Sacred and Secular : Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics)

Rating:
Summary: The bottom line: poverty breeds religious faith...
Review: The single strongest argument to be found in this book -- shown through extensive data anayis, rich evidence, and clear thinking -- is that societies where people have enough to eat, housing, healthcare, good education, and jobs are societies marked by LOW religiosity: few go to church and few believe in God or that the Bible is divine. Conversely, societies whyere life is precarious, marked by poverty, corruption, sickness, low education and unemployment, are societies marked by high degrees of religiosity. Makes perfect sense. And this book spells it all out, with lots of reliable data.
The funny things as that all the social scientists of Europe from the 1800s who predicted the detah of religion WERE RIGHT -- for their own societies. Their predictions obviously didn't hold for the rest of the world, but heck, no prediction is perfect. Religion in most of Europe is dying -- as was predicted. See the work of Steve Bruce for even more solid contemporary evidence. or Grace Davie.
Greeley, Stark, and Finke are simply wrong. This book proves much of their theories wrong. Shame on Greeley for calling secularization theory "dogma" without data. Shame on Stark for mocking sound sociological evidence.
Rife with clear data and clear theoretical articulation, this is a solid look at religion the world over. Religious faith is indeed flourishing throughout much of the world, but that is only because poverty is also flourishing throughout much of the world. And why is religion so strong in the US? Hm...let;'s see...could it maybe be that we have the highest percentage of people below poverty of any advanced industrial democracy, and we have the greatest gap between rich and poor, and no national health coverage? Well heck, at least Bush is big on prayer....