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.

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.

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.

It’s important to note what is and isn’t being said here. When Roszak wrote the line quoted above, there were still many millions of people kneeling in churches every Sunday, and some of them were having powerful spiritual experiences. In the same way, the death of progress does not mean that new discoveries will no longer be made in laboratories or that new technologies will stop finding their way to the marketplace.

What it means, rather, is that these, and the rest of the odd assortment of things currently lumped together under the label of “progress”, will no longer benefit from the aura of inevitability that popular culture assigned them in the past century. The once-widespread faith that what is newer must be better, just because it is newer, is already looking decidedly shopworn.

A newborn skepticism shows up in many contexts. Calvin Trillin got a nervous laugh a few years back when he pointed out that “upgrade” has become the most frightening word in the English language. We all know from bitter personal experience what evoked that laugh. Nowadays, far more often than not, a software upgrade means that the program becomes less convenient, less effective, and more burdensome for the user. There are good reasons why Microsoft, for example, has to give away its latest version of Windows for free.

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In fields where complexity for its own sake can be more obviously fatal, the same process has led to an even more striking set of outcomes. Consider the bomber fleets of the United States and the Russian Federation, the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Both nations rely on strategic bombers that first entered service in the Fifties: the B-52 Stratofortress and the Tu-95 Bear. Both nations have built and tested other strategic bombers since that time, but the B-52 and the Tu-95 remain in service three-quarters of a century later, because no more recent aircraft does the same job with the same effectiveness for the same or lower cost.

More broadly, it can be fascinating to compare the changes that swept over the industrial nations between 1825 and 1925 with the changes that followed between 1925 and 2025. The earlier century saw the introduction of nearly all the technologies that still shape modern life, from indoor plumbing and electric lights to telephones, automobiles, diesel shipping, airplanes, radio communication, and the list goes on. The century since then, by contrast, has seen only one new technology on the same revolutionary scale — the digital computer. We may get another, or we may not; the jury’s still out on whether AI will turn out to be a revolution or one more flash in the pan like nuclear power. The rate of technological change has turned out to be much slower than most people expected.

Granted, our telephones no longer have wires, our automobiles and airplanes are faster, and a variety of other incremental changes have taken place. Someone who went into suspended animation in 1925 and was thawed out this year, however, would be shocked by our social customs but would find it easy to adapt to the updated versions of familiar technologies. Compare this to the utter bafflement of a person who spent the period from 1825 to 1925 in a similar state, and had to make the leap from horsedrawn carriages and sailing ships to air travel, radio broadcasts, movie theaters, and the cultural impact of the automobile.

What makes the difference in the rate of change so difficult for many people to grasp is that by and large, the slowdown hasn’t been caused by technical difficulty. Consider the revolutionary changes that were supposed to happen by now: space travel, nuclear power, flying cars, and the rest of it. Most of these things are well within our technological grasp. The problem is that none of them are affordable. Fission power makes a good poster child for this problem. Nuclear power plants have been technically viable since the Forties; the difficulty is that they never pay for themselves, and a society that builds them has to choose between making electricity unaffordable for most people and paying out lavish government subsidies forever.

Space travel, the obsessive focus of so many daydreams about the future since the time of H.G. Wells, is another case in point. It’s technically feasible to get human beings to the Moon, or Mars, or even the moons of Jupiter. The problem is that it’s insanely expensive. The United States had to pour 15% of its national budget for a decade or so just to send a handful of men across what, in interplanetary terms, is the whisker-thin gap between the earth and the moon. A nation that set out to build a permanent settlement on the moon, or put a manned lander on Mars, could very easily bankrupt itself in the process. Nor is the financial return on any such investment commensurate with the more than sky-high costs.

This, in turn, points up the great and unmentionable problem we face. That progress is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

The classic metaphor of the apple tree is useful here. If you only want one apple from a tree, nothing could be easier: you walk up to the tree, reach up for the lowest apple that is ripe, pull it down and take a bite. If you want more than one, up to a point, it’s just as easy, because there is (quite literally) a certain amount of low-hanging fruit. Once you’ve picked all the apples within easy reach, however, getting more becomes more difficult — and getting the apples at the very top of the tree may be so difficult that it is no longer worth the effort.

The same thing, it turns out, is true of technology. The great inventions that revolutionized life in the industrial world were made with tools and instruments that seem impossibly simple these days. Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who invented the airplane, did it in their spare time with the tools they happened to have in the bicycle shop that paid their bills. Compare that with the gargantuan sums governments had to spend in order to put human beings into orbit and you have a good first approximation of the way that the law of diminishing returns is tightening its grip on the throat of technological progress.

Whenever the law of diminishing returns comes into play, the only rational strategy is to find the point at which the returns are still large enough to justify the outlay. That’s what our civilization needs to start doing at this point: backtracking to the last point at which the results still justify the investment. Most of our technology is either near or already past the point at which diminishing returns give way to negative returns.

The stakes involved may be quite a bit higher than most people realize. In his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter argued that one of the things that the failed civilizations of the past all have in common is that they pushed the complexity of their societies and technologies past the point where further complexity made any sense at all. Then, just as we are doing, they kept on pushing — and collapse followed promptly. It’s quite believable that our civilization could end up in the same predicament, pouring so much of its available wealth, talent, and resources into technologies that will never pay for themselves that it becomes unable to maintain essential infrastructure or provide adequate food, housing, and other needs to its citizens. A case could be made, in fact, that this is already beginning to happen.

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Thus, it may not be any kind of accident that so many people, in so many fields, are backing away from the latest hypercomplex technogimmickry and turning instead to simpler technologies that do a better job of meeting their needs. Most of us still recall, for example, when ebooks first hit the market, and corporate media was bursting with confident predictions that books printed on paper would soon be as obsolete as Babylonian clay tablets. Since then, millions of readers have defied the predictions and kept on buying printed books. At this point ebooks have claimed a handful of market niches, but sales are stagnant and only the most incremental improvements in ebook technology are forthcoming, while printed books still hold the place among readers that they won in Gutenberg’s time.

In exactly the same way, but even more dramatically, vinyl records are staging a comeback decades after they were consigned to the dustbin. The issue here is simple enough: analogue recordings have a richness of sound that digital formats can’t match. As a result, classic albums are being produced again and sold at premium prices, while more musicians every year are releasing their new albums on vinyl. Now that direct and indirect subsidies for the internet are starting to fall away, and web-based music services have to find some way to monetize themselves and pay for their share of the internet’s vast infrastructure, it is by no means certain that digital formats will hold onto their temporary dominance. The supposedly outmoded analogue stereo LP may turn out to be the wave of the future after all.

If we were rational about the future of our societies, applying this same principle generally would be the obvious choice. Across the board, from cars and planes to household appliances, it would be easy enough to replace complex devices that don’t work well with older, simpler, and more reliable technologies that do. Microsoft, for example, could regain some of the reputation it’s thrown away in recent years by taking one of the older and more reliable versions of Windows, and reworking it just enough to make it handle current computers and programs. (Although I doubt they’ll do anything of the kind — the myth of progress is particularly strong in the computer-geek subculture.) Among its other advantages, that strategy would lower consumer prices, raising the standard of living measurably for many people, and especially for the poorer and more vulnerable among us. For that matter, since none of those older technologies would have to be invented, and all their strengths and weaknesses are already well known, such a project would encounter few if any technical challenges.

The difficulties are cultural in nature, not technical or economic. Comparing the death of progress to the death of God, as I did earlier, is far from absurd, for progress has taken on the same kind of cultural aura in our time that religions have in ages dominated by more obviously theological faiths. A great many modern people have taken their hopes of salvation and their dreams of a utopian future out of their natural habitat in theology and applied them to progress instead. You can see this clearly enough in the way that advocates for space travel insist that if humanity never settles other worlds, our species will have failed in its “cosmic mission”. The stealth theology underlying claims like these is clear for all to see.

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So the revival of God tells us something about the death of progress, and also about the slow, unwelcome dawning of public recognition that we really have gone far down the rathole of diminishing returns in response to that crumbling secular faith. It does seem to be true, after all, that people cannot live without a religion. If they abandon one, they’ll find or make another, even if they have to build it out of so absurdly untheological a theme as infinite technical complexity. The turn back to more obviously theological forms of religion is part of that same story; it’s the normal response when secular pseudofaiths falter.

Of course the ersatz religion of progress is far from the only example of this type. Marxism is another. It used even more unprepossessing material to create an even more exact imitation of Christian theology, with the eventual utopia of true Communism hovering in the air like a mirage, filling the same role that the Second Coming plays in so many Christian sects.

Yet the god of dialectical materialism fell over and died once he too obviously failed to make good on his promises. The god of progress is clearly headed the same way. The sooner we reshape our technological choices on reasonable grounds instead of forcing them to conform to the failed pseudoreligion of progress, the better for everyone.

These so-called “cultural Christians” are appearing in droves: Douglas Murray, Tom Holland (not that one), Konstantin Kisin, Jordan Peterson (depending on what you mean by “Christian” and “cultural” and “and”); even Richard Dawkins — the archetypal modern atheist who has done more to confront organised religion than perhaps any other identifiable person in a generation — happily adopts this paradoxical moniker for himself.

Paradoxical because, of course, Christianity is more than just an affinity for evensong, disappointment with secular architecture, and suspicion of Islam. St Paul wrote in no uncertain terms to the Corinthians that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”, and the vague, à la carte approach to the religion displayed by the “cultural Christian” which doesn’t seem to care about, much less affirm, the historicity of the extraordinary events of Easter Sunday is the kind of attitude that would see you condemned as heretical by the founders of the orthodox church.

Yet Christianity is experiencing a popular makeover, from an affirmative doctrine of truth-claims to a sort of protective garment to be worn as a practical measure against the equal and opposite destabilising forces of radical political religiosity and cynical nihilism which continue to claw away at the souls of those without a firm spiritual conviction.

This metamorphosis of the Christian religion in is many ways indebted to Tom Holland — not the actor, though perhaps an actor, in that he seems content to live as if Christianity were true — whose “Dominion” thesis has convinced a not insignificant number of intellectuals that the bulk of our celebrated Western ethics is ultimately the product of Christianity, an ideology which has so successfully embedded itself in our culture that we do not even notice it anymore.

This leads our cultural Christians, often those with a special interest in safeguarding Western civilisation, to cozy up to an ideology that they can’t quite adopt without qualification due to their rather inconvenient conviction that it isn’t true.

Enter Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Re-enter, I should say, as this brave apostate from Islam won successful prominence as an atheist writer and speaker for many years since the early 2000s, before recently announcing that she had embraced Christianity. Indeed, she had originally been scheduled to participate in that famed discussion in Washington D.C. in 2007 which gave birth to the “four horsemen” of new atheism — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. So news of the “almost fifth’s” conversion was met with widespread surprise, joy, and speculation.

Perhaps the most widely read response came from Dawkins, in an open letter whose first sentence contained a rather less than charitable: “Seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more Christian than I am.”

Why? Because Hirsi Ali’s article, while passionate and detailed, suffered from the exclusion of anything resembling an argument for the existence of God, or for the theological supremacy of the Christian religion over others (or even over atheism). Instead, it is a political treatise: it begins with her experiences as a Muslim, touching on 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood, and antisemitism, before asking: “So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?”

She answers: “Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces,” which she identifies as Russian/Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism, and wokeism. All of which are distinctly political considerations and so hardly serve as a theological defence of Christianity. Then, referring to Tom Holland, she tells us that the “story of the West” is a civilisation built on the “Judeo-Christian tradition”. That is to say, She is ticking all the boxes of a merely cultural Christian.

Yet she later writes, as if anticipating this objection, “I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.” It’s a promising interjection, which seems to ready us for an apolitical testimony that might justify her exclusion of the “cultural” in labelling her new Christian identity.

Here, Hirsi Ali begins to describe her personal struggles as an atheist. “I have…  found life without any spiritual solace unendurable,” she writes, claiming that the “God hole” left behind after her deconversion was not filled with reason and intelligent humanism, as atheists like Betrand Russell had predicted, but instead left painfully vacant.

“In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational,” she continues. “We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.” In explaining, then, her reasons for becoming Christian apart from her desire to defeat her political foes, she tells us that she was struggling with a nihilistic vacuum that was… insufficient for defeating her political foes. Once again, the motivation seems political.

Thus Richard Dawkins and his assessment, “you are no more a Christian than I am”. The funny thing is, Ayaan Hirsi Ali endorses this sentiment. Dawkins has, of late, been airing his misgivings about gender theorists and Islamists, and constantly reaffirms his admiration for Christian art, architecture and music. These political and aesthetic preferences inspired her to refer to Dawkins at one point as one of “the most Christian” people that she knows. Strangely, then, they could find initial agreement on one point: their being just as Christian as each other.

This uneasy equilibrium provided the mise en scène for an eagerly awaited conversation between the two, which took place in Brooklyn last month. Dawkins tells us at one point that he showed up fully prepared to explain to Hirsi Ali why she is not a Christian: “The idea,” he says, “that the Universe has lurking beneath it an intelligence a supernatural intelligence that invented the laws of physics it invented mathematics […] is a stupendous idea (if it’s true) and to me that simply dwarfs all talk of nobility and morality and comfort and that sort of thing.”

He was, therefore, taken quite unawares, as were many of us, when he asked (or rather told) her, “You don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, surely?” and she confidently replied, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And that is a matter of choice.” This, for Dawkins (as for me), changes the game. While throughout the event she had no hesitation in repeating her political grievances, in New York, she finally addressed the truth claims of Christianity, and appeared to confess a belief in them. “I came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, you’re not a Christian,” Dawkins told her, before correcting himself: “I think you are a Christian,” and — being Richard Dawkins — he added, “and I think Christianity is nonsense.”

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This extraordinary event began with Hirsi Ali recounting her conversion: “I lived for about a decade with intense depression and anxiety self-loathing. I hit rock bottom. I went to a place where I actually didn’t want to live anymore but wasn’t brave enough to take my own life.” Through prayer, she managed to escape that hole. “My zest for life is back,” she declared to a healthy applause, indicative of the one thing that everyone can agree on: it is wonderful to hear that Ayaan is happy again.

After finishing this personal narrative, she could only look at Dawkins and shrug slightly. The audience laughed, in anticipation of something of a shift in tone. I did think there was something comical about following such a moving story of escape from depression and anxiety with, “But do you really think Jesus was born of a virgin?” Dawkins’s decision to do so, however, can hardly be blamed: as touching as his former colleague’s story may be, if he is right that God’s existence is a scientific question, then we should remember that bringing personal narrative into the laboratory is as inappropriate an approach as bringing a microscope into a poetry seminar. It should be no more an insult to say that Hirsi Ali’s emotional struggles are irrelevant to the question of God’s existence than it would be to say to say that scientific observations are irrelevant to the study of Keats.

As Dawkins himself put it, responding to Hirsi Ali’s fear that an atheistic universe doesn’t offer us any way to connect with each other and the cosmos: “Suppose it were true that atheism doesn’t offer anything. So what? why should it offer anything?” Further applause.

“Faith offers you something, obviously. That’s very very very clear,” he says at one point. “But it doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t make the existence claims of Christianity true.” More clapping. Given that such a claim is hardly extraordinary or controversial, this reception seemed to be less in support of the point, and more of Dawkins’s willingness to make it plain.

Yet it is worth remembering that believing something for non-rational reasons is not unusual. Our beliefs are quite often formed by our surrounding environment, rather than some kind of perfect logic and analysis of abstract syllogisms. Most people know this. Hirsi Ali is happy to admit it. You may think it imperfect, but it is not unique to her.

This means that any surge in Christian interest we may notice among our public intellectuals is unlikely to be due to a renewed interest in Biblical scholarship or the figure of the crucified Nazarene. It is instead likely a product of their environment. Cultural Christianity, then, is in many ways a political movement disguised as a religious one, reacting not to arguments for God’s existence, but concerns about the practical shortcomings of atheism and alternative religions. The kind of Christianity adopted by Hirsi Ali goes further in asserting its truth, but not very much further in its justification.

Therefore, those celebrating some alleged resurgence of Christianity ought be cautious: it would certainly be a happy day for them if their favourite intellectuals began discovering a relationship with Jesus, but if they begin converting to Christianity principally as an ideological bulwark, we may witness the return not of a meek and mild community of believers, but of a more strong-armed, aggressive Christianity that has historically been a touch more controversial.

But Ayaan does seem genuinely transformed by her new faith: she looks happy, speaks humbly, and seems genuinely uninterested in point-scoring or winning any arguments. It troubles me not at all to admit that I found myself applauding her more than Richard Dawkins. It transpired in Brooklyn that her conversion, which at first appeared mostly political, was more a result of her personal battle with nihilism. This is hardly going to convince anybody else to become Christian, but such personal experience isn’t ever supposed to.

Atheists are often told that they are plagued with a “God-shaped hole”. Hirsi Ali appears to have developed for herself a hole-shaped God. But despite the probability of at least an element of motivated reasoning in this conversion, I’m genuinely happy for her. We should keep in mind, too, as her story evolves, that our ideas are the most unclear to us when they are new, and Ayaan is a new Christian. While we are all trying to work out what she really believes, she is probably trying to work out the same thing. She, however, has the unusual courage to do it out loud.

