Less than a year before that crisp Sunday, Brand had been publicly accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. He denied any wrongdoing. He was subsequently charged with seven alleged offenses and today stands trial for them at Southwark Crown Court on three counts of rape, three of sexual assault, and one of indecent assault, together relating to allegations dating from 1999 to 2009.

To some, there was something opportunistic about the timing of Brand’s religious rebirth. But the more interesting story is what kind of Christian he would go on to become. For he did not simply become a tea-and-biscuits Anglican: he moved, like a moth to a flame, toward a distinctively American religious and political ecosystem, one whose ideas about rebirth, persecution and personal testimony fit both him and the American Right strikingly well — even as the same trends are now following Brand back home to Britain.

Brand came to Christianity via Grylls and Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical church in South Kensington. Yet if British Christianity offered him a font, that was about it. Within days of the baptism, Christian magazine Woman Alive cattily argued that it was too soon to hold him up as an example of God’s redeeming power. A few months later, Brand gave the publication’s pearl-clutching readers something else to worry about: he began baptizing people himself. One self-released photograph showed him officiating in a pair of white budgie smugglers. The convert was fully dressed. One vicar quoted in Premier Christian News quipped that he had baptized a great many people over the years — and had somehow always managed to keep his clothes on.

County Road 30A couldn’t be more different from South Kensington. Running for a little over 20 miles along the Florida Panhandle, following the northern spit of Florida until it reaches Alabama, 30A is lined by beach towns, whose tin roofs and picket fences evoke a dream of small-town America. Locals dart between pastel villages by golf cart, past pale quartz beaches and the Gulf’s turquoise water. Seaside, the area’s main town, was the set for The Truman Show, a 1998 film about a man living inside a television broadcast and whose neighbors, unbeknown to him, are all acting for the cameras.

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Brand moved his family here in the autumn of 2024 — a few months after his baptism, and just before Trump’s re-election — explaining that he could no longer live in a country whose media, government and judiciary would always find a way to muzzle anyone who became an inconvenience. He did not come as a man hiding from the limelight. Neighbors reported seeing him as a permanent fixture at the Saturday farmers’ market; he cycled through Seaside calling out blessings to passers-by; one morning in December, after bumping into a group of groomsmen on the beach, he accepted their invitation to the wedding later that day.

Brand worships at Good News Church in Santa Rosa Beach, which invites people to be “born again through Jesus”. In November 2025, The Times reported that he had begun baptizing willing converts in a penguin pool at the Emerald Coast Zoo, a nearby Christian-themed attraction. Never one to miss an opportunity to furnish his followers with devotional content, Brand posted the footage himself with a penguin emoji. It’s an odd thing to watch: the shirtless celebrity, the solemn words, the tilt-dunk backwards, all in the company of a colony of flightless seabirds going about their business. Then again, this is Florida, America’s great subtropical carnival of roadside oddities, religious revivalists, get-rich-quick schemes and anti-government eccentrics, a place where the sacred and the absurd have always rubbed shoulders.

A parody to many Brits, Brand is legible to Florida in a way he could never be in Henley. He has also landed in a place where his new faith sits comfortably alongside almost everything he already believed. The wealthy, photogenic beach towns of 30A are hardly a wilderness of sackcloth and penance. Here, Christianity, biohacking, hot yoga and Pelotons coexist with remarkably little friction. A man who has spent decades moving between spirituality, addiction recovery, yoga and anti-corporate politics barely has to change his clothes.

From the churches of 30A, Brand quickly found rather more powerful friends. Among the first was Sean Feucht, a long-haired, guitar-strumming evangelist and Trump devotee, whose ministry has been dogged by allegations of financial mismanagement. By February 2025, a few weeks before he was charged, Brand was lauded at a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago hosted by America’s Future, a conservative organization that campaigns for “durable institutions” and “liberty”. There, Brand was handed a glimmering “Global Defender of Freedom” award, sharing the bill with Mike Tyson and the singer Ted Nugent.

Then, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, the first since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Brand opened his speech on his knees, thanking God for the example of forgiveness set by Kirk’s widow. He told the crowd that the words “turning point”, to him, meant repentance. When he replayed the speech a few days later on Stay Free with Russell Brand, his video podcast devoted to politics, spirituality and the supposed evils of the establishment, the episode came with a giveaway promoting Reborn, his own wellness brand, and which sells the sort of biohacking supplements beloved by the American alternative-health movement. First prize was a Jeep Wrangler and $10,000 cash.

Brand’s website continues in a similar vein, inviting visitors to join Awakened Wonders, a subscription community with whom he reads and prays weekly. The mailing list promises subscribers their “place on the ark”. Videos end with a nudge towards a premium channel on Rumble, where subscribers can join the “movement”. And this spring came a book, How to Become a Christian in Seven Days, 192 Tony Robbins-endorsed pages and yours for $19.79. The publisher: Tucker Carlson Books.

As these examples imply, Brand has entered a religious culture with few issues blending money and faith. From the television evangelists of the Seventies and Eighties, with their enormous hair, enormous congregations and even more enormous bank accounts, to the prosperity preachers of today’s megachurches, certain strands of American evangelicalism have proved remarkably adept at reconciling God with Mammon. Faith need not mean renunciation; it can promise abundance, better health, greater happiness and a more successful you. The language of salvation has mingled with that of self-improvement, and the American pulpit has become a platform from which to sell both.

It helps, too, that behind Brand’s swelling online following — 6.6 million YouTube subscribers and more than two million more on Rumble, a self-styled free-speech alternative — sits an architecture of belonging that he’s been building for years. Long before his conversion, Brand was cultivating a community of the supposedly awakened, first through online sermons railing against the mainstream media, then through podcasts and live events promoting his particular brand of enlightenment. Christianity has furnished the enterprise with a new vocabulary, especially given his new political contacts, but the business model is remarkably familiar.

Theology plays a role here too. “Born again” is a phrase from the third chapter of John’s Gospel, in which Jesus tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that no man will see the kingdom of God unless he is born anew. For much of Christian history, this was interpreted as the slow, lifelong work of worship. It was the Protestant revivalists of the 18th century who turned it into an event: a datable, theatrical moment in which a person becomes something new.

American evangelism has always had a special fondness for the “twice-born”. Take the revivalist minister Charles Finney, leader in the 19th century of the Second Great Awakening. He would seat the unconverted on an “anxious bench” at the front of a tent and publicly wrestle with their souls in full view of their neighbors, establishing “testimony” — confessional, mea culpa monologues — as a form of popular entertainment. It’s a short hop, conceptually at least, to the Emerald Coast penguin pool. The spectacle attracts the faithful; the faithful become followers; and followers, as Brand knows better than most, can be monetized.

Compare all this to British Christianity. Charismatic Anglicanism — the CofE’s emotionally expressive branch that emphasizes personal encounters with the Holy Spirit — may have given  Brand a theology of dramatic renewal. But it also came embedded in a national church whose instincts run pastoral and discreet, in a country where public displays of piety are more likely to provoke embarrassment than applause. The American habit of treating salvation as both a public spectacle and a commercial opportunity has never quite taken hold here. In Britain, a celebrity finding Jesus is more likely to raise eyebrows than confer authority. In America, though, finding Jesus can be the beginning of a lucrative new public life, even the start of a second career.

As Brand’s embrace by Magaworld implies, meanwhile, this is especially true given the broad political context. The New Apostolic Reformation, the radical fringe of the American charismatic network, whose ideas have shaped figures like Feucht, now talks about Christians conquering the “seven mountains” of culture: from government and media to education and the arts. “We want souls, and we want nations,” declares Lance Wallnau, one of the movement’s leading evangelists. And, under Trump, this vision of politics as spiritual warfare has found a receptive audience. A 2025 survey found that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants sympathized with or embraced Christian nationalist ideas. To be clear, not all these belong to the NAR, but the numbers suggest how far this fusion of faith and politics extends. Certainly, on 6 January 2021, as rioters stormed the US Capitol, leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation gathered outside, blowing horns, speaking in tongues and praying for angels to drive a demonic serpent from the Senate. For them, the struggle for political power was quite literally a battle between heavenly forces. In this cosmology, opposition from the press or the courts can be read not just as mere politics, but as a kind of spiritual resistance, a sign the believer is doing something right.

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Some of the congregants of Santa Rosa Beach remain unconvinced by their neighbor’s transformation. Josh Parish, a local Christian real estate agent, was quoted as saying he thought Brand was “a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman”. But to those who want it, a language is available — woven through its politics and increasingly through its churches — in which demonetization, de-platforming, hostile coverage can be narrated as the familiar sufferings of the faithful.

Little wonder Brand continues to make inroads into politics. In September, he appeared at Washington’s lavish Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, moderating a discussion on healthcare reform with senior Trump administration officials. Vice President JD Vance and Health Secretary RFK Jr were also on the program. The spectacle captured something of the new American Right: evangelical Christianity, alternative medicine, self-optimization and political grievance mingling in a movement that has made suspicion of established authority practically a qualification for belonging. Brand, whose joss-stick spirituality and conspiracy-laden sermons have made him an increasingly eccentric figure in British public life, has found himself a place amazingly close to the center of US power.

And in a sign, perhaps, of how strong American culture-war currents now are, something similar is now happening back across the Atlantic. Where the nationalist Right once invoked Christianity largely as a marker of British heritage, some of its more radical figures are increasingly embracing the language of evangelical revival. Tommy Robinson, for instance, claims to have found Jesus in prison. Last year, at Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London, crosses rose above a sea of St George’s flags; crowds chanted “Christ is King”; and a minute’s silence was held for Charlie Kirk. All this dismays many British church leaders. “The church is not the chaplain to any political tribe,” stressed Mike Judge, editor of the Evangelical Times. The Church of England, from which Brand’s religious journey began, has also joined Pentecostal, Baptist and Methodist leaders in warning against misusing the cross to exclude others.

Yet more than politics or commercialism, there is one more way of looking at Brand’s conversion: as the latest in a long line of reinventions. After all, he has spent most of his life killing off previous versions of himself. There was Russell Brand the heroin addict; Russell Brand the priapic MTV presenter; Russell Brand the Hollywood actor and husband of Katy Perry; the revolutionary who wanted to overthrow capitalism; the wellness guru; the anti-establishment broadcaster who railed against big pharma, big data and the global elite. Christianity has offered him perhaps his most dramatic transformation yet, albeit with the added promise of eternal life.

This month marks 800 years since Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone died at the Porziuncola, on the plain below Assisi, on the evening of 3 October 1226. He was about 44, blind, stigmatized and completely worn out. Kenneth Clark, in the third episode of Civilisation, called him a religious genius, “the greatest, I believe, that Europe has ever produced”. What was the genius?

Not doctrine. Francis had almost none, and what he had he got from hearing the Gospel read aloud and taking it literally, which is the one thing the Church has never wanted anyone to do. It was a position on property. The Franciscan Rule of 1223 puts it in a sentence: “Let the brothers not make anything their own, neither house, nor place, nor anything at all.” They are to go through the world “as pilgrims and strangers”, and they are forbidden money in any form. In his “Testament”, dictated in his last weeks, Francis added that the Rule was to be understood “simply and without gloss”, which is to say: do not let the canon lawyers near it.

The distinction the Franciscans drew, and had to keep drawing for a century, was between use and ownership: usus and dominium. A friar eats bread, wears a tunic, sleeps under a roof, but owns none of them. He has, as the theologians put it, the bare use of the thing, usus facti, while every right of property is renounced. The argument reached back way beyond Roman law to Eden, where all things were held common and nothing belonged to anyone. Ownership entered the world with the Fall. To live without property was therefore not a penance but a return: it was to live as human beings had been made to live.

The position was there before the doctrine. In 1206, in the piazza in front of the bishop of Assisi, with his father, a cloth merchant, demanding his money back, the young Francis took off his clothes, folded them, handed them over and walked away naked. There was no Rule yet. The gesture was the Rule.

This is an extremely radical position. It is communism before the word, or anarchism, or both at once, though without a program, a party or the smallest wish to seize anything, since seizing was the whole problem. It was also, as the Church immediately saw, good for business. The friars were mobile, poor, eloquent and wildly popular, and a movement like that is either contained or burned at the stake. Francis was contained. 

The Church took the celebrity and quietly dropped the message. Francis was canonized within two years of his death and the basilica was built in his memory. The Order, meanwhile, was flooded with educated recruits who wanted books, and with gifts of land and buildings from patrons who wanted to be buried in them. By the time the first generation of friars had died, the Order had tens of thousands of members and no longer resembled the man who founded it. It even rewrote him. In 1263 Bonaventure produced the official life of Francis, and in 1266 the Order ordered every earlier life destroyed.

What followed was a hundred years of argument about a single question, and it is worth being clear about the question, because people were killed over it. If the friars own nothing, how do they have libraries, churches, granaries, and a basilica? Two parties formed inside the Order. The majority, later called the Conventuals, were content to let the buildings be held for them by intermediaries, so that the friars used what they technically did not own. The minority, the Spirituals, said this was a lawyer’s trick: the Rule meant poor use, not just use without title, and a friar in a stone convent with a library was no poorer than a bishop. 

The Church kept trying to close the question. In 1230, four years after Francis’s death, Gregory IX ruled that the “Testament”, the deathbed text with its plea for no gloss, was not binding on the Order; the friars were to follow the Rule as the Pope read it, not the founder’s last words. In 1279 Nicholas III settled the ownership problem with an elegant fiction: everything the friars used, down to the bread in their mouths, belonged to the papacy, which held it on their behalf, so the friars had use and the Pope had title. He then forbade anyone to discuss the matter further. They discussed it for another 50 years.

John XXII, a canon jurist with a lawyer’s patience for paradox and love of equivocation, ended the game, in two moves. First he dealt with the Spirituals. In 1317 he ordered them to accept granaries, cellars and ordinary habits like everyone else. Those who refused were handed to the Inquisition as disobedient, which in that world meant heretical, and in May 1318 four of them were burned at Marseille. Then he dealt with the doctrine. In 1322 he renounced the papal fiction of ownership and handed the property back, so that the friars now owned what they used whether they liked it or not, and he made the point that the whole distinction was unreal: when you eat the bread there is no bread left, and a use that destroys the thing is indistinguishable from owning it. 

In 1323 he went for the root. It was declared heresy to say that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing. The whole Franciscan case rested on that claim: if Christ had had property, then poverty was not the imitation of Christ but a private eccentricity. The head of the Order, Michael of Cesena, refused to accept it and in 1328 fled from the papal court at Avignon to the protection of the Emperor, taking the philosopher William of Ockham with him. Both died as excommunicates. The rest of the Order became what it has been ever since: an institution, with houses. This is the world of The Name of the Rose, which Umberto Eco set in 1327 for a reason.

In The Highest Poverty, Giorgio Agamben argues that the Franciscans lost because they fought on the wrong ground. They let poverty be defined juridically, as the negation of a right, and so were always one bull away from refutation. What Francis had actually invented, Agamben thinks, was not a legal doctrine but a form of life, in which one does not apply a rule to a life but lives so that the living produces the rule. The naked man in the piazza is not obeying anything.

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And while the message was being glossed away, the monument kept going up. Each decade of the argument added another layer: the Lower Church in the 1230s, the Upper Church above it, Cimabue in the 1280s, Giotto’s cycle of the saint’s life in the 1290s, so that by the time the Spirituals were burning at Marseille the poor man of Assisi had the most richly painted interior in Italy. Brother Elias, who ran the Order after Francis and had a genius of a different sort, had raised the money and hired the builders. He also hid Francis’s body, so thoroughly that it was not found again until 1818. For nearly six centuries the most visited saint in Christendom was celebrated in a basilica that had, in effect, lost him. The church is a betrayal, of course, but I am glad of it; I would not want a world without the Giotto frescoes. But the contradiction is exact. Francis owned nothing. In death, he became the Order’s principal asset.

At least one person saw the building for what it was: Angela of Foligno, an illiterate widow from a dozen miles down the road. The most wonderfully extreme of all the mystics went on pilgrimage to Assisi in 1291 and, at the door of the basilica, fell down and began to scream, asking love why it had abandoned her. Her confessor, Brother Arnaldo of the Friars Minor, was mortified and told her never to come back. He then spent years writing down everything she said. She was canonized in 2013, by a pope who had just taken the name Francis. Angela did not dispute the Rule. She screamed at the door.

What, then, is a saint? Not a good person; there are plenty of those and no one builds them churches. Not a hero either, who acts, wins and is remembered for the act. A saint is someone whose life has become a form, legible enough that others can live inside it. The saint is the answer to the question “how should I live?” given not as a self-help book but as a being of flesh and blood. This is why saints have bodies and why the bodies matter. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that, for all the fame of his stigmata, Francis is one of only two men in the history of the Church to have claimed all five visible wounds of Christ. The saint’s flesh is a text, and an argument.

It is also why the lives of the saints were, for something like a thousand years, the most read books in Europe after the Bible. The Golden Legend, a Dominican friar’s compendium of saints’ lives arranged by the feast days of the year, compiled around 1260 and read aloud in churches and households across Europe, survives in more manuscripts than almost any other medieval book. Remember what the Order did to the earlier lives of Francis in 1266. It tells you what a saint’s life is for: it is not a record but an instrument, endlessly revised, and the revisions are where the authority lies. Nobody read the Golden Legend for information. They read it the way we read biographies of musicians: to find out whether a certain kind of life could be lived, and what it cost.

What do saints do, then? They demonstrate. They show that a form of existence everybody had agreed was impossible, living without possessions, without violence, without fear of death, is possible, because here is someone doing it, badly fed and in a filthy tunic, on the plain below Assisi. The demonstration does not require that you follow; most readers of the Golden Legend kept their houses. But it changes what the word “impossible” means.

I do not know what to do with the end-times feeling that has settled on everything, the sense that the systems we live inside are at once all-powerful and coming apart, that the weather is wrong and the politics worse and the machines have learned to talk and are about to wipe us out. But the feeling is proprietary. It is the panic of people who own things, or who thought they did, watching their title deeds dissolve: to land, to a future, to their own attention. Francis’s answer to a world that was passing away was not to save it. It was to stop claiming it. Use it, care for it, sing to it (his “Canticle of the Creatures” is the first great poem in Italian, and it is a poem about not owning the sun) and hold none of it as yours. There is a politics in that which neither Left nor Right can presently say aloud, since both are, in the end, arguments about who gets the property.

Who is the Francis of this moment? The honest answer is that you would not be told. Saints are recognized late, usually after they are safely dead, by the institution that spent their lifetime trying to gloss them. The last man to take the name, and to mean something by it, died in the Vatican, which is where popes die, and which is a vast piece of richly arrayed real estate. If there is a Francis now, he or she is doing something we currently regard as impossible, somewhere unimportant, quite possibly with no religion at all, without a rule anyone has written down yet, and is being ignored by exactly the people who will one day lay the foundation stone.

The first thing to be said to those wary of a book with “Tarot” in its title is that this is not a book about using tarot cards to foresee the future. Instead, it contemplates the richly enigmatic symbolism of the 22 Major Arcana — the trump cards — to reveal their compacted insights into spirit and psyche, death and eternity, faith and salvation.

The true subject of Meditations is even stranger than the Tarot: esoteric theology. Christian Hermeticism is a tradition that has quietly flourished down the centuries under the protective shelter of mainstream Christian thought. Insofar as a faith’s mystical dimension is its avant garde — a site of verification at the limits of inner experience — the Christian Hermetic tradition that Meditations at once summarizes and adds to is an extensive body of occult science and speculative mysticism of often bewildering, astrophysical complexity. It originates with Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary author of antiquity whose esoteric texts were of great influence on subsequent Western esotericism. Christian Hermeticism fuses Hermes’ teachings with Christian theology.

As per the book’s subtitle, this really is a journey. The lands we traverse are otherworldly and replete with hyperdetermined symbols. Every reading nestles within it deeper readings still, a profuse flora of wildly sprawling interpretation. Comprising mysticism, gnosis (the intellectual comprehension of mystical experience), and “sacred magic”, Christian Hermeticism suggests a colossal supercomputer of occult intelligence humming in the walls of a faith-citadel more readily associated with universal love.

Unlike other books on esoteric topics, Meditations on the Tarot is well-regarded within the Catholic Church. A stamp-of-approval afterword is provided by the late Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was nominated by Pope John Paul II and is regarded as among the leading theologians of the 20th century. To von Balthasar, the work’s author is “a thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable purity” who has achieved an intellectual synthesis unprecedented in the faith’s history.

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I first heard about Meditations on the Tarot on the wonderful Weird Studies podcast, a cultural godsend whereon two amiable Canadian philosophers discuss ideas and art in a pally, digressive manner that counterbalances the seriousness of their agenda: to breach the boundaries of “official” philosophy in search of a more capacious, re-enchanted worldview. On one episode, the hosts venture a philosophical rationale as to why, against received scientific acceptability, Tarot cards, the I Ching, and other such divinatory tools can seem to actually work. What I took from it is that we might regard such systems as symbolic technologies at the interface between inner and outer worlds… which, to various modes of thinking outside of Western materialist (or physicalist) orthodoxy, are not as separate as we tend to believe.

Much has been made lately of a renewed interest in religion — itself surely symptomatic of a widespread ontological disaffection. Many people sense, often as a result of personal experiences unaccountable within the current philosophy, that the reigning scientific-materialist paradigm simply no longer holds. The reductive, ultra-rationalist outlook that emerged from the Enlightenment and reached its apogee with the 19th century’s mechanistic vision of the cosmos has grown as antiquated as monocles and top-hats. As the planet burns up in consequence of nihilistic science and myopic greed run amok, the world suffers too from spiritual asphyxiation. We begin to suspect that clues to a salvageable future may lie scattered in the past; that, for all the sublimity of its technological ascension, our psychotic civilization may not have everything figured out after all. Traditions, techniques, and bodies of knowledge that once seemed unworthy of serious attention to modern minds exert a renewed pull. At the end point of a philosophical crisis, the horizons of the possible expand afresh.

Until recently, I had no interest in the Tarot. My partner, however, is a dabbler. For some time now she’s been drawing cards from her Rider-Waite deck — sometimes one, sometimes three — as a way to gain perspective on her dilemmas and life-challenges. I observed this with cautious curiosity until eventually I allowed her to draw a card for me. She did so on several occasions, always at moments of acute psychic tension on my part. Each time, the card drawn was clearly linked to interpretations that spoke in an uncannily precise way to my predicament. It was less like having my fortune told than having my psyche X-Rayed — less divining the future than peering into the deep structure of the now. While the most salient examples are too intimate to divulge here, suffice it to say I was startled. To the committed rationalist: all pure coincidence. To anyone with a touch more ideational flexibility — anyone not automatically loyal to strict, post-Enlightenment materialism — this demanded a sitting-up-straight. For the first time, I started really looking at the cards.

The Major Arcana of the Tarot include such archetypal figures as The Magician, The Emperor, and The High Priestess; elemental images such as The Moon, The Sun, The World, and The Judgement; and such famously ominous trumps as The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Tower of Destruction, and Death. Then there are the Minor Arcana — the more numerous cards divided into the four suits of Cups, Swords, Wands, and Coins.

For all the cards’ mystique, I might have gazed at those illustrations for a hundred years and extracted only a fraction of what the author of Meditations on the Tarot reads into them (he uses the older, Marseilles deck). Esotericism, after all, entails seeing beyond the surface to fathom the meanings at once veiled and revealed by the outward, the exoteric. To the Hermetic mind, in which consciousness is the ultimate stratum of reality, the world is not only the objects that comprise it: the world is a realm of symbols.

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Each of the 22 chapters in Meditations is a letter addressed to an “Unknown Friend” — our correspondent is courteous, impassioned, and scrupulously religiously humble. To say the author covers a lot of ground is a laughable understatement. Even Cardinal von Balthasar’s broad theological mind flinches at the book’s conceptual maximalism: a “superabundance — almost too much”. There are finely parsed reflections on everything from Purgatory and the metaphysics of forgiveness, to hardcore occult practices like the generation of egregores (artificial demons), to the Akashic chronicles (an objectively real, quasi-digital recording of everything that’s ever occurred!). Valentin Tomberg appears possessed by a kind of inverse nihilism: there’s seemingly nothing he doesn’t believe in. Reincarnation or resurrection? Not only will he take both, he’ll restlessly subdivide each spiritual phenomenon into multiple strata, everything branching out and forking off and spiraling upwards, via the “cosmic Christ” and a whole Byzantine superstructure of dominions, Archangels and all the rest of it, to God. The author’s range of reference is suitably broad: he quotes extensively from Scripture; his Hermeticist forebears; Kabbalah and Buddhism; Christian-mystic Saints such as John of the Cross and Theresa of Ávila; and philosophers including Nietzsche, Bergson, Schopenhauer and Hegel. All the while he takes pains to display deference to Catholic orthodoxy. He insists that Hermeticism is but a special vocation within Christianity, and he has full sympathy for less rarefied forms of faith.

Such is Tomberg’s level of hermeneutic sophistication that his interpretations often have little to do with the more commonplace ones to be found online or in books about cartomancy. For instance, the awesomely creepy Devil card — on which the Black One looms over a naked man and woman chained at the neck — is commonly related to carnal temptation, materialism, addiction and obsession. (The Devil was in fact drawn for me during a bout of acute temptation towards compulsive, potentially destructive behaviors.) To Tomberg, on the other hand, the card symbolizes the “intoxication of counter-inspiration”. Cue a rigorous, psychologically astute analysis of the dangers of identifying with evil — and of enslavement by demonic “tulpas” of our own creation.

The preternaturally authoritative voice expressing from the inside an abundance of intensely strange phenomena calls to mind the astonishing works of Henry Corbin — a celebrated French scholar of religion who discovered multiverses of spiritual wisdom in the works of Islamic mystical philosophers. Both authors can overwhelm with their arcane knowledge and remote, mountain-peak speculations.

But Meditations is far more than a treasury of metaphysical exoticism. Amidst its profusion, we’re never more than a page or two away from an incisive ray of wisdom that we’ll feel subtly recalibrate our inner being in the days and weeks that follow. Like all books on esoteric thought, Meditations on the Tarot is predicated on the belief that there are two worlds in one: the above and the below; the Visible and the Invisible. Wisdom, in this context, means the ever-deepening comprehension by which we may think, speak, and act so that the two move ever closer together and finally cohere — on earth as it is in heaven.

Perhaps England’s beleaguered Protestants have just become inured. Already in the Nineties, Tony Blair was a crypto-Catholic leader, straight out of the pages of 17th-century polemic. As with the Stuart monarchs, or King Ahab, it was the wife what got him. Everyone knew that Cherie took her Catholicism seriously, and that the children were being raised in her faith. But Blair himself, across his 10 years in office, purported to conform to the established Church. He converted just months after leaving Downing Street and one needn’t be Titus Oates to suspect that he had been moving in that direction for a long time. When he prayed on the eve of the Iraq invasion, might he have been thinking unreformed thoughts?

