This rhetoric — by turns timorous and aggressive — blurs once vital distinctions between Christian confessions and denominations. Miriam Cates, a former Tory MP and evangelical Anglican, called on “British Christians” to drop their suspicion of Kirk, she employed a collective noun with which few churchgoers would have been comfortable in previous decades, when rifts between the Church of England and nonconformist chapel, Catholic and Protestant ran deep. In the United States, the veneration of Kirk has been a strangely ecumenical matter. 

Kirk, after all, was a Bible-bashing evangelical Protestant who condemned the Papacy. His funeral resembled a glitzy megachurch service. Yet, Roman Catholics have been his most emotional eulogists. Cardinal Dolan of New York likened his speaking tours to the missionary journeys of Saint Paul. Bishop Robert Barron, an energetic podcaster, was reminded of the philosophical method of Socrates and Aristotle. The images of a saintly, smiling Kirk proliferating across America oddly resemble Carlo Acutis, the Millennial influencer recently canonized by the Church for seeking to rescue the young for religion.

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Christianity in this charged moment is no longer an intricate constellation of disputed beliefs but something easier to grasp: an identity. To be a Christian is to commit oneself to a concentric circle of values — the family, the nation, the West, civilization itself — that are under attack. Those who oppose this Rightward tilt are ironically just as confident in offering capsule definitions of what being a Christian is. Rowan Williams headed the signatories of an open letter against Tommy Robinson’s march, protesting that “the cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other” and should not be used to incite division: “Jesus calls us to love both our neighbors and our enemies and to welcome the stranger.” The Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals who signed alongside the former Archbishop of Canterbury would once have regarded his church as an impediment to the gospel and at worst a corrupt institution. He would have seen their fervent biblicism as pretty naive.

The historian Udi Greenberg reminds us in a thoughtful recent book that this is hardly the first time that basic conceptions of mere Christianity have served as banners in culture wars. Though the political instrumentalization of faith now seems archetypally American, the crucible of the transformation he discusses was Western Europe in the early and mid-20th centuries, when the rising fear of Communism overcame earlier divisions between churches and confessions. The legacy of the Reformation ensured that these ran deep. Right down to the 20th century, Protestants and Catholics believed and worshiped in sharply and sometimes bitterly opposed ways from which they derived very different social and moral doctrines.

Since the Reformation, no one in this fractured Christendom had been able to agree on what counted as a Christian family. Protestant propagandists claimed that the celibate clergy of Rome came between man and wife by forcing women to spill their intimate secrets in the confessional booth. Catholics riposted that Martin Luther had destroyed the sanctity of marriage when he had allowed divorce. There was no more unanimity when it came to the security or prosperity of nations. Protestants used the developing science of statistics to allege that the oppressive Roman priesthood made their flocks criminal and dishonest. Was it any wonder that in superstitious, Popish Naples there was one murder per 2,750 people, but only one per 270,000 in thrifty Presbyterian Scotland? 

It took a shared enemy to overcome these animosities. By the time of the First World War, Protestants and Catholics were converging in fear of socialism and feminism. When feminists said there was more to life than raising children — work or emotional and sexual fulfillment for instance — Protestant and Catholic writers borrowed one another’s arguments for their natural subordination and domesticity of women. In particular, they now began to identify Christianity not with a set of disputed dogmas but rather a basic defense of the nuclear family against the menace of selfish and “animalistic” pleasure. Their politicians joined in passing vice laws that cracked down on pornographic books or racy plays that undermined the sanctity of the home. In the Netherlands, for example, Catholics and Protestants teamed up in 1911 to close brothels and ramp up censorship.

The defense of a Christian culture could be progressive as well as puritanical. Protestants and Catholics built the first welfare states. Though Otto von Bismarck had once initiated a fierce “culture war” against the Roman Catholic Church, he worked in the 1880s with both Protestant and Catholic legislators to introduce unemployment and accident insurance for workers. The state and the churches would insulate workers against the temptations of socialism by tempering the worst cruelties of capitalism. 

In the aftermath of the First World War though, the continuing dread of socialism would push the churches into some terrible mistakes. The credible fear that the spread of Communism would initiate the same kind of ruthless dechristianization that was evident in Soviet Russia pushed leading Protestants and Catholics into collaboration with fascist and authoritarian governments. In Germany, both Protestant and Catholic theologians fell for Adolf Hitler’s airy claim that he stood for “positive Christianity” against “Judeo-Bolshevism”. According to the Catholic theologian Robert Grosche, Germany was now a “sacred space” in which confessional differences counted for less than race: the Germans formed a “community of blood” through which all believers came to Christ. They were so impressed by Nazism’s willingness to confront Soviet Russia that they barely noticed its viciousness, especially when it was exercised against groups such as the Jews who did not belong to their racial or religious community. What did bother them about the Nazis were trivial sins against family values: the “tendency toward nudism” of its youth organizations or the wartime policy of running brothels to service the troops.

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This hollowed out conception of Christian civilization, which provided rhetorical cover for wars of aggression and the mass murder of the Holocaust, should have collapsed with the Third Reich. Yet Christian theologians of all persuasions gamely pressed on with the defense of Christianity thereafter, dodging their share of responsibility for the Second World War with the implausible claim that believers “suffered more under the Nazis than others”. The defeat of Fascism allowed Christians to concentrate on what remained the real enemy: atheistic Soviet Communism, which now threatened to mount a “barbarian invasion” of the West. Catholics and Protestants mingled in Christian parties: one good example is West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, which hoped that revived democracies could prop up family life and the natural inequalities of capitalism. 

The defenders of Christianity slightly modernized it to make it more appealing to war-weary Europeans. They allowed that being a Christian was no obstacle to enjoying the economic miracle of postwar affluence. The opposite was true: once everyone could afford cars and televisions, exclaimed one Dutch Protestant, they would find it easier to be good Christian neighbors. Western politicians influenced by ecumenical thinkers presented human rights not just as a bastion against Soviet totalitarianism but as a precious bequest from Christianity. 

Winston Churchill described the European Convention on Human Rights which is so unpopular with Right-leaning Britons today as vital to the “health of… Christendom”. Catholic and Protestants agreed that they should now present marriage not as a brake on eroticism but a means to its highest fulfillment. In bestselling books, formerly stern theologians became marriage guidance counselors, urging Christian couples to chase mutual orgasms and try out multiple positions, allowing that there was much more to sex than procreation. The French Catholic sexologist Marc Oraison urged Christian men to “follow the beat of the woman’s rhythm” to “synchronize the climax”.

All this sex positivity did not stop Christians from collaborating against people whose tastes and practices did not fit their definitions of good clean fun. They supported a renewed drive to prosecute homosexuals in postwar Europe for example. In Africa and South East Asia, Protestant and Catholic missionaries reacted to the swift disintegration of Europe’s disintegrating colonial empires by suggesting that Christianity might advance economic and social development. Yet they also pressed on with campaigns against polygamy, which they denounced as a “consequence of original sin”. And they intensified their hostility to Islam, which in their minds joined Communism as a materialist threat to the still fragile advance of Christian civilization. As a Catholic bishop in Tanzania put it in 1959, Protestants and Catholics must overcome the “scandal” of their divisions so that they could take on the “totalitarian” threat of Islam.

This complacent sense that Christianity was the sanctification of the nuclear family and social market capitalism did not survive the spiritual tumult of the Sixties and Seventies. The radical theologians of those decades did still seek a simple definition of Christianity to which both Europeans and the people of their former colonies could subscribe. They just tried to smash the social conservatism of their predecessors by killing off the authoritarian God they had worshipped. Christianity must now become a “religionless” faith: one that respected Jesus as the “outcast” who had dreamed of overturning society but had no need for his Father. Protestants and Catholics competed to see who could break most decisively with the dusty devotions of former times. Dorothee Sölle, a German Catholic feminist, urged her readers to live as the crucified Jesus had done, as if God did not exist.

The most important thing about this religionless ecumenicism in Greenberg’s eyes is that it failed. If radical theology did not cause the plunges in churchgoing and membership that set in across Europe at that time, it did nothing to prevent them. This means that when European politicians speak about a common Christian civilization today, they have fallen back on the conservative and authoritarian ecumenicism of earlier decades. This is a zombie Christianity: which has little to do with the actual worship or beliefs of dwindling churches. When Giorgia Meloni speaks of being “a Christian”, she nods at but hardly bows to Italian Catholicism: she is a single mother who is happier to quote Tolkien than Saint Paul. What has not changed is that talk of Christian civilization still rallies support against the enemies supposedly pressing at its borders or already plotting against it from within, even if they are no longer the Bolsheviks of old. Benjamin Netanyahu’s praise of Kirk for standing “tall for Judeo-Christian civilization” would have surprised interwar propagandists, who saw Jews as outsiders to or adversaries of Christendom. But they would have understood his strategy, which is to bind Israel and the West in a struggle against Islamism.

