Why the rest hates the West | Meic Pearse (ISBN: 281056013)

As others see us

WHY THE REST HATES THE WEST
By Meic Pearse
SPCK. 192 pages.
ISBN 0 281 05601 3

A few years ago I was one of two evangelicals at a conference where one of the speakers was an Australian 'ecofeminist' Catholic, and a leading Muslim Imam from a Muslim college in Britain.

The audience were mainly traditional Catholics. Most of them were appalled at the ecofeminist, but delighted by the Imam. This is because he made an unapologetic defence of old-fashioned family values, of the very kind that had been denounced by the ecofeminist speaker, despite her notional Catholicism.

As one of the evangelicals present, I found myself rather agreeing, on those issues, with the Imam. The family is the basic unit of society, and it ought to be defended. On that, he was right, and so were the traditional Catholics in the audience.

However, my reasons for supporting the family - the clear teaching of Scripture - was, I suspect, different from both that of the Imam and of the traditional Catholics. We were coming to the same conclusion, but via very distinctive routes.

Does it matter?

The question that we need to ask ourselves as evangelicals, in surveying the moral wreckage of post-modern Western society, is 'Does this matter?' I suspect that the author of the book under review and I would share a common sense of despair at our society, but would have radically different solutions to what is in fact a spiritual rather than a moral problem.

For who could deny that there is a very serious moral problem, one that is particularly acute in the increasingly secular, post-Christian Western Europe, of which Britain is an all too typical part? (One cavil here - the author talks incessantly about 'the West', but hardly ever refers to the USA, a country which, whatever its blemishes, has within it a considerably higher proportion of active evangelical Christians than anywhere in Europe, Britain fully included). There is a profound sense of alienation and moral decay, amply demonstrated in this book, that appals anyone with traditional moral values, whether old-fashioned tribal societies in the Third World, or the severe and strict lands of Islam. People in non-Western societies are right to be shocked.

Earnest?

But is a gathering together of people of all faiths or none in defence of moral virtue the answer, as Meic Pearse suggests? To me, his chapter called 'On the importance of being earnest' encapsulates what is wrong about this otherwise well-intentioned and passionately-argued book. Not only does he completely misunderstand the Reformers' doctrine of salvation by faith alone and its consequences, he also contends that 'our circumstance (in today's West) is one that the Gospel writers - indeed any pre-modern source - did not entirely envisage'. Apart from the fact that those very Gospel writers lived in the decadent days of the Roman Empire, a society every bit as immoral as our own, you surely cannot really ever say, from an evangelical perspective, that the Gospel writers got it wrong. Scripture is God-inspired, and culturally relevant to all peoples of all times, Roman as well as our own.

Surely, what is wrong with 'the West' is that most of its inhabitants have rejected Jesus as Saviour and Lord. In the traditional 'pre-modern' world - this is a book filled with sociological terms that many readers will find hard to follow, including Oxbridge educated historians - genuine Christianity, by contrast, is expanding at a phenomenal rate. But as our brothers and sisters in Nigeria, and similar places, are finding, the traditional society, whether Muslim or pagan, far from welcoming them is often persecuting Christians, and sometimes as far as creating a whole new generation of martyrs.

Not part of the West?

In my book Whose Side is God On? (recently reviewed in EN), I argued that Christians should, in a real sense, not see themselves as part of the West at all. Our loyalty and citizenship is ultimately in Christ, not in any human country. Great though it would be to see a return to moral certainties in 'the West', that really is not going to happen without a major work of the Holy Spirit in conversion, of a kind we have probably not seen since Wesley and Whitefield in the 18th century. The non-Western world may have legitimate reasons for not liking the increasing scope of Western power, but, spiritually speaking, a family loving, morally traditional Third World Muslim villager is as much in need of salvation as a dope smoking promiscuous Western investment banker. For all have fallen short, wherever we come from, and Jesus Christ remains the only answer.

Christopher Catherwood is a theologically conservative Calvinistic Baptist on the PCC of the evangelical Anglican church, the Round at St. Andrew the Great, in Cambridge. He teaches history for several institutions in Cambridge, and in Richmond, Virginia. His latest books are Christians, Muslims and Islamic Rage (Zondervan) and The Balkans in World War Two (Palgrave).