Blair’s reticence on spiritual matters prevented him from claiming the distinction of Britain’s first Catholic prime minister. The distinction is genuinely significant, given that Britain was — and still officially is — a Protestant nation, forged in the crucible of confessional controversy. No, the accolade of being Britain’s “Catholic Obama” descends upon, of all people, Boris Johnson. He cut a different kind of early-modern figure to Blair, a reverse Henry VIII. Baptised a Catholic, he entered the Church of England while at Eton, presumably as part of the High Tory shtick he was then busy cultivating. His first two marriages were not officiated in the Catholic manner. Canon law thus exonerated him on the adultery charges; technically, in the eyes of the Vatican, the two-time divorcé was a lifelong bachelor. Reverting to his childhood faith, he was thus permitted to marry Carrie, his Anne Boleyn, at Westminster Cathedral in 2021.

And now Britain, which has never knowingly elected a Catholic Prime Minister, might soon have another. Andy Burnham was an altar boy. His power base in the Northwest always was a hotbed of Romanism. In the 17th century, Thomas Fuller described the people of western Lancashire as “Popishly affected”. When Sir Henry Spiller went to inspect the county in 1621, he found no fewer than 1,800 recusants. Far from the gaze of Protestant London, it was fertile ground for Jesuits. One priest — a cousin of Guy Fawkes — wrote in 1600 that “Catholics are so numerous that priests can wander through the villages and countryside with the utmost freedom”. Manchester, for its part, was a Jacobite stronghold; it provided the only English regiment in the 1745 rising. The Catholic identity of this part of England was bolstered further in the 19th century by an influx of Irish immigration. Even today, the Northwest remains England’s most Catholic region. If Burnham pulls off the long march from Makerfield to Westminster, he will succeed where Guy Fawkes and Bonnie Prince Charlie failed.

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Though he might have lost out on being the first Catholic Prime Minister, Burnham will be the first to be meaningfully shaped by the religion, and the first to enter Downing Street with a strong British Catholic identity. A decisive personality in his formative years was Derek Worlock, the liberal, anti-Thatcher, ecumenically-minded archbishop of Liverpool. Burnham once remarked that the “political implementation” of Worlock’s teaching was the Labour Party, which he signed up aged 15. Burnham’s politics and his Catholicism were thus always closely linked.

Burnham, like many on the Left, has nonetheless had his difficulties with the Church. In 2015 he confessed that he was struggling with its “obsession with sexuality”. He waxed nostalgic about the Catholicism of his childhood, of Archbishop Worlock and John Paul II, who visited Liverpool when he was a boy. The Church that he had grown up in was “quite forgiving… quite humane, humorous, irreverent”. Things began to sour in 2005, when Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI and brought a “more judgemental mode” to the papal chair. Yet even Ratzinger’s conservatism could not dent Burnham’s long-held belief that the purpose of the Labour Party was to do God’s work on earth. “The basic tenets of the Labour Party and socialism”, he declared during his first leadership bid in 2010, “are one and the same with those of Christianity”.

There, he was giving voice to a longstanding position within British Catholicism. Thanks to the Irish connection, a general feeling of being outsiders, and a traditional suspicion of liberal and capitalist excesses, British Catholics have tended to lean Left. Catholics have broken for Labour in almost every postwar general election. In fact, it is quite surprising that Labour has never had a Catholic leader (putting aside the special case of Blair). Several have come close: Roy Hattersley, the son of a lapsed priest, wrote a history of the Catholics in Britain; John McDonnell, though now an atheist, speaks about the impact of his Catholic upbringing on his worldview. Yet there is a tendency within Labour to view religious Catholics with suspicion. In 2020 Rebecca Long-Bailey landed in some hot water when it became known that she harbored personal views about abortion, rooted in her Catholic faith, which were at odds with those of the Party. Catholic identity — especially an Irish Catholic identity — might go along well with the modern Labour Party; Catholic beliefs, however, generally do not.

Burnham Country was not only the most Catholic part of England; it was also one of the last parts of England where religion continued to matter. It was the region of England most prone to sectarian violence. Liverpool, the city of Burnham’s birth, was the closest England had to a Glasgow or Belfast. In 1819, an Orange procession in the city caused a riot; 90 years later a Catholic procession culminated in hundreds of injuries and 50 arrests. The only Irish Nationalist MP sent to Westminster from a non-Irish constituency was Liverpool’s T.P. O’Connor. These divisions were still festering when Burnham was born. When his non-Catholic father first met the family of his Catholic mother, he was worried that confessional divides would prove an issue. Thankfully, they were able to find common ground in their shared support for Everton FC.

Football, to use that cliché about modern Britain, and Liverpool especially, is really Burnham’s religion. In 2023, reconciled with the Church of his childhood, he beamingly presented the football-mad Pope Francis with a Manchester United shirt, signed by the Argentine center-back Lisandro Martínez. His campaigning material in Makerfield makes much more reference to football than God. Burnham once said that the most important things in his life, apart from family, were “Everton FC, the Labour Party and the Catholic church — in that order”.

Is it significant that Everton is traditionally regarded as the “Catholic team” in the Merseyside derby? The idea that the rivalry between Everton and Liverpool mirrored that between Catholic and Protestant — an English “Old Firm” — seems to be a myth. Both teams can be traced to a Methodist congregation in the later 19th century; Everton’s first club president was an Orangeman. Still, the myth was widely believed when Burnham was growing up, and he subscribes to it.

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The sectarianism that supposedly once clung to the Merseyside derby, Burnham has said, may have “gone with the mists of time”: but still he has never met a Catholic priest who was a Red. The Eighties, the decade of Thatcher and the Hillsborough disaster, witnessed the formation of Burnham’s worldview, based upon a distinct Northwest identity. “In the 1986 final at Wembley” — Liverpool v. Everton — “everybody sang ‘Merseyside’”. His part of England, though divided by football and religion, finds it must unite against a common enemy: “the London media, Thatcher, the establishment”.

All this serves to give the Northwest a Left-wing, anti-establishment identity, which Burnham taps into. This identity is closely linked to the region’s historic Catholicism; and hence, Burnham’s own cultural Catholicism adds to his carefully constructed image. Cilla Black remarked in 2002 that “in Liverpool… most Protestants were Conservative and most Catholics were Labour, just as Everton was the Catholic team and Liverpool the ‘Proddy-Dog’ one”. The second of those ideas might be a fiction; the first definitely isn’t. It was due in part to strong Protestant (and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish) feeling that Liverpool was solidly Tory for much of the 20th century. When Burnham speaks as though the Northwest is uniformly Left-wing, and that Left-wing values are intrinsically Manchester (or Liverpool) values, really he is appealing to a Catholic history and identity.

Either way, England’s Protestant patriots can breathe a sigh of relief: if the Catholic conquest comes, it will not bring with it much by way of doctrine. Indeed, due largely to the triumph of social liberalism within the Labour Party, British Catholics are no longer even a reliable Labour bloc. They struggle to reconcile their conservatism with Labour policy: Long-Bailey’s struggles aside, Stella Creasy’s successful push for the partial decriminalization of abortion, and Kim Leadbeater’s unsuccessful one for the legalization of assisted suicide, were never likely to keep them red. Burnham abstained on euthanasia when he was an MP, but he appears now to lean in favor. If, as prime minister, he reopens that can of worms, we could witness something similar to various episodes from the Biden presidency, where a socially liberal Catholic leader gets into awkward public conflict with the authorities of his own Church. We might then find that a Catholic Labour prime minister does nothing to arrest the trickling away of British Catholics from the Party. The political implications here will, in any case, be narrowly intra-Catholic ones. They will be of no interest to the non-Catholic and non-religious majority. Once a Roman Catholic prime minister would have been met with cries of “No Popery!”; the striking thing today is how little anyone cares. We have become men, and put away childish things.

Still, the Augustinians never asked for the painting to be removed. They had survived a lot worse. Their order risked being suppressed in the 13th century. It was nearly wiped out by the Black Death. And it again risked extinction in the 18th century. Along the way, the Augustinians gave the world Martin Luther, which is scarcely a claim to distinction in the Catholic Church.

However eventful their past, the Augustinians today occupy a relatively uncontentious space in a Church which, like much of the rest of society, has become acrimoniously polarized in recent decades. They are neither as thoroughly liberal as the Jesuits nor as staunchly conservative as the quasi-monks of Opus Dei. If you were looking for a pope capable of bridging the divisions in the Catholic Church, which became painfully obvious during the stormy papacy of the populist-progressive Francis, you could do worse than elect an Augustinian friar. Which is exactly what the cardinals who gathered to elect Francis’s successor did a year ago when they opted for Cardinal Robert Prevost, the American head of the Vatican department that advises popes on the naming of bishops.

The reasoning, and maneuvering, that led up to that decision is wrapped in a mist far denser than the white smoke that gushed from the Sistine Chapel’s rickety-looking chimney, announcing to the world that a new pope had been chosen. The cardinals swear an oath of secrecy and, although from time to time in the years that follow a papal election titbits of information leak out, the full story never emerges.

By electing the man who chose to be known as Leo XIV, the cardinal-electors (those below the age of 80 at the end of the previous papacy) tossed out of the Sistine Chapel’s windows a supposed taboo: that an American could never be, to use a charming Italian term, papabile (literally, “pope-able”). 

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The view widely held in the Vatican until last year was that it would be unthinkable for the Catholic Church to ally itself to the United States. You only had to imagine the effect a ‘‘gringo pope” would have in Latin America, where tens of millions of devout Catholics had suffered the consequences of CIA-engineered coups and other instruments of American foreign policy: an approach that was seldom less than condescending and all-too-often undemocratic and indifferent to human rights. And how would tens of millions of other pious Catholics in the poorest states of Africa and Asia react to seeing their Church governed by a citizen of a country in which wealth was celebrated, even worshipped? Among those convinced of the taboo was the then-Cardinal Prevost. “I’m an American, I can’t be elected,” he wrote to a fellow Augustinian just days before his election.  

So why did those concerns suddenly count for so little? There are three discernible reasons. None are mutually exclusive and they all have a bearing on the current, tempestuous dispute between Leo XIV and Donald Trump. 

The first has to do with Leo’s own character and biography. By any measure, he is an unusual American. He may root for the Chicago White Sox, but he has spent much of his life outside the United States, first as a missionary and later traveling as head of the Augustinian Order. He is fluent in Spanish and Italian, holds Peruvian citizenship and was the bishop of a Peruvian diocese. He has signally un-WASPish ancestry that even includes a touch of Creole. And his demeanor could scarcely be less like that of the brash, swaggering Americans who inhabit the collective imagination of the poor South.

A second factor, and one known to have weighed on the minds of the cardinals in Conclave, is the parlous state of the Vatican’s finances. One of the cardinals said as much before they were locked away for the vote. Asked if politics might play a role in their choice, Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the Archbishop of Tokyo, replied: “I don’t think so. But perhaps money…”. The year before Pope Francis’s death, the Holy See ran a deficit of more than €80 million. Its pension fund has a shortfall of as much as €1 billion.

In a recent book on America’s relations with the Vatican, Papi, dollari e guerre, Massimo Franco, a columnist for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, writes that there was so much talk of money in the discussions that preceded the Conclave that Cardinal Gerhard Müller had lost patience. “We’re meant to be electing the successor of Peter, not of Judas!”, he is said to have exclaimed. Traditionally, the biggest contributions to the Holy See came from Germany and the United States. But they fell off as the Catholic Church was immersed in scandals over the sexual abuse of minors by priests and the misuse of Vatican funds. An American pope would stand a better chance than most of loosening the purse-strings of his rich compatriots.

But the third, and simplest, way to explain the election of Leo is that the cardinals wanted a unifier and a period of tranquility after the turbulent papacy of Pope Francis and found in their mild-mannered American colleague a man only too happy to walk peacefully down the middle of the road. If that was the deciding factor, nothing much happened in the first 11 months of his papacy to suggest the cardinals got it wrong. It was a period of exceptional calm — free of scandal and controversy.

Leo delighted progressive Catholics by repeatedly quoting Francis and articulating many of the liberal views associated with him. But if the words were progressive, the symbolism was traditional. That was clear from the moment he walked out onto the balcony of St Peter’s wearing a red satin mozzetta, a shoulder cape that had long formed part of a pope’s garb, but which Francis dispensed with. He moved back into the grand papal apartments his predecessor had eschewed, and even gave permission for a mass to be said in Latin in St Peter’s. None of this earned him the approval of the most diehard conservatives like Steve Bannon. But symbolism counts for a lot in Catholicism and, at the very least, traditionalists could no longer feel, as many did under Francis, that they were being victimized.

On 7 April, though, the calm was shattered. Pope Leo clashed head-on with President Trump. A point that has been largely overlooked is that, if this was a fight, then it was Leo — not Trump — who threw the first punch. Asked about the President’s melodramatic threat to put an end to Iranian civilization, Leo could have used any one of the many ways in which popes avoid calling out individual politicians. Instead, he described Trump’s warning as “truly unacceptable”. The President hit back, describing Leo as “WEAK” (his capitals) on crime and “terrible” at diplomacy. The man whom more than a billion Catholics believe is God’s representative on Earth needed to “get his act together”, the President wrote on Truth Social. For a while, it seemed as if the row was over after the Pope said he had no interest in debating with Trump. But then, this week, the President had another go at Leo, claiming “he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon”. That stung the pontiff into another retort. “If anyone wants to criticise me for proclaiming the gospel, let them do so with the truth,” Leo said. “The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years.”

The clash — the way it started and the way it is continuing with Leo refusing to let Trump’s claims go unanswered — raises an intriguing thought. Insiders say that, in the discussions that precede a conclave, the cardinals first try to agree on the biggest challenge, or opportunity, facing the Catholic Church, and then move on to considering which of their number would be best suited to deal with it. That, it is said, is how a cardinal little known outside his native Poland came to be Pope John Paul II: his peers concluded that communism in Europe was structurally unsound and that a pontiff was needed who could help topple it.

The vast majority of cardinals — 108 of the 133 who filed into the Sistine Chapel on 7 May 2025 — owed their red caps to Francis and, with few exceptions, viewed the world in much the same way as the late pope. Might they have believed that the biggest single threat the Catholic Church faced was Donald Trump? The MAGA movement sees eye-to-eye with the Church on abortion. But Trump himself stands for much else that Catholics, and not just liberal Catholics, fear and disdain: the destruction of a rules-based world order, use of the death penalty at home and aggressive warmongering abroad, indifference to human rights, climate denial, harsh anti-immigration measures and — of particular concern to Leo — an apparent lack of concern for the dangers posed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence. What is more, Trump has come to be aligned with a section of the evangelical movement that is opposed, and in some cases actively hostile, to Catholicism.

Might the cardinals have sought in Francis’s successor something other than just an ability to reconcile the opposing wings of the Church? Might they have accepted an American not just because he might replenish the Vatican’s coffers, but because he could stand up to the US President, speaking to him in his own language and with a native understanding of the American political environment?

Soon after Leo was installed, a theory circulated in Rome that has since failed to gain much traction: that his election was orchestrated by the then-archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, a conservative openly favored by Trump. Among those who still believe in it is the President himself. At the height of his row with the Pope, Trump said Leo would not have been chosen but for him. Perhaps he was right, just not in the way he meant.

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. . . .

There is a hushed silence as a dozen of us, bleary-eyed, trickle in for Matins. It is 7:30am on a Wednesday. Few seem to pay much heed to the vaulted stone ceiling above, the stained-glass windows, the intricately carved memorials and paintings on every wall. The service begins almost imperceptibly, as a black-cassocked priest, sitting quietly in the back row, starts to lead his tiny congregation through the prayer book. For the next 20 minutes, we murmur liturgies and psalms, and listen to Bible readings and canticles. At the end of each section, we recite in unison: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be for ever. Amen.” And then it’s over, and we file back through the cathedral and out into the brightening morning, a single bell pealing high above us.

That afternoon, David Monteith, the dean of Canterbury and one of three priests to join the worshipers during Matins, tells me it was an unremarkably normal service of morning prayer, a service which has taken place every day at Canterbury Cathedral for nearly 1,400 years. This daily rhythm, which winds through a lunchtime communion and ends with choral evensong in the evening, is what Monteith calls the “heartbeat” of the institution. It might seem quaint, even banal, reading out the same words, day after day, to much the same tiny group of people. But for Monteith, it’s precisely this “tried and tested means of prayer” that “sustains you for the long haul”.

We may soon discover if he’s right. For today, the cathedral’s stone-flagged floors will go from empty to heaving, as thousands attend the enthronement of Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a historic moment for the C of E, which for the first time ever installs a woman as its chief priest. Yet more than her sex, Mullally will ultimately be judged on whether she can steady the listing ship that is her Church. She takes over an institution reeling from years of abuse scandals and dangerously low on trust from the nation it claims to serve. And even if she can begin to turn things around, it will count for little if she cannot also find a way to resolve the bitter internal conflict between liberal and conservative factions, still at each other’s throats over gay marriage. And then there’s perhaps the biggest question of all: can Mullally find a way for this ancient institution to survive in modern, secular Britain, all without losing its soul?

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If all eyes are today on Mullally, Canterbury owes its fame to another woman. Back in the 6th century, a Christian Frankish princess called Bertha married the pagan King Æthelberht of Kent. When, 17 years later, the Pope asked Augustine to re-Christianize the English, the monk headed straight for Bertha as one of the few known believers in this godless land. Augustine  ended up founding the cathedral and becoming the first ever Archbishop of Canterbury, in a line which now stretches all the way to Mullally. Bertha’s own personal chapel still sits just beyond the ancient city walls, and indeed remains the oldest active church anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Canterbury’s close association with the Church has not always been easy. In 1647, townsfolk revolted against the Puritanical abolition of Christmas and attempts to confiscate their much-loved festive treats, storming the cathedral in what are now called the Plum Pudding Riots. But this was nothing compared to the turmoil of 1170, when four knights hacked Thomas Becket, one of Mullally’s more ill-fated predecessors, to death with their swords.

Mullally will no doubt be hoping for a less tumultuous reign. But the former chief nurse is taking over the C of E at a profoundly challenging moment. Perhaps the most urgent item in her in-tray is safeguarding. Wracked by never-ending abuse scandals, England’s national church has lost the trust of the nation. At the depths of the crisis last year, after Mullally’s predecessor Justin Welby was forced to step down in disgrace, accused of failing to report an abuser, a poll revealed just one in four people had a favorable view of the Church. In the 18 months since he left, meanwhile, there has been a cascade of new revelations, notably when the Bishop of Liverpool was accused of sexual harassment by one of his peers.

Mullally herself has skeletons in her closet. Some abuse survivors distrust her because during her time as Bishop of London, there was a case which saw a retired (and blameless) vicar kill himself during a botched safeguarding inquiry. Even since she was named as Welby’s successor in October, she’s faced fresh complaints about her handling of separate abuse allegations. “I can’t pretend that those shadows aren’t real and aren’t pressing,” Monteith admits. He himself has been called a “paedo” while walking down Canterbury High Street in clerical garb.

All the same, he sometimes feels as if the Church is “carrying the can” for all of society’s failures. The Bishop of Dover, who acts as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s deputy running the Diocese of Canterbury, says much the same. Sitting in her office nestled up against the cathedral, Rose Hudson-Wilkin accepts that the “furor” around abuse is reasonable. Even so, she fears it wrongly gives the impression that today’s C of E is mired in corruption and cover-up. Instead, she argues, these old cases are emerging precisely because the Church is getting its act together.

Perhaps. But I can’t help but feel like Monteith and Hudson-Wilkin both seem oddly relaxed about the crisis their Church has just weathered. To be sure, they represent a view common within the C of E establishment: that this is primarily a PR problem, and that a handful of high-profile failures don’t speak to a deeper issue. And it’s also true, of course, that crimes have been uncovered everywhere from the BBC to the NHS. But it obviously angers the public much more when the Church — supposedly a paragon of morality and involved in the education of millions of children — is revealed to be as riddled with abusers as anywhere else.

As for what’s next, Hudson-Wilkin parades a number of improvements, notably outsourcing safeguarding to an independent charity. That’ll suit Mullally just fine. A dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat — long years in the NHS guarantee that — her response to the abuse crisis will be administrative rather than charismatic. Instead of grand gestures, she’ll likely get stuck in with regulation, seeing salvation for the Church in enforcing best practice and ever more bureaucracy. The problem, though, is that the C of E is drowning in procedure already, and all the red tape in the world does little to stop flesh-and-blood humans from flouting the rules. If, then, Mullally can reclaim the bedside manner of her nursing days, giving the Church a softer public image than the sometimes-abrasive Old Etonian Welby, it’s distinctively unclear if managerialism can bury the abuse scandal once and for all.

Certainly, managerialism seems hopeless for the other big item on Mullally’s agenda: the simmering tensions over gay blessings. First announced in 2023, after years of agonizing consultation and spearheaded by Mullally herself, these services have sparked a civil war within the Church. Despite her evangelical background, Mullally has carved out a cautiously progressive approach, pushing for the blessings but refusing to chart a path to full-fat gay marriage. Conservatives have fought a ferocious rearguard action against these so-called “Prayers of Love and Faith”, succeeding in limiting much of the reforms. Initially invigorated by the reforms, their liberal opponents have themselves become disillusioned at the lack of progress, as embittered against their bishops as their traditionalist opponents.

The hierarchy tried to draw a line under the conflict at the synod in February, formally ending the 9-year project. But unwilling to entirely abandon the idea of gay marriage in church, the bishops immediately launched a new working group on the issue. Ever the consensual team player, Mullally won’t pursue anything she fears could lead to further splits, particularly when her bishops are almost as divided as the rest of the Church. It’s more likely, then, that the Church will head for the safety of the long grass, delaying a final decision on gay marriage still further. But this essentially bureaucratic approach again comes with risks. Liberal congregations — including Canterbury Cathedral, now led by its second dean in a row to openly live with their civil partner — will gradually feel their way towards something more accommodating. Yet all the while, conservatives will continue to drift the other way, even if a formal schism currently seems unlikely.

Yet if Mullally’s cautious liberalism just about holds the center in England itself, she’s also the unofficial head of the global Anglican Communion, a family of 42 independent Churches spanning a huge spectrum of convictions. Canterbury itself may be relaxed about gay relationships, but there are Anglican Churches in Africa which vociferously back the criminalization of homosexuality; in 2023 Welby chastised his Ugandan counterpart for backing a bill that imposed the death penalty on gay people. Further complicating the uneasy post-colonial position of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Communion is the fact that it’s these same deeply conservative Churches in Africa and Asia which are growing fastest — while their liberal Anglican cousins in the West dwindle away. One renegade movement called Gafcon has already denounced Mullally as an unacceptably liberal Archbishop, pledging to boycott official Anglican institutions in protest (though they recently scrapped plans to anoint one of their own as a kind of Anti-Mullally).

Besides, even if Mullally can somehow tempt Gafcon back into the fold, it will count for little if she can’t keep the show on the road closer to home. What, to be blunt, is the use of being “first among equals” in global Anglicanism — if there are no Anglicans left in England? In this, the final issue for the new archbishop to grapple with as she settles into Lambeth Palace is surely the most existential. For generations, the C of E has died before our eyes. Church attendance in 1980 was about 1.5 million. Despite significant population growth, last year it had more than halved to 700,000, with the decline only accelerating during Covid.

Fewer and fewer bums on pews means less money in the collection plate, crumbling buildings going unfixed, and less to pass on to regional dioceses (most of which are now in financial crisis and running up multi-million pound deficits). There are also fewer clergy than ever before, forcing bishops to spread their vicars thinner and thinner: most now look after at least two or three parishes at once. In rural areas, it’s not uncommon for as many as 10 churches to all share the same stressed and overworked cleric.

In the face of this crisis, the church is trying to reinvent itself for the 21st century, and find new ways of bringing the English back to their national religion. The Diocese of Canterbury, like most, has an ambitious target to start 200 new types of church by 2030, one for each of their traditional parishes.

Less than a mile north of the cathedral’s Gothic arches is a shabby and unremarkable place called All Saints. Once the garrison church of the local army barracks, it’s an unpretentious and tatty building, full of peeling paint and flanked by a scrubby car park and blocks of postwar council flats. This is Ignite, which runs most Wednesday afternoons both in Canterbury and five other locations across Kent. Plasticky folding tables have been laid out across All Saints’ faded carpet, and about 30 locals are tucking into baked potatoes smothered in chili con carne and cheese.

It couldn’t feel further from the reverent glories of Matins in Our Lady Martyrdom. And as I sit down for lunch, it becomes clear the people at Ignite are not your usual C of E types either. There are immigrants and the elderly, the disabled and people on benefits. Some are confident Christians, but others are unsure; one man describes himself to me as a “pragmatic spiritualist” (though the vicar later says he’s in fact Ignite’s most faithful attendee). Whatever they are, they very much are not plugged into the agonies of the institution this meeting is technically part of: one person on my table hadn’t even heard there was going to be a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

The service, such as it is, is a far cry from Anglicanism’s prayer book traditions too. The vicar, Patrick Ellisdon, dressed in a jumper and jeans, begins with some ice-breaker games. The heart of today’s event is a five-minute reflection on how Desmond Doss, the pacifist war hero of the film Hacksaw Ridge, tried to live for God. It ends with a contemporary soft rock worship song, with lyrics projected onto a screen: “I fall on my knees and I fight like a warrior, I call on the name of the One who is conqueror…”

After the service, Ellisdon explains that Ignite — which he pioneered with his wife at their previous ultra-deprived church in Margate — was designed to appeal to those on the margins with no religious background: unlike the overwhelmingly middle-class parishes of the C of E. He calls it “drip-feed evangelism”, giving hints of Christianity in accessible language and style for people who would never cross the threshold of an ordinary Sunday service. It may seem like another world to the worship up the road at the cathedral, but it has been backed with a £1 million grant from the C of E’s national endowment fund, allowing the Diocese of Canterbury to hire a handful of staff to roll Ignite out across Kent.

Hudson-Wilkin is unapologetic about her diocese’s hopes to transform the face of Anglicanism for the 21st century. But the main challenge, she suggests, is not about finding the right evangelistic strategy: but rather reinspiring hope and enthusiasm. Far too many churchgoers cringe and hide their faith out of embarrassment, lacking confidence in the gospel they’re supposed to be proclaiming. “If we don’t sing the song of joy and peace and love and forgiveness, then we may as well pack our bags up and hang our dog collars up.” Her people are “holding up and holding on”. But, Hudson-Wilkin says, it’s time to go on the offensive again.

More than that, Hudson-Wilkin says she can spot signs of a turnaround. This is the so-called “quiet revival”, after a 2025 survey by the Bible Society claimed that churchgoing was rocketing among the young. Albeit in a different way to All Saints, even the venerable cathedral has been trying to tap into this trend, offering silent discos and graffiti installations to tempt younger folk. But whether any of this actually works is another question entirely. A slew of social scientists have expressed doubt with the Bible Society’s figures, noting that more rigorous surveys have shown only a continued decline in churchgoing, including among the supposedly faith-curious young. And there is more than a hint of the cringe-inducing “trendy vicar” trope here too — are Gen Zs really going to be drawn back to Christ through graffiti and discos?