Greenberg’s account of interwar ecumenicism is meant more as a cautionary tale to Western countries today than as a precise diagnosis of our present moment, in which America has supplanted Europe as the main battlefield for spiritual culture wars. Americans got to their equally blurry talk about a Christian nation and a Judeo-Christian civilization by different paths than Europeans. The Second World War played an equally formative but very different role: American propaganda urged Catholic, Protestant and Jewish men to enlist as equal members of a “tri-faith nation” in the combat against the godless Nazis. The rhetoric was pluralist and egalitarian rather than conservative and defensive, which suited what was then an expansive and firmly democratic nation. Greenberg all the same wants to remind us that when Christians feel the urge to unite against their enemies, they should first ask whether they don’t stand to undermine what they once thought precious or distinctive about their own faiths.

Perhaps these fears seem overblown. After all, it is doubtful that the cult of Charlie Kirk will last longer than any other of MAGA’s fitful passions. Yet the journalists and thinkers who have hailed it as a “milestone” in the public resurgence of religion risk discrediting the Christianity for which they speak. Greenberg’s book is a somber reminder that past efforts by Europeans to defend Christian values did little to help churches but much to excuse the lawless abuse of state power. The few Christian thinkers who did mount a vital opposition to fascism, such as the Catholic humanist Jacques Maritain, sharply distinguished their faith from the visceral, binary loyalties that tie us to a people or a state. Maritain’s fervent pluralism, in which historic creeds can agree to disagree on everything but the inherent dignity of human persons, offers Christians more today than politicians who claim to defend a faith they might struggle to define.

The Protestant Reformation was ignited when accepted Catholic practices were carried to extremes that became abusive — most notably simony (selling church offices) and indulgences (pardons purchased to get out of purgatory), neither of which had any basis in scripture. Once begun, the Reformation was seized upon and accelerated by ambitious German princes who sought to free themselves from the financial and political influence of the pope. The Catholic Church eventually stopped selling bishoprics and forgiveness, but not before the fabric of European civilization had been torn asunder.

Much as 16th-century Europe was anchored by respect for religious institutions, the United States is today united by respect for its Constitution, a sacred document to which citizens, civil servants, and the military all regularly swear allegiance. Unlike the constitutions of France or Germany, which have changed with the political seasons, the American Constitution has functioned effectively for nearly 250 years.

Yet nowhere does the Constitution give any one of 677 unelected district-court judges the authority to block the policies of an elected president, as they’ve been doing regularly for the past decade by issuing nationwide injunctions. These injunctions cover everyone in the country, not just those who brought the case. Yet the use of sweeping injunctions is a manufactured practice created by legislation, but not found in the Constitution. And like simony and the sale of indulgences, it has been abused by excessive use. It needs to stop.

Do not scoff at the possibility of a constitutional reformation. For centuries, the pope was a powerful and respected figure throughout Europe, until one day he wasn’t. Today our judiciary is powerful, but there is a large element of faith and mystery upholding respect for the Supreme Court. The justices reside in a building designed to resemble a Roman temple. They appear in costumes resembling the robes of a high priest and inform us that, like oracles, only they are qualified to decipher the constitution. As with the papacy, faith in the Supreme Court will quickly evaporate if it is seen to endorse the widespread abuse of contrived practices not found in scripture.

The facts speak for themselves. Issuing nationwide injunctions to block executive orders has become a routine partisan tool. In Donald Trump’s first term, 64 nationwide injunctions were issued against him, of which 92% were granted by Democrat-appointed judges. In the first five months of his second term, 92% were granted have been issued against him — the overwhelming majority coming from just five judicial districts, all of which are located in liberal cities such as San Francisco and Boston. In many recent cases, the terms “arbitrary and capricious” were used to block any executive order the judge disagreed with, including policies many Americans strongly support such as deporting illegal aliens and reducing government waste.

Conservatives have played the same game: Republican judges issued all 14 of the injunctions against President Biden. As a result of all this, citizens are beginning to regard some judges as unelected politicians in robes rather than unbiased arbiters of justice. That should worry all Americans.

Last week, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court dismissed three nationwide injunctions against President Trump. The significance of the verdict is not that it allowed his efforts to reinterpret birthright citizenship to proceed. That issue will return to the lower courts and be decided later. This was a landmark decision because it concluded that Congress never granted trial judges the authority to issue broad relief to individuals who had not actually brought a case before their court.

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett indicated that nationwide injunctions do not align with accepted practice in either the United States or Britain. She wrote: “The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our nation’s history… Its absence from 18th and 19th century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.”

It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court looked only at legislation governing court procedures. It did not address the fundamental constitutionality of nationwide injunctions. Therefore, Congress could quite easily pass new legislation reversing this decision.

Regrettably, the decision also undermined the credibility of the court’s three liberal justices. During the Biden administration, when Republican judges issued nationwide injunctions, Justice Elena Kagan stated: “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a national policy in its tracks.” Yet last week she voted against ending nationwide injunctions. Regardless of the legal reasoning behind her decision, it appeared to many as politically motivated hypocrisy.

Even more remarkable was Justice Barrett’s public rebuke of the court’s newest member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Jackson called the majority decision of six more senior judges “an existential threat to the rule of law”. Justice Barrett, who has frequently sided with the liberal justices, essentially told Jackson that she needed to go back to law school, writing: “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument which is at odds with more than two centuries of precedent, not to mention the Constitution.” She added, pointedly: “We observe only this, that Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

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Such division is worrying given that faith in many civic institutions is already in decline. Reporting by the mainstream media is routinely dismissed as propaganda. Following Covid, scientific pronouncements are no longer accepted at face value. Congress is seen as promoting partisan excess rather than national interest. Even the judiciary is no longer immune from growing skepticism. Accurately or not, many Americans consider prosecutor Letitia James and judge Arthur Engoron to have been overtly partisan in Donald Trump’s real estate fraud trial. A Colorado state court actually sought to keep Trump off the ballot only to be overturned by the Supreme Court. As a result of these and similar incidents, a new and troubling phrase has crept into the American vocabulary, “weaponized lawfare”.

Even more significantly, while the Supreme Court decision limited the use of nationwide injunctions, it still allows “class certification” through which courts can issue injunctions affecting a very broad group of people. As Justice Samuel Alito noted, this is “a potentially significant loophole” in the decision. Is there any reason to doubt that judges who were lax in the use of nationwide injunctions will be any stricter in their use of class certification? The failed plaintiffs in last week’s decision have already sought a new injunction under this provision of the law.

The decision neither enhanced the Supreme Court’s legitimacy nor resolved the issue of judicial overreach. The potential for abuse remains. Once a tipping point in public trust is reached, partisan actors, like the German nobles, will seize the issue. They will twist legitimate reform efforts to their own immediate gain, potentially undermining the entire process of judicial review. Every law school professor will tell you the courts have the authority to declare laws unconstitutional. Every one of them also knows that this authority is not found anywhere in the Constitution. It was the self-aggrandizing brainchild of Chief Justice John Marshall who promulgated it in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison. It has been accepted because it is generally regarded as useful. So was papal infallibility.

The Protestant Reformation began on All Saints Day 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the cathedral door in Wittenberg and publicly declared that selling forgiveness of sins was a fraud. Yet Luther wanted to reform the Church, not dismember it. Pope Leo X could have defused the Reformation, and preserved the unifying stature of the Catholic Church, by ending practices many had come to regard as corrupt.

Luther’s Reformation became a political as much as a religious event. Today, the authority of district court judges has become a political as much as a legal issue. In “Federalist 47”, founding father and president James Madison noted that it is the concentration of power that defines tyranny, not the ends to which that power is used. The power of one unelected, junior trial-court judge to block the policies of a nationally elected president is an unwarranted concentration of power in the judiciary. Hopefully, last week’s decision will end the abuse of judge shopping to block executive orders, but it may not. We do not need a constitutional reformation. We need the Lutherans and Catholics on the Supreme Court to firmly rein in highly partisan district court judges from both parties before someone nails 95 Theses to their courthouse door.

Built amid London’s squalid slums or ragged suburbs, both Anglican churches remind you that the Anglo-Catholic clerics and artists of their time believed that nothing was too good for the people they aimed to serve. They plundered the high-medieval styles of France, Italy and Germany to plant islands of awe and majesty in the midst of urban grime. The toiling masses needed sacred beauty as much as they needed bread. Indeed, these neo-Gothic visions and missionary Christian Socialism often went hand-in-hand. Such retro grandeur also gave voice in brick and stone to another powerful yearning: a wish that the Protestant Reformation had either never happened, or else had not led to a permanent schism — and that the English church had stayed firmly within the fold of undivided Christendom.

Such Romish nostalgia might now look like a niche interest. But its secular legacy lives on: for instance, in the attraction of a variety of home-grown Europeanism that pines for a profound connection not so much with some suited bureaucracy in Brussels as a continental mainstream of art, thought and culture, without which England will wither into petty provincialism and insularity. Much of the time I share that longing, although I know it has tangled roots. And, surprising as it may seem, an outlier work by the foremost English comic novelist of the later 20th century expresses and dissects it with enormous empathy, mischief and wit. That work is Kingsley Amis’s 1976 novel The Alteration.

