Ghislaine was born with every disadvantage: extraordinary privilege, limitless resources, endless leisure, posh friends, inborn entitlement, and a repulsive beast of a father who seems to have bullied and indulged her by turns. Other people were born to do her bidding, while she herself was immune to accountability. She referred to the young women she exploited as trash. You don’t need to be a card-carrying Freudian to see that the man she pimped for, Jeffrey Epstein, was a surrogate father whose affection she could probably never depend on.

It wasn’t women of her age who attracted him. One unreliable father had already died on her, and another might metaphorically speaking do the same. In several of the photos of the pair, Maxwell is looking adoringly at Epstein, or even kissing him, while he is looking away or at the camera, apparently tolerating her devotion rather than reciprocating it. Desperate to continue as his partner in love, so I would argue in court, she was willing to become his partner in crime. People can do appalling things for the sake of love, but doing them for love is better than doing them out of cruelty or malevolence.

Was Maxwell fated to end up behind bars as a kid with a sexually abusive father and an alcoholic mother? Obviously not. Plenty of people with her upper-class handicaps turn out to be decent human beings. Maxwell didn’t have to inveigle young women into her lover’s massage room. That we amount to more than our circumstances is what we know as freedom. You can always act against the grain of your upbringing. It’s just that it can be fearfully hard to do so. Hangers and floggers aren’t wrong to think we have freedom of choice, simply blind to how arduous this can be. We are all free not to smoke, but a nicotine addict is less free in this respect than the Queen. If you want an image of freedom, don’t look at those who regard health and safety laws as fatal to human liberty; look at a man with a revolver who refrains from shooting the rapist of his small daughter.

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It is only in the modern period that we start thinking of the will as a heroic force, one which overcomes our baser inclinations. It is thus that the idea of will power comes into existence. It is a matter of tensed sinews and gritted teeth. By contrast, for traditional thinkers such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the will is more a form of desire than a kind of power. On this view, to will to do something is to feel drawn to it — even, in the end, to love it. Far from struggling against what we want, the will has to plug into your deepest wishes if it is to work. Instead of a deep desire for heroin, you begin to feel an even deeper desire to be well. You embrace well-being because it’s enjoyable, not just because you’re likely to die if you don’t. Most addicts are aware of this possibility, but it rarely stops them from drinking or shooting up, just as nobody stops being a radical Islamist because somebody tells them they should.

The United States, true to its Puritan heritage, is a deep believer in voluntarism, regarding the will as supreme. That you’re responsible for absolutely everything you do is part of American folklore. It is this belief which puts so many of its citizens on death row. To point out that a lot of criminals were deprived and unloved as children is to sell out to determinism. The fact that there are degrees of responsibility goes unacknowledged. Freedom is as absolute in the judicial system as it is in the market place, and appeals to social conditions can be left to fancy-pants sociologists. Yet we wouldn’t have the concept of freedom in the first place, or know how to practise it, if we didn’t live in society. When Margaret Thatcher announced that society didn’t exist, she did so in the English language, which belongs to an individual only because it belongs in the first place to a particular civilisation.

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None of this is to deny that Ghislaine Maxwell is a despicable predator who richly deserves her prison sentence. She treated the young woman she hired as a sub-human species fashioned to serve her own interests, much as her father treated his employees. Like the rest of us, however, she was also a victim of original sin, which is a more everyday affair than snakes in gardens or forbidden apples. St. Augustine was right to see that original sin is transmitted down the generations, though he was wrong to think that this was a genetic affair. His view of it is broadly at one with that of the poet Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Larkin knew what he was talking about: his father was a fascist who supported Hitler, and Larkin himself was a racist and trade union-basher. The fact is that being born severely restricts your freedom. Nobody chooses to enter the world, or gets to select their parents. When a character in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame protests to another character “But you’re my father!”, the latter replies “Yes, but I didn’t know it was going to be you”. Nobody chooses their body, their social status at birth or much of their temperament, a discomforting thought for a society obsessed with options.