Some think the Church shouldn’t even try, and instead more keenly look backwards. “The good thing about a place like this,” says Monteith, gesturing through his office windows to the hulking 1,400-year-old cathedral next door, “is that I’m reminded that all things pass.” He believes both old and new are attractive, pointing to hundreds attending a Latin mass he lately put on for Ash Wednesday. Even Gen Z, Monteith says, finds the “solemnity and gravity” of traditional church worship appealing. Relatively speaking, cathedrals seem to thrive because they invest in high-quality music, liturgy and preaching, mixing transcendence with a down-to-earth cheeriness.

Yet though it’s true that cathedrals have escaped the collapse of country parish churches — we’re still not talking about large numbers. The total weekly attendance from Exeter to Ely only comes in at roughly 17,000. And though it’s true that a handful of Anglo-Catholic churches have found success in tradition, this feels more like the exception that proves the rule. The fact is that most twenty-somethings are spending Sunday evenings scrolling TikTok in their overpriced flatshares, not at choral evensong.

What, then, of the future? Rosie Duffield, the independent local MP and an occasional worshiper at Monteith’s cathedral, says it would be a tragedy if the C of E withered away to nothing. The cathedral isn’t just a heritage site for Canterbury — it’s “our beating heart and our soul”. “Just the idea that it would turn into a museum would rip the soul out of what we are.” Besides, Duffield argues, the wider church is still a bulwark of stability and moral guidance in a confused and volatile world, harking back to a now famous sermon Welby gave from the cathedral’s pulpit in 2022, decrying proposals to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda as un-Christian.

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Yet again, though, there are risks here for the Church here, as it tries to project relevance and weigh in on contemporary politics. For every Duffield delighted by Welby’s condemnation of the Rwanda scheme, there was a Conservative MP castigating the prelate’s intervention as symptomatic of a Church gone woke. Four years on, the country is even more divided, as Reform top the polls and the Greens win by-elections.

Debate over how England’s established church should respond to the recent surge of Christian nationalism has also reached East Kent. Monteith says that nearby coastal towns Whitstable, Sheerness and Margate are full of those sympathetic to Tommy Robinson’s newly Christianized far-Right. The dean, for his part, is open to building bridges rather than dismissing it all as racist bigotry. But Hudson-Wilkin — the first black woman to become a bishop in the C of E — scoffs at what she calls the “disingenuousness” of activists waving crosses while protesting Islam. The Church, she insists, isn’t dying because of Muslim immigration. It’s dying of neglect because white Britons who claim to be believers are staying at home. This is probably true, but also the kind of hectoring unlikely to nudge apathetic agnostics off their sofas and into church. The constant tension facing today’s genteel and overwhelmingly middle-class C of E is that the liberal centrism its current worshipers appreciate — and which Mullally herself epitomizes — is precisely what puts off an increasing number of would-be parishioners.

And on the Matins go. For 1,400 years Anglicans have been intoning that same liturgy: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be for ever.” But can this really go on forever? Will there still be people murmuring these ancient words inside Canterbury Cathedral, let alone All Saints down the road, on into the next century? These are questions that would daunt even a Becket or an Augustine — let alone a Mullally.

To a degree I’m sympathetic — I am, after all, a professional storyteller. Chaotic times create a desire for innovation, to “think” our way out of our problems. But some of that chaos has very deep roots. And for the first time in my life, I’ve been thinking that we are exposed to too many stories. Stories that sell counterfeit directives, tales to seduce not to court.

Ours is sometimes called a “Hermian Age” — you may remember Hermes is the Greek god of the storytellers and instant communication between people. But, friends, draw closer. We’re not addressing the fine print in Hermes’s contract. His connection is only successful soul to soul. If the soul is not roused, Hermes is simply not present. We are living in a facsimile of that rapidity. Our ears are filled with story — but the stories we need now are not new stories, but the old stories, the ones that turned up about 3,000 years ago. Myths. Over 30 years of telling and teaching folklore and writing many books on the subject have convinced me of this.

Here’s a story about a story. I’m driving a man I know, Gary, back to his house on a Plymouth council estate. He’s off drugs, off servicing men behind the bus station, out of the gang his brother runs. But only just, these things being a magnet he keeps floating towards. Sometimes he wants to talk to me about his life, sometimes not, and the change can be in a fraction of a second. Last time we did he threatened to hurl himself into the fast-moving current of a river we were passing. But today’s different, today he wants a story.

I tell him a tale about a girl leaving a village for good, and not one pair of eyes is on her wishing her well. At this he moans for a bit, rocks a bit, then makes a grab for the gear stick, tries to uproot it from the stem and bring the car off the road. I pull over and he starts pummeling his own head. “Get it out of my head,” he says. “Get the story away from me, it’s in me, I don’t like it, what have you done?” This from a young man who watches horror, porn, and plays violent video games on an almost hourly rotation.

A tiny folk tale has unearthed something in its terrible simplicity that’s gone straight to his heart. “That’s me, the girl is me, no one, no one, is looking out for me.” I hug him for a moment and tell him, I am. To get to you, they have to come through me. Whoever they may be. He cries then opens the car door. It’s January, and it’s dark. A great blast of freezing air gallops into the car. For a moment he’s lit up under a streetlamp before darting into the shadows. I will never see him again.

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How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

There’s no one in this whole wide world that isn’t carrying a story. You could be a president, a yoga teacher, a junkie, and you have this one completely unique thing in your pocket. Your story. And myths help us to move a mere story — an account of something bad that happened to us — from the confessional to the majestic, from persona to presence. Tristan and Isolde is still playing itself out in fraught love affairs, Beowulf is called forth in the sheer guts of trying to piece yourself together after a rough divorce.

I see it as my job — my civic duty, my privilege — to track the myth hanging onto the wingtip of the personal anecdote. When we use myth in this way, we make connections with the little I and the big We — and in doing so, shrug off a little unnecessary loneliness. In place of isolation, we now have the camaraderie of situating ourselves within a bigger story.

This is no small thing we’re doing, anchoring ourselves to the most extraordinary sources of wisdom. Myths are north stars to any culture deserving of the name — culture coming from the Latin, colere, which means to till the ground. To make a culture you dig down into a story. That story needs to be robust enough to explain a few things while also accommodating mystery. Myths hold together heaven and earth, they are a crossroads between the timeless and the timebound. Myths are the connecting tissue between us and the universe. Myths can be the words that underpin a ritual, or actually are a ritual themselves. They often explicate our origins, the gods, the visible and invisible worlds. They have images so emphatic and nourishing that humans can organize their philosophies around them. They afford dignity and purpose to the reactive experience of living. They intrigue us, they excite us, they deepen our understanding of the ordinary. They make luminous.

Myths are the original ecstasies: tales ground down by the gleaming teeth of wolves, containing the whispers of a Ghanaian grandmother; fulsome with the blue longings of the moon. Such stories shouldn’t behave or play nice. They slip the trap of allegory and pad off over the snow, leaving us baffled and delighted. When they fulfill this mystical mandate, you get what could be called a “Sacred Story”. It’s a tale that’s not transactional but transformative, that takes rupture and gives it rapture. It’s what we’ve always done. From the very beginning of things, we’ve tended to imagine in story. Thousands and thousands of years before cuneiform tablets, we stuffed wild, useful ideas into stories so they could be passed from generation to generation.

Of course, everything has its darker aspect. These days we most often associate myths with fiction — a myth is another word for a fib, a lie. For me this is a thin and inaccurate reading. This is modern advertising aggressively selling stories with the aim of possessing your imagination — a toxic mimic. For more on that kind of thing, seek out Roland Barthes, sipping his coffee and scowling at trees.

The other position — shared by cultures across continents — is that myths arise when you go walkabout. When you take off — and shake the civilized off you. If you walk long enough, a mountain may say something to you, a bird may sweep by with some gossip, you may lie down by a river and get dreamt. Humans weren’t the center of the imagining — but we were awfully good at picking up the news. It was the Earth that thought in myth, and we used to have the smarts to interpret that heavenly braille. A myth worth its salt was more than just human. It, in some tangible and mysterious way, spoke across species. A storyteller wasn’t just an entertainer, they were in touch with the ineffable.

Storytellers know that there are many types of time too — indeed, one of the powers of myths is that they pull us out of our hurried sense of time, our sense of not having enough of the stuff. There’s the kind that glows on your phone, the kind that pings and tells you that you have a Zoom call in 10 minutes. The Greeks call that “Kronos” time, and it has its function. But there’s another type — “Kairos”, which lifts us into the dimensions of a myth. The stories we tend to remember have some transformational rather than transactional at their core. As I often say, a combination of the timeless and the time-bound. Too much of the former it can feel perennial but not urgent, too much of the latter it lacks the dignity of the great themes.

Myth is about connotation not denotation; it’s about symbols not signs. People are snooty these days about metaphors, but I’d say that’s nonsense. A metaphor is a symbol that doesn’t tell you quite what it is, allowing an indefinite number of associations to flood in. It’s how poems work. It’s how we find something to nest within when we fall in love. We need wiggle room for our imagination. I could tell you that myth is a beautiful lie that tells a deeper truth; I could tell you that myth never was and always is; I could tell you myth is truth without the use of facts, but actually, no, even those diminish it, make it smaller somehow. After replying thousands of times to the question I will just settle with this: ‘Myth is a Sacred Story.’

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Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

Some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king — a king who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register: ours. This is where myth collides with history. I’ve long held the strange idea that the arrival of Christ begins in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits the Underworld, Achilles tells him: “Sooner be a slave to a poor man than King of the Underworld.” The game is up for the old order. With these words, from the greatest of Greek heroes, the world turns. Kleos — imperishable glory — is the deepest ambition of a warrior. When Achilles says it is without meaning down in Hades, something utterly new is being announced. A shield is hurled on a stone floor. A fresh consciousness. Yeshua, the God-Man is coming. The last shall be first.

So where to begin with the kind of myths I think we need? I want to bring in an idea that I’ve worked with for years as a wilderness guide. We could call it the Old Idea. That idea is that our soul — or most of it — lives outside our body. This is a big break with the Western notion of interiority as the primary poetic truth. Less of the therapy couch, “my truth,” the interior franchise of fairy tales, me, me, me.

This is not the same thing as an ad campaign for Nike telling us we can be anything we want. No. Myths tell us we are to be something quite specific.

In the simplest terms they tell us that we are profoundly connected to the stuff of Earth — storms, roosters, oaks, pomegranates — but that a great withdrawing has taken place. A divorce. It seems the price for commercial expansion is a certain kind of imaginative pulling back, a concerted withdrawing of the wider, wilder, world-soul. With this in place, less consciousness and then less conscience is required from our actions.

I’m not suggesting abandoning science and psychology — but I am sure that our senses are hinting at something bigger. We are meant to take up more spiritual space. Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover Beach” lamented this evacuation by comparing a melancholy, roaring tide leaving the shore. But, of course, tides come back. In a pre-Copernican world, everything was interior; we viewed our gods in star formations, even our very fates were writ large and circling over our heads. We were enclosed in soul. To see a grizzly bear at the water hole was to encounter a spirit; when thunder boomed it was because our heart was broken — obviously. Everything out there was telling us about in here. Our body was the beautiful, lonesome crossroads between the two. We don’t have unique access to our soul; it rests in condor nests and gambling dens in Russian villages, slipping back into our body with kohl-streaked cheeks just seconds before we wake up. It’s not entirely human.

Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity. In the writ-largeness of their narratives we can locate our own stories, like a river finding the sea. They are a home for us. Some say they are our very bones.

***

Liturgies of the Wild is out now. Buy tickets to Martin Shaw’s upcoming UnHerd Academy talk on mythology here.

***

Philosophy, claimed Étienne Gilson, always buries its undertakers. Gilson was himself a philosopher, so perhaps he had an interest in believing this. But there might be something in it: as the complaints pile up, about cultural stagnation and loss of meaning, Britain’s young people are on a renewed quest for higher things.

One of the forms this seems to be taking, at least for some, is a turn toward God. According to a new study a “Quiet Revival” is afoot in British Christianity, with young people leading the way: reportedly, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who attend church at least monthly has risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024: a startling increase. And yet it may also be true that England’s Christian heritage is as moribund as ever — at least in an institutional sense. For this reported church attendance is mainly growing in Roman Catholic and Pentecostal congregations, while the established, national Church of England continues to languish.

This isn’t the first indicator that some kind of religious backswing is underway among the young. A poll in January, for example, revealed that Gen Zs are half as likely as their parents to identify as atheists. The trend reaches beyond England as well, with the French journalist Solène Tadié recently pointing to a revival of traditional Catholicism in Europe, again especially among the young. Last year, too, Rod Dreher documented a similar pattern of Christian revival across the West, especially among young people, setting this in the wider context of a general, youthful turn toward spirituality.

Dreher argues that the governing feature of those churches that are thriving is their orientation toward the numinous, whether expressed through adherence to ancient high-church liturgy, or through intense, charismatic spiritual communion. But why would this be happening at all? Why especially young people, and why the mystical edge? I wonder if this trend is less about a spiritual awakening among Gen Z, and more about how sharply this contrasts with the generation that raised them: so-called “Gen X”, born roughly 1965 to 1980.

I belong, just about, to this demographic. It’s an open question for me whether Gen X exists at all or just comprises those Boomers born too late to enjoy the fun phase of smashing history, heritage, and the future. Either way, by the time I reached adolescence in the early Nineties, there didn’t seem much left to believe in; and yet, growing up in an unusually peaceful and prosperous era, we combined this sense of post-cultural anomie with far too much time to think.

The result was a pervasive sense of nihilism as a kind of moral duty, and profound unshakeable truth. It’s difficult to convey in these virulently ideological times, but back in the Nineties Nirvana’s anthem to existential boredom felt fiercely real in its raw but morally empty energy: “Here we are now, entertain us.” The same restless, angry alienation energizes the work of writer Irvine Welsh, whose Trainspotting (1993) was for a while the definitive edgy zeitgeist text for younger Gen X: so much so, in fact, that Trainspotting’s opening monologue made its way onto t-shirts, posters, and other merch, all spitting in the face of what it meant to “Choose life”.

For Welsh’s heroin-addicted anti-hero Renton, “life” is empty of meaning and purpose. It’s mere mechanical, dull consumerist tedium grinding toward a loveless, pointless, neglected end: “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

Renton declares: “I chose not to choose life.” And the 1996 movie adaptation, starring Ewan McGregor, enthroned Renton as one of Britpop’s most iconically perverse heartthrobs: as enthrallingly self-destructive a cultural icon as Kurt Cobain.

But what happens, then, when nihilists have kids? Raising kids requires innumerable choices, all of which tacitly concede a vision of the good. How does this square with a cultural outlook that denies any such thing? Describing his own predicament as a Gen X parent, the novelist Ewan Morrison — a friend and contemporary of Irvine Welsh — captured this paradox in a recent talk when he recalled seeing a young woman in the Nineties wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, over a visibly pregnant belly.

What does it mean to disavow futurity even as you’re gestating it? And how do you go about raising the resulting kids? The object of philosophy and religion has classically been eudaimonia: human flourishing. But by the end of the 20th century, pace Étienne Gilson, even those adults who chose not just life but creating new life often struggled to articulate what flourishing should look like.

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In Trainspotting, the only parents are the addicts Lesley and Sick Boy, whose neglected baby dies while they are high on heroin. But the fact that Gen Z has reached adulthood at all suggests that even parents with a fondness for Nietzsche and goth music generally didn’t prove as radically relativist as Lesley and Sick Boy, when it came to pursuing eudaimonia for their own children. Very simply, much of the circle was squared by pragmatists: parents who embraced a vague humanism, or New Atheism, while teaching their kids to say please and thank you and answering questions about Christmas and Easter with a shrug.

And yet at a deeper level the ambivalence remains, between the need to model the good for your kids and the relativist’s aversion to any such definitive moral stance. In turn, this produced a distinctive approach to child-rearing that the philosopher Agnes Callard characterizes as “acceptance parenting”. Acceptance parents, Callard argues, disavow any obligation to provide a substantive account of the good for their kids. Instead, children are left to determine what “happiness” means for themselves.

As the children of Gen X reach adulthood, we can thus ask: what kind of adults does such an upbringing produce? In What Are Children For?, published last year, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer some indication of how it feels to grow up under “acceptance parenting”. Wiseman recounts quizzing her own mother about whether there was anything at all she could choose to do that would disappoint her mother. Her mother demurred. Wiseman found this less supportive than incomprehensible: “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”

It’s not difficult to see how a generation that sang “oh well, whatever, nevermind” and pinned Welsh’s “Choose Life” monologue to their student bedroom walls might balk at defining eudaimonia for their kids. Who are they, after all, to say what the good life looks like? But this reluctance to impose values, Wiseman gently suggests, can result less in an enabling freedom, than a moral vacuum: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”

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Is it really so strange, then, that a generation raised in this void might, in some cases, turn to religious faith in search of clearer guidance? When the world’s faith traditions offer cumulative millennia of writing and practice on how to live well, it stands to reason that some young people would opt not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to fill the void.

And this, in turn, sheds light on why such an exploration might take literally any form other than the mainstream Anglican Church: in its conventional form, Anglicanism functions as a continuation of “acceptance parenting” by religious means. There are, of course, a great many deeply devout Anglicans; but by virtue of its historic role, the Church of England walks a precarious institutional tightrope between politics and faith, political and spiritual England. And this invites a public image less as a spiritual body, than as the representative of whatever remains of British institutional Christianity that hasn’t been subsumed by the welfare state and mainstream secular liberalism.

In fulfilling its duty as far as possible to offer spiritual welcome to the whole national community, our established Church risks appearing to stand for nothing much, or at best to embody the Christian equivalent of the moral vacuum Wiseman describes. Against this, young people weary of the effort to define their own values and happiness ex nihilo, and eager for guidance from somewhere — anywhere — might be forgiven for concluding that such direction is not to be found in a church whose leaders shrug at turning over their sacred buildings to silent discos or helter-skelters. Confronted by what looks overwhelmingly like a mass abdication of moral authority by parents and religious institutions, then, perhaps the last form of youthful revolt available is against nothingness itself: a rejection of relativism, and embrace of doctrine and mystery.

We can perhaps draw a few inferences from this. Firstly, taken at the broadest level, this presages an increasingly faith-inflected world as this generation matures — not just within the Christian Church but also across the fast-growing “spiritual but not religious” cohort. Secondly, as regards Christianity in particular, it suggests that predictions of the coming end of established, institutional Christianity in Britain, at least in the form it’s taken for the last century or two, may well turn out to be accurate. But this doesn’t mean that Christianity is dying out in Britain.

If anything, what’s on the wane now is nihilism, physicalism, and the reductive “nothing-butness” characteristic of the “Nevermind” era. By contrast, Christianity appears to be growing stranger, more countercultural, and more resistant to corralling in mainstream political institutions. This is a faith whose God rose from the dead; a generation of relativists will not finish it off.

God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.

Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a skeptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.

Not every argument in the book takes this form, but most do. The first section focuses on the Big Bang theory, and its implication that the universe must have had a beginning, and will have an end; in which case, the authors think, the existence of a supernatural first cause is deductively implied. But the next section, focusing on “fine-tuning arguments”, puts us squarely in the territory of induction not deduction, and what philosophers like to call “inference to the best explanation” — treating the physical universe as if it were a murder scene, with you as Hercule Poirot, trying to work out whodunnit from the clues.

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Fine-tuning arguments are already familiar to many — not least from earlier popular science books like Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma — and Bolloré and Bonnassies make a reasonable job of introducing them to those not in the know. Put simply, the claim is that the universe is sensitively calibrated for life in a way that cannot be coincidental. It’s intelligent design. Physical laws and constants are balanced excruciatingly delicately. “For some of these numbers, a very slight deviation by even a distant decimal point would have yielded an unrecognizable Universe, and we would not be here to talk about it.”

Had the mass of a proton been slightly bigger than that of a neutron, there would be nothing in the universe but neutronium. Had the beryllium 8 in stars not formed chemical bonds at a very precise resonance, there wouldn’t have been enough carbon in the universe for the beginning of life. Had the electromagnetic force binding electrons to nuclei been only a few percentage points different, you wouldn’t be reading this now. Counterfactual after counterfactual underlines just how lucky we are to be alive — so lucky, in fact, that perhaps luck has nothing to do with it.

And it is not just in the realm of physics that Bolloré and Bonnassies find natural phenomena too improbable to be accidental. In biology, the complexity of a single cell organism and the stunning efficiency of the double helix are among the structures they think only an intelligent being could account for. But it’s when our co-authors get to the last third of their book, and take on the supposed improbability of historical events involving Jesus, the Jewish race, and miracles such as the one at Fatima, that the true extent of their detective skills comes to the fore: less Hercule Poirot and more Inspector Clouseau. This part of the book is so clumsily argued, it would cause the Pope himself to have doubts.

Consider their story about why the existence of the Old Testament counts as good historical evidence for God’s invisible hand. They argue that it offers readers proto-scientific truths, such as “mankind comes from matter”, and “the world was not created all at once but developed in stages”, that absolutely could not have been revealed to the Ancient Hebrews at the time without divine instruction. (Never mind that much earlier pre-Socratic Greeks like Anaximenes and Anaximander made statements like this too.) At this, you might reasonably protest that the Bible also gets quite a lot wrong, perhaps suggesting that occasional empirical accuracy is more due to luck than judgment. For instance, the Book of Genesis says that heaven and earth were created in six days, not 13.8 billion years. But a bit like loyal press officers working to cover the ramblings of an unreliable leader, Bolloré and Bonnassies retort that nobody back then had the concept of a billion (though couldn’t God have given it to them?); and anyway, the “precise” age of the Earth “is of no interest at all, from either a metaphysical or physical point of view”.

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Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?

By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.

Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?

Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God. This is explicit in God, the Science, the Evidence: at one point the authors write that “the human body is just an intelligent machine”. Only the soul, if it exists, is of a different nature.” Inside nature, we might one day understand everything; on the outside, there is no time, no space, no real hooks for our subjective minds to catch on. Every earthbound image we come up with is inadequate.

But materialist accounts don’t do much better in banishing cosmological mystery; for arguably, saying we came from absolutely nothing is the most mysterious stance of all. So puzzling is this proposal, attempts to explain the origins of the universe in terms of prior nothingness often inadvertently smuggle something in. A portion of space pulsating with energy is still something; a quantum field is still something. We can still always ask: yes, but what caused the existence of it? And there’s also the metaphysically irritating fact that, if you don’t want to countenance a birth and a death for the universe, you have to posit the existence of an actual infinity; no less bizarre for the average mind, acquainted only with finitude, than its religious alternative.

Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesizing transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.

But we can now say confidently that Yang didn’t get it quite right. Woke-ism, for lack of a better term, no longer seems to be ascendent. Those ideas remain common, maybe even dominant, in many elite institutions, from academe to media and even some houses of worship. But somehow, they seem stale now. When Malcolm Gladwell starts talking like J.K. Rowling, it’s safe to say that mainstream culture is somewhere past “peak woke.”

What, then, is the real Successor Ideology? The short answer might be faith — the old-fashioned kind.

We seem to be in the beginning stages of a Christian revival in the West. About 10 years ago, a new group of secular thinkers, led by the historian Tom Holland and the psychologist Jordan Peterson, began defending the civilizational value of Christianity, noting its contributions to peace, tolerance, and civil rights. After decades of more and more people coming to regard Christianity as a set of repressive superstitions, it suddenly became conventional wisdom in certain quarters that Christianity is good for people and societies.

Then, surprisingly, a number of high-profile artists and intellectuals, many of them British, started announcing their conversion (or return) to Christianity: people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Russell Brand, and Nick Cave. What’s more, YouTube has exploded with Christian-curious seekers making and watching videos about “the meaning crisis.”

The open question has been this: Is this just another celebrity-fueled online fad, like cold plunges or Ozempic? Or will the people actually return to the pews? Charlie Kirk made the case on Facebook just six days before his assassination: “There is revival in the Christian church. Churches are growing. Young people are flocking to faith in God.” But this is the kind of thing that Christians are so desperate to see after decades of decline. It’s possible they’re seeing what they want to see.

Still, some data suggest the ferment is real. Consider a new report from the Bible Society purporting to show that church attendance in England and Wales has surged in recent years. Survey data from The Quiet Revival, as the report was titled, suggests that the number of churchgoing Christians in England and Wales increased to nearly 6 million last year, up from about 4 million in 2018. That’s a 56% explosion in just six years. Perhaps even more surprising, it is young men driving the growth, with 21% of 18-to-24-year-old men reporting that they go to church once a month, compared to only 12% of young women.

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“In churches across society,” the report proclaims, “something amazing is happening.”

I’m not the first person to be skeptical of the numbers. As Stephen Bullivant pointed out in First Things, the study suggests that five times as many young men are attending church relative to 2018, and at least 500,000 additional worshipers should be in the pews every week. That’s hard to square with reports of lower attendance since the pandemic.

But there is something going on, and it’s consistent with what we’re seeing in the United States. More young men are telling pollsters that they are religious, and Catholic churches are reporting higher numbers of converts. I recently spoke to two friends, a married couple, who work in ministry at a large nondenominational church in suburban Los Angeles. They report that the church is seeing an influx of hundreds of young people from the local colleges like the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s more men than women,” he reports. “And their faith is unusually authentic,” she adds. About half of the kids seem to come from traditional Christian families, and the other half seem to have followed a path that started online with someone like Jordan Peterson. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before.”

What’s weird is that secularization is continuing apace. A recent Pew poll found that the Catholic church loses eight of its faithful for every single person that joins. And the mainline Protestant churches remain mired in a precipitous decline.

Here’s a theory: secularization and re-enchantment are happening simultaneously. It’s showing up as a creative churn in the English-speaking world. As young people, especially young men, enter the church, older folks, especially women, are leaving. I wonder if one day we may be forced to retire the haggard stereotype of the “church lady” who drags her reluctant husband and kids to services every Sunday. 

But I also wonder how a church can adapt to a sanctuary filled with “church bros.” Are these men bringing with them a “rad-trad” vision of male-female relations that they picked up online? Or are they rejecting both the nihilism and the macho Nietzscheanism so common in digital spaces? Will young women follow the men back through the church doors? Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Not all churches benefit from the churn. While milquetoast suburban congregations founder, two very different types of congregations are seeing growth: the first are more traditional, devout congregations in the sacramental traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy; the second are nondenominational megachurches that emphasize a personal, emotional relationship with Christ. The report from the Bible Society suggests the same thing is happening in England and Wales: Catholics and Pentecostals increase in number, while the Church of England continues to see decline.

On the ground, this can be quite disorienting. Here in Los Angeles, my family attends weekly Mass at a gorgeous Italianate church built in the Twenties. It isn’t the Latin Mass, but there is a lot of Latin in the service, and the choral hymns and organ music are defiantly traditional. On a typical Sunday, the pews are full of young families who have traveled up to an hour for this style of reverent worship. It’s often standing-room-only.

Just 10 minutes away is a nondescript Catholic church building built in the Fifties. My family visited one Sunday last year. There’s hardly any Latin, and a folksy guitar player sings modern worship songs. The vibe is eager-to-please, but whom is it pleasing? Not very many people, frankly. The sanctuary is mostly empty, and the average age is north of 60. As the young seek out tradition and transcendence, it is the older Christian generations who cling to flat modernity.

