John Dickerson's Hope of Nations: Standing Strong in a Post-Truth, Post-Christian World is written as a call to hope for Christians -- who themselves are the only hope for the world, according to Dickerson -- in a world of shifting moral values and social and cultural collapse. Dickerson doubtless has one important view of the current Western climate. He sees the world spinning out of control, and that without the Christian faith, all may well be lost.
But is it?
What's lost are the powers of control by Christians who have had a tremendous impact on the way Western culture began and developed. That control, of course, brought with it certain objective, verifiable ways of articulate the world in moral terms. Now that fewer folks are Christian, though, the objective foundations of this Western outlook have been shaken.
What Dickerson fails to appreciate is the place that faith has always held in the Christian worldview. There was hardly ever any objective truth that could (or even would) be universally affirmed. With the kinds of objectivity Dickerson craves, faith itself collapses. In the end, Dickerson longs for a return to that objectivity.
There are things to commend about Hope of Nations, but in the end it feels far more like a chronicle of bad news than a witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ, who is the only and final hope of the world.
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I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review here.