No other theme in popular culture combines such enduring popularity with so unbroken a record of failure. Of course, cataclysmic events do happen from time to time — as I type these words, the people of Venezuela are struggling with the aftermath of a major earthquake. But there’s a crucial difference between real events of this kind and the gaudy dreams of universal destruction that cluster around apocalyptic claims, like so many wasps round a jam jar.

In Venezuela, after all, the survivors are picking up the pieces of their lives and preparing for a slow return to business as usual. The core premise of the apocalyptic faith, by contrast, is that business as usual will never return. An apocalypse places a full stop at the end of everything familiar, and if anyone survives to witness the aftermath, they will inhabit a world wholly unlike the one that was destroyed. The mere fact that destructions so total don’t happen in the real world does nothing to dent the devout faith that some time soon it will happen to us all.

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The predictive power of dreams

By John Michael Greer

A contribution from the odder end of postmodern philosophy may be useful here. You will rarely catch me quoting Jacques Derrida, but just this once he has something useful to contribute: hauntology. The word is a portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology” (or in Derrida’s own language, of their exact French cognates “hant” and “ontologie”). The concept is the recognition that something which has never existed, does not exist, and will never exist, can still affect human culture and thought in much the same way as something that possesses a less phantasmal mode of being.

Derrida coined the word during a famous discussion of Marxism. That was wholly appropriate, of course. The entire apparatus of Marxist historical mythology — all the way from primitive communism through the arrival of the Workers’ Paradise, for all the world like the New Jerusalem descending from the clouds — is a 19th-century construct pieced together from scraps of inaccurate anthropology and random pieces of Christian apocalypticism with the serial numbers filed off. Such oddly assorted raw materials are common enough in the backstories of popular movements.

Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were quite correct when they claimed, in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, that the specter of Communism was haunting Europe. While the ghost in question was chased out of its familiar European haunts by the events of 1989, it still hovers unbanished in Russia, where the Communist Party is the second-largest political party in the country, and in the United States, where a resurgent socialist faction is battling the mainstream Democrats for control of the party. Given the massive unpopularity of socialist ideas in the US, outside a handful of huge and very liberal cities, that struggle may yet succeed in handing the midterm elections to Donald Trump: a reminder, if one were needed, that when idealists go charging into the political sphere, the outcome of their actions may not be what they hope.

The specter of apocalypse has less immediate political impact than that of the ghost just studied, since believers in imminent cataclysm are much less likely than their Marxist peers to join political movements and try to overthrow governments. Even so, belief in the impending end of the world can have considerable indirect impacts on politics, economics, and society. Consider the prepper movement in the United States — a complex phenomenon poorly understood by most of its critics. On one end, you have people who have reasonably decided, after watching the remarkably inept responses to recent natural disasters by state and federal agencies, that having food and other necessities stashed in safe places might just be a good idea. On the other, you have believers in full-blown apocalyptic ideologies insisting that this time for sure the Antichrist or some other figure of dread will show up and give red-blooded Americans the long-awaited chance to blaze away with automatic weapons. There are, of course, many other options between these two extremes.

While the prepper scene in any of its variations inspires and supports a certain skepticism toward government, it has little direct impact on politics. Yet its indirect impact is considerable. Prepper networks routinely become informal conduits for political ideas, as well as rules for storing powdered milk and recipes using dried beans. Since the networks exist outside the accepted channels of information flow in American society, and make a point of not being too conspicuous in the mainstream culture, pundits and politicians alike can end up blindsided when large numbers of their constituents take up ideas that the talking heads of the establishment media never thought to push on them. It was thus by way of prepper networks, among other channels, that the ideas that paved the way for Trump’s victories — notably the rejection of the bipartisan consensus on immigration and economic globalization — found their way well in advance to a considerable share of the US electorate.

Paying attention to upsurges in apocalyptic belief is, therefore, one way to gauge when such conduits for alternative ideas may be forming, and perhaps yield clues about which ideas are likely to flow. Apocalyptic beliefs are important in another way, however, which they share with other beliefs at odds with the consensus reality of their society. Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous book on the subject, form a sensitive indicator of social stress. Notice where, when, and among whom strange beliefs find a substantial foothold, and you have some chance of guessing where stresses are rising toward crisis.

