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The Evolution of the West
What has Christianity ever done for us?
A lot more than you might think, as Nick Spencer reveals in this fresh exploration of our cultural origins.
Looking at the big ideas that characterize the West, such as human dignity, the rule of law, human rights, science – and even, paradoxically, atheism and secularism – he traces the varied ways in which many of our present values grew up and flourished in distinctively Christian soil.
Always alert to the tensions and the mess of history, and careful not to overstate the Christian role in shaping our present values, Spencer shows how a better awareness of what we owe to Christianity can help us as we face new cultural challenges.
A lot more than you might think, as Nick Spencer reveals in this fresh exploration of our cultural origins.
Looking at the big ideas that characterize the West, such as human dignity, the rule of law, human rights, science – and even, paradoxically, atheism and secularism – he traces the varied ways in which many of our present values grew up and flourished in distinctively Christian soil.
Always alert to the tensions and the mess of history, and careful not to overstate the Christian role in shaping our present values, Spencer shows how a better awareness of what we owe to Christianity can help us as we face new cultural challenges.
204 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2016
40 people are currently reading
248 people want to read
About the author
Nick Spencer
23 books10 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
British theologian and chairman of Theos, a think tank examining politics from a religious perspective.
British theologian and chairman of Theos, a think tank examining politics from a religious perspective.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 21, 2019
All too often in our contemporary discussion of current events, we ignore our religious past. We in the West tend to overlook the vital ways both positive and negative that Christianity has come to shape who we are as a society.
This book is an attempt to address that oversight. Taking on a variety of aspects of modern culture, this book is a semi-scholarly examination into the ways Christianity has influenced and informed who we are and what we believe in the West. It is not an apologia and the author does his best to show how that influence has been sometimes good, sometimes bad. Each chapter is a stand-alone essay and so you don't necessarily have to read the book front to back but you can pick and choose based on interest.
This book is an attempt to address that oversight. Taking on a variety of aspects of modern culture, this book is a semi-scholarly examination into the ways Christianity has influenced and informed who we are and what we believe in the West. It is not an apologia and the author does his best to show how that influence has been sometimes good, sometimes bad. Each chapter is a stand-alone essay and so you don't necessarily have to read the book front to back but you can pick and choose based on interest.
March 8, 2018
I had been looking forward to reading the book for some time. It connects the strands of humanism and Christianity in a way that I wanted to confirm or debunk. For me, this book confirms those connections, and goes further, confirming the foundation both for much of the West’s liberal, humanitarian policies and concrete actions through welfare and economics.
It is a short book, so speaks more to the author’s beliefs than to a complete analysis. Based heavily on Larry Siedentop’s work and the development of individualism in the west, the book weaves the various stands of that development into the over-all social/political/economic evolution of the west.
I found the analysis of the differing influences of Christian denominations that spring from their differences in believes, particularly interesting.
It is a strong, quick read, that help understand western societies.
It is a short book, so speaks more to the author’s beliefs than to a complete analysis. Based heavily on Larry Siedentop’s work and the development of individualism in the west, the book weaves the various stands of that development into the over-all social/political/economic evolution of the west.
I found the analysis of the differing influences of Christian denominations that spring from their differences in believes, particularly interesting.
It is a strong, quick read, that help understand western societies.
May 4, 2018
It has been almost half a century since Richard Nixon delared, "We are all Keynesians now". Events of the past decade, such as strident opposition to Obama stimulus programs in the wake of the economic collapse of 2008 and last year's tax cuts during a period of sustained economic growth, strongly suggest that Nixon was wrong or, at least no longer correct. Nixon was trying to end a decades long debate between Keynesians and classical Economists on the basic tenets of economics. Economists have kept a low profile since their collective failure to predict the aforementioned economic collapse, so I am uncertain of their current thoughts on Nixon's delaration, however I feel more certain that the general populace, now and then, have no idea what Nixon was talking about. Nick Spencer could relate. In this book Spencer is declaring, "Most of us are humanists now". He is trying to declare a truce in the decades long debate between Christians and secular humanists as to the source of morality and the purpose of life. He calls himself a Christian humanist and wants his fellow humanists of the secular variety to reflect upon the Christian origins of the human rights on which they base their ethics and world view. His ideas are thought provoking.
June 25, 2017
Each chapter is a great basis for thinking around these issues. A brilliant little book bringing the Christian influences through the sweep of western history together. In the places where I wasn't sure I agreed it gave me the impetus to think around the subject and challenged me to justify or alter my views. Excellent.