Amis was born a century ago, on 16 April 1922. The eclipse of his reputation means that any anniversary jubilations will have been muted at best. According to a now-standard version of his life, the maverick outsider satirist of Lucky Jim subsided fast into grumpily reactionary provocations spiced with heavy-duty boozing, serial adultery and (in his later fiction) spasms of venomous misogyny. Others can draw up the charge-sheet or plead for mitigations. I’m convinced merely that The Alteration — mid-period Amis, written when his decline into blowhard cynicism had supposedly taken hold — deserves to endure. It succeeds not only as a wildly imaginative, vastly entertaining, fictional dystopia, but as an acute exploration of the emotional dynamics behind cultural, political or religious faith. Like complementary panels of some medieval diptych, it merits study alongside Margaret Atwood’s oddly comparable The Handmaid’s Tale — published in 1985. Though I doubt that any university today would twin the pair.

Amis read, admired and analysed science fiction (or speculative fiction, as the buffs prefer). The Alteration bears witness to his long immersion in its formats and protocols. He creates an alternative 1976 in which, four centuries before, the Reformation in Europe had failed. England never split from Rome. The Tudor Prince Arthur did not die but went on to father a dynasty with the Blessed Catherine of Aragon. A revolt by the villainous Prince Henry (“the Abominable”) led to the “Holy Victory” and the entrenchment of Papal power. Luther himself reconciled with Rome and became pope; so, next in line, did Thomas More.

Amis sidesteps the dangers of the dreary “info-dump” — an endemic sin of science fiction — as he scatters teasing morsels of this alternative reality throughout the story rather than bombarding the reader with tedious expositions. When his American editor objected to this piece-by-piece illumination, Amis insisted in a letter that “one direct and complete tip-off instead of hundreds of indirect and partial tip-offs would impose a disastrously simplistic strategy on the book”. He was right: his approach intrigues, and satisfies. As in our world, England and other European nations have colonised much of the globe: Dahnang Station, south of the Thames, commemorates the English seizure of Indo-China from the French in 1815. But Church always trumps State and no power can rival, or question, the overarching authority of the papacy.

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However, two important non-papal polities exist. One is the mighty Muslim empire of the Sultan-Calif in Istanbul, antagonist in an endless cold (and sporadic hot) war with Christendom; recently, Islamic forces have reached Brussels before being driven back. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, expelled Protestant heretics formed the schismatic state of New England. It covers much of the eastern seaboard, but not the American west or south, which are still in European hands. In this Republic of New England, speculative thought and experimental science can flourish. However, the Native Americans who serve the European elite remain inferiors kept down by a doctrine of “separateness” — apartheid, in our world’s terms.

In Europe, a superstitious horror of electricity and its destructive power has stalled progress on many fronts and limited the population of London to one million (far too many, people grumble). Forests still swathe much of Middlesex. Some breakthroughs have occurred: Amis gleefully devises a steampunk techno-sphere in which a kind of Diesel engine powers fast mechanical carriages for the elite. Trains may move at 21st-century speeds. The “Eternal City Rapid”, for instance, makes the London-Rome run in seven hours as it thunders at 195mph over the Channel Bridge. Luxurious airships float serenely across the Atlantic. Technology, though, counts for less than the marvels of religious art: in the English capital of Coverley (once Cowley, outside Oxford), Wren’s Cathedral-Basilica of St George is a dazzling treasure-house adorned with pious works by devout artists such as William Blake, William Morris and young David Hockney.

For all its rigid hierarchy, Amis’s holy England can beguile with its grace and beauty. Music, art and architecture — the sensory arts sidelined in the Reformation and mourned by English aesthetes ever since — have flourished at world-beating levels of excellence. This England is confidently European, cosmopolitan, not remotely philistine — and utterly unfree. Amis’s glimpses of the musical and visual grandeur cultivated in the place of independent thought have a jewel-like, pre-Raphaelite brilliance. We can almost feel why, lapped in such a plush despotism, many people might opt to swap liberty for loveliness. Clever upholders of the system think that “tyranny alone can let men be safe and serene”.

Amis’s plot turns on the efforts of a fabulously gifted ten-year-old chorister, Hubert Anvil, to escape the “alteration” — ie, castration — that will preserve his God-given soprano voice into maturity. One minor, safe, painless operation (medicine has advanced, at least for the rich) can guarantee a lifetime’s fame and wealth. Art, and faith, demand such a sacrifice from “the best boy singer in living memory”. Or so his elders insist.

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Hubert has other ideas. A zigzagging plot sends him in flight from his “alteration” across the landscape of Amis’s unreformed, historically altered country. A totalitarian theocracy, savage but clumsy, directs every aspect of daily life and punishes heresy with brutal swiftness. The mass of the people (like Orwell’s proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four) suffer a lighter yoke so long as they obediently work, pray and drink; they go on foot or horseback while misnamed Diesel “publics” carry their betters. Amis might have had Soviet Russia in mind during the mid-Seventies, but his antennae proved acute: soon, fundamentalist clerics spearheaded Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

From the Tower of London, Lord Stansgate runs the secret police of the Holy Office (one of Amis’s perishable gags: Tony Benn’s title was Viscount Stansgate, but the jibe requires a footnote now). In Rome, the bluff but ruthless Yorkshireman Pope John XXIV (apparently modelled on the novelist John Braine, but with distinct touches of the then prime minister Harold Wilson) governs Christendom with a Machiavellian hand that often grasps a mug of imported bitter ale. Amis piles up the history-switching jokes: Himmler and Beria survive as top Roman bureaucrats; the fiercely secular logician A.J. Ayer becomes Professor of Dogmatic Theology; Jean-Paul Sartre is an orthodox Jesuit monsignor. Rudyard Kipling was “First Citizen” of the heretical RNE, and General Edgar Allan Poe the military genius who defeated the Catholic armies of Louisiana and Mexico.

For all its witty arabesques, Amis’s counterfactual schema has an underlying coherence and consistency. We see how faith-led social control seeks to dominate lives and minds — and why it may falter. In England, “careless, bumptious, over-liberal”, the Pope’s rule has softened a little. A fornicating monk got away with a flogging, for instance, but stupidly repeated the offence — and so “went to the pulley” to be torn limb from limb. As in any totalitarian order, smart, ambitious operators — priests, monks, students — do their duty, hold their tongues, and think forbidden thoughts. “In our world, a man does what he’s told, goes where he’s sent, answers what he’s asked. And, after seeing that, one is free.”

What, though, if a quest for freedom has to break the prudent silence of the sceptical conscience? Hubert’s act of rebellion can hardly be disguised. Abetted by his medical-student brother Anthony and a dissident priest, Father Lyall, who is conducting an affair with Hubert’s mother, the star treble learns about the value of the sexual love the Church will force him to relinquish. In their ecstasy, Hubert hears, lovers may grow “closer to each other than they can ever be to God”. In this regard, Amis sounds like a bloke of his own time. He treats the absence of testicles as irreparable exile from bliss, though the record shows that 18th century celebrity castrati were much sought after as lovers by society ladies. Anthony explains the allure of sexual congress to his little brother by comparing it to Hubert’s favourite treat: chocolate ice-cream. Whereas Amis’s erotic ideal appears to be strictly vanilla.

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Hubert’s plans to avoid alteration come to depend on the sympathetic stratagems of the New England ambassador, Cornelius van den Haag. Amis’s portrait of the lone schismatic republic has a fertile ambivalence. On the one hand, the New Englanders do stand for liberty, free enquiry and resistance to autocracy. Yet not only does Amis stress the racial inequality that builds these virtues on a bedrock of subjugated Indian labour (plantation slavery seems not to have taken root in New England territory). He hints that the upright Puritans reserve vicious punishments for social miscreants, and that “alteration” itself may be imposed on sexual transgressors. Here Planet Amis and Planet Atwood, perhaps unexpectedly, start to align.

If the sole free republic has its downsides, then the Pope’s domains — England included — are allowed their charms. With its magnificent basilicas, august ecclesiastical palaces and first-rate music-makers in comely, compact towns surrounded by unspoiled woods and meadows, the country its higher ranks enjoy does resemble the bucolic blueprint of some Anglo-Catholic architect steeped in Ruskin and Morris. But Amis lets us see that the mutilated — “altered” — mind will always be too high a price to pay for this.

Remember, though, that when he wrote the chief real-world models of a totalising system took the form of Soviet or Chinese communism. Although the Bolshoi ballet or Kirov opera might excel, neither regime much appealed on artistic grounds. Re-read The Alteration in the 21st century, and other kinds of gilded prison might suggest themselves. Think, for instance, not of Iran but the orderly, courteous and cultivated spirit of Abu Dhabi. In that emirate (not in brasher, franker Dubai) I have enjoyed the company of gracious, refined servants of the state, with all the subtlety and sophistication of an ancient aesthetic culture at their command. Never mind that Emirati society rests on ruthlessly enforced conformity, obedience to unaccountable power, and an unbridgeable chasm between a favoured elite and a vast servant class. Sink a little into the fragrant pillow of temptation that system offers and the cry for freedom begins to sound like sheer bad manners above all. In The Alteration, Amis conjures a sort of English Catholic equivalent of such a velvet cage — remarkably, since in the Seventies Sheikh Zayed had only just begun to build his fief.

Pluralist liberty, as Amis intuited, must always be rough, messy and discordant. (Young Hubert also excels as a composer, and shocks his tutors with rule-breaking harmonic shifts.) And any beautiful, euphonious society will cast a bloody shadow. Amis hints at secret plague-spreading experiments, masterminded by the Pope, designed to curb population growth. He’s too good a novelist, though, to preach for very long. The Alteration climaxes in a final, startling, twist.

