During one of the ballads, I invited Asante, the thirty-seven-year-old miracle mother, outside to talk. We chatted about her triplets. She had prayed for two but was blessed with three; although she had taken fertility drugs, her pregnancy, coming after so many years, was surely God’s reward for her patience and faith.

Asante was raised a Catholic, but was born again in high school. As an adult, she joined Action International, where she now led a small prayer group. “In Catholic church, we didn’t even clap. We used to stand there sanctimoniously and listen to the preacher. Here the people jump around; we rejoice; we have revelations. It’s a personal encounter with God.”

Feeling a touch Jesuit, I wondered aloud how the church’s talk of money and success fits into the Bible’s message.

“We are always taught that God does not want us to be the tail,” she said. “He wants us to be the head. You don’t have to be the underdog. We should be at the forefront of society, in politics or business. A church of this nature has to mix up with society, encourage its people to be educated, get involved with politics, so one day we will be able to change this dying world.”

God has long been global. Go almost anywhere in the world, the farthest you can get from the beaten track, and chances are good you will find Christian missionaries — say, two college-age Mormon boys in whitey-white short-sleeved shirts with nameplates glinting in the tropical sun — or hear stories from locals about those evangelicals from Dallas-based SIL International way back when.

But God wasn’t supposed to be this global, not still. Just twenty years ago, the academics were insisting that as societies became more modern, they would necessarily grow more secular. Secularization theory, the prevailing orthodoxy when I was studying sociology of religion at university, argued that religious observance would decline, religious institutions and symbols would fade from prominence, and religion in general would drop out of public life. In his seminal 1967 book on the subject, The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger argued that “the modern West has produced an increasing number of individuals who look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations.” He identified industrial capitalism as “the original ‘carrier’ of secularization,” adding that these secularizing forces had spread worldwide alongside westernization and modernization.”

While secularization theory appears to hold true in Western Europe, Australia, and perhaps Canada, these places are exceptions. In most of the world, religion is playing an ever more prominent role both within countries and as a vehicle for outreach across borders. Islamism, for instance, is challenging the flagging promise of pan-Arabism as a motivating collective identity, its array of rival sects and sub-movements proactively addressing peoples’ spiritual, social, and material needs where the state lacks the capacity or will. Post-Soviet Russia is experiencing a resurgence of indigenous, mystically inclined Orthodox Christianity that compliments its resurgent nationalism, while India’s Hindu nationalists have risen to become part of the governing establishment in the past decade. Societies are demonstrating that they can absorb many aspects of modernity and outside influence while reserving a powerful role for religion in public life.

Only a decade after The Sacred Canopy was published, Berger himself began to realize that the empirical evidence no longer supported secularization theory. During a lecture in 2006, he said, “We don’t live in an age of secularity; we live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity.” Religion, as much or more than anything else in our lives, had been overwhelmingly globalized. Some observers explain this about-face as a reaction to the failure of various secular ideologies — Marxism, Freudianism, market liberalism — to meaningfully improve peoples’ lives. But it’s misleading to speak of religiosity as simply reactionary. Just as, in sociologist Max Weber’s famous account, Protestantism’s moral values of self-denial and rational planning had a unique, inadvertent fluency with capitalism prior to the twentieth century, today’s most successful religious movements demonstrate an inborn capacity for reconciling themselves with the uncertainties of contemporary life.

Berger attributes their persistence primarily to pluralism, mass migration, travel, and the ubiquity of communication technologies: “Everybody talks to everybody else,” he says, “and as everybody talks to everybody else, a highly pluralistic situation is enhanced by technology, and people begin to influence each other.” Modernity is all about the move from a society predicated on fate to one based on choice; from a society in which one’s religion is inherited and taken for granted to one in which we can pick our affiliations. In the resulting marketplace of faiths, one particularly demonstrative, individualized, and telegenic religion — Pentecostalism — is proving itself singularly well positioned to compete.

A 2006 survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life called “renewalist movements” — an umbrella term that includes Pentecostals, evangelicals, and mainline Protestants and Catholics with an interest in charismatic-style worship — the fastest-growing religious population in the world, accounting for one-quarter of the world’s 2 billion Christians. Thirty years ago, they made up just 6 percent. The phenomenon is most evident in the developing world of Africa and Latin America, whether in the form of cramped storefront churches, carnivalesque redemption camps, or gleaming new mega-churches. The world’s largest Catholic nation, for example, is growing less Catholic by the day; Brazilian Catholics are leaving the church, and when they do so they’re more likely to join Pentecostal congregations than to abandon religious worship in general.