Though Hegel leaves him unnamed, it is the figure of Jesus that hovers over the conclusion of his thrilling, Romantic treatise on the human (and divine) “experience of consciousness”. For what the final sentence of The Phenomenology of Spirit tells us — and this is the book, remember, that conjures up all the spectres of Marx in 19th-century Europe, 20th-century Asia and beyond — is that the secret of human history, in all its melancholy glory, is Golgotha.

In Hegel’s mysterious vision of the end of history, history restlessly circles and progressively spirals upwards from (and towards) its spiritual core. That is the rock that the waves of Hegel’s great oceanic book break upon, again and again — “the Golgotha of absolute spirit”. Without its Golgotha, Hegel says, history “would be lifeless”. Which is also to say that, without Golgotha — whatever that is — global history would be lacking in “truth”.

How do we know this? In the original German, Hegel deploys the phrase “die Schädelstätte”, which Martin Luther, the 16th-century theological avant-gardist (and restorationist), used to Germanise a sinister Jerusalem place name, Golgotha, in his epoch-making translation of the New Testament. We read in the Gospel of Mark, for instance, that on the morning of his death, Roman conscripts brought Jesus “to the place called Golgotha, which means the place of a skull”. It is there that the Romans crucified him. And Luther’s rendering of that place — “the place of a skull” — is Schädelstätte. Three hundred years later, that is the name that Hegel bestows on the dark heart of global history. In Aramaic, it is Golgotha — and in Latin, Calvariae Locus. The place of a skull. The place where Jesus died.

If Karl Marx & Co. had remembered this, they might have known that fully liberated worldwide luxury communism was never on the cards. And if Francis Fukuyama & Bros. had remembered this, they might not have been taken in by the late-liberal fever dream of the end of history.

Whether or not we’re Hegelians, we can agree that Hegel saw better than most what was coming in his century — and is still coming in ours. Which is suffering and death, and the sublime question of what humans will do with them. What will become of us through suffering and death? What will become of us through our own Golgotha?

Hegel puts it differently, and more vividly, in a manuscript of his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. He writes that:

“Even as we look upon history as an altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask: to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrifices been made?”

This gloomy vision of world history can help us to decipher the last sentence of his Phenomenology. For what is history, here, but a vast zone in which “monstrous sacrifices” have been made (and are still being made, and will always be made)? And what is Hegel’s Golgotha, but the place par excellence where a “monstrous sacrifice” was made?

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Yet the question formulated in Hegel’s Lectures still hangs: What are we to make of the gruesome spectacle of human history?

One of the peculiarities of this question is that the spectacle of world history is not one that we can disinterestedly observe. It can never just be an object for our “brooding reflection”, for we are all immersed in the spectacle. And history irresistibly makes something of us, too — something which Hegel ultimately calls a sacrifice. His question therefore becomes: to whom or for what are we being sacrificed? A sacrifice is not senseless. It is not lacking in intentionality, or in structure.

Hegel believes that human suffering is not without intrinsic meaning. Because of this, he places himself in line with the incomparably brilliant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who advanced the earth and life sciences, formulated infinitesimal calculus, foreshadowed AI, promoted civilisational dialogue with China, and elaborated a radically modern, yet richly traditional metaphysics. Hegel tells us that his own philosophy can be read, like Leibniz’s, as “a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God”. He tells us, too, that he is “personally convinced” that the world is “governed by providence”. It is his “general notion of a divine world order” — burlesqued by Voltaire in his 1759 novella, Candide, or Optimism — that he shares with Leibniz.

“It is in world history,” writes Hegel, “that we encounter the sum total of concrete evil.” Needless to say, that sum is both incalculable and inexpressible. Hegel himself feels that world history presents “a most terrifying picture”. But he also concludes that the “concrete events” in history are “the ways of providence”. What he means by this is that “the history of the world is a rational process”. And what that means, for him, is that divine reason — and divine love — must obscurely be present “in everything, especially in the theatre of world history”.

How could divine love be present in the “monstrous sacrifices” that human reason rightly finds abhorrent? There is only one way, and it is what Hegel calls “the category of the negative”. The negative is, for him, precisely a category of sacrifice. “We cannot fail to notice”, he writes, “how all that is finest and noblest in the history of the world is immolated upon its altar”. The negative, then, is Hegel’s altar — his place of sacrifice. And he thinks that divine love can be present in global history, because the divine itself has been placed upon that altar. Hegel’s God is no stranger to the anguish and irrationality of the negative.

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It is only through suffering — or “the labour of the negative”, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology’s opening pages — that a divine love could prove its “seriousness”. And where then, for him, is the place where divine love has revealed its seriousness — by actually convulsing, and dying, and “decaying” in history?

At Golgotha, at the Schädelstätte.

For Hegel, the place where Jesus died thus symbolises the essence of history — both past and future — because it is the place where we can contemplate human suffering in all its glistening horror, where it is the divine itself that is being sacrificed, and the divine itself that is dying. Only after his baptism of blood, in Hegel’s reading of the gospels, is Jesus finally transformed into the bearer (or figure) of a new and higher life.

Hegel cannot consider the rationality of history without the suffering of God. At the same time, he cannot consider the realisation of meaning in history without our suffering — which is perhaps to say, without our participation in the suffering of God. Without our Golgotha.

But Hegel’s stress on the necessity and radical meaning of human suffering does not make him — like his younger contemporary, Schopenhauer — a pessimist. It is Schopenhauer who systematises pessimism as a new style of philosophy, in conscious opposition to Hegel — generating a fierce and largely forgotten “Pessimism Controversy” (Pessimismusstreit) in 19th-century Germany. For Schopenhauer (as for Voltaire, before him), optimism is a term of abuse. In his words, the world is nothing but a blood-land of “tormented and anxious beings who survive only by devouring one another”. Where Leibniz had reasoned that ours must be “the best of all possible worlds”, Schopenhauer counters that it is certainly “the worst of all possible worlds”.

Schopenhauer is blistering in his criticisms of both Leibniz and Hegel. And yet, on the last page of his huge opus, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer points us — much like Hegel, on the last page of his Phenomenology — to the sacred narratives of Jesus’ death. Schopenhauer tells us here, whatever we make of it, that his own theory of ethics is “in complete agreement with Christian ethics”. Furthermore, he tells us, it is the figure of “the crucified Saviour” — or perhaps, he adds, one of the outlaws crucified with Jesus — who has revealed “the inner essence of the world”.

For Hegel, the essence of history is divine reason, which must be revered. For Schopenhauer, it is an effect of demoniac will, which must be negated. The contrast is not only stark, but self-conscious. And yet, in the last pages of both their iconic 19th-century works, we find that if love is to be the secret of history (Hegel) and compassion the basis of ethics (Schopenhauer), then “the place of a skull” — the place where Jesus died — is world history’s symbolic centre. All the chaos, anguish, and destructiveness of recent months invite us to remember that.

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.

The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated a direction: the straight path. A purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil.

The Brotherhood preachers left nothing to the imagination. They gave us a choice. Strive to live by the Prophet’s manual and reap the glorious rewards in the hereafter. On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the sake of Allah.

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The alternative, indulging in the pleasures of the world, was to earn Allah’s wrath and be condemned to an eternal life in hellfire. Some of the “worldly pleasures” they were decrying included reading novels, listening to music, dancing, and going to the cinema — all of which I was ashamed to admit that I adored.

The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

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You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

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Israel's distraction is a warning to the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

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Watch and read Ayaan respond to her critics here.

Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. There’s nothing ideological about revering the monarchy — like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, it’s a natural human inclination — but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.

To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions weren’t so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.

It’s mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One can’t imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the country’s eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can — in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.

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Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isn’t what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesn’t give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.

This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question don’t need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.

Rather as religious belief was privatised some centuries ago with the birth of Protestantism, as a transaction between you and God alone, so belief in general becomes a kind of private hobby, as harmlessly idiosyncratic as Morris dancing or pigeon-fancying. What holds such societies together — consumerism, material interests, the rule of law — doesn’t really have to pass through the human mind, as it most certainly does in Islamist set-ups. This is one way in which the West’s latest bogeyman — terrorism rather than Communism — puts it at a severe political disadvantage. Solidarity in such nations goes all the way down, whereas in Britain it is largely confined to football. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic”.

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It was unfortunate for the West that just when Islamism began to blow up innocent civilians, its own culture was becoming increasingly sceptical and relativist. Conviction was falling in value at just the point when it was politically necessary. Truth became subservient to material interests. In the age of Plato, truth was thought to be independent of such mundane matters. It was an absolute affair, sublimely transcendent of the everyday world of ignorance and delusion. Later, however, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche argued that what we held to be true was largely determined by our perspective on the world, which was merely one among many such standpoints, and which was shaped among other things by our struggle for material survival. This argument didn’t deny that truth existed, but it placed it within a social and historical framework.

In our own time, this case has been reduced to a cruder version of itself: truth is simply an instrument of power. You describe the world in whatever way best promotes your interests. And since there are many conflicting interests, there are many conflicting truths. Enter Donald Trump and the Big Lie, along with those postmodernists who maintain that truth is just what’s true for me. Truth had finally been either abolished or privatised. What matters is what works — and for that purpose a blatant falsehood may do just as well. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.

All this suits a society which is continually in flux. Truth and facts seem to be static, and thus incapable of surviving in a world whose only permanent feature is changeability. In the world of postmodern capitalism, everything is fluid, unstable, groundless and provisional. Change is good, but staying the same isn’t. This may be true for the CEOs of Tesco and Google, but as a general proposition it’s clearly absurd: if permanence and consistency are uncool, why not abolish the ban on child labour and send children of five into workplaces? But there’s also something absolute about historical truth that sticks in the craw of the Trumps and Hannitys of this world. If it’s true that the emperor Tiberius died on the island of Capri in 37 CE, it was true in 37 CE, true today and will no doubt also be true in the year 3000. Of course, it may not be true at all. But that is another question.

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There are other reasons why truth is being discredited. For Plato, truth was something deep, lurking beneath the surface appearances of everyday reality. Postmodernism is uneasy with this surface/depth model, for a number of reasons, one of them concerning what Lenin called the reality of appearances. In a culture of the image, star, brand, momentary sensation and instant gratification, everything seems on the surface; but if there are no depths, then there are no surfaces either, and the whole model collapses. The image is the reality, as in the term “Reality TV”. What you see is what you get. One is asked for one’s “take” on a topic, a verb borrowed from film and television. All this is convenient enough for the political Right, who also dislike the surface/depth model because it suggests that there are powerful but invisible forces which dominate our lives, not least those of the marketplace. “All the important processes,” Marx wrote, “go on behind the backs of individuals”. What we see and what we get aren’t at all the same thing. This belief lingers on in the post-truth era, but now it’s known as conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts. There is, however, a more attractive aspect to the concept of truth. The word itself comes from the Old English “triewth”, which means faith or constancy. There’s a related word, “troth”, which means trust or loyalty. So truth is originally a moral concept. Speaking in a way which is true to the way things are is closely bound up with being faithful to others. In fact, we couldn’t do the latter without the former. Without mutual trust there couldn’t be any social existence. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump’s cavalier way with the facts is linked with a foul-mouthed contempt for most of his fellow human beings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If vicars are often an object of projection, so much more the Archbishop. Any assessment of Justin Welby’s 10 years of office, therefore, will say more about me than him. The Archbishop is a living, breathing Rorschach test. Still: here goes.

Welby is hard to read because he is seemingly open and yet emotionally closed at the same time. Even before he landed the top job in the worldwide Anglican Communion, he was adept at not granting access to his inner world. The social polish you learn at Eton, with its arsenal of confident self-deprecation, is precisely the sort of self-protecting buffer zone that you need to survive being the nation’s punch bag.

There has been great pain in his life: dysfunctional alcoholic parents, the loss of a seven-month-year-old baby daughter in a car accident. Understandably, he has suffered periods of crippling darkness and has admitted to taking anti-depressants. He is brave in talking about his bruises, and yet also strangely hidden, both open and emotionally distant. And since he is not a natural people person, his openness can come across as scripted.

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Welby smiles to reassure, but in repose his face crackles with all the scary intensity of an officer on the Death Star; yes, a bit like a born-again Director Krennic. People say he has a thunderous temper when things don’t go his own way, which I can quite believe. Sometimes you can’t keep it all bottled up. I like Welby, but I am frightened of him.

Back in 2012, I interviewed him for The Guardian when he was still Bishop of Durham. Paddy Power had him at 6/1 to be the next vicar to the nation. We discussed woman bishops, still seen as a long way off. How would he reconcile the competing demands of those who see it as a theological necessity and those who deem it a theological impossibility? How would he square the circle, I asked? “Well, you just look at the circle and say it’s a circle with sharp bits on it,” he laughed. Anglicanism has always involved a certain amount of shape-shifting from its leadership. The phrase “all things to all men” is from the Bible, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing. Ideologically, Welby can be what you want him to be.

Here’s an example. A few days after that Guardian interview, the Rev Rod Thomas — an evangelical conservative — and I discussed who should get the top job on Channel 4 news. Thomas was against women bishops and believes homosexuality is a sin. I thought the opposite. Yet we both agreed that Welby was the right man for the job. That’s the power of a circle with pointy bits. Some see a circle, others see a square.

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Women bishops were approved within a few years, and the Church has now agreed on prayers for blessing same-sex marriages. Rod Thomas was made a bishop in 2015 and kept on board. But he is far from happy. “We should not mislead people into believing that we can ask God to bless those things that He has revealed are contrary to His will,” said Bishop Rod recently. I think he may have been more deceived than I about that circle.

Welby’s church, his circle with pointy bits, turned out to be this: a collection of morally-progressive, liturgically-charismatic evangelicals with a hint of woke. Damaged public schoolboys who find it hard to express their feelings in everyday life are often attracted to forms of worship that let it all hang out. Welby talks in tongues. The whole thing is so achingly sincere. This is surely what Prince Harry would be like if he got God. It’s the sort of religion that some of us watch through our fingers with embarrassment — like dad dancing.

With Welby, open evangelicalism has become the new centre of gravity in the Church of England. More Radio 2 than Radio 4, undemanding and depressingly easy listening. “Let’s be clear, I’m one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England”, he told me back in 2012. There remains stiff competition for this title, I can tell you. And Welby is not even close. He has a keen and lively intelligence and a steely will. But Welby’s Church of England, it might be said, no longer feels the need for academic-minded bishops. Better some B-school MBA or a Certificate in Church Planting than a proper PhD in Patristics for the modern cleric on the make.

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And here is my real beef with Welby’s Church: managerialism. The backdrop to Welby’s appointment was the banking crisis and the subsequent Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Church needed to get a bit more this worldly, many thought. It needed to understand finance and business. When it came to capitalism, Welby was a grown-up, having worked for Elf Aquitaine in a previous life. And 11 years in the oil industry clearly shaped his thinking about organisational structures. The old, slightly bumbling high-table, soft-power understanding of Lambeth Palace was not for him. Welby wanted to change things and have access to levers of real executive power.

But the Church of England is not set up like this. It never has been. The parish system is the very model of subsidiarity. If anything, the Church is a bottom-up institution rather than top-down. You bow to your bishop, but you don’t necessarily do everything he asks. Under Welby, however, the centre has grown ever stronger, the parishes increasingly weaker. Max Weber famously divided power into the charismatic, the traditional and the legal/rational. Welby is the first archbishop who has tried to govern through the latter.

The “Save the Parish” movement was established as a fightback. Too many bishops became middle managers, hidden behind their laptops. Directives and new initiatives came down from head office, which many of the clergy, myself included, received with an inner groan. In the face of declining attendance, we all had to learn that evangelical up-speak, and get on with the paperwork. Morale has plummeted.

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The Church’s reaction to Covid was the depressing conclusion of Welby’s legal/rational approach to power. Buffeted by abuse scandals — including that of a previous friend and mentor, John Smyth, who beat and sexually harassed young boys on Christian summer camps — Welby read the Covid situation in the light of his safeguarding nightmares. Safeguarding was the one area where rules could be imposed on the clergy. Churches were to be closed to protect the faithful from infection. Clergy were allowed into their churches to check them over for insurance purposes, but not to celebrate the holy mysteries, even on their own. The shepherds abandoned their sheep.

It was a terrible directive and a lot of us — myself included — ignored it and were put on the Lambeth Palace naughty list. The gap grew wider between the clergy and the powers that be. “If I had my time again, I would be more cautious about closing the churches,” Welby later admitted. But the damage was done. For many people, a pattern of churchgoing had been broken never to be taken up again. Sunday schools were abandoned, the vulnerable left to fend for themselves. Parish treasurers pulled their hair out as finances went into a death spiral. Zoom was never a realistic alternative for a religion that is inherently physical, all about the body and the blood.

In a couple of months, Welby will preside over the coronation of King Charles III, and the Church of England has never felt weaker. It’s not his fault. Secularisation is a feature of the Western world, not of any specifically failed leadership. But nonetheless, Welby has failed to speak the right words for our time.

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In a moment of crisis, Welby’s answer seems to be organisational restructuring — redirecting more and more resources into big, successful, glitzy, mostly-evangelical churches, while letting smaller ones wither on the vine, run by the unpaid or the retired, all exhausted. This feels like what a CEO archbishop would do. Not a pastor or an evangelist. And, most depressing of all, the whole thing seems to be an exercise in bureaucratic navel-gazing.

