UnHerd presents ‘In Search of Wild Gods’, an intimate discussion between bestselling historian Tom Holland and rock legend Nick Cave, with Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers. Discover how grief, Elvis, R.S. Thomas and mystical encounters led Tom and Nick to the same church, and how doubt and faith fuel their creative lives.

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UnHerd presents ‘In Search of Wild Gods’, an intimate discussion between bestselling historian Tom Holland and rock legend Nick Cave, with Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers. Discover how grief, Elvis, R.S. Thomas and mystical encounters led Tom and Nick to the same church, and how doubt and faith fuel their creative lives.


Transcript:

Freddie Sayers. Nick [Cave], I’ll start with you. Both Tom [Holland] and I witnessed you on that stage with so much energy, running around, producing this celestial experience for all of us. How did it feel for you?

Nick Cave. This recent tour has been different. It has been a release from a series of events that have affected me for ten years or so, into something that was just really joyful. It was a very, very beautiful experience. I have to go to America now, in a couple of months. And the idea that I’m actually still excited to go back on tour at this stage of the game is kind of remarkable. We maintained our energy throughout the whole thing. Rather than the usual, where it starts to get less and less as you go on, this just built and built.

FS. On stage, when you are performing, where does that energy come from?

NC. Look, it’s a strange set of affairs. You walk up the stairs like this to go on and you have absolutely no idea how you can do a show. There’s a sort of weird sense of dread about the whole thing until you get onto the stage and then anything becomes possible. In fact, you suddenly start doing things on stage that are highly dubious and I don’t recommend anyone tries to do off stage. But there’s a certain energy to it, a special spiritual energy.

FS. Does that just come reliably?

NC. Yeah. It does.

FS. Do you think of Wild God as a religious album?

NC. I think they all are, in a way, but there’s a more overt religiousness about it. There’s a kind of earned joy. There’s the idea of suffering that runs through Wild God, but it doesn’t remain like Ghosteen, I think. The suffering of Ghosteen, which was made very, very close to when my son died, sort of permeates that record. And there’s no relief from it. And Wild God feels like it just leaps out of that into these moments of ecstasy. And it really felt like that on stage for us.

FS. So who is the wild god of Wild God? Do you think of it as a character?

NC. It’s essentially an old man that’s roaming around the world through his memories and through history and across a sort of blasted landscape, attempting to find someone or some people to believe in him. It’s a sort of absent God returning to the world and that particular character inhabits most of the songs on that record.

FS. So it’s from the God’s perspective?

NC. Some of it, yeah, I would say. I don’t really like to delve too much into what the lyrics mean because people by now have their own feelings about them, but yeah, it’s something like that.

FS. ‘Conversion’, for example, builds with this wall of sound to this incantation: “touched by the spirit, touched by the flame”. What is the story of that song?

NS. This is an incident that happened to me and my wife. There’s a gentle tension between my need to overshare about things that have happened in my life, and Susie’s deep circumspection and quietness around those sorts of matters. And this very beautiful thing happened, which I will tell you about.

We went to this little church in the town next to Brighton. It’s a 12th-century church, I think. And it’s where both of my sons are buried. And we went along to this service. We sometimes go there occasionally. And the vicar, this lovely guy, he sort of muttered something about that there was something going on in the lady’s chapel. If anyone had any ailments or sicknesses or whatever, there’s someone in there that can help you in those matters. I didn’t really take much notice of it. But as I was going back, Susie sort of tugged at my sleeve and we went into the lady’s chapel. And in the lady’s chapel, there’s this extremely old lady. Just this small, thin, withered-up old lady. And Susie just sat down and said, “my son died.” And she said this in such a beautifully matter-of-fact way, and then just wept in a way I haven’t seen for years.