Is it possible to imagine that some new-old iteration of Christianity could evolve into a Successor Ideology that would hold our body politic together, much like liberal Protestantism did for most of the last century? Sure, it is.

Charlie Kirk’s moving memorial, with pyrotechnics and an altar call, was an unabashed mash-up of a tent revival and a MAGA campaign event. You don’t have to squint very hard to see President Trump as America’s first megachurch president. He may not preach the gospel or live a holy life. But like many a Protestant preacher, he combines elements of the prosperity gospel with the subversive instincts of a great stand-up comedian. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings are more sober Catholic men like JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

In this transitory time of social fragmentation, however, Christians aren’t the only ones searching for signs. As some look for evidence in the pews, others are looking to the polling places. Consider the joy and optimism that have greeted Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to be the mayor of New York. For some Democrats, Mamdani’s win in the primary last June was a harbinger of a new, populist Left that would retain a softer woke-ism in combination with democratic socialism in the style of Bernie Sanders. They seem to imagine that this fusion could produce the true Successor Ideology.

At the same time, we are seeing a zealous, idealistic fervor erupt around artificial intelligence and the new reproductive technologies. It seems that much of Silicon Valley is converging on a kind of techno-utopianism that they envision as the engine of the next age.

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And, finally, as we are constantly reminded, you can also squint your eyes and see in Trump not an embodiment of any Christian spirit, but the prototype of a more autocratic leader tapping into a cult of personality. This path could be quite ugly, even if the risk of real fascism seems remote. And this type of leader, despite his populist promises, might be most likely to use his power to promote the interests of his cronies.

 It may be helpful here to recall what the Successor Ideology was going to replace. Since World War II, at least, the default ideology of the West was basically a form of Christian liberalism. The relative proportions of Christianity and liberalism might have fluctuated up or down a bit, but the basic throughline was there.

 This ideology made two overlapping transcendent promises: eternal life in heaven and infinite progress here on earth, thanks to the onward march of America-inspired liberal democracy. It was Christian liberalism that provided the ideological oomph for that political phenomenon often called neoliberalism.

 Between 1980 and 2010 or so, however, Christian liberalism transformed itself — quite gradually and without many of us noticing — into something else that might be called agnostic liberationism. This new ideology denied that it was an ideology at all, and it made no transcendent promise other than more and more freedom for ever and ever. Its apogee was the legalization of gay marriage which swept the West in the 2010s.

 The current moment of political upheaval and social crisis is a direct result of the failure of that ideology, which eroded institutions and failed to feed the human hunger for communal transcendence. That’s why woke-ism — with its rituals of confession and penance without forgiveness — was so attractive to so many among the urban professional classes, and why it briefly felt like the thing that was going to overtake the world.

From where we stand now, it’s hard to tell exactly where we are headed.  But it’s probably safe to predict that the true Successor Ideology is going to make some sort of transcendent promise. If it is to last, it will also have to renew our institutions and our traditions. In the end, we may be left with the same choices as those who have come before us. Where will we find our transcendence — in God, in the king, in mere government, or in promethean “progress”?

 May we choose wisely.

When one pictures a 14-year-old teenage girl being ridiculed for her very ordinary Anglican faith, one might imagine her leaving her faith, or at the very least, not acknowledging it publicly. But the events of that horrible spring forged my daughter into a stronger Christian than she was before. Instead of shrinking away from Christianity, she wore a crucifix necklace to school. Instead of hiding, as the principal suggested, in a locked classroom, she remained out and about with the other kids during lunch; instead of meekly shrinking from discussions, she told those who were targeting her that she forgave them. It was, strangely, a time of joy for her, a time to discover that she really did believe in the things she professed to believe in and that her Sunday rituals weren’t empty. She felt loved and strong and free. There is something in the Christian that makes her bold. If you know, you know, as the kids say.

The results of her refusal to back down were surprising. First of all, she discovered who her real friends were (African and Eastern European immigrants, it turned out: kids who are also Christians, and who have some familiarity with persecution). The second surprising thing was how many of her bullies slowly became her friends again. This didn’t happen en masse. One girl reached out through text to say sorry. Then a few weeks later, another did. Some started coming to church with my daughter. Some became Christians themselves. That was four years ago; my daughter is now a senior and is thriving. She’s on the varsity volleyball team, has a part-time job as a lifeguard, and spent her summer volunteering at our Anglican church. She wears Christian clothing to school. “Faith Over Fear,” says one of her hoodies. “The Lord is on my side. What can man do to me?” It’s a verse from one of the Psalms of David. It might elicit the occasional eyeroll from one of her classmates, but the verse disarms their contempt even as they express it.

It was clear that attitudes towards Christianity were changing; one could see this shift happening both in pop culture and among the high school teens themselves. This past summer the Amazon Prime show The Chosen, which chronicles the life of Jesus, moved from niche Christian to top 10 most watched. Justin Bieber released his album Swag, which ends with a cover of an Eighties praise and worship song, familiar to anyone who attended church camp in the last 40 years, “Lord I Lift Your Name on High”. (Bieber and his wife Hailey are born again Christians. He is headlining Coachella this year and has more Instagram followers than Taylor Swift, even though his life is both quiet and private.) Last year religious jewelry made a huge comeback; crucifixes and saint pendants were at every teen girl store.

And so I was not surprised that one evening just a few weeks ago, a group of my daughter’s teenage friends, both guys and girls, came to my house for late night snacks with some questions about Christianity. Only one of them is Christian; the others were simply curious. “How do you know that Christianity is true?” they asked. “Why is it hard to believe in God?” They wanted answers. The wishy-washy values they’d been raised with, those of subjective feelings, validating speech, and “my truth”, they were now rejecting. There is a certain kind of teen for whom the cultural narrative of victimhood now seems brackish and empty, both self-serving and anxiety producing. They want to be courageous, and they see that the self-affirming “truths” of some of their classmates aren’t a way to be brave, but rather a way to control how others respond to them.

I am not a theologian, but I do know more than the average person about these things. So it was with great pleasure that I sat with the teens and explained what I could. Christianity is a wrestle, I told them. And that is what the believer does, struggles with her inner proclivity to self-centeredness. One wrestles against pride, against envy, against self-satisfaction. One wrestles most of all with a truth that is seen through a glass dimly. The work of the Christian isn’t to know with certainty what truth is, but to continually chip away at what is untrue. Much of the time, “my truth” is a mask for “my self-delusion” because for the Christian, inwardness begins not with the acknowledgment of one’s inner goodness, but of one’s inner sinfulness. You deceive yourself, the Christian must acknowledge. You are not who you think you are. In fact, you are much, much worse. For teenagers who have been raised on words affirming their inner perfection, this is bracing stuff.

Then came the murder of Charlie Kirk. Whether they loved or hated him, all teens knew who he was and what he stood for. He resonated with so many young people because he said out loud things that have been anathema to think about, let alone speak about, especially on university campuses. His appeal is — was — his courage to hold fast to beliefs rooted in the Christian scriptures. Even if one didn’t entirely adhere to his interpretation of the Bible, it was genuinely new for teens to see a young man root his values in an ancient authority rather than the tyranny of personal feelings. For the young student who has been raised within the totalitarian politics of enforced empathy, this is immensely appealing. But it is also in its own way something to treat cautiously. The teens in my kitchen were looking for clear answers, but clear answers can often tempt one into self-righteousness.

To many of their questions, I had disappointing answers. “Who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?” was one of these. My answer was firm: “It’s not up to us to judge, and we don’t get to know.” For the teens, this was a difficult answer, not because they were hoping to be able to condemn people, but because they are largely unacquainted with uncertainty and humility in the face of mystery. This may be just a feature of youth in general. The world is big, wicked, frightening and beautiful. As the world’s murkiness makes itself known, it’s tempting to want to cling to clarity and certainty. But to have an attraction to moral answers that are very rigid is also, of course, a feature of the culture in which they’ve been raised, one that has been divided into two groups: villains and victims. As our conversation went on, it became evident that none of these teens understood the first thing about history, about historical context, or about how our culture came to have the moral judgments that we do (it’s because of Christianity, kids).

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The teens have, through the cultural ether, picked up the idea that Christianity offers harsh judgments of others. What they have failed to grasp is that Christianity offers harsh judgments of oneself. The youth has imbibed the myth of progress which places them at the end of history. They look at the past with breathtaking judgmentalism while being blind to the formations of their judgments. Trained only in the ethic of debunking their civilization’s merits, they seem to have no sense of the complex movements of human culture, nor, more importantly, of their own inward inclination toward moral absolutism. To make matters worse, it is precisely one’s inward state that our therapeutic culture has valorized as the highest ethical good that needs to be not only accepted but admired by others. To tell teenagers that Christianity says the opposite, that your inner state is sinful, selfish, corrupt, and deceitful, is the most radical thing they’ve ever heard.

Many are ready for radical. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there has been a flood of social media posts about Christianity. Many people are announcing that they are suddenly going to church. “Ive never been a believer” (sic), writes one, “I actually didn’t think God was real, watching Charlie be assassinated for his beliefs makes me think im (sic) wrong and he was right. I am now ready to learn about God. Charlie did that.” Here’s another: “Charlie Kirk’s death made me pick up a Bible for the first time in my life and I found a truth I didn’t know I was searching for.” And another: “I used to be a ‘closet’ Christian because I’m not one for the backlash. But babyyy when I say a fire is lit.” There are thousands of these.

The satirical Christian news outlet, The Babylon Bee (“fake news you can trust”), ran a headline in the hours following Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “Satan: ‘I’ve made a huge mistake’,” it reads. The photograph shows the packed stadium filled with people worshiping God: “‘Well’,” says Satan, “‘this isn’t going how I planned at all.’” Indeed. We are now watching something unfold in real time, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. We are discovering that we do not live in an era in which God is irrelevant, but instead that a religion based on resurrection has some capacity to come back from the dead.

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It’s estimated that at least 20 million people streamed Charlie Kirk’s memorial. I was one of them. By far the most moving moment of the event was when Erika Kirk announced that she forgave the young man who murdered her husband because it was what Christ did on the cross. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love.” There is a power in forgiveness. There is a power in speaking of forgiveness. Donald Trump’s calls for retribution are clownish and vulgar in comparison.

And so what is this revival (it is most certainly a revival) going to accomplish? Of course we don’t yet know. But we cannot ignore that Christianity is strong. And we also cannot ignore the power of loving one’s enemy. The Christian should condemn in the harshest terms any political maneuver that seeks to dehumanize and hate one’s political opponent, even if one feels that they are spreading sickness and nihilism. For it is the hate within one’s soul that Christ’s love first needs to conquer. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”

Christianity no longer represents something oppressive or intolerant to youth, and Christians need to be careful that, backed by administrative power, it doesn’t become this. The United States should not become a theocracy. Christian strength is not filled with resentment, condemnation or blame, but with a vitality that is born of courage and humility. Christianity beckons towards something that is larger than one’s own inner truth or one’s own inner feelings; it makes one’s inner self larger, braver, freer, and stronger as they turn towards it. It takes more strength to forgive than to blame.

One reason for this is that the dimensions of ourselves that are churned up while under the influence of psychedelics are ones that we often have difficulty squaring with the persons endowed with moral agency that we ordinarily take ourselves to be. It is normal to recoil from some of what we find within ourselves, to seek to disavow it once the trip is over. But the fact that we are able to find hidden dimensions of ourselves that seem to have a life of their own, whether we like what we find or not, while under the influence of certain substances, is itself of interest, or should be, to anyone who wants to understand what it is to live in this world, with a human mind and a sense of wonder.

It raises the question: how is it that we perceive reality the way we do? And what does it say about our perception of reality that it can be so fundamentally altered through an intentional alteration of our internal chemistry? Do psychedelics warp our perception of reality, drawing us further than in our ordinary lucid state from the actual way things are? Or do they rather reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? It seems that to answer in favor of the view that psychedelics push us further from apprehension of the world as it is presupposes that our mind is, in its default state, naturally and adequately constituted so as to know reality itself. But philosophy has spent the last few millennia coming up with some pretty good reasons why we should be skeptical of the idea that the mind is so constituted.

Something therefore seems a bit off, a bit fishy, when philosophers, along with the surrounding culture, shy away from psychedelics, whether taking them or studying their effects, on the grounds that they distance you from reality. Philosophy is born of the realization that we already are, or seem to be, at some distance from reality even in our default mode of consciousness. Why not, then, explore all the modes of consciousness available to us, considering what each of them might have to tell us about the relationship between mind and world? That is exactly what I did while researching my new book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality.

Not so long ago, I was in a city in the Netherlands for three nights. I had been invited to give a public lecture, and I decided to stay on over the weekend to conduct some research for my book. In that time, I took psychedelics twice.

The evening of the second psilocybin trip, having taken more than before, and far more than is recommended, would turn out to be one of the most intense and transformative experiences of my life. Though I bump up against the limits of language when I try to convey what it was like.

My hotel room had a cheap-looking poster of Marilyn Monroe framed on the wall. One of the first signs that the psilocybin was taking effect arrived when I was walking towards the bathroom, and I saw her there and paused in front of her image and stared at her in absolute wonder. “Do I know Marilyn Monroe?” I asked myself. I never met her, but she has been with me my whole life, just as she has probably been with everyone reading this piece. She is at least as familiar to me as, say, any of my first cousins. And yet, I reflect, I have never so much as greeted her. How strange! So, there in that hotel room, I greeted Marilyn Monroe, and it was heartfelt, and I was certain that whatever just transpired counted as a meaningful interpersonal exchange.

But this was just the beginning, as the particular quality of that encounter with Marilyn would be felt 10 times more strongly when I returned to the bed and pulled up old clips on YouTube of Cass Elliott, more commonly known as Mama Cass. For some inscrutable reason, earlier in that day I had had an earworm from The Mamas and the Papas’ 1967 song “Creeque Alley” going through my head, in particular the line that runs: “And no one’s gettin’ fat except Mama Cass.” This had come to me in my completely unaltered mental state, a reminder that the mind and memory are a marvel, too, without psychedelics. I don’t know what it was doing there. I’m not particularly a fan of Sixties folkpop. But there it was, in my head, and so I pulled it up on the computer, and I ended up spending the next few hours watching clips of Mama Cass on the talk show circuit, all the while feeling not only that I knew her, and had always known her, but that I had always loved her.

To say it like this sounds ridiculous, but the feeling was entirely sincere. Something about Mama Cass seemed to tell the whole story of my own existence. I suddenly recalled a black-and-white picture of my parents, from the summer of 1972. My mother is pregnant with me, and she is unusually heavy. Then I recalled a distant memory from early childhood when that photo was being shown around to guests at our home. I knew I was in it, though still unborn, and I knew I was the reason why my mother had gained so much weight. Then I recalled that someone, I don’t know who, said, when looking at the photo, that my mother looked like Mama Cass. Resemblance, now, seemed to collapse into identity, or rather the distinction between them no longer mattered. Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as “Mama” in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.

I am not going to attempt to defend this conviction, which felt so strong at the time. That it is indefensible, that it is ridiculous, is precisely what I am attempting to convey. Why did such thoughts come to me so intensely and unbidden? The mind, it seemed to me as I reviewed the experience on the following day, is just so much more wondrous, so much stranger, than my professional colleagues ordinarily take it to be! We philosophers are typically concerned to understand how a human mind can entertain such propositions as “There is a pain in my foot” or how it can perceive a red dot on a screen. These are fascinating problems, too, but surely we might also gain from considering how the mind can become convinced that a long-dead pop star has become identical with one’s own mother or with something like “cosmic motherhood”.

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I think at least a part of the reason we tend to stick with the pain in the foot or the dot on the screen is that, in order to talk about the stranger divagations of the mind, we generally have to acknowledge that we have experienced them, and that is an acknowledgment that typically entails a measure of shame. Part of my motivation in writing what I have written here is to push beyond that shame, to write about conscious experience in a way that truly faces up to the weirdness of the world.

Was my encounter with Mama Cass so ridiculous in the end? Was I completely out of line in my conviction that I loved her? In the Symposium Plato has Socrates describe the ideal ascension of this emotion, from its lowest to its highest expressions. Early in life, we experience love mixed with sexual desire for the beauty of a particular other person’s body, and then we move from there to love of all beautiful bodies. But if we progress as we might hope to do, towards wisdom, then as we age we will also gradually come to love all beautiful minds, and in turn all beautiful institutions and endeavors, then all beautiful knowledge, and in the end, as wise old philosophers, our love will be focused upon nothing but Love itself.

The truth is that most of us vacillate throughout our lives between the various positions on this imagined hierarchy. But whether we think of the ascension as a one-way journey or not, the key philosophical idea in it is that there is a real entity, Love, that exists independently of any of its instances as we know them from experience. This is what we generally refer to as a “universal”, and the question whether such a thing exists or not — not just loveable creatures and things, but Love itself; not just instances of justice, but Justice itself, and so on — will divide the schools of the philosophers, with their running “footnotes to Plato”, as Alfred North Whitehead described the history of Western philosophy, for millennia to come.

I am certainly not going to make any progress towards solving the problem of universals in my book, nor even stake out a position on either of the familiar sides of the debate. But I will remark, first, that psychedelic experience can itself deliver a strong argument in favor of the realist camp in the debate. Under the influence of psilocybin, I seemed not to love Mama Cass, for example, in her particularity, but rather to love her because this love is a point of entry, so to speak, to the experience of Love itself. When I listen to music while on psilocybin, I love the particular song, but I also feel, much more strongly, that the song is my point of entry to Music, with a capital “M”, to the thing itself that exists eternally behind and before all the songs that have ever been sung.

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America's cult of Weird

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We all have this feeling from time to time, to some extent. It’s the feeling, in fact, that music and poetry excel above all at conjuring in us: the feeling that there is another dimension that these works of art are coming from. Ordinarily, in a sober and lucid mind, this feeling mostly gets expressed in the form of longing. Songs we love have a particular power to make us feel as though there is a world that we know, somehow, but from which we are cut off. Songs seem to emanate from that world but generally do not seem fully to open that world up to us. Yet under the influence of psilocybin, one of my most vivid thoughts goes something like this: “So that other world is real after all, and it is now open to me! I wasn’t only imagining it!”

Do I still think that other world is real, now, when my brain chemistry is back to its default setting? The answer is complicated, but I believe philosophy can help us face up to the challenge somewhat.

The trouble is that Western philosophy has long valorized the sober, lucid mind above the drugged, drunk, or dreaming one. For at least the past two millennia, Western philosophy has defined itself in contrast to other related endeavors, such as mysticism, theology, poetry, and myth, even as nonspecialists often run these endeavors together. The key difference between philosophy and mysticism in particular, and indeed a key point of pride among the philosophers, is that unlike the mystics — who often rely on techniques to bring themselves into altered states of consciousness, which might include drugs, but also include meditative practices, or attention to one’s own dreams, or the hallucinations induced by descending into the dark depths of a cave — we philosophers are expected to rely entirely on the cognitive faculties available to us in our lucid, waking, and sober state. Our aim is to produce natural-language propositions that can be shared with other philosophers, discussed, argued about, and nitpicked.

Philosophy is almost always held to be concerned, by definition, with meanings and arguments, not with what lies beyond these. But there has also always been a dissenting camp, which says that philosophy should occupy itself with whatever human beings experience, whether easily rendered into propositional form or not. It may be that it is ultimately for the good of philosophy if some of its practitioners willingly run the risk of being seen as having gone off the deep end.

***

This is an excerpt from On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality. Copyright (c) 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

What makes the case of Carlo Acutis so remarkable is the combination of youth and speed. The first millennial saint would be only 34 years old if he were alive today, the 19th anniversary of his death. His parents were in the congregation yesterday. “Carlo met Jesus in his family, thanks to his parents Andrea and Antonia,” said Pope Leo. That was a generous form of words. When Carlo was born, his father Andrea was working in London for the investment bank Lazard; neither he nor his wife Antonia were practicing Catholics, and it was only the piety of their son that drew them back to the Church. At the time, Carlo was the wealthy couple’s only child. On the fourth anniversary of his death, Antonia gave birth to the twins Francesca and Michele; the latter gave the first reading at the canonization Mass, speaking in natively fluent English. A popular image on Instagram shows Carlo, halo shining, with his arms around the siblings he never met.

The notion of a millennial saint, photogenic in his polo shirt and Ray-Bans, has proved irresistible to the secular media. Most Catholics are delighted. But, like every major event in a shrinking Western Church scarred by scandal and online factional warfare, it is tinged with controversy. The convergence of modernity and tradition in Carlo’s life has created a legacy that is unsettling as well as exhilarating. Many Northern European Catholics are unenthusiastic about the permanent exhibition of saints’ dead bodies; Carlo lies in a glass tomb in Assisi, at first glance incorrupt, though in fact his apparently flawless complexion is a silicone mask concealing what the Church admits are “normal signs of decay”. And some Italian Catholics, though accustomed to such exhibitions, think it was disrespectful to dress the boy in jeans and Nike trainers. But, honestly, it is difficult to get these things right. There is no precedent for the cult of a style-conscious computer geek.

A more fundamental controversy has been generated by the new saint’s personal faith — which, unlike his sartorial tastes, was impervious to fashion. Carlo Acutis’s Catholicism was rooted in the Eucharist: not just the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass, which is common to all flavors of Catholic spirituality, but the practice of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. The modernists who seized control of the Church’s liturgy after the Second Vatican Council regarded Eucharistic Adoration as a superstitious relic of the Middle Ages or, worse, sugary 19th-century piety. They and their successors have watched incredulously as a new generation of Catholics have embraced Adoration, falling to their denim-covered knees as the sacrament, encased in a richly ornamented monstrance, processes through the streets. Sales of mantillas or “Mass veils” for young women are through the roof; engaged couples, chaste until marriage and hoping for large families, cross themselves every time they pass a Catholic church.

Even before yesterday, Carlo Acutis, who coded websites celebrating the Eucharist and its associated miracles, was an unofficial patron saint of Generation Z traditionalists, many of whom attend the traditional Latin Mass that Pope Francis unsuccessfully tried to stamp out. St Carlo did not: he died the year before Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, later torn up by his successor, liberated the old rite for young people bored by the dreary folksiness of “youth Masses”. Yet the liturgical civil war that followed Francis’s 2021 document Traditionis Custodes, which attempted to drive the Latin Mass out of parishes, nonetheless cast a shadow over last weekend’s celebrations.

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Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Academy of St Anselm in Rome, was an influential lay advisor to the Argentinian pope; he is often described as “the mind behind the motu proprio” – that is, Francis’s brutal, and brutally enforced, restrictions on the old rite. Grillo has often written savagely against the traditional Mass. But last June he found a new target: the then Blessed Carlo Acutis. Writing in the journal Munera, he asked: “How is it possible that a young Blessed can communicate a Eucharistic theology so old, so heavy, so obsessive, so focused on the inessential …?” This “young ardent communicator”, he wrote, had a deficient, defective and one-sided understanding of the sacrament. A visit to Carlo’s website confirmed him in his view that the teenager manifested a “distorted fixation on Eucharistic miracles”.

The significance of Grillo’s polemic lay not so much in its venom but in his exalted position at the court of Pope Francis. This is not to say that the late pontiff shared his contemptuous view of Carlo Acutis. After all, it was Francis who — appreciating his popularity and reassured that he was untainted by the old Missal — would have canonized Carlo in April if he had not himself gone to meet his maker. What the Munera diatribe illustrated was the grip of the hard Left on the Bergoglio pontificate. Put bluntly, Francis knew that Grillo was a nasty piece of work, and it did not bother him.

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The battle for John Henry Newman

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In the act of canonizing Saints Piergiorgio and Carlo, Pope Leo displayed a perfect dignity that may yet develop into much-needed papal charisma. What remains to be seen is whether he grasps the extent to which, over the past 12 years, the institutions of the Church have been infiltrated by secular lobbyists. In this respect, it is not Sunday’s ceremony that matters so much as what happened on Saturday, when gay activists wearing T-shirts reading “Fuck the Rules” processed into St Peter’s Basilica as part of a papally-sanctioned LGBT pilgrimage. The contrast between the two events could not have been greater.

Leo can hardly attribute the scandal caused by the activists to homophobia; if he ponders the sequence of events that led up to it, and he is a deeply reflective man, perhaps he will realize that his own naïvety is partly to blame. In private he has promised to “bring peace to the Church”. Despite the joyful mood yesterday, there are frustratingly few signs that the healing has begun. Perhaps a prayer to St Carlo Acutis is in order.

Skepticism in China about Christianity predates Communism by quite some way. When Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552-1510) began to visit in the late 16th century, they found that even those elites who were sympathetic to their faith required a great deal of persuasion before entering the fold — God appeared to ask too much while offering too little and so many of the aspects of Christianity they would have to adopt seemed to clash with traditional Chinese life. Doing away with concubines seemed self-defeating, since they might furnish a man with an heir. Removing ancestor tablets from the home meant losing the means of paying filial respect. The crucifixion of Jesus struck many as shocking rather than heroic: corporal punishment was reserved for the very lowest in society.

Still, Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

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Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organizations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organizations were banned in favor of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out.

Even then, given the CCP’s interest in managing people who possess the ability to influence whole communities in China, the ideological soundness of church leaders has never been taken for granted. Education at seminaries is tightly managed, with a strong focus on patriotism. Qualified clergy face constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty, to which some respond by emphasizing Christianity’s proletarian credentials: Jesus was a carpenter, who chose fishermen as his early disciples and had harsh words for merchants and the wealthy.

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organizations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicization”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

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The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicization” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership program. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalization in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularization theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanization. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

That wasn’t because people didn’t think Newman deserved to become one of only 38 saints — out of more than 10,000 recognized by the Catholic Church — whose writings receive the ultimate papal imprimatur. Pope Leo’s announcement was almost universally welcomed. But what did it mean?

St John Henry (1805-90) will join the ranks of Saints Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux. He will be the first native English Doctor of the Church since St Bede, born in Northumbria in 672 AD. And Newman — who was canonized in 2019 — will be the first former Protestant to be granted this exalted title.

Newman was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, at the age of 21 in 1822. Three years later, he was ordained an Anglican priest. By 1828 he was Vicar of St Mary’s, the Oxford University church. Soon he developed a cult following among undergraduates, who would skip meals in order to hear him preach. His sermons — couched in exquisite prose laced with sarcasm — were the most glittering product of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reintroduce the Church of England to the pure apostolic faith of the early Fathers.

Then, in 1845, swayed by study, Newman sensationally went over to Rome, eventually becoming a cardinal. The decision cost him his teaching post at Oxford and many friends. The Victorian public was horrified. Even Newman’s enemies — of which he had many, since he was both outspoken and thin-skinned — realized that the dreaded Papists had poached the finest mind in Anglicanism.

But the point-scoring that followed Pope Leo’s announcement wasn’t inspired by Protestant sour grapes. Anglicans long ago came to terms with Newman’s defection. They argue that his most celebrated insights — above all, his notion that doctrine of the Church “develops” as successive generations uncover fresh truths — are derived from his Oxford sermons, whose brilliance was perhaps unsurpassed by anything he wrote as a Catholic. If Pope Leo wants to make him a Doctor of the Church, then they accept the implied compliment. It is rarely mentioned that Newman went to his grave believing that the Church of England was a heretical body that should submit to Rome.