Although dystopian fictions like to warn us against the formulaic reduction of reality, their plots often succumb to an oppressive tidiness. Not so Amis: we leave an older Hubert still lost in a confusing world with “nothing ever measured or settled”. If The Alteration admits the spangly attractions of top-down harmony and unanimity, it underlines the bill that always comes attached. A return visit to its seductive, sinister domain showed me why those gorgeous Gothic Revival churches in my neighbourhood may have such a magnetic allure. And why I’ll never linger in their pews for long.

It’s estimated that about 20% of the population of Europe died in the Thirty Years’ War, the culmination of some 150 years of religious conflict triggered by the Protestant Reformation. And the Reformation was, in turn, powered by a radical new means of disseminating information: the printing press.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme. It’s not original to suggest that the internet is as transformative as the printing press: less library in your pocket and more, as David Bowie put it in 1999, an “alien life form”. But less often asked is: if revolutionising how we view, store, exchange and cross-reference our knowledge set off violent religious convulsions 500 years ago, that rewrote the political map of Europe, how long before the internet does the same thing?

The usual response to this suggestion tends to be wild gesturing at the now-common “wokeness is a religion” take, accompanied by “well, look, it’s happening”.

But this has it backwards. “Wokeness” isn’t an upstart faith. It’s a secularised, mutant form of the Protestantism that began with Luther. It’s the creed of our current elite establishment, with near-hegemonic power, and it’s subject to many of the same critiques as the then-hegemonic Catholic Church was in Luther’s time, down to the selling of indulgences. In this story, “wokeness” isn’t the schism; it’s the established church.

For schismatics, look to the emerging coalition of dissenters from woke hegemony. And if this coalition increasingly replaces ‘the Right’ in Covid-era politics, its most action-oriented and potentially disruptive faction is also perhaps the least well-understood: the crypto bros.

Often fiercely anti-woke, this loosely Right-aligned subculture blends tech futurism with a desire to preserve elements of the past, and sometimes unsettlingly strong views on facets of human nature they see as immutable and hence not amenable to progressive social engineering.

The mainstream Right mostly doesn’t really know what to make of this faction, and largely ignores them. Meanwhile, they’re busy building. And what they’re building has the potential to transform not just the internet but our most fundamental political structures — as dramatically as the Reformation and its aftermath.

Thinking of the Reformation as a religious schism driven partly by new information technology isn’t to trivialise it. The shift in mindset it drove was so radical it pushed some to opt out altogether, from a regime they found intolerable. And one form this took was the Puritans leaving Europe for America.

The political scientist Albert Hirschman argues that for this historical reason opting-out, or “exit”, has “an extraordinarily privileged position in the American tradition”.

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Hirschman’s influential book Exit, Voice and Loyalty looks at what happens when things start to go wrong in an organisation or polity. As he sees it, citizens can choose to remain loyal, to exercise their voice (ie protest) or to “exit”. And as Hirschman points out, America’s origin story has contributed to an especially robust American political tradition of people voting with their feet when they don’t like how things are going.

Those talking about “exit” today in America aren’t the modern-day Puritans but their opponents. Many prominent figures associated with the subculture I’ll call the Exit Right are determinedly anonymous. Of those who write or speak under their own name, one key thinker is the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin’s “patchwork theory” offers a model for what exit might look like: he argues that nation-states should be replaced by proliferating, competing, autocratic city-states, each with its own CEO. In effect, this would then institute a market for governance, in which citizens could exit for a different polity, if an existing one didn’t suit.

But perhaps its most well-known powerhouse is Peter Thiel. Thiel is influenced by libertarian individualism and aversion to big government. But he doesn’t just dislike the current woke kind: he seems averse to all large-scale political systems. In a 2009 essay published at the libertarian Cato Institute, Thiel took aim at “totalitarian” and “fundamentalist” politics alike, and also the “unthinking demos” that powers “so-called ‘social democracy’”.

Thiel’s NatCon address took aim at institutional wokeness — but also the fundamental structures of Web 2.0 that power this creed. He denounced the way “the wisdom of crowds” has shaded into “the madness of crowds”. He railed against the “epistemic closure” around approved “scientific” consensus and fiat currency, warning against “a globalist future in which individuals will not exist”. He hinted at his preferred solution to this predicament, when he went on to say his biggest regret was not buying enough crypto while it was cheap. And he called for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of the Bitcoin protocol, to be lauded with a ticker-tape parade.

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Many looked baffled. But for the tech bros, talking about political models and talking about tech models is the same conversation, because the one enables the other. And when even a sitting president is vulnerable to deplatforming if they fall foul of consensus on proper behaviour, perhaps they have a point.

It’s not just about freedom of speech or association. Because as the Exit Right sees it, the problems inherent in big, centralised tech infrastructures are also there in big, centralised (and increasingly Big Tech-enabled) financial infrastructures and the fiat currencies they use. The Exit Right argues that the only way to protect any measure of freedom for dissenters is to abandon fiat currency altogether, in favour of crypto.

Meanwhile, the stories keep coming about tech converging with government: Google passing search histories to the government, for example, or Amazon hosting UK spy agencies’ data. With every story, the drumbeat grows louder from the Exit Right, to escape the convergence of government and Big Tech for salvation in the decentralising power of the blockchain.

The tech bros suggest the mainstream Right merely carps about “wokeness” from the sidelines, while assenting to every framework that gives this brittle bad-faith “faith” its real-world power: notably finance and the over-centralised internet.

Their proposed solution is leaning into new tech, to escape an increasingly totalitarian present tech. The theorist James Poulos argues in the forthcoming Human, Forever that the only way out of this bind is to embrace decentralised tech, and create “parallel institutions and secure, robust networks of mature and culturally healthy people online and off”.

This means building. Thiel is a prolific funder of projects in the Exit Right ecosystem; Yarvin hasn’t just contributed dissenting theory, but also dissenting tech. He was a founding developer of Urbit, which aims to replace the centralised Big Tech model with a peer-to-peer network of web services in which identities and data are always owned by the user, and not by Big Tech. (Urbit was part-funded by Thiel.)

Another example is New Founding, which aims to connect dissident (conservative) American individuals and businesses with “new media, technology, and commerce that serves and supports the American people”. Poulos also practises what he preaches: his book will launch initially as an NFT on Canonic, a blockchain-based self-publishing platform that sells books denominated in Bitcoin and also recently published Zero HP Lovecraft.

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If the internet does drive serious, world-shattering schisms, my money’s not on wokeness as their source. It’s on these decentralising visionaries. Because for all that many of them see their task as freeing the world of Big Tech’s now rapidly-consolidating woke priesthood, their own tech vision will in turn inevitably develop its own priest class — or rather, priest classes (plural).

Right now, the Exit Right is a heavily male-dominated, almost exclusively nerd-only subculture full of exceptionally clever techies: a group that, to a man wildly underestimates the ability or willingness of normal people to get their heads around tech innovations. But in order to go mainstream, the tech that powers the Exit Right’s vision will need explaining for non-nerds. And that means roping in writers. In other words: arts graduates, people with the right mindset to simplify, prettify, explain and popularise.

But as well as bringing an ability to explain, when you get arts graduates involved, they’re guaranteed to bring their moral viewpoints with them. Arguably a key reason why tech is currently so creepily uniform in moral outlook, is because it’s heavily centralised. And its explainers and popularisers — its priest class — are recruited mostly from a small set of elite American universities with a fairly homogenous worldview.

Peter Thiel and the Exit Right argue that the only way to give teeth to the emerging “anti-woke” consensus is to decentralise finance, tech and even governance. But popularising this won’t create one new priest class. Instead, every exiting faction will need its own. If they succeed, the upshot won’t be liberation from tech-adjacent priesthoods but competition between moral outlooks.

And a measure of their success will be that this happens not in an otherwise neutral, unified “marketplace of ideas”. It’ll happen in a world where each competing worldview potentially has its own infrastructures, currencies and perhaps even city-states. Let’s hope they can all get along. Because zero-sum disagreement between moral worldviews with their own infrastructures has a name: just like the last time our information technology changed this radically. Think culture war, but without the prefix.

There may come a time when even those of us who dislike our current stifling woke hegemony look back on it with nostalgia, as the last-ditch effort of a fading age to save us from the oncoming storm.

It didn’t happen by design. And a horrendous religious civil war was to follow, an extension, in many ways, of the wars of religious that had disfigured Europe with Protestants and Catholics all slaughtering each other in the name of God. But, in this country, a place of healing was eventually discovered. In this place, faith began to be separated from violence.

That place was the parish church of the Church of England. Here, both the catholic and the protestant instincts could be partially accommodated. This was somewhere people could worship in the same church without reaching for the pitchforks. Divisions could be managed without necessarily being overcome. With a book of common prayer — the common bit being crucial — and an emphasis on prayer and pastoral care, the established church, and the parish church in particular, became the site of national healing.

Not for everyone — non-conformists, for instance, were side-lined. But what held a great many people together was a loyalty to the local, to place. And more than any other institution, the parish church symbolised this renewal of local solidarity. Former enemies could sit alongside each other in church and pray to the same God, bracketing out their ideological differences, suspicious of enthusiasm, both catholic and reformed, singing over the cracks.