Welby is a well-intentioned man, but he is unable to read the room — or, rather the nation. When in 2020, he abandoned his fine 13th-century chapel to take the Easter service online from his kitchen, I imagine he thought he was expressing solidarity with those who were stuck at home. But most people didn’t see it like that. It felt like a silly gesture, a gimmick. And a kick in the teeth to those of us struggling to keep the Church show on the road.

Some say Welby will go after the coronation. I don’t know about that. But what I would want from the new man or woman is someone who could help revive the morale of the clergy. “It’s just not so much fun anymore,” said one senior cleric to me recently. On the front line, in the parishes, it feels like the Archbishop doesn’t much care about us. Or if he does, he has been refusing to show it.

Their belief that their imaginations, combined with good vibes, could change another human being’s life channelled Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 self-help classic, The Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living. Peale was a Protestant clergyman, but his ideas have had an influence far beyond the American Church. The book has inspired not only football fans, but also prosperity preachers, presidents, new age spiritualists, celebrities and, now, TikTok influencers. Key religious texts aside, Peale’s guide, which has just celebrated its 70th anniversary, is arguably the most influential book in the world today.

Peale’s philosophy is a direct descendant of the 19th-century New Thought movement, promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other thinkers of his day, which held that a healthy mind led to a healthy body and spirit. His “system of creative living based on spiritual techniques” was an instant success, thanks to his simple formula of prayerise, picturise, actualise. According to Peale, the “spiritual energy” of mind-power is on par with the science of atomic energy, and his simple three-step technique ensures that readers won’t be “defeated by anything”.

Peale knew his audience. Preaching out of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, he spoke to a 4,000-strong congregation filled with successful, business-minded types, including a young Donald Trump, whose tyrannical father Fred lapped up the belief that a winner’s mindset could achieve anything. “It is appalling to realise the number of pathetic people,” Peale writes in prose that sounds jarring today, “who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex.”

Trump became a life-long advocate of the so-called “law of attraction”, which Peale summarises: “When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.” Speaking of his time in Peale’s church in 2015, Trump said that the pastor, who presided over his first marriage, would “bring real-life situations” to his sermons, and that “when you left the church, you were disappointed that it was over”.

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Peale’s preaching may have been exceptional, but it was also representative of a fundamental shift in American theology. Positive Thinking was the final stop on American Protestantism’s journey away from Calvinism, the austere form of Protestantism that promoted the idea that we’re all degenerates and only God can determine who will be saved. As Europe and Asia smouldered, in the Fifties it felt like America’s time had come; there was no appetite for negativity, even in church. A new band of evangelical leaders began taking a greater role in mainstream American life, equally encouraged by the spirit of the times and fearing the spread of communism to their shores.

The Pentecostal movement, a branch of evangelicalism that was particularly strong among the working classes in the South and Midwest, had already experienced a theological revolution with the Latter Rain movement in 1946. Instead of tarrying, or waiting for the blessings of the Holy Spirit to fall upon them, they decided that they could receive God’s gifts on demand. “Ask and ye shall receive” was a mantra that encouraged a wave of faith healing — a practice that has an awful lot in common with manifesting.

More radical shifts were to come. In the Fifties, preachers such as Oral Roberts began to popularise the prosperity gospel: the idea that God rewards you for giving money to your church and pastor. In “seeding” these donations, followers plant an act of faith that then grows a material harvest.

This idea thrived in large part thanks to the highly respectable Peale presenting them in a wholesome package. Kate Bowler, author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, calls Peale the “principal prophet of this generation” — one who transformed “abstract theology into workable wisdom”. With a syndicated newspaper column that attracted 10 million readers, and radio and television programmes that stayed on-air for decades, his message was broadcast across the nation. The Power of Positive Thinking stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for three record-breaking years, selling a million copies.

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Bowler believes that Peale’s “synthesis of upward mobility with religious buoyancy matched the postwar mood, turning a man into a movement”. An energetic new generation of evangelists, such as Kenneth Hagin and Reverend Ike, heard the call. They, too, used new media such as syndicated radio to take this relatable, optimistic form of Christianity to the masses.

According to prosperity preachers, God cared about the size of your pay packet at the end of the week. Christ was actually wealthy, they claimed. A donkey was the equivalent of a Cadillac back then; Baby Jesus was famously bestowed with gifts; His guards at the crucifixion were a sign if his high status.

While only the boldest evangelists in America, such as Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, continue with this line of preaching today, the prosperity gospel has real currency elsewhere. Neocharismatic Pentecostalism’s rapid expansion in Asia, Africa and Latin America is thanks in large part to the promises it makes, of health and wealth. In the slums of Sao Paulo and Lagos, the idea of one day reaping the rewards of giving a little money and having a lot of faith is the only opportunity to succeed that most people can imagine.

And, just as there are some health benefits to seeing the glass half full, there’s a growing body of evidence that adherence to the prosperity gospel sees an uplift in people’s circumstances. Research in Latin America has found that people who have experienced poverty, violence and addiction have a greater chance of escaping those cycles by joining an evangelical church. In Brazil, researchers found that when the GDP goes down, attendance at evangelical churches increases, and that the support networks available at those churches further support a politics that says people should seek a hand up, and not a hand out.

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Of course, this phenomenon is far from limited to the faithful poor. In the United States alone, the self-help industry rakes in around $10 billion annually, with Peale’s work something of a Rosetta Stone for a field that relies on good vibes. But it was Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne who reintroduced The Power of Positive Thinking to a new, global audience in 2006 with her film and book, The Secret. Though Byrne claimed inspiration from Wallace Wattles’s 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich, “the secret”, we find out, is a familiar three-step solution: “ask, believe, receive”. A sexier version of Peale’s prayerise, picturise, actualise, in other words, and more than an echo of Matthew 21:22: “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”

The secret also employed Trump’s favoured “law of attraction”, whereby positive thoughts attract positive things — in Byrne’s case, that included selling more than 35 million copies worldwide, endorsements by Oprah Winfrey, and a reported $300 million fortune. She also has the honour of being the person who introduced the concept of “manifesting” thoughts into things to a mainstream audience. In one chapter on the body, Byrne writes that “it is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight”.

Whereas most of Peale’s case studies were about people gaining confidence and finding success in life, Byrnes’ focus appears to be much more centred on realising material goods, like better cars and houses, or more money — reframing self-help for a new audience who had come increasingly to define themselves as consumers. Now, you didn’t even need biblical justification, or New Thought virtues. You could simply “ask, believe, receive”.

A toddler can prod the premise with a stick and see it fall apart. What if everyone who buys a lotto ticket imagines themselves winning it and says a prayer? Has no one who has died from cancer ever sincerely wished it away? But Byrne, who says that “the secret” has been understood by everyone from Buddhist monks to Shakespeare and Einstein, was, much like Peale, the right person at the right moment.

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A “spiritual but not religious” type in a secularising world, her suspicion that elites were hiding this great truth from ordinary people appeared to be prophetic. Byrne came to prominence shortly before the 2008 financial collapse, which destroyed Americans’ faith in something that had been a fundamental: the idea of an ever-growing housing market. Many turned to Byrne’s renegade optimism as a result.

It should come as little surprise, then, that the next great global shock saw a resurgence in “manifesting”. In March 2020, as the pandemic locked most of us in our homes, videos about “369 manifesting” began appearing on TikTok, amassing hundreds of millions of views. The idea here is that people need simply write down what they’d like to manifest three times in the morning, six times during the day, and nine times at night. Pop star Lizzo is one of many celebrities who preaches the benefits of thinking your way to success; she told one interviewer that “you can manifest your life and speak things into existence, if you have positive goals and affirmations for yourself”.

TikTok manifesting has launched a variety of new techniques, including “wouldn’t it be nice” and ”the law of assumption”, which provide new ways to ruminate on getting what you want. The practice appears equally popular with men and women alike, with not only Lizzo but also hopeful Liverpool fans and manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate getting on board. For young people who feel cheated out of two important years of their lives, and conventional job and housing opportunities looking evermore slim, the resurgence in positive thinking is easy to understand. Having the right mindset might be the only thing they feel they have control over.

And crucially, the practice is flexible. You can call it positive thinking, the secret, or manifesting. It can be spiritual or religious, or dressed up as pop psychology. A variety of activities can fall into its remit, including journalling and vision boarding, and there is a wealth of new manifestation practitioners offering podcasts, coaching and online courses — almost always cutely priced at numbers like $2,222, given that manifesting and numerology seem to go hand-in-hand.

That manifesting has taken a turn for the capitalist is telling. The enduring influence of The Power of Positive Thinking points to an essential human trait: we seem hard-wired for magical thinking. But it also reveals something far grimmer. The closest that we can come now to divining the will of God, or the energy of the universe, is by noticing who gets what they want. And the closest we come to practising devotion is to imagine getting it.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin did not, in his foundational work on evolution, focus on Homo sapiens. Only with the publication, 12 years later, of The Descent of Man did he explicitly address the question of “whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form”. Nevertheless, the implications of his theory, for humanity’s claim to a special status, had been evident enough from the start. Bishops might mock, and demand to know whether Darwin’s followers were descended from gorillas on the father’s side or the mother’s side, but humans ranked, in the final reckoning, as organisms just like any other. For them to imagine otherwise, to regard themselves as somehow superior to the rest of creation, was a conceit verging on the ludicrous.

Darwin was not, of course, the first to have undermined the notion that humans might stand at the centre of the universe. In 1638, the young John Milton, in Florence, “visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought”. It was not the sun that revolved around the Earth, so Galileo had taught, but the Earth that revolved around the sun. Time came to prove his hypothesis right.

Today, we know that the sun is an undistinctive star in an undistinctive corner of an undistinctive galaxy in a universe so stupefyingly vast that it can hurt the brain even to try and comprehend its size. Set against the icy immensities of space, what is humanity, then, but the merest speck of a speck of dust? What scope is left us as a species to claim any dignity at all? “In science,” as the astronomer Seth Shostak has put it, “if you think you’re special, you probably aren’t.”

Strikingly, however, in an age that has seen the theory of evolution almost universally accepted in Britain, and the limits of our knowledge of the universe pushed to ever more incredible extremes, there seems to have been no diminution in the value that we, as a culture, ascribe to human life. Quite the contrary. That we are all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human, and of a dignity that embraces our entire species, are doctrines so widely accepted in contemporary Britain that many of us barely recognise them as doctrines at all. It is a measure of just how radically these beliefs privilege human beings that they have increasingly come to be described, over the course of the past century, as “humanist”.

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The end of secularism is nigh

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The term is a vague one; and the fuzziness of the definition has encouraged various attempts to endow it with a greater precision. In 2002, the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands, issued what its delegates presented as “the official defining statement of World Humanism”. The Amsterdam Declaration proclaimed, “the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others”. Religions — dismissed as “dogmatic” — were condemned for their ambition “to impose their world-view on all of humanity”. Science and its methods, by contrast, were highly praised. Not for humanists any Bronze Age mumbo-jumbo. Ethics were to be derived, not from sky fairies, but “through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision”.

To accept the truth of all these various propositions — one might almost call them dogmas — requires, of course, less the exercise of reason than a leap of faith. That science sustains a belief in human rights is hardly an obvious proposition. Implausible too is the conviction of those who issued the Amsterdam Declaration that their own values are where “a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision” is bound to lead — so much so that they rank, in effect, as universal. International the Humanists may claim to be, but in truth they are preponderantly Western. The delegates who met in Amsterdam for the first World Humanist Congress came from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain and Austria; only one of the 18 subsequent congresses have been held outside Europe, North America or Australasia; the headquarters of Humanists International is in London. Its understanding of “universal” is, then, a somewhat culturally contingent one.

Humanists, unsurprisingly, tend to reject this characterisation. They prefer to see themselves as the heirs of traditions of intellectual enquiry that embrace the globe, and reach back millennia. In ancient India, in Confucian China, in classical Greece, writings have been identified by humanists that appear to prefigure the very things that they themselves believe. Yet the risk of this approach is not merely that it results in cherry-picking, but that it can obscure the very alien quality of those texts which are being cherry-picked.

Take, for instance, ancient Greece: a civilisation for which humanists have long had a particular fondness. Epicurus, for all that he featured in a list of famous atheists drawn up by the philosopher Sextus Empiricus, believed in gods. The only value of research into the natural world, so Epicurus believed, was to enable the philosopher, by properly appreciating the pointlessness of superstition, to attain the state of tranquillity that was, so he taught his disciples, the ultimate goal of life. The closest modern parallel is less Richard Dawkins than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

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To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them.

But how common, in antiquity, are the fundamental tenets of humanism: that humans — no matter their sex, their place of origin, their class — are all of equal value; and that those who walk in darkness must be brought into light? Not common at all, I would say. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that their fusion was pretty much a one-off.

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s flood: here are stories that have long served as prime exhibits in the contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature in round-ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences. Yet humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped by it. In fact, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is the opening chapter of the Bible.

Gods in antiquity were not in the habit of endowing humanity with an inherent dignity. Quite the opposite. “I will make man, who shall inhabit the world, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.” So spoke Marduk, who according to the Babylonians created humanity out of a sticky compound of dust and blood to be the slaves of deities. Here was an understanding of man’s purpose, bleak and despairing, that it would have been very easy for the exiles brought to the banks of the Euphrates from sacked Jerusalem to accept: for it would certainly have corresponded to a sense of their puniness before the immensity of Babylon the Great.

But the exiles from Judah did not accept it. They clung instead to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being, per Genesis. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, were endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, had been created on the godh day.

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The corollary of this was, of course, very clear: that the cult of Marduk ranked as the merest superstition. So too did the pantheons worshipped by other peoples: the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: they were all of them, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “less than nothing”.

In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions which served to define them; but in Europe there was only the odd community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Church. Just as humanists do today, it cast its values and ideals as universal — “catholic”. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones.

Even when, in the 16th century, Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal remained. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers, and in their attempts to convert the inhabitants they found there.

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical re-alignment, our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as most of us in the West had assumed them to be. The need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are, and not to confuse them with “human nature” is, perhaps, more pressing than it has ever been. To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries — and in many cases millennia — has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.

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So it is, for instance, that the Amsterdam Declaration can airily dismiss the dogmas of religion, even as it simultaneously takes for granted the existence of “universal legal human rights”. Yet to believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity. The origins of the concept lie not in “the application of the methods of science” so prized by the Amsterdam Declaration but in medieval theology.

When, in the 12th century, Christian scholars sought to fashion a properly Christian legal system, they naturally turned to the Bible for guidance. There, they read that all men and women were endowed with an inherent dignity. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Yet how, that being so, were Christians to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that “the use of all things should be common to all”? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in the Latin West.

The solution, arrived at by 1200, was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to those learned in the Church’s canons, iure naturali — “in accordance with natural law”. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. He was merely taking what was properly owed him.

Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers decreed, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered something novel: a legal obligation. That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, however, was a matching principal: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was — in a formulation increasingly deployed by lawyers in medieval Christendom — their ius: their “right”.

Yet this doctrine — despite its origins in Christian jurisprudence — was one that would come, in time, to slip the moorings of doctrinal Christianity. Indeed, first in the American Revolution, and then in the French, the claim would be made that human rights owned nothing at all to the distinctive history of Latin Christendom. They were instead eternal and universal. “The Declaration of Rights,” proclaimed anti-clerical French revolutionaries, “is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.” A momentous discovery had been made: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.

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The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences. Today, as in the 18th century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.

Yet this in turn veiled a further irony: for what was the contempt displayed by the iconoclasts of the French Revolution for Christianity if not a sign of Christianity’s influence? “The old has gone, the new has come!” So Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, had proclaimed. Change, in the opinion of the Romans, was by definition sinister. The phrase res novae — “new things” — served as a synonym for everything in society that was most menacing. Christianity, on the other hand, glorified revolution. Just as Isaiah had condemned the gods of the Egyptians and the Babylonians as mere idols, fit to be toppled into the mire, so had Christians in the early Middle Ages equated progress with the banishment of superstition. Trees sacred to pagan gods were exultantly felled by missionaries, and churches planted where blood-stained altars had originally stood.

Humanists, when they celebrate the liberation from dogma and superstition that is to be gained, in their opinion, from “the application of the methods of science”, are bearing witness to the enduring hold on Western civilisation, not of Greek philosophy, but of Biblical prophecy. It was certainly no accident that many of Darwin’s most enthusiastic defenders should have borne the unmistakeable stamp of radical Protestantism. “Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.” So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, an anatomist and biologist whose genius for savaging bishops led to him being described as “Darwin’s bulldog”.

That it was his duty to bring light to the world was Huxley’s devoutest conviction. His sense of himself as a member of an elect had — as contemporaries were quick to note — a familiar quality: “He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire and determination to impress them upon all mankind, which are the essential marks of the Puritan character.” Huxley’s conviction that medieval Christendom had been nothing but bigotry and backwardness was one that ultimately descended, not from Voltaire, but from Luther. Agnostics — a term coined by Huxley — have always tended to display, in their attitudes towards Christianity, a marked susceptibility towards Protestant propaganda. He is merely another illustration of the great paradox of our age: that Christianity has no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish.

