Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense

By Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience.

Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford's crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis.

Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780062300485

Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford began as the author of four highly praised books of nonfiction. His first book, I May Be Some Time, won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, and most recently, Unapologetic. But with Red Plenty in 2012 he switched to the novel. Golden Hill won multiple literary prizes on both sides of the Atlantic; Light Perpetual was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In England he is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Book preview

Preface to the U.S. Edition

This is a book written in, and about, a different place from the one in which you are about to read it. In Britain, where I live, recent figures suggest that about 6 percent of the population goes regularly to church, and it’s a number that has drifted steadily downward over the past few decades, while the average age of churchgoers has just as steadily trended upward: presently the average worshipper is fifty-one years old. In the United States, by contrast, the equivalent figure (from 2006) is 26 percent of the population, with a youthful, rosy-cheeked age distribution. That’s not all, though. Some surveys, tellingly, reveal that a further 16 percent of Americans claim to be regular churchgoers. From the British perspective this second statistic is even more startling and alien than the first one. The idea of people pretending to be regular churchgoers because it will make them look virtuous—or respectable, or serious, or community-minded—is completely bizarre to us. Here in Britain, it is more likely that people would deny they went to church even if they actually did, on the grounds of embarrassment, for embarrassment is one of the most powerfully motivating emotions in British culture and it now wraps religion round snug and tight. The very idea of faith carries a quiver of unease, of potential self-exposure as somebody needy and foolish and old-fashioned. And, crucially, humorless. To say you’re religious in Britain is to risk excluding yourself from the consensual irony that pervades British life, the constant subdued self-conscious joking which oils all social difficulties here, and is the means by which we prove to each other that we’re normal, responsive, polite, self-aware human beings. GSOH (Good Sense of Humor) is by far the commonest demand made in British personal ads. We have a small, vociferous, recently acquired lobby of angry atheists, but far more influential in keeping religion marginal are the millions of people who are indefinably certain that strong emotions on the subject, pro and anti, would be squirmingly incompatible with a GSOH.

Writers who happen to believe tend to keep quiet about it—at least the sensible ones do—so as not to alienate their readership, or to get themselves associated with a distractingly unlikeable minority position. Politicians, far from feeling the need to name-check the deity, prefer to avoid mentioning any commitments they do have, calculating (correctly) that there would be only downside in so doing. When Tony Blair was prime minister, and a rare question arose about his religious views, his press secretary said firmly, We don’t do God, and refused to answer. There is a lingering attachment to what you might call a passive culture-Christianity, manifested in church weddings and carols on the radio at Christmastime, and some of the logics of the culture are still very, very Christian deep down, which is not surprising given the country’s fifteen or sixteen centuries of Christian history; but we are well past the tipping point where the religion stops providing a language that can be confidently manipulated in the expectation that it will be powerful. Or even that it will be understood. Most of the British public are now two or more generations away from familiarity with the religion’s vocabulary, its stories, its personages, its Sunday-school kit of parts, let alone from familiarity with any kind of felt experience of belief. Many people seem to get their information about it primarily from news coverage of church scandals, which of course confirms their sense that belief’s operative contents—its principles that actually get put into practice—must be homophobia and misogyny and child abuse.

I am at home in this setting. It is what represents normal for me. In some ways, for both religious and other reasons, I kind of approve of it. It saves us, as I explain toward the end of the book, from quantities of pious bullshit; from a whole slew of temptations to do with this-worldly power; from the danger of presuming that conservative social attitudes somehow have divine sanction. But it has consequences that aren’t all obvious, from outside, and since they shape both the argument this book makes and the manner in which it makes it, it seems like a good idea to try to explain them a little as Unapologetic sets off, swearing like a drill sergeant, toward the bookshelves of the United States.

