Here’s what fascinates me. Leo’s triumphal progress has been greeted with rather subdued delight by two opposing wings of the Church: hardline liberals and ultra-conservatives. In front of the cameras, they’re all smiles. In private, and reading between the lines of their social media comments, not so much. For different reasons, both were disconcerted by the ferocity of the Pope’s attack on France’s assisted dying law and its constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, which has led to an epidemic of “terminations” of supposedly imperfect babies. Not for nothing did Leo choose six altar servers with Down’s syndrome for his Paris Mass — a gesture more beautiful than any liturgical finery. He doubled down on this in his sermon, in which he said that deciding an embryo’s future by test result was like assisted dying; that it’s thoroughly sinister “programmed death”.

You can understand why liberal Catholics, especially American members of the Democratic Party, were uncomfortable with this. They wanted the first pope from the United States to take a swing at Trump in time for the midterms. They failed. And they wanted him to steer clear of issues such as abortion, on which even Catholic Democrat candidates defy Church teachings. But why were some hardline traditionalist Catholics so disconcerted by both Leo’s statements and the sea of humanity surging around him in France?

I emphasize that we’re only talking about a fanatical rump. Most conservative Catholics were overjoyed by the papal visit, the pro-life exhortations, and Leo’s unexpected homage to the Catholic martyrs of the French Revolution.

And yet, it was precisely these things that wrong-footed the militant “trads”. Leo had deviated from the script they have written for him. Ever since he took office, they have insisted that he’s just Francis in nicer vestments. They look away when he behaves like an old-style pope, singing the Salve Regina until he’s hoarse, or weeping when he celebrates the Eucharist. Instead, they obsess over an ancient grainy photo of the then Fr Prevost praying in front of a indigenous statue in Peru; over an environmental stunt in which he blessed a block of ice; over the continuing (if rare) cancellation of Latin Masses; and over his enthusiasm for “synodality”, which under the last pontificate was shorthand for the hijacking of the Curia by liberal control freaks.

Last weekend’s tour de force undermined the Right-wing caricature of Leo as a mediocre or even malevolent liberal nonentity. Now we can all see that it’s false. And yet even the mean-spirited trads aren’t wrong about everything. The true state of the Catholic Church is always difficult to assess, especially after a papal public relations triumph. Pope John Paul II attracted crowds of more than a million in Poland, the Philippines and Ireland, while Francis’s 2025 Mass in Manila was the largest in papal history — attended by some six million people. Even so, both pontiffs presided over a devastating crisis of morale and, in Europe, collapsing church attendance.

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Do we make too much of open-air spectacles? How many bystanders cheering the Holy Father in the streets, or at a one-off mega-Mass, then sat through a service the following Sunday (as the Catholic Church demands on pain of mortal sin)? I suspect the answer would be hard to reconcile with the florid talk of “spiritual hunger” during papal visits.

The truth is complicated and unsatisfactory, if not entirely depressing. Pope Leo is hard to read. He alternates between joyful assertions of the divinity of Christ and synodal jargon that lingers like a bad smell from the Francis era. He simultaneously favors brilliant young orthodox bishops and the greasiest bureaucrats of the ancien regime. Is this any way to run a Church? Until recently it was relatively easy to make the case that the less the new American pope intervened, the sooner he could narrow the factional divide deliberately widened by his Argentinian predecessor. But Leo is no longer a new pope and, a year and a half in, his diplomacy looks increasingly like inertia.

To allow the Traditional Latin Mass to be revived in one place and crushed in another does nothing to promote unity. Likewise, it’s all very well for the Pope to insist on covering up the artwork by the accused serial nun-rapist Fr Marko Rupnik at Lourdes. But scars will not be healed while, inexcusably, the canonical proceedings against Rupnik are bogged down and he remains a priest.

Unfortunately Leo is as hard to read literally as well as metaphorically. He has just published Freedom Under Grace, a collection of his addresses to his fellow Augustinians when he was head of the order. A page-turner it ain’t, and you wouldn’t expect it to be. But it’s still a curious mixture: encouraging and discouraging in roughly equal proportions.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The former Fr Prevost was, to put it politely, politically naive. His “global south” rhetoric was supported by clumsy swipes at neoliberalism, the favored bogeyman of most Catholic clerics ordained in the Eighties. But, since his political views didn’t matter at the time, and still don’t count for much even now he’s pope, we can let that pass. More disturbing is the lack of interest in the numinous aspects of worship that Benedict XVI understood so well. I have no doubt that Leo always celebrated Mass with reverence, and once he was in Latin America there would have been no demand for the liturgical aesthetics that have nurtured the faith of young Westerners. It’s also true that now that he is pope we see fewer of the ceremonial atrocities encouraged by Francis. But decades of attachment to the mind-numbing post-Vatican II liturgical consensus are still a problem.

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Leo thinks of the ancient Latin rite as a personal preference rather than as a source of regeneration. And so he permits fanatical liberal bishops to persecute traditionalists, while also allowing trad-friendly bishops freedom to liberate the old Mass. It’s a mess.

On the other hand, the good news found in the formulaic prose of Freedom Under Grace is more significant than those disputes over the liturgy. Robert Prevost’s faith in Jesus is as potent as that of any successor of St Peter. The book blows apart claims by conservative fundamentalists that he is a syncretist or, worse, an indifferentist who believes that all religions lead to salvation. The latter charge could be leveled at Francis, though like a true Peronist he adjusted his orthodoxy to suit his audience or his mood. This pope is unquestionably a Catholic.

Again and again Leo reminds us of, and revels in, the salvific majesty of Christ, and as we saw in France, he does this with a quiet charisma that has already converted some unbelievers. What I don’t think he can do is succeed in his self-declared mission to bring “peace to the Church”. But, sad to say, that would be asking too much of any pope.

***

Nearly 60 years ago, Time magazine, then an important publication, posed a discomfiting question on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Yet today, a spiritual hunger grips America, with roughly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans still believing in God or a universal spirit, according to Pew. Overall, young people are drawing closer to a higher power, and new research reports that most Gen-Z teens are more interested in learning more about Jesus, often using the internet to find new commitments.  

There is even some sign of revival in decidedly secular Europe, with 45% more people being baptized in historically anti-clerical France compared to last year. And, notes The Spectator, there’s a “boom biblique”: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. More broadly, religious bookstores report a 20% percent increase in purchases since 2024. In Britain, of course, there is the “quiet revival,” with the church-attending share of the population rising to nearly 6 million in 2025, up from 3.7 million in 2018, with much of the energy seen among young men.

In modern sociology, conventional wisdom holds that religious people are generally less curious, less ambitious, and less intelligent than their nonbelieving peers. But this view is out of tune with current realities. On the contrary, a deep dive into the data shows that, over the last 15 years, religiously engaged people have become more likely to be well-educated, while atheists are less so. In the United States, religious groups outperform atheists and agnostics.

Overall, religious enthusiasm is most concentrated among middle-income professionals. An analysis of the 2022-2023 Cooperative Election Study, surveying nearly 85,000 Americans, found a positive correlation between education and weekly religious attendance. The rate of attendance rises from 23% among high school graduates to 30% for those with graduate degrees. This trend is supported by the sociologist Philip Schwadel’s research, which found that each additional year of education increases an American’s likelihood of attending religious services by 15%.

At the same time, the nature of worshipers has changed, and taken on increasingly conservative character. This has much to do with the rise of Gen Z, notes religious commentator Aaron Renn. Today’s young believers have arrived at faith amid a decidedly hostile environment for religion. They have, moreover, embraced political positions on race, immigration, and transgenderism that are vastly different from those held by older liberal Catholics as well as mainline Protestants.

Indeed, progressive ideology has proved catastrophic for houses of worship that embrace it. In 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened in the United States, as mainstream Protestant denominations lost 5 million members in the past decade. Once dominant mainline Protestant churches now count barely 9% of Americans in their flocks, down from a peak of 50%. Progressive-dominated sects like the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ are experiencing what one analyst described as “a bloodbath,” with membership down at least 30% since the Nineties.

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In Canada,  the once-dominant Anglicans have lost roughly three-quarters of their worshipers and could go extinct by 2040, according to some church leaders. Even in its ancestral home, the Church of England, fashionably liberal and dismissive of many of the concerns of its congregants about such problems as Islamic militancy or grooming gangs, has been in secular decline and may be surpassed by Islam within a decade. Liberal Catholicism is similarly graying and out of touch.

The progressive hierarchs of all denominations, in short, face the challenge of an increasingly conservative customer base, both in the West and even more so in Africa, the crucible of the Catholic future. Traditionalist faiths, such as Greek Orthodoxy, seem to be doing better. A survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The average age of attendees is 42, with 62% between 18 and 45. That’s significantly younger than other major traditions.

Among Jews, reform and even conservative synagogues are struggling while those of Orthodox Judaism, particularly the thriving Chabad movement, have gained both members and influence, enjoying the greatest growth in engagement since Oct. 7. Some reform Jews (including yours truly) have been shocked by the turn toward anti-Zionism among leading reform rabbis. Given the overwhelming support among Jews for Israel, these Leftist-oriented clergy can only alienate most congregants and can only survive as useful idiots for those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.

If there’s an epicenter for the new religious revival, it’s Africa, which is the one continent with a growing population and enormous, largely untapped economic potential. Historically, Christian missions were central to establishing formal education on the continent, forging a lasting link between faith and upward mobility. Today, Pentecostalism is a major driver of this trend, offering a version of Christianity that promotes values such as individualism and a strong work ethic, providing followers with the spiritual and social tools to pursue economic advancement and a better future.

Widely ignored by Western interests, Africa is far from a hopeless basket case. It is home to 11 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies. In the span of a single century, Africa has undergone a religious revolution in tandem with its economic growth. While Islam has expanded its footprint in Africa, doubling its share since 1900, the preponderant growth is among Christians. The Chrisitan faith has won the adherence of nearly 57% of all Africans since 1900, compared to 29% for Islam.

Clearly Africa’s demographic exceptionalism will drive the future of religion. The population of sub-Saharan Africa grew by an extraordinary 31% between 2010 and 2020 alone, reaching 1.1 billion people. UN projections indicate that this population will increase by two-thirds by 2050, a period during which Europe and North America are forecast to remain largely static. By the end of the century, seven of the world’s 15 most populous nations are projected to be in Africa, a stark contrast to 1950, when only one African country made that list.

Ultimately, then, Christianity’s future lies in Africa. As of 2020, there were 697.4 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. This growth now accounts for most of the numerical increase in Christians globally. A century ago, two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe. Today, that figure is roughly a quarter. By 2050, projections indicate that 4 out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. The region’s share of the global Christian population is expected to rise to 38% by 2050, up from a quarter in 2010; while Europe’s share is projected to plummet to just 16%. Africa’s Christians are also young, with a median age of 20, compared to a global Christian median of 30.

In Africa, Christianity also tends toward social conservatism and takes traditionalist stances both inside mainstream groups like the Anglicans or the Catholic Church, or in fast-growing  evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal denominations.

This tie between religious faith and growth, so visible in Africa, could also shape the West. Education, long dominated by Left-leaning secularists and radicals, will be a crucial inflection point. In the South Bronx or Houston’s heavily immigrant Sharpstown, religious educators are having success with young people from very poor backgrounds where secular education is failing. Inner-city boys who attend religious schools, notes Tulane University sociologist Ilana Horwitz, do far better and are twice as likely to graduate from college than those in public schools. Critical here, she notes, are the attributes of religious engagement, such as respect for elders and learning. Even guilt has its efficacy, helping to restrain the worst impulses that often lead adolescents into dark spaces.

Nationwide, enrollment in private Christian schools has risen in recent years. In New York, as city schools are emptying, Catholic-oriented charters have doubled their enrollments. The K-12 enrollment at the Association of Christian Schools International, described as “one of the country’s largest networks of evangelical schools,” increased 12% between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years, even as more families migrate out of the public-school systems. The rise of voucher programs, including in such large states as Texas and Florida, has largely benefited religiously oriented schools.

It is becoming increasingly clear that religious faith provides critical social benefits. For instance, just 10% of religiously observant people today say they have no close friends; the share almost doubles for those who have no faith. Participation in church generally also correlates, according to a 2022 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, with better health outcomes. Equally well-established are the links between religious participation and longer lives, greater financial generosity, and more stable families. 

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Christian talk show host Justin Brierley predicts “the fall of the New Atheism.” Richard Dawkins’s vision of a universe driven by “blind, pitiless indifference” is being challenged by a generation of conservative intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, JD Vance, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who embrace religion’s resurgence as counterweight to the current declines in marriage, family, community, and civil society.      

Even some in the tech elite are having second thoughts. Most scientists tend toward secularism, but there seems to be a trend among scientists to embrace faith. Most notably, the expanding Society of Catholic Scientists counts more than 2,100 members and has 28 regional chapters.  

Even in the technological heartland of secular America, Silicon Valley, there are religious stirrings. The world’s most important innovator, Elon Musk, has recently become more public in his embrace of Christianity, which he described  as “ a religion of curiosity” and “greater enlightenment.” Other executives and investors like Pat Gelsinger, former head of Intel, Gary Tan, CEO of Y Incubator, and Peter Theil have likewise embraced the faith.

In Silicon Valley — where, as one observer notes, religion is “borderline illegal” — the congregation of the Catholic Our Lady of Peace church has burgeoned to more than 3000 families. And, according to Fr. Brian Dinkel, who hears an estimated 50,000 confessions a year, “People who may be doing well also want something more. Our people work at Google and Apple, but there’s a real search for the truth beyond tech.”    

Ultimately, the religious may prevail due to their higher birthrates. The places where Americans have children tend to be in the South, the Plains, and parts of the Intermountain West. These are also centers of conservative Christianity. The presence of children is all the more important in an  era where the population bomb has morphed into the population deficit.  

 It seems likely that more Americans, seeing the benefits of faith and community, will continue to take on a more religious cast of mind in the future. News of the death of God, it turns out, was greatly exaggerated.

Recruits would receive instruction in military operations and Latin — a clear political signifier as the Vatican tries to prohibit Latin mass to the chagrin of the Church’s more conservative elements. The St Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the online application for the militia, which has since been taken down and disavowed by Ascension, also included references to “platoons”, “hand-to-hand combat” and even featured a sketch of the “bright white uniforms”. While Legionnaires would not serve as armed guards at the church, they “could be called upon by the Pastor of the Parish to take up arms defensively” if the congregation were threatened.

Amid national controversy, Ray walked back his call to arms, citing his distress at dwindling congregations and the closure of churches. He had hoped, he said, to “create an organisation for young men to push themselves mentally, physically” through practices “modelled after the military”. While regretting his use of the term “militia”, Ray explained that the “current state of the Church in the West is equally regrettable and I’m sure we can all agree that we are in desperate times”.

While Ray might sound like a local eccentric, his push is in fact part of a wider trend in the US. This has seen increasing numbers of churches gathering armed security forces, variously described as “safety ministries” or at the more explicit end offering “Christian warrior training”.

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Attacks on places of worship are nothing new, and are a very real consideration for even the most pacifist flock. Historically, they have been associated with hate crimes against black protestant congregations, primarily in the Deep South, as opposed to wealthy, predominately white Catholic congregations, such as Chesterfield. But as the proportion of Americans who identify as white Christian dwindles, they are feeling increasingly under threat.

This is borne out in a report on violence against churches in the US published earlier this year by the evangelical group the Family Research Council. It declares that “hostility against American churches is not only on the rise but also accelerating”. Identifying some 436 incidents against churches in 2023 — more than double the number in 2022, according to their records, and more than eight times the number in 2018 — it warned that these are “destructive and have the potential to intimidate a religious community”.

The fear is an understandable one. Unfortunately, though, the Family Research Council is far from an impartial or authoritative source. Controversially designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre in 2010 for its hostility to LGBT issues, the Council conceded in its report that “the motivations for many of these incidents remain unknown”, however, it believes that “the rise in crimes against churches is taking place in a context in which American culture appears increasingly hostile to Christianity”.

Only, there is a wider political context: the so-called decline of white Christian America. This idea is often rehearsed within elements of the Right-wing media, with claims that immigration policies are changing the racial and religious makeup of the country.

In this vein, the Family Research Council report, though widely cited, does seem to be more political than scholarly. It does not list the methodology of its research, nor classify incidents. Perceived hostility and violence are considered one and the same. One example cited in the report is of a “Vote No” sign being pulled from the ground and thrown in a bin outside a Cincinatti Church, while fires with unknown causes are lumped in with established arson.

A more credible study by the nonpartisan A-Mark Foundation put the violence in better context. They identified 59 attacks targeting congregants, clergy, or staff at houses of worship of all faiths between January 2012 and December 2022. Shootings caused 74 of 79 deaths, while 40% of perpetrators suffered from mental illness.

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Moreover, the A-Mark report found that when it comes to motivation for attacks on places of worship, Christians aren’t the main target. “Only 18% of attacks targeting Christian or Catholic places of worship were motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred,” the authors said, while “attacks targeting Jewish (93%) and Muslim (83%) houses of worship were overwhelmingly motivated by antisemitic or Islamophobic hate”.

This is not to say that the fear felt by members of Ascension Catholic Church, or any other Christian congregation, is not real, but it is being stoked disproportionally by politicians and media figures — as well as by for-profit church security training and protection organisations.

The founder of one such company, Dwayne Harris of Full Armor Church Safety Solutions, told UnHerd that he launched the firm in 2017 as a response to “certain incidents that were occurring in the news” such as the Charleston church shooting. An ordained Pentecostal bishop and law enforcement officer, Harris says that the most common incidents at churches are lone actors in crisis, often due to mental health, however he believes that “cultural shifts and tendencies towards violence and disruption” in wider society have created a sense of fear that exacerbates these issues.

