Abstract
This book of interconnected essays distils much of Nick Spencer’s work over the last decade as Research Director of Theos. The think tank was founded a month after the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and the success of New Atheism naturally influenced its sense of purpose. Spencer was struck by the atheists’ refusal to admit that modern secular values are largely rooted in religious history and rightly sensed that this attitude extends far beyond card-carrying atheists. His core aim, then, has been to remind people of Christianity’s massive influence on modern Western values.
Spencer has been influenced by two substantial books of the last decade: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual. Taylor’s core thesis is that modernity was shaped by Christian categories rather than simply emerging when the supposed error of religion was taken away (the ‘subtraction’ narrative). But Taylor almost allows this to get lost amid other theoretical explorations and conceptual coinages, and Spencer is perhaps too respectful of this. Siedentop’s argument is more straightforward, though often dry and technical: medieval Christianity established respect for individual rights and equality. Useful as this is, it doesn’t have much to say on the crucial arena of the Enlightenment. Spencer himself has researched the atheism of the Enlightenment era and reprises his findings here. But there is still an overall impression of patchiness: a coherent account of modern humanism’s emergence from Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not quite attempted.
But there are plenty of excellent insights. He is good on human rights, which is, ‘in effect, a kind of faith. If held with sufficient strength and confidence it can discipline other less benevolent attitudes to the human. If not, it has no power at all’ (p. 77). In another essay he notes that some theologians overstate the notion that the Bible has an account of natural human rights: rather it typically urges us to treat people with perfect (and in a sense unnatural) justice.
Spencer sometimes strikes a sceptical note. Our culture tends to overstate the role of law, he notes in an essay on Magna Carta. It was a major breakthrough to subject the king to the law, but this was enabled by a shared moral framework. When this framework weakens, it’s tempting to think that the right laws can make up for the loss. Similarly, democracy is of limited value without an ethos of the common good: we come to expect too much of the flawed politicians we elect. And the recent debate about inequality also hinges on the question of shared national purpose. He explains, in relation to Thomas Piketty, that extreme inequality has been a constant feature of human history, aside from a few decades after the Second World War. We should challenge this, but without pretending that there is a form of politics that can be trusted to deliver greater equality. For an increased level of progressive taxation ‘demands an overpowering sense of “us” – or common identity or social mores, or purposes, or enemies’ (p. 164). And left-wing politics can’t will this into existence. Nor it seems can religion, but it has become clear that the churches’ ability to model a more equal world is a precious political resource.
Spencer is perhaps overly cautious: The introduction spends more time emphasizing the messy, contradictory, indirect nature of Christianity’s influence on our values, than on clearly stating the important thesis.