The Plight of Western Religion: The Eclipse of the Other-Worldly
PAUL GIFFORD
(HURST publishers, 176 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064
The Plight of Western Religion by the distinguished anthropologist Paul Gifford is a pessimistic work from a life-long Catholic. Gifford advances a “hard secularisation” argument and mounts a defence of Christianity as belief in supernatural powers as against approaches that deny the “other-worldly”. In Christianity today, he finds what passes for belief anaemic, sophisticated and “internally secularised”. He includes the Catholic Church prominently in his strictures, lamenting the emptying out of doctrine in favour of social engagement. Perhaps he wrote this book as a clarion call to the Church.
Gifford insists that his concern is solely Christianity’s cognitive content: “belief”. The sources for his indictment of Western secularisation feature arch-secularists such as Steve Bruce (positivist sociologist) and Ernest Gellner (secularist philosopher and anthropologist of Islam) as well as the popular philosopher-journalist Nick Spencer of the Theos think tank. Although Gifford makes a single reference to the Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, he does not engage with any of Taylor’s analyses of the development of the “secular age” and the modern identity of the West.
