The Undercover Revolution

How Fiction Changed Britain

Book Details

Discerning Reader Editorial Review

Reviewed 05/07/2009 by Mark Tubbs.

Recommended. A brief but hearty defence of the Bible's truthfulness, albeit from a bad angle.

Iain Murray has been a boon to evangelicalism for over sixty years. From his co-founding of the Banner of Truth Trust, his work with the late Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel, and the twenty-plus book he has written, the Church would be the poorer without his gifts and his efforts. Therefore it pains me to say that writing about literature does not seem to number among his many and varied gifts – that is, if Murray’s latest book, The Undercover Revolution: How Fiction Changed Britain, is any indication.

Murray’s stated thesis is sound: "Words are powerful things and none can be more injurious than many to be found in fiction." The words he refers to are those literary works written by the atheistic and agnostic authors of late Victorian/early Edwardian England, including H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edmund Gosse, George Moore, Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, and George Bernard Shaw.

However, as Peter Leithart has written, "Creatures cannot remake the world merely by speaking or writing words. What exists in words becomes flesh and remakes the world only when people accept the invitation to live in the reality that the words describe" – for better or for worse. There’s no doubt of the power of anti-Christian or un-Christian literature to further harden hearts, but this only implies that those hearts were already on the slippery slope away from the Lord. Later Murray seems to agree: "The real problem that this school of men could not solve, either in their own lives or in those of others, was human nature."

Therefore I cannot agree wholeheartedly with John MacArthur’s endorsement of this book, namely that "Iain Murray has put his finger on the turning point that sent western culture down the path to immorality." I wonder if Murray himself agrees with MacArthur’s assessment, based on the Murray quote rounding out the paragraph before this one. Whereas MacArthur finds Murray’s explanation persuasive, I find it wanting. One need only to refer back to the Enlightenment, the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the 17th century Restoration and 19th century Regency periods in England to discover extreme dissolution in morals making its way into the literature of the period. Such undercurrents were not exclusive to the fin de siècle literature of England.

I offer this syllogism, which seems to me to be accurate in its portrayal of Murray’s argument in the book, but lacks cohesion as a logical sequence:

1.    The ungodly literature of late Victorian and early Edwardian England was injurious to society.
2.    The Bible is not fiction.
3.    Therefore, we must believe what is true: the Bible, which tells of Christ.

This is a problematic syllogism on many levels. Note the distinction between 'literature' and 'fiction' in the syllogism. Unfortunately, such a distinction is all but absent in the book. Whereas the first section is concerned with 'fiction' in the sense of it being "the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration," Murray wants to bend the meaning to connote the secondary, more abstract sense of the word: "something feigned, invented, or imagined; a made-up story." Unjustly, he conflates these two senses in the book.

But it would not do to imply that Murray’s discussion of literature is altogether bankrupt. As much as it lacks cohesion, Murray makes some important point about literature. Firstly, classic literature is not beyond criticism. Secondly, the Victorian and Edwardian authors Murray examines in Part 1 are not simply relics in the museum of the past, to quote Leland Ryken. These authors – and even more so, the books they wrote which continue to be read – do illuminate the present. Moreover, even though many of these authors' books are now considered classics, it does not mean we must approve their underlying worldviews:

Nor is it even necessary for literature to be specifically immoral...Books that constantly convey a purely secular mindset, that treat the present world as though it were the only world, that studiously avoid truths revealed in Scripture (unless to scoff)—such books impart a godless view of life, and teach their readers to regard this world as the only 'reality.'

After enumerating five general lessons from Part 1, Murray moves on to a defence of Christianity – a topic in which he is obviously more at home. The following is an especially good point regarding the accurate transmission of the scriptures, answering the question of whether it could

be that Christians 'edited' the Old Testament manuscripts, adding details of what really only happened in their own lifetime? This is impossible for a simple reason: the Old Testament was never an exclusively Christian preserve. It was jealously guarded by Jews who never became Christians. Large parts of the Prophets they knew by heart, and their scribes scrupulously watched over every word. So if any fraud in the transmission of the text had ever occurred it would have been speedily discovered and repudiated. There was no such discovery. The Jews had various objections to Christianity, but an allegation of rewriting Old Testament Scriptures was never one of them.

I agree implicitly with Murray in this section, in that the Bible is not fiction. But I also agree with a reviewer who states that "The last chapter requires a bit of a leap as it turns from modern fiction to a defence of The Bible as the inerrant word of God." The two parts simply do not hang together. If they were never supposed to hang together, then perhaps an editorial decision should have been made to separate them before going to print – especially considering the different uses of the term 'fiction.'

The second section might have been better released as a Banner booklet, or expanded considerably and peer-reviewed by various Christian literature professors. As it is, I can recommend you read this book, but only just. Murray’s conclusions are not wrong, but they lack nuance, precision, and any modern-day application. For a book that accomplishes all the above and more, read Leland Ryken's Windows to the World: Literature in Christian Perspective.