This is because the resurrection can’t be represented. Not because it’s too sacred, but because although Christians believe it actually happened, it isn’t an event in the sense that the Budget or the war against Iran is an event. You wouldn’t have been able to take a photo of it had you been lurking around Jesus’s tomb with your phone. It’s not as though he yawned, scrambled to his feet, shucked off his shroud and walked out blinking into the sunlight. The resurrection throws into question the whole idea of what counts as something happening. Is waiting, for example, an event — or is it the absence of one? Falling in love is an event of a kind, but not in the way that burning a piece of toast is. The resurrection is beyond representation not because it isn’t real, but because it’s too real to make an image of. If there is something one might call ultimate reality, we wouldn’t be able to capture it in language. It would lie on the far side of our speech, like the unconscious.

But Jesus’s rising from the dead isn’t just a “spiritual” or symbolic affair, because it involves an actual human body. The risen Jesus eats with his friends to show that he’s not a ghost, he has real wounds in his hands and so on. Yet this body is of a different order from the body of, say, Pete Hegseth — not because it’s less flesh-and-blood than he is, but because it’s more intensely so.

Whether anything happened in the tomb or not also raises the question of who reported the body being missing. The first person to do so was Mary Magdalene, who was probably a sex worker and thus in the eyes of the establishment not the most dependable of witnesses. She was also of course a woman, and the testimony of women at the time was regarded as worthless. So the fact that it was Mary and some female companions who first reported that the tomb was empty would have been highly embarrassing for the Gospel writers, who might well have omitted this bit of the narrative had they felt able to do so. The fact that they didn’t suggests it was too widely believed to be left out.

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Lord of the Flies is wrong about humanity

By Terry Eagleton

All of this is deeply inconvenient for the pious of this world, who demand a rather more positive icon of the Almighty than an empty space. Icons, however, are specifically forbidden by the Yahweh of the Hebrew scriptures. You can’t make graven images of God because the only authentic image of him is human flesh and blood. You can’t wield him as an idol or fetish in combat with your enemies, or try to scramble into paradise by wafting incense at a statue of him. In fact, you can’t even give him a name, because this, too, would be a way of trying to have him in your pocket, using him as a tool to promote your own interests.

Then again, it’s easier for some Israelites to project their Oedipal fantasies onto him and see him as Big Daddy, a vengeful deity who will punish them for their transgressions and so relieve them of their guilt. The Hebrew name for this false image of Yahweh as patriarch and superego is Satan, which means Accuser. When Christian nationalist Americans hail God as Commander-in-Chief of the Cosmos, they are committing what the Scriptures know as idolatry, for all their neatly creased trousers and shiny white teeth. The bad news is that God has no more peculiar concern for the United States than he has for East Grinstead. There are no favorite nations — not even Israel.

In fact, God gets quite testy with the ancient Israelites. Some of them keep wanting him to behave like a Super Being, whereas in fact he isn’t a being at all, in the sense that the Princess Royal or a set of bagpipes is a being. He isn’t any kind of object or entity or individual. Nor does he keep meddling in human history like an American neocon. God and the universe don’t make two. He isn’t in Heaven in the sense that he might be in Chicago. He certainly isn’t in the skies, despite the fact that people tend to gesture reverently upwards when they invoke his name. In the Book of Isaiah, when the Israelites think that he can be appeased by burnt offerings, he complains that their incense stinks in his nostrils — and asks them what they are doing about protecting the widows and the orphans and shielding the poor from the violence of the rich.

When the Virgin Mary bursts out into a triumphal chant when she’s pregnant with Jesus, she praises the God who has brought down the mighty from the thrones and raised up the lowly, filled the poor with good things and sent the rich away empty. These are typical themes of the Hebrew scriptures. As an obscure young woman from a notoriously backward part of the country, Mary is an image of the poor herself. The child in her womb will be murdered by the Roman state for fearlessly speaking the truth. He will fall victim to the kind of torture and death reserved by the Romans for runaway slaves and political insurrectionists. In fact, he was lucky to get away with only six hours on the cross. Some victims of crucifixion thrashed around for days.

It’s doubtful that he was a revolutionary himself, but a few of his closest followers almost certainly were. One of them, Simon, is specifically called a Zealot, a member of the anti-imperialist guerrilla movement of the era; two others (James and John) are given a nickname with Zealot connotations, while Judas Iscariot might have sold his master out because he had hoped he would lead an armed rebellion against the Romans and was disappointed that he didn’t. Jesus himself was a vagrant with no profession who railed against the ruling caste and seems to have had a particular distaste for the family, not least his own. A fidelity to his mission takes priority over attending your kids’ graduation.

A great many pre-Christian societies had rituals of death, burial and resurrection. Vegetation and fertility cults, myths of the slain or wounded god who will finally regenerate the sterile land: all this, ironically, lurks beneath the surface of the most boldly “modern” of all English poems, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem is archaic and avant-garde at the same time. It would seem, perhaps, that these patterns and rhythms are somehow built into the human psyche. In this respect, Christianity doesn’t introduce something entirely new to humanity but builds on a long tradition of sacrificial victims. The victim in question is the scapegoat, who takes on itself the burden of sin and guilt of a whole community, and by dying to this barren condition rises to new life.

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By Terry Eagleton

Christianity, however, transforms this pattern in the act of conforming to it. Fertility cults, sacrificed gods, the release of fresh water onto parched land and so on: all this is essentially about power. The tribe needs to exert power over Nature to grow its crops, and acts this out symbolically in the form of a god who is buried in the earth and then rises to new life. The seed must die in order for the plant to flower. What Christianity does is to raise all this from the level of Nature and biology to that of history and morality. Death is still essential for redemption — but now it’s death in the form of a loving self-giving to others, as exemplified in the life of Jesus. It’s this — not burnt offerings or slain idols — which constitutes the necessary condition of new life. You have to die to the system represented in Jesus’s day by the organized brutality and injustice of the Roman Empire, and be born again into a community of friendship. This is why baptism is about drowning, not washing.

It’s all a long way from bunny suits and painted eggs. Easter is about fun and joy, to be sure, but like any genuine happiness it comes at a steep price. Even if only in symbolic terms, you have to travel all the way through death and dispossession if you’re to emerge somewhere on the other side. Doing this without any guarantees up your sleeve is known as faith. This is why Jesus is said to descend into Hell when he dies — into that cacophony of mocking yelps, sniggers, hoots and cackles which is the domain of the demonic. The demonic is the sworn enemy of life and meaning, devoted to demolishing what it sees as the ludicrous fiction that anything human can be of the slightest value. You have to live all this in order to get beyond it, moving from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Or as W.B. Yeats puts the point: “Nothing can be whole or sole /That has not been rent”.

You don’t, however, simply leave death behind. The most unpleasant part of the Christian message is that if you love properly, you’re likely to be killed. It’s the least cozy kind of love imaginable, compared with the romantic, erotic and sentimental brands of the stuff that are peddled nowadays. Jesus dies as a martyr, which is to say one who freely gives up their life for others. It’s a little extremist for English taste. But it’s unlikely that any power short of this is going to bring down the death-dealing imperial machine now ruled not by Caesar but by Donald J. Trump.

Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The art of storytelling is coming to an end. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.”

The art of storytelling is vital to truth. To a certain cast of mind this sounds like nonsense: after all, in the schoolyard “telling stories” is a synonym for lying. But after the schoolyard comes life, and to understand what is happening in life one needs myths. “Myth”, too, has journeyed from being a word that denoted the deepest kind of truth to the ancient Greeks, to one that suggests falsehood to us. (I hold this to be a natural consequence of the limited way in which our brains now serve us.) Myths embody wisdom that cannot be conveyed in the vapid language of concepts. It is, for example, because we have forgotten the great myths that we are defenseless against artificial intelligence. Leaving aside whether the projected, almost infinite expansion of power offered by artificial intelligence were really possible, could such an expansion ever be wise? For that, we would already have to have achieved wisdom commensurate with the power that is being offered; and, as it turns out, any wisdom we once had seems to have left us at just the moment when it was most needed. But that is only to be expected, since if we had been wise we would not have aimed for Promethean power. We need to remember and understand the great and ancient myths — no amount of meaningless information will ever serve in their stead. The wise rarely aspire to be chained to a rock in perpetuity, while an eagle devours their liver. Other cultures, other times, have seen this only too clearly. Why are we so blind? We have forgotten the eloquent wisdom made real and palpable in the deepest myths.

“Experience is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.” What this means is that we rely on mere theory to guide us. Around the time Benjamin wrote these words we were engaged in the hubristic exercise of turning our backs on the wisdom of experience, and striking out with bold new theories, however half-baked they might be. And theory is an atrociously bad guide to life. But life is in retreat; in its place is theory of every kind.

I often refer to the well-known fact that English has only one word for knowledge, whereas in most other languages there are at least two: in French, for example, savoir and connaître, and in German wissen and kennen. The difference, of course, is between knowing the facts, so to speak, and knowing by experience: I know (savoir) that Paris is the capital of France, but I know (connaître) Paris, because I lived there for a couple of years. These are so different that it is quite astonishing that we should apply the same word to them, and I sometimes wonder if the mess we are in is due to this tendency in the Anglophone world. After all it is the Anglophone world that is responsible for a whole school of philosophy that assumes that a technical, abstract, decontextualizing, dissevering approach to life will disclose its true essence, rather than a phenomenological approach to life as it is experienced. Such an analytic approach reveals not embodied, embedded, situated gestalten — that is to say wholes that cannot be taken apart without profound loss — but mere fragments.

Now these differences, between theory and experience, between the general and the unique, between what is abstract and what is embodied, between what can be made explicit, and what must forever remain implicit if it is not to become a travesty of itself, are at the heart of the difference between the two brain hemispheres. I can’t unpack either the science or the multitude of philosophical implications of this, but for those who want to get the full picture I have done my best in a disgracefully-long book called The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, but here I must content myself with the merest outline.

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It turns out that the foundational difference lies in the nature of the attention each hemisphere pays to the world. This has a clear evolutionary purpose. For all creatures, the ultimate survival conundrum is how to eat while at the same time not being eaten. For the first, what is needed is narrow-beam, highly focused, piecemeal attention to a familiar detail, targeted for its use; for the second, the exact opposite — broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to everything else that is going on in the world, without preconception as to what it might be. Since this is impossible to achieve in just one neuronal mass, the solution adopted by all creatures with brains is to have two such masses, each capable of disposing its consciousness towards the world in a quite different way.

But that evolutionary account is only the very beginning, since attention is no small thing: indeed, attention changes the world. How you attend determines what it is you will find, and what you find determines the kind of attention you will pay in the future. Thus, it is that two distinct experiential worlds, each internally coherent but at least superficially incompatible, are brought into being for us by our two brain hemispheres.

What are those worlds like? In one, that of the left hemisphere, we know and recognize what is familiar, certain, fixed, a collection of isolated fragments or parts, “things” that are explicit, decontextualized, disembodied and meaningless, abstract, general in nature and lifeless. But useful. What matters here is quantity, not quality: all is both fungible and reproducible. What is experienced is a re-presentation, a two-dimensional version of the world, a schema, a theoretical model, and it is, like a map, vastly simpler than the world that is mapped. That is not a weakness in a map, but a strength. Obviously we must be careful not to mistake the map for the world in which it is given us to live.

In the other world, that of the right hemisphere, nothing is ever completely certain, or wholly predictable, and we are always alert to the possibility that there could be something new here. Where the left hemisphere aims to close down to a certainty, the right hemisphere opens up to possibility. What looks fixed in the left hemisphere is seen to be part of a continuous flow in the right. Everything here is connected and essentially relational. Where there were only parts, there are now wholes, gestalten. Here the implicit matters at least as much as the explicit, and everything is understood in terms of the context in which it is situated. This is a world composed of unique things, not general types. It is animate, and in it things are not just re-presented, but truly “present” to us, in the Heideggerian sense — they are not just passively there, but actually coming into being for us.

Obviously, barring accidents, both our hemispheres are working and need to be working in tandem. So, I expect many people might say that all this is very well, but why should they care where certain types of experience are brought about in the brain? But that is to overlook something I believe to be both exciting and important.

Because the two worldviews mediated by the two hemispheres are, strictly speaking, logically incompatible, when it comes to formulating an understanding of what we humans are, what we are doing here, and what the nature of the cosmos might be — in other words, when we begin to philosophize — we tend, in order to be consistent, to rely on one or other of these hemispheric viewpoints, not both. Only relatively rarely do we succeed in synthesizing them. This leads to what have traditionally been seen as irresolvable debates about the nature of reality; and over 2,500 years of Western history are littered with such disputes between schools. It would seem the choice one ultimately makes must be determined by nothing better than personal inclination. But I suggest to you that this is not where things need to end.

We can now definitively say that the left hemisphere is not, as people used to think, the reliable and dependable one — indeed, the opposite is the case. Not only does the right hemisphere attend better, but it is also superior to the left hemisphere in perception (which is of course not the same thing as attention), and far better at forming reliable judgments on the basis of what it has attended to and perceived. Delusions are so much more common when the reality-orienting influence of the right hemisphere is impaired, that the left hemisphere has been described by several neuroscientists as frankly delusional — a conclusion with which I concur. In The Matter with Things, I look at some 25 of the most extraordinary and bizarre neuropsychiatric delusional syndromes, and in all but one case the lesion responsible is either always, or more commonly, found to be in the right hemisphere, not the left. Additionally the right hemisphere is not only more emotionally and socially intelligent than the left hemisphere, but actually more cognitively intelligent: old-fashioned IQ is more dependent on the right hemisphere than on the left, and in cases where people show a drop in IQ following a brain insult of some kind, that insult is far more commonly in the right hemisphere than the left.

All this may sound unlikely and unbalanced — why should the right hemisphere have such a marked advantage? But, if you think about it, this would naturally follow from the differing evolutionary roles they have developed to fulfill. So important is the ability to grasp things, pin them down and have power over them that, while in the left hemisphere comprehension is poorer, the faculty of apprehension is clearly superior. This explains its control of the right hand, with which the majority of us literally grasp hold of the world so as to manipulate it, and its dominance for those aspects of language with which we say we have grasped something or pinned it down. But the left hemisphere has for millions of years — remember, not just human brains, but all brains, have this structure — ceded comprehension of the whole to its counterpart on the right.

So we know that one hemisphere at least tends to be more reliable, less prone to be deluded — in a word, a better guide to reality than the other. The left hemisphere has a role in making us powerful manipulators, but it cannot make us wise. There is a vast body of neuropsychological literature which I have reviewed in The Matter with Things that confirms this to be the case.

Clearly even that revelation would be of rather little practical use if we could not simultaneously have a very good idea of which hemisphere’s world picture we were encountering in any one situation. But we can. We can see the hallmark or characteristic imprint of either hemisphere on different ways of thinking. This means that we can say with a degree of confidence that one way of looking at the world is, other things being equal, more likely to be on the path to truth than another. This is surely a step forward for both philosophy and science.

Don’t get me wrong; there is no problem with the left hemisphere as long as it remains firmly under the guidance of the right. But since it knows so much less than the right, it is prone to imagine that it knows everything, and tends to become headstrong. Though a helpful servant, it is a very poor master. Interestingly there are myths from round the world that speak of two powers that should not cooperate but come, through the resentment of the inferior party, to be at loggerheads — two rivalrous brothers, an emperor and his general, a master and his emissary. And ultimately, if the quarrel is not resolved, the world falls to ruin. It was this that led me to choose the title The Master and his Emissary for my first book-length exploration of the philosophical significance of hemisphere difference; and in the second part of that book, I consider the main turning points in the history of ideas in the West, from the ancient Greeks all the way through to postmodernism, looking specifically at the way in which that civilizational turn reflected a balance or imbalance between the contributions of the hemispheres. In summary, there is a pattern repeated at least three times — in Greece, in Rome, and in our own civilization since the Renaissance — whereby there is a sudden upwelling, an efflorescence of creative life and beauty, accompanied by great advances in both the arts and sciences, in which the appropriate balance between the hemispheres is achieved; and then overall, though with at times temporary corrections, a decline, as the civilization moves further and further towards the dominance of the left — always the left — and the subtlety and insight that had been achieved is lost, and in one case was lost for nearly a thousand years.

I imagine you will have little difficulty in recognizing the stigmata of left-hemisphere domination in our culture. Amongst the most obvious are neglect of the broader picture; the replacement of understanding by information, and the complete abandonment of wisdom, even as an ideal; the loss of concepts of skill and judgment, which are human, contextual, nuanced, not programmatic, abstract and rulebound; the rise of what Jacques Ellul called technique, the totality of rationalized methods aiming for absolute efficiency in every field, including politics, education, and human behavior; and, with it, bureaucracy — a cancer that has spread everywhere and continues to leach the life blood of the organism it was supposed to serve; the loss of uniqueness — a much neglected virtue of all life as opposed to the machine; the triumph of quantity over quality; the rise of either/or, black-and-white ways of thinking; the loss of reasonableness, which can only come from experience; a failure of common sense; an obsession with control, while being completely unwilling to take responsibility… I could go on, but I won’t. I believe the mushrooming of bureaucracy and the sudden irruption of AI into our lives are the most obvious examples of the externalization of left hemisphere ways of thinking into our environment, and its most audacious bid for domination yet. They recognize only one value, the lowest of all, that of mere utility and power.

Both are driven towards, and issue in, the fettering of human freedom and creativity, and lead to the disengagement of human lives and loves from the traditional centers of our loyalty which are not only overlooked but actively excluded in this vision of things. AI, in particular, promises us freedom, as do all seductive tyrannies; once again we appear to have forgotten a myth, that of the serpent and the apple (whether Steve Jobs recognized it, or whether the archetype spoke to him unconsciously, I don’t know).

The ultimate goal of modern man is to be himself, unfettered from all bonds. Everything that gives meaning to our lives is, under the left hemisphere’s view, seen as a constraint from which technocracy will free us. Yet it is through constraint alone that we can be free, or create anything that is good, beautiful and true. We cast off the bonds — for the very word, too, embodies the paradox to which I wish to draw attention — the bonds that unite us to family, friends and community, the bonds we have with nature that gave birth to us, and the bonds we feel with the sacred, all that fulfills us and set us free to be truly ourselves. We reject the service in which we could have found perfect freedom, and, as though hypnotized, we embrace the fetters of the machine.

Behind all this is a morally bankrupt and intellectually simplistic philosophy, that of reductive materialism. And so, of course, it is good when people adopt what they call a more spiritual approach, and I do not in the least decry it. But I think we will not survive without something more substantial, something more embodied and embedded in the deep structure of life, something, importantly, not just personal but shared — in short, we must return to the spiritual roots of this civilization. We have been living for some time in what might be thought of as the afterglow of Christianity: there were the usual gestures of a respectful kind in its direction, while in practice it was considered by many a dispensable anachronism. It moved out of the realm of lived experience into that of a perfectly acceptable theory for those who liked that sort of thing — peripheral, rather than central to our shared lives. The full extent of what we in truth owe to it is only now being realized as all the customary decencies we took for granted fall away from life. Without some return to religion, there is not enough there to provide the needed structure and support for both the moral life and the life of the spirit. Our house is built on sand, and as the rain descends, and the floods come, and the winds blow, and beat upon that house, it will fall: and great will be the fall thereof.

We urgently need something to lead us out of the shallows back into the depths, out of the two-dimensional world of the abstract and theoretical, into the full-bloodedness of embodied life. Myths are embodied insights into the nature of being. In ancient Greece mythos, from which we get our word myth, was considered the source of the greater truths, and more important than logos, which was appropriate to the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. In hemisphere terms, mythos was aimed at intuitive and imaginative integration of an understanding, the concern of the right hemisphere, while logos was aimed at utility and power to manipulate the world, the concern of the left hemisphere.

Christianity is I believe the greatest of all myths, a word I use without any implication that it is not true — indeed quite the opposite. And something it expresses better than any other I know is the beauty, dignity and pathos of the soul’s embodiment in this world. Ordinary language cannot reveal to us what is divine, which utterly transcends everyday language. Language was developed for purposes of utility, enabling people to share an understanding of the steps to be taken in a practical task. Language refuses God, and God refuses language, unless it is the language of poetry. Poetry is when language is deftly used to subvert language: and that is why the language of ritual must work at the level of poetry if it is not to lead us astray.

