God Lives

The Economist has a special section on religion. As an answer to globalization's challenges, religion’s coming back, a theme in line with Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), and touched on in this blog’s “computers v. culture”. The world’s biggest religions—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—are larger than ever, and Islam’s extreme version is a truly serious threat to globalization. Secularism, once thought the wave of the future, is a North American-Western Europe exception to a picture that has seen Christianity grow from 10 million to 400 million African believers in the 20th century, and China moving toward becoming the world's largest Christian nation by 2050. As The Economist puts it, modernization was thought to lead to secularization, but in fact modernization means pluralism, or different religions (including Atheism as a choice).

Nationalism followed the Age of Faith, and it dominated world history from 1648 to the Berlin Wall’s 1989 fall. We are now in the era of globalization, with religion in its shadow, making a comeback.