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It is hardly surprising, of course, in a society that has increasingly abandoned the institutional practice of Christianity, yet still clings to its assumptions, its values, its myths, that we should shrink from staring the implications of our current predicament fully in the face. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”

Such was the warning given almost a century and a half ago by Friedrich Nietzsche: the most radical, because the most unsparingly honest, of modern atheists. He gazed unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. Humanism, despised by Nietzsche as an ideology to which the English were peculiarly prone, was dismissed by him as palpable idiocy:

“When the English actually believe that they know ‘intuitively’ what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment.”

“For the English,” Nietzsche concluded witheringly, “morality is not yet a problem.”

It was not from reason that the doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith which humanists believed themselves — in their conceit — to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead — but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell. The myths of Christianity would long endure. And yet they were no less myths, for all that, because they now wore the show of the secular. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour”: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilisation. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. “In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,” he wrote, “before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.”

And yet Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. “After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection, with new questions.”

Half a century after Nietzsche wrote this, and almost two decades after the outbreak of the Great War, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed how Christian his movement was, had come increasingly to share in Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity. Its morality, its concern for the weak, the Führer viewed as cowardly and shameful. Christian teachings had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their day. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words — with which I opened — were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide.

He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption. It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism — “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” — finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.

The above is an abridged version of the 2022 Theos Annual Lecture, “Humanism: A Christian Heresy”. 

Now, what was once an abstract idea in philosophy has become disturbingly real. Where we used to maintain that reality provided us with certain givens, many now argue that we can uncouple ourselves from those givens, and construct ourselves with reference to our will alone. The obvious example is the debate around sex and gender. We used to think that biological sex was a kind of given; now, increasingly, some think of it as something that has been merely “assigned”. And that our gender, our self-image, is to be taken as metaphysically primary. It used to be the case that a transexual would live out their life as if they were of another sex; now, the claim is that they are that other sex, a change brought about not by biology but by will, by wanting it. Reality — truth — used to be something we had to adjust ourselves to, to deal with. These days, reality is second fiddle to will, just as Nietzsche predicted.

Nietzsche believed in self-ID of the most radical kind, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, the extreme version of this is not transexualism but transhumanism. Nietzsche predicted the rise of the Ubermensch, the super-human whose capacity exceeded the limitations of the merely human. “Dear Mother Nature,” wrote the transhumanist Max More in 1999, “we humans — your offspring — come to you with something to say. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution.” Human nature is not fixed but needs to be improved, even overcome, with science, technology and an ethics that is built around individual freedom.

Just as we have thrown off the tyranny of the Father God, so too we must throw off the tyranny of Mother Nature. We will be the masters of our biology, not the other way round. Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is like an artist making himself up as though he were a work of art. Nothing can interfere with his or her unfettered creativity, not even biology or reality itself. “Man is something that shall be overcome”. Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the Ubermensch. The only thing Nietzsche didn’t predict is that technology would be the agent of this revolution in what it is to be human.

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In the early years of Nietzsche studies, it was assumed that because the Nazis were drawn to his ideas, then Nietzsche himself must have been some sort of fellow traveller. He wasn’t. But part of the reason that fascists found his views so congenial is that he emphasised the concept of will and power over truth. If truth is simply a mobile army of metaphors — rather than something out there, fixed, waiting to be discovered — then what counts as truth is established through power and assertion, not dispassionate observation or careful listening. We used to call it lying. But for Nietzsche, the truth is what I assert it to be. Here, then, is where Donald Trump or Boris Johnson intersect with the woke Left. For all their superficial antipathy, they share a very similar metaphysical space.

And this philosophy similarity should alert us to the fact that the trans movement — broadly understood as the overcoming of Mother Nature — is not necessarily a Left-wing or progressive idea. It could just as easily be purloined by the Right. Wearing black balaclavas, angry men shout hateful obscenities at women, silence those whose words are deemed unacceptable, and whip up a mob. On the new Left there’s an ambivalence towards free speech, even a fierce antipathy towards Israel. Everyone is calling everyone else a fascist these days, but the new Left looks more and more like what we used to think of as fascists. Both admire Nietzsche.

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Of course, there is one big difference between Nietzsche and woke culture: Nietzsche despised victims. He insisted that the resentful powerless — typically Christians — had used their imaginations as a weapon against the strong by upending what we normally think of as good. This is what the victim mentality maintains:

“Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned.”

That this passage could be taken as a manifesto of new Left politics shows how Nietzsche’s mobile army of metaphors can destabilise our current understanding of the political spectrum. If truth is a contest of wills, a feature of the culture war so to speak, and political assertiveness is what public will looks like, then there is no reason why the Left cannot out-shout, out-manoeuvre, out-intimidate and out-march the old “aristocratic” values that Nietzsche so admired.

When Nietzsche declared the death of God, he wasn’t just declaring religion to be over; he was also burying the very idea that truth is something fixed. Following Nietzsche, generations of progressive activists have come to believe that truth is something made not found. Something to be created in the cauldron of technological ingenuity and political assertiveness.

At the present moment, this philosophical position is supporting a kind of Left-wing run. But it won’t always do so. And when Nietzsche renews his conjugation with the Right, we may well descend even further into antipathy and madness. When truth with a capital T dies, all we have left is the struggle for dominance.

Might is right. Which is why, as the culture wars deepen, you will find me in church, on my knees, before my dead God. A dead God who, Nietzsche would be disappointed to hear, refuses to die.

When the first antidepressants were developed in the Fifties, the condition was considered so rare that the drug research seemed like a waste of money. But in a 2017 survey, 12.7% of Americans had taken antidepressants in the past month (and nearly twice as many women as men). It is not to deny the existence of catatonic states of despair to suggest that there may have been a definitional leak.

One might retort that “depression” was simply “under-diagnosed”, but equally present in every earlier stage of human history. Consider, though, the discovery of SSRIs, a class of drugs that combined lifetime use with a better safety profile than earlier antidepressants (just weight gain, sexual dysfunction, and the occasional suicide upon withdrawal). And consider the context of that discovery: a world where pharmaceutical companies fund much of the research used in their own regulation, and that research is easy to skew. In short, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a pharmaceutical company in possession of a new drug shall be in want of an endemic illness. As the GlaxoSmithKline slogan bluntly went: “Does your soul have a cold?”

Still, it would be sophomoric to think that depression was wholly and solely constructed by Big Pharma. Until recently, it was understood that “no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of” melancholy. So wrote Robert Burton, a reclusive life-long fellow of Oxford, four centuries ago, in his freewheeling account of sadness, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Burton was writing in one of the last periods where the role of the writer wasn’t to express an individual thesis, but instead to summarise everything. As such, his Anatomy has little in the way of synthetic thought. As Burton says, “I have read many Bookes, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over divers Authors in our Libraries, with small profit, for want of Art, Order, Memory, Judgment.” He can’t even settle on a definition of melancholy — “whether it be a cause or an effect, a disease or symptom … I will not contend about it” — but he does examine some potential causes. Black bread, melons, hot air, cold air, excessive exercise, defective exercise, the stars, God, hot baths, a hot brain, Calvinism, Catholicism, excessive studying, excessive merrymaking, excessive “chamber-making”.

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As for melancholy’s symptoms, “the tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms”. Indeed, it’s sometimes difficult to separate cause from symptom, as in the glorious description “lascivious by reason of much wind”. Burton’s aim is to “adventure yet in such vast confusion and generality to bring them into some order; and so descend into particulars”. Many of these loopy excursions come to a familiar enough conclusion: melancholy’s cause is sin, and its cure is God: “We ought to fear our own fickle estates, remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate ourselves, seek to God, and call to Him for mercy.”

But Burton does not deny the importance of strategies to combat melancholia. These include behavioural changes — drink a glass of water upon waking; seek hills or mountains; “be not solitary, be not idle” — and mental ones — avoid prolonging passionate thoughts; avoid believing in predestination; “be meek, merciful, and patient”. There is comfort here, for the post-modern reader. Thanks to the rapid rise of neuroscience and the branding of depression as a “brain disease”, many third-party carriers reimburse doctors for medication management only, and many depressed people are simply handed a prescription by a general practitioner and told to check in in six weeks. In Burton’s day, the old Galenic system of humours did emphasise the physical. But these days depression is treated like heartburn; in more exploring reaches, it’s treated by impersonal, one-size-fits-all cognitive behavioural therapy, now the province of therapy apps advertised by Instagram scroll.

At the extremes, the “chemical imbalance” theory raises troubling questions about human character; and its Brave New World-style treatment can make the human being feel like an unruly dog. No matter how many analogies one can make to infectious disease or broken legs, depression is experienced at a complicated level inextricable from one’s most virtuous traits — sensitivity, self-criticism, ambition — and to think of oneself as merely a malfunctioning machine or a bundle of “trauma reactions” can impoverish the self.

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The experience of The Anatomy is one of overload, and perhaps it is best to read it with the desperation and joy of Samuel Johnson, who “frequently resorted to [The Anatomy] for the purpose of exhilaration” while running his tiny, failing school at Edial Hall. Its very eclecticism and capaciousness is its virtue. Perhaps reading anecdotes about ancient kings won’t cure you: but given that depression rarely is “curable” at all, there’s something beautiful about feeling this continuity of human experience, across time and space, to feel one’s sadness as part of a world history full of delight and variety. Compare the experience of the sad person today, asking their doctor for Prozac or maybe playing with an adult colouring book, to the experience of a Samuel Johnson. The first is made to feel small and simple; the second is made to feel himself more intelligent, more dignified, more ambitious. Moreover, as any reader of Shakespeare’s tragedies will know, the early Moderns had a way of laughing about despair, solitude, even suicide — a kind of manic sad clowning found absent from the way most people talk about mental health now, both infantilising and deadly serious. Burton, after all, wrote The Anatomy under the name Democritus Junior: the laughing philosopher.

I read The Anatomy the winter after my first law school exams, ambivalent about a course of study that was beginning, nonetheless, to gel into inevitability. I was staying on the couch of a family member in Florida, in a condo surrounded by red and orange tropical plants and buzzing constantly with the exertions of a leaking air conditioner. Through the screen door, at any hour of the day or night, I could see the recently discharged woman next door swaying silently in front of a blue-fuzz TV. Against her state, obviously, The Anatomy is of little use. But for the sort of low-grade malaise I found myself in — the sense that my fears would never disappear but my possibilities, one by one, would — The Anatomy made me feel a little bit better. I read it on the beach, I read it over diner milkshakes, I read it on hot and sleepless nights, on that orange leather sofa that congealed to my skin.

The Anatomy clocks in at 1,392 pages — my paperback quickly broke in half — and any paragraph swims through a dizzying array of references, Homeric through Renaissance; medical, theological, and philosophical. On the one hand, its difficulty made me feel accomplished; and on the other hand, it made me feel, basically, that it was fine to be scared, to still be doubting. I could try cabbage one day, clear water another, oranges, opening windows, perfume, walking in fields, sweet-scented baths, confessing to a friend, faith in God, eating earlier, fasting, seeing sunlight upon waking, reading Herodotus, reading Elizabethans. And above all, as Burton’s last section of course requires, truly and steadfastly resisting despair.

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Small consolations, it’s true, but ones that fit into a life well lived — unlike antidepressants, with their dubious efficacy and their near-certain, unpleasant side effects; and unlike so much of self-help, with its individualism, and its transactional focus on convenience and utility. Burton’s salves are enriching, not subtracting. They make the reader feel, in some small way, in control of their condition, an active agent. As the habit makes the monk, the medicine makes the patient, and against the pop psychology and medical cocktails more commonly on offer, there’s something to be said for the demanding and delightful sublimations of The Anatomy. That the book is often baffling only further recommends it. It feels good to do something difficult; and it feels good to get out of one’s own time, to defamiliarise one’s own condition: though people may have always felt sad, they felt differently about feeling sad.

The Anatomy of Melancholy won’t cure depression. But there’s something comforting about this futility: if sadness has always existed and always will, even for those, like Burton, of exemplary learning and unparalleled discipline, even in the most foreign reaches of time and place, even after 13,000 pieces of advice and 400 years, then we might try to make something generative of some of the pain, to “write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A funeral director friend — a woman whose job depends on not becoming too emotional — was livid at the omission. Clap for Our Carers celebrated “all those who are out there making an unbelievable difference to our lives in these challenging times”. Meanwhile, those making an unbelievable difference to our deaths were ignored, even though their times were just as challenging, if not more so.

It was not so much the case numbers — one of Amanda’s biggest grumbles was constantly tripping over the coffins she panic-bought in March, didn’t use, and had to store in the staff kitchen — but the ludicrous Covid theatre she had to choreograph. Instead of meeting families for tea and sympathy, she was giving advice over Zoom on strategies for deciding which ten people would make the cut, and whether these ten were allowed to place a rose on the coffin individually so long as they were socially distanced. And then, after she gave the correct answer — “No, but do it anyway” — there was the tedium of fighting with crematorium staff threatening to blacklist her.

Funeral directors weren’t even on the Government’s list of Key Workers when it was first introduced. Those who deal with the dead were forgotten, even when the shadow of death was over the whole country. It was not deliberate suppression of the facts, like the mobile crematoria rumoured to be following the Russian front line to keep reality at a distance from people back home; it simply never occurred to the authorities to think about who and what comes after death.

Someone who does think about the who and what is Hayley Campbell. Her new book, All the Living and the Dead, is a series of profiles of “death workers” — not just funeral directors, but embalmers, grave diggers, anatomists and, in one haunting chapter, an executioner. There is a huge emphasis on the physical: her chapter on the work of funeral directors is about the act of changing the clothes on a body, not the counselling or event organising (“all the work of a wedding planner but done in a week”) or the constant state of war with crematorium staff — the work that takes up most of a funeral director’s time. Funeral celebrants are not mentioned at all.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a range of people from the funeral industry; and one of my standard questions was “What is a funeral for?” (The other one was “Who is a funeral for?”) It wasn’t until the very last interview that someone said, “to dispose of the body”, and I realised that everyone had been skipping over the one thing that defines a funeral, like those restaurant reviewers who never mention the food. The whole point of a funeral is that it gets the body where it needs to be — a physical presence that we can cope with, buried or processed into ash.

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Campbell doesn’t make that mistake. She has a whole chapter about what happens in crematoria. The part that will stay with me longest — possibly because both my parents died of cancer — is that a tumour takes longer to turn to ash than the rest of the body, unyielding while everything else is burnt away, like St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz. The operator has to fire jets directly at the lump — “almost like black coral” — until it too is dust.

Still, the book doesn’t talk about what happens to the ashes after they’ve gone through the cremulator and become powder. It is as if Campbell loses interest in human remains at the moment most of us can face up to them: when they are no longer recognisable as a body. She interviews a specialist in the niche and rather creepy art of death masks — “Nick thought that the popularity of death masks was on the rise… But it never really took off” — but doesn’t examine the growing industry surrounding ashes that have been safely unbodied.

There is no mention of the companies that will send them into the heavens in fireworks; or turn them into diamonds, pencils, vinyl records or tattoos; or pour them into hourglasses (“They cannot be exactly timed, due to the consistency of the cremains”); or mix them with concrete to create habitats for fish in coral reefs; or of the company in Alabama which will place them “with care and reverence into almost any caliber or gauge of ammunition”. Or, if you want niche and rather creepy, vibrators.

There is money in achieving the impossible — giving you a physical reminder of someone that isn’t a physical reminder of them. Perhaps the reason death masks never took off was that they are too good a reminder. Although it is worth noting that one high-profile British politician did commission one of his late father: Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It was different when ours was a Christian society, but we now find it difficult to admit that our bodies are what we are. The most popular reading at funerals is now the dreadful “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, which suggests that the deceased is wind or sunlight or glints in snow — anything but the body being buried. It’s a bit of doggerel so mawkish and vacuous that Ricky Gervais used it as the emotional climax to his telly show about death. The first time I laughed after my mother’s death was when a priest, to whom I had sarcastically suggested it as a reading, read it all the way to “I am not here / I did not die,” the final lines, before handing it back and saying, “Well, the crematorium’s going to be a hell of a shock, isn’t it?”

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Campbell, though, doesn’t shy away from the physicality of dead bodies — the smell of putrefaction, and why it smells like a gas leak; the sound of rigor snapping — and how they are physically handled. In many ways, emphasising the physicality is healthier than ignoring it: in a disaster, Campbell points out, those who actively do something are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised, as they are using their stress hormones for their proper purpose, than those who stand by. (On a smaller scale, it was felt deeply by my cousins that they were not allowed to carry my uncle’s coffin at his funeral, because of the social distancing rules, which everyone knew would be totally ignored at the subsequent wake.)

But, in a post-Christian society, it’s just as easy to ignore the fact we are not just our bodies. Most of the death workers Campbell interviews do this to a certain extent because they need to separate these bodies from their identities — technicians in the autopsy room who can weigh organs so long as they know nothing about the person whose body it is; crematorium workers who can pitch someone into a fire but find dressing them too personal.

The executioner is the only death worker in the book who knew the bodies in his charge equally well when they were alive — execution was among his duties as a prison guard. He is also the only one who believes in God. This is not a coincidence. Campbell dismisses this as wishful thinking: “God is the soft focus everyone [involved in an execution] puts on the scene… to me, it says they’re choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they’re doing because it doesn’t matter.” To me, it says something very different. He believes because he knows that death does matter. It is the rest of us who are looking in soft focus.

Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.

But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?

Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?

Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:

“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”

Compare it to Rowan Williams answering John Humphrys asking “Where was God?” the morning after the Beslan Massacre in 2004.