For one thing, it means that a book like this needs to carry all its own luggage. You may be surprised, at various points, by the way it appears to labor over explanations of basics—but I wrote it knowing that I couldn’t rely on readers necessarily being able to fit the particular things it said into an existing frame of reference, or to encounter it as part of an accepted conversation that had been going on for centuries. For a lot of the people who picked it up it would be the first encounter with even the possibility of that conversation, and it would need, to begin with, to create the frame of reference within which such a conversation could look intelligible, or desirable, or interesting. Hence the emphasis on conveying an experience, which has always been one of the imaginative tasks of this kind of writing, but this time comes overwhelmingly to the fore. Hence the need to produce from scratch, when required in the book, such things as a word for human destructiveness that could actually be heard without leading people away into visions of lingerie, and a portable version of the New Testament story, and a reckoning, ridiculous but necessary, with the whole of Christian history. Or to put it most simply: hence the need to ground a description of religion on something other than more religion.

On the other hand, along with these tasks came a corresponding freedom, also generated by the blankness of the British cultural landscape when it comes to religion. I didn’t have to take a position in some vexed, deeply ingrained, ongoing tussle over the social implications of belief. I didn’t have to sign up to one side or the other in the culture wars, because we don’t really have them in Britain. We don’t have aggressive and well-funded creationists. We don’t have school-board arguments over biology textbooks. We don’t have the assumption that (apart from the social gospel of African-American churches) religion probably lines up on the conservative side of a liberal/conservative cultural split, locked into place as an identity with a set of attitudes to taxation, guns, the climate, abortion, science funding, and sexuality. It isn’t, on the whole, a left/right issue with us. I spend a little time in the book chasing away the shadows of the great American divide, because one of the consequences of British unfamiliarity with the local religious product is a slight tendency to take our images of religion from American TV, in just the same way that confused persons in British police stations have been known to demand their Miranda rights. But for the most part I don’t have to worry about situating the forms of religion I find attractive and/or theologically defensible at a particular address on a partisan spectrum. You’ll find as you read that I am, fairly obviously, a liberal in American terms, but I am not arguing for some special kind of left-Christianity. I don’t have that burden, or that luxury. The most that Unapologetic is trying for is to persuade people that Christianity as such, in any variety, should be seen as something not axiomatically contemptible, something emotionally comprehensible even if not shared; something that provides one good-enough solution to a set of fundamental human needs.

I didn’t write the book in order to engage in zero-sum competition with atheists. I’ve had to push back against some of contemporary atheism’s more insistent claims—and I can’t deny that I enjoyed the combat involved—but chiefly in order to clear a space in which to make a different, non-symmetrical claim of my own. I am not arguing that Christianity is true and atheism isn’t. I do not know any such thing, and couldn’t. I have no problem with respecting atheism as a philosophy, as an emotional position grounded in experience, and (on occasion) as a tool of liberation. What I want to assert, instead, is the religion’s imaginative legitimacy, its rightful (and for that matter inevitable) but non-exclusive place in the domain of what we all dream, hope, conjecture.

The irony, though, that any talk of legitimacy for religion arouses in Britain is that in the most literal way we already have it. We have the thing the Founders carefully ruled out for the United States, an established church. The whole ceremonial face of the British state is officially Christian. We have bishops in our unelected upper house of Parliament, we have prayers in the elected House of Commons, we have a monarch who is de jure head of the Church of England, we have hundreds of elementary schools under church sponsorship. This kind of thing is self-evidently ludicrous as an arrangement for a multicultural, multifaith society. It drives British atheists wild, and tends to be part of the currency they offer when affirming their common ground with American liberals who feel that the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution is the only defense in the United States against a domineering Christianity that would invade the public domain if it could. However, what this picture of religious tyranny leaves out is that establishment, in Britain, has demonstrably been a force that has helped wither our religion away, by keeping it ceremonious, and paternalistic, and always someone else’s responsibility; while in the United States, at least from the standpoint of this British observer, it’s the prohibition on establishment that has helped keep American religion voluntary, and self-organized, and therefore vigorous. A truly Machiavellian American atheist could do worse than to campaign for the immediate creation of a state church. For me, the complaints of British atheists against the flea-weight public influence of my church radiate unwitting comedy. I feel a kind of historical affection for the apparatus of establishment, and I respect the inclusiveness that the attempt to be everybody’s church entails, even when 94 percent of the population pay no attention at all: but as far as I am concerned, I would trade in these dusty remnants of public status in an instant, for a modest-sized helping of public understanding. That, not the gilded fairy-tale business with archbishops and coronations, is where real legitimacy lives.

