St Bartholomew the Great, London.

In the corner of the courtroom was a beautiful stained-glass window. It was dedicated to a former judge of the court, and simply read “Praise God” underneath. During the week I spent in that room I would regularly look up at this window and seek solace in it, repeating the Lord’s Prayer to myself as I listened to an army of men in suits speak legalese.
I was there, at the Court of Appeal, to fight an Electoral Commission fine of £20,000 for alleged irregularities during the referendum. The case had propelled me to a sort of notoriety, and had I lost this appeal, it would have ruined me – both financially and professionally.
It was the culmination of a long journey. A few years ago, in my early twenties, I would have called myself a staunch libertarian and atheist. I thought that religion was just a form of coercion and control, and to believe in some mystical pixie in the sky – when science has explained away any need for the divine – made you a deluded fool at best.
Fast forward to 2018, and aged 25, I had become a churchgoer, attending a service each week in which robed choristers processed through clouds of pungent incense. Here, within the walls of what had been a medieval priory and hospital, I witnessed the elevation of the gilded King James Bible above the priest’s head and listened to the sung Latin of the liturgy.
It was Twitter, of all things, which had brought me to God. As my public infamy grew, my phone would go ping-ping-ping, as message after message flashed up with the vilest abuse, much of it dripping with homophobia. There were endless variations on me going to prison and what would be done to me there. I don’t know if these twitterers would have said the same to me in person, but this was the internet, the context was Brexit and so all bets were off.
As the saga dragged on, I lost friends, relationships and income. I felt isolated and helpless. There was a great deal of anger and shock over the referendum, which I understood, but it was strange, as a student from a working-class background in the north-east, to be in the public glare.
And so, for me, social media was a digital sewer. Yet, paradoxically, it also introduced me to Fr Marcus Walker, rector of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, just inside the City of London. It was Fr Marcus who would set me on a journey to God, for which I will always be grateful. I had followed him on Twitter for a while and enjoyed his takes on everything from history to politics – so when a friend suggested I attend a service at St Bart’s I did.
This was an unexpected path. I grew up in Stanley, in Co. Durham, and, like a lot of people in that part of the world, most of my family were originally Irish and devoutly Catholic. My granddad’s family were Protestant and he used to go and sit in church sometimes when he was younger. But all this I only found out last year after he died: the family had all turned against religion long before I came into the world.
I had been curious about religion as a child, but my mother’s visceral reaction to my questions was enough to warn me off for many years. She had gone to a Catholic school that was, by all accounts, intensely pious and strict. Whenever I’d ask her about it, she’d tell me that religion was the root of all evil and not worth indulging.
I attended my first service at Great St Bartholomew’s one Ash Wednesday, having never voluntarily given up an evening to go to church before. Until then my experience with religion revolved around singing “Hosanna to the King of Kings” in an assembly hall, and sticking cocktail sticks into oranges at primary school once a year.
As I left with the ashen cross on my forehead it would have been the natural thing to rub it off and rejoin the crowd of office workers milling around me. But, and I’m not sure why, I chose to leave it on. There was something intensely powerful about that reminder and symbol: that dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. I told a colleague about my experience and how surprised I was by my stubborn attachment to the ashes, and a few days later he gave me a copy of atheist-turned-theist C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
This became my “Christianity for Dummies” guidebook; I had no real understanding of what it was about at all before that. But then, perhaps, as Lewis said, there is something to be said about that zeal of a convert, the power of finding Christ on your own terms, of accepting the love that only God can offer when you’re ready. Thus inspired, I took up Confirmation classes a few months later.
Then, last year, my grandfather passed away. He was my political and personal hero and when he died I was in a dark place; it was the Church that offered me comfort and meaning. Words are not empty things. The simple act of a parish community offering their thoughts and prayers through such a time of turmoil had a profound impact on me. I felt, for possibly the first time in quite some while, that I had found my home in London – a city in which it is easy to feel lost and alone. It occurred to me that I belonged to something much bigger than myself, and my Sunday mornings of prayer and reflection, followed by coffee in the cloister with my new church community, became a grounding experience that has done so much to enrich my life.
I was worried about what my mam would make of it, given her hostility to religion. But when she came down to London for the first time, she saw the support network that the Church had built around me. It was such a relief for her, because up until that point I think she had assumed that I was alone in the wilderness. Perhaps it also helped her deal with her own feelings about what she had experienced; she actually got a bit emotional after the service and remarked on how comforting it was to see so much love in that Church, to see me make my commitment to it, and the beginning of my journey with God. When I was baptised and confirmed, despite it being into the Anglican faith, my mother gave me my great-grandmother’s rosary beads.