“The short answer is that God is where God always is, and that is with those who are trying to comfort and bring light in any situation. … I would guess that there must have been older children putting their arms around younger children, you might see God there.”

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These are remarkable similar responses, exonerating God or humanity by pointing towards what is best in the response of these respective actors. But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

Yes, humanists disagree about the extent to which they think of human beings as intrinsically good. Though, in truth, they do dither on this. Nonetheless, they place human beings at the centre of their belief system. And indeed, why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good? For instance, I’m not sure that you could believe in some kind of secular equivalent to original sin and still call yourself a humanist, though I would be fascinated to be contradicted on this.

My own view is that the Enlightenment too often used human suffering as line in a handy argument against an all-powerful, benevolent Deity, but only feigned to be interested in suffering itself. Suffering was deployed as a part of a syllogism against God. But it felt existentially inert, absent of the kind of crisis that suffering created for faith. Humanist suffering always seems a bit too much like suffering at a philosophical distance. Indeed, the kind of crisis of faith that suffering causes for Christianity seems to be just the sort of perfectly appropriate response that suffering should create in all of us.

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With Easter round the corner, it’s worth saying that for Christianity, the proper response to human suffering and evil — and by proper, I mean the response that is internal to Christian theology — is the cross. This is not the sort of answer that was admissible in Philosophy of Religion tutorials, because it presumes faith rather than holding it up for critical scrutiny. But when Christians talk of suffering, they are not so interested in trying to reconcile the all-powerful, good God plus suffering “problem” — because people being murdered by Russian bombs isn’t first and foremost an intellectual “problem”. It is a crisis, a collapse of faith, a desolation. The cross is where all of that is carried, and — for Christians – overcome. Humanists will scoff that this doesn’t answer the question, and they are right. For Christians, the “problem of evil” is a very different kind of question. To call it a problem is too cold, too detached.

Humanists have responded to the crisis in Ukraine with generosity, as many have. Of course, I applaud them for this. But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith? Do they ever wonder whether human beings are ghastly creatures and that it makes no sense to follow a philosophy named in their honour? And if they don’t, then it seems to me that humanism is all the poorer for it. What we see on our TV screens should quite properly rock us to the core. It should make us question our deepest commitments, there should be a dark night of the soul.

The British Humanist Association offers a downloadable primer on humanism and suffering. They conclude: “For humanists then, the answer to the question why bad things happen is simply, because they do: that is just the way the world is.” In other words, shit happens. What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it. A world view that has become intellectually insulated from a crisis of faith is not one that has properly exposed itself to the horrors of the world.

Surely the answer is something like this: we look to the end to make sense of the whole. This is where things come together, or not. Where the point is revealed, where some sort of unity is achieved or isn’t. The end gives the story its meaning. Significantly, the word “end” can mean both last things and purpose.

As with novels, so too with human lives. We are story-seeking animals. Even in a post-Christian society, we retain some residual sense that how we end — how we die — contains a special significance for the meaning of our lives as a whole. And this is why there is something especially disturbing about the findings of a Lancet Commission report published this week, that argues we have over-medicalised death and have lost a sense of what a good one might look like.

Imagine if we were to take a look at the last few pages of the book of our lives. There we are, in a huge hospital, surrounded by masked medics and machines. We are not doing very much because we are all doped up. And due to Covid, not even in the presence of our loved ones. The ending is one of medical failure. “This situation has further fuelled the fear of death, reinforcing the idea of health-care services as the custodians of death,” says the report.

We die when the experts “cannot do any more”. It’s not much of an ending. This is not a criticism of the people we have tasked with keeping us alive. But more a question about what it is to live without a narrative sense of our own ending. For without some hermeneutic rhythm of beginning and end, our lives — like Arnold Toynbee’s view of history — are “just one damn fact after another”. There is no conclusion, no purpose, no narrative arc; just a succession of inconsequential events with our death having no more or less meaning than any other event. The contrast with the religious worldview couldn’t be stronger.

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Yesterday was the feast of Candlemas, the last day of the Christmas season. Jesus is taken into the Jerusalem temple as a child and an elderly Jewish gentleman recognises Him to be the promised Messiah, the light of the world. “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word,” he exclaims, words that get sung as the Nunc Dimittis every day in churches and Cathedrals up and down the land. Or, in less floral language — I have seen what I wanted to see and I can now die happy.

Christmas, the celebration of a birth, ends with the anticipation of a death. Not just that of Simeon, but also of the child himself. “And a sword will pierce your own heart too,” Simeon tells Mary darkly, a reference to the agony she will experience when she watches her child – and He will always be her child – die in agony, executed by the Romans.

I have been taking funerals for 30 years, and they all have concluded with Simeon’s words. Earlier this week, I used them at the bedside of a parishioner to whom I gave the last rites. The promise they hold out is of a life that reaches some sort of conclusion, where the threads of our story come together.

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For those of us who are religious, this narrative arc is curated through a wider cosmic narrative in which human lives conclude in a return to the loving embrace of the Almighty. Across the West, these meta-narratives are mostly forgotten or have been deliberately abandoned. Life is now “one damn fact after another”. Death is of no more narrative significance than any other moment in time.

If you ask people how they want to die, they often say quickly and in their sleep. It is as if they don’t want to be aware of death as something that happens to them. And those at the bedside — if they are lucky enough to be able to be there — can sometimes co-operate with this sense of denial with well-meaning words of getting better, “you will be up on your feet in no time” and so on.

In this world, the book doesn’t have an acknowledged ending. From a religious perspective this all feels a little ironic. We are often told we are the fantasists about death, pretending it doesn’t happen with all that talk of everlasting life.

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At the bedside, priests often talk about death to those who are saying their goodbyes. And equally often, they are obstructed from doing so by family members who maintain it isn’t going to happen. Even at funerals, we are sometimes instructed to wear brightly coloured clothes, and to celebrate a life rather than mourn a death.

Atheists will say that we all need to face the fact that, ultimately, we are nothing more or less than food for worms and daffodils. That eternal life is a fantasy designed to give the clergy some sort of control over people’s lives. Auguste Comte said that the afterlife produced “slaves of God”. But atheism has arguably made us less able to talk about death, not knowing how it fits into the story of our lives. Instead of bravely facing death, too often the secular world ducks it.

When I die, don’t you dare come in a bright jumper. I want a church full of Sophia Loren look-a-likes under their black veils bawling their eyes out. These days, it is often secular death that refuses to think of death as real.

“How people die has changed dramatically over the last 60 years” writes Dr Libby Sallnow, co-chair of the Lancet commission and a palliative care consultant, “from a family event with occasional medical support, to a medical event with limited family support. A fundamental re-think is needed.”

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It is no coincidence that the 60 years the good doctor refers to here is roughly the time scale of what we might call contemporary liberalism (older, better versions are available) — that is, the rise of autonomy and self-determination as the ultimate matrix of moral value. I suspect that part of the reason we have become so inarticulate about death is not about increasing squeamishness. Our society has been reconstructed around the centrality of the “I”. The moral priority of individual choice has nowhere to go with death, something we mostly do not chose, and something that represents the absolute obliteration of this ever demanding “I”.

The great archbishop William Temple once wrote that the true aim of all religion is to “transfer the centre of interest from self to God”. When you centre your life on something that is more important than you, then your own death ceases to be the destruction of all you care about. The message of most religions is simply: “it’s not all about you”; it is a message both of challenge to the nagging demands of the ego and yet one of ultimate hope.

This is the very opposite of the liberal worldview, that predicates value upon the making of individual choices, and has no sense of what a decentred self might look like. In other words, contemporary liberalism has no way of looking death in the face, no way of answering it back with the words “where is your sting?”, no way of singing the Nunc Dimittis. No wonder we are all so afraid.

Del Noce’s work seems particularly current in the Anglosphere, perhaps, because it has only recently become available in English. Carlo Lancelotti, a New York-based math professor, first translated Del Noce’s The Crisis of Modernity in 2014; this month, his translation of The Problem with Atheism was published. The latter was written first — between 1917 and 1945 — and produced the thesis about Marxism that allowed Del Noce to see the future.

Del Noce’s take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. “There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction,” he wrote. Marx’s view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process — man’s liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of man’s alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Society’s values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.

Since, in the Marxist framework, removing oppression is the primary way of bringing about the future, philosophy is subordinated to politics. As Marx wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” In Marxism, reason is not something universally accessible to all; it is the tool that certain radically free people use to impose their will on existence. This creates a contradiction: how can anyone change the world if history is inevitably going to culminate in communism? And if all philosophy is just a reflection of economic arrangements, is the same not true of Marxism?

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This contradiction bifurcated Marxism along two different paths. The first path embraced the revolutionary philosopher, while the other one embraced history. The first path led to Lenin, the revolution, and the Soviet Union. The second path led to us. Del Noce wrote, “Marxism has ended up being a stage in the development of the technological and affluent society, which accepts all [of Marxism’s] negations of traditional thought but at the same time eliminates its messianic and (in its own way) religious aspect.” Marx’s vision was achieved by his ostensible enemy.

Long before it became obvious, Del Noce wrote that “the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left is there for everyone to see.” He argued that liberalism “sublimated,” or absorbed, various aspects of Marxism, transforming into what he called “the technological society.” Bourgeois society always had two historical enemies: revolutionary thought and religious thought. As a synthesis of these opposites, Marxism provided bourgeois society with the tool needed to defeat both. Our society largely embraces Marx’s historical vision: advancing technologies are viewed as de facto proof that the question of God, and all transcendent values, are irrelevant. Yet this vision of history is also turned onto Marxism itself. Communism was tried and it was a failed experiment. The technological society does not have to enlist any religious or moral claims to reject Communism. It simply dismisses Communism as inefficient.

The Leninist path of Marxism also stumbles through our society in a misshapen form. Del Noce argued that Leninism unleashed a type of post-Christian gnosticism — which was an early Christian heresy that believed the world was evil and could only be saved by those with access to secret or esoteric knowledge. Lenin believed that the revolution wouldn’t just happen spontaneously — it had to be brought about by raising the consciousness of the proletariat. This required “professional revolutionaries”. Drawn from the people tasked with the job of modernising the Russian economy, these revolutionaries were an elect class that understands how the world “really” works. The British writer H.G. Wells understood the implications of this better than Lenin himself: in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy, inspired by his trips to the Soviet Union, Wells called for the West to embrace rule by its own elect class of “experts.”

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Everyone understands that a person is not wise by virtue of being an accountant, or a therapist, or an immunologist; we all understand that a person can have limited domain expertise, and be a complete fool outside of that area. Moreover, domain expertise is not the same as executive function: the act of governing a society is the act of choosing between competing goods, and this requires virtues like wisdom and prudence. And yet society has become enthralled by the “expert,” the idea of which works in the exact opposite way, suggesting that a person is equipped to make prudential choices between competing goods simply by virtue of possessing technical knowledge in some limited domain. Eventually this denigrates into absurdities, like the “disinformation expert” who is basically a “truth expert.”

Del Noce paints a landscape of a society that rejects all traditional values in the name of a supposedly neutral rationality, has a caste of revolutionary-cum-technocratic experts who function like gnostic priests, and engages in near-constant, system-approved “revolution.” This revolution was separate from Marxism, and was encapsulated in a sentence written by Friedrich Engels: “the thesis that reality is rational leads, according to Hegelian dialectics, to this other one: everything that exists deserves to die.” Del Noce wrote that “the revolutionary is the executioner of a death sentence that history has pronounced.” But since the radically bourgeois society rejects all transcendent values, its revolutionaries offer only negation. “The global rebellion becomes an absurd revolt against what exists” or what once existed. It becomes either a silly attempt to escape reality or a tool of the system it is revolting against. It should be obvious how this explains the woke, but it also shows how the anti-woke offer a mirror image.

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There are many, like James Lindsay and John McWhorter, who champion “Enlightenment values” in the face of the woke. They praise things like reason, rationality, and positivism in the face of a new religious fervor. The miracle of rationality fought off the forces of religious superstition, we are told, and we must be vigilant not to slide back into the shadows of irrationality. Del Noce might call this “the Enlightenment after Marxism.” It is a mythic narrative that its proponents fail to see as myth.

Carl Schmitt once wrote that American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks were engaged in a common struggle. That synthesis is now complete. Del Noce helps us see how this synthesis is at the root of today’s most pressing issues, and how those who want to fight the woke cannot retreat into the static categories of the 20th century. Decomposed Marxism limits our ability to see a new horizon, and the future seems impossibly hopeless because so few are willing to reassess past mistakes.

“There are two kinds of egoists in the world,” wrote Rowan Williams after meeting Tutu. “There are egoists who are so in love with themselves that they have no room of anyone else and there are those egoists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves.” Tutu was the second sort of egoist. Desmond Tutu loved being Desmond Tutu, but in such a way that he encouraged other people to believe that they could also be in love with who they are and take joy in it.

This cuts across what many in his generation thought about being a priest. When I was taught to celebrate the Eucharist, for instance, I was encouraged not to show any personality in my recitation of the holy words of consecration. The important thing as a priest is to get out of the way, to be a conduit between other people and God. Don’t put yourself, your personality, between the congregation and the divine. Don’t modulate your voice, don’t try to inject meaning into your words. Your job is to disappear. Say the words like you are reading from the telephone directory. The congregation don’t come to church for you.

Tutu did it very differently. Some in the old school thought what you got with Desmond Tutu was the Desmond Tutu Show, and they slightly disapproved. But this wonderful little man from South Africa, with his impish sense of fun and Old Testament prophet morality, had a totally different theology from that of the Old School. And it was from this theology that all his activism and politics cascaded — “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, as the second-century church father Irenaeus put it. Tutu loved that line and it often cropped up in his sermons. It captured his theology in a nutshell.

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In other words, Desmond Tutu was very much a Christmas Christian. God comes into the world as a human being so that human beings might regard themselves as divine, a part of the divine life. Tutu once remarked that as all human beings contain the image and likeness of God, we ought to genuflect before everyone we meet.

Tutu often told the story of his parish priest in Johannesburg, the legendary Fr Trevor Huddleston, once doffing his hat to his mother — a white man simply acknowledging the humanity of a black woman being a revolutionary act in the context of South Africa in the Forties. It was a genuflection, of sorts. And this is where Tutu’s theology and politics grows from: all human beings reflect God’s glory, all of them. His hatred of apartheid was at root theological, rather than political — though this is a false binary, of course. His point was that apartheid was a heresy. It was a failure to see God in others; in those who are of a different colour, in those who are lesbian and gay, and most radically of all, in the oppressor too.

But this theology of the person was in no sense individualistic. Perhaps the most important contribution that African Christianity has made to Christianity has been through the development of the idea of Ubuntu — the idea that “I am because you are”. We are not individual cells of separate Godliness, but through God’s presence within us all, we are all brothers and sisters. And so in order to be fully what God intended, we have to be reconciled with those from whom we have become estranged. Forgiveness was not some sentimental touchy-feely emotional weakness, but a tough-minded determination to recognise our own humanity as inescapably bound up with others. Confessing past wrongs with the hope of some sort of reconciliation was a way of putting the pieces of the self back together.

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Tutu was hated for this insight as much as he was loved. When he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was putting into practice a version of this theology: that only through forgiveness could a community find the gift of a common future. Forgiveness meant breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat revenge. It wasn’t about having warm and fuzzy feelings about those that had participated in the evil that was apartheid. It was the belief that a future was possible, but only through a process of confession and forgiveness in which the image of God is restored in others. This was a basic priestly insight turned into a political process.

There were times when he got it wrong, of course. His extension of the apartheid tag to the situation in Israel/Palestine was a mistake. Perhaps inevitably, he saw the world too much through the lens of his own history, and was sometimes blind to its differences. That’s why many Jews think of Tutu as a much more morally ambivalent figure.

He was also hated by the hard Left as much as by the Right. Tutu had absolutely no time for Marxism. At heart, he was a prayerful cassock-wearing Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest of a very familiar sort. He wasn’t a political radical, but a faithful servant of the church, with a huge personality, preaching what he saw with enormous courage in wicked times. And it was because he was a priest that the apartheid regime never dared to touch him. He called it as he saw it, including in his vociferous condemnations of the ANC as they descended into corruption and petty infighting. Tutu could be the friend of anyone, yet he was no one’s patsy.

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Tutu once said that if he ever walked on water, the South African press would have chosen the headline “Tutu cannot swim”. We forget now how much he was hated and traduced by the whole apparatus of racist apartheid. How his life was threatened. He is now seen as a hero of human rights, which isn’t quite accurate. Yes, he used the secular language of human rights, but it was the Imago Dei — the imprint of God in us all — that was his basic guiding insight.

Will we see his like again in the Church? These days our bishops are largely chosen for their management skills and abilities to run a spreadsheet. Tutu showed us God by being so wonderfully himself, a human being, flawed no doubt, but fully and magnificently alive. His theology and his personality were perfectly aligned. That’s why we loved him. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

In days that seem unprecedented, we cling to the familiar. I do, anyway, and Christmas has been familiar to me all my life. The excitement and the anticipation that I felt as a boy is felt now by my young son, and I can live vicariously through him: the lack of sleep, the mince pies for the reindeer, the presents waiting, if he’s lucky, under the tree. Christmas has its rituals, and we don’t have many shared rituals left in the modern West.