All of this is set for us by our ancestors, hordes of whom lurk within our most casual gestures. It is impossible to say how many people there are in a relationship, but the parents of both partners are certainly at work there, and probably their grandparents and great-grandparents as well. The dead can kill us or drive us insane. The past is what we are mostly made of, and it lives on to stymie the present and future. So much for the excited chatter of brave new worlds and technological wonders.

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Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, we are all guilty innocents, tainted by our origins. It’s notable that Oedipus, confronted with the fact that he has killed his father and married his mother, never once tries to defend himself by pointing out that he did all this unknowingly. For the ancient Greeks, guilt is an objective affair like disease or pollution, not in the first place a question of your intentions. And this is also true of the debt and guilt involved in our tangled inheritance. It infiltrates your bones and your blood whether you are conscious of it or not.

Characters in ancient Greek tragedy must move warily, as though picking their way through a minefield. Half-blind that we are, we can never know what damage our deeds will cause in the lives of others. Acts freely performed spin out of control and come to confront ourselves and others like some implacable destiny. It is this which the Greeks called Fate. Oedipus becomes a stranger to himself, while those who should be sexual strangers (one’s parents, for example) become intimate. In fact, there are no strangers, just friends you haven’t alienated yet. It would take a whole army of researchers to trace the consequences of any one of our actions, and some of them are very likely to inflict pain on someone somewhere. If we can’t move without hurting others, then simply to be alive is a question of guilt. There is a residue of harm built into social existence.

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Original sin has to do with injuries of which we are innocent but are still in some sense responsible. Let’s say I sit on a bus and see the image of a desert island on a hoarding. The image begins to obsess me to the point where I abandon my family and spend the rest of my days lounging under a palm tree. Aghast at being deserted, my partner finds it impossible to carry on as a psychotherapist, with the result that one of her patients drowns himself in despair. Meanwhile, my daughter packs in ballet school and goes off to run a protection racket in Huddersfield. The culprit for all this is me; but the Malaysian workers who make spiral cuts on the bark of Para rubber trees to collect their milky latex also had a hand in it. Without them, there would have been no rubber to manufacture the tyres of the bus on which I was sitting. They are guilty innocents, bound up like the rest of us with those of whom they know nothing. All this is because Fate is a myth, and what we have instead is contingency: random collisions, collateral damage, unforeseeable effects.

The Larkin poem continues:

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

“They” refers to one’s parents; and if it is true that the fuckers-up are also the fucked-up, forgiveness becomes possible. The misery your mum and dad handed on to you was a crippling legacy bequeathed to them as well. By recognising this, as the drug-addicted Patrick Melrose does at the end of Edward St Aubyn’s magnificent sequence of novels, you can break this deathly lineage, at least in your head and with any luck in your guts as well. It is a tragic process, however, precisely because the price of achieving sanity and fulfilment in these conditions is so fearfully steep. But if Melrose can do it, so can Ghislaine Maxwell in the quiet of her prison cell. In fact, it is all that is now left to her. We should remember that people who act abominably are usually under the influence of forces they can’t fully understand. But we shouldn’t allow them to get away with it either.

In America, the picture seems more rosy. 65% of Americans identify as Christian. But ten years ago the figure was around 75%. And in the early 1980s it was close to 90%. The trajectory is clear.

There is, of course, a distinction between identifying as a Christian and going to church every week. On the latter front the picture in Western Europe is strikingly bleak. As Harriet Sherwood puts it in the Guardian: “In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and between 63% and 66% said they never pray”. But what interests me more is disaffiliation — the lack of willingness to espouse even a Christian identity.

This is secularisation: the transformation of religion from an integral part of civic life to a fading husk. The relationship between Christianity and secularisation, framed this way, looks antagonistic. Secularisation is Christianity’s bête noire.

David Lloyd Dusenbury’s new book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, investigates the relationship between Christianity and the secular. And he comes to a radically different conclusion. Rather than viewing them as conflicting poles, Dusenbury argues that the secular is a product of Christian thinking.

This viewpoint, or something very similar to it, is advanced in Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, Tom Holland’s Dominion, Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West, and many works by John Gray. I don’t think Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are fans of this view.

