What To Do About the Decline of the West

Review of Joe Boot's The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society (part 1 of 10)

As western morality continues to crumble, is it high time for “the Puritan Option”?

This is an important book for our time. I first came across it in my first year as a lecturer at Cliff College, where I was running the MA Mission programme. Strangely enough, this was the programme on which the author, Joe Boot, had himself studied several years earlier. It sounded as if he’d caused quite a stir whilst he was there. Perhaps this is why the then-principal, when handing me the book which Boot had sent him, said he thought I might get on better with it than he would!

Weighing in at over 600 pages with numerous endnotes and appendices, it seems to be the kind of book you probably need a good reason to read. For many years it sat there on my shelf always “intending” to be read, but on the occasional moments I picked it off the shelf and glanced through the contents, the sheer range and scale of topics and sub-topics seemed bewildering. I’m not beyond an eclectic range of subjects within my own publications, by any means (see the contents page of my own Theology of Preaching and Dialectic, for example…), but Boot’s Mission of God takes this to another level! It is unsurprising that familiar phrases like ‘magnum opus’ and ‘tour de force’ feature frequently among the book’s numerous commendations. It’s a book that covers a lot of ground, but not without significant nuance too.

It was not only the range of topics that initially dissuaded me from wading further in when I flicked through it nearly a decade ago. It was also what seemed to be an unrealistic – perhaps even “distractive” – area of focus. Boot seemed to be talking about things which seemed far beyond what a “front line” approach to mission ought to take in the 21st century. It seemed like the kind of idealistic thinking for which we simply did not have time. Much of this is because I had not yet fully seen the full depth of the implications of secularism writ large and its ongoing effects on the Church’s ability to challenge them. It’s not that I and other evangelicals had not seen the problems of secularism and cultural decay a decade ago, it’s that we had failed to see that the retreatist attitude in most evangelical churches towards socio-political issues were a large part of the problem. We may have argued with atheists; we may have pointed to immorality; but in many ways we were more affected by secularism than we had realised.

Socio-political avoidance (or, “quietism”) has long been held as a prudent strategy to maximise focus upon evangelism and the Church. It has not only been largely unsuccessful in the west when compared to previous eras of evangelical fruitfulness, but it has also led directly to the erosion of the average Christian’s Biblical convictions on many of the key moral and doctrinal issues on which we have lost so much ground in recent decades. At just the point at which the Church ought to have been going on the offensive as salt and light in our society, we have retreated to our pietistic corner, ceding the ground to the world and patting ourselves on the back that we are not becoming “too embroiled in politics”.

It is thus not all that surprising that Joe Boot’s work would come into my eyeline more prominently in light of my own shift in thinking on these issues over the last decade or so, finally culminating in the “offensive” tweet against the invasion of homosexuality into the Church, a tweet that got me infamously fired from an evangelical Bible college in March 2023. I reviewed Joe’s more recent (and much shorter!) book on a related but more specifically focussed topic (Ruler of Kings: Toward a Christian Vision of Government) for the American Reformer later that year. Given the significance of the moment we are in as a Church, it seemed the appropriate time to also grapple with the behemoth of Mission of God.

The Structure of the Review

Given the aforementioned breadth of topics across its fifteen chapters, I have structured this review into several sections in which I will collate the key themes from small clusters of chapters. It will read as something of an unusually long review essay as I engage with the ideas along the way, with some critiques collated towards the end. There are, of course, ways to review books like this in a ‘tour de force’ style manner too. But given the significance of its themes for our time, the relative unfamiliarity of many themes to the modern evangelical imagination, and the nuance with which these themes are discussed within the book’s strong proclamatory thesis, I felt it necessary to go into greater detail to discuss the chapters more comprehensively.

I will thus spread this über-review over ten separate posts over the next few weeks. In many respects my own reflections on these themes will be interspersed with my review of Boot’s treatment of them so to some they may seem like mini essays themselves. During some moments there may be slightly more academic engagement than most of my writing here. This is inevitable given the subject matter. But hopefully such moments of engagement will not be impenetrable to the non-academic reader, not least one who understands the importance of the issues at stake.

This means it will end up running to well over 10% of the length of the book itself! But hopefully this unusually closer look, with plenty of quotation, will give a sense of the book’s argument and general “spirit” without discouraging anyone from reading it for themselves. As noted above, this is indeed a very important book for our time and ought to be wrestled with by far more people. These are themes which the times require that we wrestle and books like this should not sit on the shelf waiting for a rainy day. As should become apparent for anyone with eyes open, it has already been raining for some time! Indeed, this is where Boot begins, with an introductory diagnosis of the decline of western culture.

