The newest book by Oxford don and Anglican priest Lord Nigel Biggar is entitled The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars. But its subtitle might as well be Why Christians Must Win the Culture Wars.

Getting involved in the culture wars is a prospect that makes many Christians uneasy, and for good reason. The Gospel should transcend partisan divisions, yet becoming mired in the culture wars entails that we take sides in political disputes. And, whether Christians align themselves with conservative factions or progressive ones, “winners” or “losers”, it may jeopardize the already precarious social acceptance of open Christian belief, or, worse, become a stumbling block for unbelievers. But Biggar insists that the culture wars are “neither artificial nor trivial. They are real and important, and much is at stake in them.” The “culture wars” he has in mind pertain to the free exchange of ideas. Taking his cue from John Stuart Mill, Biggar’s starting assumption is that “a free marketplace of ideas is the best way of testing and correcting prevailing orthodoxies.” For if ambition cannot meet counter-ambition in the context of debate, accountable to the rules of tolerance and the measure of reason, the only other option is coercion.

This is why the call for Christians to take up the culture wars is not a call to brandish a sword. It is a call for peace, or at least peacemaking (Matt. 5:9).

Biggar writes from firsthand experience. In 2017, when he launched his “Ethics and Empire” project, Dr. Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer in postcolonial studies at Cambridge University, posted, “OMG… We need to SHUT THIS DOWN.” She was one voice in a chorus of condemnation—190 academics worldwide, and 58 from Oxford, signed a petition denouncing the project. The scandal? “Ethics and Empire” did not proceed from the assumption that empire has always and everywhere been an illegitimate form of government. Similar denunciations followed on the heels of the publication of his Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning in 2023, which made the what-should-be-uncontroversial case that British imperial history is an admixture of good (e.g., the abolition of slavery in 1834) and bad (e.g., the Amritsar Massacre of 1919).

History had become a proxy in a culture war over who should be denounced and who should not, who should be labeled “perpetrator” and who should be labeled “victim.” Indeed, such a “Manichaean” (Biggar’s term) divide sets the agenda for the culture war in its other theaters, not least race and gender.

But what alternative does a Christian approach to the culture wars offer? One answer lies in how Christians approach the study of history.

To borrow a distinction from Wheaton College history professor Tracy McKenzie, a Christian view of history opts for moral reflection rather than judgment. In contrast to moral judgment, moral reflection invites us to sympathize with and appreciate our forebears within the constraints of their time and place. Then, it prompts us to ask in what ways our own age might similarly impair our moral vision. Biggar writes: “unless we meet the past in its difference, we will never appreciate the contingency of our own present and be provoked to critical reflection upon it.” This is another way of saying that Christians have an obligation to extend charity, even to the dead. For, as Biggar’s experience shows, our approach to the past is inextricably tied up with how we reason in the present.

Such a posture of humility stands in contrast to the pseudo-humility of Biggar’s more aggressive detractors. That so much of this animus toward imperial Britain—particularly the notion that the empire’s evils do not necessarily outweigh its beneficence—comes from Brits themselves speaks to a pervasive self-loathing. Among Brits who can trace their roots back to the imperial era, “perpetrator” stock is thought to taint them with a kind of original sin. Biggar also understands the tendency of this self-loathing to turn into “a perverse bid for self-righteousness, which exaggerates one’s sins and broadcasts the display of repentance: holier-than-thou because more-sinful-than-thou.” No doubt Christians themselves are vulnerable to the same vice (for which one name is “puritanical”). But we should not invent sins for ourselves any more than we should advertise our piety.

Christians declining to take part in the culture wars does not mean they will not be fought. Rather, the culture wars will rage on, but absent the theological anthropology needed to hold together the dual truths that all human history is tainted by sin, yet not beyond the pale of redemption. Bearing this in mind, the result of a properly Christian engagement with the culture wars is twofold. First, it should make us more accurate critics of true injustice—and this, as Biggar writes, is “the prerequisite for effective relief.” Second, it will be attended by a cooling of tempers. For, while it does not ask that Christians become spineless interlocutors, it does ask that we discipline our convictions with “humility, charity, and docility.” These virtues make Mill’s “free marketplace of ideas” possible in the first place and ensure that it remains an attractive option. The New Dark Age reminds us that our crusade is a gentle one.