A competitor in the industry, Joe Puckett of the Church Security Academy, referred me to a recent video he posted on YouTube alerting US churchgoers to the threat of ISIS-K, a particularly active branch of the terrorist group believed to be responsible for recent attacks in Russia and Afghanistan. Puckett says that churches tend to come to him “afraid of their skill level and how they can defend themselves” against “the traditional lone wolf attack”. Increasingly, however, he says that “we’re afraid of some of these groups that are here” and that “it might be multiple people that are attacking us at one time”.

There is no evidence that ISIS-K, based in Central Asia, has any presence in the United States, however, the idea that terrorists are coming over an unsecure Southern border with Mexico is a common refrain on the Right and from Republican Party politicians, including Donald Trump.

Religious studies professor Matthew D. Taylor at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies believes that in certain Right-wing Christian circles, creating this climate of anxiety helps to justify retaliation. “Very rarely do people conceptualise themselves as violent aggressors”, he says. But the MAGA ecosystem, he explains, helps to rationalise taking-up arms as a defensive posture, because other groups are posing the greater threat.

Catholics and other denominations may be keying in on the trend, but Taylor says that is driven by a Charismatic-Pentecostal movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), increasingly influential within the Republican Party and counting Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White Cain, in its numbers.

“The NAR movement is spiritually accelerationist” Taylor says, claiming that “the current system is corrupted, false and demonic — and that their opponents are so totalitarian and tyrannical that they must be opposed”. Prominent Right-wing Christian influencers are helping to translate these political themes into spiritual terms, “claiming we need a great revival — which is intrinsically political and Right-wing in their theology — to reset American culture”.

The critical doctrine emerging from the NAR movement is the concept of “Spiritual Warfare”. Here, cosmic enemies are everywhere, helping to create a climate of fear and hostility, placing “true believers” on a permanent war-footing. From there, the idea of starting private militias helps fellow travellers to “disinvest in the system”, Taylor says, which risks creating suspicion for American democracy.

“When you start saying that we need to physically protect ourselves against our political opponents, and that they are a threat to our very existence, there’s no room for compromise” Taylor warns. “There’s no room for democratic negotiation if you claim the other side is out to destroy you. It’s violence all the way down.”

As America’s burning political climate collides with a mental health crisis and untrammelled access to guns, the idea of armed church militias is a dangerous thing. Places of worship are already high-profile targets for violence. But a greater risk for conflict, however, may be coming from inside the house. At a time when many conservative Christians feel that they are under siege by the secular, liberal world around them, taking up arms could feel like their only protection.

The postmaster, like the vicar and the publican, has historically created a kind of tapestry out of individual, sometimes rather lonely, human lives. Through the wonderful alchemy of community, it is capable of transforming them into something immeasurably more worthwhile. But in the first half of last year, pubs were closing at a rate of two a day. Churches are being shut down by the very people who are supposed to be keeping them open. In 2000, nearly a million people went to a Church of England service on a Sunday; by 2022, that figure fell to 549,000. And, as all of us have learned this January if we didn’t know already, for the past two decades the Post Office has been driving its own employees into the ground. 

The Church has become intertwined in this scandal in more than symbolic ways however, through the figure of Rev. Paula Vennells, first ordained as a deacon in 2005 and CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. She is now personally and nominally tied to one of our century’s great miscarriages of justice. And I imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury now rather regrets the foreword to his book Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope in which he credits Vennells with having “shaped my thinking over the years”. But this wasn’t just a rhetorical tribute: Vennells’s thinking has left its mark on more than one national institution. Across her careers, she has championed and centralised precisely the kind of centralising managerialism that leaves the little people forgotten. It is exactly this approach that Welby has galvanised as a battering ram against the local parish church throughout his tenure at Canterbury.

Despite the fact that Vennells had almost zero parish experience, never having been a vicar for instance, her candidacy for the post of Bishop of London — the third-most senior clerical job in the country — was supported by Welby. Astonishingly in retrospect, she came within a whisker of getting that job in 2017. This was at a time when Vennells’s star was riding high. She had turned a loss-making Post Office to profit. Perhaps she could do the same with the ailing Church of England, restoring both institutions to their position — alongside the Pub — in the holy trinity of British communal life. But, as we now know, not since Beeching has the local had such powerful enemies. 

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Embarrassingly for me, many of us subscribed to Vennells’s ideas back then. In 2015, without recognising the irony, I wrote for the Guardian: “We must do to the churches what Beeching did to the railways.” Here are some lines from that sorry piece. “The Church of England is the custodian of 15,700 churches… I suspect that if every single one of them were blown up tomorrow, England would be a much more Christian country in 10 years’ time.” The idea was this: “Instead of one over-stretched vicar covering six of eight rural churches, we should copy the way in which England was first evangelised through the establishment of minsters – churches that are supported by a community of clergy, churches that have the scale to maintain good organists, choirs and Sunday Schools… These high-morale, better-resourced bundles of energy could then become local campaign headquarters for the re-evangelisation of England.” What we needed was some creative destruction. 

It was a ridiculous thing to believe and I regret saying it. Mea culpa. But others kept the faith, and practised what they preached. Leicester Diocese, for instance, describes their Minster Communities as “groups of churches and fresh expressions working collaboratively and sharing resources to enable effective mission”. In 2021, Leicester Diocese voted to close 234 parish churches and replace them with 20-25 Minster communities each led by an Operations Director — who may or (more likely) may not be a priest. Clergy numbers could be cut and thus savings achieved. 

What do these clergymen and women do all day, after all? In my own Guardian piece I described the Church of England as mired in nostalgia “for a parish pastoral in which the local vicar, who knows everyone, wanders around in some wheel of benevolent aimlessness”. But this was to besmirch a vital civic function. Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw has noticed the dire consequences of this Minster mentality over in the Diocese of Truro: “Parishes are losing their clergy and you’re getting these huge mega-parishes that are unmanageable.”

In 2019, Rev. Vennells was tasked by the Church of England to write a secret review of how all this new thinking was going, in a church governance and buildings report. And not longer after she’d apologised to the wronged sub-postmasters for the “distress” they had been caused, the Church Commissioners asked her to come and tell them about her findings. The report surfaced last week, and in it the scale of the central church’s attack upon the local is fully revealed. It speaks of 1,000 church closures over the country: “Manchester has closed more than anywhere and balances its books with closures. And Chichester – £1.5 million deficit and was able to take £1.5 from closed churches and pastoral account and again this year.”

One Bishop who spoke up for the local church and against mass church closures was castigated in Vennell’s report for an attitude displaying an unwillingness to face “the ‘burdens’ of truth”. In an Orwellian twist, the report suggested that such recalcitrant Bishops would benefit from a “peer review” — which is manager-speak for re-education. It advised they have a “‘leadership contract’ or covenant agreed by senior leaders aligned to shared leadership values and behaviours”. This is the kind of language by which managerialism clasps its bony hands around the throats of the church. 

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In the light of the Post Office scandal, there has been much understandable anger about Vennells personally, claims that she is somehow morally deficient and in it for the money. I don’t quite share this view. In a sense, I think it’s worse than that. What the shocking treatment of sub-postmasters has revealed is not so much a story of avarice but of unwarranted trust in systems — systems of management, systems of technology — over people. This is the 21st-century equivalent of the banality of evil. And now, 700 ordinary decent men and women have been accused and prosecuted for theft on the say-so of a system of data. Divorces followed, stress, illness, bankruptcy, in some cases suicide. Apparently they thought computer systems — unlike people — could never sin. 

Something incredibly beautiful has been broken, perhaps never again to be mended. I was a fool to think that the local parish church could be replaced by vicars in regional hubs, fired with start-up entrepreneurial energy but hiding behind their laptops. I wanted some quick fix to the church’s slow decline, but I helped to make it worse. Clergy were described as “limiting factors”, church buildings as expensive millstones. Out with the old in with the new. Move fast and break things, was the spirit of the age. The sad story of Rev. Vennells and the Post Office has the same roots: a hubristic faith in technology and progress. Tragically, we broke far more than we ever realised. 

Some seven metres in height, it’s a super-confident portrayal of the triumph of good over evil, made in 1958 by a Jewish sculptor who lived in London throughout the Nazi murder of Jews in Europe.

But Coventry Cathedral famously stands for a more nuanced way of dealing with wrongdoing. On November 14, 1940, much of the city centre — and, notably, its medieval cathedral — was destroyed by a massive air raid of 500 German bombers. The rebuilt landmark, which last year marked the 60th anniversary of its consecration, was intended as a sentinel of peace and forgiveness.

Carved into the red sandstone of the original cathedral’s bombed-out altar — and behind a replica Cross of Nails created from the destroyed building’s charred roof timbers — is an inscription in foot-high letters: “Father Forgive”.

The Cathedral, then, is home to a vigorous ministry of reconciliation. And it was in this same spirit that its authorities decided to deal with the man who vandalised their statue.

Instead of pressing charges, they arranged a meeting with the vandal. It would be an opportunity for him to take responsibility for his actions. As Canon Mary Gregory, the Canon for Arts and Reconciliation at Coventry, says: “It was not easy for the person who damaged the statue to come to the Cathedral and apologise. Instead of seeking revenge, we choose the more challenging path of forgiveness and growing understanding.”

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A few miles south of the Cathedral is Finham Park School. They, like a great many schools around the country, have opted for a restorative justice approach to bad behaviour. According to Detective Inspector Stew Lewis from Coventry CID, “restorative justice is powerful in that in enables [victims] to speak directly to offenders about the harm their actions have caused, while allowing those responsible to show remorse and look to make amends”.

Practitioners of restorative justice believe punishment doesn’t work, and that words such as “consequences” are to be distrusted as euphemisms for crass retribution. 

As someone who was regularly beaten at school from the age of seven, with the headmaster’s extensive collection of canes, and often going to bed with blood in my underpants, I have a deep, visceral, and not entirely rational, dislike of “consequences”. But I still can’t adjust myself to a school without any consequences — not least because I can’t work out what sort of protection this affords to those who are affected by the bad behaviour of others.

The big idea is that “RJ”, as it is known to its fans, offers a way of rebuilding relationships within the school community. Instead of a detention, misbehaving students are offered an opportunity for conversation or a meeting with their victims.

In the words of one teacher, “RJ is about getting students to understand the harm they have caused, rather than blaming them”. Retributive justice is concerned with punishment and penalty, restorative justice with restitution and restoring community relationships.

Sounds great. And RJ is not just increasingly popular in secondary education. In primary schools around the UK, “consequences” for bad behaviour are being replaced by restorative practices such as “circle time”, in which all parties are brought together in the round and invited to share their thoughts with the group.

Thus, the school bully is encouraged to meet the person they have bulled, to hear how the victim feels about what has been done to them, and to apologise for what they have done. The lion lays down with the lamb. Reconciliation is achieved without punishment.

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Proponents argue restorative justice is a way of doing things with children, not to them. It is all about building collaborative behaviour between pupils and teachers. Not so much “this is my classroom and I’m in charge” from the teachers, but “this is our classroom”.

But… what if the bully enjoys this process? Gets a bit of a kick out of hearing the pain he has caused? What if he quietly smirks to himself, knowing that his charade of an apology is a frictionless fast-track back into school? What a travesty of justice this would be — the victim being re-bullied, within the very process that is meant to bring them some kind of resolution.

And the victim may not want to have to explain how the bullying made them feel. That is pretty exposing stuff, after all. I can imagine the victim coming away from such a meeting thinking that the whole school has secretly co-operated with the person who has made their life hell.

Do teachers really have the training, or the time, to replace punishment with some sort of quasi-therapeutic social environment? Daniel Buck, a teacher from the US, recently posted on Twitter:

“There were these two girls, one of them was from an abusive household, the other one her Dad had just died. They had a whole bunch of stuff going on in their lives and they kept nipping at each other, insulting each other online and bringing it to school. One of my administrators said: ‘Maybe you should sit down and have a restorative conversation with them”. I’m a 29-year-old dude with no training in counselling. You think that’s going to go well? Bringing up all of this really intense emotion, that’s going to end terribly. I don’t have the skill set for that. It’s probably very unethical, too, asking me to do something way outside of my training.”

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But it’s not just the practical aspects of RJ that ought to be interrogated more deeply. There is a troubling philosophical aspect to it all.

Michel Foucault, the philosopher who made his name pointing out the iron fist of punishment inside the velvet glove of therapy and behaviour management, would have had a field day with the potential manipulations of restorative justice. His great 1975 book, Discipline and Punishment, begins with a contrast between two sorts of penal systems: that of the violent 18th century, with its tortures and executions, and the apparently more ‘humanitarian’ reform into prison and incarceration that comes about in the 19th century. But Foucault sees more than humanitarian progress here. He exposes the prison system as a deepening of control and the advent of a society dominated by surveillance.

Restorative justice can be understood in Foucauldian terms as the interiorisation of subjection. Something that looks more humanitarian and people-centred, but something that introduces subtle new forms of subjective domination. With RJ, the therapeutic circle becomes a new form of social discipline.

What makes me especially uncomfortable is the unleashing of all this psychological power — the therapeutic techniques, the mobilisation of shame — within primary schools where the children are so young, they are often unable to resist being manipulated. A small child being asked whether they want to accept the apology of their bully is so suggestible at that age, one really must question whether they have the emotional wherewithal to agree. Or, indeed, to apologise and seek restoration and forgiveness.

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As with the Coventry example, forgiveness is the guiding spirit behind RJ. And when it happens properly, it is a beautiful thing. But it has to be carefully handled, and a healthy degree of scepticism is imperative. Any sense that the victim has some sort of obligation to forgive will create eddies of harm that radiate out.

Take an extreme example: imagine we introduced, however subtly, some sort of social expectation that victims of rape should find a way to forgive their attackers. Here, forgiveness can easily become another way of inflicting damage.

It is hard to know how deeply ensconced the philosophy of RJ has become in our school system. Local authorities like it partly because it lowers the number of school exclusions and relives them of the headache of having to make provision for excluded children. If bullies can say sorry and be “rehabilitated”, it probably saves the council a lot of money.

But is it working? At their most recent conference, the teaching union NASUWT reported that more than one in ten of their teachers had been physically assaulted by a pupil during the last year. They had also been subjected to pushing/shoving (22%), threats of physical assault (19%) and verbal abuse (58%).

It is easy to worry that the withdrawal of “consequences” in our schools is having very damaging consequences in the classroom. Indiscipline can affect a teacher’s confidence, leaving them feeling helpless and disempowered. The knock-on effects on lost teaching time are left to ripple silently across society.

Perhaps we need a touch more of St Michael’s robust attitude to the Devil than the punishment-averse psychology of restorative justice.

If vicars are often an object of projection, so much more the Archbishop. Any assessment of Justin Welby’s 10 years of office, therefore, will say more about me than him. The Archbishop is a living, breathing Rorschach test. Still: here goes.

Welby is hard to read because he is seemingly open and yet emotionally closed at the same time. Even before he landed the top job in the worldwide Anglican Communion, he was adept at not granting access to his inner world. The social polish you learn at Eton, with its arsenal of confident self-deprecation, is precisely the sort of self-protecting buffer zone that you need to survive being the nation’s punch bag.

There has been great pain in his life: dysfunctional alcoholic parents, the loss of a seven-month-year-old baby daughter in a car accident. Understandably, he has suffered periods of crippling darkness and has admitted to taking anti-depressants. He is brave in talking about his bruises, and yet also strangely hidden, both open and emotionally distant. And since he is not a natural people person, his openness can come across as scripted.

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Welby smiles to reassure, but in repose his face crackles with all the scary intensity of an officer on the Death Star; yes, a bit like a born-again Director Krennic. People say he has a thunderous temper when things don’t go his own way, which I can quite believe. Sometimes you can’t keep it all bottled up. I like Welby, but I am frightened of him.

Back in 2012, I interviewed him for The Guardian when he was still Bishop of Durham. Paddy Power had him at 6/1 to be the next vicar to the nation. We discussed woman bishops, still seen as a long way off. How would he reconcile the competing demands of those who see it as a theological necessity and those who deem it a theological impossibility? How would he square the circle, I asked? “Well, you just look at the circle and say it’s a circle with sharp bits on it,” he laughed. Anglicanism has always involved a certain amount of shape-shifting from its leadership. The phrase “all things to all men” is from the Bible, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing. Ideologically, Welby can be what you want him to be.

Here’s an example. A few days after that Guardian interview, the Rev Rod Thomas — an evangelical conservative — and I discussed who should get the top job on Channel 4 news. Thomas was against women bishops and believes homosexuality is a sin. I thought the opposite. Yet we both agreed that Welby was the right man for the job. That’s the power of a circle with pointy bits. Some see a circle, others see a square.

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Women bishops were approved within a few years, and the Church has now agreed on prayers for blessing same-sex marriages. Rod Thomas was made a bishop in 2015 and kept on board. But he is far from happy. “We should not mislead people into believing that we can ask God to bless those things that He has revealed are contrary to His will,” said Bishop Rod recently. I think he may have been more deceived than I about that circle.

Welby’s church, his circle with pointy bits, turned out to be this: a collection of morally-progressive, liturgically-charismatic evangelicals with a hint of woke. Damaged public schoolboys who find it hard to express their feelings in everyday life are often attracted to forms of worship that let it all hang out. Welby talks in tongues. The whole thing is so achingly sincere. This is surely what Prince Harry would be like if he got God. It’s the sort of religion that some of us watch through our fingers with embarrassment — like dad dancing.

With Welby, open evangelicalism has become the new centre of gravity in the Church of England. More Radio 2 than Radio 4, undemanding and depressingly easy listening. “Let’s be clear, I’m one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England”, he told me back in 2012. There remains stiff competition for this title, I can tell you. And Welby is not even close. He has a keen and lively intelligence and a steely will. But Welby’s Church of England, it might be said, no longer feels the need for academic-minded bishops. Better some B-school MBA or a Certificate in Church Planting than a proper PhD in Patristics for the modern cleric on the make.