And it was just this beautiful unburdening of herself in some way. And this old lady didn’t talk about the ten stages of grief, or say, “don’t worry, your son lives in your heart.” There were no platitudes. There was nothing. This old lady just put her hand on Susie’s head and quietly prayed. And there was this beautiful feeling in the room, a beautiful spiritual feeling in the room. And I just felt that there’s just nowhere else where this sort of thing can happen. That this place or this moment was purpose-built for this kind of feeling of existential sorrow. Church afforded that opportunity for me to take my various sorrows and lean into them in this environment that felt that it existed in some way to deal with my own personal sorrow. And I found that there was finally a place for that.

FS. You mentioned that Ghosteen, your previous album, was a lot about the death of your son. Do you feel that that period of your life was somehow opening you up in any way? Would you be here in terms of what you believe without that?

NC. No. I mean, I’ve always been interested in religion. I’ve always gone to church off and on. I think I actually heard you talk about this, Tom. There are moments when you’re there, but there are other moments where you’re just embarrassed to some degree. I felt that I had a yearning for something, but I could never find the place that dealt with that yearning without me feeling slightly awkward about it. But after my son died, it became much more necessary, I think, to find some place for that.

I think it’s important if you’re at all interested in this, to find the right place. I mean, the Anglican Church is going through a terrible time, and I finally found a church that was completely unembarrassed, let’s say, about the message that it was trying to put across, and embraced that, and so that’s quite something.

FS. What people might be surprised about is that while your performances are so ecstatic and high energy, the church you have found yourself at now is not one of those kind of churches where there’s guitars –

NC. No. No guitars. Thank God. Well, we’ve been trying to get rid of the guitar from our music for years.

FS. It’s actually quite an ancient place.

NC. It’s an ancient place full of ritual and structure, and it very beautifully kind of ferries you along through the different parts of the service. But there’s something else that goes on there beyond the beautiful choir and the organ player and the homilies. There’s another feeling I get there that keeps me going back. There was an initial utility, I guess you would say, of the church, that it helped me in my particular needs. But I think there’s an aspect of this church that is divorced or stands back or aloof from the idea of utility. It is just somewhere that you go to that exists without you. It has no need for you, in a sense. It’s existed for hundreds of years. And there’s a sense of humility about going there. I feel I go there now essentially to worship a kind of abstraction, and there’s something really beautiful and thrilling about that.

FS. A lot of critics have written up your most recent tour as the nearest thing to going to church. How do you respond to that?

NC. Well, I feel really privileged to be a musician. What musicians are doing is being involved in one of the last remaining legitimate transcendental experiences available to us. So I take it very seriously. I take it more seriously than perhaps I ever have done. What goes on on stage at a concert at its best is a kind of a metaphor for a religious experience. We could talk about it from Elvis Presley’s point of view. Me and Tom have been having a back and forth about Elvis Presley.

Tom Holland. The Fortean Times had a feature about ‘Weird Elvis’ and they included a face that is so like Elvis, you wouldn’t believe it, that appeared on a Roman sarcophagus from the 2nd Century AD. And it’s mad how much like Elvis it looks. And I sent it to you and it affected you much as it affected me.

NH. Yes. I always suspected that about Elvis. But I guess what I’m trying to say is what happened with Elvis, you can really see these late-period Elvis concerts, it’s a late-period Elvis that appears on the sarcophagus.

TH. It was prophesied.

NC. I think what you’re seeing in those Vegas concerts and what I think hopefully happens to some degree in our concerts, or that I’ve seen in a Nina Simone concert, or some of these transcendent-style concerts, is that you are presented in a live situation with a human being in all their sort of flawed, corrupted humanity. Elvis is an amazing example. Those late concerts of his that creates a legitimate transcendent moment. You see them on stage move away from their corrupted self into something that’s truly beautiful, and it’s the distance that’s travelled in that way. So he was doing that twice a day, it was extraordinary. It was like being crucified and resurrected at a matinee show, a supper show, seven days a week for months and months on end. And that is what a concert can give you, that feeling.

FS. Tom, let me bring you in here. Because you were also at Nick’s concert in December. Let me ask that, first of all, how was it for you?

