Every semester, new students pour into my classroom to learn systematic theology. With their sights set on ecclesial ministry or academic ministry, they are eager to break open textbooks, work through difficult doctrines, develop dogmatics, and simply pursue the theological life. While we get to all of that in due time, I start every one of my classes by opening our Bibles to 2 Corinthians 3:18 in order to set the stage for the end for which theology exists. 

This singular verse, for me, lays bare the entire enterprise of Christian theology. Paul, writing to the Church in Corinth, says, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."

As unsophisticated as it sounds, Paul gives in this verse the verb that should characterize the many gears that turn when we exercise our theological imagination and contemplation—behold. 

In reading this passage every semester for my students during the first day of class, I hope to show both the simplicity and the wonder of Christian theology. In saying that I hope to show the simplicity of theology, I mean that I want any student in the room who is coming in with insecurity about formal theological education, to see that the best theologians are those who have given themselves to developing the habits and virtues of those who can afford to simply behold. This is an activity even the simplest amongst us can perform—simply look. And yet, on the other side, anyone who has given themselves to this activity of beholding the beauty of the Lord knows that there is an inexhaustible well of glory to be seen when we dedicate ourselves to it. It is in setting our eyes on the Lord that we see the source of all that is true, good, and beautiful. Not even ten generations of beholding will resolve the majesty at which we look.

Framing the theological task in this way shows that theology itself is not the end for which we strive. Rather, theology is a gracious means to the great end of beholding God. If it is the Christian’s eternal vocation to behold God in the beatific vision in the life hereafter, we ought to be about participating in that great telos now by beholding God through theology in this life.

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My hope in opening classes with the vision I describe above has spilled over into my hopes in writing Theology for Life: A Joy-Filled Introduction to Christian Doctrine. In the first sentence of the book, I say: “This book is built on a rather simple conviction: One of the most practical things we can do in the Christian life is get an eyeful of the beauty of the Lord.” 

This new book, published by Baker Books, works through ten various doctrines, but as means not ends. Each of the ten doctrines works much like an optometrist adjusting our gaze that so we may focus well on God and his works. Each chapter is designed to have a flow that gives readers accessible handrails to hold while reading, but more important, to develop a rhythm thinking about doctrines. Each chapter begins with “defining” the doctrine before moving into “delighting” in the doctrine. This two-part rhythm reminds readers that the proper theological path is one in which their eyes will be lifted—lifted from the page, the words, the ideas, and even the theological truths themselves toward the Lord. 

Readers ought to feel that upward tilt is not incidental to a chapter or two, but rather is the conviction of the book playing itself out throughout. Each of the ten doctrines—trinity, attributes, creation, scripture, incarnation, justification, preservation, union with Christ, ecclesiology, and eschatology—aims to go beyond mere examination and into exaltation.

However, it must be said that the book does not shy away from theological grammar in hopes of accessibility. A frustration I have felt, personally, is that when I am looking for introductory texts in Christian theology, I’m often forced to choose between technical precision and accessibility. Of course, there will always be tension here and my claim is not that Theology for Life has found the perfect balance between the two ditches. Rather, I want to take the “optometrist” role of each doctrine seriously. A good pair of glasses is only a means to the end of better vision, just as theology is a means to the great end of beholding God. The analogy goes further, though, as you would not want an optometrist who is careless about prescriptions since glasses are not the ultimate end. The optometrist’s care in issuing a prescription serves the sight just as the theologian’s rigor serves the beholding. 

Theology serves a much greater end than merely being correct but being correct still matters a great deal. Where a bad prescription leaves patients with still blurry vision, imprecise theological contemplation and grammar still perverts the theologian’s sight and song. 

For this reason, I have decided to utilize theological grammar developed throughout the Church’s long history in the hopes of giving readers clarity. I wade into conversations and use words that some readers may be unfamiliar with—things like eternal relations of origin, divine simplicity, dyothelitism, imputed righteousness, the beatific vision, and more. However, readers can expect clear definitions for each new piece of theological grammar and an articulation of why such a word, idea, doctrine, or teaching really is good, true, and beautiful. 

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In the end Theology for Life is not a brilliant book. That may be bad salesmanship, but it is truthful. Instead of brilliance, the book aims at wonder. I aim to put theology in line with its proper telos—God himself. Paul gives us the shape of this in a written doxology he tucks in toward the end of a long treatise about God’s faithfulness toward his people. The apostle writes: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36). 

Theology, if it is anything worth doing, can find itself inside those “all things” Paul has in mind. Theology is from God, since he is the source of its subject matter and not merely its most interesting subject. Theology is through him since it is only the mind which has been made alive by the resurrection which bears the needed prerequisite of faith seeking understanding. Finally, it is meant to end in or to him, and this is a piece easily lost even in the most well-organized dogmatics. A theology which never moves a person toward God has misplaced its own ending however sound its propositions and ordered its footnotes. 

So, in line with how I begin every semester, my hope for this book is quite simple: I want hearers to behold God, just as I want to behold him myself. I’m convinced that in Christ I have found the one worth looking at for a thousand generations, and this book is a simple offering for God’s people to come and see the treasure in the field. The end of theology is God himself, and it is my earnest prayer that readers’ eyes are taken from the book toward his worthy direction.

(A small concluding note: The team at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has put together a high-quality, and more importantly—free—video course which goes along with the book. I have provided a 30-ish minute video lecture for each chapter which is intended for churches and individuals to use as study curriculum along with the book. You can find the free course at Midwestern Seminary’s For the Church Institute.)

In 2026, we clearly live at the end of a world. While it may not be the end of the world, the massive technological and social changes moving through the West are quickly dissolving the old order and ushering in something whose exact contours remain to be seen. Rapid advancements in AI, declining trust in institutions, social polarization, and the collapse of family structures drive widespread alienation, mental illness, and addiction, unraveling the social fabric and fueling fear of an apocalyptic future. 

Our predicament is not exactly new. Like Yeats’s beast slouching slowly toward Bethlehem to be born, the modern Machine has been remaking the world into its own image for hundreds of years now. In the name of advancing rational enlightenment and personal autonomy, our lives have been slowly wired into the structures of what E. M. Forster, Paul Kingsnorth, and others have called “The Machine,” a massive, emergent techno-industrialist globalism that controls modern life through its Kafkaesque systems of bureaucratic state power. This system, as Lewis Mumford observed, transforms the world into “an archetypal machine made of human parts,” reducing communally integrated persons into isolated, interchangeable cogs.

Ironically, every bit of independence we think we gain from nature is in reality a little bit of dependence we have given to the Machine. When you no longer depend upon the sun or woodfire for warmth, you have not become personally independent of nature; you have become dependent on the energy company. Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community, diagnoses the unintended consequences of this shift: “Individualism has resulted in masses of normless, unattached, insecure individuals who lose even the capacity for independent, creative living.” We think our technology liberates us from the limits of nature, but the techno-industrialist machine actually re-organizes our lives toward dissipation so our attention and energy can feed the Machine. The Machine’s fuel, as Paul Kingsnorth starkly notes, is life itself: “The fuel is nature... The fuel is you.” In the 21^st century, we have clearly moved across a kind of tipping point where industry no longer serves the genuine interests of man; man now serves the interests of the Machine.

The industrial strength horrors of the World Wars began to awaken the West to the Faustian bargain she had made with technology. Post-war writers like C. S. Lewis, E. M. Forster, and Robert Nisbet worked to understand how the Machine dissolves the fundamental structures of a humane community and to explore paradigms for its recovery. The alienation, disintegration, and spiritual anxiety created by life in the modern ouroborosian Machine led to a renewed search for the roots of genuine human community. Many find themselves longing for the renewal of embodied local relationship and a connection to nature. Nisbet again observes the trend: “In our own time we are confronted by the spectacle of innumerable individuals seeking escape from the very processes of individualism and impersonality which the nineteenth-century rationalist hailed as the very condition of progress.” In this post-human, techno-bureaucratic world, we find ourselves desperate to recover coherent communities that can provide a sense of personal agency, identity, meaning, and value. 

Yet, ironically, as a people well-catechized by the technopoly, we automatically look for technological solutions to our technological problems. We try to resolve the problem of unprecedented power with more power. Like Boromir, we put our hope in finding the One Machine to rule them all. Concerned about the existential dangers of AI, we rush to create more AI. We look for solutions from the very Machine that erodes coherent forms of embodied relationship with each other and with the created order. 

In his masterful sci-fi dystopian novel, That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis suggests that the answer to our predicament lies not in direct confrontation with our Techno-industrial Tower of Babel, but at the subversive level of personal community where we can know and be known. As Lewis warns in The Abolition of Man and illustrates in That Hideous Strength, those who live by the manipulation of nature will die by the manipulation of nature, for the inexorable logic of The Machine will digest, corrode, and assimilate everything that adopts as fundamental its structures and methods. Lewis shows that the restoration of localized husbandry as distinct from mass-scale manipulation is essential to the survival of man, if not physically then essentially and spiritually. Through an ironic contrast between the apocalyptic imagery of judgement and the symbolic structures of community life, C. S. Lewis offers us a map out of the Machine and back into the membership of humane communities. 

In That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis dramatizes both the breakdown of humane social bonds and the search for a renewed community. It is a story about how to live with faith and hope in a world threatened by chaos and tyranny. It is a story for such a time as this. On the title page, Lewis indicates that his novel is both a “Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups” and a modern dystopia about the rebuilding of Babel, similar in theme and style to 1984 or Brave New World. That Hideous Strength is dystopian in that it shows how the rationalist values and scientistic institutions of the modern world are pulling us into a totalitarian nightmare, yet it is unlike the other great dystopian novels of the 20^th century in that it promises a happy ending and a fairy-tale counterpoint to the shadow of Babel.

The symbolism of Babel is central to Lewis’s novel, for it serves as the archetypal model of human history, thereby giving us the key to our future through an understanding of our past. The story of Babel reveals that God created our world to be ordered according to a sacred structure, but we repeatedly rebel against the natural order and try to replace sacred structures with technological structures. Throughout Scripture beginning with Genesis, and all throughout the history of empire, we see rebellious men attempt to overcome the curse of sin and death through technological control rather than obedience to the kingdom of God. This is what the Tower of Babel symbolizes: the human attempt to build independent kingdoms patterned not by the temple of God but by the temple of the self. 

Set in post-World War II England, That Hideous Strength juxtaposes the traditional English village of St. Anne’s with the institutional life of the new National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), a quasi-governmental organization ostensibly devoted to progress and human betterment through scientific and social engineering. For Lewis, the community of St. Anne’s symbolizes life lived according to the sacred structures of nature, while the NICE symbolizes the modern Tower of Babel, the technological city of man that works to gain power over nature. Mark Studdock, the main protagonist in the novel, becomes entangled with the NICE, drawn in by ambition and a desire to belong. As Mark rises in the ranks, he discovers the organization’s true aim: a transhuman utopia where individuality, morality, and freedom are sacrificed to overcome death through technologies created by transhuman intelligences which Lewis calls “Macrobes.” 

The Futility of Direct Resistance

As the plot progresses, Lewis portrays direct confrontation with the Machine as futile. Ransom, the leader of St. Anne’s, explains, “The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands.” The omnipresence of the globalist Machine upon which our livelihood now depends renders human strategies for escape impotent, and to fight technological control with more technological control is simply to accelerate the very power that dehumanizes us and degrades our social structures. As Lewis reminds us in The Abolition of Man, “Man’s conquest of nature … means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.” Moreover, as finite, temporal creatures, humans will never be in an epistemological position to master nature or control history, no matter how advanced our AI tools. We cannot see the whole causal landscape of the past, present, or future, much less see into the hearts of men or the purposes of God. Rescue from the Machine will not be engineered by greater control over the Machine; victory lies in a renewed obedience to the created order, not greater dominion over it. 

In That Hideous Strength, the resistance community at St. Anne’s does not develop their own technology or form a political action network; rather they wait in prayer, seek the truth, build relationships of trust, grow a garden, tend the animals, and break bread together. They refuse to live by lies or participate in corruption. They discover harmony, stability, and strength through obedience to God’s created order. In short, they resist the Machine by remaining stubbornly human. In “On Living in an Atomic Age,” Lewis argues that when faced with apocalyptic crisis 

“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” 

When faced with an anti-human enemy, the community at St. Anne’s fights by returning to the fundamentally human things. The great question that differentiates those who live in the City of God from the City of Babel is this: will we conform our will to the good and beautiful order of nature or will we try to conform nature to the pleasures of our will? The key to victory over the Machine is to be a certain kind of people who live a certain way, a way that obediently conforms to the divine order of the world.

When the resident skeptic MacPhee wonders “how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears,” Ransom replies, “You have done what was required of you… You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that.” In Lewis’s novel, those on the side of humanity are given their providential, practical tasks to complete, but those tasks are revealed to them through the demands of virtue particular to situations as they arise, not through grand schemes for taking control. 

Lewis is not suggesting that we withdraw into our caves and retreat from responsibility, waiting idly for the Lord’s trumpet to sound. Rather, Lewis’s fairy-tale calls for a transformation of the way in which we live in the world and build our communities; he bids us reject the modern desire to “subdue reality to the wishes of men” and return to the paradigm of “wise men of old [for whom] the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality.” At some point this transformative return will require a refusal to participate in institutions or systems so compromised by the values of the Machine that they actively war against the Kingdom of God. In That Hideous Strength, neither Mark nor any person of integrity could work for the NICE and still retain their soul, but Mark’s rejection of the NICE is not a withdrawal from society per se; the Studdock’s move to St. Anne’s is a re-rooting into the kind of rightly-ordered community that can build and sustain a genuine society. 

Bacchanalian Judgment and the Fall of Belbury

At the end of That Hideous Strength, it is not the stratagems or efforts of men but the supernatural working of Providence that brings down the NICE and ends the tyranny of Babel. Through the narrative juxtaposition of the NICE and St. Anne’s, Lewis reveals the eucatastrophic irony in Babel’s fall: the very powers that destroy the Machine are also those that restore the natural community. The waters that flood the Tower of Babel also water the garden of God. This double-aspect of the prophetic tradition is developed through Lewis’s use of both Biblical and Bacchanalian imagery in the climactic scenes of That Hideous Strength. 

Seen most clearly in Isaiah, Joel, Amos, and Zechariah, the prophetic tradition of Israel continually presents the Day of the Lord as simultaneously both a day of judgement and a day of blessing. The exile from Eden, the Flood of Genesis, the scattering of Babel – all these are examples of the Day of the Lord, that day when the Lord calls a people to account, that day when a man or nation reaps what it has sown. As Obadiah tells us, “The day of the Lord is near for all nations. As you have done, it will be done to you; your deeds will return upon your own head.” Ultimately, there will be a great and final day of the Lord, when the whole cosmos is brought to account, every man and nation is judged, and the true Kingdom of God is revealed, but meanwhile we see all throughout Scripture and human history many “local” days of judgement.

Saint John the Apostle condenses this tradition in Revelation 19, which tells us that the Beast of Babylon will fall on the great Day of the Lord when the King returns with his white robed army to judge and make war. Surprisingly, Revelation first describes this day of destruction as the marriage supper of the Lamb, a day of great rejoicing and exultation. However, when the Bridegroom arrives for the feast, His first task is to lead the armies of heaven and strike down the rebellious nations. An angel calls “to all the birds that fly overhead, ‘Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.’” This strange mingling of feast and slaughter reveals the paradox of divine judgement: the same event that destroys Babylon renews creation. For those who serve the Beast, the feast is ruin; for those who serve the Lamb, it is wedding joy. 

Greco-Roman traditions also suggest a polyvalent understanding of civilizational judgement. In The Bacchae by Euripides, we see that the rites of Dionysus also suggests the dual nature of feasting: the god brings wine to Thebes to celebrate his divinity, yet he destroys King Pentheus for rejecting it, rousing the Maenads to tear him apart in ecstatic frenzy. At the climactic turn of The Odyssey, Homer sets the hero’s violent judgement over the invading suitors in the context of a feast. The moment before he begins his deadly vengeance, Odysseus cries, “Now is the time for their dinner to be served!” and as the first suitor falls, Homer describes the goblet of wine slipping from his hand while blood bursts from his face. Prepared for a banquet, the suitors find destruction instead. Throughout the ancient myths, wine is both the joyful gift of civilization and a potent image of violence; it symbolizes both the human and divine, the rational and ecstatic, and the civilized and primal. 

Lewis draws upon this ancient symbolism in his own mythic worlds. At the end of Prince Caspian, a story with many parallels to That Hideous Strength, Lewis evokes this Bacchanalian imagery to depict the renewal of Narnia through the divine judgment of Aslan. Like Ransom, the hidden King Caspian leads a resistance movement against the usurping tyrant Miraz who, like the NICE, desires to control nature and eradicate the common folk of Narnia. When Aslan returns to free the Narnians of Telmarine control, all of true Narnia breaks out into a Bacchinalian feast; trees and fairy folk dance as grape vines grow over all the land. Under Aslan’s rule, Bacchus, Silvanus, and their retinue bring life and joy back to Old Narnia, yet for the tyrant and the faithless, the renewal of nature brings dethronement and destruction. Lewis again draws from this same Bacchanalian duality to structure the climax of That Hideous Strength. Lewis ends his novel with a tale of two banquets, one at Belbury Manor for the leaders, funders, and administrators of the NICE and another for the resistance community living at St. Anne’s. 

Judgment day for the NICE thus begins with the banquet at Belbury where the leaders of the Macrobe-controlled technopoly gather to celebrate their recent triumph over Bracton College. The wine flows freely—symbolizing both the gifts of civilization and its penchant for violence, both the gladness of genuine community and the chaos of dissipation. Like Pentheus who rejects wine and the divine rites of Dionysius, the people of Belbury discover that the power which is a drink of joy to those who honor the gods is the blood of violence for those who reject them. Lewis mirrors this Janus-faced quality of wine when the same drink that fosters joy among the faithful at St. Anne’s turns to the blood of violence for those who scorn nature and nature’s God at Belbury. 

As the men of the NICE unknowingly drink to their own demise, judgement unfolds through the collapse of language—the curse of Babel returned. Having long abused words, filled the world with lies, and obfuscated the truth, the ability of members at the NICE to communicate collapses entirely. As one character declares, “Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis”: They that have despised the word of God, from them also shall the word of man be taken away! As the curse of Babel descends, language turns to nonsense and panic fills the halls of Belbury—a name whose very syllables foretell its judgment. Belbury, from the Anglo-Saxon bealu meaning bane and burh meaning fortress, has become the ‘evil stronghold’, the Tower of Babel rebuilt in modern England. 

The collapse of language leads to the second stage of judgment: having rejected moral law for the sake of technological power, all sense of restraint or duty fails, and the intoxicated people of Belbury turn on one another in violence. Fairy Hardcastle shoots Jules, the public frontman for the NICE, unleashing a stampede of “kicking, struggling, leaping on tables and under tables, pressing on and pulling back, screams, [and] breaking of glass.”As the prophet Zechariah warned, "on that day a great panic from the Lord shall fall on them, so that each will seize the hand of another, and the hand of the one will be raised against the hand of the other.” With apocalyptic frenzy, language and law alike collapse under the weight of Belbury’s institutionalized deceit.  

