The woman’s response, as Lewis reported it, was an interesting one: “It’s a public train, for heaven’s sake.”

Under this framing, it would appear that there are no customs or manners about noise in public places in Britain nowadays. Individuals and families are allowed peace and quiet at home. But once they leave that private space, they must put up with the freedom of others to do what they want, to impose and interrupt and disturb them at will.

The initial situation Lewis described is now depressingly familiar. Indeed the phenomenon, now known as “loudcasting”, has become so widespread that some travelers report facing it on pretty much every journey they take. Last week, the Prime Minister announced a campaign that promises to punish offenders with fines — though the instruction to watch videos “quietly”, rather than silently, suggests that little will change.

The practice is so objectionable because it irrupts through the boundary of our private space, imposing unchosen noise into the stream of thoughts that make for an individual life, while making private conversations more strained and difficult. It effectively imposes a law of the jungle onto public spaces, contributing to a sort of high-tech state of nature where the loudest and most brazen dominate public places, imposing their passing whims on everyone else.

The customs of private and public life that frame such encounters are the subject of Tiffany Jenkins’ recent book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. The book comes with a warning: that private life is not just under threat in the Western world, but has been under attack — and in retreat — for decades. Long before consumer technology allowed us to place our private thoughts, intimate pictures and noise tastes into the public realm, the barriers between private and public life were collapsing.

As Jenkins writes, “by the mid-1970s, the idea of a private life as freedom from interference, forged over centuries, was evaporating.” In Britain, the Younger Commission Report of 1972 revealed a generational divide, with people aged 45 and above describing privacy as “keeping your own private affairs to yourself” and “other people minding their own business”, while younger people defined it in terms of “leading your life as you want to lead it” and the like.

This might help to make sense of the couple that Martin Lewis encountered on the train. They were leading their lives as they wanted to. It was just that, by doing so, they were making it impossible for those around them to do the same.

Pressure on private life has come from many directions in recent times, not least from our own actions online. Revolutionary Leftist politics has also done its bit. In the late Eighties, the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon argued that the very division between public and private spheres should be dissolved, suggesting that it “works to protect systematic inequality” and serves “male supremacy”. Another radfem, Carol Hanisch, meanwhile promoted the idea that “The Personal is Political”, one consequence being that all personal (i.e. private) life is open to scrutiny and intrusion. The Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing chimed in with the assertion that family life is a primary source of mental illness and social dysfunction, while promoting psychology, his own practice, as “the key to the interpretation of experience in its political significance.” From here on, it seems now, your private thoughts would be a primary target of experts seeking to engineer social change.

Social science, including psychology, has a crucial role here as a source of authority that justifies intrusions into the private world of the self and intimate relations. These intrusions, it is claimed, address the root causes of social problems. Left-wing social scientists and political figures treat such things as “hate” and “Islamophobia” as if they are perversions of the mind that the state and civil society must work to eliminate. The individual’s role is to follow and do what they are told; to line up on the Right Side of History, not to think and feel for themselves but to defer to the experts.

The big claims of sociology and psychology that underlie such efforts often tend toward totalitarianism. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera recognized something like this in the Soviet bloc in which he lived his early adult life, valuing by contrast the space that liberal society offered. “Public and private are two essentially different worlds”, he says in one of the opening epigraphs to Jenkins’ book, and “respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free.”

Jenkins herself states: “It is essential to have a private space shielded from corporate, state and public scrutiny — a place where we can be alone.” Solitude, she says, “enables us to develop an inner life and a sense of self without constant external pressures.”

These “constant external pressures” may be those of the state, but they can also be those of our fellow human beings, variously “loudcasting” on the bus, shouting about politics via amplified sound systems in our town centers, or even dropping litter.

In a recent BBC article, Dr Rachael Kent, a senior lecturer in digital economy and society at King’s College, London, suggested that loudcasting is “performative… a way to rebel.” Harry Witchel, a professor of physiology at the University of Sussex, meanwhile described it as a “phenomenon of marking social territory”. Littering is similar: the person dropping the takeaway food carton or used water bottle on the street is rather like a dog peeing against a lamppost. They are leaving their imprint on the world, marking their presence, affecting others, perhaps enjoying how they can get away with it.

In this way, private life isn’t just something we experience between the four walls of our home. We take it with us: on the train, in the streets and the hospital waiting room. The condition of respecting it is what we might call “civility”: courtesy and politeness, respecting others.

In Britain, Jenkins writes, private life and the civility which facilitates it developed largely by accident from the late 17th century on, in response to religious and political conflict. “Out of the convoluted twists of history and the English Civil Wars, England’s people eventually forged a path towards the idea that political communities could survive in the midst of religious diversity if they limited their activities to a ‘private’ sphere, thus endorsing its possibility.”

In this time, toleration and freedom of conscience emerged as principles regulating public life. Queen Elizabeth I summed up the new spirit with the words, “Her Majesty is not inclined to peer into men’s hearts and secret thoughts”, later rendered into the famous line: “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” As Jenkins puts it, “the new political order… established that there were places the state could not go. From this the private realm was built.”

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By these principles, an individual human being was thereby allowed a space of their own to think and feel as they wished, in a “society of strangers”. This society was necessarily composed of people who, by and large, showed restraint and refrained from imposing themselves on others. In retrospect, perhaps the old reality of the train carriage full of silent commuters was the apotheosis of this, reflecting a society of non-interference and suppressed self-expression: Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty” made flesh.

The changes we are now experiencing reflect an evolution of liberal society away from restraint and towards self-expression, or what Berlin would describe as “positive liberty”. Globalization has also contributed, bringing together populations who do not observe such strange rules as the divide between religion (as private) and politics (public).

Islam, for example, particularly in its modern Islamist strains, is a public, political religion whose leaders would never accept God being consigned to a private sphere, let alone one of individual choice. Conservative dress, such as the niqab, is one part of this. Public prayer, of the kind that occurred in Trafalgar Square in March, is another, as is the more abstract expectation that Muslims serve the “ummah”: that is, the global community of Muslims. There is private life for Muslims under the leaders who require or encourage this behavior, but it’s not the same sort of private life that developed in the West. This sort of private life is not a place for religion but a place that must not interfere with religion. Even those Westerners who are not Muslim must take more and more care to mind their language when they talk about Islam, lest they suffer social or legal consequences or even be forced into hiding. Thus they, too, find their lives to be further intruded on by religion.

This reality jars against one of the most important aspects of private life for Jenkins: its interdependence with public life. As we have seen, private life is vulnerable and requires public permission. It requires the state but also our fellow human beings to show restraint. In turn, public life benefits, at least in theory, from the space available for thought and reflection in private life.

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Systems of multiculturalism and diversity appear to threaten this idealized state of affairs, with old liberal rights that used to attach to the individual being quietly transferred to what are termed “communities”, overseen by community and group leaders. This attaches the Muslim, gay or black individual to the group rather than affirming their right to think and feel for themselves.

Individual conscience and freedom of thought have little role in this system of diversity, either for members of protected groups or for outsiders, who are more or less prohibited from interfering with this allocation of authority away from the individual and towards group representatives. In this way, through systemic multiculturalism and diversity, the relationship between private thought and public action, a crucial plank behind the promise of liberal democracy, has at least partially broken down.

Splitting the necessary world of society and politics from private life was, we might reflect now, a civilizing process: allowing individuals, families and intimates the space to think, reflect, make mistakes, indulge interests and explore possibilities without being subject to the controlling gaze and noise of public life — including community leaders demanding fealty. As Hannah Arendt said, “Thinking and acting are not the same, and to the extent that I wish to think I have to withdraw from the world.”

The distinction between public and private also allows us the space to reach towards greatness. For, unlike what arts bureaucrats tell us, greatness in art and culture doesn’t arise from immersing ourselves in group orthodoxies, but from the mind being allowed to roam free. As Jenkins puts it, “Originality begins in private, shaded from the conformity of social pressures, long before it is made public.”  The act of creation itself, as with scientific discovery, arises out of the self: from being on your own.

That self — and the private life that nurtures and protects it — is a foundation of modern freedom and civilization. We let it wither further at our peril.

Despite — or perhaps because of — his unorthodox approach to client relations, Glassman’s methods exploded over the ensuing decades. At its peak in the late 2010s, there were more than 15,000 CrossFit-franchised gyms, known as “boxes”, across the world; when it was sold in 2020, it went for a reported $200 million. The brand answered a call for the return to machismo, offering regular dudes beyond Muscle Beach the chance to get swole. Today, grunting over kettlebells is standard fare in any old provincial PureGym, while competitive metrics — logging public runs on Strava, tracking cardio loads and recovery rates on sport watches — are integral to fitness culture (if you’ve left your Garmin at home, did the jog really happen?). In both respects, CrossFit got there first. 

Witnessing the physical transformation of your body, with scoreboards to prove it, is motivating enough. Throw in a charismatic leader with a penchant for larping as a drill sergeant and you’re really cooking on gas. Glassman, an outspoken patriot, was deeply inspired by the war in the Middle East; his lieutenant Dave Castro (who would ultimately replace him) was a former Navy Seal. From its early days, CrossFit had a big military and police client base, a fact which shouldn’t be overlooked: for men in particular, it must have been freeing to belong to a “fitness community” which shrugged off the distinctly effeminate vibe of Olivia Newton-John and Jane Fonda honing perky buttcheeks in fuzzy legwarmers. This was not about looking your best as much as being the best, embodying muscular American prowess. Now get down and give me 20 you fat fuck!  

For those who struggle to see the appeal of an expensive fitness club whose owner hurls insults at you until you throw up in a specially appointed bin in the corner of the room, CrossFit was all about winning. Workouts were timed and turned into races; everything was marked on the leaderboards. Every year a CrossFit Games event would bring together global champions to find the “fittest [athlete] on Earth”. Its leaders, Glassman included, became exercise evangelists, transplanting secular Californians’ religious inclinations into a new temple of the body.  

Glassman’s unhinged managerial style was all part of the program. Marsh frames this very Noughties CEO as a sort of muscle-head Charles Manson — a magnetic leader with a “twitchy, slightly manic brio”. His then wife and business partner Lauren Jenai put it more forcefully: “This guy is either the biggest fucking con man in history, or he’s on to something pretty fucking spectacular.” (Jenai was not far off the mark on either count, it turned out: Glassman was found to have hemorrhaged money to fund ridiculous extravagances for he and his apostles, while overseeing less than fastidious bookkeeping, according to Marsh.) His “spectacular” discovery, as it turned out, was that “men will die for points”. Pushing paying clients to the limits of endurance would keep them coming back, wads of cash in hand.

The bellowing, the aching, the vomiting — it bonded bros together. “Everyone was so freaking passionate,” says one attendee of the 2010 Games. “They were drinking the Kool-Aid at every level,” they added, in a hopefully inadvertent nod to Jonestown. Not unlike Jonestown, CrossFit promised a sort of immortality. Jenai said CrossFit’s founders “felt like we had the cure for cancer”. The results were remarkable: like any guru worth his salt, Glassman claimed to have cured his clients of maladies, vanquishing high cholesterol and diabetes like a new Jim Jones come to heal the broken legs of his congregants. Like all the best prophets, Glassman had mastered miracles. Here was a man fighting the good fight against the evils of Fat America (Glassman constantly berated Coca-Cola and Pepsi, whose corporate partners he denigrated as “soda whores”). 

As in every cult, there were reprisals for stepping out of line. Belief in the project was ruthlessly enforced. CrossFitters were derided — including by the glorious leader — as “incredibly weak” or “morbidly obese”. During one of the annual Games, two pudgy volunteers were hustled out of view: “Get those fat people out of here,” said a disgruntled exec.  

In the ignoble traditions of Bikram yoga, NXIVM, Osho and more, the CrossFit cult enriched its high priests. The C-suite, stocked with Glassman’s yes-men acolytes, enjoyed Four Seasons stays, cocaine binges, lavish dinners and “rampant adultery”, from the top dog down, according to Marsh. Glassman became megalomaniacal, insisting on $5,000 detours in his prop plane to get Chick-fil-A. The flock was disciplined; its shepherds enjoyed the perks. 

As might be expected from a band of bruhs, locker-room chat was rampant. Marsh reports that the gym’s WiFi password was “wet pussy”. Understandably, any whisperings about the noxious vibes at head office were viciously countered. As CrossFit’s star rose, true believers took the crusade online. Marsh describes Glassman’s PR heavies, “two guys on a company laptop”, deploying “dozens of fake Facebook profiles” to slap down critics and create the impression of an army of defenders ready to body-slam those who said, for example, that CrossFit encouraged poor lifting form. Sometimes, animosity turned inwards, with beef between the CEO and his right-hand man, the irritatingly well-liked Dave Castro, who hogged Glassman’s “Jesus”-like spotlight by turning the Games into a mainstream TV success.  

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The darkest expression of Glassman’s philosophy — “men will die for points” — came in 2024. Four years after Glassman was forced out over heretical comments about George Floyd, the new evangelist-in-chief Castro presided over the summer Games in Fort Worth, Texas. The event was held in a sweltering August — during the swimming event, the lake was warm. Conditions were, in other words, extremely dangerous. An uber-fit Serbian athlete called Lazar Dukic, whom many had expected to win, drowned. At the suggestion that the event should be canceled to respect Dukic’s memory, some CrossFitters questioned what the “big deal” was; “people die every day”. Here was the central contradiction: a movement devoted to perfecting the body had become disturbingly casual about its destruction. 

CrossFit still exists today, but has a dwindling cultural footprint since Dukic’s death raised concerns about the method’s safety compliance and reporting around its toxic corporate culture. Its natural successor is Hyrox, another hellish indoor fitness competition combining runs with workout stations; I know this all too well, frequently being woken on a Sunday morning by the maddening whoops and hell yeahs of jockish acolytes from my neighborhood gym. I recently heard the brand used as a slur (“Oh you mean his new Hyrox girlfriend? Good luck…”). 

Like CrossFit, Hyrox elevates suffering and abasement as noble and purifying rites. Much purification was needed last month when Joanna Wietrzyk, an Australian champion, got the runs during a Beijing competition and inexplicably carried on. “A win is a win,” she declared after contaminating the course and claiming the crown. Her unhygienic heroics went uber-viral; the outrage it prompted eclipsed that which followed Dukic’s death in 2024. Of course, it tracks — the story was spectacularly gross — but something else unsettled the untoned masses. Why had finishing seemed more important than stopping? It was difficult to escape the sense that this otherwise normal woman was in the grip of indoctrination, just like the vomiting votaries of CrossFit’s heyday.   

Extreme fitness offers benediction in the secular age. Shared ordeals bind. Injury, collapse and even death are offerings. The official purpose of fitness culture is about health and well-being; when gymgoing becomes a jihad it shifts to something else — sacralized suffering, control of the self and, at the very top, others. Like most religions, extreme fitness touts its doctrine as unfalsifiable: a rockin’ bod is proof of concept, while physical or psychological damage is proof you didn’t believe hard enough. For some searchers in the post-modern world, salvation is always just one more rep away. Glassman’s vision may by now seem an ancient cult thoroughly displaced by more glamorous upstarts, but all of today’s die-hard gym bros have CrossFit to thank for the spread of extreme faith in fitness.

Many intellectuals and revolutionaries, Right-wing and Left, find this apparent sameness — omniculture, they’d call it — downright repellent. For conservatives, it signals the erasure of particularity by “globalism.” Leftists, meanwhile, see in the omniculture the triumph of a consumerist economy built on exploitation. What neither camp appreciates is that this sameness is the source of the West’s enduring influence at a time when the United States and its allies are in relative decline thanks mainly to the rise of China.

We should be grateful for omniculture because it appeals to a globalized world more than any of its civilizational rivals do.

Intellectuals and revolutionaries always like to imagine idealized versions of culture. During the Cold War, the best minds looked past the grimness of the “really existing socialism” of Communist states to the idealized socialisms that existed only in the imagination. In the same way, the nostalgic Right today laments the decline of an idealized Greco-Roman-Christian West, and the legacy Left celebrates the defeat of an imperialist, racist West. Neither of these constructs bears any resemblance to the actual culture of the Really Existing West today.

Half a century ago, much of Latin America was ruled by military officers in sunglasses, some of whom looked to Italian fascism or Spanish or Portuguese corporatism for economic models. Meanwhile, the eastern half of Europe was governed by Communist satraps of Moscow. Now democracy, in more and less corrupt versions, has replaced military juntas and rule by politburos. In addition to sharing multiparty democracy, Europe and the Americas increasingly share similar politics — not least the polarization between rural and working-class voters (“the Right”), and urban professionals and ethnic minorities (“the Left”).

The convergence of the nations of the West isn’t limited to political forms and political divisions. Partially, it’s demographic: Western nations are becoming uniformly diverse, in the sense that all are now home to ballooning shares of immigrants from non-Western regions, including Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

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In every Western country, fertility rates have collapsed far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. In the United States, the total fertility rate is 1.6; in the European Union, it’s 1.34; and in Latin America, it’s 1.8 and falling. The shortfall is being filled, everywhere, by immigrants and their descendants. The foreign-born share of the United States population is nearly 15%, the highest rate since the late 19th century. Foreign-born residents make up an even larger share of the population in Britain (around 20%) and Canada (more than 20%).

Growing secularization is another characteristic of the omniculture. Protestantism once defined the United States, while Catholicism shaped life across much of Continental Europe and Latin America. But on both sides of the Atlantic, organized religion and church attendance are in rapid, and perhaps irreversible, decline. More than half of Americans never attend religious services at all. Christian self-identification in the United States has declined to around 60%, not owing to the influence of non-Christian religions, which remain small, but because of the rise of “nones”: those who have left the Christian denominations of their ancestors, mostly for “nothing in particular.”

In Europe between 2010 and 2020, the Christian share of the population dropped to about two-thirds, down from about 3 in 4 — a result caused less by Muslim and other non-Christian migration than by the simple extinction of Christian belief without its replacement by another traditional religion. The same process can be observed in Latin America, where Catholicism is in decline and competing with “nones,” who account for more than 20% of the population in South America and 13% in Mexico and Central America. 

The Catholic Church is also losing ground to Protestants, chiefly evangelicals and Pentecostalists, whose numbers in Latin America swelled to about a quarter, up from only 4% in 1970. Increasingly, in Latin America, evangelical Protestants make up an important constituency of the political Right, as in the United States.

The decline of organized religion has been accompanied by the liberalization of attitudes toward sex and reproduction throughout the Really Existing West. In Europe, abortion is prohibited outright only in Vatican City, Poland, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Andorra; elsewhere, it is legal and subject to varying restrictions. In the United States, following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, only 13 of 50 states imposed total or near-total bans on abortion.

Homosexuality has been decriminalized in every European country, with most recognizing same-sex marriages or civil unions. In the United States, the Supreme Court has decriminalized homosexuality and legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Every Latin-American country has decriminalized homosexuality as well.  