TH. There were particular moments where I felt that I was hearing songs that I thought I knew in a completely new way. And actually carrying on the Elvis theme, it was ‘Tupelo’, in which you’re casting Elvis as a kind of Messiah or Moses or this great figure who’s going to come. And it’s done with such seriousness that you entirely accept that Elvis is worthy of this treatment. And that was an amazing.

NC. Oh, thank you very much.

TH. That was an amazing moment.

NC. You’ve made my night.

TH. Well, that’s why I knew that you would enjoy the Roman Elvis. Because it kind of proves the truth of what you were singing in that song, that he is indeed the Lord.

NC. He’s Lord adjacent, yes.

FS. Tom, can we hear a bit about how you’ve got to where you are? Because you were quite an enthusiastic non-Christian for quite a period of your life. Is that right?

TH. I wasn’t an enthusiastic atheist, but I found that my belief in the supernatural ebbed away over the course of childhood and into my teenage years. I never had a Dawkins-like moment of conversion to evangelical atheism, but I just thought that it was essentially nonsense. It’s not true. I had a very materialist perspective on things. But having said that, throughout my life and certainly throughout my writing career, I’ve always been interested in the supernatural. I began as a vampire writer. And these were all historical novels in which I was framing the events of the Regency period or the 1880s or the Restoration or Ancient Egypt in terms of the weird stuff that people had believed at those moments. And then when I went on to write history, again, I always felt very powerfully that it was thrilling to try and see the world through the eyes of ancient peoples, and that that absolutely required abandoning any kind of atheist or materialist perspective, because that is not how these people saw things. And it’s actually a problem, I think, for modern contemporary historians that immediately puts them at a distance from the people that they’re talking about. Because how can you understand how Romans or Vikings, how they saw the world, if you don’t have a place at least imaginatively, for the operating of the supernatural?

FS. So actually, the kind of atheist period is the anomaly across history.

TH. The evangelical atheism of the new atheists is, and I use the word evangelical advisedly. I think it is a logical endpoint of a certain trend within Christianity, because even if you go back to the writings of the Hebrew prophets, a lot of what they’re saying is that the gods who were worshipped by the Babylonians or the Egyptians are nonsense, that these idols are just wood or stone, and that God is not to be found in springs or shrines on the top of hills. The idea that Christianity is something opposing superstition, that Christians are throwing down idols, is an important part of how the Christian Revolution manifests itself in antiquity. Then it’s a crucial part of the Reformation. The Reformation is all about overthrowing idols. And I think to that extent, to be an atheist is to take God seriously. It’s just that you’re pushing this idea that the supernatural is not to be found in springs. You’re saying, actually, it’s not to be found anywhere in the cosmos. But it’s an expression of that trend, which is why I think that atheism tends to be far more rooted in Christian societies than it is, say, in other civilisations.

FS. So Christianity had kind of the seeds of its own destruction in that desire to reveal false idols.

TH. To that extent, yes.

FS. And your book, Dominion, is a history of Christianity but also explains a lot of what we think of as secular thinking as actually a version of Christian thinking. Did that also impact you personally? Did it make you think differently?

TH. Well, I came to it as a result of quite a lot of personal reflection because writing about the ancient gods, I felt the tug from childhood. I’d always loved the Greek gods in particular. I also felt increasingly as I wrote about the pre-Christian world, how alien they were. And then I wrote a book on the beginnings of Islam, where, again, I felt how alien Islam seemed to me relative to my core gut instincts and assumptions. And I began to realise that these core gut instincts were essentially Christian, that they were a product of my upbringing in a civilisation, a society, a culture that has been shaped by Christianity for a thousand years and more. And I wrote Dominion to essentially stress test that idea. I was a kind of guinea pig within that because I was saying that I, myself, as someone born in Britain in the late 1960s, that I am a product of this as well as the society as a whole. But what I hadn’t appreciated was how deeply I would feel the tug of what I was writing about. That really surprised me.

FS. Because that’s the leap. It would be possible to intellectually observe the influence of Christianity without feeling yourself being drawn to it.