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And here is my real beef with Welby’s Church: managerialism. The backdrop to Welby’s appointment was the banking crisis and the subsequent Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Church needed to get a bit more this worldly, many thought. It needed to understand finance and business. When it came to capitalism, Welby was a grown-up, having worked for Elf Aquitaine in a previous life. And 11 years in the oil industry clearly shaped his thinking about organisational structures. The old, slightly bumbling high-table, soft-power understanding of Lambeth Palace was not for him. Welby wanted to change things and have access to levers of real executive power.

But the Church of England is not set up like this. It never has been. The parish system is the very model of subsidiarity. If anything, the Church is a bottom-up institution rather than top-down. You bow to your bishop, but you don’t necessarily do everything he asks. Under Welby, however, the centre has grown ever stronger, the parishes increasingly weaker. Max Weber famously divided power into the charismatic, the traditional and the legal/rational. Welby is the first archbishop who has tried to govern through the latter.

The “Save the Parish” movement was established as a fightback. Too many bishops became middle managers, hidden behind their laptops. Directives and new initiatives came down from head office, which many of the clergy, myself included, received with an inner groan. In the face of declining attendance, we all had to learn that evangelical up-speak, and get on with the paperwork. Morale has plummeted.

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The Church’s reaction to Covid was the depressing conclusion of Welby’s legal/rational approach to power. Buffeted by abuse scandals — including that of a previous friend and mentor, John Smyth, who beat and sexually harassed young boys on Christian summer camps — Welby read the Covid situation in the light of his safeguarding nightmares. Safeguarding was the one area where rules could be imposed on the clergy. Churches were to be closed to protect the faithful from infection. Clergy were allowed into their churches to check them over for insurance purposes, but not to celebrate the holy mysteries, even on their own. The shepherds abandoned their sheep.

It was a terrible directive and a lot of us — myself included — ignored it and were put on the Lambeth Palace naughty list. The gap grew wider between the clergy and the powers that be. “If I had my time again, I would be more cautious about closing the churches,” Welby later admitted. But the damage was done. For many people, a pattern of churchgoing had been broken never to be taken up again. Sunday schools were abandoned, the vulnerable left to fend for themselves. Parish treasurers pulled their hair out as finances went into a death spiral. Zoom was never a realistic alternative for a religion that is inherently physical, all about the body and the blood.

In a couple of months, Welby will preside over the coronation of King Charles III, and the Church of England has never felt weaker. It’s not his fault. Secularisation is a feature of the Western world, not of any specifically failed leadership. But nonetheless, Welby has failed to speak the right words for our time.

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In a moment of crisis, Welby’s answer seems to be organisational restructuring — redirecting more and more resources into big, successful, glitzy, mostly-evangelical churches, while letting smaller ones wither on the vine, run by the unpaid or the retired, all exhausted. This feels like what a CEO archbishop would do. Not a pastor or an evangelist. And, most depressing of all, the whole thing seems to be an exercise in bureaucratic navel-gazing.

Welby is a well-intentioned man, but he is unable to read the room — or, rather the nation. When in 2020, he abandoned his fine 13th-century chapel to take the Easter service online from his kitchen, I imagine he thought he was expressing solidarity with those who were stuck at home. But most people didn’t see it like that. It felt like a silly gesture, a gimmick. And a kick in the teeth to those of us struggling to keep the Church show on the road.

Some say Welby will go after the coronation. I don’t know about that. But what I would want from the new man or woman is someone who could help revive the morale of the clergy. “It’s just not so much fun anymore,” said one senior cleric to me recently. On the front line, in the parishes, it feels like the Archbishop doesn’t much care about us. Or if he does, he has been refusing to show it.

I asked him to imagine he was standing on the edge of a swimming pool. Then I gave him a push in the small of his back. He stumbled forward. The leap of faith often requires a little shove. Yes, there are books to read, courses to attend, things to think about. But like learning to swim, there is only so much you can do from dry ground.

And like learning to swim, faith also involves the prospect of drowning. Baptism isn’t a little bit of genteel water sprinkling. The imagery is one of death and rebirth. It’s a simulated drowning. The old person is destroyed; the new one rises from the waters. Like Neo being unplugged from the Matrix and being reborn into a new reality. Evangelicals are not wrong when they speak of being born again. You can’t fully plan for what that involves. At some level, you just have to take the plunge.

I have been the priest at St Mary, Newington for ten years. This Sunday, I am moving on. A new parish awaits. The skip is full of stuff I remember buying with much excitement, but now looks like pointless trash; the salvation promised by advertising and the shopping centre is so short-lived. And now the removal vans have been — and trashed more of our apparently precious belongings — there are further trips to the local tip, which is rather poignantly located next to the crematorium.

This is where things come when they have stopped working: our fridges and our bodies. The tip and the crem are Good Friday places. This is the wasteland, the valley of the shadow of death. Perhaps one day we should gather here, rather than in a lovely church, to experience the full existential desolation of the crucifixion. Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion, was itself a rubbish dump. A place of human landfill. This is where our dreams come to die.

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I have never been especially threatened by atheism. For one thing, atheism is good for business: it helps maintain the tension. Indifference is the real enemy. But also because atheism is assigned a pivotal place in the Christian narrative. The period between 3pm on Friday and dawn on Sunday symbolises my own atheistic imaginings. When He is murdered by the Romans, all the expectation and excitement of Jesus-following is shown up as a terrible, embarrassing mistake. We were conned. He wasn’t the new King after all. Might is right. Oh, I get atheism all right. It’s an essential part of the cycle of Holy Week.

But professional atheists reading this will be sceptical of my identification with their cause. There is a “but” coming. A sleight of hand. As Alice Roberts snarkily told her Twitter followers last Good Friday: “Just a little reminder today. Dead people — don’t come back to life.”

They don’t, of course. But even nature itself sings a very different kind of song. A wander around Kew Gardens, right next to my new church, reveals the natural world coming back to glorious life after the dead of winter. It’s a wholly natural expression of deep Christian instinct: that there is life beyond death. That even death cannot keep life down.

The resurrection of Jesus is not magic. Not “a conjuring trick with bones”, as the great Bishop David Jenkins once put it. It’s an acknowledgement that a life rooted in the eternal will not remain under the heel of perpetual nothingness. Agreed, this is not an empirical statement. I have stepped outside what can be demonstrated naturally. The God I describe is beyond time and space, the author of all things, not one thing among others.

“Blah,” go the atheists. But upon this “blah” I hang my whole life. The God who is there in the person of Jesus is the same one in whom everything moves and has their being. It’s not that physical death doesn’t happen. It’s just that it doesn’t mean what nihilists believe it means. Hope exists because God exists.

As I leave my old parish, I feel a terrible sense of abandoning my people. It was hard to start with. Ten years ago, I was parachuted in by the Bishop who took pity on me after my resignation from St Paul’s Cathedral. Like all parishes, they wanted St Francis of Assisi with an MBA. What they got was a broken spirit, in hiding from the world. And to start with, many of them didn’t much care for what they got.

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I don’t blame them really. I was a mess. Some of them left the church. But slowly we rebuilt and we bonded. Now they are my family, the water of baptism being thicker than the blood of biological relatedness. We have been through everything together: bereavements, deep disappointments, some of the happiest parties you can ever imagine, then the emotional desolation of lockdown. During my ten years here, some of the post-war estates have been demolished and new more expensive and private developments have taken their place. As gentrification spread, our congregation has become much younger and whiter.

Last week, I buried Mr Jones, a man of great dignity and wisdom. Originally from Accra in Ghana, he worked as a civil servant in international development. He lay in church in an open casket, in a grey suit and a white bow tie. He loved his family and would read the Bible every day. He was old-school, the “Jesus loves me this I know” kind of Christian. The church was packed. The service was “done properly”. We sang ‘Abide with Me’: “Change and decay in all around I see, O thou who changest not abide with me.”

Our new church intake looks very different. Apart from being younger and whiter, they were not raised in the faith. There were fewer infant baptisms for this generation. Here, faith is a choice not an inheritance. “I wish my parents had done this for me,” said one of the new baptismal candidates. I understand this. Becoming a Christian is much harder to do as an act of choice, more fraught with anxiety.

The generation raised under the aegis of liberalism have to bear the weight of their own choices. This is problematic because to be in a church is to be a part of a family. The idea that you choose your family, choose to be baptised, seems to introduce a strange contractual aspect to this relationship, like taking out a mobile phone contract. I wonder if those “wanting more” in baptism preparation are, on some level, asking me for the small print. Is that how they see the Bible, I wonder? I hope I have helped to disabuse them of this idea.

My old friend Lord Sacks, of blessed memory, made much of this. The Bible speaks of God being bound to His people through covenant not contract. Unlike the contract, the Biblical covenant is a promise — love and be loved, through thick and thin, good times and bad. Even death cannot destroy this love. God is not a service provider in the liberal economy. The Holy Spirit cannot be summoned on Getir.

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More is the pity, some might say. I don’t have answers to many of the problems that people bring into this church. I can’t solve the deep poverty that many experience, nor the broken relationships, nor the desperate sense that the world is not responsive to everyone’s deepest needs. I am there to carry them, and they carry me. The church is where you can bring all the stuff that is impossible to solve. And there are advantages to this — it means that we are not frightened of all the stuff that cannot be remedied. We can carry failure. And we can only do this because, as I said before, hope exists because God exists.

When I celebrate Mass here for the final time, I need to remind myself that I am not abandoning people, because it’s not all about me. The only real job of a priest is to point beyond him or herself to that God who, I believe, is the only true ground of lasting hope. In a funny way, I suspect my departure has helped focus that for some of the congregation. Like a small shove in the back.

On Easter Sunday, as dawn breaks over South London, I will light a fire in the crumbling remains of my old church, substantially redesigned by the Luftwaffe, yet unbowed. I will take that fire into church and the first of the day’s baptisms will begin. Clouds of incense will pick up the light now streaming in through the window. The fire will be shared as everyone’s candles are lit. I will cry. Hugs will be shared. The victory over death will be proclaimed.

Later, we will feast on Jollof rice, which is a kind of sacrament of community round these parts. That seems a perfect way to say goodbye. We will always be family. Water is thicker than blood.

Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the illogical nature of the current Dutch coronavirus restrictions, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie, last week changed the statutes of his organisation and registered it with the chamber of commerce as a faith-based movement: overnight, The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason was born.

It is unlikely to be the last. His example, a group of Dutch mayors predicted wryly in an open letter to the government, is likely to mark the start of “an unprecedented religious revival in the coming weeks”.

The Netherlands has been in partial or full lockdown since November, primarily due to the pressure of patients with the Delta variant on the hospital system and one of Europe’s least efficient booster campaigns. But just over a week ago, the restrictions were loosened — albeit in a strikingly surreal fashion.

In the Netherlands today, brothels can open but museums can’t. You can sweat, unmasked, in a gym but you can’t sit in a bar nursing a quiet gin. “You can come together in the Veluwe [in the country’s Bible Belt] to talk about a 2,000-year-old book, but you can’t get together in Amsterdam to talk about a book from last month,” as Albrecht put it.

So last Friday night, I was among 50 people who snuck into De Balie under the cover of darkness — for fear of the police turning up — who signed a big, black book to join the community, and prepared to enjoy a night of much-missed comedy. “The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason is about democracy and the rule of law, the solace and consolation of culture, experiencing something together that culture can give, seeing a bit of light after two years of darkness,” said Albrecht – something of an unusual opening blessing.

Everything about the evening was as absurd as the situation in the Netherlands. The crowd devoutly wore face masks and staff religiously scanned coronavirus ‘QR code passes’. But the comics were not announced in advance, photos and recording were banned, and the whole affair had the illicit frisson of an under-age boozing session.

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Yet De Balie is far from alone in its rebellion. Across the Netherlands, bars and restaurants have been opening regardless of the restrictions – especially in towns near the German and Belgian borders. On Saturday, for instance, 30 hospitality venues threw open their doors in Horst aan de Maas in protest. Last Wednesday, some 70 museums and galleries around the country decided to ‘open’ as temporary hairdressers, beauty salons and gyms – including world-renowned institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw, and Amsterdam’s oldest theatre, De Kleine Komedie.

“We have a problem with the fact that hairdressers and nail bars and commercial activities can be open, and we can’t,” explained Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker. “We support everything we need to do in order to keep people safe. But this policy just seems contradictory and it seems to favour the commercial sector over the cultural one.”

Even the Dutch government appears to recognise this inconsistency. In a bizarre moment during a recent press conference, Mark Rutte emphasised that the Dutch have a constitutional right to protest, and that temporary openings could be viewed in this regard. “The right to demonstrate also applies to sectors like the hospitality industry, and I can imagine that mayors could look at ‘what’s allowed for a little while’… with the emphasis on ‘a little while’,” he said. “So if they want to open for a few hours to show ‘we are demonstrating’, then it’s up to the mayors how they deal with that.”

If it was an attempt to shunt on responsibility for enforcing his restrictions to local government (even though this is actually their structural role in the Netherlands), it soon backfired. Last week, 31 mayors — including Amsterdam chief Femke Halsema and non-conformist Breda mayor Paul Depla — wrote to the Government, pointing out that short-term policy-making is “reaching its limits” and putting local enforcers in a perilous position against a growing mood of civic disobedience. “It is in fact impossible but also undesirable for the state to use repression to forcibly convince Dutch citizens that the measures are correct,” they pointed out.

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Ahead of the Government’s next coronavirus press conference tomorrow, it also emerged at the weekend that the country’s medical advisory body, the Outbreak Management Team, wants cultural and hospitality venues to reopen alongside everything else until 8pm each day.

No doubt it would be a welcome move; but is it too little too late? In the Netherlands, the damage from these lockdowns has become increasingly evident. In the government’s most recent press conference, new health minister Ernst Kuipers admitted that two-thirds of young people are suffering from loneliness. Even since the November partial lockdown, the SCP, a social and cultural government think tank, has found that psychological wellbeing had dropped, particularly among the young.

And as for the affected industries, it’s unlikely that, even if the restrictions are lifted, business will be able to return to normal any time soon. Thousands of people working in the hospitality and culture sectors have simply given up and looked for work elsewhere. Many will be in coronavirus quarantine, after coming into contact with someone who has been infected. And for those who do want to return, it won’t simply be a matter of turning up to work the day after an announcement is made. An orchestra can’t just suddenly pick up bows and be ready to perform again next week: they need advance notice to plan.

“You see that the Netherlands is mentally exhausted with the pandemic and all of the restrictions — young people but also a lot of others,” said Concertgebouw managing director Simon Reinink on Wednesday, as the orchestra gave a protest rehearsal in front of a crowd of 50 people. “The one thing that can give meaning to life is the cultural sector. There has been a chronic underestimation of the importance of culture for people’s psychological health and wellbeing — and this is a huge problem.”

And as more rules are broken, mainstream civic disobedience risks becoming a habit; this is a country where ‘rules’ (like soft drug laws) are already treated flexibly and even the prime minister admits society tends to be “slightly anarchistic”. “Rules only work if they rest upon social and political agreement,” pointed out the group of mayors in their letter last week. “For example, almost everyone in the Netherlands understands and respects the importance of stopping for a red light. Enforcement powers are there to bring the few offenders into line and issue fines.”

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Despite last week’s mini-revolts, that remains a sentiment shared by most of the country. While “wappie” Dutch vaccine sceptics and pugilistic rioters sometimes make a lot of noise, 89.2% of the population is double jabbed, and almost 55% are boosted. Most of us have done our bit, we’ve followed the rules, despite their inconsistency and blunt capriciousness.

But all the signs suggest that we have reached a turning point: the latest reports suggest that while mostly-Omicron coronavirus infections are ramping up, the number of people needing hospital treatment is relatively stable.

I rang their bell, nervously. You never quite know what you will have to deal with, what manner of grief will be present. Here it was raw, angry, and visceral. The family were sitting on the floor in their lounge, eyes red and puffy, Christmas decorations pulled off the wall. Discarded tinsel was piled up in the corner of the room. The house was cold. The tree was bare. Christmas had been exposed as a lie.

Later, I went to a parish Christmas party. Mariah Carey and Jingle Bells filled the air. The party atmosphere bubbled with a generalised bonhomie. “Cheer up, Vicar. It’s Christmas,” someone said, handing me a glass of fizz and ignoring the obvious fact that I wasn’t the slightest bit in the mood. They meant well, of course, but all I could think of was that this party didn’t feel anything like the Christmas that we had been hearing about in church.

There, we had been reading from the book of Isaiah: “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Everything seemed the wrong way around. The people to whom Christmas was primarily addressed thought it an insult to their pain, and yet those who celebrated it the most seemed quite oblivious to its deeper existential message.

For the last twenty years or so, a new kind of Christmas celebration has been slowly working its way into the mainstream liturgical calendar. Its origins are in the Christian response to the longest night, around December 21, traditionally also the feast day for St Thomas, the patron saint of doubt. It was revived in the Eighties by people putting on Christmas celebrations in hospices. And it’s called Blue Christmas, blue as in feeling blue rather than an Elvis tribute Christmas service. It’s like Christmas except in the minor key, often with jazz music rather than traditional carols — though In the Bleak Midwinter often gets sung.

Blue Christmas is aimed at those for whom this is an especially difficult time, because of loneliness, or bereavement, or being out of work. And at Christmas it’s impossible not to remember those who we love and see no longer.

On top of this, the Covid uncertainty now throws a pall of gloom over all our preparations. So people came to our service last night, finding a dark corner of the church to sit in: those facing a miserable Christmas dinner for one bunged in the microwave, but also the cancelled, the bankrupt, the disgraced, the betrayed, the addicted, the heartbroken, the disillusioned. Some of us wanted to be there simply because life itself is never easy.