In the case of the arts, the folk cultures of various peasantries, the elite cultures of royal courts and the haute bourgeoisie, and the official artistic styles of totalitarian regimes have been swept aside everywhere by commercial mass media and social media. Thanks to comic books and superhero movies, today’s Westerners recognize Spider-Man and Darth Vader more easily than they do figures of Greco-Roman mythology like Hercules or biblical heroes like Joshua. Even many Western conservatives, while lamenting the decline of classical literacy, appear to derive much of their worldview from children’s books by two British authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. 

Patriotism exists in the Really Existing West, but it is an unintellectual, sentimental, populist patriotism, based on national sports teams and national music and movies. Contemporary Europeans have long forgotten what they learned in school about the early kings and saints of their countries, but they can tell you the names of their leading national football players and Eurovision contestants. The World Cup plays the role of the original Olympic Games in the era of multiple Greek city-states and kingdoms.

The emerging pan-Western omniculture is deeply pluralistic — but the pluralism is based on functions and sectors, not on races or religions. In premodern multiethnic societies, segregated, parallel communities often existed side by side, as in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed minorities a restricted freedom to practice their own religion and establish their own culture and law. In today’s Really Existing West, by contrast, horizontal stratification of different areas of life has replaced vertical communal divisions. There is a pan-Western business and economic culture; a pan-Western academic culture; a pan-Western avant-garde artistic culture; and various pan-Western musical styles with fans everywhere (rock, pop, rap). The same individual can participate in all of these subcultures at different times, with no sense of contradiction.

This functional pluralism is difficult for many intellectuals and activists on both Right and Left to understand. Catholics and Calvinists and Marxists and democrats and romantic nationalists alike have dreamed of aligning every aspect of society — from politics and values to art and architecture and literature — with a single overarching doctrine. Democracies must have “democratic” architecture, socialist regimes must have “socialist” art and literature, and so on. The functional pluralism of the new omniculture seems like incoherence to these would-be social engineers.

But such diversity would have been familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans and premodern East Asians. In the Hellenistic era and the Roman period that followed, formerly segregated and separate cultures of the Mediterranean disintegrated and became parts of a kaleidoscopic whole in which at least some individuals could pick and choose among fragments of different traditions.  People could take part in imperial or civic rites, worship their ancestors and household spirits, practice Stoicism or Epicureanism, and belong to this or that mystery cult at the same time. Similarly, in premodern China and Japan, you could be a Confucian in public life, a Taoist in private life, and perhaps a Buddhist on some occasions for particular purposes. This kind of cafeteria approach to culture — with no comprehensive dogma governing every aspect of life, and with some transnational subcultures appropriate for some functions but not others — is the emerging norm in the Really Existing West.

Subcultural pluralism, however, is not liberal individualism. The local geographic community has given way to multiple transnational communities for many people, but these decentralized communities can be just as conformist and intolerant. Marshall McLuhan believed that modern communications technology would create a “global village.” Yet global villages — plural — would be more accurate. The same neoliberal economic orthodoxy is taught in business schools in the United States, France, and Brazil, while the same intolerant woke identity politics structures the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic. You can choose to enjoy country music or rap, but each has its zealously guarded standards of authentic tradition. 

Post-liberal critics of the modern West get this wrong. Tradition and community have not been replaced by radical individualism and anomie. Rather, complex plural communitarianism has replaced homogeneous tribal and village communitarianism.  

The dominant attitude toward sex in this emerging Western omniculture is not one of celebration of alternative lifestyles, but of lack of concern about what other people do in their bedrooms. If this is liberal, it is the liberalism of indifference. Transgenderism is a bridge too far, because it requires everyone to actively acknowledge minority sexual identities — and radical claims about mind-body dualism — instead of just ignoring them.

Thinkers on both the Right and the Left persist in trying to explain these cultural developments as derivations of this or that overarching ideology. Cultural Marxism! Gnosticism! False consciousness spread by the capitalist media! But there is no common worldview, any more than there was in the Hellenistic era, when you could worship Athena and Serapis at the same time.  The intolerant monotheisms that tried to impose uniform belief on societies by state coercion, and the intolerant secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, were historical aberrations. In the absence of government-imposed orthodoxies, large-scale societies will be heterodox by default.  Led by the Really Existing West, global civilization is returning to its natural incoherent condition.

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Attempts by Western conservatives to revive older versions of the West — whether of 1950 or 1350 — are doomed. The West of widespread Christian orthodoxy and overwhelming white majorities and sexual conservatism is gone, never to return. One by one, the countries that the Right sees as refuges from the omniculture of the Really Existing West have succumbed and have been absorbed by the omniculture. Catholic Ireland liberalized abortion law. Anti-gay Hungary jettisoned Orbán and Orbánism. Radical Salafists who want to restore the medieval Caliphate, trad Caths who want to restore medieval Christendom, slavophile Eurasianists who want to de-Westernize Russia — all are fated to fail.

Equally doomed is the progressive Left’s vision of a post-national world society in which every race and gender is represented in every social realm in proportion to its numbers in society as a whole. A shared civilization doesn’t mean a lack of national rivalries and wars. And the incoherent, segmented, functional pluralism of the omniculture, with different subcultures for different private and public purposes, is incompatible with absolute cultural egalitarianism. 

The models for the nostalgic Right are all in the past and the utopias of the progressive Left are in a borderless future that will never come about. Among contemporary societies, there are no alternatives to the new pan-Western omniculture that don’t have to be propped up by autocracy, given their lack of appeal even within their own borders. Communism, at least, once won enthusiastic converts around the world, but radical Islamism appeals to few other than a minority of ethnic Muslims. And the relaxation of religious coercion in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan would almost certainly lead to the assimilation of those societies in short order into the emerging omniculture.  

People in other countries look to China for models of industrial policy and state capitalism, not for neo-Confucian philosophy or authoritarianism. Xi Jinping’s daughter attended Harvard, and China’s Communist princelings have traded Mao suits for Western businesswear and Western fashions.

Jeremiads about Western decline, then, are doubly wrong. While the United States and Europe have allowed too much manufacturing to be lost, the main reason for their declining shares of global GDP and potential military power is external — the industrialization of China, India, and other countries — not internal mismanagement or moral decadence that can be reversed by wise leadership or a revival of correct values.

Paradoxically, the relative decline of the West’s share of global economic and military power is accompanied by the spread of Western values — the values, that is, of today’s new, religiously indifferentist, multiracial Really Existing West. If you don’t like the omniculture of the Really Existing West, you can move to Communist North Korea or anti-gay Uganda or the Taliban’s Islamist Afghanistan — for as long as they hold out against the tide. 

Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher had long discussions about whether to keep the word God in the song, given God’s alleged un-coolness in the 1960s. They needn’t have worried. The song spoke to the universal teenage yearning to fall in love and the universal teenage dread of what would happen “if you should ever leave me.”

Little did Brian Wilson know that a simple phrase, “God only knows,” meant so much more.

The idea that God only knows has a long and storied history in the Abrahamic faiths. The phrases “Lord knows,” “God willing,” and “Inshallah” are part of the modern secular lexicon — even if we don’t fully appreciate their religious origins. These phrases carry significant spiritual meaning and, as we will see, real political consequences.

Each statement tacitly admits a state of human ignorance and imperfection. The speaker is confessing, “I don’t fully know. I’m not in total control.” To say “God willing” is to acknowledge a fundamental difference between the almighty Creator and the not-so-mighty creature. While God is all-knowing, our knowledge is inherently limited. We, after all, are mere mortals, who pale in comparison.

Wilson sings, “God only knows what I’d be without you,” and he is right. He can try to imagine what his life would be like if the girl ever left him, as he fears she might, but he can never know for sure. God alone — here a stand-in for the great beyond, a higher power, or some spiritual force that we can’t grasp — can know. We can’t. Not knowing, it seems, is at the heart of what it means to be human. And it is at the heart of what it means to love and be loved.

The implications of this are that contrary to popular wisdom, “following your truth” is not always the best idea. Not believing in yourself can actually be the right thing to do. In fact, total certainty is bad for us and it can be destructive for democracy.

Think about it: if you have all of life’s questions completely settled, what is there left to discuss? If one political tribe has full and complete access to the truth, why should they include other tribes in the democratic process? Once one group possesses “the truth,” the give-and-take of democracy becomes nothing more than a waste of time. We don’t worry about citizens who have doubts. We worry about the ones who believe in themselves all the way down to their feet. 

A healthy democracy requires citizens who possess intellectual humility, who can shrug their shoulders from time to time and say, “God only knows.” Intellectual humility is a trait and a practice that allows citizens to accept their limitations. Is it “evil” to prefer a marginal tax rate of 42% over one that is 36%? If two citizens are fighting over whether a particular intersection should have a stop sign or a traffic light, there may not be one right answer. It may just be a matter of preference, with each side having a legitimate argument. Even if we suspect that we are right, we must accept that we might be wrong.  

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By Shadi Hamid

This might all sound obvious, but we are not sure that it is. Quickly rejecting “bad” opinions — and rushing to label certain political beliefs as reflecting deep moral flaws — is not ideal in a democracy, in which bad ideas will always be plentiful. When someone disagrees with you, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily a bad person. It most likely just means that they are different. Citizens must reject the notion that, as philosopher Kevin Vallier puts it, “others disagree with our moral, religious, and political viewpoints solely because of some cognitive or moral vice.”

This is where simple phrases like “Inshallah” and “God only knows” become more than just an offhand phrase or a lyric in a Beach Boys song. They represent an essential starting point for a healthy democracy.

A practice that nicely illustrates our point began more than a millennium ago, instituted by a group of Muslim clerics. Whenever these jurists would write a fatwa, or religious edict, they would always conclude with the phrase Allahu a’lam, which roughly translates to “God only knows.” To be sure, these jurists were not moral relativists. They believed that their particular edicts were correct. They had real confidence in their rulings. However, at the very end, the jurists would reserve the last word for God. It was as if the jurists needed to remind both the reader — and themselves — of their own shortcomings.

Here we can begin to distinguish between human confidence and human certainty. Confidence in one’s beliefs is critically important in a democracy. Absolute certainty in one’s beliefs, on the other hand, is dangerous.  

Christians have their own version of Allahu a’lam. Christians believe that the Bible is divinely inspired — “God-breathed,” as Paul puts it — even though it was written by flawed human beings. But Paul doesn’t pretend that every word he writes carries the same divine weight.

When Paul discusses marriage ethics, he is remarkably transparent about his sources. “For those who are married,” he writes, “I have a command that comes not from me, but from the Lord” — essentially, don’t get divorced. Fair enough. But then Paul encounters a thornier question, one that Jesus never directly addressed: what happens when a new Christian is married to someone who wants nothing to do with the faith? Should they divorce? Paul has an opinion — he thinks they should stay married. But listen to how he frames it: “I do not have a direct command from the Lord.” In other words, “This is my best judgment, but I am flying a bit blind here.”

The lesson is unmistakable: if Paul — writing under divine inspiration — could admit the limits of his certainty, then maybe the rest of us should too. Sometimes wisdom means saying “God only knows,” even when we are pretty sure we know what God would want.

A sincere faith does not depend on absolute certainty and it is unfortunate that our broader religious and political culture tends to equate the two. Feeling comfortable and confident in our convictions can actually engender greater intellectual humility, rather than hubris. After all, if we know where we stand, we may find ourselves less threatened by others’ convictions.

Let’s return for a moment to the Muslim jurists and the fatwa. Trusting God rather than themselves enabled these jurists to approach their legal opponents with generosity. If truth belongs to God alone, that changes the fundamental purpose of debate. As the great 8th- and 9th- century jurist Imam Shafi’i, one of Islam’s most influential scholars, put it, “I never once argued with anyone hoping to win the debate; rather I always wished that the truth would come from his side.” The search for truth, rather than victory, is the goal.

We, your authors, would like to uphold this standard. It is easier said than done, especially when the convictions in question are not about tax rates but about salvation. One of us is Christian, the other Muslim. Regarding the very nature of God, we disagree, and our disagreement is profound. 

Years ago, in one of our Christian-Muslim dialogues at the University of Minnesota, a student asked me (Shadi) how I felt about the fact that many evangelicals — including my co-author Matthew — want me to know Christ, embrace him as my savior, and anchor my life in his grace. I feel no such need to see Matthew convert to Islam, so I can’t entirely relate to the impulse. I was a bit stumped about how to respond, since I was well aware of the imbalance in our perspectives.

Frankly, I am still uncomfortable with the idea that a dear friend might wish for me to replace one set of foundational beliefs with another — to, in effect, become something other than what I am. But I understand better now. My friendship with Matthew is premised on trying our best to understand each other. And if this is what Matthew believes, then I can’t expect him to suppress his own commitments as an evangelical who, by definition, has an interest in evangelizing. He wants me to convert to Christianity, and that’s okay.

Matthew’s confidence in his faith doesn’t threaten our friendship. Certainty would. If either of us believed he possessed God’s final verdict on the other, there would be nothing left to talk about. Matthew and I wrestle with moral and political uncertainty every day. We have found that our respective religious traditions do not forbid this wrestling. In fact, they enable us to wrestle more productively with our questions as well as our doubts.

So how can citizens hold political confidence while at the same time avoiding the destructive temptations of political certainty? It comes down to this: to be a person of political confidence is to place your confidence in something beyond yourself, something you can’t fully comprehend or control. To be a person of political certainty is to place your confidence in yourself and your ability to fully comprehend the truth. The writer Anne Lamott says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” This is not just another clever aphorism. It speaks to something deep and true about what it means to be human.

A cautionary tale of the dangers of making premature political judgments comes from the life and death of Ali, one of the most beloved figures in the history of Islam. Ali was the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and the last of the four “rightly guided” caliphs. He was assassinated in 661 AD, during a civil war that haunts Muslims to this day. 

Ali was embroiled in a bitter dispute with Muawiya, the powerful governor of Syria, who refused to recognize his authority. To settle the matter, Ali submitted himself to a formal process of arbitration, in which an ostensibly neutral party would adjudicate each man’s claims. Many of Ali’s followers were outraged that their beloved leader would humble himself in this way. How could he — the commander of the faithful, blessed by the one true and immortal God — subject himself to the ruling of a mere mortal?

Upon hearing their grumbling, Ali did something both startling and strange. He brought forward a copy of the Quran and touched it. Ali then declared in front of the crowd, “Oh Quran, speak to the people!” His followers were confused. “Oh Ali, why do you mock us?” they asked. The Quran, Ali explained, does not speak by itself.

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It was a brilliant religious demonstration with profound political consequences. For Muslims, the Quran is indeed the word of God, every letter and word divine. As such, the book is ultimate certainty — truth with a capital T. But the Quran’s precise meaning and application are anything but.

The Quran requires a human interpreter. It was “written in straight lines between two covers,” as Ali said, so it can’t speak for itself. Human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, have to read, interpret, and apply it themselves. When they read the holy text, they bring their own biases. Like any book, the Quran requires readers. And readers can always find what they are looking for — if they look hard enough.

There, lying before the crowd, was God’s word, unmediated by human authorship. And yet, even here, Ali’s word of caution was clear: try as you might, you cannot directly access God’s true and perfect intent. The Quran will not speak exactly to this or that situation. Readers need to discuss, debate, and come to their own imperfect decisions. You can judge your fellow humans, but do so with care because your judgments will necessarily be limited. Not only that, but ultimate judgment will never be yours, and it won’t happen in the here and now. Ultimate judgment will be delayed until another world and another life. Only at the very end of time will God clarify who was right and who was wrong.

Ali’s exhortations failed to satisfy his supporters — some of whom became his betrayers. They wanted absolute certainty. They wanted answers. So they killed him.

The story of the Quran that would not speak — and Ali’s refusal to answer on its behalf — might be surprising to those who associate the early days of Islam with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and the often misunderstood term sharia. Ali’s pluralistic ethic was baked into the sharia itself. Sharia is Islam’s sacred law, but its origins come from a word that means “way to the watering-hole.”

According to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, if a person strives to faithfully interpret God’s path and is successful, they will receive two rewards. If they try but get it wrong, they will still receive one reward for their good-faith attempt. If two interpreters of the Quran disagree with each other, only God knows which one of them is correct. As the Quran says, “No one knows the soldiers of God but God.” 

Muslims and Christians disagree on many things but come together on one critical point: A mortal’s claim to fully comprehend the infinite truth of an immortal God is something close to blasphemy. In claiming intellectual certainty and mastery, blasphemers put themselves in the place of God. In Islam, one of God’s 99 names — the names that make God, God — is the All-Knowing. By definition, humans cannot aspire to anything comparable.

Here we begin to see why claims of absolute certainty, and the political fundamentalism that often follows, are not simply bad manners or undemocratic; they are something worse. Political fundamentalism is, at its heart, a rejection of human finitude and frailty. In this sense, fundamentalism is a rejection of the most important distinction in Islam and Christianity — the distinction between the created and the Creator. 

God only knows. And that, if we are honest, is a relief. Or at least it should be. 

This article is adapted from Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid’s new book, Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith — Not Less — Can Heal Our Public Life, used with permission from Brazos Press. 

As the fighting grinds on, the backlash against the pro-war nuns has continued. At a Christmas fair in the Polish city of Szczecin, Belarusian pro-democracy activists protested in front of the nuns’ stall, accusing shoppers of “supporting torture in Belarusian prisons and Russian aggression against Ukraine”. Ukrainians in Belfast warned of the nuns’ ties to the Kremlin and urged the city council not to host them again. Last Christmas, in the parish of Täby, a suburb of Stockholm, the rector allowed the nuns to flog their wares in the church corridor. But the Church of Sweden later warned that the nuns “use their income to support Russian nationalism” and “have close ties with GRU”, referring to Russia’s military intelligence service. It advised its believers “against supporting their activities in any way”.

The Saint Elisabeth Convent in Minsk refutes such claims. On its website, it says money from the sales helps orphans and funds “humanitarian aid” for residents of Russian occupied Donbas. Yet Archpriest Andrey Lemeshonok, the convent’s spiritual father, has made no secret of his backing of the invasion. He once boasted that his nuns were part of “a combat unit”, fighting for Russia’s future. Saint Elisabeth nuns, with flak jackets over their habits, have been photographed in occupied Ukraine and posing with Russian flags decorated with the pro-war Z symbol.

Four and a half years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Kirill did not call for peace. Instead he called Russia’s opponents in Ukraine “evil forces”, casting the war as a metaphysical battle against what he labeled the corrupting values of the West. Since then, his rhetoric has only hardened, sanctifying the bloodshed in Ukraine. But his hawkishness is nothing new: a poisonous co-dependency between church and state has existed for centuries. Many of the patriarch’s predecessors were under the Kremlin’s thumb and in hock to the secret police. In Soviet times, not a single bishop was appointed without the blessing of the KGB. But today, more than ever before, the church acts as an instrument of Moscow’s geopolitical power projecting influence, and posing a growing threat, across Europe.

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European security agencies increasingly view Russian church networks with suspicion. An open-source investigation by the Kyiv-based Molfar Intelligence Institute in late 2024 concluded that the ROC “constructs churches near strategic facilities, government institutions, and military bases across various European countries” in a systematic effort to use religious outposts for espionage. In Bulgaria, Czechia, North Macedonia and elsewhere, “spies in cassocks” have been used as an alternative to diplomatic cover after the expulsion of Russian embassy staff following the invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, a priest from a Russian church in the Czech resort town of Karlovy Vary was expelled over suspicions of hostile activities. “We would be particularly foolish,” said one Czech MEP,  “if we did not recognize that Russia is undeniably using the Orthodox Church to carry out its hybrid warfare.”

