Christians making their way in the world today are confronted by a dizzying multitude of messages, each with their own baked-in moral assumptions. All humans have equal value. We should care for the poor and marginalized. Sexual activity should always be consensual. People should be kind. Beliefs and policies should be based on evidence-based science. Oppression is wrong; freedom is good. We should work to advance moral progress.
If we had to list the values behind these messages, we might come up with something like this: equality, compassion, consent, kindness, science, freedom, and progress. Others could be added, of course, but it’s a good start.
We would be hard-pressed to find many Western people who oppose the above values. They permeate the moral atmosphere of our culture, or in other words, they are the air we breathe.
The Air We Breathe
Glen Scrivener
There was a time in the 1990’s and 2000’s when it seemed both fashionable and plausible to argue in public that moral judgments were subjective, merely the result of cultural conditioning. But that moment did not last very long.
This big idea is at the core of Glen Scrivener’s 2022 book by the same title. According to Wikipedia, Scrivener is a former professional Canadian football defensive tackle who won the Grey Cup with the BC Lions in 1994. Oh, sorry—wrong Glen. This Glen Scrivener, born and raised in Australia, is an ordained Church of England minister and evangelist who writes, speaks, and produces online media. He directs the evangelistic ministry Speak Life which recently unveiled its online video outreach program called 321.
There was a time in the 1990’s and 2000’s when it seemed both fashionable and plausible to argue in public that moral judgments were subjective, merely the result of cultural conditioning. But that moment did not last very long, and it now seems completely gone in the wake of large geopolitical events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the barbaric terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7.
These events, and the far-too-long list of injustices like them, elicit the strongest moral feelings in Western people. We truly believe in these values, even if we don’t really understand where they come from.
The Air We Breathe is an unusual book in one important regard. Rather than simply making an intellectual argument supported by evidence, this book goes a step further by leveraging the reader’s own moral intuitions. It harnesses the power of those moral instincts, what we feel is right, and uses that elemental energy to get the reader to look behind the curtain at what drives such feelings, and where their roots lie.
Spoiler alert: their roots go back to the Christian Scriptures and what Scrivener describes as the Christian revolution which so fundamentally reshaped the morality of the Western world.
Turning the Tables
There’s an old joke I heard in church circles growing up. It goes like this: It’s the sixth day of creation and God makes man out of the dust of the ground. Satan shows up and says something like, “Oh come on. That’s not very impressive, I could do that just as easily.” God replies, “Okay then, go ahead.” So Satan stoops down and picks up a handful of dust to begin working with, but God says, “Hey now, hold on. Get your own dust.” Cue the laugh track. The point of the punch line of course is that only God can create ex nihilo, out of nothing. Satan can only ever take the good that God has already created and pervert it in a derivative way.
The point of The Air We Breathe is not all that different. Essentially it shows how many of our bedrock moral assumptions and values in the modern West are borrowed directly from Christianity, even while Christian orthodoxy is left behind and derided. This understanding arms the Christian to say to our increasingly post-Christian culture, “Hey now, hold on. Get your own moral foundations.”
In his quote-rich and thought-provoking book, Fool’s Talk, the apologist and cultural critic Os Guinness presents various strategies for persuading others about the truth of Christian message. One of the strategies he outlines is turning the tables, a kind of rhetorical maneuver whereby the interlocutor’s own affirmations are used to point out some inconsistency or some logical conclusion they do not wish to affirm. I don’t know if Scrivener has read Guinness, but he certainly makes use of this strategy in The Air We Breathe. In fact, in some ways the entire book is a macro version of that form of persuasion. Consider this passage from the opening pages:
“We might feel that Christianity is unequal, cruel, coercive, ignorant, anti-science, restrictive or backwards. That is, in fact, a pretty common list of objections to the Christian faith, and, at points, the shoe fits.”
We can picture many secular and de-churched folks nodding emphatically at this. Yes, that’s exactly what Christianity is like. And the next step for many of us would be to argue that Christianity, on the whole, is not any of those things. But Scrivener takes things in a very different direction:
“But I didn’t pick those seven objections at random. I simply reversed the seven core values at the heart of this book. The reason why those seven accusations bite is because, deep down, we believe in the seven values. Our problems with Christianity (and we all have problems with it, especially Christians!) turn out to be Christian problems” (page 14).
That is a clever turn, and to my mind, quite powerful. Scrivener goes on to drive home this big point repeatedly throughout the book: the most common objections to Christianity are themselves the misbegotten children of the Christian revolution.