This is what the church looks like. It is one of the few places in our culture where we can bring all that messy stuff in our lives that we don’t know how to fix or process. And — if you will forgive me for sounding like a sermon is coming on — these are the gifts we bring to the manger that are more precious than gold, frankincense and myrrh. It is the cracks that let the light in.

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Every year, Christians struggle to distinguish between the Christian festival that takes place on December 25, and its secular cousin that travels alongside it. Every year, the cultural mash-up between Santa and Jesus, Rudolph and the angel Gabriel, gets ever harder to distinguish. In 1951, French Catholic clergy burnt an effigy of Santa Claus in front of Dijon cathedral. Extreme, yes. But I get it. Christmas has become far too confused.

Some years ago a little boy came to our Christmas nativity play dressed up as Batman. He sat among the kings and shepherds, the Vicar unclear as to his theological role. This cultural fusion has long been with us, of course. Arguably, Prince Albert and Charles Dickens have formatted our celebrations more than the Christ-child in the manger. “And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time,” sang Band Aid. Well, there won’t be snow in Bethlehem either (I just checked). It’s the Middle East for heaven’s sake. Snow is not a big part of the weather. Christmas has become a strange jumble of cultural references. And every year, there will always be yet another dreary hot take in the Guardian to the effect that Christmas is a borrowed pagan festival anyway.

Inevitably, then, Christians seek to maintain a degree of distinctiveness to what they do at this time of year. And there are already differences. For Christians, Christmas begins on the 25th and goes on for several weeks. For non-Christians, it ends on the 25th, or a day or two after. This means we sing our carols at different times. Just as the secular Christmas falls silent, full of that having-spent-too-much, having-drunk-too-much ennui, Christians take up the strain. It’s a problem, because by then many of us are sick of all those bloody carols, having been bombarded with them for weeks.

The answer to this need for distinctiveness is to be found in the minor key, in Isaiah’s proclamation, in the blue of Christmas. While secular Christmas goes on with its relentless up-speak, a Christian Christmas can get to the parts that “Merry Christmas” cannot reach. Technically, the difference is between optimism and hope. Optimism is generally fuelled by denial, a refusal to face the darkness. It’s a kind of holiday from reality. Hope, on the other hand, is a much more belligerent emotion. It stubbornly dwells in the darkness yet refuses to be beaten by it. Have you seen that YouTube clip of a classical music band doing a flash-mob performance of Here Comes the Sun in a Madrid unemployment office? This isn’t cheap optimism. It is light in the darkness. It’s hope.

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By Tom Holland

The Book of Isaiah was written several centuries before the birth of Christ but is clearly its inspiration. “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,” the author writes. Then, a few chapters later: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given … and his name shall be called Almighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”. When Isaiah promises that the people who have walked in darkness shall see a great light, St John develops the theme: “a light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” Whether you see Isaiah as some sort of prediction — the traditional Christian view — or as something that becomes the basis for a later ‘Christian’ understanding of the incarnation, it matters not so much. Isaiah conceptually organises Christmas.

Which is why the light pollution of the secular Christmas fairy lights must be a worry for those of a more religious disposition. You can only see the star if you are prepared to sit in the dark, refusing cheap consolation. Which is all to say that another Covid Christmas, one where the festivities might be once again a little more muted, could be a much better basis for appreciating what the whole thing is supposed to be about. It is at the funeral services I take at this time of year that I find the real Christmas message is easiest to preach — we stay in the dark and look for the light.

You can’t help but love the way an old-timer in a white aran sweater and houndstooth flat cap tells it. You want to believe in the solidarity of the diaspora. But if what he says is true, the Irish would not have just won their independence; we’d control India, Australia, and, God forbid, Canada.

Instead, what we got was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, signed 100 years ago this week. The treaty promised Ireland self-government under British dominion, as well as an exit plan for the Ulsterman in the counties to the north. With peace restored after centuries of violence, the Irish, naturally, decided to have another war. The victorious rebels now found themselves fighting the IRA and Éamon de Valera, who rejected the treaty as being too favourable to the British.

The provisional government, led by Michael Collins and the subsequent Irish Free State, turned their attention to an important front in the civil war: the United States. The Government lacked diplomatic recognition under the terms of the treaty, but its mission was not to wrangle support in Washington, DC; it was to convince the Irish Americans who had financed and armed Irish revolutionary forces to rally behind the treaty.

Two years earlier, the American-born de Valera had arrived in the United States as a stowaway on the SS Lapland, having just escaped from prison in England. Once ashore, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish Republic raised the equivalent of $70 million for the revolution in a coast-to-coast barnstorming tour, which drew disapproval from American elites. The grandees of Washington may have thought it uncouth to welcome a phantom dignitary from a non-existent country, but local and state politicians knew they would be whipped from office if they ignored the visit.

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Babe Ruth’s Boston Red Sox drew 15,000 fans to its 1918 World Series victory, the club’s last championship for nearly a century. Nine months later, 50,000 people packed the same stadium to witness de Valera speak, flanked on the podium by former Mayor James Michael Curley and every member of the city’s Democratic machine. The rapture from the crowd prompted invitations from the governors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as city leaders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Ultimately, De Valera’s year-long jaunt across the United States helped the Irish win their independence — and once the civil war started, leaders of the provisional government feared his contacts could be mobilised against the treaty. What they did not appreciate was how polarising a figure de Valera had become among the Irish diaspora.

Irish American leaders bristled at de Valera’s imperial attitude; he was happy to cash the checks and happier still to dismiss his financial backers when they opined on how to spend the money. The Gaelic American, the mouthpiece for the republican movement in the United States, opposed the treaty right up until the moment de Valera agreed with it. “This half-breed Spanish-American Jew intends if he can to turn Ireland into a miniature Mexico where defeated candidates for office refused to abide by the decision of the majority rendered at the election and seek to overthrow the will of the people by force,” the paper said in an editorial.

While some Irish American activists continued to oppose the treaty, Free State officials determined the silent majority of the Irish in America were satisfied to hear that their countrymen had received a reprieve from British oppression. The details of whatever government emerged were of little concern. “The most effective propaganda is frequent dignified statements from the government of the Irish Free State showing that it is functioning successfully and is determined to do so,” diplomat Timothy Smiddy wrote in a memo back home.

Smiddy shifted the focus of the pro-treaty forces from winning the hearts and minds of Irish American activists to publicly re-enforcing the legitimacy of the new government. He set about attempting to undo the very work in America that had helped the Irish win independence, pressing US officials who had once turned a blind eye to gun-running to crack down on it. He prevailed upon activists to ignore the pleas of IRA widows when the hat made its way around the pub. He succeeded on all fronts, but nothing helped his cause more than the American Irish’s unity in their own domestic political machines where ethnic solidarity trumped ideological difference.

As for De Valera, he was soon chastened by the civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty. He appeared to have learned a few important lessons from the machine politicians that kissed his ring back in 1919. James Michael Curley, like the Irish rebel leader, did two prison stints for fraud. This did not stop the Boston Irish from sending him to Congress, the governor’s mansion, and on four occasions to the Mayor’s Office. When he was barred from attending the 1932 Democratic convention with the Massachusetts state delegation, he arrived in Chicago alone. The party clerk must have been puzzled during roll call when the Puerto Rican delegation sent forth its new ‘representative’: Alcalde Jaime Miguel Culeo. The people of Boston could forgive any crime or public embarrassment, so long as Curley delivered on the patronage projects that won him the nickname the “Mayor of the Poor”.

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By 1926, de Valera cut ties with Sinn Féin and established Fianna Fáil, pledging to take his seat in the Dáil and achieve republican government from within the Irish Free State. In 1932, Fianna Fáil dominated the elections on a populist platform dedicated to public works projects and social security. He delivered on the social safety net, which kept Fianna Fáil in charge long enough to gut the constitution of any trace of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By July 1937, just two months after someone dynamited George II’s imperial monument in St. Stephen’s Green, the Irish had a new constitution. That “half-breed Spanish Jew” had made good on delivering an authentic and unique Irish Catholic vision for what a Republic could be.

The Sons of Gael who threw their fivers into the hat and their .38s into the barrel throughout the Troubles believed their contributions would deliver de Valera’s romantic vision to their compatriots to the north. Today, you’ll find their American grandchildren on barstools listening in awe to the Old Timer in the Aran Sweater and singing along to “A Nation Once Again”, as indifferent to the particulars on the ground in the old country as their great grandfathers were at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

These youths have embraced smoking and the Clancy Brothers and unapologetic popery to stick it to the secular, technocratic, iconoclastic, opioid-addicted world the dominant protestant class left the United States. Éire is a counter-culture preserved in amber, an escape hatch from a modernity that has left them feeling just as alien as their great grandparents must have felt at Ellis Island.

They have no idea the freedom fighters of the IRA are mere heroin dealers now. That the Emerald Isle has become Europe’s answer to the Cayman Islands, rather than that beacon standing athwart brute materialism. Ireland, freed from the oppression of the Black and Tans, voluntarily followed London’s lead into financialisation and speculation.

It is a nation of bankers and those on the dole, waking up to the realisation that Silicon Valley’s dream of universal basic income exists so the jobless masses can have just enough money in their pockets to pay the billionaire overlord class. The robots aren’t advanced enough to take all the jobs just yet, so they make do with Polish labourers — the only people in Ireland who still go to Mass in the modernist concrete churches.

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To look at Ireland from abroad is to understand the world of John Swanwick Drennan, the least appreciated of the great Irish poets:

A golden casket I designed
To hold a braid of hair
My Love was false and now I find
A coil of serpents there

The Irish resent the pedestal erected by the diaspora. They desire the same freedom to squander the national inheritance as the rest of the West. Occasionally, Irish Americans — or at least a sliver of its activist class — take notice of the retreat from what made Ireland unique only to be dismissed as Cromwellian interlopers.

When Ireland’s technocratic banker class moved to strike the constitutional protection of the unborn, Americans rallied to its defence (the pro-life movement being one of the last vestiges of Irish Catholic machine politics). Irish authorities, hungry as they are for US investment when it comes to corporate tax dodges, suddenly developed an allergy to American dollars. Just as the Irish Free State appealed to higher authorities in DC to stifle the flow of guns, the ruling class turned to Dublin corporate resident Mark Zuckerberg to successfully disarm the opposition.

One hundred years on, de Valera is as welcome in Ireland today as Curley was at the 1932 Democratic convention.

Sometimes, I can’t help but chuckle at their irreverence. And so it was last week with their “Taking the Michael” headline. St Michael’s Church in Bournemouth had renamed itself St Mike’s “in a trendy rebrand to entice young people”. Grumpy conservatives online — like me — pointed out that the “el” bit at the end of the word “Michael” is of one of the words for God in the Hebrew Bible. Michael — roughly translated — means something like, “One who is like God.” Given this, taking the “el” bit off the end seems rather unfortunate, especially for a church.

But like most headlines in The Sun, there is a streak of cruelty about it. St Mike’s is a huge barn of a Victorian church designed to seat 1,000 people, but now with a congregation of 20. Bournemouth has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the South West. The Vicar there, Sarah Yetman, has a tough gig and all power to her elbow for trying to turn things around. “We aren’t trying to alienate anyone by changing the name” she explains, “But I do feel that if we don’t take steps now to draw people in from those younger generations we will be lamenting what we have missed in the years to come.” “A bid to become more trendy” was the Daily Mail’s take.

So why did this tiny story attract such attention from the national press? Well, I suspect because it does say something rather important about the changing nature of the Church of England. “Taking the Michael” is just the latest in a broad transformation whereby formality of worship is being dropped because it is seen as a barrier to new younger worshippers. The big idea is that we should all get more chummy with the divine. The austere, intimidating God of fire and thunder, the God of the mountain top, the God whom we approach in awe and wonder, is being replaced with the friendly face of Jesus, more mate than majesty. St Michael was the angel of battle who defeated Satan in the ultimate celestial firefight of good vs evil. I don’t think he’s a Mike.

For the Daily Mail and The Sun, what is going on here is of a piece with the cheapening of our national life — which may seem a bit rich coming from them, but there you are. Trendy vicars are the new trendy teachers trying to relate to the kids with permanent (draining to watch) smiles, over the top, unrelenting enthusiasm, and awkward references to popular culture. Yes, I get it. I too want my children’s teachers to look more like Hector from the History Boys (without the fondling) than the Nineties era Tony Blair leaning casually against the photocopier in his stonewashed jeans. And the comparison is not just with trendy vicars. Our new Bishops want to be known as Ric or Pete or Rod. Names are all about relatability. And Christianity is about our relatability to God.

But here, of course, we stumble very quickly into some deep theological waters of the sort Christians have been arguing about since the first few centuries of its existence. It is a cliché — and indeed an antisemitic trope (See Richard Dawkins) — to compare the violent austere God of the Old Testament to the loving warm and cuddly God of the New Testament as captured in the person of Jesus. Old Testament bad, New Testament good — that’s not Christianity btw.

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But nonetheless, the central dynamic of Christianity is to be found in the interplay between immanence and transcendence, between the God who draws near and the God who is far off. And far off isn’t a bad thing. This is the God who hovered over creation at the beginning of time. The is the God of the unknown, the one who rather put Job in his place by saying that there are some things that will always be beyond his understanding. This is the God of the God’s eye view, looking at things from the widest possible perspective. This also is the mystical God of silence, there in the still small voice of calm. For Jews, this God is not even to be named. He is known as “Hashem”, the name. This is the God who hides his face from Moses.

Christianity doesn’t resile from any of this. But adds something shockingly different. God is manifest in a particular person, with a name and a face. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He is down-to-earth (quite literally) and makes God relatable in a whole new way. Jesus is God, and Jesus is my friend.

For the first 400 years of the church’s history, it struggled to express how both of these perspectives could be true at once, how God could be both near and far, immanent and transcendent. And what it came up with was the doctrine of the Trinity, not so much an answer to how these different perspectives co-exist, but rather a firm commitment to the idea that neither could be given up without giving up the heart of what it was to be a Christian. The Trinity is not any sort of philosophical answer but a kind of regulative guide to what orthodox Christianity looks like. “But play you must a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” wrote Wallace Stephens. It’s a bit like that.

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I am not convinced that the whole Jesus-is-my-best-friend approach best carries all that young people want from the Almighty. There is nothing like spending an hour or so on your knees, somewhere vast and empty, to put your life into some kind of larger perspective and make you feel suitably humble in the great scheme of things. There is nothing quite like the order and majesty of catholic worship to summon a sense of holiness. This is the place where you can come with all your baggage, failures, stupidities, and hold them up to the altar without the distracting need for chat or explanations. This is the place where the sinner hears the convincing reply of silence. Even the deeply irreligious poet Philip Larkin could see what this kind of church offered: “Since someone will always be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

St Mike’s has spent some of the considerable money it received from the central church funds on a smart new website. It has the look of a Benetton advert with ridiculously good-looking 20-somethings in fashionable clothes set in interesting locations. Some of the clergy I know call this sort of thing “imaginary church”. On the website, there are no images of the church itself or the real congregation. So I looked for some. I found one of ladies in their 70s with tight platinum rinses and big coats keeping out the chill.

Being a vicar is extremely hard. And it looks like the Vicar of St Mike’s has a job that is harder than most. I wish her well. But even so, the new St Mike’s scares me for the future of the church. As numbers collapse, it is the small pools of musty holy silence that are being cut out first, ordinary churchgoers being sidelined, as central church finance is being pumped into smiley relatable imaginary church. People can find relatable anywhere these days, in every walk of life. Our culture is sick with the sugary taste of emoting professionals. Because, like diabetes, it eats us away from within.

The Revd Canon Alan Billings, who used to be a parish priest — and taught me theology at Vicar’s training college — is now the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire. He recently wrote a piece, in which he suggested that the Church could learn a valuable lesson from the mistakes made by the police.

Both organisations, for example, require visibility in the community. But the police, under financial pressure, have closed one local station after another, and replaced “bobbies on the beat” with hubs covering increasingly large areas that serve multiple communities. The Church, he argued, is about to try something similar. And it will end in tears.

In response, Michael Mulqueen, Professor of Policing and National Security at the University of Lancaster, wrote a letter to the paper, accusing Dr Billings of being “unfair”. He praised the way the “officers and staff [have] creatively formulated new, good-quality, high-value solutions to police increasingly complex communities”. For example, Professor Mulqueen thinks it perfectly acceptable that “digital neighbourhood policing services” can be used to compensate for reduced officer headcount. In his view, ordinary citizens find face-to-face discussions with officers “too daunting or dangerous a task”.

This latter comment echoes the language used following the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, a few miles from my parish. If women don’t trust the police, perhaps then it is safer to engage with the police online. But there are safety issues here too. Only this week, one of the women who was arrested at the vigil for Sarah Everard described her discomfort after 50 police officers contacted her on Tinder.

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The case for digital policing, according to Professor Mulqueen, is that it enables the police to “reach more people than we otherwise could, while reducing cost and carbon footprint”. Yet for Professor Billings, this strategy has opened up “a gulf between public and police, as trust and confidence in police ebbed away”.

The two boroughs of London with the highest gun and knife crime are Southwark and Lambeth. I live on the border of the two. But the only time I ever see a police officer is in a car going sixty with its lights and sirens flashing. I never see an officer walking around my parish, still less get the opportunity to speak to one, except when I report a crime to a call centre or when they come when called — which, I have to say, they do.

Isn’t this all we should reasonably expect, some might argue? Why waste valuable police resources on chat and public relations? We should free them up to chase the baddies. “Bobbies on the beat” is just sentimental nostalgia.

