“Of all horrible religions,” G. K. Chesterton once observed, “the most horrible is the worship of the god within… . That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.” We had occasion to ponder Chesterton’s remark on Sunday, December 7, when The New York Times Magazine favored its readers with a special issue on religion. Elsewhere, the media was full of recollections about the bombing of Pearl Harbor— the event, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, that made December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.” For its part, the Times gave us “God Decentralized,” a miscellany of a dozen or so short articles by divers hands on subjects ranging from the problems of interfaith marriages, young American Muslim girls who wear nose rings and baggy jeans, and the monthly meetings of the “Freethought Association” in Talladega, Alabama, where & ...

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