The Great Return: Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western Civilisation. By Jamie Franklin. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2025. 272 pp. $24.99 (hardcover).
Settled beliefs are, by their nature, difficult to disrupt. Indeed, a dramatic occurrence of some kind is often a necessary impetus for people to re-evaluate their deepest assumptions. For many, the COVID-19 panic of 2020–21 was such an event. It is they, perhaps, who are the primary audience for Jamie Franklin’s The Great Return: “This book is for everyone who is interested in the subject matter, but I address it specifically to the many who have felt in recent times a sense of encroaching darkness and even evil in our culture” (15).
The book’s thesis, in brief, is that “if we want to rescue our civilisation from a bleak, nihilistic, totalitarian future then we must return to individual and collective belief in Christianity. Indeed…it may already be too late” (1). To be more precise, Franklin argues that things people take to be blessings of Enlightenment modernity—e.g., “the principles of democracy” (28) and “the basic presuppositions underlying the scientific worldview” (25)—are in fact traceable to Christianity: “My aim is to demonstrate that Christianity largely created the world that we take for granted and that, as Christianity declines, significant parts of that world will change in ways that will be deeply undesirable and worse” (15). Chapter 1 surveys some of the key claims of “The Myth of Enlightenment” and then dismantles them; Chapter 2 examines the nature of scientific inquiry and why it cannot function as a substitute for religion; Chapter 3 argues that the reality of transcendent beauty, instinctively recognized by all, cannot be grounded in secularism; Chapters 4–5 make a similar argument with respect to ethics, focusing in particular on some of the “confused ideas and disturbing trends” that have gained currency in the absence of a robust, Christianity-based morality; and Chapter 6 addresses what the church can and should do in response to the present moment.
In discussing these matters, Franklin demonstrates his keen attunement to the current cultural moment (the aftermath of COVID) and adeptly taps into it in order to undermine widely held assumptions about Christianity, science, ethics, and aesthetics that many people have accepted without question for years now. As recently as a decade or two ago, the arguments he offers would more likely have fallen on deaf ears, but with the enormities of the COVID panic still fresh in collective memory, there is greater potential for his words to reach shaken hearts and minds. Particularly commendable is Franklin’s attention to the importance of beauty, given how often it is neglected in modernity. As he argues at length, life loses its color when those moments of beauty we experience every day—usually small, but sometimes grand—are reduced to the outcomes of entirely naturalistic processes. Keeping alive the spark of transcendence in those moments requires belief in a transcendent reality, and Franklin does well to make this clear. On the other hand, Franklin’s assertion that “the principles of democracy” are one of the fruits of “our Christian inheritance” (28) regrettably goes unexamined. Some measure of scrutiny aimed at the notion that democracy is a Christian ideal would not have been out of place in his chapter on the Myth of the Enlightenment, but this lacuna is somewhat mitigated by his acknowledgment of “an inherent flaw within the liberal political project” in which liberty and equality are only maximized at the other’s expense (204–205).[1] This passing remark might be all that could reasonably be expected, given Franklin’s statement that the book is “not primarily about politics” (29).
Overall, The Great Return is a timely work for those who have become unsettled in their most basic assumptions about reality by the tendencies and direction of the modern West. For any who lately believed in the beneficence of modern science and global democracy, they may find the way to a better and more grounded life in this book.
Notes
- For more on the inherent flaws of liberalism, see Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, trans. Teresa Adelson (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), and Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). ↑