This was why imperial China had an entire government department dedicated to keeping track of omens, and required local mandarins to send in reports of any strange events from local people. That gave the central government a back-channel view into the collective thoughts and passions of people even in the most remote provinces. The power of strange beliefs and rumor panics to flag unrest before it breaks out has not diminished in modern times. It’s hardly an accident, for example, that the same regions of the rural United States that were seized by the cattle mutilation rumor panic in the Seventies became hotbeds of anti-government sentiment a decade or two later.

The cattle-mutilation panic evolved into the centerpiece of a flurry of competing conspiracy theories: was it government agents who were mysteriously slaughtering cattle in the rural West, or was it Satanists doing those evil deeds, or were aliens in flying saucers responsible? The lack of a single focus didn’t make the signal less important. When conspiracy theories flourish, whether or not they reach consensus on the plot’s supposed nature, that tells the attentive watcher that large numbers of people have lost faith in the government that rules them. By the time conspiracy theories arise, it’s too late to resolve the situation with propaganda or the suppression of free speech — the government needs to change its policies in response to public pressure, and the punishment of a few high-ranking scapegoats is usually needed as well.

Apocalyptic beliefs have a different message to communicate, though one no less explosive. People place their faith in an imminent end of the world when society as it exists refuses to meet their needs, and gives them no hope of better times ahead. Think for a moment of the state of mind that would make you regard the prospect of huddling in a burnt-out basement, eating rats if you’re lucky enough to catch them, as a less daunting option than waking up tomorrow morning and going on with the life you lived today. Plenty of people have reached that state. While it’s certainly true that few of them genuinely grasp what life would be like if they got the collapse that anchors their dreams, the prevalence of such fantasies shows how little faith they place in the future toward which their societies appear to be heading.

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Nor will that disaffection remain safely locked away in the realm of fringe beliefs. It bears reminding how short a time passed between the first great wave of apocalyptic frenzy in the American colonies, the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the outbreak of the American Revolution — or how an even shorter interval passed between the second such wave, the one that culminated in the so-called “Great Disappointment of 1844”, when tens of thousands of Americans waited vainly on hilltops for Jesus to appear, and the outbreak of the American Civil War. British readers may draw a comparable lesson from the way that Puritan apocalyptic beliefs in the first half of the 17th century helped drive the rising spiral of political and religious passions that sent the New Model Army marching across the British landscape and brought Charles I to the headsman’s block.

It’s possible and, I suggest, useful, to generalize from these examples. The strange popular beliefs and rumor panics of a society are its collective dreams, and they can be interpreted in much the same symbolic manner as the dreams of individuals. In a very real sense, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic beliefs, and other forms of popular rejected knowledge are the ways ordinary people say the unsayable, and communicate in veiled form those realities of their lives that can’t be mentioned in public.

I’ve mentioned above some examples of where these trends can lead. In the United States and Britain alike, we may be closer to a repetition of such scenes than the respectable thinkers of our time are willing to recognize. For this reason, if no other, close observation of the specters haunting the collective imagination of our time is an urgent necessity.

But still, the sound of the tide going out on the sea of faith is unmistakable. The results of the 2021 census, announced this week, tell us that we are a minority Christian country, with just 46% self-defining as Christian. The humanists are gleeful. And the treasurer tells me we are again set to lose tens of thousands of pounds next year. Churches in poorer areas may not survive the coming storm. Ones set in the leafy suburbs may be able to reinvent themselves as fancy conference venues — but both will be subject to a kind of death.

Of course, the universal church isn’t in this situation. It remains the largest movement on earth, despite a little local difficulty in this part of the world. It just goes to highlight the woeful parochialism of so much of our media coverage. The narrative of secularisation, and of its inevitability, is linked to that dodgy old Enlightenment idea of progress — which is as much a matter of wilful faith as anything said from the pulpit. Numerically speaking, the 20th century was the Church’s best since its creation. Or is it that “progress” only applies to white Westerners?

Despite the success of the church worldwide, we are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful. The central image of the Christian faith is of a man being strung up on a cross, mocked for his claims to royal authority. Whatever the outcome of this cosmic interruption, whatever its meaning, triumphalism has little place amongst the detritus of spears and spit that attended His gruesome end. For Christians, victory is claimed in the manner of His failing. A smaller church is not a failed church any more than a satsuma is a failed orange, as one bishop rightly put it.

