TTF Staff
Trinity Forum founder and Moderator Os Guinness has published a review of a new book on religion and politics worldwide in the Spring 2005 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.
Discussing Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. Dr. Guinness welcomes their contribution to the research and understanding of religion in public life but suggests that their approach contains a fundamental weakness. Two clips follow.
The weight of all the data, interestingly, points somewhere between the extremes of the debate. Religion is far from dead, and it certainly hasn’t disappeared—even in Europe, where the evidence for its demise is most powerful. But there is strong evidence that it has lost its decisive authority over the lives of adherents in the developed world—even in the United States, where American exceptionalism has long defied European trends toward secularization.
And
What really ought to be addressed, however, are the implications of Norris and Inglehart’s findings for the Western democracies. They nowhere discuss religion as having more than a generic, functional role in assuring existential security. Such a view is inadequate for those who take the specific content of faith seriously, and who argue that faiths of a certain shape produce citizens of a certain shape, who in turn produce societies of a certain shape—in other words, that faith must be considered as a set of beliefs with particular consequences and not others.
Sightings, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Mon 06 Jun 2005
It is significant, I think, that in the presence of a story, whether we are telling it or listening to it, we never have the feeling of being experts—there is too much we don’t yet know, too many possibilities available, too much mystery and glory. Even the most sophisticated of stories tends to bring out the childlike in us—expectant, wondering, responsive, delighted—which, of course, is why the story is the child’s favorite form of speech; why it is the Holy Spirit’s dominant form of revelation; and why we adults, who like posing as experts and managers of life, so often prefer explanation and information.
Eugene Peterson