The Decline of Western Society

Boot rightly opens out his manifesto with a sharp analysis of the roots of an ‘epochal turning point’ (21) in western society, pointing to

the growing threat to religious liberty, the rule of law, the freedom of the church, and survival of family (and hence western civilization as we have known it)…engendered by a growing statist vision of society, increasingly committed to a neo-pagan ideology that is now permeating every aspect of the Western social order. (21)

When Boot was first writing this book over a decade ago, many evangelicals may have scoffed at such an evaluation as hyperbolic doomsaying. This was, remember, before concepts like ‘Woke’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ had entered common parlance in media debates. It was before most people had ever heard of Jordan Peterson, and before the phenomena of President Trump, Brexit, Covid, and the death of George Floyd. As many have since observed, such events revealed and catalysed cracked foundations and faulty responses within and beyond the Church.

This is one of the especially impressive aspects of the book, that some of Boot’s analysis of the situation now sounds almost ‘standard’ among many evangelicals today due to the widening of the Overton Window on how such issues are spoken about, even as the problems commented upon continue to accelerate. As Boot noted then: ‘even the secular world is slowly beginning to realize that the decline of Christianity in the West and the virtues of the law of God are leading us to an inevitable social collapse and cultural death.’ (45).

Once again, Boot is writing this a number of years before the recent shift on the centre-right to speak about the value of Christian influence in the West far more positively, including the likes of Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, and even Richard Dawkins! Christianity, of course, is not merely a bulwark to use against less desirable alternatives, so we should also be cautious about some of this optimism. What is clear is that the catalyst has been the realisation that the decay of the West correlates more or less directly with the decline of Christian influence in the West.

One of the key aims for the book is to combine an analysis of this cultural decline with a more compelling vision which emerges by calling us to ‘draw on ancient cisterns for fresh water’ (22). There is thus not merely a cogent analysis of the problem but a ‘prophetic urgency’ for the Church to speak and act with hopeful confidence in ‘an increasingly de-Christianized public square where people are becoming either ignorant of, or hostile toward, the worldview of the Bible’ (30). This is the strange paradox of the situation, that even as more people than ever within western culture are realising the need for Christianity, western culture continues to de-Christianise faster than ever.

To offer the kind of compelling vision which does not merely lament the situation, but seeks rebuild the lost foundations, Boot argues that we must return to the Puritans. This might invoke the usual caricatures C.S. Lewis spoke of, in which the word ‘Puritanical’ has become a modern synonym for rigid and sanctimonious pharisees who merely wish to regulate behaviour and limit everyone’s fun! Boot challenges such caricatures, highlighting the phenomenal socio-cultural impact of the Puritans, and also introducing the reader to those who have sought to recover something approximating their wholehearted vision for a theologically rooted social transformation today.

Yet it is not merely these ideas about Puritan gargoyles which deter such a vision today. It is also ‘the retreat of conservative evangelicals into various theological and cultural ghettoes’ (32) where many refuse to apply Scripture concretely beyond the ethereal matters which affect an individual’s salvation and/or the operations of the Church. This has left a gaping void in public Christian witness, one which – enacted and/or inspired by the Puritans – once stood at the forefront of evangelical mission.

What would such a return to a full-orbed new Puritanism look like? Those most suspicious of such an endeavour often invoke the cautions against forcing Christianity upon the populace, akin to Islamism. They summon the ghosts of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, or the intra-ecclesiastical persecutions which characterised England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as evidence that any such return to a robust Christian approach to cultural transformation is doomed to failure or unfaithfulness. To the contrary, Boot argues: ‘A Puritan missiology thus seeks to win and not whip people into the faith, pursuing true freedom under God.’ (35). Indeed, as he argues consistently throughout the book, it is in large part the Puritan legacy which – contrary to common assumptions – undergirds much of the historical freedom and toleration in modern west.

Essentially, it would seem that – to borrow terminology within the field of Christian cultural analysis – Boot is arguing for ‘The Puritan Option’. But this is not an advocation for a return to seventeenth century England any more than Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option advocates a return to sixth century Europe. As with Dreher’s invocation of the Benedictine way in light of the Fall of Rome, Boot is advocating for a return to the full-orbed approach to Christian discipleship and life that drove the Puritans not merely to withdraw from the world but to be salt and light within it. But at root, as his early chapters show, this is not a mere return to a particular ‘tradition’. It is nothing more than a consistent application of the Gospel, including an application of the Law in the midst of the Gospel.