TH. Right.

FS. When did that final step start being taken?

TH. Well, I felt torn throughout, and I still, to an extent. When you’re writing history, you have to stand back from the beliefs that you’re writing about, as well as participating in them. People have said that reading Dominion has brought them to Christian faith. I think it could equally bring them to a despairing relativism, a sense that everything we believe is just a product of our culture, that there’s nothing absolute about it at all.

We believe what we believe because we’re the product of that culture. Spartans were, Vikings were. I mean, maybe Nazis were. I was kind of increasingly wondering what if the Germans had won the Second World War and I’d been raised in a fascist society, what would my beliefs be then? That’s quite an abyss to have opening up before you. But at the same time, I found consolation in reading how Christians had related to what they believed over the course of 2,000 years. There are many different ways of doing that, but I did find it powerful and moving.

FS. And so did you kind of think yourself into Christianity?

TH. It’s kind of thinking. And it’s letting go of that. It’s the spirit of being on a stage and feeling the music uplifting you. Maybe that’s why music is so powerful, is that you don’t have to think! You feel it, and it opens up new ways of experiencing things. And that is what the mystics, many of the profoundest Christian thinkers, have tried to articulate. There’s a meaning that transcends thought. And I have found, since I began writing Dominion and in the years that followed it, that actually I feel the tug of Christianity and Christian belief most profoundly when I am most ready to surrender to stuff that my kind of Protestant atheist self would regard as absolutely ridiculous. So it’s fully mad stuff. And that’s when I can go: “Yeah, this is mad and it’s brilliant, but I love it.”

FS. And have you had a mystical experience of any kind?

TH. Yeah. There are two answers to that. I’ve read the Bible three times, and the first time I read it as a work of literature, I read the King James Bible. The second time I read it as preparation for writing Dominion, and I was doing it as a historian, deconstructing it, trying to work out when all the various bits were stitched together and all the various books were compiled and how it related to the cultures of the age of the time that they were written. And then when I was writing Dominion, I read some of the works of Origen. He was from Alexandria in the third century. He was very influenced by Greek philosophy. And he has this passage where he says that Scripture, the Bible, is like a great mansion full of many rooms, and that each room has the key that will unlock another room somewhere in the mansion. So, in other words, to approach Christian faith is to read the Bible as though it is a text that has been ordained by something unimaginably powerful and supernatural. So everything within it has meaning. And at the same time, I was opening myself up to experiences that gelled with that sense that maybe the world is stranger than I had ever allowed myself to think. And it was an intoxicating experience.
And for me, the most intense moments were not grief, but fear. I had two moments where I was essentially in despair of my life. One of them was where I went to Iraq to make a film about the Yazidis who were a religious minority in Iraq, who were horribly persecuted by the Islamic State. And their main centre of habitation was a place called Sinjar, which was occupied by the Islamic State in 2014. We got taken out into the no man’s land, and I walked among the bones of these men and women, and I felt this kind of terrible sickness, because I’m not a brave person. If I’d known this is where I was going to end up, I would never have agreed to make that film. I felt sick to my core, partly with horror at what I was seeing but also, frankly, personal cowardice, because the one thing I did not want was to be captured by the Islamic State. And this was a very real possibility being out in the open.

And then we went to this church which had been built by refugees from the Armenian genocide, and it had been systematically trashed and smashed and detonated and drilled and they’d broken everything in it. And then I saw there was this one picture, framed with glass, and it had survived. It hadn’t broken. And it was a picture of the Annunciation, so it was Gabriel talking to Mary. And whether I was hallucinating, whether it was sheer funk, whether I was dehydrated, I was a bit sick, but I felt, physically, the kind of rush of something very strange. And I thought, “Oh, it’s the wings of an angel. It’s an angel watching me.” And realising that I could seriously think that I’d experienced an angel was an amazing experience. It was something I never in my wildest dreams imagined, that I would literally be able to believe in an angel. And for a brief moment, I did believe that I had experienced an angel. And the memory of that stayed with me, because this was at the beginning of writing Dominion. And all the way through, I would go back to that memory and think, “I know what it’s like to believe this, and it is incredible. I get why people get so moved by this.”