The Christian mythos centers on the embodiment of the divine in a living, and suffering, world. What the church offers us is a treasure-house of embodied meaning that our souls can turn to for sustenance. It incarnates the sacred in a narrative or mythos, stores it for us in ways that can be accessed through ritual, and through the language of poetry and music, as well as through art, and icons, and the beauty of an architecture that provides a tangible instantiation of all of this. It is not that they do not speak to one’s emotions and intellect, but that they transcend any such terms. It is to the soul that they speak. They make the things we otherwise can only talk about palpably real.

The other great embodied treasure-house of the divine, of course, is the lives and deeds of the saints, as they are passed down to us. They speak to us of what at our best human beings can be. And here I would include all those unnamed and unremembered “saints” whose lives spoke of their beliefs, in the performance of selfless and compassionate actions, sometimes at very great cost, cost even of their lives. As Pope Benedict XVI reflected: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.”

All this language, that is importantly so much more than language, is also importantly shared with others across time and space, and down through generations, finding its way into the very fabric of everyday life. While it is a wonderful thing for people to find their own spiritual path, I fear that we need more than good intentions and private spiritual experience if we are to survive. If this civilization is to be saved, and we all know how urgent that need is, there must be more: nothing less than a return to the place of the Christian tradition at the core of life, daily life. I don’t know how likely this is; however the signs are that people, particularly perhaps young people, are realizing the bankruptcy of the materialist position, and are seeking more nourishing sustenance.

Part of this is to do with the absolutely core insight that this is not a world of things, but a world of relations. Over the last hundred years, the reality of this has been emphasized, in modern physics, of all places. This is, as the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler put it, a participatory universe. That means that our consciousness makes a difference to what happens. This is part of a reimagining of the world that I have elaborated in Part III of The Matter with Things, and is one of the three ways in which the title of that book can be read. We believe the world is made up of things, but as I argue, things are secondary to relations — relations come before relata. There is a vast body of psychological research which shows that it is relationships with one another, bonded by shared values and beliefs, our relationship with nature, and our relationship with the divine cosmos that constitute the three great factors that give meaning and fulfillment to life.

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If you wanted to destroy a people, you would teach them to be alienated from the past and careless of the future. That self is everything and that all factors that tend to limit total freedom are to be scorned and rejected. That societal traditions and loyalties are nothing more than inconvenient trammels. You would extract them from, and alienate them from, nature in all her forms — nature out of which we are born and to which we return. You would teach them that only simple people adhere to a religious tradition and way of life. The predictable consequences of this would be massive increases in existential anxiety, depression and a pathological self-absorption, in which all the deep causes of human fulfillment would have been cut off.

As Emerson put it already in the 1830s, man has become the dwarf of himself. Self-respect (and I do not mean self-esteem, a much over-rated quality) has been eroded by mass society in all the ways so trenchantly identified by Hannah Arendt, and recently we have been relentlessly dragooned into a belief that we are inefficient machines. Yuval Noah Harari calls us hackable animals and recommends we should get used to the idea and even embrace it. In January this year he spoke at Davos to the World Economic Forum. “Artificial Intelligence is the new master of words,” he said. “It will take over language, law and power. Most of the world of the mind will originate in a machine. AI has coined a new word for humans —‘the watchers’. AI machines can lie better than humans.”

Low self-respect leads to moral degeneracy, deceitfulness, selfishness, lower achievement levels and addiction. This is where I believe we now are, and we need to rediscover what our right hemispheres know at a deeper level, but have been taught to disattend to and disregard.

The right hemisphere alone has the capacity to understand the depths of meaning required by those who would approach the ideals on which Western civilization was founded: Plato’s the good, the true and the beautiful. And I would add, at the pinnacle of all, the sacred. Without this wiser understanding, human life is already over.

But life can be snatched from the jaws of death. We matter and there is hope. That too is the Christian story.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered at the Pusey House Revival Conference. 

Today, as secularization proceeds apace, and the “quiet revival” of Christianity turns out not to have been all it was jazzed up to be, we labor under all the horror of Good Friday — the loss of the good — but taste little of the hope. Ours is a world in which it seems that God is indeed dead, even as the devil carries on.

Few cultural texts have come closer to capturing this predicament than The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s classic horror film from 1973. The movie concerns priests, the devil, and God, and thus is an apposite rewatch over the Christian high holy days, which culminate on Easter Sunday.  The Exorcist puts its finger on a growing threat to the West: our consistent tendency to name evil, but not the good, a loss that is eroding us from within. 

In The Exorcist, Catholic priest Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) accidentally brings an Assyrian demon, Pazuzu, back from an archaeological dig in Nineveh, Iraq, and it possesses young Regan (Linda Blair). Regan’s distraught mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) finally consults a local priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) — and is astonished to discover that even he is skeptical of demons. In the 1970s, priests weren’t what they used to be. 

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This, it turns out, makes Karras an existentialist hero of our times. He is both a priest and a psychiatrist at Georgetown Medical School, and though he is losing his faith, he still has the sense of moral responsibility that accompanied it. He embodies a contemporary dilemma: we make commitments freely, as a matter of individual choice, yet in the absence of secure authority, those commitments feel anxious and fragile.

Indeed, like most of us, Karras straddles two worlds: an older world of fixed values presided over by legitimate authority — and a rational, materialist world, which, in the 1960s, and ’70s when the Exorcist was filmed, was fast turning into a therapeutic domain. The therapeutic approach of the “psy” disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) offers a softening of rational materialism, and performs a substitution of explanation for judgment. Instead of judging a person as “wicked,” these modalities will explain them as “unhappy” or “troubled.” They will ask: what wound or trauma accounts for this? This can be humane and often correct. But as explanation replaces judgment, the ability to name corruption, cruelty, and selfishness fades. We are left without the language that would help us identify what must be resisted.

This shows up clearly in The Exorcist, in which adversaries can be authoritatively demonic. Chris consults doctors and psychiatrists, who argue over the possibilities of central nervous disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, lesions in Regan’s brain, and so on. All the while, the devil is gaining ground. He has the advantage of knowing what he is, long before others recognize the danger. 

The doctors never wise up: after consulting 80 experts, Chris is told by one doctor to seek an exorcism. This is not because said doctor believes in the Catholic faith and its rituals. But because Regan thinks she is possessed, the doctor reasons, an exorcism might work through auto-suggestion. This way, the old wisdom is folded seamlessly into the therapeutic culture, a process that obscures the moral and spiritual battle actually taking place.

Father Karras eventually changes his mind on the existence of demons and together with Father Merrin does battle for Regan’s soul. However, in the symbology of the film, he is a figure of doubt, wearing a medallion of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of “people in doubt.” In one sense, the film suggests that doubt, although a key aspect of our cultural mentality, is a fatal weakness when faced with evil. In a deeper sense, it captures our cultural ambiguity. Karras comes to accept evil but still doubts the good. The exorcism works, and the demon jumps from Regan to Karras, who then jumps to his death to end the possession. But we are never given any sure indication that his faith is restored. Pazuzu reveals himself but God does not.

It would be easy to treat such narratives as relics of a more superstitious age. And yet even in a culture that increasingly explains behavior through trauma and pathology, the language of evil has not disappeared. To be sure, we are more inclined to explain individuals than to judge them. But  at the level of systems, histories, and political enemies, we readily invoke evil. This is evident in official rhetoric — from Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” — as well as in the popular imagination, which has thrilled to panics over evil, including the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the conspiracy theories of QAnon, and the Epstein mythos. Most recently there has been chatter that the Labubu dolls resemble Pazuzu, reviving fears of possession in an otherwise secular culture. 

We are never in doubt of what we are fighting against, but we rarely ask ourselves what we are fighting for.

The inability to answer this question lies at the heart of the exhaustion of the West, its crises of meaning and self-belief. The problem has been framed in terms of the decline of religion; it is, I suggest, less the need to believe in God than to believe in the good. By this, I mean the sense that there is something outside us — objectively — that sets a standard and demands to be seen and responded to. From the perspective of classical theism, the good is God, and ordinary goods are a participation in the higher Good. The Enlightenment retained part of this conviction, even as religious faith declined; moral life was still oriented toward truth, order, and hierarchy as external realities. What has changed more recently is not simply lack of belief in goodness, but the erosion of that orientation altogether. Without it, the existentialist emphasis on freedom, choice, and individual responsibility collapses into a shallow focus on success on the one hand, nihilism on the other.

In ancient Assyrian cosmology, figures such as Pazuzu occupied a strange and unstable position: they were lesser demons, invoked to ward off other, greater evils, and served a similar function as gargoyles or the “wrathful deities” in Buddhism. What is striking in Assyrian religion is not simply the proliferation of such forces, but the absence of any clear, unifying conception of the good. The result is a world structured around dangers, rather than purposes — a world, in other words, very much like our own. 

For us, this brings new threats. In The Exorcist, when Merrin finds the amulet of Pazuzu, he also finds nearby a Christian medallion of Saint Joseph, an echo of the one Karras wears. In older times, the smaller, named evils protected us from ultimate Evil; but when we doubt the existence of the opposing force of good, these small evils become dangerous in their own right. 

If the problem is not a lack of God, but a lack of the good, then we might turn to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who sought a way of recovering moral reality without restoring dogma. In her landmark text The Sovereignty of the Good, Murdoch didn’t advocate attempting to go back to the days of religious fervor; instead she located the good in the everyday benevolent actions of ordinary human beings, and the sense we have that “there is more than this” when we look compassionately at people. Such moments do not have to be grand. Indeed, she insisted that such insights must remain small, almost imperceptible, in order to not become theological. 

Murdoch referred to the good as something with a metaphysical position, but no fixed metaphysical form. It has no doctrine, but it can be perceived with a kind of disciplined attention in which we do not allow our egos, fears, and desires to blind us to reality. This is the opposite of the modern injunction to “be kind” and suspend judgment; judgments must be harder, sharper, and less self-flattering. 

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The good has slipped out of our conversations and our dramas; it goes unnamed. In The Exorcist, the frame of Christian theology allows the possibility of a literal triumph of God over Satan, by the film’s logic. But for secular audiences, the good in the film is glimpsed in small things, as Murdoch might have imagined it, and is easily missed against the backdrop of dramatic evil. We see it especially in the friendship between Karras and Father Joseph Dyer (played by an actual priest, the Rev. William O’Malley), who grasps Karras’s hand as he lies dying on the infamous Georgetown steps, offering both Last Rites (salvation, in the Catholic understanding) but also human comfort — the best we can ask for in a world without God. 

The concept of the good, could, in its own quiet way, prove revolutionary in our current civilizational crisis. The virtuous person, attuned to the good, Murdoch says, looks outward at others and at the world around her, not inward, at self. She is required to be truthful and view both others and herself as they are, not as she would like them to be. Such moral practice is a skill, rather than a set of rules, and it opposes the tendencies of modern therapeutic society and very much departs from today’s ethos of non-judgmental “kindness.” Murdoch believed such forms of seeing could “unwind” a long historical process that began with the Enlightenment and eventually “sundered” truth from virtue, returning us to the great classical insight that the two belong together — indeed, that the two are the same and thus convertible.

Is any of this possible in a world where we believe in “our own truth” instead of “the truth”?  Perhaps not, but if we cannot believe in the good, the unquestionable persistence of evil, both small and large, should goad us on. We know evil exists, and not only in the movies. The good does not announce itself so clearly. It has to be seen. And yet its presence is a story our culture continues to tell, even as it forgets how to name it, leaving no answer or consolation to our cry: Eli, Eli. . . .

Gibson, a staunch Catholic, was livid about a ceremony conducted at the Vatican in 2019. During the Amazon Synod, held to discuss the Church in the Amazon region, wooden statues of the Amazonian goddess Pachamama were dotted around the Vatican gardens. At one point, inside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis led a prayer while facing a small carving of the Pachamama.

For Gibson, who has been appointed Special Envoy to Hollywood by President Trump, this episode represents everything that has gone wrong with the Church. He blames it on “an inside job”. And, in his eyes, it all started at the Second Vatican Council — or Vatican II — which took place from 1962 to 1965. Its purpose: to modernize Catholicism. After that, the Church became “something else” entirely, Gibson told Rogan. That something else, as far as he is concerned, is a sham. “I don’t adhere to a post-conciliar Church,” he said.

He doesn’t sound like your ordinary disgruntled Catholic. In fact, Gibson was echoing the key tenets of a ragtag movement known as sedevacantism.

The sedevacantists take their name from the Latin phrase sede vacante, meaning the See of Rome is vacant. The phrase is typically used to describe the period between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, when the papacy is unoccupied. Sedevacantists, however, believe that the papacy has been unoccupied since Vatican II. There have been six popes since then, but none are considered legitimate.

There are at most 30,000 sedevacantists in dozens of distinct organizations worldwide. The movement originated in Mexico in the mid-Sixties, where a priest named Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga came up with its core tenet: the Church post-Vatican II was “headless”. Predictably, that didn’t go down well with His Headless Holiness, and Sáenz y Arriaga was excommunicated. The movement spread in the Seventies, after it was endorsed by Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers, a French friar and the personal confessor to Pius XII. As the last pope before Vatican II, Pius is considered the last legitimate pontiff by sedevacantists. This makes Guérard des Lauriers something of a cult hero.

Now, the movement has moved online. The meme-posting page Novus Ordo Watch boasts more than 25,000 followers on X and 13,000 followers on Facebook. Its logo is a sketch of Pius XII (of course), with the tagline: “Unmasking the Modernist Church of Vatican II”.

So, what really happened at this dreadful council that left the sedevacantists stricken? The conventional narrative of Church reform goes like this: Vatican II was called in 1959 by Pope John XXIII, who thought the Church was in dire need of aggiornamento — an update. He believed that if it wanted to thrive in the 20th century, Catholicism would have to ditch dusty dogmas and embrace the modern world. “Through Vatican II, the Church sought to re-engage with an increasingly secularized world,” the historian Jessica Wärnberg told me.

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This re-engagement crusade took several forms. Vatican II did away with the belief that there was no salvation outside the Church. From then on, non-Catholics could be redeemed. Religious liberty was embraced as the unalienable right of every human being: other religions were to be held in esteem, and antisemitism was denounced.

Vatican II also overhauled the liturgy. Up until then, Mass had been conducted in Latin; the priest had his back to the congregation and faced the altar. But at the council, it was decided that Mass would be conducted in the national language so as to be more inclusive. The priest would face the congregation. The Latin Mass wasn’t abolished, but it became much rarer.

This was a seismic moment for practicing Catholics. For many, it was as if the religion they had followed since childhood, that had given meaning to their lives, had suddenly been taken away from them. The refashioned Mass hit particularly hard. At the time, French President Charles de Gaulle is said to have remarked that Vatican II was “the most important event of the century, because you can’t change the prayer of a million men and women without affecting the balance of the planet”.

Millions of conservative Catholics felt aggrieved. Most of them, however, didn’t embrace sedevacantism. It was too radical, too weird, for them. Rather than flee their besieged Church, they chose to stay in it and fight. Their mission: the preservation of the old ways.

These Catholics are usually referred to as traditionalists, and they share many of the same grievances as sedevacantists. They attend Mass in Latin and are critical of the direction of the Church. Yet they stop short of breaking ties with the Holy See, remaining in communion with the Pope. While traditionalists think like reformers, hoping to change the system from within, sedevacantists think like revolutionaries. They want to bring down the whole corrupted system.

Enter a Catholic with chiselled looks named Hutton Gibson, father of Mel. In 1977, he started a newsletter called The War is Now! Think Substack in the analogue age. “This journal has but one purpose: complete recovery of our Church!” Hutton wrote in the first installment. Then, in the hallowed tradition of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, he went after his enemies: “To all who promoted the current deviation… may they roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell!”

Hutton would go on to become one of the leading lights of the sedevacantist movement, writing a series of self-published books. He would argue that Vatican II was actually “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews”, which had rigged the conclave that had elected John XXIII in 1958. In his telling, another cardinal, the arch-conservative Giuseppe Siri, had been elected. But the Jewish-backed Masons had threatened “to atom-bomb Vatican City” if they didn’t get their candidate. John XXIII, a secret Mason, became pope instead.

As Hutton’s tale suggests, sedevacantism is a wonderland of alternative facts, which is another reason why traditionalists steer well clear of it. At its core, sedevacantism isn’t a theological stance; it’s a conspiracy theory. Call it Catholic QAnon, for just like QAnon, it has become a magnet for haters, weirdos, and phonies.

Take Francis Schuckardt, the founder of the Tridentine Latin Rite Church, who in the Seventies crisscrossed America to preach the Bad News: Vatican II had destroyed the Catholic Church. The Pope was demonic, and any Catholic who followed him would be damned — that is, unless they followed Bishop Schuckardt. Hundreds of lost souls fell for it.

The Tridentine Latin Rite Church became a site of horrors. Schuckardt was a sexual predator who regularly assaulted seminarians, according to writer Michael W. Cueno’s The Smoke of Satan. Whenever the nuns were deemed to have misbehaved, they were imprisoned in freezing attics for several weeks. Congregants were mistreated too: nuns once force-fed rotten food to a young girl; after she threw up, she was made to eat her own vomit. “Lick the vomit clean,” one nun yelled while beating her.

The truth was exposed by the press in 1984. Schuckardt took off with his most loyal followers and $250,000 in cash. He tried to get another church off the ground in California, but in 1987 a SWAT team raided his compound. They found drugs, automatic weapons, and gruesome documents about body dismemberment. Schuckardt served a stint in jail and died in 2006.

Another sedevacantist thought leader was Veronica Lueken, a Catholic housewife from Queens, New York. One day in 1968, according to the academic Joseph P. Laycock’s The Seer of Bayside, Lueken started hearing voices. Then the visions began. One time, she saw a giant face in the sky: it was Jesus Christ himself. Soon after that, the Virgin Mary spoke to her from heaven. Surprise, surprise, the Blessed Mother hated Vatican II.

Like a medieval soothsayer, Lueken attracted a sizable following. People from all over the US would flock to Queens to see her in a trance. Her neighbors cursed her. Local restaurateurs thanked the Good Lord for their fortune and set up hot dog stalls for the hungry pilgrims.

In 1975, Mary finally let Lueken in on the secret behind Vatican II. “My child, I bring to you a sad truth, one that must be made known to mankind,” Lueken recalls being told. Paul VI, who promulgated Vatican II, had been replaced by a lookalike. “There is one who is ruling in his place, an impostor, created from the minds of the agents of Satan,” Mary supposedly said. How was that possible? “Plastic surgery, my child — the best of surgeons were used to create this impostor.”

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Not every sedevacantist would pay homage to Lueken. The movement is divided between a myriad of splinter groups, and each group insists on its particular definition. To complicate matters, a few reject the term sedevacantist and will go ballistic if you call them one. Some prefer the term sedeprivationism, which holds that the popes are popes “materially but not formally”. Others still insist they are simply “true” Catholics who follow the age-old teachings of the Church. But these are marginal distinctions: all ascribe to the same core doctrine. In this, they resemble Leninists, Trotskyists, and Stalinists squabbling over the correct definition of Marxism.

However, just as communists hate the moderate Left, sedevacantists are united in their contempt for traditionalist Catholics. Despite fighting similar battles, the two groups are far from brother in arms, with sedevacantists regarding traditionalists as traitors in the pocket of the Holy See.

One target of sedevacantist ire is the Society of St Pius X — SSPX for connoisseurs — a hardline traditionalist organization which has 600,000 members worldwide. It was founded in 1970 by Marcel Lefebvre, a French archbishop who had led the charge against Vatican II.

Lefebvre often spoke like a sedevacantist. Vatican II was “satanic”. It was the result of an alliance between “the highest authorities of the Church and of masonic lodges”. Therefore, Lefebvre concluded, “this conciliar Church is not Catholic. In so far as the pope, bishops, priests and the faithful adhere to this new Church, they are separating from the Catholic Church.” But Lefebvre never became a sedevacantist. He realized that the Vatican was where the power was, and he always hoped to have more influence within the Church than outside it. He entered into negotiations with Rome several times, to no avail. In the end, Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988 after ordaining bishops without authorization.

In the eyes of sedevacantists, Lefebvre was a weakling. In 1983, a group of exasperated followers left SSPX, claiming Lefebvre was “far too soft”. In a feat of imagination, they called their new organization the Society of St Pius V, or SSPV. But even SSPV wasn’t hardline enough for the most committed of sedevacantists. In the Nineties, a handful of true believers broke away and joined the Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, which was itself a splinter group from the Tridentine Latin Rite Church.

