IS WESTERN culture moving inexorably from the darkness and superstition of the Christian past towards a humane, enlightened, liberated future, or is it sliding inevitably towards new forms of enslavement and oppression, and its own destruction? Jamie Franklin evidently believes the latter, as you can gauge from the subtitle of this fascinating and articulate book.
Franklin is much influenced by Charles Taylor’s vision of secular humanism’s evisceration of the “social imaginary” of the Christian West, and by John Paul II’s description of it as a “culture of death”. In a succession of excoriating chapters, he exposes the lies at the heart of modern secular humanism’s narrative of its own rise: the Christian world buried the learning of the ancient world; the rise of science depended on escape from the suffocating bonds of Christian metaphysics; human flourishing and personal fulfilment were trammelled by Christian ethics, and so on. All this is brilliantly done. As he points out, underneath it all is a tenacious but dreary materialism: we have become conditioned into thinking that “only the material realm is real.” And this has terrible consequences for the way in which we see the vulnerable, the ill, the marginalised, and the difficult.
The argument goes further, too. Not only is it the case that an empty, soulless view of the world is rapidly replacing the Christian imagination, but even the values that secular humanism professes to endorse — tolerance, freedom, respect for the rights of individuals, the intrinsic worth of every human person — in fact stem from the very Christian beliefs that modern secularism is cheerfully deconstructing. Franklin traverses a wide range of sources to demonstrate their Christian genealogy. Modern secular humanism is like the proverbial lumberjack, sawing off the branch on which it sits.
The answer to the bleak future that lies ahead of us, if faith is finally eclipsed by secular humanism, is a full-blown return to Christianity. This book is as much social commentary as it is theological analysis, but it shares much in common with traditional apologetics. It calls for a no-holds barred, Patristically informed, unashamed, sacramental religious revival. The positive vision of Christianity presented here is attractive and warm. Franklin admits that there are many who won’t be amenable to conversion, but he says that they can be like flying buttresses holding up the edifice of a rejuvenated Christian culture (reputedly a Churchillian aphorism).
This is a book, however, for those with strong stomachs. The criticism is at times unrelenting and pitiless. For all his hostility to the nihilism of secular humanism, Franklin falls into the same habit of universal suspicion as the ultimate nihilist, Nietzsche. Almost no politicians and church leaders emerge unscathed from his battering. The shadow of other controversies, over the handling of the pandemic, and over climate action, seems to push the argument off course, especially towards the end of the book.
Franklin, no doubt, thinks that these are logical outworkings of his argument, but to this reader they seem arbitrary and unfortunate distractions. It is not clear that Franklin reckons enough with the internal diversity (including ethics) of Christian belief. The polemical language is overheated. The word “liberal” is coupled in the index simply with “see atheist materialist worldview”. The case that the author is making stands on its own without recourse to these and other flaws. It is a pity, because the case needs to be heard and considered urgently.
The Revd Dr Jeremy Morris is the Church of England’s National Adviser for Ecumenical Relations.
The Great Return: Why only a restoration of Christianity can save Western civilisation
Jamie Franklin
Hodder & Stoughton £20
(978-1-3998-1492-8)
Church Times Bookshop £18