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No: last week’s infighting was between Roman Catholics, who are mostly united in their devotion to St John Henry, but at loggerheads over his legacy. Both conservative and liberal Catholics want to “own” Newman, and in a Church scarred by the partisan liberal pontificate of Pope Francis they are ready to fight it out. To quote one prominent traditionalist, “Now that Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church, it’s important that those who have actually read his works take control of the narrative before the Woke brigade hijacks him.”

The problem for conservatives is that plenty of liberal Catholics have read Newman and believe that he foreshadowed the innovations of the Second Vatican Council, which for that reason has been called “Newman’s Council”. And it’s true that Newman believed that lay Catholics could play a role in safeguarding doctrine. He noted that, during the fourth-century Arian conflict, bishops disavowed the divinity of Christ but their faithful flocks held on to it. Also, while accepting the doctrine of papal infallibility, he was dismayed by its triumphalist definition by the First Vatican Council in 1870.

Yet the constant invocation of Newman by modernizing Catholics is hard to square with the savagery of his attacks on the liberalism of his own era. As an Anglican, Newman lampooned Victorian progressives who believed that moral truths could be uncovered by science. He returned to the subject with renewed ferocity nearly half a century later, in an address when he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879.

Liberals were guilty of believing that “one creed is as good as another”, he said, and that “it is the right of each individual to make [revealed religion] say just what strikes his fancy”. This would lead to the ruin of souls. To quote Dr Samuel Gregg of the conservative Catholic Acton Institute, “Today, I suspect, the sheer force of Newman’s critique of what he called ‘liberalism in religion’ would make him persona non grata in most Northern European theology faculties.”

Of course, conservative and liberal Catholics are simply indulging in guesswork when they transport an eminent Victorian into the 20th or 21st centuries. What we do know, however, is that John Henry Newman was persona non grata in certain Anglican circles before he even considered converting, and also among powerful Catholics after he sacrificed everything to join their Church.

Partly this was his own fault. Professor Eamon Duffy, doyen of English Catholic historians and a huge Newman enthusiast, writes that as an Anglican the young theologian was “far from fastidious” in advancing his agenda, orchestrating “an anonymous campaign of denigration and protest” against a liberal churchman. (Perhaps he would have felt at home on X.) Decades later, as Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, Newman ministered selflessly to the poor while nurturing ancient grudges and ghosting friends who had offended him. That isn’t saintly behavior — but, on the other hand, it isn’t uncharacteristic of many saints who have temporarily lost sight of human decency in their crusades against “error”.

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A more fundamental problem was that, in both his Churches, Newman was looking for a via media — a middle way. As an Anglican he tried to reconcile the apostolic teachings of Rome with the insights of the Protestant Reformers before deciding that he was wasting his time. As a Catholic he criticized liberals while trying to moderate the dogmatism of Pope Pius IX and his ally Cardinal Henry Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, a fellow ex-Anglican convert who wanted to impose papal authority on every aspect of English Catholic life.

Manning privately thought Newman was a heretic — an absurd notion. When the new Pope Leo XIII offered the old man a red hat, Manning played a really dirty trick, spreading anonymously authored false reports that Newman had declined the honor. Fortunately, a message from Birmingham reached Rome just in time.

Such are the perils of trying to find common ground in a fractured Church. This year the first American pope took the name Leo in order to honor the pope who, in making the great English theologian a cardinal, implicitly conceded that Pius IX had dragged the Church into unnecessary controversies. Newman was more explicit. Pius had suffered the fate of any pope who reigns for too long: “He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.”

Does that ring a bell? Pope Francis reigned for only 12 years, but it seemed longer. He was a liberal, not an ultra-conservative in the mold of Pope Pius; indeed, he sometimes flirted with the notion, so scandalous to Newman, that “one creed is as good as another”. But, like Pius, Francis tolerated no contradiction, displayed little intellectual curiosity, and did cruel things to Catholics who attended the Latin Mass celebrated by St John Henry. He issued encyclicals that merited the latter’s verdict on Pius’s “Syllabus of Errors” – in Duffy’s paraphrase, “a theological mess, made up of scattergun denunciations of matters in which the Church had no real expertise.” Above all, despite the pantomime of “synodality”, he centralized the government of the Church in the despotic fashion that Newman deplored.

Leo XIV has, so far, given us few hints of specific policy initiatives. But most commentators agree that he is looking for a middle way between conservatives and liberals, and already we can see trouble ahead: both hardline liberals and paranoid conservatives are determined to cast him in the role of Pope Francis II. My guess is that there is a via media out there, but that Leo will find it only if he displays the sort of courage that enabled St John Henry to cross the Tiber, and walks away from the path to chaotic secularism mapped out by his predecessor.

What America needs today is a Democratic Party with a prosocial vision advanced through prosocial means: to defend human beings as fundamentally social, cooperative, and mutually dependent, both in the way they campaign and in the policies they promote. 

Unfortunately, too many Democrats look at Trump and conclude they can use his tools to advance their ends. Envious of Trump’s success, they have also become envious of his political style. Unable, or maybe unwilling, to reckon with their electoral failing, Democrats are frantically searching for someone to match Trump’s crassness and cruelty in a feckless bid to mirror his political success. But what they fail to recognize is that Trump’s style is consistent with his political outlook. The cultivation of anger, vulgarity, antagonism, derision — these tools are antithetical to any legitimate effort to build up the common good and unite Americans. 

Democrats began the Trump era running ads about how our children were watching, and warning that Trump’s language and character were unfit for the highest office in the land. They had a point, and it’s a big reason why they won in 2020. In 2024, however, Democrats sought to maintain their claim of moral superiority all while increasingly employing their own brand of frivolous, crude, and ultimately ineffective politics (you cannot beat Trump at his own game). During the last presidential campaign, if my kids were within earshot, I would preemptively change the station whenever a Harris-Walz ad came on the air, as they so often resorted to using vulgarity as a shortcut to conveying conviction. We have never had such an openly vulgar, profane presidential campaign in the modern era — and Trump wasn’t the only vulgar nominee.  

Trump has pitted family members and communities against one another, and it’s been heartbreaking and destructive. Rather than strike a contrast with Trump, Democrats routinely suggest that voting against them equates to a personal betrayal of one’s family, gender, and race. Kamala Harris supporters closed the campaign encouraging spouses to lie to one another, in effect promoting familial conflict. 

It is ludicrous and self-defeating that a leading slogan for the 2024 Democratic ticket was “mind your own damn business.” For some reason, Tim Walz referred to it as “the Golden Rule,” though, of course, that is emphatically not the Golden Rule in Minnesota or anywhere else. Did he get a thrill out of gesturing to the sacred before turning to the profane? The distance between the winning Obama coalition and the campaign-by-meme Democrats we have now might well be the distance between Obama’s “I am my brother’s keeper” and Walz’s “mind your own damn business” (full disclosure: I served the 44th president as his director of faith outreach). 

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Progressives who dismiss critiques of Democrats as “false equivalencies” miss the point. It is no coincidence that Trump employs vulgarity, derision, anger, and fear; these are the social and emotional conditions that justify his antisocial politics. The nature of these tools does not change just because Democrats use them. Democrats help Trump when they appropriate his style — even when they ostensibly aim to oppose him.

Democrats should understand that just because a particular style or set of references have cachet in pop culture and on social media, it doesn’t mean Americans want it in their politics. Obscure references, sarcastic putdowns, memes, and celebrity culture can undermine Democrats’ message, and make voters feel like politics and politicians are distant from their lives. Similarly, many Americans may accept and be drawn to entertainment that is full of anger and vulgarity. But for politicians and activists to deploy the crude vernacular of the entertainment industry and online culture can only undermine confidence that the government can act on behalf of all of the people. Instead, Democrats can renew a vision of politics as a forum for service and identify acts of neighborliness as integral to this vision.

It will be tempting for the Democratic Party to find its purpose in opposing Trump for the next four years, while avoiding its own internal contradictions and aimlessness. There are some who seem to think that if Democrats would just fight, they would regain Americans’ trust. Newspaper columns and cable-news punditry are filled with calls for Democrats to fight, though specifics about whom or what they’re fighting for are more difficult to find.

This advice gets it exactly backwards. You don’t figure out what you believe by fighting. You figure out what’s worth fighting for when you know what you believe. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has argued, Democrats need “not just an opposition vision … but a proposition vision.” If Democrats want to effectively fight the Trump administration, they need to regain Americans’ trust by gaining clarity on what they believe, what they are willing to defend, and what they want to do with the power to govern again.

In order to regain Americans’ trust and deserve to govern, Democrats must become a prosocial party that filters all policies, tactics, and communications through a prosocial filter. Put simply, a prosocial filter means that what Democrats support and oppose must meet the test of improving our common life together, rather than just representing a hodgepodge of policies that please certain advocacy groups and the interests they claim to represent.

Democrats have allowed themselves to be tied to antisocial behavior, which undermines their vision of governance and America’s potential. In The Atlantic last year, Marc Fisher described the growing acceptance and prevalence of shoplifting, and how it is transforming retail operations. Likewise, in many cities, anyone who takes public transportation regularly encounters flagrant fare evasion. It is demoralizing to be unable to walk into a store and choose the items we need off the shelf, without a clerk having to unlock a shoplifting-proof cabinet. It assails our sense of dignity to be forced to painstakingly monitor our personal budget for what are apparently optional ticket fares. 

Democrats generally don’t actively support shoplifting or fare evasion, to be sure. But why is it that when you read criticisms of these behaviors, they are coded as conservative concerns? Rather than offer isolated, defensive pleas that they, too, oppose crime, and a reactionary plan to combat price-gouging as a talking point on inflation, Democrats ought to oppose crime and corruption because injustice makes life miserable, communities distrustful, and robust economic and community well-being unattainable. 

Likewise, instead of accepting the unfettered advance of technological and business encroachments that promote antisocial behavior, Democrats ought to be the party that puts social well-being at the center of decision making. They should take New York Rep. Paul Tonko’s lead in seeking to rein in online sports gambling, a societal catastrophe everyone sees coming but acts helpless to prevent. Democrats should revisit their support for the legalization and public proliferation of marijuana in light of new scientific evidence of its harms; even if they do not go so far, their support for the legalization of marijuana must include a social analysis and policy attentiveness to the consequences of legalization. Does anyone really believe that the ubiquitous, public presence of marijuana or online sports gambling (as just two examples) have made our communities better, healthier or even more enjoyable? 

Similarly, it should not be assumed that the policy task at hand is to simply help Americans adjust to artificial intelligence. Instead, the development and utilization of AI should proceed in negotiation with the demands of a prosocial vision for our communities and nation. How do the American people want AI to affect their lives? Shouldn’t that question at least be on the table? Politics should pose and help answer that question, not just go along with the profit motive and technological prowess for their own sake. Some Democrats are taking steps to address AI’s effect on Americans’ jobs. But many more should be taking seriously the consequences AI might have for our humanity: for the way we relate to one another as social creatures.  

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America's desperate dysfunction

By Tom McTague

Then, too, Democrats need to take responsibility for the antisocial effects of their politics in recent years. As 2024 wound down, reports emerged of a Federal Emergency Management Agency official instructing government canvassers to avoid the homes of Trump supporters while offering hurricane relief in Florida. Democrats must ask themselves: have we conducted ourselves in a way that could give someone the impression that this is OK? Have we provided permission for this kind of behavior toward fellow Americans? 

Democrats must stop being so concerned about whether there is a double standard for judging appropriate political behavior, and become much more concerned about their own standards, and whether they live up to them. The American people have less tolerance for feigned sincerity than for Donald Trump’s transparent insincerity. 

The party doesn’t have to start from scratch in building a prosocial politics; there are leaders already showing the way. They can look to Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s service agenda; Senator Chris Murphy’s incisive work to address our nation’s loneliness epidemic and rebuild social capital; Senator Andy Kim’s focus on humble service, rather than self-aggrandizing condemnation or antipathy, following Jan. 6. It’s also worth revisiting Pete Buttigieg’s values-based “Rules for the Road” for his 2020 presidential campaign.

Donald Trump borrowed “Make America Great Again” from Ronald Reagan. Democrats would do well to take up the promise of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, to pursue a “kinder, gentler society.” We have become meaner, lonelier, and less considerate as a nation, often in the name of politics. Political ideology is increasingly used to justify and excuse interpersonal cruelty. It doesn’t take a prophet to foresee that in a few years, voters will have had their fill of conflict and cruelty. They will want community again, and they deserve a party that will help them build, nurture, and protect it.

Rather, his themes of freedom, faith, nationalism, family breakdown and suicide link into very modern cultural concerns. At a moment of surging popularity, Dostoyevsky’s prophetic nature has come into sharper focus. The works of this complicated figure reverberate powerfully in our own conflicted era, as the allure of Russian literature continues to grip the Western imagination.

Whatever way you look at it, Dostoyevsky has struck a chord with a new generation of readers. The top-selling Penguin Classic last year — helped by hype on social media community “BookTok” — was his novella White Nights (1848), while the publisher’s sales of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and Crime and Punishment (1866) have roughly tripled since 2020.

This growing interest is the latest stage in a reputation which has changed significantly over time, both during the author’s lifetime and after his death in 1881. After the rapturous reception of Dostoyevsky’s debut novel Poor Folk (1846), his second The Double (1846) was poorly reviewed and was followed by more than a decade in the wilderness. Dostoyevsky only really achieved lasting popular glory in Russia towards the end of his life.

Literary luminaries have come to quite different conclusions about Dostoyevsky and his legacy. Albert Camus believed that “the real 19th-century prophet was Dostoyevsky, not Karl Marx”, while E.M. Forster argued that “no English novelist explored man’s soul as deeply”. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad complained that “there is a certain foul stench emanating from Dostoyevsky’s works that I cannot endure”.

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You're reaping what you sowed, liberals

By John Gray

Given his reputation as an arch-reactionary, for those new to Dostoyevsky it can be a shock to discover that he had a liberal past. It was interest in French utopian socialism which led him into a revolutionary group connected with the radical Petrashevsky Circle in St Petersburg. This resulted in his arrest in 1849, a last-minute reprieve from death by firing squad, and banishment to Siberia with only the New Testament to read.

Dostoyevsky later wrote with contempt of the period when “I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’”. The liberalism he reacted against was the Russian nihilism of the 19th-century, which took the path of negation and cast aside all tradition and moral restraint through its faulty vision of progress. This nihilism, which entered the Russian psyche more widely with Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862), arguably has deep similarities to 21st-century liberalism: both in its scientific utopianism and its vision of materialism as a means of providing fundamental values.

Devils (1872) is Dostoyevsky’s great attack on nihilism. In the novel, the maniacal Peter Verkhovensky speaks gleefully of revolutionary terror: “A Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be stoned”. The “devils” of nihilism and materialism lead Peter and his band of motley radicals to murder and self-destruction in provincial 19th-century Russia. In his portrait of a nihilistic descent into chaos in the pursuit of absolute freedom, Dostoyevsky anticipated the totalitarianism of 20th-century Bolshevism.

The novel, which despite its dark plot is full of buffoonish and slapstick moments, was a response to real events and intellectual forces. Dostoyevsky based the murder of Ivan Shatov — a member of the slapdash revolutionary group who manages to free himself from its nihilistic grip — on revolutionary Sergei Nechaev’s killing of a student who had turned against him. Inspired by Nechaev, the radical Vera Zasulich would shoot the governor of St Petersburg; Oscar Wilde based a play on her.

Dostoyevsky’s answer to materialism and liberalism was Holy Russia. With his belief in the spiritual superiority of the Russian nation, and Orthodoxy as the only expression of pure and undefiled Christianity, his faith took a jingoistic form. Dostoyevsky called for Constantinople to be reclaimed as the center of Orthodoxy, and supported Russia’s attempts to reclaim lost territory from the Crimean War. His sometimes-exaggerated voice can be found in the mouth of Shatov: “Only one nation is ‘god-bearing,’ that’s the Russian people”.

This worldview provokes discomfort in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — though it would surely be unfair to second-guess exactly what Dostoyevsky’s own take would be on the conflict. Either way, at a time of growing nationalism and political extremes, Dostoyevsky’s messianic politics are of particular pertinence in his native country. Vladimir Putin, who has attempted to justify contemporary Russian messianism by pointing to Prince Vladimir’s baptism in Kyiv in 988 as the birth of Holy Russia, has equally singled out Dostoyevsky as a writer of the Russian “heart” opposed to the “pragmatic” West.

It’s impossible here to understand Dostoyevsky and downplay his Christianity. While he explores religion through a heavy dose of doubt and spiritual desolation, and often spoke of faith through contradiction, it would be a fundamental misreading to consider him as some sort of doubt-ridden agnostic. After all, if he doesn’t provide formal arguments for the existence of God, he does paint a picture of a world in which the choices and consequences of belief and unbelief tell their own story. His own position, in the corner of faith, shines through in the often dark and terrible episodes of his novels, in intellectual distress, madness, murder, suicide, and rape.

This religious perspective is again being read at an interesting cultural moment. The New Atheist consensus of the early 21st century is under serious strain. That’s echoed by an uptick in interest in traditional forms of Christianity amongst the young: a recent YouGov survey found that 16% of 18-24-year-olds in the UK attend church at least monthly, up from 4% in 2018, while young adult converts drove the French Catholic Church’s record number of baptisms last Easter. There are Reddit threads about how reading Dostoyevsky has inspired new Christian conversions, while contemporary Christian figures from Pope Francis to Rowan Williams have cited him as a figure of significant spiritual interest (the former Archbishop of Canterbury even wrote a book on him).

This brings us to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s final and greatest novel. This is a profound exploration of faith, morality and freedom, centered on patricide, suffering and moral uncertainty through the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the violently different outlooks and experiences of his four sons.

The novel contains the famous poem of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. This is told by the intellectual Ivan, who is tormented by the problem of evil, to his novice monk brother Alyosha. Christ returns to earth in 16th-century Seville and is arrested by the Inquisitor, who is fresh from burning heretics. The Inquisitor tells Christ that he got freedom wrong. Humanity would’ve been happier if he had accepted the Devil’s temptations in the desert. The masses cannot handle freedom, but want bread, miracles and strongman authority. “Those same people who today kissed your feet will tomorrow at one wave of my hand rush to rake up the embers on your bonfire.” Christ is silent throughout the Inquisitor’s elocutions. Finally, he “quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips”. With a shudder, the Inquisitor turns him out.

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A Russian novel saved my mind

By Noah Kumin

The poem gets to the heart of 20th-century totalitarianism and the conflict between freedom and secure contentment which lies at the center of modern liberalism. All the while, it foreshadows 20th-century dystopian literature from authors like Huxley and Orwell. It also highlights the sometimes-paradoxical approach of Dostoyevsky to religious truth: the critic Konstantin Leontiev wrote that “the beautiful fantasy” of the Legend displayed Dostoyevsky’s “mistaken, false and obscure” view of Christianity.

This should not be a surprise, for like any prophet, Dostoyevsky has paradoxes. While cultural context can’t be ignored, it is galling that a writer who explores suffering humanity in such astounding depth could fall foul of base antisemitism. In response to a question in The Brothers Karamazov about whether Jews steal and kill Christian children at Easter, Alyosha replies with a simple “I don’t know”. That is quite the glib treatment of blood libel.

Then there is Dostoyevsky’s anti-Catholicism, evident in the Legend, which was tied up with his antipathy towards the West and reached absurd heights. Prince Myshkin in his novel The Idiot spouts Dostoyevsky’s own view that the Catholic Church “is even worse than atheism itself”. Ecumenical Dostoyevsky was not, even if I don’t feel this diminishes the power of his literary apologia for Christianity.

Despite these tensions — and the misguided calls to boycott all Russian culture in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion — classic Russian literature has maintained a deep hold on the Western mind. Russia is a European country which in its anti-liberal traditions is fundamentally not of the West, which gives it a definite sense of strangeness and otherness. While Russia in some ways feels like a not-so-distant cousin, its soul seems exotic, even incomprehensible. The familiar yet unfamiliar spiritual and political forces contained within the grand Russian novels, explored against the backdrop of the extremities of the nation’s history, have proven durably enticing.

As for Dostoyevsky himself, there is something dark and dangerous, perhaps even depraved, about his work which makes him more relevant to contemporary readers than even Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. The violent realism of his writing and its frantic existentialism fits strangely well into modern literary appetites, while his anti-capitalism is surely appealing to young readers exhausted by the desperate failures of contemporary mainstream politics. Plenty, in short, for new children of doubt to grapple with.

The year after Columba died on Iona, another mission to convert the British began, this one landing in Kent. This was the official mission. Initiated by the Pope, it was fronted by a Roman priest called Augustine who would become known as the “apostle to the English.” He was lucky. The local Kentish king was married to a Frankish Christian woman, so the new faith was not unknown. Things went so well for Augustine’s mission that he remained in Kent and set up his headquarters there. This is why the current leader of 100 million Anglicans, all over the world, takes his title from the small town of Canterbury.

If things proceed as planned (and they probably won’t) there could be a new Archbishop on the throne of Augustine by the autumn. It has taken so long because the Diocese of Canterbury couldn’t get its act together to work through the thicket of electoral rules that govern the election of three members of the Canterbury Diocese to the Crown Nominations Committee (CNC), the appointing body for the next archbishop. They had three botched elections before they finally got it right. It took the Roman Catholics 17 days from the death of Pope Francis to the election of Pope Leo. That election transfixed the world with its pomp, glamour and excitement. Our process will be done in committees, and though certainly more inclusive, will be as dreary and procedural as taking out a mortgage. And it is being run by the former boss of MI5, so don’t expect any interesting leaks. Though this much he has said: we must avoid a short list “all of whom are white, Oxbridge, male and come from the southeast of England.”

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The ungodly truth about Hallow

By Giles Fraser

The problem in finding a suitable person is this: it has become an impossible job. Not just difficult, but impossible. After all, the Archbishop has to be in more than one place at the same time — as both head of the Church of England and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion — and also because it necessitates the ability to say totally opposite things to the very different and warring tribes of the church. It is a job where much is expected, but with very little power to achieve it. The Church of England is mired in layers of deadening bureaucracy. Many clergy feel unloved and overworked. Morale is low. A report on the issue of trust within the Church has recently been canned because to investigate it might “do more harm than good”, the Bishop of Peterborough explained recently.

Which is why no one wants the job. To be the Archbishop of Canterbury is to put yourself into the meat grinder. You are asked to speak Christian truths to a nation that largely couldn’t care less what you say, unless you say something silly or too political. Then the press will chew you up. You are asked to take royal funerals and make speeches in the House of Lords, yet also to have the common touch, appealing to everyone. “All things to all people,” as Saint Paul described it.

No wonder anyone with the slightest shred of self-preservation would run a mile from the job — leaving only a bunch of deeply unexciting candidates. Many would love to see the current Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, as Archbishop. Born in Isfahan, her father was the first ethnic Persian to be Bishop of Iran since the 7th century. In 1980, her brother was murdered by Iranian government agents. She is Church of England through and through, but with a global perspective. Her maiden speech was described as “a powerful and very personal debut from Chelmsford that had several pees wiping away tears and saying it was the finest they had heard.” This is exactly what the Church needs. But perhaps she may not have the Teflon skin required to survive the nastiness of the Church and the press. Bishop Guli took time off work to bring up her children, and she is not one of those hard-bitten career clerics who would do anything for the top job, even to the detriment of their families. 

One way of proceeding would be to split the job in two, with Canterbury doing England and another Archbishop looking after the rest of the world. Pretty much everyone agrees this would be a good idea. But separating these Siamese twins will take time, perhaps years. And having someone in to steady the ship whilst the necessary surgery is performed is not a bad idea. And there is probably no better candidate here than the current Bishop of London, Sarah Mullaly. She is 63, so couldn’t do it for ages. As a former chief nursing officer, she has an interesting hinterland. But who knows if she would be prepared to do it.

I am not singling out two women for ideological reasons. The reality is just that when it comes to men, the cupboard is bare. The Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, would have been great, but he has cleverly dodged the bullet by getting himself on the CNC appointing committee, and so is ineligible. There are some Welby continuity candidates out there, like Martyn Snow, the evangelical Bishop of Leicester, who is the one person who looks like he wants it. But the Welby era proved to be so disastrous that it’s hard to imagine anyone would want to risk a repeat of that. Safeguarding issues — real or imagined — are now kryptonite to any potential candidate, and it’s hard to think of many senior bishops for whom this is not a problem, however unfair that might be.

The Church of England is at a fork in the road. Those who see the long arc of history as pointing inevitably towards a more secular society predict only more decline. But the evidence of history suggests that the Church often goes through periods of greater and lesser popularity. And we need someone who doesn’t panic about the challenge of secularity. A steady faithful presence in Lambeth Palace, someone who isn’t constantly firing off nervous new initiatives, redirecting the church’s resources to glitzy new evangelistic movements, is essential. We have had enough of breathlessly conceived boom-and-bust initiatives. We need the calm of someone who has spent proper time with the sea and the sky, with the kind of demeanour that has been formatted by eternity, rather than the frenetic pace of meetings at Lambeth Palace. When they go fast, he or she must go slow.  

Back on Iona, with a group of pilgrims from my church in London, we wander the island and feel our body clocks adjusting to a different rhythm. And here amid the rocks and spray another thought comes to mind. What if we don’t want another company man, but someone from the edge of things? More Columba than Augustine. Columba’s Gaelic tradition was less hierarchical, more decentralized. In the end, this gentler more contemplative tradition lost out at the Synod of Whitby, 664 AD, where on-the-make career clerics like Saint Wilfred persuaded the wider church to follow Augustine’s European centralized Christianity rather than Columba’s Irish version. 

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The mystery of Pope Francis

By Thomas of Celano

However tricky it looks to find the right candidate from amongst the present house of Bishops, there are a great many faithful and compelling clerics out there who would be a breath of fresh air. Pope Urban V wasn’t a bishop when he was elected Pope. Pope Gregory X wasn’t even a priest. Could the Church of England summon the courage to do something similar, to reach beyond the obvious and find someone sitting in a croft on the Farne Islands, praying and watching the birdlife? Someone whose soul has not been deadened by committees and spreadsheets. Or even somewhere in Africa or South America, where the Church is bursting with life? The super spy chair of the CNC is right: no more male, pale, establishment and stale.

Oh, I know, it’s a fantasy. Not least because the next Archbishop of Canterbury must hold a British passport in order to sit in the House of Lords. Institutional decluttering is essential but unimaginable. But we can dream. What we really need in an Archbishop is someone who will pray for his or her clergy and stop flying around the world and sitting in meetings. Perhaps they could even abolish that terrible old talking shop, General Synod, about to meet up in York. The Church is at its worst when it tries to act like it’s important.

On the ground, many churches are flourishing despite the fact that Augustine’s throne feels as cursed at the Chelsea number nine shirt. But there’s a huge incentive to find a steady leader while momentum in the Church is hot. In the UK, Bible sales have grown from 2.7 million in 2019 to 5 million in 2024, and especially among the young. Something is stirring. The secular age may be bottoming out. And we need someone to surf this new mood. What we are looking for is another — doubtless very different — St Columba.

