The divine divide: The gods of America, and the difference they make.(America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--& What That Says about Us)(Book review)

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More than a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche, the depressive and depressing German philosopher, pronounced the death of God, but most Americans have yet to hear the message. The four horsemen of the New Atheist apocalypse-Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel C. Dennett--have done their best to carry on the movement that Nietzsche heralded, but their achievement has been largely monetary. Some 90 percent of Americans are still content to believe in God.

Or gods, rather. According to Baylor University professors Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, the real war in American society is not between atheists and theists, but between people who have differing conceptions of the divine. In 1991, James Davison Hunter introduced the concept of the culture wars, which he said were grounded in different conceptions of moral authority. In America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--and What That Says about Us (Oxford University Press) ****, Froese and Bader take the sociological examination one step further. Views of "moral authority" are notoriously difficult to study empirically. Few people, after all, are equipped to explain the differences between …