Kevin Swanson. Apostate: The Men who Destroyed the Christian West. Parker CO: Generations with Vision, 2013. Print.
Apostate has a striking subtitle and a strident text. It is not for everyone. Having said that, the author makes a number of valid points, especially about the philosophy and educational system in most modern countries.
While the author is American and his focus is on the United States, he views the philosophies of about a dozen writers and thinkers who have influenced Western culture in a manner opposed to Biblical Christianity. This means that men like Isaac Newton or Martin Luther are not profiled for they promoted Biblical Christianity in some sense, but Rousseau and Darwin are.
As I began Apostate, I confess being somewhat put off by its style. It will be difficult to persuade a reader who is not already inclined to see things the book’s way. It does touch upon significant figures, however. A few of them may have had good intentions but an unintended effect, but most were clearly opposed to Christianity or to God Himself and did little to conceal their hostility.
Ideas have consequences. In nearly every case, at least until the twentieth century, these writers thought that their ideas would improve things. The author notes at the beginning that now people are realizing that utopian experiments end in disappointment:
As shall be demonstrated in this book, the materialist worldview has assumed control of the major institutions in the Western world. For the post-modernist, this secular humanist vision is quickly passing from high utopian expectations to dystopian disappointment. It will prove to be a failure. (14,15)
I could quibble about Swanson’s omission of some Bible “scholars” like Wellhausen or Strauss who used specious logic and methodology to debunk the Bible, but that would be the content of another book. Here the author picks out those who seemed to have a great effect on the cultural elite—academics, philosophers, politicians, other writers—whose beliefs would end up being adopted by the educational system, the arts, government, and the culture in general.
I give Swanson credit for naming first Thomas Aquinas. As he admits, Aquinas was likely well-intentioned and from all accounts had a Christian testimony. But Aquinas did consciously bring Aristotle into the Church. By Luther’s time most Catholic thinkers had adopted Aquinas’ view that philosophical knowledge is “different in kind” from theological knowledge. It is no coincidence that Luther was a teacher at an Augustinian university, one of the few that still held to the idea that all truth is God’s truth.
Most of the early philosophers or political theorists named in Apostate are obvious: Descartes, Rousseau, Bentham. When we study romanticism in my English classes, I tell students that most revolutions since 1789 are romantic revolutions. Most of them are based on Rousseau’s idea that “men are born free but everywhere are in chains.” In other words, man is basically good, and if there is evil in the world, it is because of evil social structures and governments. Remake society, and all will be good.
The French Revolution of 1789 was based on Rousseau’s philosophy, and, frankly, we saw its fruits. Alas, people did not learn, and so similar revolutions would continue up until the present, all based on similar romantic notions.
As Edmund Burke and others have pointed out, the American Revolution was not the same kind of revolution. Indeed, twentieth century political scientists like Crane Brinton would say that it was not a revolution at all. It was an attempt to preserve the institutions in North America that the British government was trying to alter or get rid of. If there was a philosopher behind the American Revolution, it was John Locke, although America’s founders were also influenced by the Bible and the Great Awakening.
Apostate includes Locke as one of those thinkers who had a negative impact. I am skeptical of that point. True, Locke was a political philosopher; he followed Aquinas in separating theology from philosophy, but then he found that he could not do so. Swanson may be correct in saying that Locke was not a strict Trinitarian, but Locke’s observations on natural law—that people all instinctively protect their lives, liberty, and property—led to the conclusion that all mankind was created by a moral God.
This is very similar to what Romans 1:18,19 says, that man can discover God’s existence and moral truth through observation of nature. No, it will likely require communication of God’s Word to learn specifics about Jesus or God’s work in history, but the natural law would not necessarily lead people astray. Locke and America’s founders proposed a limited government: one that protected life, liberty, and property, and not one that would transform culture and be involved in every aspect of human life. I would say, go easy on Locke, Rev. Swanson. He was no utopian. America would not have the years of freedom we have had without him.
Swanson does an effective job it seems with the nineteenth century philosophers who have had a great effect on the culture: Emerson, Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche. All four were very consciously opposed to Christianity. I was amazed in college how much these four thinkers formed the core beliefs in higher education. This in spite of the horrors that Marx’s Communism or Nietzsche’s Fascism had perpetrated on the world. This in spite of the vagueness of Emerson’s pantheism. And I could see that the appreciation of Darwinism was not based on any repeatable scientific observations but on materialistic wishful thinking that God did not exist.