Yet meanwhile, far from the pandemonium of Belbury, a very different feast begins. At St. Anne’s—where no lies were admitted—language serves as a medium for wisdom and camaraderie, binding the community together rather than tearing it apart. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis imagines the medieval planets as angelic beings who descend upon Earth to wage war against the evil powers controlling the NICE. When Mercury, the Lord of Language, descends upon Belbury, words fail those who live in rebellion against the Created order of God, yet at St. Anne’s, where Ransom and his friends live in obedience to the divine Logos, Mercury’s descent inspires such a celebration of language as even Shakespeare himself would rejoice to hear. Lewis, a great lover of words, takes time to describe the sheer joy of good conversation:

“If not plays upon words, yet certainly plays upon thoughts, paradoxes, fancies, anecdotes, theories laughingly advanced yet well worth taking seriously, had flowed from them and over them with dazzling prodigality...  never in her life had she heard such talk—such eloquence, such melody (song could have added nothing to it), such toppling structures of double meaning, such skyrockets of metaphor and allusion.”

When the Lord of Language descends on the wicked, babbling men of the NICE, their speech is confused and reduced to nonsense; when the same Lord of Language descends on the faithful people of St. Anne’s, their speech is enlivened and elevated. The same spirit of judgement that is chaos to the wicked is life to the faithful. 

Ultimately, the breakdown of language and moral order at Belbury summons the final reckoning of nature and nature’s God. As Saint Paul tells us in Galatians 6, the Lord of Heaven and Earth is not mocked and a man will one day reap what he sows. Though wicked men attempt to twist, suppress, and overcome the natural order, inevitably it rebounds and reasserts itself. Animals liberated from the experimental laboratories of the NICE invade the banquet hall and devour their tormentors. Evoking Bacchus’s beastly retinue together with Revelation’s “winepress of the fury of the wrath of God,” Lewis describes a tiger hunting her prey and a huge elephant trampling “like a girl treading grapes, heavily and soon wetly tramping in a pash of blood and bones, of flesh, wine, fruit, and sodden tablecloth.” Even Mr. Bultitude, the pet bear of St. Anne’s, joins the fray and eats the very head of the NICE, performing what Lewis calls "the best deed that any bear had done in Britain.”

In the ruins of Belbury, nature becomes the instrument of judgement, yet in the village of St. Anne’s, it becomes a servant of grace. At St. Anne’s, nature is not foe but friend. Unlike Belbury’s exploited beasts, St. Anne’s menagerie lives in harmony with humans—providing help, companionship, and cheer. The Director is able to tame all manner of creatures, from the mice to the jackdaw to the lumbering bear who naps on the bathroom floor and begs for treats in the kitchen. Lewis gives his bear, Mr. Bultitude, a key role in the climactic resolution to his novel. Like Bacchus himself, whose presence joins terror and delight, Ransom’s bear embodies not only the dangerous strength, ferocity, and wildness of nature but also its maternal, affectionate, and protective aspects. Mr. Bultitude not only kills the great enemy, he also plays an important role in St. Anne’s redemptive symbolism. Ransom, we discover, is a descendent of King Arthur and inheritor of the title Pendragon, ruler of Logres. Mr. Bultitude thus provides a proper mascot for this Arthurian household, for Arthur’s name is connected to the old Celtic word for bear (Artio). He is the Bear King whose dual nature as beast in war and angel at table made him a bulwark in ancient Britain against the dark agents of chaos. King Arthur stood as a fierce, protective wall between the chaos of invading darkness and the light of Christian community. So too, Ransom’s kitchen companion, Mr. Bultitude, leads the revenge of nature in his own day to keep the hideous shadow of Babel at bay one generation more. 

In the last stage of judgement, even the earth itself rebels against the Machine—floods, quakes, and fires destroy all the buildings under the control of the NICE. The fundamental powers of nature—language, morality, and natural law—arrogantly denied by the progressive ideology of the NICE, now exact their retribution, toppling the hideous strength of Babel. Yet in the order of divine justice, destruction and renewal arrive together. As Belbury falls, the membership at St. Anne’s feasts in Arthurian splendor—robes, crowns, table, and dance all foreshadowing the marriage supper of the Lamb. The same forces of nature that demolished the NICE—the Lord of Language, the King of Beasts, the Goddess of Desire—also strengthen and rejoice the hearts of virtuous men. At St. Anne’s, for those who remain human to the end, wine gladdens rather than curses, language binds rather than breaks, and nature serves rather than devours. 

This double-edged eucatastrophe at the end of That Hideous Strength exposes the self-destructive logic at the heart of The Machine. The world turns according to the eternal nature of the Logos, and the created order cannot be undone by the machinations of those within it and dependent upon it. Babel, Belbury, and all those who rebel against the goodness and beauty of creation ultimately only fuel their own demise. As Ransom concludes in the last chapter, “Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.” Mother nature will have her revenge. 

Finally, for Lewis, and the symbolic tradition on which he stands, the essential key to remaining human is to remember our nature as male and female made together to image the glory of God. Marriage is the inescapable foundation for a proper connection to the created order. That Hideous Strength begins with the word matrimony, which literally means mother-making, and the story ends with the restored and repentant Mark finally making a mother of his wife, Jane. The fruitful union of man and wife, symbolic of the marriage between heaven and earth, is the means by which the world is reborn. The abolition of marriage is the abolition of Man, but the renewal of marriage is the restoration of Man. Mother-making marriage is both the origin and the goal of human life, for it is by the marriage of heaven and earth that we are created and it is for the free, conscious, consummation of this marriage that we are destined. This is Lewis’s fairy-tale ending: not technological liberation from nature, but loving harmony with nature and nature’s God through the faithful marriage of heaven and earth. Only through obedience to the order of creation are we essentially joined to the Creator of that order. 

Through the perennial symbolism of the apocalyptic tradition, That Hideous Strength charts a path out of the modern Machine and back into human community. The vision Lewis gives us is no passive, fearful retreat but a radical reaffirmation of our fundamental humanity against the anti-humanism of the Machine. Those who steward creation according to natural law will endure when judgment falls while those who rebel against the created order pull down Deep Heaven upon their heads. Nations rise and nations fall, but the truly human—prayer, work, friendship, love—abides. More technology cannot redeem us from technology’s curse; greater control cannot rescue us from tyranny; only faithful husbandry in obedience to the created order can—by God’s grace—renew our world.

Michael J. Rhodes. Reimagining Biblical Politics: What Scripture Says about Public Life and Why It Matters. Baker Academic, 2026. $26.99. 248 pp.

A few pages into Reimagining Biblical Politics, Old Testament scholar Michael J. Rhodes remarks candidly that “the recent political witness of God’s people in the West has often been abysmal.” Many American churches have dramatically failed to provide the kind of well-reasoned biblical instruction that could equip their laity with an appropriate framework for thoughtful Christian political engagement. Some congregations, seeking to avoid the sort of polarized, hyper-partisan politics of our day, have reverted to simply sidestepping the whole subject. They’ve opted to maintain a deafening silence on any topic that might be perceived as political. While profound political differences may divide those seated in the same pew, a kind of stilted silence is politely maintained. 

Given the emotionally charged political exchanges that erupt constantly online, this quietist approach has a certain appeal. But, as Rhodes rightly asks in this valuable book: “How do our political lives get discipled if we never talk about this stuff with our fellow congregants?” Further, he contends that avoiding the subject altogether isn’t a valid option for pastors who seek to teach the whole counsel of God. The political realm is, he insists, an integral part of the gospel message. 

Into this fraught situation, Rhodes argues that Scripture actually has good news to deliver. The simple, ancient Christian affirmation that “Jesus is Lord” has profound implications for human politics. Christians should begin exploring this subject not by clutching a set of particular policies or ideological shibboleths close to their hearts, but with the fundamental recognition and declaration that God reigns. Thankfully, the Bible provides a wide variety of instructive examples of faithful political engagement. Christians can benefit from studying these diverse stories while taking care to consider how they hang together, like so many puzzle pieces, to create a coherent portrait. 

Rhodes begins by considering how Torah conceives of God’s kingdom and the character of His rule. Old Testament books like Deuteronomy describe how God reclaims His creation “by calling together a community that will live out his kingdom way together.” These scriptures lay out the model for a society that can serve as an example to the world around it, demonstrating the way God’s people do politics. Indeed, this model should be attractive to those living outside their unique community.  Rhodes labels this approach “the outpost politics of Moses.” 

Because the Lord is a holy God of justice, both transformed individuals and transformed social structures must reflect His justice and generosity. Still, Rhodes takes care to exclude Christians adopting a theocratic approach since the church is a multinational community. Christians’ primary loyalty is to Jesus, and they are often called to live “in political communities that include many that do not recognize his authority.” 

Among the book’s most insightful chapters is one focused on the Psalms. Christians often fail to grasp that the Psalms contain subversive political teaching—something slave owners in the nineteenth century recognized when they sought to produce a Bible suitably edited for slaves. The Psalms praise God as the universe’s creator and ruler, they stress his rule over human nations and highlight the Lord's reign over man-made idols, the so-called “gods.” Thus, “singing the psalms is an act of political rebellion, a conscious, calculated rejection of the forces, human and spiritual, that claim to run the universe.” Understood correctly, the book can help believers become faithful and effective outpost communities. Similarly, Jesus in the Gospels gathers a transformed people to Himself. Those who encountered Jesus, established communities whose “outpost politics drew people in to meet” their Savior and Lord. In Matthew 5, Jesus uses the metaphor of the city upon a hill where those who have personally experienced healing radiate it to the surrounding world. 

Rhodes’ creative reading of the opening chapters of Exodus focuses on the courageous actions of obscure Hebrew women who were instrumental in saving and protecting the baby Moses, behavior he aptly describes as nonviolent resistance to evil arbitrary authority. Persons in these biblical accounts often act without explicit divine guidance or direct divine intervention. In an equally innovative comparison of the political themes contained in Jeremiah 29 and 1 Peter, Rhodes demonstrates how these two messages to different sets of exiles can provide the faithful today with useful guidance.  

In both books, God’s people are called to seek the peace and well-being (i.e., shalom) of the city in which they reside. In seeking this shalom, one must keep one’s focus on this particular place and time while also being “fixed on the long-term fuller shalom” that will only be brought about directly by God himself. Both groups of exiles are called to seek common ground with non-believing neighbors while still retaining their “distinctive identities.” 

Pursuing what Rhodes terms “polite resistance” in exile definitely represents a lofty and difficult calling. The peaceful protests and innocent suffering of participants in the American Civil Rights movement provides an inspirational example of this approach from more recent history. Christians today must make appropriate adjustments since many live in western liberal democracies where they enjoy far more rights and political influence than did believers during biblical times. 

Although Rhodes concedes that Jesus’ focus is not primarily on social structures per se, he notes that His teachings do tackle subjects with political implications. Unlike the egotistical rulers of this world, Jesus is the selfless, sacrificial ruler that many long for in their hearts. His deft handling of challenging questions about paying tribute to Caesar in the Gospels can help Christians navigate complex political questions. As Rhodes puts it, by drawing his audience’s attention to Caesar’s image on the currency, Jesus “opens the space for disciples to creatively engage political authorities, while also calling us to reject the idolatrous claims those political authorities often make.” 

The Apostle Paul also wrestles with the relationship between Christians and political authorities—and not only in the commonly cited verses of Romans 13. For Paul, spiritual and political realities were deeply interconnected. Drawing upon his Hebrew Bible, Paul teaches that ultimately all authority is derived from God. But the Apostle is careful not to write a “blank check for political authorities.” They are granted such authority only in order to enforce justice and promote good behavior. The accounts of Paul’s activities in Acts emphasize this point and portray his main posture to imperial authorities as that of a faithful witness. 

In his closing chapter, Rhodes pulls together these disparate threads. Encouraging congregations to tackle thorny political questions, he warns that this sort of biblically-informed “political discernment will get messy.” Christians will inevitably disagree over which of these different scriptural cases constitute the best fit for the present particular predicament. Christians will disagree about “whether and how God’s people should address a societal problem” but Rhodes contends that such debates, if conducted properly, can be fruitful. 

There is much to commend in Rhodes’s careful and thorough study. It contains many practical helps that can aid congregations at this difficult time. He eschews simplistic answers and does justice to the complex variety of perspectives in the biblical text. Although Rhodes is usually careful to qualify his statements, his contention that “your God reigns [Isa., 52:7]… is perhaps the clearest shorthand summary of the gospel itself” (italics in the original) may strike some as problematic. Such an approach could serve to redirect the central focus from Christ’s atoning death and resurrection (cf. 1 Cor 15:3-4). A fuller theological discussion of the distinction between the gospel as promise and the Kingdom as fulfillment would have been helpful. Some interaction with Oliver O’Donovan’s understanding of the relationship between human government and the proclamation of the gospel might have been illuminating too, including more on how Christ’s resurrection and ascension displaces the nation’s claims to ultimate authority. Finally, the book could have benefited from a more extensive consideration of how to grapple with political differences that extend well beyond particular programs or policies. How do we engage our brethren who reject the whole notion of a pluralist democratic system? 

Reimagining Biblical Politics remains, nevertheless, an invaluable resource that provides the sort of insightful and practical Bible-based reflection that has been so conspicuously absent from many American churches.

Susan Wise Bauer. The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy. St. Martin’s Press, 2026. $30.00. 352 pp. 

Death from infectious disease feels wrong to us in the twenty-first century. Such deaths are rare enough in developed, wealthy countries to make headlines or launch inquiries after they happen to young, otherwise healthy people—because they are often preventable. Such deaths do not happen every day in my work at a mission hospital in rural Kenya, but when they do, almost always one can identify the point where the system broke down and a preventable death became inevitable. 

This feeling of wrongness is the result of what scholars call the Second Epidemiological Transition—the massive changes in quality and length of life brought about by modern medicine, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century. Before antibiotics and vaccines, deadly infectious diseases lurked everywhere and inspired all sorts of human efforts to prevent or cure them. Susan Wise Bauer’s new book The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy catalogues these efforts and attempts to put them in context as we ride the wave of the Third Epidemiological Transition—our modern era of antibiotic resistance and mutated viruses.

Bauer, the founder of Well-Trained Mind Press and author of the Story of the World books used by millions of homeschoolers, is well-equipped to tell the story of sickness. The Great Shadow joins recent releases like John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis and Timothy Winegard’s The Mosquito as a history of human culture examined through the lens of infectious disease, taking readers through thousands of years of humans trying to figure out how to prevent and treat infections. The threat of infection and death is life-altering, as Bauer writes:

Sickness is not “just” sickness. Sickness is the most intimate expression of our vexed relationship with reality, the place where smooth functioning suddenly fractures and spins apart without warning. Sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent question: Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? How do we avoid it? How do we fight back?

As a historical catalogue of maladies and our reactions to them, Bauer has assembled a solid (if somewhat incomplete) narrative. However, whenever the book tries to draw contemporary parallels, it generally falls flat, detracting from an otherwise fascinating story. The story of sickness is much bigger than infectious disease, and the wisdom of human response to infections is more complicated than Bauer seems willing to give people credit for.

How Sickness Shapes Us

The Great Shadow begins with the First Epidemiological Transition, when humans started living together in static settlements and made themselves vulnerable to all kinds of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites that hunter-gatherers eluded by virtue of their migratory lifestyle. Irrigation required standing water, domesticating animals allowed new infections to jump from species to species, and managing our bodily waste became a perennial issue. Ancient myths from places as diverse as Mesopotamia, China, and West Africa told just-so stories linking settled, agricultural civilization with the rise of disease. The tone is overly dramatic; the best way to describe it is as if Bauer has written the script for a documentary. For the most part, this approach works but at times it is tiring. 

Disease raised spiritual and moral questions, as people assumed that there must be a cause for every effect. From the Biblical book of Job to the Epic of Gilgamesh, humans began to tie guilt and blame to the existence of illnesses and found ways as diverse as priestly dreams to studying animal entrails to find the why. The Great Shadow frequently returns to the idea of human responsibility, seeing it as a thread that ties together many different human responses to sickness. While acknowledging that there are some sicknesses that are indeed the fault of the sick person, repeatedly the book shows examples where blame was unfairly placed throughout history.

This idea only intensifies as the book turns to Hippocratic medicine, which explained sickness as an imbalance of humors within the body and saw miasma (“bad airs”) as a critical piece of the disease puzzle. The bottom line for Hippocratic medicine (which came to dominate the culture of medicine for thousands of years) is, in Bauer’s words: “More than ever before, illness is your fault.” (Emphasis in the original.) The Great Shadow argues that this idea is still with us: “Striving for wholeness and balance, for moderation and temperance: these all seem like worthy goals to us. But we have carried over, from Hippocratic times, a complicated and lingering sense of failure when our lives do not flow with ease.”

Medieval pogroms took the idea of blame to another level, blaming Jews for various illnesses and then carrying out violence against them. This idea recurred with even deadlier consequences in the Nazi regime, which Bauer places in a “straight line” leading to conspiracy theories about COVID-19 as a Jewish bioweapon. Similarly, the story of “Typhoid Mary” still animates contemporary fears about foreigners carrying illnesses.

As humans got closer and closer to scientific facts about microorganisms causing disease, they often came into conflict with the reigning theories about balancing humors and clearing miasma. Ignaz Semmelweiss was hounded into a mental asylum by his contemporaries after calling for his fellow doctors to sterilize their hands between autopsies and delivering babies, while intense debates broke out about the wisdom of vaccination.

What seems like common sense to us was the result of hard-fought battles—battles that Bauer argues we are still fighting today. She makes the case that because miasma theory was still predominant well into the Second Epidemiological Transition, a number of products we still use today (such as plug-in air fresheners and Listerine) are still in use because “our noses have inherited the nineteenth-century fear of miasma.”

The Great Shadow concludes by taking readers through the brief “exhilaration” of antibiotics and vaccines that was almost immediately deflated by the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, novel viruses like HIV and Ebola, and cultural works like Night of the Living Dead or The Last of Us that use zombies as a metaphor for our fears about contagion. In the book’s conclusion, Bauer argues that the response to COVID-19 (particularly in the U.S.) “replayed, unthinking, almost every beat of the last few centuries of our relationship with infectious disease.” And while “[s]ome of these reactions might well have been sound and well-considered,” she argues that “[m]ost were not.” Six-foot distancing represented our fear of miasma, fearing immigrants repeated the ugly patterns of blame from the past, and the overuse of sanitizing agents made us too much like the Victorians of the past.

The Great Shadow ends with a somewhat hopeful note that understanding this history will help answer the question whether, during the next big pandemic, we will or won’t “coat ourselves in chemicals, rail against bodies that don’t look like ours, and accuse scientists of corruption?” This is Bauer’s apparent purpose: in order to prevent reactions that are not “sound and well-considered,” we must appreciate how some of these irrational responses are deeply hard-wired into human culture.

