(REVIEW) Andrew Root’s “The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms” (Baker Academic, 2023) includes some ponderous writing but a central concept well worth pondering. Root asks us not to think of politics and culture not as a battle of socialistic secularists versus MAGA right-wingers but as a pyramid. Two secular philosophies are on the bottom: “Exclusive humanists” on the left and “counter-enlightenment” on the right. “Beyonders” who hope to step heavenward are at the top.

Root says “exclusive humanists” are deeply committed to “to believing all human flourishing comes from within humanity itself.” They say “openness to the beyond [brings] no value, only problems.” Root, echoing Charles Taylor, places on the right side of the triangle’s base the “counter-enlightenment” of “neo-Nietzscheans. Those in this camp are galvanized and mobilized by defiant rejection [of] religion’s contention that there is something beyond death. … They find the modern moral order a shameful castration.”

“Beyonders” under cultural pressure have the tendency to slide down one or other of the sides. Root clarifies this by naming names. Moving down the left slope from closest to the top: Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King Jr., Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton (who is close to the bottom). On the right slope, Root has Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Soren Kierkegaard close to the top, while Malcolm X, Jordan Peterson and Mark Driscoll slide closer to the bottom, and Donald Trump is almost all the way down.

READ: Nancy French’s ‘Ghosted’ Offers A Haunting, Helpful Read, But Not For Everyone

Root generalizes that much of current Christianity “has followed the mysticism of heroic action and inner genius because it has no stomach for the necessity of the negative (the cross!).” He says this results in “congregations that lack inner depth, with little yearning for transcendence.” Overall, his approach is much better than a mere spectrum or a vague left-right-up.  

The title of Nijay Gupta’s “Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous and Compelling” (Brazos Press, 2024) offers a good moral for Christians who panic when others consider them weird: Don’t worry about it. Romans believed in “efficient and ‘successful’ ritual performance to keep the gods content and happy,” but Christians believed the unbelievable.”

Some theologians today complain about Deus absconditus, the God who hides, but they’re largely repeating the double-millennium-ago Roman critique that since Christians and Jews have no images of their God, they are atheists.

Christians seemed weird in other ways as well. Rome had many cults in which “communion with the god was often achieved through ecstatic modes induced by high-sensory experiences via drugs, alcohol, sex, and blood sacrifice.” Christians also spent a a lot of time with each other, but without using substances.

For Romans,“spending too much time in a temple or at an altar,” especially without stimulants, “looked like a sign of desperation. Piety was best expressed through time-honored ritual, not enthusiasm.

And of course, Christian sociology was also strange: “Jesus has honest and vulnerable conversations with women. Jesus encouraged fellow Jews to admire virtuous Samaritans, whom many Jews saw as enemies.”

Rulers were supposed to be servants. Bizarre. Leaders of a religion on top were supposed to use their power to make society conform to their will. Christians for almost three centuries were out of power and thus immune to the temptation to push around others.

David Fitch’s “Reckoning with Power” has an attractive and historically accurate subtitle: “Why the Church Fails When It’s on the Wrong Side of Power” (Brazos, 2024). The book gained my respect early with its discussion of why Christians should emphasize convincing rather than commanding, a distinction useful on many questions including ones of life and death: The U.S. pro-life movement is most successful when it focuses less on legal transformation than on the work of building a culture of life. But Fitch loses me when he seems to suggest that all things are up for discussion: Churches cannot remain Christian if they abandon what the Bible clearly teaches about life, death, and marriage.  

In brief: Since I’m a Discovery Institute senior fellow, I’ll merely mention a book that deserves longer praise from an impartial observer, Robert Shedinger’s “Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished” (Discovery, 2024). Most people don’t know that Darwin himself called “The Origin of Species” a “mere abstract” without sufficient specific detail to prove his thesis, but promised a sequel that would provide empirical evidence for evolution’s creative power. That sequel never arrived.     

Probably the best book for a Discovery newcomer is Stephen Meyer’s “Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe” (2021).

Other Discovery books range from the easy-to-read “Your Designed Body” (2022) by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman to the second edition of “The Design Influence” by William Dembski and Winston Ewert (2023), which is harder — but worth reading.

Marvin Olasky is the author of thirty books, including this year’s Moral Vision and Pivot Points. His foundation awards Zenger Prizes for street-level journalism.