As author of The Grace Effect, I am grateful for this thoughtful review.  The Burner is right to conclude that it was my purpose to tackle an ongoing cultural debate about the relevance of Christianity in public life and discourse.  Religion, the secularists argue, should be privatized.  Consequently, public professions of faith in Jesus Christ are increasingly being treated like smoking: you can do it, but only in the designated areas.  To this extent, I hope the good folks at Fuller Seminary are in agreement with me.

That said, I wish to quibble with a couple of remarks made by the reviewer.  First, that the book is characterized by “an us vs. them mentality.”  On the contrary, central to my thesis is the idea that the problems of human society are the problems of human nature.  It is, in other words, “us vs. us.”  

The problem thus defined, the question becomes “what will save us from ourselves and preserve human dignity and life in the societies we create?”  My answer is not democracy.  On this point the reviewer has entirely misunderstood me.  That is the conclusion of a (failed) Religious Right that has placed all of its hopes in the Republican Party and the reviewer is correct in condemning it.  It is, rather, my contention that a given philosophy or religion will serve either to exacerbate our evil natures or to restrain them.  

What, then, might we learn when we contrast American society with that of, say, Ukraine?  We discover differences that are more than an accident of history or political systems.  The societies we create and the governments that rule them are a product of one’s view of God (his existence/non-existence) and his character (gracious or malevolent).  Hence, I conclude that any nation heavily sprinkled with the salt that is Christ’s Church, is a nation that is gentled by the presence of the Gospel and is, therefore, less likely to commit Auschwitzes and Darfurs.  More to the point, it is a society that has a greater concern for the Sasha’s of this world.  This is what I call “The Grace Effect.”  As God’s grace transforms us inwardly, there is a corresponding outward transformation of society. 

Finally, I wish to address the reviewer’s implicit suggestion that I have written a pro-American/anti-Ukrainian book: “To Taunton, Americans are easy to work with, mostly just and consider each individual to be valuable, while Ukrainians are heartless, selfish, and malevolent.”  These days, being pro-American is a rather unAmerican thing to do.  Even so, it is beside the point as I make no such argument.  A day at the Department of Motor Vehicles is enough to dispel any naive notions that Americans are easy to work with.  But the simple fact remains that some parts of our world are more wicked than others; it is an observable, even measurable, phenomenon.  Why is this so?  

The absence of grace.  

That we had to bribe every single Ukrainian government official we encountered and witnessed a criminal neglect of children and the poor, is what it is.  One may interpret these observations as anti-Ukrainian or pro-American, but the point, when tied to the book’s overarching thesis, is that grace transforms societies while the absence of it leads to human degradation.  

The book is pro-grace.

Delighted to do so.  Thank you for reading the book.  I am honored.