December 21, 2016
The idea that America is a Christian nation has a long, contested history. Believers can find evidence that confirms the thesis and unbelievers evidence that disconfirms it. The reality, in other words, is complex, and therefore our history writing should be nuanced.
I had America’s history in mind as I read Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West, which looks at how Christianity shaped the values of Western Europe and especially the United Kingdom in the course of its long history in those lands. Spencer opens the book with a nod toward New Atheists’ denial that Christianity formed the modern world in any meaningful sense but negation. In other words, modernity is the rejection of religion’s influence, not its effect. He then concedes that, going in the opposite direction, some Christians are prone to a simplistic affirmation of Christianity’s formative influence. “There is no end of cheap proof-texting that can show how the West owes everything to Christianity—or rather everything it currently holds dear.”
Spencer’s argument is that Christianity’s influence is real (against the New Atheists) but complex (against the proof-texting proponents of a Christian West). Using a theatrical metaphor, he writes: “Christianity has played a leading role in this show—indeed it has played the lead for much of the last 1,500 years—but the play has been no mere soliloquy, and the lead has had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the overall plotline.” The book’s twelve successive chapters then take up the complex story of Christianity’s influence over a variety of topics.
Rather than summarize the contents of each of the book’s chapters, let me highlight one chapter as an example of Spencer’s method throughout. Chapter 3 examines the influence of Christianity on the Magna Carta, which celebrated its eight-hundredth anniversary in 2014. Spencer highlights three principles embodied in the charter’s legal mandates: “due process,” “the arbitration of the king’s affairs,” and “the extension of liberties and rights…to those who did not occupy the top strata of English society.” He shows that, in each case, Christianity influenced the development of these practices “in the realm of ideas, of theology.”
“Magna Carta,” he writes, “was written after, and drew on, a century of ongoing development of (a theologically reflective and coherent) canon law. This was a great renewal and systematization of theological and legal thought (best embodied by a book by Gratian entitled Decretum, otherwise known as the Concordance of Discordant Canons). It provided intellectual foundations for key aspects of Magna Carta,” specifically, the three principles mentioned above.
Moreover, there were practical ways in which what Spencer calls “the fact of the Church” shaped the charter’s limitation of the king’s power. He writes, “Magna Carta and the legal culture in which it grew were profoundly shaped by the Church; not just by Christian beliefs but by an institution that was shaped (in theory) by those beliefs and protected itself fiercely from outward interference with them and it.” (The charter’s first clause states, “the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.”)
As I understand him, what Spencer is arguing is that the combination of the Church’s beliefs and its institutional freedom both inspired voluntary obedience to moral norms and put boundaries around the growth of the State. The latter curbed the expansion of state power through positive law, while the former produced a citizenry capable of acting justly without a need for detailed legislation. What worries him (and frankly me) seems to be whether the State can be limited in the absence of Christian belief and the Church as a strong institution.
“In the absence of those deep cultural norms,” Spencer writes, “those religious and social conventions, which were historically embedded in institutions, there is a temptation to turn to the law to settle all disputes. And if that law is somehow seen as extra-political”—that is, outside the scope of democratic adjudication—“…then not only is society weakened but so, ultimately, is democracy.”
Obviously, the emergence of this kind of Western political norm—i.e., the limitation of law—is not a simple or straightforward affair. It is, to use Spencer’s biological metaphor, an “evolution.” We think of evolution as a process of “unrepeatable randomness.” As Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote, “If you could rewind the tape of life, erasing what actually happened and let it run again, you’d get a different [result] each time.” In that understanding of evolution, the conjunction of Christianity and Western political norms is an accident of history.
There’s a different way to think of evolution, however, one that is less accidental and more teleological. It draws on paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris’ concept of “convergence,” which is “the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same ‘solution’ to a particular need.” Spencer comments, “For all the randomness involved in the process, there are certain inherent invisible conditions and constraints and contours that shape it towards ends that, if not predictable, are certainly probable.” In other words, re-running Gould’s “tape of Western history, erasing what actually happened and letting it run again, we might, assuming the same deep Christian conditions and commitments, end up with a set of values that, while superficially different, bore a striking resemblance to those we recognize today.”
If that is the case, then Christianity’s influence on concepts and practices such as human dignity, rule of law, welfare, humanism, capitalism, science, human rights, nationhood, ethics, democracy, and even atheism and secularism represents the outworking of a deep cultural logic, not a happenstance of history. It’s not a straight-line development, as some Western Christians might want it, but it’s not the New Atheists’ nothing either.