Secularity, he writes, doesn’t come “from a priest-baiting eighteenth-century philosophe”. Rather, “it is a coinage of medieval Christian writers”.

To substantiate his thesis, Dusenbury goes further back than medieval Europe to the most consequential legal judgement in the history of western civilisation: the Roman trial of Jesus.

When we think of secular, we immediately conceive it in terms of the privatisation of religious belief. Properly speaking, the secularist would say, religion does not belong in the public sphere. But a more fundamental distinction is between the temporal and the divine: what is secular is the distinction between the laws of man and the laws of God.

What constitutes the secular, in this frame, owes much to an utterance made by Jesus in the Gospel of John. As he is tried and convicted by Pontius Pilate, Jesus proclaims: “My kingdom is not of this world”.

This still seems abstract. How does that allusive proclamation lead to a greater limit of religion’s role in society? A famously doctrinaire bishop in an African port city is the first person to edge us towards our modern conception of the secular: Augustine of Hippo.

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Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John is crucial for understanding the secular. Augustine insists on the guilt of Pilate in the trial of Jesus. And he contrastingly affirms the innocence of Christ. Augustine, writes Dusenbury, is thus “led… to theorise the reign of God and the kingship of Jesus in a way that radically contrasts them with the ‘reign’ of any human empire and the ‘kingship’ of any human sovereign”.

When Augustine examines Jesus’s statement “my kingdom is not of this world”, according to Dusenbury, “he hears a delineation, by Jesus, of a novel form of jurisdiction that renders all other forms of jurisdiction, eo ipso, worldly — which is to say, secular”. Most human judgements are, according to Augustine, “melancholy and lamentable”.

This means “they derive not only from human laws and insights but from human ignorance and prejudice”. Human laws are provisional and subject to the failures and biases of human reasoning. By contrast, the law of the Lord is perfect.

Another Roman African, Pope Gelasius, substantiated this distinction in the late 5^th century when he proclaimed in Latin duo sont. This means: “there are two”. The laws of Caesar are distinct from the laws of Christ. According to Gelasius, “no Caesar is competent to clarify the ‘venerable mysteries’ that are celebrated, and promulgated, by the church”.

Ultimately, writes Dusenbury, “it is the African prelates Augustine and Gelasius, I believe, who transmit to medieval clerics and legal theorists in Europe a lexicon of ‘secular power’, and an interpretation of the Roman trial of Jesus that will be cited and reconceived, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in continent-shaping ways”.

How is this interpretation of what is secular seen in the early modern period? This was the time when our modern notion of toleration was first thoroughly systemised. Hobbes, according to Dusenbury, argued that the “Ecclesiastics ‘have not Regal Power in this world’, Hobbes writes, for the simple reason that ‘the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world’. It is only because of this – which is to say, because of the Roman trial of Jesus – that Hobbes can definitively state that ‘Faith hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon Compulsion’”.

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Because the law of God has no jurisdiction in the world of man, people should not be compelled to subscribe to religious doctrine. The case for identifying with Christianity thus rests on the persuasive power of Christian doctrine itself.

Dusenbury also examines Samuel von Pufendorf’s interpretation of the trial of Jesus in light of secular power. Pufendorf, little read now, is according to Dusenbury “Locke’s rival in forging the modern logic of toleration”. Jesus, according to Pufendorf, is a king but “his kingdom is not of this world. A correct reading of the Roman trial of Jesus is thus, according to Pufendorf, a sine qua non of a European political culture in which ritual and confessional differences are tolerated”.

Because the sovereignty of Jesus does not extend to the drama of human life, differences between communities need to be tolerated — as a way of managing the conflicts and imperfections that come with being human as much as anything else. To assume Christian doctrine ought to have a monopoly on human behaviour is to suggest Jesus does in fact have jurisdiction in this world. This goes against the injunction: “my Kingdom is not of this world”. The interpretation expressed from Augustine to Pufendorf, by contrast, underpins one of the distinguishing features of modernity: religious and ideological tolerance.

