Purpose Driven – Body Parts

History has a way of repeating itself.

A couple millenia ago, the powers of the age tried to kill and bury God. Three days later, He came back, making all His doubters look pretty foolish. And now, even after all this time, God still won’t stay dead and buried. 

That is, in so many words (and a little embellishment) the scholarly take of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their collaborative book, “God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World.” The journalists, two leading lights for The Economist (Micklethwait is the prestigious magazine’s editor-in-chief),  come from different ends of the theological spectrum — Micklethwait’s a Catholic and Wooldridge is an atheist — but they conclude in their book that faith is far from dead: Rather, it’s been rejuvenated through the unlikeliest of circumstances.

Timothy Samuel Shah wrote an essay about the book for Foreign Affairs — titled, cleverly, “Born Again in the U.S.A.” “What they find,” he says, “is that many of the forces that were supposed to consign the Almighty to the ash heap of history — or to a quiet corner of the living room — have only made Him stronger.”

And among those forces, the authors argue, was America’s entrepreneurial spirit. Shah writes:

Beyond discovering that God still has a pulse, Micklethwait and Wooldridge give a firsthand account of how religious groups all over the world — from family ministries in the United States and megachurches in South Korea to televangelists in Egypt — use modern methods to convert people. The result is more Robert Capa than Max Weber: arresting snapshots of bubbling religiosity rather than elaborate theories about the causes and consequences of the global religious revival. But the snapshots support an argument: that the United States’ increasingly competitive religious market has incubated a form of entrepreneurial faith — a religious style that is conservative at its doctrinal core but restlessly innovative in its techniques of organization and communication.

I think that’s true. Look in most large evangelical churches and what do you see? Worship bands. Big screens. Coffee shops. Behind the scenes you’ll see many organizations that tick with the precision of a Fortune 500 company.

Some of us bemoan these trappings at times — and at times, I think, with good reason. We can lose ourselves in our bells and whistles. But the instinct behind it all — to reach the unreached, to make people feel comfortable, to feel at home — is a good one. And it has kept faith strong and relevant for millions of people.

Let me confess something: Belief doesn’t come easily to me. I’m a skeptical cuss prone to the blues, and there are days when I wake up and feel sadly, fearfully, alone. On days like these, I don’t push reason aside: Rather, I embrace it. Because even when I don’t feel God is there, I know he is.

And the very fact that Christianity has endured, so improbably under so trying of circumstances for so many centuries, is one of the many reasons I know it. The history of Christianity sometimes seems so outlandish when you read about it. And yet, here she is — not a fictional fairy tale, but a force that has, so far, outlived all her critics: Beautiful and scarred, always changing, always constant. And it sounds as though a whiff of that can be found in “God is Back.”

Of course, I have a quibble with the title. After all, God never left.