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 detailed in an illuminating discussion on public radio’s Speaking of Faith, this nearly universal assumption among scholars of social development has been smashed to smithereens by reality. Only Europe stands outside the worldwide religious revival.

This is a challenge for some American leftist intellectuals who consider Europe the fons et origo 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.

This may be an inconvenient approach since Christianity is spreading rapidly around the globe, often in tandem with modernization (unlike Christianity’s 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 “Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala.”

A short Tablet article on Goldberg’s opening example – Daniel Ortega.

DANIEL ORTEGA of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación 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.

snip

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.

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.

Sandinismo, named after the nationalist hero, Augusto César Sandino, was, Fr Cardenal said, transformed into a cult of personality, "Danielismo".