The sedevacantists have no intention of standing by while an imposter rules the Vatican. And so, in order to save the one true Church, the most pious of them have taken one for the team and proclaimed themselves popes. There was Pope Michael I, born David Bawden. A former SSPX member, Bawden proclaimed himself pope in the Nineties. He took over a dollar store in rural Kansas to hold a conclave. His College of Cardinals consisted of his parents, three friends, and himself. There was also Pope Pius XIII, born Lucian Pulvermacher. His conclave took place in 1998 in a log cabin in the mountains of Montana.

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The most high-profile antipope yet is Peter III, born Markus Josef Odermatt, the leader of the Palmarian Catholic Church, which is based near Seville, Spain. The Church, though not technically sedevacantist, is essentially a cult: there are around 5,000 Palmarians, who are tightly controlled, encouraged to reproduce (some families have 15 kids), and taught that Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco are saints.

Peter III’s predecessor, Gregory XVIII, quit the organization in 2016 and exposed it as a massive scam. “It’s all a set-up, particularly a financial one,” he said. “They’re just using the miracle of the Virgin Mary as a front.” The whole thing is allegedly bankrolled by donations from wealthy businessmen and may be a front for money-laundering.

It’s tempting, perhaps, to dismiss the sedevacantists as a joke — a droll footnote in the long history of the Catholic Church. But to do so would be to underestimate their influence. While sedevacantism remains a fringe movement, its rhetoric has seeped into Catholic conservative circles in recent years. There is the same sense of paranoia and betrayal, and the same belief that the Church is under threat.

The trigger has been Pope Francis himself. Although he isn’t the firebrand progressive portrayed in the media, he is a liberal. The pontiff has reformed the Vatican and tried to make the Church less judgmental and more inclusive: in 2023, for example, he allowed priests to bless same-sex couples.

The backlash has been nasty. From the moment he became pope, Church conservatives have been out to get Francis. At times, they’ve sounded a lot like sedevacantists. Cardinal Robert Sarah is a prime example. To be clear, he has never openly questioned the validity of Francis’s election. That would be grounds for excommunication. But the Cardinal has not minced words. Francis’s decision to let same-sex couples receive blessings was, he said, “a heresy that seriously undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and Tradition”.

By Vatican standards, such a comment is outrageous. The Holy See, lest we forget, is an absolute monarchy. Francis is the supreme pontiff. While he’s not above criticism, insinuating that he’s betraying Catholicism crosses a red line.

But there is more. Just two months ago, Sarah said that any attempt to abolish the Latin Mass would be akin to “a diabolical project that seeks to break with the Church of Christ”. This was surely a dig at Francis, who has severely restricted the use of the Latin Mass. Rumors abound that he wants to abolish it altogether. Sarah’s remark borrowed heavily from sedevacantist lore. The implications are clear: the Church might fall under the sway of the Devil. And none other than the Pope might be responsible.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has gone even further. He has not only rejected Francis’s teachings, but also cast aspersions on the Pope’s legitimacy. “Many have expressed their concerns to me. At this very critical moment, there’s a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a rudder,” Burke said in 2014. “They are feeling a bit seasick because they feel like the Church’s ship has lost its way.” A ship without a rudder. Burke was aping the core tenet of sedevacantism: the Church (the ship) was without a pope (the rudder). The Cardinal later put out a statement making a distinction between “the person of Pope Francis” and “the divine gift of the Petrine Office”.

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There were doubts over whether Burke still recognized Francis as Pope. A Catholic website published an article headlined “Does Cardinal Burke think Francis is an antipope?” In 2019, Ross Douthat of The New York Times even questioned Burke about it: “You believe Francis is a legitimate pope?” It beggars belief — here was a leading newspaper asking a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church if he was a sedevacantist. In the end, Burke clarified that, of course, he does believe Francis is the Pope. Nonetheless, he admitted that “people are getting more and more extreme in their response to what’s going on in the Church”.

On that point, Burke is right. The Francis papacy has broken traditionalists. Many are losing faith that they can ever change the Church from within. Angry and increasingly desperate, some openly flirt with sedevacantism. Even if most traditionalists don’t come out as sedevacantists, the damage to the Church is considerable.

The Church has struck back. In 2024 the Vatican excommunicated Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditionalist archbishop, for schism. He was found guilty of “refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff… and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council”.

Viganò sure sounds like a sedevacantist. “We have a deep church that has infiltrated and occupied the Catholic Church,” Viganò said last month. “The members of this counter-church have transformed the Catholic Church into an organization in support of the woke globalist Left.” Predictably, he has won plaudits from some lay conservative Catholics. Among them is Brian Burch, Trump’s Ambassador to the Holy See and a vocal critic of the Pope. “Viganò may not have everything right,” Burch said in 2020. “But there is one thing of which I am certain; Satan is real, and he is on the prowl.”

The story of the sedevacantists is a parable for our times: it shows how extremism goes mainstream. It starts when progress is achieved — a handful of zealots lose their minds and, at the start, everyone ignores them. But, over time, their conspiratorial paranoia takes root. Next thing you know, what sounded preposterous has become legitimate discourse.

But a final question remains: is their ultimate fantasy — to overturn Vatican II — possible? Could the traditionalists inside the Church regain control of the Holy See and coax them back into the fold? Could the next pope redeem them?

The polite answer is that it would take a miracle. Francis has appointed 80% of the cardinals who will elect the next pontiff. “I’m not saying he will be a progressive,” says Frédéric Martel, a sociologist and the author of In the Closet of the Vatican, “but he probably won’t be an ultra-conservative.”

It seems that sedevacantists have lost the holy war — but at least they can take comfort in the knowledge that their usurpers will roast eternally in the deepest pit of hell.

This is the story of a vertiginous collapse of popularity. Jesus enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to wild public acclaim. Thousands line his route shouting support, waving their palms aloft, laying their cloaks on the road as he travels into town on a donkey. It is the welcome of a conquering hero, not all that different from victorious Roman generals arriving in Rome. This is what success looks like.

But within a few days of this triumphal entry, the same crowd will be screaming for his blood. Nervous politicians, with one eye on popular sentiment, will give in to the crowd and send him to his death. Hanging on a terrifying Roman instrument of torture and death, he will drip with the spit of jeering passers-by. There he will suffocate and die, abandoned by most of his friends and followers, a tiny footnote in the long history of Roman cruelty. This is what failure looks like.

What changed? One of the things you could say that Jesus wasn’t very good at expectation management, especially with regard to his political intentions. About such an important matter as whether he was the Messiah, the messaging was, at best, just a little oblique. Yes, there was an encounter with a Samaritan woman whom many would have regarded as an unreliable witness. “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one who will proclaim all things to us,” she says. And Jesus replies: “I am he.” But even the woman wasn’t totally clear: “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” she mused immediately afterwards. And then there is that funny theme in Mark’s Gospel — the so-called Messianic Secret — where Jesus goes around telling those who see him as the Messiah to keep quiet about it. But in the absence of clear messaging, stories spread. This was the one, they whispered.

But what was their expectation? The Messiah had long been a figure of myth. Part-religious, part-political, he was to be the one who would take Israel back to the glory days of David and Solomon. Akin to those Trump MAGA hats, the Messiah was the leader of the Make Israel Great Again movement. Messianic success meant kicking out the occupying Romans. It meant big temples and cheering crowds. Messianic success is national pride, power and popularity. The people of Israel wanted someone a bit like Samson. He too had some heavenly intervention associated with his birth, and he killed 3,000 Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone.

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It’s not exactly when and how the crowd cottoned on to the fact that Jesus wasn’t into any of this. But whenever and however the murmurations of the crowd shifted shape, very soon the over-hyped, ramped-up excitement of Palm Sunday collapsed into acrimonious disappointment. This odd man from Nazareth, with his northern accent and dubious choice of friends, was a fraud. A failure.

When I was studying at a theological college, we were asked a terrifying question. Should a “successful” priest be fêted by his congregation, or end up being crucified by them? Those who are called to hold a mirror up to others are never going to be popular.

I remember reading the extraordinary 1948 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis called Christ Recrucified. It tells of a Passion play put on in Anatolia, where a popular shepherd boy, Manolios, is chosen to play the part of Jesus. During rehearsals, a group of starving refugees arrive. They are from a nearby village that had been devastated by the Turks, but they are turned away. And the cowardly clergy fear that if it stands with the refugees, the village will turn against the church. So it too rejects the refugees and turns against Manolios who supports them. Manolios had taken his new role as Jesus a little too seriously. He is murdered by the villagers. “Two thousand years have gone by and men crucify you still,” says Father Fotis, one of the few remaining godly priests.

The Church of England is a dying church. Everybody says so. Numbers are down, churches are being turned into luxury flats, vocations abandoned. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned in failure. But what are we to make of this failure from the perspective of Holy Week? Throughout his preaching, Jesus was keen on the language of inversions. The first will be last and the last will be first; those who lose their life will find it; take down the mighty, lift up the lowly. Should we not think of success and failure within a similar inverted frame?

Some of the most irritating churches I know are ones that are just a little too pleased with themselves, particularly about how successful they are (yes, mea culpa). They tick all the right boxes. They attract lots of enthusiastic, successful and articulate young people, they have sound finances, slick advertising, beautiful buildings, and amazing choirs, they do lots of good work in the community. Heaven spare us from cocky, successful churches. They so depress me.

Conversely, some of the most important churches in which I have been a priest are what others might — and do — think of as failures. They look terrible to the Diocesan statistician. People sometimes squabble with each other. The organist is a bit rubbish. The church is not a looker. The heating breaks down, the roof leaks. People can have some very strange views. I love these churches because they are me. I too am a bit rubbish. I too am a failure in the deepest parts of my being. And the only thing that keeps these places together — the only thing that keeps me together— is reliance on something other than me.

Which is why my own ecclesiology — what I think a church should be like — is Alcoholics Anonymous, but with incense and vestments. At AA we have to admit our weakness, and accept that we have no power within ourselves to help ourselves. These are the big theological must-haves… along with a trust that God will do the rest. Everything else about church is aesthetics and solidarity, which I like a lot, but as a second-order concern.

The Reverend Richard Coles, a friend of mine, often tells me he thinks of church as “organized goodness”. It’s a lovely idea, but I don’t exactly buy it. Not least because I don’t think of Christians as being especially good (atheists have long complained about this association, and rightly so). If anything, Christians are the ones who know we are not especially good. Or, to borrow Jesus’ words: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” That’s the whole problem with the successful church — they don’t really understand that they, too, are sick.

Now let me row back on something. I don’t actually think that there are distinct things called “successful” and “unsuccessful” churches. All churches are complicated mixtures of both. No church — evangelical, Catholic, liberal — has a monopoly on smugness. But nonetheless, success as an ideology is absolute kryptonite to the Easter story. Nietzsche was right in a way: Christianity is for losers.

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That’s why I hope the next Archbishop of Canterbury will shrug his shoulders a little when asked — as he inevitably will be — how he will revive the fortunes of the Church of England. He must scorn cheap routes to numerical success. And I beg him to forget about all those centrally devised initiatives that your predecessor was so keen on: money redirected to big successful churches, greater enthusiasm breathlessly heralded as the latest route to growth. Jesus was down to a tiny handful of followers when he changed the world. Of course, if I were the Archbishop’s media adviser I’d advise the Archbishop not to say any of that too openly. People like success. The media likes success. Best not to encourage the crowd to turn upon you right away. That will happen in its own time and there won’t be much you can do about it when it does. The last Archbishop failed disastrously, and so will the next. Remember what Samuel Beckett said: “Never mind. Fail again. Fail better.”

But, whisper it: Jesus played chicken with total and absolute disaster, and he won. The resurrection is not about the magic — though I grant that’s the eye-catching bit. The resurrection is about how love transforms failure into genuine triumph. The abandoned man covered in spit and blood, stinking of death — yes, Ecce Homo — is the site of a renewed humanity. And that’s exactly why I love failed churches. Because they remind me that there is hope for us all, even losers like you and me. Happy Easter, losers.

This exultant line does not exactly mark the beginning of Faust — a two-part play whose beginning is, in fact, hard to identify. Part One opens with a night scene in which we see Faust, heartsick and alone, in a dimly lit Gothic room, conjuring demons and contemplating suicide. It is here that an Easter hymn, sung by an invisible chorus, breaks in. The disillusioned professor is lifting a vial of poison to his lips, when he hears this:

“Christ is arisen!
Blest is the man of love,
He who the anguishing,
Bitter, exacting test,
Salvation bringing, passed.”

In a literal sense, Goethe’s antihero is saved by Christ — “the man of love” — in Faust’s first dramatic sequence. We will return to this scene. But before we see Faust in his gloomy chamber — and hear, with him, a Romantic Easter song — Goethe presents his readers with a trio of other introductions. First, he presents a haunting verse dedication to the play’s “dear shadows”. From there, he moves on to a cynical prelude, in which a theatre-manager tells the poet he only has one job to do: “Deliver the goods.” Then he presents an allegorical conversation set in the throne room of heaven, in which the Lord himself gives Mephisto, one of the “spirits of negation”, carte blanche to lead Faust into temptation.

There seems to be no end, then, of Faust’s beginnings. And this is by design. The motto of Faust Part One reveals that the start is the crux of Goethe’s play: “In the beginning was the Deed!” This is a brazen misstatement of the first verse of The Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Goethe’s huge drama turns upon Faust’s deep unhappiness with just that beginning, that Christian beginning, and his spectacular challenge to it. (Crucially, the challenge is not only his. A certain Mephisto is on the scene too.) It is only after Goethe lures us through some 400 pages of eerie verse that — in the last stanza of Part Two, and of the play itself — a mystical chorus corrects (or half-corrects) the professor’s error. “Everything transitory,” we read, “is symbolic only.”

Faust’s total veneration of the Deed is not given the final word in Goethe’s tragedy. But what are we to make of this iconic modern drama of Word and Deed — of soul-selling and demonic influence, of delusion and redemption? Whatever else we might decide, few would object to a framing statement we find in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan drama, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus: namely that the figure of Faust in some way concerns “both Germany and the world”.

Why Germany? The historical Faustus, a Latin sobriquet meaning “fortunate one”, was Germanic. Marlowe knows this, and dubs him “the German conjurer”. According to the historian Anthony Grafton, he was probably based on Georg of Helmstadt, who took a Master of Arts from the University of Heidelberg in the 1480s. In any case, Grafton writes, the shadowy character who comes to be known as Faust made use of “expert knowledge of optics, light, and shadow” — all designed to thrill and terrify his contemporaries with images that “seemed to move”. The real Faust was a Renaissance magus, or, as we might now say, a master of simulacra.

Naturally, German artists have not forgotten Faust’s origins. The most accomplished conjuration of a specifically German Faust is probably Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel, Doctor Faustus, written in Pacific Palisades, California, in which Hitler’s Reich offers “the embrace of demons” that locks Mann’s fatherland into a nightmare of criminality and despair. Doctor Faustus is a captivating treatment of the theme, and one of the great Hollywood novels. But it still seems fair to conclude that Marlowe was right. The Faust myth is not purely national. Faust is a spiritual figure — and, as such, a civilizational one.

Ironically, it is a hardcore German nationalist, Oswald Spengler, who argues most compellingly that Faust is not a German, but rather a world-historical figure. For Spengler, something like a “Faustian soul” fueled the rise — and is now suffering the decline — not just of Germany, but of the West as a whole. The “Faustian world-feeling” is, to his mind, a decisive factor in the ever-more-rapidly unfolding world-history of modernity.

But what meaning does Spengler give to that half-mythical descriptor: “Faustian”? In Spengler’s momentous Decline of the West, written about a century ago, he claims that the Faustian life-force of the West is something like “a will-to-power over the infinite”. This formulation is virtually lifted from the pages of Nietzsche, whose late 19th-century elevation of “will-to-power” is well known. And this suggests, to me at least, that Spengler’s idea of a Faustian West might be connected, however obscurely, to the pathologically anti-Christian will that Nietzsche expresses in his final text, The Anti-Christ. We might therefore ask: Is the essence of the Faustian legacy, in a declining West, the attitude of “the anti-Christ”?

The simplicity of this question is unnerving, and Spengler would not like it. He seems to think that it is not Nietzsche’s anti-Christian spleen, but rather the redemptive finale of Goethe’s Faust, together with Richard Wagner’s Romantic-Christian opera Parsifal, which can “disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume” in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Nevertheless, the simple question of Faust’s anti-Christianity brings us back to the curious beginning of Goethe’s play, in which it is the memory of Christ’s death and resurrection that keeps Faust from killing himself.

Spengler comments on this critical moment. He calls it, in passing, Faust’s “Easter scene”. But what I want to ask is this: What if there is not only one “Easter scene” in Goethe’s Faust? What if, rather, this whole myth of tragic modernity is framed by Easter, and by the events that Christians commemorate on that day? What if, furthermore, the real legacy of Faustian modernity is not just — as Mann and others have thought — the hellish Nazi interlude, but rather a far more enduring tendency to anti-Christianity in the West? What if, in other words, it is precisely Faust’s anti-Christian attitude which is somehow at the heart of Western malaise?

It is time to return, with these questions in mind, to the scene in which the drama of Faust’s soul begins. It is titled simply “Night”. Throughout the scene, Goethe’s unstable Herr Doktor is both citing and mis-citing the gospels — and especially The Gospel According to John. One of these echoes is decisive: Faust says that there is no book, no text, which could satisfy his “eternal thirst” (Durst auf ewig). His wording distinctly recalls a scene in John Chapter 4, in which Jesus tells a woman in Samaria: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

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On the night before Easter, Faust is thirsty. And on the play’s fateful Easter day, when Faust first meets Mephisto, his own personal demon, Christ’s sayings in John 4, are on his mind. “You long to drink the living waters”, Faust confesses to himself, until Mephisto interrupts him. The bitter professor knows, and the play’s 19th-century readers all knew, that “living water” is what Jesus mystically offers to the woman in Samaria. It is precisely because Faust is not drinking the spiritual water he longs to drink — however we might interpret his longing, or his failure — that he signs his soul over to Mephisto, a nihilist avant la lettre, and embraces the devil’s element, fire.

I call such echoes of John 4 decisive, not only because they reveal the depth of Faust’s sickness of heart, in the first scenes of the play, but because they are still sounding in Faust’s final stanzas. Here, in the chaos of love, or the clamor of grace, that meets a half-repentant Faust in the afterlife, we encounter a radiant figure — one of Faust’s angelic intercessors, who is given by Goethe a simple Latin title: Mulier Samaritana. “The Samaritan Woman.” And Goethe tells us, in his play’s margin, so no one can miss it, where he is taking his inspiration from: “Saint John 4.” This is how the Samaritan Woman pleads for Faust’s soul:

“By the pail which, when he thirsted,
Cooled the lips of our Savior,
By the streams of living water
Pouring out from that pure fountain
Prodigally and forever,
Flowing through all of creation –”

It is not Mephisto’s fire, but Jesus’ water — in Goethe’s unorthodox conception of it — that lives on, in this stanza, after Faust dies.

Faust’s drama, which is paschal at the beginning, is still paschal at the end. At the instant of his antihero’s death, Goethe quotes — yet again — from The Gospel According to John: “It is finished.” Though some translations obscure the biblical reference, Goethe’s German is identical to Martin Luther’s translation in John Chapter 19, where Jesus says, from the cross: “It is finished” (Es ist vollbracht). But we must, of course, ask: what is finished? Faust’s lurid drama is linked to the gospels’ paschal narrative. But how?

We might say by corruption, with an eye to Faust’s alteration of John’s canonical line. After all, “In the beginning was the Word” becomes “In the beginning was the Deed”. Or we might say by negation, since Mephisto, a cynical mystagogue, tells us, and then shows us, that he is “the spirit that says no, no”. But none of this goes far enough. Goethe’s play is in fact structured by Faust’s imprecation, and then, persecution of Christianity. He becomes, decades before Nietzsche, a partisan of “the anti-Christ”.

Faust’s rejection of “the old, the true religion” — as Mephisto dryly calls it — is part of the process. This is how deals with the devil get done. And Faust complies. “I pronounce a curse”, he says:

“Curse love on its pinnacle of bliss,
Curse faith, so false, curse all vain hope!”

It is really Saint Paul who is being cursed, here, for having the audacity to write in his First Letter to the Corinthians that “faith, hope, and love abide”. Faust is a myth of tragic modernity precisely in so far as it is determined by this conscious repudiation of the Christian beyond — in faith, hope, and love.

Yet if Faust’s curse on Christianity is a structuring moment in Part One, what do I mean by his persecution of Christianity? This comes towards the end of Part Two, in the days before Faust’s death. After he and Mephisto have provided some necromantic help to the forces of European unification, Faust settles, with Mephisto, naturally, near an undisclosed coastline. Here, he begins a new life as a visionary property developer. The venture ends badly. His final property development is — his grave.