The Church is a great bridge. Each Sunday, I join with people of all political opinions – Left and Right, Leave and Remain. We share a common baptism that transcends our trivial divisions, differences that in the wider scheme of eternity are nothing.
I do worry that society’s loss of faith is one of the things helping to drive us apart. But while some people take great delight in the decline in churchgoing, I wouldn’t count on its fall quite yet. I think that in the not-too-distant future there will be a crisis of confidence in what we’ve replaced it with – a competition for likes and retweets instead of a sharing together of community and moral values. The signs are already here; there’s a reason why so many of my generation long for the perceived authenticity of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg. They’re seen as the genuine article, the real deal.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s line that “God is dead” is often interpreted as an atheist broadside, but that’s not how I read it. He said: “God is dead and we have killed him”, and “we’ll never find enough water to wash away the blood”. That, to me, has a very different meaning. It wasn’t that Nietzsche was proclaiming it triumphantly, but rather lamenting a catastrophic loss of meaning. His words were prophetic, and especially to my generation – with our online, on-demand culture that can order a hook-up as a fast as a Chinese takeaway.
But meaning has been forgotten, not destroyed. It is still there to be found. I feel eternal gratitude to St Bart’s for helping me find it – and for rescuing me.
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SubscribeNormie, allied with basic competence, must surely be the way to go. De Santis seemed to have both until he went nutter on abortion.
America, like every where else, has strident nuttters occupying 10% of the vote, and 90% of the discourse, at each end of the spectrum. Trump is a nutter and Biden is controlled by nuttters.
It really shouldn’t be this difficult but at least you guys have people with ideas and energy unlike the focus group zombies here.
Maybe he could try completing a sentence without using the word “woke”?
yeh, who could possibly disagree with identity politics ideologues and blank slatists
yeh, who could possibly disagree with identity politics ideologues and blank slatists
The abortion thing really turned me off. Florida had a sensible 15-week threshold that 70% of people support. By reducing it to six weeks, he was pandering to the fringe. I would have more respect for him if I thought he truly believed abortion was an immoral act. But I don’t think this is true. He changed the law for purely political reasons, not because of any personal belief.
Maybe he could try completing a sentence without using the word “woke”?
The abortion thing really turned me off. Florida had a sensible 15-week threshold that 70% of people support. By reducing it to six weeks, he was pandering to the fringe. I would have more respect for him if I thought he truly believed abortion was an immoral act. But I don’t think this is true. He changed the law for purely political reasons, not because of any personal belief.
Normie, allied with basic competence, must surely be the way to go. De Santis seemed to have both until he went nutter on abortion.
America, like every where else, has strident nuttters occupying 10% of the vote, and 90% of the discourse, at each end of the spectrum. Trump is a nutter and Biden is controlled by nuttters.
It really shouldn’t be this difficult but at least you guys have people with ideas and energy unlike the focus group zombies here.
The problem with Ron DeSantis is he’s simply a product manufactured and propped up by the Never-Trumper Republican establishment class. This is how they think. They thought: “We can get those stupid American’s who voted for the orange menace to like this guy if we get him to start talking about things that fire them up like he does.”
So, they chose a few culture war issues, and he started hammering them. His positions got a mild response, but then it turns out that on issues of substance, like the Ukraine war (a sacred cow for the blue-blood Neo-Con Republican establishment) he’s a double-talker. In other words, he’s a phony. People can smell phony, and he smells like a rotten phony!
Trump, for all his faults…and he has a lot of them, genuinely believes the things he says, and the issues he takes on he believes in…and here is the thing, he will talk about things that the establishment doesn’t talk about. He’ll just bring them up, and say stuff that nobody in the media is talking about, and therefore they are telling us what the “significant-issue-of-the-day” is. He sort of marches to the beat of his own orange colored drum.
Really though, RFK Jr. is the real story. That man is a great man, a man of great substance, and I’m not even a Democrat. That man has some things to say, and if we are smart we will listen to him. He has, as they say “gravitas” like no one else running on either side. It’s like he was plucked out of another time, or another generation, and is here now in the political clown-world days to show us what a man of substance and character looks like, sounds like, and talks like. He has that sort of air of unstoppableness about him… I hope he doesn’t end up like his father and uncle.
The problem with Ron DeSantis is he’s simply a product manufactured and propped up by the Never-Trumper Republican establishment class. This is how they think. They thought: “We can get those stupid American’s who voted for the orange menace to like this guy if we get him to start talking about things that fire them up like he does.”
