News of God’s death has been grossly exaggerated, says Peter Mullen.

GOD IS BACK: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin, £25) SO God is back? In truth, I didn’t know he had been away. I do know that we have been lectured for decades on the subject of the inevitability of secularisation.

For more than 200 years “progressive”

Western intellectuals have been telling us that religion is withering on the vine and that it’s only a matter of time before it dies away altogether: that, as Nietzsche said, “God is dead”

and any recollection of him persists only evanescently, like the last fading smile of some cosmic Cheshire cat.

When I was studying for the priesthood in the 1960s, the fashion was for secular versions of Christianity and we were inundated with paperback books from radical theologians, with strange titles such as The Secular Meaning of the Gospel and The Gospel of Christian Atheism. The most controversial of these books was Honest to God by JAT Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, who coined the slogan: “Our image of God must go”.

While it is certainly true that Christianity has declined in Western Europe over the last 40 years, in most other parts of the world the faith has prospered and increased tremendously.

There are now more than one billion Roman Catholics worldwide.

Protestant Pentecostalism is all the rage in South and Central America and in sub-Saharan Africa and its traditional values of thrift and cleanliness- next-to-godliness are changing millions of lives for the better, providing an exit route from the scourges of crime, drugs and prostitution.

Indeed, the authors of this book admit as much. Astonishingly, they claim that religion is increasing so quickly in China that by the middle of the century Christianity and Islam will claim more adherents in that country than anywhere else in the world.

The authors say: “Even leftish intellectuals are finding God – at least as a subject. Mike Davis, a Marxist sociologist, has decided that, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to Muhammad and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the post-industrial cities of the developing world.”

Why, with the single exception of Western Europe, is religion on the increase?

The authors claim that this is because “...consumer capitalism is eating its own children by undermining the culture of discipline and selfrestraint, as the affluent children of the 1960s turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Capitalism needs to be supported by old-fashioned bourgeois virtue if it is to succeed – and the obvious place to find such virtue is in the churches.”

SECULAR welfarism is the god that failed. As this book says: “You cannot solve the problem of poverty simply by giving poor people more money. You need to teach them habits of self-respect and discipline.

The decline of religion has gone hand in hand with the demoralisation of society: the Government version of the welfare state had perversely decoupled the provision of basic services from any attempt to reform personal behaviour.”

Modern secular welfarism has destroyed the conventional family and the tragedy is that all the alternative forms of cohabitation have failed to provide social cohesion. Social breakdown has become institutionalised as divorce, one-parent families, serial monogamy and abortion are the rule rather than the exception.

On all these crucial issues, “secularists are allowed to express their moral views in the public square while religious people are excluded”.

This is a fascinating and exciting book – not so much for its authors’ opinions, but for the many startling facts they reveal. Scratch any secular veneer, they say, and you will find religion just beneath the surface.

For instance: “The New York elite may be one of the least religious groups in the country, but look beneath the surface of the secular city and you find a religious heart beating.

– a place of crammed churches, storefront temples, raucous revival meetings and charismatic preachers. The Times Square church in the heart of neon-lit capitalism has 8,000 congregants a week...”

God is back all right – you might say, with a vengeance