"With the death of Utopia," writes John Gray in his latest, "apocalyptic religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned, as a force in world politics." As has the author — this follow-up to Straw Dogs, al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern and Heresies is a ferociously ambitious polemic that grabs onto the coat-tails of bestselling God-bashers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, wrestles them to the ground, rips the shirts from their backs and burns them in the street. Religion, says Gray, like sex and violence, is a vital part of human nature. It's the optimistic belief in utopias, the "attempts to build a secular monolith", that are doomed and unnatural.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
During the last century global politics was shaped by utopian projects. Pursuing a dream of a world without evil, powerful states waged war and practised terror on an unprecedented scale. From Germany to Russia to China to Afghanistan entire societies were destroyed. Utopian ideologies rejected traditional faiths and claimed to be based in science. They were actually secular versions of the myth of Apocalypse - the belief in a world-changing event that brings history, with all its conflicts, to an end. The war in Iraq was the last of these secular utopias, promising a new era of democracy and producing blood-soaked anarchy and an emerging theocracy instead. "Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia", John Gray's powerful and frightening new book, argues that the death of utopia does not mean peace. Instead it portends the resurgence of ancient myths, now in openly fundamentalist forms. Obscurely mixed with geopolitical struggles for the control of natural resources, apocalyptic religion has returned as a major force in global conflict.

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