Generally speaking, however, the leadership of the Church of England is still gripped by the debilitating fear of numerical decline. It nervously responds at every turn with cheesy new initiatives bent on making us relevant and popular. These often have the very opposite of their intended consequences: cathedrals have answered Larkin’s challenge by turning themselves into fun parks of crazy golf or helter skelters. “Please like us,” they plead, desperately, with all the panache (and success rate) of spotty teenagers dousing themselves in cheap aftershave in a bid to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex.

Of course, it’s no good thinking that we have the wrong sort of parishioners. In part, we have to meet people where they are. But nevertheless, our core mission is responding to a deeper seriousness in people. And chumminess with the divine is not the answer. Where the church is failing its parishioners is how thin our offer can so often be. People don’t want weak jokes from the pulpit — they want fire. And too often we have been short-changing people by simply reflecting back to them an undemanding slate of soft-Left progressive values that they already have.

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By Tom Holland

There are three things the church leadership needs to hear: the uppermost among them is to stop being so afraid. “Fear not,” is the message of the Christmas angel. If God is in charge then, ultimately, we cannot fail. If God is not in charge, or does not exist, then we deserve to. We will not be saved by better management, or by a more compelling social media strategy: we will be saved by God or not at all. To say this is not to give us an alibi for inaction or laziness or lack of creativity — simply, to insist that we live or die by our theology.

You’d think we’d have learnt by now that relevance is an unappealing evangelistic strategy. We should be doing the very opposite of proclaiming our faith through the lens of popular culture. A minority church has the freedom to be defiantly culturally different, more learned even. It can be unapologetically serious about those things secular culture shies away from, like death and our need for salvation. We do not need to speak to God as if he were our mate. And we shouldn’t be so scared of people sometimes being a little bored in church: the silence of the monastic cloister is terrifying to a generation weaned on the internet and video games, but it is here that something deeper can be mined. The Church has to stop trying to satisfy every fidgety urge of its visitors.

Finally, we must fight to reclaim that particular strand of English Christianity — associated especially with the Church of England — that regards belonging as preceding believing. Going to church is a little like going to the pub. People speak of “my pub” or “my local” in the way they used to talk about “my church” — or at least they used to. This is a place where you expect to feel at home, where you belong. Here you are welcome whoever you are.

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Unfortunately, as Christianity in this country has become a more urban phenomenon, people have stopped thinking of churchgoing as a local activity. Rather than a place where you sit among your local community, with the dead of that community buried all around, church is now seen as something you choose to do with like-minded people, even if they gather on the other side of town. This gathered church model certainly brings in the punters, but it is a deracinated church, a membership club for “people like us”. And as with all churches that concede to a market model, it is forever subject to the logic of boom and bust. As the Parable of the Sower has it, some seed falls on stony ground and springs up quickly but soon withers because there is no depth of soil.

The latest census has triggered a great deal of doom-mongering. I am merely adding to this, of course. Bishops do an impossible job and mostly do it pretty well, despite all the brickbats they receive. And the church will, of course, survive despite its diminished circumstances.

Ironically, I think the secular imagination has far more challenges in store. For once it has finished piggybacking on the inherited deposit of faith, it will have to work out what it believes and why. Not believing in anything, which is the fastest growing position, has nothing to offer as a foundation for many of our moral concerns. As Tom Holland has observed, human rights, for instance, borrow substantially from a Christian worldview. When that worldview disappears from sight, secular culture will be walking on little but thin air. Without a meaningful moral story to underpin it, might will be right and power supreme. This is why the weeds and the mould should worry far more people than just the vicar.

In the shadow of Bran Castle, once home to Vlad the Impaler, you might enjoy the irony of hearing this revisionist history lesson while surrounded by a whole gallery of vampire kitsch — kiosks with plastic fangs for sale; a Dracula face-in-a-hole board as diminutive and unthreatening as his descendants Count Chocula, of breakfast-cereal fame, or Sesame Street’s own Count von Count.

Listening to such lectures in the past, I would often find myself unable to suppress that exclamation, so completely taboo in our era of stay-in-your-lane deference: “Well, actually…” Because the truth is that tales of vampires existed in the Balkans long before Bram Stoker. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the figure of the vampire made the gradual transition from the proto-ethnography of the Balkans to the imaginations of Gothic littérateurs.