But the rituals disguise the radical strangeness of the claim that Christmas makes, and the radical strangeness of the religion that makes it. That God took human form, that he was born into persecution and poverty, that he came to put the world back into its right shape. That this God does not demand burnt offerings, but will instead sacrifice himself to correct our errors. That He shows us a path both straight and narrow and leaves it to us to decide whether to follow it. A virgin birth in a cave, a risen corpse and an empty tomb: there is no sense in any of this. None of it is normal, even by religious standards. It is some kind of revolution.

But here we are, celebrating it with turkey and crackers, and yet not really celebrating it, because — well, because this is now, and that was then. We all know that Christmas has become a commercial horror show: complaining about this is another part of the ritual. We all know that most of us will barely genuflect towards the Christ whose mass this once was: hearing bishops lamenting this is also as traditional as watching the Queen’s Christmas message, or refusing to watch it and reading the Guardian in the corner instead.

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The West has lost its roots

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The world has been upended these past two years, and it feels to me as if the ructions, which are far from over, are not merely temporal. It feels like we are being shaken out of some slumber; as if the spirit is on the move. Perhaps I feel this way because of the unexpected turn my life has taken, coincidentally or not, during the corona era. Just over a year ago, much to my own surprise (and initial resistance) I became a Christian. Some people might call it a “conversion”, which always sounds a bit shiny-eyed to me, but I didn’t really feel like I’d converted to anything. I felt like I’d come home. I can’t explain it, though I keep wanting to.

It is always ridiculous to write about religion. When I say “ridiculous,” I mean “dangerous”, I think: dangerous in the West, anyway, which is the only part of the world in which the rejection of religion and the denial of God has ever really taken off. This does not seem to be working out well for us, but try talking about that in public. Since I became a Christian, and as the daily practice of the faith has deepened my understanding of it, I have found it harder and harder to relate the Christian worldview to the worldview I used to have, and which the culture around me encourages in us daily. This is not just a Christian problem: everyone I know who follows a faith seems to understand it. It might just be a manifestation of how new I am to this, and how inadequate my understanding is. Still, the gap between the world and the Way — as the early Christians called the path of Christ — seems more and more like a widening gulf.

This will be my first Christmas in the church. The Orthodox church, into which I was baptised just under a year ago, has a deep and old and demanding practice around this festival of light. For the last forty days, we have been fasting: today the fast is broken. A child is born, and everything has changed. The birth of Christ marked the beginning of a new age. The Orthodox church talks of Jesus of Nazareth as the “second Adam”. The first human messed up by rejecting God — by choosing control over communion, and falling into self-love. The incarnation of God in human form corrects the error: we get a second chance to turn from ourselves and look to the greater whole.

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It is, as I say, a strange story: frightening, glorious, thrilling, radical, impossible, repulsive to some. Jesus remains the most controversial man in history, and his followers have always been looked at, like him, through narrowed eyes. Here in the West we are still emerging, both psychologically and structurally, from a period in which Christianity was associated with authority: with power and Popes and state churches and holy wars. Now that this authority has been overthrown, Christians are increasingly regarded again as they were for the first four centuries of their existence: with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Some Christians regret this, and long for the return of a West in which church and state again hold sway in tandem: a world of faith, in which the people live, at least in theory, by the way of the cross. I understand this: it’s an enticing vision. I would like to live, I think, among the symbolic splendour of the high medieval Christian world. Certainly I’ve never felt comfortable in this one. But for better or worse, that world is not coming back, and it seems right that a faith built on sacrifice and renunciation should again require some of its followers. Throw down your nets and follow me. If the world hates you, know that it hated me first. The Way was never supposed to be comfortable. Christ and power don’t mix.

This is how it seems to me, but I am still new. One thing I have learned though — or had brought home to me, because I knew it before I became Christian — is the necessity of ritual in a human life. One reason I joined the Orthodox church, despite being an Englishman who lives in Ireland, was because of its deep understanding and practice of this. We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else.

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The rituals of the Orthodox church are sometimes florid and always long, and like Christianity itself they can look strange or off-putting from the outside. But the first time I attended a divine liturgy, I knew where I belonged. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t put my finger on. This service, largely unchanged for 1600 years, has a spiritual and psychological impact that can’t be outlined in essays or explained in words at all.

Church rituals, like those of all religions, fit into a wider pattern — that of the ritual year. As a Christian celebrating my first real Christmas, I have come late to the realisation of how much this matters. I think this is why many Western Christians hanker for the Christendom that is gone: not because they desire power, but because of the container, the guiding light, that the ritual year offers, and because they see what we have lost by abandoning it. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Whitsun — we still know the names, but we are long detached from the symbolic pattern they provided, and the understanding of our place in the universe that they formalised in daily life. What comes together in the bread and the wine, changed into the flesh and the blood — this can never be replaced with turkey and sherry.

Something is missing here, and not just for Christians. I have come to believe that humans are above all religious animals. If we do not have a religion, we will make one for ourselves, or substitute politics or ideology for it, to assuage our need for ritual, worship and meaning. But ideology or self-help can’t fill the gap, because what is missing is the thing we are all fleeing from, like the fire it is. The real meaning of Christmas, I think, and maybe the real meaning of all faith, is simply: look up. Raise your gaze. When we lose the religion that made us, and the rituals that contained it, however imperfect those things were, we lose our understanding of the heart of the matter, the thing we turn from and scorn and then are returned to because nothing else will fit into the empty space in our hearts: God.

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Good, say the atheists, about time. I disagree. I think that understanding that there is something higher than us — that we are part of a greater pattern, that a higher intelligence is at work, that we are not in charge and that this is good. I think that without this understanding we find ourselves back in the garden, tasting the apple all over again, every day of our lives. We choose self over other, control over communion, power over sacrifice. Of course we do: we all do. We want to walk that way. But I think we can see now where it is leading us.

Like I say, it is ridiculous to write about religion. Ridiculous for me, anyway. But there is nothing else I can say today. It is deep winter, but some light is rising. It has been rising for a long time. Everybody should celebrate today, whatever they choose to raise a glass to. It has been a hard year. I will try to turn my scattered mind, before the feast and after, to the words that made us, and which still linger in the air, waiting to settle on the holy and the profane, the weak and the strong, the willing and the broken and the unsuspecting:

 Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.

He eventually became a YouTube Bruh: that genre of male intellectual celebrity, like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, “destroying” idiots in bite-sized video clips. But the appeal of Hitchens, to me at least, wasn’t just polemical; he possessed a suavity that impressed me powerfully. He was just as likely to riff on Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel sequence on twentieth-century British upper-class life as to publicly humiliate a religious crank.

I was 13 when I first discovered him. He had a similar appeal to me as James Bond: the willingness to engage in combat, the charm and sophistication of a worldly bruiser, even the booze. In a 2000 documentary called Hitch Hike, made by Channel 4 and tracking Hitchens’s book tour of his polemic against Bill Clinton, he said, “Jimmy Cameron was the reason I wanted to become a journalist”. He added that Cameron, who was a foreign correspondent, wrote a piece in 1966 outlining all the things he had accomplished as a journalist. Here is Hitchens ventriloquising Cameron: “I’ve sat with Ho Chi Minh, and I was deported from South Africa, and I was there listening to Nehru at midnight when India became a free country. I’ve also swum in all the five oceans and fucked on all five continents”. Hitchens himself made the world of the hack seem glamorous.

Or, perhaps, not the glamour of Bond or a foreign correspondent, but another form: the monied public intellectual. As Ian Parker puts it in his excellent 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens: “Hitchens has the life that a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be: he wakes up when he likes, works from home, is married to someone who wears leopard-skin high heels, and conducts heady, serious discussions late into the night.”

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On the topic of glamour, there was something also Francophile about him, and not just his fondness for exposing part of his chest in interviews and debates. He was an eighteenth-century style iconoclast, a public school Voltaire, who took down sacred cows: Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and God. This tendency toward confrontation was instilled by his education in Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the heretics of Communism. One must never stick rigidly to the party line. Individual responsibility and moral conscience were essential.

Nevertheless, there was also a coarseness beneath his oratorical sheen: when he tried, for instance, to divorce the civil rights movement from its religious influence, emphasising the secularism of A. Philip Randolph over the religious fervour of Martin Luther King. This was sophistry. Arguing, as he also did, that religion poisons everything, was intellectually juvenile and inconsistent with his deep appreciation of John Donne.

When he said, moreover, “there is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ”, this was a brilliant epigram. H.L. Mencken would be proud of its rhetorical force, but it’s also nonsense: IQ is one of the most stable findings in psychology and social science.

Related to this coarseness was his deep appreciation for vulgarity and obscenity. Substantial passages of his memoir Hitch-22 are dedicated to explaining the games he used to play with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Clive James and others: the boomer version of Dr Johnson’s Club. He called the gathering “the Bloomsbury kebab joint”. One of their games consisted of substituting the word “heart” for “dick” in well-known titles, or the word “love” for “fuck”, or “love” for “hysterical sex”. So they got, among many other confected titles, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Man Who Fucked Women”, and “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate”.

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He once said to an audience who were distracted by a heckler, “leave him alone … I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire”. On the question of Mother Teresa’s virginity, he wrote: “Who can say what happened with the dashing boulevardiers of Skopje when Agnes Bojaxhiu was but a pouting and trusting lass? (The whole problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position.)”.

This bawdiness was at times entertaining and at times embarrassing. But what we value in intellectuals is not often the particular arguments they make but their personality. As Edward Said wrote, in an essay about public intellectuals, “when I read Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertrand Russell it is their specific, individual voice and presence that makes an impression on me over and above their arguments because they are speaking out for their beliefs. They cannot be mistaken for an anonymous functionary or careful bureaucrat”.

The voice of Hitchens worked less well in print. As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”. Martin’s father Kingsley was more brutal: he described Hitchens as “the one who can talk but can’t write”. This was in the Seventies, during Hitchens’s New Statesman days, when his prose was more functional and didactic. According to Amis fils, however, Hitchens’s writing improved after 1989. But there were still some odd tics in his style after this, such as his tendency towards using brackets for a needless digression on some point, and puncturing that digression with a showy italicised word or phrase. I can endlessly listen to him speak in interviews and discussion panels; but reading him can be a bumpy experience.

When Amis said Hitchens thought like a child, he was getting at something. Although Hitchens’s moral convictions seemed admirably clear, they also strayed into simple-mindedness: some of his criticism of the “anti-imperialist” Left and religious extremism is still valuable, but his zealous support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks even more disastrous now.

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Although Hitchens spent much of his career going after sacred cows, many of his fans now treat him in a hagiographical fashion. After the Spectator journalist Angus Colwell wrote a piece criticising Hitchens’s gung-ho support for the war in Afghanistan in August, many people described Colwell as possessing “sour grapes” and argued that Hitchens was “living rent-free” in his mind. These responses speak to the cultishness that surrounds some of Hitchens’s fan base; it is like someone is attacking their dad.

But if there is one thing worth taking from the writings and life of Christopher Hitchens, it is the importance of thinking critically and independently. Turning a blind eye to his faults out of a sense of sentimental loyalty seems profoundly un-Hitchian. It’s a shame that many of his supporters do this. But then again, as the title to Julien Benda’s book about intellectuals suggests, La Trahison des Clercs, public intellectuals are often like clerics. We should be able to admire Hitchens’s voice without taking it as holy writ.

But I wasn’t there to gossip, plot and gripe with my mates; I was on a mission. Would I be able to work out what the Prime Minister really thought about religion? I have long found this a puzzle, not knowing what to make of the multitude of signals that he gives out. Earlier this year he described himself as a “very, very bad Christian”. Asked by Robert Peston whether he was now a Roman Catholic, after his marriage in a Roman Catholic cathedral, he declined to answer. “I don’t discuss these deep issues,” he blustered. Then, spotting an opportunity to have a swipe at the openly atheist Keir Starmer, he added a quote from Psalm 14: “the foolish man has said in his heart there is no God.” Peston played along and simply chuckled.

There was lots of chuckling going on at No.10. Introduced by fellow Etonian, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Boris stood up and threw out some amusing anecdotes. He and Justin Welby go running together round Lambeth Palace gardens. Sometimes they run in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. It was a metaphor for the relationship between church and state. He then thanked the Church for its Covid response, which delivered on “the clear teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ to ‘be a good neighbour’”. Oh, I thought. Now there is a phrase: “our Lord Jesus Christ”. “Our” is such a strong word of belonging. The evangelicals smiled. It is an “I am one of you” word. Or maybe it was just something he said — something people say.

The problem I have with Boris is that all that Etonian bluster and bullshit is so wall-to-wall you never get the feeling you are seeing the real thing, whatever that is. I long for a flicker of sincerity — something Mrs May did in spades at her Christmas parties — some sense of what he really thinks about things. Yes, what he really believes. But there is a kind of dandyish public-school raconteur for whom the admission of sincerity is some sort of failure, a sign that the great game has broken down, a depressing admission that charm can only go so far. So everything is deflection and misdirection, smiling and ducking, making other people laugh as a strategy of tactical evasion. And as with Peston, it works. Our laughter gives him time to make for the exit. Only then do you feel just a little short-changed.

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Now this sort of dandyish bullshitter has to be very careful with religion. Because at some point religion demands precisely the kind of moral seriousness — sincerity of heart — that Boris despises, or is at a loss to know what to do with. Yes, I too avoid the man who will come up to me on Oxford Street, look me straight in the eye and ask me if I believe in Jesus. Everything inside me screams “none of your bloody business”. But this sort of evangelical directness has no time for the social conventions which we often hide behind, and which allow Boris Johnson to be the master of illusion.

But there is a story about Boris being put on the spot like this. And it is quite extraordinary.

Back in 2019, at the time of the September Equinox, a group of new-age religious pilgrims — Extinction Rebellion supporters — were walking the Ridgeway, part of an ancient trail from Salisbury Plain to East Anglia, a route well-known for its springs and holy places. Their plan was to travel barefoot and sing to the Great Spirit Mother as they went. They wanted their prayers to “open the hearts and minds of those in power”.

As they passed Chequers, the weekend retreat of the Prime Minister, they stopped off to visit a nearby farm shop. And — how extraordinary — there he was: Boris Johnson getting his groceries. Just Boris and the cashier in this tiny, enclosed space. And not knowing what to say, this group of women decided to stand around and just sing: “Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you.”

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Now I find what happened next really hard to square with what I know of the Prime Minister. The way Tori Lewis, one of the women, describes the scene, Boris Johnson was strangely moved by the experience. “His mouth is just open, he has his hand on his heart, he has tears in his eyes.” Of course, Boris had no idea how to react to this cringey intrusion into his personal space. “I, err, don’t know what…” he apparently blurted out.

Tori goes on: “Annabel intuitively — she’s a beautiful mother — puts her hand on his shoulder and sees him like a little boy that he is and we keep singing.” Regaining his composure, Boris asks the group where they are from, makes polite conversation, and looks for the exit. “We are healing the world one heart at a time” they sing as he leaves.

If this wasn’t strange enough, one of the group then overheard him talking to his then-girlfriend, Carrie, who was waiting outside: “Where have they come from, it’s like they have emerged from the Earth?” he asked. “Yes” she replied, “and they have a message for you.” And he said, “listen to your heart”.

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This, by the way, is the reason evangelical Christians used to get such good results in posh public schools. Here is a group of emotionally damaged children, who have suffered a kind of privileged abandonment, who have learnt to manage the absence of necessary motherly love — though this management is inevitably unstable and difficult to maintain. Suddenly, they are offered a kind of love — a “hand on the shoulder” — that is as emotionally direct and all-embracing as they might imagine motherly love to be. It is a religion of the heart, so to speak, for those whose hearts are a source of pain. Some retreat from this offer, appalled. Others embrace it with huge transformative joy, and it marks them for the rest of their lives. “Why do you need a God if you have a good mother?” my friend, the psychotherapist Adam Phillips, asked me the other day. It’s a very challenging question.

Justin Welby didn’t get converted at Eton. His conversion was at Cambridge, on the evening of 12 October 1975. There is often a single date, for evangelicals, because what happens is a kind of immediate breakthrough. A friend invited Welby to his rooms at Trinity College. Nearing midnight, Nicky Hills pressed Welby, “Jesus died on the cross for you, Justin”. At that moment, Welby says that the penny dropped and, as he later put it, “I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life”. Were Welby on Adam Phillips’ couch, this experience would no doubt be brought into some sort of conversation about his highly dysfunctional parents — both alcoholics, his father turning out not to have been his father after all.

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Boris had a dysfunctional home life, too. His mother and father divorced when he was 15. There are stories that his father was abusive towards her. But where Welby embraced the emotional hyper-sincerity of evangelical Christianity, Boris rejects it with every fibre of his being, terrified that it is the one thing that can bring down the “pyramid of piffle” on which the whole Boris act is founded.

In effect, Boris is a polytheist: he worships a great many gods. That’s what allows him to be all things to all people. Yes, he refers to “our Lord Jesus Christ” in front of the Christians, but he’d flirt in the same way with other gods too — as promiscuous with divinity as he is elsewhere in his life.

Boris has a lot in common with his schoolmate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can see why they got on. They have similar demons. But they react to them in totally opposite ways, running in different directions.

How appalling! How dare you pipe out ganache to pretend you are one of us! What will these dastardly immigrants think of next?