Lulled by sandy stone architecture, the gentle lullabies of “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive our foolish ways”, and an irenic, softly spoken Vicar, the parish church did its job almost too well. The English church fell asleep.

But for all its many dangers, enthusiasm also has its uses — not least when the church urgently needs to rally its forces in the face of a growing lack of interest, as it does right now. For all its many virtues, the gentle sleepy spirit of the parish church doesn’t always feel like a bridgehead for the re-conversion of England. Passion needs to be re-kindled. Forces need to be concentrated. The Christian church within England has to return to missionary mode. And it is, therefore, perhaps inevitable that some of us parish clergy are feeling a little bit of whiplash. Times they are a changing.

But many of the problems we now face are as much the consequence of missionary over-reach as of sleepy church complacency. The year I was ordained, the sociologist Robin Gill published his famous The Myth of the Empty Church, which should have probably been titled The Myth of the Full Church. The Victorians built too many churches, he argued, thus burdening and bankrupting future generations with the upkeep of impressive but expensive God boxes. It was the boom-and-bust theory of church growth.

The history of my ancient parish bears this out: Newington dates back to 1212, perhaps even earlier. Geographically, it was huge by modern standards, covering an area now served by a dozen or so parishes, most of what we now call Southwark. When London expanded during the 19th century — from a population of 1.9 million 1810 to 6.2 million in 1897 — the Church of England responded with a massive programme of church building. In the middle of that century, a new church was consecrated every four or five days. My own parish was split into ten between 1826 and 1877. And there were more later, carved from parts of my old parish and slices of neighbouring ones.

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These were the boom times, built at the height of imperial confidence. But bust is now upon us. This week we had to go cap in hand to the Diocese to ask them for a loan. Our old Victorian church hall collapsed back in December and the bill for demolition is around £150,000. We have nothing like that.

This week we also learned that the Church is concerned about “the sustainability of many local churches” — a problem floated in a leaked document. The Covid crisis has cost the church something in the region of £150 million and counting. And there are those who say that many of our congregations will never come back. As the report detailed: “Church attendance has reduced by around 40% over the last thirty years; the number of church buildings has fallen by 6%, which means a higher cost burden for the remaining attendees.” Something has to give. I cannot keep on asking my parishioners for money they don’t have. And the Diocese is no longer able to keep on subsidising all those churches that do not pay their own way.

But if the Church of England is to be precisely that – a church for the whole of the country, rich and poor — it cannot retreat into the wealthy suburbs, leaving the inner-city churches to become repurposed as designer flats with pointy ceilings. Nor can it fool itself that Zoom is the magical answer – a way of providing church without the need to worry about the leaky roof or whether or not we can afford to turn on the heating. Zoom has its advantages, not least that it offers to the housebound a window into the worshiping life of the church they are no longer able to attend. And indeed, over the last year, my own congregation has grown by about 20%, with new people joining us from all over the world. But for those churches in the more Catholic tradition, where church life centres around the offering of bread and wine, zoom is no substitute.

Transubstantiation may be an unexplainable miracle, but there is no way to convert the body of Christ into a digital offering that can be passed into the hands of the congregation via the camera on my laptop. You can no more offer the body and blood of Christ over zoom as you can go to the dentist over zoom. Catholic Christianity is inescapably physical, incarnational. And Zoom is, so to speak, an inherently Protestant medium, a genius technology for the promulgation of the word (much as the printing press did so much to accelerate the Reformation) but incapable of carrying the full weight of a more catholic sensibility, with its emphasis on place and presence. An evangelical church can function more like Boohoo than Debenhams, but a catholic one cannot.

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It is not the fault of the more successful parts of the church that the poorer parts of it are struggling. And it is a mistake to look at the growth of the more missionary minded evangelical parishes and regard them as some sort of threat to parishes like mine. Nonetheless, the idea that precious resources should be redirected towards growing, successful parishes does nothing to address the question of how the Church of England survives within the inner city. Such an approach would transform the Church of England into a middle-class broadly Protestant offering, and thus constitute a retreat from the core Church of England raison d’etre of, as it were, universal service provision. The only good justification for an established church is that it has a presence within every community in the land. Without this, disestablishment would be morally unavoidable.

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One way to both save the parish and allow the release of missionary energy would be to cut the layers of middle management that Dioceses haves built up over time. The Henry VIII shaped problem that the Church of England has is that of the bloated middle, with the continual invention of administrative jobs located at Church House. Some of us who are struggling to keep our parishes going unkindly wonder whether there are too many people employed by the church to sit behind a desk rather than stand behind an altar. We may also need to cut the number of Dioceses and expensive talking shops like the General Synod. But the truth is that without the central structures of the church, parishes like mine would no longer exist. After all, from where else would we get a loan from to pay for the demolition of our church hall? Indeed, how else could the parish afford to have a priest here, and a Rectory, if not for the subsidy administered by Church House.

But do these central structures really need to be so big? Church house for the Oxford diocese now employs more than 100 people. These are jobs that are replicated in many of our 42 dioceses. The Roman Catholic church, for example, seems to be able to manage (just as successfully) with a few office staff and an old filing cabinet. The problem within the Church of England appears to be the employment of a whole middle management class of communication officers and compliance professionals generating reams of forms and paperwork. In normal times there may be a case for such work. But when the church is busy cutting frontline staff — the parish clergy — the existence of this bloated middle has to be seriously challenged.

But if we’re talking about greater subsidiarity, this inevitably means parishes taking greater responsibility for their own financial affairs. At the moment, and however much I explain otherwise, many in my parish still believe that we pay some sort of tax to the diocese just for existing. In truth we are heavily subsidised. It is the worst of both worlds.

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So yes, the church must change. There will be much pain in those changes for many. But what, for me, is absolutely non-negotiable is the parish system. Parishes like mine covered a much larger geographical area before and they can do so again. Some churches will close. Some of that hubristic Victorian over expansion will have to be reversed. Resources must be concentrated. But the idea of a priest in a parish must be defended. The transformation that is needed will not take place successfully if the parish clergy fear that the central church regards its poorer parishes as little more than failing cost centres.

This is a crucial moment for the C of E. But churches have survived much worse. And events of the 21st century have demonstrated that the old narrative of slow religious decline is as much a myth as that of that of the Victorian church triumphant. Globally, Christianity continues to grow in the most unexpected places. China, for instance. But on these shores, we are called to be faithful in dark and difficult times. The Christian faith contains a genius for reinvention. And if we are right that God is in his heaven, then there is ultimately nothing to worry about. And if we are wrong, then it doesn’t matter anyway.

To describe the Reformation as a Twitter spat that got out of hand would obviously be anachronistic. Nevertheless, it is not entirely so: for it hints at a quality of Luther’s genius that we, in the age of social media, are perhaps peculiarly qualified to appreciate.

When, in 1517, the previously obscure professor of theology at Wittenberg published 95 theses challenging Church doctrine on salvation, they promptly went viral. “A mere squabble of envious monks.” So the Pope, with the lordly tone of a politician in 2010 turning his nose up at Twitter, is said to have dismissed the imbroglio.

Pretty soon, however, the flame war had got out of hand. Luther turned out to have a genius for publicity beyond anything that Europe had witnessed before. A mere four years after he had posted his 95 theses, his name had come to sound across Germany, and far beyond. Even the emperor, Charles V, had found himself perturbed by it. When, 500 years ago this month, a great assembly of the empire’s power-brokers, a “diet”, was convened in the city of Worms, Luther was on its agenda.

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On 26 March, a summons duly arrived in Wittenberg. Luther was instructed “to answer with regard to your books and teachings”. He was given three weeks to comply. He also received a personal assurance from the emperor of safe conduct to the diet. This, however, was not entirely reassuring, for history suggested that the word of an emperor could not always be trusted. Nevertheless, Luther answered the summons. He set off from Saxony for Worms. The journey proved a triumph. Welcoming committees toasted him at the gates of city after city; crowds crammed into churches to hear him preach. As he entered Worms, thousands thronged the streets to catch a glimpse of him. Luther was the man of the hour.

How had he done it? “Luther spoke,” as Diarmaid MacCulloch has put it, “at many levels: he debated with scholars, shouted from the pulpit, wrote vigorous German and sang his message in German hymns and songs.” He was — to coin a metaphor — a digital theologian faced by ponderously analogue foes. The technology he exploited was, of course, the printing press. No one had recognised its potential as readily as Luther, nor leveraged it to such seismic effect. The impact of his 95 theses had been crucially dependent on his determination to have them broadcast as widely as possible. He carried on as he had begun.

Staggeringly, over the course of the decade that followed the Diet of Worms, more than a fifth of the pamphlets printed by German presses came from Luther’s pen. These treatises and broadsides were then further amplified by memes. Luther himself was portrayed as a prophet, a hero, a saint. His enemies were shown as animals, or demons, or excrement. Nothing on the scale of this trolling had ever been witnessed before. Luther’s admirers were putting images to use in a way that was destined to have a long and enduring history. They had, in the words of Carlos Eire, “invented the satirical cartoon”.

