Andrew Wilson is based in Eastbourne and serves as the Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London.
Andrew will be familiar to many from his books, including The God of All Things and 1 Corinthians for Today, the Think Theology website, and his regular columns in US magazine, Christianity Today. Our Reviews Editor John Woods was pleased to have the opportunity to chat with Andrew about his latest book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, which is now hot off the press from Crossway.
en: What gave you the idea for this book?
AW: All my best ideas about books come when I am on holiday in France. I was reading a book that said that the steam engine was invented in the same year as The Wealth of Nations was written, which was also the year of the American Revolution.
I thought, wow, that is three seismic events in one year. I began to look things up and began to see other things, like the publication of Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire happened in that year. I realised that this was a momentous year and wondered if I could do something on that. At this stage I didn’t have a way into the subject, but then I read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and saw the WEIRD acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic; to which I added Ex-Christian and Romantic thus expanding the acronym to WEIRDER), and realised that this might be my way in. If one was going to tell the story of the modern West, that might be a way of trying to tell it.
en: When I mention your book to American friends and tell them the title there is an instant nod of recognition, Brits not so much. Could it have been 1789? Is there a gestation period for ideas and events?
AW: I think it is a better window in than other years. 1789 is the other big year when, with 1776, you see history through a political lens. Yet I want to say that these are not the most important developments. Ideas do gestate over centuries, so of course there is a sense in which the choice of this year is arbitrary. I was seeking to do something like Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in One Hundred Objects. He told the history of the world through the lens of those objects; I have sought to do so through this one significant year.
en: How did you go about your research? What guided your choices?
AW: I started with what I thought were key events in the year; the stories that needed to be told. I was always going to do something about America, something about Paris and the Enlightenment, and something about the Industrial Revolution.
I also thought I should do something about economics; and that was the chapter that changed the most. I thought I was going to do the story of Adam Smith, but it didn’t turn out like that. I wanted something that would tell the story of what we would now call globalisation. I felt that the James Cook story fitted well there. The WEIRDER acronym begins with a W; I started there. It meant that I had to do a deep dive on Cook’s voyage and the history that came with it and the development of the West.
en: What are the main things that surprised you in your research?
AW: That is a good question. The chapter that changed the most was the one on enrichment. I was surprised by the answer to my question ‘Why did the Western world get so rich?’. I thought it had something to do with Adam Smith and economic theory, but Smith does not seem to be aware of the consequences of his ideas as he was writing. The great discovery for me was the character of Johann Georg Hamann (1730 –1788). I found him a compelling figure, intellectually arresting, funny, and obviously a genius in any meaningful sense of that word, but thoroughly evangelical. I was surprised how much I liked him and laughed with him. Here was an obscure 18th-century German philosopher whose brilliance was admired by his contemporaries; this was the gold that I found that I was not looking for.
en: Why do you think there is a tendency toward historical amnesia in our churches?
AW: Technology is one aspect of this as we switch between one thing and another. Forgetfulness seems to be wired into the way we live our lives; replaceable technology, instant news. Our severance from the generations is a significant part of that. Children interact with their grandparents as child carers, but do not live in a storied inter-generational household like many generations in the past. In some cultures it is obvious that older people may know more than younger people, and that wisdom is better than ideas.
en: Christian engagement in historical and cultural analysis can be helpful if done well. What are the potential pitfalls of such an approach?
AW: The pitfall of any narrative history is that there is some kind of cash value in the eyes of the author. People are not generally just researching for their own interest. There has got to be some payoff. The danger is that, when history is done with an end too vividly in mind, we can begin to chop the shoe to fit. It can be at its worst in our generation when it is deeply politicised. There can be an attempt to control the historical narrative, which decides the answer beforehand and then writes to get to that answer. For Christians to reflect on history we need to avoid massive cynicism, which says that the church has always got this wrong, or the triumphalist narrative of evangelical activism and fidelity, which has plenty of stars in the period I am studying, but plenty of failures as well. No one is going to be completely objective, but I think we can attempt to be fair. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
en: The response chapters read like you are actually responding to what you have written. Is that the order in which they were written?
AW: Yes, it is. Partly because I wrote in a chronological order working through the WEIRDER format. Then I began to ask: What is the church’s response? The humble answer would be that I didn’t know what those chapters were going to be. The honest answer is that I presented a version of this to the council of the Gospel Coalition in March 2022. This was the scariest audience I have ever presented to, with Don Carson sitting on the front row! John Piper said: ‘At this point, you obviously have not written the final two chapters. What are you going to say?’ At that stage I was not sure. I think it has made the book better, but I am not sure that this was why I did it.
en: If pressed, who or what would you say was the most important person or event in 1776?