Most succinctly, we may say that the figure of the vampire emerges out of the confluence of three elements. The first is the real historical record of the actions of a certain Vlad Țepeș (1428/31—1476/77). The violent transgressions for which he became notorious were extreme — notably, impalement on rounded and greased spikes, carefully avoiding direct puncture of inner organs so as to prolong the victim’s misery. Woodcuts depicting his deeds were soon published in German books, and as these circulated the legends surrounding him grew beyond all human proportion.

The second element is the arrival of Germanophone Habsburg administrators in newly subordinated regions of Southeastern Europe, who had been influenced in their practices by the emerging culture of the Republic of Letters, which encouraged literate travellers in little-known places to note down and to report back to the metropole all rare or mysterious incidents. The third element, finally, are the ancient folk-cultural practices and beliefs that these humble clerks observed and documented.

Of particular importance in the revisionist lesson for foreigners in Transylvania is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism. “Dracula”, they explain, is simply the title, but not the name, of Vlad Țepeș, also known as Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler. He inherited it from his father, Vlad II, a member of the Order of the Dragon. In Romanian, dracul derives from the Latin draco, and simply means “the dragon”.

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By Justin E. H. Smith

It is not in fact in the castles, but in the villages of Romania that we typically hear rumours of the strigoi, which are in turn close cousins of the vrykolakas of Greece and the upior of the Slavic countries. These are, in all their regional variants, ghosts of the deceased, poltergeists who return to trouble the living. A common belief holds that one may prevent their apparition by sealing the coffin of the dead shut with extra nails, and by driving a stake through the chest of the corpse. Should one encounter a strigoi, some texts and traditions counsel the use of apotropaics such as garlic or holy water to ward them off. These folkloric characters thus share some, but not all, of the traits associated with the Stokerian vampire. There is as yet no strong association with bats, for example, or with hematophagy.

It is at least true, then, that Stoker’s rendition bumps the vampire up several social classes from where it had always resided in “authentic” folk culture, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. And it is the elevation of traditional village practices to a form of aristocratic decadence that enables Stoker to give his fiction a historical grounding, and to identify his own protagonist’s vampirism as part of an inheritance from none other than Vlad the Impaler:

“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode [a military leader] crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land?”

In portraying Vlad as a hero in the war against the Turks, the Irish novelist is channelling a historiographical tendency more commonly seen in Russia and the Balkans than in Western Europe. In the Orthodox lands, while his cruelty is acknowledged, Vlad is mostly seen as a valiant defender against the Ottoman menace, and therefore as a bulwark of Christendom. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, his significance as a military leader pales in comparison with his inhuman and gratuitous cruelty. Beginning as early as the 1460s, broadsides circulated describing the delight Vlad took in roasting babies alive and forcing their mothers to eat them, in hearing the low moans of his impaled victims as musical accompaniment to his meals.

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Horrific tales of Vlad the Impaler were not the only source of vampire mythology. Non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretches back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports, largely inspired by the learned journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666.

The first extant treatise on vampirism is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis [On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs], published in 1725, by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. In his work, Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that, within eight days [of his death], nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of 24 hours”. It is reported that: “As they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.”

The author of the report cited by Ranfft uses the word “vampire” in one of its earliest printed occurrences. He reports that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing”, the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:

“That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed.”

At issue in part was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way bodies decompose. While they often rot quickly, depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the presence of microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal breakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement only to be explained on the assumption that the corpse had been ingesting food — food, that is, or blood.

The difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death is a subject that reappears throughout the 18th century — not just in reference to vampires, but in numerous medical treatises. The most interesting example of such work is undoubtedly the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites several authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death”.

Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.” Soon enough, documentary sources such as this were sublimated into fictional stories about the undead, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Premature Burial (1844) being a prime example.

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The early modern explosion of interest in Balkan “superstition” is, as we have begun to see, in no small measure an effect of the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and in particular of the expansion of Habsburg rule into regions of the Balkans that had previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. This encounter triggered a long — and indeed still ongoing — habit of representing Southeastern Europe as a land of benighted and backwards belief.

In his contribution to the 1776 Dictionnaire philosophique, none other than Voltaire, who never misses an opportunity to scoff at people who happen not to be French, takes up the example of vampires not only as a measure of the distance between Enlightened Europe and those other parts, but also between the rationality of the ancient Greeks and the irrationality of their degenerated modern descendants. “Who would believe that the fashion of vampires came from Greece? This is not the Greece of Alexander, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Epicurus, of Demosthenes, but rather Christian Greece, which is, unfortunately, schismatic.”