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But before Faust’s slave-laborers lower him into the pit, there is a sequence of events that confuses many commentators. Along the shoreline that Faust wants to develop is an elderly couple — “kind, pious people” — who live in a simple house, within a copse of linden trees, beside a rustic chapel. They refuse to sell their land to the man who has sold his soul. What is more, they sense that Faust’s seemingly progressive venture is in fact primitive and cruel. “Men were sacrificed,” the wife tells her husband, “I’m certain.” And what is her intuition about Faust? “Godless,” she concludes, “he imagines we’re his slaves.”

With his own death impending, Faust becomes obsessed with this poor old couple. It is not only that their recalcitrance irritates him, or that their mere existence ruins his view of a newly cleared coastline. What drives Faust to distraction is the “churchlike, tomblike” clanging of their chapel bell. This lone, liturgical act materializes — not only for them, but for him — their commitment to the “old God” that Faust — a devotee, now, only of his own will — has abandoned. “Come,” they say quietly to each other:

“We’ll walk out to the chapel,
Watch the sun sink to its rest,
Ring the bell and kneeling, pray.”

But there is more. For on the night before Easter, just as the suicidal professor begins to hear the old exultant words — “Christ is arisen!” — in Faust’s first scene, we read this in Goethe’s text: Glockenklang. “Bells peal.” Symbolically it is these Easter bells that ring — but from a harassed and isolated church, now — as Faust, long-declining, nears his denouement.

Before he dies, Faust silences the bells. Mephisto and his enforcers set fire to the old couple’s chapel — and their house. They burn to death inside. In this way, the last Christians left on Goethe’s stage are martyred. Faust is — imperfectly, briefly — repentant. He thinks back on the days before his apostasy, before he gave himself over to

“The things of darkness, cursed the world, myself,
Impiously. Now ghosts so fill the air …”

Ours too, seems to be a time when, strangely, ghosts fill the air. It was a friend of Goethe’s, Novalis, a Christian Romantic, who once said: “Where there are no gods, ghosts reign.” Perhaps there is something for us in Novalis’ dictum — and in Goethe’s drama. And, perhaps, every year, while the Easter bells still peal, we are not only being drawn into a circle of sacred memory, but being reminded to look to the future, and ask: on what venture are we embarked? And with what forces are we in league?

What would it be like to watch your language die over your lifetime? A language encodes a way of looking at the world, as much as of interacting with others. The many Inuit words for “snow” may or may not be apocryphal, but the legend captures something true: a language goes into great detail on subjects its speakers believe important. What would it be like to be the only one left for whom these words, those sentences, felt natural and obvious?

In a similar way, a religious faith is a moral language. A faith goes into great detail on themes its speakers believe important. Moral languages can also die, or evolve into something new, as (for whatever reason) its adherents stop passing on its grammar and priorities.

These gloomy thoughts percolated last Sunday as I sat, with my daughter on my lap, gazing around the 800-year-old nave of a little Norman church near our home, as we listened to the Palm Sunday reading of the Passion of Christ. This story is the heart of the Christian faith: it describes an incarnate God, acclaimed in his own capital city as Messiah — and betrayed in the moment of worldly triumph. It tells of that deity swarmed by a mocking crowd, and abandoned by even the disciples who swore never to do so. It recounts his death on the cross, as a criminal flanked by criminals, crying out at the last moment of agony about having been forsaken by the God in whom he trusted.

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Today, we view the cross through a 2,000-year prism of Christian meanings. In the pre-Christian tradition absorbed into that symbolism, though, it was often held to symbolise the four material elements of earth, air, fire, and water. And from this perspective, we might read the Crucifixion as in part the story of a God that doesn’t just willingly take on flesh, but also the profound suffering that comes with embodied life: limitation, pain, and — finally — agonising death, in the certainty of having been forsaken by the divine.

And in this sense, the two-millennia trajectory of the Christian Church also echoes the Passion narrative. A faith born among the poor, rising to immense worldly reach and power; even in that little church, one of thousands throughout England, gravestones and memorials mark more than 800 years of the great and the good whose lives pepper this story. Then, the same institution, crippled from within at the moment of peak political reach, and now spiralling toward irrelevance.

The Passion, and the Holy Week in which it’s celebrated, is the central festival in the Christian liturgical calendar. Not so long ago, whole communities would have turned out to celebrate it. Last weekend, though, nearly all of the thin congregation was over 60. What will happen to that unbroken fabric of cultural continuity when people stop showing up? Will my daughter, like Dolly Pentreath, see her native moral grammar and way of looking at the world fade and disappear?

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But it makes sense that we should have arrived here. For the history of the Christian Church is also the long history of its slow death on the cross of matter. We can’t separate the history of Christianity from that of scientific modernity — which is to say, from our trajectory away from enchantment, and into the material world. It was movable type and the proliferation of Bibles, then the spread of literacy and thereafter the break with papal authority, that opened space for the first stirrings of modern natural science. With that science came the steady withdrawal of God from His creation, first (per Descartes) into mechanistic principles, and finally (per Nietzsche) from widespread observance altogether: killed by our own hand. In the space left by our murder of God, Nietzsche claims, we may now attempt to create our own values and, if we can, to live by them.

These shifts have consequences that reach far wider than individual ruminations, or small provincial churches. For as God has given way to (or been sacrificed for) science, so money and congregants have drained away, and moral authority has departed with them. Today, opponents howl about “Christian privilege”, but the reality is that the inverse operates. Where the Christian moral grammar once formed the common structure within which other religious outlooks were more or less tolerated, Christians are now a minority within a framework that has adopted some of its ideas, but is overtly hostile to many of the beliefs.

At the heart of this is a thoroughly Christian battle: one that could only happen from within a faith that speaks of how “the Word became flesh”. Christianity describes a God who took on mortal, embodied life; an extraordinary image that triggered a 2,000-year effort to square the sometimes-competing claims of matter and spirit. Accordingly, schisms often also turn on disagreements over that relation, and have often carried real-world consequences.

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The relative import of spirit and matter was at the heart of wranglings between Catholic and Protestant factions after the English Civil War, for example. Do good deeds in this world affect our prospect of Heaven in the next? Does the Eucharist become literally the Body and Blood of Christ? These may seem abstruse arguments to a modern-day reader, but 17th-century England considered them so important that the Test Act of 1673 forced anyone entering public office to renounce the doctrine of works, and of literal transubstantiation.

And today, something akin to the Test Acts is once again emerging. Once again, too, the dispute is over the relation between Word and Flesh — but this time the domain is not the world, or the Eucharist, but our bodies themselves. Are we created in God’s image, and what does that mean if so? Are we obliged to remain the sex we’re born as? Is it permissible to end a pregnancy? Are any desires forbidden, and why? Who gets to marry? What is marriage even for?

On all these points, the long-held Christian moral grammar departs from now-prevailing norms. And on all these points, Christians are permitted to exist in public life to the extent that they’re willing to forswear doctrine, or at the very least to keep quiet about their beliefs. A recent case in point is SNP politician Kate Forbes, whose candidacy as Scotland’s First Minister was effectively halted by views on abortion, marriage and gender ideology that remain standard Christian teaching across many denominations, but are now widely viewed as irrationally “faith-based”, troubling, outdated and rendering those who profess them unfit for public office.

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Last Sunday, gazing at the cobwebbed relics of that Church at the peak of its power, I listened to the superannuated congregation read the description of Christ’s death on Calvary: three hours of darkness, in the middle of the day, at the end of which the incarnate God cried out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”. And it struck me that, inasmuch as the Passion holds, too, for the Christian church, that worldly story is also now well into the hours of darkness.

Perhaps we’re already forsaken. Far more eminent thinkers than I have already declared God’s disappearance — and not just enemies of the Christian faith, such as Nietzsche. Others whose work is intricately bound up in Christian tradition, such as the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, critique the extent to which modernity has produced a string of hollow efforts to ground a workable morality, on principles from which the divine telos (aim) has been excised.

In these institutional hours of darkness, too, we’re left only with the four elements of matter: the domain of the rational, the tangible, and the measurable. Meanwhile, the new Test Acts — the doctrinal vows that Kate Forbes refused to take, even at the cost of her SNP leadership bid — affirm that where human bodies are concerned, it’s not just frowned-upon to treat matter as having any relationship with divinity.

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Now, it’s outright heresy. There is no such thing as a divine plan, or a telos for the human organism. Instead, what makes us “human” is our freedom to self-create, in any form we like, and our bodies have moral valence only inasmuch we choose to sanctify them. To put it another way: Christianity’s successor-faith — a faith now hard at work suppressing its progenitor — treats as sacrosanct the moment God left His son alone, on the cross of matter.

To suggest that anyone might be called to any purpose other than the one they themselves have chosen is to be guilty of a kind of moral violence. And the new Test Act obliges us to accept that the price of political power is professing to renounce such moral violence, and to believe that Word and Flesh are utterly separate, and there is no Word save the one we ourselves choose.

Those who still adhere to the old grammar have responded to the new Test Acts in a number of ways. One is simply to accept the new moral regime. Another is to rage against the crumbling of the old order, or to call for a renewed, more muscular political Christianity capable of fighting back. Elsewhere, again, others propose in various ways returning to the catacombs: the “Benedict Option”, as Rod Dreher called it, or, in Paul Kingsnorth’s formulation, fleeing to the wilderness for a contemplative approach to re-enchanting the world. In all these proposals, one bleak common theme recurs: despair. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

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During Holy Week, even so, many Christians still show up, whether in church or in their thoughts, to meditate on the Passion and on the three days that followed it, during which the tomb remained sealed and guarded. And perhaps we need to extend that meditation as well to the bigger story of the Christian Church. For Nietzsche was right: we have indeed killed God. But what he left out, in his gleeful embrace of nihilism, is the rest of the story of God’s death.

The Word may have journeyed into Flesh, and thence into mortification, despair, and finally death, in the certainty of God’s abandonment. We may have joined Nietzsche in effecting this death and abandonment, before collectively bemoaning the slow death of the institutions that embodied the Christian God on Earth. In their place, and over their backs, we live under a newly-ascendant post-Christian moral regime, that sanctifies God’s abandonment of His creation and bans those who dissent from political office.

But let Nietzsche have his victory. I don’t know how long these three metaphorical days of mourning will last; but the other message of the Passion is that this, of all times, is the moment for faith. This story has long been retold not just as history, but also as prophecy. And seen thus, the Passion’s deepest mystery is yet to come.

For on the third day, the disciples found the stone rolled away. And from behind it, Word and Flesh returned: once again living, and once again united.

But Fry was undoubtedly a devout Christian of the Quaker variety, as were the other two of the big three British chocolatiers, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, all of whom were directed towards manufacturing through being barred from most professions. They were drawn to chocolate in particular because they regarded it as a more moral treat, and that was how it was widely perceived: an innocent indulgence, supplied by men whose Quaker conscience dictated that they combine its manufacture with good works. In a wider sense, we might see that Fry’s egg as symbolising a strain of particularly moral — indeed, overtly Christian — capitalism, operating paternalistically both in its own workplaces and the surrounding community. The story of these eggs, and the companies that made them, therefore forms a simulacrum for the narrative of Britain since the Industrial Revolution, and the transition from local, civic-minded commerce toward globalised, faceless big business.   

I grew up in Seventies York, upon which the Rowntrees had been showering gifts for nearly a century. The primary benefactor had been Joseph Rowntree II, heir to the first Joseph Rowntree, who’d established the business in 1822. In 1893, JR II established Rowntree’s garden factory in York, whose 4,000 employees benefited from a female welfare worker, a doctor’s surgery, sick and provident funds, savings and pensions schemes. Nearby was — and is — New Earwsick, a model village for employees with pretty Arts and Crafts houses, each with a fruit tree in the front garden, and no two successive trees bore the same fruit, to promote crop-swapping and neighbourliness. There was a toytown air about the signs indicating “Butcher”, “Greengrocer”, ”Chemist”. No sign indicated “pub” of course.

Several members of my extended family worked for Rowntree’s, and they were entitled to heavily discounted chocolate, some of which came my way, and my mother always included a Kit-Kat in my packed lunch, a token of love from her, and (it seemed) the Rowntrees themselves. One could still almost believe that their primary concern was philanthropy and the creation of charitable trusts, while they left the chocolate making to secular subordinates.

I benefited in many ways from Rowntree largesse, playing tennis and swimming in Rowntree Park, acting in plays at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre and swotting for exams in York Library, which they’d funded. I never went inside the factory but did once visit its equivalent in the Midlands: Cadbury’s Bournville complex. This too is a garden factory, with a similarly relaxed spaciousness between the buildings, like pieces on a chess board towards the end of a game. I recall seeing, among many other tokens of paternalism, the factory dentist’s surgery, indicated by a sign in Cadbury’s purple. At the time (early 2000s) Cadbury’s seemed to have retained the “purity” (a word much employed in their advertising) we appeared to have lost in York.

Rowntree’s was acquired by Nestlé in 1988, and I remember being shocked at seeing the Swiss flag flying from the factory roof. Nestlé have since invested heavily in the York factory, but they admit that they don’t continue the Rowntree tradition of York benefactions, and the extent of their wider philanthropy is mysterious to me. A spokesperson for the firm said: “We don’t necessarily PR our charitable work.”

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In 2010, Cadbury’s, which does still support the charitable Cadbury Foundation, was sold to the America-based multinational, Kraft, and is now owned by Mondelez, a company hived off from Kraft in 2012. In York, we knew all about Kraft. It had acquired the other York chocolatier, Terry’s, who were not Quakers, but whose factory — closed by Kraft in 1993 — nonetheless had a fishpond, bowling green and sports fields, and whose female hockey team played in the colours of one of their best-known brands: All Gold.

But even before British Big Chocolate entered a world you’d need a degree in business studies to comprehend, the companies had not been averse to capitalistic chess playing. In 1919, Cadbury’s had (gently and politely) acquired Fry’s, and in 1969, Cadbury’s merged with Schweppes, despite Schweppes mixers being used in alcoholic drinks. In his history of 20th-century confectionery, Sweet Talk, Nicholas Whittaker refutes the sentimental version of the Rowntree’s takeover, whereby Nestlé was seen as a bully spoiling for a fight: “Who should it be? Cadbury’s looked a bit too muscular, and that Mars was a Yankee smartarse. How about that Rowntree’s wimp in the corner, happily counting his Smarties? He’d do.” On the contrary, as Whittaker writes, it was “all about percentages, shareholdings and wheeler-dealing”.

The Quakers had also been worldly enough to embrace advertising even though, as Deborah Cadbury writes in her 2010 book, Chocolate Wars: “Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself; abhorrent to a man of God.” The heyday of chocolate advertising was in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of it was particularly un-Quaker like (the way those fashion models ate a Cadbury’s Flake, for instance). And whereas Cadbury and Rowntree’s benignity on the home front was unquestionable, they took their eye off the ball when it came to the cocoa-producing regions.

In 2021, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Barrow Cadbury Trust — created in 1920, and now an independent charitable trust “inspired by Quaker beliefs” — apologised for the fact that their endowment was “not free from labour exploitation”. In the early 19th Century, Cadbury’s had acquired cocoa from plantations where slave labour had been used. The company eventually organised a boycott of those plantations by British cocoa manufacturers, but they had benefited from slave labour for eight years. Also in 2021, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust — established in 1904, and now “an independent Quaker charitable trust” — apologised for the “Rowntree company having purchased cocoa and other goods produced by enslaved people”.

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Cocoa production is still bedevilled by labour exploitation, which is one reason why the Fairtrade label (imprimatur of the Fairtrade movement) was established in 1997. It is applied to goods produced ethically, for which a fair price had been paid. Neither Mondelez nor Nestlé are currently signed up to Fairtrade, although both have their own schemes of certification: Cocoa Life and Rainforest Alliance respectively. Cocoa Life operates in partnership with Fairtrade but neither it nor Rainforest Alliance guarantees a minimum price to cocoa farmers, which Fairtrade does. In 2009, Nestle’s Kit-Kat did become Fairtrade-registered, a momentous event, given the scale of Kit-Kat sales, but in 2020, Nestlé moved Kit-Kat into its Rainforest Alliance scheme. (Nestlé insisted this was about unifying all their products under one umbrella and not a moneysaving measure. But Joanna Pollard, a co-ordinator of Fairtrade Yorkshire contended that cocoa farmers would lose out heavily, and she presented a petition of protest with 300,000 signatures at their York factory.)

It tends to be only the smaller players who can now claim the moral high ground, a reversal of the previous situation. Tony’s Chocolonely (“crazy about chocolate, serious about people”) was founded in 2005 by a Dutch TV producer, Tuen van de Keuken, whose chocolate bars have irregular divisions, like crazy paving, to reflect the inequalities of the chocolate industry. The “lonely” tag is because van de Keuken felt as if he alone were addressing exploitation in chocolate farming, but the company’s moral claims go only so far. Chocolonely has never claimed there is no child labour in its supply chain, which is just as well, since, in 2022, the company reported that 1,701 instances of it had been found in the previous year — a situation it has undertaken to correct.

So there remains a moral dimension to the chocolate industry, albeit now a globalised one, and there is a new moral fraughtness, concerning our view of both its past and its social effects today. To the question of modern slavery, we might add the British obesity crisis that has come along to embarrass the chocolatiers. And in the modern age, there is even an anxiety about the nomenclature of their seasonal eggs. In one sense the creation of the chocolate egg pushed Easter in the child-oriented, secularised direction that Christmas had already begun to take in the Victorian period. (Decorated hard-boiled eggs had previously been given to the local poor rather than one’s own offspring.) While the Easter chocolate can be viewed as a Christian symbol, it is increasingly not so perceived.

In 2010, David Marshall crowdfunded the launch of the Meaningful Chocolate Company, having been given an Easter egg whose packaging proclaimed, “Easter is the festival of chocolate and loveliness.” Surveying the 80 million eggs on sale, he concluded that not a single manufacturer mentioned the religious aspect of the festival, hence his “Real Easter Egg”, which comes with a copy of the Easter story, is Fairtrade certified, and from the profits of which a donation is made to charity. By Easter 2023, 1.8 million of these eggs will have been sold, and without the aid of the supermarkets, who won’t stock an explicitly religious egg. Having spoken to Mr Marshall, I visited my local Sainsbury’s. About half the chocolate eggs on display were described as “Easter eggs”, but the E-word tended to be on the back of the package in small print rather than blazoned the front.

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The Quaker capitalism behind Fry’s Easter egg has become shareholder capitalism. In a globalised world, the chocolate industry grew too big for a connection to any one place or system of belief, unless it be the belief in profit. In decades past, guided tours of the Rowntree factory were regularly offered to the general public. But, a few years ago, when I applied to Nestlé for a tour, they turned me down on the grounds that if they let me in, they’d be overwhelmed with other applicants.

And Quakerism itself is a faith in decline. As Deborah Cadbury writes “there was a time when one in 10 people in Britain were Quakers”, but when she visited Quaker HQ, the Society of Friends on Euston Road, she discovered that membership was down to 15,000. As Quakerism and Christianity has faded from the world of British chocolate, a very familiar modern landscape has replaced it: a transition from the solidity and faith of the past towards a liquid, rootless, profit-maximising present.

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

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

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

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

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Secular Christmas is a lie

By Giles Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since the Roman state reserved this penalty almost entirely for political rebels and runaway slaves, the so-called thieves probably fell into the former category. In fact, it is quite likely that they were Zealots, members of an underground anti-imperialist movement which wanted to kick out the Romans and replace them with a purified Jewish state run by a priestly caste. The Zealots were to stage an insurrection some decades after Jesus’s death, with catastrophic results. They are memorably satirised as a kind of first-century Socialist Workers Party in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

The point of crucifixion wasn’t so much the pain, even though we derive the word “excruciating” from the practice. It was rather to proclaim the helplessness of those who struck against Roman sovereignty, hence discouraging others from doing the same. Their mutilated bodies were turned into advertisements for the power of Rome, pinned up in public humiliation on the edge of the city. Even so, Jesus himself got off fairly lightly.

I once made the mistake of pointing this out in a talk on BBC radio, and was the recipient of a shedload of outraged letters from Evangelical Christians who promised to pray for my soul while deeply doubting that I was in possession of one. But it’s true: Jesus seems to have been on the cross for only six hours, whereas there were other victims who thrashed around for days. It could be that the scourging they gave him helped to speed him on his way. If you are about to be crucified, lose as much blood as you can.

