By Os Guinness

“Grotesque schizophrenia” – That famous comment on American churches of the 1940’s came from Sayid Qt’b, a leading Muslim radical and one of Osama bin Laden’s favorite writers. He was not describing today’s churches, but the “white picket fence” congregations that he saw in Colorado long before the seismic sixties had left their mark. Twenty years later, Theodore Roszak described the Californian churches similarly as “privately engaging but publicly irrelevant,” a historian’s rendering of the schizophrenia the devout Muslim scorned, and which social scientists had long called the “privatization” of religion in the modern Western world.