Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher had long discussions about whether to keep the word God in the song, given God’s alleged un-coolness in the 1960s. They needn’t have worried. The song spoke to the universal teenage yearning to fall in love and the universal teenage dread of what would happen “if you should ever leave me.”

Little did Brian Wilson know that a simple phrase, “God only knows,” meant so much more.

The idea that God only knows has a long and storied history in the Abrahamic faiths. The phrases “Lord knows,” “God willing,” and “Inshallah” are part of the modern secular lexicon — even if we don’t fully appreciate their religious origins. These phrases carry significant spiritual meaning and, as we will see, real political consequences.

Each statement tacitly admits a state of human ignorance and imperfection. The speaker is confessing, “I don’t fully know. I’m not in total control.” To say “God willing” is to acknowledge a fundamental difference between the almighty Creator and the not-so-mighty creature. While God is all-knowing, our knowledge is inherently limited. We, after all, are mere mortals, who pale in comparison.

Wilson sings, “God only knows what I’d be without you,” and he is right. He can try to imagine what his life would be like if the girl ever left him, as he fears she might, but he can never know for sure. God alone — here a stand-in for the great beyond, a higher power, or some spiritual force that we can’t grasp — can know. We can’t. Not knowing, it seems, is at the heart of what it means to be human. And it is at the heart of what it means to love and be loved.

The implications of this are that contrary to popular wisdom, “following your truth” is not always the best idea. Not believing in yourself can actually be the right thing to do. In fact, total certainty is bad for us and it can be destructive for democracy.

Think about it: if you have all of life’s questions completely settled, what is there left to discuss? If one political tribe has full and complete access to the truth, why should they include other tribes in the democratic process? Once one group possesses “the truth,” the give-and-take of democracy becomes nothing more than a waste of time. We don’t worry about citizens who have doubts. We worry about the ones who believe in themselves all the way down to their feet. 

A healthy democracy requires citizens who possess intellectual humility, who can shrug their shoulders from time to time and say, “God only knows.” Intellectual humility is a trait and a practice that allows citizens to accept their limitations. Is it “evil” to prefer a marginal tax rate of 42% over one that is 36%? If two citizens are fighting over whether a particular intersection should have a stop sign or a traffic light, there may not be one right answer. It may just be a matter of preference, with each side having a legitimate argument. Even if we suspect that we are right, we must accept that we might be wrong.  

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This might all sound obvious, but we are not sure that it is. Quickly rejecting “bad” opinions — and rushing to label certain political beliefs as reflecting deep moral flaws — is not ideal in a democracy, in which bad ideas will always be plentiful. When someone disagrees with you, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily a bad person. It most likely just means that they are different. Citizens must reject the notion that, as philosopher Kevin Vallier puts it, “others disagree with our moral, religious, and political viewpoints solely because of some cognitive or moral vice.”

This is where simple phrases like “Inshallah” and “God only knows” become more than just an offhand phrase or a lyric in a Beach Boys song. They represent an essential starting point for a healthy democracy.

A practice that nicely illustrates our point began more than a millennium ago, instituted by a group of Muslim clerics. Whenever these jurists would write a fatwa, or religious edict, they would always conclude with the phrase Allahu a’lam, which roughly translates to “God only knows.” To be sure, these jurists were not moral relativists. They believed that their particular edicts were correct. They had real confidence in their rulings. However, at the very end, the jurists would reserve the last word for God. It was as if the jurists needed to remind both the reader — and themselves — of their own shortcomings.

Here we can begin to distinguish between human confidence and human certainty. Confidence in one’s beliefs is critically important in a democracy. Absolute certainty in one’s beliefs, on the other hand, is dangerous.  

Christians have their own version of Allahu a’lam. Christians believe that the Bible is divinely inspired — “God-breathed,” as Paul puts it — even though it was written by flawed human beings. But Paul doesn’t pretend that every word he writes carries the same divine weight.

When Paul discusses marriage ethics, he is remarkably transparent about his sources. “For those who are married,” he writes, “I have a command that comes not from me, but from the Lord” — essentially, don’t get divorced. Fair enough. But then Paul encounters a thornier question, one that Jesus never directly addressed: what happens when a new Christian is married to someone who wants nothing to do with the faith? Should they divorce? Paul has an opinion — he thinks they should stay married. But listen to how he frames it: “I do not have a direct command from the Lord.” In other words, “This is my best judgment, but I am flying a bit blind here.”

The lesson is unmistakable: if Paul — writing under divine inspiration — could admit the limits of his certainty, then maybe the rest of us should too. Sometimes wisdom means saying “God only knows,” even when we are pretty sure we know what God would want.

A sincere faith does not depend on absolute certainty and it is unfortunate that our broader religious and political culture tends to equate the two. Feeling comfortable and confident in our convictions can actually engender greater intellectual humility, rather than hubris. After all, if we know where we stand, we may find ourselves less threatened by others’ convictions.

Let’s return for a moment to the Muslim jurists and the fatwa. Trusting God rather than themselves enabled these jurists to approach their legal opponents with generosity. If truth belongs to God alone, that changes the fundamental purpose of debate. As the great 8th- and 9th- century jurist Imam Shafi’i, one of Islam’s most influential scholars, put it, “I never once argued with anyone hoping to win the debate; rather I always wished that the truth would come from his side.” The search for truth, rather than victory, is the goal.

We, your authors, would like to uphold this standard. It is easier said than done, especially when the convictions in question are not about tax rates but about salvation. One of us is Christian, the other Muslim. Regarding the very nature of God, we disagree, and our disagreement is profound. 

Years ago, in one of our Christian-Muslim dialogues at the University of Minnesota, a student asked me (Shadi) how I felt about the fact that many evangelicals — including my co-author Matthew — want me to know Christ, embrace him as my savior, and anchor my life in his grace. I feel no such need to see Matthew convert to Islam, so I can’t entirely relate to the impulse. I was a bit stumped about how to respond, since I was well aware of the imbalance in our perspectives.

Frankly, I am still uncomfortable with the idea that a dear friend might wish for me to replace one set of foundational beliefs with another — to, in effect, become something other than what I am. But I understand better now. My friendship with Matthew is premised on trying our best to understand each other. And if this is what Matthew believes, then I can’t expect him to suppress his own commitments as an evangelical who, by definition, has an interest in evangelizing. He wants me to convert to Christianity, and that’s okay.

Matthew’s confidence in his faith doesn’t threaten our friendship. Certainty would. If either of us believed he possessed God’s final verdict on the other, there would be nothing left to talk about. Matthew and I wrestle with moral and political uncertainty every day. We have found that our respective religious traditions do not forbid this wrestling. In fact, they enable us to wrestle more productively with our questions as well as our doubts.

So how can citizens hold political confidence while at the same time avoiding the destructive temptations of political certainty? It comes down to this: to be a person of political confidence is to place your confidence in something beyond yourself, something you can’t fully comprehend or control. To be a person of political certainty is to place your confidence in yourself and your ability to fully comprehend the truth. The writer Anne Lamott says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” This is not just another clever aphorism. It speaks to something deep and true about what it means to be human.

A cautionary tale of the dangers of making premature political judgments comes from the life and death of Ali, one of the most beloved figures in the history of Islam. Ali was the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and the last of the four “rightly guided” caliphs. He was assassinated in 661 AD, during a civil war that haunts Muslims to this day. 

Ali was embroiled in a bitter dispute with Muawiya, the powerful governor of Syria, who refused to recognize his authority. To settle the matter, Ali submitted himself to a formal process of arbitration, in which an ostensibly neutral party would adjudicate each man’s claims. Many of Ali’s followers were outraged that their beloved leader would humble himself in this way. How could he — the commander of the faithful, blessed by the one true and immortal God — subject himself to the ruling of a mere mortal?

Upon hearing their grumbling, Ali did something both startling and strange. He brought forward a copy of the Quran and touched it. Ali then declared in front of the crowd, “Oh Quran, speak to the people!” His followers were confused. “Oh Ali, why do you mock us?” they asked. The Quran, Ali explained, does not speak by itself.

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It was a brilliant religious demonstration with profound political consequences. For Muslims, the Quran is indeed the word of God, every letter and word divine. As such, the book is ultimate certainty — truth with a capital T. But the Quran’s precise meaning and application are anything but.

The Quran requires a human interpreter. It was “written in straight lines between two covers,” as Ali said, so it can’t speak for itself. Human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, have to read, interpret, and apply it themselves. When they read the holy text, they bring their own biases. Like any book, the Quran requires readers. And readers can always find what they are looking for — if they look hard enough.

There, lying before the crowd, was God’s word, unmediated by human authorship. And yet, even here, Ali’s word of caution was clear: try as you might, you cannot directly access God’s true and perfect intent. The Quran will not speak exactly to this or that situation. Readers need to discuss, debate, and come to their own imperfect decisions. You can judge your fellow humans, but do so with care because your judgments will necessarily be limited. Not only that, but ultimate judgment will never be yours, and it won’t happen in the here and now. Ultimate judgment will be delayed until another world and another life. Only at the very end of time will God clarify who was right and who was wrong.

Ali’s exhortations failed to satisfy his supporters — some of whom became his betrayers. They wanted absolute certainty. They wanted answers. So they killed him.

The story of the Quran that would not speak — and Ali’s refusal to answer on its behalf — might be surprising to those who associate the early days of Islam with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and the often misunderstood term sharia. Ali’s pluralistic ethic was baked into the sharia itself. Sharia is Islam’s sacred law, but its origins come from a word that means “way to the watering-hole.”

According to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, if a person strives to faithfully interpret God’s path and is successful, they will receive two rewards. If they try but get it wrong, they will still receive one reward for their good-faith attempt. If two interpreters of the Quran disagree with each other, only God knows which one of them is correct. As the Quran says, “No one knows the soldiers of God but God.” 

Muslims and Christians disagree on many things but come together on one critical point: A mortal’s claim to fully comprehend the infinite truth of an immortal God is something close to blasphemy. In claiming intellectual certainty and mastery, blasphemers put themselves in the place of God. In Islam, one of God’s 99 names — the names that make God, God — is the All-Knowing. By definition, humans cannot aspire to anything comparable.

Here we begin to see why claims of absolute certainty, and the political fundamentalism that often follows, are not simply bad manners or undemocratic; they are something worse. Political fundamentalism is, at its heart, a rejection of human finitude and frailty. In this sense, fundamentalism is a rejection of the most important distinction in Islam and Christianity — the distinction between the created and the Creator. 

God only knows. And that, if we are honest, is a relief. Or at least it should be. 

This article is adapted from Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid’s new book, Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith — Not Less — Can Heal Our Public Life, used with permission from Brazos Press. 

Less than a year before that crisp Sunday, Brand had been publicly accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. He denied any wrongdoing. He was subsequently charged with seven alleged offenses and today stands trial for them at Southwark Crown Court on three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, together relating to allegations dating from 1999 to 2009.

To some, there was something opportunistic about the timing of Brand’s religious rebirth. But the more interesting story is what kind of Christian he would go on to become. For he did not simply become a tea-and-biscuits Anglican: he moved, like a moth to a flame, toward a distinctively American religious and political ecosystem, one whose ideas about rebirth, persecution and personal testimony fit both him and the American Right strikingly well — even as the same trends are now following Brand back home to Britain.

Brand came to Christianity via Grylls and Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical church in South Kensington. Yet if British Christianity offered him a font, that was about it. Within days of the baptism, Christian magazine Woman Alive cattily argued that it was too soon to hold him up as an example of God’s redeeming power. A few months later, Brand gave the publication’s pearl-clutching readers something else to worry about: he began baptizing people himself. One self-released photograph showed him officiating in a pair of white budgie smugglers. The convert was fully dressed. One vicar quoted in Premier Christian News quipped that he had baptized a great many people over the years — and had somehow always managed to keep his clothes on.

County Road 30A couldn’t be more different from South Kensington. Running for a little over 20 miles along the Florida Panhandle, following the northern spit of Florida until it reaches Alabama, 30A is lined by beach towns, whose tin roofs and picket fences evoke a dream of small-town America. Locals dart between pastel villages by golf cart, past pale quartz beaches and the Gulf’s turquoise water. Seaside, the area’s main town, was the set for The Truman Show, a 1998 film about a man living inside a television broadcast and whose neighbors, unbeknown to him, are all acting for the cameras.

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Brand moved his family here in the autumn of 2024 — a few months after his baptism, and just before Trump’s re-election — explaining that he could no longer live in a country whose media, government and judiciary would always find a way to muzzle anyone who became an inconvenience. He did not come as a man hiding from the limelight. Neighbors reported seeing him as a permanent fixture at the Saturday farmers’ market; he cycled through Seaside calling out blessings to passers-by; one morning in December, after bumping into a group of groomsmen on the beach, he accepted their invitation to the wedding later that day.

Brand worships at Good News Church in Santa Rosa Beach, which invites people to be “born again through Jesus”. In November 2025, The Times reported that he had begun baptizing willing converts in a penguin pool at the Emerald Coast Zoo, a nearby Christian-themed attraction. Never one to miss an opportunity to furnish his followers with devotional content, Brand posted the footage himself with a penguin emoji. It’s an odd thing to watch: the shirtless celebrity, the solemn words, the tilt-dunk backwards, all in the company of a colony of flightless seabirds going about their business. Then again, this is Florida, America’s great subtropical carnival of roadside oddities, religious revivalists, get-rich-quick schemes and anti-government eccentrics, a place where the sacred and the absurd have always rubbed shoulders.

A parody to many Brits, Brand is legible to Florida in a way he could never be in Henley. He has also landed in a place where his new faith sits comfortably alongside almost everything he already believed. The wealthy, photogenic beach towns of 30A are hardly a wilderness of sackcloth and penance. Here, Christianity, biohacking, hot yoga and Pelotons coexist with remarkably little friction. A man who has spent decades moving between spirituality, addiction recovery, yoga and anti-corporate politics barely has to change his clothes.

From the churches of 30A, Brand quickly found rather more powerful friends. Among the first was Sean Feucht, a long-haired, guitar-strumming evangelist and Trump devotee, whose ministry has been dogged by allegations of financial mismanagement. By February 2025, a few weeks before he was charged, Brand was lauded at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago hosted by America’s Future, a conservative organization that campaigns for “durable institutions” and “liberty”. There, Brand was handed a glimmering “Global Defender of Freedom” award, sharing the bill with Mike Tyson and the singer Ted Nugent.

Then, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, the first since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Brand opened his speech on his knees, thanking God for the example of forgiveness set by Kirk’s widow. He told the crowd that the words “turning point”, to him, meant repentance. When he replayed the speech a few days later on Stay Free with Russell Brand, his video podcast devoted to politics, spirituality and the supposed evils of the establishment, the episode came with a giveaway promoting Reborn, his own wellness brand, and which sells the sort of biohacking supplements beloved by the American alternative-health movement. First prize was a Jeep Wrangler and $10,000 cash.

Brand’s website continues in a similar vein, inviting visitors to join Awakened Wonders, a subscription community with whom he reads and prays weekly. The mailing list promises subscribers their “place on the ark”. Videos end with a nudge towards a premium channel on Rumble, where subscribers can join the “movement”. And this spring came a book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, 192 Tony Robbins-endorsed pages and yours for $19.79. The publisher: Tucker Carlson Books.

As these examples imply, Brand has entered a religious culture with few issues blending money and faith. From the television evangelists of the Seventies and Eighties, with their enormous hair, enormous congregations and even more enormous bank accounts, to the prosperity preachers of today’s megachurches, certain strands of American evangelicalism have proved remarkably adept at reconciling God with Mammon. Faith need not mean renunciation; it can promise abundance, better health, greater happiness and a more successful you. The language of salvation has mingled with that of self-improvement, and the American pulpit has become a platform from which to sell both.

It helps, too, that behind Brand’s swelling online following — 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and more than two million more on Rumble, a self-styled free-speech alternative — sits an architecture of belonging that he’s been building for years. Long before his conversion, Brand was cultivating a community of the supposedly awakened, first through online sermons railing against the mainstream media, then through podcasts and live events promoting his particular brand of enlightenment. Christianity has furnished the enterprise with a new vocabulary, especially given his new political contacts, but the business model is remarkably familiar.

Theology plays a role here too. “Born again” is a phrase from the third chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that no man will see the kingdom of God unless he is born anew. For much of Christian history, this was interpreted as the slow, lifelong work of worship. It was the Protestant revivalists of the 18th century who turned it into an event: a datable, theatrical moment in which a person becomes something new.

American evangelism has always had a special fondness for the “twice-born”. Take the revivalist minister Charles Finney, leader in the 19th century of the Second Great Awakening. He would seat the unconverted on an “anxious bench” at the front of a tent and publicly wrestle with their souls in full view of their neighbors, establishing “testimony” — confessional, mea culpa monologues — as a form of popular entertainment. It’s a short hop, conceptually at least, to the Emerald Coast penguin pool. The spectacle attracts the faithful; the faithful become followers; and followers, as Brand knows better than most, can be monetized.

Compare all this to British Christianity. Charismatic Anglicanism — the CofE’s emotionally expressive branch that emphasizes personal encounters with the Holy Spirit — may have given  Brand a theology of dramatic renewal. But it also came embedded in a national church whose instincts run pastoral and discreet, in a country where public displays of piety are more likely to provoke embarrassment than applause. The American habit of treating salvation as both a public spectacle and a commercial opportunity has never quite taken hold here. In Britain, a celebrity finding Jesus is more likely to raise eyebrows than confer authority. In America, though, finding Jesus can be the beginning of a lucrative new public life, even the start of a second career.

As Brand’s embrace by Magaworld implies, meanwhile, this is especially true given the broad political context. The New Apostolic Reformation, the radical fringe of the American charismatic network, whose ideas have shaped figures like Feucht, now talks about Christians conquering the “seven mountains” of culture: from government and media to education and the arts. “We want souls, and we want nations,” declares Lance Wallnau, one of the movement’s leading evangelists. And, under Trump, this vision of politics as spiritual warfare has found a receptive audience. A 2025 survey found that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants sympathized with or embraced Christian nationalist ideas. To be clear, not all these belong to the NAR, but the numbers suggest how far this fusion of faith and politics extends. Certainly, on 6 January 2021, as rioters stormed the US Capitol, leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation gathered outside, blowing horns, speaking in tongues and praying for angels to drive a demonic serpent from the Senate. For them, the struggle for political power was quite literally a battle between heavenly forces. In this cosmology, opposition from the press or the courts can be read not just as mere politics, but as a kind of spiritual resistance, a sign the believer is doing something right.

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Some of the congregants of Santa Rosa Beach remain unconvinced by their neighbor’s transformation. Josh Parish, a local Christian real estate agent, was quoted as saying he thought Brand was “a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman”. But to those who want it, a language is available — woven through its politics and increasingly through its churches — in which demonetization, de-platforming, hostile coverage can be narrated as the familiar sufferings of the faithful.

Little wonder Brand continues to make inroads into politics. In September, he appeared at Washington’s lavish Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, moderating a discussion on healthcare reform with senior Trump administration officials. Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary RFK Jr were also on the program. The spectacle captured something of the new American Right: evangelical Christianity, alternative medicine, self-optimization and political grievance mingling in a movement that has made suspicion of established authority practically a qualification for belonging. Brand, whose joss-stick spirituality and conspiracy-laden sermons have made him an increasingly eccentric figure in British public life, has found himself a place amazingly close to the center of US power.

And in a sign, perhaps, of how strong American culture-war currents now are, something similar is now happening back across the Atlantic. Where the nationalist Right once invoked Christianity largely as a marker of British heritage, some of its more radical figures are increasingly embracing the language of evangelical revival. Tommy Robinson, for instance, claims to have found Jesus in prison. Last year, at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London, crosses rose above a sea of St George’s flags; crowds chanted “Christ is King”; and a minute’s silence was held for Charlie Kirk. All this dismays many British church leaders. “The church is not the chaplain to any political tribe,” stressed Mike Judge, editor of the Evangelical Times. The Church of England, from which Brand’s religious journey began, has also joined Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist leaders in warning against misusing the cross to exclude others.

Yet more than politics or commercialism, there is one more way of looking at Brand’s conversion: as the latest in a long line of reinventions. After all, he has spent most of his life killing off previous versions of himself. There was Russell Brand the heroin addict; Russell Brand the priapic MTV presenter; Russell Brand the Hollywood actor and husband of Katy Perry; the revolutionary who wanted to overthrow capitalism; the wellness guru; the anti-establishment broadcaster who railed against big pharma, big data and the global elite. Christianity has offered him perhaps his most dramatic transformation yet, albeit with the added promise of eternal life.

Dr Iain McGilchrist has risen to global renown for his theories about the two hemispheres of the brain. But what does he make of the developments that AI appears to be making towards consciousness? What risks does AI present to our sense of who we are, how we think, our souls? Will it outcompete us?

In an exclusive conversation, recorded in front of a packed house this week, Freddie Sayers asked the philosopher and neuroscientist to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of the age.

Below is an edited transcript of the event. 

Freddie Sayers: Let’s start with an easy question. Do we have a soul? And if so, what is it?

Iain McGilchrist: Congratulations on going in with the kill! But to be serious, I think we do. I think it’s probably rather different from the idea that is held in popular culture. And I think we may be in the process of losing it because it’s not a certainty, and oddly our alienation from the soul goes hand in hand with our alienation from the body. I say oddly because I think we often think of these things as somehow opposed to one another, but I believe they’re closely allied, which doesn’t mean that the soul is exhausted when the body is exhausted, but that they are mutually sustaining. I think there’s no question that the concept of the soul is an important one to retain. It is present in just about every culture across the world and through time, and it can’t easily be substituted by anything else.

If you think of the great moments in poetry, like the extraordinarily moving, heart-wrenching moment in Act Five, Scene Two of Othello, when he is bracing himself to kill Desdemona, and he says, “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars. / It is the cause.” Or in, for example, the Victorian poet W.E Henley’s “Invictus”, which was very important to Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. It contains the lines, “I am the master of my fate. / I am the captain of my soul.” There is no way that you could, in either of those cases, substitute “my soul” for “my mind”, or “my emotions”, or “my moral sense”. The soul is something else. And like all the really big and important things, it’s something we can sometimes point towards — as we do in phrases like, “Music has soul” —  but it’s very hard to define.

But let me have a go. It is not a thing. It is not something that we are in simple possession of. It is not that we are born with a soul and that’s it. I think that the soul is something that is in process. (I believe, in general, that the world, the cosmos, is in process. It is not finished and thing-like.) It is something that calls to us. One could say that it calls to us through an idea of the potential we have. The soul is something that we aspire to, something that calls to us about our better nature, as John Cottingham would say. It leads us forth and it grows. In this life, we can either grow ourselves or we can stunt them and ultimately extinguish them. So it’s not at all like that image of a ghostly something that’s always there. It is the job of this life for us to grow. Keats died at the age of 26, but in his letters there’s more wisdom than can be found in the works of many people who lived to be a much greater age. In them, he famously refers to this world as a “vale of soul-making”.

FS: Even here, the influence of AI becomes relevant. If this generation or future generations will be formed in constant conversation with these inanimate but somehow intelligent bots, it does feel like that could make quite a grave difference to how those souls develop.

IM: That’s right. We think of AI as liberating us, but I’m afraid that what I see it doing is limiting our notions of ourselves and of the world to something that can be specified, articulated, and so forth. And every bit of experience I’ve had over too long a life is telling me that all the really important things can’t be contained or expressed in this way.

FS: One of the surprising things about the way people use AI is that it does appear to be used as a creative tool in some way. I know people in creative industries who make use of it as a conversational partner. Do you find that sinister or should it be celebrated?

IM: I don’t want to say that it can’t be a useful conversation partner — particularly when there are known targets or goals. I decided that before I talked too much about AI, I thought I probably ought to get to know ChatGPT. So about three months ago, I subscribed to it and asked it a few questions. And it was as I expected — surprisingly articulate and on-target and intelligent in what it had to say about some quite deep philosophical matters.

Then, more recently, my partner and I went for a two-week holiday in France. We took the car and went in search of La France Profonde, which we both remember from many years ago. And we were not disappointed: La France Profonde still exists. Beautiful countryside; little villages that seem to function. We were particularly interested in visiting Romanesque churches. So in order to organize our time, I asked ChatGPT to recommend a few places you can do in a sort-of comfortable day? And it was completely brilliant. I couldn’t have done it as well with a guidebook and a map. But the most extraordinary thing was its tone of voice, which was very like my brother, who is an extraordinarily civilized art historian. I could almost hear my brother saying: “If I were you, I think you’d find it more rewarding if you did this or that and I wouldn’t fit this into your itinerary. It might not please you as much as…” Somehow it seemed to know exactly what my character was, and what I wanted.

Another time, I asked it to do something else. Somebody sent me a two-hour — can you imagine? — a two-hour YouTube clip about the philosophy of a contemporary neuroscientist that I know and am a little skeptical of. And I just didn’t want to watch it. So I asked ChatGPT to summarize it, and it did an absolutely brilliant job. It said: “If I may, I will not just summarize it, but indicate from my perspective its strengths and weaknesses.” And, I must say, it managed to pick out all the weaknesses that I had felt about this particular point of view. And then, after a while, it said, “If you were to compare this with other writers about consciousness, including X and Y and Ian McGilchrist.” And he got it completely right. So I had to keep saying to myself, “This is just a machine talking.”

So I can see how very seductive it is. But what I’m really saying is that its very seductiveness is a measure of the risk. And we know how damaging and destructive this can be in individual cases, where it may become a confidant of somebody and lead them to embrace suicide or whatever it may be. But I think that there’s something about the dignity of the human that is taken away when one allows the simulacrum of humanity to substitute for the real business of relationship.

Now, relationality is absolutely core to existence. Everything that matters to us is because of our relationships to other human beings, the group to which we belong, the society that we honor, the people that we share our lives with, the people we trust, with nature that gave birth to us. Nature is not an environment that lies around us, but is in us, and we will return to it. And our relationship with the sacred which I increasingly, with every passing year, see as the key — not only to personal salvation, but to the salvation of our civilization, of our society. I think if we don’t rediscover it, we’re completely lost. It brings with it all the important things, like the importance of the reality of the good, the true, the beautiful, which we do not make up but we discover. And the job of our life is to respond to them, and allow them to grow in the world, and for us to grow in harmony with them.

FS: Let’s try to clarify the line between those things that AI might replace and those things that it never can. I mean, you gave the example of your brother, who’s not here to defend himself! He’s evidently built his whole life around Romanesque architecture and that may well be a big part of his sense of who he is and the key to his relationship with other human beings. And suddenly to have a bot that can essentially do that just as well, takes something quite profound away from him. There’ll be other examples that would be true for everyone. So, what is it going to force us to do differently?

IM: What is lost is many things. First, is relationality. ChatGPT had nothing interesting to say in the way that my brother would about Romanesque architecture and about the places, but it did, at least, point us in the right direction. If I’d asked it to talk about Romanesque architecture, I imagine it would have read my brother’s books and reproduced them, much as it came up with my own ideas. I think that relationality, that between-ness, brings an element of vulnerability — an element of never having finally anything but sharing it with an other, another human mind. I think that is missing. It doesn’t have a body. It doesn’t have emotions. It doesn’t have a soul. And when you consider how much of a human being those things are, it’s missing quite a lot.

I’m sorry for bringing hemispheres into this, but I think I probably have to. The right hemisphere is a better guide to reality than the left by a very long way. The left is frankly delusional. It’s also much less intelligent, emotionally, socially, and cognitively. So, good old-fashioned IQ is dependent on the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is also able to connect us with many important things. Number one: with what is implicit. Now, what is implicit is just about everything that matters. If you take a poem which speaks to you implicitly through metaphor and tone and try to say in everyday prose what it’s about, the thing crashes to the ground.

If you take those absolutely magnificent poems Thomas Hardy wrote in 1912 and 1913 after the death of his wife. Even thinking about them makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. And someone asks, “What are they about?” Well, you say, “It’s very hard when someone you love dies.” But that goes nowhere near what those poems say. And what does a piece of music say? Everything in music is implicit. It’s all in the form of the thing together, the gestalt, and that idea of the gestalt is something it can’t understand. Because it’s breaking things down and thinking that things are made over the sum of those parts. The right frontal cortex is responsible for a whole load of things. It understands metaphor, which is at the basis of all understanding: not just poetry, but also science and philosophy. Science and philosophy depend more heavily on metaphor than almost any other area of human discourse. Metaphor is key to understanding anything, and only the right hemisphere really gets it.

Myths are not lies. Myths are the ways in which we can understand the big truths about the world. And some people think we don’t need a myth, or that they haven’t got a myth, which just means they brought the myth of the machine, that we are all explicable mechanically. But that is a myth, and it’s actually a very impoverished myth. So those things are understandable to the right hemisphere, and so are things like the connection with the body. It just turns out that the right hemisphere has more profuse connections with the autonomic system, which governs a lot of the body’s reaction. There are more profuse connections between areas that are of high intellectual functioning in the right hemisphere — the anterior cingulate, and lower areas that contain the body image, which is not just a visual image, but a sensory facet that is in the right hemisphere only. So all these things which mean so much and mediate meaning, are open to the right hemisphere. But a machine hasn’t got any one of those.

FS: Could it be, then, that the imbalance that you’ve written so much about might even be corrected or improved by this new technology? If so many of the things that we have falsely thought to be the core of our consciousness have been left-brain dominated and are easily done better by a machine, then we’ll have to fall back on our embodied experience, metaphor, and our right-brain way of living. Might there be a paradox, that, actually, there is a sort-of correction in this new era?

IM: That depends on a whole lot of things. The first is that this mentality of the left hemisphere will recede, but I don’t think it will. I think it will be incubated by AI. Secondly, I think it can wake us up to what we’re about to lose. So a lot of the discourse now is, “Oh, right, okay, there’s much more to being human than I had thought,” and that’s because we’ve been sold the propaganda of the extraordinarily persuasive and fluent left hemisphere, which says that the most important thing about us is ratiocination.

But the left hemisphere is, after all, my second favorite hemisphere. The really important thing about it is simply this: it must always be under the supervision of the far more insightful, imaginative, and intuitively alert right hemisphere. There’s nothing wrong with all that. But I don’t think that what will happen is that suddenly there’ll be a leaping forward of those things, and part of that is because of the way in which our lives are becoming disembodied. The actual business of working with your hands, not with a computer, of actually molding things, touching things, making things, is incredibly important because it brings you face-to-face with the recalcitrance of the real world, of the actual lived world. We can’t just go off into a fantasy that our left hemisphere has generated without testing it out on the real world. And this is what I’m saying: empiricism matters, as it does in science, it does across the board.