Voltaire is a defiant atheist, but his polemical anti-clericalism brings him close to some of the themes of anti-Papism familiar from Protestant lands. For many Protestant authors, the difference between Catholicism and worship of the forces of darkness is but another case of the narcissism of minor differences. Voltaire, writing in this same spirit, speaks mockingly of a young sceptic who had dared to question the truth of a number of reported miracles involving the Virgin Mary, and who finally was won over to all manner of Catholic articles of faith as a result of exposure to folk-beliefs about vampires. In his satirical account, it was best for the weak-minded to shelter themselves from stories of vampires, if only because these can all too easily serve as a gateway drug to the Roman religion.

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Among Catholic authors, by contrast, we generally see not mockery of folk-beliefs about vampires, but rather a subtle, almost mischievous, effort to occupy the ambiguous space between affirmation and scepticism. Indeed, a convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. Which side, a reader constantly wonders, is the author really on?

Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Sceptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.

And yet it still seems to me that vampires are due a certain measure of rehabilitation. The vampire, I think, is at least as “good to think with” as the “philosophical zombie” that has historically been preferred by analytic philosophers. Zombies give us all of the conceptual problems about mind and consciousness, but none of the feeling, and are thus perfect water-carriers for whatever it is the analytics are trying to do. To “think with vampires” is by contrast to think about feeling, mood, and the dimensions of human existence these disclose.

In its essence, a vampire is a being that knows it is dead, and feels infinite sadness about its plight. This is a paradoxical situation to be in, since death is supposed to be the cessation of all consciousness. But it is also fairly close to what we imagine when we try, per impossibile, to imagine death. We do so, mostly, by feeling our way into it, until we can bear no more and recoil. We do so by allowing what that feeling discloses to us to count for something. And also in our dreams, notably, we encounter dead people with surprising regularity. They walk and talk, and give us tidings, yet there’s something off about them, by which we understand that they are dead. An impossible condition — yet there they are.

But you can also see Liddle’s point. If “radicals” are excluded from the public conversation, how are they ever to be drawn into dialogue – that apparently magical crucible in which hate and suspicion is transformed into understanding. Yet isn’t that precisely the promise held out by interfaith encounter?

The murder of Sir David Amess, a committed Roman Catholic, apparently by an Islamic radical, once again raises the question of whether the interfaith encounter works.

For centuries human beings of different faith perspectives have met together to try and … well, try and what exactly? When Nachmanides met with Dominican and Franciscan theologians in 1263 for a formal disputation on the fundamentals of faith, the purpose seemed to be to persuade the “other side” that they were wrong. Accounts of the famous Disputation of Barcelona vary, but both sides did their polemical best to say why the other was mistaken. It was tense — of course it was. And the Christian account tells of Nachmanides fleeing from the scene.

These days, interfaith dialogue — on the ground at least — rarely allows itself to visit areas of controversy. In primary school, religious studies classes are, more often than not, existentially anaemic encounters. Different faith traditions are presented alongside each other without the tension created by wondering which one may be true. Lesson plans emphasise things like food traditions among religions, where you liking Halal lamb curry and me liking Jollof rice (definitely a religious tradition in my parish) describes differences without the need to introduce conflict over who is right. After all, what is more subjective than our taste buds. It’s all perfectly understandable. Who wants to import the tensions of the world into a classroom?

But that’s the dilemma: either interfaith discussion directly addresses the issues that divide people of faith, including the more conservative ones (who globally speaking, are in the majority) and accepts that quite a lot of friction and heat will be created — offence, shouting, walk outs — or it avoids the real tensions between people of faith, in which case it is deathly dull and, therefore, useless.

Most people don’t want to give up their precious evenings for shouting matches in an atmosphere of extreme tension. Who would? Most religious conservatives already think they’re right anyway. They don’t want to open up an audience to potentially liberalising speakers either. So interfaith groups tend to be dominated by those who don’t really need them: well-meaning people; keen to stress the common denominators amongst people of faith.

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There’s a view that suggests secularism uses these meetings between the faiths to muscle into their territory. Not as an impartial umpire, but something more. One way of describing the rise of a secular society is that it was driven by the need to provide a public space free from religious sectarianism — open to all, not dominated by any.