This is where the comparison between the police and the Church of England is instructive. There are 45 territorial police forces in the UK. There are 42 dioceses in the Church of England. Both are cash-strapped. Both seek universal service provision. Both are expected to have a presence on the ground across the country.

The so-called “British way of policing” — growing out of community consent — and the Church of England are the building blocks of localism. And localism is still being lauded as the answer to our problems: “Localism is the key to levelling up Britain,” wrote William Hague in The Times this week.

But for all the high-profile public defence of localism — and the PM was at it in his speech to the Tory Conference, defending the broken windows theory of crime prevention — experientially, localism seems on the decline. I have no idea what the name of my GP is anymore. I never see the same person twice. Getting into the surgery is a bureaucratic nightmare. Meanwhile, the police whizz by. And now the Church — most recently in the Diocese of Leicester — is proposing to relocate vicars to regional hubs.

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Rationally and perhaps economically, all this makes a certain sense if these jobs are understood in purely instrumental terms. But as well as being crime fighters, the police exist to reassure the public. And here there is no substitute for presence, for the face-to-face encounter. In church terms, it is the Ministry of Just Wandering Around, of being seen and available.

I recently bought one of those fancy new electric bikes with a box on the front so that we can take the children to school. It’s something of a godsend in the Mad Max dystopian world of petrol-less south London. But the best thing about it is that I have rediscovered the joys of community vicaring. “Morning!” I shout out breezily to Mrs so-and-so as she pops out to the shops. Sometimes I pass by with a wave. Sometimes I stop for a chat. It is in these chance encounters that you really find out what’s going on in the parish, who has upset who (often me), who has gone into hospital and so on. It is the basis of establishing trust.

Is this a waste of time and money? Should the Church be paying me and should the police be paying its officers to wander around my neighbourhood with a vague sense of semi-purposeless benevolence? The bean-counters in head office think this can be achieved more efficiently. But the problem here is that so much of what we do does not fit into a strict job description.

The doctor isn’t just a glorified drug dispenser. She listens to the concerned; she gives people time to express their hidden fears. Things often emerge in conversation that reveal where the real issue lies. There is no substitute to giving people time. Efficiency directives from head office rob people of this opportunity. And defending all this is not simply some reactionary nostalgia for the 1950’s — bobbies on the beat, vicars out in the parishes, GP’s chatting with their patients. It is defending the human scale of things.

Localism isn’t regionalisation. It is the presence of people, over time, and geographically rooted, committed to a collection of streets, building up relationships layered by years of daily encounter.

All this has been collapsing for years, but Covid has accelerated the change. The pubs are closing — we no longer speak of going to the “local’ for a pint. The village church is empty, so too, soon, the local vicarage. The GP hasn’t time to see you. The police fly by, always in a hurry.

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My own instinct is that, one day, some of this will have to return. A regionalised church will collapse for want of local support and new forms of local church will spring up, hopefully reclaiming the ancient buildings that have been abandoned.

But for now it is time to hunker down, and sit out this social and emotional winter. Those of us who want a return to what we had will have to keep the memory of it alive. Innovations will have to be survived and endured.

Forty years ago, the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that “what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us”. He wrote those prophetic words two years before the official invention of the Internet and decades before the dreaded Zoom.

These have superficially brought us together, yet also fundamentally separated us in ways that he hardly could have imagined. Fractured and disconnected as we are, with social solidarity continually fraying through lack of real face-to-face contact, the new dark ages are indeed already upon us.

As an atheist, and as someone who had to apologise the last time he went to church after its leaders were accused of carrying out “exorcisms” on gay people, you might have thought this would be a tough gig. And yet it wasn’t.

The theme was deliberately chosen so he could reflect on the way local communities had pulled together during the pandemic: “One of the things I’ve been profoundly struck by in the last 18 months is the fact that people have looked out for each other in a way I haven’t seen in my lifetime.” And he thanked people of faith for playing their part in all this. “I may not believe in God, but I do believe in faith,” as he once explained. Christians, he said on Sunday, were the Labour Party’s “moral compass”.

But the “love thy neighbour” story is a good deal more morally challenging than Keir Starmer seems to realise. For it is not a moral tale designed to celebrate social togetherness; it is supposed to challenge the listener to think about who their neighbour might be. And this is the message that appears to be lost on Angela Rayner.

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After all, the point of the Good Samaritan story is that the audience hated Samaritans. They were “scum”. Too often this story is simply taken to be a heart-warming moral tale of helping others in a time of need — hence Starmer’s words about our coming together in the pandemic, with references to food banks and so on.

That’s all good and fine. But the parable’s purpose is not to make us all feel good about ourselves. It is the “scum” that acts with compassion, while the morally righteous pass by on the other side of the road. Applied to the Labour conference, the story should be renamed “the Good Tory”.

And here we reach the heart of the Labour Party’s problem with voters. It believes far too much in its own virtue — and so gives itself the licence to disparage its opponents in any way it likes. They are “scum”, we are the righteous. They deserve it.

At the end of Sunday’s church service, Starmer was presented with a copy of Graham Dale’s God’s Politicians: The Christian Contribution to 100 years of Labour. It is a “contribution” which has historically been fundamental to the success of the Left — arguably even more so than to the Right — but has been on the wane following the decline of Christianity.

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Theologically, the Christian contribution to the Labour movement has rested on one fundamental idea: that what used to be called the “brotherhood of man” was rooted in “the Fatherhood of God”. To claim that all human beings are children of the same heavenly Father is to establish a deep ontological equality between all people and readily serves as the basis for a politics of social justice. But while this basic religious assumption can be harnessed as a powerful defence against divisive forces of social change — most notably certain forms of unbridled capitalism — it can just as much be used to express our fundamental connectedness with people with whom we passionately disagree.

In other words, the Fatherhood of God cuts both ways: it serves as the basis for food banks and better social security, but it also resists the dehumanisation of those some might label “scum”. It is no coincidence that churches are perhaps still the most socially diverse gatherings in the country.

But social justice has come to mean something else to the modern Labour Party. Justice is a complicated word in Christian ethics because theologians have long recognised that it can have a persecutory flavour. In many ways “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is the epitome of justice in so far as the punishment is proportionate to the crime.

Starmer spoke proudly yesterday of his former life in the Crown Prosecution Service. The scales of justice that hang over the Courts of Justice in which he plied his trade speak precisely to this sense of balance — the punishment fitting the crime. But without being tempered by mercy, justice alone can lead to a kind of revenge mentality in which retribution is cheered and celebrated. This is especially prevalent among those who are convinced of their own righteousness. Which is why, generally speaking, I fear people’s virtues far more than their vices.

Martin Luther famously had a complete about turn in his theology when he recognised that he actually hated the idea of a just God, because if God was just — and so treated people according to their just deserts — then we would all be lost. Polonius says to Hamlet: “My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.” Hamlet replies: “God’s bodykins, man… use every man after his desert and who should ‘scape whipping?” From this perspective, we are all wrong-un’s, in need of forgiveness.

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And so social justice — unmoored from the Christian belief in forgiveness and a society rooted in the Fatherhood of God — can easily turn into something that most of us might legitimately fear. After all, who of us would escape a whipping were the extent of our social sins exposed? That is why I — and I suspect I am not alone — am terrified at the prospect of angry people such as Angela Rayner gaining a whiff of real power. I fear that what they call justice many of us would experience as persecution. We would become scum.

That isn’t to say, as the great theologian Stanley Hauerwas once commented, that just because we should love our enemies we shouldn’t have any. Yes, there is struggle and political contest. Yes, there must be passion. But justice warriors must also recognise in their opponents something inherent in all of us — we are all potentially loveable, all fallen. When Labour violates this basic human solidarity out of a heightened sense of their own righteousness, voters rightly flee. Because the fear is that it’s Labour that has now become the nasty party.

“The current trajectory of our church is a huge mistake and the leadership is out of touch with ordinary churchgoers,” George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote yesterday. “It is time to rally the troops.”

He was writing in support of the newly formed Save the Parish movement — a group I have been plotting with from its creation. And yes, that is a staggering thing for a former Archbishop to say about the current leadership.

However, it is not former Archbishops that are at the core of this new movement, but ordinary parishioners and parish priests who believe that the church itself has turned against them. They have witnessed how the centre of gravity in church affairs — as well as the funding — has shifted from the local parish towards an increasingly bureaucratic and centralised church structure.

It is ordinary churchgoers and faithful church wardens who have looked after their churches for years, as well as clergy padding about in their parish, visiting the sick, burying the dead and administering the sacraments, who are most angry about this betrayal. It feels like we are in the middle of an aggressive corporate takeover.

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If you flick through the jobs section of the Church Times, you can see this effect almost straight away. It used to be full of jobs for the Rector of This and the Vicar of That. But such vacancies have increasingly been replaced by people with unrecognisable and convoluted job descriptions. Now they advertise areas of responsibility that have little to do with parish ministry, answerable directly to a line manager somewhere in Church House.

Jobs that began as a way of supporting the mission of the parish are now being regarded as its cheaper replacement. The parish clergy are “limiting factors” and the people in the pews merely “passengers”, as one senior Anglican clergyman put it last month.

No need for priests, or expensive theological education and the like. 10,000 new churches are imagined, led by lay people, not clergy. Many will not have a building, just a website. Many will meet on Zoom. It’s not really what most of us would call a church. But if “the church is the people not the building”, as goes the oft-heard mantra, then why not? There is certainly no need to worry about a leaky roof when you’re only online.

Of course, there have been times when I have fantasised about my job not involving the maintenance of a crumbing church tower. Even ten years ago, at St Paul’s, when the Occupy movement gathered around the Cathedral, I felt the building had become more important to some than the message it was built to proclaim.

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My shamefully silent Church

By Giles Fraser

St Paul was a tentmaker, after all. And few parish clergy who have done the job as long as I have can be unfamiliar with the frustration that comes with looking after a large building. But the idea that we would be more entrepreneurial and light of foot if we were to hand the keys over to the National Trust is an absolute fantasy.

“Pioneers” is what the Church’s Head of Evangelism, Canon Dave Male, wants more of. Pioneers must be “freed up”, he says. But the problem here is that the weight of parish commitments, even the building, is what keeps us from floating off into some abstract theological space. The parish is grounded, rooted in place and time.

Yes, the pandemic has left the church feeling the pinch financially — and there is much need for belt-tightening. But we have far too many Bishops for the number of churchgoers that we now have. Probably far too many Dioceses as well, each with its own set of managers and advisors. Save the Parish believes that in times when finances are hard, it is the front-line parishes that should be supported as a priority rather than directing funds away towards another new top-down initiative.

It used to be the case that the parish owned its own vicarages and paid its own clergy. It was almost the very definition of an anti-fragile, localised organisational structure. But those who proclaim subsidiarity as a principle — and it was originally a theological idea — are often the first to betray it.

In 1976, the central Church decided that the parish was an inefficient way of running things and brought the ownership of parish assets under the control of the Diocese, introducing a whole new layer of management to look after the parish’s assets. From here on in, the Diocese began to have its own ideas about how best to spend a parish’s assets. Vicarages were sold off. The clergy were paid from a central pot. And power shifted from the parishes to the Diocesan structures.

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Last week, we gathered as Save the Parish for the first time in the ancient St Bartholomew’s church in Smithfield. Alison Millbank, Canon Theologian from Southwell Cathedral, put the matter plainly: “the Church of England has totally capitulated to market values and managerialism… There has been a tendency to view the parish like some inherited embarrassing knick-knack from a great-aunt that you wish were in the attic.”

The fightback, it’s safe to say, has started. At the end of the event, Fr Marcus Walker, the Rector of St Bartholomew’s, described Save the Parish as “the last chance to save the system that has defined Christianity in this country for 1000 years”. He may not have been exaggerating.

These days, our senior clergy do MBAs and spend their lives in committees, devising desk-generated grand plans for the revitalisation of the Church. On the receiving end of these continual initiatives are the poor bloody infantry, the clergy and people of the parishes, slagged off as an impediment to growth and rubbished as some antique hangover from a bygone age.

The senior clergy say they value the parish. And some do. But many on the ground are just not feeling the love.

Once again he gives the impression of leading a charmed existence, free from the constraints endured by ordinary mortals. Once again he’s been accused of acting as if the rules — even those of Holy Mother Church — are for the little people.

In this particular case, the little people are Johnson’s fellow Catholics, many of whom have made great personal sacrifices to abide by the teachings of the Church — especially those on marriage and divorce. So the news of Boris and Carrie’s wedding ceremony at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday must have come as a shock. It certainly came as a surprise to me.

But perhaps it shouldn’t have. There are some people in this life who are blessed — or, rather, cursed — with the ability to get away with almost anything. Boris Johnson is one of them. And as if to prove it beyond doubt: there he was, at the altar, getting away with it again.

Except that he wasn’t.

It’s not as if the happy couple snuck into the Cathedral, with a tame priest in tow, and got married in defiance of ecclesiastical authority. No, this will have gone through the proper channels and will have received the appropriate approvals. Indeed, given the circumstances, I’d be surprised if Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, was not informed.

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Unless a colossal error has been made or false information has been supplied — and there’s no evidence of either — then this marriage took place within the rules.

And so on to the second charge in the case against Boris’s nuptials — which is that he exploited a loophole in canon law: that his two previous marriages are not recognised by the Catholic Church. If it did indeed come down to a technicality, then Boris could be accused of violating the spirit of the law, if not its letter.

There’s plenty who’d just love to do that. For the zealots of the Unreformed Church of Remain, Boris is already guilty of the gravest possible sin (getting Brexit done); and thus, if he can be accused of others, that would be a bonus.

Among the experts trying to explain canon law to a confused public, the consensus is this: that the ceremony that took place in the cathedral on Saturday, was not — from the point of view of the Church — Boris Johnson’s third marriage, but his first.

The Church does not deny that the first two marriages took place as a civil arrangement under the secular law of the land. However, the Church’s primary concern is with marriage as a sacrament.  And here we need to understand what the Church means — and absolutely believes — a sacrament to be.

It’s more than just another word for a ritual or a ceremony. The Catholic Church recognises seven sacraments, including Matrimony, and each of these have a particular set of rituals associated with them. However, the ceremony is a visible sign of something more important: the dispensation of divine life to God’s people through His Church.

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So, when the Church marries a man and a woman it isn’t some theatrical performance to make the happy couple’s special day extra special (at least that’s not all it is). Nor is it solely the Church’s blessing upon the tribal rites of a particular time and place — the hatches, matches and dispatches universal to every human society. It’s also more than a means by which Christians proclaim and celebrate what they believe.

Rather, what a sacrament is first and foremost is a channel for God’s grace and power. It is a gift that changes reality at the most fundamental level. Thus it is through Baptism that a person becomes a member of the Church. It is through Confession that sins are absolved. And it is through Matrimony that a man and a woman enter into a lifelong union that is authored by God Himself.

I cannot stress enough that this is what faithful Catholics actually believe. Just as God is not a metaphor, His divinely instituted sacraments are not metaphors.

You may think that this is all very weird — which is fine, because it’s meant to be weird. In fact, the main problem with getting outsiders (or even Catholics themselves) to understand Catholicism is not that they find it strange, but that they don’t appreciate the full extent of its strangeness.

Ever since the Reformation, and arguably long before, people have tried to translate the things of God into purely human language. And, up to a point, that’s fine — as long as one remembers that, like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, the translation is incomplete.

Here’s just one example, a tweet addressed to Boris Johnson from the comedian Katy Brand: “A nice touch to have your previous marriages struck out by the Catholic Church. Gives it all a lovely Tudor flourish.”

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Eighteen thousand likes, but zero understanding. The Catholic Church didn’t “strike out” anything. Boris Johnson’s first two marriages were not entered into as Catholic sacraments — and are thus not the Church’s business. The question of striking out does not even arise.

The Church’s business is marriage as a Catholic sacrament — and it is in this context that it will not allow divorce, because it cannot put asunder what God has joined together. In some circumstances, the Church will annul a marriage, but that is only a recognition that the marriage, as a sacrament, never existed in the first place because it was not freely or properly entered into.

And thus we come to the real issue regarding Saturday’s big event — and that is the question of Boris Johnson’s sincerity. Though he was baptised a Catholic, evidence of his commitment as an adult to any form of Christianity is somewhat patchy. As for what he’s said himself about his religious beliefs, he’s best known for likening them to a faltering radio signal:

“I suppose my own faith, you know, it’s a bit like trying to get Virgin Radio when you’re driving through the Chilterns. It sort of comes and goes. I mean sometimes the signal is strong, and then sometimes I’m afraid it just vanishes. And then it comes back again.”

One might also ask about the spiritual radio station he’s been tuning into. Indeed, some might suspect that the signals he’s sent and received are closer to the Bacchanalian worldliness of classical paganism than to the heavenly fixations of Christianity.

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By Giles Fraser

If that was, and still is, his outlook on life, then the commitment he entered into on Saturday cannot have been made in good faith. To go through the motions in that state of mind would be an act of such cynicism as ought to revolt his closest friends and shock even his worst enemies. It would also shame the Church authorities for failing to detect the imposture.

But who are we to judge? Last year, Boris Johnson almost died; his son, Wilfrid, was born (and baptised); and he led his country through its most testing time since the Second World War. Experiences like that change people.

Perhaps it was just the wording, but the Prime Minister’s Easter message this year sounded awfully close to a profession of Christian faith:

“But if there’s one thing British Christians have shown us this year it’s that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” not just today but every day. His teachings, and the message of his death and resurrection, permeate through every aspect of daily life.”

What we can definitely say is a profession of Christian faith are the words that Mr and Mrs Johnson would have said in Saturday’s ceremony. In the Catholic Church, Matrimony is unique among the sacraments in that the minister of the sacrament — that is to say the conduit of God’s grace — is not a priest or a bishop, but the two people being married.

