Related articles and links |  1 of 4

For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery
Rodney Stark
Princeton University Press
496 pages, $35

God has gone missing. Over the past couple of decades, critics and parents have decried the way that school textbooks have been purged of references to the role of religious belief in the shaping of America's major social movements, from William Bradford's "errand in the wilderness" to Martin Luther King's Montgomery bus boycott—all in the name of "neutrality" toward religion.

Earlier this year, God went missing from the proposed wording for the European Union's constitution. There remains a veiled reference to Europe's "cultural, religious, and humanist heritage," but there is nothing to suggest that there ever was a European "Christendom" or that the continent's history was shaped by ideas derived from Christian theology.

And in newsrooms, reporters regularly ignore the religious commitments and understandings that explain why people take risks and make sacrifices for the causes they believe in.

God is also missing in certain sectors of academe. And in For the Glory of God, University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark offers a corrective to the work of sociologists and historians who downplay, despise, or dispute the role that belief in God has played in shaping history.

At the hinge-points of history, people take risks or invest their energies in ways that cannot be explained simply in terms of self-interest. Not that certain historians and social scientists don't try—trying to reduce, for example, our understanding of the War Between the States as a form of economic conflict between an agricultural South and an industrial North.

But Stark has lost patience with these scholars, and in this latest book, he takes four major chapters from our cultural history and shows that a belief in God—nay, a belief in the God of Christian theology—was a necessary condition for these developments. "Moral fervor," Stark writes, "is the fundamental topic of this entire book: the potent capacity of monotheism, and especially Christianity, to activate extraordinary episodes of faith that have shaped Western civilization."

Extraordinary episodes
Stark doesn't argue so much the virtues of Western civilization as the fact (yes, fact, not theory) that you cannot understand Western civ without reference to Christian theology and the way that it fertilized the soil in which those "extraordinary episodes" grew. The book focuses on four episodes: (1) the efforts at church reform that culminated in the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, (2) the rise of modern science, (3) the fabled witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, and (4) the abolition of slavery and the slave trade.

In each case, Stark shows that a belief in a great God who makes moral demands and who rewards and punishes in the afterlife is an essential component of what happened. Think about church reform: What if the church had been polytheistic in the manner of Hinduism or perhaps ancient Greece? What if the church had taught then, as Paul Tillich did in the 20th century, that there was a divine principle (but not a passionate personal God) at the base of all reality? Would precursors of the Reformation—Peter Waldo, Jan Hus, John Wyclif, Henry the Monk, and Arnold of Brescia—have taken the enormous personal and political risks they did to bring about change if they had worshiped a philosophical principle or the capricious residents of Mount Olympus?

next page... |  1 of 4

July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47