnement solaire, dans cette petite zone de l’univers (même si elle semble à présent plus grande que prévu) dite “zone de Boucle d’or” (à l’instar de la soupe de la petit fille du conte, ni trop chaude ni trop froide)?
Repousser les frontières du pays de Boucles d’Or
traduction de Didier Jamet
Ciel des hommes
02-10-2003
Tous les jours, les scientifiques découvrent que la vie peut s’épanouir dans des endroits inattendus, et pas seulement dans l’aire privilégiée où nous la croyions confinée.
” Cette soupe est trop chaude ! ” s’exclama Boucles d’Or.
Puis elle goûta la deuxième assiette de soupe.
” Cette soupe est trop froide ! ” protesta-t-elle.
Elle trempa alors sa cuillère dans la troisième assiette et la porta à sa bouche
” Hummm… cette soupe est juste comme il faut ! ” dit-elle joyeusement, avant de l’avaler d’une seule traite.
(” Boucles d’Or et les trois ours “, conte pour enfants)
On pourrait dire que les scientifiques qui se posent la question de l’existence d’une vie extraterrestre sont un peu comme Boucles d’Or.
Pendant de nombreuses années, ils ont regardé le système solaire autour d’eux. Mercure et Vénus étaient définitivement trop chaudes, et Mars et les planètes extérieures trop froides pour abriter des êtres vivants. Seule la Terre convenait à la vie pensaient-ils. Notre planète avait pour elle son eau liquide, son atmosphère respirable, et une quantité adaptée de rayonnement solaire. Formidable.
Cependant les choses auraient pu être très différentes. Si la Terre avait été seulement un petit peu plus proche du Soleil, elle aurait pu connaître le même sort que la suffocante Vénus. Un soupçon plus loin, et elle serait devenu un désert glacé semblable à Mars. Et malgré tout, la Terre s’est retrouvée pile au bon endroit, et qui plus est avec les bons ingrédients pour permettre à la vie de croître et embellir. Les scientifiques des années 70, perplexes, en conclurent que nous étions ” au pays de Boucles d’Or “
Mais ce pays de cocagne s’étendait sur une portion remarquablement limitée de l’espace. Il ne recouvrait même pas toute la Terre. À cette époque, les formes de vie connues se confinaient dans des limites bien définies : pas plus froid que l’Antarctique (les pingouins), pas plus chaud que l’eau frémissante (les lézards du désert), pas plus haut que les nuages (grands rapaces), pas plus bas que certains puits de mines (microbes).
Et cependant dans les 30 dernières années, notre connaissance de la vie dans les milieux extrêmes a littéralement explosé. Les scientifiques ont découvert des microbes dans les réacteurs nucléaires, d’autres qui se gavent d’acide, d’autres encore pour lesquels l’eau bouillante est un agréable jacuzzi. Des écosystèmes complets ont été découverts autour de cheminées hydrothermales du fond des mers où la lumière du Soleil ne pénètre jamais, et où l’eau qui jaillit de ces cheminées est à la température du plomb fondu.
Le pays de Boucles d’Or est beaucoup plus grand qu’on ne l’avait initialement pensé.
Grand comment ? Pour le découvrir, les scientifiques vont chercher plus profond, plus haut et pour ainsi dire dans tous les coins et recoins de notre planète.
Rechercher la vie dans l’Univers est une des missions essentielles de la Nasa. Et trouver une forme de vie dans un milieu extrême ici sur Terre peut nous indiquer quels types d’endroits pourraient finalement se révéler propices à la vie ailleurs dans l’univers.
Les chercheurs de la Nasa Richard Hoover et Elena Pikuta font partie de ces scientifiques. Le mois dernier, ils ont annoncé la découverte d’une nouvelle espèce d’organisme extrêmophile, Tindallia californiensis, découverte sur les rivages du lac Mono, en Californie.
Le lac Mono est une pièce d’eau extrêmement salée et alcaline. Elle est environ trois fois plus salée que l’eau de mer et son pH est de 10, équivalent à celui des produits ménagers utilisés pour nettoyer les vitres. (un pH de 7 est neutre, tandis que la lessive de soude a un pH de 14).
Et en dépit de cela, le lac Mono comprend une gamme étendue de formes de vie, depuis les microbes jusqu’à de petites crevettes en passant par le plancton. Tindalia Californiensis s’y trouve chez elle car elle prolifère dans les milieux très alcalins (pH compris entre 8,5 et 10) et contenant une forte proportion de sel (20%)
” Tindalia californiensis occupe une niche intéressante dans la chaîne alimentaire du lac Mono ” note Hoover. Laquelle ? découvrez le maintenant dans la suite de cet article, ” l’exobiologie est un sport d’endurance “. (lien ci-dessous).
Voir aussi:
ASTROBIOLOGIE
Les conditions nécéssaires à l’apparition de la vie
Pour les scientifiques, l’apparition de la vie sur une planète résulte d’une propention naturelle de la matière à s’organiser en structures de plus en plus complexes, lorsque certaines conditions favorables sont réunies.
Ces conditions sont celles d’un équilibre, d’une zone tempérée entre les extrêmes, entre le trop chaud et le trop froid, le trop massif et le trop léger, entre le trop lointain et le trop proche de l’étoile.
Il y a donc une zone orbitale propice à la vie autour de nombreuses étoiles, d’où la probabilité très élevée que la vie puisse exister sur de nombreuses autres planètes dans l’univers.
Condition n°1: La masse de l’étoile
Les étoiles géantes ont une longévité inférieure à 1 milliard d’année. Elles meurent donc avant que des formes de vie intelligentes n’aient eu le temps de se dèvelopper. De même, les étoiles de masse 10 fois inférieure au soleil ne parviennent pas à “s’allumer” (c’est à dire à démarrer le processus de fusion thermonucléaire qui fait la différence entre une étoile et une planète). Les étoiles moyennes comme le Soleil sont donc les plus favorables.
Condition n°2: La masse de la planète
La masse de la planète détermine la composition de l’atmosphère. La gravité sélectionne les atomes retenus sur la planète, et ceux qui peuvent s’échapper vers l’espace.
