Strange Gods, in the end, proves more than is not only timely; we needed it, like, yesterday. Fail to understand the crisis facing separation of church and state—'a historical and a legal fact for which [the religious Right] should fall on their knees and thank their god'—and twenty-first-century America will be Alexandria all over again.
If the book’s polemical overtones rankle at times, its conclusion—that religious coercion inevitably 'produces a false uniformity that collapses as swiftly or slowly as social conditions permit'—is powerful.
Jacoby cannot admit there ever is such a thing as genuine spiritual conversion. She justifiably spends a lot of time on the crueler forms of compulsion, which recur distressingly often in history. But she thinks that all conversions are coerced, however softly or subtly.
True to her calling as a heroine of free thought, [Jacoby] fights the good fight for irreligion as she goes, treating her reader to many a saucy aside, many a laugh-line for the baptismally decertified. No matter: Along the way she also seduces her readers out of the mistake that that religion is a boring and done-with subject and into the recognition that dealing with it is an open-ended intellectual engagement of compelling interest.
“Strange Gods, with its scope (Augustine of Hippo to Muhammad Ali), insight, and carefully assessed judgments, emerges as an engaging rumination on – if not quite a history of – this tricky and multifarious subject.
Strange Gods will warm the hearts of atheists, but the faithful may recoil at its anti-clericalism. Christians who come out looking good here are the Quakers, and that is probably because they aren’t particularly aggressive proselytizers. Jacoby has nice things to say about the Convivencia, the period of Muslim influence in Spain when different faiths lived together in relative harmony; but at the end she appears to blame Islamic terrorism on Islam.