If the so-called thieves were revolutionaries, was Jesus one as well? It’s possible that the gospel-writers edited out some politically explosive stuff in order to cosy up to the authorities. Christians at the time were being savagely persecuted, and for them to portray their leader as a prototype for Lenin would scarcely have appealed to those in power. It’s true that a lot of what Jesus said might have sounded to a casual bystander like good Zealot stuff. He certainly would have had Zealots in his entourage. Judas Iscariot may have been one of them. Perhaps he sold his master out because he had expected him to lead the Jewish people against the occupying forces and was bitterly disenchanted when he didn’t. Jesus’s right-hand man Peter carried a sword, an odd thing for a Galilean fisherman to do.

On the other hand, Jesus supported paying taxes to Caesar, which the Zealots didn’t. He also called down some frightful curses on the heads of the Pharisees, who were more or less the Zealots’ theological wing, perhaps in order to put some daylight between the militants and himself.

The Pharisees, incidentally, have had a particularly bad press. They were admired by most Jews for their piety and good works, but are vilified in the New Testament as legalists and hypocrites. Some modern Christians think that Judaism is about the external and collective, while Christianity is about the inward and individual. Jews are devotees of Law, while Christians are disciples of Love. The gospel-writers, who were of course Jews themselves, wouldn’t have believed any such theological nonsense, and neither would Jesus himself. But the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism can already be detected in the smearing of the Pharisees.

Jesus tries to overturn what might be called the Satanic image of God. This is the idea of God as Patriarch, Big Daddy, Judge and Superego, with whom you have to bargain your way to heaven by being exceptionally righteous and respectable. On this theory, if you’re going to have a God at all, you might as well have a big nasty bastard of one who will relieve you of your guilt by clobbering you at regular intervals — not some gentle, Guardian-reading deity who lets us murder his own child without even a struggle. Jesus’s God, by contrast, is not a judge but a counsel for the defence. You can’t make graven images of this God because the only image of him is flesh and blood.

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The real Big Daddy was not the Jewish Yahweh but the imperial state, of which the local representative at the time was Pontius Pilate. The Roman governor is presented in the gospels as a vacillating, well-meaning, rather spineless liberal with a metaphysical turn of mind (“What is truth?” he inquires of Jesus), the kind of man you could imagine doing moderately well in the BBC. Being a decent sort of chap, he doesn’t want to come down too hard on this enigmatic young holy man, one of a whole pack of hairy prophets, freaks, hippies and charlatans thronging the streets of Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. The place must have looked a bit like Woodstock. In the end, however, Pilate can’t resist the pleas of the Jewish rabble and reluctantly packs Jesus off to his death.

None of this is likely to be true. For one thing, Jesus was wildly popular with the common people, who would never have called for his crucifixion. Like a modern rock star, he actually has to hide from his adoring fans. For another thing, Pilate was by no means the decent chap the gospels make him out to be. We happen to know from other sources that he was a ruthless despot who murdered prisoners, executed at the drop of a hat, and already stood accused of bribery, cruelty and illegal execution when Jesus appeared before him. He would never have got past his first interview at the BBC. In fact, he was finally dismissed from the imperial service for dishonourable conduct, and you had to be spectacularly dishonourable to be kicked out by the Romans. He would certainly have condemned Jesus, not to speak of his own grandmother, without a qualm, and without needing to believe that he was guilty.

Seeking once more to keep the ruling powers sweet, the gospel-writers tried to shift the blame for Jesus’s death from Pilate himself to the Jewish people. But why was he killed in the first place? It’s true that his life-style might have been offensive to the Jewish Establishment. He was homeless, vagrant, without property, celibate, a scourge of the rich and powerful, a champion of the dispossessed, remarkably laid-back about sex, averse to material goods and hostile to the family (almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is resoundingly negative). He also laid claim to an extraordinary authority, surprisingly for someone from a rural backwater like Galilee.

None of this would have got him into rabbinical school, but none of it would have got him topped either. He doesn’t directly claim to be Son of God, and even if he had it wouldn’t necessarily have landed him in trouble. All Jews were sons and daughters of God. He doesn’t claim to be the Messiah either. Instead, in carnivalesque spirit, he sends up the whole notion of kingship by riding into the capital on the back of a donkey. Besides, Messiahs don’t get themselves crucified. The very idea of a crucified Messiah would have struck the Jews of the time as a moral obscenity. In any case, the Romans wouldn’t have given a toss about the theological squabbles of their colonial underlings. They didn’t get out the hammer and nails for that.

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They might well have done so, however, had they thought that the Jesus movement was seditious. And the people most likely to have sown that suspicion in their minds were the Jewish priestly caste or Sanhedrin. Maybe the priests didn’t believe that Jesus was a would-be insurrectionist, but it might have been convenient for them to pretend that they did. The political atmosphere in the capital at Passover would have been extremely tense, and Jesus could have provided the spark that sent the place up in flames. The Sanhedrin knew that any such uprising would bring the full force of Roman power down on the backs of their hapless people, and would have been properly fearful on their behalf. They were out to prevent a disaster, and Jesus was to be the scapegoat. So it may be that Jesus was sent to his death as a political agitator without either the Jewish or Roman leaders believing that he was — or in the case of the Romans, really caring.

The first person to discover that Jesus’s tomb is empty was Mary Magdalen, which means that the news of his resurrection was broken to the world by what used to be known as a fallen woman. She was in the company of other women, all of whom testified that Jesus had risen from the dead. This must have proved an embarrassment for the early Christians — not because Mary was of dubious moral character, but because the testimony of a woman was regarded as worthless. What the Christian community viewed as the most momentous event in human history rested on notoriously unreliable witnesses. Just for this reason, however, the women would seem to be vindicated. If the gospel-writers could have passed over this awkward episode, they might well have done so; but the fact that they don’t suggests that it was so widely believed that it would have been odd to leave it out.

Jesus warns his followers that if they speak out for justice and friendship as he did, then they, too, will be done away with by the state. There are plenty of latter-day Zealots who have learnt this lesson the hard way. The message of the gospels is that if you love in a certain way, you are likely to be killed. There’s your pie in the sky for you. But as long as we see love mostly as an erotic and Romantic affair, rather than a matter of, say, toppling dictators, this needn’t disturb us unduly. One of the biggest mistakes of the modern era is to see love only as interpersonal. The authors of the New Testament can’t be accused of that, whatever their other shortcomings.

I liked him. And I think he liked me. There were times when he would deign to let me rub him under his chin as he stood four-square, head jutting forward. He was imperious, as if conscious of the glorious history attached to his kind. Ryeland sheep: first bred in the fifteenth century by the monks of Leominster Priory. Robin Hood was not just a sheep in a Welsh Marches paddock. He had ancestry — breeding, you might say.

It is odd how little most of us know about sheep, given how deeply entrenched they are in our culture. The Greek astrological sign Aries is a ram. In nursery rhymes, “Mary had a little lamb”, and “Baa-baa black sheep” was asked if he had any wool. On the screen Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep has gambolled about entertaining families for decades. On Easter cards lambs are no less frolicsome each passing year.

Those same little lambikins get slaughtered before they are a year old. On the supermarket shelf they are reduced to abstract, packaged commodities. To cope with this glaring contradiction — Little Gambolling Lamb in Field v. Big Rack of Lamb in the Oven — we downplay sheep’s intelligence and individuality. Hence the traducing expression “to be a sheep”, meaning to be a dumb, passive follower. Even a man as sensitive and attuned to nature as George Orwell made the sheep in Animal Farm the stupidest of the stupid, who go from mindlessly chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad” to “Two legs good, four legs bad”. When it comes to sheep, then, we suffer what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.

Or we blank the treatment we give them. Once upon a time, sheep were always raised outside in the fresh air, in a system that would, in today’s terminology, be called “extensive”, even “organic”. More than ten million sheep are now stuck in factory farms worldwide; sheep are also used extensively in biomedical research. About 24,000 are used annually for a range of purposes, from the study of Huntington’s disease and heart conditions to orthopaedics, organ transplants and genetic research (including cloning). There was a time when sheep were used in Argentina as fuel, their bodies thrown into furnaces. Like logs.

My family began farming them 800 years ago. Since I started, 25 years ago, I have learned that sheep are curious things. And sheep farming is a curious old business, where one can become attached to, loving, even, of animals raised for sale, for the pot. That has always been the case. As the Old Testament, which knew a thing or two about shepherding, tells it in II Samuel:

The poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, was unto him a daughter.

So, my fondness for Robin Hood was not unusual, and I believe spoke of the way we should treat sheep. With respect. That is how sheep farming used to be. And should be again.

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Robin Hood was easy to know and like because the species barrier between sheep and humans is gossamer thin. They are more like us than we may care to know. Sheep form friendship bonds, as well as family and flock ones.

I have made mistakes over the last 25 years, some terrible. I once had to put an injured sheep out of its misery. I did so in the corner of a field, but still in view of the flock. After the blast from the Lincoln 12-bore shotgun, the sheep changed their relationship with me. No longer was I the nice guy who gave them food; I was the killer. Far from crowding around me on my arrival in the field, they kept up the safety distance of wild animals. Our relationship had gone bust. It took months to heal, because sheep remember.

I understand the ethical objection to sending a lamb to the abattoir. (I don’t like the process either, and don’t do it any more.) In the good old days, a sheep would be raised to productive adulthood and only eaten when this time had expired, which was about the length of its natural life: five to seven years.

When I used to kill lambs, I would look into the eyes of each one, to remind myself of their value and their beauty. And they were gorgeous: spotted black and white, their tight curly wool gleaming, their horns curling in geometrically exact spirals.

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But now, I will no longer have lambs slaughtered for meat. I will, however, defend sheep, and sheep farming, together with the on-farm slaughter of (mature) sheep. It is the right way for a sheep to die, in the right place — which is its home. But today it is compulsory for all animals entering the food chain to be slaughtered at a licensed abattoir. The number of abattoirs is insufficient, however, meaning that animals have a long trip, packed tight in a trailer to the slaughterhouse.

Stress, as well as being cruel to the sheep, produces excesses of lactic acid, meaning the meat becomes ill-flavoured. Frequently, the animals sense their destiny at the abattoir and struggle to escape. To persuade sheep into the killing chamber, slaughterhouses use a trained “Judas sheep” to entice them forwards.

Sheep deserve a decent death, and there should be no more stressful, long-distance transport to a fear-reeking abattoir. “On-spot slaughtering” by high-velocity rifle has been successfully campaigned for in Switzerland by animal welfare association Four Paws (Vier Pfoten Schweiz). This method is already used in UK for “farmed” deer.

On-farm slaughter has the singular advantage that the sheep are less stressed before death. I’ve seen an apprentice butcher kill my excess rams while they were eating beet pellets as happy as Larry the Lamb. The shooting was so quick that the four were all mid-munch when they dropped dead, all in a row. I would not mind going the same way.

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Britons eat 306,000 tonnes of sheep meat each year. This equates to approximately 1,041,000 sheep killed per month. Paradoxically, this keeps sheep alive. Why do so few care about the sheep breeds that have disappeared off the face of the Earth as decidedly as the Dodo? Such as the Scottish Dunface. I have decided to eat more meat from our remaining native and rare breeds to do my bit to help preserve them. After all, I like sheep, on the plate and on the hill. It is possible to have your sheep and eat it. To have happy meat. It all depends on how the sheep are farmed.

I am not pretending to be noble. Being a shepherd has entirely selfish aspects; there’s a romance to shepherding which is entirely absent from pig and poultry farming. In a time of technology, in a time of cities and disconnect from the countryside, shepherds, male or female, feel themselves to be the last of a breed: hard, solitary individuals doing real graft out in the elements. It’s almost heroic.

I love cattle and pigs, I have a deep affection for chickens and geese, but sheep are special. It’s there in the Bible. Jesus is the “lamb of God”, not His calf, His piglet, even His kid. I suspect it’s the dependency, the fact that sheep require such close care. Humans are hard-wired to want companionship, but also to protect their kith, kin and charges. Sheep, especially their gentle offspring, fit the bill like no other farmyard animal.

Extracted from The Sheep’s Tale by John Lewis-Stempel, Doubleday

This could be a statement of the philosopher’s conservatism, as much as an explanation for the outpouring of love that has followed his death, two years ago last week. And the publication of a new collection of his old essays and columns, Against the Tide, along with the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, could be seen as a part of a canonisation process.

But Scruton was no saint. And he was disarmingly frank about his failings as a human being. Yet persecuted in life, especially towards the end; dedicated to the cause, despite considerable personal cost; personally and visibly vulnerable; other-worldly even: when last we spoke, he even compared himself to Jesus — which I mention as an example of his rather compelling naivety, not his holiness.

“Forgive them for they know not what they do,” was his answer to those who had been seeking to get him sacked from his job as government advisor on architecture. I slightly bridled at the role he imagined for himself here. I am a priest after all. “Fully to understand the Easter story, it helps to be hounded by the mob” he wrote in The Telegraph in 2019, casting himself as the crucified. As responses to his own dark night of the soul, these felt clumsy, verging on the blasphemous, yet also extremely touching. There was no guile in him. He would have found life a lot easier if there had been.

Scruton was always looking for a new way of expressing his conservatism, refusing the idea that it was some sort of grand philosophical theory, and often unhappy with the way he had expressed it in the past. He called it a “temperament” and I suspect it had more to do with the love of dying things than with some generalised political philosophy. Critics of conservatism often only see in it some sort of dead-eyed reactionary obstruction of the new, or a selfish defence of established privilege — they don’t recognise it as an act of love. Cherishing things in the face of their passing away, their intrinsic mortality, is a kind of heroic loving resistance to the fragility of human life.

To hold on to someone, to hold onto forms of life, traditions, institutions — this is where love and conservatism meet. Hence Scruton’s love of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, for example. And because it is the love of dying things — and dying not because they are useless but because they are human — one might also say that conservatism is also something intrinsically tragic and woeful. It is surely not insignificant that Scruton himself had such a mournful demeanour. He wore his politics on his face. Conservatism is a temperament.

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This is what I learnt from Roger Scruton. Conservatism is much more attuned to the spiritual and the emotional in human life than the socialism I spent most of my life subscribing to. As a socialist, I always wanted the world in general to be a better place, to improve. The future was always the place where the world would be better. I would happily ignore the past and the present, even jettison them, in the pursuit of this yet-to-be dream. It was a cold philosophy, despite its genuine desire for universal betterment. The not yet was always preferred to the present. And love in general was always preferred to love in particular. Scruton disabused me of these dangerous abstractions. Love is specific and tragic, a relationship between dying things.

“At the heart of every conservative endeavour is the effort to conserve a historically given community,” wrote Scruton in the Wall Street Journal, in 2002. “In any conflict, the conservative is the one who sides with ‘us’ against ‘them’ — not knowing but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is, therefore, suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.”

I am still new to recognising myself as a conservative. There are some things in this passage that really do not sit right with me. “Us” and “them” is unnecessarily binary and combative — a distinction that too easily slides into Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political as the relationship between “friend” and “enemy”. I just won’t have that. And, though it pains me to say it, there are times when Scruton seemed to enable something that I do find pretty close to racism. The first issue of the Scruton-edited Salisbury Review contained an essay by John Casey on the politics of race. The presence of “West Indian communities … offends a sense of what English life should be like,” he wrote. What a terrible thing to say.

Scruton himself was much more intellectually considerate to other cultures than this. Be they Hungarian, French, Iranian, Levantine, American — he was far from a chauvinist. But he did think that love was the love of the specific, an “us”. And he celebrated the love of one specific place, England, its countryside, its churches and political traditions.

Looking for the good in things, even those things that have become broken, compromised, cancelled or forgotten, could be another description of the conservative temperament. His essay in The Times, from 1984, titled The Art of Motor-Cycle Maintenance, is a love letter to the repairer. “The person who repairs must love the broken object, and must love the process of repair.” Perhaps it is the Christian instinct in me, but that is how I want people to treat each other. Yes, I feel a sermon coming on. We are all broken, but not looking to be thrown away and replaced. But to be loved. So notwithstanding the fact that Scruton had some views I find unacceptable — on homosexuality, for instance — I still want to see the good in him.

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I remain uncertain as to the nature of Scruton’s deeper religious commitments. He once played the organ for me in my church in Kennington. He loved the whole paraphernalia of the English church, its buildings, its music, its liturgy. For all of this, I could not say if he believed in God in the same way that I do exactly. I sensed the degree to which his thoroughgoing empiricism held him back. But he certainly believed in beauty, and that is where his God was to be found.

What this collection of columns demonstrates is the sensitive and emotional temper of his conservatism. He had no time for the kind of brash, money-chasing, me-first philistinism of much that sails under the conservative flag these days. The idea of holding him in the same thought as this trashy lot now in Government who claim the word conservative is an anathema. Scruton was was worth the whole damn bunch put together, as Nick says of Gatsby.

Perhaps he reminds me of a passing age, something slipping away into history, something in need of cherishing and repairing. His world view needs some brushing up and polishing. Some bits need replacing. But what is demonstrated here is a serviceable philosophy of life, intellectually generous, grounded in the specific and the real, and mournful of the destruction that modernity has wrought upon our culture. For all his faults, he was a great man. And we are much the poorer for his passing.

Clearly, something very odd has happened. Consider, for instance, the events of the last week. On Good Friday, the Christian community reflects on Jesus being taken before the Roman Authorities, charged with setting himself up as an alternative king. This year, the Polish Roman Catholic Church of Christ the King in Balham had the ingenious idea of incorporating a real police raid into the liturgy. The police broke up the gathering of Christian worshippers, rather effectively making the point that even in the most apparently benign of political circumstances, Christians derive their authority not from the law of the land but from a king who is not of this world.

Unfortunately, of course, it wasn’t a creative piece of liturgy. Someone had phoned the police to complain. We do not know if his name was Judas. But breakup the service they did. “This is an unlawful gathering,” announced the boys and girls in blue, threatening to fine those gathered in prayer. Despite the fact that — as images of the service clearly showed — most of the congregation were social distancing, wearing masks and had pre-booked their attendance, the police closed down the service on one of the holiest days of the year.

It was clearly not close to being a proportionate response. And the church was right to be furious. The right freely to worship is an ancient freedom that ought never to be messed with so casually. And so, for the first time in my life, I phoned a lawyer in advance of opening up for the Easter weekend. “It is guidance”, she explained, “not law”. As long as I had done a risk assessment, I would be covered. (It’s worth noting, of course, that the Polish church had done precisely that — but it didn’t stop the police.)

I also posted the first section of Magna Carta on a pane of glass on the front of my church door the evening before our Easter service. We are only a few miles from Balham, and we all wondered if the police would be breaking up more church services. The first clause of Magna Carta reads thus:

“First, that we have granted to God, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed.”

As it would happen, the police didn’t show up to complain. Instead, and far more peculiarly, the only hostility I experienced happened after I shared an image of the poster on Twitter. “Magna Carta is only quoted by ignorant ideologues,” was one of the more polite responses.

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What particularly surprised me, though, was that the pile-on wasn’t confined to the usual vulgar suspects. In fact, a number of the critical comments were from medievalist historians, pointing out — often in quite a superior tone — how the foundational text no longer applies; that it was rescinded by the Pope just a few weeks after it was published. And then there were the lawyers, informing me that the text has no legal force. “Bless,” replied one prominent lawyer and blogger, patting me on the head, patronisingly.

Now I must say that, when I stuck the poster to my church’s window, I wasn’t aware quite how contentious a subject Magna Carta has become. Since lockdown, some business owners, including a Bradford hairdresser, have been posting clause 61 on their shop windows to warn off the police; others then accused them of populist numskullery.

Back in January, the Guardian even published a piece claiming that “in the far-Right spaces of social media in particular, Magna Carta is invoked as a digital rallying cry”. Apparently, it continued, Magna Carta is a “delusion” which “converts discontent into a dangerous politics”. It seems that, without me noticing, Magna Carta has become a kind of Right-wing meme, a whole new frontier in our never-ending culture wars.

But there is something very strange about all of this. How did the Left fall out of love with Magna Carta? Back in 2007, a Guardian article attacking the 90-day detention period for suspected terrorists was headlined “Protecting Magna Carta”. Indeed, only in 2015, at the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, Left-wing commentators were falling over themselves to laud the charter as the foundation of not just English freedom, but the very fount of human rights themselves.

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Interestingly, back then it was Right-wing people such as David Starkey who banged on about how “Magna Carta is a great theme for guff”, and progressive human rights lawyers like Dinah Rose QC who disagreed. “I don’t think it is ‘irrelevant guff’,” she said at the time. “I think it is very important. Not for what it meant in 1215 but for the symbol that it became and for the significance that it acquired as a part of the common law.”