Si la planète est trop massive, elle retient intégralement les gaz les plus légers comme l’hydrogène et l’hélium, ce qui crée une atmosphère à base de méthane ou d’amoniac, comme sur Jupiter, Saturne, Uranus ou Neptune.
Si la planète n’est pas assez massive, elle laisse échapper l’hydrogène mais aussi les gaz plus lourds indispensables à la vie comme l’oxygène, ainsi que l’eau qui va s’évaporer dans l’espace. De telles planètes dépourvues d’atmosphère sont exposée sans protection à la radioactivité solaire, aux ultra-violets, ainsi qu’au bombardement des météorites. Dans le système solaire, Mercure est un exemple de ce type de planète.
Mercure: trop petite
Terre: OK
Jupiter: trop grosse
Condition n°3: La distance par rapport à l’étoile
La distance par rapport à l’étoile détermine la quantité reçue de rayonnement solaire. Elle conditionne donc:
La température, qui détermine la présence ou non d’eau liquide, indispensable pour le développement de la vie.
La lumière disponible pour les végétaux
La quantité reçue de rayonnements nocifs à la vie et à la stabilité de l’ADN (ultra-violets, rayons gamma)
Si la Terre avait été plus près du Soleil de 4%, son sort aurait été celui de Vénus: une fournaise.
Si elle avait été plus éloignée de 1 ou 2%, sa destinée aurait été celle de Mars, une planète glacée. La bande d’espace favorable à la vie autour d’une étoile est donc relativement étroite.
Venus: trop chaud
Terre: OK
Mars: trop froid
Condition n°4: La composition de la planète
Eau, oxygène, carbone, fer, font partie des éléments indispensables à la vie telle que nous la connaissons sur Terre, c’est à dire basée sur la chimie du carbone et de l’eau.
Mais il n’est pas exclu que des formes de vie différentes puissent se développer à partir d’autres éléments chimiques, comme par exemple le silicium, ou le méthane.
La composition interne de la planète et de son noyau va également déterminer la présence ou l’absence d’une magnétosphère, dont l’effet est de protéger la planète des rayonnements dangereux en provenance de l’espace et du soleil. Sur Terre, la magnétosphère est générée par les mouvements du fer en fusion, au coeur de notre planète.
Condition n°5: Les lois physiques de la matière et de l’univers
Si les planètes et les étoiles peuvent exister, c’est d’abord grâce aux lois physiques de notre univers, ainsi qu’au “bon dosage” de ses composants.
Ainsi, notre monde n’existerait pas si il n’y avait pas eu initialement un peu plus de matière que d’antimatière. L’univers que nous connaissons est en effet la matière restante après l’anihilation réciproque des masses de matière et d’antimatière, dans les premiers instants de l’univers.
De même, si la vitesse d’expansion initiale de l’univers avait été plus faible, la phase de nucléosynthèse primordiale aurait duré plus longtemps. Si elle avait duré quelques millions d’années au lieu de quelques minutes, notre univers serait ajourd’hui entièrement constitué d’atomes lourds. Un univers de métal, stable et stérile.
De manière générale, les forces physiques fondamentales (gravitation, force électromagnétique, forces nucléaires électro-forte et électro- faible) et les constantes universelles (vitesse de la lumière, constante de Planck, constante de gravitation…) sont idéalement réglés pour permettre l’apparition de la vie.
Les scientifiques ont calculé que si l’on modifie un tant soit peu les valeurs de ces constantes, l’univers n’aurait pu permettre l’apparition de la vie.
L’astrophysicien Trinh Xuan Thuan résume les choses ainsi: “L’univers a été réglé très précisément pour l’émergence de la vie et de la conscience. Le réglage initial est d’une virtuosité époustouflante: on pourrait le comparer à l’habileté d’un archer qui réussirait à planter sa flèche au milieu d’une cible carrée de 1 centimètre de coté, éloignée de 15 milliards d’années-lumière”…
Voir de plus:
• Plus chaud:
121°C, Strain 121 (fumeurs duPacifique)
• Plus froid: –‐15C°, Cryptoendoliths
(Antarctique)
• Radiation: 5MRad, Deinococcusradiodurans
• Gravité: 1 million de g, Escherichiacoli (dans une centrifugeuse)
• Profondeur: 3.2km sous la terre, 12km sous la mer. BacillusInfernus
• Acide: pH0.0 (la plupart des organismes vivent dans un milieu 100000x moins acide), Thiobacillus
• Basique: pH12.8 (la plupart des organismes vivent dans un milieu 1000x moins basique)
• Espace: 6 ans de survie dans le vide pour Bacillussubtilis retrouvé sur un satellite de la NASA
• Pression: 1200x la pression atmosphérique ou 12km d’eau!
• Salinité: 300g/L en mer Morte, Haloarcula
Voir aussi:
God is Back by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: review
According to John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s God is Back, the resurgence of religion has little to do with belief, finds Michael Burleigh
Michael Burleigh
06 Jun 2009
In 1968 the sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, 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’. Among spectacularly wrong-headed predictions this almost ranks alongside the British liberal patrician journalist who assured Europeans that al-Qa’eda was no threat to Europe, on the day that it murdered 200 commuters at Madrid’s Atocha station. At least in Berger’s case it has been a matter of live and learn, and he has since acknowledged the ‘category error’ of confusing modernisation with secularisation, a form of wishful thinking that goes back to the Enlightenment.
John Micklethwait is editor of The Economist and Adrian Wooldridge the magazine’s Washington bureau chief. They have coauthored several books, including The Right Nation, a knowledgeable survey of the tribes that make up US conservatism, even if the long-term hegemony they predicted looks like a category error in the era of Barack Obama. They are on firmer ground with this sparky account of the strength and vitality of religion in the 21st century, although their relentless emphasis on the material world may grate upon those for whom religion is more ineffable. Art and music are a closed book to them.