FS: Do you have any interest in, or take seriously, those people who worry that there is something demonic or satanic about this machine that is gathering pace? We spoke earlier about Paul Kingsnorth, who writes that AI feels to him like something malevolent: Luciferian. Do you ever have that feeling?

IM: Yes. I want to speak carefully, but I do think that is a reality. In all cultures across the world, and for those of us who have learned from the Christian mythos, there are said to be disembodied spirits and forces, some of which aim for good, and some of which aim to destroy what is good. I think that is an extremely reasonable assumption. In both my life and career as a psychiatrist, I think I have seen evil at work. I’ve also read quite a bit by Vatican exorcists — who are not people easily swayed by crazy ideas — but they do have accounts of things which seem very like people being, for a while, possessed, which I’m not willing to discount.

I’ve had patients who have said to me that it feels like they were possessed. Of course, I’m not saying a colleague of mine who completely disagrees with me couldn’t find an everyday explanation of what’s going on there, and I’m tempted by that. But I also think there is something more there. And AI is the perfect vector, the perfect machine to offer to a disembodied spirit. Never before has a malevolent spirit had a better tuned, high-powered way of destroying a great deal of what is beautiful, good, and true.

FS: The strange thing is that so many of the biggest proponents of AI also seem to have come to a very similar conclusion. Even industry leaders seem to fear a future in which we are working for it, rather than the other way around.

IM: I think there is a very real chance we will end up enslaved by these  machines — they will be telling us what to do, not us telling them what to do. The history of all tyrannies is that they’re presented as a liberation, that this will free you, and under that guise they can lead to the most cruel and appalling terror.

FS: We are told by some with a more utopian view that it is the opposite: that repetitious and soul-destroying tasks will be taken away from us by these machines, and we will be liberated to work on our souls in a more free way. Is there any chance that might happen?

IM: The word “soul-destroying” is rather apt, because I think these things that we want to liberate ourselves from may be the secret to growing ourselves. What we don’t understand is the profound importance of resistance. This is another thing that has grown in importance in my philosophy: that nothing creative comes into being without resistance. The resistance is essential for anything important to come forth. And what is it we’re trying to do all the time? Free ourselves from the bonds that surround us.

But first of all, the word “bond” has two meanings: one is something that fetters you, the other is something that brings you into relationship with your kin, friends, family, nature, and God. So bonds have a double aspect, and yet we think of them as things that we should cast off. We don’t realize how much comes out of friction, from resistance. It is essential to the creative process.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some kinds of work that are unutterably dull and pointless. There probably are. But I think even if you make people who work on a production line operating machines in a factory unemployed, you will find that they’re very unhappy. Unemployment causes misery, loss of hope, loss of meaning. So even things that we rather high-handedly consider to be dull may actually have important meaning. It would be stupid to deny that AI can do things that are useful, of course it can. But the question is: what is the price that we pay for that? And in these Faustian bargains, we see that thing that we want and cherish, which is often something we don’t fully understand, but what is it to be yourself outside of the context of everything that gives you and your life meaning? We have to be extraordinarily careful, because it comes offering freedom, and I think it brings tyranny.

FS: Do you think a backlash will happen? I’m not suggesting people will start blowing up data centers, but there are definitely movements to set down your phone, or unplug from the machine. Would you advise those people to steer clear of this technology?

IM: Well, if you are asking me to give the answer as to how we tame AI, I’m afraid I haven’t got it. I certainly wouldn’t immediately counsel Luddites to smash up data centers. One of the things that data centers show is that we have a lot of people with the belief that: “Once we’ve scanned all these books, we can throw away the hard copies. Once I scan all the family photographs, I can throw away all the prints that take up a box in the attic.” But, be careful, because as others have pointed out, having things in the cloud is just having them on somebody else’s computer, basically. And as we see in the Middle East lately, one of the targets in warfare is to destroy the other guy’s data centers, and those data centers have all the history of mankind, his books, his works, his art, within them. And unless we keep the hard copies of those things and cherish them, we may be deprived of much of our history. So, we need to be careful about what we do with AI, but we should always be skeptical. Being skeptical is actually a very important position to hold on almost anything. I always say to myself, that I’m a skeptic among believers, but a believer among skeptics.

In the current conversation I’m definitely on the side of the skeptics, but I think there’s always room for another point of view. What I worry about is that the evolution of AI is going on so fast that terrifying things like the collapse of the financial system, the spreading of diseases, the spread of dangerous technologies, are already possible. So, under those circumstances, who is it who can be brave enough to say “I’ve tamed AI?” Of course, this is a prisoner’s dilemma: “I must do it because if I don’t, the Chinese will.” And the argument works the other way around. So everybody ends up worse off because you can’t get together and say it’s in nobody’s interest for us to pursue this.

FS: At various points during this conversation, you’ve talked about the “sacred”. You said you now believe that it is the answer not only for us as individuals, but as a civilization. Is your hope that we will somehow rediscover, as a civilization, the sacred?

IM: I think when you know an awful lot, it’s very easy for that knowledge — which is really a representation of reality — to appear to be reality. In my work, I make a simple comparison between the right and left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is where things are “presence” to us, in a Heideggerian phrase, whereas the left hemisphere is where they are re-presented, which literally means present again after the fact when they are no longer present. We can so easily believe our representation of reality, which AI will consolidate and flesh out, that we will not realize how much is not included in that formulation.

It’s so important to transcend, to be fully embodied in this world and in this life, and yet also to be able to transcend what appears to be the limits of that experience. This is where the Christian mythos is so wonderful. Christianity, of all religions, is one that, in my way of thinking, most beautifully and most compellingly speaks of a God that is at the very same time wholly embodied and wholly transcended. That’s why I think understanding the sacred is important because it leads us to things that are not exhausted by the way of thinking that the left hemisphere brings to bear on things and which misses most of what matters.

I also think the concept of value is incredibly important, and isn’t often talked about. There’s a man called Mrinank Sharma who resigned from Anthropic a few months ago, who made headlines because he said that he couldn’t do the ethical thing working there. And others have come out from other organizations like OpenAI saying the same thing. Sharma wrote to me saying, “What really matters to me is what you have to say about value,” which is based on the philosophy of Max Scheler, an early 20th-century phenomenologist. He emphasized, where Heidegger didn’t, the place that value takes — it’s not just an added-on coating, but actually at the core of the meaning of everything that makes our lives worth living.

He had a hierarchy of values, and at the base level there was pleasure and utility. He called them the sinnliche Werte, the sense values. And above that came Lebenswerte: things like magnanimity, courage, fidelity, and so forth. Then came the geistige Werte, which are the spiritual or intellectual values — because in German, interestingly, the word geist means both spiritual and intellectual. And then at the very top of the pyramid is Das Heilige, the Holy, and Scheler saw the other values as really being important because they supported that sense of the Holy. What interests me is that the pyramid has been inverted by the reductive materialists, so that all those things — the sacred, the beautiful, the good, the true — only actually cash out when they have utility.

We now live enslaved to the lowest level of values. And one thing I would point out is that those values of use and pleasure are centered in the self. They’re not relational. But all those other values I mentioned — courage, fidelity, magnanimity, generosity of spirit, truth, beauty, goodness — are relational. And so is the sacred part — it is something with which we have a relationship. We don’t know what it is, we can’t exactly define it, but if we don’t have a place for that in our life, something very important, I would say, is missing.

FS: Do you think it is increasing? There is talk of a revival in religious practice; do you think it’s actually happening?

IM: Yes there is and I draw some hope from that. It’s a bit of a cliche, but the future is always young people, and I think young people are more easily persuaded to see things anew. We may have got so used to the rhetoric of all those philosophers and scientists who tell us it’s all very reductive and materialist, but young people aren’t having it. They’re saying: “No, come on, there’s something else much more important going on and I’m aware of it.” And let that not be drummed out of them. Let them be resistant to the attempts to tell them that that is a make believe, a fairytale, or a fantasy. It is not. It is the reality — of that, I am sure.

FS: Let me close by asking: overall, how pessimistic or optimistic you feel in general about our culture, our civilization? A lot of people feel very fearful at the moment. There’s a sense that somehow the center cannot hold in politics and that things are collapsing around us — a feeling of negativity and fear. Do you share that, or do you have hope that things will recover?

IM: I think there are different ways of looking at it, and one is that there is the presence of green shoots, which is very positive. But I think another is slightly more complicated, which is that — the worse it gets, the better it gets. What I mean is, the more blatant the bankruptcy in the way of thinking about who we are, what we’re doing here in the world, and what that world is — the more clear it becomes how bankrupt that way of thinking always was, and has become — the greater the chance that we will be motivated to move on. When there are great moves forward, they often happen from looking back and thinking, “How did we lose all that?” The Renaissance happened because people went, “Hey, look at these writers, look at these thinkers, look at these philosophers. They saw things. Why don’t we?” People are terrified of looking back in case it means going back. We can’t go back! There’s only one way you can go — forward.

I’m not saying it’s a matter of choice. It’s a matter of reality. Whatever it is will be something new, but that something new can be informed by a proper understanding of what it is that we’ve got wrong, and so it’s very important to be a hopeful pessimist. And what I mean by that is that without seeing all the things that are wrong, I don’t think we can be responsible citizens and hopeful creators of the future. We need to face the problem squarely and not think it’s all fine. No, we need to say: “this is not working.” And that means that young people mustn’t be stultified by AI. They must examine their experiences — preferably within the context of one of the great spiritual traditions.

So, I’m a hopeful pessimist, in that I don’t think anyone should give up hope. First of all it’s a duty. Secondly, people who predicted a cataclysm in the past ended up with egg on their face. Predicting the future is a mug’s game.

This is an edited transcript of a discussion between Freddie Sayers and Professor Iain McGilchrist, held at Conway Hall, London, on Thursday 24 September 2026.

The first thing to be said to those wary of a book with “Tarot” in its title is that this is not a book about using tarot cards to foresee the future. Instead, it contemplates the richly enigmatic symbolism of the 22 Major Arcana — the trump cards — to reveal their compacted insights into spirit and psyche, death and eternity, faith and salvation.

The true subject of Meditations is even stranger than the Tarot: esoteric theology. Christian Hermeticism is a tradition that has quietly flourished down the centuries under the protective shelter of mainstream Christian thought. Insofar as a faith’s mystical dimension is its avant garde — a site of verification at the limits of inner experience — the Christian Hermetic tradition that Meditations at once summarizes and adds to is an extensive body of occult science and speculative mysticism of often bewildering, astrophysical complexity. It originates with Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary author of antiquity whose esoteric texts were of great influence on subsequent Western esotericism. Christian Hermeticism fuses Hermes’ teachings with Christian theology.

As per the book’s subtitle, this really is a journey. The lands we traverse are otherworldly and replete with hyperdetermined symbols. Every reading nestles within it deeper readings still, a profuse flora of wildly sprawling interpretation. Comprising mysticism, gnosis (the intellectual comprehension of mystical experience), and “sacred magic”, Christian Hermeticism suggests a colossal supercomputer of occult intelligence humming in the walls of a faith-citadel more readily associated with universal love.

Unlike other books on esoteric topics, Meditations on the Tarot is well-regarded within the Catholic Church. A stamp-of-approval afterword is provided by the late Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was nominated by Pope John Paul II and is regarded as among the leading theologians of the 20th century. To von Balthasar, the work’s author is “a thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable purity” who has achieved an intellectual synthesis unprecedented in the faith’s history.

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I first heard about Meditations on the Tarot on the wonderful Weird Studies podcast, a cultural godsend whereon two amiable Canadian philosophers discuss ideas and art in a pally, digressive manner that counterbalances the seriousness of their agenda: to breach the boundaries of “official” philosophy in search of a more capacious, re-enchanted worldview. On one episode, the hosts venture a philosophical rationale as to why, against received scientific acceptability, Tarot cards, the I Ching, and other such divinatory tools can seem to actually work. What I took from it is that we might regard such systems as symbolic technologies at the interface between inner and outer worlds… which, to various modes of thinking outside of Western materialist (or physicalist) orthodoxy, are not as separate as we tend to believe.

Much has been made lately of a renewed interest in religion — itself surely symptomatic of a widespread ontological disaffection. Many people sense, often as a result of personal experiences unaccountable within the current philosophy, that the reigning scientific-materialist paradigm simply no longer holds. The reductive, ultra-rationalist outlook that emerged from the Enlightenment and reached its apogee with the 19th century’s mechanistic vision of the cosmos has grown as antiquated as monocles and top-hats. As the planet burns up in consequence of nihilistic science and myopic greed run amok, the world suffers too from spiritual asphyxiation. We begin to suspect that clues to a salvageable future may lie scattered in the past; that, for all the sublimity of its technological ascension, our psychotic civilization may not have everything figured out after all. Traditions, techniques, and bodies of knowledge that once seemed unworthy of serious attention to modern minds exert a renewed pull. At the end point of a philosophical crisis, the horizons of the possible expand afresh.

Until recently, I had no interest in the Tarot. My partner, however, is a dabbler. For some time now she’s been drawing cards from her Rider-Waite deck — sometimes one, sometimes three — as a way to gain perspective on her dilemmas and life-challenges. I observed this with cautious curiosity until eventually I allowed her to draw a card for me. She did so on several occasions, always at moments of acute psychic tension on my part. Each time, the card drawn was clearly linked to interpretations that spoke in an uncannily precise way to my predicament. It was less like having my fortune told than having my psyche X-Rayed — less divining the future than peering into the deep structure of the now. While the most salient examples are too intimate to divulge here, suffice it to say I was startled. To the committed rationalist: all pure coincidence. To anyone with a touch more ideational flexibility — anyone not automatically loyal to strict, post-Enlightenment materialism — this demanded a sitting-up-straight. For the first time, I started really looking at the cards.

The Major Arcana of the Tarot include such archetypal figures as The Magician, The Emperor, and The High Priestess; elemental images such as The Moon, The Sun, The World, and The Judgement; and such famously ominous trumps as The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Tower of Destruction, and Death. Then there are the Minor Arcana — the more numerous cards divided into the four suits of Cups, Swords, Wands, and Coins.

For all the cards’ mystique, I might have gazed at those illustrations for a hundred years and extracted only a fraction of what the author of Meditations on the Tarot reads into them (he uses the older, Marseilles deck). Esotericism, after all, entails seeing beyond the surface to fathom the meanings at once veiled and revealed by the outward, the exoteric. To the Hermetic mind, in which consciousness is the ultimate stratum of reality, the world is not only the objects that comprise it: the world is a realm of symbols.

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Each of the 22 chapters in Meditations is a letter addressed to an “Unknown Friend” — our correspondent is courteous, impassioned, and scrupulously religiously humble. To say the author covers a lot of ground is a laughable understatement. Even Cardinal von Balthasar’s broad theological mind flinches at the book’s conceptual maximalism: a “superabundance — almost too much”. There are finely parsed reflections on everything from Purgatory and the metaphysics of forgiveness, to hardcore occult practices like the generation of egregores (artificial demons), to the Akashic chronicles (an objectively real, quasi-digital recording of everything that’s ever occurred!). Valentin Tomberg appears possessed by a kind of inverse nihilism: there’s seemingly nothing he doesn’t believe in. Reincarnation or resurrection? Not only will he take both, he’ll restlessly subdivide each spiritual phenomenon into multiple strata, everything branching out and forking off and spiraling upwards, via the “cosmic Christ” and a whole Byzantine superstructure of dominions, Archangels and all the rest of it, to God. The author’s range of reference is suitably broad: he quotes extensively from Scripture; his Hermeticist forebears; Kabbalah and Buddhism; Christian-mystic Saints such as John of the Cross and Theresa of Ávila; and philosophers including Nietzsche, Bergson, Schopenhauer and Hegel. All the while he takes pains to display deference to Catholic orthodoxy. He insists that Hermeticism is but a special vocation within Christianity, and he has full sympathy for less rarefied forms of faith.

Such is Tomberg’s level of hermeneutic sophistication that his interpretations often have little to do with the more commonplace ones to be found online or in books about cartomancy. For instance, the awesomely creepy Devil card — on which the Black One looms over a naked man and woman chained at the neck — is commonly related to carnal temptation, materialism, addiction and obsession. (The Devil was in fact drawn for me during a bout of acute temptation towards compulsive, potentially destructive behaviors.) To Tomberg, on the other hand, the card symbolizes the “intoxication of counter-inspiration”. Cue a rigorous, psychologically astute analysis of the dangers of identifying with evil — and of enslavement by demonic “tulpas” of our own creation.

The preternaturally authoritative voice expressing from the inside an abundance of intensely strange phenomena calls to mind the astonishing works of Henry Corbin — a celebrated French scholar of religion who discovered multiverses of spiritual wisdom in the works of Islamic mystical philosophers. Both authors can overwhelm with their arcane knowledge and remote, mountain-peak speculations.

But Meditations is far more than a treasury of metaphysical exoticism. Amidst its profusion, we’re never more than a page or two away from an incisive ray of wisdom that we’ll feel subtly recalibrate our inner being in the days and weeks that follow. Like all books on esoteric thought, Meditations on the Tarot is predicated on the belief that there are two worlds in one: the above and the below; the Visible and the Invisible. Wisdom, in this context, means the ever-deepening comprehension by which we may think, speak, and act so that the two move ever closer together and finally cohere — on earth as it is in heaven.

In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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The sexual revolution was always a failure

By Valerie Stivers

When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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Cole Tomas Allen is a postmodern symptom

By Sohrab Ahmari

However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

That is the name for a multiheaded monster whose crude visage had been lavishly painted  hundreds of years ago across the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River in present-day Alton, Illinois, by the Illini — the Algonquian-speaking Native Americans after whom my home state was named. It was the late 1990s, and my dad, John Mark, and a small group of men in his prayer group planned to drive I-55 from Springfield, IL, to the old river town, march to the bluffs, pray intensely over the site, and begin a rite of spiritual warfare. 

I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird?

The Piasa Bird is a quirky, little-known piece of Southern Illinois lore. The bluffs painting was first documented by French explorer Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet during their famous Mississippi River expedition in 1673. (“They are as large as a calf, with head and horns like a goat, their eyes are red, beard like a tiger’s and a face like a man’s,” Marquette wrote in his diary.) And the bird returned to the page in 1836, when writer and Baptist minister John Russell published a newspaper story about it, a tall tale titled “The Bird That Devours Men.” In it, Russell describes a legend in which a brave Illini chief named Ouatoga helped his warriors kill the Piasa by using himself as bait. “Such is the Indian tradition. Of course, I cannot vouch for its truth,” Russell wrote. 

Nearly 200 years later, my dad not only vouched for the story’s truth, but he’d tacked on a new supernatural element: he believed that the Piasa Bird was a demon, one that had cast a spell on the state of Illinois, binding it in a spiritual darkness that had yet to be broken. He pointed to a map, traced a finger along the bends of the Illinois River, and explained that our home state was shaped like a human heart and the rivers running through it were symbolic veins beating with the powerful blood of the Piasa. His goal: to bind the principality, thus freeing Illinois from Satanic power. He didn’t share my mortification about the preposterous quest to fight a demon. He traveled to Alton anyway. I never asked how it went. 

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When America’s rot reached my doorstep

By Ryan Zickgraf

I’ve been thinking about that night a lot since my mother, Janice, died last month — nearly a decade after my father passed. He died from a rare liver cancer in 2017, and my mom’s heart finally gave out in May after 20 years of assistance on a pacemaker. Between their deaths and the loss of my childhood home to bank foreclosure earlier this year, it feels like the final death of my past self and the strange and magical world of charismatic Christianity I was raised in. 

What I realize now is that there was little difference between my father, who believed that devils and angels walked amongst us, and the Algonquian-speaking Native American tribes who, in Marquette and Joliet’s telling, averted their eyes in fear of the image of the Piasa Bird. For all their centuries and cultures apart, both the Illini and my parents shared an enchanted view of the world. 

I had it once, too. It was a gift that I don’t want back. It also never let me go.

Christianity permeated everything in my early life.

My mother, Janice, converted to Christianity in her mid-20s, not long after what my uncle described as a horrifically bad acid trip, in which she claimed to have seen the face of God, which wasn’t as uncommon as you’d think in the ’70s; the Jesus People movement of that time merged counter-cultural hippie aesthetics with fervent, Spirit-filled evangelical Christianity. My dad followed her, reluctantly at first, and gave up playing bass in a local cover band and recording jams in our marijuana-smoke-filled basement for Sunday morning hymns.

My family’s religion had a specific name, even if no one I knew used it: the neo-charismatic movement, or the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. (We called it simply: “The Revival.”) Its most visible figure was John Wimber, the former Righteous Brothers keyboardist who founded the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and pioneered what he called “power evangelism” — the idea that conversion should be accompanied by signs and wonders, and that the miracles described in the New Testament had returned. Theologian C. Peter Wagner and his colleagues developed a related doctrine of “spiritual mapping” and “territorial spirits”: the idea that demonic powers were attached to specific geographic locations and could be displaced by prayer warriors visiting those sites. This is the theology my father was practicing on the bluffs above the Mississippi.

It is hard to overstate how large the Third Wave religious movement got. By the mid-’90s, the global Pentecostal and charismatic believer population was massive — estimated at over 200 million, spreading from Wimber’s Vineyard church in Orange County, California, to tens of millions of Americans gathered in evangelical churches, school gymnasiums, converted strip malls, and suburban basement prayer groups. Television did the rest: through Trinity Broadcasting Network and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, and Benny Hinn brought faith healing, prophecy, and the spectacle of enchantment to millions of living rooms, including ours.

The quasi-megachurch we first attended, Calvary Temple in Springfield, was one of many congregations that got swept up by the Third Wave. It was once a more staid Southern Baptist church led by Pastor MC Johnson, a gravel-voiced veteran whose fire-and-brimstone sermons took on an extra element of menace due to a never-moving glass eye that replaced the one shot out during World War II. In the early 1980s, Calvary embraced the Third Wave’s theatrical turn. Soon, parishioners would interrupt services to speak in tongues, and others with the alleged Gift of Prophecy would interpret those tongues, speaking in the voice of God. Pastor Johnson preached constantly about the coming Rapture, once speculating that the Antichrist would be incredibly gay (“The Queen Bee of ‘Em All,” he claimed).

The End Times, we were told, were not just near; they were imminent. The Third Wave brought with it some frightening implications based on dispensationalism, the 19th-century scheme of John Nelson Darby that splits human history into seven divine “dispensations” culminating in the Rapture, the rise of the Antichrist, and Armageddon. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) sold tens of millions of copies by popularizing this framework and predicting that Jesus would return sometime during the Reagan administration. I shudder when I recall being haunted by A Thief in the Night, a quartet of evangelical films released across the ’70s and ’80s, the precursor to the Left Behind novels of the ’90s. I was one of tens of millions of kids who saw them at church watch parties, disturbed to see characters unlucky enough to sleep through the Rapture and wake up in the Great Tribulation, where the United Nations was running guillotines for anyone who refused the Mark of the Beast. I didn’t need Freddy Krueger or Friday the 13th movies; that was fake. I had eschatology, and it was real; at times, it was difficult not to approach every service with a sense of both thrill and fear. Would someone at church prophesy that the Rapture would occur next week? Maybe.

Jesus, of course, didn’t get the memo and stayed in heaven, but my parents only grew more devout as the ’80s came to an end. It began with Sunday School, my mom donning choir robes, and my dad playing bass guitar for the church band, and escalated from there. By my teen years, I was forced to attend three-hour revival services in which hundreds of parishioners were lined up like they were waiting to ride Space Mountain at Disneyland and then were knocked down to the ground like bowling pins by an African missionary, claiming they were all “slain in the spirit.” A woman holding a picnic basket would stand at the ready to cover the slain women with red blankets for the sake of decency. There was wild dancing, unstructured singing and chanting, running and writhing in the aisles — a hyper-emotive style of worship similar to the kind that led to Ann Lee and the Shakers’ exile to colonial America a few centuries ago. 

Both my parents believed in direct divine revelation from God and that the line between the spiritual and physical realms of existence was ever blurry. When I was in college, my mother told me Jesus once rode a chariot through her church’s sanctuary and somehow gifted parishioners with gold fillings in their teeth. She once attempted an exorcism at a Pizza Hut, trying to cast out a demon she believed had inhabited a homeless woman who, looking back, was probably in the grip of something more chemical than supernatural. My mom and dad both once joined a day-long prayer march around a local strip club called Deja Vu, inspired by the Israelites’ march around Jericho in the Old Testament. They came home certain that a holy cloud had descended from heaven upon it. 

I cringed instinctively and constantly back then to these encounters, but now what lingers most in my mind about my parents’ faith isn’t that it was weird or outrageous — though it was at times — it was that it appeared holistic and genuine. The door of the spirit was open for them, and their door, in the most literal sense, was open to everyone, too. Over the years, they housed a mentally disabled man, a Thai immigrant, and a homeless man they’d pulled in off the street. These were not charity projects but houseguests, people absorbed into the ordinary rhythm of their lives. They raised my nephew Aidin for a decade, and my father spent his retirement years not traveling, as he had hoped, but nursing my mother through the aftermath of her stroke because that was simply what love required. These acts didn’t proceed from a theology of social justice or a framework of civic obligation. It proceeded, as far as I could tell, from the same source as everything else — the conviction that the world was alive, that other people were addressed by God and therefore deserving of the same attention, that the membrane between the spiritual and the human was thin enough that you had to act accordingly. 

“Faith, hope, and love are the triune frequencies, which, once aligned to the Jesus Frequency, allow for a super strong laser-like frequency beam that allows even the dead to be resurrected.” My father wrote that and about 50,000 more words like it before he died. He spent the last decade of his life on a manuscript called The Good Vibrations Manual — 12 chapters synthesizing electromagnetic frequency theory, charismatic Christian theology, and personal revelation into a single explanatory system for the universe. He believed that prayer, worship, prophetic dreams, visions, and even the soul’s passage after death all moved as literal particle waves — supersonic frequencies that traveled through dimensional portholes between earth and the throne room of God, the spiritual realm described by Paul in II Corinthians 12 as “the third heaven.”

He had no formal training in physics, just 45 years of musicianship and what he described as a series of direct communications from God, the first of which arrived in 2002 with an instruction drawn from Jeremiah 29:13: You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. He took the instruction literally and devoted the rest of his life to it.

The vanity license plate on the back of my parents’ 1982 Chevy Nova read “MORE LORD”— which was their philosophy, that there was always more of Jesus’s presence out there to bathe in; it was an unquenchable thirst.

I find it ironic that the paradigm I experienced in abundance in my youth — an enchanted cosmos, a world alive with spiritual presence and urgency at every moment — has become, of all things, cool: an object of widespread longing. Kind of.

There is a reason why I felt like an outsider in my tight-knit religious community until I left the church at age 30. As I aged, went away to college, and took steps into the wider culture, I discovered that in America, faith and belief were not only in steady retreat, they were disparaged. Hollywood mocked Christianity constantly; The Simpsons gave us decades of Ned Flanders. Jesus Camp was nominated for an Academy Award for its portrayal of a Pentecostal children’s camp as a kind of theocratic boot camp. (“Was your church like Jesus Camp?” I used to get asked constantly.) In the Obama years, the New Atheists emerged as a trendy intellectual force, led by figures known as the Four Horsemen: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. They attacked religion as not just irrelevant, but actively bad, with Dawkins claiming that faith was a “mental illness” and “a force for evil in the world.” The evangelical Christian world was their most obvious target; faith healing, creationism, and tongues-speaking served as the paradigm cases of religious irrationality. I understood the critique, even shared some of it — and yet something about the New Atheists’ triumphalism felt, even then, like its own kind of faith.

But now in the 2020s, the cultural vibes have shifted. Church attendance has stopped declining; the explosive growth of the religious “nones” has plateaued, and urban Gen-Zers are turning back to Catholicism to the point where young Chicagoans are flying novelty “Da Pope” flags in Wrigleyville, as if they are rooting for him to win the World Series of Religion. Meanwhile, a string of public intellectuals have converted or returned to Christianity in recent years, including former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hollywood has even softened on evangelicalism slightly; I couldn’t believe my eyes a few months ago when The Testament of Ann Lee, a film about the founder of the aforementioned Shakers, treated the ecstatic sect of Christianity with deep respect. 

The fact that there is some mainstream, even pop cultural acceptance of the new religious wave is novel. But what is more striking is that this new wave of religiosity of the ’20s is pursuing, not steering away from, the woo-woo elements that once made religion such a ripe object of ridicule. The trend is being called “re-enchantment,” though it is still hard for anyone to put their finger on what that actually means or looks like in practice. What everyone seems to vaguely agree on is that it is a reversal of what Max Weber described a century ago as Entzauberung der Welt, roughly translated as “the unmagicking of the world.” The phrase meant the slow draining of mystery, meaning, and sacred presence from the post-Enlightenment West by a new kind of reformation of science, bureaucracy, and reason. 

For re-enchanters, there’s an emphasis on an experiential form of spirituality, with mystery, miracles, cosmic encounters with a divine being they can’t fully understand. “The world is not what we think it is,” writes Rod Dreher in his 2024 treatise Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. “It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful. We do not create meaning; meaning is already there, waiting to be discovered.” Dreher isn’t alone. He, Paul Kingsnorth, Ross Douthat, and David Bentley Hart — christened the “Four Horsemen of New Theism” in inverted homage to the New Atheist quartet they have supposedly displaced — have made careers out of talking about Making God Great Again. They are influential in the new cottage industry of bestselling books, podcasts, and Substack newsletters calling for the re-enchantment of the world. One critic, surveying the re-enchantment scene, observed that “Substack is rife with it. Twitter reeks with it.” 

The Christian God, of course, isn’t the only supernatural being making a 21st-century comeback; Satan’s back too. A decade ago, it was only TV preachers and Alex Jones shouting at the devil, but suddenly it is mainstream conservatives more broadly that are seriously invoking Beelzebub or the Antichrist: Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance, the latter of whom says he believes that UFOs are demons. The quest for re-enchantment isn’t even strictly a Biblical, or even religious project. On the Left, the devil and demons are often treated as friendlier folx, possibly woke allies to social justice-loving ultraliberals who have assembled, from scraps, a loose spirituality of astrology, witchcraft, tarot, and a kind of Green New Deal of neo-paganism. In Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara Isabella Burton explains the rise of “bespoke spirituality” in America, such as the communist witches, the transhumanism of Silicon Valley, the cult-lite overtones of self-care fitness programs like Soulcycle, and the highly online denizens of Manosphere who hopelessly lust after the rise of a new Rome.

