My View

Religion is so powerful a force in the contemporary world that without knowledge of religion we scarcely can understand the daily newspapers. A fair example of what happens when people do not know how to make sense of the power of religions in contemporary life is our country’s difficulty in understanding the Islamic revolution in Iran, not to mention the Judaic revolution in the State of Israel, the Protestant army of Northern Ireland, the Roman Catholic revolutions in Poland and in Latin America, the Christian army of Lebanon, the tragedy at Jamestown and many continuing evidences of the vitality of religious belief—sometimes healthy, sometimes perverse.

There is a bias against religion as a force in culture and psychology. Intellectuals in general, and the political left in particular, assume that religion is dead and that God never was. This is surely one possible way of thinking about the character and meaning of society and of life. According to this viewpoint, religion is dying; as we know it, it is a holdover from another age. People who hold this view therefore claim that religion does not require study. Those of us who find religion an exceptionally interesting phenomenon of society and culture, imagination and the heart, can do little to overcome this bias. But it is a bias, for it rests upon the will to wish religion away, not upon the perception that religion has gone away.