Norman Dodge asks it, in three ways

Confident critiques of religion by major intellectuals launched our century. Yet these were not refutations, but merely critiques. Nietzsche did not refute God, but argued that belief in God was already so threatened, so doubted, that He was already dead. Marx claimed religion was a mere economic tool-to keep the masses in drugged complacence. Freud launched a strong critique, but never claimed to have refuted religion. He called it an illusion not a delusion. A delusion is an error. An illusion need not necessarily be false; an illusion is a belief, based upon a wish-fulfillment, that sets no store in verification. Most illusions cannot be proved or refuted; our wishes form illusions around an irrefutable assertion. Still, Freud showed how much magical and wishful thinking underlay religious ritual and belief in a parent-like God. He described ways in which neuroses, with their rituals, punishments, and purifications are akin to complex "private religions", and how religions are, by implication, akin to "public neuroses". He wished to take the teeth out of religions which seemed so prone to violent persecution of anyone who doubted hard-to-believe religious assertions. Freud suggested that the doubter was so threatening to the believer precisely because the believer had buried doubts.
None of the three great critics muted their criticisms very much. There was something admirably hard-hitting, and manly in their forgoing the consolation of soothing tales. In his public pronouncements Nietzsche refused to stop at agnosticism, by confessing his ignorance of the ultimate. To the believer who says, "Why shouldn't I believe? Just as religion cannot be proved, it cannot be refuted either. And it offers so many consolations," Freud, like a good Houynhnm, replied: "Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it."
Freud did not hold out atheism as a cure. He saw its bleakness, and saw, too, in his critique of totalitarianism, that atheistic politics and ideology were not free of cruelty or madness. Nietzsche was aware there would be a cost for atheism: great art and deep thought had been often inspired by religion, which at its best focuses on ultimate questions, makes constant demands upon us, gives us a tension and longing and discipline to attempt to overcome ourselves. Still, man would do better if he faced the abyss head on.
Yet how often does one find such confident atheists now? And is religion fading away as they predicted?
We have devoted this issue of Books in Canada to examining the state of religion in Canada because we suspect that this is a moment of religious flux. There are signs that religion, far from being dead, is hanging in. Whereas the ranks of agnosticism once swelled mostly at the expense of religion, it now seems that they sometimes are swelling at the expense of those who were once atheists. There are signs that religion has faded substantially in the Europe in which the above critiques were first made, while the overwhelming majority of Americans claim to be believers. Canadians are somewhere in between. We doubt that one can say that religion is surviving simply because of demographic shifts: yuppies moving from "All You Need is Love" to more spiritual concerns now that they are old enough to have seen more than a few friends pass from this world. Nor is it clear that religion is strengthened due to the immigration and endless mingling of people from different traditional religious backgrounds that one sees in multi-racial societies; such societies, Nietzsche pointed out, tend historically to lead to widespread skepticism, not religion.

These stirrings of religion, as might be expected, are very influenced by egalitarianism. God and the sacred are being egalitarianized. Traditional sacred texts are being rewritten, or profaned, depending upon your point of view, and rituals changed so that they offend no-one. Religion is making itself available.
Even when God is mocked, it is from an egalitarian point of view. Generation Xianity, if such a thing exists, brings God down to grunge:

What if God was one of us,
Just a slob like one of us,
A stranger on a bus
Trying to make his way home.

Sure, one could argue that this is not a mockery of God, but an evolution of the Christian God: God manifest in common man, as humble, with a special interest in meekness. But a slob is not a special man. He is brought down to our level. Yet the lyric-precisely because it seeks to provoke-brings out a contradiction inherent in the egalitarianization of God even among believers: why bother worshipping a slob like one of us? As God becomes more like us, worship of him becomes an increasingly incomprehensible activity, its practice merely a circuitous path for our ordinary narcissism, another inconvenience. Must we go out of the way for ourselves? The singer seems aware that this God as slob is a dead end. Her voice is seasoned with postmodern irony, directed not just at God, but at herself, also a slob. But one also hears the triumph in her voice as she brings Him down, punching out the words "slob like one of us," with her mocking slang. And "mocking and profane speech concerning God" happens to be the dictionary definition of blasphemy.