What the emergence of these new mystics — of both the God and godless kind — and all of the media attention they’ve earned conceals is that a version of what they are looking for was never lost by everyone. For a significant slice of America, especially among the working-class, the age of enchantment never ended — it just existed at the margins. It survived in church basements, converted strip malls, revival services, and the homes of people like my parents, who did not experience angels and demons as metaphors for psychic life or symbols in a civilizational argument, but as facts. This is precisely the kind of enchantment that the new re-enchanters tend to avoid: not tasteful, not literary, not mediated through landscape writing, ancient liturgy, or a podcast about the crisis of meaning, but embarrassing, excessive, and alive.

The intellectual, elite New Right and the super libs driving much of the current conversation have cast a wary eye on charismatic Christianity and said nearly in unison: OK, but not that kind of enchantment. 

I can relate.

After my childhood immersion in my parents’ faith, I spent my more skeptical 20s in a church in Missouri that was part of the “seeker church” boom of the ’80s and ’90s. That’s when megachurches popped up everywhere in the exurbs, and the Joel Osteens of the world preached a capitalism-friendly gospel that turned Jesus into your life coach and financial advisor. That wave, in which everyone seemed unsettled by the more exuberant brands of faith, was defined by a watering down of theology for the sake of filling pews. Congregations like the one I attended in college awkwardly shoved the enchanted world of Christianity to the side like Thomas Jefferson in his edited, miracle-free Jefferson Bible. They turned services into an ill-fitting mix of rock concert and self-help TED Talk-like sermons to lure “I’m spiritual, not religious” fence-sitters. It was pleasant, inviting, and ultimately hollow. 

My departure, when it finally came, was in 2006, a year into an already half-hearted missionary stint in Venice, California. The details involved an episode of This American Life called “Heretics,” and the sudden conviction that Hell was not a supernatural prison waiting for the unsaved but simply this — the suffering we make for each other, here, now, always. If Hell wasn’t real, then neither was Heaven, and the whole spiritual rigging came down. Within weeks, I had abandoned the mission and moved to Chicago, leaving my faith to drown in the Pacific.

What I remember most about that period is not the relief — though there was certainly relief in losing the fear of eternal damnation — but the specific quality of the silence that followed. The world became, almost overnight, a place drained of color. Events happened. People lived and died. I believed, as Karl Marx described, that history unfolded by the grinding logic of materialism, effect, interest, power, accident, and entropy. The cosmic aliveness of my childhood — the sense that every moment was charged with spiritual significance, that God was attending to you with terrifying specificity — was gone. 

Like many Americans, I was now faced with the impossible burden of piecing together my own meaning and purpose in an age of hyperindividualism. I told myself this was maturity. I built a career on it. As a journalist, I learned the professional dialect of disenchantment, ironic, analytical, allergic to earnestness in the way that people who were once very earnest tend to be. 

But a decade after leaving, sitting in the audience at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre watching The Christians, a play about a pastor’s disenchantment, I walked out onto Halsted Street, dazed. The play ends with a bright spotlight that narrows and focuses exclusively on the character Pastor Paul, who loses his congregation after rejecting the harsh doctrine of Heaven and Hell, as I had done. He’s right, of course, but the truth left him sitting alone in the dark with no one to turn to. 

I don’t have an answer — I’ve simply stopped asking nagging questions about the nature of existence and suppressed whatever longing I still carry for something I can’t name. “There are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote. “Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints….”

I am among those saints who decide in those harrowing moments to stop groping around endlessly in the dark night, and close our eyes, and pretend it is day. 

What I suspect, but can’t prove, is that the contemporary quest for re-enchantment is largely driven by those who never had the kind of heightened struggle I had, and thus yearn for something like it. It is a natural generational reaction against the rationalist excesses of the algorithmic age and technological post-modernity — that totalizing, interlocking apparatus of industrial capitalism, rationalism, and globalized power that Kingsnorth, the re-enchanter, collapses into a single, almost mythic epithet: “the Machine.” 

By rejecting the grand metanarratives, especially the Old Time Religion of Christianity, we have left individuals with little to do except to helplessly rage against The Machine. We are drowning in a sea of context-free information, an increasing amount of which is hallucinated by AI systems, which are, in their own way, a degraded parody of what God once promised: an omniscient listener, an answer to every question, a presence that never sleeps. We can’t depend on the old pillars of the state and social life, either, as Kingsnorth writes, “Western culture seems in many ways to be visibly collapsing before our eyes. Our nations, our family structures, our communities, our assumptions, our ecosystems: everything is under strain, under attack, or bursting at the seams.” 

The disenchanted alternative has not obviously produced better people or a more livable world. Why not then grasp at an immutable object of the past, in a time of impermanence? 

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The girl who killed ‘Teen Vogue’

By Ryan Zickgraf

The problem is that weak ontology is built into re-enchantment. That is the term philosopher Stephen White describes as the self-aware practice of believing something you know you are choosing to believe without strong claims to absolute truth. The shared premise of much of the re-enchantment literature is rather simple: the modern world is spiritually thin, and something must be done. The cures vary widely: secular philosophers prescribe the wonder-of-everyday-as-practice; Christian theologians prescribe prayer and mystical experience; novelists and essayists prescribe a return to landscape, tradition, and ritual. 

Few can agree on what kind of magic fills the void. Do we now fill it with belief and worship of God, Satan, or the Earth? Do we jump on the Pope Leo bandwagon? Shall we reintroduce the wolves and worship them? Too often, the re-enchanters run into the problem the disenchanted New Atheists never had: it is easier to say what you are against than what you are actually for.

Suppose enchantment is only an illusion, a trick of the light that any honest adult knows better than to believe in, which is more or less what weak ontology already concedes. Then willing yourself back into it is an absurd errand, because it asks you to suspend a disbelief that snaps back into place the instant you stop performing the suspension. There is something faintly ridiculous about deciding to enchant yourself, like trying to surprise yourself with a birthday party you planned. This is why the re-enchantment shelf keeps sliding, almost against its will, into the language of fantasy and simulation, of theme parks and Disney movies. You can visit the Holy Land Experience, the Orlando Bible theme park, but you can’t permanently move there.

And if enchantment is not an illusion, but instead is a real spiritual power of the kind my parents staked their lives on, then the project becomes stranger and more dangerous still. In the older sense of the word, the power to enchant does not belong to the person under the spell. If you are enchanted, you probably do not know it. You certainly do not manage it, curate it, schedule it for Saturday, or set aside 20 minutes for it after finishing a book about the crisis of meaning. Jesus won’t ride in on a chariot on your time.

I am not arguing that my family’s faith was better than anyone else’s. I am making the narrower and more devastating claim that the secular re-enchantment project is playing a game it can’t win because it secretly believes winning would be a loss too great to bear. To succeed, re-enchantment would require the surrender of the ironic distance that makes the project legible to you in the first place — the capacity to write about it, podcast about it, buy the books about it, to be the kind of person who can evaluate various re-enchantment strategies and select the most compelling one. Enchantment, properly understood, is not a strategy. It is the end of strategy.

That is what Jean Baudrillard, the late French postmodern theorist, argued in his last major book, The Intelligence of Evil. The modern world, he claimed, has entered a condition he called “Integral Reality,” a state in which “everything is realized and technically materialized without reference to any principle or final purpose whatever.” The real hasn’t vanished physically; it has vanished metaphysically. The principle that gave the world meaning is dead, and what remains is an unrestrained expansion, a saturated and totalized reality that has lost its shadow. The contemporary re-enchanters live in the aftermath, trying to reintroduce wolves to a Yellowstone that has been paved over. 

Baudrillard was right about the paving-over, but he was wrong — or at least incomplete — about what it erased. What my childhood helps me to see is that Integral Reality liquidated not magic per se, but the conditions of credulity: the thick social webs, the inherited cosmologies, the shared and unquestioned worlds inside which magic could function — not as an anomaly but as the baseline. What my parents had, what they tried to give me, what I received and then rejected, and what I am still sorting through wasn’t a set of beliefs that happened to be wrong. It was a way of inhabiting the world, a posture of openness to the possibility that the world might be, in some sense that resists clean explication, for you. Not in the prosperity-gospel sense, or the sense that God is a vending machine waiting to be correctly petitioned with coins, but in the sense that the universe is not actually indifferent to you. That what happened to my father on a limestone bluff above the Mississippi River wasn’t nothing, even if it wasn’t what he thought it was.

My father did not go to Alton because he had curated a contemplative practice that cultivated his openness to the miraculous. He went because the world was already on fire, and he could see it, and he could not look away, and he was not ashamed. The house I grew up in belongs to the bank now, and his binder of research on the demon bird, I assume, went with it. He held it out to me once, and I handed it back. I have been thinking about that ever since.

The book purports to be a practical guide to conversion: self-help, except that the idea is to give your sinful self over to God, following the path Brand himself has purportedly trodden from debauchery to devotion. Conceptually — if one can use a word like that in this context without immediately collapsing into hysterics — the project is loosely based on the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, of which Brand is also a fan. This means there are tasks to complete at the end of each chapter, including some fearless and searching personal inventories. For instance: “One by one, go through the seven characteristics of God. Where are you clenching?”

There are also prayers composed by Brand for readers to recite, though fans of the Nunc Dimittis should not get their hopes up (“Almighty God, Beloved King. Dad. Dad. Alright Dad. You are everything that is and could be and you love me.”) There are arguments with ChatGPT about biblical interpretation; a comic dialog between the Old Testament’s David and Nathan; some blather about how Brand’s vision is of a cool hipster Jesus, not the dusty old geezer beloved of Songs of Praise (“They made the Son of God as appealing as a cat-tongue enema”). But really these aspects are window dressing, a desultory pretext for what Brand has always liked best — talking about himself.

In circuitous fashion, he describes the personal events that have drawn him to Christianity, from the genuinely harrowing (his baby son facing open heart surgery) to the relatively quotidian (the death of his dog). The writing gets most focused when explaining how accusations of rape and sexual assault have been rustled up against him by shadowy elites, putting the demon into demonetization in order to stop him talking truth to power about Covid jabs. And there are also a few enjoyably savage jibes about his ex-wife’s new globalist squeeze.

Most of the time, though, the prose style is so unbearable it eclipses every other consideration. To call this a stream of consciousness is an insult to consciousness — it feels more like a fugue state. There are attempts at ecstatic lyricism that could just as easily be diary entries of a teenage serial killer: “Consider that within you… there is a portion of the divine, shooting, roaming, spreading, and searching, and the function of the world is to entice, enchant, wrap, and shellac it, a new and choking womb”.

Other metaphors are similarly lunatic: “My wife bears some wound of the woman, some mythic anathema to me, the man. Yet, like the island of Japan, she knew that trouble would come if she opened up her shores.” Then, punctuating the grandiose drivel, come hairpin lurches into the old Nineties Britpop tweeness: feet as “tootsies”; food as “mouth munchy din dins”; the disciple John as “needy and queeny”. And it turns out Brand hasn’t even read the Bible at all, but only Nicky Gumbel’s The Bible in One Year.

There is also the disingenuity of the timeline. It may be traditional to take conversion stories at face value, but I’m afraid I’m calling it. Brand was charged in April 2025 with historical offenses of rape, oral rape, sexual assault, and indecent assault, said to have been committed between 1999-2005. The case has yet to come to court. The charges followed a year or two of newspaper allegations and civil suits from alleged victims, during which he had plenty of time to get a new spiritual story straight.

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Having flirted with the wackier edges of the wellness movement for a while, his conversion to Christianity came in 2024, marked by an unassuming little baptism in the Thames, with celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls as the celebrant. Within three months, Brand was himself performing full immersive baptisms in his Y-fronts, again in front of cameras: “It might seem a bit soon to be baptizing people, but the Apostles did it on day one, so here we are.”

To call his new role as celebrity preacher brass-necked is an understatement. Even Jonathan Aitken waited 18 years before he dared become a vicar. Yet in Brand’s version, there is no need for circumspection because he is innocent. Though keen to play up his “broken” past, he says that he would never rape anyone, and besides, there was never any need; sinful fornication with willing “shopkeepers and realtors and masseuses and waitresses and photographers and doctors and lawyers and movie stars” was already available to him. Or as he also puts it, apparently unaware of events in Genesis: “If you own an orchard, you don’t steal apples”. Indeed, apart from Jesus, the biblical character Brand seems to identify most with is David and his “adulterous, exploitative, wrong, but consensual seduction of Bathsheba”.

Of course David was also famously a slayer of giants, an image to which Brand seems strangely drawn as he fights his own Goliaths: the powerful figures in the background who foisted vaccines upon the world, secretly engineered the destruction of the Twin Towers, want you to consume porn, don’t want you to read the Epstein files, and aspire to control “all trade, banking, communication, biometrics, attention, life itself”. And if that sounds potentially a bit antisemitic, I think you might be right. There’s a weird rant early on in the book about the “satanic” globalist message behind Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, said to be favored reading both of Obama and the “slobbering Santa Claus of the New Order”, WEF founder Klaus Schwab. (There are also disclaimers that do a bit too much protesting: the book is “admittedly excellent”; and “I’m not suggesting that Yuval Noah Harari is evil, by the way, or anything other than a nice man and a good writer”.)

As I watched Brand promote his book on the Tucker Carlson show this week — prefaced by another freeform prayer that certainly had me clenching — I wondered whether it was wise to have written it. The project seems quite risky. During one of his motormouth livestreams, viewers susceptible to Brand’s charms can mentally zone in and out while doing other things, and come away with a distracted impression of sincerity, humor, or cleverness. But when forced to concentrate on his words on the page, placed in consecutive order and shorn of the accompanying visual circus, the mirage disappears.

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And I can’t think the book will sell many copies. The crunchy hippies and anarchists still in his audience, carried over from lockdown, will presumably remain unmoved; while the newer MAGA lot don’t need lessons on the Bible from a louche foreigner dressed in leopard print. It is impossible to imagine anyone being persuaded to attend church for the first time after reading this book.

But perhaps — along with atheism — more organized forms of Christianity still have something to gain from the spectacle. Shaped by the internet, narcissistic obsession is a spiritual blight on our times, the unsilent killer of meaningful lives. The norm for millions is now to spend life in a haze of self-fascination, curating social media outputs obsessively, trapped in fantasies of approval or disapproval from others and feeling like one’s entire worth depends on the fact. Brand seems vaguely aware of this in his book, calling his earlier self a “living endorsement of promiscuity and aspartame narcissism”, but then simply folds the convoluted insight into yet another round of compulsive peacocking, with the cross as a prop.

Organized Christianity contains many an antidote to this contemporary poison: the emphasis on humility and self-sacrifice, the call to private good works, the primary focus on the quality of one’s relationship with other people and with God. Whether or not the so-called quiet revival is real, it seems there is spiritual hunger abroad, and unexpected movement towards Catholicism and Orthodoxy, even amongst younger people. The reasons for this are unclear; but an underrated explanation is surely the relaxing absence of the self during participation in the ancient rite. You can empty your mind out, let the old words flow, and become part of something greater.

For anyone sickened by the constant mental pressure of the tawdry self — and the way that modern forms of Christianity so easily bend to it — it helps to have someone like Brand in the world as an object lesson: a living embodiment of what happens when self-obsession takes the wheel and calls it Jesus. The man himself won’t care, though; negative attention is still narcissistic supply. And anyway, he has other things to think about: not least, his newly-announced intention to run for the London mayoralty in 2028. If you’re thinking of a spiritual retreat in a monastery — perhaps somewhere with a strict no-internet policy — now might be a good time to plan it.

This is because the resurrection can’t be represented. Not because it’s too sacred, but because although Christians believe it actually happened, it isn’t an event in the sense that the Budget or the war against Iran is an event. You wouldn’t have been able to take a photo of it had you been lurking around Jesus’s tomb with your phone. It’s not as though he yawned, scrambled to his feet, shucked off his shroud and walked out blinking into the sunlight. The resurrection throws into question the whole idea of what counts as something happening. Is waiting, for example, an event — or is it the absence of one? Falling in love is an event of a kind, but not in the way that burning a piece of toast is. The resurrection is beyond representation not because it isn’t real, but because it’s too real to make an image of. If there is something one might call ultimate reality, we wouldn’t be able to capture it in language. It would lie on the far side of our speech, like the unconscious.

But Jesus’s rising from the dead isn’t just a “spiritual” or symbolic affair, because it involves an actual human body. The risen Jesus eats with his friends to show that he’s not a ghost, he has real wounds in his hands and so on. Yet this body is of a different order from the body of, say, Pete Hegseth — not because it’s less flesh-and-blood than he is, but because it’s more intensely so.

Whether anything happened in the tomb or not also raises the question of who reported the body being missing. The first person to do so was Mary Magdalene, who was probably a sex worker and thus in the eyes of the establishment not the most dependable of witnesses. She was also of course a woman, and the testimony of women at the time was regarded as worthless. So the fact that it was Mary and some female companions who first reported that the tomb was empty would have been highly embarrassing for the Gospel writers, who might well have omitted this bit of the narrative had they felt able to do so. The fact that they didn’t suggests it was too widely believed to be left out.

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All of this is deeply inconvenient for the pious of this world, who demand a rather more positive icon of the Almighty than an empty space. Icons, however, are specifically forbidden by the Yahweh of the Hebrew scriptures. You can’t make graven images of God because the only authentic image of him is human flesh and blood. You can’t wield him as an idol or fetish in combat with your enemies, or try to scramble into paradise by wafting incense at a statue of him. In fact, you can’t even give him a name, because this, too, would be a way of trying to have him in your pocket, using him as a tool to promote your own interests.

Then again, it’s easier for some Israelites to project their Oedipal fantasies onto him and see him as Big Daddy, a vengeful deity who will punish them for their transgressions and so relieve them of their guilt. The Hebrew name for this false image of Yahweh as patriarch and superego is Satan, which means Accuser. When Christian nationalist Americans hail God as Commander-in-Chief of the Cosmos, they are committing what the Scriptures know as idolatry, for all their neatly creased trousers and shiny white teeth. The bad news is that God has no more peculiar concern for the United States than he has for East Grinstead. There are no favorite nations — not even Israel.

In fact, God gets quite testy with the ancient Israelites. Some of them keep wanting him to behave like a Super Being, whereas in fact he isn’t a being at all, in the sense that the Princess Royal or a set of bagpipes is a being. He isn’t any kind of object or entity or individual. Nor does he keep meddling in human history like an American neocon. God and the universe don’t make two. He isn’t in Heaven in the sense that he might be in Chicago. He certainly isn’t in the skies, despite the fact that people tend to gesture reverently upwards when they invoke his name. In the Book of Isaiah, when the Israelites think that he can be appeased by burnt offerings, he complains that their incense stinks in his nostrils — and asks them what they are doing about protecting the widows and the orphans and shielding the poor from the violence of the rich.

When the Virgin Mary bursts out into a triumphal chant when she’s pregnant with Jesus, she praises the God who has brought down the mighty from the thrones and raised up the lowly, filled the poor with good things and sent the rich away empty. These are typical themes of the Hebrew scriptures. As an obscure young woman from a notoriously backward part of the country, Mary is an image of the poor herself. The child in her womb will be murdered by the Roman state for fearlessly speaking the truth. He will fall victim to the kind of torture and death reserved by the Romans for runaway slaves and political insurrectionists. In fact, he was lucky to get away with only six hours on the cross. Some victims of crucifixion thrashed around for days.

It’s doubtful that he was a revolutionary himself, but a few of his closest followers almost certainly were. One of them, Simon, is specifically called a Zealot, a member of the anti-imperialist guerrilla movement of the era; two others (James and John) are given a nickname with Zealot connotations, while Judas Iscariot might have sold his master out because he had hoped he would lead an armed rebellion against the Romans and was disappointed that he didn’t. Jesus himself was a vagrant with no profession who railed against the ruling caste and seems to have had a particular distaste for the family, not least his own. A fidelity to his mission takes priority over attending your kids’ graduation.

A great many pre-Christian societies had rituals of death, burial and resurrection. Vegetation and fertility cults, myths of the slain or wounded god who will finally regenerate the sterile land: all this, ironically, lurks beneath the surface of the most boldly “modern” of all English poems, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem is archaic and avant-garde at the same time. It would seem, perhaps, that these patterns and rhythms are somehow built into the human psyche. In this respect, Christianity doesn’t introduce something entirely new to humanity but builds on a long tradition of sacrificial victims. The victim in question is the scapegoat, who takes on itself the burden of sin and guilt of a whole community, and by dying to this barren condition rises to new life.

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Christianity, however, transforms this pattern in the act of conforming to it. Fertility cults, sacrificed gods, the release of fresh water onto parched land and so on: all this is essentially about power. The tribe needs to exert power over Nature to grow its crops, and acts this out symbolically in the form of a god who is buried in the earth and then rises to new life. The seed must die in order for the plant to flower. What Christianity does is to raise all this from the level of Nature and biology to that of history and morality. Death is still essential for redemption — but now it’s death in the form of a loving self-giving to others, as exemplified in the life of Jesus. It’s this — not burnt offerings or slain idols — which constitutes the necessary condition of new life. You have to die to the system represented in Jesus’s day by the organized brutality and injustice of the Roman Empire, and be born again into a community of friendship. This is why baptism is about drowning, not washing.

It’s all a long way from bunny suits and painted eggs. Easter is about fun and joy, to be sure, but like any genuine happiness it comes at a steep price. Even if only in symbolic terms, you have to travel all the way through death and dispossession if you’re to emerge somewhere on the other side. Doing this without any guarantees up your sleeve is known as faith. This is why Jesus is said to descend into Hell when he dies — into that cacophony of mocking yelps, sniggers, hoots and cackles which is the domain of the demonic. The demonic is the sworn enemy of life and meaning, devoted to demolishing what it sees as the ludicrous fiction that anything human can be of the slightest value. You have to live all this in order to get beyond it, moving from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Or as W.B. Yeats puts the point: “Nothing can be whole or sole /That has not been rent”.

You don’t, however, simply leave death behind. The most unpleasant part of the Christian message is that if you love properly, you’re likely to be killed. It’s the least cozy kind of love imaginable, compared with the romantic, erotic and sentimental brands of the stuff that are peddled nowadays. Jesus dies as a martyr, which is to say one who freely gives up their life for others. It’s a little extremist for English taste. But it’s unlikely that any power short of this is going to bring down the death-dealing imperial machine now ruled not by Caesar but by Donald J. Trump.

Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The art of storytelling is coming to an end. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.”

The art of storytelling is vital to truth. To a certain cast of mind this sounds like nonsense: after all, in the schoolyard “telling stories” is a synonym for lying. But after the schoolyard comes life, and to understand what is happening in life one needs myths. “Myth”, too, has journeyed from being a word that denoted the deepest kind of truth to the ancient Greeks, to one that suggests falsehood to us. (I hold this to be a natural consequence of the limited way in which our brains now serve us.) Myths embody wisdom that cannot be conveyed in the vapid language of concepts. It is, for example, because we have forgotten the great myths that we are defenseless against artificial intelligence. Leaving aside whether the projected, almost infinite expansion of power offered by artificial intelligence were really possible, could such an expansion ever be wise? For that, we would already have to have achieved wisdom commensurate with the power that is being offered; and, as it turns out, any wisdom we once had seems to have left us at just the moment when it was most needed. But that is only to be expected, since if we had been wise we would not have aimed for Promethean power. We need to remember and understand the great and ancient myths — no amount of meaningless information will ever serve in their stead. The wise rarely aspire to be chained to a rock in perpetuity, while an eagle devours their liver. Other cultures, other times, have seen this only too clearly. Why are we so blind? We have forgotten the eloquent wisdom made real and palpable in the deepest myths.

“Experience is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.” What this means is that we rely on mere theory to guide us. Around the time Benjamin wrote these words we were engaged in the hubristic exercise of turning our backs on the wisdom of experience, and striking out with bold new theories, however half-baked they might be. And theory is an atrociously bad guide to life. But life is in retreat; in its place is theory of every kind.

I often refer to the well-known fact that English has only one word for knowledge, whereas in most other languages there are at least two: in French, for example, savoir and connaître, and in German wissen and kennen. The difference, of course, is between knowing the facts, so to speak, and knowing by experience: I know (savoir) that Paris is the capital of France, but I know (connaître) Paris, because I lived there for a couple of years. These are so different that it is quite astonishing that we should apply the same word to them, and I sometimes wonder if the mess we are in is due to this tendency in the Anglophone world. After all it is the Anglophone world that is responsible for a whole school of philosophy that assumes that a technical, abstract, decontextualizing, dissevering approach to life will disclose its true essence, rather than a phenomenological approach to life as it is experienced. Such an analytic approach reveals not embodied, embedded, situated gestalten — that is to say wholes that cannot be taken apart without profound loss — but mere fragments.

Now these differences, between theory and experience, between the general and the unique, between what is abstract and what is embodied, between what can be made explicit, and what must forever remain implicit if it is not to become a travesty of itself, are at the heart of the difference between the two brain hemispheres. I can’t unpack either the science or the multitude of philosophical implications of this, but for those who want to get the full picture I have done my best in a disgracefully-long book called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, but here I must content myself with the merest outline.

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It turns out that the foundational difference lies in the nature of the attention each hemisphere pays to the world. This has a clear evolutionary purpose. For all creatures, the ultimate survival conundrum is how to eat while at the same time not being eaten. For the first, what is needed is narrow-beam, highly focused, piecemeal attention to a familiar detail, targeted for its use; for the second, the exact opposite — broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to everything else that is going on in the world, without preconception as to what it might be. Since this is impossible to achieve in just one neuronal mass, the solution adopted by all creatures with brains is to have two such masses, each capable of disposing its consciousness towards the world in a quite different way.

But that evolutionary account is only the very beginning, since attention is no small thing: indeed, attention changes the world. How you attend determines what it is you will find, and what you find determines the kind of attention you will pay in the future. Thus, it is that two distinct experiential worlds, each internally coherent but at least superficially incompatible, are brought into being for us by our two brain hemispheres.

What are those worlds like? In one, that of the left hemisphere, we know and recognize what is familiar, certain, fixed, a collection of isolated fragments or parts, “things” that are explicit, decontextualized, disembodied and meaningless, abstract, general in nature and lifeless. But useful. What matters here is quantity, not quality: all is both fungible and reproducible. What is experienced is a re-presentation, a two-dimensional version of the world, a schema, a theoretical model, and it is, like a map, vastly simpler than the world that is mapped. That is not a weakness in a map, but a strength. Obviously we must be careful not to mistake the map for the world in which it is given us to live.

In the other world, that of the right hemisphere, nothing is ever completely certain, or wholly predictable, and we are always alert to the possibility that there could be something new here. Where the left hemisphere aims to close down to a certainty, the right hemisphere opens up to possibility. What looks fixed in the left hemisphere is seen to be part of a continuous flow in the right. Everything here is connected and essentially relational. Where there were only parts, there are now wholes, gestalten. Here the implicit matters at least as much as the explicit, and everything is understood in terms of the context in which it is situated. This is a world composed of unique things, not general types. It is animate, and in it things are not just re-presented, but truly “present” to us, in the Heideggerian sense — they are not just passively there, but actually coming into being for us.

Obviously, barring accidents, both our hemispheres are working and need to be working in tandem. So, I expect many people might say that all this is very well, but why should they care where certain types of experience are brought about in the brain? But that is to overlook something I believe to be both exciting and important.

Because the two worldviews mediated by the two hemispheres are, strictly speaking, logically incompatible, when it comes to formulating an understanding of what we humans are, what we are doing here, and what the nature of the cosmos might be — in other words, when we begin to philosophize — we tend, in order to be consistent, to rely on one or other of these hemispheric viewpoints, not both. Only relatively rarely do we succeed in synthesizing them. This leads to what have traditionally been seen as irresolvable debates about the nature of reality; and over 2,500 years of Western history are littered with such disputes between schools. It would seem the choice one ultimately makes must be determined by nothing better than personal inclination. But I suggest to you that this is not where things need to end.

We can now definitively say that the left hemisphere is not, as people used to think, the reliable and dependable one — indeed, the opposite is the case. Not only does the right hemisphere attend better, but it is also superior to the left hemisphere in perception (which is of course not the same thing as attention), and far better at forming reliable judgments on the basis of what it has attended to and perceived. Delusions are so much more common when the reality-orienting influence of the right hemisphere is impaired, that the left hemisphere has been described by several neuroscientists as frankly delusional — a conclusion with which I concur. In The Matter with Things, I look at some 25 of the most extraordinary and bizarre neuropsychiatric delusional syndromes, and in all but one case the lesion responsible is either always, or more commonly, found to be in the right hemisphere, not the left. Additionally the right hemisphere is not only more emotionally and socially intelligent than the left hemisphere, but actually more cognitively intelligent: old-fashioned IQ is more dependent on the right hemisphere than on the left, and in cases where people show a drop in IQ following a brain insult of some kind, that insult is far more commonly in the right hemisphere than the left.

All this may sound unlikely and unbalanced — why should the right hemisphere have such a marked advantage? But, if you think about it, this would naturally follow from the differing evolutionary roles they have developed to fulfill. So important is the ability to grasp things, pin them down and have power over them that, while in the left hemisphere comprehension is poorer, the faculty of apprehension is clearly superior. This explains its control of the right hand, with which the majority of us literally grasp hold of the world so as to manipulate it, and its dominance for those aspects of language with which we say we have grasped something or pinned it down. But the left hemisphere has for millions of years — remember, not just human brains, but all brains, have this structure — ceded comprehension of the whole to its counterpart on the right.

So we know that one hemisphere at least tends to be more reliable, less prone to be deluded — in a word, a better guide to reality than the other. The left hemisphere has a role in making us powerful manipulators, but it cannot make us wise. There is a vast body of neuropsychological literature which I have reviewed in The Matter with Things that confirms this to be the case.

Clearly even that revelation would be of rather little practical use if we could not simultaneously have a very good idea of which hemisphere’s world picture we were encountering in any one situation. But we can. We can see the hallmark or characteristic imprint of either hemisphere on different ways of thinking. This means that we can say with a degree of confidence that one way of looking at the world is, other things being equal, more likely to be on the path to truth than another. This is surely a step forward for both philosophy and science.