Goff: Very roughly, panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe. So it’s a question for physics — what the fundamental building blocks are — but for the sake of argument let’s say they’re particles like electrons and quarks. Panpsychists think those fundamental particles have very rudimentary forms of conscious experience, and that the very complex consciousness of the human or animal brain is somehow built up from these simpler forms right at the base of reality.

For decades, we’ve been trying to explain consciousness in terms of physical processes in the brain — and that has gone precisely nowhere. It’s not just that we don’t have the full story yet, we haven’t managed to explain a single experience in terms of patterns of neural firings.

I like to give the analogy of Copernicus. For centuries, people started from the assumption that the Earth was in the center of the universe, and tried to understand astronomical observations on that basis. But it couldn’t be done. Then Copernicus sweeps all that away: by showing that the sun, not the Earth, is the center of the universe. I feel that way about consciousness. If you turn our assumptions upside down, if you start from consciousness being foundational, then try to make sense of physical reality emerging from that, it suddenly all makes sense.

McGilchrist: I agree that our attempts to explain consciousness as something mysteriously secreted by matter have failed. You said that putting together these particles somehow results in higher levels of consciousness. Can you gloss that a little bit?

Goff: People get a bit confused by it, because they’re thinking about human consciousness, which is incredibly rich and sophisticated, the result of millions of years of evolution. But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes. The consciousness of a sheep is much simpler. The consciousness of a snail, if a snail has experience, is simpler still. Do bed bugs have experience? And, as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. So the panpsychist’s view is that this keeps going down to the basics, the fundamental particles having ludicrously simple forms of experience to reflect their very simple physical nature. So it’s not like the electrons are thinking or feeling existential angst. It’s just that consciousness is a highly evolved form of what fills the universe.

McGilchrist: I wouldn’t want to dismiss the idea of AI consciousness. But I think we ought to be very aware of the fallacious reasoning that allows us to liken things to consciousness. I think the word “experience” is really the best. The term comes from “experiere“, which suggests a degree of danger. So the “peri” bit is cognate with “peril” in English and “gefahr” in German. They both come from the same Proto-Indo-European roots. The idea, I think, is that experience is fundamentally dangerous, but also that you can’t be certain of anything. I sometimes say the only thing that’s certainly true is that people who say that things are certain are certainly wrong. In a way, I can’t quite avoid this blanket term. But experience is something that is threaded through, and if one uses that instead of the word “consciousness”, maybe that helps.

Goff: I think it’s unfortunate that we’re stuck with this word “consciousness” because people always think of it as something very sophisticated, like awareness of your own existence. I don’t think a rabbit can do that, but I do think a rabbit has experiences. It feels pain, it feels hot, it feels cold. This is what scientists and philosophers are interested in. We know a lot about the basic chemistry, how chemical signals are sent, how neurons fire. But where does experience come from? Well, nothing in the neuroscientific story of the brain seems to have anything to do with feelings and experiences. If aliens came from another planet and looked in our brains they wouldn’t know if we were conscious, just from the outside, in the same way we struggle to know if fish are conscious.

McGilchrist: I bet they are. The difficult thing is that we feel we have to explain consciousness. That’s different from accepting its existence. Now, it does seem to me extraordinary that there are presumably intelligent people occupying university chairs in philosophy who actually deny the existence of consciousness. To do that at all, they have to be conscious. For it to be an illusion, it must necessarily be an illusion in consciousness. So the thing that we should be concentrating on is understanding: what the hell is matter? Why did we decide that it was primary? I mean, very obviously, no human being can deny having a knowing consciousness, but we don’t really know what matter is. Nobody has ever seen or experienced it. We’ve only had experiences in consciousness of things that we describe as material.

Goff: The contemporary panpsychist community draws inspiration from the work of Bertrand Russell. I think of him as the Darwin of consciousness. His central insight is that physics is just pure mathematical structure. Much later, Stephen Hawking said that physics doesn’t tell us what “breathes fire” into the equations. Physics doesn’t really care what’s going on at the base of reality. All it cares about is that there’s the right mathematical structure. Panpsychists exploit this: our hypothesis is that very simple conscious entities, interacting in predictable ways, are at the base of reality. Through these interactions, they make certain structures, ultimately what we call physics. In other words, physics emerges from this underlying story about consciousness. I don’t think we can get consciousness out of physics but certain members of the philosophical community have become very angry at panpsychism being taken more seriously.

McGilchrist: Actually, my impression is that there are many people in academic philosophy who do now espouse panpsychism. It’s become almost commonplace and not at all heretical.

Goff: Absolutely.

McGilchrist: I’d like to reflect on the idea of complexity, because it always strikes me as something like a miracle. We get so complex and it’s not conscious — and then suddenly you reach the stage where, by a miracle, there is consciousness. I don’t think this is likely, and there are various reasons why complexity in itself cannot be the cause of consciousness. If you want to retain the idea of complexity, the way I’d do it is by talking about the system as a whole, and ultimately the whole universe. I think, indeed, that the whole universe is conscious, and that consciousness is an ontological primitive. You can’t get behind it and find something that causes it, and that is in keeping with the traditions of many cultures, particularly in the east, that consciousness is something primary.

It’s very difficult for us to imagine that something like a stone is conscious. But what would you say to the idea that it is part of a bigger conscious system? In other words, panpsychism can mean two things: either that psyche is in everything, or everything is in psyche. My way of thinking of it is that everything is in psyche and partakes of its nature. Matter, for its part, is a form of psyche that provides two very important elements if the universe is to be creative. The simplest thing that you can observe about the universe is that it’s creative. And for that creativity, you need two things that matter gives: resistance and persistence. Without resistance, my thoughts can go anywhere; there’s no form, there’s nothing to get purchase on. And without persistence, they come and go, but there is nothing that can take part in the unfolding of the panoply of the cosmos. So I see matter as a kind of phase of consciousness, and vital given persistence and resistance. What do you feel about that?

Goff: It’s the job of physicists to tell us what the “fundamental things” are, and we tend to think of them as particles, little billiard balls. But actually, many theoretical physicists are inclined to think that universe-wide fields are those fundamental things. And if you combine that with panpsychism, we reach what’s sometimes called cosmo-psychism. Meaning? The fundamental thing is the conscious universe. This gets us on to the other thing I wanted to ask you about: God. If the universe is in some sense conscious, would that be God? Is there any connection to God? Or are these just entirely different?

McGilchrist: No, I don’t think they’re entirely different. When I was writing The Matter with Things, which is an unconscionably long book, I knew I was going to talk about the sacred. I was having conversations with various philosophers who were reading the book as I was writing it, and they almost all said: “Please don’t include this chapter on the sacred, because you’ve done some good philosophical work here that deserves to be read. But if you talk about the sacred, nobody will take you seriously anymore.” I have a cussed streak in me, so I decided to do it anyway. I expected to get a little flack from atheists, but in fact didn’t get any. What I have got is flack from Christians who asked why I didn’t talk more about their religion.

I can see what they’re getting at. But I didn’t want to appear to be proselytizing for a particular faith, though I happen to think that the mythos of Christianity is the deepest and richest of any religion in the world. I also didn’t want to seem to be going towards a particular preconceived idea of God. But I did want to take very seriously the idea of the divine. You probably know that I have written a great deal about the difference between the two brain hemispheres. The important thing is not to accept the left hemisphere’s “version” of God: which must be something that is certain, demonstrable, reproducible. It is like the left hemisphere itself. This God has to be a controlling God, a divine engineer who winds up the machine, all this awful 18th century stuff. Deism, in other words. I don’t see God as remotely like that, and I wanted to get that out of the way fairly early on. What do you think?

Goff: One thing that drew me back to religion was discovering the mystical traditions that are found in all the Abrahamic faiths. For example, there is much less emphasis on sin in the Eastern Orthodox Church. God isn’t interested in finding someone to punish for our sins. That was invented by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago. That has never been part of the Eastern tradition. The fundamental drive in the Eastern tradition, the fundamental purpose of existence, is for God and the universe to become one. So linking back to the cosmo-psychist view, I think this fits quite well with a conscious universe. If your worldview is that what’s at the base of reality is what physics talks about, then it’s very hard to make sense of God and the universe becoming one.

McGilchrist: I find there’s a parallel between what I think we both understand about psyche and panpsychism, and my view about God, which is effectively panentheistic. Many Christians are panentheists. The idea of panentheism is distinct from pantheism, which is the idea that the sum of everything is God, and God is just everything that exists. This is very much like my feeling about the pervasive psyche, and it may be no coincidence that it has that structure. I take the view that everything is in process. Everything is becoming nothing is final, and that even God, in a sense, is discovering the potential within him. I have to use the word “him” because “it” is no good.

Everything that exists, that we can know and experience, exists in the relationship between an individual consciousness and something other. Each alters the other, each has an effect on the other, and I’ve come to see that everything is resonant and interactive and coming into being between two entities. That “twoness” is important, but they are also one. There’s not just the objective and the subjective in a dualistic way. They are distinguishable, but not wholly distinct or divided, and that’s a distinction we’re not used to making in the modern world. We tend to think that if we can make a distinction, it implies a division. But it doesn’t. And what is apparently distinct goes through phases of being more united and then more unpacked.

Goethe has this wonderful saying that dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the whole work of nature, and I see this as a very important reciprocal motion. Now, what this is leading up to is a Whiteheadian view of God, and that they’re engaged in a kind of cosmic dance.

Intuition and imagination are vital for our being able to understand anything, and understanding is much more than an explanation. An explanation is getting stuck in a causative mode. But I’m not saying that anything causes anything. I’m not saying that consciousness is caused by or causes anything. I think consciousness exists — and I think God exists too.

God never ordained the details of anything, just the general direction in which things are going, and because it has freedom in it, things that look pretty grim do turn up. But one thing about evolution is that, generally speaking, when people want to talk about how ghastly nature is, they have to go down to the Newman wasp or the North American shrew. But, generally speaking, as evolution has gone further, it has produced something rather more insightful into the nature of the universe: namely ourselves. And while we are capable of the greatest evil, that’s because we’re capable of great good. If it’s about winning the race to survive, then the best key to surviving a long time is never to have been alive. If you’re a rock, you persist for eons, whereas a living thing is fragile. And what’s more, over the course of evolution, we’ve become more short-lived. At the base of the ocean, there are examples of very primitive creatures called Actinobacteria, single examples of which are a million years old. They do very well on that particular account. So why spend so much energy kicking against entropy to produce these complex beings?

This divine essence requires a resonant relationship in which its goodness, beauty and truth are perceived, and in which the beauty and goodness and truth are further developed by the lives of those people who perceive it. And I think that is what we are here for, if you like: to amplify, to help to flourish things that are good, beautiful and true. A North American shrew, with all respect to it, can’t do any of these things. And that is why we are here. That is why we can suffer, but it’s also why we can do immense good. We are creative, spiritual beings.

Frankly, we don’t know what’s possible in this cosmos and in life. We cheer ourselves up: “Just a few more experiments, we’ll understand everything”. But actually, the more sophisticated our understanding, the more we realize how little we actually know. So I’m not prepared to be dogmatic.

Goff: We can agree on that.

McGilchrist: We can agree on that.

The Charedi community is one of the most devout among the Jews and almost every one of their acts is bound by law, tradition and rules. On the Sabbath, before eating bread, there is a hand-washing ritual governed by specific instructions. Cold water is poured from a cup twice over the right hand, then twice over the left. These rules are beyond question, but Fletcher decided that rather than wash her hands, she would only pretend to, then see if God struck her down. “God was not only revered,” she says, “he was the shape of everything we did.”

Heart pounding, Fletcher “went ahead and did it anyway”. And so the die was cast for a rebellious life within a community that refuses women any personal autonomy. Now 37, an avowed lesbian and feminist, she has been disowned by her family, sexually abused by her foster father and abused by both her husbands — all devout Charedim. And yet she refuses to flee her community. Instead, Fletcher has found a way not only to remain within her Jewish faith, but also to be openly critical of practices such as forced marriage and the overlooking of the secular. Now, in a further act of rebellion, she has published Chutzpah!: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay, a book that takes a close look at those issues she has faced.

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Before Charedi girls are even out of their teens, they enter arranged marriages, where they have, on average, seven children. Driving, working outside the home, and disobeying their husbands is frowned upon, and once they are married, they are obliged to wear a wig known as a sheitel. Their clothes must cover collarbone, elbows and ankles, and sex segregation is so strictly enforced that many families don’t even allow brothers and sisters to play together.

The daughter of a rabbi, Fletcher has spent much of her life in this intensely insular world. She recalls a childhood that she spent at a Lanarkshire school wearing opaque tights. And then, aged 14, she and her younger sister — their four older siblings were already married — moved from Scotland to Israel with their parents to make aliyah (the settling of Israel by the Jewish diaspora). Life there was even stricter than in Scotland: at schools she was described by one teacher as “anthrax” — a bad influence to everyone else. Fletcher was so miserable that she overdosed on Ibuprofen, and ended up on a mental health ward for six weeks. Hospital was preferable to home. After that, she was admitted to foster care.

If anything, however, things would get even worse. After only a year in Israel she was sent back home to live in Manchester with family friends. She was 15 when she started lodging with a Jewish scholar, Todros Grynhaus. In her book, Fletcher describes him as an “authoritarian who locked his kids in their rooms for days at a time”. Then, one night, he began sexually abusing her: “He shoved two fingers inside me. I felt no pain because I wasn’t in my body any more.” These assaults continued nightly for six months, until they were discovered by his wife and he threw her out. She moved in with another family, unable to tell her parents to whom she was virtually a stranger now. And when Fletcher eventually reported him to the local rabbi, he just told her husband to go to therapy. Her testimony was worthless without a male witness.

So she returned to Israel to learn “how to be a wife” at a seminary. By the time she was 18, a shidduch (match) had been found and she was pressured into an arranged marriage with Danny.

Right from the start, the union was marked by regressive gender attitudes, something Charedi girls are taught from childhood. Having to devote their lives to housework, children and the Sabbath, Fletcher recalls her mother saying that even doing the laundry was holy. “Fuck off,” she laughingly responds. “The laundry gets done because the laundry needs to get done. The idea that men do holy things in the synagogue and women do holy things with laundry is just patriarchy.”

Sex was framed in similar ways. “If there is an expectation that you have sex on a certain night at a particular time and if you’re not in the mood,” Fletcher explains, “it’s like you’re saying no to God, not even just your husband.” But Fletcher’s husband was also violent, and when she found him in bed with another woman, she abandoned the marriage. Barely a year in, she left. Her parents needed to get shot of the 19-year-old divorcée, and six months later, she married again, this time to Zvi, 29. As she tells me, “I knew he wasn’t going to hit me.” And though he wanted sex constantly — he started saying the prayers that were to be recited before sex in the car home after the marriage so as not to waste any time — the marriage lasted for over a decade. She left the day before her 31st birthday with her three children.

At this point, Fletcher had known for a long time that she was a lesbian. She had suspected as much at school in Israel and came out to a rabbi at 17. His response: “All the girls are doing it but it goes away when you get married.” Ironically enough, all that sex segregation provided ample opportunities for experimentation.

Her coming-out story is also bound up with her discovery of feminism. In her early 20s, she stumbled upon a feminist book, Harriet Harman’s autobiography. “I read it on the train, and by the end of the journey I’d signed up as a member of the Labor Party. I went into work after I read it and started rabble rousing and talking to the other women in the office about, like there’s a thing called maternity pay. And this is how it works.”

In 2019 Fletcher enrolled for a degree at the University of Salford. “I had been taught that they were forbidden spaces for us,” she says, but nevertheless went ahead without seeking permission to do so.

When she wrote a paper on forced marriage, it was covered on Radio 4, as well as on TV in America and India. At that point, though, she was careful not to talk about her lesbianism for fear her critics would claim it informed her critique of forced marriage.

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When she eventually came out to her family, in 2021, she was roundly rejected. As Fletcher continues, leaving the Charedim is like being a refugee in your own country, with many members ultimately put off by how hard it is. Remarkably, though, leaving her husband wasn’t followed by departure from the Charedi community more generally. She calls staying a “revolutionary” act, arguing that “My existence is resistance. I feel that it is an act of service to the future of this community for it to include visible feminist lesbians.” No one, she adds, “should have to choose between staying and staying safe.”

Describing life in the Chasidic community, she tells me, “Every single moment of the day is mapped out. So as soon as you get out of bed there are rules that you follow before you even walk and, for many people, what that does is give a freedom or absolution.” But this has a terrible downside for girls and women as Fletcher explains: “Personal autonomy is dictated, particularly sex when sex is so ritualized and dictated by external authority. Not only does it diminish it, but it pretty much removes capacity for consent.”

Fletcher’s decision to stand and fight, to show how women are harmed within her culture, has already led to material change. Her campaign against forced marriage led her to co-found Nahamu, the first UK think-tank to tackle religious extremism in the Jewish community. “It’s not about burning down the house,” she says, “it’s about infusing a community with informed consent, with knowledge of what we’re entitled to as women.”

You might say the same about Fletcher personally. She once worried about being spotted in public with a partner and was terrified of putting anything on the record; she lived a public life in which she was campaigning as a feminist but hiding her sexuality.

But wanting a more integrated life, she came out and now lives with a partner openly. Fletcher has also been gratified to discover that though some people “will take offense on seeing me in the kosher shops, especially if I’m wearing one of my rude t-shirts”, others “have capacity for it”.

Perhaps that helps explain why, despite everything, Fletcher has always loved her culture and could never leave it behind. Most Friday nights, she hosts dinners for up to 25 lesbians, gay men and trans people, all from the Charedi community, all around a single table in the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox community. “For me,” she says, “to live a Charedi life — it’s the food that I like to eat and it’s the songs that I sing and it’s where I feel comfortable. It’s my heritage.”

It has helped, too, that Fletcher has fought to reclaim her own past. The code of mesirah prohibits Jews from handing over other Jews to secular authorities, and usually prevents anyone from reporting crimes against women and children. But, in 2015, Fletcher helped convict Todros Grynhaus for sexual assault against her and another girl, waiving her right to anonymity. The case led the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, to state that sexual abuse must always be reported to the police, with Fletcher herself continuing to condemn those Charedis who actively cover up abuse within the community.

As for the future, Fletcher is clear about what must happen. Like most Charedi women, she received effectively no education until she went to college. With that in mind, and at risk of “sounding neoliberal”, Fletcher argues that “education, education, education is what makes a difference.” And rather than turn her back on her community, she is striving to make it a better place. “No one,” she adds, “gets to throw me out”. Given everything she’s achieved so far, we should probably take her at her word.

But for Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, the faith’s social teaching inspired his turn against conventional GOP orthodoxy (free trade, low taxes, deregulation). Before Donald Trump tapped him as his 2024 running mate, then-Sen. Vance’s major legislative initiatives bore a distinct Catholic imprint, from railroad reform to the fight for lower insulin prices and a proposal to claw back CEO pay from bailed-out banks.

Upon Leo’s election, many seized upon the fact that, back when he was Cardinal Robert Prevost, he had repeatedly taken issue with Trumpian populism, singling out the veep in particular. In February, an X account associated with him reposted an article headlined: “JD Vance Is Wrong: Jesus Doesn’t Ask Us to Rank Our Love for Others.” It took issue with Vance’s interpretation of the ancient concept of ordo amoris (“the order of love”) to justify a pinched account of what Americans owe foreigners.

Progressives took this as a (delicious) sign that Leo would carry over his immediate predecessor’s hostility toward populism, and maintain the hierarchy’s fairly uncompromising recent line in favor of the free movement of people across national frontiers. If Vance emerges as the Republican presidential nominee for 2028, his opponent’s debate barb writes itself: “Your own pope slammed your deplorable views.”

The Vice President has publicly brushed off Leo’s pre-papal posts. Vance is aware that Leo’s considered views on immigration are more sophisticated than his social-media footprint might suggest. The sort of mass, low-wage, South-North movement that surged over the past decade, he has said, “is a huge problem, and it’s a problem worldwide. There’s gotta be a way to solve the problem but also to treat people with real respect.”

This recognition that migration is a crisis — straining wages, public services, and social cohesion in receiving countries — jars with the stereotype of a Church always proclaiming “let them come”. Even Pope Francis sounded more nuanced notes, insisting that immigration is a “two-way process” that entails a duty of integration on newcomers. In a message to the US bishops rebuking Trump II deportations, Francis reiterated the right of nations to control their borders.

Still, these tensions suggest a far deeper clash of worldviews and sensibilities: between a fundamentally universalistic faith and Western populations fed up with universalism, or at least, the liberal kind. Between people redoubling to nationalism and a Church called to baptize panta ta ethnē (“all the nations”). Between the pride and particularism of the Appalachian “holler” and a two-millennia-old body that inherited the administrative forms of the Roman Empire.

As these two forces barrel towards each other, each has to wonder if a collision can be averted. A full accommodation is out of the question, of course. No more can the Church bend itself to 21st-century populism than it could to, say, the Napoleonic surge in the early 19th century. But mutual understanding and engagement aren’t out of reach. Indeed, they are essential. It helps, then, for each camp to start by trying to see the world through the other’s eyes.

The Church’s default political form is empire. That’s a scandalous term in our time, owing to its association with recent European imperialism and colonialism. But in this context, it should be taken in a strictly “neutral” way: a society that encompasses many smaller units (tribes, nations) — indeed, one that theoretically aims to encompass all. In the Church’s telling, the imperial form was pressed on Catholic Christianity not by accident, but by providence and the gospel itself.

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It began with ideas. Before the Church took up the universalist political forms of the Roman Empire, it embraced the universalist yearnings of Greek philosophy, blending these with the harsh desert monotheism of the Jewish people. It was just this synthesis — the unlikely but surprisingly durable synthesis of Greek logic with the voice from the burning bush — that made possible Christianity’s global span.

Christianity universalized salvation: from a story centered on a single nation, the Jews, to one that invited the Gentiles into the tent — now refigured from a building to a person, a God-Man. This universalism, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, was already latent in exilic and post-exilic Judaism, as contact with foreign overlords forced the Israelites to proclaim Yahweh “as the God of heaven and earth” — who, in parallel to Socratic philosophy, mocked local or national myths.

The Academy and the Temple, in other words, courted each other. The Christ event deepened this courtship, leading to the marriage between a Greek philosophy in search of the ultimate wellspring of reality, and the God of the Jews, held up as just that. As Benedict taught, it was no accident that it was a Macedonian man who appeared to Saint Paul in a dream, pleading with him to “come over and help us” (Acts 16:9).

Just as Christ’s Davidic lineage was no accident, so there was a reason that the founder of Pauline Christianity enjoyed overlapping identities as both a Jew and a Roman citizen. From the Catholic perspective, it likewise wasn’t a mere coincidence that Christianity put down its deepest early roots on the Mediterranean shore, among commercial and shipping hubs; in fertile soil already tilled by the Greek passion for universal ideas and the Roman love of law.

Yes, Rome persecuted the early Church, driving believers into the catacombs. But as the French historian Henri Daniel-Rops showed, all along the Church of the catacombs was preparing itself to conquer Roman administrative structures for Jesus. Underground, the Church was already a highly organized, hierarchical, corporate institution. With the Constantinian conversion, it got the chance to go overground. Now, 1,700 years on, the Church is ruled by a pontifex maximus, who is advised by a curia, overseeing worldwide dioikesis, according to a codex.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, this apostolic empire confronted the rise of nationalism (often in connivance with liberalism). Modern nation-states grouped ethnic and linguistic tribes into “pure”, prickly, militant little sovereignties. For the Church, this was a trauma. It meant the dilution of papal authority over the hearts and minds of individual Christians, as well as the end of Christendom as a larger geographic and spiritual society, folding in many nations.

Hence why it was Catholic political thinkers who first championed the European Union. Hence why senior churchmen down to our own time prize transnational institutions like the United Nations, and invariably seek regularized, well-administered relations with even hostile worldly powers, such as Beijing. And hence why the Church looks askance at immigration restrictionism and militarized borders. These are all deeply Roman impulses and yearnings.

In short: no one can understand Christianity’s largest denomination without appreciating the Roman-ness braided, even fused, into its institutional soul.

But for Vance’s voters, and similar populations in Europe, transnationalism has come to mean an entirely different set of outcomes. The erosion of solidarity and bargaining power by corporate globalization. Dislocation brought about by rapid demographic change. Above all, the loss of agency, as decisions about how to organize society were removed from democratic political contestation and placed under “expert” determination or judicial and bureaucratic fiat.

The rise of postwar, liberal (or neoliberal) transnationalism — an empire of autonomy without limits — has come at the expense of the political community, where the common good used to be properly located, defined and contested by competing classes and interests. Liberal transnationalism did well by multinationals and the educated managerial classes that service them, to be sure, but it left behind many others.

Laid-off workers, whether they resided in the French rust belt or the American inner city, were told to take up their complaints with the immutable and incontrovertible laws of the market and “globalization”. Nothing substantive could be contested; global supply chains, you see, were too large and tangled up. EU membership meant that, whether they liked it or not, individual nations had to bear the burdens associated with Angela Merkel’s decision to admit some 1.3 million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa over the course of a year, many of them hard-to-integrate welfare migrants.

To be sure, many of these voters live messy, unchurched lives — divorce, children born outside of marriage, addiction, etc. are common. Nevertheless, they sense that biblical universalism and the liberal kind aren’t necessarily congruous. Sometimes, the two are downright inimical. And the populist voters have half a point. The apostolic empire can’t be identical to the liberal imperium, whose subject, as the French thinker Pierre Manent has said, “no longer acknowledges any limits ‘because he deserves it’”.

When Christ charged his disciples to teach and baptize all the nations, was the Lord thinking of a European Union that militantly repudiated John Paul II’s appeals to include a mild reference to the Continent’s Christian roots in its constitutional documents?

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Christianity is not the patrimony of a single ethnos, as churchmen rightly insist. But should they also not question liberal transnationalism’s drive to impose on all nations a single law — the smooth operation of the market and maximal autonomy for the unbound, unattached individual or corporate actor?

Indeed, they have: for example, in his book-length meditation on the Hail Mary, Pope Francis skewered a neoliberal elite “that does not know what it means to live among the people” and lacks “any sense of belonging to a family, to a land, to our God”. An elite that has “no need of mother, of father, of a family, of a homeland, of belonging to a people”.

A patria. A people. The Church can and has maintained that these things matter, even as it has rejected the idolatry of the nation. While Almighty God universalized salvation history through the fiat of a Jewish woman of the Galilee, he didn’t thereby obliterate her Jewishness.

So can the two — the universalist Church and Western populations recoiling from one recent form of universalism — come to some accommodation? Can they see eye-to-eye? Not totally. When the Trump administration dumps Venezuelan hairdressers into a Salvadoran gulag (for life, without due process), the Church can’t but rebuke and chastise. Ditto, when the more goonish populists make idols out of nations or races, much as Communists made idols of social classes.