So, they chose a few culture war issues, and he started hammering them. His positions got a mild response, but then it turns out that on issues of substance, like the Ukraine war (a sacred cow for the blue-blood Neo-Con Republican establishment) he’s a double-talker. In other words, he’s a phony. People can smell phony, and he smells like a rotten phony!
Trump, for all his faults…and he has a lot of them, genuinely believes the things he says, and the issues he takes on he believes in…and here is the thing, he will talk about things that the establishment doesn’t talk about. He’ll just bring them up, and say stuff that nobody in the media is talking about, and therefore they are telling us what the “significant-issue-of-the-day” is. He sort of marches to the beat of his own orange colored drum.
Really though, RFK Jr. is the real story. That man is a great man, a man of great substance, and I’m not even a Democrat. That man has some things to say, and if we are smart we will listen to him. He has, as they say “gravitas” like no one else running on either side. It’s like he was plucked out of another time, or another generation, and is here now in the political clown-world days to show us what a man of substance and character looks like, sounds like, and talks like. He has that sort of air of unstoppableness about him… I hope he doesn’t end up like his father and uncle.
This is baloney on stale bread from a RINO.
This is baloney on stale bread from a RINO.
Don’t try to overcomplicate it – he’s losing because he is a horrible politician with grotesque policies.
Could you give some examples? I googled him, but almost every headline is about how unlikeable he is – very little on his actual policies.
Why don’t you start with his attempts to bully private companies and his subsequent humiliation.
I need to read more on this, but from what I can tell he seems to be trying to de-fang companies that are adopting Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) initiatives. From what I’ve gathered so far about ESG policies is that they are highly controversial and undemocratic. In effect, they circumnavigate democratic processes in order to place state decision-making power into the hands of unelected officials and experts. Disney, Bud-Light, and many others seem to have gone down this route which is why many of them are losing money. In short they are massively neglecting their duties to their shareholders (e.g. making profit) in order to promote agendas that are controversial to a large majority of the electorate.
What business of it of his what policies private companies choose to adopt? What has that got to do with democracy? You do know that Disney profits rose by almost 30% in 2022? ESG policies are only controversial to a tiny minority of far right wing extremists.
You seem incredibly poorly informed on this subject, much like DeSantis. I suggest you try to expand your sources of information beyond the conservative echo chamber.
“ESG policies are only controversial to a tiny minority…. “ You’ve given yourself away as one of the 10% of nutters.
No doubt you are also active on Twitter and the others. Probably all from a bedroom in your mum’s house.
I predict you will be active on here for a week or two then, like all the others incapable of a coherent argument, will go in search of somebody else to screech at.
Au contraire, cherie!
The “nutters”, as you so charmingly refer to them – you really should try to come up with your own material BTW – are the lunatic fringe who seem to feel that corporations should not be allowed to try to make the world a slightly better place for us all to inhabit.
I note that you did not try to refute the other points that I make. Good choice on your part!
I ditched Twitter the moment that Elon Musk took over – good decision on my part!
I’ll tell mom you said hey!
Au contraire, cherie!
The “nutters”, as you so charmingly refer to them – you really should try to come up with your own material BTW – are the lunatic fringe who seem to feel that corporations should not be allowed to try to make the world a slightly better place for us all to inhabit.
I note that you did not try to refute the other points that I make. Good choice on your part!
I ditched Twitter the moment that Elon Musk took over – good decision on my part!
I’ll tell mom you said hey!
You make a lot of assumptions here. Private companies are not islands unto themselves. They have vast sums of money and political influence at their disposal. I am deeply uncomfortable with company policies that run counter to democratic processes or enforce a moral framework that employees and customers may disagree with.
Disney profits and stock are actually down, not up. While there are many factors that contribute to this, one major reason is that most parents are uncomfortable with the company’s political and sexual messaging toward younger viewers. Yet, Disney continue to churn out movies and cartoons that net them very little profit (“Elemental”, “Lightyear”, and “Strange World” to name a few). The only people it seems keen on pleasing is a small group of very vocal activists who are more concerned about an agenda being passed through than it is about entertaining the majority of its customer-base. That’s rather strange, don’t you think?
ESG policies are deeply controversial, not just to ‘right-wing extremists’ (a term too easily applied to those who question current political orthodoxy), but to anyone who cares about democracy.
This newspaper article does a pretty good job of explaining it better than I can:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/biden-insists-on-anti-worker-anti-democracy-esg-principles#:~:text=ESG%20represents%20a%20genuine%20threat,voters%20repeatedly%20and%20steadfastly%20reject.