Don’t get me wrong; there is no problem with the left hemisphere as long as it remains firmly under the guidance of the right. But since it knows so much less than the right, it is prone to imagine that it knows everything, and tends to become headstrong. Though a helpful servant, it is a very poor master. Interestingly there are myths from round the world that speak of two powers that should not cooperate but come, through the resentment of the inferior party, to be at loggerheads — two rivalrous brothers, an emperor and his general, a master and his emissary. And ultimately, if the quarrel is not resolved, the world falls to ruin. It was this that led me to choose the title The Master and his Emissary for my first book-length exploration of the philosophical significance of hemisphere difference; and in the second part of that book, I consider the main turning points in the history of ideas in the West, from the ancient Greeks all the way through to postmodernism, looking specifically at the way in which that civilizational turn reflected a balance or imbalance between the contributions of the hemispheres. In summary, there is a pattern repeated at least three times — in Greece, in Rome, and in our own civilization since the Renaissance — whereby there is a sudden upwelling, an efflorescence of creative life and beauty, accompanied by great advances in both the arts and sciences, in which the appropriate balance between the hemispheres is achieved; and then overall, though with at times temporary corrections, a decline, as the civilization moves further and further towards the dominance of the left — always the left — and the subtlety and insight that had been achieved is lost, and in one case was lost for nearly a thousand years.

I imagine you will have little difficulty in recognizing the stigmata of left-hemisphere domination in our culture. Amongst the most obvious are neglect of the broader picture; the replacement of understanding by information, and the complete abandonment of wisdom, even as an ideal; the loss of concepts of skill and judgment, which are human, contextual, nuanced, not programmatic, abstract and rulebound; the rise of what Jacques Ellul called technique, the totality of rationalized methods aiming for absolute efficiency in every field, including politics, education, and human behavior; and, with it, bureaucracy — a cancer that has spread everywhere and continues to leach the life blood of the organism it was supposed to serve; the loss of uniqueness — a much neglected virtue of all life as opposed to the machine; the triumph of quantity over quality; the rise of either/or, black-and-white ways of thinking; the loss of reasonableness, which can only come from experience; a failure of common sense; an obsession with control, while being completely unwilling to take responsibility… I could go on, but I won’t. I believe the mushrooming of bureaucracy and the sudden irruption of AI into our lives are the most obvious examples of the externalization of left hemisphere ways of thinking into our environment, and its most audacious bid for domination yet. They recognize only one value, the lowest of all, that of mere utility and power.

Both are driven towards, and issue in, the fettering of human freedom and creativity, and lead to the disengagement of human lives and loves from the traditional centers of our loyalty which are not only overlooked but actively excluded in this vision of things. AI, in particular, promises us freedom, as do all seductive tyrannies; once again we appear to have forgotten a myth, that of the serpent and the apple (whether Steve Jobs recognized it, or whether the archetype spoke to him unconsciously, I don’t know).

The ultimate goal of modern man is to be himself, unfettered from all bonds. Everything that gives meaning to our lives is, under the left hemisphere’s view, seen as a constraint from which technocracy will free us. Yet it is through constraint alone that we can be free, or create anything that is good, beautiful and true. We cast off the bonds — for the very word, too, embodies the paradox to which I wish to draw attention — the bonds that unite us to family, friends and community, the bonds we have with nature that gave birth to us, and the bonds we feel with the sacred, all that fulfills us and set us free to be truly ourselves. We reject the service in which we could have found perfect freedom, and, as though hypnotized, we embrace the fetters of the machine.

Behind all this is a morally bankrupt and intellectually simplistic philosophy, that of reductive materialism. And so, of course, it is good when people adopt what they call a more spiritual approach, and I do not in the least decry it. But I think we will not survive without something more substantial, something more embodied and embedded in the deep structure of life, something, importantly, not just personal but shared — in short, we must return to the spiritual roots of this civilization. We have been living for some time in what might be thought of as the afterglow of Christianity: there were the usual gestures of a respectful kind in its direction, while in practice it was considered by many a dispensable anachronism. It moved out of the realm of lived experience into that of a perfectly acceptable theory for those who liked that sort of thing — peripheral, rather than central to our shared lives. The full extent of what we in truth owe to it is only now being realized as all the customary decencies we took for granted fall away from life. Without some return to religion, there is not enough there to provide the needed structure and support for both the moral life and the life of the spirit. Our house is built on sand, and as the rain descends, and the floods come, and the winds blow, and beat upon that house, it will fall: and great will be the fall thereof.

We urgently need something to lead us out of the shallows back into the depths, out of the two-dimensional world of the abstract and theoretical, into the full-bloodedness of embodied life. Myths are embodied insights into the nature of being. In ancient Greece mythos, from which we get our word myth, was considered the source of the greater truths, and more important than logos, which was appropriate to the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. In hemisphere terms, mythos was aimed at intuitive and imaginative integration of an understanding, the concern of the right hemisphere, while logos was aimed at utility and power to manipulate the world, the concern of the left hemisphere.

Christianity is I believe the greatest of all myths, a word I use without any implication that it is not true — indeed quite the opposite. And something it expresses better than any other I know is the beauty, dignity and pathos of the soul’s embodiment in this world. Ordinary language cannot reveal to us what is divine, which utterly transcends everyday language. Language was developed for purposes of utility, enabling people to share an understanding of the steps to be taken in a practical task. Language refuses God, and God refuses language, unless it is the language of poetry. Poetry is when language is deftly used to subvert language: and that is why the language of ritual must work at the level of poetry if it is not to lead us astray.

The Christian mythos centers on the embodiment of the divine in a living, and suffering, world. What the church offers us is a treasure-house of embodied meaning that our souls can turn to for sustenance. It incarnates the sacred in a narrative or mythos, stores it for us in ways that can be accessed through ritual, and through the language of poetry and music, as well as through art, and icons, and the beauty of an architecture that provides a tangible instantiation of all of this. It is not that they do not speak to one’s emotions and intellect, but that they transcend any such terms. It is to the soul that they speak. They make the things we otherwise can only talk about palpably real.

The other great embodied treasure-house of the divine, of course, is the lives and deeds of the saints, as they are passed down to us. They speak to us of what at our best human beings can be. And here I would include all those unnamed and unremembered “saints” whose lives spoke of their beliefs, in the performance of selfless and compassionate actions, sometimes at very great cost, cost even of their lives. As Pope Benedict XVI reflected: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.”

All this language, that is importantly so much more than language, is also importantly shared with others across time and space, and down through generations, finding its way into the very fabric of everyday life. While it is a wonderful thing for people to find their own spiritual path, I fear that we need more than good intentions and private spiritual experience if we are to survive. If this civilization is to be saved, and we all know how urgent that need is, there must be more: nothing less than a return to the place of the Christian tradition at the core of life, daily life. I don’t know how likely this is; however the signs are that people, particularly perhaps young people, are realizing the bankruptcy of the materialist position, and are seeking more nourishing sustenance.

Part of this is to do with the absolutely core insight that this is not a world of things, but a world of relations. Over the last hundred years, the reality of this has been emphasized, in modern physics, of all places. This is, as the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it, a participatory universe. That means that our consciousness makes a difference to what happens. This is part of a reimagining of the world that I have elaborated in Part III of The Matter with Things, and is one of the three ways in which the title of that book can be read. We believe the world is made up of things, but as I argue, things are secondary to relations — relations come before relata. There is a vast body of psychological research which shows that it is relationships with one another, bonded by shared values and beliefs, our relationship with nature, and our relationship with the divine cosmos that constitute the three great factors that give meaning and fulfillment to life.

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By Dr Iain McGilchrist

If you wanted to destroy a people, you would teach them to be alienated from the past and careless of the future. That self is everything and that all factors that tend to limit total freedom are to be scorned and rejected. That societal traditions and loyalties are nothing more than inconvenient trammels. You would extract them from, and alienate them from, nature in all her forms — nature out of which we are born and to which we return. You would teach them that only simple people adhere to a religious tradition and way of life. The predictable consequences of this would be massive increases in existential anxiety, depression and a pathological self-absorption, in which all the deep causes of human fulfillment would have been cut off.

As Emerson put it already in the 1830s, man has become the dwarf of himself. Self-respect (and I do not mean self-esteem, a much over-rated quality) has been eroded by mass society in all the ways so trenchantly identified by Hannah Arendt, and recently we have been relentlessly dragooned into a belief that we are inefficient machines. Yuval Noah Harari calls us hackable animals and recommends we should get used to the idea and even embrace it. In January this year he spoke at Davos to the World Economic Forum. “Artificial Intelligence is the new master of words,” he said. “It will take over language, law and power. Most of the world of the mind will originate in a machine. AI has coined a new word for humans —‘the watchers’. AI machines can lie better than humans.”

Low self-respect leads to moral degeneracy, deceitfulness, selfishness, lower achievement levels and addiction. This is where I believe we now are, and we need to rediscover what our right hemispheres know at a deeper level, but have been taught to disattend to and disregard.

The right hemisphere alone has the capacity to understand the depths of meaning required by those who would approach the ideals on which Western civilization was founded: Plato’s the good, the true and the beautiful. And I would add, at the pinnacle of all, the sacred. Without this wiser understanding, human life is already over.

But life can be snatched from the jaws of death. We matter and there is hope. That too is the Christian story.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered at the Pusey House Revival Conference. 

Today, as secularization proceeds apace, and the “quiet revival” of Christianity turns out not to have been all it was jazzed up to be, we labor under all the horror of Good Friday — the loss of the good — but taste little of the hope. Ours is a world in which it seems that God is indeed dead, even as the devil carries on.

Few cultural texts have come closer to capturing this predicament than The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s classic horror film from 1973. The movie concerns priests, the devil, and God, and thus is an apposite rewatch over the Christian high holy days, which culminate on Easter Sunday.  The Exorcist puts its finger on a growing threat to the West: our consistent tendency to name evil, but not the good, a loss that is eroding us from within. 

In The Exorcist, Catholic priest Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) accidentally brings an Assyrian demon, Pazuzu, back from an archaeological dig in Nineveh, Iraq, and it possesses young Regan (Linda Blair). Regan’s distraught mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) finally consults a local priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) — and is astonished to discover that even he is skeptical of demons. In the 1970s, priests weren’t what they used to be. 

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This, it turns out, makes Karras an existentialist hero of our times. He is both a priest and a psychiatrist at Georgetown Medical School, and though he is losing his faith, he still has the sense of moral responsibility that accompanied it. He embodies a contemporary dilemma: we make commitments freely, as a matter of individual choice, yet in the absence of secure authority, those commitments feel anxious and fragile.

Indeed, like most of us, Karras straddles two worlds: an older world of fixed values presided over by legitimate authority — and a rational, materialist world, which, in the 1960s, and ’70s when the Exorcist was filmed, was fast turning into a therapeutic domain. The therapeutic approach of the “psy” disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) offers a softening of rational materialism, and performs a substitution of explanation for judgment. Instead of judging a person as “wicked,” these modalities will explain them as “unhappy” or “troubled.” They will ask: what wound or trauma accounts for this? This can be humane and often correct. But as explanation replaces judgment, the ability to name corruption, cruelty, and selfishness fades. We are left without the language that would help us identify what must be resisted.

This shows up clearly in The Exorcist, in which adversaries can be authoritatively demonic. Chris consults doctors and psychiatrists, who argue over the possibilities of central nervous disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, lesions in Regan’s brain, and so on. All the while, the devil is gaining ground. He has the advantage of knowing what he is, long before others recognize the danger. 

The doctors never wise up: after consulting 80 experts, Chris is told by one doctor to seek an exorcism. This is not because said doctor believes in the Catholic faith and its rituals. But because Regan thinks she is possessed, the doctor reasons, an exorcism might work through auto-suggestion. This way, the old wisdom is folded seamlessly into the therapeutic culture, a process that obscures the moral and spiritual battle actually taking place.

Father Karras eventually changes his mind on the existence of demons and together with Father Merrin does battle for Regan’s soul. However, in the symbology of the film, he is a figure of doubt, wearing a medallion of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of “people in doubt.” In one sense, the film suggests that doubt, although a key aspect of our cultural mentality, is a fatal weakness when faced with evil. In a deeper sense, it captures our cultural ambiguity. Karras comes to accept evil but still doubts the good. The exorcism works, and the demon jumps from Regan to Karras, who then jumps to his death to end the possession. But we are never given any sure indication that his faith is restored. Pazuzu reveals himself but God does not.

It would be easy to treat such narratives as relics of a more superstitious age. And yet even in a culture that increasingly explains behavior through trauma and pathology, the language of evil has not disappeared. To be sure, we are more inclined to explain individuals than to judge them. But  at the level of systems, histories, and political enemies, we readily invoke evil. This is evident in official rhetoric — from Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” — as well as in the popular imagination, which has thrilled to panics over evil, including the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the conspiracy theories of QAnon, and the Epstein mythos. Most recently there has been chatter that the Labubu dolls resemble Pazuzu, reviving fears of possession in an otherwise secular culture. 

We are never in doubt of what we are fighting against, but we rarely ask ourselves what we are fighting for.

The inability to answer this question lies at the heart of the exhaustion of the West, its crises of meaning and self-belief. The problem has been framed in terms of the decline of religion; it is, I suggest, less the need to believe in God than to believe in the good. By this, I mean the sense that there is something outside us — objectively — that sets a standard and demands to be seen and responded to. From the perspective of classical theism, the good is God, and ordinary goods are a participation in the higher Good. The Enlightenment retained part of this conviction, even as religious faith declined; moral life was still oriented toward truth, order, and hierarchy as external realities. What has changed more recently is not simply lack of belief in goodness, but the erosion of that orientation altogether. Without it, the existentialist emphasis on freedom, choice, and individual responsibility collapses into a shallow focus on success on the one hand, nihilism on the other.

In ancient Assyrian cosmology, figures such as Pazuzu occupied a strange and unstable position: they were lesser demons, invoked to ward off other, greater evils, and served a similar function as gargoyles or the “wrathful deities” in Buddhism. What is striking in Assyrian religion is not simply the proliferation of such forces, but the absence of any clear, unifying conception of the good. The result is a world structured around dangers, rather than purposes — a world, in other words, very much like our own. 

For us, this brings new threats. In The Exorcist, when Merrin finds the amulet of Pazuzu, he also finds nearby a Christian medallion of Saint Joseph, an echo of the one Karras wears. In older times, the smaller, named evils protected us from ultimate Evil; but when we doubt the existence of the opposing force of good, these small evils become dangerous in their own right. 

If the problem is not a lack of God, but a lack of the good, then we might turn to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who sought a way of recovering moral reality without restoring dogma. In her landmark text The Sovereignty of the Good, Murdoch didn’t advocate attempting to go back to the days of religious fervor; instead she located the good in the everyday benevolent actions of ordinary human beings, and the sense we have that “there is more than this” when we look compassionately at people. Such moments do not have to be grand. Indeed, she insisted that such insights must remain small, almost imperceptible, in order to not become theological. 

Murdoch referred to the good as something with a metaphysical position, but no fixed metaphysical form. It has no doctrine, but it can be perceived with a kind of disciplined attention in which we do not allow our egos, fears, and desires to blind us to reality. This is the opposite of the modern injunction to “be kind” and suspend judgment; judgments must be harder, sharper, and less self-flattering. 

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The good has slipped out of our conversations and our dramas; it goes unnamed. In The Exorcist, the frame of Christian theology allows the possibility of a literal triumph of God over Satan, by the film’s logic. But for secular audiences, the good in the film is glimpsed in small things, as Murdoch might have imagined it, and is easily missed against the backdrop of dramatic evil. We see it especially in the friendship between Karras and Father Joseph Dyer (played by an actual priest, the Rev. William O’Malley), who grasps Karras’s hand as he lies dying on the infamous Georgetown steps, offering both Last Rites (salvation, in the Catholic understanding) but also human comfort — the best we can ask for in a world without God. 

The concept of the good, could, in its own quiet way, prove revolutionary in our current civilizational crisis. The virtuous person, attuned to the good, Murdoch says, looks outward at others and at the world around her, not inward, at self. She is required to be truthful and view both others and herself as they are, not as she would like them to be. Such moral practice is a skill, rather than a set of rules, and it opposes the tendencies of modern therapeutic society and very much departs from today’s ethos of non-judgmental “kindness.” Murdoch believed such forms of seeing could “unwind” a long historical process that began with the Enlightenment and eventually “sundered” truth from virtue, returning us to the great classical insight that the two belong together — indeed, that the two are the same and thus convertible.

Is any of this possible in a world where we believe in “our own truth” instead of “the truth”?  Perhaps not, but if we cannot believe in the good, the unquestionable persistence of evil, both small and large, should goad us on. We know evil exists, and not only in the movies. The good does not announce itself so clearly. It has to be seen. And yet its presence is a story our culture continues to tell, even as it forgets how to name it, leaving no answer or consolation to our cry: Eli, Eli. . . .

After years of depressing statistics about the decline of churchgoing and religiosity, news of last year’s “Quiet Revival” felt like a long-awaited good-news story. Based on YouGov polling data, and turned into a report by the Bible Society, it was especially pertinent to my thesis that we are seeing a surprising rebirth of belief in God in the secular West.

But secular campaigners and some religious journalists soon pointed out that the remarkable figures for increased churchgoing did not reflect actual attendance numbers reported by church denominations. Similarly, the 2025 British Social Attitudes survey directly contradicted the data — showing a continued decline in church attendance across all age groups.

The picture was complicated. But the Bible Society continued to stand by its report. YouGov was a reputable polling company, used and trusted by hundreds of organizations, including secular organizations like Humanists UK. The Bible Society had sought and been given repeated reassurance of the quality of the data.

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Then came the bombshell. The Bible Society this week announced they were withdrawing the Quiet Revival report, having discovered that YouGov “failed to activate key quality control technologies that protect the sample from a wide range of errors and this undermines the reliability of the result”. It appears that the survey had been contaminated by bogus respondents.

This is an important wake-up call: that we should all be very wary of putting our faith in surveys and polls, especially when they align with our deepest desires. Confirmation bias runs deep. As a Christian I’ve been guilty of it, as are people on the other side of the aisle.

In fairness, the Bible Society has owned up to what went wrong, and will no doubt think carefully about how it publicizes any future research. For the moment, a dose of humility and introspection is in order, and perhaps an opportunity to build some bridges with critics whose concerns turned out to be fully justified.

Even so, the danger with a U-turn of this magnitude is that it can also lead to errors in the opposite direction. Humanists UK, freshly vindicated by the reversal, now states on its website: “We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain.”

That statement is true. Yet it doesn’t do justice to the actual picture of what’s happening both here and in Europe. “Revival” is not the word we should ever have used for what’s happening — but “rebirth” does still feel appropriate. 

The same day that the Bible Society’s report was retracted, Le Figaro, one of France’s leading newspapers, published a full-page article on the continuing rise in adult baptisms. For the past two years, this famously secular country has seen the largest number of adult converts to Catholicism in living memory. This year’s Easter vigil is expected to set a fresh record, as over 20,000 people enter the Church.

Nor is France an outlier. Spain is reporting a similar trend. Something unexpected is also happening in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark; all reporting an uptick of interest, especially among young men. Likewise, many Orthodox parishes around Europe are dealing with a boom in young catechumens.

In the UK, meanwhile, the Catholic diocese of Westminster is about to see its largest intake of new converts for 15 years, while other parts of the country are recording similar spikes. Attendance at Alpha courses, an introduction to Christianity run by many churches across the UK, has also risen sharply in the past two years.

Commercial metrics tell the same story. Christian music streaming on Spotify has surged in recent years and, against an otherwise stagnant book market, Bible sales in Britain are at a historic high, rising from £2.69 million to over £6.3 million from 2019-25.

None of these figures amounts to a “revival”. But they are reliable data points and indicate that something is happening. 

How that plays out in future church-attendance statistics remains to be seen. At this point, my best guess is that any new converts are not yet offsetting the number of older religious people who are dying. That means the church is still shrinking, but that the decline itself may be slowing. This is underscored by figures from the Church of England. Recent modest growth comes in the context that Covid lockdowns had already decimated churchgoing. In the end, though, this is about more than mere numbers. 

A “vibe shift” is a hard thing to quantify — but there’s been an undoubted change in the way people publicly talk about faith in the past few years. That’s perhaps best captured by the list of influential converts that have popped up recently, including the former atheist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her husband the historian Niall Ferguson, and the sociologist Michael Murray. Even Prince William, after years of speculation about what the future head of the Church of England actually believes, has confirmed a “quiet faith”.

Of course, many of these celebrity personalities lean Right in their outlook. Likewise, it’s no secret that the religious vibe shift is overlapping with a wider political vibe shift. The result is sometimes dubbed “Christian Nationalism”. 

Yet whenever Christianity gets into bed with politics — either of the Left or Right — it’s a recipe for disaster. Being co-opted by cynical political actors like Tommy Robinson would be a far greater catastrophe for Christianity than a flawed report.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be surprised when social tumult creates a messy picture. Religious renewals of the past have always been bred of cultural disruptions and mixed motives. Whether or not we approve of the Tommy Robinson crowd, the common thread is that people are searching for identity.

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The default secular humanism on offer today has manifestly failed to deliver on its promises. We are being atomized by technologies that are programmed to polarize us. AI is proving a dangerous substitute for real human relationships, while the identities and ideologies promoted by social media have created a generation of disillusioned, distracted and depressed young people. Little wonder many have started looking for a better story.

That’s why, as I’ve met with vicars, church ministers and youth leaders over the past three years, I’ve kept hearing the same thing: that spiritual hunger is leading more and more seekers to their doors. Besides, if a Christian revival ever truly gets underway, we won’t need a spreadsheet to tell us. It’ll be obvious. 

Think about it: when was the last time you praised someone for being noble or honorable? Even the word good has receded. In its place we find the more domesticated commendations: kind and nice. They are agreeable words, certainly, but also modest ones — virtues stripped of grandeur, careful not to be too much of anything. Self-sacrifice is almost unheard-of.

The moral ends that guide modern life now tend to gather around three dominant aims. The first is safety. This reveals itself in a vigilant concern for the preservation of both the body and, increasingly, the mind. Both of these are now understood as biological systems requiring maintenance, hence the growing societal preoccupation with mental health and the medicalization of emotional states. The second aim is utility: the relentless emphasis on efficiency, productivity and optimization. Life is measured in outputs and improvements, and its worth is justified in terms of functionality.

Lastly, there is the obsession with equality — the only one of these aims that still gestures toward something like a moral ideal. The others are largely managerial and materialistic. When I speak of equality as a dominant aim, I do not mean equality in the classical sense of a universal human right. What I have in mind instead is the contemporary drive toward the equalization of outcomes, the growing discomfort with hierarchy, and the proliferation of the narratives of oppression that now function as a central moral grammar in Western societies.

Nietzsche suggested that obsessive egalitarianism was the afterglow of Christianity: a moral residue that lingered after faith itself had faded. But Christianity bequeathed many values to the modern world: humility, charity, forgiveness, self-sacrifice. Out of these, equality, in particular, survived as the key virtue. The question is: why?

It seems to me that equality functions almost as a consolation prize of the secular age. The transition from an enchanted cosmos to a disenchanted, secular world has undoubtedly expanded human freedom. Yet in dismantling the old metaphysical framework, we have also stripped away the cosmic narrative that once conferred dignity even upon those at the margins of society: the so-called “losers”. 

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The modern valorization of equality, of course, would be bizarre to our ancestors. In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor offers a remarkable account of just how foreign the land of the past truly is. For Taylor, modernity is defined not simply by a decline in religious belief, but by a deeper shift in the background assumptions through which people experience reality: a change not merely in what people believe, but in how the world itself is imagined and lived. He describes this transformation as the passage from an enchanted world to one that is disenchanted and secular. 

In the pre-modern “enchanted” world, the world of “spirits, demons and moral forces”, reality was thick with agency and meaning. The cosmos was not neutral or inert, and people understood themselves as vulnerable to powers beyond their control, capable of being corrupted or elevated by forces outside themselves. The boundary between the self and the world was therefore permeable.

Taylor describes this condition as that of the “porous self”: a self embedded within a morally charged universe, open to external influences and aware of its dependence on a larger, divinely structured order. While this dependence implied a certain impotence, it also provided a powerful sense of belonging, situating individual lives within a cosmic order not of their own making. 

Disenchantment dissolves this structure. What disappears is not simply belief in spirits, but the very sense that meaning resides in the fabric of the world. The locus of meaning is relocated from the world to solely inside the human. And this gives rise to what Taylor terms the “buffered self”. The buffered self confronts the world from behind a kind of protective membrane. It no longer sees itself as vulnerable to cosmic forces. In the world of the buffered self, nature is no longer enchanted but inert, something to be explained, predicted, and manipulated. Even when we acknowledge the limits of human power, the dominant modern assumption is that natural obstacles will eventually yield to science and technology. Rather than propitiating unseen powers for a good harvest, we design irrigation systems and engineer crops.

The advantages of the buffered self — and of life in a disenchanted world — are obvious. Human beings no longer experience themselves as helpless before the powers of nature, nor do they feel their destinies to be at the mercy of capricious gods. Nature has become something to be understood and mastered. In this sense, the modern self appears capable of shaping its own fate.

This shift in mentality also helped make possible the extraordinary achievements of modernity. The economist Deirdre McCloskey is among those who have argued that this cultural transformation was crucial in enabling the Scientific Revolution and the economic changes that followed: developments that produced some of the greatest increases in living standards in human history. By any measure, it stands as an immense achievement.

But with such immense empowerment also comes a crushing burden: that of radical responsibility. Once we anchor meaning within the individual and we understand him to be radically able to improve his condition, we can no longer find refuge in helplessness. The secular mind implicitly understands power and merit as matters of will. The loser is solely responsible for their condition.

Formerly, within an enchanted worldview, earthly failure did not exhaust a life’s meaning: the poor and humiliated could still belong to a larger divine story in which salvation, not worldly success, was the ultimate measure. But in a disenchanted world, life’s losers are deprived of both the promise of ultimate reversal — “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” as the Bible puts it. Even when it came to life on Earth itself, social hierarchy was seen as part of a divinely ordered cosmos, which granted even the humblest positions a certain dignity.

And more disturbingly, without all these, it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that some lives contribute less, matter less and — even more disturbingly — might even be less necessary.

It is in erecting barriers to this conclusion that post-World War II modernity is at its most morally energetic. This moral energy manifests in the relentless pursuit of equality, the acute sensitivity to oppression and the refusal to accept hierarchy as natural. These phenomena are not merely fashions. They are attempts to supply, through political means, what religion once provided: an assurance that no life is negligible. In a world where dignity no longer descends from heaven, it must be constructed on earth. Or else the weak are left with nothing at all.

The “loser” is not a permanent class of people. It exists, in some degree, within each of us. Human beings are fragile creatures, capable of failure and weakness at any point. Indeed, the anxiety over “loserdom” is often strongest not among the most destitute but among the moderately successful — those who glimpse success and know they might yet fail to reach it. Something of this tension can be seen in the rising levels of anxiety reported at elite universities and other highly competitive environments.

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Equality in a disenchanted world serves not only to reassure “the weak,” but also to place limits on the strong. It provides a moral vocabulary through which we can say that the strong are behaving improperly. In modern societies, strength is often defined in terms of utility: that is, those who are strong are those who generate wealth or have influence. Yet without a shared conception of the good life, it becomes difficult to explain why such individuals might still be failing in their obligations to the community. In earlier eras, even the most powerful figures were understood to stand under a higher moral order. Kings answered to God and power carried expectations of virtue and stewardship.

Modern liberal societies are less comfortable articulating such expectations. Over the past century, political thought, influenced no doubt by the rise of secularism, has increasingly embraced the idea that the state should remain neutral regarding competing visions of the good life. As the philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, freedom came to be defined largely as the ability of individuals to pursue their own preferences without interference. The result is a society that carefully protects rights but grows hesitant to articulate shared ends.

In this setting, criticism of the powerful often takes an indirect form. Public frustration with elites, whether directed at billionaires or corporations, is frequently expressed in the language of equality and redistribution. A recent flashpoint of this kind has been the proposal for a California billionaire tax. Yet beneath these demands often lies a deeper moral intuition: that the powerful are failing in some civic or ethical duty. Lacking a widely shared language of virtue or the common good, however, that intuition tends to be translated into the one moral grammar that remains widely legitimate — equality.

There remain pockets of the modern world where the obsession with equality recedes, most notably in the sphere of work. In such contexts, individuals can still find a sense of belonging and participation in a mission larger than themselves. Nowhere is this more visible than in start-ups. In such spaces, even the pretense of equality is often suspended in practice. Employees willingly subordinate themselves to a founder, often investing that figure with a quasi-prophetic aura. An entire mythology around the figure is born. “Founder-mode” might be the closest we get in the modern era to a grand hero narrative.

This hierarchy is accepted, even celebrated, because it promises belonging to a grand narrative: building the future and bending the arc of history through innovation. In recent years, companies like Anthropic have inspired precisely this kind of near-religious devotion in their employees. Access to such positions, however, is difficult, even for the fortunate. To most people, it is virtually inaccessible. A society cannot rely on such rare opportunities alone; it must find ways to generate sources of meaning for the many. 

One possible response is a return to a civic form of republicanism — the tradition that animated many of the Founding Fathers — in which the value of citizens is not measured solely by their economic utility but by their participation in a shared common good. Such a vision would require a society willing to articulate what that good consists of, and to speak openly about the virtues and forms of life that sustain it. 

Whether modern liberal societies still possess the confidence to define such shared ends — and whether disenchantment itself might be, even in part, reversible — remains an open question. What does seem clear, however, is that the hunger for such ends has not entirely vanished. Our continued ability to read 19th-century novels and not only recognize but feel drawn to their moral world is itself revealing.

At the same time, new technological forces — chiefly those unleashed by the rise of AI, from the spread of hyper-addictive gambling platforms to more subtle forms of behavioral manipulation — are beginning to unsettle even the most committed of liberals. The pressure to recover a richer moral vocabulary is gathering faster than almost anyone could have expected. 

It is these assurances that come to my mind — and that of my father, the Catholic publisher and businessman Jimmy Lai — as the Chinese state ramps up its persecution of him for the “crime” of insisting on democracy and rule of law in Hong Kong.

When my father came to Hong Kong, then a British colony, as a boy, he discovered his life’s great loves: God, family, and freedom. The freedoms he found were curtailed after the handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997. At first, it was gradual; he saw decreasing ad sales for his media properties, and subtle changes in the expressions on people’s faces. He was arrested one month after Beijing enacted the National Security Law on July 1, 2020, and in December 2020 was charged with violations of that law. 

On the morning of Feb. 9, my father was sentenced to 20 years in prison. At the age of 78 and in failing health, my father does not have 20 years; he doesn’t even have 10. Yet news outlets reported that he smiled and made a sign of gratitude to the crowd before leaving. 

Many people wondered why or even how he could smile. But even in my heartbreak, I didn’t.