Blame and Responsibility

Bauer’s primary assumption is true: sickness really does force us to confront a number of existential realities and the brokenness within our world. However, the apparent secondary thesis, that guilt and blame (as well as other misunderstandings) have inappropriately lingered in our social imaginary is not as straightforward as she makes it out to be.

The Great Shadow is not really about sickness in general; it’s mostly about infectious diseases caused by foreign microorganisms. Only the chapters about painkillers and hysteria dwell at any length on non-infectious diseases. A history of all sickness would be much longer and far more complicated, for there are many diseases that are not caused by infections and some that hew more closely to Hippocratic ideals and miasma theory. Both of these ideas—indeed, nearly all of the reactions and behaviors that Bauer describes—contain a kernel of truth. Bauer readily concedes this point but does not ever really let it refine her thesis.

Air pollution, for example, is estimated to be responsible for millions of deaths worldwide every year. To eliminate these deaths would simply take cleaning up the air and improving household ventilation, since cleaning circulated air is valuable in preventing both infectious and non-infectious diseases. Some studies suggest that retrofitting school buses can even improve students’ academic performance! Whether “blame” is the correct frame for air pollution is a debate for a different space, but certainly we must as a society figure out where the pollution is coming from. Regulating and occasionally punishing its producers would also help.

There are a few other notable gaps in the story. Sexually transmitted infections have been identified as such for over 500 years, and the politics of blame around HIV get only a passing mention in the book. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the government was very much to blame for allowing a disease to destroy vulnerable people, is not mentioned at all. The history of eugenics might have fit in as well, given the significant overlap between the scientific consensus about the spread of germs and health authorities’ approach to genetic causes of disease a century ago.

I do not know when exactly the book went to press, but even the story The Great Shadow tells about COVID-19 is not as simple as it sounds. The US government was funding gain-of-function research (a fascinating response to the specter of infectious diseases worthy of discussion in and of itself) in Wuhan, and many of the government’s earliest critics were right to smell a conspiracy when Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed otherwise. Given the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of the disease may have cost millions of lives, pointing some fingers and assigning responsibility is eminently reasonable.

When it comes to responsibility, Bauer mixes straightforward reporting about past misunderstandings of hysteria and “the passions” with criticism of diagnoses that shifts any responsibility for getting better onto the sick person themselves. Yet psychosomatic illnesses (that is, illnesses that are thought to be due to a patient’s internal or psychological stress manifesting as physical symptoms) are estimated to make up 20% of visits to primary care doctors. The most rigorous scientific studies about chronic pain suggest that the patients who do better are the ones who take the most responsibility for their own wellness, as Haider Warrach’s book The Song of Our Scars discusses carefully.

While miasma theory only reflects a half-truth about illness (and, as The Great Shadow details, a lot of the work to cleanly dispose of sewage was the right thing for the wrong reason), Hippocratic medicine endures because it reflects truths about our bodies and souls: Patients want to feel like their lives are balanced, nutrition and exercise are key factors in preventing chronic diseases, and our environment (whether it’s clean air or a walkable neighborhood) does have a role to play in our health. The lesson to learn from Hippocrates’ staying power beyond the Second Epidemiological Transition is one that Bauer doesn’t seem to find of interest: while many aspects of our health are indeed beyond our control, there’s still a lot that we can do to find balance and wholeness.

In the Shadow of the Great Physician

Most importantly, though, none of the reactions that The Great Shadow discusses seem like positive developments for human culture. As Lydia Dugdale discusses in her must-read book The Lost Art of Dying, the possibility of death and disease made our ancestors far more careful about not only dying well but also living in such a way that they were ready whenever death might come. It is certainly possible to allow fear of sickness and blame (of others or of ourselves) for infections to lead to atrocities—but there is a far richer history of love and care to be found in traditions like the ars moriendi that forms the focus of Dugdale’s book.

One omission from The Great Shadow that would illuminate this sort of love and care is the story that Rodney Stark details in his book The Rise of Christianity. Christians in the third century, facing a deadly plague, did not run or blame foreigners. Rather, they sacrificed themselves to care for their pagan neighbors. So began a tradition of medical care despite the risk of infection that endures to the selfless heroism of health professionals (Christian and otherwise) who rush to “hot zones” of Ebola epidemics nowadays. The capricious nature of the gods in ancient times gave way to Francis Bacon’s insistence that God gave us technology to relieve pain and suffering—an enormous part of what we think and believe now that we count history by the life and death of the Great Physician.

The Great Shadow is, of course, coming out at a time when America’s own Secretary of Health and Human Services may not actually believe in germ theory and many people are in need of an anti-miasma correction. Some have made the ideals of Hippocratic medicine into a story of karma that unnecessarily heaps blame and shame on suffering people. However, as we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and elsewhere, telling only parts of the story will continue to engender the sort of responses that are harmful to others. The history told in The Great Shadow is vast but incomplete, telling the truth about the ugliest aspects of human encounters with infectious disease while leaving out the ways in which our awareness of fragility became a light that chased the shadows away.

Jack Zipes. Once Upon a Time There Was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales. Yale University Press, 2026. $28.00. 200 pp. 

We live in a moment in which the mere act of paying attention is a problem, or perhaps a challenge. We know it’s possible. Simply think about the enchantment you felt with stories in your childhood: Do you remember your own wide eyes and mouth agape as you leaned in to listen to a fantastic tale? Perhaps it was King Arthur and his round table or the pixie dust that Tinkerbell bestowed so the Darling children could fly that took you from your modern world to some place outside of time and place. Maybe it was the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights or Robinson Crusoe’s daring adventures that opened up the possibility of enchantment, change, and perseverance through bleak trials. Fairy tales give us a framework for imaginative possibility. They might also restore our attention.

Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has been writing fairy tales—and writing about fairy tales—for sixty years. Now approaching 90, he still believes the genre is borne from our utopian “hopeful desires.” Once Upon a Time There was Truth or, Why We Need Fairy Tales is a collection of his essays on the development of the fairy tale from oral tales to the genre’s more contemporary “Disneyfication.” The genre has changed along the way. And yet, he writes, “if there is any genre of storytelling that can raise our spirits and make a contribution to humanity…it is the fairy tale.” 

As a collection of separate essays, most of the book’s chapters focus on various tales: “Puss in Boots,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Nutcracker,” Disney’s versions of classic tales, and The Wizard of Oz. Throughout, Zipes draws attention to the pedagogical and socializing functions of fairy tales, especially as they begin to be told to children. For Zipes there is a hardening of the genre throughout the 20^th century as Disney’s pervasive influence flattens the genre’s subversive possibilities. Yet, the fairy tale isn’t just about a “happily ever after.” 

Zipes traces the evolution of the form from oral tales to a literary form that flourished from the early 19^th century to the early 20^th century. Different from myth and oral wonder tales, the fairy tale both substantiated civilizing norms while also subverting them. There is a logic to their telling: a protagonist violates a norm and is then faced with banishment or an impossible task. She or he then has various encounters—with a villain, or magical animals or a creature who bestows gifts, thereby enabling the protagonist to tackle the task while a wonder or a miracle also reverses his or her fortune. The result is often marriage and wealth.

Especially in the genre’s golden age, folklorists (like the Brothers Grimm) very much saw their work of gathering and writing down these oral tales to be an integral part of the nation-building project. These “middle-class collectors [gave] voice to the lower classes… and wrote in defense of their native languages and in the interests of national and regional movements.” The nineteenth century literary fairy tale, then, began as a political statement—one that validated the common folk—and while contemporary tales have been more likely to “entertain and soothe a child’s anxieties,” the genre still maintains the power to inspire and subvert. Zipes’ project, then, is not only to recover the history and shifts of the genre but also to name an “impulse for hope for better living conditions.” 

But is the fairy tale simply a social construct, meant to either civilize or comment on social norms? When literary critics evaluate the genre, is it only to class and nation we must look? Must we understand the Disneyfication of fairy tales in terms of perpetuating patriarchal norms? While the fairy tale offers commentary on our present, something much deeper is going on in the genre. This is the nature of truth and reality.

Zipes’ title, Once Upon a Time There Was Truth, links “truth” with the fairy tale, but this truth is located within the fairy tale itself. The implication is that truth cannot be found in the readers’ present circumstances and that the tale motivates the reader to align the truth of the tale with the truth of experience. By presenting the world as it should be—where anyone is capable of social climbing and the villain gets his just due—the fairy tale as Zipes writes in his Epilogue, offers “happily ever after” and “once upon a time” as “a persistent refusal to accept life as it is and a demand that utopian longings be fulfilled.” For Zipes the genre presents possibilities for transformation as we compare our society with the counter world of the fairy tale.

But there is little surprise in Zipes’ readings. There is talk of wonder and magic but there is little magic in the prose. In the book there is not much that gestures to deeper human longings beyond political, national, or gender-based categories. The responsibility is squarely on the reader to recognize “something [is] still missing, deeply missing even, in our lives” and through the world of the fairy tale “to seize on [glimmers of hope] as we tell our tales, and futures, today. Zipes argues that we “insert ourselves cunningly into our daily struggles to turn the course of the world’s events in our favor.” While he has no love for Disneyfication, ultimately Zipes advocates for the same project—to turn our tales into self-made dreams.

Zipes correctly diagnoses how fairy tales name the longing for the world to be different than it is, but he misses the cure. This realization that the world is not how it should be and a resulting longing for a magical intervention aligns with the Christian reality. C. S. Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Fairy tales elicit this longing. Lewis places the truth not in the gap between tale and unfulfilled longing, but in the transcendent reality of God’s creative work. Christian hope tells a story—not of writing one’s destiny and future—but of a good created order, a fall into sin, redemption through the work of Christ, and a future restoration of all things. 

Fairy tales—fairy stories, or true myths as Lewis and Tolkien call them—still have an important role to play. They awaken us to imaginative reversal. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about the moment of recognition, or joyful turn, implicit in the fairy tale. Delivered first as a lecture, he wrote in On Fairy Stories: “It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.” More than just “an agent of socialization,” the fairy tale can hit at something deeper: a moment of surprise, a eucatastrophe. This is the narrative moment where we have, in Tolkien’s words, a “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.” 

The truth that fairy stories give is “not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question…In the ‘Eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.” This moment of realization, where all is restored in a manner that is both good and true, also ushers readers and hearers into what Tolkien calls a “Secondary Belief,” a real enchantment, an experience of good news.

Martin Shaw in his new book, Liturgies of the Wild: The Myths that Make Us, reminds us how our stories point to true myth. Like Zipes, he notes that myths or fairy tales serve a social and pedagogical function. He believes myths make us human, they help us grow up, and they help us locate ourselves. “Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity.” Myths are guides. 

But in moments, myths are more than guides. They pierce through the immanent frame, to get at the heart of reality. “Myth is a Sacred Story,” Shaw writes, “And some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king. Who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register, ours.” 

Zipes would argue that we ultimately need fairy tales so that we can assert ourselves between the gap of our reality and the world as it should or could be. Shaw (and Tolkien and Lewis) would instead point to the nature of narrative itself: The best fairy tales do not primarily tell us what to do but what must be done on our behalf. They hold out a world where justice rolls down like streams of mighty water, where the lion lays down with the lamb, where the destitute pauper becomes a king. The best fairy tales succeed to the extent that joy catches in our throats and tear ducts so that finally we see: Our King has come, and He will come again to make all things new.

In late June, Donald Trump's Religious Liberty Commission released a 224-page report on the state of religious freedom in America. Ironically, this document, which is supposed to defend religious freedom for all Americans, is exclusive. It also misconstrues the Founders. It reads more like a defense of a religious establishment than an endorsement of liberty. Still, the report is worth taking seriously because it reflects how some American evangelicals now understand the relationship between church and state.

To begin with, the commission that produced the report does not reflect the religious pluralism it claims to defend. Eight of the commissioners are evangelical Protestants aligned with the MAGA movement, including Paula White-Cain, Dr. Phil McGraw, Eric Metaxas, and Franklin Graham. Three are Catholic. One, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, is Jewish. The commission includes no Muslim, no atheist, no Mormon, no Hindu, no Buddhist, no Sikh, and no representative of the historically Black Protestant tradition.

Yet the Commission insists that it exists "for everyone — to ensure that all Americans of all faiths, from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Sikhs to Hindus can approach God freely to worship him fully and to express their faith without government interference." When commissioner Ryan Anderson, the Catholic president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes that "Jewish students should be authentically Jewish, Muslim students could be authentically Muslim," the irony is that no Muslim voice was in the room to say so for themselves. A report that claims to speak for American religious pluralism while mostly excluding non-Christians from the drafting process should raise red flags before a single policy proposal is articulated.

The report calls for repealing the Johnson Amendment, the tax-code provision that bars clergy from endorsing candidates while speaking in their official capacity. Whatever one thinks of its constitutionality, repealing the Johnson Amendment would be bad for the church. Evangelical pastors who chafe against the amendment seem to value free speech over their gospel witness. Many conservative evangelical activists urge Christians to get engaged in political life without acknowledging that partisan politics and the advancement of the Gospel do not mix cleanly.

American evangelicals should thank God that we live in a nation that celebrates religious freedom. The United States is built upon the idea that all citizens have human dignity to practice their faith and to pursue truth without government interference. The idea that humans possess such rights comes, of course, from the great thinkers of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but these ideas are also rooted in the Christian tradition. (And according to many scholars, including Tom Holland and Nicholas Wolterstorff, the Christian tradition informed the development of these ideas to begin with.) Human dignity, not particular Christian doctrines or beliefs, must order a free and diverse society.

America’s Founding Fathers understood this, but I am not sure that the members of Trump’s commission do. So it may help to briefly review the history of religious freedom in America. In the founding era, three competing visions of church and state emerged.

In Massachusetts, John Adams and the other framers of the 1780 state constitution gave the government the power to tax residents to support the “institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” Such a tax was necessary because, as Article 3 of the Constitution states, “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality….” The Congregational Church remained Massachusetts’s established church until 1833.

Massachusetts also required a religious-test oath for officeholding. Candidates for election to the state legislature needed to be “Protestant.” When Benjamin Franklin heard about this stipulation, he wrote his friend, the Unitarian moral philosopher Richard Price: “I am fully aware of your Opinion respecting Religious Tests; but tho’ the People of Massachusetts have not in their new Constitution kept quite clear of them.” 

Franklin opposed religious tests, but, as he understood it, the place of his birth and the colony established by 17th-century Puritans was at least moving in the right direction: “...if we consider what that People were 100 years ago, we must allow they have gone to great Lengths in Liberality of Sentiment on religious subjects; and we may hope for a greater Degrees of Perfection, when, their Constitution, some years hence, shall be revised.” Franklin would give Massachusetts a pass, at least for now. “When a Religion is good,” he told Price, “I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ‘tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

Patrick Henry, the two-time governor of Virginia, proposed another model of church-state relations. In “A Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion (1784), he called for a general religious tax in Virginia to fund religious teachers who would offer “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge…to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society.” Henry suggested that county sheriffs would collect religious taxes in their communities and keep a list of the religious society to which the taxpayer wanted their money distributed.

But for fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Henry’s “General Assessment” (as it was called) was still a religious tax. Madison challenged it in his 1785 petition, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which most of the state’s Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians supported. These evangelicals suffered religious persecution for decades under the colonial Anglican establishment in Virginia and thus welcomed a complete separation of church and state. For them, religious freedom was not about building a Christian or moral nation; it was, more importantly, about freeing up the opportunity to build the Kingdom of God.

Madison’s Remonstrance did not pass in the Virginia Assembly. Still, it certainly paved the way for Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, considered by many to be the greatest statement of religious freedom ever written. The future president of the United States argued that the government should not be in the business of promoting religion through taxpayer money and wrote that compelling anyone to fund a religion he does not believe in is "sinful and tyrannical." Because of this statute, Jefferson, a man who did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and removed all references to the supernatural in his edited version of the Gospels, became an evangelical hero. In many parts of the United States, he rode evangelical support to two presidential terms.

Of the three major models on the relationship between church and state available to Americans in the early republic–Adams, Henry, and Jefferson/Madison–the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom most directly informed the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Trump Commission's report does not cite Jefferson’s statute. Its recommendations point the other way, toward direct funding of faith-based institutions and toward public endorsement of religious practice in schools. The report quotes Trump: "We're bringing back religion in our country... because for America to be a great nation, we must always be one nation under God." That is not a defense of religious liberty, but an endorsement of religion by the state.

The same tension appears in the report's call to place the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A sacred text that opens with "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me" is not a neutral document; it is a claim about which god a schoolchild should worship—endorsing it as classroom decor is a form of religious establishment.

A common critique of what I just wrote in the preceding paragraph goes something like this: American law is built on the 10 Commandments, and we should thus display them in public school classrooms for historical, not religious reasons. This argument is correct in its claim that “Judeo-Christian” ideas informed the U.S. legal system. But the 10 Commandments are also (and primarily) part of sacred scripture for two major world religions: Christianity and Judaism. This makes their placement in school classrooms a First Amendment violation. The effort to post them is more about culture war politics than an honest interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

Much of the report's historical argument rests not on published scholarship but on the testimony of commissioners like culture warrior Eric Metaxas and television pop psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw.  For example, the report calls for restoring service members discharged over their religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine. Still, for all its appeals to American history, the report ignores the fact that George Washington himself mandated smallpox inoculation for the Continental Army in 1777.

Elsewhere, the report attributes Virginia's 1776 constitutional definition of religion to James Madison, but George Mason actually wrote that document. Madison's actual views on religion's relationship to government—he opposed military chaplains and later in his life rejected days of fasting and prayer—run counter to the report's broader argument.

A separate claim, sourced to Dr. Phil, asserts that "In God We Trust" dates to the nation's founding. The phrase did not appear on currency until 1864, and not on paper money until 1957. These kinds of sloppy historical errors further undermine the report's credibility.

The report also invokes religion's "prophetic" role in American life. Like the 17^th-century Puritan clergy who called the Massachusetts Bay Colony back to its spiritual founding, Trump’s commission calls the United States back to its stated ideals. This is the best argument in the document, and I largely agree: a healthy society needs spiritual voices willing to criticize it, not simply bless it. But I am not entirely sure that the Founders shared such a prophetic view of religion. Washington and his contemporaries valued religion chiefly as a support for civic order — a "pillar," in Washington's own words from his Farewell Address (1796), not an independent moral authority that might one day call out the American republic for its sins. Genuine faith, of the kind that produced abolitionists and civil rights activists, is not submissive. This is why the commission report's own celebration of religion's humanitarian record sits so awkwardly beside the administration's cuts to USAID and PEPFAR. As Mr. and Mrs. Beaver reminded Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan is not a tame lion. True religion never serves the state, despite what some of the founders may have believed.

Much of the report's factual foundation comes from testimony gathered from 100 self-selected witnesses who testified before the committee over 10 months. These accounts likely contain real experiences of genuine mistreatment. Still, a self-selected sample skewed toward people already engaged in high-profile disputes is not a representative picture of how religious liberty functions for most Americans day to day. It is also worth noting that almost all these witnesses describe being persecuted for Christianity rather than other religious faiths.

