Civilization, Statism, and Utopia

Review of Joe Boot's The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (part 3 of 10)

What happens when the power of the State fills the vacuum of God? Is the history of the West a ‘Christian’ history? How has humanism indoctrinated the masses? Why is utopian thinking dangerous?

Having reintroduced the value of the Puritan vision and shown the significance of the Law in relation to the Gospel, in chapter 3 Boot moves on to specify what any effective Christian engagement with culture will face: the nihilism of our secular age, where the very concept of ‘civilization’ is fast becoming unravelled in the gleefully ‘post-Christian’ understanding of society.

He points to numerous examples of this, including the outbreak of looting and rioting among younger generations, which Boot sees as indicative of a cultural rootlessness emanating from a sense of historical amnesia of where we have come from as a society (110). Indeed, the postmodern West is, in a sense, the product of a kind of ‘looting’ of inherited values, taking what it wants and discarding what it doesn’t want, all oblivious to the wider consequences.

Christendom and the Politics of “History”