Yet the Church, especially since Vatican II, has made a priority of encounter — of going out into the world and meeting people, especially the poor and marginalized. At this moment, with secular politics and Christian universalism poised to clash, the imperative to encounter should be widened to include not just the barrios and colonias of the desperately poor in Latin America, but also the dispossessed of the North: once-proud manufacturing workers scrabbling for jobs, often forced to compete at the lowest rungs with migrants willing to work for even less.

Here, Vance and Leo XIV do have meaningful things to say to each other. The new pontiff has taken the name Leo, he has said, in tribute to Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching in the late 19th century. Responding to the dislocations and miseries inflicted upon working classes in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution, Leo XIII preached not class war, as the socialists did, but class reconciliation, an ideal that jibed with the movements for social and Christian democracy in Europe and the New Deal in the United States.

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Yet as I’ve argued in these pages, reconciliation in the Leonine vision doesn’t come about from merely exhorting the asset-rich to do right by the asset-less. It requires empowering the latter relative to the former. Leo called for the state to require employers to pay a living wage, as a matter of justice — not charity. He also defended the right of workers to band together in labor unions in defense of their mutual interests and to boost their bargaining power.

In light of this teaching, Leo XIV can rightly chide the Trump-Vance administration for acting no better than its establishment-Republican predecessors in attacking America’s National Labor Relations Board and weakening regulatory guardians of the poor such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among other populist disappointments.

At the same time, as a Christian statesman, Vance can help Leo decode the secular signs of the times. The Vice President has repeatedly told me, for example, that he views the free movement of labor as a key component of the neoliberal models of exploitation which Francis decried and which Leo XIV surely abhors (given his choice of papal name). Can Leo, for example, deepen the Church’s theology of migration in a way that upholds the dignity of the sojourner while addressing the rights and concerns of recipient countries?

We can only hope. Indeed, Catholics on both sides of this divide must pray for such engagement. For the populists, it’s a matter of taking seriously the counsels of an institution that has outlived countless ideological enthusiasms in the past. For the Church, meanwhile, at stake is the ability to hear and reach fed-up working- and lower-middle classes in the Global North, even as it champions the claims and aspirations of the South.

I was curious to visit Louise because I had been reading Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, an absorbing new book by the anthropologist and New Yorker writer Manvir Singh. Singh — who has lived with and studied indigenous peoples from Indonesia to the Amazon — points out that shamanism is having a moment. In the 2021 UK census, 8,000 people said their religion was shamanism — more than Rastafarians or Zoroastrians. Celebrities from Madonna to Will Smith have testified to the transformative powers of ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant used by Amazonian shamans, inspiring a busy trade in Western tourism to South American retreats. And, of course, you don’t need to leave your home to meet a shaman: Durek Verrett, who claims to be a reptile and whose clients include Gwyneth Paltrow, is just one of the more popular shamanic influencers online, with more than 400,000 Instagram followers.

Shamanism — the word comes from 17th-century accounts of hunter-gatherer religion in Siberia — may strike us as profoundly alien. Siberian Chukchi shamans claimed to turn into reindeer and travel through the underworld, and Durek Verrett offers to cleanse women’s vaginas of evil spirits. But in his book, Singh makes a striking claim: shamanism isn’t some primitive stage in the evolution of religion proper, or some kooky New Age parody of ancient superstitions. Instead, it’s about as natural to human beings as storytelling or dance — and it’s our institutional religions, with their bishops, churches and creeds, that are the peculiar innovations of a new age.

Singh’s argument is worth paying attention to, because if he’s right — if humans instinctively gravitate towards shamanism — then it means that the practices of the Chukchi don’t just tell us about our primordial past. They may also help us understand the spiritual yearnings that beset us today — and offer clues about where we are headed in the future. And if it’s true, as many claim, that secular Western societies are undergoing a “meaning crisis”, perhaps we’ll end up turning for answers not to traditional religions but to new forms of shamanism.

Singh’s argument starts from the fact that, when Europeans began exploring and colonizing the globe after the 15th century, everywhere they went they encountered peoples with remarkably similar religious practices. From the tundras of Siberia to the plains of North America to the islands of the Pacific, traditional societies recognized certain men or women as religious visionaries who used their special access to the supernatural to offer services like healing and prophecy. They explained what they were doing in different ways — Nepali shamans extracted ghosts from people’s bodies, whereas Eskimo shamans traveled to the moon and turned into bears — but beneath this diversity were some conspicuously similar characteristics.

Shamans everywhere advertise their connection to the unseen by entering altered states, whether through drugs, ecstatic dance, dreams or visions. They emphasize their difference from ordinary people by undergoing rituals of transformation, and by depriving themselves of food or sex. Although their work brings money and prestige, shamans are often society’s outsiders: some seem to be mentally ill, prone to weeping or psychosis; and some (like the bujasa of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi) were what today we would call trans. Certain ideas — like “soul journeying” and metamorphosis into animals — occur among shamans again and again.

The fact that shamanism is virtually universal in traditional societies, despite their separation by millennia of historical development, calls for an explanation. It must be, argues Singh, that shamanism evolved again and again because it meets a fundamental human need — similar to how wings have evolved separately among insects, bats and birds to solve the challenge of how to navigate through the air.

The tragedy of human life is that we crave order in a wildly unpredictable universe. We want our crops to grow in a world of hail storms and drought. We want our loved ones to survive and stay healthy in a world of danger and disease. And when things go wrong, we find it virtually impossible to accept that they do so for no reason. We look out at the chaos of reality and see a universe saturated with agency. When bad things happen — the medieval Black Death, the Covid pandemic, the death of a child — we have a natural tendency to think unseen agents must be to blame. As a result, we are always susceptible to the claims of charismatic individuals who can convince us that they have special access to the world of invisible causes.

Singh’s account implies that, at the root of the human religious impulse — deeper even than a desire for community or existential purpose or moral guidance — is something far simpler: a craving for magic. We want good things to happen and bad things not to happen, and we want to believe that certain people have the power to make it so. This is the basis of shamanism, which means it was most likely the basis of religion everywhere for 95% of our species’ history, before agriculture triggered the development of civilizations and institutional religions. Not until the appearance of those newfangled faiths did the gods become obsessed with monitoring our behavior and beliefs. Most human religions have had nothing much to do with morality or doctrine.

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Today our post-Enlightenment religions go to great lengths to prove they are respectably rational. The spooky and miraculous have largely been banished from church. The pope pays obeisance to Darwin, apologists write books reconciling God and science, and talk of miraculous healing is for most part the preserve of embarrassing cranks. Priests pray that God will grant us wisdom and compassion, not that he will hold off plagues and tornadoes, stymie witches or curse our enemies.

But if Singh is right, it may be that the problem with mainstream Western religion is not that it is insufficiently rational but, rather, that it is nowhere near irrational enough. It’s now a commonplace that Westerners are dissatisfied with a coldly rationalistic worldview, and are increasingly seeking answers in a panoply of spiritual practices — or perhaps even rediscovering a belief in God. But reading Singh I began to wonder if the standard explanations for why this is happening — a loss of community, a breakdown in moral values, a search for transcendent meaning — ignore an even deeper cause.

Western societies like Britain didn’t rapidly become more secular after the Second World War because people began to reject Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs, or because we were busy reading On the Origin of Species. We stopped attending church because the modern state increasingly performed the functions of the ancient gods. First the Industrial Revolution and then the creation of welfare states helped us make staggering strides towards eliminating the role of chance in human affairs. Decades of postwar peace and economic growth meant we were living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives. And shrinking inequality and expanding welfare systems meant most of us no longer dreaded catastrophic reversals of economic fortune or social standing.

That era may now be coming to an abrupt halt. Climate change means the weather is again becoming a matter of existential concern. Covid destroyed our faith in the state’s ability to protect us from plague. The unthinkable prospect of great power war and nuclear apocalypse has again become thinkable. Flatlining economic growth may not look like a disaster in the grand scheme of human history, but when the very rich are capturing an ever-greater share of wealth, it translates to lower living standards for most and humiliating losses of status for many. Secularism advanced quickest in egalitarian Scandinavia, and slowest in the United States, where high inequality and patchy state support left people more exposed to the vagaries of fate. A more uncertain future may very well be a more religious one.

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But reading Singh and visiting Louise made me skeptical that we are about to see people flocking back to church pews — despite recent headlines trumpeting a revival of religiosity based on scanty data. According to Singh, institutional religions like Christianity never replaced the innate human attraction to shamanism, but merely captured and suppressed it. New religions, he argues, tend to be founded by shamans — Jesus, St Paul, Muhammad and Joseph Smith all gathered followers by hearing voices and performing miracles — and echoes of shamanism can be found in “charismatic” Christian churches. But shamans are unruly, and mainstream religions tend to maintain order and authority by stamping them out. Even so, the human fear of uncertainty means that shamans crop up again and again in the form of prophets, gurus and cult leaders.

This is particularly true in times of social upheaval. At the beginning of the 20th century, a social crisis was triggered in Polynesia when ships bearing American cargo confronted native peoples with previously unimaginable hordes of wealth. Indigenous societies were thrown into confusion, their settled worldviews overturned. Shamanic prophets emerged to lead “cargo cults”, promising a coming age of salvation when the heavenly ships would return. Rituals were invented to hasten their arrival, such as beating drums while marching up and down the shore.

Our own age of confusion has thrown up its own shamans with their own promises of salvation. Guru-influencers like Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand gain followers by promising healing based on their special insight into mysterious psychic realities. Like traditional shamans, they advertise their spiritual otherness via weird lifestyles based on self-deprivation (Brand abstains from animal products, drugs and alcohol; Peterson lives on steak). Like traditional shamans with their trance states, they weep and promise transcendence in ecstatic tirades of semi-comprehensible language. Only a little kookier than Brand and Peterson is Joe Dispenza, who tells his 1.36 million YouTube followers that he healed his broken back with positive thinking, and teaches techniques to use quantum physics to cure cancer and bring wealth.

Our new shamans may seem like the bizarre products of our strange new age of smartphones and algorithms, but in the long view of human history they make perfect sense. It’s the human condition to seek, in Peterson’s phrase, antidotes to chaos. A world of lavish wealth for a few and growing anxiety for many is one where charismatic individuals promising magical transformation will flourish. Now when I think of our current craze for Kundalini yoga and reiki, meditation and affirmation, ayahuasca and psilocybin, I consider those Polynesia islanders undergoing their own meaning crisis a century ago. Frightened by changes beyond our control, and stirred into ecstatic longing by wealth we can barely understand, we beat our drums and gaze out over the horizon, praying for the coming age of riches and renewal.

His nationality is two things at once: not important, but crucial. In recent times, the Vatican has turned to America in financial desperation, no longer able to rely on funding from the German-speaking lands, now that increasing numbers there avoid paying the Church tax. The Americans have obliged. But it has not been a happy relationship. The American Church has bankrolled the Vatican, while the Italians and their allies have continued to use the cash in ways that are hardly transparent. American patience has run out. The election of an American Pope means that from now on, at long last, the Italian way of doing things in the financial sphere, that has led to innumerable scandals, is over. Expect no more stories of the type that involved Italian bankers swinging from under Blackfriars Bridge; rather expect the intervention of corporate America, backed by an American Pope. If this works, and the Italians have ways of fighting back, it will be a new era. And, relatively young in Papal terms, the 69-year-old Leo XIV has perhaps 20 years ahead of him in which to bring this about.

He is American, and yet he is not American: he has a Peruvian passport, and has worked in that country for decades as a missionary. He is in no way aligned to the MAGA Catholicism of JD Vance. Far from it, as their recent spat on X revealed. Leo XIV is pro-immigration, speaks of  bridges not walls, and is all the things that Trump isn’t and Pope Francis was. As he spoke from the balcony he spoke good Italian, and he also spoke in Spanish, mentioning his former diocese in Peru. He is American, but he is firmly rooting himself in the Latin American experience. It has often been said that there could never be a Pope from the world’s only superpower. Well, there is now, and Leo XIV shows how it is done: an American by birth, but one with a very international outlook. In the eyes of MAGA Catholics, he will seem a terrible political Lefty, but in the eyes of most Catholics, of which there are 1.4 billion around the world, this won’t matter. Most of them live in grim circumstances and in challenging countries and are deeply attached to those who speak of the Church’s love for the poor. Mother Teresa of Calcutta remains the most important Catholic of the age. Various photographs have emerged of Leo, as a diocesan bishop in Peru, wading through flood zones in Wellington boots, riding a horse in a country with no roads, and helping out in a soup kitchen. He has actually lived with and worked with the economically disadvantaged: that marks him out, when you think of some of the very grand prince bishops of the Church in the USA, as distinctly un-American. But it is pure Catholic gold.

He was a missionary, and at the same time he has been an administrator; here too, he spans two worlds. As Prior General of the Augustinian Order for two six-year terms, he travelled the world, and ruled a disparate body of men, and no doubt had some tough decisions to make. His most recent job in the Vatican was presiding over the dicastery that appoints, and in some cases disciplines, bishops. In his two years in post, he won respect for the way he did his job. The Vatican machine, the Roman Curia, is widely seen as not fit for purpose, and in need of leadership and reform. Leo XIV, the cardinals must be hoping, is the man to deliver reform.

In his opening speech he name-checked Pope Francis twice. He will not undo his legacy, whatever that legacy was, which is still hard to discern. Leo will continue with the synods on synodality (conferences about having conferences, as they have been called). But he might take the project in a somewhat different direction. Several cardinals, who are not noted conservatives, such as Vincent Nichols and Timothy Dolan, spoke before the Conclave about the need for greater doctrinal clarity and here Leo may well deliver. He name-checked Saint Augustine too, the great theologian and saint who, 1,500 years ago, laid down the parameters of the Church’s relations with the world — in it, but not of it. An Augustinian Pope means an intellectually grounded Pope, a Pope rooted in theological tradition and suspicious of innovation.

There were other signs as well in that opening speech. He gave a special greeting to the people of Rome, to huge cheers, for he is their bishop after all, and to the Italians. He was signaling his intention (John Paul II did it as well) to be a Roman and an Italian by adoption. Rome and Italy will appreciate that hugely. He is theirs, a source of immense pride; he showed he wanted to be theirs and he understood the importance of being theirs. And to underline the point, he mentioned the supplication to the Madonna of Pompei, a traditional prayer to be uttered at noon on that very day. To most, maybe all, people outside Italy, Catholics included, Pompei means ruins, but to Italians it is also an important shrine to Mary. And he concluded with the Hail Mary, the most popular prayer to the Madonna. A Leftist Pope? Sure, but a traditional Italian Pope as well, a Pope of two worlds.

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The Vatican’s moral decay

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

He is the successor to Pope Francis, the great disruptor, the man who said hagan lio, “make a mess”. Those who were expecting someone to undo the Francis years, at least directly, were always doomed to disappointment: there were not enough votes for that in the Conclave, and besides, it’s awkward trying to explain away the last 12 years as a blip or a mistake in a Church that values consistency of doctrine. But at the same time, there were clear indications that a more orderly way of doing things has returned. He wore the traditional garb of a newly elected Pope, the Apostolic stole and the scarlet mozzetta. Francis refused the latter, saying, according to some, “The carnival is over”: or more likely “I prefer not”. But by donning the mozzetta, Leo indicated that he will be the sort of Pope traditionalists can love. He looks like a Pope — there is a bit of a resemblance to the bespectacled Paul VI — he smiles, he is confident but diffident, and he seems to understand that peace and unity are his mission. The relief, for traditionalist Catholics, is palpable, and came with the first sight of that mozzetta. Never has a piece of silk counted for so much.

How political a Pope will he be? He is worried about climate change and the plight of immigrants, as well as the conflicts around the world; so was Pope Francis, but Pope Leo may handle these themes with more subtlety, with more guarded interventions. One thing already apparent, from the first speech, and the sermon the next day in the Sistine Chapel, is that he does not want to be a nakedly political Pope. The peace he mentioned on the balcony was the peace of the Lord, the peace that comes from faith in God. In the Sistine Chapel he spoke about Jesus Christ and the need for faith, to offset “the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society”. He continued: “Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.” These words have political implications, but what is apparent is the bridge he is trying to build between faith and life, the project of Saint Augustine. He may be a political Pope, but he will be so for religious reasons, and religion will not be obscured by politics.

It is too early to tell what will happen, but the indications are good. He is eirenic, even soothing, perhaps a little boring as well; after the excitement of Pope Francis, this is to be welcomed. “Leone! Leone! Leone!” chanted the excited crowd when they heard the name he had given himself. Were they all thinking of the great Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903 after a term of 24 years and who was also elected at a similar age? Or were they thinking of Leo the Great, who saved Rome from Attila the Hun? The more recent Leo steered the Church towards reconciliation with the modern world, and wrote the encyclical De Rerum Novarum (“Concerning New Things”) which dealt with social questions, among them industrialization, poverty and trade unions. Leo XIII led the Church into the modern world, while not forgetting the world from which it came. May Leo XIV, the Pope of two worlds, do the same.

Did you realize this was the most “diverse” conclave in history? Did you know that various enthusiastic people (for which read: childlike peasant types) have waited “all day in the sun” to hear the news? “They certainly know how to do drama, don’t they?” said one supercilious git, apparently unaware that British people might be Roman Catholic too. He banged on: “This place — Rome, Europe! — needs to be challenged by the realities of the developing world; it needs to be shaken out of its complacency.” Only belatedly did he remember to ascribe the sentiment to the late Pope Francis — also described as “a bit of a rockstar” — and not himself.

I tried to ignore the obvious political bias; for it was the satanists who first taught me to drown out irritating worldly intrusions into strictly sacred matters. As a child, my family and I attended a Catholic church on an RAF base leased to the US Navy, set in the foothills of the Grampian mountains. The only available building was a Utilitarian-looking prefab which had to be shared with every other kind of religion there. Shelves at the back of the room contained a dizzying selection of reading material, from pamphlets about lives of the saints, to scientology books by L. Ron Hubbard. Once a month, the devil-worshippers apparently got their turn at the altar. “They are very friendly and polite”, a gently ironical priest from New York once told my father.

Still, our congregation managed to suppress any troubling thoughts of previous occupants for an hour or two every Sunday, as the space was remade into a holy one by the unfolding of the familiar rites. As I remember it, Catholicism is quite at home with the delicate dance between the sacred and the profane. And indeed, as the papal conclave made its way towards its dramatic decision yesterday, a similar sense of focus was probably required.

From one perspective, conclaves are so obviously worldly: full of human flaws, compromise, and opportunism. According to a story circulating this week, newbies to the role watched the new Hollywood film in order to know what to expect. Factions form, votes get switched, and gradually the main contenders start to emerge. In between, there are huddles over dinner, corridor conversations, and whispers in the breakfast queue.

Though it sounds glamorous, in reality I imagine it’s more like some tortuously long academic conference; exhausted introverts continually forced to be sociable, overstimulated by too much caffeine, and unable to hide behind their confiscated smartphones. Apparently they even wear name badges. With all that distraction and pressure, the rhythms of rituals inherited from centuries of conclaves must feel like solid ground.

Back in the Eighties, as I crossed the threshold of my occasional church, the sense of mysterious transformation was compounded by the fact I was also entering a little piece of America, appearing like a crazy hallucination: cursive script on the noticeboards, friendly soccer-mom Sunday School teachers, root beer in the vending machines. It was all very unlike the Scottish world that lay just beyond the gates. And here, too, there was negotiation between the relatively permanent and the ephemeral. Along with the exotic frosted donuts after Mass, the words and gestures of the liturgy were the only real constant.

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The base’s mission was to keep track of long-range nuclear missiles. Rotating tours of duty meant some family in the congregation was always arriving, or leaving with a celebratory cake. Every now and again a new naval chaplain with an Irish or an Italian name would pitch up in the tiny rural location, fresh off a gunship or out of a warzone. His subsequent inevitable collapse into bored alcoholism would be studiously ignored by his flock. This church also gave me my first glimpse of that fascinating indeterminate object, a priest in a cassock puffing furiously on a fag.

My early religiosity didn’t last. Relative outsider to the faith as I now am, trying to guess who might become pope was like trying to pick a Grand National winner, based only on horses’ names and the colors of jockey silks. Would it be the powerbroker Parolin; the keffiyeh-sporting Pizzaballa; the austere conservative Erdő, or jolly-looking progressive Tagle? In the end, it was 69-year-old moderate Robert Prevost, an American with a French name who has spent most of his ecclesiastical mission in Peru, and who once argued on X about ordo amoris with J.D. Vance. Symbolically straddling various global currents, this too looked like a canny move. Or as the BBC woman put it: “Let’s be honest; he ticks a lot of boxes.”

But despite the self-interest and unpredictability of group dynamics, for believers, a conclave is directed by God not man. According to Cardinal Vincent Nichols, divine will is revealed by a “resonance”: “[I]t can come from a phrase or prayer… a conversation over a meal, a sense that something’s going on here, and it’s those things that count as much as predetermined positions or perspectives.” The sequestration is supposed to enhance openness to God’s will, without any distraction; as is the elaborate formality of solemnly counting, then burning the ballots. In essence, observant Catholics must treat the high drama as directed by a single auteur, while still acknowledging that the actors have a lot of room for improv.

And the same apparently goes for canonization. A fascinating piece in The Economist details the ongoing campaign to make deceased Italian teenager Carlos Acuti the first millennial saint, by fitting him into the requisite mold of “heroic virtue”. Wishing to connect with younger worshippers, the Vatican is apparently in the market for a relatable saint who wore sneakers and looked like he was in a boy band. And so awkward recollections of schoolmates are downplayed; stories of his great piety pushed to the fore; posthumous miracles conveniently found and authenticated.

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As Kenneth Woodward writes in his book Making Saints: “Each time a new saint is officially recognized by the Church of Rome, it does so in the wider interest of inquiring into the nature of holiness itself.” The same is presumably true of choosing a pope. But still, those in charge believe theirs is a genuine inquiry. They are discovering the right answer as dictated by God, rather than finessing history to fit the desired narrative. Whether aspects of Leo XIV’s back story require some finessing remains to be seen.

A few decades ago, pointing out the apparently earthbound, arbitrary element of religious procedures would be offered by triumphant rationalists as proof of hollowness. I’m sure I once took it that way too. Seeing what tawdry motivations lay behind the curtain seemed like an effective antidote to faith. In a defensive response to all the scrutiny and mockery, many Christian institutions dialed down the mysticism and got rid of tradition and formality, selling off the family pews and bringing us the cringe of the acoustic guitar, the Alpha course, and the rave in the nave instead. But now, Catholic churches are filling up again, and particularly with young people — even in the absence of relatable millennial saints. They don’t appear to be put off by the Tridentine Mass, women wearing mantillas, or the burning of palms for Ash Wednesday. In fact, they seem to rather like these things.

Of course, this might too be a passing fashion: a pendulum swing away from decades of mirthless, flat-voiced rationalism. It is perhaps compounded by being buffeted about aimlessly in the vortex of hyper-liberal values, eventually giving rise to a desire for firmer footing. But from the perspective of the believer, even fads for Christianity don’t happen on their own. The universe’s most successful influencer is also involved in their co-production. Between nature, God, and man, the background causal metaphysics may be murky, but no weirder than thinking that Mother Earth is hurting, or that sexed bodies get changed with words.

Life is coming at us fast these days, and we need all the help we can get. I’m glad that the words of the liturgy create a space to appreciate the sacred, even when uttered by inebriated naval chaplains in competition for space with satanists. And it is beautiful that the papal conclave still unfolds with meditative, ritualized solemnity, even as backroom deals get made, BBC commentators sneer, and shy clerics long for their smartphones.

Now an adult, and via a stint at Goldman Sachs, DiSanto has seriously scaled up his service to the church. In 2018, he co-founded Hallow, a Catholic prayer and meditation app that has been downloaded over 20 million times. Securing investment funding of over $157 million, with notable investors including Peter Thiel and JD Vance, Hallow has gone on to be the most successful piece of religious digital technology ever. Following an ad during the Super Bowl, in February last year, it became the most downloaded app on the Apple store, ahead of ChatGPT, Google and Netflix.

“It aired in 15 markets during the big game,” Fox Business explained. “God is doing incredible things,” added Alex Jones, the CEO of Hallow. “All glory and credit and praise belongs to him.” The company doesn’t publish profits, but the former rapper and actor Mark Wahlberg has denied that he received $20 million for fronting the Super Bowl slot. It’s hard to follow the money, but there is certainly a lot of it sloshing around.

I have been on Hallow for a week now, and I can see why it is popular. There is a lot of nice stuff here. The interface is clean, the functionality great. And the theology is pretty mainstream Roman Catholic stuff, with cameos from well-known Catholic commentators like Bishop Barron, and even the old Pope. There is a bit of a meditation feel to some of it, which is fine if that’s your thing. There are parts of the app to help you sleep, someone whispering Bible verses almost as lullabies.

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The Examen technique, developed by the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola, is used to help people review their day. The Lectio Divina, often ascribed to St Benedict, is used to encourage people to read the Bible in a more meditative way. The app feels a bit bossy to me, reminding me when to pray and how to pray. The more I stay on Hallow, the more I feel I am being managed. Today, I received an email from Hallow inviting me to join the waiting list for the Conclave Prayer Challenge. Oh sod off, I thought. I also really hate it when people try to supply too much meaning in their voice when they talk breathlessly of God.

That’s all a personal reaction. But what I can’t get my head round is why someone might spend $69.99 a year to have their relationship with God mediated by an app. For such a contemporary phenomenon, this feels like a pretty medieval issue: money, mediation and the Catholic Church. Martin Luther, remember, attacked the Church on two counts. First, that it came to interpose a level of clerical intermediaries between the individual believer and God. Second, that it came to monetize this role in the form of indulgences.

Hallow isn’t doing anything as crude as trying to sell you time off from purgatory. But certainly, to European sensibilities, the obscurity of Hallow finances raises considerable alarm bells. How much money is it OK to make from religion? $15 a funeral? My $29,000-ish-a-year stipend? Hallow’s estimated $51.4 million income? I told all this to a mate of mine who is in finance. “How do we get into this game, Giles?” he laughed, only half-jokingly. St Francis told his followers not to even touch money, lest they become corrupted by it. “Money is the devil’s dung,” advised St Basil of Caesarea. Pope Francis repeated the idea too, though I can’t find any of that in Hallow.

Selling people prayer time is a bit like when they started to sell you water. You can get it straight out of the tap, but such is the dark genius of marketing that they can persuade us to pay silly money for something that is free already. Actually, it is worse than selling fancy water, because prayer isn’t the sort of thing that fits comfortably alongside technology. Fundamentally, it is the most low-tech thing there is: just you and God and time. You don’t need to join a waiting list. Just find some silence and sit in it.

At base, the values of modern technology and the values of ancient prayer seem deeply antithetical. Technology is fundamentally about efficiency: achieving things more quickly, more effectively, with less hassle and disruption. You don’t have to be Thomas Merton to work out that prayer doesn’t operate with this logic. It is not just another way of getting things done in the world. Prayer is not useful. It is not, to reference Foucault, just another form of self-management. Prayer is more like play. You do it for the sheer hell of it — though I appreciate that’s not really the best way of expressing things. You do it for itself, not because of any particular benefit it might bring. At its best, it is a state of being, not a means to an end.