AW: I probably think that the most comprehensively important person, whose work and relationships were the most important in relationship in different fields, was David Hume. I feel that he is very significant in the Enlightenment, very significant in the telling of history, very significant in his relationships with economic theory linked to Adam Smith, his connection to Baron d’Holbach’s Salon in Paris. Hume is significant in the move toward post-Christianity. If Hume had not made the case that you need to believe things, using faith, there would not have been a move to the Counter-Enlightenment. He is more a man of sentiment and experience than of simple reason. Without Hume you have no Kant. Hume is most connected to most of the developments.
en: If you could time travel back to 1776, what message might we say to Christians?
AW: The mistakes that Christians make in most periods are the opposite mistakes of over-adapting to the cultural moment you are in, and overreacting to it. A lot of the worst things that have happened in history are overreactions to something bad. These are some of the trends that you are going to face in the next two or three decades. The obvious thing we would have to say would be about slavery: ‘What on earth are you doing?’
en: ‘This is the most fun I have ever had writing a book.’ A 25-year-old unknown Andrew Wilson probably would not have landed a contract for writing a book like this. Is this vanity project or is this the book you were made to write?
AW: It is hard to know. I don’t think I would have had the research or the background at 25. I agree that when people have already written books, they are given licence to take more risks. Sometimes those risks come off and sometimes they don’t. When publishing with established publishers, ultimately that is not my problem.
I cannot say at this stage that this is the book I was meant to write. I might look back and think that’s one of the handful of things that I knew I could do and not many other people could have done. Often I am writing books that popularise things that other people have said in language that our generation can understand. In 20 years’ time we will need new versions. Whereas with this book I think I am saying something here that others have done in the same way. I think it is a really good story; I hope that people will enjoy it as a narrative.
en: You conclude the book with two sections on Christian responses; how can we make best use of those chapters?
AW: For those who have not read them, grace, freedom and truth are the three words I use to describe what the church in 1776 did and how we might respond. This week I have to write three messages for a youth conference. I am aiming to speak about grace and truth with an apologetic mindset informed by writing this book. It is important to be aware of how these things are particularly craved as touchpoints, those things that don’t give way. People talk about post-truth, and we certainly live in a society that is powered by works. So the Christian views of grace and truth are important, and even the Christian vision of freedom, which you would think is taken for granted in our culture, still needs to be seen as not merely freedom from external oppression but from internal oppression. I personally find it valuable for preaching, evangelism and discipleship.
When you engage with relatives and neighbours who are not believers, you realise that there is a lot about this project that can help unbelievers see why they think as they do, and why the uniquely Christian approach in Western thought, as puzzling as it ever was, is actually reaching the deep needs they have, even if they have not processed them. I would like readers to finish the book asking the question: ‘How do we live in the light of this?’
Extracts from the book
The first of these extracts comes from near the beginning of the book and sets the scene for the journey ahead. The other extract is from one of the two responses chapters. What is refreshing about this is that, although it is honest about the challenges of living in what Andrew Wilson describes as a post-secular age, there is also a robust expression of hope that points to how the church might positively respond to our times.
Ours is a forgetful age, though. Lots of us do not remember the names of our great-grandparents; perhaps it is unsurprising that we do not remember their world either. The rate of change in the last two centuries makes the past feel much further away than it actually is, which inclines us to fawn over the future, and either patronise the past or ignore it altogether.
Our technology does not help us here. We spend much of our lives on devices that are designed to need replacing every three years, accessing social media platforms that amplify the sense of a continuous present and an absent past. A huge number of well-educated people, for example, marked the end of 2016 by lamenting it (quite unironically) as ‘the worst year ever’, despite having marked the 100th anniversary of The Battle of the Somme just six months before. Mainstream media outlets are no different. The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was repeatedly described as unprecedented in its impact, despite the Spanish flu (or for that matter, the Black Death). More amusingly, I think of the European correspondent for Reuters in the 1970s who, apparently unaware of World War II, claimed that ‘Relations between Britain and Germany fell to an all-time low today over potato quotas.’ In an era of instant news, amnesia is baked in. And amnesia has consequences.
One is confusion. The dizzying number of social changes in the anglophone West from 2014 to 2017 alone – gay marriage, Brexit, Trump, #BlackLivesMatter, transgender rights, Antifa, #MeToo, and so forth – left many people reeling, punch-drunk, even fearful about what would happen next. For obvious reasons, periods of social upheaval are always disorienting. But they can be particularly distressing when we do not know our history. Everything feels unexpected, as if it is coming out of nowhere. Developments appear unconnected to the past, and indeed to each other. In the absence of a plausible historical narrative, people retreat into tribalism or conspiracy theories (perhaps both) to help them make sense of the pace of change, because the deeper currents that shape society over decades and centuries – what James Davison Hunter calls the cultural ‘climate,’ as opposed to the ‘weather’ – are invisible to them. The results can be painful.
Another result of amnesia is arrogance, and it is available in both conservative and progressive flavours. In the progressive version, our current mores are self-evidently correct, which means that anyone who thought differently a hundred years ago, or even ten years ago, must have been either stupid or evil (or both). In the conservative version, the only reasons for a person’s success are their own ability and effort, which means that anyone who highlights the importance of historical privileges, or oppression, must be either jealous or lazy (or both). Memory, in contrast, should generate humility: the acknowledgment of our past, with all its strengths and weaknesses, and the recognition that the reason we have the moral convictions we do, and the material advantages we do, is because of our ancestors. As James Baldwin relentlessly pointed out, we are our history.
