Book of the week: The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

(Little, Brown, 576 pages, $25.99)

Let’s stop asking if Islam is a religion of peace, says author Robert Wright. The sacred texts of all three Abrahamic faiths are schizoid on the question of whether the adherents of rival religions should be invited for tea or summarily annihilated. Monotheism itself took root soon after the Israelite king Josiah, who ruled in the seventh century B.C., instituted a brutal campaign to stamp out worship of any god but Yahweh. But a belligerent religious policy suited Josiah’s political needs better than it suited his heirs’. If you juxtapose the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam against what’s known of the period in which each passage was written, you’ll notice, in fact, that the mood of God seems to change as the facts on the ground change.

Wright’s ambitious new work “is not a book to read on the beach this summer,” said Lisa Miller in Newsweek. In exploring the roots of religion and then detailing how historical circumstance influenced how God was portrayed by writers of the Bible and the Koran, Wright “exhaustively, minutely catalogues” who the texts’ probable authors were and what their specific political aims might have been. It can be slow going. But his argument gains strength as the book proceeds, said Gregg Easterbrook in The Wall Street Journal. Wright wants us to notice that religions grew most when they stressed comity, not conflict. Christianity, for instance, caught fire only when St. Paul sold his listeners on the concept of universal brotherhood—an idea that no faith had offered before. A similar message underlaid Islam’s early growth.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Wright isn’t linking changing doctrines to material causes in order to undermine the faith of believers, said Andrew Sullivan in the London Times. Instead, he’s offering them a kind of moral support. His previous books, The Moral Animal and Nonzero, pointed to the evolutionary and political advantages of mutual cooperation, and the heartening message of this new volume is that religion, too, might just be evolving away from conflict. True, “it’s not a linear process.” But the major faiths all have exhibited long-term tendencies toward inclusiveness, even if none would condone “total relativism.” Indeed, Wright tacitly endorses the possibility that the ongoing evolution of religious doctrine could be evidence of “human beings’ slow education into the real nature of the divine.”