The Work
How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture was first published in 1976 by Fleming H. Revell Company. It is approximately 288 pages, illustrated with reproductions of major Western artworks, and is organized as a chronological survey of Western cultural history from ancient Rome through the modern era. An accompanying ten-episode film series, produced by Franky Schaeffer and shot on location across Europe, was released simultaneously and screened in churches, schools, and theaters worldwide. A study guide for group use was also published.
The book and film series reached an estimated ten million people in North America alone during their initial release, representing one of the largest coordinated Christian educational campaigns of the twentieth century. The book has been continuously in print since publication and has sold over two million copies. A thirtieth-anniversary edition was published in 2005 with a new foreword by Udo Middlemann. The book is regularly cited as a foundational text of the Christian cultural engagement movement and is credited with mobilizing a generation of conservative Christians into political and cultural participation.
Biblical Engagement
The book's biblical framework is built primarily on Romans 1:18-25 and the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Romans 1:21-22 ('Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools') is Schaeffer's master text for the cultural decline narrative: the systematic replacement of God as the absolute reference point leads, with logical inevitability, through idolatry to moral confusion to social breakdown.
Isaiah 10:1 ('Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed') represents the prophetic tradition that Schaeffer invokes against modern totalitarianism. He argues that the Hebrew prophets, in condemning injustice by appeal to a transcendent standard of righteousness, demonstrated that law requires a lawgiver - that without God as the absolute referent, positive law degenerates into the will of whoever holds power.
Proverbs 14:34 ('Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people') and Jeremiah 6:16 ('Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls') provide the prophetic models for Schaeffer's call to a return to biblical foundations.
Acts 17:28 ('For in him we live, and move, and have our being'), quoted in Paul's Areopagus address from the Stoic poet Aratus, is central to Schaeffer's argument about the distinctiveness of the Christian worldview: it grounds existence itself - the very possibility of reason, meaning, and moral knowledge - in the God who is, rather than in the autonomous human mind.
Daniel 3 (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refusing to worship the golden image) is invoked as the model for Christian civil disobedience: when the state makes divine claims, Christians must refuse. This argument, presented in Chapter 8 ('The Abolition of Truth and Morality'), is the book's most directly political section and the one with the greatest influence on the emerging Christian political movement.
Author & Context
Francis August Schaeffer (1912-1984) was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to a working-class family with no particular religious background. He was converted in his late teens, studied at Hampden-Sydney College and Westminster Theological Seminary (under the influence of J. Gresham Machen), and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1936. After years of parish ministry in the United States and a period of ministry in Europe, he and his wife Edith founded L'Abri ('shelter' in French) in the Swiss Alps village of Huemoz in 1955.
L'Abri became one of the most remarkable intellectual and spiritual communities of the twentieth century. Thousands of students, artists, intellectuals, and seekers made the pilgrimage to the Swiss chalet to engage with Schaeffer's combination of Reformed theology, cultural analysis, philosophical apologetics, and personal hospitality. Schaeffer was unusual among evangelical intellectuals in taking art, film, music, and philosophy seriously as expressions of cultural worldview rather than dismissing them as secular irrelevancies.
His earlier trilogy - Escape from Reason (1968), The God Who Is There (1968), and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972) - had established him as the leading evangelical apologist for university-educated audiences. How Should We Then Live? represented a broadening of his apologetics into cultural history: instead of arguing philosophically for the coherence of the Christian worldview, he argued historically for the necessity of its recovery.
The political context was the mid-1970s: the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision (1973) had galvanized conservative religious opinion; the Watergate crisis had produced widespread disillusionment with the political establishment; and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s had left many conservative Americans convinced that Western civilization was in moral freefall. Schaeffer's historical analysis provided an intellectual framework for these anxieties and pointed toward a political as well as spiritual response.
Structure and Argument
The book is organized chronologically through Western cultural history:
Chapters 1-3: The Pre-Modern Foundation - Schaeffer traces Western culture's origins through ancient Rome, the early church, and the medieval period. The key claim is that medieval Europe, despite its failures, maintained a broadly biblical worldview in which God was the absolute reference point for truth, morality, and meaning. The art of Giotto, Dante's Commedia, and the architecture of the great cathedrals are read as expressions of a culture still grounded in transcendent reference.