Russia’s church has even tried to sway elections. Ahead of Moldova’s 2024 presidential poll and EU integration referendum, Russian state officials funded all-expenses-paid “pilgrimages” to Moscow for dozens of Moldovan Orthodox priests and gave them debit cards loaded with hundreds of dollars as going-home presents. In exchange, the clerics were instructed to create channels on the Telegram messaging app warning against joining the EU.

Moscow has also been quietly hoovering up strategic real estate. In Vardø, a remote Arctic town close to Norway’s GLOBUS radar station, the Moscow Patriarchate secured local approval, and even Norwegian state funding, to build a chapel. Clergy from the nearby Russian diocese of Plesetsk and Kargopol, including its bishop, made frequent visits to Vardø to unveil monuments to Norwegian partisans and consecrate Orthodox crosses. They said the chapel would serve Orthodox sailors and be a reminder of the cultural ties between Russia and Norway. But when the proposal was eventually submitted, the chapel had grown to 17 meters in height and, according to Vardø’s current mayor, the Russian bishop insisted the exact location under Nato radars had been “dictated” to him “by God himself”. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and growing scrutiny of Moscow-linked institutions, the plans were shelved.

But many Russian churches have been built in sensitive spots, including in neighboring Sweden. The Church of the Holy Mother of God of Kazan in the town of Västerås, west of Stockholm, built and consecrated in 2024, is near a major airport, a water treatment works and a network of energy companies. Markus Göransson, a researcher at the Swedish Defense University, felt it was too close for comfort. “When Sweden’s defense forces undertake exercises on or near the airport… they do so under possible surveillance from the church,” he complained. Moreover, locals discovered that the plot of land for the church had been bought by Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation which also, through an intermediary, funded the construction. Last August, the agency overseeing non-state religion funding in Sweden cut off state subsidies to the Västerås parish citing security concerns.

Finland, meanwhile, knows Russian pressure only too well. It shares an 833-mile border with its eastern neighbor, the longest in the EU. Decades of conflict and more recent hybrid tactics have fueled deep distrust. After the invasion, officials in the Finnish city of Turku moved quickly to close a Moscow-linked Orthodox church near a naval base, the port, government offices and Russia’s consulate. Governments in other countries have also wised up. Following the open-source intelligence findings of the Molfar report, governments across Europe are responding with sanctions, security investigations and pressure on Moscow-linked churches to cut ties with the Kremlin.

The issue is especially acute in the three Baltic states, where the Orthodox Church has become a flashpoint between a Soviet past and a European future. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are firmly anchored in the West through Nato and the EU, but all have sizable Russian-speaking populations, many descended from the Soviet era. Few attend church regularly, yet for many, Orthodoxy remains closely tied to Russian identity. In Estonia, where more than a quarter of the 1.4 million population are native Russian speakers, that makes the issue particularly sensitive. Parliament has now ordered Orthodox churches to sever ties with Moscow or face closure by the end of the year.

The sharpest confrontation to date in Estonia has been with the Pühtitsa Convent, which is a stavropegic monastery, meaning it comes under the direct authority of Patriarch Kirill rather than the local diocese. Pühtitsa’s abbess, Filareta Kalatšova, argues that the convent cannot unilaterally drop its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate without breaking Church law. In an open letter to Parliament, she accused Estonian MPs of forcing her to commit a canonical crime. Though Martin Tulit, the Estonian official in charge of religious affairs, pointed out that the 134-year-old convent has changed its canonical affiliation before — including during the nation’s period of independence between the two world wars.

Outside Russia and occupied Ukraine, some Orthodox clerics who refused to follow Moscow orders eventually found they had other options. In January 2023,  in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, I met five unemployed priests who had been serving in a diocese linked to the Moscow Patriarchate but were defrocked for opposing the war. One had become a taxi driver to feed his family. The clerics were in limbo until the following year when Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople agreed to reinstate them under his jurisdiction. Not all the parishioners reacted well to the swap. Father Vladimiras Seliavko said many cold shouldered him and even relatives viewed him as a traitor but he “could not remain with a patriarch who blessed war criminals”. Although the Orthodox have no Pope, the Constantinople Patriarch, based in today’s Istanbul, is the closest equivalent. He is also known as the Ecumenical Patriarch and — much to Moscow’s annoyance — is seen as primus inter pares: first among equals and senior among all Orthodox bishops. Some Russian priests defrocked and forced into exile for refusing to read Kirill’s mandatory Victory Prayer have also been transferred to Bartholomew’s jurisdiction.

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In northern Europe, Poland and the Baltics, where Catholicism and Protestantism dominate, Russia’s church is widely seen as an arm of the Kremlin rather than a religious institution. The picture is very different in Orthodox eastern Europe, particularly in Serbia, Bulgaria and Georgia, where Moscow retains far deeper religious and cultural ties. Indeed, one of the challenges in countering the Russian Orthodox Church’s political influence is the hold it still has over its believers and its propensity to treat any criticism as tantamount to religious persecution. Last month, Bulgaria successfully blocked the European Union’s attempt to sanction Kirill. “The era of the Crusades is over,” said the country’s prime minister, Rumen Radev. He said he was wary of alienating millions of Eastern Orthodox believers. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is administratively self-governing but its patriarch, Daniel, has aligned himself with Kirill’s position on the war. He warned his clergy against “inciting hatred” by labeling Russia as the “sole and unprovoked aggressor”.

Then there is the fraught question of the church in Ukraine. The establishment of the self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018, with the blessing of Bartholomew, was a slap in the face to Putin and his vision of the Russian World. But it was also a humiliation for Kirill. His Church, the biggest and the richest in the Orthodox world, stood to lose at least a fifth of its 150 million members, thousands of parishes and several hundred churches and monasteries. Nato encroachment aside, Ukraine’s desire to cut ties with the mother church in Moscow, to which it has been linked for three centuries, became a casus belli.

Disagreements over which Orthodox church in Ukraine is the most legitimate have not gone away. Even today, as bombs rain down on Ukrainian cities, many parishioners are reluctant to change jurisdictions to the autonomous Orthodox Church of Ukraine. They believe that it is uncanonical and that joining it means that they will be deprived of divine grace. This agenda is relentlessly pushed by the Kremlin. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, hardly an authority on matters ecclesiastical, routinely invokes “canon law” to condemn Ukrainian and Western action against the branch of the church historically linked to Moscow.

Such talk leaves parishioners particularly open to manipulation. “The church is very convenient for dictatorships”, says Father Vladimiras, one of the five Lithuanian priests defrocked by Moscow, “because any propaganda can be spread through its channels. Believers are accustomed to trusting their clergy and rarely doubt the statements of their patriarch, bishops or priests.” Recent reports in the Ukrainian media suggest Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are being used to recruit Ukrainian refugees. It is not clear how these refugees would be deployed, but it’s not unimaginable they could become Russian intelligence assets.

Throughout the Cold War, Soviet propaganda relentlessly targeted Uncle Sam. Now, Europe has morphed into Russia’s main enemy. And the Russian Church is key to Putin’s plan to destroy European liberal democracy and the institutions underpinning it. According to Kirill, the continent is mired in moral decay thanks to its acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights; Orthodox politicians and talk show hosts often use the pejorative term “Gayropa” instead of Evropa.

The war has given the Patriarch a chance to reassert his authority in a post-Soviet world as he championed the twin causes of Orthodox unity and Russian imperialism. Since the Western world “has fallen into Satanism”, in Kirill’s view, Russia functions as the Katechon — the biblical force that restrains the Antichrist. In a recent sermon he praised Russia’s atomic bomb for thwarting its enemies plans to “to destroy and enslave the Motherland”. In other words, massive military destruction is justified as an act of cosmic purification.

Europe may now have to confront this increasingly aggressive alliance of “the missile and the incense burner”, as one French theologian put it, with little help from across the Atlantic. If previous US administrations made equality for sexual minorities a pillar of American diplomacy, Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last November, puts “traditional values” at its heart instead. On a trip to Texas last year for the BBC, I was struck by how some ultra-conservative Americans now see Russia as a Christian bulwark — even a model to emulate. The strategy contains little criticism of Moscow despite the mounting death toll, while voicing support for “patriotic parties”, several of which enjoy the Kremlin’s favor and, in some cases, the backing of its pliant church. For a continent already facing a resurgent Russia, Europe’s isolation on this issue is an uncomfortable prospect and one it can no longer afford to ignore.

Personal essays, it seems, have always been Vance’s bread and butter. Even at Yale Law School, he was busy writing personal essays instead of studying law. The first draft for what became Hillbilly Elegy was submitted as a 60-page paper for a class on international business transactions; what exactly it had to do with international business transactions remains unclear. He wanted to use his lived experience to do social-science analysis of the “ills befalling working-class white people”. Swap “white” for any other racial identity, or for “queer” or “trans”, and one is left with the sort of solipsistic, self-indulgent claptrap that conservative intellectuals, Vance’s modern-day cheerleaders, tend to castigate as “woke”.

Hillbilly Elegy was not simply the narration of an exotic and unusual life — as was, say, the memoir of another politically-ambitious 30-something Ivy League graduate, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father. Vance’s book aspired to be serious political science. It held the key, it was claimed in 2016, the year in which it had the good fortune to be published, to understanding the rise of Donald Trump. Even in Britain, where nobody had ever heard of Jackson, Kentucky or tasted Mountain Dew, the lived experience of this cherubic Ohioan was believed to say something meaningful about Brexit and the “Red Wall”.

It is ironic that the people who most dislike the Vice President today, and whom he dislikes the most in return, were exactly the sorts who gave him his start. The Financial Times and the Economist were among Hillbilly Elegy’s biggest evangelists. His message, after all, appealed to them: the “autoethnography” was ultimately in service to an old-fashioned, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps liberalism. Some passages could have been written by Samuel Smiles or Margaret Thatcher. “We spend our way to the poorhouse”, Vance wrote of his hillbilly kinsfolk; “thrift is inimical to our being”.

Vance has been on quite a journey since then, documented in a trickle of personal essays. At long last, he has treated us to a fully-fledged sequel to the book that made his name. Communion is, its subtitle says, about Vance’s return to faith. In fact, it is a broader Apologia pro vita sua, presenting a self-flattering account of his many conversions since 2016. It therefore considers his conversion to MAGA and his conversion to a kind of anti-liberalism and anti-capitalism, alongside his conversion to Roman Catholicism. All these, he makes clear, are closely linked.

Communion is written in the same folksy, syrupy style as Hillbilly Elegy. Vance’s first book began with a faux-modest apology, and in Communion he likewise occasionally pleads for his readers’ clemency: “Keep reading”, he says amid one long-winded digression, “there’s a point here, I promise”. The main difference in style arises from Communion’s affected piety. The sweariness of Hillbilly Elegy is toned down. Mamaw, one of the great characters of modern American literature, used to curse like a sailor; at one point she asks a young JD, then questioning his sexuality, if he wants to suck dicks. In Communion, Mamaw has lost some of her edge: now she lamely refers to “effing crooks” and “effing perverts”. The word “bullshit” appears right at the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy. Clean-mouthed, Ned-Flanders Communion ends with a nauseating “Amen”.

Much of Communion narrates Vance’s shifting relationship with Christianity. It retreads the relevant sections of Hillbilly Elegy, occasionally quoting them at length. After some adolescent Bible-thumping, Vance saw the light of atheism, and combined this in his student years with a love for Ayn Rand. In this, he was fairly typical of young men of this milieu, “freethinkers” who found refuge online from the superstitions that stifled them at home. He still shows a nostalgic familiarity with their main totems, notably Christopher Hitchens and Reddit.

Why, then, did Vance convert? One of his reasons is that religious people are the most rational and sane. His evidence is his lived experience of the presidential election of 2016. He describes seeing people, elite media types, wailing and thrashing about as it became clear that Trump was on course to win. Quite understandably, he concluded that these people “need psychological help”. “If Hillary Clinton had won”, he continued, “my evangelical, Trump-loving father would have turned off the TV, prayed, and said, ‘Well, I hope she ain’t as bad as I feared’”.

That comparison called into question his prior assumptions: “I had thought that my father was an irrational religious man…, and that these newsroom criers were sensible, logical people.” There is a glaring problem here, however. When Joe Biden beat Trump in the election of 2020, the prevailing attitude among Trump’s followers was a far cry from “I hope he ain’t as bad as I feared”. Nor was this the attitude of JD Vance himself, then freshly emerged from the baptismal font. In 2021, as his political ambition was brewing, he described Biden’s victory as “unfair”. He was picked as Trump’s running mate in 2024 in large part because he cleaves to the dogma of his new faith: that the election was rigged.

Vance offers the President more than just obsequiousness. His youth and intellectual vigor are supposed to balance out his boss’s dotage. Vance hopes to be the first millennial in the White House. Indeed, Communion is a millennial book, through and through, its themes springing straight from the generation’s roster. Aside from “work-life balance”, there’s a jab at something an author of a different bent would call “mansplaining”: those “insufferable tirades by above-average guys who think they’re brilliant”. Vance details his own sub-Seth-Rogenite college years: “Dude”, he asks a friend, “are you in love with this chick?” Once it has moved to more serious political terrain, many of the book’s barbs are aimed at the “Boomer leadership” — a group from which President Trump is curiously exempted.

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Communion, as a result, preaches a millennial faith. It is telling that Catholicism ends up, in Vance’s life, as a substitute for therapy, a way for him to “deal with his past”. Its politics are of a similar vintage: generic post-Crash progressivism. That may be a strange ideology to impute to a Republican, but there it is. “I’m uninterested in making people servants to the economy”, he says, as though shouting into a megaphone at Occupy Wall Street in 2011: “the economy ought to be serving us”. The part of the book which sets out his political vision — a foretaste, perhaps, of the presidential campaign to come — is awash with such Sandersesque bluster. He repeatedly criticizes his own party for being “far too willing to worship the market”. He anyway seems just as eager to abjure his past Randian libertarianism as his New Atheism.

A Protestant ethic, the ethic of thrift, might have suited the liberalism of Hillbilly Elegy. His new Catholicism likewise suits this postliberal, anti-market shift. In Catholicism he has found some support for his semi-sarcastic, sophomoric suggestion that “maybe economics is just fake”. Vance extols the “skepticism of free market theory” which he finds in the “Catholic Church’s ancient social doctrine”. When he inveighs against the “gods of GDP”, he can cast himself as the inheritor to a venerable tradition of Catholic social thought, critical of “consumerism”, “individualism”, and other vices of modernity, in the mold of Pope Leo XIII, G.K. Chesterton, or Dorothy Day.

One can believe that Vance is a sincere Catholic, and a sincere postliberal, while also considering some of the more cynical motivations at play. One theme of Communion is the author’s obsession with status. He knows that this used to inform his beliefs and ideas. His past criticism for Trump gave him “social immunity”, allowing him, as a conservative, to get invited to all the right dinner parties. His Ayn Rand phase used to have a similar effect: “tax breaks and Social Security cuts were socially acceptable ways to be conservative among the American elite”.

What Vance never mentions is that Catholicism is a socially acceptable way to be conservative among the American elite — or, at least, that it grants entry to an elite of its own. At Yale Law School, even in its conservative circles, reversion to the hick evangelicalism in which he was reared would never have been an option. Evangelical churches, with their smoke machines and strobe lighting, their faith-healers and doomsday preachers, lack the gravitas that Vance was after. Protestants used to regard themselves as more serious, more intellectually rigorous, than those sensuous, emotional Papists. But now the stakes are reversed. Austere Presbyterianism isn’t really a thing anymore. Even where evangelicalism is on the up — as in Brazil — this is precisely because of its flashy aesthetics and “prosperity gospel”. Catholicism, on the other hand, provides its initiates with an intricate intellectual pedigree. It gives them the mantle of a storied tradition. It directs them to St Augustine (Vance’s patron) and Thomas Aquinas; it allows its adherents to seem “deep”.

The leading minds on the American Right, especially those which attended to its postliberal and communitarian turn in the late 2010s, are Catholic, whether converts like Adrian Vermeule or cradle Catholics like Patrick Deneen. The same can be said of the robustly Right-wing justices on the Supreme Court: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. As with any prestigious club, the Catholic Church sets some barriers for entry. Anyone and his dog can become an evangelical Christian. But to become a Catholic means that a suitably learned priest has decided that you are up to it. Vance acknowledges this directly: “I really liked that the Church required you to work a little to join”. Having cleared that hurdle, conversion to Catholicism brought Vance into this more refined set. If he was once drawn to atheism and libertarianism because they offered him a certain cachet, how do we know his Catholicism is any different?

In America, Catholicism possesses another distinct advantage. It was never the dominant religion. It is separate from the elite WASP culture that Vance likes to spurn. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance felt alienated from that culture on the grounds that he was “Scotch-Irish” rather than “Anglo-Saxon”; his conversion to Catholicism has since allowed him to also drop the P in that acronym. Catholicism gives him a certain fellow-feeling with other “white ethnic” hyphenated Americans, historically excluded from the WASP core — the Italians, the Irish, the Poles. Those groups used to be part of the Democratic coalition. The Catholic Al Smith ran for the presidency as a Democrat in 1928; anti-Catholic prejudice played a part in his defeat. Such prejudice was overcome in 1960, in the election of JFK, and had more or less evaporated completely 60 years later, when the Catholic Joe Biden beat Trump (fair and square). In 2024, buoyed perhaps by Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket, Catholics broke solidly for Trump. Latino Catholics still tend to vote Democratic, but even they are moving Rightwards. This growing alignment between Catholicism and American conservatism, along with its outsider status, doubtless eased Vance’s walk along his road to Damascus.

In a similar vein, Vance seems to like Catholicism because it is an Old World religion — he says that it was “quite literally a foreign religion to me, rooted in Roman influences that I had very little exposure to”. It gives him and his faith a certain sun-baked sophistication. In Hillbilly Elegy, he describes his identity growing up as narrowly American; he lacked what many Americans possess, that feeling of being bound to a “mother country”. But the Catholic Vance has a real stake in Europe; so now he is better-placed to polemicize fervently about its declining fortunes. He describes himself in Communion feeling haunted by an empty cathedral in Burgundy, and “what that said about Europe’s cultural decline and Christianity’s slow evaporation from the continent”. He was overwhelmed by a similar feeling of “dread” in England — where, in a detail that hardly lends credence to the strength of his recollections, he claims that something in his full English breakfast was “oozing blood”.

His general criticisms of Europe have much to do with his criticisms of European religion, or lack thereof: one of the causes célèbres in his famous Munich speech, after all, concerned the arrest of a British man for praying outside an abortion clinic. His criticism of Europe extends even to the Vatican: Communion makes ample room for the author’s frustrations with his Church. He gives an exasperated sigh over the Vatican’s “trite platitudes” about his administration’s immigration policy. The implication here is that Rome is currently doing a poor job of tending to her flock. The energetic Catholic sheepdogs of the New World are called to guide the listless, straying Catholics of the Old.