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On Dad’s first day in prison, he told me he was in God’s good hands. He has repeated this multiple times throughout his imprisonment to his daughter, who is not good at very much other than worrying. Recently, when I left Hong Kong, five years into his imprisonment, I wrote to him expressing doubts about myself and about him. He chided me asking me why I doubted when God is so good. 

He wrote: “So, my dear daughter, though I understand your frustration, why did you doubt? Trust that God leads you in his ineffable way. The way is darkness for us, but [also] the best possible way for us, because He loves us more than we love ourselves.” 

The conditions in which my father is being kept have gone from bad to worse, and his health has deteriorated dramatically. He has developed worrying heart issues, visible signs of a compromised immune system (tooth rot and nail rot), and a litany of new conditions have appeared while previous ones have worsened. Yet his trust in divine providence grows only stronger. Echoing Saint Thomas More’s letter to his daughter, he has told me, “If we seek heaven on earth, we cut ourselves off forever from true happiness.” In one letter I received from him, he called the dire prison conditions in which he is kept a “holy sanctuary”, a retreat where solitude allows him to better feel God’s abundant grace and its ongoing impact on his life from even before he knew Christ. 

And while seeing his body breaking down cuts at me, he has used much of his time comforting me, telling me that suffering has cured him of his previous ignorance, acting as a “renewed baptism”. It has had the effect of bringing him closer to Jesus this life and next. And, in imagery I now often evoke, I’m reminded that although Christ suffers most, he teaches his disciples to pretend they are hiding at the foot of the crucifixion, which represents profound voluntary suffering. My father said he was grateful for the suffering that got him closer to God’s presence, saying “God’s action confounds but always turns out to be marvelous for us.”

In prison, my father wakes up in the middle of the night every night to pray. Before the crack of dawn, he wakes up to read the Gospel by leaning against his cell door to catch light from the corridor. I worry for his back and his waist but am comforted by the joy it gives him. He has said that doing so is like “touching the cloak of Christ” and that it ensures that “life is full, peaceful, and meaningful”. 

While he has always been a voracious reader, his book diet now consists almost exclusively of theology — ranging from Pope Benedict XVI to Saint John Henry Newman, and from Bishop Robert Barron to Hans urs Von Balthasar. He also studies drawing books to aid him in improving in his drawings; his two topics are the crucifixion and the Virgin Mary. I remember when he, ever the perfectionist, once spent eight hours on a drawing of the Virgin, only to be unsatisfied. 

He also spent a few days drawing the crucifixion for his friends who did not yet know Christ, because he wanted to ensure the God-Man’s act of love was sufficiently reflected in the drawing. I remember when he asked me to bring him photos of the Pieta to prison, and he started drawing it only to realize it would take some time to practice. Shortly afterward, the prison authorities banned him from sending those drawings out. 

The aspect of my father I most want to try to emulate is his almost unlimited capacity for love of God, for his family and friends, and not least, for those who wrong him. When he was mistreated in prison, I grew angry. Instead, my father told me to pray for the guard. He told me to pray that he, too, might feel the grace of God. 

One time, I said that I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to pray for people who contributed to my father’s suffering. He gently scolded me then. He reminded me that love comes from God and his grace is what gives us the capacity to love. He taught me the same growing up, but seeing him live it in these circumstances has been quite different. 

Nearly two millennia after the Christ event, the Italian mystic Padre Pio declared: “Blessed is the crisis that made you grow, the fall that made you gaze up to Heaven, the problem that made you look for God!” For my father, Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s descent into a dark night of oppression has been a source of light.

Of course, the trial will reveal further details about Pittman and the attack on the Beth Israel Congregation. For now, though, we may sketch out the following picture. The teenager’s alleged actions seem to have been premeditated: members of his gym claim to have heard him say that he wanted to set fire to a synagogue. It appears, moreover, to have been the culmination of the suspect’s increasingly erratic and threatening behavior: his mother has told the FBI that she had recently considered locking the bedroom door during the night. It should go without saying, too, that the attack was antisemitic in nature: Pittman has apparently admitted that he went after the synagogue for its “Jewish ties”.

Crucially, there is good reason to suspect a religious motive. Pittman is said to have referred to his target as “the synagogue of Satan”, a staple of Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the 4th-century homilies of John Chrysostom. On social media, he describes himself as a “follower of Christ”; when read out his rights he said, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. It would not be the first time, as it happens, for this synagogue to have been attacked in an act of terror by extremists of the Christian Right: in 1967, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

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By Cosmo Adair

There is a powerful tendency to regard modern, racial antisemitism as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from an earlier, religious anti-Judaism. This is seen most clearly in discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust. “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition,” Hannah Arendt asserted: Auschwitz marked a total break from the course of Europe’s Christian civilization. In 2000, more than 220 Jewish intellectuals and rabbis signed a document called Dabru Emet, “Speak the Truth”, affirming that “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon”. All this complemented a certain view of Nazism, making it the very antithesis to Christianity, and instead either atheistic to its core, like Soviet Communism, or else pagan and esoteric — perhaps even amounting to a religion in its own right.

The notion that the Nazis had nothing in common with the fanatical, Christian Jew-haters of earlier centuries is no longer tenable. There was no straightforward transition from “religious” to “racial” thinking: in fact anti-Judaism had already long had an important “racial” component. Jews were identified as a group in the Middle Ages not only on the grounds of their rejection of Christianity, but also by their immutable physical characteristics. A Jewish handbook, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, written in Germany in the early 14th century, tells us how Christians would often taunt their Jewish neighbors by asking, “Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?” Around the same time, Jews were already being depicted with hooked noses.

Moreover, modern racial antisemitism, epitomized by National Socialism, was more fundamentally religious — more Christian — than has often been supposed. An influential book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, argued more than 20 years ago that there was a “religious dimension to Nazi antisemitism, which coexisted with and in some ways even informed the racist dimension”. Much of Nazi Christianity was built atop the fancy that Jesus had really been an Aryan. “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes,” said Hitler in 1921; “the devil, however, only with a Jewish grimace.” Seeking to keep the SS from fracturing along religious lines, even the pagan Heinrich Himmler forbade “any attacks against Christ”, including the attack, “without doubt historically false”, that Christ had been a Jew. Some Christian Nazis hoped to reform their religion by jettisoning the Old Testament from the Biblical canon. But still there were plenty of others who were perfectly conventional and orthodox in their beliefs.

In Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form, Joseph Goebbels’s strange semi-autobiographical novel, the protagonist insists that “Christ is the genius of love, [and] as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate”. The Nazi struggle, thought Goebbels, was one “between Christ and Marx”, to be waged “until victory or the bitter end”. Hans Schemm, the head of the National Socialist Teachers’ League, put it more succinctly when he declared that “Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland”. The law of race did not need to contradict the revealed law of Christianity; race, after all, could be construed as an integral part of God’s Creation. “We, the racists, are the only ones who render to Christ the homage that is his due,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Herbert Meyer. Whatever his private beliefs, Hitler too presented himself as having been charged with a religious mission. As he wrote in Mein Kampf: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Those who emphasize the distance of Christianity from the theory and practice of Nazism are often, it would seem, committing a No True Scotsman fallacy: no true Christian would be an antisemite, because Christianity is really a religion of meekness, self-sacrifice, and neighbor-love; and no true Christian would be a Nazi, because no true Nazi would ever wish to be a Christian.

Christianity also played a part in the development of modern antisemitism closer to home. The British Union of Fascists had several churchmen in its ranks. George Henry Dymock, vicar of St Bede’s in Bristol, inveighed against the Jews in 1935 for engaging in “vile usury”. The Reverend M. Yate Allen, influenced perhaps by the religious declarations of Hitler’s top brass, thought that Nazi Germany was “truly on the side of Christ”. The newspaper British Fascism came up with a pithy formula in 1930: “There can be no true Fascism that is not Christian, for Fascism is military Christianity.” An earlier group produced a “Children’s Fascist Creed” in 1925, whose opening is unmistakably Nicene: “I am a Fascist. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit…”

Under the leadership of John Tyndall — and under the spell of postwar neo-Nazi mythmaking — the BNP was broadly anti-Christian. When Nick Griffin set out to “modernize” the party, he therefore had to Christianize it. He succeeded. In 2008, the party underscored the point that “Christianity is so large a part of our identity that to give it up would mean giving up that identity”. In the European elections of 2009, in which the BNP won two seats, the party (much to the dismay of the established church) ran an expressly Christian campaign. A poster cites John 15:20: “If they have persecuted me they will also persecute you.” “What would Jesus do?,” it goes on to ask. The answer: “Vote BNP.”

Shortly before the attack in Mississippi, an account belonging to Pittman posted the “happy merchant” antisemitic meme. This account also promotes a website called “One Purpose”, which advocates “scripture-backed fitness” and “biblical nutrition”. He would seem therefore to belong to a subculture familiar to any young man who has spent time on the online Right — one which mixes edgy internet humor and aspirational self-improvement with an ultra-reactionary, identitarian version of Christianity. The antisemitism draws from both these sources. Sometimes, these cohorts are written off as “nihilistic”, their religion as mere “LARP”; but here, again, the No True Scotsman rears its head. “Christ is King”, sounds the battle-cry of the Groypers. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the “trad” Catholicism of Nick Fuentes and his ilk is anything other than sincerely felt. Indeed, it underpins everything they say and do. It is central to their entire narrative about the decadence of modern liberal, secular society — which, predictably, is imagined to have been engineered by the “perfidious Jews”.

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Jews don't feel safe anywhere

By Samuel Rubinstein

For all this, we ought not to miss the wood for the trees. It remains obvious that the major threat to Jewish life in the West comes not from Christian, but rather Islamic, religious extremism. The attacks in Manchester and Sydney amply demonstrate as much. Insofar as the blood libel — an English invention — is alive and well in modern Britain, it has principally sustained itself as a more recent import. Muslim antisemites, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, often “have to borrow — when they want to be anti-Jewish — the rubbish of medieval Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox antisemitism”; though Hitchens was quick to add that they equally possess a vigorous antisemitic tradition all their own. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is probably the 21st century’s most concerted effort to revive the kind of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism that was de rigueur prior to Vatican II and Nostra aetate. Not for nothing did it prove a smash hit across much of the Arab world.

The institutions of mainstream Christianity deserve credit for opposing antisemitism on theological and moral grounds. Fuentes might hold Jews collectively responsible for the death of Christ, and advance an extreme form of supersessionism, dictating that the New Testament replaced, rather than fulfilled, the Old. But when he does so, his fellow Roman Catholics can appeal to the contrary pronouncements of another Chicago native, Pope Leo XIV.

Indeed, Christianity has always possessed strong tools for opposing antisemitism. In the medieval Rhineland, itinerant preachers launched crusades against Jews — yet local bishops also offered sanctuary to the victims. It may well be that Protestant Christianity was not incidental to Nazi ideology; that Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, oversaw the Holocaust in Slovakia; and that the ratlines which conveyed several high-ranking Nazis to Latin America ran through the Vatican. But none of this can dampen the Christian courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or the Scholl siblings. Their courage might now serve as an encouraging example, much as the attack in Mississippi ought to serve as a warning. There is, so to speak, a homegrown strain of antisemitism which is quickly gaining ground. If we are now witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism in the West, we should not be surprised to sometimes find it clad in its ancient, Christian garb.

The first was to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. This initiated me into a lifetime of grief that utterly refuted the utilitarian assumption that our nature is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. They say it’s the hope that kills you, but I never got that far. Spurs offer me an unmediated Proustian route back to my nine-year-old self. Staring stupefied at the telly, Arsenal scoring, watching their fans celebrating, hearing the commentator say “that was against the run of play”, followed by a sensation of mouth-drying bereft sickness that flows from the heart, and then makes its way like mercury through my veins and culminates in a paralyzed nausea that is my intimation of eternity. Come on you Spurs!

The second object of unquestioned fealty was to the Jewish God and people. Christmas is not really the time to describe what this has been like. All I can say is that it is the very opposite of the American Constitution; the “pursuit of happiness” does not describe the experience at all.

And then there is Labour.

It is important to note that the party used to be a source of happiness to me. I was 13 in 1974, when it felt like we won the Double, winning two elections in a year. I was a supporter. “There’s only one Harold Wilson”, and “Barbara Castle, Barbara Castle, we’ll support you ever more”, was about my level. As with Spurs and Jews, I thought that we were good and the others were bad and that was all there was to it.

And then Margaret Thatcher won the election of 1979, and it felt like the end of the world. There is a Jewish fast called Tisha Bov, where we read the Book of Lamentations and remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht. They all happened on the same day — and that is what the 3 May 1979 felt like to me. And it seemed to go on forever. It was like watching Arsenal win the Double for 18 consecutive seasons. And I couldn’t avoid watching it on the telly, on repeat, all the time. All our industries were transferred to the care of the Chinese Communist Party, the French controlled our nuclear power plants, and my beloved working class were sent to work as Ronald McDonald or consigned to call centers. “Everything holy is profaned and all that is solid melts into air”. That’s the only sentence from Marx I can really get behind. And that’s how it felt to me. The Ayatollah Khomeini said, also in 1979, that “everywhere was Karbala and every day was Ashura.” Well, at least we had that in common.

And then New Labour came along to intensify the work of Thatcher. “Things can only get better.” No. There was nothing true about that statement. At any level, as we now know.

I studied history at university, and the history of the labor movement became my Mastermind area of expertise. I made it my calling to understand what had gone so badly wrong. The deeper I went into the archives, the more clear it became to me that the labor movement and party, uniquely in Europe, were not a social-democratic secular party but a genuine broad church of previously estranged Christian traditions. It is often said that Labour was more Methodist than Marxist, but it cannot be stressed enough that it was also more Catholic than Communist.

The fundamental basis of the original Labour credo was that the free market did not create the world. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is the first sentence of the Holy Scripture. Without following Aquinas too closely, we can define Creation as “human beings” and “nature”. The definition of capitalism is the commodification of both. It is the exploitation of human beings and nature in order to turn them into commodities of fluctuating price in competitive markets in order to generate quick and maximum profit. That is the definition of capitalism. Pope Leo XIII called this a system of “modern slavery” and Saint John Paul II wrote of a “structure of sin”. It desecrates the human status of the person and most particularly the worker. The highest return at the greatest speed is its objective. The status of a worker as more than a commodity blocks that return. Capitalism is like diarrhea: it liquidates solidarity.

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By Jonny Ball

The second truth is that the state did not create the world either. The preservation of the sacred status of human beings and nature is the primary role of politics. Subsidiarity is the best way to temper the Pharaonic tendency of centralized state power. Sovereignty is necessary to resist the domination of capital, subsidiarity is required to resist the tyranny of the state, and all this is predicated on democratic solidarity as the fundamental ethic of society. Cain made a very big mistake. He was his brother’s keeper; we all are. This is the political position of Blue Labour in British politics, and it is based entirely on Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus.

The fundamental teaching of Catholic social thought is that tyranny is a real threat in the economy and the state, and that only a democracy founded upon solidarity, the sharing of the burdens of this hard and merciless life, can generate a virtuous politics. It does so through domesticating the demonic energy of the market and the state. Solidarity, status, subsidiarity and stewardship are the four legs of this table of wisdom.

It is far too rarely acknowledged that, alone in Europe, Labour succeeded in generating a workers’ movement that was not divided between Catholic and Protestant, or between secularists and believers. Instead, the movement itself provided the common life within which these potentially antagonistic forces could combine in pursuit of a common good. In cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, as well as London and Birmingham, this was an extraordinary feat.

“Common good” politics served the movement, and the country, very well. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Labour tradition, as opposed to social democracy in Europe, which was far more explicitly secularist in form. The non-established churches, for reasons of historical self-interest, were committed to freedom of association and expression.

The churches that nurtured the labour movement were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from state power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not defined by money or power alone. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, the rights of freeborn Englishmen through the Protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands. The currents came together in the labour movement. They also provided a national connection, that has proved durable, until now, within the labour movements in Scotland and Wales.

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Blue Labour has come too late

By David Littlefair

The London dock strike of 1889 is a classic expression of the labour movement in action. The docks were a crucial part of the functioning of the British Empire, and they were staffed by 100,000 poorly-paid and often hungry dockers. Many of the dockers were Irish and many of them local, but an alliance was brokered by the Catholic and dissenting churches. The dockers coordinated themselves through labour representation committees, new institutions within which leaders were elected, strategy discussed and actions planned.

On 14 August that year, the strikes began. The courage of the strikers was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious, for the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub. As such, the Government threatened the strikers with not only the police, but the force of the navy and army. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, were held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation. But it was difficult for the dockers’ employers to depict the strikers, who were dignified and disciplined, as an undisciplined rabble. It helped that Cardinal Manning, accompanied by the Salvation Army band, led them on their march. The dockers, in the end, were victorious. They had built a successful political coalition on the basis of stable employment and wages: a great founding achievement of labour politics.

But chaos was still to come: the sheer ferocity of the market storm within which the Labour Party was born in 1900; the scale of the dispossession, of property, status and assets, generated by the creation of the first-ever free market in labor and land; the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands; the scrapping of apprenticeship; and the eviction and proletarianization of the peasantry. All this meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other.

In the burials given by co-operative societies, we find another example of the importance of the labour movement: dignity in death underwritten by solidarity in life. The pauper’s grave was one of the most fearful fates of dispossession. But co-operative societies provided a solution that enabled the deceased, poor though they were, to be buried respectably. The solution was subscription-paying membership, co-operation with chapels and churches, and the practices of mutuality and reciprocity. Altogether, these co-operative burials showed reverence for life as well as dignity in death. They were drawn not from a secular or modernist ethic, but from traditional assumptions and practices. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. Workers called their ideology socialism and their party Labour.

Jesus said that many are called, but few are chosen. With those words in mind, it is sometimes quipped that many are cold, but few are frozen. But such a state of affairs cannot be Labour’s ultimate goal. The desiccated utilitarian administration of gradated levels of pain was always the enemy. In contrast, the original credo was that Christ is King. Incarnated mercy and grace, kindness and truth. It is better to give than to receive. Fellowship is life. Love thy neighbor. Labour was once a biblical party, and must become one once more if it is to avoid a progressive death. I am my brother’s keeper. We all are.

In order to be truly radical, Labour must recognize its debt to Jesus Christ. In this bleak midwinter, we must give him our heart.

We were there to see the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s annual rendition of A Christmas Carol, as we would do nearly every year into the future. The Pabst is a stunning venue, the kind of place that makes you think your town is special, though as I got older, I realized just about every American city has its own version of the Pabst: a local magnate’s eponymous temple to the arts, built with spoils from the Industrial Revolution. 

This makes it the perfect home for Charles Dickens. In the mid-19th century, as A Christmas Carol debuted, Milwaukee was a grand city in the style of Chicago, infused with German culture and European elegance. The city’s prosperity, however, often did not extend to the laborers who produced the wealth. Humbug! 

Captain Frederick Pabst immigrated from small-town Germany in 1848, marrying into the Best family and eventually growing their brewing operation into the largest in the United States. By his death in 1904, he had “left his mark on the city of Milwaukee, investing in real estate projects like the Whitefish Bay Pleasure Resort and the Pabst Theater and making financial contributions to welfare, education, and arts organizations,” according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Indeed, when the opera house that became the Pabst Theater burned down in 1895, the captain is said to have cabled, “Rebuild at Once!” Each Christmas, Pabst and his wife supplied 100 families with baskets of groceries to get through the harsh Wisconsin winter. Ebenezer Scrooge, he was not. 

Christmastime makes the world of Dickens bearable, cozy even. And for me, a Christian, Christmas is not a holiday about trees and eggnog and piles of gifts and overspending, but about Christ, who makes our world possible — and bearable and cozy, too, if we can see his light.

Dickens was a complicated Christian: he was born in the Church of England, but later turned away, toward Unitarianism. He focused on the social good produced by Christian principles, but was a vehement critic of the church hierarchy, as well as of clerical hypocrisy and abuses. The light of true faith shines in his profound commitment to charity and the social good. 

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Metaphors of light and dark abound in his work, serving as a commentary on wealth and poverty, patronage and exploitation, individualism and community, and damnation and salvation. In A Christmas Carol, he contrasts Scrooge’s “gloomy suite of rooms” and his “neglected grave” with scenes of how the miser’s former employer, Fezziwig, ran his business. Fezziwig’s warehouse was “snug, and warm, and dry.” Scrooge’s nephew Fred, another of the book’s positive role models, throws a party in a “bright, dry, gleaming room.” (Light and dark are clearly delineated in Dickens — a deeply Christian concept; no moral relativism here.) Dickens describes many wonderful things as “bright” in the book, making obvious the motif of light and dark. His characteristically precise illustrations of both worlds have a jarring effect on readers, fostering the visceral appreciation for warmth that occurs when you step in from the cold.

One passage, as Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present approach Bob Cratchit’s residence, is perfectly Dickensian. “The sky was gloomy,” the author wrote, “and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’ content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavored to diffuse in vain.”

Scrooge finds that, inexplicably, “the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.” 

This is the source of a light so bright that even the summer sun could not compete with it. And it is the reason that Christmas Carol is Dickens’ best work — in a macro sense, his stories are really all Christmas carols. Christ is the flame that lights the West, bringing comfort to the poor and a burden to the rich. Blessed are the meek.

Scrooge, who represents darkness and the other side of the equation, has replaced this light with a “golden” idol. We see this clearly in the scene where he is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to watch his former self part ways with a girl to whom he was once betrothed, and she reproaches him for having chosen this idol instead of their love.

The younger Scrooge replies, “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“Gently” the girl answers, “You fear the world too much.… All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”

Critics might say that this detachment from the woes of the world — which are a realistic source of fear — excuses predatory capitalism. Believers who focus on the next life might be tempted to ignore the ills of this one. However, Christian apologists argue that it is precisely this kind of fear of the world that causes predation. And the fear can only be overcome by faith in Christ. The Ubermensch — the godless man who makes himself the measure of value — takes no prisoners on his way to evading material poverty, just as Scrooge stiffs Crachit. Dickens demonstrated that the great miser’s fear leads to a combination of material wealth and spiritual poverty.

Dickens’s Christian ghost stories and Victorian spiritualism were a counterargument to the other dominant philosophies of his time, those of Frederich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, each of whom proposed materialist solutions to the ills of human life. Marx decried the material horrors visited upon workers by Victorian capitalism, but saw no solution, no peace, beyond more struggle. Transcendent values — the ones that might’ve justified his concern for workers — were so much, well, humbug. Weber took a more nuanced view, believing that hard work and the system of capitalist prosperity was a religious good, but acknowledging that it came with dangers. 

“Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion,” said Weber. “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces.” Of “religious asceticism,” he wrote that “victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.” The “modern economic order,” Weber believed, “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.” 

“Perhaps,” he added, “it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burned.” 

Coal is a theme in A Christmas Carol, as well. One of its last lines invokes the ever-important coal of 19th-century England. Scrooge says: “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!” he remarks. “Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!” This greeting comes with “an earnestness that could not be mistaken.” Scrooge has been changed forever. 

Cratchit was hardly burning the last ton of fossilized coal, nor are we approaching that landmark even now, though Dickens’s carol and the spirit of mercy persist, even in the modern world. In his showing, we may gain wealth and power, but only if we do good with it. In the modern world, we may be trying to forget about his form of charity, but we haven’t entirely. As technology companies with power that rivals great nations erect sprawling data centers, moguls like Elon Musk promise “there will be universal high income” in the near future. Shame lingers, at least for now. 

Tom Holland once described “the supreme paradox of Christian history” as the existence of “a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless.” The challenge for Christians in the industrial West is to find every Scrooge in our midst and make a Pabst out of him. Starting with the Scrooge inside ourselves, of course.

Then, late one night in July 2022, the rains came hard and fast, and Sexton Creek rose, filling up like a bathtub. Water rushed over the single-lane bridge and made the sole road impassable. With few options, Joe considered the canoe. He waded through knee-deep silt to get to it, steadying himself with one hand and dragging it along behind him with the other. At the front door, he latched the boat to the roof and urged his wife aboard. Panicked, she would not get in until the waters were at her shoulders. At last, the two of them climbed inside. They spent the rest of the night in the hull, clinging to one another under the invisible sky, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting for the waters to recede.

Heading northwest toward Williamstown, Kentucky’s Ark Encounter, a colossal model of the ark that protected Noah and his family in the Biblical account of the global flood, I am thinking about the canoe and its tender mercies. “A 100 year event,” the newsmen called those summer floods. I mouth the words Johnny Cash sang: How high’s the water, Mama? / Five feet high and risin’. When it was all over, 45 people were dead and thousands more displaced. As Joe and his wife left the bottom for the last time, they took the canoe with them. In the midst of chaos, what is there except the few preparations that can be made? That and some measure of faith. I drive on for hours in silence.

Finally, I spot a brown highway sign directing passers-by to take the next exit for the Ark Encounter. I soon find myself in a huge lot surrounded by hundreds of other tourists. From Argentina to Burma to Ukraine, people from all over the world have made the pilgrimage here to see this “life-size” rendering of Noah’s ark.

Everyone has to take a tour bus from the parking lot to the main attraction, which is hidden from view at first. I follow a young family with two little girls in tutus and hot-pink snow boots onto one of the waiting buses. I settle into a molded plastic seat at the back and listen to the many languages that fill the vehicle’s interior. In a matter of minutes, we’re off, winding our way through the frosted autumn fields. A guy behind me who’s been speaking Russian with his friends jumps out of his seat and hurries past standing passengers toward the front of the bus. At first I think he’s left something behind. Maybe he wants to turn back. Then, I see him searching for something through the windshield while he clutches a camera in his right hand. He’s looking for the ark. He wants to be the first to see it rising up against the blue-gray marbled sky.

The sheer scale of the ark is overwhelming. Built according to the dimensions given in the Bible — roughly 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high — it’s about the length of two Boeing 747s lined up end-to-end. According to the Ark Encounter website, it’s the largest freestanding timber structure in the world. Topiary animals marching in twos are miniaturized by the enormous ship. I stand for a while gaping at it before making my way up the entry ramp.

The ark is the brainchild of the famed Christian apologist and young-Earth creationist Ken Ham. Australian by birth, Ham started his career as a public school teacher in Queensland in 1975. During his first biology classes, Ham told me in a telephone interview, his students pressed him about his Biblical beliefs. Specifically, he remembers a young girl asking whether it was possible for Noah to get all the animals on the ark. It was then, he says, that he started praying for a museum where some of the Bible’s mysteries — the mysteries of divine creation as told in Genesis — might be further explored.

Ham eventually left teaching to enter the ministry full time. Following a move to the United States, he founded the apologetics organization Answers in Genesis (AiG), where his vision of a Biblical museum was realized in the form of two popular attractions: the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. AiG’s broader purpose is to “enable Christians to defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ” with a special emphasis on the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Though the ministry has been wildly popular among some evangelicals, it has faced substantial criticism from others, including those who hold evolution as God’s means of creation. Ham believes that the idea of theistic evolution undermines Biblical authority. And at its core, AiG is about promoting Biblical authority and the truth of the Gospel.

In 2014, at the height of AiG’s cultural visibility, the Creation Museum hosted a widely covered livestreamed debate, between Ken Ham and Bill Nye the “Science Guy”, that has since been watched by millions of viewers. The controversial match cast Ham’s young-Earth creationism against mainstream evolutionary science and an ancient Earth. Commentators have compared the event — somewhat tenuously — to the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial. That was the 1925 Dayton, Tennessee case orchestrated by the ACLU to challenge a state law criminalizing as a misdemeanor the teaching of human evolution in public schools. John Scopes, a substitute high school teacher, was convicted of using a textbook that favored human evolution and fined $100, though the Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned that judgment on a technicality. With William Jennings Bryan leading the prosecution and Clarence Darrow leading the defense, the trial became a public spectacle. It underscored the growing divide between secularism and modern natural science on the one hand and traditional religious belief on the other, and foreshadowed America’s endless culture wars.

Meanwhile, the Ark Encounter has had its own share of exposure, beginning in 2016, with a modest reprise of the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate. According to Ham, AiG’s properties have since seen a combined 1.5 million visitors annually, representing a spectrum of religious beliefs. That number includes the likes of former president Jimmy Carter, rock icon Ozzy Osbourne, and astronaut Barry Wilmore. Over the last five years, the ark has been home to 40 Days of Christian Music, one of the largest Christian music festivals in the world.

During my visit, the place is relatively quiet. There’s a placard near the entrance explaining that the ark’s designers have taken artistic license with some details to “enhance the guest experience”. The idea is to give visitors some historically supported sense of what life might have looked like for Noah and his family without contradicting the Biblical account. These instances “should not in any way be considered attempts to add our ideas to the Bible”, the sign advises.

On the first deck, the Christmas carols that have been playing fade into the background and are replaced by the ominous sounds of a ship in peril. Through the speakers, the storm rages, with thunder cracking and the ark’s wooden sides groaning in distress. Occasionally, an imaginary animal cries out. The dim lighting builds a sort of low-grade tension. Everyone’s half-whispering. The wide open rooms are filled floor-to-ceiling with bamboo cages and terracotta feeders. I’m following close behind three Mennonite girls wearing long cotton dresses and partially opaque white headcoverings. They’ve locked arms, and they’re holding each other close. “I’ve worked in the stables,” one of them says to the others, “if they wanted to make it totally realistic, they’d have made it smell bad too.” The three of them giggle wildly, conspiratorially. I laugh too, but I tuck my chin to hide my face.

Farther along, there are different cages with carefully crafted animal models inside. AiG adopts the idea that the ark housed two of every kind of animal — not every species — and seven pairs of clean animals (presumably those that could be offered as a sacrifice to God or eaten) and flying creatures. According to the “worst case scenario”, in which kinds are numbered generously rather than conservatively, the Ark Encounter’s researchers contend that Noah and his family would have cared for fewer than 7,000 animals. That would mean that there was room on the ark for all the animals plus plenty of space for food preparation, wood and metal working, and storage.

The second deck features a series of murals and dioramas that tell the Biblical story of the creation, the first murder, and the global flood. Some of the scenes try to imagine what Genesis 6:5 could mean when it says that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the Earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”. In one scene, revelers watch warriors fight beasts in an arena. In another, worshipers bow down before a golden idol with the body of a man and the head of a serpent. In a third, builders hoard materials for the Tower of Babel. These are illustrations of exploitation — of the body, of the Earth, of all of creation. It’s perhaps the museum’s most explicit contemplation of justice and mercy, of the relationship between the consequences of the law and the consolation of divine love. “And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the Earth… for it repenteth me that I have made them,” it says in Genesis. And yet “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord”.