And perhaps that is a model for how American Christians might think about the influence of their religion on their own nation. At least that’s the thought The Evolution of the West caused this American Christian to think.
_____
P.S. If you found my review helpful, please vote “yes” on my Amazon.com review page.
Nick Spencer, The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values (London: SPCK, 2016).
I had America’s history in mind as I read Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West, which looks at how Christianity shaped the values of Western Europe and especially the United Kingdom in the course of its long history in those lands. Spencer opens the book with a nod toward New Atheists’ denial that Christianity formed the modern world in any meaningful sense but negation. In other words, modernity is the rejection of religion’s influence, not its effect. He then concedes that, going in the opposite direction, some Christians are prone to a simplistic affirmation of Christianity’s formative influence. “There is no end of cheap proof-texting that can show how the West owes everything to Christianity—or rather everything it currently holds dear.”
Spencer’s argument is that Christianity’s influence is real (against the New Atheists) but complex (against the proof-texting proponents of a Christian West). Using a theatrical metaphor, he writes: “Christianity has played a leading role in this show—indeed it has played the lead for much of the last 1,500 years—but the play has been no mere soliloquy, and the lead has had a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the overall plotline.” The book’s twelve successive chapters then take up the complex story of Christianity’s influence over a variety of topics.
Rather than summarize the contents of each of the book’s chapters, let me highlight one chapter as an example of Spencer’s method throughout. Chapter 3 examines the influence of Christianity on the Magna Carta, which celebrated its eight-hundredth anniversary in 2014. Spencer highlights three principles embodied in the charter’s legal mandates: “due process,” “the arbitration of the king’s affairs,” and “the extension of liberties and rights…to those who did not occupy the top strata of English society.” He shows that, in each case, Christianity influenced the development of these practices “in the realm of ideas, of theology.”
“Magna Carta,” he writes, “was written after, and drew on, a century of ongoing development of (a theologically reflective and coherent) canon law. This was a great renewal and systematization of theological and legal thought (best embodied by a book by Gratian entitled Decretum, otherwise known as the Concordance of Discordant Canons). It provided intellectual foundations for key aspects of Magna Carta,” specifically, the three principles mentioned above.
Moreover, there were practical ways in which what Spencer calls “the fact of the Church” shaped the charter’s limitation of the king’s power. He writes, “Magna Carta and the legal culture in which it grew were profoundly shaped by the Church; not just by Christian beliefs but by an institution that was shaped (in theory) by those beliefs and protected itself fiercely from outward interference with them and it.” (The charter’s first clause states, “the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.”)
As I understand him, what Spencer is arguing is that the combination of the Church’s beliefs and its institutional freedom both inspired voluntary obedience to moral norms and put boundaries around the growth of the State. The latter curbed the expansion of state power through positive law, while the former produced a citizenry capable of acting justly without a need for detailed legislation. What worries him (and frankly me) seems to be whether the State can be limited in the absence of Christian belief and the Church as a strong institution.
“In the absence of those deep cultural norms,” Spencer writes, “those religious and social conventions, which were historically embedded in institutions, there is a temptation to turn to the law to settle all disputes. And if that law is somehow seen as extra-political”—that is, outside the scope of democratic adjudication—“…then not only is society weakened but so, ultimately, is democracy.”
Obviously, the emergence of this kind of Western political norm—i.e., the limitation of law—is not a simple or straightforward affair. It is, to use Spencer’s biological metaphor, an “evolution.” We think of evolution as a process of “unrepeatable randomness.” As Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote, “If you could rewind the tape of life, erasing what actually happened and let it run again, you’d get a different [result] each time.” In that understanding of evolution, the conjunction of Christianity and Western political norms is an accident of history.
There’s a different way to think of evolution, however, one that is less accidental and more teleological. It draws on paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris’ concept of “convergence,” which is “the recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same ‘solution’ to a particular need.” Spencer comments, “For all the randomness involved in the process, there are certain inherent invisible conditions and constraints and contours that shape it towards ends that, if not predictable, are certainly probable.” In other words, re-running Gould’s “tape of Western history, erasing what actually happened and letting it run again, we might, assuming the same deep Christian conditions and commitments, end up with a set of values that, while superficially different, bore a striking resemblance to those we recognize today.”