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JD Vance became a Catholic rather than a different type of Christian because Catholicism today is the thinking man’s Christianity. As Candace Owens — not, herself, much of a thinking woman — supposedly remarked to Charlie Kirk before he was murdered: “You’re too smart to be a Protestant”. In Communion, Vance describes a friend named Sam, another convert to Catholicism. He would go on “extended rants about the Reformation and immigration”, and thought America’s ills could all be traced to John Calvin. Here is a character familiar to anybody who has rubbed shoulders with young conservatives at elite institutions.

The problem for Vance now, however, is that he cannot only speak for those high-brow Catholic Right-wingers. He may wish, no less fervently than Adrian Mole, to be a Malcolm Muggeridge; but he is also the Hillbilly Vice President, the tribune of the plebs. He cannot leave his own people behind. He has therefore had to fuse his two personas into one. This is why Communion, a book about Catholicism, shows on its front cover a Methodist church. It is why its subtitle talks generically about “finding my way back to faith” — rather than the faith. It is why he describes his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio — whose population is 46% Protestant, 16% Catholic — as an effort to make “more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy”, even though he says these arguments are what attracted him to Catholicism specifically. He probably can’t even play up his Catholicism now too much, lest there be persistent traces, in Middle America, of Protestant chauvinism. He cannot, like his friend Sam, launch into diatribes about Calvin. His political ambition requires him to be ecumenical.

What, then, does Communion mean for America, the country which, two-and-a-half years from now, its author may well be leading? Time and again, reading the book, it struck me that Vance’s ideal society, the America he hopes to build, is sleepy, southern, ancien régime Europe. He wants something like the Portugal of that other Catholic public intellectual turned statesman, Antonio Salazar: a country built on a foundation of Catholic social teaching, one sapped of prosperity and dynamism, but where everybody goes to church. He wants a society where people care less about work; he waxes nostalgic about the “blessings” of being raised in a “multigenerational household”. In Vance’s America, in his crusade against the Protestant Ethic, “GDP” is a dirty word, and the chief problem in Europe is declining church attendance rather than declining wealth. It is difficult to imagine such an America putting a man on Mars. It is also difficult to imagine such a schoolmarmish message resonating with most Americans.

The seeds for Vance’s conversions — both from secularism to Catholicism, and from liberalism to post- or anti-liberalism — were, he suggests in Communion, sown before 2016 and even further from Rome. Revealingly, they first took root in a general denunciation of American culture. As a soldier in Iraq, among Christian and Muslim Arabs, he encountered a “genuinely compelling critique” of that culture in the fear that, if Iraq grew too “Americanized”, it would become too “consumerist and hypersexualized”. He then paints a picture of a contrast between one culture, pious, austere, morally upstanding, and another one, wayward and decadent. “A woman in a niqab was reading the Quran”, he quotes from some fellow Catholic intellectual, “and a man was rocking while praying, and on the TV was Britney Spears dancing in her underwear”. Which of these cultures does JD Vance prefer? Catholic his answer may in fact be; but it does not strike me as very American.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the name for a multiheaded monster whose crude visage had been lavishly painted  hundreds of years ago across the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River in present-day Alton, Illinois, by the Illini — the Algonquian-speaking Native Americans after whom my home state was named. It was the late 1990s, and my dad, John Mark, and a small group of men in his prayer group planned to drive I-55 from Springfield, IL, to the old river town, march to the bluffs, pray intensely over the site, and begin a rite of spiritual warfare. 

I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird?

The Piasa Bird is a quirky, little-known piece of Southern Illinois lore. The bluffs painting was first documented by French explorer Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet during their famous Mississippi River expedition in 1673. (“They are as large as a calf, with head and horns like a goat, their eyes are red, beard like a tiger’s and a face like a man’s,” Marquette wrote in his diary.) And the bird returned to the page in 1836, when writer and Baptist minister John Russell published a newspaper story about it, a tall tale titled “The Bird That Devours Men.” In it, Russell describes a legend in which a brave Illini chief named Ouatoga helped his warriors kill the Piasa by using himself as bait. “Such is the Indian tradition. Of course, I cannot vouch for its truth,” Russell wrote. 

Nearly 200 years later, my dad not only vouched for the story’s truth, but he’d tacked on a new supernatural element: he believed that the Piasa Bird was a demon, one that had cast a spell on the state of Illinois, binding it in a spiritual darkness that had yet to be broken. He pointed to a map, traced a finger along the bends of the Illinois River, and explained that our home state was shaped like a human heart and the rivers running through it were symbolic veins beating with the powerful blood of the Piasa. His goal: to bind the principality, thus freeing Illinois from Satanic power. He didn’t share my mortification about the preposterous quest to fight a demon. He traveled to Alton anyway. I never asked how it went. 

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I’ve been thinking about that night a lot since my mother, Janice, died last month — nearly a decade after my father passed. He died from a rare liver cancer in 2017, and my mom’s heart finally gave out in May after 20 years of assistance on a pacemaker. Between their deaths and the loss of my childhood home to bank foreclosure earlier this year, it feels like the final death of my past self and the strange and magical world of charismatic Christianity I was raised in. 

What I realize now is that there was little difference between my father, who believed that devils and angels walked amongst us, and the Algonquian-speaking Native American tribes who, in Marquette and Joliet’s telling, averted their eyes in fear of the image of the Piasa Bird. For all their centuries and cultures apart, both the Illini and my parents shared an enchanted view of the world. 

I had it once, too. It was a gift that I don’t want back. It also never let me go.

Christianity permeated everything in my early life.

My mother, Janice, converted to Christianity in her mid-20s, not long after what my uncle described as a horrifically bad acid trip, in which she claimed to have seen the face of God, which wasn’t as uncommon as you’d think in the ’70s; the Jesus People movement of that time merged counter-cultural hippie aesthetics with fervent, Spirit-filled evangelical Christianity. My dad followed her, reluctantly at first, and gave up playing bass in a local cover band and recording jams in our marijuana-smoke-filled basement for Sunday morning hymns.

My family’s religion had a specific name, even if no one I knew used it: the neo-charismatic movement, or the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. (We called it simply: “The Revival.”) Its most visible figure was John Wimber, the former Righteous Brothers keyboardist who founded the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and pioneered what he called “power evangelism” — the idea that conversion should be accompanied by signs and wonders, and that the miracles described in the New Testament had returned. Theologian C. Peter Wagner and his colleagues developed a related doctrine of “spiritual mapping” and “territorial spirits”: the idea that demonic powers were attached to specific geographic locations and could be displaced by prayer warriors visiting those sites. This is the theology my father was practicing on the bluffs above the Mississippi.

It is hard to overstate how large the Third Wave religious movement got. By the mid-’90s, the global Pentecostal and charismatic believer population was massive — estimated at over 200 million, spreading from Wimber’s Vineyard church in Orange County, California, to tens of millions of Americans gathered in evangelical churches, school gymnasiums, converted strip malls, and suburban basement prayer groups. Television did the rest: through Trinity Broadcasting Network and Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, and Benny Hinn brought faith healing, prophecy, and the spectacle of enchantment to millions of living rooms, including ours.

The quasi-megachurch we first attended, Calvary Temple in Springfield, was one of many congregations that got swept up by the Third Wave. It was once a more staid Southern Baptist church led by Pastor MC Johnson, a gravel-voiced veteran whose fire-and-brimstone sermons took on an extra element of menace due to a never-moving glass eye that replaced the one shot out during World War II. In the early 1980s, Calvary embraced the Third Wave’s theatrical turn. Soon, parishioners would interrupt services to speak in tongues, and others with the alleged Gift of Prophecy would interpret those tongues, speaking in the voice of God. Pastor Johnson preached constantly about the coming Rapture, once speculating that the Antichrist would be incredibly gay (“The Queen Bee of ‘Em All,” he claimed).

The End Times, we were told, were not just near; they were imminent. The Third Wave brought with it some frightening implications based on dispensationalism, the 19th-century scheme of John Nelson Darby that splits human history into seven divine “dispensations” culminating in the Rapture, the rise of the Antichrist, and Armageddon. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) sold tens of millions of copies by popularizing this framework and predicting that Jesus would return sometime during the Reagan administration. I shudder when I recall being haunted by A Thief in the Night, a quartet of evangelical films released across the ’70s and ’80s, the precursor to the Left Behind novels of the ’90s. I was one of tens of millions of kids who saw them at church watch parties, disturbed to see characters unlucky enough to sleep through the Rapture and wake up in the Great Tribulation, where the United Nations was running guillotines for anyone who refused the Mark of the Beast. I didn’t need Freddy Krueger or Friday the 13th movies; that was fake. I had eschatology, and it was real; at times, it was difficult not to approach every service with a sense of both thrill and fear. Would someone at church prophesy that the Rapture would occur next week? Maybe.

Jesus, of course, didn’t get the memo and stayed in heaven, but my parents only grew more devout as the ’80s came to an end. It began with Sunday School, my mom donning choir robes, and my dad playing bass guitar for the church band, and escalated from there. By my teen years, I was forced to attend three-hour revival services in which hundreds of parishioners were lined up like they were waiting to ride Space Mountain at Disneyland and then were knocked down to the ground like bowling pins by an African missionary, claiming they were all “slain in the spirit.” A woman holding a picnic basket would stand at the ready to cover the slain women with red blankets for the sake of decency. There was wild dancing, unstructured singing and chanting, running and writhing in the aisles — a hyper-emotive style of worship similar to the kind that led to Ann Lee and the Shakers’ exile to colonial America a few centuries ago. 

Both my parents believed in direct divine revelation from God and that the line between the spiritual and physical realms of existence was ever blurry. When I was in college, my mother told me Jesus once rode a chariot through her church’s sanctuary and somehow gifted parishioners with gold fillings in their teeth. She once attempted an exorcism at a Pizza Hut, trying to cast out a demon she believed had inhabited a homeless woman who, looking back, was probably in the grip of something more chemical than supernatural. My mom and dad both once joined a day-long prayer march around a local strip club called Deja Vu, inspired by the Israelites’ march around Jericho in the Old Testament. They came home certain that a holy cloud had descended from heaven upon it. 

I cringed instinctively and constantly back then to these encounters, but now what lingers most in my mind about my parents’ faith isn’t that it was weird or outrageous — though it was at times — it was that it appeared holistic and genuine. The door of the spirit was open for them, and their door, in the most literal sense, was open to everyone, too. Over the years, they housed a mentally disabled man, a Thai immigrant, and a homeless man they’d pulled in off the street. These were not charity projects but houseguests, people absorbed into the ordinary rhythm of their lives. They raised my nephew Aidin for a decade, and my father spent his retirement years not traveling, as he had hoped, but nursing my mother through the aftermath of her stroke because that was simply what love required. These acts didn’t proceed from a theology of social justice or a framework of civic obligation. It proceeded, as far as I could tell, from the same source as everything else — the conviction that the world was alive, that other people were addressed by God and therefore deserving of the same attention, that the membrane between the spiritual and the human was thin enough that you had to act accordingly. 

“Faith, hope, and love are the triune frequencies, which, once aligned to the Jesus Frequency, allow for a super strong laser-like frequency beam that allows even the dead to be resurrected.” My father wrote that and about 50,000 more words like it before he died. He spent the last decade of his life on a manuscript called The Good Vibrations Manual — 12 chapters synthesizing electromagnetic frequency theory, charismatic Christian theology, and personal revelation into a single explanatory system for the universe. He believed that prayer, worship, prophetic dreams, visions, and even the soul’s passage after death all moved as literal particle waves — supersonic frequencies that traveled through dimensional portholes between earth and the throne room of God, the spiritual realm described by Paul in II Corinthians 12 as “the third heaven.”

He had no formal training in physics, just 45 years of musicianship and what he described as a series of direct communications from God, the first of which arrived in 2002 with an instruction drawn from Jeremiah 29:13: You will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all your heart. He took the instruction literally and devoted the rest of his life to it.

The vanity license plate on the back of my parents’ 1982 Chevy Nova read “MORE LORD”— which was their philosophy, that there was always more of Jesus’s presence out there to bathe in; it was an unquenchable thirst.

I find it ironic that the paradigm I experienced in abundance in my youth — an enchanted cosmos, a world alive with spiritual presence and urgency at every moment — has become, of all things, cool: an object of widespread longing. Kind of.

There is a reason why I felt like an outsider in my tight-knit religious community until I left the church at age 30. As I aged, went away to college, and took steps into the wider culture, I discovered that in America, faith and belief were not only in steady retreat, they were disparaged. Hollywood mocked Christianity constantly; The Simpsons gave us decades of Ned Flanders. Jesus Camp was nominated for an Academy Award for its portrayal of a Pentecostal children’s camp as a kind of theocratic boot camp. (“Was your church like Jesus Camp?” I used to get asked constantly.) In the Obama years, the New Atheists emerged as a trendy intellectual force, led by figures known as the Four Horsemen: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. They attacked religion as not just irrelevant, but actively bad, with Dawkins claiming that faith was a “mental illness” and “a force for evil in the world.” The evangelical Christian world was their most obvious target; faith healing, creationism, and tongues-speaking served as the paradigm cases of religious irrationality. I understood the critique, even shared some of it — and yet something about the New Atheists’ triumphalism felt, even then, like its own kind of faith.

But now in the 2020s, the cultural vibes have shifted. Church attendance has stopped declining; the explosive growth of the religious “nones” has plateaued, and urban Gen-Zers are turning back to Catholicism to the point where young Chicagoans are flying novelty “Da Pope” flags in Wrigleyville, as if they are rooting for him to win the World Series of Religion. Meanwhile, a string of public intellectuals have converted or returned to Christianity in recent years, including former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hollywood has even softened on evangelicalism slightly; I couldn’t believe my eyes a few months ago when The Testament of Ann Lee, a film about the founder of the aforementioned Shakers, treated the ecstatic sect of Christianity with deep respect. 

The fact that there is some mainstream, even pop cultural acceptance of the new religious wave is novel. But what is more striking is that this new wave of religiosity of the ’20s is pursuing, not steering away from, the woo-woo elements that once made religion such a ripe object of ridicule. The trend is being called “re-enchantment,” though it is still hard for anyone to put their finger on what that actually means or looks like in practice. What everyone seems to vaguely agree on is that it is a reversal of what Max Weber described a century ago as Entzauberung der Welt, roughly translated as “the unmagicking of the world.” The phrase meant the slow draining of mystery, meaning, and sacred presence from the post-Enlightenment West by a new kind of reformation of science, bureaucracy, and reason. 

For re-enchanters, there’s an emphasis on an experiential form of spirituality, with mystery, miracles, cosmic encounters with a divine being they can’t fully understand. “The world is not what we think it is,” writes Rod Dreher in his 2024 treatise Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. “It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful. We do not create meaning; meaning is already there, waiting to be discovered.” Dreher isn’t alone. He, Paul Kingsnorth, Ross Douthat, and David Bentley Hart — christened the “Four Horsemen of New Theism” in inverted homage to the New Atheist quartet they have supposedly displaced — have made careers out of talking about Making God Great Again. They are influential in the new cottage industry of bestselling books, podcasts, and Substack newsletters calling for the re-enchantment of the world. One critic, surveying the re-enchantment scene, observed that “Substack is rife with it. Twitter reeks with it.” 

The Christian God, of course, isn’t the only supernatural being making a 21st-century comeback; Satan’s back too. A decade ago, it was only TV preachers and Alex Jones shouting at the devil, but suddenly it is mainstream conservatives more broadly that are seriously invoking Beelzebub or the Antichrist: Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance, the latter of whom says he believes that UFOs are demons. The quest for re-enchantment isn’t even strictly a Biblical, or even religious project. On the Left, the devil and demons are often treated as friendlier folx, possibly woke allies to social justice-loving ultraliberals who have assembled, from scraps, a loose spirituality of astrology, witchcraft, tarot, and a kind of Green New Deal of neo-paganism. In Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara Isabella Burton explains the rise of “bespoke spirituality” in America, such as the communist witches, the transhumanism of Silicon Valley, the cult-lite overtones of self-care fitness programs like Soulcycle, and the highly online denizens of Manosphere who hopelessly lust after the rise of a new Rome.

What the emergence of these new mystics — of both the God and godless kind — and all of the media attention they’ve earned conceals is that a version of what they are looking for was never lost by everyone. For a significant slice of America, especially among the working-class, the age of enchantment never ended — it just existed at the margins. It survived in church basements, converted strip malls, revival services, and the homes of people like my parents, who did not experience angels and demons as metaphors for psychic life or symbols in a civilizational argument, but as facts. This is precisely the kind of enchantment that the new re-enchanters tend to avoid: not tasteful, not literary, not mediated through landscape writing, ancient liturgy, or a podcast about the crisis of meaning, but embarrassing, excessive, and alive.

The intellectual, elite New Right and the super libs driving much of the current conversation have cast a wary eye on charismatic Christianity and said nearly in unison: OK, but not that kind of enchantment. 

I can relate.

After my childhood immersion in my parents’ faith, I spent my more skeptical 20s in a church in Missouri that was part of the “seeker church” boom of the ’80s and ’90s. That’s when megachurches popped up everywhere in the exurbs, and the Joel Osteens of the world preached a capitalism-friendly gospel that turned Jesus into your life coach and financial advisor. That wave, in which everyone seemed unsettled by the more exuberant brands of faith, was defined by a watering down of theology for the sake of filling pews. Congregations like the one I attended in college awkwardly shoved the enchanted world of Christianity to the side like Thomas Jefferson in his edited, miracle-free Jefferson Bible. They turned services into an ill-fitting mix of rock concert and self-help TED Talk-like sermons to lure “I’m spiritual, not religious” fence-sitters. It was pleasant, inviting, and ultimately hollow. 

My departure, when it finally came, was in 2006, a year into an already half-hearted missionary stint in Venice, California. The details involved an episode of This American Life called “Heretics,” and the sudden conviction that Hell was not a supernatural prison waiting for the unsaved but simply this — the suffering we make for each other, here, now, always. If Hell wasn’t real, then neither was Heaven, and the whole spiritual rigging came down. Within weeks, I had abandoned the mission and moved to Chicago, leaving my faith to drown in the Pacific.

What I remember most about that period is not the relief — though there was certainly relief in losing the fear of eternal damnation — but the specific quality of the silence that followed. The world became, almost overnight, a place drained of color. Events happened. People lived and died. I believed, as Karl Marx described, that history unfolded by the grinding logic of materialism, effect, interest, power, accident, and entropy. The cosmic aliveness of my childhood — the sense that every moment was charged with spiritual significance, that God was attending to you with terrifying specificity — was gone. 

Like many Americans, I was now faced with the impossible burden of piecing together my own meaning and purpose in an age of hyperindividualism. I told myself this was maturity. I built a career on it. As a journalist, I learned the professional dialect of disenchantment, ironic, analytical, allergic to earnestness in the way that people who were once very earnest tend to be. 

But a decade after leaving, sitting in the audience at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre watching The Christians, a play about a pastor’s disenchantment, I walked out onto Halsted Street, dazed. The play ends with a bright spotlight that narrows and focuses exclusively on the character Pastor Paul, who loses his congregation after rejecting the harsh doctrine of Heaven and Hell, as I had done. He’s right, of course, but the truth left him sitting alone in the dark with no one to turn to. 