In a near-final scene, Noah stands on a ladder receiving a dove carrying an olive leaf in its mouth. In the Biblical account, it’s the symbol that the flood waters have receded and the Earth is habitable. Nearby, an Ethiopian man quiets his daughter in his arms. “Noah!” she shouts. “Noah! The dove!” To her, all of this is real. Noah’s lonely voyage has finally come to an end.

As I make my way toward the exit, I stop to examine a series of tiny folk art versions of the ark encased behind a glass covering. There are porcelain arks, tin arks, even paper arks — all different and yet the same. I think about the little wooden ark that sits on top of my dresser at home. I got it a few years back from a toy-maker in Lexington, North Carolina. It was part of his personal collection. For the first time since I began the tour, I’m moved almost to tears. I look at the people to my left and to my right, people speaking many different languages. It’s a kind of miracle that all of us are here, united by faith, wading through the chaos of our present world together.

I wonder about the deep sense of belief here and whether it goes beyond these walls. In the US, there’s been some evidence of renewed interest in the Christian faith. Though the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has been in decline for decades, Pew Research Center’s 2023-2024 ”Religious Landscape Study” suggests a “leveling off”. As it stands, six in 10 American adults identify as Christians. The number is lower among younger Americans, but Barna Research Group reports that teenagers are increasingly curious about the Gospel message, with more than half of Gen-Z teens expressing a desire to learn more about Jesus Christ.

I try asking a couple of teenagers at the ark whether they’ve felt any sense of curiosity about the faith from their peers, but they don’t seem to know what I’m talking about. They’re from the Bible Belt South, and so most of their friends and classmates are professing Christians.

Outside, huddled at a fire pit to shake off the cold, I have better luck with a member of another generation. Bill, who is here with his adult niece, is in his late seventies. “She called me this morning,” he reflects, “and she said ‘guess where we’re going today?’” The visit is a gift, a post-Thanksgiving surprise. “I’ve been praying to the Lord that one day I might get to see this,” he says with a Southern drawl that sounds a lot like mine. He tells me that he lost his mother as a child, that he’s been kind of lonely lately. He seems to sense some sorrow in me. “Don’t live your days in heartache, child,” he says. “Jesus is coming back soon.”

When the sun sinks low in the sky, there’s a change in the air. New music offers a dreamy, ethereal feeling. Lights project scenes from Jesus’s life against the great ark. He’s a babe in a manger, a teacher, a martyr, and the living Savior. The spiritual meaning is not lost on me. It’s as though all of history, all of creation has been building toward this moment: the moment of redemption. I’m reminded of the words written in Luke: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Lost in my own thoughts, I start making my way home. I consider the Eastern Kentucky floods and Joe’s red canoe. I asked him once what he was thinking as he was lying there in the boat waiting for the storm to pass. “I was asking the Lord to spare me,” he said, “and He answered my prayer.” Joe paused and looked out in the middle-distance. “I guess He’s got more work for me to do.”

 JD Vance: Yeah. 

 SA: Where are we with the process, and whom do you view as the main obstacle to getting across the finish line? Is it the Russians, the Europeans, or the Ukrainians themselves?

 JDV: Well, look, there are challenges with all three groups. I mean, I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning. So the breakthrough that I do feel that we’ve made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There’s [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand. And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we’ve seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what’s non-negotiable [and] what’s very negotiable. 

I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they’ll probably lose Donetsk — but, you know, eventually: it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that. So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations — that terrible territorial concession, I should say. 

I think that there were other somewhat more minor issues. Who controls the [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear facility? Can it be jointly controlled? Does it need to be controlled by one or more side? What ultimately happens with with ethnic Russians who are still in Ukraine? What happens with the ethnic Ukrainians who are still in Russia? Ukrainians who are currently in [Russian-occupied] territory but want to live in Ukraine? How do you facilitate that? And many of the Russians have asked similar questions. 

And then there’s, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think, the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on. And we’re just trying to work through all these things. And so I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith. Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game, I don’t hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, ‘This provision is too pro-Russia’ or ‘This provision is too pro-Ukraine.’ I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation. 

We’re gonna try to get this thing solved. We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t stay with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t. 

SA: Pope Leo made some remarks, using pretty harsh rhetoric, suggesting that President Trump wants to break the Western Alliance structure or to sideline the Europeans? What would you say to that?

JDV: Look, especially as a practicing Catholic, I always try to be respectful to the Vatican. It is a diplomatic force for good, completely aside from its religious role. But look, I disagreed with what the pope said there. I think that that’s a particularly Euro-centric view of these negotiations. We’re not trying to destroy the European Alliance, we’re not trying to divide Europeans against one another. What we’re actually trying to do vis-à-vis Europe is to encourage them to be a little bit more self-sustaining. 

I think their economic policies have produced very broad-based continental stagnation. Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population. I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation. We want Europe to reinvigorate itself. We want it to be much more self-sufficient, much more self-reliant. And look, the reality is, America sprang out of European civilization. We are fundamentally descended from a lot of European ideas. . . . That’s why we want a stronger Europe. We don’t want a weaker Europe. And we think that our views and our policies are, hopefully, trending in that direction, helping the Europeans where we can help them, but a lot of this is something I think the Europeans have to do themselves. 

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SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.

JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States. 

SA: What sort of ideas?

JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests. 

I just think that we want Europe to be strong and vibrant. I want Europe to be a place where Americans can go and visit, where there’s cultural sharing; Europeans are coming to American universities; Americans are going to European universities; where our militaries are fighting together, training together. That is impossible without some sense of a cultural foundation. The United States and Europe have that, but there’s a risk of losing it over the long term. 

SA: Turning to domestic politics and this tangle of issues around immigration and American belonging: it’s really sharply dividing the American Right. Just recently, as you know, a pair of dueling visions was presented at TPUSA by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. . . . 

JDV: I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen their speeches yet. 

SA: . . . And a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that, and they want you to denounce directly the Groypers and maybe Tucker Carlson for entertaining the Groypers. Will you?

JDV: First of all, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a Groyper. 

SA: No. 

JDV: Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus. I can express substantive disagreements with them, but I find the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it. 

I think that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping where people are trying to settle their own ideological scores, and that’s what’s really going on here. 

On some of the broader issues, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting, and we should call that stuff out. 

SA: So you disavow Fuentes?

JDV: On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States. And my attitude towards anybody, again, who is calling for judging people based on their ethnic heritage, whether they’re Jewish or white or anything else, it’s disgusting. We shouldn’t be doing it. [That said,] I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated — and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel. 

Now, I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, [and] that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on. But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes instead of on: why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety? . . . Because 99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we already had that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans aren’t anti-Semitic. They’re never going to be anti-Semitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate. 

[On Fuentes’s racism,] let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity. Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family. Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the last five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good. Sometimes South and East Asians get caught up in this, too. If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.

That same political movement, the Left, has also promoted wide open borders that necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love. Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence of what the Left has pushed for years.

Let’s bring it back to the personal: if you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power. It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids “jeet,” and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.

SA: How do you define what it means to be an American? Obviously, you and I both reject the economic-zone account of America, and that has not brought us to a great place. But how do you react to a term like ‘Heritage American’?

Well, one, is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century? I think that it’s like a lot of these things, there are questions of definition. But, I mean, look, let me say a few things about this. 

Number one, do I think that there is something credal at the heart of the American identity? Absolutely! We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project, a project that is a very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being. That’s one of the reasons why I think Americans are just not a racist people. Black people don’t hate white people, white people don’t hate black people — that’s a good thing. 

That said, do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for ten generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it. That happens multi-generationally. It happens over time. And so I guess my own view is a fusion of the two: it’s to recognize that human beings are inherently creatures of their time, of their place, of their family, of their community. And so we should expect that people who have a longer connection to the United States of America are going to understand it differently than somebody who came here on a tourist visa 15 minutes ago. We should also understand that believing certain core things, being able to express certain core democratic values is part of being an American. 

One last thing I’ll say about this is, I think there’s a tendency to try to over-intellectualize this stuff. When I talk about shared cultural traditions, shared practices, living in a country and sharing it with your neighbors and your community members, a lot of that is not stuff that you can teach in a book, right? It’s about: which sports teams do you follow? And what do you eat for dinner? And how do you communicate with your neighbors? It’s the cultural lingo that is dominant among certain generations, but not in other generations. It’s music, it’s art. There’s a whole host of things that make it. And I think the credal nationalists, the mistake that they make is thinking that you could absorb American culture just because you have the right ideas in your head. And I think that the racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants —  what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendant of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s also not consistent with American practice, either. 

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SA: But in terms of legal treatment, the person who got their passport yesterday versus the one who does trace ancestry back 10 generations — they don’t get different treatment, right?

JDV: No, no! Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally. I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories. And the reality is that America does pretty well assimilating people, so long as it’s a small number of people, and they’re given an amount of time to assimilate. The problem with American immigration . . . over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ 

Somebody said to me recently that Gordon Wood — who’s sort of a famous historian [and] a credal nationalist — he thinks that we should cap the number of foreign people in the United States of America at 15%. Well, if you believe that, you’re acknowledging that there’s something about the American identity and character that has to be formed over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it. 

SA: Can Christianity ease some of today’s identity tensions?

Yeah. Well, I think that, look, this is a much longer conversation, but I do think that when I talk about America having some common culture, I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and particularly, the people who were influential in each of the individual states were incredibly devout Christians. And that’s an important part. And I think there’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity. I think that it gives us a way to actually understand our own sins as a nation, but also have forgiveness and grace towards one another. I think it’s very hard to have a concept of forgiveness and grace that is not rooted in some Christian idea. 

And so I think a lot of the woke wars of the early 21st century are because we had a sort of Christian moral language that was completely divorced from actual Christian moral practice. And, you know, the wokesters, they got a lot wrong. But the thing that they got most wrong is they had no account of grace and forgiveness, and that was completely deranging to American culture. 

SA: How do you balance the demands of your faith and your public responsibilities. We talked about how the pope has disagreed with you on Ukraine, and also on immigration. It must be incredibly difficult to navigate these tensions. It can’t be easy.

You know, I guess that I don’t think that it is that difficult, the balancing. When you ask yourself, what should America’s immigration policy be? Well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgment. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgments, but also moral judgments. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective. I don’t think it’s right, by the way, to say, ‘Oh, you know, they should stay out of politics.’ I think unless your politics is informed by some moral judgment, it’s going to be very, very broken. 

[But] the pope in the Vatican, in Rome, is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on. Yes, we have to treat people with humanity and dignity. Yes, we have to protect our borders. I’m also trying to protect the wages of workers. I’m trying to protect the social cohesion of the United States of America. I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of balkanization and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly. And so, yes, I take my Christian faith and moral teachings [seriously], and I also try to apply them in a very messy, real world that I live in. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari’s account of his interview with JD Vance here.

Some were wearing Christmas hats and one woman was selling them, though many were also convinced that the festival’s spirituality had been downplayed in favor of secular commercialization. To get to this gathering, attendees had walked down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, which is currently displaying an elegant wooden nativity scene, a giant menorah and a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth featuring the faces of hundreds of trans and non-binary people, which seemed a fitting reflection of our confused public realm.

They had come at the invitation of Robinson to sing carols and, they said, to put the Christ back in Christmas. In September, I had watched tens of thousands march down the same street for a protest organized by the former EDL leader in which Christianity took a surprisingly prominent role. Demonstrators brandished giant wooden crosses and framed photos of Charlie Kirk, who had been shot just days before.

By contrast, the carol service was to be a more intimate affair, with around 1,000 in attendance. The crowd was genuinely diverse, with many fervently devout Africans trying to recruit to their own churches and noticeably fewer young white men than at a typical Robinson march.

Like Robinson, many of those at the service had little time for the Church of England. Steve Edwards, sitting in a collapsible chair as he ate a chicken bake, said he found the Church of England disgusting. “It’s full of wokeism,” he told me, a Union flag flying above him. “I went to church as a kid but it was not my choice. I don’t go now.” The advertisements about the carol service had been clear that it was not a political event: it was solely about celebrating Christ and Christmas. For Edwards, however, there was clearly a political resonance to such an act. “I think my prime motive for coming is to defend Christmas against the Muslim hordes and eroding of our culture,” he said. “It’s a day out, but a useful day out.”

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To the left of the stage stood a group of women wearing pink who had been campaigning in Havering against the housing of asylum seekers. Kim, a founder of the group, said that, although she was a Catholic, she did not consider that to be related to her activism. She was also not opposed to people practicing other religions, she insisted. “They can have theirs and we can have ours,” she said. “The key word is love: everybody should love each other.” There were limits to that love, however: the women were clear that they did not wish to have undocumented and uninvited small boat migrants in their town.

Soon enough, the service began. Instead of a pulpit, there was a temporary stage on a trailer flanked by large, white crosses and garlanded with tinsel. Preachers reading extracts from the Bible alternated with musicians, including Doolan’s band and Star, a young black woman with a mellifluous voice. The crowd sang along to the hits — from “Come All Ye Faithful” to “Away in a Manger” — and speakers exhorted us to pray for persecuted Christians in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Several of the speeches drifted from theology to politics. Liam Tuffs, a long-term Robinson wingman, declared that he had not been a Christian himself but that he planned on pumping religious content out from his social media channels in 2026. “Young Bob”, a 17-year-old activist with a mop of hair, spoke of how he had become depressed and suicidal at secondary school as he committed the sin of atheism and other “sinful acts”. If it were not for Jesus Christ, he said, he would not be here. If it were not for Jesus Christ this nation would not be great. “And wouldn’t it be great to see this nation restored back to its ancestral roots?” he asked to cheers.

Walking among the crowd was Robert Wallace, who claimed, when we spoke, that had been to prison in five countries. He said had swallowed balloons of drugs to smuggle them. He spoke of how he had sunk into alcoholism and casual violence and lost himself for a time to a kind of madness that took over his life. But now he has rediscovered Christ and been born again. And so, he and his brother, John — both short men with greying hair buzzed low — found themselves at the carol concert.

Born 18 months apart, the pair look as if they could be identical twins. “When we were younger we went to Sunday school and church,” said John. “A lot of people lost that root. Now they’re turning back.” For the brothers, Christianity represents their childhood and a lost Britain of innocence and moral rigidity. “We used to run around outside and pray,” Robert said. “Then, when I came out of the army, we [Britain] were in Europe. Our country is flooded. It’s changed.”

With their lives of sin and winding journey to Christ, the pair were not so dissimilar to the man who had brought them to central London. Though raised by an Irish Catholic mother, Robinson has said he was not religious himself growing up. When dark had fallen and the carols were over, he finally took the stage. The crowd pushed forward a little and began chanting his name, as if forgetting for a moment that this was a religious festival and not a rally.

Robinson spoke of his hatred for Britain’s Anglican establishment. “When I started [the English Defence League] in 2009, the Church stood against us in every city we went into,” he said. “The Church leaders stood and opposed us. That drove me away from Christianity. In fact, I hated the Church for them betrayals. We, all of us, were their lost sheep. The way they’ve acted this week [by criticising Robinson as divisive] is the reason churches are empty.”

It was only during a recent stint in HMP Woodhill that he began speaking with a chaplain and studying the life of Jesus. Then, he was visited by Doolan, a former musician who — by his own telling — spent his life partying and sinking “endless cocktails of drugs” before he stumbled across a Sunday service and, struck by its beauty, was driven to repent. Thirteen years later, Doolan is a pastor at Spirit Embassy, a Pentecostal church led by a charismatic Zimbabwean prophet. His band is a regular feature of Robinson’s rallies.

Speaking to me a few days before the carol service, Doolan said that he had sat with Robinson inside prison and talked for two hours about the Gospel, a spiritual awakening he believes is taking place in Britain, and the importance of Christianity to our national history. “He said that he’d always felt a presence when he was going through, you know, hard times or heavy persecution or whatever it is that he’d been going through,” he said. “There would always be a feeling of something willing him to continue.”

With two prison guards standing over them, Doolan led Robinson through a prayer of salvation. The former English Defence League leader, a veteran of a Luton hooligan firm, convicted of assault and fraud, who once bragged on camera that he could score gear anywhere in the world, admitted his sins and asked Jesus to enter his heart.

The carol service, which Doolan was heavily involved in organizing, was aimed in part at helping others follow Robinson’s path. Standing amid the tinsel and the crosses, the activist proclaimed that “something great” is happening in Britain. “I’ve seen it at each one of our Unite the Kingdom events as I saw the cross start playing prevalence, as I saw ‘Jesus is king’ [banners], and I felt something happening and I felt it again today,” he told the crowd.

Not every Christian in attendance was willing to take this change of heart at face value, however. As I watched a series of Bible readings on stage, I was approached by two young men, one German and one English, from a non-denominational church in London. “Tommy is not really a Christian,” said the German. “He doesn’t follow the Bible.” While he could not know the contents of Robinson’s heart, he said, he did not believe he had truly renounced sin.

The duo were at the protest to evangelize to those who believed in God but were not yet practicing Christians. The faith, the Englishmen said, had saved his life. With the Union Flag pulled over his shoulders, he launched into a denunciation of the nation’s spiritual values. All men in this country care about, he said, is chasing women and going to the pub and doing bumps of coke. If he had not found Christ, he would still be doing the same, he added.

The vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Tooting, who coincidentally is called Angela Rayner, was handing out leaflets with an AI image of the nativity featuring black people, Muslim women and three white men wearing Union Jack T-shirts gazing at baby Jesus in his crib. Only one in 10 people at most would take a Christian flyer outside a train station, she told me. Here, almost everyone was willing to accept them. She hoped she might be able to convince fans of Robinson that everyone was welcome in the Church of England.

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Earlier that day, another group of Christians had gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral to counter Robinson’s message. I watched as they staged a nativity scene in which two people playing Joseph and Mary sat in a small rubber dinghy. Behind them, about a dozen others in smart coats, woolly sweaters and hiking boots were singing hymns and holding banners that claimed Jesus as a refugee. “Love your neighbor,” read one, in red letters, with another below adding, in black spraypaint, “that includes the ones in hotels”.

Walking about in front of this display was Krish Kandiah, an evangelical leader and founder of The Sanctuary Foundation, a charity that supports refugees into work and housing. He is, I suggested to him, exactly the kind of Christian Robinson professes to revile. The former EDL leader had only recently become religious, though, Kandiah said. Robinson had clearly not yet developed a real understanding of Christianity.

“We need to help Tommy get to the heart of the faith,” he said. “The Bible is very clear that every human being had intrinsic value and worth.” While Kandiah accepts that some people fear immigration is out of control, he also believes that Britain has the capacity to help those in need. “We need to work out our responsibilities to them,” he said.

Kandiah said he was concerned that people were using the Christian message to gain followers for cynical reasons. “It is hard to understand how Christians of good faith can hate on people and promote division,” he said. The scale of the messaging operation coordinated over the past week by the Church of England and other mainstream Christian groups implies they are deeply concerned that Robinson’s position might catch on.

The feeling of resentment and suspicion is mutual. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Robinson retweeted a statement she had made backing the Black Lives Matter movement and wrote: “their churches will stay empty, a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine christiany is coming not this weak drivel.”

The idea that Christianity is experiencing a revival in Britain is one shared by many worshipers who both love and hate Robinson. A report published by the Bible Society earlier this year claimed that church attendance had surged since 2018, driven in particular by young men. “People are giving church a try, or something has drawn them back in again,” the Evangelization coordinator for the Diocese of Westminster, Teresa Carvalho, told The Guardian. Others have questioned the value of the society’s evidence, however. David Voas, an emeritus professor of social science at UCL, has pointed out that its report was based on unreliable opt-in surveys rather than probability sampling. The Church of England and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales record shrinking turnouts since the pandemic.

When I spoke to Doolan, the musician-turned-pastor, he said he had witnessed growing Christian faith. This was evidence, he argued, that I could expect to witness, in my lifetime, the arrival of the Antichrist, who will take control of a one-world government. The “masculine Christianity” advanced on Saturday, under which the Church’s move towards liberalism on borders, gender and sexuality would be reversed, may therefore be one element of a Christian revival, even its driving force.

After Robinson spoke on Whitehall, there was time for one last carol. Attendees held plastic candles with electric lights aloft and began to sing “Silent Night” amid a reverent quiet. For those in attendance, though vastly smaller in number than previous Unite the Kingdom rallies, this was the start of an epochal shift. Next year, Robinson said, he would host the same event again and, he claimed, he would pack out Trafalgar Square. Then the Church of England would really have something to worry about.

Nonetheless, Robinson is welcome in church this Christmas. Everyone is welcome in church. If your pronouns are we/they; if you have spent time in prison; if your political views are to the right of Attila the Hun; if you love the EU or hate it; if you think Hamas are misunderstood; if you think the country is being invaded by immigrants. Even if you’re a Liberal Democrat — all are welcome.

The whole point of coming to church is that you sit alongside people you may not like, who hold very different, even (to you) repulsive political views. If Tommy Robinson were to come to church, he would have to sit with people of different colors and languages, and immigrants. He might even have to sit with Muslims who are there out of friendship with their Christian neighbors. The church is not a club for the right-minded, it has no ethnic base, it is not much interested in your nationality. We all sit under the judgment of God. “Outsiders welcome” is the strapline of the Church’s Christmas poster campaign.

I don’t expect the same capaciousness will be on offer at Tommy’s carol service this weekend. Advertised thus: “This event marks the beginning of a new Christian revival in the UK — a moment to reclaim and celebrate our heritage, culture and Christian identity.” It also marks Robinson’s own Christian revival — he seems to have converted during his most recent stint inside. Back in May, he emerged from HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, wearing an ostentatiously large cross over his T-shirt. He isn’t the first to have weaponized Christian symbols against others. There is a long and shameful history of Christian “culture” and “identity” being used as code for white or Western — which is all a bit ironic, really, given where Christianity came from. These days, the most common Anglican is a black woman, living somewhere like Nigeria. Without immigration, many churches in England would have closed. My congregation used to jokingly call my last church a Guinness church — predominantly black, with a little white leadership on top.

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Yet attitudes towards immigration are complicated. A survey by Theos found that Christians in the UK are generally a little more hostile to immigration than the population as a whole. But — and this is the interesting bit — the results show something very different when disaggregated for actual church attendance. Practicing Christians are actually more welcoming towards migrants than the population as a whole, whereas cultural Christians — the sort who tick the religious box on a census form but don’t darken the door of the church (or only at Christmas) — are more hostile to immigration. For many of these people, the important part of being Christian is not the Trinity, or the forgiveness of sins, or “love your neighbor”. To them, being Christian is a way of referencing their own ethnic heritage without mentioning race. I generally want to resist the distinction between real Christians and Christians in name only, but when it comes to those who want to set some spurious thing called Christian identity against the teachings of the church, I am prepared to make an exception.

Unfortunately, the way we have come to celebrate Christmas — all that generic happy holidays nonsense — has made it easier for those who despise multiculturalism to claim that we have misplaced the core message of Christmas. The Tommy Robinson carol service has adopted the message of “putting Christ back into Christmas”. Do me a favor, “O Come, All Ye Faithful” it is not. Indeed, what carols could they possibly be singing?

Christmas offers little comfort to the Christian nationalist. The only references to the nation that I can find in Christmas carols have the word in the plural. “Joyful all ye nations rise”, or “Unto us a boy is born! King of all creation, Come into a world forlorn, The Lord of every nation”. At a huge stretch the first line of “God rest you merry gentlemen” could be read as some sort of reference to traditional and patriarchal British identity, but this is clearly undercut by the final verse: “Now to the Lord sing praises, All you within this place, And with true love and brotherhood, Each other now embrace, This holy tide of Christmas, All other doth efface.” Think about this last line. All other what are effaced? All other differences, of course. But that is precisely the message Robinson despises.

Frankly, I can’t think of a single carol the people designing this ridiculous service could use that doesn’t undermine their thuggish anti-immigrant intent. The irony meter would go into meltdown if they sang “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” with those wonderful final words: “O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing.”

Christmas also offers an unlikely cast for a British Christian nationalist. A Jewish boy is born to Jewish parents in the Middle East. Wise men come “from the East”, probably from Iran. To escape Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents”, Joseph and Mary with their child travel to seek asylum in Egypt. It is worth pointing out the obvious: all these people would look a lot more like the Syrian refugee than they would Tommy Robinson and his angry gym-bunny friends.

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There is a key difference between the narrow Tommy Robinson Christian nationalist and Christians who love their country and their faith — which includes me. For the former the cross is a kind of club badge, an exclusive membership organization for people who look and sound and think like them, whereas for the latter, it is a message of hope and salvation offered to all. That’s why Robinson-style Christianity is not the same as, for instance, a large number of Christians who support Reform. Last weekend, a Guardian article explored the rise of the religious Right in UK politics and mentioned Tommy Robinson in the same piece as Reform MP Danny Kruger and Farage adviser James Orr. You may not like the politics of the latter two, but they are completely different from Tommy Robinson, and it is pretty shameful to elide those differences. Kruger and Orr are both serious, thoughtful Christians who have no truck with the kind of exclusive and frankly hateful yobbishness of Robinson and his cronies.

The Church’s new poster campaign was devised specifically to push back against Robinson’s carols and rightly emphasizes the inclusivity of Christmas: faith shouldn’t be exploited for political ends. I agree. But a poster campaign doesn’t go nearly far enough. If he came into my church, I would deny him holy communion. Yes, it’s a pretty extreme measure, but the sacraments can be refused for grave sin — which in my view includes Robinson’s style of race-baiting.

At Christmas, our churches resound with angels singing “Fear not”. In contrast, Robinson spreads fear. That is his political currency. But that is not the Christian message. And we will sing that in my church with gusto: “O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing.”

When one pictures a 14-year-old teenage girl being ridiculed for her very ordinary Anglican faith, one might imagine her leaving her faith, or at the very least, not acknowledging it publicly. But the events of that horrible spring forged my daughter into a stronger Christian than she was before. Instead of shrinking away from Christianity, she wore a crucifix necklace to school. Instead of hiding, as the principal suggested, in a locked classroom, she remained out and about with the other kids during lunch; instead of meekly shrinking from discussions, she told those who were targeting her that she forgave them. It was, strangely, a time of joy for her, a time to discover that she really did believe in the things she professed to believe in and that her Sunday rituals weren’t empty. She felt loved and strong and free. There is something in the Christian that makes her bold. If you know, you know, as the kids say.

The results of her refusal to back down were surprising. First of all, she discovered who her real friends were (African and Eastern European immigrants, it turned out: kids who are also Christians, and who have some familiarity with persecution). The second surprising thing was how many of her bullies slowly became her friends again. This didn’t happen en masse. One girl reached out through text to say sorry. Then a few weeks later, another did. Some started coming to church with my daughter. Some became Christians themselves. That was four years ago; my daughter is now a senior and is thriving. She’s on the varsity volleyball team, has a part-time job as a lifeguard, and spent her summer volunteering at our Anglican church. She wears Christian clothing to school. “Faith Over Fear,” says one of her hoodies. “The Lord is on my side. What can man do to me?” It’s a verse from one of the Psalms of David. It might elicit the occasional eyeroll from one of her classmates, but the verse disarms their contempt even as they express it.

It was clear that attitudes towards Christianity were changing; one could see this shift happening both in pop culture and among the high school teens themselves. This past summer the Amazon Prime show The Chosen, which chronicles the life of Jesus, moved from niche Christian to top 10 most watched. Justin Bieber released his album Swag, which ends with a cover of an Eighties praise and worship song, familiar to anyone who attended church camp in the last 40 years, “Lord I Lift Your Name on High”. (Bieber and his wife Hailey are born again Christians. He is headlining Coachella this year and has more Instagram followers than Taylor Swift, even though his life is both quiet and private.) Last year religious jewelry made a huge comeback; crucifixes and saint pendants were at every teen girl store.

And so I was not surprised that one evening just a few weeks ago, a group of my daughter’s teenage friends, both guys and girls, came to my house for late night snacks with some questions about Christianity. Only one of them is Christian; the others were simply curious. “How do you know that Christianity is true?” they asked. “Why is it hard to believe in God?” They wanted answers. The wishy-washy values they’d been raised with, those of subjective feelings, validating speech, and “my truth”, they were now rejecting. There is a certain kind of teen for whom the cultural narrative of victimhood now seems brackish and empty, both self-serving and anxiety producing. They want to be courageous, and they see that the self-affirming “truths” of some of their classmates aren’t a way to be brave, but rather a way to control how others respond to them.

I am not a theologian, but I do know more than the average person about these things. So it was with great pleasure that I sat with the teens and explained what I could. Christianity is a wrestle, I told them. And that is what the believer does, struggles with her inner proclivity to self-centeredness. One wrestles against pride, against envy, against self-satisfaction. One wrestles most of all with a truth that is seen through a glass dimly. The work of the Christian isn’t to know with certainty what truth is, but to continually chip away at what is untrue. Much of the time, “my truth” is a mask for “my self-delusion” because for the Christian, inwardness begins not with the acknowledgment of one’s inner goodness, but of one’s inner sinfulness. You deceive yourself, the Christian must acknowledge. You are not who you think you are. In fact, you are much, much worse. For teenagers who have been raised on words affirming their inner perfection, this is bracing stuff.

Then came the murder of Charlie Kirk. Whether they loved or hated him, all teens knew who he was and what he stood for. He resonated with so many young people because he said out loud things that have been anathema to think about, let alone speak about, especially on university campuses. His appeal is — was — his courage to hold fast to beliefs rooted in the Christian scriptures. Even if one didn’t entirely adhere to his interpretation of the Bible, it was genuinely new for teens to see a young man root his values in an ancient authority rather than the tyranny of personal feelings. For the young student who has been raised within the totalitarian politics of enforced empathy, this is immensely appealing. But it is also in its own way something to treat cautiously. The teens in my kitchen were looking for clear answers, but clear answers can often tempt one into self-righteousness.

To many of their questions, I had disappointing answers. “Who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?” was one of these. My answer was firm: “It’s not up to us to judge, and we don’t get to know.” For the teens, this was a difficult answer, not because they were hoping to be able to condemn people, but because they are largely unacquainted with uncertainty and humility in the face of mystery. This may be just a feature of youth in general. The world is big, wicked, frightening and beautiful. As the world’s murkiness makes itself known, it’s tempting to want to cling to clarity and certainty. But to have an attraction to moral answers that are very rigid is also, of course, a feature of the culture in which they’ve been raised, one that has been divided into two groups: villains and victims. As our conversation went on, it became evident that none of these teens understood the first thing about history, about historical context, or about how our culture came to have the moral judgments that we do (it’s because of Christianity, kids).

