For good or ill, religion is back at the center of public life. The Economist’s John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue in their new book, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World, that the resurgence of deeply felt faith around the world represents the triumph of American-style religious pluralism, but that it brings with it increasing risk of religious wars, both violent and cultural.

At a book forum at the American Enterprise Institute on April 3, the director of AEI’s National Research Initiative Henry Olsen asked the authors where, if He had ever left, God went. “The elite assumed that modernity was crushing religion,” Micklethwait said. It was taken for granted by the world’s top minds that the Enlightenment had triumphed and that religion had been relegated to a private sphere. This assumption dominated the 20th century and was instrumental in Communist regimes, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkey, and the revulsion of Western democrats to Nazism and fascism. Even The Economist published an obituary for God, Micklethwait said with a grin. Scientific and technological progress was supposed to make God obsolete. But the late 20th century proved the elite consensus wrong. The Iranian revolution, the Polish pope, and the election of a born-again American president were all tokens of a resurgence of religion, not in the private sphere, but out in the open. Today, the president of the United States and the British prime minister speak openly and warmly about their faiths and only a few people bat their eyes. Even regimes that are hostile to religion are increasingly powerless to resist it: China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian country.

What is driving this resurgence? “People are going to religion because it is doing things for them,” Micklethwait said. But it’s not just a matter of getting material well-being (although that is part of it). Religions are growing fast in the global middle class, a phenomenon noted by Carol Lee Hamrin in an AEI paper on China’s urban, educated Protestants. Religion has documented benefits for well-being and living a meaningful life—hence bestsellers such as Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life.

Modern lives are full of insecurities and dislocation. People are searching for community and moral grounding, and they are increasingly finding it in faith.

Another factor that Micklethwait and Wooldridge cite for revivified religion is something I once noted in The American about U.S. evangelicalism: “Everywhere in the United States, people have more consumer choice in their exercise of religion than they do in almost any other sector of the economy. Individual parish churches, regardless of denominational affiliation, function as independent contractors of salvation in America’s religious free market.” This intense competition within and among religions explains why churches, mosques, and ministries have gotten better at meeting people’s needs.

Luis E. Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, offered an additional explanation of religion’s latter-day appeal. Modern lives are full of insecurities and dislocation, especially those most affected by globalization. People are “searching for community, searching for moral grounding,” he said, and they are increasingly finding it in faith. Thus, modernity can strengthen religion. (Even secularists feel the pressures of modernity and reach for quasi-religious solutions; consider the apocalyptic prophecies of the environmental movement.)

The intense competition within and among religions explains why churches, mosques, and ministries have gotten better at meeting people’s needs.

Wooldridge highlighted the dangers of the religious revival. “Passionately held religious beliefs are a devil to deal with,” he said. With them could come a return to wars of religion—not that interreligious conflict ever really died, but religion is returning to the statecraft of the great powers—which are intractable because the issues at stake do not invite compromise. Also of concern, Wooldridge said, is the “spread of American-style culture wars all around the world.” He cited as examples debates about gay marriage, abortion, sharia law, and cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But Micklethwait and Wooldridge locate the solution to American-style culture wars in the American constitutional order: separation of church and state. America uniquely “institutionalized toleration . . . and competition,” which invigorated religious belief and practice in this country and paved the way for what Wooldridge called the “global spread of American-style religion.” He contrasted this to Europe’s approach to faith, a brittle secularism that props up lifeless state churches but cannot absorb deeply felt religions like Islam, professed by many of its immigrants. “America has created a regime that allows religion to coexist with modernity in a relatively safe and stable manner,” Wooldridge said. “It’s a solution, I think.”

Evan Sparks is an associate editor at the American Enterprise Institute.

FURTHER READING: AEI’s Peter J. Wallison discusses why science does not and never will have the answers to the deepest spiritual questions in “Let’s Declare a Truce in the Culture War.”

Image by Darren Wamboldt/The Bergman Group.