FS. It occurs to me that you’re both, in very different ways, people who like stories and you’re imaginative people. How should we, non-religious people, deal with the stories you’re telling us tonight?

TH. It’s up to you. I mean, it’s up to all of us how we respond. I don’t think we should dictate it. But at the same time, what I felt in that church in Sinjar was allowing myself to open up to the possibility that perhaps there was a transcendent meaning that was manifesting itself to me. And that’s what I then felt with my second great experience of fear, which happened a few years later in the final spike of Covid, when I got a cancer diagnosis. It was just before Christmas. I thought I’m probably going to die, because I’m a massive hypochondriac. And so I absolutely assumed the worst. And I went to this church. And it’s very old, it’s London’s oldest parish church, and it’s a place where the Virgin Mary had a recorded appearance, and she turned up in the 12th century and bollocked the monks for having got the liturgy wrong. And I went there for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. There is no atheist in a foxhole. I’ve experienced the truth of that myself. At the end of the service, I thought, I’ve got nothing to lose. And I remembered that kind of brushing of the angel. And I went to the place where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared. And I offered a full-hearted prayer. I said, “Come on, Mary, come on, please. Help me out here.” And she did help me out, or at least that’s what it felt like, because a miraculous intervention from a surgeon meant that I didn’t have this operation. The cancer hadn’t spread. It could be snipped out very easily and, touching wood, I’ve been fine since. Now, of course, my logical self would think, “Well, I mean, it’s a fortunate coincidence.” But I remember telling the story to you, and I said, “I feel a bit ungrateful to the Virgin,” to put it like that. And you basically told me off and said, “Yeah, you are being ungrateful.” And it was the first time I’d met you, and I thought, “Oh, God, I’ve been called ungrateful by Nick Cave. So I better improve myself.” And I did begin to think, “This is brilliant. I’m a Protestant atheist who is contemplating the possibility of a Marian intervention. This is the essence of madness.” And I then began to think about that picture of the annunciation in Sinjar and thought, had I got it wrong, that actually, my focus was on the angel, but perhaps it should have been on the Virgin.

Even allowing myself to contemplate the possibility of that felt kind of illicit and exciting. And I realised that opening myself up to the possibility of this, it makes life more interesting. And it makes me happier. And therefore, why shouldn’t I allow myself sometimes to feel that and to think that?

FS. Nick, does that ring a bell?

NC. It chimes very much with me. That feeling of giving myself over to an absurdity to some degree, something that there’s a real dissonance about, is completely thrilling. In the service, in the church that we both go to, there is the Apostle’s Creed, and that is sung by everyone, and that makes a series of impossible claims. But there is something thrilling about bowing my head, to sing this with everybody else, something that’s been around for 1,700 years or something like that. And the church itself is 900 years old, and it’s been sung in this way, I guess, for this amount of time. I’m giving myself over to an abstraction, giving myself over to even an absence of something. It feels extremely exciting.

FS. It sounds like you’re a Christian. Do you think of yourself that way now? Both of you are telling stories of kind of being touched by the divine in some way.

NC. I mean, I personally don’t ever feel the need to call myself a Christian or not a Christian. And I don’t like to join. I’m not a joiner in that way. So I have a problem with that. But I have to say there are moments in church where this feeling is washing over me, and I’m thinking about these claims that are being made, and I can kind of believe that. Or there feels there is something that is both truthful and imaginative that is more beautiful than rational truth and feels like something that I really truly can believe in. That doesn’t mean that I feel that way all the time, but I do feel that feeling seeping into my life more and more. The beauty of the ritual of going to church, is that after a while you give up the sort of sceptical view of things, and you have no need for that anymore. Do you call yourself a Christian?