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The teens have, through the cultural ether, picked up the idea that Christianity offers harsh judgments of others. What they have failed to grasp is that Christianity offers harsh judgments of oneself. The youth has imbibed the myth of progress which places them at the end of history. They look at the past with breathtaking judgmentalism while being blind to the formations of their judgments. Trained only in the ethic of debunking their civilization’s merits, they seem to have no sense of the complex movements of human culture, nor, more importantly, of their own inward inclination toward moral absolutism. To make matters worse, it is precisely one’s inward state that our therapeutic culture has valorized as the highest ethical good that needs to be not only accepted but admired by others. To tell teenagers that Christianity says the opposite, that your inner state is sinful, selfish, corrupt, and deceitful, is the most radical thing they’ve ever heard.

Many are ready for radical. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there has been a flood of social media posts about Christianity. Many people are announcing that they are suddenly going to church. “Ive never been a believer” (sic), writes one, “I actually didn’t think God was real, watching Charlie be assassinated for his beliefs makes me think im (sic) wrong and he was right. I am now ready to learn about God. Charlie did that.” Here’s another: “Charlie Kirk’s death made me pick up a Bible for the first time in my life and I found a truth I didn’t know I was searching for.” And another: “I used to be a ‘closet’ Christian because I’m not one for the backlash. But babyyy when I say a fire is lit.” There are thousands of these.

The satirical Christian news outlet, The Babylon Bee (“fake news you can trust”), ran a headline in the hours following Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “Satan: ‘I’ve made a huge mistake’,” it reads. The photograph shows the packed stadium filled with people worshiping God: “‘Well’,” says Satan, “‘this isn’t going how I planned at all.’” Indeed. We are now watching something unfold in real time, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. We are discovering that we do not live in an era in which God is irrelevant, but instead that a religion based on resurrection has some capacity to come back from the dead.

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It’s estimated that at least 20 million people streamed Charlie Kirk’s memorial. I was one of them. By far the most moving moment of the event was when Erika Kirk announced that she forgave the young man who murdered her husband because it was what Christ did on the cross. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love.” There is a power in forgiveness. There is a power in speaking of forgiveness. Donald Trump’s calls for retribution are clownish and vulgar in comparison.

And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know. But we cannot ignore that Christianity is strong. And we also cannot ignore the power of loving one’s enemy. The Christian should condemn in the harshest terms any political maneuver that seeks to dehumanize and hate one’s political opponent, even if one feels that they are spreading sickness and nihilism. For it is the hate within one’s soul that Christ’s love first needs to conquer. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”

Christianity no longer represents something oppressive or intolerant to youth, and Christians need to be careful that, backed by administrative power, it doesn’t become this. The United States should not become a theocracy. Christian strength is not filled with resentment, condemnation or blame, but with a vitality that is born of courage and humility. Christianity beckons towards something that is larger than one’s own inner truth or one’s own inner feelings; it makes one’s inner self larger, braver, freer, and stronger as they turn towards it. It takes more strength to forgive than to blame.

Skepticism in China about Christianity predates Communism by quite some way. When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1510) began to visit in the late 16th century, they found that even those elites who were sympathetic to their faith required a great deal of persuasion before entering the fold — God appeared to ask too much while offering too little and so many of the aspects of Christianity they would have to adopt seemed to clash with traditional Chinese life. Doing away with concubines seemed self-defeating, since they might furnish a man with an heir. Removing ancestor tablets from the home meant losing the means of paying filial respect. The crucifixion of Jesus struck many as shocking rather than heroic: corporal punishment was reserved for the very lowest in society.

Still, Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

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Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organizations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organizations were banned in favor of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out.

Even then, given the CCP’s interest in managing people who possess the ability to influence whole communities in China, the ideological soundness of church leaders has never been taken for granted. Education at seminaries is tightly managed, with a strong focus on patriotism. Qualified clergy face constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty, to which some respond by emphasizing Christianity’s proletarian credentials: Jesus was a carpenter, who chose fishermen as his early disciples and had harsh words for merchants and the wealthy.

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organizations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicization”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

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The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicization” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership program. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalization in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularization theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanization. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

The letter — an actual document from the ancient world that survives to this day — reveals a man capable of deep feeling. The fact that Hilarion could be so flippant about discarding an unwanted newborn, all the same, may seem shocking to us today, but it reveals much about the pre-Christian pagan culture that formed him. The pagan Greeks and Romans had no trouble dehumanizing newborns, and they thought nothing of making choices about which babies should live and which die, based upon their own needs and desires.

Fast-forward two millennia, and we come face-to-face with an ascendant worldview not all that different from the one that guided Hilarion. It, too, carelessly wields the power of life and death over children depending on parents’ desires. Only, it does this with much greater sophistication and at a potentially industrial scale: through reproductive technologies that allow would-be parents to choose their preferred embryo based on intelligence and other characteristics. All from the comfort and familiarity of an app.

Swipe right, and your high-IQ embryo is allowed to become a human being; swipe left, and the less intelligent or otherwise less desirable child is discarded. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a high-tech reversion to Hilarion’s and Alis’s pagan mindset. The only question is whether our civilization can muster the resources to resist it, as the Church stamped out the original.

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By Tom Rowsell

As the historian Nadya Williams has shown, Greece and Rome offer proof that the parental quest for quality control over offspring is anything but new. Indeed, the popular stories of the era vigorously affirmed such practices. From Thetis dipping Achilles into the river Styx to render him invulnerable, to Hera throwing her newborn baby, Hephaestus, off Mount Olympus because he was so ugly and deformed — ancient pagans were taught by their culture to pursue biological optimization. In the realm of philosophy, thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca lent moral support to parents’ refusal to raise newborns with disabilities.

These mythic and philosophical teachings informed concrete social practices. The Spartans discarded sickly babies unlikely to grow into strong warriors. Roman fathers regularly invoked the right of paterfamilias to decide whether or not to welcome a newborn child into the family.

Yet this would all change as the ancient world was transfigured by Christianity, a faith which insisted that these little children, as the least among us, bore the holy face of Christ in a special way. The Didache, an ancient Christian catechism dating probably to the late first century, reveals a faith that not only rejected abortion and infanticide (thought to be related), but also welcomed discarded children into early Christian homes. Early Church fathers like Tertullian (late second century) and Lactantius (early third century) were among those who held up these countercultural practices as evidence of the superiority of Christian culture over the pagan.

Eventually, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, pagan reproductive practices such as infant exposure were formally outlawed, and the Church established monasteries and orphanages to care for unwanted newborns.

Today, however, amid the waning of Christian influence in the West, a neopagan revival has filled the void, particularly in medicine. The field increasingly shrugs off a Christian anthropology and thus no longer has the resources to explain why all human beings are equal in dignity. In order to count (morally and legally), human beings now need to have certain traits: autonomy and independence, brain development, and the like. Human beings don’t share these traits in equal measure, and a good number lack them altogether. Do such people deserve the right to exist? Are their lives worthy of life? 

The champions of the new technologies and their media and academic allies answer: no.

As with the pagans, the reproductive practices of the consumerist neopagan West are focused not on welcoming children unconditionally as a gift from God — but on optimization and quality control based on the customer’s desires for a product purchased like any other in a marketplace. Indeed, just as people of Hilarion’s day could choose to keep or discard their human offspring based on whether they wanted a boy or a girl, for many years a customer has been able to use in-vitro fertilization to create a certain number of embryos and implant only XY or XX embryos, while “casting out” the rest.

But aren’t there important moral differences between an embryo being discarded as medical waste and the newborn daughter of Alis being discarded as unsuitable for the family? The latter was very clearly one of us. But how can something with only eight cells be one of us?

The short answer to this somewhat complex (though definitely answerable) question is that all of us were once an embryo. A new member of the species Homo sapiens comes into existence after fertilization. It is true that our neopagan, autonomy-obsessed, quality-control-addicted culture has been formed in ways that make it difficult to see human embryos as one of us. But we should not find that surprising, especially given how difficult it was for ancient pagan cultures to see newborns as one of them.

Add capitalist profit-seeking to such practices, and the picture becomes even grimmer. Firms like Orchid and Nucleus have developed new technologies they claim can help customers be even more choosy about which of their children will be welcomed into a family and which children will be cast out. Nucleus allows customers to accept or reject these least of our brethren based not only on height, hair color, and eye color — but also intelligence and the likelihood of the child developing certain mental illnesses.

Orchid CEO Noor Siddiqui, meanwhile, has been quite outspoken about the kind of cultural changes her company heralds. In a recent video she shared on X, she claims that “sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies. It is going to be insane not to screen for these things.” A New York Times article covering the rise of these designer-baby companies suggested that by “these things,” Siddiqui “presumably refers to conditions like obesity and autism, both of which Orchid says it can screen for.”

It is interesting that she foregrounds the radical disconnect between sex and procreation — a separation the Catholic Church has lamented since the advent of the Pill — as inherent to the vision of reproduction undergirding her company’s rise. Second-century pagans may well have said something similar: “Sex is for fun. Infant screening is for babies. Those Christians who don’t screen their infants are insane.”

In an interview with Siddiqui, Times columnist Ross Douthat tried to make the case for a Catholic vision of procreation. He read aloud a beautiful poem about the unchosen gift of children born of sexual union, regardless of the quality and consumer value. Reading the poem left Douthat visibly choked up, but Siddiqui responded with a blank look on her face: “What do you mean?” She went on to explain that his view — the poem’s view, the Catholic view — has already been left in the dust. Our culture has already severed the tie between sex and procreation. What she and her company are proposing is simply the next logical step. 

She’s right.

I suspect that Siddiqui and her colleagues live out many praiseworthy virtues, as Hilarion did. I have little doubt that they were originally motivated by a desire to help others and reduce suffering. But also like Hilarion, their souls have been shaped by a pagan culture that makes it impossible for them to see that they are recklessly discarding those we should be valuing and caring for the most. They aren’t moral monsters — though they are promoting, on a massive scale, morally monstrous practices.

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And these practices are likely going to get worse before they get better. Soon we will be able to coax virtually any somatic cell to become an egg or sperm cell, with the result that single rounds of IVF will produce, not 15 embryos, but 15,000 of them. And assuming companies like Orchid and Nucleus will be around, they will undoubtedly use sophisticated AI technologies to screen this much larger set, pick the desirable one or two, and discard the rest. 

At first, it will no doubt be the wealthy who avail themselves of the opportunity, given the high expense. Our society’s already wide class-based inequalities will be compounded by the biological advantages accruing to the children born on the upper social rungs. Class (defined by one’s place in the social production process) will be reinforced by new conditions of biological caste, giving rise to a new biopolitics: having a child with a disability or a less-than-sculpted body will consign people to the lower castes. Later on, as these practices become cheaper and more widely available, a sort of soft compulsion will likely bear down on all parents to optimize their kids (health insurers might decline to cover claims associated with non-optimized children). Having children the old-fashioned way will be the mark of a few “insane” religious fanatics — freaks and outcasts. 

Which is exactly how Christians were viewed by mainstream pagan society in the faith’s early days. Even so, a child-centered, Christian understanding of procreation defeated and replaced the ancient pagan culture’s understanding of reproduction. Could it happen again in our time? Perhaps the excesses coming into view will cause enough ordinary people to freak out, demand that politicians press the pause button, and look around for alternatives. 

Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, is on the move again, especially among pockets of the young in the United States and Europe. One of the hallmarks of the ancient Christians was their resistance to pagan reproductive practices. Dare we hope that one of the hallmarks of the 21st-century Christian revival will also be resistance to the neopaganism of the Siddiquis of the world? It may be the only force that can stave off dystopia.

The year after Columba died on Iona, another mission to convert the British began, this one landing in Kent. This was the official mission. Initiated by the Pope, it was fronted by a Roman priest called Augustine who would become known as the “apostle to the English.” He was lucky. The local Kentish king was married to a Frankish Christian woman, so the new faith was not unknown. Things went so well for Augustine’s mission that he remained in Kent and set up his headquarters there. This is why the current leader of 100 million Anglicans, all over the world, takes his title from the small town of Canterbury.

If things proceed as planned (and they probably won’t) there could be a new Archbishop on the throne of Augustine by the autumn. It has taken so long because the Diocese of Canterbury couldn’t get its act together to work through the thicket of electoral rules that govern the election of three members of the Canterbury Diocese to the Crown Nominations Committee (CNC), the appointing body for the next archbishop. They had three botched elections before they finally got it right. It took the Roman Catholics 17 days from the death of Pope Francis to the election of Pope Leo. That election transfixed the world with its pomp, glamour and excitement. Our process will be done in committees, and though certainly more inclusive, will be as dreary and procedural as taking out a mortgage. And it is being run by the former boss of MI5, so don’t expect any interesting leaks. Though this much he has said: we must avoid a short list “all of whom are white, Oxbridge, male and come from the southeast of England.”

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The problem in finding a suitable person is this: it has become an impossible job. Not just difficult, but impossible. After all, the Archbishop has to be in more than one place at the same time — as both head of the Church of England and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion — and also because it necessitates the ability to say totally opposite things to the very different and warring tribes of the church. It is a job where much is expected, but with very little power to achieve it. The Church of England is mired in layers of deadening bureaucracy. Many clergy feel unloved and overworked. Morale is low. A report on the issue of trust within the Church has recently been canned because to investigate it might “do more harm than good”, the Bishop of Peterborough explained recently.

Which is why no one wants the job. To be the Archbishop of Canterbury is to put yourself into the meat grinder. You are asked to speak Christian truths to a nation that largely couldn’t care less what you say, unless you say something silly or too political. Then the press will chew you up. You are asked to take royal funerals and make speeches in the House of Lords, yet also to have the common touch, appealing to everyone. “All things to all people,” as Saint Paul described it.

No wonder anyone with the slightest shred of self-preservation would run a mile from the job — leaving only a bunch of deeply unexciting candidates. Many would love to see the current Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, as Archbishop. Born in Isfahan, her father was the first ethnic Persian to be Bishop of Iran since the 7th century. In 1980, her brother was murdered by Iranian government agents. She is Church of England through and through, but with a global perspective. Her maiden speech was described as “a powerful and very personal debut from Chelmsford that had several pees wiping away tears and saying it was the finest they had heard.” This is exactly what the Church needs. But perhaps she may not have the Teflon skin required to survive the nastiness of the Church and the press. Bishop Guli took time off work to bring up her children, and she is not one of those hard-bitten career clerics who would do anything for the top job, even to the detriment of their families. 

One way of proceeding would be to split the job in two, with Canterbury doing England and another Archbishop looking after the rest of the world. Pretty much everyone agrees this would be a good idea. But separating these Siamese twins will take time, perhaps years. And having someone in to steady the ship whilst the necessary surgery is performed is not a bad idea. And there is probably no better candidate here than the current Bishop of London, Sarah Mullaly. She is 63, so couldn’t do it for ages. As a former chief nursing officer, she has an interesting hinterland. But who knows if she would be prepared to do it.

I am not singling out two women for ideological reasons. The reality is just that when it comes to men, the cupboard is bare. The Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, would have been great, but he has cleverly dodged the bullet by getting himself on the CNC appointing committee, and so is ineligible. There are some Welby continuity candidates out there, like Martyn Snow, the evangelical Bishop of Leicester, who is the one person who looks like he wants it. But the Welby era proved to be so disastrous that it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to risk a repeat of that. Safeguarding issues — real or imagined — are now kryptonite to any potential candidate, and it’s hard to think of many senior bishops for whom this is not a problem, however unfair that might be.

The Church of England is at a fork in the road. Those who see the long arc of history as pointing inevitably towards a more secular society predict only more decline. But the evidence of history suggests that the Church often goes through periods of greater and lesser popularity. And we need someone who doesn’t panic about the challenge of secularity. A steady faithful presence in Lambeth Palace, someone who isn’t constantly firing off nervous new initiatives, redirecting the church’s resources to glitzy new evangelistic movements, is essential. We have had enough of breathlessly conceived boom-and-bust initiatives. We need the calm of someone who has spent proper time with the sea and the sky, with the kind of demeanour that has been formatted by eternity, rather than the frenetic pace of meetings at Lambeth Palace. When they go fast, he or she must go slow.  

Back on Iona, with a group of pilgrims from my church in London, we wander the island and feel our body clocks adjusting to a different rhythm. And here amid the rocks and spray another thought comes to mind. What if we don’t want another company man, but someone from the edge of things? More Columba than Augustine. Columba’s Gaelic tradition was less hierarchical, more decentralized. In the end, this gentler more contemplative tradition lost out at the Synod of Whitby, 664 AD, where on-the-make career clerics like Saint Wilfred persuaded the wider church to follow Augustine’s European centralized Christianity rather than Columba’s Irish version. 

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However tricky it looks to find the right candidate from amongst the present house of Bishops, there are a great many faithful and compelling clerics out there who would be a breath of fresh air. Pope Urban V wasn’t a bishop when he was elected Pope. Pope Gregory X wasn’t even a priest. Could the Church of England summon the courage to do something similar, to reach beyond the obvious and find someone sitting in a croft on the Farne Islands, praying and watching the birdlife? Someone whose soul has not been deadened by committees and spreadsheets. Or even somewhere in Africa or South America, where the Church is bursting with life? The super spy chair of the CNC is right: no more male, pale, establishment and stale.

Oh, I know, it’s a fantasy. Not least because the next Archbishop of Canterbury must hold a British passport in order to sit in the House of Lords. Institutional decluttering is essential but unimaginable. But we can dream. What we really need in an Archbishop is someone who will pray for his or her clergy and stop flying around the world and sitting in meetings. Perhaps they could even abolish that terrible old talking shop, General Synod, about to meet up in York. The Church is at its worst when it tries to act like it’s important.

On the ground, many churches are flourishing despite the fact that Augustine’s throne feels as cursed at the Chelsea number nine shirt. But there’s a huge incentive to find a steady leader while momentum in the Church is hot. In the UK, Bible sales have grown from 2.7 million in 2019 to 5 million in 2024, and especially among the young. Something is stirring. The secular age may be bottoming out. And we need someone to surf this new mood. What we are looking for is another — doubtless very different — St Columba.

A mysterious force in Christian eschatology, the katechon should not be treated as something historical that can be pinned down, identified and controlled. Literally “the one who restrains”, it comes from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, in which he alludes to the fact that the community knows “what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes”. A force will hold back the rise of the Antichrist before the return of Christ and the final judgment. But the restraining is only temporary, as “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed”.

The katechon has fascinated theologians and political thinkers for centuries. This mysterious figure or power has been variously interpreted across history, often reflecting the anxieties and hopes of different epochs. Is it a single person? A government? An institution? A spiritual power acting through history? Is the battle it fights one of politics or of faith? The early Christian writer Tertullian identified the katechon with the Roman Empire, viewing its imperial authority as a bulwark against chaos and the rise of the Antichrist. Centuries later, Martin Luther suggested that it might be the institutional Church itself, paradoxically preserving social order even as he criticized its corruption. But the Catholic Church ended up condemning the attempts to identify the restrainer with a political structure.

In more recent thought, the katechon is often understood less as a concrete political institution and more as a metaphysical or cultural principle, a force that resists dissolution, chaos, and the meaninglessness of a secularizing world. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev interpreted the katechon as Christian culture itself, while the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade saw the katechon in traditional structures of sacred time and myth, which he believed held back the modern world’s drift into historical relativism and existential despair.

Now Thiel is taking up the mantle. The German-born Silicon Valley-based tech entrepreneur, who was raised Evangelical but describes his religious views as “somewhat heterodox”, explored these questions in four private lectures delivered so far in Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin. The talks were modeled on the four sermons on the Antichrist that John Henry Newman gave in the 1830s, before he converted to Catholicism. The event was strictly invitation-only and guests were asked not to speak publicly about what was said — though Thiel has occasionally alluded to the themes in interviews. He recently discussed some of his intuitions with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

Thiel’s fascination with the katechon places him in dialogue with Carl Schmitt. For the German jurist and political theorist, it could and must be identified in history. In this way, Schmitt “immanentized” the katechon — believing it had to take concrete form. His fear of the lawlessness and disorder foretold by scripture led him to a chilling conclusion: that the Nazi regime, for all its evils, might have been a bulwark against something even worse. The Third Reich, in his eyes, held back even greater threats of chaos, such as Bolshevism or the collapse of European order. He believed that the regime embodied a decisive political authority capable of resisting the disintegration of state sovereignty and the rise of a borderless, technocratic liberalism.

Thiel is attuned to this paradox. For him, the katechon and the Antichrist are not absolute opposites. The restrainer, he suggests, is always at risk of becoming what it seeks to hold back. When I ask him about this over Zoom, he says that “the katechon is purely defensive and hence somehow inadequate” to fit with the various power structures that in history claimed to have a katechontic role. He points to how Christian forces like the Holy Roman Empire saw themselves as more than just passive restraining forces, but rather as active interpreters of a salvific vision. Once it has exhausted its historical role, the protective force may mutate into something else entirely. After all, the Roman Empire was, at different times, both the persecutor and the defender of Christians. Nero, one of the great persecutors of Christians, was a Roman emperor just like Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion. Thiel’s mentor, René Girard, saw this ambiguity clearly: “Christ and Antichrist are intermingled and concomitant until apocalypsis — the moment of revelation and decision — is reached.”

This tension runs through Thiel’s worldview. In our conversation, he traced the role of the katechon in 20th-century politics. “After 1948, Carl Schmitt struggled to identify a katechon in history,” Thiel told me. To his mind, the forces keeping away communism and secular liberalism were elusive. “My placeholder answer from 1949–1989 is anti-communism, which united the Reagan coalition of priests, generals, and millionaires against the one-world ideology of communism,” Thiel continued. But after the Cold War ended, they had to make a choice: “pack up and go home, or push George Bush Sr.’s ‘New World Order’: anti-Communism in a world with no more Communists.” The anti-communist coalition had to become something new.

The power that emerged to restrain evil thus became a creative power, a temptation experienced by many forces once regarded as preventers of evil. Anti-communist forces took different paths after the Cold War. Liberal internationalists and a segment of the Reaganites have refounded the globalist project, while Christian Democracy has hollowed out from within. “Christian democracy morphed into something neither Christian nor democratic,” says Thiel. “When Angela Merkel rose to power in 2005, the CDU became like KFC — they stopped saying the full name, just the acronym. With the name change, the Christian Democrats lost their souls.” What had for a time appeared to be a katechon ultimately revealed itself to be its opposite.

And what about the Antichrist? Rarely presented as an openly devilish figure bent on destruction, the Antichrist appears as a compelling unifying presence. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, in his Story of Antichrist, imagined him as a magnetic 33-year-old man with a PhD in theology and a genuine concern for the environment. His goal was not to destroy Christianity, but to domesticate the churches and unify them under his guidance and his vision of good governance. Similarly in Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Lord of the World, world leader Julian Felsenburgh is a charismatic figure who unites the globe under a tolerant version of socialism, promoting peace and safety for everyone — except rebellious Catholics. After the First World War, Pope Benedict XV warned against the “advent of a universal republic” in which “there is no longer any distinction of nationality”. The rise of a socialist international republic, he said, “would lead to terrible social convulsions”.

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While the international project of communism is the most obvious example, Thiel detects this pattern in many historical phenomena. The spread of the Islamic Caliphate in Europe — from the Battle of Tours in 732 to the Siege of Vienna in 1683 — was, in his view, another attempt to impose a universal government. Today’s equivalent is what he calls “woke socialism”, or what post-liberal theorists would simply call “liberalism”. In this reading, the same structures of power that once restrained evil now serve as its stewards.

“You could argue that the US deep state and intelligence apparatus historically played a katechontic role,” Thiel explained. “Their secrecy allowed them to get away with all sorts of morally dubious activities in the name of stopping Communism or Islamic terrorism. But their secrecy also obscured their decay into their opposite. The USAID disclosures revealed just how far down that path they had slid,” Thiel went on, referring to how the foreign aid machine has been captured by woke ideology, supporting almost-parody programmes like drag shows for Venezuelan migrants in Ecuador, sex-change surgeries in Guatemala, or training Sri Lankan journalists to avoid “binary-gendered language”.

The elephant in this apocalyptic room is Donald Trump. No doubt his critics see him as an Antichrist of sorts, but in Thiel’s scheme, his role is open to interpretation. Is he a katechon? A katechon that may become the Antichrist? An unnecessary immanentisation? None of the above? Thiel wouldn’t say. But the growing realization of how deeply woke-thinking has penetrated the administrative state has only increased Thiel’s confidence in Trump. He supported the President way before it was acceptable in tech circles, and many Silicon Valley converts to Trumpism now acknowledge he was ahead of his time. Plus, he’s a mentor to Vice President J.D. Vance, who began his path toward Catholicism after hearing Thiel give a speech at Yale. Trump doesn’t sound like a great candidate to turn out as the Antichrist.

The view that Trump is a katechontic figure is widespread on the religious Right. Conservative writer Rod Dreher has said he sees Trump as a katechon, even while sharply criticizing aspects of his agenda. Interpreting Trump as a restraining force against evil allows for acknowledgment of his historical necessity — without excusing his flaws. Following this logic, some Evangelicals argue that Trump’s character must be judged against the backdrop of the end times.

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“Before the US election, I told Elon Musk that I would leave the country in the case of a Trump defeat,” Thiel told me. “He replied, ‘There’s nowhere to go.’ He believed the US would export woke socialism across the globe.” And not just across the globe. The ideology unleashed in these apocalyptic times, Thiel warns, has interplanetary reach. “For me, 2024 will be remembered as the year Elon gave up on Mars — not as a technological project but as a political project — because he realized that this threat would follow him into outer space if he didn’t address it here on Earth.”

Whatever role Trump plays — katechon or Antichrist or both — Thiel’s main concern is in revitalizing apocalyptic thinking, something late modernity has largely rejected. But not entirely. “I think many people, including within the Catholic world, are thinking in apocalyptic terms, but admitting it remains taboo,” he said, explaining his almost mystical fascination with Benedict XVI.

“I believe Benedict XVI saw our time that way. There was an official teaching stating that the Church, confronted with rampant secularization, would become smaller and purer. But then there was the secret belief — that we are witnessing signs of the end times. In my view, one reason he wouldn’t openly discuss it is that doing so would be accelerationist, hastening the arrival of the eschaton. My rebuttal to Benedict would be that things could not possibly have accelerated faster down that path than they did.”

Thiel is battling for the return of apocalyptic thinking, a profound shift in how we understand history, power, and the limits of human agency. Modernity, with its faith in inevitable progress and institutional stability, long sought to exile the apocalyptic imagination, viewing it as irrational and disruptive. But in the age marked by technological acceleration and looming existential threats, the end-times narrative has regained its grip on the political imagination. For Thiel, politics and theology are ultimately the same thing — each grounded in a vision of ultimate salvation or catastrophe. The resurgence of the apocalyptic reveals not just a fear of collapse but a hunger for meaning, a search for the forces that restrain or unleash history’s final dramas. In this light, political discourse is no longer just about policy or governance; it is once again about destiny.

And yet US Vice President JD Vance ascribes his adult conversion to Catholicism partly to the influence of Girard, via his campaign funder, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The latter encountered Girard at Stanford and champions him to aspiring entrepreneurs. Now, 10 years after his death, Girard is everywhere — profiled in the Financial Times, analyzed on politics podcasts, presented in YouTube lecture series by men in tailored suits.

Would Girard be happy about this? Given his warnings about scapegoating, it’s hard to imagine him celebrating his influence upon a vice president who campaigned by accusing immigrants of eating pets. And he’d probably be greatly puzzled by the promotion of his ideas as a key to business success. What strikes me is how the popular versions of Girard leave out his most powerful idea — the one most humbling to our pride. He has been popularized as a propounder of “grand, gruesome theories” about the secret savagery behind civilization. But I see him, before this, as a theorist of identity. This element in his thought seems to have been played down by his new, high-status audience.

Girard’s name for his body of thought is “Mimetic Theory”. It is founded on a single idea: mimetic desire. This is the hypothesis that our desires, beyond our basic needs, are always mediated by a mimetic model: somebody who guides us on what to desire, and what not to. Everyone knows that online shoppers look to influencers to decide which brands to buy. But Girard shows the same dynamic at work in the sophisticated plots of great theatre and novels, not to mention the Bible. Somehow, through some unexpected twists, this hypothesis leads Girard to a theory of human culture and violence.

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Some find Mimetic Theory to be a revelation, explaining everything from social media to the US-China trade war. Others are dubious. But both sides overlook a fundamental philosophical question. Why would our desires be mediated by a model? Why should we need somebody else to show us what to want?

Girard gave a direct answer to this question, one that has been largely ignored. Once we have solved the problem of satisfying our basic needs, we begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: “I have become an enigma to myself.” Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard’s confronting idea is that this is a lie — he calls it the “Romantic lie”. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.

Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.

His most profound and disturbing thought is that we copy not just our desires but our whole identity from others. His preferred term for identity was “being”, as it was for Sartre. Thus, he said: “absolute being — I don’t have in me. I don’t feel it. I feel my emptiness. But the other always seems to have more of it than I have.” As far as I’ve seen, this idea has not made it to Silicon Valley, nor the podcasts, nor YouTube, nor the White House.

Consider Thiel. He draws heavily on Mimetic Theory in a self-help book modestly subtitled: “How to Build the Future”. He is clearly influenced by Girard’s explanation of how mimetic desire escalates into rivalry. Suppose my boss is my mimetic model. I start to dress like her, talk like her, aim at rising to her position, etc. She begins to feel threatened and takes measures to ward me off as a rival. But this makes her position seem even more exclusive and alluring. I emulate her more ardently, intensifying her feelings of rivalry, and so on in an upward spiral. Thiel uses this self-reinforcing dynamic between mimesis and rivalry to argue that competition, via mimesis, has a homogenizing effect. The more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again.

So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodeled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.

The same is true of Thiel’s political use of Girard. This appears most clearly in a paper, “The Straussian Moment”, which Thiel gave at a conference in 2004, on “Politics & Apocalypse”. He personally funded this conference and invited Girard, whose contribution was a modest philological study of some violent language in the Gospels. Thiel, meanwhile, unveiled a grand apocalyptic vision of the world after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He presented these attacks as a wakeup call to the liberal West, which had grown complacent about violence. He ended with advice to “the Christian statesman or stateswoman”, who “would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace”. A not-so-subtle implication is that, in cases that aren’t “close”, the wise Christian should, as Hobbes put it, seek all the helps and advantages of war.

