The Evolution of the West: How Christianity has Shaped Our Values
by Nick Spencer
SPCK (London 2016) Pbk. 176 pages. £9.99.
The author of this book, Nick Spencer, is a director of the ‘Theos’ religious think tank, which seeks to promote an understanding of religion in society. Apart from delivering lectures the author has previously produced a number of well received works including Atheists: the Origin of the Species and Darwin and God. He has now added this further work to the list.
The book is not a general history but a collection of twelve independent chapters which began life as lectures. The cover of the book itemises its twelve topics/chapters, which include Dignity, Rule of Law, Welfare, Capitalism, Human Rights…. even Atheism and Secularism: in fact just about everything we associate with modern life.
The subtitle of the book – How Christianity has Shaped Our Values – highlights the underlying theme: that a distinctively Christian context provided the soil in which a wide range of attitudes and values, which characterise the modern West, originated. As Spencer writes, the ‘golden thread’ of the book is that ‘we will have an attenuated idea of who we are and what we value, let alone of where we are going… if we fail to recognise where we have come from.’
The motive for pursuing this theme is the conviction of the author that the popular secular reading of history which attributes our modern values largely to the Enlightenment is not only mistaken but shallow and prejudiced against the importance of religion in general and Christianity in particular.
But this is not a revamped form of apologetics. It is a profound and subtle historical evaluation. All the chapters are extremely well researched and fluently written, starting with an extensive appraisal of the work of the Oxford don, Larry Siedentop, whose courageous book, Inventing the Individual, sets the scene in showing that the source of our political virtues are to be found not in the Enlightenment nor Classical Antiquity but in our often overlooked and misunderstood Christian heritage.
This opening chapter is followed by a more focused chapter on our national identity in which Spencer is more forthright, affirming, ‘We owe our notions of “England” as a political entity, as opposed to a geographic or ethnic one, to Christianity.’ He supports his claim by an evaluation of the importance of the role of Pope Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede’s ecclesiastical history, which created an ideal of an ‘English people’ modelled on the biblical idea of a ‘chosen people’. Paradoxically, as Spencer goes on to show, Christianity – but of a different version from Roman Catholicism – would go on to play a decisive part in another watershed moment of English identity at the Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century when, ‘to be English was to reject the authority of the bishop of Rome.’
Already this narrative is beginning to highlight some key aspects of the book as a whole. This is not a straightforward story or ‘evolution’ but rather an often convoluted dialectic, a ‘circuitous path marked by circumstance and accident rather than a smooth, gradual parabola.’ Spencer acknowledges this at the outset in his Introduction: ‘The tree of Western values did grow in Christian soil,’ even if the soil had no precise blueprint of what the tree would eventually look like.
This nuanced approach is clearly expressed in a particularly impressive chapter: ‘The Accidental Midwife: the Emergence of Scientific Culture’. This shows just how much a key aspect of the West, and what makes it unique, is rooted in the theological attitudes and religious controversies of the seventeenth century. Equally impressive is his study of ‘Christianity and the Welfare State’ (his doctoral thesis), which reaches the interesting conclusion that, ‘countries with higher levels of per capita welfare have a proclivity for less religious participation and tend to have a higher percentage of non-religious individuals.’ Welfare and secularism march hand in hand!
Regardless of this, Spencer is convinced we are not at the end of a 500 year descent into unbelief but at a turning point. Following another influential writer, Charles Taylor – whose work A Secular Age has had a clear effect on this author – he quotes, ‘Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief.’ Rather, ours is a post-secular age and we are ‘just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching.’ This book is a reflection of this new age.