I HAVE been turned down by plenty of publishers before writing a book for them — it hurts, but you get used to it — but never after writing one. That, however, was the fate of Nigel Biggar, at the time Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, who, having completed a commissioned book on colonialism for Bloomsbury, was unceremoniously dropped for rather evasive and pusillanimous reasons.

It wasn’t his first experience of cancellation. A few years earlier, he had launched a project at Oxford, “Ethics and Empire”. The announcement was greeted by one Cambridge don on Twitter saying: “OMG. This is serious shit . . . We need to SHUT THIS DOWN”, while several hundred others rounded on Biggar for a project that had yet to hold a seminar or publish a paper. In short, he has lived the culture wars.

Those who claim that these wars are confected should read The New Dark Age, which, although short, bristles with examples of academic vices and institutional weaknesses. However much certain newspapers may want to talk up the threat of campus capture, academic life in the UK (the main focus of the book; the narrative would be worse in the US) has had to face some serious questions of late.

Biggar documents this well, albeit with much evidence from his own experiences (those familiar with the empire wars will be acquainted with a lot of material here). He mounts a forceful case against academia and a few other institutions, accusing the humanities, in particular, of abandoning a commitment to reason in favour of the uncritical embrace of post-modernism, post-colonialism, equality, diversity, and inclusion.

This is no rant. Biggar doesn’t resort to ad hominems or abuse. His prose is controlled and precise throughout (albeit with an undue fondness for rhetorical questions: I counted seven on one page). He can write with generosity about “opposing” views: for example, defending the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s argument that African writers should decolonise their literature and “stop being in thrall to the assumption that whatever comes out of Europe is better”. He does make several comparisons to 1930s Germany, which will not, I suspect, strengthen his case; but, even here, this isn’t a reductio ad Hitlerum. Altogether, he mounts a powerful case for the prosecution, with a shorter plea for the promotion of intellectual virtues in the final chapter.

If the book has a weakness, it is in its elision of Biggar’s own experiences with the wider sins of academia and the culture. It doesn’t help his wider case that all the examples of academic malpractice come from people who have criticised his work or views. Some examples of legitimate criticism of his ideas would, ironically, have strengthened his case, and obviated the criticism that the book is bound to receive, that it is really just score-settling.

In a similar vein, however much British academia might have slid to the liberal left in the last two generations, I can’t believe that all its sins and vices emanate from that quarter. The accusations that “academic life is unduly in thrall to postcolonialism and EDI” and “academic life is riven with vice and malpractice” may well overlap, but they are unlikely to be wholly coterminous.

Still, Biggar’s fundamental argument stands up. One does not have to agree with his views on empire — or war, nationhood, assisted dying, or any of the sparky subjects about which he has written — to have sympathy with someone who has been caught up in one of the theatres of our culture war and lived to tell the tale.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the host of the Reading Our Times podcast.

The New Dark Age: Why liberals must win the culture wars
Nigel Biggar
Polity £20
(978-1-5095-6832-1)
Church Times Bookshop £18