So let’s hope they meant every last word.

Except, of course, that there are large stretches of the world where the idea that men might legally marry men, or women legally marry women, continues to be seen as abhorrent, grotesque, immoral. The list of countries that license same-sex marriage is a highly distinctive one. All of them, with the sole exception of Taiwan, are culturally Christian. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, have witnessed a decline over recent years in church-attendance. In many of them, indeed, this decline has been precipitous.

The temptation, then, might be to cast the legalisation of same-sex marriage across much of the West as a decisive repudiation of Christian assumptions. If countries like Sweden or Canada have blazed a trail yet to be followed by countries like Iran or India, then that, so the presumption goes, is simply because the decline of religion has further to go in the non-Western world. How long, though, can its ultimate collapse be put off? Reason, progress and tolerance, it might be hoped, cannot forever be bucked. Surely, then, given time, we shall see bearded couples cutting wedding cake in Qom?

What, though, if the prevalence of same-sex marriage in culturally Christian countries is due less to the repudiation of Christian assumptions, and more to their enduring influence? What if it is in truth a bloom with roots deep in a very particular seed-bed? Even in the bedroom, after all, we are shaped by the past. Much that we take for granted is relative, and much that we assume to be “human nature” is in truth the result of decades, centuries, millennia worth of cultural weathering.

The category of “homosexuality”, far from being something that has been universally recognised, is of very recent origin. Like “television”, it is a portmanteau word coined to define a concept that would have baffled previous generations. Although formed out of Greek and Latin, neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a word for it. Suetonius, in his biographies of the Caesars, noted as interesting foibles that Claudius only ever slept with women, and Galba only ever slept with men — but he did not dwell upon it.

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To the Romans, a preference for fucking males over females no more defined a man than did a preference for brunettes over blondes. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course, precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive; but the male body, too, was not lacking in orifices. A thrust or two, deep and quick, like the stabbing of a sword into the guts, and the business was done. Whether into the vagina, the anus or the mouth, it made no real difference — just so long as it was masterful.

Only one crucial qualification, one crucial safeguard, had to be respected. Free-born Romans, male and female both: these were strictly, absolutely off-limits. Conversely, it was the duty of slaves to serve a master’s every conceivable sexual need. They knew, as a matter of course, that the threat of rape might be realised at any moment.

All of which, of course, is liable to seem unfathomably alien to us. Why, though, do we find it shocking? Because, over the course of the centuries, Christian teachings on sex and marriage served radically to rewire the sexual imaginings of the ancient world. Paul, as a Jew, believed that every human body was created in the image of God, and therefore to be respected as such. Nevertheless, on his conviction that to rape was to offend against the divine, he put a novel spin.

The only acceptable sexual relationship, he argued, was one in which a man played the part of Christ, and the woman the part of the Church — which in turn left the head of a household no leeway to force himself on housemaids or pageboys. For Roman converts to Christianity, this required a radical recalibration of their most fundamental assumptions about sex. It was a recalibration from which we, in the West, have never turned back.

Something else, however, followed from Paul’s insistence on marriage between a man and a woman as the only acceptable sexual relationship. Almost incidentally, in his letter to the Romans, he paired men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women as comparable actions. Here was an acorn from which a mighty oak was destined to grow. Never before had the category of same sex relationships been defined in quite this way: as a unity.

It is the measure of how novel it was that it took centuries even to coin a word for it. The word “sodomy”, which began to be used in the 11^th century, signified not what we call “homosexuality”, but rather a deviant sexual act. It might just as well refer to anal sex between a man and a woman as to anal sex between two men, or indeed to bestiality, or to masturbation. It was a sinful act that, by definition, required from the person who committed it a surrender to sin. That was why it stood condemned.

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Then came Darwin. The functioning of natural selection, as developed in The Origin of Species, depended on reproduction. The mating habits of humans were therefore no less legitimate a field of study than those of the birds or the bees. Here, for scientists, was a licence to investigate the entire range of human sexual behaviour. In 1886, when a German psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing published a survey of what he termed “pathological fetishism”, the sheer scope of his research rendered his book a focus of interest far beyond the scholarly circles at which it was aimed.

One word in particular stuck out. Homosexualität had originally been coined in 1869, to serve the writer of a pamphlet on Prussian morality laws as shorthand for sexual relations between people of the same gender. This, of course, was precisely the category of behaviour that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had so roundly excoriated, and which the Church had come to define as “sodomy”.

Nevertheless, in the 19th century as in the Middle Ages, the word had remained a slippery one. Now, though, with the precision of an anatomist pinning down a kidney for the benefit of watching students, Krafft-Ebing had succeeded at last in identifying with a single word the category of sexual behaviour condemned by Paul.

Only a medical man, perhaps, could have done it. Krafft-Ebing’s interest in same sex relations was as a scientist, not a moralist. Why — in seeming defiance of Darwin’s theory — did men or women choose to sleep with people of their own sex? The traditional explanation, that such people were lustful predators whose failure to control their appetites had led them to weary of what God had ordained as natural, increasingly appeared to psychiatrists inadequate. Much likelier, Krafft-Ebing believed, “homosexuals” were the victims of an underlying morbid condition.

Whether this was to be viewed as something degenerative, an ailment passed down the generations, or as the result of an accident suffered in the uterus, it was clear to him that homosexuality should be regarded, not as a sin, but as something very different: an immutable condition. Homosexuals, he argued, were the creatures of their proclivities. As such — Christian concern for the unfortunate being what it was — they deserved to be treated, not with contempt, but with generosity and compassion.

Most Christians, it is fair to say, were unpersuaded. Yet if Krafft-Ebing’s research represented a challenge to Christian assumptions about sexual morality, then so also were they a fortification of them. His conclusions were not nearly as clinical as either his critics or his admirers cared to think. Raised a Catholic, he took for granted the primacy of the Christian model of marriage. The great labour of the Church in fashioning and upholding monogamy as a lifelong institution was one that he deeply valued.

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“Christianity raised the union of the sexes to a sublime position by making woman socially the equal of man and by elevating the bond of love to a moral and religious institution.” It was not despite believing this, but because of it, that Krafft-Ebing, by the end of his career, had come to believe that sodomy should be decriminalised. Homosexuals, he ringingly declared, might be no less familiar with “the noblest inspirations of the heart” than any married couple. Huge numbers of them, inspired by his researchs, duly wrote to him, sharing their most intimate yearnings and secrets. It was on the basis of this correspondence that Krafft-Ebing was able to arrive at a paradoxical conclusion. The sexual practice condemned by the Church as “sodomy” was perfectly compatible with the ideal that he saw as Christianity’s great contribution to civilisation: lifelong monogamy. Homosexuality, as defined by the first scientist ever to attempt a detailed categorisation of it, constituted the seamless union of Christian sin with Christian love.

In cool and dispassionate language, Krafft-Ebing served to put the seal on a revolution in the dimensions of the erotic without parallel in history. Paul, by twinning men who slept with men and women who slept with women, had set in train a recalibration of the sexual order that now, in an age of science, attained its apotheosis.

But “homosexuality” was not the only medical-sounding compound of Greek and Latin to which Psychopathia Sexualis introduced the world. There was a second as well: “heterosexuality”. All the other categories of sexual behaviour that Krafft-Ebing had identified — sadism, masochism, fetishistic obsessions with silk, or mourning ribbons, or gloves — were mere variations of the one great and fundamental divide: that which existed between heterosexual and homosexual desire. Categories which had taken almost two millennia to evolve were now impregnably defined. Soon enough, people came to forget that they had ever not been there.

All of which, for the Churches today, presents an agonising dilemma. Should homosexuality be condemned as sodomy or praised as love? Should same-sex marriage be slated as an abomination against God’s creation or cherished as a sacrament? Should an entire conceptualisation of sexual behaviour, unyoked as it has been from the theology that gave it birth, be repudiated by Christians as a bastard mutation or embraced as their own?

None of these questions is easily answered. Among those who take them seriously, they have ensured endless and pained debate. Among those who do not, they have provided confirmation that popes and pastors are not merely irrelevant but malign. Certainly, seen in the broad perspective of Christianity’s history, there is nothing paradoxical about the legal blessing given by so many Christian countries to an innovation that has put churches painfully on the spot. Nor does it seem very likely that there will be same-sex marriages in Qom any time soon.

Some might wonder what my congregation was so afraid of? After all, private prayer is still allowed. But this argument profoundly misunderstands what churches do and, particularly, how they function to combat loneliness. By loneliness I don’t just mean the experience of being alone, but something far more existentially corrosive.

Millions of us are once more being locked into the fortress of our own homes, with little relief, without the comfort of company, without the presence of another’s touch or conversation. Even before Lockdown 2, loneliness was at epidemic proportions in this country. Now it represents a full blown emergency — with huge consequences for our mental and physical health.

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There is, though, a difference between loneliness and being alone. And many who have chosen a form of lockdown for themselves do not experience loneliness; at least, not in the same way. Members of religious communities, for example: monks and nuns. Some live lives of silence and quiet contemplation, eschewing the sort of social connectedness that most of us take for granted. Yet we also speak of such people as living “in community” — which can seem an odd phrase, given that they have chosen the monastic life partly because it relieves them of the whole buzz of social engagement, the very thing we generally mean by “community”.

No, what living “in community” means in a monastery is participation in the worshiping life of a place, by which one is connected to others on a profound and intimate level through the love of Almighty God.

I have no idea how the new Covid restrictions will affect those living in closed communities, sealed off from the outside world. It strikes me as patently ridiculous that Mass will not be said in such places. Not, I suppose, that the Government would ever find out if it were. And I hope they do continue to come together and say their prayers and receive the comfort of holy communion. Because without that, I imagine that many of them will be lonely indeed, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

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In her beautiful book A Biography of Loneliness, Fay Bound Alberti describes loneliness as a distinctively modern phenomenon. “Have people always been lonely? Is loneliness a state that can afflict us all, regardless of our time in place and history? I don’t believe so,” she argues, going on to say that, “loneliness in its modern sense emerged as both a term and a recognisable experience around 1800, soon after ideas about sociability, and secularism, became important to the social and political fabric.”

For Alberti, secularisation has much to do with our current condition of chronic loneliness. And this makes a good deal of sense. Roughly speaking, for those who lived before the 19th century, the world outside our window was not some inert space without personality or meaning.

In his autobiography, the British monk Bede Griffiths describes a solitary walk he had while still at school. He describes the birdsong and the bloom of hawthorn trees: “I remember now the feeling of awe that came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it were but a veil before the face of God.”

The former political dissident and Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, described something similar from his prison cell: “As I watched the imperceptible trembling of [the] leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time.” He described himself as “standing at the very edge of the infinite”.

Both these men experienced lockdown: one chosen, one imposed. And their mystical experiences express a relationship to the outside world in which it is forever pregnant with comfort, meaning and purpose. If secularisation is implicated in our current crisis of loneliness, as Alberti argues, it is perhaps because these kinds of experiences seem peculiar to many of us, in ways that they absolutely wouldn’t to our forebears. Max Weber called the process by which we lose such a sense of the world as disenchantment. And with it the world became a chillier, lonelier place.

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What is interesting to me about the Griffiths and Havel stories is not that some sensitive individuals have exotic-sounding, highly poetic experiences of the world. But rather that we have almost lost the form of life through which such things can be experienced by all. That has traditionally been the function of the church: to establish a whole pattern of being and ordered meaning, through which what people call reality can be felt as loving and purposeful, and through which individuals can feel connected to each other and to creation.

There are what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “horizons of significance”, the background against which things make sense. For present purposes, I will bracket out the question of whether this is a discovery or a projection. I simply want to suggest that without this kind of frame, the experience of being in the world became susceptible to existential loneliness in a way that it never was before. And that, in short, is why monks and nuns don’t get lonely. They are self-consciously embedded in a world that is so much larger than themselves. I don’t mean they have private invisible friends to keep them company; I mean they experience reality itself as the bearer of loving personality.

Many have been making the point that churches are not like golf clubs or friendly societies. Churches are the bearers of meaning for those who attend, the place where that all-important “horizon of significance” is sustained, nourished, and lived out. And for those of us in the Catholic tradition, this takes place supremely through the Mass, our holy communion. Here is where reality is most fully expressed as pregnant with loving significance. Which is why not being allowed to gather for holy communion is not just some simple privation, but an axe taken to the very root of our being. Our community is formed by communion.

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Our present Prime Minister, perhaps more than any other before him, has a tin ear to the purpose of religious gathering. I don’t suppose it has helped that the Bishops have recently used up much of their political capital on things like Brexit. But even so, Johnson just doesn’t get religion. He sees it as just another glorified leisure activity, and one that can be turned off and on at will.

It absolutely isn’t. It is the basis for everything else that we, as believers, do. Not just one thing among others, but the background against which all that we do makes sense. He wants us to continue to serve the community with food banks and the like, which we will. But he refuses to appreciate where the basis for that community solidarity lies and out of which it grows. What is at stake here is a whole infrastructure of meaning and care.

And my congregation have strongly been making these very representations to me. There is a winter of emptiness and meaninglessness on the way and many are frightened. Which is why I won’t be meekly consenting to the strictures of secular authority. Yes, we will keep safe, as churches have been. Churches are not hot-spots of transmission. But as well as maintaining Covid vigilance, I will do all I can to serve my congregation as their priest, under the authority of my bishop. They expect me to. And they are absolutely right to do so.

The advice came too late to inform a number of my congregation who made their way to church for Tuesday night Mass. “I am sorry,” I said weakly, through the glass panel in the door. George had come down from Islington. He said that if I were any sort of priest I would tell the archbishops where to stick it, and open up. I tried to explain: pressure on the NHS, keeping the elderly safe, flattening the curve.

But he didn’t get it. We both walked away from the window, him back home, me to the altar. And a little part of me died inside.

7pm Mass. A brief thought. pic.twitter.com/NkHVS0qjZ9

— Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) March 17, 2020

Celebrating Mass in an empty church is a weird experience. No need to check your watch to make sure you start on time. I ring the church bell, a bell that is supposed to tell people to hurry up because the service is about to start. But this time it offers no such invitation. I ring it in the hope that a few local people might know we are carrying on, after a fashion. I unplug the photocopier. We are not going to need that for a while. I dress up in my robes, and process out into a dark church, alone.

The opening words of the service are supposed to be a greeting to all who have gathered: “The Lord be with you.” But there is only me to respond. And I do, as the service book dictates: “And also with you.” It’s crazy. I am literally talking to myself in an empty building. And so I start skipping bits of the service. What is the point of the peace or the blessing? The Mass feels like it is falling apart before me. Perhaps this what losing one’s faith feels like? Only when I raise the chalice towards the ceiling with the worlds “Do this in remembrance of me” does the whole thing come back together as purposeful. I drink from the cup denied to others. This is heartbreaking.

Earlier in the day my friend David Lan called to see if we were OK. David used to be the director of the Young Vic theatre, just up the road from my parish. “You wouldn’t put a play on if there was no audience?” I asked him. I wouldn’t, he agreed. But that, of course, is where theatre and liturgy divide. Because the proper purpose of liturgy is the worship of Almighty God, and that is what this church is now for, with the priest performing that ancient function of representing the people to the divine, making the sacrifice of the Mass on their behalf.

Message for parishioners is St Mary Newington. pic.twitter.com/alH1MYmUhn

— Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) March 17, 2020

Will people come back again when the doors are unlocked? Will the presence of death stalking the land bring people to a more intense sense of their wider place in the great scheme of things? Or maybe people will develop new patterns of behaviour, and start to wonder what they ever needed church for in the first place? Some of our elderly congregants may not be alive when we reopen.

I suspect that weaker churches too may pass away. I have long been challenged by that Larkin poem where he goes into an empty church, takes off his cycle clips “in awkward reverence”, pronounces “here endeth” more loudly than he meant. “The echoes snigger briefly,” he writes. Yes, they do that when you celebrate Mass on your own too. And what is this place for, Larkin asks? What indeed?

Technology will help — but only up to a point. WhatsApp groups will help us organise with each other to help those most in need. And some will broadcast services to people sitting at home. We are thinking about all of this at my church, though many of my parishioners don’t have the equipment to make possible what the telephone and internet people call “universal service provision”. And technology will only help so far because religion is intrinsically a social business. And however much it is needed right now, social media will only ever be a distant simulacrum of the real thing. After all, how does one receive the consecrated bread of the Eucharist, the body of Christ, over the internet?

Many, of course, have long argued that you don’t need church to “do God”. That you can sit at home and read the Bible, go for a walk and pray, commune with the deity in the silence of your own heart. Perhaps the virus will complete the work of reform that Luther started: do away with all the intermediaries between you and God: church, bishops and priests, church councils, flower rotas, incense and chalices. Perhaps. Or perhaps — and I think this more likely — it will stress test as never before the naive idea that we can be spiritual without being religious. Sitting at home, as things fall apart, we may relearn the important role that institutions have in knitting us together, and remember with fondness the role that public worship has as a very effective delivery mechanism for communal values.

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In many ways Judaism is better placed than Christianity to withstand this crisis. The Chief Rabbi has closed the synagogues just as the archbishops have closed the churches. But Judaism is much more a religion of the home than Christianity. Many of the great events of the Jewish year — Passover, for example — take place within the home and around the meal table. Earlier this week, as we sat round the table to eat, my wife, who is Jewish, suggested we say grace together as a family. It was unexpectedly moving. After all the challenges of going out shopping, the relief of having food on the table, and the awareness that there are others far less fortunate, the simple words “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful” felt like a whole Eucharist in one sentence.

In his new book Morality, the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, writes about morality being a journey from “I” to “we”. Absolutely right: and the great aim of all true religion is to transfer the centre of interest in life from self to the Other — that Other being both God and other people.