In other words, the most common criticisms levelled against Christianity are, historically speaking, curiously Christian criticisms which would not arise in ancient Roman, or pagan, or Hindu societies. The criticisms arise because people truly hold these values; but people hold these values only because our society has been so thoroughly Christianized.
Rubbing Our Noses in It
One of the strengths of the book is the primary source material that Scrivener relies on to make his case.
For example, in the first chapter he tries to get the reader to understand the way ancient Romans thought. He quotes directly from figures such as Cicero and Tacitus, though not in a dry academic style. Scrivener has a gift for keeping the tone very conversational. At one point he recounts how, after a Roman Senator was murdered by one of his slaves, all four hundred of his other slaves were crucified along with the guilty one, in accordance with Roman law at the time. He goes on to describe in hair-raising detail the kinds of scenes that were wildly popular at the gladiatorial games, scenes that would be too gruesome and depraved even for the most bloody and sexually explicit of our contemporary shows like Game of Thrones (which, no, I have not seen).
We also learn that when meat became scarce at one point in the first century, the organizers of the gladiatorial games chose to feed prisoners to the beasts rather than lose their animals. Scrivener does not sugarcoat the brutal realities of the Roman world, in fact, he rubs our noses in it.
They, to put it mildly, did not think like we do. The reader cannot help but be shocked at the level of cruelty and disregard for human life. And that intuitive moral reaction is exactly what Scrivener is after, for it proves in a visceral way that we carry deep within us moral assumptions which are alien to the ancient world. And this forces us to ask: where exactly did our moral certainties come from? Certainly not from Rome.
Making Sense of Our World
I happened to be listening to Andrew Wilson’s Remaking The World at the same time that I was reading The Air We Breathe. That was an interesting experience in cross-pollination as the books cover a lot of similar ground.
One day, for example, I listened to a chapter of Remaking the World as I drove home from work. Then as I sat down to read The Air We Breathe with a cup of tea after the kids were in bed, I encountered the very same quote from the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) on the page before me in a strange experience of déja vu; with the very same argument being made, that in fact “these truths” about universal human rights are anything but self-evident. Scrivener puts it memorably: “A survey of human civilisations reveals that the only thing self-evident about human rights is that they are not self-evident” (page 152).
This overlap between the books is not a criticism of them. I found the books to be different in emphasis but in deep harmony with each other and mutually reinforcing. (No surprise then that these authors have teamed up for a new podcast called Post-Christianity?). In our quickly-changing culture, we have a compelling need to make sense of the world around us.
These two books, along with Carl Trueman’s Strange New World, are on my short list of the most readable and accessible guides to our cultural moment, with The Air We Breathe taking top marks for being not only readable but downright difficult to put down.
How are the three books different? Strange New World traces the history of certain ideas relating to identity, selfhood, sexuality, and politics which together explain how we got to where we are today, where a person can claim that he is “a man trapped inside a woman’s body.” Remaking the World looks at a number of geographical, technological, and ideological streams that are traceable to the year 1776 and have combined to produce the modern West. It is broader in scope and frames the big picture. And as this review has discussed, The Air We Breathe focuses in on the moral values that linger powerfully in the West, orphaned from the Christianity which gave birth to them.
If I had the power, I would hand this book to every Christian teenager and every person tempted to buy into the critiques of Christianity (or the church) that are based on the values described above.
Together, these three books represent rich resources for today’s thoughtful Christian to “understand the times” and adopt a posture of faithful confidence rather than fear and anger (1 Chronicles 12:32).
Morals Aren’t Enough
As I put down the book, I had a fresh sense that our Western world is burdened by the fragmented remains of a Christian morality without the soul-freeing grace of the gospel.
Not only that, but when these fragments are isolated from the Source of the moral law, they become absurd and contradictory, like when compassion is used to justify Canada’s dystopian and evil assisted-suicide regime, or when values like equality and progress are used to justify having drag queens spend time with small children, undermining their sense that gender is a category fixed firmly by the creation order.
So if our culture has morals without gospel, it has a new law. And just like the old law, the new law cannot save, cannot set free, and cannot change hearts. The dynamics of the human heart remain the same in such a system, even if the Ten Commandments have been replaced, and thus the West is drowning in unacknowledged sin, guilt, and shame.
And the answer to those problems is the same it has always been: the soul-freeing gospel of Jesus who not only taught us how to live, but died and rose again in our place.