If that is the case, then Christianity’s influence on concepts and practices such as human dignity, rule of law, welfare, humanism, capitalism, science, human rights, nationhood, ethics, democracy, and even atheism and secularism represents the outworking of a deep cultural logic, not a happenstance of history. It’s not a straight-line development, as some Western Christians might want it, but it’s not the New Atheists’ nothing either.
And perhaps that is a model for how American Christians might think about the influence of their religion on their own nation. At least that’s the thought The Evolution of the West caused this American Christian to think.
_____
P.S. If you found my review helpful, please vote “yes” on my Amazon.com review page.
Nick Spencer, The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values (London: SPCK, 2016).
March 20, 2022
Nick Spencer has a collection of essays that threads the fine line between the twin errors of making Christianity either wholly responsible or wholly absent from the formation of the 'West'. (Note the 'West' is not always a helpful marker but there you go). Nick presents a balanced perspective on things with my only drawback being that some British history is boring (King X talked to pope Y at conference Z, blah blah) but that's not Nick's fault, though he could maybe have made those sections slightly clearer as I kept forgetting who was who.
Helpful as a summary/signpost to further reading on each subject as Nick tends to rely on one key thinker in each section (e.g. Larry Siedentop on the individual, Charles Taylor on secularisation, etc.), think I will refer back to.
Want to know the involvement (for good or bad) of Christianity on Science, the individual, human rights, evolution, etc.? Then I would recommend this as a starting point (or maybe a finishing point if you're me and you might never actually get round to reading 'A Secular Age').
Helpful as a summary/signpost to further reading on each subject as Nick tends to rely on one key thinker in each section (e.g. Larry Siedentop on the individual, Charles Taylor on secularisation, etc.), think I will refer back to.
Want to know the involvement (for good or bad) of Christianity on Science, the individual, human rights, evolution, etc.? Then I would recommend this as a starting point (or maybe a finishing point if you're me and you might never actually get round to reading 'A Secular Age').
October 9, 2023
A superb exploration of the many, often overlooked, ways that our culture and its values have been profoundly shaped by Christianity, for good or ill. Clear-eyed in seeing the complexities and ambiguities, it also debunks some of our modern myths, and questions how long the superstructure can last once the foundations are weakened or even removed.
December 24, 2017
I really enjoyed this book - a lot of great essays on all the topics listed on the cover. I was hoping for more of a single narrative - but enjoyed the essays.
October 27, 2018
Sometimes the theological terms & the dense subject matter made my eyes glaze over. I tended to read at bedtime— not that the best time to read a deep book.
January 18, 2020
It had some interesting chapters on how Christianity influenced politics in Western countries (US, Europe, UK). I liked chapter 11 on Piketty's book.
July 31, 2025
lost interest and couldn't finish it
March 16, 2017
Nick Spencer's book is not a Christian apologia, any reader coming to the book for a defense of Christianity will be disappointed, but an intellectual history of the manner in which the ideology(ies) of Christianity overlap with the contemporary values of Western Civilization or the tattered remnants of this on the European peninsula.
Though not a difficult book it is slow moving and abstract.
The Evolution of the West is a very good book, even with the above caveats, and worth reading for anyone seeking to explain the origins of the West's values and those looking for the source material of Western ethics.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Though not a difficult book it is slow moving and abstract.
The Evolution of the West is a very good book, even with the above caveats, and worth reading for anyone seeking to explain the origins of the West's values and those looking for the source material of Western ethics.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
March 15, 2017
obvious with more than a hint of naivete, unduly uncynical and somewhat undercooked
not bad
not bad
February 11, 2017
The book gives a view of the contribution of Christianity to western development. The arguments make a good case for much of the evolution of western government toward welfare states being strongly influenced by Christianity as it has evolved in parallel. This is not subject matter in which I am strongly informed, so I cannot judge the likely accuracy of the suggested influences. It is nevertheless a good book for stimulating thinking on important questions of the day on health care policy, housing, etc.
October 25, 2016
This is a fantastic collection of essays tracing the development of important political and cultural characteristics of the West from their origins in Christian thought. The analysis is always balanced, fair, and sophisticated; avoiding the triumphalism and easy equivocations of other such works, yet nevertheless doing justice to the contribution Christianity has made to western culture. Particularly fascinating are the little known correlations between types of state welfare provision and different Protestant doctrines about the relationship between Church and state, and the chapter on Christianity and human rights. All told, a thorough, compelling, well-written and timely read.
April 4, 2017
11/20
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews