Christ as Saviour of the West

In his 2021 book, Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in our World, Australian journalist, Greg Sheridan, includes a chapter, ‘Smuggling Christ into popular culture’. It is a proposal for Christians to insert Christ figures into the culture because ‘Western culture deserves to have Jesus at its centre’. This Christian apologetic interest in Christ figures overlaps with but is strikingly different from that of Australian atheist, scholar and public intellectual, John Carroll. In various works over the last two decades, Carroll has argued that Jesus is the ‘pivot to Western dreaming’. Jesus’ story, says Carroll, is ‘the story of Western stories’ and its loss to Western consciousness has led to the fragmentation of the West. Both his diagnosis of the West’s cultural condition and his interpretation of Jesus are highly contestable. This chapter will nevertheless argue that Carroll’s Christ figure is more worthy of Christian engagement than Sheridan’s. It will also argue that the Christian attempt to ‘smuggle’ Christ figures into the culture for apologetic purposes fails to capture the richness—not least for Christians themselves—of discovering and engaging the non-Christian Christ figures which might, using Carroll’s term, ‘cryptically intersect’ with contemporary Australian cultural and religious discourse.