None of this means the document is without merit. Its section on healthcare conscience protections — shielding medical professionals from being compelled to participate in procedures that violate their beliefs — is reasonable in principle, even if its actual application will call for careful, case-by-case judgment. Its defense of faith-based colleges competing for public funding on an equal footing with secular institutions, rather than as a special exemption, is fair.  And the report’s condemnation of attacks on churches and disruptions of worship should be obvious to all readers, regardless of political conviction.

The report references Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, urging Americans to refuse to participate in lies as the surest defense of a free society. Coming from a commission built on a skewed committee, thin history, and selectively gathered testimony, and serving a presidential administration not known for its truthfulness, the citation reads more as irony than moral exhortation.

The deeper question this report raises is not whether religious Americans deserve protection — they do and always have under the First Amendment. It is whether "religious liberty," in this administration's hands, means freedom for all faiths to practice without government interference, or freedom for one faith tradition to receive government favor. A genuine defense of religious liberty would welcome faith into public life on equal terms for everyone without asking the state to put its thumb on the scale for any of them. This report never quite gets there.

There was a time when Wendell Berry was a passionate and even amusing critic of Christianity. This is seen perhaps most explicitly in one of his earliest published essays, "The Long-Legged House." 

In the essay, Berry describes the experience of repairing an old cabin built by a relative of his. That cabin would become the home that he and his soon-to-be wife would move into it after their wedding. (For long-time readers of Berry’s work, the cabin by the river that Jayber Crow moves to in his dying days is the fictional imagining of this actual cabin where Mr. and Mrs. Berry began their married life together.) Much of the essay is taken up with the meaningfulness of the work of restoring such a place, the ways in which that work tied Berry to his place and his people, and how the preparing of that place for his wife would also set something of a course for their life together.

Then Berry turns to the church, an institution about which he had virtually nothing to say up to that point. But as the wedding grew closer, it became impossible to avoid the church—which is what Berry had been doing quite happily and successfully. When you read his account of things, it is hard to blame the man for wanting to stay well clear of the church:

Our wedding reminds me a little of the Kentucky Derby. The main event, which lasted only a couple of minutes, required days of frantic prologue. During this commotion one must discontinue one’s own life and attempt to emulate everybody. Nobody can be still until convinced that this marriage will be like everybody else’s. The men insinuate. The women gloat. The church is resurrected and permitted to interfere. As at funerals, the principals cannot be decently let alone, but must be overhauled, upgraded, and messed with until they are not recognizable.

During the week up to and including the wedding I am sure I was at the center of more absurdity than I hope ever to be at the center of again. One of my unforgettable moments, as they are called, was a quaint session with the minister who having met me for the first time that moment, and being scarcely better acquainted with Tanya, undertook to instruct us in the marital intimacies. A display of preacherish cant and presumption unusual even for a preacher, and all carried out with a slogging joyless dutifulness. As we were leaving he handed us a book on marriage.

In a country less abject before “expert advice,” the effrontery of it would be incredible. Well, be damned to him and his book, too. We thrive in spite of him, and in defiance of some of his rules. We are, I like to think, his Waterloo—though I know that, like most of his kind, he had come to his Waterloo before that, and survived by his inability to recognize it.

The text is obviously Berry, though written when he was only in his early 30s: You can hear the language of his male characters in it—of Jack Beechum and Carter Keith and Nathan Coulter. The phrase "survived by his inability to recognize it" is also vintage Berry and a classic example of his ability to find simple, under-stated ways of making a devastating critique. The disdain for "experts" is there as well, as is the revulsion at ostentatious displays. It is not at all surprising to think that the man who wrote these words would, within only a few years, write The Memory of Old Jack. Indeed, we can find a similarly disdainful attitude toward the church in that book, the first of Berry's truly great novels, alongside Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter.

In this particular case, the church manifests as villain in the final pages of the novel, as the departed old farmer Jack Beechum is fraudulently reconstructed as a dutiful son of the church by his affluent and spoiled daughter, Clara, who hasn't known her father well for at least 30 years, if she ever did at all. In a particularly pointed passage, Beechum's true heir and closest relative, Mat Feltner, instructs the preacher to simply read a few Psalms at a small graveside service. When the preacher ignores Mat's request and launches into a showy and dishonest prayer after reading the Psalms, Berry describes Mat's reaction to this fictionalized version of "preacherish cant":

And then Mat exercises for the first time his prerogative as the oldest man. He turns his back and gazes upon his fields.

The gesture is subtle, perhaps even polite in its own way, yet its meaning is unmistakable: For Berry, at this time at least, the church is merely one of the institutions of the world, seeking to make better theoretical persons in better theoretical places, without any recognition of the world as it is, of people as they are, and gratitude for all the good things we have. The church, like virtually all other institutions, is perpetually trying to improve its members, exhorting them to make something of themselves. None of them see and love the world as it is, see and love people as they are. They only love imagined, far off places and imagined, far off people who exist only in the false prayers of mendacious preachers. 

There is another passage in Old Jack that names the failure Berry recognizes in the church, but not in the church alone; it is a failure of imagination, a failure of seeing. In the passage I am about to quote, Mat Feltner is reflecting on the bizarre life of a couple renting a home from him on his property. This couple, the Berlews, are travelers, thrill chasers. They avoid hard work as much as they can, seeking only to work enough to make enough to facilitate their thrill chasing. 

For the privilege of such a life they end up working far harder to maintain their old car that facilitates that life than they ever would dream of working in the day for pay.

Then Berry remarks, comparing the Berlews with Beechum's extremely rich and successful daughter and son-in-law the Pettits,

It comes to Mat suddenly—so that he first grimaces and then grunts—that the Berlews and Pettits represent the two halves of the same distraction. What the Pettits are is what the Berlews dream of being. Is not the Berlews' old car the hopeless dream of a Cadillac? Is not their tireless going a persistently frustrated pilgrimage in search of Easy Street? That the Pettits live on Easy Street makes no essential difference between them and the Berlews. If the Pettits are what the Berlews would like to be, they are also what the Pettits would like to be; they have imagined nothing higher than they are.

We could put it this way: There is a way we people, perhaps especially we modern people, have of imagining nothing higher than we are. And once we have started from that point, there is some sense in which Christianity can't help us. It can only be abused and twisted and perverted by us. This is what Berry recognized: The church we find in "The Long-Legged House" and The Memory of Old Jack is a church that simply takes for granted the belief that this world has nothing worthy to offer us. These churches believe without thought or question that the only good thing in this life is to seek to save our own souls out of the world—and if that is the only thing of ultimate importance, than everything else doesn’t much matter, which perhaps explains why such radical spiritualism can often be found closely associated with rampant materialism and spiritual complacency. The ease with which a kind of fundamentalist Baptist or Methodist Christianity of the old south can be melded with a life that imagines nothing higher than we are is actually quite astonishing: Christianity simply becomes one means of serving ourselves (by giving us a sense of superiority), of exalting ourselves (by highlighting our own righteousness in the eyes of others), of protecting ourselves (by acquiring the requisite fire insurance to protect our immortal souls). 

You might say that this is a Christianity that lacks both a doctrine of creation and a doctrine of resurrection; it is bloodless and disembodied and, for precisely those reasons, has very little to offer the world and very little of use to protect its members from violating themselves, their neighbors, and the world.

This is a point worth lingering over. There is a passage in the Gospels where Jesus warns the religious leaders that all their religious teaching serves only to make their followers twice the children of Hell that they themselves are. The Christianity we encounter in Berry's early work is one example of how that can happen. Only leave the great idol of the heart—the supremacy of the self—unchallenged and Christianity, of a kind at least, becomes a tool for spreading and facilitating unimaginable wickedness.

To put it another way, when Berry looked at the goodness of the world he walked about in every day and set that against what he found in the church, he found the church's account of goodness entirely inadequate. Indeed, he found the church routinely taking the side of evil while the world itself shined unnoticed. What Treebeard says to Merry and Pippin in The Lord of the Rings could just as well be said by the land and, perhaps, by Berry himself in Berry's fiction: "Side? I am on nobody's side, for nobody is altogether on my side."

It's important to understand this because this is a different sort of objection to Christianity from those familiar to most Christians. It is not claiming that Christianity’s moral norms are stuffy or antiquated. It is not an objection founded on some sort of moral relativism, or even on some sort of strong moral critique against Christianity. 

The failure, as someone like Jack Beechum would see it, is that he lives "hard up against mystery" every day (to use a phrase from Jayber Crow) and when he sets what he sees in the world, both its beauties and its many evils, he simply finds the Christian account to be small and stuffy, and, as a result, deeply unconvincing. Christianity is too small for the men of Berry's novels—the gratitudes and mercies they receive every day by virtue of their life as human beings (and, particularly, as farmers) seem far more real to them than anything they ever heard in a church.

It's not that there is some negative criticism of Christianity that Berry accepts and this prevents him from believing; that framing presupposes belief as a kind of default mode which will only be deviated from if presented with some sort of sufficient obstacle. But that isn't how the early Berry regards Christianity. It's not that Christianity is necessarily immoral or corrupt or unjust. It's that when Berry encounters the given earth with its pleasures and mercies and difficulties and sets it against Christianity he finds the world far more beautiful.

That, I think, is why Christianity, though seldom treated kindly in Berry's early work is also not something he spends an immense amount of time addressing. Berry is not a misotheist, a god-hater, in the way of a Nietzsche or a Christopher Hitchens. Religion is almost wholly absent from The Memory of Old Jack and from most of Berry's short stories, for example, and most of his early essays. To the degree he considers religion at all, it is simply as one more example of an institution more concerned with its own life than the life of the world and filled with people more concerned with their own lives than the lives of others or of their place.

And yet that is not where the story ends. By the time we come to Jayber Crow, published in the early 2000s, Berry has retained many of his criticisms of certain Christian communities and even of certain Christian ideas. But the tone is measured and careful, as if he has learned to do what Frederick Douglass learned a hundred years prior: to distinguish between a sort of Americanized folk Christianity aimed at self-exaltation at the expense of all else and the "pure peaceable" Christianity of Christ. The point is not that the theological questions have evaporated for Berry, or at least for Jayber Crow. They don’t. They linger. But the experience of living in the world and finding love in it caused Jayber to reconsider his relationship to the faith—and in the Gospels, at least, he finds an account of love that anchors and deepens his own experience of it.

And so the rage we find in Berry’s older work has dissipated by the time we arrive at Jayber Crow. What remains is an ordinary man vexed by certain theological questions still, yet convinced that God's mercy can work to overcome any evil and that Christ's law of love is the pinnacle of moral wisdom. How did this change happen?

A neglected volume of essays published in the early 1980s provides an answer—and for my money this particular volume is Berry's greatest accomplishment as an essayist. The collection is called Standing by Words and in it Berry considers poetry, poetic forms, the limits inherent in language, and how all these things relate to the ways we imagine the world. Why is it the volume that is so pivotal in his reconsideration of Christianity? 

I think the answer is here: What Berry knew all along is that he found the life of the world more entrancing and satisfying than the life of the church as he knew it. What becomes apparent in Standing by Words is that he needed an account of why the life of the world is marked by the beauty, abundance, and superfluity that so delighted him. The answer he comes to, through various means, is that the life of the earth is marked by forms that it did not choose for itself, so to speak, but also cannot be overwritten, erased, or remade without causing great and unnecessary harm. The good life and our capacity for good work are both largely bound up with how we are able to relate to the order, place, and people that have been given to us. When we regard these things with indifference, rage, or contempt it turns out that we can violate the fields that Mat Feltner turned toward in Old Jack just as easily as we can violate churches or universities.

What Berry is reckoning with in this collection of essays is the way in which his own callings as both a writer and a farmer have been compromised and set at odds with the givenness of things, coming under the sway of specialization and control and so being drawn out of the world, one might say. In the first essay of the volume, in which Berry laments the "specialization" of poetry he writes, "the poet is isolated and specialized and.. the old union of beauty, goodness, and truth is broken." Later he continues, writing about poets in much the same way he had previously written about bankers and professional religious people:

One of the oldest doctrines of specialist-poets is that of the primacy of language and the primacy of poetry. They have virtually made a religion of their art, a religion based not on what they have in common with other people, but on what they do that sets them apart. For poets who believe this way, a poem is not a point of clarification or connection between themselves and the world on the one hand and between themselves and their readers on the other, nor is it an adventure into any reality or mystery outside themselves. It is a seeking of self in words, the making of a word-world in which the word-self may be at home. The poets go to their poems as other people go to the world or to God—for a sense of their own reality. ...

It may be argued that this emphasis was in some sense forced upon poets by their peculiar isolation in a society dominated by specialists of more practical kinds. But this way of looking at language and at poetry also completes and enforces the isolation of poets, not just within a sort of literary ghetto or subghetto, but within themselves. Mark Strand is evidently not the only poet who would say that, 'the self in a sense is all we have left.'

There are strong echoes here of what Berry wrote of the Berlews and Pettits in The Memory of Old Jack, but whereas in Jack Berry seems to isolate that narrowed spirit, in "The Specialization of Poetry" he is suggesting that it has become ubiquitous. In Old Jack the villains are bankers and drifters and the heroes are farmers. By the time we come to Standing by Words Berry is reckoning constantly with the ways in which farmers and poets–his two vocations–can be just as complicit in the unmaking of places as the bankers and drifters. The problem, in short, can’t be concentrated or distilled down to “corrupt institutions indifferent to the health of the land smothering men like Jack Beechum.” The problem Berry wants to address strikes at the heart of what it means to steward both land and language, the two great preoccupations of Berry’s life.

What this means is that he no longer can focus his ire primarily on bankers, like the Pettits, or lazy dreamers, like the Berlews. Rather, he has had to turn this critique loose on everyone, including the people closest to him and, indeed, on himself. But then that also suggests that the contest we see at the end of Old Jack in which Mat Feltner turns away from the rude and pontificating preacher to turn toward the fields is not quite so clear as that image might suggest. The fields themselves can become a subject of "specialization" and can themselves be cut off. If you are seeking an escape from preacherish cant, it is no sure thing that you will find it in the fields. You might find the same desecration there that one can find in so many other places.

It turns out that one cannot simply pit the life of the world against the life of institutions. Rather, even the world itself can, in the twistedness and lostness of human beings, be set against the life of the world. It is a challenge to see the life of the world truly. And if it is a challenge, that suggests that aids are needed in order to do so. This is where we begin to see a reconsideration of Christianity in Berry's work.

In the essay, "Standing by Words," Berry considers the problem of language and naming in ways quite similar to what Lewis sought to address in The Abolition of Man. And he comes to quite similar answers, though he gets there via a different route. The problem, for Berry, concerns the ways in which language itself becomes divorced from any kind of external control or referent aside from power and will.

He rightly sees that the health of the world and of people and their many communities is dependent on the notion that words stand for something real; language is not simply an expression of tastes or a tool for acquiring power. Language is how we try to name what is real and true and worth living for. The trouble is that when language becomes materialized or politicized, it loses its referent. He illustrates the point with two diagrams, one of which he suggests is a model of healthy communal and natural life while the other is the industrial semblance:

In the first diagram, everything that is part of our life in the world is encompassed in some sense. The second, by contrast, has removed anything that can’t be quantified or financialized. This is how Berry names the change that happens when you move from the economy depicted in the first diagram to the economy of the second diagram:

So long as the smaller systems are enclosed within the larger, and so long as all are connected by complex patterns of interdependency, as we know they are, then whatever affects one system will affect the others. It seems that this system of systems is safe so long as each system is controlled by the next larger one. If at any point the hierarchy is reversed, and the smaller begins to control the larger, then the destruction of the entire system of systems begins. This system of systems is perhaps an updated, ecological version of the Great Chain of Being. That is, it may bring us back to a hierarchical structure not too different from the one that underlies Paradise Lose–a theory of the form of Creation which is at the same time a moral form, and which is violated by the ‘disobedience’ or hubris of attempting to rise and take power above one’s proper place.

What does Berry propose to fix this? As is implied above, he suggests that what we need is a category above 'nature' that controls and names it, and that category, he suggests, is "religion.” The issue he sees is that his “system of systems” is fragile and easily destroyed because its only measure is truth and truth is easily ignored or suppressed. A moral witness is needed from outside Berry’s system, something to help the members of a community recognize why it is good for them to tune their lives to the lives of neighbors and the life of the world. That something, he thinks, is religion:

There is no reliable standard for behavior anywhere within the system of systems except truth. Lesser standards produce destruction–as, for example, the standards of public relations make gibberish of language. The trouble, obviously, is that we do not know much of the truth…. And so yet another term has be introduced. The system of systems has to be controlled from above and outside. There has to be a religious interest of some kind above the ecogenetic. It will be sufficient to my purpose to say simply that the system of systems is enclosed within mystery, in which some truth can be known but never all truth.

In other words, the members of the world can never know the world exhaustively. And so a certain deference to mystery and to our own creaturely ignorance is often necessary to prevent us from committing monstrous acts. You might say that this is Berry’s articulation of the famous Chesterton’s Fence aphorism in which the British writer G. K. Chesterton said that a fence should never be knocked down by someone who doesn’t know why it is there. The only time it is safe to knock a fence down is when you do know its purpose and can explain why it is no longer needed. The recognition of ignorance, in other words, should provoke us toward gentleness, caution, and care–and this provocation, Berry thinks, is what is needed to preserve healthy places, which include the land and the people living from the land.

Interestingly, Berry actually pressed the religious language even further. Earlier in the essay he had teased at this solution when he suggested that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation would offer a way of grounding our language, such that we can claim that our language is not simply taste or power-grabbing, but can actually be an attempt to speak of reality. Specifically he argues that in the Incarnation true Word and true Flesh are found together, suggesting that not only should we try to speak of reality truly, but that we actually can.

In other words, by the time we arrive at Standing by Words Berry has become aware that the deeper evil he wants to oppose is a kind of human wilfulness that, flowing out of the idea that there is nothing higher than ourselves, reduces everything it finds to consumable goods. The battle is not, necessarily, between “the peace of wild things” and the mechanical. The evils of the machine can come to reign in the wild as easily as they can in churches, farms, and universities. 

What is needed, rather, is some account that offers us a way to name the things that are higher than us, a way to love those things, and a way to tune our lives to them—and that work can happen as much in the fields as it does in the church. The way Berry learns to make this critique is through a return to Christianity, through considering the ways in which theological themes in Christian scripture help us to see and love what is higher than us, to know that Higher Good so well that we can tune ourselves to it wherever we go, whether that be the wild places, a classroom or, even, a church.

Stefan Borg, The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right. Routledge, 2026. $200.00, 162 pp.

As someone who has been a self-identified postliberal since around 2010, I have been waiting for a book like this for years. Postliberal political theory has recently become a focal point of intense—and often hostile—attention. Critics routinely accuse postliberals of misrepresenting liberalism, failing to offer constructive alternatives, or advancing proposals that amount to thinly veiled authoritarianism. At the same time, confusion persists about what postliberalism actually is, where it came from, and whether it constitutes anything more than a fleeting reaction to recent political developments.