But secularism is itself divided on a continuum between those who want to offer a level playing field for all — including religious people — to flourish, and those who, frankly, seek the elimination of the religious perspective from public life entirely. (This is the difference between American and French secularism.)

The involvement of secularists within interfaith discussion is doubly complicated by the suspicion that secularism has an interest in keeping religious tension going. Historically speaking at least, religious tension is the reason that secularism has justified its existence.

Ironically perhaps, secularism also unites those of faith. Especially the conservatives. They see a common enemy, who they regard as seeking to silence them.

The former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory, who went to a Church of England primary school, was of the view that one of the vocations of the Church of England was to provide all people of faith with a platform in the public realm. He also thought that this required something sacrificial from the Church of England, downplaying its proselytising instincts in favour of this more inclusive mission. All people in my parish, regardless of faith, are somehow my spiritual responsibility. It is also true that the current mood in the Church of England for mission and evangelism does create a certain tension with Sacks’s way of understanding its role.

I wonder if interfaith dialogue can be truly revived. Disagreement, even full-blown dispute, will have to be part of any resurrection of this great tradition. Breaking bread and making friends is one — important — aspect of such talks. But we must beware of such groups avoiding the difficult points of disagreement between us and indeed limiting themselves to liberal believers. This means that interfaith groups must accept that they will always be poised in an uncomfortable place between solidarity and disagreement, the greater the former always allowing for more of the latter.

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It can happen. Last week, I addressed a local meeting of the Council for Christians and Jews (CCJ). That night, as trust was  established, more difficult questions could be asked — about the Messiah (same issue in Barcelona in the 13^th century), about Christian anti-Semitism, about Zionism.

This fragile dynamic between trust and challenge is easily damaged. My own feeling is that we are still not there in our conversations between Christianity and Islam, or between Judaism and Islam for that matter. There continue to be many perils in such encounters. Danger one is subjectivism: your truth is just as good as my truth. No one really thinks that anyway, it’s just a convenient way of not coming to blows. Danger two is coming to blows, or the verbal equivalent with encounters collapsing into acrimony and insult.

I called up Rod Liddle to confirm the story about Thought for the Day. It’s true. He explains that when he said he wanted Abu Hamza doing the slot it was a joke. But he did think it was a real problem “having people from very different faith traditions constantly saying the same thing.” — as if there was no real disagreement.

I totally agree. We need to be braver in exploring our divisions. And dig deeper into our resources of kindness and patient listening to one another as we do so. I suspect that people who are confident in their own faith are better able to achieve this. Which is why we need to be less frightened of division if we seek to become more united in our understanding. Even if it means we all end up running away like Nachmanides did.

But Cohen’s point still stands. I bridle at dim, of course. But “middle-class” and “sect” hit home. I left the SWP because I felt a fraud: a public schoolboy selling socialist newspapers outside the Haymarket Metro in Newcastle City Centre, imagining my ripped jeans and dyed hair put me at the vanguard of the proletariat. Mea culpa.

Over time, Christianity took its place — one “change the world” belief system replacing another. But for all its many failings, I suspect there will always remain in me some small sense of nostalgia for my Trotskyite phase. The world felt simpler back then.

A hundred years ago this summer, the Communist Party of Great Britain established its youth wing, the Young Communist League. Earlier this week, comedian Alexi Sayle and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen described their experiences of growing up within this all-encompassing belief system. Rosen remembers his mother linking her commitment to Communism to the growing threat of fascism in the 1930s; with Black shirts on the streets of the East End, Hitler’s rise in Germany and the Civil War in Spain. “Who else was going to defend us?” she asked.

Put this way, communism shares its basic question with protestant Christianity: “How are we saved?” Indeed, when considered experientially, Communism is much more like a salvation religion than a dry body of Marxist philosophical doctrine.

Yes, I remember endless arguments down the Student Bar about the precise relationship between the working class and the revolution, just as later I would argue with my friends about the way in which Jesus would inaugurate the Kingdom of God — all rather technical sounding stuff. And both arguments rapidly descended into heated debates on minor details of doctrine: the People’s Front of Judea vs. the Judean’s People’s Front. But the existential punch of both belief systems is carried much more by something like the simplicity of Mrs Rosen’s question.

