SOURCE: “The Road Back to God,” in National Review, July 15, 1996, pp. 49–50.

In the following review, Klinghoffer offers a positive assessment of The Quest for God, despite objecting to Johnson's “enthusiasm for imagining things beyond the scope of revelation.”

For conservatives, the importance of Paul Johnson's new book [The Quest for God] is demonstrated not by comparing it to similar books—of which, by current writers, there are few—but by considering something apparently unrelated: the barely detectable conservative effort to fend off legalized gay marriage.

As most of us sense, the real reason to oppose gay marriage is simply that God opposes it. In Leviticus, He warned the Israelites to shun the “practices” of the Egyptians and the Canaanites, if they wanted to avoid getting ejected from the Holy Land, and the Talmud records that one of those practices was to allow men to marry men and women...