Review of "The Air We Breathe"
James Valentine is a well- known Australian author, musician and presenter on radio and television. Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, he describes himself thus:
“With no faith, religion or spiritual practice, I believe in love, hope, truth and my fellow humans. I’m driven by wonder, joy, curiosity, knowledge, wisdom. I believe in equality. Of opportunity of education, of access to water, food, shelter. I believe in human rights, the rule of law, voting, reason and respect.
I like reason, science, information. Honesty and trust are good things to strive for….. I hate injustice, bullying, greed and tyranny.”[1]
Bravo, James! I’m so glad he believes and loves all those things. But I wonder whether he, and many others, have ever stopped to reflect on how and why they came by such values? He explicitly says “faith, religion or spiritual practice” have played no part in the formation of his much-lauded moral principles. Have they just been plucked from our superior, Western-educated liberal minds that have thrown up more wars in the last century than any previous century?
If you have ever wondered how you could dialogue with the James Valentines of this world, then Glen Scrivener’s masterful book, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality will be a valuable weapon in your arsenal.
This is the contention of the book: “…if you’re a Westerner - whether you’ve stepped foot inside a church or not, whether you’ve clapped eyes on a Bible or not, whether you consider yourself an atheist, pagan or Jedi Knight - you are a goldfish, and Christianity is the water in which you swim.” (p11)
Why a goldfish? Because a goldfish sees what’s in the water around it, it shapes everything it does, but it doesn’t SEE the water. Like goldfish (and James Valentine), we see the good things we value in our culture, like equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment and freedom, but don’t recognise the ideas and values that gave rise to them. We take them for granted, and they are just… well… the air we breathe.
As a (very) former history teacher, I am constantly saddened and perplexed that denizens of the 21st century have no clue whatsoever of the values and practices of the ancient world of the 1st century and of the legacy of the Christian revolution at that time.
Scrivener takes us on a journey from the ancient world to our modern one, or as he puts it - from Genesis to George Floyd - showing us how Jesus has shaped our modern world - its ideals, its values, its moral principles.
The core of the book are seven chapters that focus on the seven values that are core to the modern outlook: Equality, Compassion, Consent, Enlightenment, Science, Freedom and Progress.
I want to take his chapter on consent to illustrate his thesis.
It begins with the story of Rachel Denhollander (herself a Christian) addressing the trial of serial sexual predator, Dr Larry Nasser (of USA Gymnastics team infamy) who sexually abused at least 265 girls under his care. She draws attention to a very significant question, “How much is a little girl worth?” Her answer? These victims are worth everything.
But as Scrivener points out, if you asked a 1st century Roman that question the answer might range between nothing to the cost of a loaf of bread.[2] A freeborn Roman man believed that he had an unquestioned right to the bodies of lower-status women, children, prostitutes and slaves. What we today call ‘abuse’ was, to his thinking, the obvious use for sex. The status of your partner - not their consent, or gender, or their age - was what mattered.[3]
So how did we get from the Roman mindset to the question at the Nasser trial? The answer? The sexual revolution.
But not, as you might think, the sexual revolution of the 1960s; rather it was the cataclysmic upheaval of sexual values and mores that began with the incarnation of Jesus.
Throughout this superb little chapter, Scrivener posits that Jesus’ teaching: imposed restrictions on men in the way they used their sexual dominance; raised the intensity of the significance of sex on a human level; announced the death of casual sex and easy divorce; afforded our human bodies great dignity because they are in-dwelt by God; and stipulated mutual consent between a man and a woman within marriage.
The final plank in Scriveners hypothesis about this sexual transformation that has reverberated down the centuries is our attitude towards children.
“In the ancient world sex with boys and girls was not merely tolerated; it was celebrated by writers like Juvenal, Petronius, Horace, Strato, Lucian and Philostratus. The word they used was pederasty: love of children. Christians were uniformly disgusted by the practice and called it by a different name - paidophthoros: destruction of children. What the classical world called love, Christians called abuse… In the reign of the Christian emperor, Justinian (527-565), pederasty was outlawed… Here church and state - preaching and legislation - worked together as a one-two punch against the sexualisation of children.”[4]
And it is here that Scrivener returns to Rachel Denhollander as she faces her abuser across the courtroom. She tells him that what he did was evil and wicked - and she knows that because a straight line exists. We know ‘crooked’ because ‘straight’ exists. We know evil because goodness exists. We know abuse is abuse because the air we have been breathing for the last 2000 years tells us that our bodies should be treated with dignity, that sex is sacred, that children are valuable, and that the powerful should not exploit the weak and vulnerable.
When we contemplate Denhollander’s question, and the guttural “Everything!” rises up within us, that’s your Christianity talking.
I highly recommend this book - it’s easy to read, it’s replete with contemporary allusions, it’s well foot-noted for those of us who like to chase up references. And he has written it for believers and unbelievers alike - so it’s an easy and thoughtful gift for our goldfish friends who can’t see the water they are swimming in.
[1] SMH July 9, 2022
[2] Scrivener, p82-3
[3] Scivener, p84
[4] Scrivener, p97
Lesley Ramsayhas been in local church ministry with her husband, Jim, for 47 years. After university she trained as a teacher and then raised four children. Over the past 30 years she has worked as a Bible teacher and evangelist across Australia and overseas. She has written and edited several books and training packages that are sold and used internationally. She now works at Moore College in Sydney, in pastoral care to the students. To relax, she enjoys a good coffee and a good book and hanging out with her grandchildren.