Rose is right. Little of Magna Carta remains on the statute book — though, technically, the first section I quoted still does. But its significance has little to do with its current force in law, and everything to do with the fact that, especially from the 17th century onwards, it became a kind of rallying cry against perceived despotism. The Levellers brandished it against the king, the “People’s Charter” of the Chartists took its name from Magna Carta, and Eleanor Roosevelt, credited as the inspiration behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, referring it to the “international Magna Carta for all mankind”. Bless!

Even hard-nosed lawyers think it important. Lord Denning, former Master of the Rolls, called it “the greatest constitutional document of all times — the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. Former Lord Chief Justice and Master of the Rolls Lord Bingham said “it can plausibly claim to be the most influential secular document in the history of the world”.

So how on Earth did today’s Lefties come to think of Magna Carta as some kind of Right-wing bogeyman? On one level, it’s not so surprising that given the mess the Left now finds itself in over their uncritical enthusiasm for lockdown, it has now turned on one of the most powerfully symbolic expressions of resistance to over-weaning executive power. Add to this that dreary Enlightenment propaganda, now taken as gospel by many liberal progressives, that anything medieval is as relevant to contemporary life as praying to a dead saint’s fingernail, and all the conditions for a political upending are in place.

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And so, what was until recently a Right-wing position, exemplified by David Starkey, has flipped into a Left-wing one, with liberal elites sniggering at the ignorance of thick Bradford hairdressers and Polish Christians for seeking to claim some very old and popularly understood freedoms. The world has turned upside down, and not in a good way. As the comedian Tony Hancock famously put it: “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?”

Yet Magna Carta is not some kind of magic amulet that can be used to ward off the police from the church door. It has long been a rallying cry for those who want to assert some basic freedoms, including the freedom to worship.

Back in March, the Scottish courts ruled that its Government’s church shut-down was unlawful, exceeding their legal authority. I do not claim any sort of authority on the law. But I do know when a government has crossed a line with regard to the freedom of religion — and police closing down a Good Friday service is precisely that. I will never seek the permission of Caesar to celebrate the Holy Mysteries. That’s why, for a while at least, Magna Carta will stay taped on my church door.

Some thought it was a bit of a laugh, that all-purpose justification for brutality the world over. And with just enough boys involved to make it a collective effort, individual responsibility was dissolved away in the frenzy of a Dionysian joint enterprise.

Others didn’t know what to do. They watched or slunk away, not wanting to be next. But there would be no escape. Bullying was cyclical. One day you were the bully, the next, you were the bullied. The roles were very swiftly transferable: victim one day, victimiser the next. Pretty much everyone was involved. A kind of omertà pertained, generated by a mixture of fear and shame. The Lord of the Flies wasn’t fiction at my school.

Few people who were at boarding school back in the Seventies can have escaped the effects of this brutal and brutalising culture. Free a group of young boys from parental control and leave them largely unsupervised for hours on end… Only those with the most blindly naïve view of human nature could be surprised at what happens next. And when the school is itself run on the basis of gratuitous violence — beatings being the only language of moral instruction I can recall — one has all the elements of a little lesson in the social dynamics of the crucifixion.

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Perhaps the most challenging thing for a congregation to accept during Holy Week is that the people who welcome Jesus into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week are those same people who jeer for him to be crucified a few days later. All the signs were that this man was the Messiah — half religious leader, half king — who would return the Jewish people to the glory days of Kings David and Solomon. The Messiah was the charismatic frontman for the Make Israel Great Again movement. The sort of person who could draw a crowd, get them all excited, hold them in his hand.

Palm Sunday has all the energy of a Trump rally in a football stadium, with crowds pouring down the Mount of Olives to hail their hero’s triumphant entry into the city. I have joined those crowds myself on Palm Sunday and, even though we know what follows, it still feels like religious enthusiasm at its least self-critical. Punch the air. We are on the winning side.

But when squeezed inside the political cauldron of Jerusalem, something changes. Within days, maybe even within hours, the perspective flips. The all-conquering hero suddenly looks like a funny little man from provincial Galilee, someone who won’t stand up for himself, someone who allows himself to be bossed about by the authorities. And all that nonsense about turning the other cheek. What a loser. And messiahs can’t be losers. The cries of “Hosanna!” fade away to be swiftly replaced by “Crucify!”.

The crowd is the great villain of Holy Week. More so than Judas, the betrayer. More so than Pilate, the pragmatic amoral politician, straight out of central casting. More so than Peter, the denier. The crowd has a kind of demonic corporate personality: fickle, gratuitous, devoid of conscience, at turns both sentimental and brutal. In the crowd, you can no more be blamed for your actions than a starling can be held responsible for the direction of a murmuration. Everyone has deniability, no one has blood on their hands because everyone has blood on their hands.

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In the Gospels, the crowd functions much like the Ring of Gyges, a mythical band that grants invisibility to those who wear it. Plato talks about it in Book 2 of The Republic, where he asks if any of us, when freed from the possibility of detection, would be so virtuous as to resist the temptation to do whatever our passions might compel. The Gospels suggest not.

The liturgy of Holy Week is designed to call us out, to expose the way we flit from friend to betrayer the moment our own security is threatened. If the liturgy is doing its job properly, Christians should recognise themselves as the very people who are screaming to string him up. And piety does not save us from being among their number. There is something more than a little ironic about that. Holy Week is packed full of religious services. Yet Holy Week is also a thoroughgoing attack on religious piety, whereby the more religious you are, the greater your failure.

So, for example, Peter’s denial of Christ — “Nope, I don’t know him” — wasn’t just a one-off. Three times he pretended he wasn’t one of them. And yet, it is from this unpromising material that the church itself is created. Peter was the first Pope.

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This Christian attitude is the absolute polar opposite of that debased and moralistic approach to human values that is known as cancel culture. In cancel culture there is no way of coming back from the taint of guilt. In cancel culture everyone is encouraged to see themselves as a victim but no one has the courage to admit they have been the victimiser — except, of course, in the most general of terms. And the two are connected. Cancel culture offers no redemption, so encourages only the denial of one’s complicity. By contrast, Holy Week offers nowhere to hide from our own cowardice and failure. In this story, we are the betrayers. And yet this is also the one where we emerge transformed.

And that, in the end is the weakness of cancel culture moralism: it leaves everything where it is. People are not changed. In the quiet of Holy Week, I can admit the painful truth that I was a bully too. Both a victim and a victimiser. I looked away when I should have stepped in. I too pretended it wasn’t going on. Because if you can’t admit it, you can’t heal it.

And, of course, she was right. I felt the same at her age, forced to endure the endless, boring ordeal of church; even the words “Mass has ended, go in peace…” still fires up a little dopamine rush in my head. Christianity lacks the glamour of the old gods, but then the world of the old gods was a brutal place and we often forget how strange our society now is.

Reims Cathedral played an important part in a story that began two thousand years ago one Friday, when the sun went down in an eastern province of the Roman Empire and the world was never the same again. A rabbi who had gathered a following in the troubled province of Judea had been condemned to death by crucifixion and suffered that agonising punishment reserved for the worst criminals.

On the Sunday, Jesus of Nazareth’s body had disappeared; soon his followers had, bizarrely, reported seeing him in the flesh and the cult grew and spread; official persecution, starting with the martyrdom of the Apostle Stephen, only made the group stronger.

Yet what might have remained one of many sects during this great period of religious fervour changed course two or three years after the death of Jesus when one of the men tasked with crushing the group, a Hellenised Jew called Saul, was struck blind while on the road to Damascus, and heard the voice: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

These dramatic events would transform the world like no other. Saul, renamed Paul, used his position as a Roman citizen and a Greek-speaker to spread the faith across the eastern Mediterranean.

The impact of the faith, and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, would revolutionise the way humans think, and how they related to each other, in ways that evolutionary biologists and psychologists are only now beginning to explain.

Like with many things, it is only now that we are losing Christianity that we are starting to appreciate its importance. This century began with the New Atheism, an overtly anti-religious movement spurred by the events of September 11; an array of books in the 2000s made the argument that “religion poisons everything”, in the words of Christopher Hitchens. They won, which was largely why New Atheism disappeared. As America moves past the 400th anniversary of its founding by English Calvinists, its religious exceptionalism has finally ended. Atheism is making headway everywhere.

Imagine no religion… fewer than half of U.S, adults belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. (Gallup) pic.twitter.com/KsnNFVDZ5N

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) March 29, 2021

Yet paradoxically, as the sea of faith has retreated, more public intellectuals now take it seriously. In the field of political philosophy Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual repopularised the 19^thcentury French idea that Christianity was the wellspring of individualism, and that contrary to the belief that Enlightenment liberalism was a revolt against the medieval Church, it was a product of it.

Christianity’s revolutionary transformation of western society was then brilliantly laid out in Tom Holland’s Dominion. Holland told the story of how the new religion had upended our worldview, tamed the sexual prowess of powerful men, sanctified the weak and given the poor kudos and pity. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, even gay marriage and the current political radicalism emanating from US campuses, all were products of the Christian revolution.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explored the positive role that religion has on social bonding; Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods looked at how deities became more moral and more universal as societies scaled up.

Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist, is also interested in the way Christianity has affected and changed the western mind. When his The Weirdest People in the World came out last year, America was still in the grip of one of its periodic moments of moral convulsions. Tens of thousands of people were frenziedly protesting against the evil of racism, with some seen washing the feet of people they viewed as sanctified by race. It was an undeniably Christian event, even if its practitioners weren’t conscious of it; blessed are the meek, the first shall be last. George Floyd, another criminal put to death by the authorities, was transformed into a Christ-like figure on murals, along with the various taboos and blasphemies attached.

Over the centuries Christianity has become so dominant that we assume lots of things to be human nature when, as Henrich points out, they are very unusual in the greater scheme of human nature. Universal human rights are a western concept and to most societies completely unintelligible. “We think nepotism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships and expediency,” he writes. People from countries ruled by the medieval Catholic Church, and countries founded by their offspring, are also “less inclined to distinguish in-groups from out-groups, more willing to help immigrants, and less firmly wedded to tradition and custom”.

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At least since the mid-14^th century, there has been an idea that medieval Christianity was a wrong turn for the West, that without monotheism polytheistic Greek-speakers might have sailed the stars, as Carl Sagan imagined. Yet as thrilling as ancient history is, and as remarkable as its achievements were, Roman society was very alien to us in a way that the medieval wasn’t.

A Roman father had total power of life and death over his children, and female infanticide was not unusual. Romans would happily watch an innocent man being torn to pieces by a wild animal for entertainment; slavery was ubiquitous and it was assumed that a man would sexually abuse his female slave; charitable giving outside the family was rare, and those who reached rock bottom in the imperial city would be left to literally die in the gutter.

This was Tom Holland’s realisation: that, although as a classicist he was fascinated by the Greeks and Romans, he couldn’t help but feel a revulsion about their worldview, one which almost completely lacked any pity for the weak. That was because he was a child of the great revolution that began on that Friday in Judea.

Like Holland, I previously imagined Christianity as being a fun-sucking succession of prohibitions, lacking the glamour and vitality of the ancient gods. I pictured ancient Valhalla as a sort of never-ending stag do, while the Christian Heaven appeared as an eerily quiet place where you sat having tea with some great-aunt who disapproved of everything. The Viking religion seemed like it was specifically designed by adolescent males, while Christianity was thought up by elderly women.

And there is a reason for that. Christ appeared that Sunday to his women followers, and, paradoxically for a religion that excluded women from senior roles, it was very female-dominated. Research from early Christian communities in Athens and Rome suggests that women may have outnumbered men by 5 or 6 to 1. The appeal of the new religion was that it domesticated men.

Men can be very idiotic creatures; our bodies start producing huge amounts of testosterone around the age of 14, which gives us the compulsive urge to fornicate or fight. Our brains don’t fully develop until 24 or 25 (and some of us don’t really grow up even after that). In that window between sexual and mental maturity the gender gap in every range of idiotic behaviour goes off the scale — car crashes, drink-related accidents, hospitalisation from violence.

Unlike the totalitarian quasi-religions of the modern era — including the one currently developing in America — Christianity had no naïve illusions about human nature. We are fallen creatures; young men in particular are barbarians who need to be tamed.

As Henrich notes, in bird species male testosterone rises as mating season begins and they prepare to fight other males. The world is cruel, and in both birds and mammals, males with higher testosterone levels tend to have more mates and offspring. Polygyny, the practice of a male having more than one mate, is also associated with higher testosterone, while monogamy comes with lower male testosterone — although in both cases the causal arrow goes both ways.

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So while low-testosterone men are more likely to be monogamous, the state of monogamy lowers their testosterone. So does childcare. As men are drawn into family life their testosterone levels plummet faster than those of their single contemporaries; that’s why many middle-aged men become obsessed with exercise in order to naturally up their T-levels.

Divorce acts as a form of de facto polygyny if powerful men are able to produce offspring with multiple women. It was standard practice in Ancient Rome but Jesus of Nazareth forbade it, seeing it as desertion. His followers opposed infanticide, which was largely initiated by men against females; they also prohibited men from having sex with anyone but their wives. For women this had huge benefits; for low-status males it was an even bigger boon, producing a sort of sexual socialism, or at least sexual social democracy.

From the late second century, Rome was struck by a series of epidemics that fatally weakened the empire. The Plague of Cyprian in the 250s also had a huge cultural impact; all of a sudden Christianity, a minority religion practised by maybe 5% of the population, was everywhere. Traditionalists would have been stunned by the sudden arrival of Christian processions, of younger relatives adopting this strange new faith, worshipping a common criminal. It would have been popular among women in particular.

The western empire was already in ruins by the time that the fatal blow came with the Justinian Plague in the 6^th century. That, combined with a war between the Goths and Byzantines and a freakish period of cold weather, left Rome a ruin of no more than 20,000 people and, like in many former Roman cities, the power vacuum had left the running of the city to the local bishop, who had long since adopted the title of Papa, Pope.

Catholic Christianity was not destined to conquer Europe; it might not even have triumphed over rival interpretations of the faith, such as Arianism. Its eventual dominance owed a lot to its adoption by one of the fiercest of the western tribes, the Franks. In 496 the Frankish leader Clovis, in the midst of a losing battle with a rival German tribe, the Alemanni, cried out to the Christian God who his wife followed; the battle turned in his favour, and in return Clovis was baptised in Reims Cathedral, along with his followers. And this was the fascinating tale I explained to my young children, who were obviously enthralled.

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Clovis’s wife Clotilde was from Burgundy, and was already Catholic, but her husband her previously resisted her demands for him to adopt her religion. Now he was persuaded, and it began a close relationship for “the first daughter of the Church”, as France would become; Charles X would become the last of Clovis’s descendants to be crowned at Reims cathedral, in 1825.

Clovis’s conversion also set about a series of events that would transform Europe; in 800AD the Frankish king Charles came to the aide of the Pope in his conflict with yet another German tribe, the Lombards. When he arrived in Rome in triumph, the Pope placed a crown on his head and Charles the Great — Charlemagne — was named Emperor of the West. Victorian academic Sir James Bryce wrote of this event that “From that moment modern history begins”, but Charlemagne’s empire was less interesting for the usual violence than for the sex, or at least the lack of it.

As well as gathering around him a group of scholars who arguably rescued western Europe from the Dark Ages, Charlemagne’s greatest legacy was in enacting the Catholic Church’s marriage laws. No man was to have more than one wife, no one was to marry a relative. This would have a revolutionary impact on western society, setting us apart from 95% of global cultures. Without cousin marriage, clans grew weaker as people married out; they saw themselves less as members of a patrilinear line and more as wider members of society. Church rules on consent were also vital too; marriage was a sacred institution, and no one could now enter into it unwillingly.

Soon the almost unthinkable developed, the idea of marrying for love, a process known as the “Romeo and Juliet Revolution”. Adult sons and daughters were no longer subject to the patriarch but were individuals in their own rights; increasingly they would set up their own separate homes upon marriage. They were individuals.

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These marriage rules were a way of taming men, in particular high-status men, and they brought huge benefits. Polygamous societies are racked by violence and turmoil, because large numbers of males are left without mates and inevitably cause trouble. The Vikings are the classic historical example, Scandinavia exporting its excess men to terrorise the British Isles, France and what is now Russia.

St Vladimir, who brought the Viking Rus into the faith, supposedly had 500 concubines before accepting Christianity and becoming an improbable saint. The Rus — the name probably means “rowers” — were Vikings who had sailed down the rivers leading to the Black Sea, creating a state that would eventually evolve into the world’s largest. The tenth century Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan had spent some time with them, calling them “Allah’s filthiest creatures”, an adventure which ten centuries later would become one of the biggest box office bombs in history.

Ibn Fadlan recalled how at the funeral of one Rus warrior a slave woman was sacrificed, having first been drugged and forced to have sex with the dead man’s friends, passed around like meat before her murder. It was once thought that a lot of similar tales about the Vikings were Christian propaganda, but multiple examples of human sacrifice have now been uncovered in graves, including in the British Isles.

The Rus had been a nuisance in Constantinople — no more than 50 were allowed in at the same time, like a cornershop next to a troubled comprehensive — and it was left to the Byzantine princess Anna Porphyrogenita to convert them by marriage to Vladimir, a prospect which naturally horrified her.

Her barbarian husband had initially been attracted to Islam, which permitted polygamy — and had the future rulers of Russia been Muslim history would have been very different. It was said that he changed his mind when his ambassadors walked into the Hagia Sophia and felt they were in heaven; the alternative, and perhaps more plausible, explanation is that Vladimir then heard about Islam’s prohibition on alcohol, and lamented that the Rus could never live without drink (“Ivan, call those other guys back in”).

Some Vikings took longer to abandon the old ways; King Canute, whose grandfather Harold Bluetooth had adopted Christianity, still continued the old Danish tradition of a handfast, or second wife. But he was the last officially polygamous ruler of England.

Today we barely notice how unnatural our norms are in a world where traditionally powerful men behaved with the brutality of Caesar or the libidinousness of St Vladimir. That all changed one Friday on a hillside in Judea. I sometimes wonder, though, what we will lose as church attendance continues to slide and, like Romans of the 3^rd century, we see our gods dying around us.

America has seen one of the most rapid de-Christianisations in the past two decades and the results so far are not good. What is left is not the rationalist paradise some naïve public philosophers were claiming at the start of the 21^st century, but a sort of distilled Christianity, which without the supernatural elements is far less rational: and so what results is endless moral panics, a world seen in stark black and white between good and evil, competitive sanctimony and the sentimental glorification of victimhood in which everyone wants the glory of being on the Cross.

For Christians, this week is the most important of the year. And this year’s Holy Week is, around the world, unlike any other. With churches shut, and services either cancelled or streamed online from all-but empty buildings, people will have to find their own space for contemplation. And that goes for non-believers, and lapsed or non-practising Christians, as well as the unambiguously religious.

For my own part, whether I have been in or out of faith, this week has always presented the richest musical opportunities. And though we can’t gather together these days, we can at least swop sources online; so I thought I might share some of the music which for me makes up Holy Week, and which can be heard for free. It is a feast rich enough to fill the long weekend, if not a lifetime.

St Matthew Passion, Bach — performed by Willem Mengelberg and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Normally in this week I would try to go to a performance of Bach’s St John or St Matthew Passion. I’ve heard some wonderful performances — and a few average ones — over the years, but in some ways the performance doesn’t matter because absolutely nothing can diminish the power of these works.

Of course, both have been recorded more times than can be counted. But this week I have been listening again, as I have most years, to a performance whose style is out of fashion, but which has an extra depth that never fails to move me.

This is the recording of the Matthew Passion broadcast on Dutch Radio on Palm Sunday 1939. The annual performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam goes on to this day. But the conductor on this recording is the great Willem Mengelberg (1871-1951), who had been conducting the event since 1899.

While the circumstances of the performance should not overshadow the music, from the first bars of the opening chorus (“Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” / “Come you daughters, help me to lament”) there is a portentousness that makes you breathe differently for a moment. The performance is moving in so many ways, particularly because we now know what that audience — whose occasional coughs you can hear — were about to go through.

Naturally I would recommend listening to it all, but if you must skip, then wait until the end of the opening chorus, then move on to the great Dutch soprano Jo Vincent sing the aria ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben’ (‘Out of love my saviour is willing to die’) which starts at 2:00:59. The whole performance is miraculously available on YouTube. Just listen to those repetitions of the words ‘Aus Liebe’, with those flute notes tumbling down.

Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, Thomas Tallis — performed by the Deller Consort

Period recordings are always a fraught issue. And in general I listen to modern recordings. But sometimes a particular performance is the one you’ve been brought up with or heard first — or has some other quality which keeps it high above all others.

The Lamentations of Jeremiah by Thomas Tallis is one of the jewels of the Holy Week musical liturgy. There are several great recordings, but this one by the Deller Consort from 1958 is the one I listen to most often.

The voice of the countertenor Alfred Deller is not to everyone’s taste, and there are those weird gear-changes in his voice that a modern counter-tenor wouldn’t get away with. But he was a pioneer and it is the fragility of Deller’s voice soaring above the others that makes this recording so special. His voice sounds as though it is going to crack at any moment and in a way it is the sense of how nearly it could go wrong that makes it so clear that it is right.

The full Latin text (beginning “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people”) can be found online. For me the first rendition of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum” (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God”) at about 7 mins in here, is the demonstration of Tallis’s — and Deller’s — greatness.

The Lamentations, Edward Bairstow — performed by the Choir of York Minster

Whilst we are on Lamentations, there is one other setting from the English choral tradition which I must flag up, because it is much less well known than the Tallis. This one from Edward Bairstow was composed in 1942. I had never heard the piece until I started attending the Good Friday service at St Paul’s Cathedral some years ago: a great service, during which the choir always sing Tallis’s Litany in procession, the Allegri Miserere and this piece from Bairstow.

This is a recording from York Minster, but you can imagine the effect of those organ chords each time the choir sings ‘Jerusalem’ in St Paul’s. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it is a magnificent setting of the words and there is something deeply moving about a piece written so firmly in the Anglican choral tradition.

Versa est in luctum, Alonso Lobo — performed by the Tenebrae Choir

One piece that most certainly is a masterpiece — and from a very different choral tradition — is this work by the sixteenth century Spanish composer Alonso Lobo. In my experience, Lobo is one of those composers who, whenever you hear anything by him, makes you immediately wonder why you don’t listen to him all the time. The recording of his magnificent ‘Versa est in luctum’ here is sung by the wonderful ensemble Tenebrae, and was recorded last year in the church of St Bartholomew the Great in London.

The Latin words have been set by many other composers, including Victoria. But I know no setting as intensely moving as this one.

Versa est in luctum cithara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium.
Parce mihi Domine, nihil enim sunt dies mei.

[My harp is turned to grieving and my flute to the voice of those who weep.
Spare me, O Lord, for my days are as nothing.]

Officium defunctorum: Parce mihi Domine — performed by the Monteverdi Choir

Incidentally, some people may know the setting of the last of these words by the slightly earlier Spanish composer Cristobal de Morales. The Hilliard Ensemble made it famous again some years ago in a setting with saxophone improvisation on top, but the sparseness of the original saxophone-less version remains my favourite. Here it is courtesy of the Monteverdi Choir.

Tenebrae responsories: O vos omnes, Tomás Luis de Victoria — performed by the Cambridge Singers

I could go on, of course. Anyone thinking I unfairly skirted over Victoria earlier might be placated by the fact that I don’t think any Holy Week should be gone through without at least one listen to his setting of ‘O vos omnes’ (the words are “O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow”). Any choristers reading will know that every phrase in this piece (especially ‘Attendite’) is as beautiful to sing as it is to hear.

Here is a recording (with score, for anyone who wants to sing along) by the Cambridge Singers.

Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle, Olivier Messiaen — performed by Olivier Latry

Of course, all of these works are works of mourning and lamentation, composed to fit the dejection and desolation of the Holy Week story, leading up to the crucifixion on Good Friday. Easter Sunday of course changes everything, including the music. But that is to get ahead of ourselves. Perhaps I might finish this Holy Week playlist with a rather different final piece.

One of my favourite composers is Olivier Messiaen, the great expander of the organ repertoire, and one of the searing religious visionaries of the twentieth century. One piece of his which is worth turning the volume up on (especially if you have some good bass speakers) is this short work from 1932, ‘Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle’ (‘The apparition of the eternal church’).

I select it not just because it looks forward to what is to come, but because this recording (with score) was made on the great organ of Notre Dame in Paris. Perhaps one Easter soon it will be played in that great cathedral again. It will be very much in the spirit of the Easter story if it is.

*

As an addendum, I might just say: these are tough times for many musicians, like everybody else. Huge amounts of work have been lost. So if these recordings or others that have been made available on YouTube do appeal to you, please do buy the artists’ albums, or those of other groups, and think about booking tickets for their next concerts. We will get back the joy of hearing live music again.

A few letters, it was reported, had been found from the Belfast-born author to a US scientist, discussing the tragic early death of the American’s son, and recalling the passing of Lewis’s wife. “You tell a most moving story. I too have lost what I most loved. Indeed unless we die young ourselves, we mostly do”, wrote Lewis. “We must die before them or see them die before us. And when we wish – and how agonizingly we do, o how perpetually! – it is entirely for ourselves, for our sakes not theirs.”

It was nothing that Lewis hadn’t in essence said before, but it showed yet again how in this age when we fetishise the blackening of whited sepulchers, Lewis seems to escape the purge. He was convinced that within five years of his death he would be forgotten, but since 1963 – he died on the same day as President Kennedy and Aldous Huxley – his influence has instead grown exponentially. His books sell in enormous numbers, films are made of them, and there has even been a play and then a movie, Shadowlands, about his late-life romance.

Lewis, author of the Narnia stories, Miracles, Till We have Faces, Surprised by Joy and so many other implicit and direct defences of Christianity has, up to now at least, largely escaped character attack because there’s just not very much ammunition for the usual assassins to exploit. Some of the female characters in his fiction are hardly champions of liberation, and he was a relatively typical product of his era, but little if anything stands out as a cause for concern. Not, of course, that this always matters to those who cancel therefore they are.

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I’m not sure if it’s still there, but some years ago there was a poignant if seldom noticed symbol in The Kilns in Oxford, the long time home of Lewis. It was the outline of a mezuzah: the small container attached to the doorposts of Jewish homes, containing parchment on which is written the Shema. It was there because one of Lewis’s two stepsons had asked to adopt the birth faith of his late mother, Joy Davidman. Lewis, the world-renowned champion of Christianity, had asked Jewish friends how he could best accommodate the boy.

It was a gently noble gesture, and that decency, or goodness if you like, is particularly significant at Easter as Christians, inevitably, face the now standard taunts not only from social media atheists but from television cynics who really should have better and braver things to do.

Lewis was most prominent between the mid 1930s and early 60s and as such inhabited a dramatically different age — good Lord, the BBC couldn’t get enough of him! But a snobbish disdain for faith had already emerged, particularly in the universities where he taught. He addressed this in his 1952 book Mere Christianity, based on a series of highly popular radio broadcasts.

“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of Heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the Scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a mere symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

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Those who allegedly couldn’t understand “books written for grown-ups” knew exactly who they were. As a consequence they made Lewis’s life at Oxford progressively more difficult, which is one of the reasons why he moved to a more accepting Cambridge in 1954. But even then, his insistence of defending what he saw as Christian truth to a mass audience as well as within his own circle lost him support and allies.

Rather like Tolkien, a friend and another Easter warrior, he was always far more appreciated by his readers than by his peers. If he hadn’t become a Christian and hadn’t written children’s stories he would have been far more respected within the academy, especially for his remarkable lectures, and for his books The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama.

Yet while he may not have been given his proper place in university circles, there is something almost hagiographical in the way he’s regarded in Christian circles, and within the Lewis industry there is, it must be said, a certain dreamy nostalgia. He’s the quintessential caricature of a fantasy don: all tweed and tea and leather armchairs. It’s no accident that he is a virtual cult in the United States, especially and in some ways ironically — he drank and smoked — within the evangelical community. American Protestants may be politically influential but they lack intellectual heroes, and Lewis does very nicely out of fulfilling this role.

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There are numerous profound thinkers making the Christian case today, but none of them wrote a children’s story as timeless as The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or something as deliciously and mischievously clever as The Screwtape Letters – if you’ve never heard John Cleese’s recording of the book about a senior devil writing to his junior, grab hold of it immediately. Or chronicled in a haunting book, A Grief Observed, how it felt to lose a spouse, where he observed that “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.”

He once wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” That’s not always an acceptable sentiment more than 50 years after the man’s death, but Lewis never worried about what was acceptable, only about what he considered to be important. That, at heart, is why old Jack Lewis, father of Aslan and, as he said about his 1929 coming to Christianity, “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”, simply won’t go away, even for The Guardian.

Yet then something miraculous happened. Spreading from east to west across the Mediterranean, travelling along the great network of roads and shipping lanes that constituted the arteries of the Roman Empire, news began to spread that this man whose mortal remains supposedly lay entombed in the grave had been seen alive. Most people, of course, scoffed at such reports — but there were some, small communities of believers, who did not. These, even as the decades passed, kept the faith: the conviction that their saviour would come again, that he would reign, in the words of a widely circulated prophecy, as “the king of Jerusalem”, that he would bring to groaning humanity a universal peace.

In the event, Nero did not come again. Despite the various imposters who appeared in the wake of his death in AD 68, and the fact that, centuries later, there were cities in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire that still honoured his memory, his fate was to be commemorated, not as a saviour, but as a monster. And so, in numerous ways, he was. His readiness to have members of his own family — mother, brother, wife — put to death ensured that when he himself died the dynasty of the Caesars perished with him.

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His sex games were notorious. He was darkly rumoured to have set fire to Rome. By the time that Suetonius, half a century after his death, came to write his biography, the details of his life could be structured almost entirely as a catalogue of deviancies and crimes. “Insolence, an uninhibited sexual appetite, dissipation, greed, cruelty: these were the vices which, to begin with — because he gave expression to them only secretly and incrementally — might well have been chalked up as the excesses of youth, had it not been manifest to everyone even at the time that they were failings, not of age, but of character.”

Nero’s rule had become one protracted blasphemy against the customs of the Roman state. These, hallowed by the centuries, enabled the people of a city that had conquered most of the known world to feel a sense of communion still with the mos maiorum: the customs of their distant ancestors. To no class of society was this more important than the Senate, which still, despite the collapse of Rome’s venerable republican order and its replacement by the autocracy of the Caesars, cherished its time-honoured role as the guardians of tradition.

Augustus, the founder of the Caesars’ monarchy, had succeeded in securing it, paradoxically, by veiling the brute reality of his power. Other emperors too had made an effort to parade their respect for constitutional and moral proprieties. Nero, however, had found the pretensions of the Senate tedious. Over the course of his reign, his boredom with them had metastasised. Increasingly, he had sought to break free from the prescriptions of what he saw as a crabbed and superseded order by creating his own reality. The Senate, wounded and demoralised by a rising swell of executions, had appeared powerless to resist him. In the end, only a series of military uprisings across the empire had been sufficient to topple Nero, and back him into taking his own life. The hatred for him shown by writers such as Suetonius reflected the hatred of an elite that had found all its priorities, all its values, all its assumptions enduring sustained attack.

But the desperation on the part of many to believe that Nero was not truly dead, and that he would come again, reflected the fact that not everybody had loathed him. The readiness of people to put their faith in him as a supernatural saviour derived from the very aspects of his reign that had so offended the political elites. When Nero took to the stage, playing on the lyre or acting the parts of ancient heroes, he had been trampling on everything that Roman traditionalists held sacred. Those who made a show of their bodies before the public gaze, draping themselves in exotic costumes and speaking other people’s lines, were regarded by upstanding citizens as little better than whores.

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But across the Greek world, and even in Rome itself, there were many who had found themselves enraptured by Nero’s command of fantasy and spectacle. To rule as a Caesar was to play a part. Sometimes, when Nero took to the stage, his mask had been painted to look like the hero he was playing, sometimes to look like himself. No one had been able to mistake the point that was being made. The events of Nero’s life, its many trials and tribulations, were as worthy a subject of drama as anything conjured up by the ancient tragedians. This was why, far from attempting to veil the murder of his mother, he had drawn attention to it as publicly as he possibly could by playing a famous matricide from Greek mythology. Nero had enabled his public to believe that heroes once again were treading the earth.

And not just heroes. As a literally colossal memorial to his reign, Nero had left behind in Rome a statue of that golden charioteer of the heavens, the Sun. There had been, though, in the contours of the god’s original face, more than a suggestion of a second famous charioteer. The Colossus, as the bronze had come to be known, “was designed to resemble the Emperor”. In other ways too, Nero had sought to offer to mortals the spectacle of a god become man. In the rumoured overthrow of his predecessor as emperor; in his rapes; in his mastery of metamorphosis, making humans into beasts and men into women, he had adopted the character not just of the Sun but of Zeus himself, the lord of the gods.

If many among the people loved him, then this was in part because Nero had offered them the chance to share in his conflation of the heavenly with the earthly. In the wake of the great fire that, in 64, had destroyed much of Rome, he had planted a park in the very centre of the city. The sprawling lawns, lakes and forests that surrounded what he termed his ‘Golden House’ had offered to the masses a feel of fresh breezes, a break from the monotony of smoke and brick, a hint of the pavilions of the immortals on Mount Olympus.

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Senators, of course, had hated it. The loss of Rome’s familiar sights to countryside had borne witness precisely to what they had always found most disorienting about Nero: his ability to dissolve the boundaries of everything that they had previously taken for granted. So it was that they had accused him of starting the fire deliberately, as a way of clearing a space for his building plans; and so it was that Nero, looking to shift the blame, had fixed on convenient scapegoats. These culprits, even by Nero’s own taboo-busting standards, embodied everything that decent citizens had always most dreaded about moral upheaval: the adherents of a sinister cult whose motivation was nothing less than, in the words of a Roman historian, “their hatred for the norms of human society”.

‘Christians’, these deviants were called, after their founder, ‘Christus’, a criminal who had been crucified in Judaea some decades before, under a previous Caesar. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, had displayed a vengefulness worthy of the Olympian gods. Some of the condemned, dressed in animal skins, had been torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, had been smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, had mingled with the gawping crowds. Suetonius would include his persecution of the Christians in the list — a very short one — of the positives of his reign.

Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, was a man who in time would come to be viewed as the very keeper of the doors of heaven. In 1601, in a church that had originally been built on the site of the tomb where Nero’s two nurses and his first great love had buried him, a painting was installed that paid homage, not to the notorious Caesar, but to the outcast origins of the city’s Christian order.

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The artist, a young man from Milan by the name of Caravaggio, had been commissioned to portray a crucifixion: not of Christ himself, but of his leading disciple. Peter, a fisherman who, according to the Gospels, had abandoned his boat and nets to follow Jesus, was said to have become the bishop of the very first Christians of Rome. Since his execution in the wake of the great fire, more than 200 men had held the bishopric: an office which brought with it a claim to primacy over the entire Church, and the honorary title of ‘Pappas’ or ‘Father’ — ‘Pope’.

Over the course of the 15 centuries and more that had followed Peter’s death, the authority of the popes had waxed and waned; but nevertheless, even though much diminished from its heyday, it remained in the lifetime of Caravaggio a formidable thing. The artist, however, knew better than to celebrate its pomp, its splendour, its wealth. The earthly greatness of the Papacy was turned — literally — on its head.

Peter, the story went, had demanded to be crucified upside down, so as not to share in the fate of his Lord; and Caravaggio, choosing as his theme the very moment when the heavy cross was levered upwards, portrayed the first pope as he had authentically been — as a peasant. No ancient artist would have thought to honour a Caesar by representing him as Caravaggio portrayed Peter: tortured, humiliated, stripped almost bare. And yet, in the city of Nero, it was a man broken to such a fate who was honoured as the keeper of “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

The utter strangeness of Easter does not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine. As Nero well knew, the border between the heavenly and the earthly had always been viewed as permeable. Divinity in the Roman world, however, was understood to be for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and Caesars. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself; to have a person stabbed in the womb, or gelded and made to live forever as a member of the opposite sex, or smeared in pitch and set to serve as a human torch.

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That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. Nero, charging the Christians with arson and hatred of humanity, seems not to have undertaken any detailed interrogation of their beliefs — but doubtless, had he done so, he would have been revolted and bewildered.

Radically though Nero had sought to demonstrate to the world that the divine might be interfused with the human, the Christians he had tortured to death believed in something infinitely more radical. There was but the one God, and His Son, by becoming mortal and dying the death of a slave, had redeemed all of humanity. Not as an emperor but as a victim he had come. The message was novel beyond the wildest dreams even of a Nero; and was destined to endure long after all his works, and the works of the Caesars, had crumbled into dust.

This Sunday, when billons of people around the globe celebrate the triumph over death of a man laid in a tomb in a garden, the triumph they celebrate will not be that of an emperor. “For God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

After almost a year racing against time to stabilise and consolidate the 850-year-old medieval structure, chief architect Philippe Villeneuve and his army of workers were only a few days from a crucial and perilous operation when they had to lay down their tools. The cutting of the 500 tonne scaffolding, which melted during the fire of 15 April 2019, would have to wait — probably for a few months.

For those in charge of the “building site of the century,” as Notre-Dame’s site has been branded by the French media, the weeks and months of inactivity ahead are going to be fraught with anguish. It has always been feared that the giant, metallic lacework of scaffolding could collapse onto the vaults and crash down into the nave. The weather forecast will be scrupulously analysed as storms and high winds could prove particularly damaging.

Still, since dawn broke in pink hues over the Seine on 16 April 2019, the day after the terrible fire, timid hope has prevailed in the heart of Paris as to Notre-Dame’s providential resilience, our ability to eventually mend her injuries and restore her to full glory. So many endearing, almost miraculous, details have contributed to restore our spirit since that day.

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It started at 2am, when General Gallet, head of the Paris fire brigade, made another inspection of the cathedral. There were still six contained fires here and there, and it would take a couple of days to extinguish them all. “Inside the nave, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white patch among the charred debris lying on what remains of the altar,” he confided to me. It was in fact a large, beige, leather-bound book, open, its pages covered with thick dust. “As I got closer, intrigued, I could make out a word through the dust: espérance [hope].” The lectionary, a collection of scripture readings, had survived the destruction. It was open to the hope of resurrection, a few days ahead of Easter.

A few hours later, Parisians and the world started hearing how the stained glass windows, dating back to the thirteenth century, had survived the fire; how the bees of Notre-Dame, living on the roof of the sacristy, had been spotted going in and out of their hives; and how the Grand Organ had suffered only minor damage.

What about the famous fourteenth-century Vierge à l’enfant (Virgin with infant), also known as ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’? Was she still standing by the south-west pillar of the transept, in what was now a zone interdite (no-go area)?

Would the Virgin who had personified Notre-Dame de Paris be found as lovely as she had been left — so elegant, with her melancholy, mysterious smile and her child playing with the fold of her coat? Since 1818, the year she was gifted to Notre-Dame, the tilt of her lip has made her stand out among the thirty-seven Virgin Marys represented in the cathedral. “Pretty and yet so bizarre, with her joyous smile on such melancholic lips!” wrote the French decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1898.

“Seen from one side, she smiles at Jesus, almost mockingly [. . .] Seen from another, this smile vanishes. The lips, pursed, may be heralding tears. Perhaps, by achieving opposite feelings in Our Lady, peace and fear, the sculptor meant to express the joy of nativity and the distant pain of the suffering of the cross.”

The chief architect was stunned: the Virgin with Infant, but also every piece of art — every painting, every statue — was intact, slightly dusty but not even blackened with soot. The fall of the spire at the crossing of the transept had created a flue effect, like a chimney, and sucked out most of the smoke. Remarkably, the rest of the vaults had held, as planned by their medieval creators. Vaults were designed very precisely in order to protect a cathedral from fire. Arches, ribs, empty space had admirably played their part.

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Of course, Notre-Dame’s regeneration goes far beyond architectural considerations. It presents a formidable opportunity for France to ask itself challenging questions. Big traumas always lead to fundamental questioning and offer renewed opportunities.

And the chance to confront, at last, and resolve problems which have blighted the reputation of Notre-Dame for decades: endless queues of tourists on the parvis blocking Parisians’ passage; inept and time-consuming security checks at the gates; the unattractiveness of cheap souvenir shops inside the cathedral — the list of such unpleasant practicalities is long. What is needed is a complete overhaul, and the possibilities are plentiful.