Why is it that today one is more likely to be censured for noticing blasphemy than for blaspheming? Is this because atheists and foes of intolerance are wont to remind us that religion has done great harm with this indictment in the past? Or is it because ours is a time of rampant experimentation with the image of God, of man appearing to remake God. If egalitarian man is to make God, he wants to have the freedom to fiddle without being accused; he can't have his religious style cramped. This activity expresses itself in many ways. Those who wish to stay in the religion of their birth rewrite the liturgical texts, and reconceive God with the approval of the lay Board, not the priest or rabbi. Those who wish to leave are "shopping around" for religions; many religions are in turn trying to attract followers by making themselves more attractive. People who "shop around" are consumers, and indeed several "Consumer-Reports-Type-Guides to God" have shown up in our office for review, rating gods, from the consumer's point of view. (Some truths, it turns out, have not been around long enough to get a full rating. Others have been around since the inception of Consumer Reports.) In such a world of alternatives, to use the word "blasphemy" is the ultimate sin against our most precious value: consumer choice. I don't want to have to worry about rotting in Hell because your product didn't have a good enough warranty.
New, more private religions are also evolving, in contrast to Biblical religion, which is in many ways very public. Biblical religion is based on revelation, and revelation is addressed to a whole people or even a world and meant to transform the public sphere. And while fundamentalism is often based upon a personal experience of God, its main doctrines are still very much part of traditional, public religion. Many, when asked if they are religious or not, answer, "I'm not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person." They appear to want to distance themselves from established organized religions, but to hold onto the transcendental. Since private religious tendencies are private, "New Age" spirituality has thousands of versions, many new practices. One often finds assertions that the universe properly understood is a good place; it thus follows that we will be happiest if we find ways to merge or unite with this good universe on its terms instead of trying to "conquer" nature as modern science does; our merging with the larger whole will undo the sense of human isolation; our home in the universe, mother earth, deserves a kind of worship and also some kind of protection in the form of environmentalism; and, finally, just as the universe is good, so are humans. This of course means that the dark side of human nature becomes very problematic, and some forms of New Age do not focus on it very much at all.
New Age religions, like much of the new religiosity, appear to be one reaction to Hobbesian and Lockean liberalism, which teaches us we are happiest when we pursue our security and enlightened self-interest instead of arguing about higher religious differences which cannot be settled without bloodshed. Yet New Agers argue enlightened self-interest promotes too much selfishness, isolation, and is not wholly satisfying. Human beings must rise again above themselves to satisfy themselves. But one is struck by how, in practice, some of the new religious texts often use the same language of personal goals as used by "self-help" books. Like Alcoholics Anonymous, which began with a religious model, one starts out on the path to obtaining personal goals by submitting to a generic "Higher Power". Often the difference between transcendentally enlightened self-interest, and a transcendence of self-interest, is blurred.
In contrast to the fundamentalisms or orthodox religions, evolving traditional religions increasingly depict God in a way that mirrors the democratic, egalitarian Zeitgeist-a change of role for the Creator of the Universe. They emphasize awe without sternness. Awe in the Biblical religions is a powerful, frightening, beautiful experience. One is overwhelmingly impressed by the divine, aware of one's own littleness, one's contingency and frailty. Moses dared not look upon God lest he be consumed. Job's questioning of God's Justice is sternly repudiated, which actually impresses Job. In evolving traditional religions, God is increasingly a New Age Sensitive Guy/Gal who doesn't hassle you with demands, and would wear jeans on Casual Fridays. In contrast, though the God of the Bible is the source of love, His is clearly a conditional love, stern in response to sinfulness. It remains to be seen whether feel-good religion can support morality the way Biblical religion attempts to. If Freud criticized traditional religion for wishfully portraying God as a parent who was loving and demanding, one can only imagine what he might say of a God who was only loving.
Feel-good beliefs are often attacked by skeptical intellectuals. Yet postmodernists, such as Stanley Fish, who have at one time or another been skeptical of, and attacked most of the premises of Western institutions, seem not to want to take on the religious impulse that is reforming traditional religion, or spawning New Age religions. Postmodernist cynicism has a failure of nerviness when it comes to the most important of all beliefs. Perhaps this is because its favourite philosopher, and critic of modern rationalism, Heidegger (whose work spawned much of postmodernism), seemed so open to mysticism-which may be all that there is left when rationalism is undermined. Does this opening for mysticism show the victory of an unfolding spiritual human tendency which conquers the sourest skepticism? Or does it show that under the almost compulsive postmodernist disillusionment and despair there lurks a kind of naive susceptibility to wishful thinking, or illusions after all?
