Today, Western culture rules the world, but understandings of what it is are oddly contradictory. The Vatican claims that the West owes everything to the Catholic Church, its oldest institution, but the European Union currently defines its core-values in purely-secular Enlightenment terms. Third-World critics attack the West for being irreligious and morally decadent, while at the same time they successfully demand Christian behaviour from it, in the form of repentance for the past and generous aid in perpetuity. To sort all this out, Don Cupitt proposes a reinterpretation of Christian history, arguing that the meaning of the West is not Catholic Christian but radical Christian. The original Jesus was a secular figure, a utopian teacher of ethical wisdom. After his martyrdom his followers personified his teaching in him and promoted him to Heaven, while postponing the earthly realization of his new world until his return at the end of history. Thus transformed into a religion of...