TH. I do. People talk about cultural Christianity. I think that if you’re culturally Christian, you’re Christian. You probably believe things that have no objective justification, you probably believe in the inherent dignity of all human beings, and there’s no objective reason for believing that at all.

NC. Yes. But do you call yourself a Christian because you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?

TH. I call myself a Christian because I think that my values are Christian, but I also call myself a Christian because my profoundest experience of believing in a supernatural dimension is Christian. I have not experienced that with any other way of approaching the dimensions of the divine. And so therefore, it would seem nonsense for me to say I’m not, I think.

NC. I’m slightly worried about the sort of politicising of the word Christian that’s come in lately with the idea of the cultural Christian. I think you sort of ignited that idea or legitimised that idea in some way. But I think it’s been mishandled in a way where the actual belief, the true belief, has been expunged out of the whole thing and it’s just being used as a kind of defensive bulwark.

FS. Even Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian.

NC. Yeah. That we all need to get together and be Christian because there’s these evil forces out there that are kind of coming for us. And that’s not me in any way.

TH. I think that one of the problems with Christianity and in fact with Islam, which are the two great universal religions that claim to have a message for all of humanity, is this problem of what you do with people who don’t buy into it. And it’s there right from the beginning with Paul, his fellow Judeans, most of them are not accepting what he’s saying, and obviously that is a cause of what is darkest in Christian history. How Christians deal with that has never shown them to best advantage, historically speaking. And that remains a problem for us because our assumptions are shaped by Christian history. The idea of secularism is a Christian one. You don’t get it in other traditions. Humanism, atheism, I think that as they manifest themselves in the West, these are all so saturated with Christian assumptions that it is helpful for those of us who hold to those principles and value them to accept where they’re coming from and to accept the fundamentally Christian nature of our society and state. Because otherwise, you are not recognising why there are fracture points and problems, say, in a multicultural society.

FS. So does that mean that you share Nick’s concern?

TH. I do. Yeah. I have a problem with political Christianity and the kind of cultural uses of Christianity, but I also have a problem with people who would count themselves impeccably secular, liberal, whatever, assuming that what they think is neutral, that somehow it’s not in itself a belief system. And I think you have to recognise that there is no neutrality here. You are believing stuff that lots of other people don’t believe, because you are shaped by these traditions.

FS. Nick, what would you say to fans of yours who thought you were this badass punk rock guy and they wanted you to be sticking your middle finger up to everyone and now you’re talking about being a Christian and it feels like a major vibe shift?
NC. I’m sorry, but what better way to do that than be a Christian?

FS. I want to ask us to just zoom out for a second if that’s possible. Do you think something is happening at the moment? If that evangelical atheism is passing in the rearview mirror, might something else be possible now?

NC. I’m not sure about that. There’s an idea that’s going around about resurgence in the belief in God. I’m quite sure that the feeling of indifference around these matters has diminished somewhat and that conversations can be had. I mean, it’s quite remarkable that we’re sitting here today having this conversation, that you’ve invited me along to talk about my religious ideas. No one would have done that five years ago. I think things have fundamentally changed where this is an acceptable thing to sit around and talk about and that people come along and want to hear. I did an interview thirty years ago for the NME. And the journalist sat down and he said, “Right. My editor has said, do not get him talking about God. That’s off the table.”

TH. I think it’s a problem for me to extrapolate from my personal experiences a kind of broader cultural trend because I’ve just written a massive book about how important Christianity is. The churches in this country seem to be in a terrible way. I don’t really think there’s any sign of any real revival. But there is perhaps a revival of an acknowledgement of how important Christianity has been for our society, even in a kind of a society that no longer goes to church.

FS. Nick, the opening lyric of one of your most famous song says, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.” Do you now?

NC. I don’t know. I don’t test God in that way. I do pray, but I don’t pray for things. That song, Into My Arms, functions very well. Atheists like it, and religious people like it, and it served me very well. It gets played constantly at weddings, funerals. It’s an all-purpose song. But to me, I’ve always felt that song is a song that’s on the point of conversion. That’s where that song trembles, between the two things.

