The world is getting more religious, because the poor go for God
Religion itself thrives in places where
liberal individualism fails. That’s the real clash of civilisations
Thursday 26 May 2016 12.25 EDT
Last modified on Friday 5 May 2017 13.19 EDT
The so-called
“masters of suspicion”, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, all thought that religion
would wither and die in the 20th century. Others enthusiastically backed the
secularisation hypothesis. Intellectually, the enlightenment had punctured it
below the waterline and it was sinking. Religion was dead. Except, of course,
the reverse happened: it flourished. In 1900, the year that Nietzsche died,
there were 8 million Christians in Africa. Now there are 335 million. And the
growth rate continues to accelerate. God wasn’t dead. God was reborn. Indeed,
far from being the century in which religion went away, for both Christianity and Islam,
the 20th century was numerically the most successful century since Christ was
crucified and Muhammad gave his farewell sermon on Mount Arafat. By 2010, there
were 2.2 billion Christians in the world and 1.6 billion Muslims, 31% and
23% of the world population respectively. The secularisation hypothesis is a European
myth, a piece of myopic parochialism that shows how narrow our worldview
continues to be. . .
Read more at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/may/26/the-world-is-getting-more-religious-because-the-poor-go-for-god
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