For several years now, I have frequently been asked whether there exists a single work that could orient readers wholly uninitiated into postliberal political theory. Until now, I have had no monograph-length treatment to recommend—no book that offers a charitable, synoptic account of postliberalism’s intellectual genealogy, internal diversity, and shared concerns. Most existing works either fixate on one recent American faction or engage in sweeping denunciations that obscure the deeper continuities and substantive agreements animating postliberal critiques of the liberal order. In such accounts, opposition to liberalism functions less as an argument worth engaging than as a prelude to warnings about the dangers supposedly lurking beyond it.

This confusion has only been exacerbated by the way postliberalism is frequently narrated through the lens of the Trumpist moment. Too often, postliberal political theory is treated as little more than an opportunistic response to American populism or an attempt to capitalize on the ascent of President Trump. Meanwhile, postliberal discourse in the United States has taken on a more statist, tribalistic, and narrowly particularistic tone, intensifying uncertainty about its relationship to nationalism. Is Christian nationalism properly postliberal? Is postliberalism simply the political theology on display at National Conservatism conferences? In the absence of careful distinctions, critics—especially in academic and media contexts—have been quick to dismiss the entire discourse as intellectually reckless or socially dangerous for daring to challenge liberalism at a fundamental level.

Against this backdrop, Stefan Borg’s The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right arrives as a welcome—and much-needed—intervention. Borg’s aim is not to defend every postliberal proposal, but to clarify what postliberalism is, where it comes from, and why it deserves serious consideration. As he puts it in the introduction, the book seeks “to remedy this confusion and present postliberalism as a fully-fledged tradition of thought.” While acknowledging significant internal differences, Borg argues that postliberalism constitutes a coherent—if still underdeveloped and often misunderstood—critique of liberalism, one that has been ignored in part because of liberalism’s own hegemonic status. That critique, he insists, “ought to be taken seriously.”

Borg’s central claim is that postliberalism is unified by what he calls a shared “common project,” a claim signaled in the book’s subtitle. Despite their disagreements, major postliberal thinkers “mobilize a set of similar arguments about the historical trajectory of liberalism and share an understanding of, as well as having similar misgivings about, the liberal order.” They diverge over what should replace liberalism, but they are united in rejecting liberalism’s “one-sided preoccupation with maximizing individual autonomy” at the expense of goods that sustain political and social life. In Borg’s formulation, “the postliberal project may in part be defined as an attempt to resurrect the common good tradition.”

Accordingly, the appeal to the common good functions as postliberalism’s central normative standard. At its most basic level, postliberalism insists that claims of individual autonomy must be ordered toward, and constrained by, the flourishing of the political community as a whole. Politics should not be oriented primarily toward autonomy-maximization, but toward sustaining the conditions of shared life.

In its most ambitious form, Borg argues, postliberalism seeks to retrieve a more ancient and Christian conception of politics—one oriented toward virtue and genuine human flourishing—over against the liberal tendency to construe politics as a mechanism for securing individual freedom alone.

Importantly, Borg is careful to stress that this “common project” does not imply uniformity. He distinguishes between two broad branches of postliberalism: a British strand and an American one. While there is sufficient overlap to justify speaking of a single project, the differences between these branches—particularly their historical origins—are analytically illuminating. One of Borg’s most valuable contributions is to demonstrate that British postliberalism long predates both Donald Trump’s election and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. On Borg’s account, postliberalism emerges in the 1990s and develops across theology, political theory, jurisprudence, international relations, and cultural criticism.

The term “postliberalism” itself (with reference to politics) was first deployed in the early 1990s by the British political theorist John Gray to name his growing disillusionment with liberal assumptions and liberal social orders. Yet Borg traces the deeper roots of British postliberalism to Radical Orthodoxy, the theological movement associated above all with John Milbank. Radical Orthodoxy mounted a far-reaching critique of secular modernity and “what is perceived as its chief ideological expression, namely liberalism.” Its foundational text is Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990), which argued that liberalism rests on a secular ontology that displaces theology as the interpretive framework for social life.

Postliberalism assumed a more overtly political form in the aftermath of Labour’s defeat in the 2010 British election. Maurice Glasman founded Blue Labour, while Philip Blond—a student of Milbank’s and a contributor to Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology—advanced related ideas under the banner of Red Toryism through the think tank ResPublica. Around the same time, the term “postliberalism” entered wider public discourse through figures such as David Goodhart, who popularized postliberal critiques of market society and social fragmentation. Across these expressions, British postliberalism combined a rejection of radical individualism and market atomization with an equally strong resistance to collectivism, emphasizing virtue, intermediary institutions, and local forms of belonging.

At the intellectual core of this tradition stands Radical Orthodoxy. Beginning with Theology and Social Theory and culminating, in Borg’s telling, with Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (2016)—which Borg describes as “the most theoretically elaborate articulation of postliberalism” and “the most comprehensive statement of postliberalism currently on offer”—Radical Orthodoxy advances a comprehensive critique of liberalism as the ideology of the secular. Liberalism, on this account, insists on carving out a supposedly neutral public sphere free from theological commitments, reducing politics to procedural coordination among competing conceptions of the good. Radical Orthodoxy rejects this neutrality as illusory. Liberalism, Milbank argues, advances its own substantive moral vision, grounded in what he famously calls an “ontology of violence”—a vision of social reality that presupposes primordial conflict and self-interest rather than participation in the divine good. As Borg summarizes, Milbank’s project seeks to reinstate theology as a governing meta-discourse by which secular modernity itself may be judged, and to recover a Christian social vision as a genuine alternative to the liberal order.

Much of Borg’s account resonated deeply with my own intellectual trajectory. My engagement with postliberalism predates the Trump moment and developed independently of the American cohort associated with The Postliberal Order. Like many others, I was first prepared for postliberal arguments through engagement with communitarian thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, as well as figures who bridge communitarianism and postliberal theology, notably Stanley Hauerwas.

Borg is especially helpful in making explicit the overlap between communitarianism and postliberalism. Postliberals share with communitarians a relational anthropology, a rejection of autonomous individualism, skepticism toward claims of neutrality, and a critique of negative liberty as liberalism’s core value. Yet Borg rightly resists collapsing the two traditions. Communitarianism emerged in a different historical moment and often exhibited a greater reluctance toward state action, and tended toward preservation of inherited social forms—which can drift in a more relativistic direction. Postliberalism—especially in its Radical Orthodox variant—is more overtly political and more explicitly theological, advancing a thicker normative account of political order and the common good.

The American branch of postliberalism, Borg argues, coalesces later, beginning with Trump’s election in 2016 and crystallizing with Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), which Borg calls “the first defining work of U.S. postliberalism.” Deneen’s critique bears a clear communitarian imprint, hardly surprising given his exposure to the communitarian political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams during his undergraduate years at Rutgers. Liberalism, Deneen argues, rests on an anthropology of voluntaristic individualism, a conception of liberty as autonomy-expansion, and a severing of the human person from nature. Far from limiting state power, this individualism generates statism: as social bonds erode, the state expands to manage the resulting disorder. Market capitalism intensifies this dynamic by commodifying desire while relying on regulatory expansion. Why Liberalism Failed is primarily diagnostic; Deneen’s later Regime Change (2023) advances more constructive proposals centered on the recovery of the common good. Borg situates these developments within the consolidation of American postliberalism around Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold in the early 2020s.

Despite these differences, Borg identifies three elements that unify postliberalism as a common project: a genealogical critique of liberalism’s internal contradictions, a social analysis of the orders liberalism produces, and a normative commitment to the common good.

First, postliberals broadly agree that liberalism is internally self-undermining. Its commitment to atomistic individualism proves corrosive not only to social life but also to the natural world. Liberalism systematically privileges the political and economic spheres over the civic and social, and this imbalance ultimately erodes the latter. Moreover, while liberalism presents itself as neutral with respect to substantive visions of the good, postliberals argue that it in fact enforces this purported neutrality as a comprehensive moral framework, often acting illiberally toward those whose substantive commitments conflict with it.

Postliberals identify liberalism as a decisive break with classical and Christian accounts of political order, and this is why Thomas Hobbes figures so centrally in their genealogy. Leviathan is commonly understood as “the most forceful articulation of the break with the ancients,” radically undercutting the foundations of common-good political theory. As Borg explains, “modernity is often understood as the process by which Hobbesian assumptions of the world slowly but steadily won out.” Hobbes’s conception of order as an artificial imposition of power designed to manage primordial hostility generates a pervasive suspicion toward social authority and inherited forms of life—one that, over time, functions as an acid on the social fabric. Contractarian models weaken the intermediary institutions that once mediated between the individual and the state, while liberalism’s commitment to negative liberty fosters mistrust toward the traditions, habits, and norms that sustain common life. In a market society these dynamics are further exacerbated, as social relations themselves are increasingly commodified. The result is a mutually reinforcing logic in which the abstract individual, the expanding state, and the market together erode the very sources of social cohesion and shared flourishing on which liberal order ultimately depends.

Second, postliberals analyze the social orders liberalism produces, with particular attention to the rise of a managerial elite. Drawing on James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Michael Lind, postliberals narrate the emergence of a professional class that governs institutions while remaining detached from the communities they administer. This elite combines technocratic power with cultural liberalism, advancing norms that corrode social solidarity while entrenching its own privileges.

Before turning to the third element, Borg clarifies a frequent misunderstanding. Critics object that postliberals offer an overly narrow, one-sided account of liberalism. Borg concedes that postliberal critiques are not primarily exercises in textual reconstruction. But this, he argues, is precisely the point. Postliberals treat liberalism not merely as a theory but as a sociopolitical project whose consequences matter more than its internal nuances. The question is whether liberal societies can sustain the goods they require to function.

This leads to the third element: the recovery of the common good. Drawing on Helen Rosenblatt’s authoritative history of liberalism, Borg acknowledges that earlier liberals often affirmed the common good, but he argues that contemporary liberalism—exemplified by John Rawls—treats it as politically inaccessible. Under conditions of pluralism, Rawls contends, the state must remain neutral and secure fair procedures which allow individuals to pursue their disparate ends rather than promote substantive goods. Postliberalism rejects this premise, seeking to recover a politics ordered toward virtue rather than autonomy.

Borg identifies three postliberal approaches to the common good: pluralist, common good conservatism, and integralism. The pluralist approach, associated with British postliberalism and Michael Lind, emphasizes an open-ended pursuit of the common good through dispersed power, corporatist institutions, relational economies, and strong civil society. Deneen’s common good conservatism places greater emphasis on tradition, social stability, and popular wisdom, articulated through his concept of “aristopopulism.” Integralism, associated with Vermeule, offers the most programmatic and state-centered approach, insisting that political authority should actively promote substantive goods.

Borg’s typology usefully dispels the claim that postliberalism lacks constructive proposals. Yet the book’s greatest strength lies in re-centering the common good itself—an emphasis increasingly eclipsed by the association of postliberalism with nationalism. 

Echoing his earlier point about communitarianism, Borg argues that postliberals are opposed to radical conservatism in that they are not primarily motivated by the preservation of a given social order—a posture that can easily slide into relativism. And, as Oliver O’Donovan demonstrates in Ways of Judgment, nationalism often functions as a species of identity politics, which postliberals recognize as an expression of liberalism. Postliberals can concede that nationalist critiques of liberal universalism have real force, particularly insofar as liberalism tends to universalize late-modern Western norms. Yet nationalism, Borg suggests, frequently replicates liberalism’s own pathologies. It retreats to a Hobbesian state of nature at the international level and reduces political judgment to collective self-interest—merely scaling liberal individualism and liberalism’s “ontology of violence” up to the level of nations.

By contrast, Borg shows that postliberals insist on the irreducible universality of the Christian faith, even while affirming the necessity of historical and cultural particularity. As he puts it, “[U]niversals must always find expression in historically instantiated particulars …. Universals are never fully disclosed outside of their (always imperfect) instantiations in particulars.” Where strands of the dissident right radicalize particularity and lapse into an ontology of violence—now transposed to relations between nations—postliberals such as Pabst and Milbank advance a form of Christian internationalism. We should understand nations as neighbors—each seeking in its own way to instantiate the good, with the common good itself requiring forms of international cooperation. On this view, postliberalism decisively rejects frameworks such as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

The book also draws attention to the “sex-realist feminists”—figures such as Louise Perry, Christine Emba, Erika Bachiochi, and Mary Harrington—showing how their work advances distinctly postliberal arguments. In particular, they critique contractarian accounts of sexual relations, the commodification of intimacy, the equation of libertinism with empowerment, and what Harrington terms “bio-libertarianism.” This strand of thought is rarely included in standard mappings of postliberalism, yet Borg persuasively demonstrates its family resemblance to the broader postliberal project. On this point, I am entirely in agreement: these thinkers deserve to be recognized as an integral part of the postliberal conversation.

There are, however, areas where Borg could go further. He rightly notes that not all postliberal positions are wholly or uniformly antiliberal, and he gestures toward the ways liberalism emerged by abstracting and radicalizing certain Christian principles. I would press this insight further: liberalism is best understood as a Christian heresy—or, in Oliver O’Donovan’s formulation, the “prodigal child” of Christendom. Liberalism represents, to borrow G. K. Chesterton’s phrase, a set of Christian “virtues gone mad.” Insofar as liberal orders continue to draw on moral capital they cannot themselves reproduce (à la the Böckenforde dilemma), that capital must be re-tethered to the Christian whole from which it was severed. On this view, the task is not simply to oppose liberalism but to call it home—to re-anchor its moral claims within the ecclesial and theological framework that once gave them coherence and limits.

Indeed, this points toward a deeper omission. Borg would benefit from drawing the theological thread more consistently throughout the book. Postliberalism—especially in its Radical Orthodox forms—is not merely a sociological critique but a theological one. Postliberals do not merely criticize liberalism for its deracinating social effects—for eroding the resources that sustain common life, producing increasingly atomized individuals alongside an ever-expanding state—but also for its desacralizing logic. This dimension is central to John Milbank’s argument in Theology and Social Theory, where the very category of the “secular” is exposed as a historical and conceptual invention—one that, though emerging from within the Christian tradition itself, was progressively hardened in modernity into a domain conceived as wholly autonomous from and impermeable to theological judgment. At the heart of Radical Orthodoxy, and thus of postliberalism more broadly, is the insistence that theology be recovered as a governing meta-discourse—the regina scientiarum by which other forms of knowledge are ordered and judged. 

This theological critique carries an implication that Borg only partially develops: political order is never religiously neutral. Borg notes that postliberals expose liberalism’s claim to neutrality as illusory and highlight its substantive moral commitments. Yet he stops short of drawing the full implication—namely, that such commitments are always and inevitably theological. He comes close when he observes that deviations from liberal orthodoxies are often treated as a form of “secular sinning,” but he does not carry the point far enough. Every political order, liberal ones included, necessarily renders judgments about God, religion, and their relevance to social life and human flourishing. Borg rightly shows that postliberals understand the human person as socially constituted and embedded in thick networks of relationships. But the most fully Christian expressions of postliberalism press further still, insisting that human beings are situated within a theological horizon, ordered toward God. Without foregrounding this claim, postliberalism risks being reduced to institutional reform rather than a challenge to liberalism’s spiritual architecture. 

Finally, Borg largely omits a crucial postliberal strand: ecclesiocentric postliberalism, represented by the Communio school and figures such as David L. and D. C. Schindler, as well as Peter Leithart and the Civitas network. Though largely North American, these thinkers stand closer to the theological and ecclesiological concerns of Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy than to the more overtly political forms of American postliberalism—complicating Borg’s neat British-American divide. What unites them is the insistence that the Church is not a voluntary association concerned exclusively with “private” and otherworldly realities, but a public body. To be sure, Borg does note that Deneen gestures in this direction, particularly in his critique of post-Westphalian nationalism, wherein the modern state sought to eliminate rival claims to sovereignty—above all those of the Catholic Church. In this settlement, the Church was progressively reduced by secular sovereigns who claimed the authority to determine the boundaries of acceptable religion within their respective realms. Yet Borg does not develop this line of analysis beyond a brief summary of Deneen’s point. Moreover, he appears to treat the Church as merely one intermediate institution among others situated between the individual and the state. 

What is missing—and what the Communio and Civitas strands of postliberalism help recover—is the political significance of the Church itself. Borg rightly highlights how postliberals critique liberalism for recognizing only non-state communities formed on liberal premises: voluntary associations of contracting individuals pursuing shared interests. The Church cannot be understood in these terms. She is not simply one voluntary society within civil society, constructed by individual choice and ranked beneath the state. She is a reality that confronts all persons. She is the body of Christ on earth (Rom. 12; 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 1; Col. 1), the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15), and the Christian’s more ultimate family (Matt. 12:48–50), nation (1 Pet. 2), and polis (Eph. 2:19; cf. Phil. 3:20; Heb. 12:22–23). The Church is the most comprehensive community, summoning all persons and, in doing so, relativizing and challenging the totalizing claims of other social bodies and purported sovereigns. Yet she does so not by withdrawing from history, but by seeking to be instantiated within every society and to receive—purified and redeemed—the fruits of each. Precisely as a multinational and transnational body, the Church also serves as a source of reconciliation and healing among the nations.

Leithart explains how liberalism systematically marginalizes the Church by reshaping its ecclesiology, focusing especially on the foundational figures of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes, Leithart contends, domesticated the Church by subordinating it to the civil sovereign, thereby resolving the problem of divided loyalties between temporal and spiritual authority. Locke, by contrast, domesticated the Church by spiritualizing and privatizing it, reducing it to a voluntary association concerned with inward belief rather than public truth. In both cases, liberalism strips the Church of any genuinely public status.

Leithart’s analysis here echoes the work of the sociologist of religion José Casanova, who has argued that the liberal state’s “preferred form of religion” is a privatized one. On this account, the liberal assumption is that religion is—and ought to remain—a “private affair.” The consequence is that the Church is stripped of any genuinely public status. It is no longer understood as a commonwealth (πολιτείας), no longer a society of “citizens” (συμπολῖται) gathered in the public assembly of the household of God (Eph. 2:12, 19). Instead, the modern liberal order ultimately recognizes only two actors as politically salient: the sovereign individual and the state. By marginalizing the Church as a public body, liberalism effectively eliminates any competing form of authority or allegiance.

Modern liberal orders have sought to privatize religion and to emancipate social life from ecclesial authority. The Church’s jurisdiction is thereby restricted to those who voluntarily choose her, while the state is increasingly treated as a comprehensive authority from which no one may opt out. Over time, the state comes to be viewed as the most ultimate and indispensable community, and loyalties once oriented toward the Church are gradually redirected toward political sovereignty. Liberalism’s deepest error, according to these postliberals, is its ecclesiological one: privatizing the Church while rendering the state ultimate. Any postliberalism that fails to recognize this fundamental ecclesiological heresy at the root of the liberal order—and the religious dangers it entails—remains incomplete.

Despite these omissions, Borg’s book is an indispensable primer on postliberalism. It is the clearest, most charitable map of the terrain currently available—and it will be my default recommendation … at least once it appears in paperback.