The big idea of this book is that 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.
We cannot understand ourselves without it. It was a year that witnessed seven transformations taking place – globalisation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism – which have remade the world and profoundly influenced the way we think about God, life, the universe, and everything.
These transformations – some call them ‘revolutions’ – explain all kinds of apparently unrelated features of our culture. They reveal why we believe in human rights, free trade, liberal democracy, and religious pluralism; they ground our preference for authenticity over authority, choice over duty, and self-expression over self-denial; and they account for all kinds of phenomena that our great-grandparents would have found incomprehensible, from intersectionality to bitcoin. 1776 provides us with an origin story for the post-Christian West (pages 6-7).
The West is not as post-Christian as it seems… Reports of Christianity’s death, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated.
Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the case that living in that postsecular age presents plenty of challenges for orthodox believers. Whatever we call it – postsecularism, post-Christianity, Protestant paganism, or something else entirely – society is still WEIRDER. People are still sceptical toward Christianity, and in some cases (one thinks of sexual ethics in particular) downright hostile. The pagan gods are still here, in varying levels of disguise, most notably Mammon, Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Gaia, and Dionysus. Renouncing them all to follow Christ is still costly. Many people are still more committed to money, sex, and power than Father, Son, and Spirit (and the transformations we have traced in this book have made money, sex, and power more available to Western people than ever before). It is still harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The church still has many flaws, and the cultural influence of Christianity has made those flaws more, not less, unattractive to everybody else. And the sheer extent of that cultural influence makes people feel like they have already tried following Jesus and found it wanting, rather than finding it difficult and leaving it untried. As any salesperson will tell you, it is hard to convince people to go for something new, but far harder if they think they have gone for it already and it didn’t work.
Compounding those external cultural challenges is an internal, psychological one that is as unsettling as it is unspoken: many Christians feel like they are losing. In some Western countries, this is a question of sheer numbers. The percentage of people in church on Sundays has fallen substantially in many WEIRDER nations since the Second World War, even as it has risen substantially in parts of the Majority World over the same period. But even in areas where levels of churchgoing remain strong, there is a widely held perception that Christian convictions have become increasingly marginal in public life. In some cases, they undoubtedly have. The American culture wars, which have now gone global through the influence of social media, provide plenty of examples.
That decline in numbers and/or acceptability has met with varied responses from the WEIRDER church. Some of those responses – repentance, prayer, a renewed commitment to discipleship – are clearly positive. Others – fear, hostility, and the pursuit of influence or power by compromising morally or theologically – are obviously negative. Some observers remain optimistic and argue that things are not as bad as they seem; just look at growing church X, famous Christian Y, or thriving movement Z. Others think they are a good deal worse; did you hear about the Christian who got fired for saying a, doing b, or posting c? Some think the church needs a radical change of approach: her mission should be broader or narrower, her congregations should be larger or smaller, her voice on controversial subjects should be louder or quieter, her services should be more or less familiar to the surrounding culture, her teaching methods should be more traditional or innovative, she should adopt this new model that is working in India or Iran or Indonesia or Indiana or whatever. Others think the challenge is not really a methodological one at all, and that the church should essentially hunker down, get used to life on the margins, faithfully continue doing what she has always done, be prepared to suffer for what she believes, pray, and trust the God who brings life to the dead that he will do something new.
In that environment, the church of 1776 does not offer us a silver bullet. There is no strategy identified in the late-eighteenth century that would transform the fortunes of the church today, if only we had the courage to implement it. Having said that, each of the three responses we considered in the previous chapter – the celebration of grace, the pursuit of freedom, and a post-secular vision of Christian truth – has the potential to strengthen the church as she seeks to reach and love the WEIRDER world around her. At the very least, the ways in which eighteenth-century Christians saw God do new things then, from revival and modern missions to religious freedom and abolitionism, should reassure those hoping that God will do a new thing now. Everything is unprecedented once…
Fidelity scores higher than novelty. Loss of influence is not a cause for panic. The doctrines, experiences, and practices that the church needs today are much the same as the ones she needed in the eighteenth century, and the tenth, and the second. We are responsible for obedience not outcomes, faithfulness not fruit; if we do not see the results we used to by praying, worshipping, reading Scripture, serving the poor, preaching the gospel, sharing the sacraments, and loving one another, we carry on with those things regardless and walk by faith not by sight. Genuine revival, when it comes, is at God’s initiative rather than ours. In the meantime, we wait, rejoicing always, praying without ceasing, giving thanks in all circumstances, and resolving not to be anxious about tomorrow, for we have no idea what tomorrow will bring (pages 273–275, 288).
Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson, ISBN: 978 1 433 580 536, was published by Crossway on 5 September 2023
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