Our New Religion

There are few things more entertaining than discovering that every generation believes it is living through a revolutionary intellectual awakening. In 1933, H. A. L. Fisher took a look at one such phenomenon and decided it deserved a closer examination. The result was Our New Religion, a compact but thought-provoking volume from the celebrated Thinkers Library series.

Despite its title, this is not a handbook for founding your own faith, nor does it involve robes, sacred relics, or instructions for constructing a shrine in the spare bedroom. Instead, Fisher turns his attention to Christian Science, a movement that had attracted considerable attention and controversy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a mixture of analysis, scepticism, and intellectual curiosity, he explores how and why new systems of belief emerge, gain followers, and establish themselves in the public imagination.

One of the delights of reading books like this today is the realisation that debates we often imagine to be uniquely modern are usually anything but. Questions about belief, authority, science, medicine, personal experience, and the appeal of alternative explanations were being argued over vigorously long before social media, podcasts, influencers, or wellness gurus arrived on the scene. Human beings, it turns out, have always been remarkably inventive when searching for answers.

Fisher approaches his subject with the confidence characteristic of educated public thinkers of the period, a time when distinguished historians and politicians cheerfully wrote short books explaining important matters to the wider public. Whether readers agree with every conclusion is beside the point; the real pleasure lies in observing an intelligent mind engaging seriously with ideas that many of his contemporaries regarded as either revolutionary or deeply alarming.

This Thinkers Library edition is itself a small piece of publishing history. The series sought to bring serious intellectual discussion to ordinary readers at affordable prices, proving that there was once a thriving market for pocket-sized books on philosophy, religion, politics, and science. Imagine a world in which people voluntarily purchased short works on theology and social theory for entertainment. Remarkable times indeed.

Condition is Good. The book has survived more than ninety years of changing fashions, shifting beliefs, and repeated declarations that society is heading in entirely the wrong direction. The binding remains sound, the text remains readable, and it has weathered the decades rather more successfully than many of the movements and controversies discussed within its pages.

For collectors of Thinkers Library titles, students of religious history, enthusiasts of social commentary, or anyone fascinated by the recurring cycle of new ideas becoming established certainties before being challenged by even newer ideas, Our New Religion offers a fascinating glimpse into the intellectual climate of the inter-war years.

As sold by Crappy Old Books: because every generation discovers a brand-new answer to life’s biggest questions, and every previous generation leaves behind a shelf full of books explaining why they’re wrong.

Keep browsing: See more Non-Fiction books Other books by HAL Fisher