Tolerance also immediately evokes the Enlightenment. And one of the most striking parts of his book is Dusenbury’s comparison between two giants of the French Enlightenment: Voltaire and Rousseau. “Voltaire”, he writes, “is obsessed, in a thoroughly provincial way, with the infamies of Christian Europe”.

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The Voltairian position is familiar. Christianity is a bastion of intolerance and persecution. A religion which, left unhindered by the civilising force of secular power, is a threat to universal human rights.

But Dusenbury adds that, “Rousseau, levelling his eye on further horizons, realises that it is Christianity’s critique of cultic violence, and its unease with the archaic temple-state, that must be entered into what Paul Veyne called the ‘inventory of differences’ of global history”.

The temple-state is the synthesis of religion and state. And it is an integral part of the non-Christian world. The key point, as Dusenbury puts it, is that “Pilate is a legate of the Roman temple-state in the Judaean temple-city. For Pilate, as for the Judaean Temple elites who charge Jesus with blasphemy and treason, the codes of religio and the saeculum had not been decoupled. It is in part because Jesus decouples them that he is sent to the cross”.

What are the implications of this? If Jesus died not only to redeem humanity but also to “decouple” the temple from the state, then embedded within Christianity itself is the conviction that religion should have a limited role in organising the civic life of a nation. Expressed another way, the fact that people don’t feel obliged to identify as Christian anymore, and are thus rapidly peeling away from it, is itself a consequence of Christianity.

A large part of why there are so few Christians is because many baby boomers lost interest in Christianity and raised their millennial children without any religious affiliation. The conventional explanation for this is the permissive society from the 1960s onwards, but if permissiveness — my kingdom is not of this world — is deeply woven into Christianity itself then the rapid decline of Christian affiliation is unsurprising. Some now joke, with a mixture of Wildean exuberance and smirk, that the Anglican Church is no longer a Christian institution. But it is simply following a normal path.

Which is not the same as saying it is following a necessary path. There are many strands of Christianity. During the medieval and early modern period many Christian churches did embody intolerance. Today, many Christians (and non-Christians) do intelligently argue that Christianity should play a more prominent part in public life. But religions are complex entities, entangled with deep tensions.

Dusenbury emphasises the oddity of Christianity when he mentions the Justinian law code. The central irony, as he puts it, is this: “Justinian inscribes, at the head of his foyer-text to his monumental code of Roman law (and with it, of much European law), as a sanctifying and legitimating figure, the name of a man who was crucified by a Roman judge as a Roman convict”.

Christianity is, of course, flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa. And the most Christian part of Britain is London — in part due to immigration. But is it any surprise that a religion with the Code of Justinian can also provide the context for its own material demise?

Another counterpoint is that America is officially a secular state while European countries usually have state religions — and the former country has a more vigorous religious culture than the latter countries. This is true. But I am interested in secularisation less as a description of how a country is constituted, and more as a social fact and an evolving process. And even in America the prominence of religion in civic life has been in decline.

Dusenbury’s dense, erudite book is not only a historical account and an exercise in theological exegesis; it is also a veiled commentary on our contemporary religious landscape.

Is this increasingly post-Christian landscape sunny? There was a recent report by a think tank called Onward which found that the proportion of under-35s saying they have just one or no close friends has trebled in the past 10 years: from 7% to 22%. Millennials and members of Generation Z are less likely to be members of a group or participate in group activities than previous generations were at similar ages. And people under 25 are three times more likely than people over 65 to distrust their neighbours.

Joining a Church won’t be a panacea to these issues; but it probably will encourage a wider network of friendships and a greater sense of civic belonging. Then again, as Joseph Henrich pointed out in his book The Weirdest People in the World, the move away from extended family networks to smaller-scale communities is itself a consequence of Christian marriage norms.

Christianity gives with one hand and takes away with another.

No Nut November emerged from the #nofap movement, a support community for masturbation addicts founded in 2011 by Pittsburgh web developer Alexander Rhodes. The original #nofap Reddit forum now has over 715,000 members, while the movement has created its own forums and even premium content and merch. Every November, in the name of freeing themselves from pornography and certain urges, boys and men (and the occasional woman) set themselves the challenge of abstaining from orgasm for an entire month.