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Luther, by coming to the Diet of Worms, by sticking his head in the lion’s jaws, by daring the emperor to do his worst, had demonstrated in the most dramatic manner possible everything that had made him so effective a rebel against the established order: his daring, his popularity, his refusal to bow and cringe before his foes. Yet all these qualities would have been for nothing had they been in the service merely of his own ego. Certainly, Luther believed himself to be loved by God — but not because he merited such love. As a monk, he had lived in dread of divine judgement, starving himself and praying every night, confessing his sins for long hours at a time, wearying his superiors, all in a despairing attempt to render himself deserving of heaven.

Yet the more he had studied the Bible, and reflected on its mysteries, the more he had come to see this as wasted effort. God did not treat sinners according to their just deserts — for, were He to do so, none would ever be saved. Only by means of His grace might salvation be obtained. This was the conviction that Luther brought with him to Worms. Unworthy though he was, helpless and fit to be condemned, yet God still loved him.

Luther, afire with the intoxicating and joyous improbability of this, loved God in turn. There was no other source of peace, no other source of comfort, to be had. This was the conviction that Luther, a heretic excommunicated by the pope, a rebel summoned by the emperor, was prepared to die for rather than retract. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”

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Twice Luther appeared before Charles V; and twice, challenged to renounce his writings, he declared that he would not. To the emperor such defiance appeared bewildering. “A lone friar whose opinions contradict the past thousand years of the Christian religion must surely be wrong.” Two days after listening to Luther’s second bravura display in the crowded hall at Worms, Charles V wrote his reply. Obedient to the example of his forebears, he vowed, he would always be a defender of the Catholic faith: “the sacred rituals, decrees, ordinances, and holy customs.”

He therefore had no hesitation in confirming Luther’s excommunication. Nevertheless, he proved himself a man of his word. He permitted the “lone friar” to depart. Luther, leaving Worms, did so as both a hero and an outlaw. A survivor too. Abducted by his patron, the ruler of Saxony, and granted sanctuary in a castle, he devoted himself to moaning about his bowels, growing a beard, and translating the New Testament into German. By the time he finally felt safe enough to return Wittenberg, a year after the Diet of Worms, he had abandoned for ever the disciplines of his life as a monk. “Here I stand,” as he was reported to have told Charles V at Worms. “I can do no other.”

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Was this arrogance, as the emperor had claimed, or was it the certitude of a sinner resolved, no matter what, to share the good news of God’s grace? Doubtless, it was both. The “restless, uneasy temperament” that so perturbed Calvin was the same temperament that enabled Luther, over the course of his eventful and fractious life, to upend Christendom.

500 years on from his defiance of emperor and pope at the Council of Worms, the episode has resonances for us that it would not have possessed even 20 years ago. Luther, over the course of his career, displayed a breathtaking command of all the qualities required to flourish on social media: a genius for aphorism, for invective, for denouncing fake news, for spreading fake news, even for publicly doting on pets. (“Oh, that I could only pray,” he once exclaimed, “in the way that my puppy stares at meat!”)

Yet few of us today in the West, when we use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, are called to draw upon the most stirring of all Luther’s qualities: his readiness to risk death in the cause of holding true to his conscience. The anniversary of the great drama at Worms should serve to remind us of our own good fortune — and of those many today who, not sharing in it, have no choice, when making a stand, but to emulate Luther’s courage.

To understand this, we need to consider Henry IX’s formation. Just 18 months after his parents’ glittering joint coronation at Westminster Abbey, Prince Henry was born on New Year’s Day 1511 to Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.

The romance between Henry and Katherine is one of the great love stories of history, so it is easily forgotten that she had previously been married to Henry’s brother, Arthur: at their wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1501, the young Henry had walked Katherine down the aisle, and it is probably at that point that he conceived his desire for her.

She was his first love and marrying her was one of the first acts of his new reign. Until her death in 1536, he demonstrated his utter devotion to her by inscribing their intertwined initials on his armour, featuring her badge — the pomegranate — alongside his rose throughout his palaces, and even defying convention by wearing her favours in the lists.

The couple shared a love of music, dancing, entertainments and magnificence. Henry liked to hunt, Katherine to hawk; both rode fearlessly. They had both been highly educated and could converse in Latin and French as well as English, as some rueful ambassadors discovered. Their shared love of learning and patronage, and their mutual taste in devotional and theological works, explains many of the riches of the Royal Collection today.

In 1524 Venetian Marino Sanuto observed that Henry and Katherine were two separate bodies animated by one spirit and one mind. Theirs was almost a joint rulership: Henry trusted Katherine and was advised by her. Katherine’s parents, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, had adopted the motto tanto monta — each as important as the other — and it could equally have been applied to Henry and Katherine.

The history of the enduring affection and friendship between England and Spain can be traced to their marriage, as can England’s continuing Hispanophilia. Katherine was so revered by the women of the court that they adopted the Spanish style of dress: fitted bodices, wide sleeves, full skirts over farthingales, high-heeled clogs and the veil or mantilla, dispensing with the unattractive gable hoods that predated her.

Their union was consolidated by the arrival of their son and heir, and to mark the birth, guns rang out from the Tower, bells pealed, bonfires were lit in the streets of London, and wine flowed freely. After Prince Henry’s christening, his father rode to Walsingham to give thanks to Our Lady and held a great tournament at Westminster to celebrate, jousting astride a charger splendidly trapped in a caparison decorated with the initials “H” and “K”.

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As the young prince grew into a sturdy boy, universally praised by foreign visitors to the court for his beauty, wit and strength, Katherine endured a further four pregnancies, but of them, only a daughter, Mary, would survive. We know her as Mary of England, Holy Roman Empress, beloved wife of Charles V, after their marriage in 1530.

But Prince Henry also had at least two half-siblings, since the king’s love for Katherine did not preclude the taking of mistresses: the beautiful Elizabeth Blount bore the king a son in 1519. The brothers were close, and Prince Henry suffered great grief when the younger boy died in 1536. Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn — former lady-in-waiting to the queen, wife of James Butler, 9^th Earl of Ormond, and the king’s mistress from 1527 — gave birth to a girl, Elizabeth, in 1533. Some historians have posited that the red-haired Lady Elizabeth Butler was the king’s daughter, but we will never know for certain. After Katherine of Aragon’s death in 1536, Henry VIII’s new wife Jane bore him a further son, Prince Edward, a year later.

Katherine’s influence can perhaps most be seen on Henry VIII’s religiosity. It was inspired by and to impress her that Henry wrote his book, Disputation on the Sacraments, refuting Luther and earning his title “Defender of the Faith”. Under the influence of Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII also presided over the burnings of heretics in the 1530s and 1540s, including sacramentarian John Lambert and a married cleric called Thomas Cranmer.

On the same day as Henry VIII married for the third time to the young Catherine Howard (a marriage that would later be annulled by the pope when Catherine was discovered to have been pre-contracted in marriage), Henry had renowned heretic and former servant to Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, burnt at Smithfield. Recent research has suggested, however, that Henry’s fourth and final wife, Kateryn Parr, may have been a Lutheran. She successfully hid her heresy from the king, but her influence on the young Prince Edward was strong. By his early teens, he showed dangerous signs of Lutheran leanings.

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In 1539, Prince Henry married Anne, a young duchess from Cleves who was just four years his junior. Their betrothal portraits by Hans Holbein show Anne’s attractive face, dark brown eyes under long lashes, and alluring half-smile, and Prince Henry, then in his late 20s. He is auburn-haired like his parents, with pale skin, a round face, blue eyes and a long nose reminiscent of his maternal grandmother, Isabel of Castile.

When Henry VIII died in January 1547, the prince acceded to the throne as King Henry IX at the age of 35. Tall, winsome and popular, he and his much-loved Queen were already parents to four daughters: Isabella — named for both her great-grandmothers — Maria, Sybille and Katherine. Henry IX was therefore the first adult married king with heirs to inherit the throne since Henry V, demonstrating the success of the Tudor succession.

Prince Edward remained Henry’s heir presumptive until his death in 1553 (their siister Mary died in 1558), but Henry and Anne had prepared for any eventuality and, inspired by the long traditions of female rule in both their families, they raised their daughters to be queens. The girls were polyglots, educated in Latin, Greek, French, German and Spanish; they were exposed early to the strategies and realities of rule.

Following the observance of the Trastámara family of his mother and the example of his father, Henry IX was a devoutly Catholic king. His piety can be traced from his youth: the Library of England has an autographed copy of a prayer in an illustrated devotional Book of Hours, inscribed in a childish hand “The prayer of Sainte Thomas of Aquine translated out of Latine into Englyshe by ye most exselent Prince Henry son to the most high and mighty Prynce and Prynces Kyng Henry the VIII and Quene Kateryne hys wyfe”. Both Henry and Anne had been raised as Erasmian Catholics, while Henry received a humanist education at his mother’s hands.

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As a result, he came to be one of Europe’s great reforming Catholic monarchs. Many of the abuses of the late medieval Church, such as simony and pluralism, were tackled by the king’s Court of Reformation. Decrees were issued on clerical morals, seminaries were established and doctrinal statements reaffirmed the importance of the Mass, pilgrimages and the veneration of saints and relics. The reform of the monasteries in the 1550s explains why the monastic tradition in England remains so rich today, and why our great medieval libraries, such as that at Glastonbury, continue to attract scholars from around the world.