Why not, for instance, utilise the vacant carpark underneath the parvis to organise an access point to the cathedral for tourists, with shops and facilities? Some of this space could be used for the archaeological crypt, which needs a complete review. Why not create a museum in the partly unoccupied Hôtel-Dieu, the former hospital at the heart of Paris standing right across the parvis — as in Milan, where the museum of the Duomo, situated a few steps away from the cathedral, offers an opportunity to understand and learn about its history? So many of Notre-Dame’s works of art from across the centuries have been scattered around France in different museums for lack of a dedicated space in Paris, about which many historians have been campaigning for decades.

As for the spire, the international competition for a new flèche, launched the day after the fire by the French prime minister, now seems a distant memory, buried in the drawer of ‘good intentions but bad ideas’. The latest thinking is to ask the French people to vote on Notre-Dame’s future spire which, by all accounts, should be rebuilt identically.

There is one moment in particular that many Parisians are looking forward to; it is one that architect Philippe Villeneuve often dreams about. When the spire collapsed on 15 April, the copper rooster perched on its tip fell 96 metres to the ground. Instead of disintegrating like the rest of the spire, made of wood and lead, it just whirled in the air like an incandescent ball and remained in one piece. At dawn, Villeneuve found the battered rooster lying in the gutter of rue du Cloître Notre-Dame. Inside, the relics of Paris’s patron saint Genevieve were intact. He understood then that his work of nursing Notre-Dame back to her former glory would only feel complete when he placed the rooster back on the new spire. Paris awaits.

Agnès Poirier’s book, Notre-Dame: The Soul of France, was published on 2nd April by Oneworld. 

It was the defining event for a generation of Enlightenment-inspired philosophers who began to put into words questions that had been circulating as far back as the ancient Greeks about the relationship between God’s benevolence and the senseless suffering that exists in the world. They called it “the problem of evil”.

In 1779, David Hume gave it its classic formulation:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is be both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?”

For a certain sort of atheist of the Enlightenment school, this argument is the slam-dunk against God’s existence. And, inevitably, the question has returned, as it always does at moments of crisis and fear. How can religious minded people go on asserting God’s existence at a time when thousands of people around the world are dying from this hideous virus? Where is God in all this horror?

Indeed, in the battle between God and the virus, the virus seems to be winning. It has shut down the churches, and shifted the centre of spiritual gravity to the hospital. It is the NHS, not God, that heals. This is our religion now. The old religion of God has become an archaic irrelevance.

“God is dead”, Nietzsche famously proclaimed. Though he was theologically savvy enough to know that this phrase would play tricks with people. And that many wouldn’t understand the in-joke. As a child of a long line of Lutheran pastors, Nietzsche would probably have sung the Lutheran hymn “O sorrow, O suffering” (Johannes Rist, 1641) many times as a child. “O great distress! God himself lies dead. On the cross he died and by doing so has won for us the realm of heaven.”

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God’s death is not something that Christians cannot imagine. Indeed, it is at the core of their proclamation. Atheists who wave this banner, beware. For the phrase “God is dead” plays squarely into the hands of the Christian evangelist. It recalls an event that is at the very heart of their narrative.

So how would I answer David Hume? I would say there is no such thing as an omnipotent God. Omnipotence is not a word in the Bible. And the idea of omnipotence comes from a completely different tradition of intellectual thought from that of the Hebrew scriptures. The idea of God as a human being hanging helpless on a Roman instrument of torture is not an image of omnipotence. In this sense, Hume’s challenge is not one that has ever detained me very much.

But I also have a far deeper problem with the way in which this question is posed. For a while, I taught philosophy at Oxford University. I also have a PhD in the subject. But in the end I gave up philosophy as an unsatisfactory discipline; not least because it seemed to me to be fundamentally unserious about many of the sorts of things it argues about, and particularly when it comes to suffering.

As a priest, dealing with death and loss all the time, no one has ever asked me the Hume type question, and certainly not in his measured tones. Never. Yes, many have been fantastically angry, spitting out the question “why?” as an accusation against anyone and everything. Many have been broken by their experience of pain and loss, alone in a dark room, unable to make themselves food or get out of bed. Perhaps it is unfair of me to call philosophy an unserious discipline when it comes to human suffering, but it has never helped me respond to people in such a state as this.

But the Bible has. When Job spits verbal fire at God for the death of his family, he manifests a sort of rage that feels far more realistic than the calm and studied logic of the dispassionate Enlightenment atheist. Job’s invective against God is so fierce that one can imagine Job thinking that non-existence would be too good for Him. Indeed, for the psychotherapist Carl Jung, the suffering of Job cries out for an answer, and pushes the divine into a kind of psychological development that ends up with the death of Jesus on the cross as a supreme act of identification of God with human suffering. According to Jung, the cross is — as the title of his book makes plain — “The Answer to Job”.

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At the very least, then, it is not that the so-called “problem of evil” is something Christianity runs away from. Indeed, it is the very point of Christianity to find a way of responding to human suffering in such way that has the sort of existential gravitas required by the challenge. That God — even understood symbolically as the sum total of human meaning — is also consumed by horrendous suffering and death, is a way to express of monumentality of what is at stake here. It’s not a “problem”. It’s far more than a mere “problem”.

That’s why the church feels like the right place for many of us to go and cry. The church is not an argument. It’s not a place for Socratic disputation. It’s a place where we can be broken, presided over by a man hanging broken on a wooden cross. And it formats our brokenness with a story that speaks of love as being ultimately greater that death, and as a triumph over even the most purposeless of human pain.

This is why human suffering does the exact opposite of what the Enlightenment atheist imagines it should do: it fills our churches, it doesn’t empty them. And not because it offers some cheap consolation that all will be ok. But for the opposite reason that it takes seriously the full weight and horror of human suffering. Indeed, church remains one of the few spaces in our culture in which we are allowed to acknowledge the existence of futile suffering without someone feeling so uncomfortable about it that they need to reassure us all that everything is going to be OK.

I have sat in church on my own quite a bit these last few weeks. I have a large wooden cross set up in the aisle. I am sitting with a dying man, keeping him company. And this feels like the proper place for me to express some sort of solidarity with those on ventilators, alone, struggling for breath; those receiving the news of the death of a mother, father, child; those being buried by men in protective clothing, no mourners there to say goodbye. I call it prayer. Atheists call it foolishness. And perhaps it is. But foolishness feels like the least of my worries these days.

Lent was first created as a way of getting ready for Easter, especially for those preparing for baptism. Forty days of fasting and self-denial were supposed to mirror Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, which, in turn, was an echo of the forty years that the people of Israel had spent in the desert, searching for their promised land. In these empty, barren desert spaces, with little surrounding them to sustain life, human beings had to reckon with their own vulnerability and closeness to death. And this experience squeezed out various forms of wisdom that more comfortable periods of life tended to obscure.

Above all, the daily reminders of human mortality were a way of focusing attention on the things that mattered most in life. Death’s presence burned away the trivial, like a refiner’s fire. Lent was supposed to mimic that experience.

This year, mimicry is not required. In locked down Britain, Lent has has universally become a period of isolation, scarcity and the constant reminders of death.

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I wondered about beginning this column with the words: “The good news is that you are all going to die.” But I thought some may find this offensive, especially those who fear for their loved ones. Yet, as a clergyman, who has taken a great many funerals and so has lived up close and personal with death for over a quarter of a century, I have learned many important things from her. She has taught me to hold more closely the people that I love. That there is something so precious about the life we have, yet so often we take it for granted. That there is a beauty to the world made more vivid, more electrically alive, precisely because it is transient.

In 1994, Melvyn Bragg conducted an interview with the writer Dennis Potter who was dying of cancer. Potter was truly magnificent, flying with intellectual energy and characteristic defiance. Drawing on a fag in the studio and sipping from a glass of Champagne, Potter was doing the interview his own way. Quite rightly, he cared little about the sort of religion that offered God as some cheap way of avoiding death. But the presence of death enabled him to see things that he hadn’t properly seen before. It’s best to watch him saying it, but these are the words:

Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it.

Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people — bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

This is not an especially ‘religious’ way of expressing the good news that we are going to die. But it speaks to me more than it usually does because the blossom is out now in my garden. The interview was conducted on the 15th March, so Potter was describing something that many of us can see at this time of year. And wondrous is the right word.

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Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly Mackenzie

I had a similar experience this week with a tomato. I wouldn’t say that we are running out of food. But the present experience of scarcity certainly focuses the mind on the value of what we have. And this was the last tomato in the fridge, which I chopped up for our baby son. And I don’t ever remember chopping a tomato with such care, with reverence almost. It felt so precious. And — it’s a ridiculous thing so say, I know — but I almost felt like crying while preparing it.

But this sense of reverence is what I mean by the sort of wisdom that can be squeezed out by the whole Lenten experience. And if this is true of a simple tomato, or plum blossom, how much more true is it of our attitude towards the people that we love. Death is a pointer to who or what we value the most. And so we squeeze them tighter. And tell them once again that we love them. Or so we should.

Christianity has suffered a great deal from the idea that it is a sort of glorified life insurance policy, offering immortality in return for the measly premium of a little bit of religious believing. But that’s really not it at all. Not least because total freedom from death wouldn’t be worth having. Immortality is a desire driven by fear. It seeks, above all, the protection of me, on and on, into infinity. This sort of infinitely endless life could only ever end with suicide. Or madness.

See, for example, Janacek’s famous opera The Makropulos Affair — something that those who speak foolishly about transhumanism and uploading oneself into the ether, there to survive forever, could do with reflecting on more. That’s not salvation. It is philosophical trash talk and a theological version of hell.

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Covid-19 is the nail in the coffin for traditional funerals

By Andrew Watts

Christianity offers the kind of salvation that takes place when everything is not all about me — when the me has been displaced from the centre of one’s life. And if that transition can be said to be an escape from death, it is to the extent that we have placed the centre of gravity in our life outside of ourselves; that is, in a place where our own personal death cannot reach it. This de-centering isn’t all about not dying. It’s about the sort of other-centredness that draws the sting from the fear of personal annihilation. And it is an extraordinary liberation.

This is a more philosophical way of expressing the good news that you are going to die. Another way is to speak of the thing that Lent is specifically a preparation for: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that takes place at Easter. When the earliest Christians were baptised at Easter, they were not just being sprinkled with a bit of holy water as if it were some sort of spell. They were being symbolically drowned. Baptism is death and resurrection imagery. The old person is extinguished, the new one born again. We are preparing to die so that we might more fully live. That, in Christian terms, is the good news.

Lent is not some morbid gothic fantasy about death and dying. The word itself comes from the old English word for the spring season, lencten. Lent, properly understood, is a celebration of life. Dennis Potter had it exactly right. It’s not so much about cheap reassurance — as he put it, “bugger that” — it is, as it were, about seeing the blossom. “Death is the mother of beauty” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. And like Potter, I can see it from my window.

I know it might sound crazy. Offensive, even. But never before has the season of Lent felt so beautiful to me, so thrillingly alive.

For Christians, it is a celebration of the moment God broke through into recorded time, became incarnate, fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament, atoned for our sins on the Cross, and, in the ultimate miracle, conquered sin and death through the resurrection.

Many who aren’t Christian still believe it to be “the greatest story ever told”. They might not be prepared to acknowledge the divinity of Christ, but the story of redemption and atonement nonetheless inspires awe.

This sense stems from the story’s deep connection to our moral identity and our sense of sin and guilt. Humans instinctively yearn for repentance and forgiveness – wanting absolution and a fresh start when we make mistakes.

Secular apologists for the power of the story point to Jung and what he had to say about the hold myths have over us: the endurance of a story is testament to its strength and ‘truth’. Arguably, the Christian understanding of the nature of human responsibility and redemption has never been surpassed in moral philosophy.

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Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

Nelson Mandela understood this. When he sought to bring reconciliation to the peoples of South Africa after the apartheid era, he realised that it needed something special. His Truth and Reconciliation Committees brought the victims of racism and oppression face to face with their persecutors in such a way that the oppressors (some of them) repented and the victims (many of them) were able to forgive. Some of the moments of confession and forgiveness during these hearings were among the most moving you will ever hear.

In this way, Mandela managed to draw a line under apartheid, and sowed the seeds for a reconciled society. It was an extraordinary act of political imagination.

In secular Britain, we have almost abandoned the traditions – even the language – of repentance, forgiveness and redemption. Yet we are most certainly in need of reconciliation: reconciliation with our history as a nation, and reconciliation with each other over our different interpretations of that history.

A recurring theme in our national conversation over the past few years (quite heavily embedded in the Brexit debate) has been the shame in some quarters over certain episodes in our history.

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By Douglas Murray

In some instances, this is justified. We cannot be anything other than ashamed of our role in the early expansion of the slave trade. The depredations and cruelty of the East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries have still not been fully laid bare. Our role in waging war on China in order to force them to open their market to the opium trade (which makes the opioid epidemic look like a picnic) is a national disgrace.

We recently commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre, when Brigadier Reginald  Dwyer opened fire on up to 1,100 demonstrators with the specific aim of “striking terror” into the Punjab. The Iraq War is one of the most damaging cases of displacement activity in history.

Yet we were also the country which, thanks to William Wilberforce, was the first to bring an end to the slave trade. The British Empire exported democracy and the rule of law to peoples across the globe, and our withdrawal from Empire was one of the speediest, most dignified and peaceful of all imperial retreats. (The enduring loyalty and friendship of the British Commonwealth is testament to our legacy). Countries from all over the world honour and respect us for the role we played in defending freedom against the Nazis.

Our imperial history, though, is contested ground. According to a recent YouGov poll, 59% think the Empire is something to be proud of, 19% something to be ashamed of. That is a significant minority who only feel shame for our country’s past.

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Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

The shame narrative was embodied in the recent assault on the memory of Winston Churchill, in which he was described as a “white supremacist and mass murderer”. It is also a motivator for those people around Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, such as Seamus Milne. It is an undercurrent of Jon Snow’s “I have never seen so many white men in one place” Channel 4 News.

Is it not time to bring both sides of the debate together?  We can all repent of the episodes which are a source of shame but celebrate the achievements of which we can be proud.

Our national history should not be a source of such polarisation. A little truth telling from both sides would bring us to a more settled understanding which embraces both those things which we can celebrate along with the “crimes, follies and misfortunes” which stain the history of all countries and communities.

To progress, an individual must let go of those things holding them back. They must let these die, so that something new can be born. So too a nation.

We already have a National Remembrance day. But this is a day of mourning for those we lost. Perhaps we could introduce a new Day of Reconciliation. It could be called British History Day.

We could celebrate Magna Carta, Wilberforce, the liberation of Europe. But we can also commemorate the episodes of which we are ashamed – the slave trade, the East India Company, the Opium Wars. We could bring together all parts of the community to acknowledge the ‘sins’ of the past and make peace. Might it bring healing?

So what was he to do with the family of four in the back of his cab? He had just brought them from Heathrow, he said. And they didn’t speak any English. Weary faces looked out of the back window, including those of a young boy and an even younger girl. These people had nowhere else to go. I said I would try and sort something out. As they got out of the taxi, I noticed that the mother was holding onto a small pendant containing the unmistakable, bespectacled image of Oscar Romeo. They were from El Salvador.

Oscar Romero was assassinated in March 1980, shot by a single bullet through the heart as he celebrated mass in the hospital chapel. To be murdered thus, in the course of celebrating the Eucharist, feels to this priest like the ultimate sacrifice – a reminder that the offering of the wine is also the offering of blood outpoured.

It was only last year, after much official consternation, that he was canonised. When Pope Frances conducted the ceremony he wore the very same cincture (a sort of liturgical girdle) that Romero was wearing on the day he died. It was still stained with Romero’s blood. For the people of El Salvador, it is the blood of a martyr.

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America 2025: a nation violently divided

By Michael Warren

Romero became the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, a few years before the military dictatorship took power. The coup sparked 12 years of civil war between the military Junta and various groups of Left-wing, some Marxist, insurgents.

Paranoid about the threat of Communism on their southern doorstep, the United States under Presidents Carter and Regan ploughed millions of dollars into El Salvador, supporting the military Junta, and its brutal suppression of leftist opposition. It was under the ‘very religious’ President Carter that the US funded the Junta that, in turn, funded the death-squads that carried out the assassination of Archbishop Romero.

Romero was a conservative, with strong links to Opus Dei. The Vatican hoped he would respect the difference between religion and politics. But, as the violence escalated, and as the Salvadorian security forces began disappearing those who questioned their authority, Romero started to challenge the brutality of the oppression.

On the day before he was killed, he used his regular slot on the radio to call for the army to disobey their orders: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”

The week following his assassination, 250,000 mourners gathered at Romero’s funeral. The army placed sharp shooters on the rooftops overlooking the funeral procession. There were 42 people were shot that day, and over 200 were wounded. Things got worse. According to a UN Truth Commission, more than 75,000 people were tortured, unlawfully killed and forcibly disappeared during the internal armed conflict in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.

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What if Trump played nice with the Democrats?

By Henry Olsen

No one was ever charged with Romero’s murder. Even the Vatican distanced itself from an archbishop they suspected of being too influenced by ‘liberation theology’ – a doctrine that blended Marx and Moses, and one that was an anathema to the viscerally anti-Communist Pope John Paul II.

From Washington to the Vatican, Romero the martyr was something of an embarrassment, and so he was carefully re-branded as something akin to a terrorist sympathiser. Even the Salvadorian church, brutalised by the Junta, with priests and nuns raped and murdered, fell into line. Throughout the civil war, journalists who asked too many questions were often intimidated into silence. And in 1993, after the war had come to an end, the Slavadorian authorities passed an Amnesty law, preventing any investigation of the atrocities that went on during the conflict.

Outside of the more conservative quarters of the Roman church, however, Romero was being held up as a hero of the faith. In 1979, the Queen unveiled 10 new limestone statues of Modern Martyrs over the main front door of Westminster Abbey; among them were Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Fr Oscar Romero.

In El Salvador itself, it was ordinary church people that kept the memory of Romero alive. He was a saint to them long before the present Pope – who had himself ministered under a military dictatorship in South America – resurrected his reputation.

The children of the family that got out of the taxi on my doorstep were too young to remember any of this. But they live in its shadow nonetheless. During the Seventies and Eighties thousands of Salvadorian refugees made their way to the United States, seeking safety.

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Why we should welcome the populist victory in Mexico

By Charlotte Pickles

Many of them gathered in the poorer parts of Los Angeles, the city of angels. Here a number of them came into contact with gang culture and adopted its ways. Here the notorious MS 13 and 18^th Street gangs were born, famous for their face tattoos and extreme violence, many of whom were deported back to El Salvador.

Returning to a country in which civil society had broken down which was awash with guns left over from the war, the gangs flourished. Oblivious to the fact that the US helped create the conditions that had so brutalised El Salvador, Donald Trump has described these people as “animals”. They feature prominently in his justification for the building of a wall on the Mexican border.

But the history of a nation isn’t just one story. It is the accumulation of many little family tragedies. And my new friends, standing alone with a few bags in a strange car park in south London, were one such story.

The Home Office helpline for refugees was closed for the weekend. First we went up to the Columbian restaurant at the Elephant and Castle for food. I found them some bedding and contacted a priest at the nearby Anglican church that has a Spanish speaking mass so he could come and interpret.

Slowly, the local church community rallied round. A collection was taken. The twitter community donated money. I bought them warm clothes. A family took them in for food. They joined us for Sunday mass. On Monday morning – credit where it is due – the Home Office agreed to give them temporary shelter while their asylum application was being processed.

This story had a successful outcome; if not, as yet, a finally happy ending. But many don’t. The Asylum Seekers Day Centre  receives many whose experiences – from Iraq and Syria, from Somalia and Eretria – tell of large scale political upheaval and of individual personal tragedy. And while our political leaders do not always distinguish themselves in response to the helplessness and pain of asylum seekers, it is worth noting that many ordinary people do – both church people and non-church people. Little victories count.

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The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

Back in El Salvador it is the evangelical churches that have developed a particular ministry among gang members. MS 13 employ a hand signal of ‘devil horns’ to signal their membership. For some, the only way to leave gang culture is through religion – gangs allowing members to quit only if they have a demonstrable commitment to faith. “The only way out is through Jesus” as one gang member put it.

There are all sorts of problems with this, of course. Is such a commitment real, we may ask, from the comfort of our own living room – as if salvation were merely an intellectual debating point. But for many, escaping the grip of gangs is precisely what salvation looks like.

Salvador means saviour. And that comes in many forms. For saints like Romero it meant following Christ to the place of execution. This week, for Christians in safer lands, it will mean the liturgies of Holy Week – which will also entail facing the cross and all its horror and abandonment. This too is a battle of good and evil. And, for Christians, one in which our salvation is also very much at stake.