‘Born Bad’ by James Boyce

At the end of Born Bad: Original sin and the making of the Western world, James Boyce tells us where he stood at the start. When the Tasmania-based historian began researching this ambitious survey, he was “scornful of a barbaric doctrine”. No surprise there – this is billed as a “grand history of ideas” that name-checks Alain de Botton and Richard Dawkins. We don’t expect a sympathetic account of the Christian notion that we are all weakened and inclined to evil through the hereditary stain of Adam’s sin.

Boyce soon concludes that there’s no “other” Western world – no West without a doctrine of original sin – with which to compare ours. So rather than show how original sin shaped the West, Born Bad explores how the West shaped original sin. It’s a measure of Boyce as explainer that he surprises not only us but also himself. The good in the old...