{"id":4687,"date":"2006-11-10T07:47:39","date_gmt":"2006-11-10T07:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/not-going-anywhere.html"},"modified":"2006-11-10T07:47:39","modified_gmt":"2006-11-10T07:47:39","slug":"not-going-anywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/not-going-anywhere.html","title":{"rendered":"Not going anywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonah Goldberg’s piece on the stubborness of religion:<\/a><\/p>\n

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For decades, students of modernization subscribed to an overriding assumption that, to paraphrase sociologist Peter Berger, more modernity means less religion. In the 1960s (and 1930s and 1890s), liberals were convinced that religion was dying out thanks to the new religion of Progress.<\/p>\n

But as Berger recently detailed in an illuminating discussion on public radio\u2019s Speaking of Faith<\/span><\/em><\/a>, this nearly universal assumption among scholars of social development has been smashed to smithereens by reality. Only Europe stands outside the worldwide religious revival.<\/p>\n

This is a challenge for some American leftist intellectuals who consider Europe the fons et origo<\/em> of all enlightenment but who also believe that condescending to the Third World is the very definition of tolerant multiculturalism. They often square this circle by refraining from denouncing religion per se, while still pooh-poohing Christianity as some sort of Western conspiracy.<\/p>\n

This may be an inconvenient approach since Christianity is spreading rapidly around the globe, often in tandem with modernization (unlike Christianity\u2019s biggest competitor, Islam). In South Korea, for example, modernization has gone hand in hand with Christianization. Today, the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul has a quarter million parishioners show up on any given Sunday. In China, underground churches are spreading like kudzu. And in South and Central America, where Pentecostalism is exploding, Protestantism is so popular, Berger jokes that his research projects should be subtitled \u201cMax Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A short Tablet article on Goldberg’s opening example – Daniel Ortega.<\/a><\/p>\n

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DANIEL ORTEGA of the Frente Sandinista de Liberaci\u00f3n Nacional (FSLN) was elected President of Nicaragua this week, after 16 years in opposition. With more than 90 per cent of the votes counted by the night of 7 November, his main opponent, conservative businessman Eduardo Montealegre, conceded defeat by the former left-wing revolutionary, who has become a fervent Catholic. <\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

But not all Catholics have been impressed by Ortega’s transformation. The Nicaraguan bishops’ conference, led by Archbishop Leopoldo Brenes of Managua, resolutely refused to take sides in the elections, and the distinguished poet and priest Fr Ernesto Cardenal, an adherent of liberation theology who served as culture minister in Ortega’s government, went even further: so disillusioned was he with Ortega that he ended up advising people to vote for Montealegre, a former banker and finance minister. "I think genuine capitalism, which is what Montealegre represents, would be preferable to a phoney revolution," he said last week. <\/p>\n

Fr Cardenal, who was publicly scolded by Pope John Paul II when he visited Nicaragua in 1983 for refusing to resign from the Government, considered that the Sandinistas were corrupted by power and betrayed by their leaders. He entitled his memoirs about his time in Government The Lost Revolution<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sandinismo, named after the nationalist hero, Augusto C\u00e9sar Sandino, was, Fr Cardenal said, transformed into a cult of personality, "Danielismo".<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonah Goldberg’s piece on the stubborness of religion: For decades, students of modernization subscribed to an overriding assumption that, to paraphrase sociologist Peter Berger, more modernity means less religion. In the 1960s (and 1930s and 1890s), liberals were convinced that religion was dying out thanks to the new religion of Progress. But as Berger recently…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNot going anywhere - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/not-going-anywhere.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Not going anywhere - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jonah Goldberg’s piece on the stubborness of religion: For decades, students of modernization subscribed to an overriding assumption that, to paraphrase sociologist Peter Berger, more modernity means less religion. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}