I don’t have an answer — I’ve simply stopped asking nagging questions about the nature of existence and suppressed whatever longing I still carry for something I can’t name. “There are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote. “Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints….”

I am among those saints who decide in those harrowing moments to stop groping around endlessly in the dark night, and close our eyes, and pretend it is day. 

What I suspect, but can’t prove, is that the contemporary quest for re-enchantment is largely driven by those who never had the kind of heightened struggle I had, and thus yearn for something like it. It is a natural generational reaction against the rationalist excesses of the algorithmic age and technological post-modernity — that totalizing, interlocking apparatus of industrial capitalism, rationalism, and globalized power that Kingsnorth, the re-enchanter, collapses into a single, almost mythic epithet: “the Machine.” 

By rejecting the grand metanarratives, especially the Old Time Religion of Christianity, we have left individuals with little to do except to helplessly rage against The Machine. We are drowning in a sea of context-free information, an increasing amount of which is hallucinated by AI systems, which are, in their own way, a degraded parody of what God once promised: an omniscient listener, an answer to every question, a presence that never sleeps. We can’t depend on the old pillars of the state and social life, either, as Kingsnorth writes, “Western culture seems in many ways to be visibly collapsing before our eyes. Our nations, our family structures, our communities, our assumptions, our ecosystems: everything is under strain, under attack, or bursting at the seams.” 

The disenchanted alternative has not obviously produced better people or a more livable world. Why not then grasp at an immutable object of the past, in a time of impermanence? 

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The girl who killed ‘Teen Vogue’

By Ryan Zickgraf

The problem is that weak ontology is built into re-enchantment. That is the term philosopher Stephen White describes as the self-aware practice of believing something you know you are choosing to believe without strong claims to absolute truth. The shared premise of much of the re-enchantment literature is rather simple: the modern world is spiritually thin, and something must be done. The cures vary widely: secular philosophers prescribe the wonder-of-everyday-as-practice; Christian theologians prescribe prayer and mystical experience; novelists and essayists prescribe a return to landscape, tradition, and ritual. 

Few can agree on what kind of magic fills the void. Do we now fill it with belief and worship of God, Satan, or the Earth? Do we jump on the Pope Leo bandwagon? Shall we reintroduce the wolves and worship them? Too often, the re-enchanters run into the problem the disenchanted New Atheists never had: it is easier to say what you are against than what you are actually for.

Suppose enchantment is only an illusion, a trick of the light that any honest adult knows better than to believe in, which is more or less what weak ontology already concedes. Then willing yourself back into it is an absurd errand, because it asks you to suspend a disbelief that snaps back into place the instant you stop performing the suspension. There is something faintly ridiculous about deciding to enchant yourself, like trying to surprise yourself with a birthday party you planned. This is why the re-enchantment shelf keeps sliding, almost against its will, into the language of fantasy and simulation, of theme parks and Disney movies. You can visit the Holy Land Experience, the Orlando Bible theme park, but you can’t permanently move there.

And if enchantment is not an illusion, but instead is a real spiritual power of the kind my parents staked their lives on, then the project becomes stranger and more dangerous still. In the older sense of the word, the power to enchant does not belong to the person under the spell. If you are enchanted, you probably do not know it. You certainly do not manage it, curate it, schedule it for Saturday, or set aside 20 minutes for it after finishing a book about the crisis of meaning. Jesus won’t ride in on a chariot on your time.

I am not arguing that my family’s faith was better than anyone else’s. I am making the narrower and more devastating claim that the secular re-enchantment project is playing a game it can’t win because it secretly believes winning would be a loss too great to bear. To succeed, re-enchantment would require the surrender of the ironic distance that makes the project legible to you in the first place — the capacity to write about it, podcast about it, buy the books about it, to be the kind of person who can evaluate various re-enchantment strategies and select the most compelling one. Enchantment, properly understood, is not a strategy. It is the end of strategy.

That is what Jean Baudrillard, the late French postmodern theorist, argued in his last major book, The Intelligence of Evil. The modern world, he claimed, has entered a condition he called “Integral Reality,” a state in which “everything is realized and technically materialized without reference to any principle or final purpose whatever.” The real hasn’t vanished physically; it has vanished metaphysically. The principle that gave the world meaning is dead, and what remains is an unrestrained expansion, a saturated and totalized reality that has lost its shadow. The contemporary re-enchanters live in the aftermath, trying to reintroduce wolves to a Yellowstone that has been paved over. 

Baudrillard was right about the paving-over, but he was wrong — or at least incomplete — about what it erased. What my childhood helps me to see is that Integral Reality liquidated not magic per se, but the conditions of credulity: the thick social webs, the inherited cosmologies, the shared and unquestioned worlds inside which magic could function — not as an anomaly but as the baseline. What my parents had, what they tried to give me, what I received and then rejected, and what I am still sorting through wasn’t a set of beliefs that happened to be wrong. It was a way of inhabiting the world, a posture of openness to the possibility that the world might be, in some sense that resists clean explication, for you. Not in the prosperity-gospel sense, or the sense that God is a vending machine waiting to be correctly petitioned with coins, but in the sense that the universe is not actually indifferent to you. That what happened to my father on a limestone bluff above the Mississippi River wasn’t nothing, even if it wasn’t what he thought it was.

My father did not go to Alton because he had curated a contemplative practice that cultivated his openness to the miraculous. He went because the world was already on fire, and he could see it, and he could not look away, and he was not ashamed. The house I grew up in belongs to the bank now, and his binder of research on the demon bird, I assume, went with it. He held it out to me once, and I handed it back. I have been thinking about that ever since.

For a time, the theory appeared to be true. Across Western Europe, as incomes rose, church attendance collapsed. In Britain, the share of the population attending weekly religious services fell from around 50% in the early 20th century to single digits today. In France and the Netherlands, organized religion receded dramatically from public life. Politics increasingly revolved around technocratic governance rather than shared cultural or religious identity.

Among intellectuals and civic leaders, the assumption hardened into orthodoxy: religion belonged to the past, secularization to the future. Those who questioned this view were often dismissed as nostalgic defenders of a fading world. As the anthropologist Anthony Wallace once predicted with remarkable confidence, “the evolutionary future of religion is extinction.”

But history has produced a striking counterexample. Israel does not simply diverge from this trajectory — it inverts it.

Israel is one of the most technologically advanced economies on earth, producing an extraordinary concentration of startups, scientific breakthroughs, and military innovations. Israeli firms have played major roles in fields ranging from cybersecurity and artificial intelligence to medical technology and water management. Yet Israel is also a deeply traditional society, with a large — and growing — religious population. 

Far from being a weakness, this tendency increasingly looks like a strength. Israel and much of the developed world are moving in opposite directions — the one toward social fragmentation and economic stagnation, the other toward greater social vitality and economic dynamism. The problems that plague advanced societies, such as demographic decline, weakening civic participation, and erosion of shared meaning, aren’t prevalent in Israel, and the country is showing remarkable resilience. What if Israel is not the exception to the rule, but evidence that the rules are wrong?

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Brad Lander’s ‘No’ to Israel

By Ross Barkan

While modernization theory emerged from Western Europe’s particular historical experience in the 19th and 20th centuries, a similar pattern occurred elsewhere. East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China industrialized rapidly while becoming increasingly urban and secular. Latin America’s most successful states — places such as Chile and Uruguay — also became its least religious. Even many states that only achieved middle-income status, such as Tunisia and Argentina, showed sharp declines in religious belief.

By the early 21st century, the modernization thesis had become almost axiomatic. Economic development, it was assumed, would inevitably coincide with declining religious authority, increasing individualism, and secularization of society — all of which were considered desirable.

Yet Israel’s modernization has not weakened its people’s religiosity. If anything, the opposite is true. As the country has become one of the most successful high-tech economies in the world, the proportion of Israelis identifying as religious or traditional has steadily increased.

The growth of religious influence is not confined to the margins of society. In fact, it is increasingly central to Israel’s political, cultural, and institutional life. Religious Zionists — once a relatively small minority — now occupy key positions in the military, government, and civil service, combining strong ideological commitment with high levels of education and professional integration. Traditional Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, historically underrepresented in the country’s elite, have become a major cultural and political force, shaping everything from electoral coalitions to popular culture. Meanwhile, the Haredi population, though more socially insular, is expanding rapidly and exerting growing influence through both demographic weight and political organization. Together, these groups are not only increasing in number; they’re reshaping the broader national culture — extending the reach of tradition into public life in ways rarely seen in other developed societies.

Even among those who consider themselves secular, religious traditions remain deeply embedded in everyday life. Surveys by the Israeli scholars Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs show that while only about 30% of Jewish Israelis describe themselves as religious, nearly two-thirds light Shabbat candles and more than 80% gather regularly as a family for the meal on Friday evening. Ninety-six percent participate in some form of Passover Seder. These patterns suggest that even where formal belief declines, shared practices continue to transmit identity across generations.

Of course, these trends are not uniform. In Israel’s more secular centers — such as Tel Aviv and Haifa — public life has in many respects become less religious over time. Secular schools devote far less attention to religious study than they did in earlier decades, civil marriage abroad has become increasingly common, and public observance of Shabbat has eroded, with transportation and commerce now operating in areas where they once did not. Israeli society is, in effect, evolving along two parallel tracks: as religious and traditional communities grow in number and influence, more secular segments reduce their formal religious observance. Yet even within these groups, participation in core rituals — family meals, Passover Seders, and life-cycle traditions — remains widespread, suggesting that tradition continues to shape social life even where formal religiosity declines.

Israel’s example shows that modernization need not coincide with secularization. This is fortunate, because the latter seems to be fraying the social fabric of the nations where it has progressed furthest. 

Traditional institutions bring to nations’ populations what the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “a unified system of beliefs and practices . . . which unite [a people] into one single moral community.” That shared framework promotes cohesion, a long-term perspective, and societal strength. When the framework weakens, the social bonds that hold societies together can weaken with them.

This much is evident in highly modernized societies today. As Robert Putnam famously documented of the United States in Bowling Alone and other books, participation in voluntary associations, community organizations, and local institutions declined sharply during the late 20th century. Today, alienation has replaced trust in governments, media, and public institutions in much of the developed world. Political participation increasingly takes the form of online outrage rather than sustained engagement. Population growth in most industrialized economies has reversed.

These trends suggest that while modernization theory may work in the short term, it overlooks a deeper possibility that is only becoming evident after many generations: over the long term, every society — no matter how rich — needs tradition and shared institutions in order to thrive.

Israel’s  unique fusion of tradition and modernity did not emerge accidentally: it was embedded in the country’s founding.

Zionism was one of the most modernizing political movements of the 19th century, yet it drew legitimacy from one of the world’s oldest civilizational traditions. The movement sought to create a modern nation-state while grounding its identity in a history stretching back thousands of years. As the French political philosopher Raymond Aron observed, Israel represented a rare historical phenomenon: a modern nation-state built in the name of an ancient tradition.

Many early Zionist leaders were secular, even militantly so. Figures such as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Berl Katznelson — a prominent intellectual who played a major role in founding Labor Zionism — envisioned Israel as a modern socialist society shaped by agriculture, industry, and national revival. Yet even these secular pioneers understood that Jewish history and collective memory formed the foundation of the national project they were building. Katznelson, for example, famously wrote about the importance of balancing “rupture and continuity.” As he asserted, “Were only memory to exist, then we would be crushed beneath its burden and would become slaves to our memories…. [W]ere we ruled entirely by forgetfulness, what place would there be for culture, science, self-consciousness, or spiritual life?”

One of the most striking examples of how Israel grounded its identity in tradition is its revival of Hebrew. For centuries, the language had survived primarily in liturgy and religious scholarship. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Zionist activists transformed it into a modern spoken language capable of supporting science, politics, literature, and daily life. It remains one of the few successful examples in history of a language revived after centuries of limited everyday use.

At the same time, Israel invested heavily in education and technology. This included establishing several of the world’s preeminent research universities, among them Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Today, the country has one of the world’s best educated populations, and consistently ranks first globally for R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP, with recent figures exceeding 6%.

Israel also adopted modern democratic institutions — including a parliament, competitive elections, and an independent judiciary. Yet it kept the national holidays of the Jewish calendar and allowed religious authorities to retain jurisdiction over marriage and personal-status matters such as marriage and divorce. 

The state founded in 1948, therefore, carried both revolutionary and traditional elements — all of which have carried over into the Israel of today. The revolutionary ones helped create a modern, innovative economy. The traditional ones helped preserve the social cohesion that many affluent societies have struggled to maintain. In Israel, unlike most of the developed world, informal networks of family, neighborhood, and community are robust. Extended families often live in close proximity, and social life frequently revolves around shared meals, religious holidays, and community institutions. While around 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab, and thus have their own distinct communal institutions and identities, many of the broader patterns of strong family structures and dense social networks extend across that population as well. 

Among Israelis, high levels of regular religious attendance, military service, and reserve duty cultivate a powerful ethos of collective responsibility. Volunteering rates also remain high, and civil-society organizations play a central role in addressing challenges that in many countries would fall primarily to the state. Zaka, for instance, is a mostly Haredi volunteer organization dedicated to responding to terror attacks, accidents, and disasters. After the October 7 attacks, it recovered and identified remains — often using advanced forensic technologies — so they could be buried in accordance with traditional Jewish law.

Deep cultural foundations, originally embedded in religion, underpin all these dynamics. Judaism places strong emphasis on communal obligation and collective responsibility. The Hebrew concept of arevut — the idea that all Jews share responsibility for one another — grounds many Israeli social norms. Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that religion often functions as a stabilizing force within democratic societies, acting as what he called “the first of their political institutions.” In Israel, this dynamic remains unusually visible.

This does not mean Israeli society lacks internal conflict. From the beginning, Israel has been prone to bouts of intense political conflict over the country’s direction. The early 1950s, for example, saw massive — and sometimes violent — protests against acceptance of reparations from Germany. In the 1970s, growing resentment among Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews erupted into a powerful protest movement that challenged the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment. In the 1990s, efforts to forge an agreement with the Palestinians produced intense societal polarization. Yet beneath these disputes lies a widely shared understanding that the survival of the state ultimately requires cooperation.

The events following the October 7 attacks once again illustrated this dynamic. Despite months of bitter divisions over judicial reform that had consumed Israeli society before the attacks, the country rapidly mobilized in support of soldiers, displaced civilians, and the broader war effort. Volunteer networks sprang into action. Civilian groups organized logistics, delivered supplies to military units, and provided assistance to communities near the front lines. Many of the initiatives leveraged technology to help heal societal wounds from the violence. ReGrow Israel, for instance, used sustainable techniques and enhanced infrastructure to restore farms. SafeHeart employed the latest in trauma research to support survivors. These efforts continue today.

Israel also stands out as an exception to demographic trends. Across much of the developed world, birthrates have collapsed far below replacement level. Countries such as Italy, Spain, South Korea, and Japan now face shrinking populations and rapidly aging societies. Governments increasingly struggle to sustain pension systems, labor forces, and economic growth. As the demographer Phillip Longman has argued, countries with shrinking populations face growing economic and geopolitical disadvantages as their workforces contract and their societies age.

Israel, despite having a highly developed economy, averages around three children per woman — easily the highest fertility rate among the world’s advanced industrialized democracies. Its population continues to grow rapidly even as populations in many advanced societies are contracting.

Part of this vitality reflects the influence of religious communities, where large families remain a deeply rooted cultural norm. But Israel’s demographic strength extends well beyond the Haredi and Religious Zionist parts of society: even secular Jewish Israelis typically have more children than their counterparts in Europe or East Asia.

The result is a society with an unusually young age structure for a developed country. Nearly 28% of Israel’s population is under the age of 15 — roughly double the proportion in many European states. This demographic carries significant strategic advantages: a younger population provides a larger workforce, a deeper military recruitment pool, and a more dynamic consumer economy.

Several factors help explain this pattern. In Israel, institutions and public spaces are unusually focused on or have adapted to the needs of children and family. Family life remains culturally central, and national identity is closely tied to demographic continuity. Raising children is widely understood to be not only a personal choice, but a contribution to a collective project — the endurance of a people and a state forged under extraordinary historical pressures. 

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Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

Traditional values have had a much larger impact than material benefits on the unusually high Israeli desire to have children. By embedding tradition within modern life, Israeli society has engendered a belief that the future is something worth investing in.

The adversity that has faced Israel since its founding is one key to this success. Israel has faced wars, terrorism, diplomatic isolation, and severe resource constraints. Few modern states have been required to solve so many existential challenges so quickly.

What is striking is not merely that Israel survived these pressures, but how it responded to them.

Again and again, the country has drawn on both halves of its social character. Tradition provides cohesion — a powerful sense of shared history, collective responsibility and national purpose. Modern institutions supply the tools: scientific research, technological innovation, and a culture of pragmatic problem-solving. The Israeli thinker Micah Goodman has described the result: a people who have mastered the high capabilities produced by modern individualism and technological development paired with a deep, premodern willingness to sacrifice for the collective good.

Together, these forces have repeatedly transformed adversity into capability. Military threats accelerated the development of advanced defense technologies, from missile-defense systems to cybersecurity innovations. Chronic water scarcity pushed Israeli engineers to pioneer large-scale desalination and highly efficient irrigation techniques that are now used around the world.

Crisis, in other words, became a kind of social training ground — continually reinforcing the country’s unusual blend of rootedness and innovation.

Israel often appears chaotic to outsiders, but instead it represents a different path to modernity. Within a few miles, one can move from the secular nightlife of Tel Aviv to the Haredi neighborhoods of Bnei Brak, where daily life for the large families therein emphasizes religious study. High-tech entrepreneurs building cybersecurity companies operate alongside communities that revolve around synagogue life and traditional religious observance.

Yet many Israelis move fluidly between traditional and modern worlds over the course of their lives. The result is a social dynamism unlike that of other developed countries, that contributes to the unique mix of rootedness and innovation. The political economist Albert Hirschman observed that social energy often emerges from tensions that are never fully resolved. Israel’s seemingly contradictory social structure has produced exactly that effect.

The lesson of Israel’s experience is not that other countries should replicate its institutions or history. Israel’s circumstances — its civilizational heritage, geopolitical environment, and founding narrative — are unique. But the underlying principles may have wider relevance.

Societies can achieve technological and economic success without secularizing or eschewing tradition. In fact, strong cultural foundations may provide the stability and cohesion needed to navigate growing uncertainty while sustaining modern dynamism over time.

Across the developed world, societies are searching for ways to rebuild trust and resilience — qualities that cannot be manufactured by bureaucratic policy alone. Israel’s experience suggests that modern societies may benefit not from abandoning their traditional foundations, but from integrating them into their modern ways of living. In a more turbulent world, such a synthesis may prove less paradoxical than prophetic.

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

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

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

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

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

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How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that definition of humans isn’t quite right, said Alexander Schmemann. 

