The invisible hand of God: does faith flourish in a free market?

• Author: Baumann, Paul
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS - God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World - Book review

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Penguin Press, 416 pp.

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In the beginning, preaches God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, God created Adam. No, not the dim-witted Adam with the nagging girlfriend and forbidden-fruit problem, but Adam Smith, the enterprising fellow with the thick burr, the invisible hand, and all those economic maxims drawn from an eighteenth-century pin factory. And God, it seems, saw that Adam Smith was very good indeed. Soon industrialists begat free traders, free traders begat robber barons, robber barons begat captains of industry, captains of industry begat high financiers, high financiers begat masters of the universe, and masters of the universe begat i-banking, securitized mortgages, and credit default swaps, and now only God and Tim Geithner know what's next. Along the way, God also created the Economist to proclaim the truth and efficacy of all this. Yes, the Economist--where John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge ply their trade--dutifully cautions that even free markets can be brought low by original sin. But that is to be expected in a world in which even God himself must cope with "market fluctuation." Today, after having His stock shorted for a century or three, God's business has revamped its marketing strategy and is repositioned with an eye for growth.

Or at least that is what God Is Back claims. Where once it was widely assumed that modernity and its handmaiden "secularization" would kill off religion, the reports of God's death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assure us, "the very things that were supposed to destroy religion--democracy and markets, technology and reason--are apparently combining to make it stronger." Europe was wrong, and America right. Irreligion in Europe is the anomaly, and the "hot religion" (namely Evangelical Protestantism) of the United States is the future. "American-style religion" is very much here to stay, and on the whole that is a good thing-especially for business.

God Is Back is an enormously ambitious book whose authors pound its argument home with the persistence of the proverbial used-car salesmen. Given their devotion to classical economics, it is no surprise to learn from them that God's reemergence as a sound investment is due in large part to the Almighty's embrace of eternal truths...