I would like to recommend it to all of my friends and anyone else who might read this blog.
Melanie is a well known English journalist who calls herself an agnostic Jew, and whilst I think that some of her observations about Christianity in particular are more about 'cultural' Christianity rather than 'theological' truth her basic thesis is both remarkable as well as insightful.
I quote from pages 258/9 to engage your interest:
"...that in doing so, the secular west is not merely adopting a quasi religious posture but a specifically Christian one. The governing story of Islam is the imposition of its doctrines through conquest and submission. Accordingly, it is today attempting to fashion its utopia through conquest and submission. The governing story of Christianity by contrast, is of sin, guilt and redemption. And remarkably, that is precisely the pattern lying behind the Utopian agendas of Western secular progressives-even though by severing these concepts from their transcendent Christian context, they have perverted their meaning and turned them from the engines of truth and justice into their antithesis.
For the left, the West is guilty of exploiting the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed. Britain has to do penance for the sins of imperialism and racism. Israel has to do penance for the sins of colonisation and racism. America has to do penance for the sins of imperialism. slavery and racism.
For the environmentalists, the West is guilty of the sins of consumerism and greed, which have given it far more than it needs. So these things must be taken away and the West must return to a simpler, austere, pre-industrial way of life.
Because of its sins, the West is being punished through the wars and terrorism against it. The West 'had it coming' on account of its manifold iniquities. America is responsible for Islamic terrorism. Israel is responsible for Palestinian terrorism. And Britain is responsible for the radicalization of British Muslims and the 7/7 attacks on the London transit system because it has backed America and Israel and lied' about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
As a result of all this sin, guilt and punishment, the Western progressive soul yearns for expiation and redemption. By electing Barack Obama as president of the United States, Americans wanted to redeem their country's original sins of slavery and racism. Through it s strictures against Israel, post Christian Europe wants to redeem its original sin of antisemitism. by campaigning against carbon dioxide emissions, environmentalists want to redeem the original sin of human existence. As for the scientific materialists, the sin to be redeemed is not by man against God but by God against man. Their governing story is that uncorrupted man fell from the Garden of Reason when he partook of the forbidden fruit of religion-which now has to purged from the world to create the Kingdom of Man on earth.
For all of these millenarian and apocolypticists and Utopians, both religious and secular, the target is the West. As Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit write in their book Occidentalism, the West is seen as an enemy not because it offers an alternative system of values but because of its promises of material comfort, individual freedom and dignity of unexceptional lives deflate all Utopian pretensions. The anti-heroic, anti-Utopian nature of Western liberalism is the greatest enemy of religious radicals, priest -kings and collective seekers after purity and heroic salvation.
That's why the West is squarely in the sights of all who want to create utopia and are determined to remove all the obstacles it places in the way. For environmentalists, that obstacle is industrialization. For scientific materialists, its religion. Fro transnational progressives, its the nation. For anti-imperialists, its American exceptionalism. For the Western intelligentsia, its Israel. For Islamists, its all the above and the entire un-islamic world. And in their desire for redemption and their suppression of dissent from the one revealed truth, Western progressives and radical Islamists are closer than either would like to think."
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