Christians in a PC World
John Benton
Evangelical Press
192 pages, £8.99
ISBN: 978-0-85234-912-0
Star Rating: 4 stars
This book is timely, easy-to-read, well reasoned and Biblically based. It focuses on one of the key issues facing Christians in our culture today.
The author sets the stage for his consideration of political correctness (PC). He points to the argument that moral (usually religious), stable societies tend towards material prosperity, which in turn tends towards materialism and eventually into the tacitly atheistic, secular culture that is modern Britain.
This secular culture has come gradually to espouse something called post-modernism (PM). Pilate is the patron saint of PM. Remember he asked Jesus, cynically, ‘What is truth?’ PM says there is no such thing as absolute truth. There are only little truths for you or for me, but nothing that is true for all of us. Biblical Christianity is definitely not PM.
With the abandonment of the Christian moral framework that had been generally accepted for centuries, something had to come in to fill that vacuum. Enter PC. Benton describes it as a ‘way of thinking that classifies certain groups of people as victims of society who should be treated differently from other people in order to correct perceived injustices and to shield them from being offended’.
He goes on to identify some of the negative consequences of PC (like loss of freedom, destruction of justice, etc). In a PC/PM world with no absolutes, people value personal happiness, feelings, experience and non-judgementalism (towards almost everyone except Christians.) We see this expressed in the therapy culture, the gay agenda, multi-culturalism and feminism. Evangelicalism is being affected. Popular books among some Christians, like The Shack and Love Wins, reflect PC/PM values and beliefs, rather than Scripture.
This is a huge subject handled very well in such a short book. Every chapter could easily have been an entire book by itself. I would highly recommend the book.
Dennis Hill
Hull