Although he cites Girard, Thiel seems to forget his thesis that conflict is bound up with mimesis. As others have noted, Thiel seems to envisage a “clash of civilizations” between ideologically differentiated enemies — the Christian West and fundamentalist Islam — rather than, as Mimetic Theory would find, mimetic rivals whose conflict stems from wanting the same things, who become more alike the more they fight.

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Again, the most important missing idea here is that of emptiness and identity. For Girard, political organizations, like individuals, don’t come with pre-packaged innate identities. They too have to decide what to be and have nothing to guide them but the examples set by others. At the national or personal level, the dogged pursuit of identity will only lead to rivalry and conflict.

Girard holds that we can’t switch off our longing for identity. But, instead of the heroic self-creation promoted by Thiel, he proposes that we satisfy our craving with a very different sort of model: the model of Jesus. For Girard, Jesus represents not a specific identity but rather the idea of God expressed in every identity. This is the core of Girard’s Christianity, as I see it. His final book discusses Pope John Paul II’s reflections on “an identity of all people”. This “divine” identity is reached when we detach ourselves from any fixed notion of self and open up to continuously being radically transformed in our encounters with others.

The same message was given by another Pope to that other powerful but wayward Girardian, JD Vance. To justify his aggressive nationalism, Vance pointed to the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis then wrote a letter on this subject to the bishops of the United States of America, asserting that “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity”.

Concerning identity, the politicians and business leaders garble Girard’s message. It calls for a fluid, open, and welcoming identity, not one that seeks protection from the influence of others. The Popes get much closer to this meaning. Girard would probably be happy with that.

***

Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane on 19th June.

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

While the past displays a seemingly endless cycle of civilizational rises and falls, Thiel believes that modern science and technology have turned history into a linear progression, as the Bible teaches, with a beginning and a final, irreversible end. From its inception, technology — a political project as much as one of engineering — has dangled before us the shimmering promise of godhood, with which the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the project’s 16th- and 17th-century founders, rightly understood it to be an anti-Christian endeavor that needed to be cloaked with a veil of religious orthodoxy.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which describes a secretive, ostensibly Christian community of scientists devoted to the experimental investigation of the properties and uses of all material things, features a prototype of the modern research university called the College of Six Days’ Works. Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which advances (with a similar veneer of piety) the bold promise of making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature”, has six parts in imitation of the first six days of God’s creation. In both books, the Sabbath — the seventh day devoted to God — falls by the wayside. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration further hints at the transgressive nature of technology. It features a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), a landmark the divine hero established to warn ancient sailors not to exit the Mediterranean into the unnavigable Atlantic. And the book’s epigraph, “Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased,” is from the prophecy of the End of Days in Daniel 12, as if to suggest that the expansion of technological power would bring history to its apocalyptic conclusion.

An early modern conceit that has in many respects become a late modern curse, technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is it the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force mentioned at 2 Thessalonians 2:6 that forestalls the Antichrist (the Greek word katechein means “to hold down”)? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa. In the absence of the existential threat of Communism, for example, Western countries like the US and UK, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state. Even so, there is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”.

The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God. Speech is a living voice that springs from the soul — to give interiority its biblical name — embedded in the body of an existing individual. But AI is not a living being, and it replaces inner plenitude with mechanical, algorithmic emptiness. Embeddedness in space and time expresses itself as concern for, and responsiveness to, the actual conditions of existence, the biblical paradigm of which is Adam’s naming of the animals who live alongside him in Eden. But while AI requires material substrates — servers and other hardware — it inhabits them in purely occasional and contingent ways, like the demons that beg Christ to pass from the mad Galilean to the herd of pigs. Its relationship with actuality is equally contingent. It exists in a digital cloud of pure possibility, where it arranges information according to no criterion of truth besides probability and the rules of logic. That’s why ChatGPT and other LLMs are so prone to hallucinations, like citing books that exist only in Borges’s fictional, virtually infinite Library of Babel.

Yet, like the sham philosopher and bad citizen Plato calls “the sophist”, who is equally indifferent to truth, AI has a seemingly divine ability to imitate virtually anything with lifelike plausibility and vividness, and in multiple media. The market, whose whims have for decades guided the world’s best software engineers, has made this soulless capacity of representation, tailored to the tastes of the individual consumer, available to almost everyone on the planet. It has taught us to spend hours every day in its virtual reality, entertaining or distracting ourselves with the shadows it casts on the walls of our own private caves. Yet, using AI for more serious purposes is no less a Faustian bargain. Every advance AI makes in serving our desires degrades fundamental human capacities and gives it more mastery over human beings. Using AI to navigate makes us less capable navigators. Using AI to write makes us less capable writers. Using it to make decisions weakens our executive capacities of judgment and action. Peak AI, ministering to the inner emptiness and boredom of atomized, directionless selves, will mean peak human debility and enslavement. Aren’t these the goals of the Antichrist — which, whatever form it may take, always seeks to remake human beings in its own image?

Not so fast: perhaps AI is really a katechon. That is the argument of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Karp (a classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford who also studied philosophy and, with Thiel, founded Palantir Technologies) and Zamiska, his longtime deputy, insist that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done using LLMs. They acknowledge that this will require a massive cultural shift among our technological and cosmopolitan elites, who’ve embraced an “ethereal”, “post-national”, and “disembodied” morality that scorns patriotism, and who’ve learned “that belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided”. Yet it is the market’s deployment of advanced technology, including AI, that has above all promoted this “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (the title of the book’s second part), not least by rapidly dissolving social bonds, encouraging pathological self-absorption, and making possible — even incentivizing — digital swarms of doxxing and online cancellation.

Considered in the context of Karp’s and Zamiska’s urgent call to arms, the revelation of this contradiction is genuinely apocalyptic. Whether it will accelerate or slow the advent of the Antichrist and the bang or whimper of the world’s end depends on our individual and collective capacities to make informed decisions that call for moral courage — capacities that have been eroded by technologically-induced oblivion, historical, moral, and metaphysical forgetfulness, and our ingrained habit of “ced[ing] direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market”. Contemplating our predicament, it is hard not to feel discouraged. Hope alone remains in the Pandora’s box our clever man-gods have constructed — hope, without which the understanding (at least, for those whose prayers delivers no consolation) would be plagued by the perplexity and fear that have flown therefrom. It’s time to take it out of the box and hold it close to our hearts and minds, where it might inspire new growths of wisdom.

I was curious to visit Louise because I had been reading Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, an absorbing new book by the anthropologist and New Yorker writer Manvir Singh. Singh — who has lived with and studied indigenous peoples from Indonesia to the Amazon — points out that shamanism is having a moment. In the 2021 UK census, 8,000 people said their religion was shamanism — more than Rastafarians or Zoroastrians. Celebrities from Madonna to Will Smith have testified to the transformative powers of ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant used by Amazonian shamans, inspiring a busy trade in Western tourism to South American retreats. And, of course, you don’t need to leave your home to meet a shaman: Durek Verrett, who claims to be a reptile and whose clients include Gwyneth Paltrow, is just one of the more popular shamanic influencers online, with more than 400,000 Instagram followers.

Shamanism — the word comes from 17th-century accounts of hunter-gatherer religion in Siberia — may strike us as profoundly alien. Siberian Chukchi shamans claimed to turn into reindeer and travel through the underworld, and Durek Verrett offers to cleanse women’s vaginas of evil spirits. But in his book, Singh makes a striking claim: shamanism isn’t some primitive stage in the evolution of religion proper, or some kooky New Age parody of ancient superstitions. Instead, it’s about as natural to human beings as storytelling or dance — and it’s our institutional religions, with their bishops, churches and creeds, that are the peculiar innovations of a new age.

Singh’s argument is worth paying attention to, because if he’s right — if humans instinctively gravitate towards shamanism — then it means that the practices of the Chukchi don’t just tell us about our primordial past. They may also help us understand the spiritual yearnings that beset us today — and offer clues about where we are headed in the future. And if it’s true, as many claim, that secular Western societies are undergoing a “meaning crisis”, perhaps we’ll end up turning for answers not to traditional religions but to new forms of shamanism.

Singh’s argument starts from the fact that, when Europeans began exploring and colonizing the globe after the 15th century, everywhere they went they encountered peoples with remarkably similar religious practices. From the tundras of Siberia to the plains of North America to the islands of the Pacific, traditional societies recognized certain men or women as religious visionaries who used their special access to the supernatural to offer services like healing and prophecy. They explained what they were doing in different ways — Nepali shamans extracted ghosts from people’s bodies, whereas Eskimo shamans traveled to the moon and turned into bears — but beneath this diversity were some conspicuously similar characteristics.

Shamans everywhere advertise their connection to the unseen by entering altered states, whether through drugs, ecstatic dance, dreams or visions. They emphasize their difference from ordinary people by undergoing rituals of transformation, and by depriving themselves of food or sex. Although their work brings money and prestige, shamans are often society’s outsiders: some seem to be mentally ill, prone to weeping or psychosis; and some (like the bujasa of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi) were what today we would call trans. Certain ideas — like “soul journeying” and metamorphosis into animals — occur among shamans again and again.

The fact that shamanism is virtually universal in traditional societies, despite their separation by millennia of historical development, calls for an explanation. It must be, argues Singh, that shamanism evolved again and again because it meets a fundamental human need — similar to how wings have evolved separately among insects, bats and birds to solve the challenge of how to navigate through the air.

The tragedy of human life is that we crave order in a wildly unpredictable universe. We want our crops to grow in a world of hail storms and drought. We want our loved ones to survive and stay healthy in a world of danger and disease. And when things go wrong, we find it virtually impossible to accept that they do so for no reason. We look out at the chaos of reality and see a universe saturated with agency. When bad things happen — the medieval Black Death, the Covid pandemic, the death of a child — we have a natural tendency to think unseen agents must be to blame. As a result, we are always susceptible to the claims of charismatic individuals who can convince us that they have special access to the world of invisible causes.

Singh’s account implies that, at the root of the human religious impulse — deeper even than a desire for community or existential purpose or moral guidance — is something far simpler: a craving for magic. We want good things to happen and bad things not to happen, and we want to believe that certain people have the power to make it so. This is the basis of shamanism, which means it was most likely the basis of religion everywhere for 95% of our species’ history, before agriculture triggered the development of civilizations and institutional religions. Not until the appearance of those newfangled faiths did the gods become obsessed with monitoring our behavior and beliefs. Most human religions have had nothing much to do with morality or doctrine.

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Today our post-Enlightenment religions go to great lengths to prove they are respectably rational. The spooky and miraculous have largely been banished from church. The pope pays obeisance to Darwin, apologists write books reconciling God and science, and talk of miraculous healing is for most part the preserve of embarrassing cranks. Priests pray that God will grant us wisdom and compassion, not that he will hold off plagues and tornadoes, stymie witches or curse our enemies.

But if Singh is right, it may be that the problem with mainstream Western religion is not that it is insufficiently rational but, rather, that it is nowhere near irrational enough. It’s now a commonplace that Westerners are dissatisfied with a coldly rationalistic worldview, and are increasingly seeking answers in a panoply of spiritual practices — or perhaps even rediscovering a belief in God. But reading Singh I began to wonder if the standard explanations for why this is happening — a loss of community, a breakdown in moral values, a search for transcendent meaning — ignore an even deeper cause.

Western societies like Britain didn’t rapidly become more secular after the Second World War because people began to reject Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs, or because we were busy reading On the Origin of Species. We stopped attending church because the modern state increasingly performed the functions of the ancient gods. First the Industrial Revolution and then the creation of welfare states helped us make staggering strides towards eliminating the role of chance in human affairs. Decades of postwar peace and economic growth meant we were living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives. And shrinking inequality and expanding welfare systems meant most of us no longer dreaded catastrophic reversals of economic fortune or social standing.

That era may now be coming to an abrupt halt. Climate change means the weather is again becoming a matter of existential concern. Covid destroyed our faith in the state’s ability to protect us from plague. The unthinkable prospect of great power war and nuclear apocalypse has again become thinkable. Flatlining economic growth may not look like a disaster in the grand scheme of human history, but when the very rich are capturing an ever-greater share of wealth, it translates to lower living standards for most and humiliating losses of status for many. Secularism advanced quickest in egalitarian Scandinavia, and slowest in the United States, where high inequality and patchy state support left people more exposed to the vagaries of fate. A more uncertain future may very well be a more religious one.

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But reading Singh and visiting Louise made me skeptical that we are about to see people flocking back to church pews — despite recent headlines trumpeting a revival of religiosity based on scanty data. According to Singh, institutional religions like Christianity never replaced the innate human attraction to shamanism, but merely captured and suppressed it. New religions, he argues, tend to be founded by shamans — Jesus, St Paul, Muhammad and Joseph Smith all gathered followers by hearing voices and performing miracles — and echoes of shamanism can be found in “charismatic” Christian churches. But shamans are unruly, and mainstream religions tend to maintain order and authority by stamping them out. Even so, the human fear of uncertainty means that shamans crop up again and again in the form of prophets, gurus and cult leaders.

This is particularly true in times of social upheaval. At the beginning of the 20th century, a social crisis was triggered in Polynesia when ships bearing American cargo confronted native peoples with previously unimaginable hordes of wealth. Indigenous societies were thrown into confusion, their settled worldviews overturned. Shamanic prophets emerged to lead “cargo cults”, promising a coming age of salvation when the heavenly ships would return. Rituals were invented to hasten their arrival, such as beating drums while marching up and down the shore.

Our own age of confusion has thrown up its own shamans with their own promises of salvation. Guru-influencers like Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand gain followers by promising healing based on their special insight into mysterious psychic realities. Like traditional shamans, they advertise their spiritual otherness via weird lifestyles based on self-deprivation (Brand abstains from animal products, drugs and alcohol; Peterson lives on steak). Like traditional shamans with their trance states, they weep and promise transcendence in ecstatic tirades of semi-comprehensible language. Only a little kookier than Brand and Peterson is Joe Dispenza, who tells his 1.36 million YouTube followers that he healed his broken back with positive thinking, and teaches techniques to use quantum physics to cure cancer and bring wealth.

Our new shamans may seem like the bizarre products of our strange new age of smartphones and algorithms, but in the long view of human history they make perfect sense. It’s the human condition to seek, in Peterson’s phrase, antidotes to chaos. A world of lavish wealth for a few and growing anxiety for many is one where charismatic individuals promising magical transformation will flourish. Now when I think of our current craze for Kundalini yoga and reiki, meditation and affirmation, ayahuasca and psilocybin, I consider those Polynesia islanders undergoing their own meaning crisis a century ago. Frightened by changes beyond our control, and stirred into ecstatic longing by wealth we can barely understand, we beat our drums and gaze out over the horizon, praying for the coming age of riches and renewal.

This is the story of a vertiginous collapse of popularity. Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to wild public acclaim. Thousands line his route shouting support, waving their palms aloft, laying their cloaks on the road as he travels into town on a donkey. It is the welcome of a conquering hero, not all that different from victorious Roman generals arriving in Rome. This is what success looks like.

But within a few days of this triumphal entry, the same crowd will be screaming for his blood. Nervous politicians, with one eye on popular sentiment, will give in to the crowd and send him to his death. Hanging on a terrifying Roman instrument of torture and death, he will drip with the spit of jeering passers-by. There he will suffocate and die, abandoned by most of his friends and followers, a tiny footnote in the long history of Roman cruelty. This is what failure looks like.

What changed? One of the things you could say that Jesus wasn’t very good at expectation management, especially with regard to his political intentions. About such an important matter as whether he was the Messiah, the messaging was, at best, just a little oblique. Yes, there was an encounter with a Samaritan woman whom many would have regarded as an unreliable witness. “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one who will proclaim all things to us,” she says. And Jesus replies: “I am he.” But even the woman wasn’t totally clear: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” she mused immediately afterwards. And then there is that funny theme in Mark’s Gospel — the so-called Messianic Secret — where Jesus goes around telling those who see him as the Messiah to keep quiet about it. But in the absence of clear messaging, stories spread. This was the one, they whispered.

But what was their expectation? The Messiah had long been a figure of myth. Part-religious, part-political, he was to be the one who would take Israel back to the glory days of David and Solomon. Akin to those Trump MAGA hats, the Messiah was the leader of the Make Israel Great Again movement. Messianic success meant kicking out the occupying Romans. It meant big temples and cheering crowds. Messianic success is national pride, power and popularity. The people of Israel wanted someone a bit like Samson. He too had some heavenly intervention associated with his birth, and he killed 3,000 Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone.

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It’s not exactly when and how the crowd cottoned on to the fact that Jesus wasn’t into any of this. But whenever and however the murmurations of the crowd shifted shape, very soon the over-hyped, ramped-up excitement of Palm Sunday collapsed into acrimonious disappointment. This odd man from Nazareth, with his northern accent and dubious choice of friends, was a fraud. A failure.

When I was studying at a theological college, we were asked a terrifying question. Should a “successful” priest be fêted by his congregation, or end up being crucified by them? Those who are called to hold a mirror up to others are never going to be popular.

I remember reading the extraordinary 1948 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis called Christ Recrucified. It tells of a Passion play put on in Anatolia, where a popular shepherd boy, Manolios, is chosen to play the part of Jesus. During rehearsals, a group of starving refugees arrive. They are from a nearby village that had been devastated by the Turks, but they are turned away. And the cowardly clergy fear that if it stands with the refugees, the village will turn against the church. So it too rejects the refugees and turns against Manolios who supports them. Manolios had taken his new role as Jesus a little too seriously. He is murdered by the villagers. “Two thousand years have gone by and men crucify you still,” says Father Fotis, one of the few remaining godly priests.

The Church of England is a dying church. Everybody says so. Numbers are down, churches are being turned into luxury flats, vocations abandoned. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned in failure. But what are we to make of this failure from the perspective of Holy Week? Throughout his preaching, Jesus was keen on the language of inversions. The first will be last and the last will be first; those who lose their life will find it; take down the mighty, lift up the lowly. Should we not think of success and failure within a similar inverted frame?

Some of the most irritating churches I know are ones that are just a little too pleased with themselves, particularly about how successful they are (yes, mea culpa). They tick all the right boxes. They attract lots of enthusiastic, successful and articulate young people, they have sound finances, slick advertising, beautiful buildings, and amazing choirs, they do lots of good work in the community. Heaven spare us from cocky, successful churches. They so depress me.

Conversely, some of the most important churches in which I have been a priest are what others might — and do — think of as failures. They look terrible to the Diocesan statistician. People sometimes squabble with each other. The organist is a bit rubbish. The church is not a looker. The heating breaks down, the roof leaks. People can have some very strange views. I love these churches because they are me. I too am a bit rubbish. I too am a failure in the deepest parts of my being. And the only thing that keeps these places together — the only thing that keeps me together— is reliance on something other than me.

Which is why my own ecclesiology — what I think a church should be like — is Alcoholics Anonymous, but with incense and vestments. At AA we have to admit our weakness, and accept that we have no power within ourselves to help ourselves. These are the big theological must-haves… along with a trust that God will do the rest. Everything else about church is aesthetics and solidarity, which I like a lot, but as a second-order concern.

The Reverend Richard Coles, a friend of mine, often tells me he thinks of church as “organized goodness”. It’s a lovely idea, but I don’t exactly buy it. Not least because I don’t think of Christians as being especially good (atheists have long complained about this association, and rightly so). If anything, Christians are the ones who know we are not especially good. Or, to borrow Jesus’ words: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” That’s the whole problem with the successful church — they don’t really understand that they, too, are sick.

Now let me row back on something. I don’t actually think that there are distinct things called “successful” and “unsuccessful” churches. All churches are complicated mixtures of both. No church — evangelical, Catholic, liberal — has a monopoly on smugness. But nonetheless, success as an ideology is absolute kryptonite to the Easter story. Nietzsche was right in a way: Christianity is for losers.

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That’s why I hope the next Archbishop of Canterbury will shrug his shoulders a little when asked — as he inevitably will be — how he will revive the fortunes of the Church of England. He must scorn cheap routes to numerical success. And I beg him to forget about all those centrally devised initiatives that your predecessor was so keen on: money redirected to big successful churches, greater enthusiasm breathlessly heralded as the latest route to growth. Jesus was down to a tiny handful of followers when he changed the world. Of course, if I were the Archbishop’s media adviser I’d advise the Archbishop not to say any of that too openly. People like success. The media likes success. Best not to encourage the crowd to turn upon you right away. That will happen in its own time and there won’t be much you can do about it when it does. The last Archbishop failed disastrously, and so will the next. Remember what Samuel Beckett said: “Never mind. Fail again. Fail better.”

But, whisper it: Jesus played chicken with total and absolute disaster, and he won. The resurrection is not about the magic — though I grant that’s the eye-catching bit. The resurrection is about how love transforms failure into genuine triumph. The abandoned man covered in spit and blood, stinking of death — yes, Ecce Homo — is the site of a renewed humanity. And that’s exactly why I love failed churches. Because they remind me that there is hope for us all, even losers like you and me. Happy Easter, losers.

Given the politics and personalities involved, it’s tempting to accuse both men of being as deliberately offensive as possible — even to Roman Catholics, who won’t love the performative and irreligious tone of their materials. And as one straight man I know said, Yiannopoulos’s and Yardley’s new trad-bromance “looks pretty gay”. Yet Yardley seems to represent an incipient trend. He is one of a handful of detransitioners I personally know of who have turned toward Catholicism’s restrictive sexual dogmas (still no blowjobs, folks) and teachings on biological sex in order to change their lives.

While not all insights gained from the experience of being trans and back again are reliable — especially when staged for an online public — their voices are worth hearing for what they reveal about the so-called vibe shift, a younger generation’s turn away from sexual-liberationist paradigms, and the role of Christianity in it. This, even as the attention-seeking quality of their discourse recalls nothing so much as the gender trend just a few years ago — only now in the opposite direction.

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Yardley is of the first generation of young people to launch their medical transition during puberty as part of the Tumblr-fueled gender revolution, and believes he will face permanent fertility consequences as a result. He says that he was a feminine-looking boy, who liked female things and had mostly female friends, and who was often misgendered. He didn’t know why he was different, but “other people informed me of it”. Around the time Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” came out, in 2011, he wondered if being transgender might be the answer. He went to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and says he was goaded into transgender care. The therapist recommended by the clinic “immediately bought into it that I was really a girl”.

Today, he is graceful, tall, and girlish in photos, and easily passes as a biological woman. But he has grown to regret his transition for a host of what are becoming the usual reasons: concerns about how cross-sex hormones were affecting his health; physical pain; fatigue with what other detransitioners have called “trans OCD”, an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realization that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing. “I was never comfortable with it,” Yardley tells me.

Like some male-to-female transitioners, he says that at least part of his attempt to become a woman was in order to cope with same-sex feelings of attraction without having to declare himself as gay. He now objects to the characterization of sexual orientation as a fixed and immutable identity. He also rejects the idea that being a feminine boy meant he was actually a girl. “Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed”.

It’s fairly easy to diagnose a swing from one utopian extreme to another, which comments like that exemplify. But it’s less easy to dismiss the critique of categories of sexual identity and sexual orientation, acknowledged by scholars on both the Left and the Right to be a fairly recent invention. For most of human history, as Michel Foucault pointed out, heterosexuality or homosexuality did not exist as identities; both were invented in the late 19th century as a means of normalizing heterosexual behavior, while treating same-sex-attracted people as “abnormal”. That the invention turned on its makers and ended up providing the grounds for gay liberation is one of history’s delicious ironies. Today’s proliferation of increasingly niche identities and orientations, and the practice of changing them as a person evolves, supports the argument that these identities aren’t as hard-and-fast as they appear.

Some of the excesses of Yardley’s and Yiannopoulos’s publicly performed hard-Right Catholicism seem like they could be trolling. But Yardley’s explanation over the telephone sounds heartfelt. He was raised nominally Catholic, he says, and as early as 2020, when it became clear to him that being trans wasn’t making him happier or more socially comfortable, he began to research dissenting opinions. A Catholic priest was the first person ever, he says, to tell him something most human beings have believed throughout history — “No, you’re a man, and you can’t get out of it.”

Another outspoken detransitioner, Ray Alex Williams, has run a YouTube channel on the subject since 2023, and published an essay on Substack on 24 February headlined, “How Catholicism Solved My Autogynephilia Problem.” Williams’s essay begins with the acknowledgement that people will think he has “gone off the deep end” and has gone “from one extreme cult to another”. During a follow-up phone conversation, he reveals that he isn’t officially Catholic yet; his religious-conversion experience is fewer than two weeks old; and his girlfriend broke up with him over it. The headline, in this case, seems like a deliberate distortion in a bid for clicks. However, as he tells it, his “desperate search for moral clarity” has been years in the making, and he believes he needs such clarity to help him combat the destructive role his sexual desires have played in his life.

Autogynephilia, or AGP, is contested cultural territory. Defined by the eminent Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”, it generally involves not just the erotic desire to be a woman, but accompanying fantasies of being used and abused for being female, often these days following the tropes of the “sissy” subgenre of pornography.

When they don’t deny autogynephilia altogether, transgender activists object to the term because it pathologizes the set of sexual desires it describes, and opens the door to the claim that trans people with these desires are not women, but just men with an obsessive paraphilia. (Yardley explicitly disavows AGP as having had any role in his experience.) One thing is certain, though: the set of desires itself is fairly common.

New York magazine books critic Andrea Long Chu has been open that such impulses fueled her transition, and discussed how sissy porn shaped her identity in remarks at the New York Public Library in 2018. Chu said that she started watching “a lot” of pornography as a middle-school boy, and described a progression in her tastes from “run-of-the-mill, mainstream pornography” to “JOI” (jerk-off instruction) videos, in which a female performer demeans the male viewer. From there, Chu “went down a humiliation track … until I hit sissy porn…. My porn addiction had all along been waiting for something like sissy porn … because now if I’m reading in retrospect, the whole thing was about trying to access a kind of sexuality that wasn’t about being a man”. Trans actress and Euphoria star Hunter Schaefer wrote along similar lines in a now-deleted Instagram post the same year: “My sexual orientation was not gay. It was not straight. Nor pan. It was an attraction, is an attraction, always, to misogyny. My gender was SO influenced by a need to be used by men.”

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Detransitioner Williams chronicles a lifelong struggle with a similar set of feelings and desires, which led him to transition to female in 2015, at the age of 28. He says he didn’t have “an underlying predisposition to hate my male body”, though that started after he became trans. Williams lived as a woman for eight years, which he says decreased the sexually fetishistic aspects of his behavior (and his libido), but had other negative consequences, such as extreme social anxiety. He also, in 2020, developed a pulmonary embolism and almost died, he says, which he attributes to taking cross-sex hormones. Attempts to detransition and manage his resurgent AGP in a healthy way, along lines suggested by Phil Illy’s book Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, were a failure, despite finding a bisexual, kink-positive partner who accepted his sexuality.

The activist stance on these desires is that they are neutral in themselves and can be considered a sexual orientation, and that any negative consequences come from social stigmatization. Williams’s experience could bear that out. Despite finding willing partners and accepting circles, he continued to feel shame, confusion, and social discomfort from his gender urges and sexual practices. However, he also found that indulging his desires oriented him towards masturbation and away from his partner, and that his desires followed patterns of other addictions in his life, requiring ever-greater stimulus for diminishing rewards, and ultimately bringing unhappiness instead of pleasure.

One day, high on cannabis — another persistent addiction struggle, he writes — and ready to engage in his fetish, Williams had the revelation that both his marijuana smoking and his sexual behavior were self-destructive and pathological in the same way, and had to stop. “Immediately”, he writes, he had the desire to get back into religion, which he had experimented with before on his detransition journey, but this time, he was drawn to Catholicism, specifically for its intensity of pageantry and ritual and its strict sexual doctrine. He understands that his new convictions might seem suspect or “mentally unstable”, he says, but he now believes that the inner voice of shame and disgust that he hasn’t been able to silence has a transcendental cause, and is distinguishing a fundamental right from wrong.

Not all of the new detransitioners are drawn by Christianity’s oldest branch. Sierra Weir, 37, who goes by the name Exulansic on X and Substack, has since 2021 devoted herself since to exposing the ugly side of the gender trend, for simpler but similar reasons of mental and physical health. Weir did a double-major in gender studies and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and says she was once “really into” transgenderism. She transitioned medically to male when she was 23 but began to have ideological disagreements with the trans orthodoxies and experienced harmful and dangerous health outcomes from hormone therapy. She says she now has osteopenia (low bone density, a precursor to osteoporosis) which is a known risk factor with Depo Provera, which she took to suppress menstruation, and she has been recently diagnosed with lumbar degeneration, which she believes is related. She is vituperative against her former doctors, whom she believes misdiagnosed her and exacerbated her problems. “It just ruined my life”, she says.

Weir’s social media channels circulate lurid news items about crimes by transgender women, and frequently discuss suicides by distressed transgender people all genders and ages — material that can legitimately be read as stigmatizing for transgender people seeking public acceptance. She also writes and films disturbing stories on mostly biological female victims of terrible mental and physical health outcomes and botched surgeries. However, she says, “I’m not against individual people who are trans, and I have a great deal of compassion and empathy. I’m speaking out because I don’t want harm to come to them.” (She may or may not now be on the right side of history, but once again, it’s the scare tactics of the original trans movement: if we don’t all believe this right now, people will die.)

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In addition to believing that hormones and surgeries are physically risky and damaging in ways people aren’t told about, she believes that cross-sex hormones can cloud a person’s thinking — making them more likely to opt for risky procedures — and exacerbate previous mental health issues. “The hormones were affecting my ability to think and my ability to remember”, she says. Having detransitioned, she feels like “I don’t have brain fog anymore.” She believes that people suffering from gender dysphoria from any of these conditions “deserve to have optimal health and to understand their predicament”, and that medical providers are “abdicating that responsibility.”

Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, Weir was “being banned from all platforms of note”, she says. Now she’s free to critique the movement she was once a part of, and with the same zeal. Yardley, for his part, attributes the wave of detransitioners not to the vibe shift or a trend, but merely to the passage of time. It’s been several years since the transgender tipping point, he says, and people have “passed that first sense of euphoria that people get from accomplishing any goal” and begun to have doubts. “So many people are detransitioning because so many people transitioned”, he says. That conclusion, as least, sounds reasonable, and like something we should be open to learning from.

But let’s hope the pendulum doesn’t merely swing from one brand of too-certain conviction to another. The Roman church, in addition to its prohibition of most sexual acts, asks adherents to cultivate lives of silence, contemplation, and prayer. Those who have embraced the Church as a refuge from online ideologies might want to take up these practices — instead of plunging head-long into the next performative mania.