I don’t mean to belittle what happened in Liverpool on Sunday. Emad al-Swealmeen, an Iraqi asylum seeker, died when an improvised bomb went off in the back of a taxi. He was allegedly on his way to the Remembrance service at Liverpool’s vast Cathedral, the place where he was prepared for confirmation, photographed smiling beside the Bishop. Had he succeeded in exploding his home-made bomb as worshippers made their way from the remembrance of deaths past, he would have caused carnage. This was wickedness itself.

But the fall-out from this incident has laid the blame at the very church he was seeking to blow up. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is reportedly appalled that the Church of England is naively complicit in ‘gaming’ the immigration system, converting hundreds of asylum seekers as a way of helping them avoid deportation to countries where being a Christian could be a death sentence. But that simply isn’t true.

My church in South London welcomes asylum seekers. Until lockdown, we hosted a weekly surgery where asylum seekers, mostly from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, could find support, including legal advice. I have been to court several times to speak on behalf of people in my congregation whose legal status here is uncertain. I have visited members of my congregation held in detention centres. And yes, I am unapologetically ‘on their side’.

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But to conclude from this that we are naive is like concluding that a defending barrister is gullible for presenting the best case for their client before the judge. The immigration authorities have their role and I have mine. It is not my job to do their work for them.

This is not naivety. Pretty much every day, I have someone on my doorstep telling me a tale. They have to go somewhere to see a dying mother; can I give them £20 for the train fare? Can I sign this document to say that they are churchgoers? These are the easy ones. Many stories are dark and frightening. Some are threatening. Posh middle-class people tell me stories too. Like many clergy, I have a bullshit detector honed by decades of such daily encounters.

Sometimes the story is true. But even if I think it is not, I still look for a way to help them. After all, something very real has driven them to ring a stranger’s door and ask for help. My job is to juggle suspicion with compassion. To be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” was Jesus’s commission. And if I do find a way to help, it doesn’t mean I believe them. It’s because someone asked me.

So good on Elizabeth and Malcolm Hitchcott, the Christian couple who took al-Swealmeen into their home, and provided him with food and shelter. They were not suckers or liberal do-gooders. Jesus was not a sucker for sharing his table with the man who would betray Him to death. The Hitchcotts are heroes, models of Christian compassion. It is a part of the Christian faith that in the cosmic battle of good against evil, kindness will win the day. Indeed, this is the message at the very heart of the Christian story: faith is about exposure to risk and death. There is no such thing as risk-free Christianity.

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“Christians are more renowned for their bake sales and the ferocity of their whist drives than for their eagerness to commit mass murder,” wrote Tom Harris, former Labour MP, this week. But he misunderstands where Christianity fits into Sunday’s attack. If the question raised by this incident is the nature of true believing, then look to the Hitchcotts. They embody it.

Was Al-Swealmeen himself pretending to be a Christian? For the sake of argument, let’s assume he was. But tell me: how can his sincerity or lack of it be tested? He studied the Bible. He went to church. He asked to be baptised and confirmed. What am I supposed to be looking for to confirm whether he means it or not? Eyes too close together? A certain hesitancy of speech? Shall I hook up my confirmation class to a lie detector test? “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls” said Elizabeth I. Quite right too.

But Priti Patel is not interested in such matters. Here is a telling comparison. Earlier this year, struggling for votes before the Knesset elections, the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the spectre of “false conversions” to Judaism, hinting that migrant workers from Africa might overrun Israel, using conversion to gain citizenship. This followed a High Court ruling that those who had converted to Judaism through the Reform and Conservative movements should be recognised as Jews and thus entitled to Israeli citizenship. What we heard from Netanyahu is the same spiel now offered by Patel: conversion is a way of avoiding border control. In both cases, it’s not about religion at all. It’s a political line designed to appeal to their political base.

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This forms part of a broader double-think concerning religion and immigration that often takes place on the Right. On the one hand, conservatives tend to value Christianity because they regard it as in some way constitutive — at least historically — of who we are as English, and of the West in general. Christianity is a part of our cultural identity. Thus, for instance, the Right might argue they are protecting Christianity by insisting upon more stringent immigration policies. Sometimes, this particular use of Christianity bleeds over into a subtle racist code for ‘not Muslim’. In recent years, cultural Christianity has become a part of Right-wing identity politics. Fake Christianity comes in many forms.

But when this sort of Christianity as culture bumps into the real thing — such as that of Elizabeth and Malcom Hitchcott — they run a mile from it. If the response to Sunday’s attack has exposed one thing, it’s that the Right wants the religion of choral evensong and of the kindly vicar’s village fete — not all that dodgy stuff about loving your enemies or turning the other cheek.

I knew his voice, I’d heard his sermons over many years, but I didn’t know him. A bit like Jonathan Sacks. And I thought that death had brought comfort to him, that the proximity of death had elevated him, and when it came, he was blessed.

There were five Jewish singer-songwriters who clouded my consciousness when I was growing up. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. (Marc Bolan didn’t really count.) Dylan was like an itinerant Protestant preacher from Minnesota, searching for a home he could never find. Tangled up in blue. Leonard, from Montreal, was the Catholic Priest burdened by original sin, and then adding a few more of his own. Ain’t no cure for love. Paul Simon ran the gospel choir, like a bridge over troubled water. Neil Diamond ran the summer camp. Sweet Caroline raised spirits round the fire. Barry Manilow was the only one who actually showed up at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs and I can tell you, Copa Cabana and Could it be Magic were the only songs by this crew that my Mum really liked.

I thought that the five of them should get together and form a band called the Sanhedrin, but then again the only song that Cohen and Dylan recorded together, with Allen Ginsberg, was called ‘Don’t go home with your hard on’. Phil Spector was the producer. I let the idea go.

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It was Dylan who towered over them all but then Cohen made a late bid for glory. The closer to death, the greater the work. The Future, released in 1992, bore the hallmark of prophesy and foreboding.

“It’s coming from the sorrow on the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin
that goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.”

His voice, his songs, and even his music became stronger in his sixties and seventies, full of wisdom and compassion. ‘Anyhow’, ‘Come Healing’ and ‘Amen’ are unique and profound songs and ‘Lullaby’ is the only song I know that directly speaks to insomnia. “If your heart is torn, I don’t wonder why, if the night is long, here’s my lullaby.” It is beautiful.

They are all from the album Old Ideas that was released when he was 78. Bob Dylan could barely talk, Neil Diamond could barely walk but Leonard Cohen, the firstborn, was still throwing lightning bolts of prayer and repentance until his death. In ‘Steer your Way’ from his final album the perfect diction of his prophetic heart was still beating:

“Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women that you bought
Year by year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.  
They whisper still the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make us holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by Year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.”

And yet we didn’t. The greatness of his work is his ease with the ancient stones, the dry bones and the mountain tops of the Bible. Abraham and King David live again. The Psalms frame and animate his writing; Hallelujah. Jesus is a constant presence from first to last. Whether he was a sailor, who walked upon the water, or the spirit who will re-animate love, the holy spirit hovers over his work:

“It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence on the dock of the bay
From the brave the bold the battered heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

No wonder the election of Donald Trump was the final nail in his coffin.

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His decades-long devotion to Zen Buddhism was also part of the story. He spent years in a Buddhist monastery in California, learning from Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who, it turned out, molested and abused hundreds of women in his role as head of the order. He claimed that sexual contact with a Zen Master would help women attain “new levels of non-attachment”. Who’d have thought?

And for all the drawing on the Kabbalah, in which sexual union is the most sublime expression of divine love, there is no mention of faithfulness, of marriage, of the fidelity to a woman and to God that is the basis of that teaching. Throughout his work, eros is disconnected from devotion. It is an escape, a healing, a triumph; but it is not bound by covenant or love. 

“And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease”.

The Sixties, when Leonard Cohen abandoned the idea of being a novelist and a poet and moved to New York to be a singer-songwriter, was a cauldron of sexual liberation and enslavement. The over-the-counter-culture intensified the commodification of sex, the dissolution of its relational essence accompanied by celebrity endorsement. The idea that sex was sacred was profaned. It was a time full of sex cults, and the emergence of Kabbalah as part of an occult sexology was part of that story. And Leonard Cohen, who initially saw himself as a prophet of a new religion, was one of the high priests of that movement.

“It’s coming from the women and the men
Ah baby we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
that rivers gonna weep
And the mountains gonna shout Amen.
It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious, in amorous array
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

It’s hard to load the dishwasher after that. It is the lack of relationality in regard to sex that is remarkable. He would have benefited from a conversation with Mary Harrington. Love and eros were divorced and it is notable that in his final recording, having elevated sex to the sublime life force of creation throughout his work, he writes: “I don’t want a lover, no, no, the wretched beast is tame.” The body and the soul could not find reconciliation.

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There was more than a dose of the biblical prophet in Leonard, and more than a dose of the new age cultist. His defrauding by his manager and ex-lover make sense within this story. The ‘wretched beast’, ‘my crazy’, and his adventures on ‘Boogie Street’ could not be constrained by his merger of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. They could not be bound; they could not be consecrated and so ‘love itself, love itself was gone’.

He was like Noah, a great man of his time, but unlike Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Imam Hussein, he could not make the sacrifice required for redemption. He was enslaved by sex. There was no liberation there. And unlike King David, the Kingdom was merely his own.

In 1992, Cohen promised: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The crack in the wall that creates a space for democracy and a cold and very broken hallelujah. In the end, however, the birth was betrayed and the marriage spent. He refused to be bound by his understanding, that the forgiveness of others is far more important that forgiving yourself. He had a messianic vocation but he could not fulfil it. He wanted it darker. And he blew out the flame.

I wonder how many times she has done this? 10,000 people a year? For 69 years. Round up a bit. That’s three quarters of a million. A YouGov poll in 2018 found that 31% of the British public said that they have met or seen the Queen. By a long distance, she has been the most met monarch in history. Which is extraordinary given how shy she is. “You were so shy” Prince Philip recalled, thinking of their first meeting. She once told a friend that she was “terrified” of sitting next to strangers “in case they talk about things I’ve never heard of.” She soldiered on anyway. 

Fewer people will meet her now. Rest, withdrawal, and slight diminishments are her future. After all, she is 95. More audiences on Zoom, which she won’t like. Back to her Tupperware packed lunches and jigsaw puzzles by the fire. No more gin in the evening, on doctors orders. Her troublesome children to worry about. And now a widow. Her vulnerability only underlining once again how central she remains to this nation.

But this vulnerability has long been a characteristic of her reign. Just 5ft 4, she walks among suited and uniformed men towering over her. The only Prime Minister to ever look her directly in the eye was Margaret Thatcher. She was just 25, little more than a girl, when she acceded to the throne, and 27 when the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the responsibility of the crown upon her head. 277 million people worldwide were gathered round their small black and white television sets.

What they didn’t see was the central moment of the whole ceremony. Then the Queen was disrobed of her crimson cloak and her jewellery removed. Here she sat in a simple white dress on a wooden throne to be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury with holy oil, a mixture of ambergris, civet, orange flowers, roses, jasmine, cinnamon, musk and benzoin, ladled from a 12th century spoon. This is when the choir sings ‘Zadok the Priest’, its words extracted from the first Book of Kings, sung at every English coronation since 973 AD. These echoes of the Hebrew Bible are deliberate. She, like Solomon, was dedicated to God. Kings and Queens are supposed to be servants too. In Christian terms, like the servant king who emptied himself of power in order to achieve His most important work.

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This bit was too raw for the cameras, the daylight of technology threatening to cheapen the magic of sanctity, to paraphrase Walter Bagehot. The monarchy, he wrote in The English Constitution, was the “dignified” branch of power. Romantic, awesome, sublime. The government was merely “efficient” — cabinet ministers and civil servants chewing pencils and pushing paper.

Monarchy is a religious business — or else it would be nothing more than a technical constitutional necessity that sits at the intersection of money and class and power. And the essence of this religious business, the unseen holiness as it were, is a kind of vulnerability that places one’s life in the service of other people and of God. This is why all these headlines we now see about the Queen being “tired” and “exhausted” reflect something of the heart of her ministry — for that is what her role remains.

In theological terms, the crucial word is kenosis, which means self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” is how Paul’s letter to the people of Philippi puts it. What is being described here is a process by which the ego is set aside for the fullness of God’s love to enter into a human life. The less of me, the more of You. In this way vulnerability is regarded as the defining feature of precisely the sort of holiness that was there in that moment of the Queen’s anointing. A ‘tired” Queen is an exemplification of just this sort of kenotic servant monarchy. In other words, a “tired” Queen is the perfect sacrificial embodiment of what a monarch should be. And demonstrates why the well-being centred virtue-signalling showiness of some of her relatives is such a grotesque parody of the role.

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But to put this in more secular terms, vulnerability is the means of connection between people. Our vulnerability is how we are open to the other and the other is open to us. Which is why — and I don’t think I am just imagining this — the present vulnerability of the Queen is establishing a renewed kind of intimacy between the Queen and her subjects. Given the formality within which she is encased, it is entirely inappropriate to say this — but I want to give her a hug. We don’t need the handshakes or the curious peering into a familiar woman’s face to try and work out what is going on behind all that well-rehearsed small talk. The more vulnerable she becomes, the more human, and so also the more fully a Queen in the theological sense.

Such public defencelessness is rare, at least in leaders. The last one I can remember achieving anything like this was Pope John Paul II. His last few years — and these may well be the last few years of the Queen’s life — were marked by a reduced physical capacity, while at the same time he became a more intense version of what he was called to be. To be a Pope is partly to perform a certain function. But when ill health robbed him of the ability to perform that function, all the job description utilitarian bits of being Pope dropped away and his, as it were, symbolic role was more fully exposed.

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A tired dying Pope turned out to be a beautiful example of what a Pope should be. In his pain, and specifically in the dignity of his final years, he expressed a kind of solidarity with the suffering of the world. That, in turn, modelled the solidarity of God with human beings as expressed in the final hours of Jesus, a king, a man crowned with thorns. In this vulnerability, he became most fully the Pope as saint.

Thankfully, the Queen is not yet this ill. But she is 95 and easily the longest serving monarch in history. Her Christian faith has long been a comfort to her. And this is especially evident now, in the twilight of her years. Indeed, the version of the Queen that we are now seeing is the greatest of her roles as our monarch. It is not important if she misses COP26 or other political talking shops. She is doing something much more important now.

The whole story evoked The Exorcist, which came out a few years before I was born and was considered the ne plus ultra of shocking content into my tween years in the nineties. But even setting aside the fact that the other “side” seems to have won, Nobell’s story evoked less shock than nostalgia.

In 2021, even the idea of a priest as the main protagonist in a battle between good and evil feels, well, very 1973. These days, while there’s plenty of Satanist imagery about, overtly anti-Christian symbols seem either banal (Lil Nas selling Satan trainers) or just naff (WitchTok).

But if devilish imagery mostly feels a bit cringe, the Devil himself has gone mainstream. If being deliberately anti-Christian pour épater la bourgeoisie feels exhausted, for the new, post-Christian bourgeoisie Satan now reads like the good guy. And in the hands of this class, the Devil’s proverbial pride, self-regard and refusal to yield isn’t just celebrated — it’s on its way to becoming the established religion of the United States of America.

America’s Satanic Temple, founded in 2012, is still small in terms of absolute membership. But it hit the headlines last week when it announced plans to sue the government of Texas for restricting women’s ability to abort a pregnancy. In response, Salon magazine declared it the “last, best hope” for protecting abortion rights in the state. The Satanic Temple has an impressive track record in self-promotion via outrage, such as founding a Satanist after-school club. It goes without saying that in our febrile online political climate, the convergence of “abortion”, “ritual”, “lawsuit” and “Satan” resulted in a lot of publicity for the group.

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But how did we get to a point where an online magazine with 10 million monthly readers is hailing Satanists as last-ditch heroes? The truth is that our modern sympathy for the devil has deep roots. And Americans in particular are highly susceptible.

Perhaps Milton is to blame; Cromwell’s chief propagandist is famous for creating the most sympathetic Satan in literary history. In Milton’s 1663 Biblical epic Paradise Lost, Satan both longs for the Heaven he’s renounced, but stubbornly refuses to be ruled, declaring: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”.

This matters, because Milton wrestled with core questions of law, authority and personal freedom that roiled at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. And the Reformation was foundational to the modern West (and especially to America). And tracing the history of that rebellion brings us, today, to the startling conclusion that post-Christian America is an increasingly Satanist regime.

Paradise Lost was written against a backdrop of religious ferment. Following Martin Luther’s 1517 rejection of the constraining, legalistic force of Catholic law, Civil War England was a chaos of competing sects. For in seeking to free Christians from a Church reformers claimed was rigid and corrupt, the Protestants opened themselves up to the possibility that all laws, rules and constraints might be replaced by faith. A great deal of early Protestant turmoil was driven by people arguing over what, if any, limits there should be to the rebellion against doctrine.

Some took it to extremes. One of Luther’s colleagues, Johann Agricola, preached in 1525 that even the Ten Commandments belong “in the courthouse, not the pulpit”. “To the gallows with Moses!” he declared. Luther was having none of it, dubbing this extreme rejection of legalism as “antinomian” heresy, meaning opposition to “nomos”, or law.

Laurence Clarkson, an antinomian contemporary of Milton, even wrote in one 1640 pamphlet that sin is fake news: “sin hath its conception only in the imagination; therefore; so long as the act was in God, or nakedly produced by God, it was as holy as God”.