The movement discourages community members from coming on too strong with religious viewpoints, and its followers have many motives for abstinence. But both the community’s recurring topics, and the criticisms it faces from wank-positive critics, reveal the outline of an argument about sexuality that stretches back over a millennium and a half.

Throughout most of the history of Christianity, masturbation has been frowned upon. Central to this is the influence of the fifth-century theologian St Augustine, who argued in The City of God that the unruliness of human sexuality is a punishment for our disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden:

 … by the just retribution of the sovereign God whom we refused to be subject to and serve, our flesh, which was subjected to us, now torments us by insubordination, although our disobedience brought trouble on ourselves, not upon God.

In our fallen state, any man experiencing an inconvenient boner is suffering “a most righteous retribution” for “the disobedience of his flesh”.

Certainly, those #Fapstronauts who report waking themselves up in the night would relate to Augustine’s description of our radically unruly bodies. But where St Augustine attributed the rampant wilfulness of human sexuality to our fallen state, his theological nemesis, a British ascetic named Pelagius, thought human willpower was enough to enable every man to get a grip.

For Pelagius, we are all born innocent. Thanks to God’s gift of free will, we are all capable of sinning – but sinning is a choice. With enough determination and discipline, he argued, a sinless life is attainable even on earth. St Augustine demurred: this sort of perfection, he protested, was only available to humans before the Fall and certainly isn’t on the menu now, no matter how grimly we stifle our urges.

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In ‘Against Julian’ St Augustine describes how even the most austere among us find “disquieting memories associated with base pleasures” pop up, unprompted, “even when not aware of any pleasure of touch”. Such thoughts, he laments (perhaps from experience, having vowed abstinence himself), “crowd in upon chaste and holy intentions with a certain uproar of sordid interruptions”.

In the epic theology-off between St Augustine and Pelagius, it was St Augustine who won. Pelagius was excommunicated and eventually fled to Egypt, where he vanished into obscurity. But despite more than a thousand years in the wilderness, with his name a byword for heresy, it may be that Pelagius had the last laugh.

Today we’re less likely to believe we need God’s grace than to imagine heaven can be achieved on earth, and that humans can be made perfect if only we ‘do the work’. Even in the #nofap communities many are more Team Pelagius than Team Augustine. In response to one #NoFap thread asking: “How do I master lust?”, the responses emphasise self-mastery through practice, with the clear inference that this can be perfected and untoward urges defeated forever.

But St Augustine worried that the logic of Pelagius’ arguments would end up writing God out of the picture altogether, in favour of a humanism interested only in perfection on earth. Fast-forward 1,400 or so years, to the 19^th century, and Friedrich Nietzsche both declared God dead and – in God’s absence – embraced a version of Pelagius’ doctrine of perfection through discipline. In Anti-Christ (Don’t say I didn’t warn you, St Augustine might have said), Nietzsche argued that the best men (he didn’t think everyone could attain this elevated state) should see themselves as the sole measure of their own values and also sole master of their own destiny:

“The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others…”

For Nietzsche self-mastery wasn’t a condition of escaping sin, as Pelagius had it. Rather, it was opposed to Christian morality – an ethic he described in Beyond Good and Evil as the doctrine of slaves. Far from offering us a path to redemption, for Nietzsche, Christianity was a fatally weakening and feminising influence on otherwise proud and vital men.

Like Nietzsche, whose thinking on self-discipline was influenced by his study of Chinese and Indian cultures, many #nofappers are influenced by Eastern thought. Here, for example in fourth-century Taoist text The Classic of Nu Su, sexual self-control is often described as a route to health and even enlightenment.

For many Chinese and Indian thinkers, the marital and the martial arts are also intimately (literally) linked: the vital energy expended in ejaculation was understood to be the same one needed for a warlike disposition. (An echo of this view is found today in those football managers who tell players not to have sex the night before a match.)