I do try to live outside my ‘echo-chamber’ as you describe it. I understand that on the surface ESG goals sound noble and virtuous particularly if they support long-held and cherished views. But we do need to question where our views come from, how our opinions are formed, and be aware that human nature is deeply flawed. If people are suspicious of big companies accruing yet more political power, does that really make them ‘right-wing extremists”?
Thank you for your response to my previous comment. I’ll end this one with a quote from HL Mencken:
Densantis doesn’t have authority to govern ESG. He can forbid state officials from investing public money to promote environmental, social and governance goals, and prohibit ESG bond sales. This is perfectly reasonable as a governor. He can’t forbid private companies from investing or subscribing to ESG. What am I missing here?
“ESG policies are only controversial to a tiny minority…. “ You’ve given yourself away as one of the 10% of nutters.
No doubt you are also active on Twitter and the others. Probably all from a bedroom in your mum’s house.
I predict you will be active on here for a week or two then, like all the others incapable of a coherent argument, will go in search of somebody else to screech at.
You make a lot of assumptions here. Private companies are not islands unto themselves. They have vast sums of money and political influence at their disposal. I am deeply uncomfortable with company policies that run counter to democratic processes or enforce a moral framework that employees and customers may disagree with.
Disney profits and stock are actually down, not up. While there are many factors that contribute to this, one major reason is that most parents are uncomfortable with the company’s political and sexual messaging toward younger viewers. Yet, Disney continue to churn out movies and cartoons that net them very little profit (“Elemental”, “Lightyear”, and “Strange World” to name a few). The only people it seems keen on pleasing is a small group of very vocal activists who are more concerned about an agenda being passed through than it is about entertaining the majority of its customer-base. That’s rather strange, don’t you think?
ESG policies are deeply controversial, not just to ‘right-wing extremists’ (a term too easily applied to those who question current political orthodoxy), but to anyone who cares about democracy.
This newspaper article does a pretty good job of explaining it better than I can:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/biden-insists-on-anti-worker-anti-democracy-esg-principles#:~:text=ESG%20represents%20a%20genuine%20threat,voters%20repeatedly%20and%20steadfastly%20reject.
I do try to live outside my ‘echo-chamber’ as you describe it. I understand that on the surface ESG goals sound noble and virtuous particularly if they support long-held and cherished views. But we do need to question where our views come from, how our opinions are formed, and be aware that human nature is deeply flawed. If people are suspicious of big companies accruing yet more political power, does that really make them ‘right-wing extremists”?
Thank you for your response to my previous comment. I’ll end this one with a quote from HL Mencken:
Densantis doesn’t have authority to govern ESG. He can forbid state officials from investing public money to promote environmental, social and governance goals, and prohibit ESG bond sales. This is perfectly reasonable as a governor. He can’t forbid private companies from investing or subscribing to ESG. What am I missing here?
What business of it of his what policies private companies choose to adopt? What has that got to do with democracy? You do know that Disney profits rose by almost 30% in 2022? ESG policies are only controversial to a tiny minority of far right wing extremists.
You seem incredibly poorly informed on this subject, much like DeSantis. I suggest you try to expand your sources of information beyond the conservative echo chamber.
No self-professed socialist would nakedly defend massive corporations like Disney. What sort of bizarre troll campaign is this?
I need to read more on this, but from what I can tell he seems to be trying to de-fang companies that are adopting Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) initiatives. From what I’ve gathered so far about ESG policies is that they are highly controversial and undemocratic. In effect, they circumnavigate democratic processes in order to place state decision-making power into the hands of unelected officials and experts. Disney, Bud-Light, and many others seem to have gone down this route which is why many of them are losing money. In short they are massively neglecting their duties to their shareholders (e.g. making profit) in order to promote agendas that are controversial to a large majority of the electorate.
No self-professed socialist would nakedly defend massive corporations like Disney. What sort of bizarre troll campaign is this?
“Unlikeable” is a typical journalistic phrase by someone who can’t be bothered to do the work.
Why don’t you start with his attempts to bully private companies and his subsequent humiliation.
“Unlikeable” is a typical journalistic phrase by someone who can’t be bothered to do the work.
Please confine your comments to the Guardian.
Could you give some examples? I googled him, but almost every headline is about how unlikeable he is – very little on his actual policies.
Please confine your comments to the Guardian.
Don’t try to overcomplicate it – he’s losing because he is a horrible politician with grotesque policies.