The Air That We Breathe – How We all Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress and Equality by Glen Scrivener (The Good Book Company 2022, 240 pages)
Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe is a thoughtful and lucid exploration of how the moral foundations of the modern West are deeply and inescapably Christian. With humour and clarity, Scrivener invites his readers to consider that the values we often take for granted, those that underpin our notions of justice, compassion, and human dignity, did not emerge out of nowhere. They are, he argues, the direct result of biblical teaching, teachings that continue to shape the moral imagination of the West, even though most people have forgotten their source.
Scrivener does a wonderful job as a “cultural excavator,” showing where certain ideas and concepts originated. In the process, he demonstrates how the Christian worldview has so thoroughly influenced modern values that even the most God-denying societies continue to live by its borrowed light. For example, beginning with the early centuries of Christian history, he shows how radical it was to claim that every person, slave or free, male or female, rich or poor, bore the image of God. This conviction, he contends, gradually reshaped attitudes toward power, mercy, and justice.
The book unfolds through seven thematic chapters, each built around a moral ideal that modern people almost automatically affirm: equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress. In each case, Scrivener demonstrates that these are not secular achievements but the fruit of gospel principles at work. He does not paint a rose-coloured picture of church history, acknowledging failure and hypocrisy where they occurred. Yet he insists that even such judgments depend on standards first introduced by Christianity itself. We condemn hypocrisy and oppression, he notes, precisely because we have internalised a Christian moral framework.
What makes The Air We Breathe especially compelling is its combination of accessibility and intellectual depth. Scrivener writes for a general audience without sacrificing rigour. He engages with solid historical scholarship, translating its insights into a memorable account of Christianity’s role in shaping the world. A significant part of the book’s appeal lies in its reversal of assumptions. Rather than asking whether Christianity is still relevant to the modern world, Scrivener reveals that the modern world is inconceivable without Christianity.
For contemporary Christians, this book offers both encouragement and challenge. It reminds readers that the gospel has not only saved individuals but has also transformed entire societies. Faith is often caricatured as oppressive or obsolete; however, Scrivener shows how even the critics of Christianity speak its language. The compassion they praise and the justice they demand trace their lineage to a crucified Lord who turned the world upside down. For believers, the book calls for a renewed sense of historical awareness, showing that Christianity’s public witness has always extended beyond the church walls.
Crucially, Scrivener also warns that the West’s core values cannot survive indefinitely once severed from their theological roots. Detached from the story of creation, fall, and redemption, our moral ideals risk collapsing into sentimentality or self-contradiction.
In making his case, Scrivener is confident but never combative. He does not seek to argue secular readers into submission but to help them see the deep convergence between their highest values and the Christian story. For sceptics, Scrivener offers an opportunity to reconsider whether the very moral air they breathe has a divine origin.
It should be emphasised that this is not a book nostalgic for a bygone age when Christian influence was more explicitly acknowledged. Instead, Scrivener invites readers to rediscover Christianity not as a relic of the past, but as the living source of the ideas that continue to sustain our world. We live in a time when it feels as though we are losing a shared moral foundation, a time of confusion and polarisation. Scrivener calls us to step back and consider the source of those foundational truths strong enough to build thriving societies upon, and that ultimately point us to eternal realities.
This is a book that should be on the reading list of every Christian who seeks to understand the world we inhabit and the faith that shaped it. Beyond that, for those who think they have moved beyond faith, this book is a call to recognise the gospel in the very air around us.
