God is Back
Recommend on Google+
Weber and Durkheim predicted the secularization of the world. Freud saw religion as neurosis. Neitzche stated confidently that “God is dead”. In fact, ever since Darwin, educated western though has considered religion to be a dying phenomena - ” the refuge of the ignorant, the superstitious”. In 1959 C. Wright Mills argued that “in due course the sacred realm shall disappear altogether, except possibly, in the private realm”.
So why is religion making a come back? Did it ever really go away?
Although the number of atheist in America has gone from 6% - 16% in the past 20 years, there also appears to be a rise in the number of commited evangelicals and Pentecostals. 3/4 of Americans still describe themselves as Christian. There are churches the size of football stadiums across Latin America, 12,000 acre “redemption camps” in Nigeria, shopfront churches in the slums of Rio and Guatemala City and brick and mud tabernacles in rural South Africa.
60% of the worlds Christians live in the developing world. In Russia 86% of the population describe themselves as Christian. In China house churches are springing up. China is well on its way to being the worlds biggest Christian country: there are at least 80 million Christans and more people go to church each week than are members of the Communist Party. Europe is less secular that it first appears. There is a rise in European Islam, Evangelical Christianity and charismatic Catholicism.
So why is religion making a come back?
It appears that Homer spoke the truth when he said “all men have need of the Gods”. Some people will always look to religion to provide their lives with meaning and purpose.
Religion has an excellent infrastructure. In many undeveloped parts of the world villages will be without running water, a school, a hospital and so on and yet they will have a church or place of worship. Often the church can be the place which fills the gap in lieu of these facilities. Rick Warrens church sends hundreds of missionaries to developing countries each year. They come equipped with things like ‘clinic in a box’, ‘school in a box’ and ‘business in a box’. the place of worship begins to bring other benefits as well as redemption. This life can look rather better as well as the next.
Whereas in the past religion and modernity have been set as if against one another, it is true to say that modernity nowadays is about pluralism rather than secularism. Berger argues that modernity was simply mis-labelled. Secularity is now a thing of the past. Blair didn’t ‘do God’. He now runs a religious foundation and Sarkozy has recently published a book arguing that religion should be given more of a role in the public square.
But, saying this, it is clear that the global revival of faith has led to religious conflict as well as all of the positive associations of faith. Nigeria is an example of the strife between conservative Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. India sees Christian communities living in fear having having been pushed out of their villages by Hindu’s. So although modernity now preaches pluralism the question that remains is whether it can do tolerance.
To read the full article click here
blog comments powered by Disqus
RELIGIOUS STUDIES TEACHER RESOURCE NEWSLETTER
Sign up for tutor2u's free Religious Studies Teacher Resource Newsletter
