Book Review: That Hideous Strength: How the West Was Lost (Melvin Tinker)
Welwyn: Evangelical Press, 2018 Drawing on the title of a C. S. Lewis novel – which is itself derived from Sir David Lyndsay – Tinker offers a searching critique of […]
Welwyn: Evangelical Press, 2018
Drawing on the title of a C. S. Lewis novel – which is itself derived from Sir David Lyndsay – Tinker offers a searching critique of the cultural Marxism that dominates the contemporary Western world. In his novel, Lewis was aiming at the eugenics notions of J. B. S. Haldane and Bertrand Russell. He saw the new zealots as religious, and increasingly that is what we have come to witness. Even Australian Rugby has an infallible code of values which no one dare transgress. The result is, as Woody Allen quipped: ‘The future isn’t what it used to be.’
Cultural Marxism (which is also known as Critical Theory) talks about equality, liberation and tolerance, which is what most of the contemporary Church talks about. Political correctness is Cultural Marxism. The proletariat are replaced by victims according to race, gender or sexual orientation. The Institute for Marxism was set up at Frankfurt in 1923 but became the Institute for Social Research, and more simply as the Frankfurt School. In 1930 Max Horkheimer steered it in a neo-Marxist direction with Critical Theory emphasising not truth but praxis.
The creators of Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives were homosexual men, and they were not fighting for gay marriage or any kind of marriage. In Tinker’s view, the evangelicals in the Church of Scotland and the Church of England have been rendered completely toothless. Even the genial Gerald Bray has commented that ‘Spinelessness has long been the mark of the true Evangelical’ O, for a William Wilberforce: ‘The only solid hopes for the well-being of our country depend not so much on her fleets and armies, the wisdom of her rulers, or the spirit of her people, as on the realisation that she still contains many, who, in a degenerate age, love and obey the Gospel of Christ.’ The book is worth the reading for that quote alone.
That Hideous Strength: How the West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Church, the World and the Gospel of Change
Melvin Tinker | Evangelical Press
Paperback
