The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious Than Ever - Hardcover

Praise for Rodney Stark

"Mr. Stark is especially adept at challenging received ideas." --Wall Street Journal

"Stark has a vigorous prose style and a gift for clear explanation." --New York Times

"Stark writes books that are models of popularly accessible scholarly writing." --World

"Rodney Stark is one of America's preeminent scholars of religion. . . . Often controversial, a slayer of historical myths." --Patheos

"Bracing, rollicking, startling, belligerent, informative, and guaranteed to provoke second and third thoughts about what readers thought they always knew about religion." --First Things

"Giants are rare in any day. . . . [But] maybe we do have giants . . . for example, Rodney Stark. . . . He continually throws the discipline of sociology of religion into chaos." --Andrew M. Greeley, University of Chicago

"An eminent sociologist of religion . . . Stimulating, provocative, even revolutionary." --Journal of Early Christian Studies

"[Stark] writes with a clarity and concision that make him a pleasure to read. . . . A number of fondly held myths get demolished." --National Review

"Here is theoretical brashness combined with disarming common sense, a capacious curiosity, and a most uncommon ability to tell a complicated story in simple prose." --Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University

"God is not dead. Despite the predictions of academics and liberal religious leaders, the world is becoming more faith-filled, not less. . . . [Stark's] real battle, though, is with intellectual elites of the West, who have been declaring the demise of religion for centuries and have been advancing a secularization thesis for decades. . . . Mr. Stark pushes back against the secularization thesis in several ways. . . . Indeed, religious fervor has taken hold in many countries where modernity is a settled fact." --Wall Street Journal

"Stark [is] one of the most prominent, respected and consistently insightful sociologists of religion in the business. . . . I enthusiastically recommend this stimulating book to religious leaders and to those generally interested in what's going on in the minds of people around the world. It has much to offer, not only for understanding but also, in my judgment, for action."
--Deseret News

"Stark's clear writing--he was a newspaper reporter before going to graduate school--distinguishes him from most academics. His argument that Christian practice wasn't as common in the Middle Ages or in eighteenth-century America as we like to think distinguishes him from some church-oriented historians. The argument in his new book, The Triumph of Faith, that 'the world is more religious than ever, ' distinguishes him from 'new atheists' who seem ready to take a victory lap."
--World

"If, in fact, religion is losing its influence--and 72 percent of respondents to a 2014 Pew Research Center study say it is--most people say that's not good. . . . But Rodney Stark, who holds the title of distinguished professor of social science at Baylor University, says in the new book The Triumph of Faith that 'The End of Christian America'--so proclaimed by a 2009 Newsweek cover--and religion's falling influence in the world aren't necessarily so."
--Chattanooga Times Free Press

"Reports about the death of religion in the United States are greatly exaggerated, sociologist Rodney Stark insists. . . . In a particularly provocative section, Stark takes issue with the much-reported rise of the 'nones' in the United States. He cites data indicating the percentage of people who do not attend houses of worship remains steady, and the increase in nonaffiliated Americans appears to be drawn from that subset of the total population. . . . Readers will benefit from reading Stark's findings and conclusions that defy conventional wisdom."
--Baptist Standard

Rodney Stark is the award-winning author of How the West Won, The Victory of Reason, The Rise of Christianity, God’s Battalions, and many other books. He serves as Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, USA where he is co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion. Stark is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Before earning his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a staff writer for several major publications. Stark’s books have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish. He lives in Texas.