The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious than Ever, by Rodney Stark. Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2015, 258 pages, $24.95.

What if the sociologists of religion get it all wrong? What if their projections of the future of religion are based on false assumptions, unscientific polling, and bad data? That is the claim of Rodney Stark in this feisty book. Stark taught the sociology of religion at the University of Washington for three decades before accepting his present appointment at Baylor University. In some thirty books that he has authored or co-written, Stark commends the study of world religions in terms of competition that yields winners and losers. (Thus phrases like “rise of,” “victory of,” and “triumph of” appear in his book titles, including the one under review.) Raised in the Lutheran tradition, Stark’s own religious convictions have shifted from agnostic to “independent Christian.”

“Until now,” Stark asserts, “worldwide religious statistics have been based on substantial guesswork” (12). Many surveys severely limited religious questions to matters of institutional affiliation or attendance at religious services. (Stark singles out the Pew Research Center surveys as particularly unreliable.) The effect has been to inflate the appearance of secularism, from Europe to China. The introduction of more sophisticated surveying (such as the Gallup World Polls, begun in 2005) is yielding a more reliable picture, he explains. (A warning to the statistically challenged: charts of survey results take up a good 20 percent of this book.)

Stark takes the reader on a quick world tour, beginning in Europe, where the claim of a “secularized Europe” is simply a “grand illusion” (37). Declining church attendance is not an indication of a rise in atheism, because the continent is replete with a “smorgasbord of spiritualities” (48), and even alleged secular strongholds such as Sweden and the Netherlands are awash in New Age and Eastern beliefs ranging from reincarnation to mental telepathy. These “believing non-belongers” (44) elude the measurement of pollsters who fixate on church membership. Stark even suggests that fears of growing Muslim populations in Europe are overstated. His research indicates that Muslim fertility rates in Europe, as with the rest of the European population, have dropped below replacement level. Indeed, the only demographic in Europe that has a fertility rate above replacement level are women who attend church weekly.

Subsequent chapters make stops in Latin America, the Muslim world, Africa, Asia (including Japan, China, and the “four tigers”—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea), and finally America. Sociologists continue to predict the withering of religious conviction under modernity. But across the globe, the evidence consistently reveals otherwise: a remarkable revival of religion is unfolding. Stark gleefully notes the irony: “It is their unshakable faith in secularization that may be the most ‘irrational’ of all beliefs” (212).

The key to Stark’s optimism is competition. Modernity does not secularize; rather, it pluralizes. And Stark confidently asserts that religion flourishes under unconstrained free-market conditions. “Lazy churches” (such as state churches in Europe or Roman Catholicism in settings without Protestant competition) wither in numbers, because they lack the incentive for aggressive evangelization. He finds the evidence particularly striking in South America, where the rise in Pentecostal Protestantism has awakened the Roman Catholic Church. Thus church attendance in that continent exceeds that of the United States and even of most Muslim nations. “Contrary to the sociological orthodoxy, pluralism results in active and effective churches” (80). The winners are new religious movements, including innovative conservative churches. The losers are “theologies of doubt and disbelief” (199). Thus “Protestantism is as strong as ever in America—only the names have changed” (201). And atheists? They may be louder now than in the past, but they remain a tiny portion of the population—less than 5 percent.

But is the stubborn and worldwide endurance of religious conviction any comfort to orthodox Christianity? Stark’s better polling data becomes less hopeful here. He concedes, for example, that Christianity’s rapid expansion in sub-Saharan Africa is producing indigenous churches that are shocking in the extent of their theological heresy. Polygamy, Old Testament dietary laws, and the prosperity gospel are common in many African Initiated Churches. (Moreover, the persistence of tribalism in new Christian sects has enflamed much Christian-against-Christian violence.)

Towards the end of the book, Stark takes on Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher who has argued, in books such as A Secular Age (2007), that the Enlightenment has created a “disenchanted world.” Stark dismisses Taylor’s claims as superficial, and he associates it with the reductionistic polling data he has exposed. Yet it seems that the charge of superficiality may be turned against Stark. When Stark finds signs of faith in beliefs in lucky charms, fortune tellers, and the like (187), he is hardly describing a rise in the triumph of true faith. Moreover, Taylor and others have explained that such practices are often quite compatible with secularist convictions. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, Stark seems willing to settle for “enchantment within the limits of modernity alone.” As sociologist Christian Smith has observed, conceiving of God as one’s personal “cosmic butler” is a domesticated form of enchantment.

Finally, Stark does not reckon fully with the effects of supernatural beliefs becoming privatized. Guardian angels, for example, may be effective coping devices in creating and maintaining personal identities. But they are unwelcome in the highly rationalized world of the public square. Simply put, religious values can be very popular and highly marginalized at the same time. So believe what you want about the sanctity of life in the womb or the importance of traditional marriage. Just keep those opinions to yourself.

John R. Muether serves as a ruling elder at Reformation Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Oviedo, Florida, library director at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, and historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, April 2016.