It’s not exactly a new book, nor an old book, but it’s a very important book, especially for a time like ours. I first came across it in my first year as a lecturer at Cliff College, where I was running the MA Mission programme. Strangely enough, this was the very programme on which the author, Joe Boot, was himself enrolled whilst studying at that same college several years earlier. To some minds, it’s remarkable that either of us made it through the doors of the college at all! Joe did leave with a completed degree under his arm, but – not unlike myself – it sounded as if he’d caused something of a stir whilst he was there. Perhaps this is why the then-principal, when handing me the signed copy of the book which Boot had sent on to him, said I might get on better with it!
Weighing in at over 600 pages with numerous endnotes and appendices, it always seemed the kind of book you’d need a good reason to read. For many years it sat there on my shelf always “intending” to be read, but on the occasional moments I picked it off the shelf and glanced through the contents, the sheer range and scale of topics and sub-topics seemed bewildering: ‘A Christian Vision of History and the Western World’; ‘The Religion of Statism and the Significance of Chalcedon’; ‘Law, Theocracy, and Contemporary Relevance’; ‘Understanding Crime and Punishment’; ‘Faith, Family, and Revolution’; ‘The Christian Mandate to Educate’, etc.! It’s no surprise that phrases like ‘magnum opus’ and ‘tour de force’ feature frequently among the book’s numerous commendations. The book covers a lot of ground, but not without significant nuance too.
When I first flicked through those contents the best part of a decade ago, it was not only the intimidating range of topics that initially dissuaded me from wading further in; it was also what seemed to be an unrealistic – perhaps even “distractive” – area of focus. Boot seemed to be talking about things which seemed far beyond what a “front line” approach to mission ought to take in the 21st century. It seemed like idealistic thinking for which we simply did not have the time. Much of this is because I had not yet fully seen the full depth of the implications of secularism writ large and its ongoing effects on the Church’s ability to challenge them.
It’s not that I, like other evangelicals, had not seen the problems of secularism and cultural decay a decade ago; it’s that we had failed to see that the retreatist attitude in most evangelical churches towards socio-political issues were a large part of the problem. We may have argued with atheists; we may have pointed to the decay of morality in the culture; but in many ways we were more affected by secularism than we’d realised.
Socio-political avoidance (or, “quietism”) has long been held as a prudent strategy to maximise focus upon evangelism and the Church. It has not only been largely unsuccessful in the west when compared to previous eras of evangelical fruitfulness, but it has also led directly to the erosion of the average Christian’s Biblical convictions on many of the key moral and doctrinal issues on which we have lost so much ground in recent decades. At just the point at which the Church ought to have been going on the offensive as salt and light in our society, we have retreated to our pietistic corner, ceding the ground to the world and patting ourselves on the back that we are not becoming “too embroiled in politics”.
It is thus not all that surprising that Joe Boot’s work would come into my eyeline more prominently in light of my own shift in thinking on these issues over the last decade or so. This finally culminated in my infamous sacking from that very “evangelical” college at which Joe had, ironically, formulated some of his thinking just a few years before I’d arrived. I have since written a not-uncritical 10-part über-review of the book on my Substack which goes into each chapter in greater detail; but I offer here a few opening reflections on the book’s primary diagnosis and proposed solutions.
Boot rightly opens out his manifesto with a sharp analysis of the roots of an ‘epochal turning point’ (21) in western society, pointing to “the growing threat to religious liberty, the rule of law, the freedom of the church, and survival of family (and hence western civilization as we have known it)…engendered by a growing statist vision of society, increasingly committed to a neo-pagan ideology that is now permeating every aspect of the Western social order.” (21)
When Boot was first writing this book over a decade ago, many evangelicals might have scoffed at such an evaluation as hyperbolic doomsaying. This was, remember, before concepts like ‘Woke’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ had entered common parlance in media debates. It was before most people had ever heard of Jordan Peterson, and before the phenomena of President Trump, Brexit, Covid, and the death of George Floyd. As many have since observed, such events revealed and catalysed cracked foundations and faulty responses within and beyond the Church.
One of the especially impressive aspects of the book is that some of Boot’s analysis of the situation now sounds almost ‘standard’ among many evangelicals today due to the widening of the Overton Window on how such issues are spoken about, even as the problems commented upon continue to accelerate. As Boot noted then: ‘even the secular world is slowly beginning to realize that the decline of Christianity in the West and the virtues of the law of God are leading us to an inevitable social collapse and cultural death.’ (45). Again, note this was being said prior to the (very) recent shift on the centre-right to speak about the value of Christian influence in the West far more positively, before influential cultural commentators like Tom Holland, Douglas Murray, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, or Russell Brand.