Their particular strength is to write intelligently and sympathetically about Christians in America, a group of people that especially seem to elicit irrational loathing in readers of The Guardian or the guardians of the BBC and Channel 4. There is certainly much to mock, if one is so inclined. Cross Garden, in Prattville, Alabama, consists of an 11-acre collection of discarded kitchen appliances interspersed with crosses. They bear such slogans as ‘No ice water in hell! Fire hot!’ or ‘You will die’. At the Golgotha Fun Park in Kentucky there is a miniature golf course; players tee-off with Creation at the first hole, and reach Resurrection at the 18th.
The authors give clear and intelligent explanations as to why religion thrives in the most advanced, modern society on the planet, and why it seems to be doing so well in societies that seek to emulate the American model. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has discovered his Orthodox roots, while Vladimir Putin also knows the value of clouds of incense in concealing chauvinism and thuggery.
Thanks to the defining American Revolution, Christianity has never been encumbered by association with a reactionary social order, the factor that explains the anticlericalism and aggressive secularism that still exists in parts of Europe. Although the authors may underestimate the absence of government social safety nets in America, they are surely right in saying that religion provides an intense and practical community. The clients include new immigrants, for whom churches are like decompression chambers for surfacing divers, as well as poor African-Americans, or middle-class blacks and whites who live in the anomic sprawl of suburbia.
In a struggling city such as Philadelphia, the authorities would have to find $250?million a year if it had to fund welfare activities run by the churches. The mega-churches are like mini cities, with cafés, cinemas, crèches, libraries and restaurants. Some of them run to giant publishing empires, universities and television stations, for in the US, as in significant parts of the developing world, religion is one defining characteristic of the aspirant and successful. Major businesses, including Domino’s Pizza, Blockbuster, Tyson Food and Wal-Mart are run on Christian lines, although they don’t take this as far as the health care firm Preferred Management, which incorporates Jesus in the company’s management chart.
In other words, Christianity is associated with success rather than condescension and indulgence towards failure. Elsewhere, there are plenty of people ready to emulate the American model that Europeans mock, if only because America is both successful and powerful. Even Chinese government economists have recognised how religion is useful in smoothing out the sharper, disintegrative effects of free-market capitalism, giving a fresh meaning to Marx’s talk of religion as a form of opiate for the masses.
The book is less sure-footed on either the Islamic world or Western Europe, where readers would be better off investigating the more assured works of Gilles Kepel or Olivier Roy. Too many of the authors’ notes in the chapter on Culture Wars refer to articles in The Economist, rather than anything of substance.
Their conclusion, which echoes Benjamin Franklin, that religion thrives when it is protected from the contaminant of civil power, seems sensible, and they explicitly recommend the disestablishment of the Church of England. By contrast, their concluding encomium to interfaith dialogue and Tony Blair’s ludicrous Faith Foundation surely includes the one unintended joke in the book when they write: ‘Either way, he has spotted a genuine opportunity.’ Amen to that.
God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
ALLEN LANE/PENGUIN, £25, 405pp
Voir aussi:
Globalisation is leading to more belief, not less. Caspar Melville talks to the editor of The Economist about his new book tracing the rise and rise of religion
Caspar Melville
New Humanist
May/June 2009
Another day, another denunciation of Dawkins and Hitchens and their fellow New Atheists. No sooner have we absorbed Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008), Tina Beattie’s The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (2008) or David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions (2009) when along comes God is Back: How the Revival of Religion is Changing the World, by Economist journalists John Micklethwait (pictured right) and Adrian Wooldridge.
But this “God book” is of a rather different order. Unlike its rivals it contains a wealth of fact and subtle argument, empirical evidence and expert witness. As we might expect from The Economist its perspective is global – it sweeps comfortably from the corridors of the Pentagon to a front room church in Shanghai, and speaks authoritatively about events in Nigeria, Pakistan and Egypt. Altogether it lays down a very serious challenge to any of us who had waved God a not-so-fond farewell.
The challenge is threefold. First in line is the secularisation thesis, the argument that religion simply fades away as a natural consequence of modernisation. Not true, argue Micklethwait and Wooldridge. Modernity doesn’t usher in secularisation, it actively promotes religious pluralism. They then train their sights on the equally popular notion that religion contaminates all those who subscribe to its bogus myths and stories. Not true, argue Micklethwait and Wooldridge. Religion brings out both the best and worst in man, and secularists need to come to terms with the positive role religions have played in providing meaningful care and support for the oppressed as well as in the nurturing of aspirations for political freedom from Poland to Burma to El Salvador. Secularists should therefore recognise the corollary of these two facts. While it is perfectly appropriate to demand that religionists should accept the separation of church and mosque from state as a guarantee of freedom of conscience for all, secularists should play their part by accepting that religion is here to stay.
Consider the United States. It is both the most modern and one of the most religious countries in the world. It also provides solid evidence of how religions can provide a commendable array of social services in the absence of an effective welfare state. But it is also a perfect example of how religion can be kept separate from the state. If we could all become more like America, the book argues, we could all get along famously.
I met up with John Micklethwait in a spacious office on the 13th floor of the tallest building in West London’s Economist Plaza. He sipped from a can of Coke as he apologised in a friendly, youthful manner for the mess on his very noticeably tidy antique desk. I began by pressing him on his objections to the well-known secularisation thesis. Were he and his co-author really saying that Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Freud and generations of sociologists had got it wrong?
“Well, I’m not sure we are the first people to say it – after all the distinguished sociologist Peter Berger changed his mind about it a while ago, which was a pretty seismic event, and sociologists have been arguing about it ever since. The difference is that as reporters we have gone out into the world and seen the evidence. We have seen that religion is not going away, that it is in many ways a partner with modernity and not in conflict with it. Many people in Europe, ourselves included, missed the signs that religion was coming back. It took 9/11 for us to take notice, but as a phenomenon it started well before. Even as a Catholic I grew up in an environment which completely accepted the notion that modernity and religion are incompatible – we all thought that if religion did survive it would be a kind of subtle Anglicanism, some version of a doubting Graham Greeneish religion. The evidence shows we were wrong.”
