Does religion reinforce the balkanization of cultural attitudes or does it help people transcend their culture? A noted scholar of world Christianity, Lamin Sanneh offers Westerners a perspective on such questions, a way to test the religio-cultural water and air in which they live.

He shows how modernity has made of moderns "cultural believers" and "religious agnostics," and how the stubborn refusal to confront this bias in both secular and religious culture depletes both Christianity and Western culture.