Religion undergoes a resurrection
Andrew Brown in the London Guardian
| 29 Oct 2008
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The return of ideology has taken us all by surprise because no one expected it all to be about religion. Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell and it seemed reasonable to suppose that all the big questions about how to organise society had been solved by history, if you had asked what could possibly disrupt this progressive consensus, hardly anyone would have supposed that the answer had anything to do with God.
There may have been a few prescient pessimists who thought Islam would be an important and dangerous disruption on the forward march to the future – perhaps important and dangerous enough to need quelling with a few brisk, punitive expeditions – but even such pessimists could hardly have imagined the fiasco that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be, nor 9/11 attacks and the widespread fear and loathing they have produced.
Nor could anyone have foreseen the emergence of the religious right as such a dominant force in American politics and its extraordinary takeover of the Republican party.
But now the Reaganite model of capitalism is collapsing around us, liberal democracy is no longer poised to take over the world but worrying about where and how it may survive - and the arguments about religion are back as fiercely as ever, and almost as popular. This is extraordinary.
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