In Taming the Gods, Ian Buruma investigates the tensions that exist between organized religion and liberal democracy. Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Tocqueville, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Burke, Jefferson, Voltaire, and Confucius, Buruma explores the history of church-state relations in different cultures. His focus is on the recent upsurge of evangelical Protestantism in American politics; the appropriation of popular religious sentiment by the political regimes that preceded modern-day democratic Japan and communist China; and the current controversy in Europe regarding Muslim immigration to secular, historically Christian states. The book highlights the deep complexities that characterize national religiosity, and predicts equally complex obstacles for political actors who attempt to manipulate religious fervor to further their own ends. Throughout, Buruma seeks to investigate the required elements that hold democratic societies together and the place of religion among them.

The book's geographic focal points—the United States, Europe, China, and Japan—may seem disparate, but Buruma's argument benefits from an expansive approach. By exploring the historical strains of secularism in each locale, he shows that current challenges to secularism are not a contemporary phenomenon, but a continuation of broader struggles to define secularism in specific, historically religious cultures.

In the United States, Rush Limbaugh is the modern embodiment of Elmer Gantry, the hustling preacher in Sinclair Lewis's famed novel of the same name, and their form of showbiz gospel partly explains the immediate impossibility of a non-Christian U.S. presidency. In China, the imposed veneration of Mao and his Little Red Book recalls, however distortedly, the country's traditional adherence to the Analects of Confucianism, a religion twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals thought undermined “their twin modern ideals, which they called ‘Mr. Science’ and ‘Mr. Democracy.’” In France, the banning of the Islamic veil should be understood in the context of the country's staunch ideological commitment to secularism—itself a product of the revolution's successful overthrow of Catholic authority and the development of the notion of laïcité. All of these places are ostensibly secular, yet Buruma illustrates how each continues its struggle to disentangle political and religious ideologies.

Particularly for European democracies, the author argues that the only common faith required for political success is a strong belief in Enlightenment values and democratic institutions. “As long as people play by the rules of free speech, free expression, independent judiciaries and free elections, they are democratic citizens, whatever they choose to wear on their heads.” In order to assuage concerns about changing cultural values, argues Buruma, proponents of secularism need to focus on the long-term cultivation of liberal-democratic principles.