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"Spencer, who is research director at the Theos think tank for religion and society, wants us to know this intellectual background [to liberalism and other Western values and institutions] and (whether we are atheists, believers, or standing somewhere in the twilight zone) to understand Christianity’s pivotal role in shaping it. The virtues of his tract include its unpolemical tone. It is precisely his being a believer which makes him so eloquent a critic of the Church’s multiple failings, and his wide reading which convinces him that many notionally secular divisions – between Right and Left in the political arena, or between social conservatives and libertarians – have theological roots.

He repeatedly takes aim at assumptions that a secularized providence has led to a liberal, God-free present, and parallel ideas that Christianity and conservatism are natural bedfellows. On the contrary, Spencer establishes that liberalism, far from being incompatible with Christianity, derives from at least one major strand of Christian teaching."

Buy "The Evolution of the West. How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values" (SPCK, 2016) here.

Rupert Shortt | Read the full article at The Times Literary Supplement.

Image from TLS.

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