Christianity and history: The search goes on

Christianity and history

The search goes on

 | 5 November 2016

The West has gained a lot from Christianity. There is still more to learn

The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values. By Nick Spencer. SPCK; 190 pages; £9.99.

IN THE early years of the Enlightenment, a few brave philosophers challenged the Christian order—an apparently hopeless task. But their efforts paid off, and tomes have since been written, by authors from Diderot to Richard Dawkins, about the triumph of secular man. What, after all, has Christianity ever done for us?

Rather a lot, argues Nick Spencer in an excellent new book, “The Evolution of the West”. Mr Spencer, who is research director at Theos, a religious think-tank in London, picks up from Larry Siedentop’s epic work from 2014, “Inventing the Individual”—a reassertion of how much the Western world owes to Christianity. It is not a popular thesis but, like a prophet crying in the post-modern wilderness, Mr Spencer provokes reflection that goes far beyond the shallow ding-dongs of the modern culture wars. He wants to make sure Westerners know where they came from as a way to illuminate where they are going.

Starting with the ancient world, he takes the reader on an extravagant journey to meet, among many others, Augustine of Hippo and John Locke as well as Thomas Piketty. The author believes that the fact that Christianity became the religion of the European establishment has blinded people to what a revolutionary doctrine it was (and is). And he clearly believes it can still play a role. The Christianisation of Europe, he says, was not a bunch of reactionary clerics trying to shut down a noble, free, secular ancient world, but a new idea of “a voluntary basis for human association in which people joined together through will and love rather than blood or shared material objectives”. Christianity declared that humans “have access to the deepest reality as individuals rather than merely as members of a group”.  

Out of this, with a reinjection at the Reformation, came the origins of the modern world: a belief in equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system and the assertion of natural rights leading to individual liberty, as well as the notion that a society built on the assumption of moral equality should have a representative form of government.

The book is not a tragic lament for lost Christendom. Mr Spencer is frank about the sins of the church. But too often, he says, they blind people to the communal, psychological, educational and creative benefits that have flowed from Christian belief. And he worries about how the absence of deep cultural norms will play out in the West. Can secular creeds bind people together now that there is plenty of pluribus but not much unum?

Shorn of its establishment baggage, Mr Spencer argues, Christianity still has much to say to an amnesiac world about human dignity, political freedom and economic inequality. And, quoting William Wilberforce, he warns that Christian values are inseparable from Christianity itself.

After the aggression of the God v science debates, Mr Spencer’s book is a gentler, though no less provocative, contribution to the discussion. It is beautifully written, too. The author believes that not everyone in the West is disenchanted with religious faith, and that the end of religion is no nearer than Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. Lurking everywhere in the secularised West is what he calls a “disenchantment with disenchantment”. People still want more than just freedom and choice. They want to belong, they want community rooted in something shared and they want to find meaning beyond themselves.  “Having arrived at the secular self,” says Mr Spencer, “we kept on searching.”