Scribner's Review: Christian Patriot by Taylor Marshall, a promising start, but it needs a lot of work

 

Christian authors, like any other author, have a lot of potential. What they are trying to say is always something that warrants a deeper read, especially when it comes to them articulating how the majority of Christians aren't bad people at all. A book like Christian Patriot, by Taylor Marshall, is an attempt to explain how important Christian values are to this country, and how they played a role in its development since its beginning. It is also about how a return to some of those same Christian virtues can help the United States heal its modern festering wounds, like the issue of abortion, unchecked immigration, outstanding national debt, and the general decline of Christianity's presence in the public square. All those points are crucial to address, but the book doesn't go the deepest into some of the problems, such as how these issues can be solved. Most chapters just end with a small section of to-do points, textbook-like, on how a person should think of how to address those problems. 

Christian Patriot also suffers from a lack of focus. The book is supposed to about tackling US-centric issues, but it sometimes just goes down rabbitholes that are not totally relevant to the book's topic. It briefly discusses the history of countries in Europe and beyond converting to Christianity, which I cannot really see as relevant to the topic. Even on the parts actually concerning the United States, Taylor makes some interesting arguments, such as that Thomas Jefferson was not really that fond of the Christian influence in the United States' founding documents, but he does not go deeper into supporting that argument, other than the assumption that the secular is totally bad? Indeed, a problem many Christian writers seem to not understand is that "secular" does not necessarily equate to "non-Christian", "pagan", or "atheistic." Secular refers to worldly matters, and even worldly matters can be imbued with a spirit of Christian values. It is odd that Taylor wrote that the momunents in Washington, D.C., are actually secular, because much of American iconography is imbued with Christian values. Even with the retreat of Christian values in the middle of the twentieth century, references to Christianity are still visible, such as in the profiles of the twenty-three great law-givers inside the Chamber of the House. Moses is the only one of the twenty-three whose face is seen from the front, not the profile. 

From the website Architect of the Capitol. https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/art/moses-relief-portrait

Taylor Marshall's Christian Patriot feels like it could be two separate books because of how much it writes about the history of Christianity as an influence in the politics and culture of European countries. It also suffers from the inclusion of lists just to pad out the word count. There are eleven pages of suggestions of how Christian Americans should live as suggested by different passages from the Bible. The whole acknowledgements section is just seventeen pages of names, many of them duplicates, of the various members of the book's launch team. There are also grammatical mistakes, such as Taylor accidentally spelling Theodosius II as Theodosian II, and getting the date of the Theodosian Code's publication wrong (he stated it was 483 AD instead of 438 AD), and Taylor also makes some bold, anachronistic assumptions about how ancient people lived (how did you get "10,000 talents = $10 billion? You are referring to monetary systems so far apart in time that making such comparisons is pointless). But I do feel like Taylor tried to bring up some suggestions for our country to solve our problems, such as implementing tax breaks and subsidies for new families similar to those employed in certain Western European countries. But there are other solutions that should be mentioned, such as limiting zoning regulations and trying to implement basic housing projects a la Levittown. Then there are solutions stated that are very well-meaning, but in reality are a pipe dream to implement, like the whole world converting to Christianity will bring about aboslute peace and harmony. If Christian Patriot instead solely focused on the United States and the Christian solutions to its problems, rather than a history of Christian influence in the western world, Taylor would have a stronger argument. 

Scribner's Rating: 6/10.