What else? Oh yes: the swearing. Why do I swear so much in what you are about to read? To make a tonal point: to suggest that religious sensibilities are not made of glass, do not need to hide themselves nervously from whole dimensions of human experience. To express a serious and appropriate judgment on human destructiveness, in the natural language of that destructiveness. But most of all, in order to help me nerve myself up for the foolishness, in my own setting, of what I am doing. To relieve my feelings as I inflict on myself an undignified self-ejection from the protections of irony. I am an Englishman writing about religion. Naturally I’m fucking embarrassed.

1

Unapologetic

My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We’re weird because we go to church.

This means—well, as she gets older there’ll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she’s a teenager they’ll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. It means that we don’t believe in dinosaurs. It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishize pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgmental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity. That we’re as bad as Muslims. That we’re worse than Muslims, because Muslims are primitives who can’t be expected to know any better. That we’re better than Muslims, but only because we’ve lost the courage of our convictions. That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in your minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress. That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy. That we get all snooty and yuck-no-thanks about transsexuals, but think it’s perfectly normal for middle-aged men to wear purple dresses. That we cover up child abuse, because we care more about power than justice. That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past. That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.

But hey, that’s not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it—or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, a mish-mash of truths and half-truths and untruths plucked from radically different parts of Christian history and the Christian world, with the part continually taken for the whole (if the part is damaging) or the whole for the part (if it’s flattering)—but at least they assume there’s a thing called religion there which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested. In fact there’s something truly devoted about the way that Dawkinsites manage to extract a stimulating hobby from the thought of other people’s belief. The ones in this country must be envious of the intensity of the anti-religious struggle in the United States; yet some of them even contrive to feel oppressed by the Church of England, which is not easy to do. It must take a deft delicacy at operating on a tiny scale, like doing needlepoint, or playing Subbuteo, or fitting a whole model-railway layout into an attaché case.

No: the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we’re embarrassing. For most people who aren’t New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren’t weird because we’re wicked. We’re weird because we’re inexplicable; because, when there’s no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we’ve committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes which obtrude, which stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respect-worthy or principled way either; more in the way that some particularly styleless piece of dressing does, which makes the onlooker wince and look away and wonder if some degree of cerebral deficiency is involved. Believers are people with pudding-bowl haircuts, wearing anoraks in August, and chunky-knit sweaters the color of vomit. Or, to pull it back from the metaphor of clothing to the bits of behavior that the judgment is really based on, believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behavior; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidized content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over. And as well as being childish, and abject, and solemn, and awkward, we voluntarily associate ourselves with an old-fashioned mildewed orthodoxy, an Authority with all its authority gone. Nothing is so sad—sad from the style point of view—as the mainstream taste of the day before yesterday. If we couldn’t help ourselves, if we absolutely had to go shopping in the general area of woo-hoo and The-Force-Is-Strong-In-You-Young-Skywalker, we could at least have picked something new and colorful, something with a bit of gap-year spiritual zing to it, possibly involving chanting and spa therapies. Instead of which, we chose old buildings that smell of dead flowers, and groups of pensioners laboriously grinding their way through All Things Bright and Beautiful. Rebel cool? Not so much.

And worst, as I said before, there is no reason for it. No obvious lack that this sad stuff could be an attempt to supply, however cack-handed. Most people don’t have a God-shaped space in their minds, waiting to be filled, or the New Atheist counterpart, a lack-of-God-shaped space, filled with the swirly, pungent vapors of polemic. Most people’s lives provide them with a full range of loves and hates and joys and despairs, and a moral framework by which to understand them, and a place for awe and transcendence, without any need for religion. Believers are the people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak.