That question is also at the heart of Paul’s Mason’s forthcoming book, How to Stop Fascism — a fascinating study of how the hard Left continues to reinvent itself despite its numerous disappointments; the kingdom having evidently failed to come, and the supposed harbinger of that kingdom, the Soviet Union, having so clearly betrayed its higher calling, most obviously in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

But Mason also explores a much more interesting question: why did the Left in Germany not unite to counter the threat that was Hitler? Why did they not offer more spirited resistance to the rise of the Nazis? “Who else is going to defend us?” asked Mrs Rosen, encouraging her son to support the Communists. And yet they didn’t.

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Why? Partly, as Mason explains, because the Nazis didn’t fit the narrow Communist script of historical development. Its whole economic and class-based analysis was just too narrow a lens through which to recognise the full horror of what the Nazis were planning. Marxism’s failure was “its inability to grasp complexity”. For orthodox Marxism, just as with Christian eschatology, historical progress was unstoppable.

The arc of history was on their side, leading inevitably to the sunny uplands of peace and prosperity for all. The gas chambers were just not in the script. And as Hitler rose to power, too many Communists remained in their equivalent to the student bar, debating obscure points of doctrine. The communist leadership “sit in the tavern and carries on the fight against fascism [there]. Landlord, another pint …” as one communist remembered from his jail cell.

Mason’s fascinating book is a call for the Left to re-invent itself once again, in the face of a new form of fascism he sees in people like Trump, Modi and Bolsonaro. Of course, the hard Left has reinvented itself many times before. Following the Soviet invasion of Prague, many Communists became disillusioned with the Soviet focus and reinvented themselves as Euro Communists. They started reading Gramsci who proposed a more culturally sophisticated analysis of political power.

But Mason goes one step further. He proposes that Marxism has to learn the language of morality, and even — shock horror — the idea of a radical evil similar to that espoused by Christians. Marxism, he writes, “failed in the face of fascism because it had no explicit theory of evil, and when confronted with a systematic, militarised, genocidal anti-humanism, it could offer scant explanation.”

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This is a very long way from Marx, who remained highly suspicious of moral philosophy, and especially of anything that had the whiff of theology. If Gramsci brought about a cultural turn in Marxist theory, Mason is proposing a moral one.

Yet this book still feels a little too much like notes from the student bar. How to Stop Fascism does not mention Winston Churchill, for instance, except to condemn the far-Right racists who rallied in support of Churchill after his statue had been graffitied by Black Lives Matter activists. It’s a strange omission, given Churchill’s actions constituted one of the most obvious solutions to the How to Stop Fascism challenge. Similarly, Zionism is not even mentioned by the former young communists as a possible answer to Mrs Rosen’s question, though Israel was established as a response to precisely that fear. The Left do not have a monopoly on hating fascism.

And indeed, Mason is correct that it would be a mistake to dismiss of fascism as a dead duck. Mason’s definition of fascism — “the organised refusal of human life” — is cleverly pithy, though perhaps a little too broad to be meaningful or accurate. But as the recent hounding of BBC journalist Nick Watt demonstrated, the heightened emotions of street thuggery remain alive and well, and are being expressed disturbingly close to the centre of our democratic institutions — though the hard Left, including Mason himself, is no stranger to whipping up strong feelings on the streets. I am frightened by both, and by the way that both fascism and communism justify their emotional intensity with reference to the moral failings of the other.

One of the insights of salvation theology is that you can pretty much work out the shape of what that theology will be if you understand what it is that we are being told we need saving from. In Christian terms, some think we need saving from death, others from hell, or the devil, or sin or self-regard. Others think we need saving from our enemies.

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Mason thinks that we need saving from fascism and from the ethno-nationalism that underpins it — and his soteriology proceeds on that basis. It’s a kind of secular theology.

What Mason could also have mentioned is that Communism and the Abrahamic religions share a belief in iconoclasm — a statue-smashing instinct that refuses to allow the glorious richness of divine or human life to be ossified in stone statues or dollar bills. Religious people call it idolatry Marxists call it commodification.

The problem with statues is not that they sometimes glorify bad people. NO, they are a metaphor for the way some people can stop thinking or stop loving — they are a celebration of unreflective stasis, fixity, dead lifeless doctrine. Iconoclasm is a movement of renewal, with the need to display human love at its centre.

My Marxism is long dead. But I still can’t shake off the idea that I have more in common with communism than I feel comfortable with. Marxist theology is not just about lefty priests, but about disturbingly quasi-religious Marxists, too.