The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs (review)

With Patrick Deneen's recent analysis in Why Liberalism Failed of liberalism's twenty-first century ironic self-annulation through liberalism's near hegemonic triumph over the world, Christian scholars have begun to question the nearly one-hundred-year marriage between Christianity and the dominant current of thinking born from the Enlightenment. The dominant narrative shaped through the West—especially in the Anglosphere—has been that, rather than being a challenge to the Christian social order, Enlightenment liberalism was, in fact, an outgrowth of the Gospel message that had been shaped but, at the same time, straitjacketed by the at times brutal and oppressive character of premodern Europe. However, as Deneen's thesis has demonstrated, liberalism, itself in its final stages, has taken a decidedly authoritarian cast that, combined with liberalism's technocratic character and the tremendous social power at its disposal, has created a near omnipotent control over the daily lives of people throughout much of the world. Late liberalism's authoritarian nature is especially paradoxical, for liberalism has carried as its attendant ethical system a humanism that championed personal liberty, rights, and various forms of equality, at least in potentia, for all of humankind, and it was precisely this humanism that, in the early and mid-twentieth century, drew so many Christian intellectuals to champion liberalism's cause.

In his recent work, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Baylor University's Alan Jacobs presents what is, without question, the most thorough presentation of the complexity of the first (post-modern) generation of Christian Humanists who helped to craft a new humanism and newly refashioned Christianity for the emergent post-World War II liberal world order. Chronicling the experience of well-known Christian thinkers and artists such as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, The Year of Our Lord also includes appearances of perhaps, in the contemporary Christian milieu, lesser known but nonetheless influential figures such as Reinhold Niehbuhr, Jacques Ellul, and the odd Simone Weil. While many contemporary conservative Christians view contemporary conservative Christianity as having an unbroken pedigree with the "pre-modern" and Early Modern Church, one of Jacobs's central theses is that the Second World War was, for many twentieth-century thinkers, a reboot of Christianity. Just as World War II for many Germany people was a Stunde Null or "zero hour" in which German history was reset, and a new era or Nachkriegszeit (post-war time) was born, so too, Alan Jacobs argues, did Christianity have to recalibrate itself for the dominate technocratic liberal world order.

For Jacobs, the recalibration of Christianity into Christian humanism parallels the political order founded at January 14, 1943 Casablanca Conference at which F. D. R. and Winston Churchill, recognizing that the tide of the war had swung in their favor, sought to plan a new global vision. In tandem with the Casablanca Conference, John Foster Dulles, whose brother Allen would help to found the Central Intelligence Agency, and along with Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, published a series of articles in Christianity and Crisis titled, "Six Pillars of Peace," which themselves served as a blueprint for a new global world order that would provide peace and stability. The joint Dulles–Niebuhr effort was serendipitously matched by a series of lectures, articles, books, and even poems by a number of French, British, and American writers who advocated a return renewal of Christian culture through a renewal of Christian education, including Jacques Maritain's "Education at the Crossroads," given the very day of the Casablanca Conference, as well as C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, drawn from a series of lectures given that year, as well as Simone Weil's The Need for Roots.

This new Christian humanism, despite complicated and qualified sympathy for medievalism and even some twentieth-century reactionary movements...