Michiko Kakutani finds God is Back, a new book by John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of the Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, that magazine’s Washington bureau chief, poorly argued and riddled with generalizations and biases:

<br />In arguing that “religion’s power” has “continued to increase,” they contradict considerable evidence to the contrary. (The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, released this month, found that “the U.S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.”) In arguing that modernity and religion are compatible, Mr. Wooldridge and Mr. Micklethwait play down that Osama bin Laden and other radical jihadis embrace highly puritanical, backward-looking forms of Islam that stand in direct opposition to much of modernity. (The authors also fail to grapple with the anti-progressive impulses of Christian and Jewish fundamentalism.) And in arguing that religion is increasingly a matter of choice, they ignore the plight of people (like women under Taliban rule) who are forced to live by strict religious codes they themselves may not believe in.

[…]

The authors write in their introduction that one of them is a Roman Catholic and one is an atheist, and that they hope “whatever biases we bring have canceled each other out,” but they often sound very rah-rah about religion in their observations and choice of language. They talk of the “acids of modernity” seeping “into American intellectual life throughout much of the late 19th century,” diminishing the role of religion on college campuses. After noting the small number of believers in France, Germany and other European countries, they add: “Still there are a few glimmers of light on the horizon. Those glimmers are brightest to the east. In Poland, more than 70 percent of the population regularly go to church.”

Read the full review here.