Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society
by RR Reno, Regnery Faith, £21
I groan a little when I read an opening sentence like: “Our country is entering a crisis.” There is always someone, it seems, who thinks their age is an age of great, unprecedented crisis.
But hold on. I shouldn’t be so smug. In Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, RR Reno (a Catholic convert from Episcopalianism and editor of First Things magazine) reports that the life expectancy of a white woman in America without a high school degree declined by five years between 1990 and 2010. This statistic alone sounds both baffling and ominous. Reno sees it as suggestive of a crisis among poor whites akin to that in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is “an indication of a shocking cultural collapse. It’s a sign of the perversion of our age that we ignore it.”
