From the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest.
Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009), 432 pp., $27.95.
Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 248 pp., $24.95.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 416 pp., $27.95.
Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 576 pp., $25.99.
God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
IN 2004, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, U.S.-based editors and writers for the Economist, published The Right Nation. "The sound that we have been hearing in the background of American political life for the past thirty years," they wrote in that book, "is the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of liberalism." Conservative ideas are vibrant, they argued, and conservative politicians entrepreneurial. With an equal mixture of brio and boldness, Micklethwait and Wooldridge concluded that because "American conservatism had both history and sociology on its side," its future could not be brighter.
Writing about politics is always a risky business, but even by the lowest expectations of predictability these men were way off the mark; five years after their book appeared, only the unelected Supreme Court, of all the branches of American government, is currently in the hands of the political Right. Undeterred, Micklethwait and Wooldridge are in the prophecy business once again; their new effort, God is Back, predicts a future for religion as bright as the one they once held out for conservatism.