Traditional religions may be demographically down, but they are not out. By virtue of having lasted and having been exposed to the first rationalist attacks originating with the development of ancient philosophy, they have a history of responding to the rationalist critique. The traditional religious response to atheism is something akin to the following. The atheist assertion that an invisible, incorporeal, inscrutable God does not exist is in fact merely an assertion. It is harder to prove the non-existence of such a Being than most atheists admit, since it is hard to prove a negative. The great mediaevalists, such as Maimonides, argued that nature is either eternal, or created. If created, it is the product of the supernatural, not the natural. This would mean that miracles, i.e., supernatural acts, are possible. The greatest supernatural act would be creation itself. On the other hand, if nature is eternal, so are its laws, and supernatural acts are not possible and creation is unnecessary. But a close rational examination of the best arguments for the eternity of the world shows them to be flawed and hardly decisive. Atheism is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it begins with an over-confident prejudice against the idea of miracles and God, and then doubts as unlikely anything that doesn't confirm the prejudice. Hence the standstill between reason and revelation. Religion is not based merely on reason, but rather on faith. Faith can come from religious experience, or on the basis of believing respected authorities, or even as one kind of response to this relative standstill between reason and revelation. It is fuelled not only by fear, but by the attitude of wonder.
Interestingly, in our times, these cosmic assertions about God and the Universe seem less the subject of public controversy or discussion than do the questions about where a given traditional religion stands in relation to human sexuality broadly understood: abortion, birth control, women priests, homosexuality, premarital sex, and attacks on patriarchy. Needless to say, each of these issues is a product of our practical egalitarianism. Some traditionally religious people see developments such as New Age as very bad indeed, because they feel people are giving in to subjective, often superstitious emotional longings. Such longings seem a product of personal inadequacies, not majesty. Others argue that although it is true that these new spiritual developments are often very subjective, they do show an outburst of religious longing. Another response, which might follow from a reading of Maimonides, is to notice how these more private religious beliefs have many characteristics of early pagan Sabeanism (including the interest in astrology, earth worship, worship of many different kinds of natural forces, occasional self-maiming, tattooing, etc.) all of which were forbidden by monotheisms, because they enfeebled people (astrology and propitiation of natural forces undermine free will, for instance).
Needless to say, those rationalists who began the century with a critique of religion in general, would likely think that these New Age developments are terrible, a recrudescence of, or regression to, human irrationality. The rationalists might even look fondly upon monotheisms which were designed to reinforce public morality and responsibility by strengthening a certain kind of close family, which makes all sorts of demands upon its members. Having seen how the absence of religion meant a loss of support for good behaviour, these rationalists might even be tempted, as Freud argued they would be, to live "as if" religious, treating religion as a practical fiction, because religion gives support to morality.
But, argued Freud, the majority of practical men wouldn't be so noble as true rational philosophers, and wouldn't squelch their doubts once they took hold; rather than live a noble lie for the sake of morality-in-general they would do what practical men and women do: look to their own interest, and not undergo the inconveniences of religious practice. Freud thought too many atheists were already afoot in Europe for a noble lie to be believed. Once Pandora's box is opened, and the evils have escaped, closing the top does not mean all woes are safely inside. Freud thought it best to develop a morality based upon nature and science, i.e., on natural science, as opposed to the supernatural. But if religion is not dead, or if it is being raised from the dead (a technique which has been part of religion's armamentarium for quite some time), we can now ask why religion is hardier, and capable of even more resistance-rational or irrational-than Freud predicted in The Future of an Illusion.
With some of these reflections in mind, Books in Canada decided to ask two groups of Canadians-those who have devoted their lives to reflection upon religion, and those who might be taken as representative of Canadians from different walks of life-these three questions:

Will the twenty-first century be an age
of religious revival?

If so, what form will this revival take?

Will this be a good thing or not?