The following excerpt from Joseph Orso, On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath is published with permission from Front Porch Republic Books and Wipf & Stock.

***

These things can go poorly.

Some time ago, another resident in the memory care facility died and the family cared for the body themselves. Though surely well-intentioned, they were unprepared. The details are not important, but workers were asked to do too much. Stories spread, and one young staff-member tells me the experience still gives her nightmares.

There’s no blame here. Our civilization has commodified all aspects of experience and relationship, and provides little support for our sacred responsibilities to each other. Most of us have never washed a breathless body, nor dug a grave, nor sat round-the-clock vigil with a loved one’s body after death. Our parents have not done this, nor our grandparents. Rather, cultural norms have neglected these responsibilities and replaced them with secular, economic transactions. In such a context, tending our dead ourselves is no simple task, and mistakes aren’t surprising.

That said, knowing what happened, we realize early on that caring for Dad after death, without a funeral home, is going to involve repair in this place. We speak extensively with the director of the facility, the nurses, and the staff about our plans—about how we are in touch with a community organization that supports families in doing this, how friends and family will be here to help us wash Dad’s body when the time comes, to carry him to a waiting vehicle, to sing as we carry him out.

When the time comes, we tell them, nothing will be asked of them, though they will be welcome to be present if they choose.

***

Dad’s breathing goes on beyond the hospice nurse’s guess of seventy- two hours, and the days feel liminal. During this dying time, it has taken no beckoning for the sacred to intrude upon our days. Dad is dying, and the thing to do has been obvious: sit around him as we’d sit around a fire, gazing at the flames, and telling stories and making music and eating cake until the flame burns out.

Yet there’s also work to do.

Ages upon ages ago, a prophet cried out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” The command stands, an ever-present calling for every generation. If we do not want to hand over death to the nearest industry, there are indeed preparations to be made. Cultural patterns no longer exist for how to tend Dad between his death and his burial, so knowledge must be recovered. We must remember skills our ancestors took for granted.

We make plans and back-up plans and to-do lists. We email friends about helping carry his body from his room to the vehicle. We prepare Mom’s spare bedroom downstairs for the vigil; prepare the gravesite at the edge of the woods on our land; clean up behind the garage; pick up the ice packs for keeping Dad’s body cool during the vigil, put them in the garage freezer, and make sure someone can bring several to the facility when the time comes; get the paperwork ready so we can transport Dad’s body legally; talk to friends about helping us organize the vigil, in which people will take shifts sitting and praying with his body.

And there are questions: Do we know enough to wash the body ourselves? If it snows—and there’s a blizzard in the forecast, and the blizzard will come—how will that change things? And how are we going to lower Dad’s body into the grave? And when his flame goes out, is it possible for someone from Threshold Care Circle to be here—in case we need help washing the body, in case we need someone who has done this before to help us with something that comes up that we haven’t thought about and are totally unprepared for?

“Prepare the way!” cried Isaiah.

I call Susan from Threshold again, and she says someone can certainly be with us when the time comes, but that we won’t need them. She is sure of this.

“Do you remember when Adrianne birthed your first child?” she asks me over the phone. “She knew just what to do. And when you first had to bathe her? You knew just what to do. Maybe it didn’t go perfectly, but you did it, and you can do this, too.”

She goes on, describing how tending our loved ones in death is a natural human experience and dwells in our cellular memories. If we lead with our hearts, she says, we can do nothing wrong. And we should also remember that we can’t hurt him. If something goes imperfectly—and it probably will—it might even be humorous, and that’s okay. Everything will be okay. Just lead with our hearts.

Her words fill in for lost knowledge. They conjure a culture, prepare a way. They remind me of what Adrianne’s midwife said to her over and over: Don’t worry. Your body is strong, wise, capable. When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what to do.

And she did.

And so will we.

***

“Prepare the way of the Lord,” Isaiah says.

Yet in the rest of Isaiah 40, he goes on to describe a God unfathomable, who “sits above the circle of the earth . . . Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in” and “brings the princes to nothing.”

Before God, nations are less than nothing and worthless, a drop in a bucket, the dust on the scales. Before the Creator, people are like grasshoppers, withering grass, fading flowers.

And yet the holy voice still commands us: Prepare the way, grasshopper. Align with starlight, you speck of dust.

***

Death is a fire we sit around, something warming and mysterious, something transcending comprehension, a journey no one living—not even the wisest—has completed. It is a cosmos beyond our cosmos, an experience beyond our experience. Convictions and identities loosen their grip as we sit before this holy fire, his flame growing brighter than us even while his breath fades like a flower. 

The prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!”

But we sit here like wood, consumed in total awe. We sit here like ashes, not knowing what to do.

Yet the prophet speaks: “Prepare the way!”

And we sit here like humans have always sat here, tending the fire, watching it flicker, grow, die down.

“Prepare the way!” he says.

It is evening now, and we are all sitting with Dad while he sleeps. They say when his feet begin to grow cool, the end is near. But his feet are still warm.

At Adrianne’s suggestion, we open the laptop, go to YouTube, and find a video about how to lower a body into a grave. The easiest way, this video suggests, is for some people to step into the grave themselves to receive the body.

We’re all convinced. When the time comes, we decide, this is the way we will do it. We will stand in the grave together. We will go into the grave before our father, receive his body from above, then gently lay him on the earth.

Joseph Orso. On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath. Front Porch Republic Books, 2026. $20.00. 156 pp.

The shelves in our libraries and bookstores groan under the weight of all the tomes that have been published lately purporting to teach us this or guide us on a path to that. Whether step-by-step guides or collections of anecdotes, such books aim to pass on a skillset or serve as a guidepost for setting out on a brave new path.

In his book On the Threshold of Worlds: Tending My Father Before and After His Last Breath, Joseph Orso explores what it's like to reclaim the work and ritual of caring for our own dead, rather than turning those very important tasks over to an industry that replaces intimacy with efficiency. But the book does not clearly mark out a journey on a map or provide detailed instructions. Orso has written a call to a return to old practices we once knew, not a listicle or "For Dummies" manual.

The book is nearer to a Viking sun stone—if you turn it this way and that until the light shines brightly through its shaft, it will point out the position of the markers that will allow us to take a bearing and determine which direction to take.

Orso sets out to share his experience with the death of his father and the choice to bring his body home to hold a vigil and then bury him on his family’s own land, in their own way. It is not a simple temporal narrative, although there are narrative elements. Likewise, he does not delineate all the steps that were involved to navigate the legal, biological, and practical considerations, although he does not shy away from a frank discussion of some of them. He does not solely concern himself in this book with the philosophical, sociological, and theological questions that we must grapple with in our decisions about death, mourning, and funerary culture.

Instead, Orso asks what we might gain, should we choose to take the work of caring for the bodies of our dead back from the funeral industry and rebuild the ritual around such work at home. What do we owe the soul of our departed, and how do we honor the body that once housed it? Then he shows us.

The book reads as if you are sitting in that room with Orso and his father. Sometimes, it is filled with family and friends. Other times, it is dim and quiet, and a window opens into the past, allowing us to see Orso and his father, both before Alzheimer’s altered their relationship, and after. Then the window slides shut, and you are sitting alone with Orso as he ponders our creatureliness and the things we owe one another. As death moves closer, memories, faith, and discernment begin to blur together, before he moves back into a more traditional account of vigil and burial.

It is the experience of losing his father twice—first to Alzheimer’s, and then to death. Orso and his family have chosen to live with great intentionality and without indoor plumbing or electricity. But the very act of having chosen that type of hard for themselves in order to reap its blessings makes caring for an aging parent who is rapidly losing both mental and physical function a near impossibility. Honoring father and mother sometimes means making difficult decisions.

Still, the choice to lead a profoundly local life leads almost inevitably to the decision to care for his father's body at home and then to bury him in that place that they have chosen to call their own. 

Orso's prose ranges from simple confessions and explanations of the procedures necessary to accomplish this into vivid recollection of the man being honored by his household and community. It then climbs another register in a near-poetic contemplation of the nature of grief and ritual. Ripples of Job shimmer underneath questions about holiness, Creation, and veneration.

It should be noted that Orso is Eastern Orthodox, his parents Catholic, and he sometimes uses language about ritual that can be a bit discomfiting to those of us of a more staid, Protestant background. It's worth it to ride that out, however, and absorb the experience as Orso draws the reader in. 

Orso paints a picture rich with meaning and deep appeal, plucking at something that is almost a memory we all share. While he does acknowledge that not everyone has the capability to follow the path he marks out, I am not sure he has truly reckoned with all of the difficulties. 

It's obvious that only someone who owns a sufficient piece of land—and lives in a jurisdiction that allows such burials—can inter their loved ones themselves. This presumes the intention of lifetime ownership of that property as well. After all, how could you sell Grandma's grave? But beyond that is an aspect that Orso does not acknowledge fully.

However radically locally we may choose to live, that decision only lasts as long as we do. Or until we, like Orso's father, lose our ability to participate in these very same decisions. It does not follow that our descendants can, or will, retain that same place or a relationship to it. What then?

As the de facto family historian, I have had cause to wrestle with this issue. My third-great-grandmother, Aaltje Sprik, and five of her children were laid to rest on the farm where they died. A marker was placed a century and a half ago, and a new granite monument was added in the late 1990s. But since then, the old homestead has been sold for development. The house is gone, although the silo and some outbuildings remain on the edges of the subdivision that now occupies the site. The markers have seemingly vanished into the ether. No one seems to know what has become of them. Were Aaltje and her children moved to another local cemetery? There is no record of it. Was the marker simply tidied away by the developer so the new residents wouldn't be bothered by their proximity to the graves? 

When another century and a half has gone by, will Orso's great-great-grandchildren be able to find his father's grave?

I can walk down the lines of Atwood Cemetery and greet six generations of my ancestors as I move from north to south. That ground is, for me, thick with the known dead. 

Which way truly ties us more tightly to our places? Orso does not ask. He borrows Paul Kingsnorth's Machine language to elucidate the industrialization of modern funerary practices. He is certainly correct that it is more common historically for us to care for our own dead, even if it is a largely forgotten practice in the modern West. Graveyards, however, are as ancient as human culture itself. There may be space between abdicating our responsibilities to our loved ones in death, and taking all those things on ourselves, up to and including interring them on our own lands. A middle ground of caring for our loved ones at home, while still burying our dead in cemeteries, is more accessible to most people. This would also be more aligned with historical and cultural practice, not less. 

Minor quibbles about practicalities aside, this book about caring for our dead and reclaiming old rituals and practices that once made up the fabric of community is really asking a deeper question: What stitches us to our places?

In "Anne's House of Dreams," Marilla remarks to Mrs. Lynde, on the eve of Anne's wedding, "When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a house was not a real home until it had been consecrated by a birth, a wedding and a death." We have, bit by bit, turned all three into businesses rather than sacraments. And in so doing, allow the fabric of our places to become so frayed and moth-eaten that it seems it cannot hold us anymore. It falls to us to rewarp the loom, so that we can reweave the "underneath," until our places can hold the weight of our creatureliness again.

What Orso is really asking: is caring for our dead with our own hands and burying them in our own places one of the warp threads? Perhaps it is. His book makes a case for it, at least, without stridently insisting that everyone follow where he leads. It is entirely worthwhile to read On the Threshold of Worlds while keeping in mind not just what Orso says about caring for our dead but also what he doesn't.

Carrie Gress. Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity. Sophia Institute Press, 2026. $21.95. 256 pp.

Carrie Gress’ new book certainly begins on an ominous note. Her central argument, as the subtitle has it, is that “feminism can’t be fused with Christianity.” It’s either God or the devil. Choose at your own peril. 

The story goes something like this. Once, before Enlightenment rationalism and revolutionary ideals took over—replacing faith in God and in God-given hierarchies—Western people lived peacefully. Women accepted patriarchy as ordained by God in his wisdom, and the relationship between the sexes was harmonious. When Mary Wollstonecraft joined forces with the big bads of Enlightenment philosophy (Hume et al.), she threw the “woman issue” into the mix. Over two hundred years later, feminism has repeatedly aligned itself with dangerous ideologies, from Marxism and communism to occult practices, and more recently to the pro-choice movement. It’s time to eradicate this way of thought and free women from their feminist shackles. Only then will Christianity prevail once again.

Something Wicked proposes an attractive intellectual history of feminism. Yet overly tidy narratives are often untrue. I believe it’s important for Christians to consider arguments both in favour and against any given ideology, but we should focus on the best of those arguments, so that we may develop our capacity to reason well. Unfortunately, Gress doesn’t deliver on her promise of a rigorous, methodical takedown of feminism as an ideology. Her account is partial at best, and misleading at worst. 

This would not particularly matter, were it not for the fact that Gress has considerable public credibility: she holds a PhD from the Catholic University of America (where she is a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology), she is a former fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and has several books already under her belt (including her popular Theology of Home series). Something Wicked has been endorsed by well-respected scholars such as the psychiatrist and philosopher Ian McGilchrist, and Gress regularly promotes her books on Catholic media outlets. She has enough influence over young Christian women that we must engage with her ideas, if only to decide that we won’t be recommending Something Wicked to our sisters, nieces, and daughters. 

A False Premise

The book’s greatest flaw is that it is based on a false premise. Gress claims that Christian women have been fooled into trying to reconcile two incompatible ideologies, feminism and Christianity. As feminism has grown more powerful, Christianity correspondingly declined. 

There are several problems with this claim. 

First, it posits Christianity and feminism as competing ideologies. This is false. While feminism fits the description of an ideology (i.e., a set of beliefs which can be used to shape social, economic, or political action), Christianity can only be considered an ideology if viewed as a cultural set of practices and morals (what one might call “thin Christianity”). By contrast, “thick” Christianity is a practice of faith. It’s an all-encompassing worldview—in the words of C.S. Lewis, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Of course, some ideologies are more dangerous or, conversely, more aligned with the Christian faith than others; but anything good to be found in any given ideology (whether that is conservatism, socialism, etc.) will inevitably be contained within Christianity. 

There is no competition there, Gress implies. There is, however, a choice for Christians. They may choose to retreat altogether from the political issues of secular society as they view engagement as futile or even corruptive. Or they may choose to engage with particular political ideologies that they judge to be conducive to the fostering and spreading of Christian faith, doctrine, or moral teaching. 

This will inevitably lead to disagreement. Some have objected to the Marxist influence on 20^th century Catholic liberation theology. Others point out that Christianity has repeatedly been weaponized by far-right governments (most famously, of course, during Hitler’s regime). But as long as it remains clear that our true “citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), Christians can engage in public life by subscribing to specific sets of political goals. It is, in theory at least, entirely possible for individuals to identify as “feminists” while retaining their overarching, inalienable allegiance to the Kingdom of God.

The question, then, is not actually whether Christianity can be fused with feminism, as Gress claims, but whether feminism is worth supporting. Gress very confidently answers in the negative. She sees such a vast divide in how philosophers pre- and post-Enlightenment envision ideas of virtue, duty, and faith, that any post-Enlightenment social and political movement, such as feminism, is in the grip of secularism. Thus it can’t contribute anything morally acceptable to faithful Christians. 

This is a compelling narrative, because it provides a simple solution to a very complex problem. But here we stumble upon the second issue with Gress’s central claim: Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. 

Gress has correctly identified the inverse correlation between the rise of Enlightenment philosophy and the decline of Christianity. It is the rest of her argument that gets muddled. Two of her main targets, Mary Wollstonecraft and Erika Bachiochi, exemplify her view of the role of feminism within this decline. She blames Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century writer who advocated for improved female education within the developing philosophical context of human rights, for promoting a genderless idea of woman. And she blames Bachochi, a contemporary legal scholar who has argued in her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision that Wollstonecraft in fact presented a view of rights based on mutual duties and responsibility, for trying to merge feminism with Christianity. 

The Enlightenment Chasm 

Gress requires her readers to make several assumptions as part of this blame game. First, we would have to agree that feminism began with Mary Wollstonecraft. Next, we’d have to accept that Wollstonecraft was irredeemably immersed in rationalistic and empirical philosophy, to the point that her views on women’s rights and her political priorities more broadly can’t be separated from her Enlightenment-style abandonment of God and the embracing of Deism. We would also need to agree that she did, in fact, abandon a belief in the divine. Then, we would have to prove that all the figures associated with the women’s rights movement and with subsequent waves of feminism accepted Wollstonecraft’s views and continued directly on that path, and that the views of contemporary feminists are indeed a direct result of her ideas.

Gress simply doesn’t substantiate these claims. The first inconsistency is her treatment of the industrial revolution. She is not unaware of the legal and technological changes which contributed to the sweeping changes of the 18^th century. In her introduction, she does name industrialization, marriage and property laws (which left women unable to support themselves if their husbands passed away or if they were abusive), secularization, and middle to upper class women being treated as ornamental as relevant factors. 

And yet, she promptly forgets all this. In the second part of Something Wicked, she goes into a little more detail, claiming that “Homelife was significantly disrupted by a surge in factories and the mechanization of work, as small cottage industries were swallowed up by enormous factories. The home ceased to be the locus of activity.” This is a well-known phenomenon in social history, with which I entirely agree, and to which Christopher Lasch devoted much of his seminal book Women and the Common Life. But the next step in Gress’s argument is a historical non sequitur. “The Industrial Revolution,” she continues, “coupled with the disvaluing of female gifts created a vacuum that the feminist ideology easily moved into. The simultaneous loss of home and mother eliminated the glue that holds Western civilization together.” 

Gress does not take into consideration the fact that many “feminists” (though the term is anachronistic for the late 18^th century) in fact campaigned against the injustices and inequalities that arose as a result of said technological changes. As English society became more industrial and less agrarian, women were still expected to contribute to the household economy, but now they worked long shifts in factories, away from the home, and often were paid less than men (another change was that wage work became the norm). Small children were often brought along and had to start working while still very young until child labour laws kicked in in the latter half of the 19^th century. None of this is the consequence of “feminist ideology.” Under such conditions, is it surprising that women started to campaign for fair wages? Or for the right to purchase property in their own right? 

The less interdependent society becomes, the more harm women and children incur. On that, Gress and I agree. But why, I kept thinking as I read this book, does she not put two and two together, and realize that figures of the women’s rights movement were in large part critiquing a situation not of their own making?

When it comes to middle- and upper-class women, Gress admits that in the 18^th century their role was often ornamental. That is precisely Mary Wollstonecraft’s complaint, and yet Gress fails to notice any affinity between Wollstonecraft’s thought and her own. Her argument instead rests on the premises that 1) Wollstonecraft is the mother of feminism, and 2) she sowed the seeds of all the societal evils we see today. 

Witch Hunting

Gress’s first wicked witch is Mary Wollstonecraft. She is not the first woman to write about female education (Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell are two prominent predecessors, though neither is mentioned), but Gress takes Wollstonecraft’s work as the beginning of all the evils of feminism.

One reason for this is that, along with the French proto-feminist Olympe de Gouges, Wollstonecraft was an early supporter of the French Revolution, which Gress takes to signify a wholesale rejection of any notions of hierarchy or authority. Sadly, she neglects to mention that writers such as de Gouges were ultimately guillotined for criticizing Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and that Wollstonecraft herself became disillusioned with the excesses of the revolution. Gress also criticizes Wollstonecraft’s promotion of female education as opposed to Christianity, despite the fact that Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader, an anthology for young girls, includes many scriptural passages. 

