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Editors’ note: 

Originally published in Themelios Volume 36, Issue 1, May 2011.

Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo is a counter-assault against the continual “global secularist” assault upon Christian thinking and creativity. The subtitle, A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning, could not summarize the book more succinctly. Pearcey is unwilling to play defense in matters of culture and truth, but rather stands “on the front lines fighting to liberate society from its captivity to secular worldviews” (278). Her message is one of redemption (Saving), specifically targeting the currently “secularized” medium of human cultural production (Leonardo), understanding that “The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture” (268).

In Schaefferesque fashion she argues that something has gone horribly wrong between the church and the arts that has allowed secularism to hijack the forms that once were integral with spreading Christian evangelism. The matter is one of worldviews, holistic Christianity versus reductive Global Secularism that must be countered by a broad assault mustering Christian artists to actively spread the biblical worldview, what is “rationally defensible, life affirming, and rooted in creation itself” (3), in a humane, redemptive, and deeply convicting way (273). Pearcey navigates possible pitfalls of worldview arguments (277) and attempts to provide both worldview analysis and an open door for the gospel. Arguing that false ideas are the main obstacle to evangelism (15) and that culture is the main vessel of secular meaning (76), her worldview analysis serves the purpose of 2 Cor 10:4–5 in breaking down purported “strongholds” of anti-Christian truth. Borrowing the words of Voddie Baucham, Saving Leonardo is Pearcey’s “game book” for active, “revolutionary” (278) Christian confrontation with Global Secularism primarily in the world of artistic creation with the aim of spreading Truth.

As a “game book,” Saving Leonardo provides both the rules of engagement and the plays themselves, a historical worldview break-down and a mandate for continued Christian artistry. As for the worldview breakdown, Part 1 defines the field: Global Secularism wrested the arts from Christianity. Pearcey attempts to identify the contemporary relevance of her analysis for today’s controversial issues by theoretically articulating Global Secularism and its consequences for church and world; in other words, Pearcey gives “the tools to individualize our approach in presenting the gospel” (246). Part 2 provides an example of fighting false ideas. With a “bird’s-eye-view” (3), Pearcey breaks secularism into “two paths,” Romantic and Enlightenment, through which the world is deceived by Global Secularism as seen in the testimony of art, movies, philosophers, and writers. When the smoke clears, she lays out a mandate for Christian artists to resist secularism and to make visible and audible declarations of Christian beauty, harmony, and truth (Epilogue). The call is for nothing short of a “global cultural revolution” (278).

Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

B&H (2010). 336 pp.

Is secularism a positive force in the modern world? Or does it lead to fragmentation and disintegration? In Saving Leonardo, best-selling award-winning author Nancy Pearcey (Total Truth, coauthor How Now Shall We Live?) makes a compelling case that secularism is destructive and dehumanizing.

B&H (2010). 336 pp.

However, while Pearcey offers an internally coherent and compelling argument, her book suffers fatally from at least one fault-line running through her rhetorical canvas: intellectual reductionism. Though Pearcey identifies secular worldviews as primarily reductive by making one aspect of creation absolute (244), she returns reductionist absolutism with her own reductive analysis. The book’s internal consistency belies the intellectual simplification required to reduce Western cultural history into discreet worldview boxes of Romantic and Enlightenment, or even “Global Secularism.” Granted, the problem is probably born less from any desire on the part of the author but rather from inter-mixed interpretations of Dooyeweerd, Rookmaaker, and Schaeffer combined with such a brief treatment of a truly monumental subject. But the problem is so endemic that Saving Leonardo is deprived of its aim by a Romanticism more Romantic than Wordsworth and a Postmodernism of the imagination.

If Pearcey’s analysis provides tools, then the tools are either warped beyond use or fit for incredibly few existing parts. For example, her articulation of “postmodernism” cites no actual postmodernist and employs quotes by literary theorists Roland Barthes and Jürgen Habermas (238) rather mistakenly (neither were postmodernists or wrote about postmodernism as such). Pearcey’s “postmodernism” rests, as far as anyone can tell, on an authoritative void. She boxes postmodernism into pithy statements about relativism and “upper-story values” with no link to actual texts that run quite to the contrary. Writing from personal experience, an actual postmodernist would find her misnomers amusingly dismissible. Pearcey also reduces Buddhism to a “radically dehumanizing” pantheism (204), an extreme misunderstanding of Buddhism that would not pose any pertinent argument to even initiate Zen thinkers. Pearcey’s account of existentialism cites the relevant philosophers but reduces their thinking to upper story/lower story truth boxes avoiding existentialist critiques that pose problems for Christian thinking and art. Existentialists were not opposed to reason, as she claims (225), but are often misleading. Existentialists destroyed the so-called “two realm theory of truth,” but are less than judiciously forced into that dichotomy by Pearcey (225).

The Christian worldview may indeed spread through artists in spite of reductive worldview analysis, but it is certainly no commendation in the eyes of the world for biblical truth to be associated with such poor quality analysis. Despite every good intention, because of unfair presentations of their views, Saving Leonardo drives away secular intellectuals who need the gospel as much as anyone. Surely Christians can do a better job of representing “worldviews” accurately so that Christians and non-Christians will explore truth and reality. Peter J. Leithart’s Solomon among the Postmoderns (Brazos, 2008) does a much better job with this. Readers would also probably find in Grant Horner, Meaning at the Movies: Becoming a Discerning Viewer (Crossway, 2010), a more modest but helpful approach for Christians approaching culture, specifically in movies, with Bible-saturated, theologically based tools for gospel-centered discernment.

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