“The French government has officially designated 173 religious groups (most of them Evangelical Protestants, including Baptists) as dangerous cults, imposing heavy tax burdens upon them and subjecting their members to official discrimination in such things as employment. Subsequently, Belgium has outdone the French, identifying 189 dangerous cults, including the Quakers, the YWCA (but not the YMCA), Hasidic Jews, Assemblies of God, the Amish, Buddhists, and Seventh-day Adventists.”
Christopher Hitchens claimed religion poisoned everything; Dawkins has compared a religious upbringing to child abuse. Are they right? Are religious groups really such a threat that these kinds of measures should be taken? Sociologist Rodney Stark draws from an impressive range of studies to make the case that the opposite is true. Religion – specifically evangelicalism – helps everything it touches to flourish.
Stark, a sociologist of
religion, began his professional life as a research sociologist at the Survey
Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He has since
worked at the University of Washington and more recently at Baylor
University. He has written over 30 books
(two of which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion) and published over 140 scholarly articles.
He has described his early stance toward religion as that of an agnostic incapable of religious faith; in 2004, he claimed neither faith nor atheism; in2007, he described himself as an “independent Christian.” In other words, he
spent years studying a worldview that he often did not support before
aligning himself with the Christian faith. One would think that his long (and thoroughly researched) path from skepticism to belief at least affords him the dignity of being taken seriously.
This book is not meant to be an
apologetic for the Christian faith. It does not argue that Christianity is
true. Mr. Stark merely makes a well-informed case that by multiple measures of
what is popularly called ‘human flourishing,’ Christianity is the solution
we’ve been looking for, not the problem we should be seeking to avoid.
