Hobson's Milton belongs to the colourful tradition of approaching the poet as champion for relevant causes. The poet James Thomson, advancing ‘the best human Rights’, reprinted Milton's Areopagitica in 1738; William Wordsworth summoned him in ‘London, 1802’ (‘Milton! Thou shouldst be with us at this hour’); even Gordon Brown cited Milton on liberty in a 2007 speech. Theo Hobson's work belongs to its current moment, to the current debate within and without the English Church about discipline, hierarchy and liberalism in an increasingly secular world. For Hobson, England hath need of Milton: Milton the Christian, the disestablishmentarian, one who thought about issues of art, sexuality and political reform, and advocated an allegedly coherent view of Christian culture. These of Milton's commitments, long understood by scholars of Milton, are developed in the book which is an engaged, even polemical, reading of the prose and poetry. The objects of his polemic are not those academics whom Hobson occasionally cites (Stanley Fish, Arthur Barker, Christopher Hill, C. S. Lewis and, most often, Anna Beer), but rather those advancing a humanist or secular vision of English culture in general, and of Milton in particular, for instance, Phillip Pullman, whose Dark materials comes in for derision (‘trite humanism in the place of theology’, p. 152). The cards are on the table, ‘Milton ought to be celebrated as England's greatest religious thinker, and one of the truly great Protestants’ (p. 169).

Hobson asks, ‘How is the [Christian] faith to be renewed in the context of secular liberalism?’ Milton helps with an answer because he ticks several boxes. First, about art: Milton ‘put art in its place’ (p. xiii), that is, he placed it below Truth. Second, about sex: Milton confronts the power of desire, and Hobson sees new things in Milton's eroticism, writing particularly well on sex in Paradise lost, and showing how there it is theologically loaded. But most of all, Hobson sees Milton as teacher about the proper relation between republican liberty and Christianity: that the one depends upon the other. In addressing theology, Hobson shows how Milton's heretical positions (on free will, on creation and matter, on the Trinity, his mortalism), and his deep suspicion of theology, contributed to a liberal Protestantism that the author deems worth reviving. For scholars, the book is a reminder that there is a public side to academic work, and that scholars' ‘impact’ may be wholly unanticipated. Like Milton, Hobson ‘is trying to announce a new, liberal direction within Protestantism’ (p. 88). For Hobson, Milton is the muse, the prompt, the touchstone, for a call for change.