Culture

Arts in Prospect this month: reality TV and the global war for souls

June 01, 2009
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This month's arts and books section features two lead articles on, first, the changing nature of global religion and, second, some more local shifts in the minor faith that is British reality television. In the first piece, Eric Kaufmann, a fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Centre, looks at John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's much-discussed new book God is Back. It's an urgently important book, he argues, because it takes the established "religious markets" arguments—that a highly entrepreneurial incarnation of Christianity lies behind much of the influence of religion in modern America—and applies this to the world as a whole. Among other things, Kaufmann notes that China is currently "the world's wild west" in religious terms—and that at current religious growth rates it "could be both the world's biggest Muslim and Christian country by 2050." Secularism, according to the authors of God is Back, may prove to be just one of those comforting myths the future will have to learn to live without.

In our second long arts piece this month, Sam Leith tackles the cult of "do-nothing celebrity"—and traces its happy demise in the relam of British reality TV. "I risk a place in Pseud's Corner," he ventures, "but I think [reality television] has undergone a telling change of ontological emphasis: from being to doing." All of which puts, as he explains, the bulging ranks of the celebrity commentariat in an increasingly complicated position…