And so what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at—if for some reason you wanted to guess at it—it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality. It looks as if, to a believer, things can never be allowed just to be what they are. They always have to be translated, moralized—given an unnecessary and rather sentimental extra meaning. A sunset can’t just be part of the

Reviews for Unapologetic

[hamburgerclan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've picked up a number of books over the years that make the case for why you should believe that the Bible and Jesus are true: Evidence That Demands A Verdict, Mere Christianity, What They Need to Hear. Each have their own way of approaching the truth, each have their own reasons for why Christianity is rational, if not compelling. But Unapologetic brings one thing to the table that the others lack: the F-word. No, I'm not talking about faith. I'm talking about #^@$! (Gotta watch my language. My mom might read this.) Mr. Spufford does not approach the truth with pleasant gentility. He speaks plainly and honestly, with a bit of snark. He describes a world from which vulgarity arises and presents a situation, our sinfulness, which certainly warrants such language. (In his opinion, at least.)(And mine.)But then, in his own words, Mr. Spufford also tells the story of Jesus, in all its wonder and wackiness. No vulgarity there, though he paints a picture of an earthy, utterly human messiah. Not in the Jehovah's Witness sense, but in the "true man, born of the Virgin Mary" sense. He then takes on arguments/objections that have been raised against Christian beliefs, as well as those against Christians. I love the wit and honesty that he brings to bear on the subject.All in all, I had to go out and add Unapologetic to my bookshelves. It's not a perfect book--it's lacking a clear declaration of the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, etc. But then, that was never Mr. Spufford's intention. His hope was to present the reasonableness Christian faith to those who had never experienced it. Not being in that category, I can't judge how well he's succeeded. But I can say that he's presented my own faith in a voice that rings true and is well worth hearing.

[maryreinert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

've been a Christian all my live--was born and raised that way. But somewhere along the line, I decided that was really a good thing. My beliefs have changed considerably since going through junior high confirmation instruction, but amazingly they have also stayed much the same. This book is nothing short of brilliant in that it puts into words much of what I have come to believe but just didn't have the ability to express it in such a way. And although I've heard the story of the last days of Jesus thousands of times, I've never heard it told the way he does. It's as if I was hearing it for the first time.That's not to say this is an easy read by any means. Spufford makes many references that I had to look up and I even had to resort to the dictionary several times. His vocabulary is far greater than mine. Many times, I simply had to reread an entire paragraph to understand. At the same time, he often made me laugh out loud. Yes, he's irreverent in places, but irreverent to things that really don't matter. For the things that do matter, he obviously has deep respect.This is a book to keep and reread. It's not a devotional or an inspirational book. It's an objective look at a very subjective topic, told not from research or in any kind of scientific way. Spufford is obviously a very smart man, and it's very refreshing to read an intelligent and thoughtful look at Christianity and what it means to him. And what it means to him, makes makes sense to me and that is reassuring. This is not a book for everyone, but it is a book that should be explored by those that question what they believe and by those that are uncomfortable with what many call "Christianity." This isn't any kind of "new age" approach; it isn't a condemnation of anyone or any belief, it isn't political, liberal or conservative. It isn't my junior high Sunday School lesson; yet, in many ways the theme is still the same. Spufford's lesson, however, is for the adult who has realized that a twelve-year-old's faith doesn't cut it in a forty-year old's life.