Her greatest accusation, however, is that Wollstonecraft has an erroneous understanding of virtue. She believes that Wollstonecraft followed David Hume, who saw morality as merely based on feelings of approval or disapproval and as detached from divine authority. This allows Gress to discredit the entirety of Wollstonecraft’s thought as being severed from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of Christian philosophy. 

However, Wollstonecraft’s account of the virtues does not, in fact, square with Hume’s. She simply doesn’t advocate for moral relativism in the way that Gress needs her to do, in order to prove that feminism was rotten from the very beginning. 

Many other witches follow Wollstonecraft in Gress’ account, from those who engaged in occult practices, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to those who were hostile to Christianity, like Matilda Gage; from the terrorist UK suffragettes like Emily Pankhurst, to the abortion rights advocates of second-wave feminism like Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone.

Yet for each of these figures, there are women whom Gress neglects. Many first-wave women’s rights advocates, contrary to Gress’ claim that “Feminism is abortion’s engine,” openly opposed abortion. Susan B. Anthony and Mary Fenn Davis are just two of the examples Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell discuss in Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America (2023). Not all feminists were irreligious, either. The 19^th-century abolitionist and women’s suffrage activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, for example, were devout Quakers. In the UK, between the late 19^th- and early 20^th-centuries the suffragettes were opposed by the suffragists. While also seeking women’s suffrage, the suffragists campaigned peacefully under the leadership of Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Among their ranks was Josephine Butler (not to be confused with the contemporary gender theorist Judith Butler), a devout Anglican Christian who, among other efforts, also campaigned for the abolition of child prostitution and human trafficking. Closer to our time, Gress ignores Andrea Dworkin, who radically (and unpopularly) condemned both prostitution and pornography in the 1970s and 80s, just as sex-positive feminism was gaining momentum. These women don’t deserve to be forgotten.

The Decay of the Christian West

The purpose of Gress’s witch-hunting is to prove that all kinds of contemporary social ills, including porn addiction, transgender ideology, single-sex parents adoption, child trafficking, prostitution, and drug addiction (her list, not mine) can be blamed on feminism. Men bear no blame in this calculus. According to Gress, men are rejecting marriage because women have made themselves too sexually available after the sexual revolution; the existence of the manosphere, while unfortunate, is a predictable reaction against feminism; domestic violence has become “commonplace,” but that is also, somehow, the fault of women. 

As we have seen, Gress is arguing that Christianity declined because of feminism, and that the only way for it to flourish again is for feminism to be eradicated. Just as the original fall is (reminds Gress) about Eve’s sin, so has our contemporary decline been at the hands of women. Something Wicked’s target readership is young girls and mothers, and I doubt that coming this close to outright misogyny is a helpful strategy for the supposed goal of converting women’s hearts.

It’s very difficult to read such an account and not walk away with the suspicion that Something Wicked is somewhat of an example of grifting. Given the number of commentators who have recently argued in favour of cultural Christianity as a means to reclaim traditional Western culture, Gress’s book catches the zeitgeist of a certain right-wing, religious-adjacent subculture. For example, she extensively engages with (and praises) the thought of Jordan Peterson—who, while very open about the West’s need for the Christian faith, has not openly converted. She likewise praises Erica Komisar, who, as of 2022, was openly opposed to restrictions on abortion in the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade (a view which should be anathema to Gress). 

Yet on the other hand, she accuses “a new group of Catholic women” of trying to “forge together” the teachings of Pope John Paul II with those of feminists and proto-feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Gress even comes dangerously close to slandering one of said women, Erika Bachiochi, by claiming that the blending of Catholicism and secularism—as evidenced the fact that Catholic women “contracept” and “abort” at similar rates to secular women—is best seen in Bachiochi’s work. This could easily be interpreted by unaware readers to mean that Bachiochi herself approves of contraception and abortion—but, in fact, she is a Catholic mother of seven who is publicly pro-life. If not outright slander, this is at best an ad hominem attack. 

My point is not that Gress isn’t allowed to take secular thinkers seriously—there is indeed a long Christian tradition of doing precisely this—but rather that her intellectual allegiances reveal a confused set of priorities. Why would Gress close off potentially fruitful debate with fellow Christians in such a vindictive manner?  

Ultimately, Gress will leave readers unsure of whether the goal is to develop a truly Christian vision of womanhood, or to restore political patriarchy and with it the “Christian West.” Gress would undoubtedly see these goals as interdependent, but they are not necessarily so. I wholeheartedly agree with Gress that women and children have historically been most cherished and safeguarded in those cultures where the influence of the Christian faith has been stronger. But this is because of the very tenets of the Christian faith. Contrary to Gress’s claim that we needed political patriarchy for the “dissemination and maintenance of Christianity,” Christianity had already been spreading before Constantine I made it the official religion of the Roman empire, in part because its insistence of equal dignity was so attractive to women. 

And to Gress’ claim that “civilization depends” on finding a road out of feminism, I would retort that it depends on finding a road out of secularism instead. St Augustine argued that Rome fell because of its own moral decadence, and that peace can only be found in the city of God. So, too, we should remember that adopting the Christian faith should not be a matter of civilizational flourishing, but rather of belief. It’s disappointing to see Gress, a sincere Christian, tap into the trend of cultural Christianity. 

Whether the intention is the genuine flourishing of a Christian society or merely the restoration of the Christian West, a movement as diverse in both political aims and philosophical underpinnings as feminism is the perfect scapegoat. I share Gress’ desire for motherhood and domestic work to be once again valued. But I can’t take Something Wicked seriously as a work of scholarship, because it is lacking in rigour and riddled with logical fallacies. In fact, its greatest flaw is not that it fails as an intellectual history of feminism (though it does that, too), but that it will inevitably teach its intended audience (i.e., young women) to reason badly. It teaches them to look for single-factor, simplistic causes to explain complex social phenomena spanning centuries. And it teaches them to adopt a tribal outlook in their intellectual life, dismissing any thinkers who don’t neatly fall into the group who hold the “right opinion,” rather than examining thinkers individually, their good and bad ideas alike. 

I will not be giving this book to my daughter once she is old enough. I will expose her to arguments both for and against feminism so that she may grapple with them and come to her own conclusions, but Something Wicked won’t be my book of choice.

This excerpt from The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity (2026) is published with permission from Oxford University Press.

Any Londoner who visited Chew’s Coffeehouse on a Monday evening in the 1720s or 1730s and made his way through the haze of smoke coming from clay pipes and the excited chattering of small groups of men passionately debating the latest news would have encountered, among other gatherings at the scattered tables, a meeting of a local literary club. 

Coffeehouse intellectual clubs were common in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment would-be philosophers, gadflies, and local wags from the middle and upper classes gathered in a caffeine-fueled environment to discuss the latest ideas and test them with the standard of reason. The gathering at Chew’s Coffeehouse was, like others of its type, a venue for the intellectually curious. Each Monday evening, the chairman of the club proposed two questions for debate, and each member of the club presented an essay for discussion. 

These clubs were sometimes a magnet for deists and skeptics, but at this particular society, one of the members, Nathaniel Lardner, was a London minister—but one who was just as committed to reason as any deist. He was already in his forties at this point and so hard of hearing that he had trouble figuring out when the choir at his church had stopped singing, but he still loved to discuss ideas with people who held contrary opinions. He was also intellectually flexible enough to change his mind when presented with new evidence. 

As a lifelong Dissenter, he was used to being a nonconformist theologically and intellectually, and as a result, he enjoyed corresponding with deists, even though he thought they were entirely wrong. He was certainly no stranger to skepticism, because his pursuit of graduate training in theology had taken him to such leading centers of skeptical opinion as Utrecht, Leiden, and finally back to London. While participating in the literary club, he was in the process of rethinking his view of the Trinity. At first, he ardently defended the orthodox position, but after a few years of study, he became convinced by Unitarian arguments that the Son was not eternally preexistent, as orthodox Christians claimed ever since the Council of Nicaea.

In some respects, Lardner was a bit of an oddball. He never married, he lived with his father until he was in his mid-fifties, and, despite his graduate education at some of Europe’s best universities, he found it impossible to secure a permanent ministerial post until he was forty- five—and even then, he served in pulpit ministry for only a short time. 

The chief obstacle that he faced in finding ministerial employment was probably not his passion for argument or his propensity to change his mind on such key points of Christian doctrine as the Trinity—the latter of which might have alienated him from some of the more theologically conservative Presbyterian churches of his youth, but which was no obstacle for the increasing number of Unitarian-minded congregations among the English Dissenters. Rather, one of his biographers speculated, his greatest barrier to parish ministry was probably his near-deafness, which prevented his friends from communicating with him except by passing him written notes. 

Lardner’s coffeehouse friends were apparently willing to tolerate the inconvenience, but he seems to have felt self-conscious about imposing his disability on a congregation. When a leading Dissenting church invited him to serve as co-pastor, he turned down the offer. Though he did preach frequently, he would primarily make his mark on Christian apologetics through his writings. And it would be through the written word that he would remain devoted to the life of the mind, exploring new ideas and choosing to accept or reject them on the basis of reason.

Changes in intellectual conviction, when presented with sufficient evidence, were common for Lardner, because he believed in freedom of thought. In the late 1720s, when the London deist Thomas Woolston was arrested and imprisoned for repeatedly publishing material denying Jesus’s miracles, Lardner argued that the deist had the right to hold his own religious opinions without coercion, even if they might be erroneous. “Nothing is so voluntary as Religion,” he wrote, quoting the Dominican friar Raymond Martini. “Faith is to be wrought by persuasion, not by compulsion.” 

In the interest of producing this “persuasion” by rational means, Lardner published a book explaining why it was “rational, consistent, and credible” to interpret the accounts of three of Jesus’s most spectacular miracles—the raising of three people from the dead—as “literal histories.” He accomplished this task by carefully comparing each of the gospels with the others in order to show that the gospel writers were not prone to distortions and exaggerations when recounting the same events, but instead demonstrated the qualities of careful, trustworthy reporters. The deists therefore had no grounds to dismiss the accounts of Jesus’s miracles.

Lardner’s A Vindication of Three of Our Blessed Savior’s Miracles, as he titled this refutation of the deists’ arguments, was only the beginning of his career as a Christian apologist. After spending his Monday evenings each week at the coffeeshop conversing with the literati, he spent his Tuesday evenings among ministers whom he hoped to turn into apologists. 

The young Dissenting ministers who gathered with Lardner each Tuesday at a meetinghouse in the heart of London’s financial district were an eclectic bunch theologically, because “Dissenter” in early eighteenth-century England was a broad category that encompassed nearly every Protestant outside the Church of England—which meant everyone from Puritans to Unitarians. Besides Lardner, the group included two Baptists, three Presbyterians, and one Congregationalist whose views on scripture were suspected of being somewhat liberal. 

Perhaps they could have spent their time bickering over their divergent interpretations of Christian doctrine if they had wanted, but they decided instead to focus on a more constructive project: the defense of the Christian faith against deism. Each minister in the group, they decided, would deliver a short series of sermons on some aspect of the “the evidences of natural and revealed religion”—in other words, natural theology and a reasoned defense of the divine origin of scripture. 

For his own set of three lectures, Lardner chose to focus specifically on refuting historical criticisms that deists made of the four gospels. The topic quickly became a life focus for Lardner. His three lectures expanded into a two-volume book, published in 1730, but this was only the beginning: he continued working on the project throughout his life, until it eventually reached seventeen volumes.

Lardner’s work functioned as the first comprehensive encyclopedia of historical criticism of the gospels, organized around a list of problematic passages. For each passage whose historical accuracy skeptics had questioned, Lardner engaged in a detailed, exhaustive analysis of every classical reference or piece of historical evidence that might have bearing on the question. He left no stone unturned. His discussion of Luke’s one-verse reference to the census of Quirinius, for instance, continued for eighty-six pages. In each case, Lardner attempted to show that historical evidence vindicated the gospel accounts. The census of Quirinius, he argued, was historically plausible, despite what the deists had said. And so was every other gospel passage that the deists had questioned.

Lardner especially focused on the question of whether information that was mentioned in only one of the four gospels—or that was never mentioned in Josephus or any classical histories—could be trusted. For instance, was it reasonable to believe John’s account of the raising of Lazarus when that miracle—as spectacular as it was—did not appear in any of the Synoptic gospels? Was it reasonable to believe that the Roman emperor Augustus had ordered an empire-wide census, as Luke suggested, even though this was never mentioned in any classical source?

Lardner treated these skeptical questions seriously and respectfully, and unlike many previous Christian apologists, he never resorted to invective or denigration when debating his skeptical opponents. Instead, he treated their criticisms of the biblical text as an opportunity for serious intellectual investigation, and at each point, he thought that an exhaustive study of all relevant ancient sources and all possible objections would show that, in the end, the biblical account was credible. His work became a massive compendium of all possible confirmations of the historical narrative of the four gospels from the nonbiblical sources of classical antiquity.

Lardner believed in the historical accuracy of the Bible, but he was hardly an adamantine reactionary; he was open to novel interpretations, as long as they sustained the Bible’s historicity. In the case of the census of Quirinius, for instance, he argued for a very limited imperial order that applied only to Judea—which explained its absence from classical sources. This meant that the Authorized Version’s rendering of Luke 2:1 as “all the world should be taxed” was incorrect; a more accurate translation, Lardner argued from the Greek, was “all the land should be taxed”— thus making it possible that the census could apply only to Judea. 

Lardner’s methodology and presuppositions were in keeping with Enlightenment rationalism, but his end goal was conservative: he wanted to defend the historical integrity and authenticity of the original Greek biblical text, because he believed, as John Locke had, that if he could prove that the gospel narrative was historically trustworthy, its divine origins and authority would be confirmed as well. Jesus’s miracles and resurrection, he believed, could have occurred only through the power of God, so if he could prove that these miracles really happened—that is, that the reports about them were historically credible—he had essentially proved the truth of Christianity and subverted the deists. This was such an important goal that it was worth becoming the project of a lifetime. 

Three decades after embarking on his project, Lardner, now seventy years old, reflected on the purpose of his undertaking as he picked up his pen to begin the fourteenth volume of his ever- expanding work. “The design of this work, from the beginning, and all along,” he wrote, “has been to shew the truth of the evangelical historie, and thereby the truth of the Christian Religion. For if the facts related in the Gospels, and confirmed by the Epistles of the New Testament, may be relied upon, the Christian Religion is from heaven.”

In 1757, thirty-three years after he had begun the project—and after battling several severe fevers that nearly killed him—Lardner finally finished the seventeenth volume and put down his pen. But even though he wanted to write more, the multivolume analysis that he did produce was so comprehensive that it was not repeated for more than a century. 

Lardner taught orthodox Christians that they did not have to be afraid of skeptical objections; exhaustive historical study, he showed, would refute the critics’ charges and uphold the historicity of the biblical text.

Earlier this summer, the government of the United Kingdom made international news. Both Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyger, prominent left-wing influencers, were barred from entry into the country, “on the grounds that their presence … may not be conducive to the public good.” Piker and Uyger were set to make appearances at the Oxford Union, the hallowed speech and debate society at the University of Oxford. As it happens, I was also invited to be among Union chamber speeches during this very same week. My charge wasn’t to speak about political ideology, but instead about why young people today are miserable.     

Ironically, part of the answer is ideological politics and activism—a mission on both the left and right that promises to provide followers with an avenue to find themselves and their meaning in life. Instead, the opposite occurs: it ignites a vicious cycle of self-focus that makes young people anxious and depressed.  

This problem, though culture-wide, is acute among elite universities. I’ve seen this personally: six years ago, I was a graduate student at Oxford; thereafter, I spent several years as a researcher at Harvard; and these days, I am a researcher at Vanderbilt studying human flourishing. Given that I was raised in a lower-middle class Midwestern family, I am grateful and thrilled to have found myself in such places. For me, these universities have helped me to realize the American dream of upward mobility; of moving to strange, unknown places, and charting out on an adventure with a nontrivial chance of failure. But a huge majority of elite university students are neither grateful nor thrilled. They are bitter, resentful, and unhappy. 

So, in my own chamber speech at the Oxford Union, I called attention to what happens when we become fully consumed with the ideas of “safetyism,” online influencers, and campus activism: in our bitterness and resentment, we become fully consumed with ourselves. This stands in stark contrast to the more transcendent habits that traditionally brought about meaning, ones that push us beyond ourselves. 

Let us, then, explore two big questions. Why, in the deepest sense, does self-focus make us miserable? And how can university students unshackle themselves from this tyranny? Two men—Oxford’s C. S. Lewis and Harvard’s William James—illuminated answers to these questions long ago, which we have forgotten. Their ideas, along with modern science, will chart the North Star for elite university students who are suffering today. 

The Mirror’s Tyranny

“Look for yourself,” wrote C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (1952), “and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.”

These words were drafted during the Second World War while Lewis taught at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, I was a stone’s throw away from Lewis’s old stomping grounds—but I was hardly in the perils of war. The coronavirus epidemic had just set in, and terrible as it was, I can’t say it was akin to war-torn Europe. My bomb shelter, so to speak, was a nice little flat with a view of tulips. 

In those days, I was studying the outgrowths of Enlightenment thought and how those ideas found their way to America. It was my view then that the Enlightenment’s ideals—a focus on progress, tolerance, reason, and the scientific method—led to a great boon of human dignity. It seemed to me that these ideals ignited a more generative (albeit imperfect) “pursuit of happiness” for ordinary people. Those intellectual origins are in no small part why I study human happiness today.

However, C. S. Lewis would have disagreed with my rosy view of the Enlightenment. And as the years have gone on, I have come to think that he may have had a point.

In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis argued that Enlightenment thinking created subjective morality, the too-tolerant idea that no one morality was better than another. He called the people who inherited this tradition “men without chests.” By this, he meant that society was full of individuals with smarts and an appetite to succeed; but since they lacked a moral framework to connect their intelligence with their ambition, this made them vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious actors. In terms we might understand today: talented young people were susceptible to getting conscripted into culture wars—ones that would lower their happiness and boost the power and influence of the folks leading, and profiting from, the charge.

Let’s start with the types of arguments that university students hear every day. Organized religion is but a corrupt fairy-tale, they are told, so it’s best to avoid it. Marriage and child-rearing are old relics that lower one’s individual freedom, so it’s best to never start a family. And as for your current family and friends who hold different political views than you? They threaten your way of life, so it’s best to go “no contact” with them, and to go “full contact” with the ideological influencers who are cashing in on your clicks. Lewis believed victims of manipulation would be easier to control, and in turn, their views would become less heterodox. Small wonder that university life has become an epicenter of ideological orthodoxy.

But the point goes beyond that. The thing to understand is that young people—whether they are forgoing God, marriage, children, or friends and family—are doing so because of an intense focus on themselves. And indeed, as we “look for [ourselves],” we inadvertently throw away the very things that make life meaningful.