It also appears that in some cases Apostate relies more on secondary sources. The strength or weakness of those sources may reflect the strength or weakness of the book’s argument in that specific case. Perhaps that is why its case against Locke is not as strong as its case against Darwin. Swanson refers a few times to Jerry Bergman who is an effective critic of Darwinism (and Darwinism is a philosophy, not a natural science).
Swanson goes into the twentieth century critiquing existentialism in the writings of Sartre and John Dewey. Dewey has had an unfortunate impact on American education. One of my favorite parts of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird is Harper Lee’s critique of what first grader Scout Finch calls “the Dewey Decimal System.” Her young, Dewey-trained teacher rebukes her for knowing how to read already because that means all the students are not learning at the same place and conforming to society the way they ought to be. Dewey promoted pure socialism, and that is what public schools have been promoting for at least two generations. Having absorbed the vision of Emerson, Marx, and Dewey, no wonder our kids are ignorant of Christianity.
I am old enough to remember prayer and Bible reading in my public school. But I also recall that from eighth grade through twelfth grade, after the Bible was banned, I studied The Communist Manifesto three times but never once the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Locke, Jefferson, Franklin, The Federalist Papers, or anything connected with the founding of the United States.
Swanson then picks out five literary writers for their negative influence on the culture. The first he picks was baffling—Shakespeare. Author Paul Jehle, who would agree with many of Swanson’s premises, calls Shakespeare “the bard of the Bible” (258, italics in original) in his Go Ye Therefore and Teach. Here I believe Swanson misses it.
First he quotes Shakespeare as if to prove these quotations express his beliefs. The problem is that Shakespeare is a story teller. Because Macbeth, after embracing witchcraft, says life is “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” does not mean that Shakespeare believes it. If anything, it demonstrates the tragedy of apostasy, certainly not a promotion of it.
It is very easy to argue that, whatever Shakespeare may personally have believed, he wrote from a Christian worldview. Swanson points to Macbeth as especially evil because of the witches, but its basic story line is straight from the Bible. It is not much more than a retelling of the story of King Saul. I admit that I am not always comfortable reading “the Scottish play” because of the witches, but I personally do not care to read Frank Peretti, either.
Swanson also suggests Shakespeare was a homosexual. That was not uncommon to hear in the eighties when the “gay pride” movement was calling all kinds of people, even Jesus, homosexual. We know very little about Shakespeare’s personal life, but such behavior in those days was punishable by death and any sodomite would not go public about it. We do know that he was married and had children; his wife and surviving children were his heirs when he died.
Swanson was also clearly influenced by pop theories about Shakespeare authorship. Swanson believes that Christopher Marlowe may have written the Shakespeare corpus. Over the years a number of theories about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works have emerged. Some point to Francis Bacon; some, to the Earl of Oxford; some, to Christopher Marlowe.
The Marlowe proponents may have a stronger case than the other two only because Shakespeare and Marlowe were both playwrights with a similar style. Still, both men were public figures. If Marlowe had lived past 1593 and assumed Shakespeare’s identity, it would have been a marvelous conspiracy indeed. While Swanson may been fortunate to rely on Jerry Bergman for information on Darwin, his reliance on a secondary source that promotes the Marlowe authorship shows some questionable judgment in this case.
I recall reading Reinventing Shakespeare, a book on the history Shakespeare criticism that dismissed “Christian fundamentalists” as unworthy of consideration when reviewing Shakespeare because of their presumed lack of intelligence or sophistication. This book seems to play into those hands.
Sadly, because of the unusual criticism based on innuendo and quoting fictional characters as though they represented the author, some readers may dismiss the entire book. If Apostate missed it so badly on Shakespeare, how can we be sure that it is any more careful on the other writers?
The next literary figure Swanson critiques is Nathaniel Hawthorne. While fairly accurate about some of the details of Hawthorne’s personal life, his interpretations of Hawthorne’s writings really miss it. There is a reason that Hawthorne is called an anti-transcendentalist. He may have lived in Concord, but he did not agree with the prevailing philosophy there.
We noted earlier how Apostate questions utopian schemes. So does Hawthorne. The preface to The Scarlet Letter is one of the most pointed critiques of the welfare state. The opening chapter of the novel is clearly anti-utopian. One of the main themes of The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance is that utopian schemes do not work because of human nature. Even the godliest preacher sins. Even the most “scientific” communal society is made up of fallen humanity.