[admiralcreedy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One book that is probably going to be given to many and various people this Christmas, and possibly find its way on to many shelves, is the latest in the discussion generated by the so-called 'New Atheists'. This book, however, is ostensibly written by a Christian. Francis Spufford is a writer and teacher of writing, and writes "Unapologetic" because, as his subtitle goes, "Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense".An interesting premise for a book then! There are three main parts to my review - the style and writing of the book, the picture of the Christian story that Spufford paints, and his success in doing so. Firstly, and most positively, the style and writing of "Unapologetic". I love the way Spufford writes - and so, apparently, should I, as he has won awards for writing and indeed teaches writing - partly because I can so identify with the 'stream of consciousness' style in response to stimuli that he employs so successfully here. The odd swear word will put off some, but it also demonstrates the passion of the writer, and so doesn't come across like a schoolboy trying to impress his peers. This is one of the most readable books I've read this year (and I read a lot of books!), which is a commendation in itself. The writing is enjoyable, and it is easy to see what Spufford is saying, rather than flailing around between meanings, as can happen with books on a spiritual theme.Spufford paints a picture of the Christian story, a version of the Christian message, that is quintessentially british, quite Anglican, and generally hopeful. I disagree with him on some fairly key areas, but I thoroughly agree with his central premise: that Christianity makes sense. In his own admission - on the back cover in fact - this is not meant to be a technical, doctrinal apologetic, but it is a book very aware of the odd place of religion, particularly Christianity, in the UK and the West today. The opening story about his daughter is quite charming and revealing, and makes a point that many will identify with; "We're weird because we go to church". This book makes much of human sinfulness - which Spufford amusingly (and arguably quite helpfully) identifies as "HPtFtU" (or, in English, the Human Propensity to F*** things Up [first swear, please forgive me, oh invisible editors]) - which is helpful, and an excellent starting point.Where I found myself disagreeing with Spufford's presentation of the Christian message was occasionally serious - such as the existence of hell, for example - but his core message is helpful. I wouldn't recommend this book to a serious seeker, or for evangelism training, over C.S.Lewis or similar, but it is helpful. This book adds to the discussion. This, arguably, is the emotional, unfinished side of the coin that David Bentley-Hart's superb "Atheist Delusions" forms the rational/historical side of. Its also an immensely enjoyable and readable book. I don't know if I'd revisit it, but I did enjoy it, and felt it has a use.

[dubiousdisciple · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

British Christianity just isn’t the same as our American brand. It’s funnier, raunchier, and more real … that is, if Spufford, a self-proclaimed Christian, is a legitimate example.We’re not likely to hear Spufford’s take on Christianity from the pulpit, but I wish we could. I really do. This book is a must-read. This is Christ and Christianity down off its pedestal, down in the mud and the blood. This is Jesus the way he really lived and died. It is Christians today, with our human doubts and fears and needs, the way we live and die in the real world. This is life; therefore, this is God.The kicker? Despite everything, despite the HPtFtU (Human propensity to f— things up) Christianity does still make surprising emotional sense.Francis Spufford is first and foremost a writer, as becomes evident in the opening paragraph, which is a good thing. Set aside a few hours for a captivating, picturesque read.Harper One, © 2013, 213 pagesISBN: 978-0-06-230046-1

[annebrooke · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mostly unhelpful ranting, but in the midst of the guff, there's a totally brilliant chapter about Jesus, and a very powerful ending.

[jsburbidge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am very much not the target audience for this book.In fact, I suspect that, in general, very few reviewers of apologetics are the target audience for apologetics; they are likely to be regular, if not professional, churchgoers. The best one can do is assess the book against one's own knowledge and experience.From that perspective, Spufford comes off fairly well. His narrative - and because he is providing an experiential and emotional appeal rather than a logical argument, it is a narrative - matches up fairly well with a reasonable mainstream Anglican position. (I can't assess how it would seem to somebody outside the church, having been more or less continuously involved in active parish life - choir member, server, member of synod, subdeacon - since my confirmation, and Spufford's description of experience from outside I have no parallel knowledge to compare with.)I would tweak a few things theologically - the place of hell, for example, has been radically downgraded in the past few decades (see, for example, Hans Urs von Balthasar's Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? With a Short Discourse on Hell) but, being a final bulwark of radical free will, has not been expunged - but what he deals with is generally solid, if rather basic.I picked this up because of Spufford's skill as a writer, and he does not disappoint.As a modern example of lay apologetics this is worth reading. The niche Lewis and Blamires filled for the C of E has been vacated by the passage of time (both start to show very much where they took specific traits of their age as universal) and this book stands up well as a successor.