This is why some scholars argue that the Enlightenment—despite the extraordinary ways it has protected individual liberties—has done a poor job at creating shared, durable meaning across culture. This is the core hypothesis in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), where he argues that meaning across the West is now fragmented, optional, and individually constructed. The result? Take it from Taylor: “There is a widespread sense of loss [in the West], if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”

But we should not stop with this mere cultural critique; deeper psychological phenomena are at play. This brings us to William James, the great 19^th century psychologist at Harvard. James is often credited as the father of modern psychology. And in his magnum opus The Principles of Psychology (1890), he distinguishes between two conceptions of ourselves: the “I-self” and the “me-self.” The former refers to the mental state in which we look outward and observe the world; the latter refers to the mental state in which we observe ourselves. 

Of course, we need to spend appropriate time in both the I-self and me-self to survive and succeed in life. Without observing beyond ourselves (via the I-self), we would make no effort to bond with other people, and we might turn a blind eye to threats or predators. On the other hand, without ever observing ourselves (via the me-self), we would have no sense of identity or self-conception. More practically, the me-self is the mental state that encourages you to look sharp for, say, a job interview—and not to show up in pajamas. By healthily observing oneself, one can put their best foot forward in life.

But to flourish, the properly ordered person must find the correct balance between time spent in the I- and me-selves. James himself alluded to this, arguing that we must spend time “contemplating” our dual nature so that the I- and me-selves can “work out their drama together.” But this balancing act is a tall task. As James argued, “for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves.” And to which half was he referring? That’s right: the me-self. 

Put differently, humanity’s natural tendency was, and has always been, to spend disproportionate time in the me-self, wrapped in self-focus. Today, in our era of digital mediation and identity obsession, we are more prone than ever to be lodged into this half of ourselves. 

Modern science demonstrates that we become more miserable because of it. For example, psychologists have long known that constant self-focus is highly predictive of strong negative emotions. In general, these negative feelings arise because thinking about oneself causes life’s worries and troubles to dominate one’s attention, which crowds out feelings of, say, gratitude and generosity. Indeed, long before science demonstrated this empirically, St. Augustine made this point. His concept of homo incurvatus en se refers to the natural human tendency to be “curved in on itself,” making our own desires and self-interest the center of our world. 

Unfortunately, this is the dominant reality for elite university students today.

The Era of Self-Focus

Modern social media and technology have fashioned incurvatus en se into a way of life—every waking minute—for many college students. Welcome, then, to what we might call The Era of Self-Focus.

This era is uniquely spurred by digital mediation—through which we compare our real lives to everyone’s fake lives. For young people searching for a job, every LinkedIn post from one’s network might as well read: “I’m thrilled to announce that I’m better than you.” Worse is the self-focus paradigm generated by the influencer class—all of whom are richer and more beautiful than their followers. And worst of all is the online grievance culture that facilitates people to dwell endlessly on their problems. As bitterness and resentment rise, scholars have shown that the gumption to use one’s agency to solve life’s problems seriously declines. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that chronically online college students are uniquely miserable. 

This data help to explain how social media acts as a mirror to, and facilitates a curvature within, ourselves. For example, in 2010—the year that social media apps became ubiquitous on the smartphone—rates of anxiety, depression, and affirmative responses to the statement “my life feels meaningless” began to rise. This has led scholars such as Arthur Brooks, whose research team I lead, to argue that meaninglessness resides at the core of the so-called unhappiness epidemic. 

The outcomes of intense self-focus are evident, especially at elite places like the University of Oxford. According to recent data from the Oxford Student Union, nearly 40 percent of undergraduates admitted that since entering their degree program, their mental health had “worsened” or “slightly worsened.” And fully 55 percent of students said that their mental health was negatively affected by “family, romantic, or familial relationships.” Some of this might be innocuous—the surveyed students might have been homesick after all, and undergraduates are not known for stable dating lives—but something about university life clearly leads to self-focus. Baked within this dataset are surely students who created family schism based on their newfound political views.

During my own time at Oxford, I saw this among my program-mates. Some were terribly affected by the temporary lockdowns; others used their free time to wade into hot-button activism; hardly any sought romance; precisely zero were religious.

Not all of this can be blamed on Oxford—or, in fact, any other university whose students deal with these problems—but it is no secret that universities have intensified The Era of Self-Focus by centering campus life around self-care and grievance-based ideas. For example, while I was at Oxford during the coronavirus epidemic, we were inundated with self-care messages from the university administration asking about our well-being. Though well-intentioned, I found this mildly baffling. I was fantastic! I was at Oxford having an intellectual adventure! Yet even in my optimism, I noticed that the more messages I received to this effect, the more I began to question my own well-being. Put another way, I became more focused on myself, and less focused on ideas bigger than myself. A more realistic version of the administration’s messages might have been: Are you thinking about yourself enough today? 

Of course, the answer for many students is: Yes, all the time. For instance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “developing a meaningful life philosophy” was the top goal of university students, and “being financially very well-off” was the least important objective. Today, those goals have inverted: finding meaning ranks last, whereas getting rich ranks highest. This is a good proxy measure for the fact that the search for meaning—and thus a focus beyond oneself—has cratered.

Again, during my time at Oxford, I made this inversion myself. My top reason for pursuing the degree was to explore ideas that would help me see the world more clearly. Color me naive, but upon entering my program, I had utterly no plans for what to “do next.” But after a mere six months, my friends in the program—who were frenetically securing their next step in the ladder—made me second guess my aims. In no time, I became a data figure in the study above. Forget developing a meaningful life philosophy, I thought. My main goal became something like: Don’t be the loser without a prestigious job.

Thankfully, at that time, university life in the UK wasn’t filled with vitriolic levels of grievance. But the same cannot be said for many American universities. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explore the 2010s rise of universities marrying a “safetyist” campus culture with one of grievance. Across scores of American data and case studies, they argue that American universities—in spotlighting so-called “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions” in the name of students’ well-being—inadvertently educated young people to equate emotional discomfort with physical harm. This was especially true at elite universities, in which students were highly attuned to the politics of the day. 

For the last five or so years, a degree of backlash has been underway within academia. But the point to underscore is that universities—like social media—have metastasized The Era of Self-Focus. They have curved students further inward, within the tyranny of the me-self. 

 But there is good news. The solution is not to dismantle university life, a place in which I have spent one-third of my life, and one that I believe in. Instead, universities should work on returning to their founding principles, which were once avenues to push students beyond themselves. For ideas on how this can be achieved, we must first unpack the paradox of self-focus—and finally return to our friends William James and C. S. Lewis.

Escaping Oneself, to Know Oneself

Self-focus is a strange phenomenon. We are naturally drawn to it, and in modern life, we have become quite good at it. But here’s the paradox: if we do, indeed, spend all day focused on ourselves, shouldn’t we know ourselves better? 

 Researchers have answered this in many clever ways. Consider one novel experiment, in which participants first had a photo taken of their face. In a separate room, the researchers made many several photoshopped copies of the original—a 10 percent more attractive copy, a 20 percent more attractive copy, and so on; and likewise for unattractive copies. When the participants were asked to select the photo of their real face from the dozen or so existing images, they were most likely to choose the 20 percent more beautified image—believing that was their real face.

In other words, despite our rampant self-focus, we don’t really know ourselves. There is a reason why we can’t pick our own face out of a lineup, why we can’t accurately assess our own personality, and why self-focus makes us a stranger to ourselves. What university students need today—across the US and the UK—is to be persuaded of a basic metaphysical truth, one that has unfortunately been waylaid by the spoils of Enlightenment thinking. The mysterious truth is that the only way to truly know yourself is by escaping yourself, in deep communion with big ideas, other people, and the divine.

But in The Era of Self-Focus, young adults do just the opposite. By naval gazing all day long, college students are crowding out these pursuits. They date less, have fewer friends, fear big ideas, are less spiritual or religious, and ignite more schism with their families because of partisan politics. 

Instead of contributing to this problem, universities can play a role in fixing it. They need only listen to great ideas of the past. 

Let’s begin with William James. In an 1899 essay, James recounted his weeklong stint at Chautauqua Assembly, an adult-education meeting venue in upstate New York. There he experienced “security, intelligence, humanity, and order,” a utopian-like venue without conflict—much like what modern universities hope (but struggle) to emulate. Yet James found himself inexplicably dissatisfied. Here’s what he observed:

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear.

What James longed for was a window into his own I-self, to become a “looker-on at life.” And what exactly did James wish to see? He desired to bask in awe of the greatest things that had ever been said and done, while also being challenged—even thrilled—by a sense of danger. That, in essence, is the classic role of great universities. Great universities once gave students an unfiltered prism into their I-selves, in which they could study and relive the greatest achievements of human beings, while also being challenged by ideas that didn’t match their worldview. Today’s universities must first return to that forgotten mission. 

Second, universities ought to learn from C. S. Lewis to help students transcend their self-focus. Lewis correctly noted that “look[ing] for yourself” will lead to “hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.” But he followed up that sentiment with this: “Look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

And indeed, looking for God was classically part and parcel with the intellectual venture at great universities—until recently, at least. For example, Oxford’s founding motto (“The Lord is my light”) and Harvard’s original mission (“Let every student be instructed…to know God”) each expressed a fundamental conviction: intellectual illumination and divine light were the same thing. Although neither university has been strictly tied to a religious sect for several hundred years—and while neither will (or should) return to a dogmatically religious approach—each would do well to require its students to reckon with theological arguments, perhaps through required coursework, taught by the best faculty each university has to offer. All students must confront the basic idea that underpins the West’s entire university project: the creator must not be separated in our scientific understanding and investigation of nature.

These two rules, from these two great men, are exactly the path toward a more vibrant university life today—as institutions, yes, but also as individuals. In short: these days university students neither stand in awe of great ideas nor worship the divine. But in returning to both pursuits, students will find what they seek, and they will be happy.

In the end, these strategies will unshackle today’s students from the tyranny of self-focus and open new avenues toward meaning. The alternative, which universities are haplessly pursuing today, will pull students further into a blackhole of themselves, despite all the empty promises to the contrary.

Michael McEwen. The Devil Reads Nietzsche: A Public Theology for a Post-Christian Age. B&H Academic, 2025. $27.99. 224 pp.

As a young parent, I was not prepared for how early my children exhibited skeptical tendencies and posed very difficult questions. My son was four years old when he told me, in all seriousness, that he was bigger than God. It happened during a very tense moment, when he repeatedly refused to obey me and finally demanded that I tell him why he should do what I asked. I was not prepared for a metaphysical discussion on the nature of obedience, but I knew that a simple “because I told you so” would not suffice.

The situation demanded a good answer, as I faced an open revolt from a very serious four-year-old. I fumbled through something along the lines of how obeying our parents helps us learn to obey God, our heavenly Father. It is at this point that my son proclaimed that he is bigger than God, hence no obeying is required. How did I get a little Nietzsche on my hands?

It was, of course, a very comical situation, but the seriousness with which my son was speaking scared me. Really, I thought, questioning faith can start this early! In the years since that day, more questions followed. Some were not openly skeptical. When he was about six years old, he asked me where he was before he was in my belly. At this point, I already knew that my kid could handle abstract talk. Recognizing that he was deeply troubled by the question of his existence, I told him that before he appeared in my belly, he was in the mind of God. That answer actually satisfied him, for it was better to think that he was somewhere, rather than nowhere at all. 

Still, another time, when I felt it was my duty as a Christian parent to encourage my son to pray more for a specific situation, he asked me, “What if, when I pray, I just talk to myself and nothing more?” How did I end up with a young Nietzsche and Feuerbach in one? I really had a hard time answering that one, as I could sense the depth of that doubt and the void that was opening up in front of my son. One misstep on my part, and he might fall into it. The best I could do on that occasion was to explain that ultimately God permeates all of creation and our whole being, for he is a creator of everything. Therefore, even when it feels like we talk to ourselves, we, in fact, speak to God. 

As his younger sister grew older, she too joined in with questions that were far more difficult for me to handle. As a middle schooler, she asked me why God doesn’t just free everyone from hell and save everyone. If, as we were taught in weekly sermons, God is truly good and there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, He has to save us all. I realized then that I have a little skeptic, who listens to Sunday sermons, analyses them, and looks for logical inconsistencies.

Imagine for a moment that I told her that God, a supreme being, has the right to send those who disobey him to eternal torment. Would this be a satisfying answer to a skeptic? In her question, the issue was not only the fate of helpless human beings and apparent unfairness, but the very character of God. What kind of God is it, and would she want to believe in that God? Once again, I knew that I had to tread carefully and give an answer that would be satisfying to a young, skeptical mind. I told her that it is good to wish that everyone would be saved. It is something we should hope for and pray for whenever we can. But we cannot tell God what he should or shouldn’t do, for he is indeed God—and is greater than all our thoughts about Him.

What I found most striking about all these questions is that my children asked them when they were fairly young, before these questions could be appropriately attributed to profound cultural influence. In other words, their questions arose not from the outside culture, but internally, from their own interactions with church and experiences with Christianity. Now, suppose I did not answer these questions, perhaps shut them down, or gave a simplistic answer that they found unsatisfactory. How would my children have thought and felt once they got older and came into direct contact with the raging atheistic culture all around? 

Most parents or Sunday school teachers are not prepared intellectually or emotionally to answer the difficult questions children so naturally ask. Oftentimes, they can’t answer them for themselves, let alone for little schoolchildren or defiant teenagers. As a result, we desperately need popular-level engagement with skepticism, especially the Nietzschean kind, in our churches. Michael McEwen’s new book The Devil Reads Nietzsche is a timely resource for many Christians, who might feel beaten down by the skepticism and even nihilism of our times. 

To engage Nietzsche is no small feat; he is a fierce and powerful opponent whose writing aims to intimidate, demoralize, and even hurt anybody who wishes to stand up to him. Therefore, McEwen deserves due respect for approaching such a formidable adversary. He also, it must be noted, approaches Nietzsche charitably, in good faith, wishing to understand Nietzsche’s line of thought and arguments, rather than operating with flat generalizations or, worse, false pretenses. 

Treating Nietzsche charitably is the only way to approach such a thinker, not only because our faith demands such treatment of human beings or out of pity (Nietzsche’s capacious mind drove him to madness), but, more important, because Nietzsche rebelled against a lifeless cultural Christianity of his time. As Nikolai Berdyaev said, behind any atheistic rebellion against God is the rebellion for a greater vision of God against a low and unworthy view of the Divine. Nietzsche was, first and foremost, a cultural critic, not a metaphysical philosopher. It was Heidegger who first attributed metaphysics to Nietzsche. It is fitting, then, that McEwen reads Nietzsche carefully and points out Nietzsche’s project as the great skeptic himself understood it—that is, dismantling cultural and religious ideologies.

While McEwen offers a charitable reading of Nietzsche, he makes his stance clear: He does so with a full commitment to the truthfulness of the Christian metanarrative. McEwen, in other words, offers a critique of Nietzsche, a necessary pushback to his narrative from the point of view of Scripture, exposing the logical inconsistencies in Nietzschean proposals. 

Building on the work of such giants of contemporary theology as Charles Taylor and John Milbank, McEwen follows the prompting of Christopher Watkin, who calls on contemporary Christians to think critically about the narratives with which secular culture operates, rather than passively absorbing them. This critical posture requires understanding the ideas and ideologies we are exposed to and offering an alternative, thoroughly Biblical narrative in their place. McEwen provides just that: an attempt to understand Nietzsche on his own terms, while pointing out his fallacies, an account of how he has influenced our current culture, and finally a counter-narrative. 

How does he do that? McEwen follows a twofold pattern of argumentation. First, he demonstrates how Nietzsche borrows and parodies Christian ideas, twisting them to suit his purpose—to challenge Christianity. Second, he shows how Biblical narrative already has answers to Nietzsche’s challenges. For example, in his chapter on Imago Dei and human identity, McEwen looks at how Nietzsche addresses the question of what it means to be human.

The classical Christian understanding of human nature combined the Greco-Roman idea of rational (unchangeable) essence with Imago Dei, or Divine image bearers, to formulate a theological anthropology. Nietzsche offers an alternative vision of humans in his Ecce Homo. In this work, he calls for a radical breakaway from the Greco-Christian view of human beings. Human beings, according to Nietzsche, do not have a static essence or unchangeable nature. Rather, they evolve; they become something through their will to power. We do not know ourselves, and the constant becoming means that we change over time. The idea of change and becoming is tied to a particular view of history. Hence, an equally important concept to Nietzsche’s understanding of human beings is the idea of eternal return—a cyclical view of history and human development. While this may sound radically different from classical Christianity, McEwen contends that Nietzsche has retained the idea of eternity and appropriated or re-packaged the Christian concept of sanctification and transformation towards the resurrected body of Christ, but leaving out God. 

McEwen offers an alternative narrative in order to “out-narrate” Nietzsche and show how the Scripture already has a response to his claims. To summarize his response: The New Testament apostolic witness firmly proclaims our future resurrection in the manner of Jesus Christ. In Col. 1:15-18, Paul brings together Christology, our existence, and our identity so that we would know ourselves as Christ’s. In other words, we know who we are when we recognize ourselves as belonging to Christ. The answer to the question of who we are has already been given to us in Christ.

The mode of engagement McEwen suggests and models in his book is a helpful start. It gives Christian readers hope that even Nietzsche is not impervious to a critique; he can even be beaten at his own game. Although McEwen’s retelling of the Biblical narrative is rather short, it points to the depth and breadth of Christian tradition. And yet, his approach left me with a few questions.

First, what if our alternative narrative is not that alternative at all, but the same old narrative that Nietzsche reacts against? Nietzsche knew the Bible and came from a religiously devout home. He was well aware of the central role of Jesus Christ in forming our identity and the historical Christian view of human nature. Retelling the same narrative back to Nietzsche may not produce a different result, since this is precisely what Nietzsche is reacting against. 

How does a Biblical narrative help make sense of the history and human development we, as a civilization, have undergone over the last two hundred years? How does our understanding of our identity in Christ help a skeptical person understand dramatic historical and social changes that a given society, say Communist Russia, had experienced in the last hundred years? Nietzsche was not a theologian, not even a metaphysician, as he understood his own work. He was concerned with human culture, something we build or destroy. Therefore, to counter a Nietzschian skepticism, especially when it is raised against Christianity, we have to extract a vision of human history, human culture, and, crucially, development from a Biblical metanarrative. 

No less significant, what if “out-narrating” is not enough to address the widespread skepticism and nihilism in our world today? What if what’s required is not only an alternative critical theory, but something much more demanding—love for people, bearing their burdens, compassion, and giving of ourselves in love? When dealing with skeptics, even very young ones, a robust intellectual response is critical. But at some point, our actions will speak louder than our words.

McEwen’s book is a much-needed introduction to engaging the intellectual ideas of our time. We need more work like this. Christians can no longer ignore the world of secular ideas. We have entered a new era, where our culture no longer possesses strong Christian intuitions. We will have to learn to live in this culture and engage it anew, drawing from our Christian tradition answers befitting our times.