Apostate suggests that Hawthorne promoted secularism and was hostile to Christianity. Hawthorne, however, was writing to an already secularized or transcendentalist audience. The Scarlet Letter’s overall message concerns the necessity of repentance. Hawthorne may have been Unitarian in his beliefs—I have read interpretations, usually based on his notebooks, that he was Unitarian, Calvinist, or even secretly Catholic. But Hawthorne was no Universalist. Dimmesdale had to repent. His short story “The Celestial Railroad” satirizes Universalism. Many of his other short stories also deal with the question of original sin.
It is possible to teach The Scarlet Letter as screed against Puritan hypocrisy, but the hypocrite comes clean at the end. To use religious language, he is convicted of his sin and makes a public confession. The real villain of the story is Chillingworth (whose name is consistently misspelled in Apostate). He is the real witch of the story. To use New Testament Greek, he is the pharmakous, using drugs to manipulate people. He is the one who opposes God and, like the apostate Macbeth, becomes a fatalist.
Hawthorne is a poor example for Apostate’s thesis. If anything, he was questioning precisely the things that Emerson, Marx, and Rousseau were promoting.
Having said these things about what Apostate said about the first two fiction writers it names, the book could have gone farther in expressing its concern about Mark Twain. What the book says about Huckleberry Finn can be supported. Swanson does spend a few pages going over some of what the Bible says about slavery to present a decent case that the American slave system before the Civil War opposed the Bible in most of its features.
At first I thought this was just a rabbit trail, but not only did Huck Finn believe that to be a good Christian you had to believe in slavery, but today I occasionally I hear talking heads in the media say that the Bible promotes slavery. One interesting pair of verses that relates directly to Huck’s helping an escaped slave are Deuteronomy 23:15 and 16 (KJV):
Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.
Swanson focuses on Huck Finn and some of Twain’s later and very bitter writings. He does not mention Tom Sawyer at all, yet, in my mind, this novel is perhaps the strongest satire of Christianity in all of Twain’s works. Tom’s adventures in the cave and returning to witness his own funeral are really a parody of the burial resurrection of Christ. I remember a fairly liberal preacher once saying, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in the resurrection doesn’t believe.” I Corinthians 15:14 says the same thing: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” Not only did Twain not believe, he mocked it.
Other writers Swanson brings up are Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Sartre. These are all highly esteemed writers whose philosophies are least transcendentalist (Steinbeck) or ultimately nihilistic (the other two). They do reflect the results of an amoral, even Nietzschean, outlook. Hemingway, though, like Arnold earlier in England, saw the difficulties of living without God. The book mentions his short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and calls it pro-abortion. The woman in the story is pressured by her boyfriend to get an abortion, but the story shows the hollowness of living such a lifestyle. Abortion advocates need no friends like that.
Swanson notes that Frantz Fanon, a favorite of academia today, was a follower of Sartre. I had forgotten about Fanon (another person whose name is misspelled through out the book), but Swanson did remind me that his Wretched of the Earth justifies terrorism, and may illustrate in part why so few academics or people in Western governments seem terribly concerned about Islamic terrorism. Swanson notes that President Obama in one of his autobiographies claimed Fanon influenced his beliefs.
Apostate notes a few interesting connections. Jeremy Bentham was John Stuart Mill’s godfather. In turn, Mill was Bertrand Russell’s godfather. Some connections are direct, if not organic. The book notes that Ralph Waldo Emerson served as William James’ godfather. James would become one of John Dewey’s mentors.
While it probably is worth mentioning Aquinas, not all the writers were really apostates. Nevertheless, it is clear that many of them—like the four from the nineteenth century named above—consciously were opposing Christianity and have had a remarkable influence. Swanson’s case is that by following such thinkers the culture is shooting itself in the foot, if not in the head.
Apostate ends with what may seem like good news to some or bad news to others. With moral relativism and nihilism setting the tone for Western culture today, it is clear that the vision of most of the thinkers mentioned in this book (and I really do have to take Shakespeare and probably Hawthorne out of the list) has failed. Post-apocalyptic books and films have become more and more popular since the 1980s. Statistics provided by the book demonstrate that no culture cannot be maintained based on materialism, population control, amorality, and envy. God has a way of renewing things according to His plan (Revelation 21:5).
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
(Hopkins, ll. 11-14)
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “God’s Grandeur.” The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Ed. Helen Gardner. New York: Oxford UP, 1972: 786. Print.
Jehle, Paul. Go Ye Therefore and Teach. Marlborough NH: Plymouth Rock Foundation, 1982. Print.