A 20th-century Orthodox Christian theologian, Schmemann coined an alternative name for our species, Homo adorans, claiming that worship is at the center of what it means to be human, not thinking. “The first and basic definition of man is that he is the priest,” Schmemann asserted without a hint of embarrassment. “He stands at the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God.”

I thought of Schmemann a few months ago while reading an essay by the Catholic writer R. R. Reno. “We are hardwired to worship,” writes Reno, using a term — “hardwired” — that is more common to the realm of evolutionary psychology. “If we turn away from the true God,” Reno continues, “we will chase after false gods.”

Reno and Schmemann are both devout believers, so it’s easy to dismiss their claims as propaganda. They want us to believe that worshipping is natural and necessary, just as they do. But is there some remote chance that they could be onto something? Could there be an evolutionary explanation for this common human act of worship? Is it grounded in an animal instinct? 

I’ve come to believe that it is. We have to try to understand worship as a biological phenomenon.

The first clue comes from the field of animal behavior, where it pays to be a bit of a prankster. Often, the goal of the researcher is to “trick” the animal and thereby reveal how it goes about its business. We all know that birds fly south for the winter, for example. But how do they do it? How do they know which direction to fly? 

Scientists in the 1970s had a hunch that the birds were looking for cues in the night sky. To test their hypothesis, these clever researchers decided to raise a flock of indigo buntings inside a planetarium. By tweaking the settings on the projector, they could create a false sky for the birds. The poor buntings, raised in the avian equivalent of Plato’s cave, would then try to fly north for the winter. Or east. Or west.

It turned out that the key variable was the sky’s rotation. Normally, in the Northern Hemisphere, the sky seems to rotate around Polaris, the outermost star in the Little Dipper’s handle. This is why we call it the North Star — because it’s always in the north. But the scientists created their own version of the heavenly sphere, in which everything rotated around, say, the star Betelgeuse. The birds inferred, incorrectly, that north was way over there and flew in the wrong direction as winter approached.

I first learned about the ingenious planetarium experiment a couple decades ago when I took a course in “comparative psychobiology” at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ants, we learned, use geometry to plot their way home if you put an obstacle in their way. Barn owls, if you plug one of their ears, aren’t able to locate their prey in space and will strike at the wrong spot. Catsharks can be induced to attack an empty patch of sand if you embed electrodes in the sand that mimic the electrical field produced by the shark’s prey, a flatfish that buries itself to hide.

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Faith is the new Successor Ideology

By Tim DeRoche

Our professor, the cognitive neuroscientist Randy Gallistel, had a particular goal of disabusing us of our naive notions about the nature-versus-nurture debate. Nature and nurture are all bound up with each other, he claimed: “your genes create your environment.”

What? I remember my puzzlement at this statement. Your genes create your environment. What could he possibly mean by that? Your environment, by definition, is everything that happens to you after your genes miraculously cohere at the moment of conception, I thought. Your genes have no control over it.

But that’s not so, Professor Gallistel argued. Your genes control what aspects of the environment you pay attention to. Our confused buntings, for example, are genetically programmed to pay attention to the stars in the night sky. Their genes “know” that the birds need a sense of direction to avoid dying of cold or hunger during the hard winter months. Because of this, the sky’s rotation is a part of the bird’s environment. Other animals are completely oblivious to this phenomenon, presumably because it isn’t relevant to any of their behavioral choices. 

At the most basic level, our genes even determine what we perceive. Human beings can see all the colors of the rainbow, but we are blind to ultraviolet and infrared light. These colors exist in the natural world, but they aren’t a part of man’s visual environment. It is our genes that make it so, as they contain the instructions that tell our body how to make our eyes. Apparently, our genes “believe” that awareness of UV and infrared light isn’t necessary for a human to survive and reproduce.

If we are to consider worship as a biological phenomenon, we need to ask ourselves: what kind of organism is a human being? What does man pay attention to and why? And what are we trying to bring about for ourselves when we engage in the act of worship?

In the brutally violent climax of the movie Apocalypse Now, the murder of Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is intercut with the ritual sacrifice of a water buffalo by the natives. And this was no product of movie magic: Francis Ford Coppola and his crew captured a real religious ritual of the Ifugao people of the Philippines, who had been hired to play the Vietnamese natives in the movie. In the scene, the bull is viciously hacked to death by three native men carrying large machetes, and the animal is nearly decapitated. 

“The horror,” whispers Kurtz as he dies.

Perhaps the hardest thing to explain about the act of human worship is how destructive and violent it can be. It is indeed often horrific. The ritual killing of animals has recurred again and again across the world and throughout human history. Often, the body of the animal — or some portion of it — is burned or destroyed, rather than being consumed by the worshippers. 

Studying the native peoples of America and Northeast Asia, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss noticed that their tribes, unrelated and often so distant from one another, shared a common system of ritual trade and worship that he called potlatch. At its center was the willful destruction of one’s own property.

“All the forms of potlatch in the American Northwest and Northeast Asia,” wrote Mauss, “know this theme of destruction … precious oils [are] burnt, copper objects [are] cast into the sea, and even the houses of princes [are] set on fire.” This is all baffling from an evolutionary perspective: why would a creature destroy its own food or shelter? 

But if we are going to understand and explain human worship as a biological phenomenon, we will have to contend with an even more extreme and horrifying example of this destruction: human sacrifice, child sacrifice.

It is a discomfiting fact that the ritualistic sacrifice of children appears again and again in the historical and archaeological record. Corpses of murdered Incan children have been discovered on the mountaintops of Peru. The early Roman and Hebrew sources contain numerous accounts of child sacrifice in the ancient Middle East. In 2012, the remains of 80 teenage girls were unearthed under the wall of a fortress in what is now the Shaanxi province of China. And the phenomenon is surprisingly persistent, right down to our own time. In the past few years, there have been disturbing cases in Africa and India.

Weirdly, some common forms of modern worship still echo these horrors. Perhaps Coppola was fascinated by the sacrifice of the water buffalo partially because it resonates with the Roman Catholicism of his own upbringing, a religion which puts the torture and ritualistic murder of Jesus Christ at the very center of its liturgy. God, we are told, “sacrificed His only son” for us.

The persistence of child sacrifice seems to make a mockery of the evolutionary account of human beings. If man’s purpose for living is to reproduce and transmit his genes to the next generation, then the slaughter of one’s own children would seem to be, at the very least, counterproductive.

But it’s equally unkind to other worldviews. In the face of child sacrifice, it’s going to be difficult to hold out a Rousseauean faith in archaic man as the “noble savage” who was only later corrupted by modern society and civilization. And it certainly gives the lie to the Greek philosophers’ idea that the essence of man is “rationality.” Man may be fitfully rational, but he is something else besides.

Perhaps it suggests that man has no essence or nature at all beyond some basic biological urges. Perhaps human culture is completely malleable and arbitrary. Maybe the social engineers, the utopians of both the Right and the Left, are right, after all.

But I don’t think so. It was a couple of Freudian psychologists, and a colonial-era anthropologist, who helped me understand what’s going on in child sacrifice. Ernest Becker won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, which argues that human beings embed themselves in religion and culture — the world of symbols — in order to escape or deny our inevitable death and decay.

But it is a later book by Becker, the more speculative Escape From Evil, published in 1975, that addresses directly this question of sacrifice, destruction, and worship. In it, the author argued that worship is man’s response to an existential dilemma. “Man,” he wrote, “has always casually sacrificed life for more life.”

Mauss, the anthropologist, said something similar when he attributed to archaic man “the belief that he has to buy from the gods and that the gods know how to repay the price.” And Norman O. Brown, another Freudian who influenced Becker, put it even more bluntly in his 1959 book, Life Agaist Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History: “In the archaic consciousness, the sense of indebtedness exists together with the illusion that the debt is payable; the gods exist to make the debt payable.” 

Becker, Brown, and Mauss believed that we offer the gods life so that they might give it back to us. Their underlying assumption was that we human beings experience life as a gift, whether we like it or not. Whether we admit it or not. And we feel a compulsion to repay the gift. “The original sacrifice is always food,” Becker taught, “because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life.”

This is an ancient idea that recurs again and again in archaic societies. In Hinduism, for example, the sacred scriptures of the Satapatha Brahmana claim that every man is “born as a debt to the gods.” One makes sacrifices to the gods “because of a debt owing to the gods from birth.” 

If Becker and Brown were right, then human sacrifice — child sacrifice — is a case of reciprocation gone wrong. It springs from a mistaken belief that we can enter into a trading relationship with the gods and thereby gain some control over our destiny. According to the anthropologist H.M. Hocart, “the ritual aims at abolishing the uncertainty.”In the grips of this theological error, we sacrifice our food, because we want more food. We sacrifice our shelter, because we want shelter. We sacrifice a life, because we want more life. 

But maybe this all sounds like psychobabble. Perhaps the urge to reciprocate with the gods is just another pseudo-Freudian notion about the ultimate hopelessness of the human psyche. It’s not psychobabble, though. We have very good scientific reasons to believe that man is the animal with a hyperactive attention to gifts. Just ask the evolutionary psychologists. Pay attention, they will tell us, at food sharing in the vampire bats.

The field of evolutionary psychology may have been born in 1971. It was in that year that a young graduate student named Robert Trivers published a now-famous paper laying out a theory called reciprocal altruism. It was, among other things, an evolutionary explanation for the emotions of gratitude and sympathy. “I suggest,” Trivers wrote, “that the emotion of gratitude has been selected to regulate human response to altruistic acts and … that the emotion of sympathy has been selected to motivate altruistic behavior as a function of the plight of the recipient of such behavior.” 

Trivers used the dry, tactical language of evolutionary theory (and the math of genetics) to explain how and why humans commit selfless acts for those unrelated to us. His most surprising claim? That the emotions of gratitude and sympathy pay dividends for the human organism in its effort to survive and reproduce.

In the animal world, the classic example is vampire bats. These blood-sucking creatures can only survive for a couple of days without food, but on any given night, there’s a fairly good chance that the bat will be unable to feed. The bats’ solution to this vulnerability is sharing. A bat who hasn’t fed will “beg” for food from a bat who has, and the satiated bat will regurgitate some of its meal for its “friend.” At a later date, the tables are likely to be turned, and the gift will be reciprocated. It’s a kind of crude insurance.

We can imagine that food sharing was an essential fact of early human life and shaped our evolution as a species. As Professor Gallistel from UCLA might argue, our social environment is created by these hardwired emotions of gratitude and sympathy. Gratitude puts us on high alert for gifts, and it triggers a biological instinct to reciprocate. Sympathy puts us on high alert for the needs of others and triggers an urge to help or to share.

Now, imagine, for a moment, that the vampire bats could talk to each other. What would they discuss? They would probably talk about their food and where they got it. “Hey, those cows that we fed on? Now they’re over by that oak tree.” And they’d talk about each other. “I shared with Charlie last week, but then last night he stiffed me. Can you believe that? I’d stay away from him, if I were you.”

Reciprocity is turbo-charged by language — the ability to speak. For one thing, language opens up whole new vistas of gift-giving. No longer must I regurgitate my food for my friend; I can just tell him where the food is. But language also means that I can trade with many, many other individuals, because who shares — and who doesn’t — quickly becomes public knowledge. If I tell my friend to avoid Cheater Charlie, then I am simultaneously giving a gift to my friend (he can avoid costly interactions with the cheater) and punishing Charlie (who will find it harder to participate in the sharing economy).

For the individual organism, this is a whole new world. If I am generous to one, word quickly gets around, and suddenly everyone seems eager to share with me. But if I am stingy with one, soon everyone seems to be reluctant to share with me when I need it. It starts to feel like I am trading not with isolated individuals, but with the community as a whole. And I start to worry about my reputation: what could they be saying about me when I’m not around? From this evolutionary perspective, it seems likely that gossip is the core function of language (a hypothesis first put forward by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar). It’s no accident that, in English, we often refer to the act of conversation as “sharing.” 

Let’s assume, for a moment, that Trivers is right. Let’s assume that the human animal is designed by evolution to be on the lookout for gifts, for every gift is an invitation into a sharing relationship that may save my life later on. Let’s take it as a given that human beings have a hardwired instinct to reciprocate the gift, an instinct that was amplified by the ability to speak. And now that reciprocating instinct is as strong as the urge to eat or to reproduce. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that it is the core drive that makes a human being a human being and not, say, an indigo bunting or a catshark or a chimpanzee.

Such a creature cannot help but find itself trapped in an infinite regress of gratitude. After two weeks of near starvation, I’m suddenly gnawing on this extremely delicious leg of wildebeest. I got it from my older sister, who got it from my mom, who got it from my dad, who got it from the chief of my village. The chief got it, in trade, from the chief of that village over there by the lake. And he presumably got it from his village’s best hunter, who got it from nature, as the wildebeest presumably got its life from its mother, who got her life from her mother, and so on into infinity.

Modern men and women face a similar conundrum. Every day, I’m told that there are thousands and thousands of people cooperating to put food on my plate. Fishermen in Alaska. Farm laborers in rural Mexico. Ship captains from Europe. Truck drivers on the roads of America. Plus, all the backroom employees of the grocery stores, snack shops, and restaurants that I visit. They’re all somehow serving me, despite the fact that I’ve never met them. Modern life is a never-ending (and terrifying) paradox of plenty. We are trapped in the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

Isn’t it possible that God exists in the vanishing point where our hardwired gratitude disappears into the distance of infinity? Or, if you prefer, we could say this is where the idea of God exists. It would explain why the act of worship is bound up with gratitude and thanks. The etymology of the word “Eucharist” is the Greek word eukharistos, which of course means “gratitude.” It is a ritual, after all, of food sharing.

In his published writings, Trivers never considered the existential implications for a thinking beast that is hardwired to be grateful. If he had, he may have come to similar conclusions as Becker, Brown, and Mauss. “Unlike us,” wrote Becker, “primitives knew the truth of man’s relation to nature: nature gives freely of its bounty to man — this was the miracle for which to be grateful and beholden and give to the gods of nature in return.”

If you’re a nonbeliever, think of it as a glitch. Our biological instincts trick us into seeing life as a gift, even though it’s all just a grand accident. Of course, the believer will counter that human beings are the only animals who have evolved the capacity to recognize that life is a gift. “The unique position of man in the universe,” wrote Schmemann, the theologian, “is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from him.”

What’s striking here is that many forms of Christian worship — including the Catholic Mass — bear a formal resemblance to the archaic sacrifice ritual, but they are bloodless. And instead of trying to barter with the gods to abolish uncertainty, biblical faith urges one to submit to uncertainty. “Not my will,” says Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, “but yours be done.” 

Indeed, it’s possible to read the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures, as well as the Christian gospels, as an extended meditation on what it means to be indebted to God and what is the appropriate way to respond. “What shall I render to the Lord for all the things that He hath rendered to me?” asks the Psalmist. Like the pagans before him, Abraham is prepared to murder his son Isaac in an act of sacrifice. But God, at the very last moment, tells him that it isn’t necessary and provides a substitute.

Perhaps one lesson of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection is this: stop sacrificing your tribal enemies, your fallen kings, your children, and even your goats. There is only one life that is yours to give — your own.

But gratitude isn’t a given, and this is no utopian vision. For if man is the grateful beast, he is also the suspicious beast. “We do not quite forgive a giver,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in a strange little essay titled Gifts. “The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.” 

We share because we are vulnerable, but the act of sharing also makes us vulnerable in new and scary ways. In the evolutionary logic of Trivers, a sharing animal like man will always be wary of being cheated — of offering a gift that isn’t fully reciprocated. But we are just as fearful of being branded as cheaters ourselves or becoming known as stingy. In his studies of archaic cultures, Mauss observed that giving and receiving are always fraught with risk and high emotion. “The gift is something that must be given, that must be received,” he wrote, “and that is, at the same time, dangerous to accept.” Our gratitude may indeed be hardwired, but it is also contingent. 

We are especially suspicious of the unsolicited gift, because it is an invitation into an ongoing relationship of reciprocity. “To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is — like refusing to accept — the equivalent of a declaration of war,” observed Mauss. “It is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.”

Of course, the difficulty for us is that, in the primordial burbling of our nervous system, we feel our very existence to be an unsolicited gift. This is what Martin Heidegger was getting at when he called attention to the geworfenheit (the “thrownness”) of human existence — I didn’t ask for this. This existential angst is the flip side of infinite gratitude and indebtedness.

On a more prosaic level, even our daily economic life is fraught with ambivalence. We are trapped in an endless game of calculation, tracking who owes what to whom. “Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging,” Friedrich Nietzsche mused, “all this preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted thinking itself.”

The idea that we have an inborn instinct to give and receive gifts, to reciprocate with our fellow human beings, is a kind of key that can help us understand so many different spheres of human life: the social, the moral, the economic, the psychological, the legal, and the religious. But, of course, for early man, there was only one sphere of life, and it encompassed all of these. Sharing and reciprocation held it all together. It was a “total” system, as Mauss called it.

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By Tim DeRoche

The temptation is to imagine archaic man living in an arcadia of unconflicted relations with his fellow man, and to hope that we might somehow return to that state. The anthropologist David Graeber wrote a fascinating book, Debt: The First 5,000 years, touching on some of these themes. In it, he imagined “that children born today might live to see the day when there is no longer an ‘economy.’’’ He seems to have believed they will be better off than we. Nietzsche, meanwhile, fantasized about a world in which aristocrats and warriors are no longer burdened by a sense of pity or responsibility for those in need. I suppose we all have our Edens.

But if Robert Trivers was right, then suspicion and social anxiety and pangs of sympathy are all features, not bugs, and they are precisely what make us human. They are also the reason why it’s so hard to be at peace with one’s self and the world.

“He is a good man,” wrote Emerson, “who can receive a gift well.”

How does one respond to a gift?

It’s possible to reject a gift outright, of course. Or you can accept it and then later complain about the quality of the gift, as if you deserved more or better. You can deny that it was really a gift at all. Or you can attempt to return it for something else. You can try to repay the gift, so as to be square with the giver. You can try to avoid the giver out of fear that there is no possible way that you could repay it. 

Yet another possible response is to accept the gift graciously with joy and wonder. You might attempt to show honor and respect to the giver, especially if the gift cannot be repaid. If the giver is unseen, faceless, you might attempt to bestow upon the giver a name and a face. You might set up a place where you could go and imagine and encounter this unseen giver. You might design certain habits or rituals, and tell certain stories, that would remind you of your gratitude and help you to avoid slipping into ungratefulness or resentment. You might do this with other people who have also received the gift.

Over the last 100 years or even more, I fear that we, like the indigo buntings in the planetarium, have been looking up at a false sky. Perhaps seeking relief from existential anguish, we have been telling ourselves stories that let us off the hook, that promise us respite from the weight of infinite gratitude. We try to convince ourselves that there is only the human will and its eternal fight against the chance and entropy of the material world. In our more delusional moments, we almost come to believe that we are winning that fight. But when we accept those stories, we put our conscious mind at war with the biological instincts of our unconscious mind, which cannot help but wonder at the gift of life.

Perhaps now is the time to step out of the planetarium and stare, without blinking, at the night sky in all of its terrible strangeness and beauty, confronting our own smallness, our inexplicable existence, our utter dependence on each other and on nature. When we do, we may find that the only appropriate response — the fully human response, the biological response — is to bow our heads, get down on our knees, and offer a prayer of praise and thanks.

