How Should We Then Live? A Critical Book Review
This paper offers a critical review of Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?, a text written for a Christian audience uncomfortable with secular modernity. The review examines Schaeffer's central thesis — that Christianity provides redemptive moral grounding while secular humanism leads to cultural and ethical decay — alongside the book's notable biases, theoretical assumptions, and Eurocentric limitations. The paper also evaluates Schaeffer's contributions to debates on law, ethics, abortion, and education, before offering a personal critique that acknowledges the book's ambitious scope while identifying its lack of rigorous documentation and its tendency to deepen rather than bridge the divide between sacred and secular worldviews.
- Purpose and Intended Audience: Overview of Schaeffer's aims and evangelical readership
- Thesis and Bias: Humanism as decay; anti-secular and Eurocentric biases
- Theoretical Assumptions: Biblical truth as foundation; Renaissance and Reformation tensions
- Historical Issues and Implications: Chronological analysis linking past to present social decline
- Contributions to Law and Ethics: Abortion, education, and legal ethics through a Christian lens
- Personal Critique: Strengths in art analysis; weaknesses in documentation and bridge-building
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What makes this paper effective
- The review is well-organized, addressing distinct analytical categories — thesis, bias, theory, history, ethics, and personal critique — in a logical sequence that mirrors standard academic book-review conventions.
- The writer balances acknowledgment of Schaeffer's strengths (his art and architecture analysis, his recognition of social alienation) with substantive criticisms, avoiding a one-sided dismissal.
- Incorporating secondary scholarship (McVicar, Williams) to contextualize Schaeffer's influence on abortion discourse and American evangelicalism strengthens the review's academic grounding.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates evaluative synthesis: rather than simply summarizing Schaeffer's argument, the writer situates it within broader intellectual and historical contexts, critiquing both internal consistency (Schaeffer's contradictions on Christian unity) and external validity (the lack of documented evidence for historical claims). This technique is central to graduate-level critical book reviewing.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a six-section structure covering: (1) purpose and audience, (2) thesis and authorial bias, (3) theoretical assumptions rooted in evangelical logic, (4) historical and contemporary implications, (5) ethical and legal contributions with reference to secondary sources, and (6) a personal critique weighing strengths against methodological weaknesses. Each section builds on the previous, culminating in a balanced but critical final judgment.
Purpose and Intended Audience
Written for a Christian audience ill at ease in the dominant culture, Francis Schaeffer traces European, or "Western," civilization through a Biblical lens. The purpose of the text is twofold. One of its main functions is to provide an alternative view of history and of Western civilization. While European history can never avoid direct discussions of the role religion has played in matters of identity construction and state-building, Schaeffer takes the discussion to a whole new level. For Schaeffer, Western history and culture has evolved either toward a Biblical worldview or antithetical to it. A second major purpose of the text is to offer readers solace, encouraging them to deepen their faith and forge ties with the Christian community that is likewise at odds with the modern world. The intended audience is squarely Christian — specifically leaning evangelical and socially conservative. Schaeffer assumes his readership to be sympathetic with his core assumptions and beliefs.
Thesis and Bias
Schaeffer is uncomfortable with modernity in general, and outright averse to postmodernism. The thesis of the book is that Christianity offers redemptive power to transform humanity, whereas secular humanism has led to moral and aesthetic decay. Schaeffer dismantles the common belief that humanism, the Enlightenment, empiricism, and rational inquiry represent the progress of civilization. In fact, Schaeffer turns the pro-humanistic bias inherent in Western society on its head, reversing the narrative entirely. The title, How Should We Then Live?, refers to the collective Christian community that struggles to find psychological, social, and spiritual footing in a progressive secular world.
Biases abound in Schaeffer's text, which is unabashedly critical of humanism. Schaeffer operates within a world of moral absolutes and decries trends toward relativism and individualism, taking a decidedly pessimistic view of human progress. The author is also narrow-minded in his approach to history, still treating Europe and the Western world as the center of the universe while patently ignoring the remainder of the planet. Schaeffer is especially uncomfortable with human sexuality; he even appears to blush when contemplating the phallus cult at Pompeii, referring to its "exaggerated sexuality" and "unabashedly blatant" imagery (Kindle Edition). No historian can deny the decadence of ancient Rome, to be sure, but Schaeffer is uniquely critical of the Roman aesthetic.
Theoretical Assumptions
The central premise of the book is that humanism leads to moral decrepitude because a human-centric world cannot be a Christ-centric world. Well within the confines of evangelical logic, it is difficult to argue with an author whose theoretical assumptions rest firmly on a foundation of Biblical truth. If the Bible is the absolute truth, and if faith in Christ is the only means to achieve salvation, then any non-Christian worldview is, by definition, wrong. Schaeffer devotes a large portion of the book to analyzing European art and architecture, which he correctly regards as a manifestation or reflection of prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and norms.
The theory is that the fusion of church and state, which persisted throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, led to an ideal social order in which absolute moral truths reinforced Christian values while sanctioning opposing views. However, the Renaissance also signaled the first major split in the Christian consciousness: the division between faith in Jesus and the theocratic model of governance on the one hand, and secular humanism on the other. The tensions brewing during the Renaissance led to the Reformation, and in turn to the Enlightenment, after which European society went downhill in Schaeffer's estimation. As an evangelical Protestant, however, Schaeffer celebrates the Reformation because of its exposure of Church corruption in both power and theology. Reformation theology shifted the focus back to faith in Christ and away from faith in the institution of the Church — which Schaeffer views as essentially a repository of human, rather than divine, authority.
References
McVicar, M. J. (2015). Christian Reconstruction. UNC Press.
Schaeffer, F. A. (2005). How Should We Then Live? L'Abri 50th Anniversary Edition. Crossway.
Williams, D. K. (2015). The partisan trajectory of the American pro-life movement. Religions, 6(2), 451–475.
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