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I used to think that being a priest was the most AI-resistant job you could imagine. How could a machine or an algorithm take confession or celebrate the eucharist? Totally ridiculous, right? Hallow doesn’t quite give you that, though it travels some way down the road. And, with the app church, you don’t have to sit next to other annoying people in the pews. You don’t have to get up early and pray in the cold; everything is made easy for you. It’s cheaper than church and less demanding. So our relationship with God is being automated, digitized, and with that shaped and manipulated. Prayer is being forced down a narrow weir of ones and zeroes.

Despite being a catholic Christian myself, albeit of the Anglican kind, all this whizzy digital mediation brings out my deepest inner Martin Luther. Broadly speaking, the theology is perfectly fine. But the medium is also the message, and the medium is highly problematic. For unlike Luther, who through the printing press harnessed the power of new technology for evangelistic purposes, it is now young Catholics who have mastered the latest technology. They have brought to bear the power of finance, social media and advertising to turn God into some slick new product, something to be marketed and sold. But however much Hallow plasters its digital platform with improving quotes from Holy Scripture, the place still feels cold and Godless to me. More a digital temple to wellbeing than a place to encounter the living God.

For decades the Roman Curia, the Church’s central organ of government, has been widely seen as unfit for purpose. One person who saw this clearly was the late Pope Francis who, in his exchange of Christmas greetings with the Curia in 2014, lambasted them for what he saw as multiple failings, including something called “spiritual Alzheimer’s”. He seemed serious about reform. Curial Christmas presents — a panettone and a bottle of prosecco each — were cancelled, and recruitment frozen. At the same time, Pope Francis instituted a dicastery for the economy, to bring all the financial departments under one roof, and put a tough Australian cardinal, George Pell, in charge of it. The soap opera seemed to be over, but in fact it was just beginning.

Pell soon found obfuscation and opposition at every turn. Monsignori lamented that they were being forced to account for every cappuccino, and stories were planted in the press about Pell’s own extravagance. The financial audit ordered by Pell was suspended by Cardinal Becciu, the sostituto, effectively the Vatican’s chief of staff. Progress stalled, and matters ended with three spectacular arrests. Pell went back to his native land to face charges of sex abuse, of which he was, after a long process, absolved. (It was believed by some Italians that the arrest and trial of Pell was orchestrated by Becciu, but this seems a stretch, even in a land addicted to conspiracy theories.) Libero Milone, the auditor, a clean pair of hands from Deloitte, was arrested by the Vatican, questioned for 12 hours and charged with espionage, or, as some might put it, merely doing his job. The charges were later dropped. But Cardinal Becciu’s triumph was short-lived. He too was arrested and, with several associates, put on trial in the Vatican for embezzlement, and found guilty. His trial was characterised by impenetrable details of a business deal concerning the ex-Harrods depository in London, and spiced up with stories about a woman, Cecilia Marogna, designated “la dama del Cardinale” (the Cardinal’s lady) who, supposedly on secret work for the Vatican, had splurged half-a-million euros of Vatican money on luxury handbags and high living.

Two things now seem clear. The Pope had appointed reformers, and then not backed them to the hilt. As such, the Vatican remains a patchwork of conflicting fiefdoms and franchises. There’s the Secretariat of State, where Becciu was sostituto, which refused to acknowledge Pell’s authority, claiming that it was “la suprema”, answerable to no one. Meanwhile, the property portfolio, which is very valuable, is controlled by APSA, the agency that oversees the patrimony of the Holy See; much of this property brings in very little money, and is rented out below market value to Vatican employees as compensation for their poor pay. The governorate of the Vatican City State is independent of this, as is the Institute for Religious Works, better known as the Vatican Bank. And while some Vatican enterprises are bringing in cash, notably the Post Office and the Museums, others are losing it hand over fist, such as Vatican Radio. The chief income stream, Peter’s Pence, the annual collection from all Catholic churches in the world, is dwindling dramatically. The crunch is coming. In fact, it may have already arrived.

Inefficiency and corruption damage the brand, and as donations tail off, squabbling over the scraps tends to increase. The Church has still not shaken off the specter of Roberto Calvi, “God’s Banker”, found dangling under Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. And the whiff of money laundering stubbornly endures. But the finances are only part of the wider administrative problem. In the past 12 years, Pope Francis effectively bypassed the Curia and the usual machinery of government. He appointed bishops personally, rather than through the normal processes as laid down by the dicastery for bishops. This turn to personal rule had some catastrophic results. In Argentina, all the episcopal appointments have been made by the Pope himself. In Mar del Plata, a city close to Buenos Aires, Pope Francis appointed two bishops in a row, both of whom had to resign before taking up the appointment. An interim diocesan administrator had to resign as well, when he was charged with misconduct. As for a previous bishop of Mar del Plata, he only lasted a year in his new job in another diocese. All of the appointees were well known to Pope Francis, but the vetting and due diligence were clearly insufficient.

After a time, a pattern of administrative failure emerges. In England, not an important country for the Vatican nor one Pope Francis took a close interest in, two newly appointed bishops of Portsmouth in a row resigned before taking up their appointment; this was presumably the fault of the dicastery for bishops. In Chile, there was an unseemly fight (complete with fisticuffs in the cathedral) over Pope Francis’s appointment of Bishop Barros of Osorno, who was imposed but eventually withdrawn after a long squabble which ended with all the Chilean bishops offering their resignation en masse. But the worst cases concern a man called Gustavo Zanchetta and another called Marko Rupnik. Both are accused of sexual crimes; in both cases, due process has been ignored.

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Consider the Zanchetta case. In July 2013, Pope Francis appointed him bishop of Orán in Argentina, one of his earliest episcopal appointments. Zanchetta was well known to the pontiff, indeed a friend. Four years later, he resigned for health reasons. Zanchetta was later sent to Spain for psychological assessment and then employed in Rome working as an “assessore” in APSA, a job specially created for him. Only later did it emerge that in 2015 one of Zanchetta’s secretaries had found sexually explicit images on his cell phone, including naked selfies of Zanchetta. Evidence suggests the Pope knew about this at the time, as he had summoned Zanchetta to Rome in October 2015. However, Pope Francis believed Zanchetta’s claim that his cell phone had been hacked.

Only in January 2019 was Zanchetta suspended from his Curial position for unspecified accusations of abuse. A church investigation was ordered, and a report filed. A canonical trial of Zanchetta was announced as imminent. In June 2019, Argentine prosecutors charged Zanchetta with sexually abusing two seminarians. Later, a charge of embezzling state funds was added. The trial began in February 2022 and Zanchetta was convicted of sexual abuse and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. However, the Argentine Bishops’ Conference asked for clemency and Zanchetta was allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest in a residence for retired priests. As for the canonical trial, that has disappeared from the radar, which means that Zanchetta continues to be a Catholic bishop in good standing. Who is protecting him, and why?

The Rupnik case is somewhat different, but worse. Rupnik, a well-known Slovenian celebrity priest, Jesuit and mosaic artist, is accused of sexual abuse against adults, in this case nuns who were under his spiritual direction. Rupnik has not been found guilty in a court of law, and probably never will be. However, his canonical crimes are clear. He absolved the sins of his partner in sexual sin, for which he was automatically excommunicated in 2019; nevertheless, the excommunication was almost immediately lifted, because, we are told, Rupnik repented. Moreover, because various allegations against Rupnik, received in 2019, dated back to the Nineties, they could not be investigated as there was a statute of limitations, which the Pope declined to lift. In 2020, Father Rupnik preached at the Lenten retreat in the Vatican. However, the Rupnik scandal ground on; some of the nuns went public. The Jesuits expelled him from the order for disobedience, and finally the Pope lifted the statute of limitations, to enable a canonical trial. This has not to date started, the excuse being that the appointment of judges is proving too hard. The person in charge of bringing Rupnik to justice is Cardinal Fernández, an Argentine and close collaborator of the late Pope Francis.

It was not always this way. Benedict XVI, shortly before becoming pope, spoke of driving the filth out of the Church. When he was pope, he sentenced the sexual abuser Marcial Maciel to a life of reclusion, by decree, without trial, as the Pope, an absolute monarch, can. Maciel had been protected by many during the pontificate of John Paul II, but Benedict moved against him swiftly and firmly. It can be done. But Rupnik continues to be a priest in good standing: who is protecting him, and why?

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By Darran Anderson

Administration, administration, administration is not quite the alluring slogan one could hope for, but it is this — the restoration of due process, and the urgent need to get things done — which will be the main challenge for the next pope. And it is decades overdue. At the tail end of the pontificate of John Paul II, who died in 2005, there was a perception that the Pope had neglected the government of the Church, thanks to his foreign travels and his long absences from his desk in the Vatican. It was hoped Benedict XVI would reform the Roman Curia, but that challenge, along with the Vatileaks scandal, defeated him, despite the promising start with Maciel. Pope Francis, too, failed to make effective changes. It’s now up to the next man. In the meantime, the Vatican is beginning to look like the Ottoman Empire in its final years, haunted by bankruptcy and the failure to reform itself.

Is there anyone who can stop the Vatican going the way of the Ottomans? Any cardinal who has run a large diocese well or governed a dicastery in the Vatican efficiently is in with a shot at becoming pope, as long as he is not too old. The trouble is that few names suggest themselves. Some of the cardinals in the running have ruled tiny dioceses, which in population terms are the size of small parishes: think of Mario Grech (Gozo, the Republic of Malta), Pierbattista Pizzaballa (Jerusalem), or even Soane Patita Paini Mafi (Tonga) and Giorgio Marengo (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). And since the archbishops of large dioceses like Milan and Paris are not cardinals, they will not be in the Conclave, though they could conceivably be voted for. As for Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines, who has had charge of the huge dicastery of Propaganda Fide in Rome, his administration has been less than stellar. It is this lack of experience among his rivals that puts Pope Francis’s second in command, Cardinal Parolin, Secretary of State, in pole position. He has spent the last 12 years touring the globe, and is well known to other cardinals. But many a man goes into the Conclave as pope and comes out a cardinal, and such will be the fate of Parolin. He is too associated with the controversies of Pope Francis’s reign, at a time when the Church is hoping, perhaps, to leave the Francis era behind.

The next Pope? I wish I knew. Conclaves have a habit of surprising us with little known candidates who go on to make an enormous contribution: Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, being a prime example, and Angelo Roncalli, John XXIII, being another. All Catholics must be hoping and praying for another Wojtyla or Roncalli, someone who will change the Church, and for the better; it does not matter what sort of theologian he is; he just needs to provide a strong hand in guiding the Barque of Peter, and sail it through the stormy waters that doubtless lie ahead.

I thought about Levy’s punchy phrase when I read the headlines last week about a “dramatic growth” in churchgoing among young people in the US, mirroring the trend in the US. Twenty years ago, almost no one would have predicted such a revival. Religiosity in the West, and Christianity specifically, was in long-term decline; but more than that, irreligiosity appeared to be on an unstoppable path towards triumph.

Back in the 2000s, atheism felt exciting. It’s hard to credit now, but from 2005 to 2007, I spent many of my evenings in the pub thrashing out the flaws in agnosticism. No, no, someone would be saying as you arrived back from the bar clutching a round, it’s nonsense to reserve judgment on something when there’s no evidence for it. Someone else would quote Bertrand Russell, then the conversation would turn to the possibility of morality absent a deity: maybe atheists were more moral, because they weren’t just following old holy books? And then everyone could feel very pleased with themselves as they took a mouthful of their pint.

Unbelieving was a pleasant pace of rebellion for a young adult in England. We were defying our Church of England schooling, the compulsory “Our Fathers” in assembly, the nativity every Christmas. It was provocation without danger. The last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the UK had been in 1976. No one had been executed for heresy in this country for 300 years. The young apologetics fans who are rediscovering collective worship probably feel something of the same. There are many reasons someone can feel called to church, and one of them is surely the opportunity to make you elders feel slightly baffled and uncomfortable.

When it came to questions of belief, all the intellectual energy was with the “New Atheist” movement, which was determined to root faith itself out of public life. It felt like taking a stand against the atrocities of the time, which all seemed to have their roots in religion. The Catholic Church was embroiled in horrifying scandals of child abuse and cover-up, and the Anglicans had a few of their own. 9/11 had been a harrowing illustration of what “religious inspiration” in practice; the military response from the US and UK looked, to some, like a divinely motivated “crusade”. People who were unreasoning enough to believe in virgin births or paradise for martyrs were presumed to be capable of all kinds of unreasonable activity besides. Hence the title of Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

But anyone who believed as fully as the New Atheists did that religion was a man-made phenomenon should have been able to foresee what happened next. New Atheism, it turned out, was not inherently immune to the unpleasant excesses of human behavior: by 2011, a number of New Atheists, particularly female ones, had started to notice that their movement was every bit as man-heavy in its leadership as the Catholic church. It wasn’t even immune from acting like exactly the thing it set itself in opposition to — a religion. And like all nascent religions, it would undergo a schism.

The rupture in New Atheism should have happened sooner, given its awkward coalition of anti-Islam hawks like Sam Harris (who set himself against “the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living”), and anti-war liberals who got twitchy when Tony Blair said he would be judged by God for his decision to commit the UK to war in Iraq. Somehow, though, that shoe never dropped. Instead, the split in New Atheism started in an elevator.

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In 2011, a New Atheist aligned blogger called Rebecca Watson (“Skepchick”) was propositioned in a lift at an atheist conference in Dublin. She posted about it, and received a comment from Richard Dawkins that began: “Dear Muslima…” The substance of his comment was that Watson’s experience was nothing in comparison to the suffering of Muslim women under theocratic regimes, and it implied that Watson should “grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.” Dawkins later apologized for invoking “rivalry in victimhood”,  but by then, the New Atheists had already taken sides.

On one side of the aisle, the old school, who believed that social justice concerns were a distraction from the important work of cultivating unbelief. On the other, the progressives, who thought of atheism as a vehicle for all the other issues they cared about. But it was a clash born of the original mission of the New Atheists, who had wanted more than freedom not to believe; they had wanted to destroy religion as an institution, because they saw its influence as toxic. If atheism was toxic too, the progressives reasoned, it surely didn’t deserve to exist. As the blogger Jen McCreigh wrote: “I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.”

McCreigh proposed the name “Atheism Plus” for the movement she wanted to instigate. As another blogger explained it, this would be a movement that “explicitly focuses, not just on atheism, but on the intersections between atheism and racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other social justice issues”. It was, in other words, an early instance of the omnicause. Very quickly, the issues of rationality and truth that had energized the early days of the New Atheists were left behind: facts might be important, but social justice mattered more.

Nowhere was this as obvious as in the way the former New Atheists dealt with trans issues. People who had once loved nothing more than dismantling the existence of the soul found themselves furiously defending the idea of “gender essences”. Rebecca Watson, the woman whose sexual harassment helped instigate the split in the first place, could recently be found “debunking” the Cass Review as “anti-science and anti-trans”. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its 1996 Humanist of the Year award from Dawkins for his skeptical comments about trans identity.

This was a bizarre turn of events, but maybe an inevitable one. The attraction of New Atheism had always been, partly, the thrill of belonging to the elect. Before Gary Wolf came up with the name that stuck, Dawkins and others had attempted to popularize the label “brights” for unbelievers. In an article in The Guardian, Dawkins wondered: “what’s the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?” And then he answered himself like this: “What would you suggest?” The implication was obvious. Religion was for the dim. Smart people were godless.

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The Atheist Plus people thought they were better than the New Atheist people, but the New Atheists thought they were better than everybody else. The abortive effort to make “brights” happen suggests that New Atheism was always more about asserting one’s own superiority than it was about popularizing reason: it was niche by design. In turn, the Atheist Plus people could prove their superiority to the New Atheists through their commitment to frankly improbable ideas. Declaring faith in gender identity was valuable in exactly the same way that believing in the literal truth of transubstantiation or the resurrection can be: an idea so unlikely that only special people could see its truth.

New Atheism was also, let us be honest, quite cringe. In many ways, it was exactly how you would imagine a religion of nerds to turn out. And, although there were many successful conferences and meet-ups built around it, it was fundamentally a very online movement. For an avowedly materialist philosophy, it offered very little in the way of real-world sustenance. I suspect that part of the resurgence of religion is down to simple skin hunger — the need of humans to be in physical contact with other humans.

It certainly hasn’t happened because religion has re-earned its moral authority. Despite the late Pope’s efforts, Catholicism still had plenty of sins to reckon with. The Anglican Communion has barely begun its own redemption — Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury over the church’s protection of the child abuser John Smyth came far too late and with far too little contrition. The lure of the pews comes from somewhere more elemental.

Christianity’s comeback with Gen Z is a backlash to the rationalist certainty in which the millennials steeped themselves, and which proved to be so limited when “rationalism” came into conflict with questions of identity. I don’t go to church and would be a hypocrite if I did (I don’t believe in God), but I do know that standing in a nave for a wedding or a funeral, elbow to elbow with a stranger, joining my voice with theirs, feels more sacred than sitting in a conference room watching a PowerPoint about why God doesn’t exist ever could.

New Atheism promised freedom from dogma so people could forge what Harris called a “religion of reason”; but that promise proved as tautological as it sounded. The collapse of New Atheism into a mirror image of its avowed enemy shows how very difficult it is to do without a god, even when you don’t believe in one. Most people do want some of the answers, rather than to be left to flounder for them alone.

Bergoglio was born on 17 December 1936 in Flores, a working-class district of Buenos Aires. He was the eldest son of Mario and Regina, immigrants from Piedmont. There were five children in all, one of whom, his sister Maria Elena, survives him, but his relations with his family after he joined the Jesuits remained opaque. He was educated at a Catholic college run by the Salesians, and had several jobs after leaving school. That included being a nightclub bouncer, and an assistant in a laboratory, but at the age of 21 he decided to join the Jesuits, the premier Catholic religious order in those days.

Bergoglio went through the usual course of studies and was ordained a priest in 1969. Soon after he was made novice master, and put in charge of the training of entrants to the order. After that, in 1973, he was appointed provincial, the superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina. It was clear that Bergoglio was recognized as a man of great talents and energy, and his promotion had come early, yet his time as provincial was far from happy. He completed his six-year term, before becoming the rector of a theological faculty. After that, he went to Germany for further studies. By 1992, relations between Bergoglio and the Jesuits had completely broken down; on visits to Rome, he never once stayed in the Jesuit house.

That something had gone wrong was clear — and Bergoglio himself has talked of a period of “great interior crisis” and a dark night of the soul occasioned by his broken relationship with the order. Despite the best efforts of biographers, both friendly and hostile, the reason for this estrangement has never been satisfactorily explained. It was perhaps partly personal, partly political. At this time, Argentina was being roiled by the Dirty War, and the Church was divided over its support for the dictatorship.

It still remains unclear where Bergoglio stood on both questions. To his many enemies in the Catholic Church, he was a Marxist and a revolutionary, though there is plenty of evidence that he was actually rather conservative in his religious beliefs and pious tastes. One example is his enthusiasm for folk religion, seen in his deep love for the figure of the Blessed Virgin. In the political sphere, meanwhile, the case of two radical Jesuits remains controversial. Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics were kidnapped by the government in May 1976. Though subsequently freed, they later accused Bergoglio of being complicit in their arrest, though this accusation was later withdrawn by Fr Jalics. Bergoglio himself only spoke of the case once, where he claimed to have worked behind the scenes to secure their release. Bergoglio, at any rate, was not an open opponent of the dictatorship, even as his relationship to Peronism remains characteristically obscure.

His period in the wilderness ended with his appointment as an assistant bishop in Buenos Aires in 1992. Five years later, he became the city’s archbishop, and in 2001 was elevated to the College of Cardinals. The initial promotion was dogged by controversy, which once more remains opaque. According to rumor, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Hans Peter Kolvenbach, wrote to Pope John Paul II begging him not to make Bergoglio a bishop, allegedly because he had done such damage to the Jesuits. But the Pope persisted. Both the letter and the Bergoglio file mysteriously vanished from the Vatican archives when Bergoglio became Pope, if indeed they ever existed.

This is just one of many conspiracy theories to dog Bergoglio. Yet given how murky so much of his life remains, it could easily be true. Certainly, his time in Buenos Aires remains hard to judge. He had the confidence of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for he was seen as a man immune to the virus of Liberation Theology then sweeping Latin America. This doctrine, blending Marxist dialectical materialism with Catholic theology, was seen as fatal to the sacramental and transcendental message of the Church. Indeed, one could interpret Bergoglio’s ministry as archbishop as an attempt to outflank the Left.

He was assiduous, as he put it, about going to the margins. That meant founding parishes in the outer suburbs of the city, where the poor and deprived lived, and in promoting a Church closer to people in their actual lived situations. Bergoglio himself renounced many of the trappings of his high office; he was regularly seen using public transport, often accompanied, critics noted, by a photographer. Other acts of humility were well publicized too, notably his visits to prisons for Maundy Thursday foot washing. While admired by many ordinary Porteños, Bergoglio remained an aloof, enigmatic and authoritarian figure to more traditional Catholics.

In December 2011, Bergoglio reached the age of 75, and submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict, in accordance with canon law. But as there was no obvious successor, he was asked to stay on as archbishop for the time being. All the same, his career in the Church seemed to be at an end. Then came the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict, and Bergoglio’s election as Pope in March 2013. For the second time in his life, his career experienced a sudden renaissance.

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This was a huge surprise. After the death of John Paul II, in 2005, Bergoglio had been considered a candidate for the Chair of St Peter. But now he was 76 years old, and Benedict had resigned in the serene hope that he would be succeeded by Cardinal Angelo Amato (or so rumor had it — everything in the Vatican is rumor, of varying degrees of plausibility). Bergoglio largely owed his election to the so-called St Gallen Mafia. Named after the Swiss town in which it met, and representing progressive cardinals, it encompassed a group of cardinals including England’s Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

They had apparently been meeting for years, plotting a strategy for the next conclave. This is a charge they always denied — influencing a conclave is against canon law — yet it’s clear Bergoglio had allies elsewhere too. One example is a speech given by Cardinal Prosper Grech before the conclave began. He argued for a shift after Pope Benedict, whose pontificate had ended in supposed failure. It was, many cardinals thought, time for a reformer, someone to shake up the sclerotic Vatican bureaucracy and bring the Church into the modern world.

This might well have been the Bergoglio plan. We don’t know for sure: he unsurprisingly never made his agenda clear, though many of his cheerleaders claimed that Pope Francis was determined to change the Church for good. The first real sign of this came during a synod, held over two sessions in 2014 and 2015, which in the end boiled down to the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion. The majority of assembled bishops were against this, appealing to Biblical tradition. Divorce and remarriage were forbidden by Christ himself, who deemed second marriages to be adulterous. Guilty of a serious sin, adulterers were precluded from receiving Holy Communion, unless they repented and confessed first, promising not to sin again.

The solution was a tremendous fudge, rammed through against all opposition and inserted as a footnote in the final document — a footnote that the Pope himself, the document’s author, claimed not to remember. Whatever the specifics, the consequences of this evasion are clear. The Church split. In Germany, those in irregular unions were welcomed to Holy Communion. Across the River Oder in Poland, they were not. Some nations’ conferences of bishops accepted the perceived new dispensation with alacrity, as in Argentina and Malta. In England, the clerics stayed prudently silent. Deep fissures were revealed in the seemingly monolithic Church, challenging the teaching that doctrine develops, but does not change, for the new teaching contradicted that of John Paul II. Was theology, as had long been accepted, a precise discipline? Or was it something more subjective, more ambiguous?

Further battles followed. In 2019, another synod looked set to authorize the ordination of married men, or even of women as deacons. But in the end, it swerved both issues. There was a further synod, in 2023 and 2024, on something called “synodality” and which supposedly made decision-making less centralized. But, at the same time, the Pope issued numerous decrees establishing his authority more firmly than ever. More than any of his predecessors, Francis was an activist, ruling on all sorts of minor matters and interfering in various religious orders and institutions, from contemplative nuns to the Knights of Malta, whose grandmaster was unceremoniously sacked. Bishops and cardinals suffered the same fate, driven to the edge of the Church by the man who claimed to care for the margins.

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When it came to personnel, the Bergoglio papacy showed its least attractive and most damaging side. Favoritism, and its opposite, were much in evidence. Certain clerics, who should have been fired for the most obvious faults, particularly with regard to child abuse and sexual immorality, were protected — even against the very people the Pope had commissioned to clean up the Church’s act. Particularly notorious was the case of Bishop Barros, who was eventually driven out after a long effort by the Pope to keep him in place. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sins caught up with him remarkably slowly, while Bishop Zanchetta of Argentina was sheltered in the Vatican despite facing criminal charges. On the other hand, those who spoke truth to power suffered: Cardinal Raymond Burke was moved on from his Vatican jobs and even evicted from his Rome flat. Other bishops deemed too conservative, most of whom were champions of the Latin Mass, were removed from office. All the while, Francis put Latin worship under ever tighter restrictions.

The men promoted by Francis raised eyebrows too. Several unknowns were made cardinals, and have remained unknown ever since. Consider his pick for the Vatican’s doctrinal chief, an undistinguished Argentine cleric called Víctor Manuel Fernández. His previous writings, particularly a book on the theology of kissing, were found to be rather embarrassing. In diplomacy, meanwhile, matters were left in the hands of Cardinal Parolin, who oversaw a secret treaty with the Chinese government allowing the CCP to appoint Catholic bishops, an unheard-of usurpation of the Church’s independence in the modern age. This move was bitterly criticized by the former bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Zen, who could only meet the Pope in a public audience. Like so many others who had concerns about the Church’s direction, he was refused a private audience.

Yet if changing the Church irreversibly was indeed Francis’s aim, the plan seemed to falter by the end of the papacy. In December 2023, Cardinal Fernández, with the Pope’s approval, published a document that allowed for the blessing of gay couples, albeit in deliberately ambiguous language. The reaction was immediate. Conservatives fumed at the thought of the Church blessing sin; many had always suspected the thrust of the Bergoglio papacy was to liberalize Church teaching on homosexuality, and this seemed proof of that. Most importantly, though, the African bishops rose up and condemned the document. Despite saying there would be no clarifications, Fernández remarkably swiftly issued what amounted to a retraction. Amid the verbiage explaining that blessings were of individuals not couples, people detected a defeat for Pope Francis and his chief collaborator.

Vatican experts have long tried to explain Pope Francis — most of them floundering on the poverty of terms like conservative or liberal. Perhaps he was a radical; perhaps a Peronist. His reign was a time of great confusion for believing Catholics, though those outside the Church continued to applaud the way he reached out to the marginalized, while handily ignoring his constant baiting of traditional Catholics. In the end, though, little substantive was achieved. The Vatican finances remain a mess, its income falling steadily over his papacy. The Holy See has still not shown clear leadership around sexual abuse, even if this has started in the lower rungs of the Church. Ordinary clergy are demoralized and bewildered, and the numbers coming forward to be ordained have declined dramatically. As for changing doctrine, or even changing practice, little has happened. Perhaps there is no new model Catholicism in the offing, for the simple reason that none is possible. There is only the Catholicism of the past two millennia. Francis apparently raged against his critics in private, and many of those same critics died before him. Yet the Church itself survives him, just as it has his predecessors.

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.