Unlike his parents, however, Henry IX immediately ended the execution of heretics, and sponsored the translation of the Bible into English – the King Henry Bible. And it was this, and the extent of his reforms, that led to the clash with Rome. Urging further reform and tolerance on the Vatican, Henry IX ran into opposition from the austere, anti-Semitic Pope Paul IV, who was a bitter enemy of Catholic humanism. The English king was publicly accused of harbouring heretics and was privately suspected to be a hidden Lutheran. Establishing himself as Supreme Governor of the Church in England in 1558 was the only way for Henry IX to protect the advances that had been made. This was a fundamental step in the shaping of English national identity as a land of liberal, tolerant and catholic — but not Roman Catholic — believers.

So it was that a most Catholic king, from most Catholic parents, came to break with Rome. When Henry died 30 years later, aged 77, and was succeeded by his daughter, Queen Isabella I — England’s first queen regnant — she could unproblematically adopt the iconography of the Virgin Mary, while reigning as Supreme Governor of the Church.

Historical note: On 22 February 1511, Prince Henry, the firstborn son of King Henry VIII and Queen Katherine of Aragon, died at the age of seven weeks.

It started with film. I was watching Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, which portrays the last hours of the dictator’s life and the scrabble for power afterward in bleakly hilarious fashion, and then Bridge of Spies, the Tom Hanks espionage vehicle, and I realised: I know embarrassingly little about the Cold War.

It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I lived through about a decade of it, for a start. But I mainly knew the big events, and mainly either as little more than names, or as set-pieces somewhat devoid of context: the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift. I didn’t have a good grasp of the sweep of it, how all the pieces fitted together.

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Does liberalism need global conflict in order to thrive?

By Peter Franklin

Someone recommended to me The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, a much-respected historian of the period. It’s not a long book – fewer than 300 pages, not counting the references and index, which isn’t much when you’re cramming in the better part of a century of complex geopolitical history. But it covers that ground brilliantly. It doesn’t travel in strict chronological order, but breaks the narrative up into various themes that Gaddis considers relevant, such as “Command vs Spontaneity”, on the differences between the two ideologies that faced each other, or “Actors”, on the individual men and women (Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul II) who “widened the range” of historical possibilities and helped bring the conflict to an end. It’s a brilliant, quick overview of a vital part of history.

While it was fascinating, though, it only really went back to 1917, and, when in passing it described Lenin’s accession to power as a “coup d’etat” rather than a popular movement, it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the Russian Revolution either. So I looked on Amazon, which recommended Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. That was a very, very different book – 900 pages, and rather than skimming over decades in a few pages, it might, for example, spend a similar number of pages examining serfs’ farming techniques in a particular village a few miles outside Moscow in 1888. It was, it should be admitted, a fair old slog, and I kept getting bogged down and wandering off to re-read old Iain M Banks books. But I know an awful lot more about the Russian Revolution than I used to. If you’re in the market for a properly in-depth discussion, it’s worthwhile.

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Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

A similar journey happened to me with the English reformation. I started by reading Dissolution, book one of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series, about a 16th-century lawyer whom Thomas Cromwell asks to solve a murder. Then I read book two, and then books three to six. They’re gripping and evocative, if a little silly, and I was hooked. Having done that, on the recommendation of a friend I read An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, set in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which similarly revolves around politics and murder, but is a much cleverer and more moving work.

But, once again, I realised: I don’t know enough about the English reformation. In fact, I don’t know enough about British history in general. I’ve spent a lot of my life reading about science, but very little about history. So I embarked on Simon Schama’s splendid A History of Britain (volume 1), which takes us from Stone Age settlements to the last days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First (spoiler: she dies at the end).

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I said at the beginning that I found these books oddly heartening. And I did. Because although we think we’re divided as a society now, with Brexit and the culture war, at least we’re not as divided as Tudor England, when the Protestant/Catholic divide nearly drove us to civil war on several occasions (and arguably did, depending on whether you count the Pilgrimage of Grace and the other rebellions against the crown as “civil wars”). And we don’t have the tsarist Third Section secret police, or the Soviet Cheka, or William Cecil’s network of informers, listening to whispers from neighbours about whether we’ve ever spoken ill of the Tsar or Comrade Stalin or Queen Bess. And even though we think we live in a dangerous time, we no longer have two impossibly powerful states staring at each other through the radar screens of nuclear missiles, fingers on the buttons.

Maybe this is naive. I’m a naturally optimistic person; maybe someone else, of a more pessimistic – or as they would see it, realistic – disposition, would read the same books and think “this shows us how easy it is to go from this world of ease and peace to darkness and violence”. The question, perhaps, is whether we should assume that the (relatively) peaceful time we live in is now the norm, and we have left that darkness in our past, or whether it is a thin veneer that we have built over a pit of despair and that could be stripped away at any moment.

But for me, at least, it felt like a reminder. Things aren’t perfect now. But human progress is real, and we have made the world a lot better than it was 50, or 100, or 500 years ago.

But there is no evidence that Luther did anything of the sort. The Augustinian friar actually mailed his propositions for a public disputation to the Archbishop of Mainz, who sat on them for a month or so. The debate about his theses really took off at the beginning of 1518, an altogether more prosaic turn of events.

It may not have been as dramatic – and nailing propositions to the church would have been a normal way of publicising the event – but in a way, the tradition is imaginatively truthful: the Reformation wouldn’t have happened without Luther, and his theses about indulgences are significant in that they foreshadow some of the radical and transformative theology which has left an abiding mark on European thought.

So what was it about Luther’s thought that was radical to the point it changed Europe? Well, one of the most significant effects of his theology wasn’t apparent in the theses, which were of course in Latin. His translation of the Bible into the vernacular formed the German language to an even greater extent than the King James’ bible changed English. He is the father of Protestant music: without Luther, we wouldn’t have hymns as we know them (carols were a medieval tradition, and rather different), and we wouldn’t have Bach. Lutheran music was grounded on his theology: the word of God, intelligible to all. It’s had a profound effect on our cultural sensibility.

But the theology that produced these things was even more important for our modern way of thinking. What was it about that thought that mattered? There were several aspects, but the crux was that Luther insisted on the certainty of salvation on the part of the individual, and that grew out of his doctrine of justification by faith – not works. So a serene self-confidence replaced the anxious striving of earlier Christians to deserve heaven through good works, prayer, charity, the sacraments and the intercession of the saints.

In Luther’s take on things, human good deeds were not just radically flawed and inadequate but almost sinful in that they suggested that Christians could earn salvation. This was wholly at odds with the old Catholic idea that God does not reject our efforts to do good. Grace and salvation became something passive, something done to you, not something active, as the Reformist slogan ‘faith without works’ suggests. That was a profound psychological change.

Then there was Luther’s insistence on sola scriptura, the unmediated word of God in scripture. He insisted the Bible should be taken in its most plain and obvious sense, which should be open to all. Yet it was obvious that Christians would have differing views on ambiguous or fraught passages in the Bible, and one thing that the history of Protestantism has shown is that the meaning and interpretation of scripture is anything but plain or obvious.

But the implications of this were profound. As Richard Rex pointed out in the Meaning of Martin Luther,

“the exaltation of the word of God above all human authority necessarily conferred upon each and every person the right and duty to work out for themselves what the Word of God might actually mean… and deciding just which of the competing plain meanings of scripture was the authoritative one.”

The effect was, he says, to exalt private judgment in a way that Luther never actually intended. One of the effects of this was to create what we would now call individualism. The modern Western sense of the self owes much to Luther, even if secular Europeans have discarded almost every other aspect of his legacy.

In political terms, the most striking aspect of Luther’s thought was his exaltation of secular rulers. He took a famously ruthless approach to the Peasants’ revolt of 1524, most notably in his pamphlet ‘Against the Thieving, Murderous Hordes of Peasants,’ describing their rebellion as a betrayal of the gospel. He invited German lords to take a bloody revenge on their serfs ”so anyone who can ought to strike, pierce or slaughter them, secretly or openly…” In the short term, it helped ensure the survival of his own theological rebellion.

More profoundly, though, it helped shore up the authoritarianism of secular rulers. His eventual scriptural justification for princely rule was that it was derived from the fourth commandment to honour your father and your mother. Henry VIII was only one king who warmed to the idea of princes appropriating the authority formerly possessed by the church. Giving authoritarianism this rationale has, to put it mildly, had unfortunate repercussions in Germany’s own history. It’s also worth remembering that Luther was famously anti-Semitic, even for his time. That had repercussions, too.

The Reformation was more than a religious event. It was a transnational movement to address a number of urgent social issues in sixteenth century Europe which are uncannily similar to ones we face today.

We have more in common with that era than might be obvious. People living in 1500 had just experienced a massive information revolution. The invention of printing had replaced a laborious method of reproducing documents by hand with one that enabled the rapid dissemination of information. Between 1450 and 1500, eight million books were published — more than the scribes of Europe had managed in all the centuries before them. The past fifty years have also seen a seismic change, with the internet and social media radically changing the way we communicate. Just as anyone can set up a website, or Twitter feed, so in 1500, almost anyone could set up a printing press, gather sermons, and spread them around Europe within weeks. The printing press opened the door to the proliferation of ‘fake news’ – documents pirated without permission from authors, or spreading false rumours like wildfire, leading to uncertainty on who to believe. No longer did the emperor or the church have a monopoly on information or opinion.