And, he went on to claim, it wasn’t only the classical academics who’d got it wrong. The political class, across the West, was almost wilfully blind to the return of the sacred. “Take the CIA looking at the Shah of Iran, just before the revolution. Someone wrote a report saying that religion was an important factor in what might happen, and someone else scribbled a dismissive note on it that it was ‘mere sociology’. Or when Hezbollah first appeared in Lebanon and people were trying to fit them into the old left-right spectrum – I mean this was a group calling itself ‘the party of God’. When the Americans were preparing to invade Iraq it was clear that no one in the State Department knew anything about the differences between Shia and Sunni – they just didn’t think it mattered. In Europe there was this same pattern. Immigrants from all over the world moved to the UK and set up organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain, and the secular British state kept trying to reinterpret them as national or ethnic groups – they didn’t understand the significance of religious identity at all. History does not record the dwindling importance of religion. Instead it’s a story of people trying to push the issue aside – until September 11.”
There was also the compelling evidence of the emergence of new forms of Christianity in China and Nigeria, the growth of Islam across the Arab world and in Asia, and the proliferation of different strands of belief in the USA. And all of this was happening while modernisation proceeded apace.
At this point we were “joined” by Micklethwait’s co-author Adrian Wooldridge, on the phone from Washington. His voice emerged, loud and clear and disconcertingly, from a golf-ball-shaped speaker in the ceiling. (It crossed my mind that it was not unlike interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury and having God join the conversation.)
Wooldridge took up the question of what we can learn from American religious pluralism: “European secularists assume that the church is on the side of the ancien régime, of the establishment, that it’s against reason and democracy and liberal emancipation, and there is a lot of evidence for that in Europe. But in America the evangelical movement advanced alongside democracy and liberal enlightened values. They were not oppositional forces but comrades in arms. If you give people more freedom and more democracy they will talk about what they want to talk about and obviously for many people that is God. Religion itself has also been important for advancing democracy – it’s an example of the little platoons of civil society. Churches nurture certain civic values, that’s why the Chinese government, and all totalitarian governments, have been very suspicious of them and have tried to crush them.”
Micklethwait was quick to provide reinforcement. “In Eastern Europe religion has served as a battering ram for opening up the post-communist world because it serves as a focus for discontent. In Poland or Latin America even the Catholic Church has been a focus for dissent. The church can act as a barrier to democratisation, as the Catholic Church did for a long time in Europe, but it can also inspire democratisation.”
They are only too happy to concede that religion has been and still can be a disaster. What they resist is a simple dichotomy. Wooldridge put it like this: “The problem with this subject, and I speak as a Balliol atheist here, is that people want to see a neat antithesis between liberalism and religion, or modernity and religion, or reason and religion, and it just doesn’t work. Religion has a good side and a bad side. Sometimes they can come together in the same organisation, as with Hezbollah. It’s complicated.”
I wondered if they realised the alarm with which rationalists and atheists would greet their suggestions that as democracy increases around the world we should expect to see the emergence of more “parties of God”. Did they recognise that this was a kind of nightmare for many of us? “If the parties of God are Hezbollah then they are nightmares for us too,” says Micklethwait. “The thing is, when democracy is concerned the secular-minded always think that people will go off and vote for ‘normal guys’ but of course they don’t. It’s not just the most oppressed who do this – in India and Turkey the educated bourgeoisie, exactly the people who should be the most secular, the driving force of the economy, have flooded towards religiously inspired parties.”
This is not necessarily a welcome development for either Micklethwait or Wooldridge. They are pragmatists. Religion is there, and you have to deal with it.
But didn’t their pragmatism wear a little thin when they turned in their book to the manner in which religion did good? In their portrait, for example, of the many ways in which American Christianity provided vital welfare to the needy, an expertise they dub “soulcraft”. Not so, argued Adrian Wooldridge. “If you look at the world of social services, religion provides two things very well. One is you have people who are willing to make sacrifices and do things that it is hard to believe that secular-minded people would do. People like Pastor Richard Smith from the Faith Assembly of God in Philadelphia, who would just walk into crack houses where people were pointing guns at him and try and close them down. No rational person, let alone any social services bureaucrat, would do that sort of thing. He was absolutely convinced that God would protect him. He devoted his entire time to helping the poor, the homeless, drug-addicted people, with very few resources. His story is remarkable but I think it is multiplied in a lot of different places. If you took away the work that is done by the church in Philadelphia alone it would represent about half a billion dollars of social services cost a year.”
But wasn’t there some traditional Economist bias against the welfare state here? Weren’t the churches in the US merely compensating for the fact that US welfare is so threadbare? Wouldn’t it be preferable if such care was provided by the state and not delivered in the context of faith? Wooldridge, the atheist, was having none of that. “Care is actually better if it is provided in a faith context. If you look at social services you have to fill in forms, people are antagonistic or they do it because they have to, whereas if you go to church for help you know you are talking to another human being who actually cares. Its not just in the US – the same is true in China or Russia and part of the Middle East. If you look around the world you have weak welfare states that don’t provide, and it is unlikely that they will provide in the future. Most people who become welfare-dependent do so because of lack of skills, lack of opportunities, but also because of a lack of self-worth or a lack of a sense of meaning or purpose. These are things that religion is very good at, that bureaucratic welfare systems can’t do. So yes, I think they are a good in themselves.”
Though the tone at times tends toward the celebratory, the authors recognise the catastrophic damage religion can do too. “We disagree with European secularists in the idea that God is dead or unimportant, or that modernity and religion are incompatible,” says Wooldridge. “Where we strongly agree with them is with the idea that religion can be dangerous, and we think that this happens when you get a fusion between political power and religion”. And they think they’ve found the solution. “The lesson other countries should learn from America,” Wooldridge continues, “is that the separation between church and state is the basis for a flourishing civil society.”
Just as American entrepreneurial can-do provides the model for the Economist-approved form of global capitalism, so religion American-style is the exportable model for faith. “We think internally America has the best system for dealing with the return of religion,” insisted Micklethwait. “If only they could recognise it, and model their foreign policy on it. They have plurality of religion, which does not clash with progress, and if people are going to continue believing in God, which they are, then some kind of formal separation between religion and the state seems a really good idea. With the constitution America has that bit cracked.”
