Gods and Empires

A compelling narrative history of religion in the modern world — from the Reformation and the Enlightenment to fundamentalism, secularism, and the global resurgence of faith.

In 1517, an unknown monk challenged the most powerful institution in Europe. He expected to be silenced. Instead, he shattered a thousand years of religious unity and launched five centuries of upheaval that would reshape every continent on earth.

The Modern Spirit is the final volume of Gods and Empires, a major narrative history of world religions. It tells the dramatic story of how religion collided with modernity — with science, revolution, empire, and secular philosophy — and emerged transformed but unbroken.

You will follow Martin Luther from his tortured conscience to his world-changing defiance. You will watch Thomas Jefferson take scissors to his Bible and cut out every miracle. You will meet the Japanese Christians who kept their faith alive for two hundred and fifty years in secret, and the Hindu mystic who electrified Chicago in 1893 by addressing an audience of thousands as “Sisters and brothers of America.” You will witness the Enlightenment’s assault on faith, the colonial missions that reshaped entire cultures, the theological catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the explosive growth of Pentecostalism from a single church in Los Angeles to six hundred million believers worldwide.

This volume confronts the central paradox of modern religious history: the twentieth century was supposed to be the age of secularism, and serious thinkers declared God dead. They were wrong. Religion returned to global politics with a force that caught nearly everyone by surprise — from the Iranian Revolution to the rise of Christian nationalism, from Hindu fundamentalism to Buddhist violence, from liberation theology to the prosperity gospel.

Subjects include: the Protestant Reformation, Calvinism, the English Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Wars of Religion, the Radical Reformation, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Christianity in East Asia, the Enlightenment, religion and political revolution, the evangelical awakenings, colonial missions, the Hindu Renaissance, Islamic reform movements, new American religions, Darwin and the creation controversy, biblical criticism, religion in both World Wars, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, Pentecostalism, Vatican II, decolonization, Zionism, the American civil rights movement, secularization, Western Buddhism, religious nationalism, political Islam, and religion in the twenty-first century.