Furthermore, in 1517, the structures of medieval society were already crumbling. The rise of Renaissance culture, along with the emergence of large international banking, houses gave birth to new wealthy urban elites marked by their ostentatious learning, patronage of the arts and politics. The result was an erosion of old structures and certainties, especially for those lower down the social order, who felt left out of these changing social arrangements. Much like today, value and worth seemed increasingly measured by income or education, achievement or visible success. This early capitalism freed the individual from the bondage of economic and social ties, but also began to erode the security given by those ties.

The theology of the time didn’t help. Some strands of late medieval preaching suggested that God helped those who help themselves – that he rewarded those who managed to achieve a level of observable piety, who try hard to be good. Luther’s message that we are justified not by what we do or achieve, but by the grace of God appealed to people left isolated in the rat race of the emerging modern world. As Luther himself put it: “Sinners are not loved because they are attractive, they become attractive because they are loved.” This message gave security, a sense of value, worth and freedom to those who felt abandoned and insecure in a fast changing world.

These social developments also led to extremes of poverty and wealth much like today, with income inequality and resulting economic migration. Every city had its army of beggars — some mendicant monks, others left behind in the new capitalist world, still others migrants from regions caught in the upheaval of conflict. And again, the theology didn’t always help. Giving alms to the poor could contribute towards gaining the spiritual merit that led to salvation, so in an odd circular logic, the existence of the poor seemed necessary for the salvation of the rich.

Luther’s doctrine changed this. Salvation was no longer gained by acquiring merit through performing good works, but simply by faith. Almsgiving was detached from personal salvation. The Reformers urged that money formerly spent on indulgences, masses for the dead, and pilgrimages should now be spent on poor relief. As a result, a serious attempt could be made to eradicate poverty. Reformation cities often banned begging as a demeaning way of addressing destitution, and instead poor relief schemes were set up, using the church-based common chest for contributions. In Geneva under John Calvin, deacons were appointed specifically to administer funds for the poor, charging excessive interest was condemned, convents were turned into to hospitals, and monasteries into schools for the young, in what was effectively the first comprehensive education system in Europe.

This was an era that also saw a revolt against the elites. Like the way many people see Brussels today, the distant power of Rome levying taxation and issuing legal decrees seemed a long way from the realities of life in much of Europe, and the new urban banking class offering loans at exorbitant interest was often resented. Luther harnessed this popular sense of resentment. He was a gifted composer, writing simple hymns and poems in bare, simple language. In 1521, he started his translation of the Bible into German. Unlike the later King James Version, he wasn’t worried about word-for-word exactness. He wanted the prophets to speak ordinary German: “We must inquire about this of the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the market place. We must be guided by their language, the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly.”

Luther would have been brilliant on Twitter, with a keen eye for the snappy, memorable slogan like “faith alone” or “a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” He was a master of the soundbite, the carefully crafted insult, the popular tract that appealed over the heads of the intellectual or moneyed elite to tap into the frustration and feeling of alienation that many people felt.

The other big factor that shaped early sixteenth century Europe was the growth of Islam. In 1526, Ottoman Turkish armies had beaten the forces of the king of Hungary at the battle of Mohacs. In 1529, they stood at the gates of Vienna, and many, Luther included, were convinced Europe was about to become Muslim. This naturally caused fear and panic among Europeans for whom the Turks were exotic but strange enemies. What is remarkable about the Reformers’ response to the spread of Islam is that they did not generally resort to Islamophobia, but aimed instead at a renewal of the wellsprings of their own Christian faith. Luther saw the rise of Islam in medieval Europe as a call to Christians to pray, to repent, to read Scripture more deeply, to recover the good news of the grace of God, and to develop a more disciplined Christian life. Luther wrote a fair bit about Islam, helping sponsor a translation of the Quran into Latin, so it could be better understood (and refuted of course) and expressing a certain degree of admiration for Muslim piety and fervour, in comparison to what he saw as the comparative flabbiness of European Christianity. Henry VIII may have dissolved the monasteries, but Thomas Cranmer’s aim in composing the Book of Common Prayer was not so much to eradicate monastic discipline, but to make it possible for ordinary Christians. Even if they couldn’t say all the monastic services, they could at least say morning and evening prayer each day.

A search for personal value, the gap between rich and poor, revolts against the elites and the attraction and fear of Islam — they all sound very familiar to us. We too live in a competitive age that leads to success for some but despair for others. Disparities between rich and poor have led to at least part of the migrant crisis as others seek their share of western wealth, and the growth of foodbanks and harsh poverty in many of our cities.  Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump were both in part revolts of those who felt left out of the prevailing winds of culture and economics. And Islam struggles to find its place in western societies, leading to admiration for some and fear for others.

The Reformation had its deep flaws, often derived from the failings of its leaders. Yet it was a remarkable attempt to meet these challenges which early modern Europe faced through a message of personal worth, an assault on poverty, a feeling for the disenchantment of many and the renewal of a disciplined life. If the European Union’s vision has stalled, with the Brexit negotiations on the horizon, the question for our new government is not just whether it can arrange an orderly withdrawal from the EU. It is a much bigger question – can it provide a new vision, powerful enough to re-shape modern Europe? Can a vision be found that avoids the divisions brought about by the Reformation, yet mimics its motivating power to give a new sense of personal value and find new ways to create a sense of a common bond in society? Only time will tell.

It was, of course, the Reformation.

Presenting a fundamental challenge to the core doctrines of the Church, Luther, Zwingli and others developed a theology which did not require ‘good works’ in order to receive salvation, but relied solely on faith in God. This turned out to be more than soteriological geekery, because it called into question many of the practices which had become common in religious life and which were seen as corrupt: paying for indulgences (fees paid to a priest in return for penance), for example.

And it ended up shifting political power bases. In England, Henry VIII saw an opportunity to use this religious and cultural shift to his advantage, adopting the new Protestant regime as the established church so that he could divorce and remarry. Quite a lot, as it turns out.

That’s the 90-second version, anyway. But of course the implications were far-reaching, and wars of religion between the Catholics (as the previously established church became known) and the newly formed Protestants ensued, followed by centuries of religious schism.

But is that over now?

The Pew Research Center recently surveyed people in Western Europe and the USA and found that the historical gap in theological position and social acceptance has narrowed dramatically. Not only are our beliefs becoming more similar these days – 46% of US Protestants say that faith in God and good works are needed to get into heaven, which has historically been the Catholic position – but our friendships and families are more accepting now. In Germany, where much of this all began, 98% of Protestants say they would accept Catholics as members of their family, 97% of Catholics say the same about Protestants.

So, if we see our religious landscape shifting over time, what might happen in the future?

‘None of the above’

The rise of the number of people in many developed nations ticking the No Religion category might suggest, as some argue, that religion will hold no value in the future of public life. Or, while it might indicate that people are not finding (or perhaps even looking for) a home in a formal religion, it could mean that people are choosing other ways to find spiritual comfort. We discussed this and other lessons from recent religion polling on this week’s Beyond Belief on BBC Radio 4. But it’s also worth noting that Pew Research projects that the ‘No Religion’ affiliations will decline as a share of the world’s population.

Family ties

While, in developed countries like Britain, the pull away from religious affiliation is stronger than the pull towards it, childhood is consistently found to be the optimum time for faith formation. Our recent ComRes research for the Church of England and HOPE Together found that people who identified as Christian in adulthood consistently attributed ‘becoming a Christian’ to early childhood. The habits of parents and carers today will directly influence the religious landscape of the next generation.

Immigration

Research in developed nations fairly consistently finds that many people who arrive legally from other countries bring religious observance with them. Studies in the US find that Christian immigrants are more Catholic, more Orthodox, and less Protestant than American Christians, and that those immigrants who are Protestant are more likely to be evangelical. In Britain, we can see from British Social Attitudes data that 81% of Hindus and 96% of Sikhs identify as being of Indian origin. Without immigration, the religious landscape in each of these countries might be more homogenous.

More Muslims

Global projections indicate that, broadly, by 2050 there will be around the same number of Muslims and Christians in the world (there are currently more Christians), which might be related to family size although there are competing arguments on this (see Hans Rosling’s TED talk below).

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FURTHER READING

Measuring religious affiliation

For more on the fallout of the Reformation in England see Dr Clive Field, who specialises in studying the religious history of Britain. In this paper about religious affiliation and record-keeping he notes that ‘Uniformity legislation was introduced to enforce adherence to the Church of England, including compulsory attendance at parish churches, a provision which – amazingly – was on the statute books for almost the entire period 1552–1969.’

Hans Rosling on birth rates

In a spectacular take-down of the prevailing wisdom that religion is a primary determinant of family size, data guru Rosling correlates birth rate data with income levels and religious affiliation from 1960 to 2010 and draws some striking conclusions about education, poverty and fecundity.

Notable exception: Northern Ireland

The legacy of sectarian conflict lives on in Northern Ireland in a way which is arguably unique in Western Europe. While immense progress has been made, peace remains fragile and memories are long. Much has been written on this, and a good starting point is the work of academics Professor John Brewer and Dr Gladys Ganiel, both of Queens University Belfast.