In the United States, especially, church membership is soaring among the young. The assassination of Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk poured fuel on the fire, but the spark kindled well before that horrific event, and it’s the more conservative churches that have welcomed the bulk of the newcomers. It’s not accidental that young men make up the vanguard in this movement back towards traditionalism. Every social movement with a future worth watching starts by attracting young men, who always seem to be the vanguards of enduring social change.

Why, though, is this shift benefiting conservative Christian denominations? There are plenty of other options for disaffected young men, some of them far more threatening to the status quo than attending Mass, finding Jesus by way of Wednesday night Bible classes, or indeed watching Charlie Kirk videos. Very few of them are making bombs, for example, or shooting at politicians they dislike — in the United States, at least, that has been far more common on the Left in the last few years. I can see several reasons for this state of affairs.

The first, put simply, is that these days conservative Christianity is perhaps the best available way for a teenage boy to shock his mother. I don’t mean this as a joke. A core part of the process by which teenagers define their own identities in contrast to the expectations of their parents is the quest for new and enticing ways to spark parental outrage. Young people half a century ago could still do that by moving further out toward the notional cutting edge than their parents were willing to go. This they accordingly did, and cultures thus lurched Leftward generation after generation.

Now? If a teenage boy says “Mom, I think I’m gay,” he’s likely to be told, “That’s nice, dear.” The same is almost as often true if he says that he thinks he’s transgender, while if he announces that he’s decided to worship some strange pagan cult, his mother may just invite him to the local Wiccan circle next time there’s a full moon. It’s hard to imagine anything more crushing to the teenage ego than being patted on the head and told that your mother approves of your attempted act of rebellion.

By contrast, imagine what happens if that same teenage boy comes home wearing a MAGA hat and announces that he’s just found Jesus. In most of today’s middle-class households, that would evoke a truly satisfying display of parental hysterics. Meanwhile, those teenagers who aren’t quite willing to face so epic a tirade from their liberal parents can pursue a less overt version of the same rebellion, swapping conservative Christian memes with their friends online in much the same spirit that led their parents to smoke cannabis with their friends after school. Cannabis itself and the other erstwhile trappings of Leftist radicalism are now too socially acceptable to fill that role. In our present culture, radicalism has become the conventional wisdom, and so the conservative has become the transgressive.

There’s a second dimension of this shift, which inevitably gets left out of simplistic linear notions of “progress”. Glance back over the history of the Anglophone world and what emerges is a curious alternation of public morals over the course of roughly a century. After the rollicking Elizabethan bawdiness of the 16th century came the Puritanism of the 17th, with its Roundheads and its colonizing Pilgrims. After that came a return to looser morals in the Georgian era of the 18th century, which was among other things a golden age of pornography and saw London get a reputation as Europe’s capital of prostitution; following that, the 19th century made “Victorian” a byword for strident moralizing, and this was reversed in the usual way by the exuberant decadence of the 20th.

Now the 21st century has arrived. The moral license of the 1900s has already undergone sharp restrictions at the hands of feminists, while conservative Christians are taking things further. None of this is accidental. Moral rigidity and moral laxity, in sexual and other contexts, both have their pathologies; there is a middle path of balance between them that avoids the problems of both, but humanity being what it is, this is rarely reached except as a transient stage between one extreme and the other. People of good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of Victorian morality, set the process in motion that led to the Sexual Revolution; people of equally good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of that revolution, are setting processes in motion that are giving the pendulum a good hard push the other way.

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By John Michael Greer

Conservative Christian churches have a great deal to offer those who see the value in moral restrictions, partly because they have so long a history of aggressive puritanism, and partly because they are among the few institutions in the modern world that have consistently pushed back against the liberal moral tides of the last century. It thus makes perfect sense that, as public attitudes swing back toward puritanicalism, conservative churches should become attractive again.

Yet there may be another process at work in all this, one playing out over a far greater timespan. Over a century ago, it was anatomized with mordant clarity by Oswald Spengler, the most accurate and therefore the most angrily dismissed of the 20th century’s students of historical cycles. What we are seeing is the early stages of what Spengler called die zweite Religiosität. The usual translation of this phrase is “the Second Religiousness”, but for reasons I will explain shortly “the Second Religiosity” is a better fit. To understand the way this is taking shape behind today’s headlines, it’s necessary to trace the outlines of Spengler’s unfashionably perceptive theory of history.

It’s crucial, in approaching Spengler, to realize that he was discussing morphology, not causality. Like Newton, he “feigned no hypotheses” to explain why history unfolds the way it does; his quest was simply to show what happens, and to seek a comparative morphology of great cultures that can be used as a basis for prediction, in much the same way that Newton’s theory allowed the accurate prediction of planetary motions. Spengler sought to line up history’s great cultures side by side, and look for the common patterns, in the same way that a comparative anatomist puts the bones of a bat’s wing, a dog’s forelimb, and a porpoise’s paddle side by side, to show that each has the same underlying structure as a human arm. Did he succeed? The jury’s still out, but his predictions so far have proved accurate, while those of his critics have generally flopped.

The Second Religiosity is a core element in both Spengler’s theory and his predictions. Every great culture starts out under the sway of a distinctive religious vision, one that embodies and frames the culture’s understanding of the cosmos. As the culture moves out of its springtime era into maturity, the mythological language of its religious vision gives way to a secularizing trend. The result is an age of reason, in which the old vision is pried loose from its religious setting and turned into an assortment of rationalist ideologies.

The pathbreakers and cheerleaders of the age of reason inevitably convince themselves that society has put its superstitious past behind it, but their ideologies turn out to be far more fragile than the faith they supplanted. Eventually, as the age of reason crashes to ruin around them, people find themselves confronted by chaos, and flee for refuge to the one resource that remains: the traditional religious forms of their culture’s springtime. This is the Second Religiosity, the return to religion that marks the fading of every great culture. The revival of Confucianism as a religious ideology in imperial China after 1100 and the return of India to Hindu faith around the same time are examples well documented in the history books. As for the Western world, Spengler expected the Second Religiosity to arrive sometime soon after the year 2000.

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Whatever the culture, the Second Religiosity always presents itself as a return to the source of a culture’s early greatness. In a crucial sense, however, it’s nothing of the kind. The religion of a culture’s springtime is forged of the shattering impact of transcendent realities on individual human prophets and visionaries. It is accordingly rough-hewn, unruly, and comfortable with contradictions that look like absurdities to the later, more logical consciousness of a later era.

The religion of the Second Religiosity, by contrast, is ordered, formal, and reasoned: all the hallmarks of religiosity, as distinct from religion in any deeper sense. Its goal is to provide a bulwark against inward and outward chaos, and it does this by relying on history rather than on the terrifying transrational shock of direct religious experience. Where the original religious impulse faces the future, the Second Religiosity is always oriented toward the past. The winds of autumn can always be heard whistling through it. Eventually they will tear it to tatters, leaving the ground cleared for the newborn religious vision of some future great culture, but that time is still far off for us.

Just now, by contrast, there are good reasons why the flight from chaos into the Second Religiosity is in the ascendant. The most important of these is the accelerating failure of faith in progress, the unacknowledged pseudosecular religion of our time. Barbed jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety are merely the cutting edge of a broader collapse of faith in progress. This doesn’t merely impact what we may as well call the “Tomorrowland future”: that world of fading daydreams in which flying cars, fusion power and interplanetary colonization all have their natural habitat. Rather, it embraces the entire belief that history must move in whatever direction we think we want it to go.

At the moment, that faltering faith is being propped up by the overblown hype surrounding large language models (LLMs), which are currently being marketed under the misleading label of “artificial intelligence”. This label is a misnomer: LLMs aren’t intelligent. All they do is string together statistically likely sequences of words or other symbols in response to a prompt. Computer scientist Emily Bender has described LLMs as “stochastic parrots”. The phrase isn’t quite apt, because parrots are highly intelligent birds, but the metaphor still has value. LLMs, like unusually stupid parrots, repeat strings of words without any connection to the realms of meaning, purpose, and value that underlie the phenomenon of intelligence.

Yet right now, blind faith in LLMs is propping up more than the mythology of progress. Rather, these overhyped programs are propping up one of history’s great speculative delusions, with the usual concomitants of wildly inflated stock prices and equally distorted investment decisions. Readers who don’t yet know how this ends may find it useful to consult John Kenneth Galbraith’s wry history The Great Crash, 1929, or Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

We are already starting to see close equivalents of Irving Fisher’s famous insistence, nine days before the 1929 crash, that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau”. While it’s true that the market can stay insane longer than most investors can stay solvent, a speculative bubble on this scale has only one possible outcome. It’s just a matter of when the crash finally hits.

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The future is barbarian

By John Michael Greer

Here again, though, it’s not just the technological side of progress that has crumpled in recent years. One of the odder features of contemporary political life is the way that so few political parties on the Left offer proposals for the future that differ in any noticeable way from the present, and the ones that do — Marxist parties come to mind here — harken fondly back to the dreams of a past era just as enthusiastically as any conservative. More clearly than anything else, perhaps, this shows the twilight of an age of reason that once put grand dreams of the future at the center of its cognitive universe.

The opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States just now is a case in point. The Democratic Party has stopped talking about anything but their opposition to the Trump administration and its policies — this at a time when a huge share of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the state of the country and the government policies that shape their lives. “Vote For Us So Life Will Continue To Suck” isn’t exactly a compelling election slogan, but it’s a fairly good summary of the Democratic platform these days. Trump’s populist movement, by contrast, has specific proposals for change, and is enacting them at a respectable pace despite the concerted opposition of the Washington establishment. This likely accounts for a good share of Trump’s popularity, even among those who don’t necessarily share his opinions.

The same weird sense of stasis appears throughout today’s industrial Western cultures. Consider our popular movies, dominated by remakes of decades-old franchises and dreary morality plays. As another example of the same exhaustion, there was a time when the goal of activists working on racial and gender issues was to heal once and for all the social wounds inflicted by various bigotries. Martin Luther King Jr. was far from the only one to speak movingly of a future in which people of all colors would live together in peace, harmony and equality. That sense of a potential for change has all but vanished from the rhetoric of today’s activists. What they offer instead resembles nothing so much as an unusually dour sort of secular Calvinism, in which the Original Sins of racism and sexism bear down immovably on humanity.

At least Calvinism offered the promise of redemption; today’s activist culture does not. Eternally cursed with the burden of privilege, due to the actions of some few of their ancestors, those who happen to belong to the wrong race, gender, and on and on through an ever-proliferating swarm of categories, can look forward to nothing but endless humiliation and repentance, with no hope of any change to their sinful condition. Thus it’s hardly surprising that a growing number of people so stigmatized are backing away from ideologies of this sort and seeking out a different setting — that of the nearest conservative church — where, whatever else they may find, they can at least hope to encounter a Redeemer.

As this suggests, there is a very real sense in which the vagaries of popular culture in recent years, unbeknownst to their creators, have been setting the stage for the coming of the Second Religiosity. This comes as no surprise to readers of Spengler, or for that matter to anyone familiar with the phenomenon of the return of the repressed. Religion — not in the sense of ideology, but in its deeper and truer sense as the confrontation of human consciousness with transcendent experience — was for several centuries rigidly repressed by the mainstream currents of Western industrial society. Now it is back in force.

Yet it bears remembering that the coming of the Second Religiosity is to a very great extent a leading symptom of that return, not its full expression. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, as the age of reason set in motion by the rise of Greek philosophy imploded in a shower of failed dreams of the world made rational, people across the empire turned back to the established religions of their time, making the traditional offerings to Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the polyglot pantheon of the ancient world. That was their Second Religiosity, their refuge from the tremendous chaos of their age, and it played an important role in maintaining classical society during its latter centuries.

It did not last, however. While incense billowed upwards to the gorgeous marble statues of the gods and goddesses, new beliefs wholly alien to classical polytheism spread through the crawlspaces of Roman society. A few centuries on, one of them would rise up to overthrow the temples and clear the ground for cultures yet unborn. From the rise of the cult of Osiris in Egypt’s First Intermediate Period to the predominance of Amidist Buddhism in early modern east Asia, it’s a familiar story.

The first stirrings of the same process are doubtless under way, though it would be just as impossible to point to the faiths of the future now as it would have been for a Roman intellectual to pick Christianity out of the turbulent religious underworld of the Roman world and identify it as the inheritor and destroyer of the classical world. It will be a century or more yet before it becomes clear which beliefs seize the imaginations of the dispossessed and disaffected, overthrowing the institutions of our Second Religiosity in their turn. Dealing with that is a task for future generations. What we face now is the resurgence of traditional religion in Western societies that had dismissed it as an outdated relic of a barbarous past. Dramatic changes for good and ill can be expected as that process continues, and the future in which so many thought we would spend the rest of our lives goes whistling down the wind.

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalize the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

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Having traveled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

The million or so Jews who remain in New York are still a largely affluent community. Yet they inhabit a city with new cultural influences, from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia — and the Middle East. The city’s Muslim population has grown to roughly 750,000, and may soon match or exceed the Jewish population. All the while, New York’s institutions have also become less culturally Jewish. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have poured money into Manhattan’s universities, and its campuses have become flashpoints of anti-Zionism. The current holder of the Herbert Lehman chair at Columbia University, established in memory of the financier, a dedicated Zionist who served New York as both senator and governor, is none other than Mahmood Mamdani: Zohran’s virulently anti-Zionist father.

Nonetheless, New York’s large Muslim population is not Mamdani’s most critical constituency. His remarkable rise has come by appealing to well-educated, but often moderately paid, professionals. Like everyone else, New York’s Jewish middle classes find the city too expensive. Many continue to leave, particularly young families. The ones who remain are hemmed in by costs that reduce their quality of life on a daily basis. There remains a large group of young people, usually long-term renters, often single and/or childless, mostly concentrated in progressive enclaves, who want to stay — but look to Mamdani to help curb rising housing, food and transport costs.

Mamdani’s promise to make New York more affordable appears to cut across any concerns voters might have about his anti-Zionism — some polls have him winning a third of the Jewish vote, though more recent surveys are less enthusiastic. Whatever the exact numbers, they imply a new version of the class divide that has long separated New York’s Jewish populations. “There’s more than one Jewish New York,” says Rabbi Cosgrove. “Things look different on the Upper East Side than in parts of Brooklyn or Washington Heights.” Many families are divided, he laments. It’s not just progressive activists who are backing Mamdani but in many cases the children of the sorts of moneyed families who might frequent the Harmonie Club.

Indeed, New York’s Jews are turning on each other. The most staunch defenders of Israel accuse Mamdani’s Jewish supporters of being, like the old Jewish Bolsheviks, “Jews in Name Only” — choosing progressive bona fides over the deepest traditions of the tribe. For many of Mamdani’s champions, it suffices to call pro-Israelis “Zionists”, which many consider slur enough.

The frightening prospect for New York Jews is that antisemitism will become more commonplace, as it increasingly appears to be in Europe, reinforcing the notion that, as the Jewish political consultant Hank Sheinkopf put it, “every galut (place of exile) ends up in tragedy.” In Europe, demography favors a growing and far larger Muslim population, as well as their allies in established progressive parties.

As Muslim power, awkwardly allied with the secular Left, grows, an increasing number of Jews feel they can no longer count on protection from what were once considered friendly states. Some American Jews have noted the vicious antisemitic murders in Manchester — are they justified as part of the “global intifada”? — and conclude they can no longer count on the British sense of fair play. In the violence that accompanied the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last year, Dutch police were notably lax in protecting both visiting football fans and Amsterdam’s Jewish residents. Even Amsterdam’s progressive, anti-Israel Green mayor, Femke Halsema, was forced to admit that the attacks resembled Nazi pogroms.

Rather than restrict openly antisemitic acts, then, it’s Jews who are now being restricted: witness the ban on Israeli soccer fans being enforced in Birmingham. When the keffiyeh crowd is out in force, it’s a “no-go zone” for British Jews. Many New York Jews worry this is their future too, with community leaders fearing that Mamdani’s election will accelerate Jewish flight from the city: both to surrounding suburbs and further afield. Florida remains one popular option here. But as Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami demographer explains, Jews are also heading to cities as varied as Dallas, Raleigh, Austin, Atlanta and Las Vegas. All these places now have among the fast-growing Jewish communities in the nation.

Of course, this will be a slow process. New York is not about to lose its Jewish character overnight. Nor will the city’s economy collapse, at least immediately, if Mamdani is elected. Life goes on. Surging tourism and the Wall Street boom keep Manhattan as frenetic as ever.

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But, for all this, the city has clearly changed, its inequalities all too evident in an economy where almost all job growth is in low-wage sectors like tourism. Indeed, low wages and high rents have proved a boon to Mamdani, whose gaggle of proposed rent freezes, higher minimum wages and free childcare offer succor to the over-extended. New York also continues to attract the largest pool of the world’s ultra-rich, but Gothamites typically spend over 40% of their incomes on rent — the highest proportion of any large US city.

Yet if that explains the popularity of Mamdani’s economic positions, his radical political views may help explain why a growing number of American Jews are taking their religion more seriously. These trends favor more conservative branches of the faith, with nearly two thirds of New York Jewish children now raised Orthodox. Chabad, the most prominent Jewish traditionalist movement, and based out of a handsome neo-gothic house in Brooklyn, is ubiquitous on campuses and storefronts. Rabbi Mottie Seligson, Chabad’s public relations officer, points out that while temples are closing in much of the city, his movement continues to build new synagogues right across the five boroughs. For those younger Jews who eschew Mamdani’s anti-Zionism, Seligson adds that Friday night Shabbat attracts over 1,000 participants.

Altogether, Seligson argues that attachment to Judaism must replace the “religion of the Ivy League”. Young Jews, if they embrace their identity, will increasingly send their kids to Jewish schools and organize such things as local volunteer patrols: which may yet become necessary given many police officers are threatening to quit should Mamdani win.

As for the traditionally liberal Jewish establishment, frequenting spots like the Harmonie Club? It will take more than one term of anti-Zionist radicalism to overcome centuries of achievement. The great Jewish real estate families — the Zeckendorf, Rudin and Tishman — have their vast fortunes invested in the city. For many Jewish New Yorkers, there is nothing like Gotham, not just for making money but living a fully-rounded life.

In the near term, meanwhile, New York’s Jews may also turn to their own considerable resources, riding out the storm until reality impinges on Mamdani’s socialist dreams. “When you feel under attack, and you feel the city will no longer protect you, you need a sanctuary,” says Sam Abrams. He’s presumably thinking of places like the Harmonie — outposts of Jewish life over almost two centuries of upheaval, and which will surely endure long after Mamdani leaves the scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 May we choose wisely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

I felt the same way once at school, when I saw in a book an illustration of the national costumes of various European nations. There were the Welsh with their lace and the Scots with their kilts and the Dutch with their clogs, and it was all faintly ridiculous, but the most ridiculous of all were the English. Our national costume, according to this picture anyway, was a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat and a rolled‑­up umbrella. The Welsh made lace, the Dutch grew tulips, the Irish played the fiddle, the French did whatever they did with those strings of onions: hell, at least it was colorful. What did my people do? We made money.