But did we really want more exporting of American models to the world? Wouldn’t we end up with more megachurchs and McMosques, with the emergence of powerful consolidated global religious brands? “There may be a degree of consolidation, but the thing about American religions is they come and go. The Methodists swept through everything, then the Baptists were in the ascendant, then the Catholics come back a bit. Nobody ever quite hangs on to dominance. It’s a vigorous, competitive marketplace of ideas.”
This might well be true of America. But when, I asked, might we expect to see a free market of religions in Saudi Arabia? Micklethwait happily conceded that Islam has a good deal further to travel but pointed out that it is losing significant ground to Christianity in the new markets of Asia and Latin America. “This is not what we expected given how well Islam did compared with Christianity in the 20th century in terms of expansion, and given that it was the arrival of Jihadi violence that alerted the world to the return of religion. Islam’s problems with plurality and individual conscience will drag it back. It has to go through a process – a Reformation or Renaissance or Enlightenment – which will be painful. It’s entirely possible that Islam will go through some horrific revolutions. Equally what might happen is that Muslims who live in the West, those with experience of living in a plural society, might start to change Islam from within. Saudi Arabia does not look like a likely candidate to offer a modernised Islam.”
It is because of their (very Economist) emphasis on the benefits of religion as a kind of spiritual marketplace, with traders free to set up stall, consumers free to choose, and rules against monopoly, that the authors choose to end their argument with a clarion call for global disestablishment, and a more local demand for the ending of the established church in Britain. “Rowan Williams is a decent man but there is no way you can defend the situation where we are the only country other than Iran to have clerics at the heart of our political system,” says Micklethwait. “Disestablishment would also be a very good thing for the church – it would allow them speak more clearly and compete in the marketplace of ideas. Has the Church of England gained from the past 200 years of being an organ of the state? I think not.”
I left feeling in need of more proof that the secularisation thesis was completely wrong: experience seems to suggest that rising educational standards do reduce religious affiliation. But I felt more able to acknowledge that the process is far from even and that globalisation is throwing up more diversity of belief. Nor did I feel ready to accept that faith-based social welfare is the best model for developing countries, but then perhaps I am romantic about the NHS.
We should all be cheered, however, by Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s unconditional support for disestablishment – they will make useful allies in keeping up the pressure on theocracies worldwide, as well as launching the long overdue expulsion of the bishops from the second chamber here at home.
Secularists might find some of the arguments in this book hard to swallow, though they should welcome the opportunity to sharpen their own against them, but as a clear and convincing case for the separation of religion and politics, it counts as a considerable, and unapologetically secular, achievement.
Voir de même:
Hanna Rosin
The NYT
GOD IS BACK
How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
405 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95
Not all that long ago, the great minds of Europe predicted a future with little or no religion. Science would make us highly skeptical of miracles. Psychiatry would direct all of our awe and wonder inward. Changing roles for women would weaken the patriarchal structure that props up clerics. Whatever script for modernity one followed, it had God playing a bit role.
As we all know, it didn’t happen that way. Modernity arrived and improvised new starring roles for God. The Americans led the way by becoming both “the quintessentially modern country” and a very devout one, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their new book, “God Is Back,” and most of the world has followed that model. In rich countries and poorer ones, democratic and undemocratic, primarily Islamic and primarily Christian — everywhere, basically, except Europe — devotion to God has remained surprisingly robust.
“The very things that were supposed to destroy religion — democracy and markets, technology and reason — are combining to make it stronger,” write Micklethwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, who together have written previous books about globalization and American conservatism, two similarly sweeping topics.
To anyone who lives outside Europe, the Harvard campus or Manhattan (all faith-free zones singled out by the authors), this conclusion is not exactly startling. In most of the United States, for example, God is always back in one form or another. And various religion-stoked conflicts in the Middle East and Africa make the modern era sometimes feel like a replay of the Crusades. But the book’s strength is in dissecting exactly how God managed to morph and evolve and become indispensable to the world at a time when he should have faded away.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge do not display the usual horror at overt religiosity that we heard in abundance from British and other European writers during the Bush years. Starting with the cheerful ad-speak of the title, they are instead astute social observers in the Tocquevillean mode, reporting from a distance in a tone just short of admiring. When it comes to American religion, they marvel mostly at its astounding success at replicating itself all over the world.
While fundamentalists of all kinds get most of the attention, the authors zero in on another phenomenon: the growth and global spread of the American megachurch. With no state-sanctioned religion, American churches began to operate like multinational corporations; pastors became “pastorpreneurs,” endlessly branding and expanding, treating the flock like customers and seeding franchises all over the world. The surge of religion was “driven by the same forces driving the success of market capitalism: competition and choice.”
The market that niche religious leaders stepped into was the hole opened up by modernity, and their product was something the authors call “soulcraft.” Instead of raging against modern life, they sold themselves as easing the way for the harried middle class. Church became a place to form social bonds, get dates, meet fellow moms isolated in suburbia, lose weight. Christian America spawned a parallel world of popular culture, with books and movies telling people how to live meaningful lives. The most popular, like Rick Warren’s “Purpose-Driven Life,” perfectly mirrored the can-do ethos of American success culture.
ll the while, religion began shedding its association with anti-intellectualism, and became the province of the upwardly mobile middle class. Evangelicals began graduating from college in record numbers, and Christian philanthropists began building an “intellectual infrastructure,” including programs and endowed chairs in the Ivy League. A new class of thinkers emerged representing what some have called “the opening of the evangelical mind,” and a solid religious left began to take shape, symbolized most powerfully by Barack Obama. Obama beat Hillary Clinton for many reasons, but one was his ability to “out-God” her, they write.
Much of Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s analysis of domestic evangelical culture is familiar. The most original parts of the book come when they follow the trail overseas, where homegrown Rick Warrens are popping up in unlikely places. The book opens with a scene from what sounds like a typical Wednesday night Bible study in, say, Colorado Springs — a doctor, an academic, a couple of entrepreneurs, a young hipster in a Che T-shirt, sitting around someone’s living room and chatting about the Bible. Only this is taking place in Shanghai, one of the many places where the casual, personalized, distinctly American style of worship is thriving. They do the same thing a group of American evangelicals would do: debate homosexuality and Darwin, vow to spread the Word, and then check their BlackBerrys before heading home.
