William Deresiewicz, writing for Salmagundi 212 - 213, Fall 2021 - Winter 2022, says:

As a replacement for religion, humanism has not fulfilled the hopes that people had for it, and neither has secularism in any of its other manifestations. They never can, and they never will. And so modernity is fated to be raked by periodic gusts of religious enthusiasm—Romanticism, communism, spiritualism, even the 60s itself, with its social crusades, its shamanistic drugs, its rock and roll revival meetings. Like all millenarian movements, each enthusiasm thinks that it’s the final one, the end of history and the transfiguration of the species, and each one falls in turn. I have no doubt that, whatever their social residues, both woke-ism and the cult of Trump will go the same way.

But if the substitute religions of modernity have not fulfilled the hopes that people had for them, then neither has religion ...

I was sent a copy of Greg Sheridan’s Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World (Allen & Unwin $32.95) but have been reluctant to review it because I’m not the type of reader who is comfortable with this sort of case-making.

However, I did learn something about The Lord of the Rings in the chapter on "Smuggling Christ into popular culture".

Here is Sheridan with a plug for the book on ABC TV’s The Drum (near the end), including a discussion of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his faith (15 pages in Christians), Marc Fennell on Pentecostal churches and Maha Abdo on her faith.

And here are some reviews, glowing and critical:

• Paul Morrissey of Campion College
• Guy Rundle at Crikey
• Paul George
• Ian Palmer for the Melbourne Anglican
• Tony Abbott in The Spectator
• Michael McGirr in the Sydney Morning Herald