Christianity, of course, is not merely a bulwark to use against less desirable alternatives, so we should also be cautious about some of this optimism. After all, even Richard Dawkins now prefers “cultural Christianity” without believing a word of it! What is clear is the growing realisation that the decay of western culture correlates more or less directly with the decline of Christian influence in the West. No serious conservative thinker can legibly deny this now, even those who vehemently disagree with Christianity.
Boot’s book combines an analysis of this cultural decline with a more compelling vision which emerges by calling us to ‘draw on ancient cisterns for fresh water’ (22). There is thus not only a cogent analysis of the problem but a ‘prophetic urgency’ for the Church to speak and act with hopeful confidence in ‘an increasingly de-Christianized public square where people are becoming either ignorant of, or hostile toward, the worldview of the Bible’ (30). This is the strange paradox of the situation, that even as more people than ever within western culture are realising the need for Christianity, western culture continues to de-Christianise faster than ever.
To offer the kind of compelling vision which does not merely lament the situation, but seeks rebuild the lost foundations, Boot argues that we must return to the Puritans. This might invoke the usual caricatures C.S. Lewis spoke of, in which the word ‘Puritanical’ has become a modern synonym for rigid and sanctimonious pharisees who merely wish to regulate behaviour and limit everyone’s fun! Boot challenges such caricatures, highlighting the phenomenal socio-cultural impact of the Puritans, and also introducing the reader to those who have sought to recover something approximating their wholehearted vision for a theologically rooted social transformation today.
Yet it is not merely these ideas about Puritan gargoyles which deter such a vision today. It is also ‘the retreat of conservative evangelicals into various theological and cultural ghettoes’ (32) where many refuse to apply Scripture concretely beyond the ethereal matters which affect an individual’s salvation and/or the operations of the Church. This has left a gaping void in public Christian witness, one which – enacted and/or inspired by the Puritans – once stood at the forefront of evangelical mission.
What would such a return to a full-orbed new Puritanism look like? Those most suspicious of such an endeavour often invoke the cautions against forcing Christianity upon the populace, akin to Islamism. They summon the ghosts of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, or the intra-ecclesiastical persecutions which characterised England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as evidence that any such return to a robust Christian approach to cultural transformation is doomed to failure or unfaithfulness. To the contrary, Boot argues: ‘A Puritan missiology thus seeks to win and not whip people into the faith, pursuing true freedom under God.’ (35). Indeed, as he argues consistently throughout the book, it is in large part the Puritan legacy which, contrary to common assumptions, undergirds much of the historical freedom and toleration in the modern west.
To borrow a phrase from Christian cultural analysis, Boot is essentially arguing for ‘The Puritan Option’. But this is no more seeking a return to seventeenth century England or America any more than Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option sought a return to sixth century Europe. As with Dreher’s invocation of the Benedictine way in light of the Fall of Rome, Boot is advocating for a return to the full-orbed approach to Christian discipleship and life that drove the Puritans not merely to withdraw from the world but to be salt and light within it (and to really mean it!). As his extensive chapters show, this is not a mere return to a particular ‘tradition’ but a manifesto for consistent application of the Gospel (and the Law) to society in the context of mission.
Among some of the issues Boot tackles is the role of the increasingly tyrannical secular state as it fills the void left by the ‘death of God’, imposing utopian ideological visions upon people, nudging us toward globalist conformity, and keeping Christians in their little box, harmless to challenge its advances. This ends up effecting everything that could possibly come under the umbrella of ‘mission’, including the spheres of politics, education, economics, the arts, and the judicial system. Should Christians have anything to say about such things? The Puritan answer is a resounding yes.
Above all, Boot’s Mission of God shows that if we are serious about recovering a robust vision of the kingdom of God in our time, we must stop playing around with pietistic ‘churchianity’ and think through the very wider societal implications of Christ’s lordship in this world not as a threat to the Church’s mission but as an outworking of it. Boot’s book provides an excellent blend of sharp analysis, cogent wisdom, and evangelical fire around which those who are truly awake to the mission field which lies before us, can begin.
The Puritans were far from perfect, but one thing they clearly have to teach us is that they did not have qualms about whether or not it was a good idea to build an explicitly Christian culture in the world. They entirely assumed that this was the mission, the very reason God had put us here in the first place: to extend God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. We have been given nothing less than a God-given, Spirit-empowered mandate to go and change the world, one square inch at a time. What on earth are we waiting for?