How we approach this task of de-centring in an age of social distancing and self-isolation is the mountainous size of the challenge. Because in all the great religious traditions of the world the Other is the source of life and joy and fulfillment, not the bearer of death. Remaining open to the life-giving Other, while also seeking protection from them: that will be the great tension of our times.

Although there is almost no historical evidence of St Valentine, the most common tradition is that he was martyred for marrying couples illegally. Desperate for troops, the emperor Claudius Gothicus had prohibited young men from being wed — and therefore escaping military service. Poor Valentine was foolish enough to disobey the Roman Emperor, and that rarely ends well.

Unlike most feast days that grew in popularity during the Middle Ages, Valentine’s survived Reformation and secularisation because it came to celebrate a popular ideal: romantic love. Indeed, it is about more than that: the idea of love as a choice; a choice made by two people that no outside authorities — not even Roman emperors — can stand in the way of.

We take love for granted (it being all around) but marrying for romance is quite a radical idea — a fairly recent one and, from a point of view of outcomes, not a very successful innovation.

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That the West is quite unusual in this matter is largely down to the medieval Catholic Church, making it entirely appropriately that a saint’s day is still used to celebrate romantic love.

For most of recorded history, marriage was seen as a contract, largely for the creation of children. If love — agape — developed as a result, all the better, but romance was not a reason for marriage. The Greeks and Romans essentially saw romantic love as a mental illness — “a sickness, a fever, a source of pain” in the words of historian Nigel Saul — while the medieval aristocracy thought of marriages as more like business contracts. Kings used their children as assets with which to make deals, one of the most ruthless being the 12th century Henry II, who had his heir Henry wed when he was five and his bride, daughter of the king of France, just two.

It was Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who did more than anyone else to influence modern ideas of romance, introducing to England and northern France the love poetry of her native region in the south (which most probably originated in Islamic Spain, although no one can be entirely sure). Eleanor’s daughter, Marie of France, played a similar role as patron of Chrétien de Troyes, creator of many of the Arthurian romances.

This poetic tradition celebrated romantic love, but it was unattainable love, doomed by differences in social or relationship status. There was rarely a happy ever after, and no concept that people might marry because they were “in love”, which relies on an idea of individual freedom that didn’t exist. Eleanor’s own marriage was testimony to this ideal, ending with her imprisonment by her own husband for 15 years. Yet, producing four healthy sons, it was a success.

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One small illustration of the social values of the age comes via a poem celebrating William Marshal, a tournament star and member of Eleanor’s entourage. Marshal went on to serve four kings and helped save Magna Carta, becoming the epitome of medieval chivalry and also providing the inspiration for A Knight’s Tale and Ser Barristan the Bold in Game of Thrones.

Following Marshal’s death, his five sons commissioned a biographical poem to glorify their father, filled with his derring-do as loyal knight and all-round hero; it contains a passage that to modern eyes seems curious. On the road one day, our brave knight came across a young couple who had eloped because they were in love, but their families disapproved. Marshal, the poem boasts, simply robbed them at the point of the sword and, the reader is supposed to see, rightly so.

 This episode says much about popular attitudes at the time, when — like in most societies — marrying against your parent’s wishes put you beyond the pale. Marshal’s own wife, Isabel de Clare, had been awarded to him as a reward for his service to Henry II, when Marshal was 43 and his bride 17. Did she want to marry him? No one cared.

Yet four centuries later, attitudes had changed so much that William Shakespeare could write a play about star-cross’d lovers in which the audience’s sympathies were clearly with the protagonists — an attitude alien to Marshal’s world. Indeed, Karl Deutsch christened this change the “Romeo and Juliet revolution” and it was perhaps the biggest cultural shift in history.

That we came to think of marrying for love as normal is largely down to the Catholic Church. Christian theologians, following the thoughts of St Paul, saw marriage between man and woman as analogous to that between Christ and his Church. Marriage had to be consensual, willingly offered into — a rule the Church enforced with increasing determination from the 12^th century.

As Tom Holland put it in Dominion:

“Here was a development pregnant with implications for the future. Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family. God’s authority was being identified, not with the venerable authority of a father to impose his will on his children, but with an altogether more subversive principle: freedom of choice.”

Western Europeans came to see marriage not just as a business deal between two clans, but a bond between individuals; increasingly, stories about romantic love saw it as likely to lead to not to disaster, but to “happy ever after”.

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Along with rules about consent and age, the Church also became increasingly strict about the marrying of relatives, which had a profound effect on wider society. Once people were forced to marry out, their loyalty to their family declined in relation to wider society and this fostered more radical ideas. Maybe Romeo wasn’t just a member of the Montague clan but an individual with his own desires? Maybe his individual happiness was more important than the extended family’s status? The effects have been long lasting, with various studies showing a link between the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage with corruption and democracy.

Yet across the world, and among Asian diasporas, arranged marriage remains the norm, while marriages rates in the west have plummeted since the 1970s. Maybe western ideas of love aren’t the only way forward.

Poor St Valentine was unlucky enough to live under a rare leader who discouraged marriage, since throughout history most social pressure has been exerted the other way. In medieval England, in Great Dunmow in Essex, a side of bacon was given each July to a couple who had been married for “a year and a day” and could honestly say they had not regretted it. Most societies wanted marriage because they wanted children (the word “proletarian” stems from “offspring”, denoting the social class who had no property but served Rome by having children). But most societies also recognised that people had to be nudged into making the plunge.

Since the final phrase in this great love revolution in the late 20^th century, when social pressure to marry early was relaxed, and with it the Church’s long-held prohibition against divorce, marriage rates have fallen dramatically.

There are now around a quarter of a million marriages a year in Britain, just over half the rate in 1969 when the Divorce Reform Act was passed. Marriage has also become a luxury good, with the gap between professional and working classes rising just this century from 22% to almost 50%. The results are huge numbers living alone, a figure that will surpass 10 million by 2040.

Many are happily single, but many others just don’t find the right person through a modern market that is far from efficient.

Maybe arranged marriage makes more sense. When westerners think of the practice they tend to think of forced marriages, and the horrific tradition of honour killings that often result, but arranged and forced marriages are not the same thing.

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In many traditional societies, arranged marriage takes the form of sons and daughters being given a short list of potential suitors from which they can choose (assuming the other person picks them, of course). Speed dating originated among Jewish communities in New York for this exact purpose, and mimics traditional practices in certain ways.

And arranged marriages do have better outcomes, on a purely measurable level.

Harvard’s Dr Robert Epstein analysed the phenomenon among south Asians and Orthodox Jews and, with an admittedly small sample, concluded that they were more successful than the secular western route.

There is certainly the argument — and the one made by matriarchs and patriarchs down the ages — that western romantics mix up love with lust, which is a reasonable criticism. There is probably something in the ancient Greek idea that being in love is a form of temporary insanity, and in no other area of life would we consider making a huge life choice during a period of temporary insanity a good idea. There is also the argument that even intelligent people make bad romantic decisions, taking a crazy salad with their meat, as that old romantic failure Yeats observed (bitterly).

Yet marriage survival rates do not necessarily reflect happiness levels, and even self-reported statements about happiness might just reflect rationalisation. Higher suicide rates among Asian women — as opposed to lower ones among older Asian men — suggest that strong families have their downsides, although suicide among western women has not declined since divorce was liberalised, while female happiness has overall declined.

And while marriage rates in the West continue to fall, especially in the US, young people in India are not spurning arranged marriages as that country gets richer. Likewise, in China and across the East “love” continues to play a far less important role in marriage than in Europe.

Western romantics might see that as cold or cynical, but then, perhaps our attitude is rather naïve and even silly. Love wins — but then sometimes it doesn’t.

Anyway, have a happy Valentine’s Day everyone; don’t forget to pick up some flowers at the petrol station.

A second knock follows; the friar repeats the question. The herald replies with the achievements and honours of the deceased. Once again the friar says “We don’t know him”. After this comes a third knock, and a third demand for identification. This time the herald simply states the given name of the deceased, followed by the words “a mortal, sinful, human being”. The friars of the Kapuzinerkirche then open the door and admit the coffin.

The symbolism is obvious. Be ye ever so mighty, you will face God’s judgment as surely as anyone else, and all your wealth and power and grandeur will avail you nothing. Even for those who do not believe in God, or who view the ceremony cynically as a bit of slick PR by the rich and mighty to sweeten the pill of their dominance for the downtrodden masses, it is surely an impressive moment.

It beautifully illustrates the same point as the old joke about the mourner at a rich man’s funeral, who asks the priest “How much did he leave?” and receives the unbeatably laconic reply “All of it”. The Book of Common Prayer puts it this way: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out”.

One of the great benefits of formal Christian liturgies, especially those that have not been cackhandedly modernised by well-meaning barbarians, is that they regularly confront the churchgoer with three absolutely fundamental truths of the human condition, namely the fact of our sinfulness, the certainty of our death, and the universal need for mercy and forgiveness. Which is why I think that, to aid national unity and reconciliation in post-Brexit Britain, as a New Year’s resolution we should oblige MPs to attend church on a regular basis.

I have it all planned out. There would, of course, be exemptions for MPs who are members of other faiths. But as for everyone else, from the Prime Minister down to the lowliest backbencher, once a week or so they would be herded over the road to Westminster Abbey, with the Serjeant-at-Arms close behind to make sure no one sneaks off for a cheeky cigarette on College Green.

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It would be an ecumenical service, to avoid any sectarian quibbling. The main thing would be to have an old-fashioned full-blooded confession of sin, with lots of kneeling, alongside some well-chosen Bible readings focused on the universality of the Fall, the inevitability of judgment and the dangers of power. The story of the Pharisee and the Publican would get a run-out once every three or four weeks, to make sure that it haunted the dreams of the inveterate moral show-offs who litter the green benches.

Maybe we could also have a recurring role for Romans 3: “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” Ideally the service would be led by one of those tall, severe clergymen with a resonant and faintly intimidating voice, although they are in short supply nowadays. Possibly we could tempt Richard Chartres out of retirement.

I am being a little bit facetious. But if you truly want to address political, cultural and social polarisation, and to start healing the divides exposed and exacerbated by the Brexit convulsions, you could do a lot worse than getting our elites back into church.

At its best, Christian worship is a great leveller. Walk into the main Sunday service at any church in London, and you will almost certainly find more ethnic diversity than in practically any other setting you care to mention. I dare say this diminishes a little as you move further out from the centre, but these days even the most suburban parishes will generally have a more varied racial mix than, say, the Liberal Democrat membership. I attend Catholic Mass in Folkestone, a mid-sized seaside town in Kent, and the congregation is significantly more ethnically diverse than the town itself.

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The same applies to class, certainly in the Catholic Church. In many places the social mix in Catholic parishes still bears the mark of the history of the faith in England, with observance kept alive by a small number of upper-class recusants and their loyal dependants, and mostly abandoned by the rising middle and commercial classes, then reinforced in the last couple of centuries by working-class Irish immigration and converts from the intelligentsia.

One of the great things about church is that you don’t get to choose who is there with you. The person next to you may be a fiery Marxist or a staid Tory; they could be a repentant murderer, or a blameless widow who has never missed a Sunday service in seventy years. They could be an immigrant who only arrived at Heathrow three weeks ago, or the second son of a Duke whose family came over with the Conqueror; they could be a brilliant intellectual or someone with profound learning difficulties.

All the same, you pray the same prayers. In churches with traditional liturgy, you turn to them and you offer them Christ’s peace. You kneel together and you ask for the same mercy from the same God. In the Catholic Mass the Confiteor, the confession, is addressed not simply to God but also to our “brothers and sisters”.

And just as in church there is no escaping human equality before God, there is no escaping from human frailty and the reality of our own wrongdoing. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”, says the Church of England’s General Confession, “and there is no health in us.” “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof”, pray Catholics before receiving Communion. To the non-churchgoer this all perhaps sounds a little excessive and gloomy, even masochistic. But it’s not really: it’s an honest reckoning with the extent of our wrongdoing and the depth and persistence of our imperfections.

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For politicians in particular — to return to my modest proposal — it is very important to be conscious of their temptations and flaws. Power does funny things to people, and it is no bad thing to have some humility thrust upon you. One of the most striking and inspiring stories from early Christianity is of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, refusing to celebrate Mass for the Emperor Theodosius until the latter repented of an atrocity which his troops had carried out. It is a fantastic example of the Church standing up to worldly might, and one might wish Ambrose’s example had been followed more consistently by other bishops in later eras.

A common jibe against Christianity is that it is a way for The Man to control the masses. Maybe getting politicians to kneel before God and admit their weakness might mean Christianity helping the masses to control The Man.

I was there, at the Court of Appeal, to fight an Electoral Commission fine of £20,000 for alleged irregularities during the referendum. The case had propelled me to a sort of notoriety, and had I lost this appeal, it would have ruined me – both financially and professionally.

It was the culmination of a long journey. A few years ago, in my early twenties, I would have called myself a staunch libertarian and atheist. I thought that religion was just a form of coercion and control, and to believe in some mystical pixie in the sky – when science has explained away any need for the divine – made you a deluded fool at best.

Fast forward to 2018, and aged 25, I had become a churchgoer, attending a service each week in which robed choristers processed through clouds of pungent incense. Here, within the walls of what had been a medieval priory and hospital, I witnessed the elevation of the gilded King James Bible above the priest’s head and listened to the sung Latin of the liturgy.

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It was Twitter, of all things, which had brought me to God. As my public infamy grew, my phone would go ping-ping-ping, as message after message flashed up with the vilest abuse, much of it dripping with homophobia. There were endless variations on me going to prison and what would be done to me there. I don’t know if these twitterers would have said the same to me in person, but this was the internet, the context was Brexit and so all bets were off.

As the saga dragged on, I lost friends, relationships and income. I felt isolated and helpless. There was a great deal of anger and shock over the referendum, which I understood, but it was strange, as a student from a working-class background in the north-east, to be in the public glare.

And so, for me, social media was a digital sewer. Yet, paradoxically, it also introduced me to Fr Marcus Walker, rector of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, just inside the City of London. It was Fr Marcus who would set me on a journey to God, for which I will always be grateful. I had followed him on Twitter for a while and enjoyed his takes on everything from history to politics – so when a friend suggested I attend a service at St Bart’s I did.

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This was an unexpected path. I grew up in Stanley, in Co. Durham, and, like a lot of people in that part of the world, most of my family were originally Irish and devoutly Catholic. My granddad’s family were Protestant and he used to go and sit in church sometimes when he was younger. But all this I only found out last year after he died: the family had all turned against religion long before I came into the world.

I had been curious about religion as a child, but my mother’s visceral reaction to my questions was enough to warn me off for many years. She had gone to a Catholic school that was, by all accounts, intensely pious and strict. Whenever I’d ask her about it, she’d tell me that religion was the root of all evil and not worth indulging.

I attended my first service at Great St Bartholomew’s one Ash Wednesday, having never voluntarily given up an evening to go to church before. Until then my experience with religion revolved around singing “Hosanna to the King of Kings” in an assembly hall, and sticking cocktail sticks into oranges at primary school once a year.

As I left with the ashen cross on my forehead it would have been the natural thing to rub it off and rejoin the crowd of office workers milling around me. But, and I’m not sure why, I chose to leave it on. There was something intensely powerful about that reminder and symbol: that dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. I told a colleague about my experience and how surprised I was by my stubborn attachment to the ashes, and a few days later he gave me a copy of atheist-turned-theist C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

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This became my “Christianity for Dummies” guidebook; I had no real understanding of what it was about at all before that. But then, perhaps, as Lewis said, there is something to be said about that zeal of a convert, the power of finding Christ on your own terms, of accepting the love that only God can offer when you’re ready. Thus inspired, I took up Confirmation classes a few months later.

Then, last year, my grandfather passed away. He was my political and personal hero and when he died I was in a dark place; it was the Church that offered me comfort and meaning. Words are not empty things. The simple act of a parish community offering their thoughts and prayers through such a time of turmoil had a profound impact on me. I felt, for possibly the first time in quite some while, that I had found my home in London – a city in which it is easy to feel lost and alone. It occurred to me that I belonged to something much bigger than myself, and my Sunday mornings of prayer and reflection, followed by coffee in the cloister with my new church community, became a grounding experience that has done so much to enrich my life.

I was worried about what my mam would make of it, given her hostility to religion. But when she came down to London for the first time, she saw the support network that the Church had built around me. It was such a relief for her, because up until that point I think she had assumed that I was alone in the wilderness. Perhaps it also helped her deal with her own feelings about what she had experienced; she actually got a bit emotional after the service and remarked on how comforting it was to see so much love in that Church, to see me make my commitment to it, and the beginning of my journey with God. When I was baptised and confirmed, despite it being into the Anglican faith, my mother gave me my great-grandmother’s rosary beads.

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The Church is a great bridge. Each Sunday, I join with people of all political opinions – Left and Right, Leave and Remain. We share a common baptism that transcends our trivial divisions, differences that in the wider scheme of eternity are nothing.

I do worry that society’s loss of faith is one of the things helping to drive us apart. But while some people take great delight in the decline in churchgoing, I wouldn’t count on its fall quite yet. I think that in the not-too-distant future there will be a crisis of confidence in what we’ve replaced it with – a competition for likes and retweets instead of a sharing together of community and moral values. The signs are already here; there’s a reason why so many of my generation long for the perceived authenticity of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg. They’re seen as the genuine article, the real deal.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s line that “God is dead” is often interpreted as an atheist broadside, but that’s not how I read it. He said: “God is dead and we have killed him”, and “we’ll never find enough water to wash away the blood”. That, to me, has a very different meaning. It wasn’t that Nietzsche was proclaiming it triumphantly, but rather lamenting a catastrophic loss of meaning. His words were prophetic, and especially to my generation – with our online, on-demand culture that can order a hook-up as a fast as a Chinese takeaway.