It should come as no surprise, then, that those corners of the Very Online Weird Right who obsess about weight-lifting and self-discipline often also embrace the masculine virtues of semen retention. Nor should it come as a surprise that this Weird Right embrace of abstinence, Nietzschean self-mastery and masculine warrior virtues sees #nofap routinely accused of being a bit, well, fash.

Confusingly, though, other critics accuse #nofap of being a stalking-horse for the Christian war on wanking. Thus, a movement dedicated to inculcating sexual self-discipline attracts criticism both for being too Christian in the Augustinian sense, in painting sex as innately sinful, but also for not being Christian enough, in taking Pelagianism to its humanistic and vaguely goose-stepping conclusion as an Übermensch doctrine.

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Behind both these critiques lies the modern belief, so pervasive it’s nigh-on invisible, that there’s no reason (Christian or otherwise) to try and control our desires. Far from being either evidence of our fallen nature, a bodily urge we should discipline, or even a ching force to be gathered in pursuit of enlightenment, for the modern world the desire to masturbate is healthy, and we should embrace it.

In this view, the fulfilment of desire is an intrinsic good. According to Oprah magazine, masturbation is a crucial part of ‘self care’. We’re more likely to be harmed by feelings of wanking-related guilt than the act of wanking. What’s the point of self-denial when the pursuit of desire’s fulfilment is so much better?

And it seems as though there’s an entire industry out there jostling to fulfil our every momentary urge, often via the advert-riddled, distraction-filled, dopamine-oriented internet where many of us spend more than a third of our waking hours. Whether it’s greasy food, pornography, social media, gambling or something else that tickles your pleasure centres, there’s someone out there who wants to monetise your dopamine cravings.

St Augustine’s “uproar of sordid interruptions” has become the fabric of reality itself. And the touchy-feely language of self-care, self-expression and healthy release is there to offer easy justifications for giving in to those interruptions. Eat that biscuit, click that outrage link, fap away: desire is healthy and natural.

Except the tech bros of our new 21^st-century aristocracy are coming to the opposite conclusion. Far from spending his days doom-scrolling, the CEO of Twitter (my personal dopamine vice) goes on 10-day vipassana retreats for his birthday. For those less committed to self-discipline than this, other hot concepts include ‘Dopamine fasting’ – that is, self-imposed breaks from activities that deliver a dopamine hit, especially those which can become compulsive or addictive such as eating, shopping or masturbation. Clearly, while the official message is ‘Give in to those urges’, those in charge of creating our dopamine hits increasingly forswear the drug they’re selling.

Downstream, young men are listening. Their response might be framed in Team Pelagius terms, as a search for perfection, or in Nietzschean terms as a a (maybe sometimes just a bit fashy) pursuit of warlike masculine self-mastery, or in cod-Taoist terms as a search for higher consciousness. It might be framed in Team Augustine terms as a desire to sublimate our fallen nature, in search of human love and even the grace of God. But, however they’re telling the story, this mutiny of wankers against wanking is a very masculine kind of rebellion against our culture of therapeutic desire.

But, so far at least, the reverse is true. Indeed, some of the landmarks of this new ideological architecture are so familiar, it feels like something of a homecoming.

Among the most familiar and welcome of these landmarks is the presence of the Christian notion of original sin. Theorists of Conservativism don’t always use this language; they are more likely to speak of a suspicion of human perfectibility. But it amounts to pretty much the same thing. The Left believes itself to be participating in some grand project of human improvement, an ambitious endeavour that points towards a comprehensive moral transformation of society. Conservatives don’t believe in this because they have a much more heightened sense of human fallibility.

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Original sin has developed a bad reputation. It sounds, to secular ears, like a disparagement of the human — overly associated with the church’s tedious obsession with sex. It is certainly true that St Augustine, the great theorist of original sin, was sex obsessed, and so he saw human brokenness through that particular lens. “God grant me continence – but not yet”, has to be one of the wittier intercessions to have been offered up to the divine by a saint of the church.

But properly understood, original sin was simply a very particular way of speaking about human brokenness, and an understanding that this brokenness was deep in the marrow of human life.