As they say today: believe in yourself, and you can do anything. Though Milton painted such extreme rejections of authority and rules as — literally — Satanic, the appealingly anti-heroic nature of his Satan suggests he had mixed feelings. He wasn’t the last writer to be thus ambivalent. A century on, the antinomian celebration of self-expression accelerated in the Romantic era.

The engraver and poet William Blake declared in his 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments… Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules”. Meanwhile, of course, across the pond Milton’s republicanism was a key influence in shaping the American rebellion against government from the Old World.

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Fast forward another century on, and it’s not such a big step from thinking God’s grace gives you the freedom to do what you want, to dispensing with the God bit. The occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) pursued a doctrine of individual will unconstrained by law or stuffy morality. He called himself “The Beast 666”, experimented with sex and drugs and in 1923 was expelled from Sicily after an associate died in mysterious circumstances, reportedly after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat.

We tend to think of such deliberately shocking behaviour as the essence of “Satanism”. But Crowley’s core legacy was stripping the last remnants of Christianity from antinomian rebellion. His most famous dictum, written in The Book of the Law (1909), was: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

He wasn’t the only one. Already in 1882, Friedrich Nietszche declared God dead and the human will to power as the only real source of good. In America, meanwhile, the individualist celebration of mankind became ever less Christian. Though she disavowed him later, the American writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982), called Nietzsche her “favourite philosopher” in the 1930s. Rand’s doctrine, Objectivism, argues selfishness is both noble and good: “It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want,” argues one character in Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead, “And it takes the greatest kind of courage”.

Both Crowley and Rand pursued the liberation of individual will from taboo, custom, law and even (as practitioners of ceremonial magic hoped) reality itself. These influences fused again in 1966 California, with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Lavey drew on both Rand and Crowley to reject all collectivist constraints on individual behaviour and emphasise the primacy of individual desire. “There is a beast in man,” he declared, “that should be exercised, not exorcised.”

LaVey, a former carnival worker, took a highly theatrical approach to exercising that beast, incorporating dark ceremonies and all the props you’d expect to find in a horror-movie depiction of Satanism (or indeed in quite a lot of heavy metal). But if he was still rebelling against Christianity, the core Satanist philosophy of radical, godless freedom took less provocative form elsewhere in 1966 California in, for example, the “self-actualisation” promoted by Abraham Maslow, at the Esalen Institute.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that individual autonomy and self-empowerment is the central aim of the Satanic Temple’s abortion ritual, the “ceremonial affirmation of self-worth and bodily autonomy” at the heart of the group’s current Texas court case.

But this doesn’t mean you need to become a devout Satanist to embrace the belief that self-empowerment is our real purpose in life, and that guilt is an unwarranted intrusion. Aleister Crowley wrote in The Book of the Law that “Every man and woman is a star”. And from Rand to Maslow to a trillion “empowering” Pinterest memes today, a variant of this dictum is a core message of the self-help industry.

Self-help writer Julia Cameron, for example, closely echoes Ayn Rand in her 1992 bestseller The Artist’s Way when she declares: “What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do”. Elsewhere, if you want a bit more ritual with your individualism, but the heavy-metal Church of Satan vibe isn’t your thing, there’s the occultism-meets-pamper-day aesthetic of Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s 2019 The Witch’s Guide To Self-Care.

Echoing Crowley, Murphy-Hiscock tells us: “Living as your authentic self means following a very individual path”. If, for instance, you find yourself plagued by inconvenient feelings of guilt as a consequence of doing exactly what you want, Murphy-Hiscock suggests a ritual for “releasing” those feelings.

No wonder the modern Satanic Temple is now (as the Guardian suggested in 2019) hard to distinguish from the liberal “good guys”. At its core Satanism is simply the doctrine of untrammelled individualism, shorn of any link to the divine. To put it another way: Satanists are just very, very liberal.

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Milton saw Satan’s refusal to submit to any law (however ambivalently) as the sin of pride. Now, in our post-Christian world of self-actualisation, pride is no longer a sin. Rather, it’s a vital part of becoming fully yourself. As body modification micro-celebrity Farrah Flawless put it: “I do not believe in God, I don’t worship the Devil, but yes I am a Satanist which means I am my own god. I worship myself’.

Indeed, it’s so far from being a sin that sacralised self-worship now has an annual religious festival. This new, increasingly pseudo-religious summer event, simply known as “Pride Month”, may have started out as a twentieth-century campaign for gay and lesbian equality. But what began as a justified and (at root deeply Christian) campaign for equal treatment for gay and lesbian people has long since morphed into a corporate-sponsored celebration of individualism that today horrifies many gay and lesbian people.

Pinterest, the internet’s motherlode of self-help platitudes, succinctly summed up the new faith in an official post this year. As a religious holiday, Pride isn’t about gay rights; it’s where we “celebrate identity and self-expression in all its forms”. Inasmuch as Milton’s ambivalence about rebellion lives on, it’s in the now-traditional argument about whether there are any forms of individual desire still off-limits for proud celebration.

At least on the now majority post-Christian East and West coasts of America, this sacralisation of individual freedom and desire is increasingly assertive in its efforts to expunge Christianity as America’s official faith.

A less overt challenge than those posed by Aleister Crowley or Anton LaVey, but a continuation of the same argument. This time, though, the boot is on the other foot. The side with imperial institutional and military backing is the faith of self-expression, individual will and indomitable pride.

Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.

Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.

There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.

The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.

When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.

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One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.

Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness. This, to do violence to language, was the constructive aspect of his project. The destructive side of the Nazis was the orgiastic way they revelled in nothingness and meaninglessness for their own sake. They, too, were in thrall to the death drive, which seduces us into delighting in destruction as an end in itself. As Primo Levi points out, one of the most chilling aspects of the Nazi concentration camps is that they were unnecessary. In fact, from the Nazis’s viewpoint they were in some ways counterproductive, disposing of men and women whose talents could have been harnessed to their war effort and tying down personnel and resources which might have been used elsewhere.

You might claim that it suited the Nazis to create a bugbear — an alien Other against which the nation would be united in its antagonism. But you do not need to kill six million people to create a bugbear. There was a crazed excess about the project which betrays the fact that the rationality driving it was by no means simply an instrumental one. This is one way in which the Nazi extermination differs from, say, Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and others, which was practically, politically motivated. This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter.

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Perhaps the camps were driven by practical reason in the sense that you needed to kill every last Jew in order to ensure that a Germany cleansed of despicable weakness would triumph in its wars. This was one motive for supposedly purifying the race. But it was also an end in itself. Evil has the mystery of things that are motiveless. This is one reason why it is sometimes seen as glamorous, compared to the prim world of virtue. In fact, virtue is also a matter of doing things for their own sake, rather than for profit and reward, and thus has an unnerving resemblance to evil. The devil, one should recall, was once an angel. Evil may appear full of energy and exoticism, but that is just outward show.

In reality it is flat, kitschy, sham and superficial, an incapacity for living at any depth. It is Jimmy Savile’s tracksuit, not Dracula’s gown, the spectacles of Adolf Eichmann rather than the lethal eyes of the Medusa. The evil are those who are deficient in the art of living — an art which Aristotle believed you had to get good at by constant practice if you were truly to become a person. There is no reason for doing this, any more than there is reason for burying little children on Saddleworth Moor.

Vice became exciting when virtue grew boring. For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, virtue is all about abundance of life. By the time we arrive at the philosophy of John Locke in the late 17th century, virtue is now a thoroughly bourgeois affair — a matter of thrift, prudence, chastity, temperance, honesty, sobriety and a number of other qualities for which one feels more admiration than affection. No wonder, then, that with the rise of the middle classes evil finally comes into own, as Milton’s magnificently rebellious Satan overshadows his stiff-necked bureaucrat of a God. Dickens’s heroes have all the virtues, but his villains have all the life. One would rather knock back a glass of whisky with Fagan than share an orange juice with Oliver Twist. How to make goodness interesting becomes an exacting artistic problem. A few centuries later, “wicked” would come to mean “great”, and Gothic would be all the rage in university English departments.

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In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly monk Father Zosima declares that the Satanic “demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they shall burn everlastingly in the flames of their own hatred, and long for death and non-being. But death shall not be granted them.” The evil can’t die because they are kept alive by their own loathing and self-torment. Only their misery can assure them that they still exist. This is what is traditionally meant by hell. It is the kingdom of the mad, absurd, surreal, farcical, disgusting and excremental — of all, in short, that pounds meaning and value to pieces. If only the evil could let themselves go, they might recognise that there is a more fertile kind of nothingness than destruction, namely the act of self-dispossession. Only in this way might they be open to genuine life.

Yet this demands a courage which is found wanting in one of the great literary figures of our own time, William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Marooned on his rock in the Atlantic Ocean, dead but unable to accept the fact, Martin’s giant, lobster-like claws grip one another to protect the dark centre of his identity against the flashes of black lighting which batter relentlessly against them, seeking to unlock his self-defence and penetrate his inner being so that he might be saved. Martin, however, who regards himself as too precious to die, turns his face to the sky and shouts “I shit on your heaven!” The novel ends without the reader ever learning who is the victor in this contest. We shall never know whether heaven could take this insult on the chin, smash Martin’s defences to pieces and thus allow him to be reborn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except, of course, that there are large stretches of the world where the idea that men might legally marry men, or women legally marry women, continues to be seen as abhorrent, grotesque, immoral. The list of countries that license same-sex marriage is a highly distinctive one. All of them, with the sole exception of Taiwan, are culturally Christian. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, have witnessed a decline over recent years in church-attendance. In many of them, indeed, this decline has been precipitous.

The temptation, then, might be to cast the legalisation of same-sex marriage across much of the West as a decisive repudiation of Christian assumptions. If countries like Sweden or Canada have blazed a trail yet to be followed by countries like Iran or India, then that, so the presumption goes, is simply because the decline of religion has further to go in the non-Western world. How long, though, can its ultimate collapse be put off? Reason, progress and tolerance, it might be hoped, cannot forever be bucked. Surely, then, given time, we shall see bearded couples cutting wedding cake in Qom?

What, though, if the prevalence of same-sex marriage in culturally Christian countries is due less to the repudiation of Christian assumptions, and more to their enduring influence? What if it is in truth a bloom with roots deep in a very particular seed-bed? Even in the bedroom, after all, we are shaped by the past. Much that we take for granted is relative, and much that we assume to be “human nature” is in truth the result of decades, centuries, millennia worth of cultural weathering.

The category of “homosexuality”, far from being something that has been universally recognised, is of very recent origin. Like “television”, it is a portmanteau word coined to define a concept that would have baffled previous generations. Although formed out of Greek and Latin, neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a word for it. Suetonius, in his biographies of the Caesars, noted as interesting foibles that Claudius only ever slept with women, and Galba only ever slept with men — but he did not dwell upon it.

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To the Romans, a preference for fucking males over females no more defined a man than did a preference for brunettes over blondes. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course, precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive; but the male body, too, was not lacking in orifices. A thrust or two, deep and quick, like the stabbing of a sword into the guts, and the business was done. Whether into the vagina, the anus or the mouth, it made no real difference — just so long as it was masterful.

Only one crucial qualification, one crucial safeguard, had to be respected. Free-born Romans, male and female both: these were strictly, absolutely off-limits. Conversely, it was the duty of slaves to serve a master’s every conceivable sexual need. They knew, as a matter of course, that the threat of rape might be realised at any moment.

All of which, of course, is liable to seem unfathomably alien to us. Why, though, do we find it shocking? Because, over the course of the centuries, Christian teachings on sex and marriage served radically to rewire the sexual imaginings of the ancient world. Paul, as a Jew, believed that every human body was created in the image of God, and therefore to be respected as such. Nevertheless, on his conviction that to rape was to offend against the divine, he put a novel spin.

The only acceptable sexual relationship, he argued, was one in which a man played the part of Christ, and the woman the part of the Church — which in turn left the head of a household no leeway to force himself on housemaids or pageboys. For Roman converts to Christianity, this required a radical recalibration of their most fundamental assumptions about sex. It was a recalibration from which we, in the West, have never turned back.

Something else, however, followed from Paul’s insistence on marriage between a man and a woman as the only acceptable sexual relationship. Almost incidentally, in his letter to the Romans, he paired men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women as comparable actions. Here was an acorn from which a mighty oak was destined to grow. Never before had the category of same sex relationships been defined in quite this way: as a unity.

It is the measure of how novel it was that it took centuries even to coin a word for it. The word “sodomy”, which began to be used in the 11^th century, signified not what we call “homosexuality”, but rather a deviant sexual act. It might just as well refer to anal sex between a man and a woman as to anal sex between two men, or indeed to bestiality, or to masturbation. It was a sinful act that, by definition, required from the person who committed it a surrender to sin. That was why it stood condemned.

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Then came Darwin. The functioning of natural selection, as developed in The Origin of Species, depended on reproduction. The mating habits of humans were therefore no less legitimate a field of study than those of the birds or the bees. Here, for scientists, was a licence to investigate the entire range of human sexual behaviour. In 1886, when a German psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing published a survey of what he termed “pathological fetishism”, the sheer scope of his research rendered his book a focus of interest far beyond the scholarly circles at which it was aimed.

One word in particular stuck out. Homosexualität had originally been coined in 1869, to serve the writer of a pamphlet on Prussian morality laws as shorthand for sexual relations between people of the same gender. This, of course, was precisely the category of behaviour that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had so roundly excoriated, and which the Church had come to define as “sodomy”.

Nevertheless, in the 19th century as in the Middle Ages, the word had remained a slippery one. Now, though, with the precision of an anatomist pinning down a kidney for the benefit of watching students, Krafft-Ebing had succeeded at last in identifying with a single word the category of sexual behaviour condemned by Paul.

Only a medical man, perhaps, could have done it. Krafft-Ebing’s interest in same sex relations was as a scientist, not a moralist. Why — in seeming defiance of Darwin’s theory — did men or women choose to sleep with people of their own sex? The traditional explanation, that such people were lustful predators whose failure to control their appetites had led them to weary of what God had ordained as natural, increasingly appeared to psychiatrists inadequate. Much likelier, Krafft-Ebing believed, “homosexuals” were the victims of an underlying morbid condition.

Whether this was to be viewed as something degenerative, an ailment passed down the generations, or as the result of an accident suffered in the uterus, it was clear to him that homosexuality should be regarded, not as a sin, but as something very different: an immutable condition. Homosexuals, he argued, were the creatures of their proclivities. As such — Christian concern for the unfortunate being what it was — they deserved to be treated, not with contempt, but with generosity and compassion.

Most Christians, it is fair to say, were unpersuaded. Yet if Krafft-Ebing’s research represented a challenge to Christian assumptions about sexual morality, then so also were they a fortification of them. His conclusions were not nearly as clinical as either his critics or his admirers cared to think. Raised a Catholic, he took for granted the primacy of the Christian model of marriage. The great labour of the Church in fashioning and upholding monogamy as a lifelong institution was one that he deeply valued.

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“Christianity raised the union of the sexes to a sublime position by making woman socially the equal of man and by elevating the bond of love to a moral and religious institution.” It was not despite believing this, but because of it, that Krafft-Ebing, by the end of his career, had come to believe that sodomy should be decriminalised. Homosexuals, he ringingly declared, might be no less familiar with “the noblest inspirations of the heart” than any married couple. Huge numbers of them, inspired by his researchs, duly wrote to him, sharing their most intimate yearnings and secrets. It was on the basis of this correspondence that Krafft-Ebing was able to arrive at a paradoxical conclusion. The sexual practice condemned by the Church as “sodomy” was perfectly compatible with the ideal that he saw as Christianity’s great contribution to civilisation: lifelong monogamy. Homosexuality, as defined by the first scientist ever to attempt a detailed categorisation of it, constituted the seamless union of Christian sin with Christian love.

In cool and dispassionate language, Krafft-Ebing served to put the seal on a revolution in the dimensions of the erotic without parallel in history. Paul, by twinning men who slept with men and women who slept with women, had set in train a recalibration of the sexual order that now, in an age of science, attained its apotheosis.

But “homosexuality” was not the only medical-sounding compound of Greek and Latin to which Psychopathia Sexualis introduced the world. There was a second as well: “heterosexuality”. All the other categories of sexual behaviour that Krafft-Ebing had identified — sadism, masochism, fetishistic obsessions with silk, or mourning ribbons, or gloves — were mere variations of the one great and fundamental divide: that which existed between heterosexual and homosexual desire. Categories which had taken almost two millennia to evolve were now impregnably defined. Soon enough, people came to forget that they had ever not been there.

All of which, for the Churches today, presents an agonising dilemma. Should homosexuality be condemned as sodomy or praised as love? Should same-sex marriage be slated as an abomination against God’s creation or cherished as a sacrament? Should an entire conceptualisation of sexual behaviour, unyoked as it has been from the theology that gave it birth, be repudiated by Christians as a bastard mutation or embraced as their own?

None of these questions is easily answered. Among those who take them seriously, they have ensured endless and pained debate. Among those who do not, they have provided confirmation that popes and pastors are not merely irrelevant but malign. Certainly, seen in the broad perspective of Christianity’s history, there is nothing paradoxical about the legal blessing given by so many Christian countries to an innovation that has put churches painfully on the spot. Nor does it seem very likely that there will be same-sex marriages in Qom any time soon.