But meaning has been forgotten, not destroyed. It is still there to be found. I feel eternal gratitude to St Bart’s for helping me find it – and for rescuing me.

Hunt’s view seems grounded in his faith – he’s a devout member of the Church of England – but he was quick to clarify that he would not seek to change the existing law.

While he stuck to his principles, Hunt didn’t want to present himself as the “Christian” candidate for No 10. But what if he had? Could Britain, a country synonymous with secularisation and declining church attendance, embrace a politics grounded in religion? If Britain learns from the examples of its political and cultural kin, the US and Europe, the answer could be a strong “yes.”

Forty years ago this summer, American Evangelicals launched the Moral Majority, a religious organisation that put a face to the then-emerging Religious Right, the conservative Christian voting bloc that helped propel Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and even Donald Trump to office.

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The British would hardly tolerate the kind of faith-based politics you see in the United States, where believers have been seeking to use state and national law to implement their ideas on everything from abortion to LGBT rights to prayer in schools. Surveys show that even religious Christian voters in Britain place low emphasis on these types of social issues, focusing instead on economic policies.

But there is an underestimated number of Britons who, I suspect, would be receptive of the type of faith that Hunt suggested; one that respects the separation of Church and State and doesn’t seek to impose sectarian views on society, but a faith-based politics motivated by religious beliefs to seek policies that promote freedom, rights and individual and public welfare.

In this regard, a political Christianity in the UK might look less like the Religious Right of America and more like the Christian Democratic parties of Europe. Since they emerged in the late 19^thcentury, these Church-backed parties have played a major role in many nations: Christian Democratic parties or their successors currently lead ruling coalitions in Ireland, Germany and Austria, and have a major role in European Parliament as well.

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Although Christian Democracy did not take hold in the UK the way it did elsewhere in Europe, there is, of course, a long history of entanglement between politics and religion in Britain. England had the most overtly political entry into the Protestant Reformation when Henry VIII ripped the Church of England away from Rome and declared himself its head. The acrimonious split between Catholics and Protestants led to everything from the Glorious Revolution to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. And the modern party system in British politics was heavily influenced by religion. As the think tank Theos, in its study of religion and voting in Britain, describes the history of party politics in Britain:

Britain never developed a tradition of Christian Democracy or a major Christian party because, by the time this happened in Europe, it already had three – Anglican Tory, Nonconformist Liberal, and Nonconformist and Catholic Labour.

As recently as the 1980s, the Conservative Party could be thought of as the “Church Party”. Religious-based politics has been the rule, not the exception, in Britain’s history.

The obvious objection is that religious politics, and to a large extent, religion itself, are just that: British history, fading relics of the country’s past. The UK is an increasingly secularised society. In some surveys, more Britons now identify as non-religious than as members of all the Christian denominations combined. And high-profile political figures have often treated their faith as a political liability (see Tony Blair’s secret Catholicism). In this environment, it might seem foolish to put much stock on a new religious politics. But the declining numbers may be just what is needed to spur the faithful to political action.

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The Christian Democrats of Europe arose in the late 19^thand 20th centuries in contexts of the rise of political liberalism (in its classical sense), and a growing hostility towards religion, and Christianity in particular, that came with it. Similarly, the US Religious Right arose in response to the changes of the 1960s and 70s – communism, the sexual revolution, the counterculture – that it saw as bringing about an end to a traditional Christian social order.

Whether or not this anti-Christian sentiment was real or merely perceived – after all, American Religious Right pioneers even railed against government encroachment on religion in the context of desegregation, a fact they’d like to forget now – it’s undeniable that the idea of a society turning against the Church motivated Christians to come out in force behind candidates who would champion their interests. The politics are different in Britain, but the Church is facing a crisis because of its steeply declining numbers and political clout, and this situation may just be ripe for a political response. Hunt did not want to present himself as the “Christian” candidate, but the potential for mobilising British Christians as voters is very real.

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What’s more, the declining numbers among all branches of Christianity could actually foster unity between the disparate denominations that are individually struggling to survive in Britain. Their differences seem minor in comparison with the shared challenge of secularisation. Marginalisation and the threat of extinction are great motivators towards unity and action, and leaders could mobilise Christian believers into an effective voting bloc.

To do so, Christian politicians in the UK can draw from an American example; not the Religious Right, but the socialist Left. There is technically a Christian Democrat party in Britain (several of them, it turns out) in the same way that there is a Democratic Socialist party in the United States. But the US socialists did not gain any traction until some of their brightest or most promising stars, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, injected their beliefs and perspectives into the existing dominant two-party structure that governs American politics.

Similarly, Christian mobilisation in Britain would probably have to come from within one of the two major parties in order to be effective. Fortunately, British Christians tend to sit near the centre of the political spectrum, putting them in an ideal position to be courted by Tories and Labour alike. The key to a successful Christian political mobilisation would come down to sincerity and vision.

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To return to the American example, “socialism” had been a dirty word in the US for decades. But in the past few years, it has rapidly emerged as a viable platform because of a few principled politicians such as Sanders, who won over audiences with his firmly-held convictions (Bernie was a socialist for decades before it was en vogue) and by offering a modernised form of their ideology as a solution to the economic divisions facing American society.

It’s hard to predict where such a figure might emerge for the UK’s Christian community. Hunt did not take up the “Christian” mantle in his political life. Perhaps he will in the future, or maybe another candidate will emerge to appeal to this community. Rising stars and political movements often move quickly: five years ago, Sanders was a backbencher from a small state and Ocasio-Cortes was a bartender. But when the moment came, they stepped up and channelled the discontent that existed among many Americans by presenting socialism as the answer to an America that seems to be increasingly driven by the ultra-rich and corporate interests at the expense of the working and middle classes.

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Likewise, a political movement based on Christian values would be well poised to provide moral leadership on some of the most pressing issues facing the UK, such as tackling poverty and fixing the social safety net. An injection of organised Christianity into British politics could also be an asset for UK foreign policy, from strengthening ties with the United States to establishing a moral high ground in dealings with China (persecution of Christians – an issue that Hunt highlighted during his time as foreign secretary – has been a significant but underappreciated aspect of the current protests in Hong Kong).

Before the era of sectarian rivalries, Christianity was a source of unity within Britain and across Europe. Now that secularisation and social divisions trump any denominational differences, Christianity could again become a unifying force in the UK. Mobilised Christians could find at least limited common cause with the country’s Muslim and Jewish populations, tapping into a mutual Abrahamic heritage and co-operating to push back against secularisation and religious-based discrimination.

A modern political Christianity – morally principled but not divisive or exclusionary – could help the nation refocus and find a new sense of purpose and identity.

That discussion has been rattling around in my head over the past few weeks. And, in particular, the idea that there exists such a thing as truth that is so entirely self-evident that it ‘speaks for itself’. This idea about truth, it seems to me, is connected with the political maelstrom in which we now find ourselves. There’s a reason ‘Post-truth’ was chosen, in 2016, by the Oxford Dictionaries as their ‘Word of the year’ – the year of the Brexit referendum, the year of Trump’s victory in America.

Why I welcome our post-Truth era

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The idea of truth has always had a powerful political valence. The promise it holds out is a little like the promise of monotheism – that the truth is singular and, therefore, is something that all human beings should rally around. Just as Du Sautoy’s mathematics is without agro, so too the truth itself promises a kind of peace between people, something around which we can all unite. It suggests a common and indisputable reference point, everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

For a secular society, the self-evident truth of mathematics comes to be seen as a bit like the idea of the one holy Catholic church, only better (because true!). And those who are persuaded by this dream of truth-based politics are driven by a sort of utopianism, that we might negotiate our place in the world – do politics – without agro. Like the teenage du Sautoy.

However, the coming together of those who claim some unique access to truth and political power has a long and not especially distinguished history. Plato imagined the existence of philosopher-kings. That philosophers (like him), with their special attention to truth, are best suited to captain the ‘ship of state’.

Likewise, the Catholic church, in the person of the Pope, aligned religious truth and temporal power, claiming to base the latter on the former. And in our present age, it is the high priests of STEM who are credited with particular access to truth, and thus the best people to steer the political ship. Hence evidence-based policy, technocratic politics and the way scientists increasing feed into our decision making process. This is society as ‘rationally ordered’.

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By John Gray

One of the most disturbing features of all of these different ways of linking truth and politics is the way they conceive of dissent. For what happens when truth and political power marry up is that those who dissent are – by definition – either stupid (because they don’t understand the truth) or liars (because they wilfully oppose it). There is no room for intelligent opposition – you can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts, as they often say. In other words, when truth and politics line up, any opposition is morally objectionable.

One way of thinking about post-truth is that, with Trump and Brexit, a new breed of political liars has emerged. This strikes me as unlikely. It is surely the case that politicians have always lied, stretched the truth, spun things to their advantage. “Everybody lies”, says Dr Gregory House. And in 2017, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz published a fascinating book of the same name, using internet data to reveal how much of a gap there exists between what we say about ourselves and what we do online when we think no one is looking.

Of course, it goes without saying that liars are to be condemned. And both Trump and the advocates of Brexit have lied about all sorts of things. As, have their opponents. Everybody lies. But post-truth, as I understand it, is not so much a crisis of political liars, so much as a collapse of faith in the (most recent version of the) alignment of truth and the political. And so, the way I see it, post-truth is to be celebrated not condemned.

Suggested reading

Is Trump making America great again?

By Henry Olsen

To be clear, I am not against truth. Not at all. How could one be? But I am highly suspicious of the claim to know something we might call the Truth, with a capital T. Big ‘T’ truth is universal truth, like God or maths (Du Sautoy thinks God and maths almost amount to the same thing). Big ‘T’ truth is the language that the universe speaks, as it were. Little ‘t’ truth, is everyday truth, “Paris is the capital of France”, “I am 53 years old”, “Barak Obama was born in the USA”. Little ‘t’ truth is tremendously important. Big ‘T’ truth is dangerous – and especially when Truth and politics are claimed to form some sort of harmonious combination.

For me, that is a recipe for fascism. Popper in his Open Society and its Enemies, charges Plato with totalitarianism and a hatred of democracy; being a philosopher, Plato knows the truth and the plebs do not. A similar change could be rightly made against the church. But the latest inheritors of the politics-as-truth tradition still do not recognise this as a picture of themselves.

Post-truth is a good thing because what has collapsed (again) is not a belief in truth, but a belief in Truth. What has disappeared is the claim that philosophers or priests or experts have some sort of unique access to it along with the idea that us plebs should just bow before them and shut up.

Suggested reading

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

This essay began with du Sautoy and his belief that the truth of mathematics promised a way of bypassing the confusing complexity of being a teenager. Those who bemoan post-truth politics are dealing with the realisation that there is no way of Truth bypassing the confusing complexity of the political. The political – the contest of competing and clashing human aspirations – is ineradicable. And it always means agro.

That is not to say that there isn’t still an issue with liars. The reformation was made possible because of a new communication technology: the printing press. And Guttenburg’s new invention spewed out all sorts of exaggerated claims and wild conspiracy theories. But it also challenged those who claimed a monopoly of power on the basis of their special access to Truth.

This new reformation is also powered by a similar invention in information technology: the internet. And it too makes possible the dissemination of lies and bullshit. But to see only this misses the bigger picture. The new reformation also brings down those who have become too comfortable with their unique access to Truth. It challenges the priesthood and the priesthood don’t like it. It is not just post-truth (which remains a problem) – but also post-Truth. And hurrah for that.

Then again, for every pub that closes down, a coffee shop seems to open. In the town where I live, we now have a ‘cat cafe’. This is a cafe with cats rather than for them – and yet it’s somehow symbolic of the direction our society is going in:

“If our era has a pre-eminent gathering space, in both its chain and independent forms, it is surely the modern cafe – where most people seem to be hunched over their laptops, transfixed by their phones, or huddled with friends and oblivious to everyone else. This is the opposite of the places where the best kind of chaotic, unexpected experiences can happen and you might end up falling into conversations with complete strangers.”

Further reading

Why are we calling time on working men's clubs?

By Ruth Cherrington

Harris fears that genuinely shared spaces are disappearing from our communities – as well as pubs, he mentions the demise of village shops, night clubs, music venues, public libraries and youth clubs.

Some of this he blames on “the effects of ten years of austerity” – but that’s not the only cause:

“On one hand cuts; on the other, deep cultural changes that are pushing us even further apart. Among some middle-class people there has long been a cringe about anything that smacks of cultural universalism, but this prejudice now seems to be defining an ever-greater swath of our culture… From Wetherspoons to McDonald’s, places that emphasise affordability and an appeal that runs across income groups and generations are viewed more snobbishly than ever. “

A few weeks back, I wrote about the ‘open versus closed‘ narrative in politics – and the way in which those who are loudest in their support for liberal policies on issues like trade and immigration just happen to be those most insulated from the downside.

Further reading

The deeper meaning of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

The cultural equivalent is to embrace an identity that is either so broad that it makes few demands on insiders (I’m a passionate European, don’t you know’), or else so narrowly defined as to exclude anyone who isn’t like you. In an era when identities are increasingly politicised, its purpose might even be to make demands on outsiders – but more likely it’s just a means of associating with people of much the same age group, social background, tastes and opinions.

To be carefully avoided, however, are identities firm enough to require at least some sacrifice on the part of the individual – and wide enough to embrace and link together different kinds of people, not just those who naturally flock together.

These are perhaps better described as loyalties than identities – and they can be both costly and uncomfortable. But then that’s the thing about sharing.

All of that said, in almost every village, town and city in the land, there is one place, and perhaps several, where you can be part of a genuine community – and furthermore one composed of people from different generations, classes and backgrounds. Whether or not you consider this to be good news rather depends on your attitude to the Good News. 

Further reading

Don't mock the parochial – it matters where we come from

By Giles Fraser

It began as a bit of office fun, a competition between colleagues to see who could get the most Twitter followers in a month. And there is no denying it is funny. Every day the account tweets out absurd headlines taken from local newspapers. “Mystery goat tied to post in Maidenhead High Street”, and “Woman taken to hospital after being knocked over by a cow in a field in Hethel”, are two of the more recent offerings. Though my favorite was the breaking news that “a Swansea town council is considering getting a colour photocopier” – imagine being the reporter sent to sleuth around after that one.

Now, I mustn’t get all morally superior about this, because I can’t help but laugh at it too. Nonetheless, there is something about @CrapLocalNews that I find just a little bit too smug – the metropolitan distain of young media trendies sitting in their central London offices poking fun at the dullness of parochial life.

Of course, this has long been a fault-line in English culture since at least the 18th century, with the English novel – Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy etc – continually returning to the divisions between town and country, between the parochial and the cosmopolitan. And it is there much further back too: think, for instance, of the urban snobbery of imperial Rome, the sneering attitude towards the provinces and their lack of cultural sophistication.

Globalisation has done something different to this well-worn theme. Air travel, international markets and a revolution in communications technology has meant that the cultural and economic elite of different regions of the world are able to live and work together, almost irrespective of geography. Just as the global elite become ever closer to each other, also they become increasingly distanced from those who live, as it were, parochially – even when sharing the same geographical space as them.

The word parochial derives from the Latin word for parish, paroecia – the parish being the basic unit of ecclesiological governance in this country since the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, was sent here in the 7th century and revolutionised the structure of local decision-making. Since then, for the last millennium and a half, the church developed and then maintained a parish system in this country, establishing a local parish church and a local parish priest at the very heart of every local community.

But now, if you look up the world parochial in the thesaurus, you find this:

“…narrow-minded, small-minded, provincial, insular, narrow, small-town, inward-looking, limited, restricted, localist, conservative, conventional, short-sighted, petty, closed-minded, blinkered, myopic, introverted, illiberal,  hidebound, intolerant…”

Whereas the local community used to be the principle site of human flourishing, it is now something to escape from. Politicians call it social mobility, and they think it an unalloyed good thing that anyone with any gumption and “get up and go” will do precisely that. If you are born into a strong, thick, traditional community, if you come from somewhere provincial and parochial, it has become almost a duty to yourself to leave such places to go and find your way in the world. In the world of liberal individualism, deracination becomes a moral obligation. It is the price of individual flourishing.

Somewheres prefer the way things look now... a bit manky,

Why the so-called 'somewheres' hold so tightly to tradition

By Graeme Archer

Back in 2003 and 2004, The Idler magazine website invited its readers to nominate Britain’s “crappest” towns. Hull won in 2003 and Luton in 2004. These become the places from which young people especially are encouraged to escape. Luton-born Safraz Manzoor had it exactly right when he wrote about the resulting book:

“There is an air of unmistakable snobbery around the people behind such a book; the stench of rich kids having fun at the expense of those less able to afford to be professionally idle.”

As a parish priest for over 20 years, my commitment has always been to the parochial. Yet as a journalist, I inhabit newsrooms where the flow of information is constant, where things move fast and the reality of world events is ever-present. The fantasy of such places is that, because of their hyper-connectivity, they have their noses pressed up hard against reality.

Perhaps the most important thing about Brexit is that it has revealed this disconnect and forced us all to face it. Sunderland (third crappest town in the UK in 2004, according to The Idler survey) led the charge on 23 June 2016. This was the much maligned and unheard voice of the parochial.

But there are still those who will not listen. That Lot was co-founded by the actor and comedian David Schneider in 2003. He’s a funny, talented guy. And he is good at poking fun – that’s his job. He recently tweeted: “I’m off on a short Twitterbreak to write a telly thing about Brexit. It’s a farce with loads of really bleak humour. And so is the telly thing.”

His twitter account is a continual flow of jokes about Brexiters and how stupid they are. It reflects the easy moral superiority of the globally networked media existence, and the laughter of those who look down upon the parochial as little more that a source of crap local news. Little wonder people are so angry.