Q&A

AUDIENCE MEMBER. The focus of what you said seemed to be on religion rather than on God. And I wonder whether it’s about the journey or the arrival?

NC. I would say that the religious experience is very similar to the creative experience, for me anyway. That is songwriting. The structure around religion, that there are these strictures that hold you in and which allows for the imagination. A freedom that exists within its confines. And it’s very much like that with the writing of songs for me. There is a structure. I sit at a desk. I begin at 9:00 o’clock in the morning. I finish at 5:30 in the evening. There are all these rigid structures around what I do, which allows the imagination free reign. So it is this journey towards the song that is absolutely of importance to me. That is the engine that exists within the world, that striving towards something. So it’s not really the song for me that’s particularly important in the end. It’s how I go about getting to that song.

FS. Some people might be surprised by that because you might think that you’re kind of walking down the street and suddenly inspiration comes.

NC. I think what church has given me is I feel a different quality to the world as I walk around it. However, it’s really within the confines of the church that I feel my imagination is at its most vibrant. And this happens with songwriting. I literally do not have a creative thought after 5:30. It’s just it’s off. If inspiration wants to hit, it has to be within those hours. And that seems to work fine. There’s a sort of practice involved which just ignites my mind in a certain way. And so it’s not dissimilar. The notion of God is an abstraction that I can’t quite ever get my head around, really. I have these feelings of what I think God is, but it’s really the story, the Christian story, the story of Christ that suddenly pulls that into focus in some way because I understand these things. I’m a storyteller. It’s the way I see the world. I see the world naturally, symbolically, poetically. And so the story of Christ fits into that very well, and I can find myself moving along with that story in a way.

TH. For me too, I feel touched and moved by the stories. It’s the stories that affect me. I have never liked the idea that I should be told what to think or believe. And that may be my endearing adolescent attitude. If I can open myself up to strange stories, then it becomes incredibly exciting. I felt guilty about it, I suppose. Was I betraying Richard Dawkins? Was I turning my back on him? And I said, “I don’t care what Richard thinks.” Just as I wouldn’t want the Archbishop of Canterbury judging me, I don’t want Richard Dawkins judging me. It makes me happy. So I’m going to allow myself to enjoy it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER. What do you think happens to us after we die?

NC. I don’t really have the authority to say. And weirdly enough, that’s not why I go to church. A lot of people criticize that aspect of it, that you’re doing it because there’ll be an afterlife. It’s not that my belief system ends at death, it’s all just too much to get my head around that aspect of it on some level. I’m still trying to deal with the other stuff. So I don’t know. What about you, Tom?

TH. This is where any pretensions I have to Christian faith comes crashing down because I think there is nothing after death. I experienced a general anaesthetic when I had the cancer operation, and they go 10, 9, and they click their fingers, and then you just go. And I woke up from that and thought, actually, death wouldn’t be so bad if that’s what it’s like, nothingness. And so in my gut I think, “Yeah, that’s what death is.” And I’m aware that that doesn’t bear any relation to what I’ve been saying up until now. But it’s just the way it is. What can I say?

AUDIENCE MEMBER. The current secular feeling which is happening, is this an aberration or is this part and parcel similar to some of the ebbs and flows of religion as it evolved in both the Latin and also the Orthodox over the millennia?

TH. I think secularism is a specific product of great historical forces that have manifested themselves specifically in the Latin church, essentially from the time of Augustine, then it becomes something that affects the whole fabric of society in the 11th century, and we now take it so for granted that we don’t even recognise how weird it is.

AUDIENCE MEMBER. Do you think that a sense of embarrassment is one of the problems for the modern church?

TH. I think that is the killer in any church. It’s toxic, I think, for any form of Christian belief. The sense that the priests feel a bit embarrassed about it and think we should whack in loads of other stuff and pretend that we’re not actually talking about loads of mad things about people rising from the dead and angels. I think that absolutely kills it dead because you feel if the people who are running the show seem embarrassed about it, why on earth should I buy into this?