The authors track the explosion of Pentecostalism — with its perfect mix of “raw emotion and self-improvement” — to Brazil and South Korea. The American style even has converts in the Muslim world. Indonesia’s Abdullah Gymnastiar, who has been criticized as “the Britney Spears of Islam,” favors wireless mikes, a chatty sermon style and casual dress. (Aa Gym, as he’s known, is making a comeback after being brought low by a sex scandal in 2006.) Amr Khaled, “Egypt’s answer to Billy Graham,” is ushering his followers into the televangelist age. His TV show features testimonials from sports stars and actresses, and he peddles cassettes and sweatshirts on his Web site.
Much like their American models, this new generation of religious leaders is an interesting mix of modern style and traditional message. The trick they try to pull off is making concessions to modernity without diluting their message, but in the Muslim world, especially, it’s not clear how much influence they have.
In many Muslim regions, democracy and the markets are leading to an explosion of religion in the opposite way, as fundamentalists react against sexual promiscuity and other excesses they see in modern life in general and American-style capitalism in particular. The Muslim world, Micklethwait and Wooldridge acknowledge, has been much slower to engage with modernity and has remained mostly hostile to it. There is no Koran equivalent of the various Bible zines that tailor their message to teenagers or hip-hop fans in America. There has never been a Muslim equivalent of the Enlightenment.
The result is a modern era that seems to be replaying the religious wars of the 17th century in a slightly altered form. Radical Islam dominates Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, casting itself as an enemy of the Judeo-Christian West. Nigeria is split along religious lines.
Despite the dark side, the authors ultimately conclude that “God is back, for better.” By this they mean that religion is now a matter of choice for most people, and not a forced or inherited identity. But if that choice can lead you to either buy a sweatshirt or blow up a building, the conclusion itself seems a little forced. The reality is that God is back, for better or worse.
Hanna Rosin is the author of “God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.”
Voir également:
Adrian Wooldridge on God is Back
Christine Linnell
The Lumière Reader
September 5, 2010
Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor of The Economist and author of God is Back, discusses the global resurgence of evangelical religion.
Former Evangelical Christians are usually difficult to spot. Many of us have had years to adjust since we put our days of Christian rock and Bible study groups behind us, and aside from a few telltale signs like a weird over-enthusiasm for the Theory of Evolution, we manage to blend in with the secular world pretty well.
But every so often something puts Evangelicals in the headlines—a movie like Jesus Camp comes out, or Sarah Palin starts talking about, well, anything really—and suddenly there we are plain as day, wincing in recognition, smiling tightly at the inevitable jokes. As much as we try to ignore it, this part of our culture isn’t going anywhere; and lately it’s been demanding more and more of our attention.
As someone who recently joined the ranks of “spiritual-not-religious” critics of the church, I found God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World to be an eye-opening but uncomfortable read. Co-authors Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, writers for The Economist, make the case that instead of fading out in the face of modernity, religion—the American Evangelical brand in particular—is flourishing.
The basic argument, made with historical context, balance, and a touch of wry amusement, is that religion falls into two main categories. There’s the European model, old-fashioned and dogmatic, in which religion is imposed on people by the government. Then there’s the American model based on the separation of church and state, in which churches have to compete with one another for followers. This new model gave rise to the aggressively commercial Evangelical movement, with its auditorium-sized mega-churches, charismatic celebrity preachers, huge media networks, and full-scale marketing campaigns like the Left Behind series. God is Back argues that the power of this spiritual free market is driving a massive revival of faith that is catching on around the world.
When I met Adrian Wooldridge for soft drinks in a hotel bar after his appearance at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, I wasn’t quite ready to accept this. As an American progressive, I cling wearily to the belief that times are changing and the Sarah Palins and Pat Robinsons of the world are on their way out. And after all, I was quick to mention, Wooldridge and Micklethwait made similar predictions about the dominance of the Republican Party that were (mostly) debunked by the 2008 election.
“Yes, the one we got wrong,” Wooldridge said with a laugh. He was jovial and relaxed that evening, loosening his tie as we talked. Admitting his mistake, he still insisted that President Obama’s narrow victory over McCain’s inept campaign during a recession proves his larger point. “America is a very conservative country in its soul, in its heart. Even the Democrats are much more conservative than most progressive parties in Europe or Australasia. I think that’s absolutely the truth.”
Still, his claims of a religious revival seemed surprising to me. Not long after the election, Newsweek magazine ran an ominous cover story called “The End of Christian America”. The article cites a recent American Religious Identification Survey showing that the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen from 86% to 76% since 1990, and a Pew Forum poll showing that the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased from 1 million in 1990 to 3.6 million in 2009.
On the other hand, Wooldridge remarked, a quarter of those self-proclaimed atheists say they believe in some kind of higher power—“an odd notion of atheism.” To him, those poll numbers actually reveal a growing intensity in the debate over organised religion and the role it plays in the world.
“What has happened in America is that the question of God has become a more serious and politicised question,” he said. “There was a long time in which people would identify themselves as religious almost in the same way they’d identify themselves as patriotic or pro-American. That was very much associated with the Cold War and the battle against atheistic Communism. Now they’ve become divided over this issue. The question of ‘Do you believe in God?’ became the question of ‘Do you believe in the Republican Party? Do you like or dislike George Bush?’”
I agreed with him there. Liberals around the world still have nightmares about President Bush “getting instructions from Jesus” in the Oval Office, and the recent headlines about Christian activists rewriting history books in Texas aren’t helping us sleep any easier. Many critics of the Republican Party, like American Theocracy author Kevin Phillips, are convinced that the Religious Right is trying to do away with the separation of church and state altogether.
According to Wooldridge, though, this fear is nonsense. “What did it actually produce under George Bush, when the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate and had a majority of publicly-appointed people on the Supreme Court?” he asked me. “They banned only publicly-funded experimentation on stem cells, and abortion remained legal.”