[john.cooper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fed up with the attacks of Richard Dawkins et al. on a faith he doesn’t recognize, and knowing that he can’t assert the truth of religion on an atheist’s terms, Francis Spufford (author of 2017’s top novel Golden Hill) sets out to explain the way Christianity can satisfy the needs of an intelligent person in the modern age. Spufford writes like the somewhat more serious cousin of Nick Hornby, speaking his truth as your most articulate friend might speak it over a pint. Pointed sarcasm is not unknown here. Exasperation is honestly expressed. Arguments are made carefully, and begin with a well-nigh undeniable presentation of sin, or as Spufford calls it, the Human Propensity to F*** Things Up — HPtFtU.The book did not quite bring me back into the fold. A maybe-yes maybe-no Christian, religious but baffled, I concede the immense attraction, conceptual power, and (yes) intellectual rigor of the faith, without quite being able to assent to enough dogma to fit into an organized community of believers. Ultimately, the keystone to Spufford’s emotional connection is the power of the forgiveness offered by the Christian conception of God; this doesn’t resonate with me. But I’m glad to read such a smart, nondogmatic, passionate defense of a belief system that sorely needs defenders these days. And I highly recommend it to anyone, religious or not, who can say the word “Christianity” without giggling, sneering, or cringing.

[khiemstra631 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Critics from across the ocean have hailed Francis Spufford as the great new Christian apologist of this century. He has written a rather difficult book that probably should be read two or three times to grasp all of what he intends to convey to the reader. Two interesting points are that the book is filled with profanity, and his statement that the great majority of Christians have known for several generations that there is no such place as Hell. Uh, that is not exactly true in my neck of the woods, but I am part of a group known to him as "wacky Americans". Despite all of that, his chapter on the life and ministry of Yeshua/Jesus is really wonderful and pretty much profanity-free. At 220 pages and of a small physical footprint, it's a worthwhile read.

[spbooks_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You’ve heard of something being a breath of fresh air. Well... this book is like standing in the middle of a thunderstorm, wind trying to push you over, rain slamming into your face. It’s stunning. The author, Francis Spufford, pulls no punches and rips through the bullshit that often attends the debates around the Christianity/atheist divide. I love the fact that the author is raw and earthy, using language that’s right on the edge of decency to get his point across. For example, he defines sin as ‘The human potential to fuck things up’. Haven’t heard it defined in quite that way before - but it certainly expresses the point articulately. Spufford does not, of course, use coarse language like this all the time. That would just make the language bland and superficial. Even when he is using ‘normal’ language, his descriptions, turns of phrases, alternative perspectives, analogies, metaphors are surprising, refreshing, and often confronting. This book is not for the fluffy, rigid, fundamentalist - Christian or atheist. It’s for those who are pissed off with the run-of-the-mill, intellectualised, defensive, avoiding, unrealistic, detached-from-reality inanity the plagues debates around religion. I loved it and am now cleaning up after the brain-cleansing storm!

[jandm_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. It's the book I no longer need to write -- not that I could ever match Spufford's honesty or style in writing, and getting underneath the surface of faith. This would particularly suit someone who thinks that the Christian faith could never be satisfying, or is underneath just a nasty religion, or is just shallow wish-fulfilment.

[skybalon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An extremely interesting and readable book that fills an important niche. It has one of the more important introductions as it is written to Americans because the book originally was published in England and it helps clear up some things that otherwise would be opaque.

Ultimately Chapter 5 was my favorite, it gives a different perspective on Jesus' life than pure apologetics could ever provide. It is not maybe as complete as it could be, I honestly think a stronger case could be made, but it does a real good job as far as it goes.

It is also rare that a book like this would contain as many profanities as it does. The author explains it in the Introduction, but it still may be off putting to some US readers. If you can get past it however, it is worth the read.