AUDIENCE MEMBER. What do you make of John Lennon’s ‘God’ as a concept by which we measure our pain?

TH. I love it. It’s one of my favourite songs, ‘God’. When I was nine, it was probably what first gave me the illicit thrill of atheism, hearing him say all the things he didn’t believe in. I found it very moving. And even now, I still find it moving because I think that there he is wrestling with questions that are manifest and pressing in the ’60s and early ’70s in a way that they had never been before for huge numbers of people. And I think that what happens in the ’60s, in a way, is akin to what happens in the 1520s. It’s a great process of recalibration of stories and assumptions and habits of thought that is so convulsive that we’re still living with it.

NC. It’s painfully raw and full of belief. But it’s absolutely sincere, that record, and it’s an extraordinary thing to listen to.

FS. I think both of you were understandably cautious about proclaiming this to be a change moment in some way. And yet, I want to just bring it back as a possibility, because it does feel that we are at a time where so many of the things we have held as certain seem to be falling away in all sorts of areas. And it does feel like this is a time where things are being revisited at a really fundamental level, and people are searching. Do you think it’s possible that we are in some kind of a moment of real change?

NC. I think it’s something that feels uncomfortable to me, to impose an idea onto other people that there is a crisis of meaning, let’s say, when I think many people don’t see that there’s a crisis of meaning at all. I don’t know if you’re suffering a crisis of meaning?

FS. I’m not.

NC. My larger concern, I think, is that there is a general demoralisation going on in the West. At least it feels like that to me, through the events that are happening in the world and the way that they are sort of promoted. It scares me where that’s actually going to go. And I don’t think it’s to a more questing sort of perception of the world, but to a flattening and demoralisation. There are certain forces that I feel that will rise up on the backs of our demoralisation, artificial intelligence and these sorts of things. That genuinely frightens me. And I see that much more than a collective interest in spiritual matters.

FS. Tom, do you share that quite bleak assessment?

TH. So I think that in all kinds of ways, actually, Christianity in the West is fading quite rapidly. Generations are growing up now in Britain who have no understanding of it at all, no interest in it at all. It means nothing to them. The great reservoir of stories that has been part of the common currency of people in this country and the West more generally, for centuries and centuries, I think, is fading away. And a consequence, in turn, of that is that the muscle memory of values that derive from those stories starts to fade. So one of the reasons why I’m happy to say that I’m a Christian is that I recognise that my belief that every human being has a kind of inherent dignity and value is dependent on the story in Genesis, that God has created man and woman in his image. If you forget the biblical framing for it, if you’re just cut off from that, then it opens up the possibility of accepting that actually humans aren’t that significant, they aren’t that important. And that ties into what you’re saying about AI or about genetic engineering or transhumanism or whatever. Or in fact, actually, the sense that was very often expressed, and with which I have quite a lot of sympathy, in the pandemic, that humans are the virus. So there’s a kind of radical fringe on the green movement that sees humans as a massive problem. And again, that is an incredible repudiation of the core Christian notion that humans have an elevated role and status in the creation.

So I think it’s entirely possible that what I’ve been describing as the Christian assumptions of the West, even if people don’t believe in God or that Jesus raised on the third day, they still believe in the legacy. That may be fading, but it’s equally possible that the realisation of that may set people on the kind of road that I’ve slightly gone on, which is realising that beliefs and values that are part of my deepest gut are not inherent. They’re not given. You can’t assume that everyone will believe them. And therefore, maybe people will start saying, “Well, where do these ideas come from?” And perhaps that is a road that might lead back to an interest in Christianity.

But I don’t know because, I mean, who can say? The world’s going so mad at the moment. It’s hard to predict anything with confidence.

FS. The world may be demoralised, but I personally found it very remoralising to spend this chilly Thursday evening with two such wonderful people, discussing the meaning of life. Ladies and gentlemen, Nick Cave and Tom Holland.