This comment touched on something I noticed while reading God is Back: a faith in the checks and balances of the United States government that is both gratifying and sometimes hard to believe. The book argues that our political system is neither as religious nor as agnostic as some make it out to be. The Founding Fathers designed a secular framework—“There were no references to biblical texts in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or the new state charters, an astounding fact for the time”—but they didn’t intend for religion to be banned from public life either.
As Wooldridge put it, the real argument America is having is not whether there should be a line between church and state, but how sharply it should be drawn. “You can’t have the Ten Commandments carved in stone in a courthouse, but you can have people proselytising as much as they absolutely want to in the town square and trying to get converts,” he said. “You can’t have prayer enforced by schoolmasters, but you can allow students to pray in private and read their Bible.” His theory is that people on both sides tend to overreach on this issue, leading to cycles of public pushback, retreat, and resurgence.
Despite my frustration with the Religious Right, I had to admit that Wooldridge had a point: non-religious people, particularly those of the Hitchens and Dawkins variety, can be too quick to dismiss the important role religion plays in society. Without the influence of religion in politics, Wooldridge pointed out, we wouldn’t have had the Civil Rights Movement. (“Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t called Martin Luther by accident.”) Many leaders in the anti-Vietnam War movement were also believers, acting on their convictions that war is immoral in the eyes of God.
It also comes down to a question of basic human kindness. Reading God is Back, I was genuinely humbled and inspired by the chapter on churches in Philadelphia that feed the homeless, provide health services to poor families and set up support networks for young people—services that would cost the city millions of dollars to replace. It’s hard to deny that in an increasingly hostile world, churches can offer a refuge and a sense of community.
The thing that bothered me is that small inner-city churches don’t seem to be the ones being exported worldwide—it’s the large, wealthy, suburban mega-churches that are organised and run like multinational corporations, complete with political lobbyists and advertising experts. The book describes how these churches are investing huge amounts of money to gain power in developing countries, using missionary work and charity organisations like Pastor Rick Warren’s anti-AIDS initiative in Africa. Fresh from reading Naomi Klein (like a good liberal) I was alarmed at the idea of American religion becoming a kind of spiritual Wal-Mart, putting a brand name on philanthropy and undermining other forms of civil society.
As one might expect of the Management Editor of The Economist, Wooldridge wasn’t very concerned about this. (When I mentioned Klein he laughed, and the word “buffoon” might have come up.) “I think what you tend to find is societies that have a lot of civil society will also tend to be quite religious societies. You can go back to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America on this. What really is destructive of civil associations, both in religious and non-religious forms, is the power of the state. I think the creation of the welfare state and the huge expansion of state power—the power to tax, to distribute income, to provide services—is really what has led to the withering of associations since the Second World War and even before that.”
With some enthusiasm, he explained that churches-as-corporations are a good thing, however commercial and tacky they may be, because they have to embrace modernity and individual choice to remain competitive. “It creates a religion that’s very differentiated, very consumer-oriented and concerned with different markets. So we talk in the book about these cowboy churches; you have churches oriented toward gays; there are churches that are oriented towards bikers. There’s this marvellous church in Colorado called the Scum of the Earth Church with people who regard themselves as rebels against society.”
Rigid, “customer-hostile” religions like traditional Islam, on the other hand, run the risk of being pushed out of the marketplace despite their strength in numbers. “All of these countries who are trying to impose religion on people are saying that if you’re born Muslim, you’ve got to stay Muslim,” he said. “If you’re born in Saudi Arabia, you’re ipso facto Muslim. In the short term that may work, but in the long term you’re in a collision course with modernity, and I think you’re backing the losing side.”
For Wooldridge, economics is both a handy metaphor for religion and a practical reality. God is Back has a number of anecdotes about upwardly mobile, educated middle-class people in places like China, India, and Indonesia who have a growing infatuation with American-style churches. The book suggests that there is a positive relationship between the rise of faith in these countries and an increase in prosperity.
Pointing me to the theories of Max Weber and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R H Tawney, Wooldridge said that Protestantism was an agent of modernity that helped to create capitalism in the West. “Protestantism spread a faith in the power of the individual and spread scepticism about received authority in the form of the Catholic hierarchy,” he said. “It put an emphasis on thrift, hard work and saving.”
Now, he argued, we may see Weber and Tawney proved right in the developing world, Latin America in particular. “When you’ve got all these people arriving in these gigantic cities and the men go to brothels and gamble and drink, that creates huge social problems. But if they go to church they’re taught, ‘Be disciplined, wear a suit, work hard, aspire to better things, and God will help you.’” Latin-American women also have a lot to gain from escaping the old Catholic system. “The women are very powerful in these churches. They do a lot of the speaking and accept very important organisational roles. They learn to have faith in themselves, present themselves, and become agents of change in society.”
It all sounded very uplifting, but I was still sceptical. If Evangelical religion is all about thrift and humility, I argued, how do you explain Christian celebrities like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer, who live in sprawling mansions and travel the world in private jets? Wooldridge agreed, with a dry smile, that Weber did not have them in mind. “These ministers—let’s put it like this—they’re not noticeably abstemious in their lifestyles. They will display their wealth in a very ostentatious and rather vulgar manner because they think this is proof of God’s favour and God’s blessing. The Gospel of Wealth is… problematic, I think.”
It was a bit more than problematic from my point of view. Osteen is one of the most well-known religious leaders in America, and he essentially preaches that if you pray hard enough and have the right amount of faith, God will magically bring wealth and power your way—a slightly more biblical version of The Secret or How to Win Friends and Influence People. I couldn’t help but wonder if people in developing countries are picking up Evangelical Christianity in the hopes that the God of the world’s wealthiest nation will decide to make them wealthy too.
But the question that worried me the most was this: In this booming global marketplace of religious ideas, how do secular-minded people compete? What about people who tend to be marginalised by organised religion—atheists, for example, or the LGBT community? In a world where an American presidential candidate has to attend the right kind of church to stand any chance of being elected, should non-religious people resign themselves to never having any real influence or political power?
