Medievalism Isn’t The Answer To Modernity

On September 3, 2025, British right-wing populist political leader Nigel Farage gave evidence to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee about free speech in Europe. He claimed the enforcement of hate-speech laws was making the United Kingdom like North Korea. The same day, President Xi staged a parade to celebrate victory over Japan in World War II and highlight China’s military power.

It’s hard not to feel that the world order is changing and that the West is in terminal decline, undermined by liberal progressivism within and revanchist imperial nationalism without. Are we witnessing the death of Western civilization?

Jamie Franklin, a high-church Anglican vicar in England, certainly thinks so. In The Great Return: Why Only a Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western Civilization, he argues that the only answer to cultural decline is a widespread return to a Christian society of a medieval flavor.

Franklin contends that the secular, liberal, multicultural outlook that has captured Western societies is leading to a total societal breakdown. He argues this breakdown is evidenced by problems like abortion, euthanasia, and transgender ideology. Something is indeed wrong in the West, yet it’s not clear that Franklin fully appreciates what it would mean to restore the civilization of the High Middle Ages.

Collapse of Medievalism

In this paean for medieval Christendom, Franklin laments the loss of the “social imaginary” of the medieval world, which, as Charles Taylor argued, made disbelief in God a near impossibility. Significantly, Franklin argues, the Middle Ages weren’t a time of darkness and ignorance. Instead, they were a time of intellectual, scientific, technological, and architectural progress. There was no inherent conflict between science and the church, because of an overarching metaphysics of creation.

According to Franklin, the root problem plaguing our culture is rationalistic materialism. This nominalist worldview can’t replace Christianity as a sufficient ground for society. It provides no solid foundation for transcendence and aesthetics, resulting in purposelessness and producing ugliness rather than beauty. In contrast, he argues, “because medieval society saw the cosmos as a reflection of the power and wisdom of God, they saw meaning within it” (96). Thus, he calls for a return to medievalism.

According to Franklin, the root problem plaguing our culture is rationalistic materialism.

Yet there’s a reason the Protestant reformers rejected the medieval vision. It had gone too far toward superstition when relics and “holy places such as the site of the crucifixion” were believed to be “charged with spiritual power” (96). Instead, the reformers, though thoroughly committed to the supernatural, felt compelled by God’s Word to reject this medieval conception as superstition.

Searching for Christendom

Franklin correctly argues that the rights and values of Western societies are grounded in Christianity. On this point, his analysis echoes Glen Scrivener’s in The Air We Breathe. However, Franklin’s attachment to the medieval world seems somewhat naive and romanticized.

For example, he doesn’t provide clear definitions of key terms like “Western Civilization” and “Christianity.” He identifies “the principles of democracy, the rule of law and the liberty of the individual” as the key characteristics of our Christian inheritance (178). The Middle Ages didn’t embody those values, though Christianity later encouraged them.

In Franklin’s analysis, the beauty of Gothic cathedrals exemplifies the glory of Western civilization. Yet he doesn’t seem concerned that these edifices were constructed by creating immiserated conditions for the mass of the population. Furthermore, those soaring churches were often statements of secular power and prestige for their lords or cities. They stood at the heart of a corrupt religious economy and false system of salvation.

Franklin assumes medieval Christendom is the pattern for a Christian society. In reality, that society was a product of a particular time and place. It likely can’t be substantially recovered. It’s not even clear that it needs to be recovered to retain the positive elements Christianity birthed in Western civilization.

In his analysis of cultural decline in the West, Franklin says little about Christianity’s rise in the Global South. Christianity is growing around the world in a way that would’ve seemed unimaginable in 1910, let alone in 1410. As Philip Jenkins rightly recognized, global Christianity may well produce a new Christendom that isn’t Western in character.

Considering the Church’s Mission

Though his call is for a more supernatural worldview, Franklin describes the West’s primary problems as philosophical, cultural, and political. Therefore, he places less emphasis on the church’s failure to defend and proclaim the biblical gospel.

Franklin seems to have little confidence in God’s common grace and providential restraining of social evil ahead of Christ’s return. Thus, it’s unsurprising that his primary prescription for the church is social action. He writes,

As the culture declines, it may be that the Christian Church finds itself in a position in which it must be much more intentional in creating a parallel culture to that of the world. . . . Therefore, schools, universities, hospitals, businesses, theatres, libraries and many other cultural institutions will need to be pioneered from a specifically Christian perspective. This will be necessary in order to allow the Christian Church to survive and the people within it to flourish. (288)

This prescription is akin to that of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option and Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World. However, Scripture is clear that while the church is in exile in this fallen world, we aren’t called to just to create a parallel society (see Jer. 29:4–7). Rather, we’re to be salt and light, an embassy of the true king, and a mission station recruiting people to membership in his coming eschatological kingdom.

The Reformation and the revivals of the post-medieval period, when the gospel was rediscovered, suggest more fruitful avenues for considering how the church might battle the tides of secularism. The church must remain faithful as the church, no matter the cultural context. All human attempts to build God’s kingdom on earth are bound to fail. Perhaps nonconformists more naturally understand this than those who belong to an established state church.

Leaning Toward Gospel Hope

Though Franklin is deeply pessimistic about the prospects for Western civilization, the Bible encourages us toward optimism. Jesus is Lord. He will build his church through the faithful preaching of the gospel.

All human attempts to build God’s kingdom on earth are bound to fail.

Western civilization has faced many crisis moments and proved remarkably resilient. The 20th century saw the defeat of two great challenges, Nazism and Communism. That’s surely because the culture was deeply formed by two millennia of Christian influence. The culture’s fundamentally Christian values may not be adequately grounded epistemologically anymore, but they’re still part of our social imaginary. Even arch-atheist Richard Dawkins identifies as a “cultural Christian.”

Franklin writes in apocalyptic terms at the very time we’re seeing a turn away from extreme progressivism and evidence of a Christian resurgence in the West, especially among Gen Z men. We need to hold our nerve, have confidence in the gospel, and recommit to making disciples of all nations.

The church’s mission isn’t to save Western civilization, even the parts we hold most dear. Rather, our mission is to proclaim the coming kingdom of God our Savior. The Great Return offers Christians a helpful cultural critique, but it proposes a political solution to a spiritual problem.