'Cook's tour' of Christian History is Fun but Unsophisticated

This bold and original book tries to argue that the seventy per cent or so of people in this country who claim to be Christian really are Christian, even though they seldom, if ever, go to church. In this, Smith suggests, modern Christianity is little different from medieval Christendom where few people attended mass and where most people had little grasp of the dogmas of the official religion. In distinction to the Puritanism of the Victorian period which was rather more of an aberration than the norm, what is happening now is a return to the normal state of Christianity. Indeed, Smith claims, secularism is not anti-Christian, but instead is the latest form of ‘inculturation’ of Christianity. Just as Christianity had to adapt when it entered different cultures in its early expansion, so it is having to adjust to modern science and technology.

Nevertheless, even though supernatural explanations of the world have long since been displaced, the religion of the passive believers of the present day can still properly be called ‘Christian ethics shorn of doctrine’. This means that ‘western society is technologically scientific but ethically it remains Christian’. Smith takes the reader on a Cook’s tour of Christian history and modern thought which is racy, occasionally quite fun and certainly provocative, but which is so unsophisticated, unnuanced, and dependent on a handful of questionable secondary sources that his overall argument is little more than unjustified assertion. A proper and detailed examination of the Christian roots of secular liberalism would require something quite different from this book. While many might sympathise with Smith’s clamour for an undogmatic and inclusive form of Christianity, few are likely to be persuaded by what seems to me to be little more than wishful-thinking and implausible historical analysis.

Revd Mark Chapman is Vice-Principal of Ripon College Cuddesdon, and curate at All Saints’ Church, Cuddesdon.