God Wars

Weird, how everything I'm reading this winter seems to come back around to religion.
First there was The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, by Jeff Sharlett. Then a Dan Brown book, The Lost Symbol. Brown always seems to be writing about religion and science, in one way or another.
Most recently, I finished The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright.
Add to that the recently announced efforts by conservatives to rewrite the "liberal bias" out of the Bible, and you have a really strange convergence of thoughts about religion in the news lately.
What on earth is going on?
On the one hand, Brown's immensely popular novel (it set a new sales record for adult fiction) is all about the New-Agey sounding mystery behind a Masonic secret, which is that people have within themselves unrealized and god-like powers. This, he backs up by citing research in to the mind powers by the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
On the other side are clandestine fundamentalist Christians (I think they call themselves that) who work behind the scenes to ensure their members access to the highest reaches in the American power system. They seem to have a creepy affinity for citing Hitler and other despots (as good examples of how far strong leaders can go with the right use of power) and for getting the US to support some of the worst tyrants on the planet.
Out there somewhere else is Andy Schlafly (son of anti-feminist Phyllis) who leads an effort to man up the Bible by getting rid of gender-inclusive language, eliminating the story of the adulteress ("Let him cast the first stone." That one.) And emphasizing the free market parables. He fits right in with an increasing right-wing tendency to wipe out anything pro-feminine in the Scriptures. I've come across some of these guys on the radio, preaching how God is a vengeful, warrior like god and Jesus has been portrayed as too gentle.
Only after I read Wright's book did any of this begin to make sense. The Evolution of God is an interesting, if somewhat slow read looking at the order and translations of the Bible and Koran and matching them with what was going on in history at the moment. On the way, he also looks at pre-Abrahamic gods and hunter-gatherer gods.
After you take a moment to ponder how breathtakingly difficult a task this would be, you begin to understand how the different kinds of God in the Bible (vengeful, forgiving, etc.) match the different political needs of the times. Even the names--Elohim, Yahweh--seemed to be subject to the political fortunes of the worshippers, according to Wright.
The fundamentalists and the New Agers are doing the same thing people have always done when societies change. They're recasting God to meet society's new needs. God is evolving.
In the Family's case, anxiety over globalization has caused these "Christians" to seek power above all else, securing America's god as the primary god of all the earth. Ancient Babylonians would be proud.
In the New Ager's case, intelligent people are trying to reconcile belief in unknown forces with facts presented by scientific research.
And as for the muscular Christians, it seems like mostly push-back from the anxiety brought on by seeing women's fortunes rise in industrialized countries in the past 50 years.
I don't know why, exactly, but this makes me feel better. The bellicose nature of organized religion the past few years has driven me away from church attendance. Every kind of optimism advice tells me you need some kind of faith to keep up your attitude. Yet here I am, feeling more like an outsider to my religion.
Maybe what I need instead is just a different god. Just like everyone else, apparently.