Encountering the West

Book excerpt: Does religion reinforce the balkanization of cultural attitudes or does it help people transcend their culture? A noted scholar of world Christianity, Lamin Sanneh offers Westerners a perspective on such questions, a way to test the religio-cultural water and air in which they live. He shows how modernity has made of moderns "cultural believers" and "religious agnostics, " and how the stubborn refusal to confront this bias in both secular and religious culture depletes both Christianity and Western culture.