That illustration was telling me the same thing as the jungle version of “Hard Rain”, and what it was saying was loud and clear: you don’t have a culture.

Since then, I seem to have picked away endlessly at this notion of “culture”. The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

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Our age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the human impact on the natural world and the rapid ­falling​­ away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.

This anticulture is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western culture and history, it has since become universal. It is an “anticulture” because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which ­pre-modern, traditional societies were built. The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a ­one-​­word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.

The philosopher Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that “liberalism” is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other­ two — communism and ­fascism —​­ were ­shorter lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the 20th century. Liberalism —​­ the elder ­brother —​­ is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of “liberty”, when in fact it was something quite different. While liberty is “the condition of self-​governance, whether achieved by the individual or a political community”, liberalism “re‑conceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.”

“Freedom from external constraints” is a good description of the central drive of the Machine’s anticulture. This pursuit, claims Deneen, seeks freedom for the individual from society itself, and it is built upon a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted, ­Weil-​­like in time and place, this new lens offers a new vision: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans are now, in Deneen’s words, “rights-​bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life”.

In this new world, the sovereign human person, ­disembedded from community, history and nature, will utilize reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live. The rational individual, making choices in a marketplace overseen by a government committed to “liberty” and guarding individual “rights” through a “social contract”: this was the basis of a wholly new world. The commitment to this ­post-​­Enlightenment liberal order is not a partisan one. The factions we refer to today as “Left” and “Right” are simply two different flavors of the same liberal food.

What is crucial to understand ­here —​­ and this is what makes liberalism an ideology —​­ is that in order for the new, “liberated” world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the family, the Church and private land ownership so that communism could materialize, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth. The individual “as a disembodied,­ self-​­interested economic actor”, claims Deneen, “didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order”.

This echoes Chesterton’s argument that ­capitalism —​­ a system referred to as “liberal economics” for good reason —​­ did not “evolve” either, but also had to be created by force. Liberalism, suggests Deneen, grew in the same desert. And the biggest obstacle to the growth of ­both —​­ then as now —​­ was real culture. “Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual,” writes Deneen. Rooted trees are hard to fell. The Machine anticulture which is felling them one by one “is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life”.

There has always been a certain pathos, and a kind of nobility, to the modern human attempt at breaking the bounds and soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis: a utopian desire to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. It strives, at its best, for equality and brotherhood, rather than prejudice and conflict. The problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of. Liberatory ambition, in the abstract, can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalized liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil.

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As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalization, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people”.
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

Maybe cultures can survive, and even thrive, without one or more of these elements. In fact, some measurably do: nomadic cultures, for example, do not have a permanent link to a particular place, but are not necessarily less culturally or spiritually rich for it. Still, if you remove more than one element from this list, your chance of sustaining a cultural story in place and through time is slim.

Looking again at my home country, England, in the light of this theory of culture, seems instructive. England, like much of the West, currently seems to be in a kind of freeform cultural collapse. Why? Well, if the Four Ps have anything going for them, the explanations are clear enough. The English long ago gave up on the religion that formed their nation and their ­values —​­ Christianity. They are one of the most urbanized nations on Earth, and the one which urbanized earliest. Our memory of the land, and our understanding of it, is almost entirely dead. We are an urban people. And we have largely forgotten our history, or had it taken away from us, depending on your point of view.

For this reason, we have no meaningful folk culture. Folk culture comes from a ­folk —​­ a people rooted in time and place, with dirty hands and a particular perspective. The English are no longer this, and have perhaps not been for centuries. Finally, the redoubts of high culture have fallen, since at least the Sixties, to a postmodern faction which believes that the very notion of “high culture” is elitist, bigoted folly, and that nations are too. England’s cultural elite today, fired by a ­longstanding oikophobia, are far more likely to be found cheering on the toppling of statues than thinking about what to replace them with. When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.

This same energy seems to be displayed to different degrees throughout the nations of the West today, and has elicited a growing reaction from those who object to it. But it is nonetheless the dominant understanding, pushed from above by those in power. We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in “advanced” countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the ­pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the Four Ss:

1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a ­non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality”, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.

If the Machine has an ideology, I suggest that these four notions are a fair summary of it. Perhaps, though, it is less an ideology than a theology. Salvation, in the modern era, comes not through eucharist, pilgrimage or prayer, but through government action, technological progress or capitalist “wealth creation”. Ideology promises us a material world remade for the better; unfortunately, as the 20th century demonstrated, it often ends up drowning it in tyranny as often, if not more often, than religion ever did.

The Four Ss, then, offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age. We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in “science and reason”, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

***

This is an extract from Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be published by Particular Books on 23 September.

The sigma male may or may not apply an elaborate skincare routine to his face a la American Pyscho’s Patrick Bateman, who may or may not be viewed unironically as a role model by these young men. On top of all this “optimization,” the grindset displaces all the other pursuits and pleasures, including romantic, sexual, and social life — as well as the whole concept of open-ended leisure. These other activities are generally derided as superfluous, if not dangerous, diversions from the only thing that should matter to any serious individual: his work.

At the dawn of the last century, the German sociologist Max Weber drew a connection between the “worldly asceticism” of Calvinist theology and the rising bourgeois classes of Northern Europe. Weber contended that this Protestant ethic was the animating force — the “spirit” — behind industrial capitalism. And while the face of bourgeois morality would change dramatically in the consumerist turn of the postwar decades, recent years have seen the return of the old Weberian type; it seems as if capitalism, now in a decaying post-industrial state, is harking back to its Puritan roots.

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The grindset lifestyle is easy enough to lambaste. Indeed, it has invited ridicule not just from social-media users but from major publications. In an Atlantic essay, “The Anti-Social Century,” the writer Derek Thompson points to the grindset and its “secular monks” as one more disheartening expression of the atomizing tendencies of our status quo. Thompson observes that “what is most striking about [grindset] videos … is the element they typically lack: other people.” The protagonist typically wakes up alone, stays that way through his day, and goes to bed alone. In The New York Times, meanwhile, Jessica Roy pokes fun at the “lion meme,” another trope that illustrates the sociopathic lack of regard for others valorized by sigmas, who compare themselves to “a lion,” who “does not concern himself with the opinion of … sheep.”

For Thompson and Roy, this aesthetic is Right-wing-coded, spreading outward from “the ‘manosphere,’ a corner of the internet … that frequently promotes anti-feminist and misogynistic rhetoric,” as the latter notes. They are not wrong. But what they miss is how many of its essential elements are just as present on the other side of the ideological spectrum: from the total immersion in (and uncritical celebration of) the ultra-competitive ethos of the work society to a hostility toward the purely social and non-utilitarian dimensions of human existence.

The same sensibilities can be found in the liberal meritocracy culture prized by the American metropolitan upper middle class and its college-bound scions, prepped from birth to partake in the cursus honorum of the best schools (from pre-K onward); the best internships; and the best extracurricular involvements — which are, of course, never undertaken for their own sake, but for padding college admissions applications.

It follows that friendships and relationships are not to be spared from this calculus and may be dispensed with if not fit for use. Though the adherents of this genteel version of the grindset may not spout the same cold Darwinian and Nietzschean slogans as their sigma counterparts, they are functionally bound to the same ruthless mentality that sees other people as either instruments or obstacles in the ruthless race to the top.

But in such a world of declining consciousness and community, and of rising neuroticism and extreme introversion, it is hard to see the grindset as just another online subculture limited to angry, alienated young men of a certain reactionary disposition, to be easily singled out for mockery. After all, anyone who must inhabit today’s corporate and bureaucratic institutions is forced to accept its imperatives as his own, whether or not he consciously subscribes to either the Right-wing sigma worldview or the liberal meritocracy code.

We are better off, then, viewing grindset and its associated outlooks as only the most pointed distillation of a much broader sociological reality, one that results from the technologies and market arrangements that mark the present moment — but also one with much deeper origins in our culture.

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After all, the impulses Weber identified were already old when he wrote The Protestant Ethic at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. To understand just how embedded these qualities are in the emergence of modernity itself, we may look even further back to the original Puritans of the 17th century, whose enduring contributions to the modern mind are often overlooked. For this, Michael Walzer’s intellectual history, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), is indispensable.

Walzer took note of just how radical the Puritan break with traditional society had been, arguing that they prefigured the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks as the world’s first true revolutionary force. The Puritans applied their militant attitude not just to theology or high politics, but the performance of secular work, believing it to be a field of spiritual battle and as well as an avenue for personal salvation and moral self-making. All this would have baffled a medieval peasant. Writes Walzer, “The saints were distinguished from the disorderly mob of worldlings by their industry and diligence: their industry revealed their saintliness — to themselves as well to their fellows. The old Catholic theory of good works was here transformed into a Protestant theory of good work.”

This novel stance was naturally accompanied by an attack on leisure and spontaneity; the Puritan citizen “worried over his occasional afternoon naps and worried most of all because they came at ‘unaccustomed times’ — they were unplanned.” Just as significant was how the Puritan design extended to family relations, which had to be consciously refashioned away from the premodern feudal paradigm of sprawling kinship networks and communal obligations; the Puritans were encouraged to winnow down their personal loyalties to the marital union and the nuclear family as a more manageable unit of social organization: “Puritanism heralds the shift from the patriarchal to the conjugal family,” through which the religious and economic dictums of the faith could be better enforced. (The grindset, it would appear, takes this process of social delimitation several steps further, heralding a shift from the family to the lone individual.)

Together, these historic changes had an ideological legitimating effect, which produced people who could both construct and functionally inhabit capitalism’s new social world. The Puritan mentality made it possible for people to think of themselves primarily as free individuals and mobile economic actors and so paved the way for the transition from feudalism to a society governed by markets and contracts. Likewise, the mass consumerist revolution of the 20th century created new appetites for household affluence and personal recreation that, in turn, fueled the demand for the industrial growth engines of the postwar age.

But those earlier phases of capitalism were accompanied by rising living standards for the masses. The entrenchment of the grindset today suggests the opposite trend: the development of subjects who would be content to live and toil in a world of diminishing material standards. Hence, their embrace of asceticism over visions of plenty and their scorn for family formation and communal belonging as decadent indulgences that can no longer be supported. In other words, the grindset is a way to legitimate the stagnant, de-socialized epoch we already live in.

The original Puritans grasped at the nascent modern notion of the individual through a theological lens — they saw him as an instrument of a providential plan. But they still retained social and civic ideals, centered around the building of a “godly commonwealth.” By contrast, the pull of secularism and today’s technological environment has made it possible to dwell in a society without either religious community or human companionship, thus the deracinated Calvinism in which the individual is left alone with only his work to preoccupy him, with neither a God to sanctify his labor nor a family to consume its fruits.

Against this grim vision of a life of constricted possibilities, what recourse remains to those of us who want to remain social beings? The answer may be to try to retrieve the dimensions of human life that have been suppressed, if not erased, by the post-Puritan march toward unrestrained individualism and the unexamined worship of work. It would call for new efforts to revalorize sociability and leisure as unqualified goods in themselves, even extending to the right to be idle and aimless at times. After all, it is when the mind is allowed to wander that alternative visions for society reveal themselves, and it is when individuals are allowed to commune in casual ways that they can discover common cause.

As the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has recently argued, the Puritans themselves were able to ground their individualist struggles in a greater redemptive ideal, “to be as a city upon a hill,” which continues to inform American political culture down to our time. What’s missing today is an equivalent ideal to leaven and humanize our labors and to anchor them in a more hopeful future; barring that, we shall continue to be, as Weber wrote, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

In its report on the 2024 summer riots, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary quizzed senior officers on their intelligence strategy. As shops were looted and cops dodged bricks, they confessed to “writing the manual as it happened”. This is new. Historically speaking, British police were masters at investigating domestic extremism, something they achieved by asking three fairly straightforward questions. What is the issue motivating a protest group? How likely is there to be wider support for that issue? Who are the agitators seeking to weaponize the issue?

It’s an approach that worked well in the past. Public order and counter-extremism intelligence helped police environmental and animal rights extremism in the Nineties and early 2000s. It pinpointed potential IRA sympathizers inside radical Leftist organizations. Later, investigators established links between criminal groups and extremism, encompassing everything from football hooligans and the far-Right to urban street gangs and Islamists.

I witnessed these successes myself. Monitoring Belfast flights from Heathrow in the mid-Nineties, I remember stopping a nervous-looking man from Andersonstown in west Belfast. I telephoned the RUC. “Ah, that fella? He did six years in the Maze for firearms,” said the Special Branch officer down the line, who knew which pubs he drank in, the school he attended and the registration number of his car. “He’s also got size 11 feet,” he added.

To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider the example of “Stand Up to Racism” (SUTR), the most prolific pro-migrant organization in Epping and elsewhere. However harmless its middle-class activists may seem, the group is closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party, itself a sect of avowed revolutionary Trotskyists. That, in theory, should mean the activist’s motives should be suspect — Trotskyists, after all, are committed to undermining oppressive state organs, using any cause du jour as their weapon.

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These days, unfortunately, representatives of activist groups are virtual police consultants. For example, His Majesty’s Inspectorate included analysis by the controversial group Hope Not Hate in its post-Southport report. More cynical officers see such relationships as anti-officer Trojan Horses, welcomed through the gates by spineless senior officers. The firebrand activist Lee Jasper, for instance, was once famously made a policing adviser by Ken Livingstone. I remember officers joking how inviting him inside Scotland Yard was akin to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

That institutional closeness, in turn, eventually created a ghost in the machine, one which has calcified into allegations of two-tier policing. Certainly, Reform activists are unlikely to be invited into any independent advisory groups. In my experience, ambitious senior officers are more likely to listen to the advice of media-savvy and politically connected advisers than their own officers.

Ideology, then, is clearly an important factor here — yet it’s far from the only issue. After all, the initial retreat from domestic intelligence-gathering was driven by circumstance. From 9/11, officers focused almost exclusively on jihadism. Then, when budgets were squeezed post-2008, police began culling their public order intelligence units, preferring to monitor social media instead.

Yet as the kids-glove approach to groups like the SUTR implies, it’s hard here not to return to the question of ideology. “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together,” proclaimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, when I was a Special Branch officer at the time of the 7/7 bombings. Yes, we raised our eyebrows too. Nonetheless, Paddick’s words were consistent with the establishment narrative around the sanctity of British multiculturalism. A decade or so later, London’s mayor famously suggested terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a global city. This gaslighting spawned a counter-narrative: one of two-tier policing.

This, it goes without saying, augurs badly for British police forces, which now answer to a political class openly sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning radical activism. It hardly helps, of course, that shorn of its long heritage of investigating domestic extremism, officers are increasingly taking a more broad-brushed approach, with forces seduced by the technological panopticon of social media aggregation and sentiment monitoring. Rather than expensively and intrusively snooping on the hardcore minority seeking to ferment unrest, they’ve decided it’s somehow fairer to monitor everyone.

And so the securocracy creates new definitions of extremism, such as “cultural nationalism“, or incels, or the other phantoms haunting Whitehall’s imagination. This, of course, ignores the more compelling issues, the ones politicians find intractable. Ethnic tension. Direct action. Sabotage. An era of harassment and violence, segueing into terrorism, all occurring during a time of technological plenty, one where would-be urban guerillas have cheap access to drones, encrypted communications and AI.

What’s clear, then, is that police chiefs must urgently reconfigure their national intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley himself lately acknowledged. Nor do we even need to grasp back into the depths of time here. Before the Metropolitan Police disbanded its Special Branch, in 2006, there were detectives who specialized in monitoring extremists within London’s diaspora communities. They excelled at the painstaking work of cultivating and maintaining discreet relationships with religious and political leaders. Situations were diffused. Disorder was averted. Ringleaders were identified. And cards, to put it bluntly, were marked.

Now, Britain’s non-existent borders means new arrivals import a smorgasbord of causes, disputes and feuds. That’s even as police intelligence-gathering activity — especially surveillance and recruiting informants — often invites allegations of bullying and racism. I remember when Left-wing groups, sometimes endorsed by radical MPs, supported militants like the IRA and the Kurdish PKK, and were bitterly opposed to police monitoring their activities. A more recent example would be the furore created when UK BLM supporters were approached to offer confidential information on protest activity after George Floyd’s murder.

Senior officers, understanding the nature of the beast, carried on regardless. The uncomfortable truth is that beating domestic extremism means monitoring radical activism — but not necessarily criminal activity. Such grey zones are the terrain in which extremists hide. In the late Nineties, far-Right nail bomber David Copeland passed through the radical, but not illegal, British National Party. The comparison is far from perfect, of course, but a more contemporary example might be activists vicariously linked to the newly proscribed Palestine Action. This would identify thousands of people sympathetic to “the cause” involved in entirely lawful organizations, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible) to track them all.

Understanding the law is important here too. In the dry language of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, police must be mindful of intelligence-gathering for reasons of “collateral intrusion”. This is partly why senior officers became overreliant on open-source social media monitoring: surveilling the public online is less politically risky and resource-intensive than focusing on the hardcore. That surely explains why police are wrong-footed when activists on e-scooters cause havoc inside critical military facilities. As social unrest increases, anyway, lawmakers should accept unlawful political action has always rubbed shoulders, albeit uneasily, with lawful activism, from the Suffragettes to Irish Republicanism.

And though such intensive surveillance is obviously expensive, it’s arguably still cheaper than the alternative. After all, public order policing is eye-wateringly expensive. Between October 2023 and February 2025, policing pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London has cost the Met over £53 million. How much would a rolling campaign of public disorder cost? Imagine disturbances occurring — everywhere, constantly. Apart from being tragic on its own terms, this normalization of political violence would quickly bankrupt the state.

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For the police, one answer to this dilemma is reassuringly simple: local policing, the alleged core principle of British law enforcement. Beat cops are an essential part of the police’s early warning system, especially now forces find themselves with a newly radicalized, racially aware faction to consider: disaffected and underprivileged white communities. That’s especially true when they lack the religious links and clan networks found elsewhere in Britain; in places like Epping, protests are generally spontaneous and “leaderless”. Yet as they say in Belfast, nobody hears “the dogs on the street” bark as quickly as a switched-on copper.

What’s clear now is that a new approach is urgently required, one where gauging potential disorder is routine. Again, Northern Ireland hoves into view. During the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary embedded local special branch teams into police stations, purely to identify subjects of interest. Was the tactic controversial and bitterly contested? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.

Not that this is just a question of institutional change. If they were cannier, senior police officers might recognize how the system is rigged against them. They might also be less inclined to tip-toe around the elite’s luxury beliefs. After all, they remain constables, swearing an oath to keep the peace without “fear or favor”. And, if the current crop of chief officers, Linkedin technocrats with warrant cards, aren’t up to the challenge? Sack them. Keep indulging failure, though, and the uniforms on our streets might eventually be less hi-viz yellow and more camouflage and khaki.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet US Vice President JD Vance ascribes his adult conversion to Catholicism partly to the influence of Girard, via his campaign funder, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The latter encountered Girard at Stanford and champions him to aspiring entrepreneurs. Now, 10 years after his death, