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The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark (Random House, 304 pp., $25.95)

SOCIAL SCIENCE has long tended to treat religion as fundamentally irrational. Never mind that scientific methods are by definition incapable of adjudicating theological propositions: Throughout the 20th century, the discipline’s leading explanations of religious belief and behavior were predicated on the assumption of irrationality. Religion, these theories maintained, is an instrument of economic oppression (Marx), a means by which societies collectively affirm their own identities (Durkheim), or a byproduct of repressed sexual and scatological urges (Freud). Wherever two or three were gathered in His name, it would seem, reason was not amidst them.

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Christopher Levenick

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The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark (Random House, 304 pp., $25.95)

SOCIAL SCIENCE has long tended to treat religion as fundamentally irrational. Never mind that scientific methods are by definition incapable of adjudicating theological propositions: Throughout the 20th century, the discipline’s leading explanations of religious belief and behavior were predicated on the assumption of irrationality. Religion, these theories maintained, is an instrument of economic oppression (Marx), a means by which societies collectively affirm their own identities (Durkheim), or a byproduct of repressed sexual and scatological urges (Freud). Wherever two or three were gathered in His name, it would seem, reason was not amidst them.