Perhaps the best way of recognising original sin as a kind and generous doctrine is to examine the views of those who opposed it, and in particular those of the British monk Pelagius. Like the liberal Left of today, Pelagius believed in human perfectibility. “Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” was his big sermon idea. God has given us the moral rules, and he wouldn’t expect from us something we are unable to achieve, so there can be no excuses. Moral improvement is the only way to heaven.

Pelagius hated the permissiveness and moral laxity that original sin made possible. No, he insisted, those who fail must be condemned. In many ways, Pelagius is the patron saint of woke, that unforgiving doctrine of moral excellence that cancels all those who cannot live up to its stringent demands. In a recent piece for UnHerd, Gavin Haynes wrote about how this moral bidding war is corroding communities.

The historian Tom Holland commented: “Purity spirals are what happen when societies saturated in Christian assumptions abandon that most democratic of Christian doctrines: original sin. If perfection on earth is possible, then boo to those who are less than perfect.”

Augustine’s idea of original sin is that human beings are constitutionally incapable of the sort of moral perfectionism asked of them by Pelagius. The Adam and Eve story is a way of introducing the idea that our lives are shot through with moral failure like a stick of seaside rock. This is why Christianity is absolutely not a story about human beings being good and then going off to heaven, but is a story about the need for us to recognise our constitutive brokenness and our need to be fixed of it by nothing less than outside help i.e. God.

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Even leaving these big theological narratives on one side, it is surely obvious that a political philosophy that recognises human weakness is going to be a good deal nicer a political environment than one that whips people on to ever greater demands of moral stringency and then condemns them for failing to live up to what is expected.

It is this Pelagianism of the Left that makes it so nasty a place to be, with its constant monitoring of micro-aggressions, and denunciations of those whose shade of socialism differs, one from another.

A kinder, gentler politics it is not.

Of course, the Left does have something that, superficially at least, looks a little bit like original sin: being white, being male, being straight. There are things that some of us cannot do anything about, things we were born with, and yet they locate us on a map of oppression as the transgressors. But this isn’t how original sin works, because, on the Christian version, sin is something common to all human beings and is, therefore, the reason for existential solidarity among ourselves, not a source of division.

That’s probably why people on the Right often feel like they are a good deal kinder to each other than people on the Left. The search for total innocence becomes persecutory to those who do not achieve it. The acceptance of fallenness, though, is properly inclusive, a recognition that we are all in the same boat, all stumbling about getting it wrong, all children of Adam helping each other along in the dark.

The thing I never understood about the Right, when I was on the Left, was how this pessimism about human nature could be so much more the compassionate option. Like Pelagius, what I recognised in it was moral laxity, indifference even — a refusal to do anything about the great moral ills of society. What I saw in Conservativism was a metaphorical shrugging of the shoulders as people slept on the streets or queued up at the food bank. But I wasn’t looking carefully enough.

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By Giles Fraser

For whereas the Left generally prefers to discharge its moral obligation to others through the transformation of society, the Right — sceptical of the grand plan — prefers to discharge it through particular acts of individual kindness and practical generosity.  Though not ever believing that such acts will totally change the world, the Right fights back against the darkness nonetheless, little by little and at local level. Without the showy drama of the revolutionary, the Conservative responds on the human scale, organically.

Conservatism, then, is the politics of human imperfection. For years I have been an enthusiastic proponent of human fallenness from the pulpit, but have never recognised the connections of all those sermons on Augustine to the political realm. I will never sit comfortably alongside all those free-market liberals who, since Thatcher, have made us confuse proper Conservatism with an ideological commitment to capitalism. That was a temporary alliance needed to defeat Communism.

Boris’s full throttle defence of global capitalism, meanwhile, in his recent speech at Greenwich — salvation by free trade — represented a form of business-minded utopianism in which genuine conservatives ought to detect the dangerous odour of ideology. Conservatives don’t believe in grand plans, whether capitalism or socialism. They see the world as inherently messed up; our job is to get on and try and make the best of it.