Wooldridge, who himself is an atheist, admitted that this is a concern. “I think it’s unfortunate that deep in the American psyche, there is this notion that to be moral you have to be religious, and that it’s a sort of test that any potential President would have to pass.” But he pointed out that it’s less of a problem for public figures in large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the major universities in America tend to be aggressively secular. “It cuts both ways. On the one hand it’s hard to become President if you’re not willing to at least profess Christianity. However, if you wanted to be on the Harvard faculty, it probably works to be a secular-minded person. And the Harvard faculty has a job for life. Not like the President—he’s only in there for a few years.”
The evening was wearing on by then, and the hotel bar was getting crowded. We chatted about Wooldridge’s study of self-help gurus and the weirdly New Age tone of management seminars as I gathered my notes together, and I left with a somewhat less defensive attitude than when I’d arrived. At the very least, the case for the social and spiritual value of organised religion was worth reconsidering.
But my distrust of the American Evangelical movement was far from over. Several days after my conversation with Wooldridge, a gay couple in Malawi made international news when they were convicted of “gross indecency and unnatural acts” and threatened with at least a decade in prison. It was the latest headline of a culture war over homosexuality and reproductive rights that has flared up in Africa over the last two years—a culture war that has been directly linked to Pastor Rick Warren and political activists from America’s far-right. Perhaps Wooldridge is correct that America is protected from the extreme elements of religion by our freedom of choice. My concern is whether the people to whom we are exporting our religious ideas will have the same protection.
Voir enfin:
Review by John Lloyd
The Financial Times
March 30, 2009
God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Penguin Press $27.95 416 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
Many liberals in postwar Europe view those who are enthusiastic about religion with a certain amount of suspicion. To be a “religious nut” – to talk fanatically about one’s faith – would be to invite at least covert ridicule; one just has to remember how President George W Bush was mocked in Europe for his evangelism. In much of Europe, most people don’t understand why anyone should be joyously and openly religious.
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The Unquiet American by Richard Holbrooke
In God is Back, The Economist’s editor John Micklethwait and its US editor Adrian Wooldridge seek to address this incomprehension, and show how it limits the understanding of what moves hundreds of millions of people round the world. Protestantism, for example, emphasises the direct experience of God through the intercession of the holy spirit, and accounts for about a quarter of the world’s 2bn Christians. This, and other extreme forms of religious belief, is widely regarded by liberals as backward, ignorant and obscurantist. The authors, however, view it as “a great force for social progress and upward mobility in the developing world”. Pentecostalists, they say, “provide people with the right psychological disposition to thrive in a capitalist economy”, because of their emphasis on discipline, regular habits, thriftiness and preservation of the family.
The authors observe that, in general, “the great forces of modernity – technology and democracy, choice and freedom – are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it”. And as a result of this, they claim that the world is moving in the “American direction, where religion and modernity happily co-exist, rather than in the European direction, where secularisation marginalises religion”. In the US version of religion (predominantly Christianity), technology, marketing, the internet and popular culture are pressed into service to gain and keep the flock. As much of the literature on US religion either deprecates its rightwing bias or boosts its wonder-working power, a cool and fair analysis such as this is a welcome rarity.
The book opens in Shanghai, with an account of a group of upper middle-class people holding a Christian prayer meeting at one of their homes. The gathering is expressing ardent agreement with the Biblical text in the book of Romans, which denounces men who “give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other”. These worshippers are the kind of people, well-educated and motivated by a desire to join or stay in the middle class, who are at China’s cutting edge, part of its formidable drive to be the leading economy in the world. As this vignette shows, such people can conjoin modern openness with prejudice, especially against homosexuals. This is disconcerting for those who believe that 21st-century intellectual thought should be at war with bigotry.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge have co-authored books on globalisation, the nature of the business corporation and the US right. Although it may seem like a departure from the sort of subject matter one might expect senior Economist writers to cover, God is Back is the duo’s most successful and vivid book to date. It is filled with clear and apposite examples of resurgent religiosity. Take the case of Chick-fil-A, a fast-food chain, selling chicken sandwiches. The company’s mission statement is “to glorify God by being faithful stewards of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with Chick-fil-A”. This is not a lone or freakish instance of unembarrassed belief in God, say the authors.
The central message of this book is that the US, by separating the state from the church and decreeing religious freedom, established the lasting base for religious entrepreneurialism, and for a successful export of various forms of Christianity. Thomas Jefferson saw separation as good for religion because it would promote competition; James Madison saw it as good for the state because religion could be free “to promote public morality, unencumbered by state patronage”. On their beliefs – and those of the other framers of the Constitution – an entrepreneurial religious agora was created, constantly able to renew itself, as it is now doing.
According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the just-departed President Bush was not out of line with postwar US presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and that louche cosmopolitan Bill Clinton all affirmed their faith and sought to promote it. This was in strong contrast to most European politicians.
US evangelicals are not a collection of rednecks: their churches are often mixed-race, their interests increasingly comprehend world poverty and global warming, and they are shedding the anti-intellectual image. Marginalised from a largely secular educational establishment, they have “formed an impressive array of academic associations”, which exist parallel to the state colleges and the Ivy League.
Christianity is the overwhelming focus of the narrative. In this sense, the book fails to be comprehensive and falls short of its sub-title, “How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World”. The God that is back is a Christian one, with an American accent. Islam gets some space, much of it an assessment of the evidence on how far the faith has mutated into a series of violent campaigns to Islamise, or re-Islamise, as much of the world as possible. There is little about Orthodoxy, not much more about Judaism, while Buddhism and Hinduism must fend for themselves.
Above all, the authors destroy the equation often made by anti-Americanists between US evangelism and radical Islam. The former resides in an assumption, not just of toleration, but of pluralism: the second insists not just on the rightness of its path but on the duty to impose it by force. “History”, said Jefferson, “furnishes no example of a priest-ridden country maintaining a free civil government.” For all its sins against liberalism, particularly on the issue of gay sexuality, new-minted US Christianity has remained true to the founders’ belief that faith should be freely found.
John Lloyd is a contributing editor to the Financial Times