Chapters 4-6: The Renaissance and Reformation - Schaeffer's reading of the Renaissance is largely negative: the humanist elevation of the autonomous human being as the measure of all things represented, in Schaeffer's analysis, the beginning of the end of Western culture's Christian foundation. The Reformation, by contrast, is read as a recovery of biblical Christianity that briefly restored transcendent reference - but the Enlightenment's development of Renaissance humanism carried the Renaissance's logic to its ultimate anti-Christian conclusion.
Chapters 7-9: The Modern Era's Collapse - The Enlightenment's elevation of autonomous reason produced, Schaeffer argues, an inevitable fragmentation: when reason replaces God as the absolute reference point, reason itself fragments, because no finite mind can provide the absolute grounding that only the infinite God can supply. The disintegration traces through Hegel, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and the cultural expressions of nihilism in art (Picasso's cubism, Dada), music (Cage's atonalism), and literature (Hemingway, T.S. Eliot).
Chapters 10-12: The Contemporary Crisis and Response - Schaeffer argues that modern Western culture now faces a choice between two totalitarianisms: secular authoritarianism (the state claiming absolute authority in the absence of transcendent standards) and a return to biblical Christianity as the only adequate basis for human freedom, dignity, and flourishing. His call to action in Chapter 12 - 'The Alternatives' - is the book's most explicitly political and the section that had the greatest direct influence on the Christian Right.
Critical Reception
The film series and book were greeted with enormous enthusiasm in conservative evangelical circles. Schaeffer became the intellectual godfather of the Christian Right: Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson all cited his influence. Charles Colson acknowledged How Should We Then Live? as a formative influence. Books and Culture called it 'the most influential piece of Christian cultural analysis in the twentieth century.'
Academic historians and cultural critics were less impressed. Schaeffer's grand narrative - the linear decline from Christian foundation to secular nihilism - was criticized as historically crude, ignoring the complexity of the Reformation, the genuine intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment, and the ways in which 'secular' thought often preserved and developed insights derived from the Christian tradition. His treatment of individual philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard) was criticized as superficial and occasionally inaccurate.
Feminist and liberation theologians questioned the assumption that the pre-modern Christian West was a genuine golden age: the same culture that produced Chartres Cathedral also produced the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the systematic exclusion of women and marginalized groups from public life. Whether the recovery of 'biblical foundations' would address these failures or perpetuate them was a question Schaeffer did not adequately address.
Theological Significance
The book's theological contribution lies in its application of the Reformed concept of the 'antithesis' - the fundamental opposition between the biblical worldview and all alternatives - to cultural history. Drawing on the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til, Schaeffer argues that worldviews are not merely abstract intellectual positions but have practical cultural consequences: what a civilization believes about God, human nature, truth, and morality is expressed in every dimension of its art, science, law, and politics.
This conviction - that Christianity is not only a personal religion but a comprehensive worldview with implications for every domain of human life - became the organizing principle of the 'worldview' movement in evangelical education and political engagement. How Should We Then Live? is the founding text of this movement.
Legacy
The book's cultural and political legacy is enormous and contested. It helped create the intellectual framework for the Moral Majority (1979) and the broader Christian Right's political engagement. The concept of a 'Christian worldview' as the standard by which all cultural, political, and intellectual activity should be evaluated - now ubiquitous in evangelical educational institutions - derives substantially from Schaeffer.
Schaeffer's influence on the arts through his son Frank Schaeffer's subsequent work and through institutions like the International Arts Movement (Makoto Fujimura) created a distinctive strand of evangelical engagement with the arts. His argument that Christians must not cede the cultural high ground to secular alternatives has shaped evangelical film, music, and visual art production for decades.
Critical assessments of this legacy are divided: defenders credit Schaeffer with rescuing a generation of evangelical intellectuals from cultural ghetto-ism and equipping them for serious cultural engagement. Critics argue that his influence helped produce a combative, politicized evangelicalism that has damaged both the church's witness and American civic life. The debate continues.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Romans 1:18-32 (the progressive consequences of suppressing the knowledge of God), Daniel 3 (resistance to idolatrous state power), Acts 17:16-34 (engaging secular culture on its own terms), Isaiah 1:2-31 (the prophetic critique of a people that has abandoned its founding covenant), and Matthew 5:13-16 (salt and light - the church's calling to preserving and illuminating influence).
Further Reading
- Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America (2008) - the best biographical and intellectual study, placing the book in the context of Schaeffer's full career. - Os Guinness, The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever (1973) - by Schaeffer's disciple, developing a complementary cultural analysis. - James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (2010) - the most important critical engagement with the Schaeffer legacy from within evangelical Christianity, arguing for a fundamentally different model of Christian cultural engagement.