The Last Christian, by David Gregory

David Gregory's The Last Christian was another pleasant surprise: a Christian novel that is not cheesy, not preachy, but well-written and explicitly Christian.  Gregory paints a convincing picture of the not-too-distant future, while weaving a suspenseful story of faith and the nature of humanity itself.

After a brief prologue in which we witness the replacement of a human brain with an electronic brain, we meet Abby, who, at 34 years old, has known no other life than living among a stone-age tribe in Papua New Guinea.  The daughter of American missionaries, Abby and her family chose to remain among their tribe even after the government declared the tribe off-limits, so they have been cut off from technology and culture for decades.  The United States in the late 21st century is a foreign culture to her.

The Grid (Gregory's name for the beefed up internet) is ubiquitous.  Many people have neural implants and communicate and enjoy entertainment in virtual reality.  Most foreign of all is the nearly complete absence of Christianity.  Churches have been abandoned or turned into schools or museums.  Criticism of other faiths is a jail-able offense.  But Abby has come to the U.S. with a mission: after her emergence from the jungle, she received an old video message from her grandparents, who told her of the rapid decline of Christianity in the United States, and that they had a dream that Abby would be the one to bring Christianity back to America.

Her task is not as simple as she thought it might be, especially when it turns out that her grandfather had helped develop the artificial brains, and that he was the recipient of the artificial brain in the prologue.  Abby's cousin is a congresswoman whose campaign for senate might be derailed by her association with her outspoken cousin, Abby the "religionist."  And the company behind the artificial brains happens to be behind a fiendish plot to get their brains into everyone.

The story is fun and thought provoking.  In some insightful passages, Gregory gives an interesting look into our possible future.  One example is his take on the so-called "Google effect."  (He, of course, doesn't use that phrase.  It's from a Science article published July of 2011 [here], which, of course, was after the publication of The Last Christian, demonstrating Gregory's foresight!)  Abby meets up with a college history professor, whose father happens to have been a friend of her grandfather.  He and Abby discuss the way the Grid has changed learning.  He tells Abby, college students "can access the information anytime they want in fact form and use it in formulating questions for tests."  "You mean formulating answers."  "No.  Formulating questions.  No one test for answers anymore.  No one is expected to retain much knowledge. . . . Facts are available on command.  The Grid can stream you to any answers you want.  The key to education is in formulating the right questions.  Asking questions that will bring you useful answers--that's what we're trying to teach our students."  You can see this today.  Ask someone a factual question, they pull out their iphone and google it.

More importantly for Christian readers is the demise of Christianity.  In Gregory's future, it takes only a couple of generations for the practice of Christianity to die out.  In a lecture in his American culture class, he outlines the causes.  I think they are worth reproducing here.

The five causes of "the decline and disappearance of Christianity in twenty-first century America."

1. Scientific progress.  Evolutionary theory, especially.
2. The culture war.  "The more strident that religionists became in their attempt to control government, the less others were attracted to Christianity."
3. "The backlash against religion in general due to Islamic fundamentalism."
4. A philosophical shift rejecting absolute truth and seeing all truth as social construction.
5. "Lack of distinctiveness."  Behaviors of religious and nonreligious people became indistinguishable.  The megachurch movement "was the beginning of the end, a last gasp of the Christian religion. . . . They adopted a new marketing strategy, using their gatherings to appeal to outsiders with popular entertainment and practical life helps.  But . . . that didn't produce a lifestyle any more distinctive than before."

Look around you, Christian.  Do you see some or all of these 5 forces at work?  I do not despair of the future of Christianity, but it's not too hard to imagine these trends worsening and continuing to weaken the church and its witness in the world. 

So The Last Christian manages to tell a great story while giving a prophetic warning about the future.  That's a rare combination.  Maybe it's not a great work of literature--it is written as popular fiction--and maybe it's not a great work of theology--again, it's a suspense/sci-fi novel--but it combines those two efforts successfully.  A recommended read.

Go to the publisher's web site here.
Go to the author's web site, which has a cool video preview of the book, here.
Finally, view the message Abby posted on the Grid here.