In May 1945, the youth club of St Anne’s Church in Kew constructed a huge pile of dried wood on the nearby cricket green in preparation for the announcement of VE Day. When Churchill declared victory, the young people of the church paraded a full-size effigy of Adolf Hitler to the green and placed it on top of the pyre, whereupon the vicar, my predecessor, conducted a ceremonial burning, personally setting the whole thing alight. Despite the echoes of medieval and early modern brutality, the account of the event in the parish magazine expressed no qualms about the idea that the church might burn another human being – albeit symbolically.

These were the beginnings of what Alec Ryrie calls ‘the age of Hitler’, a period in which our moral centre of gravity was defined by the belief that one man was the very embodiment of evil. As Ryrie sees it, Hitler was for the second half of the 20th century and on into the next, what Jesus had been for previous generations: the centre of the moral wheel, around which our ethical instincts turned. Of course, whereas Jesus shaped our moral instincts through positive example, Hitler shaped them by defining what we were against.

Morally speaking, Ryrie argues, we have been fighting the Second World War ever since Churchill declared victory over the Nazi enemy. During that war, my father escaped the German bombers and was evacuated from Golders Green to Devon. He went on to join the Royal Air Force and worked as an engineer on the weapons systems of the Lightning and Tornado aircraft. He didn’t talk much about his work. But once, as a rebellious teenager, I goaded him into an argument about it. ‘You have to remember what they did to us’ (or something like that), he blurted out. There was no doubt whom ‘they’ were. My father’s Cold War moral certainties were rooted in the evils of Nazism – as indeed were mine. My cheap teenage go-to insult was ‘Nazi’. My parents were being Nazis when I was grounded or made to eat something I didn’t like; teachers were pretty much universally Nazis. As children, we would put two fingers over our upper lip and raise our right hands in defiance of authority. Nazis were shoehorned in every­where to add moral certainty to any position. It was the same with the comics I read and the films I watched. In 1981, for example, the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark ridiculously introduced Nazis as the baddies. It was only much later in life, when I married an Israeli, that I stopped using ‘Nazi’ as a shorthand moral insult. I thoroughly bleached my mind of the word in case one day it might inadvertently fall out in an argument with my wife.

As the former vicar of St Anne’s burned the effigy of Hitler, the postwar moral order was being defined around human rights and personal freedom, and the United Nations was being shaped in San Francisco. Over the decades that followed, the moral clarity that seemed to flow from the Second World War shaped Western foreign policy. Explaining why the United States needed to go to war with Iraq in 2003, George Bush referenced the appeasement of Hitler. The day before the war started, he said this: ‘In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.’ Once the link between Saddam Hussein and Hitler had been established, the war had its moral impetus and grim inevitability.

It is impossible to imagine the First World War having the same effect. Whereas the example of the Great War might warn against the horrors of intractable conflict, human lives wasted and poor military and political leadership, the Second World War presents a clearer case of goodies and baddies, and a more compelling vindication of violence. This is its danger. Framed in such terms, the war in Iraq felt like a moral crusade. It turned out to be anything but: in reality, the Second World War provided a kind of moral alibi for the human rights abuses at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. With the moral and military failures of the campaign in Iraq, the values of the age of Hitler began to lose some of their lustre. By the time Covid came along, Boris Johnson’s attempts to model himself on Churchill, invoking the wartime spirit, seemed quite preposterous. It is also notable that there is a significant generational difference in the way people think about Israel, another sign that the age of Hitler is coming to a close.

Ryrie’s compelling book ends with the culture wars of the present. The moral certainties of the age of Hitler were fundamentally rooted in what we were against; there was no positive moral vision of what we were for. At its worst, it fostered an environment of denouncing rather than encouraging. Here, cancel culture feels like a continuation, even an intensification, of anti-Hitler ethics. At the same time, far-right politicians – Trump, Orbán, Le Pen, Meloni – have achieved success peddling messages that many regard as out of kilter with the values of the age of Hitler. Ryrie also points to the explosion of interest in Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America as a sign that the age of Hitler-centred morality has passed. ‘The problem with post-Nazi values is not that they are wrong,’ Ryrie writes, ‘but that they are insufficient: thin, grey gruel compared to the taste and richness of our rooted traditions. It is a culture that only knows what it hates.’

In his conclusion, Ryrie looks forward to a synthesis of the values held by those on both sides of the culture wars. I hope he is right, though I don’t quite share his optimism. Even so, Ryrie’s study of the shaping of postwar values is compelling and expertly written. As a commentary on the moral condition of our age and what is at stake, it could hardly be bettered.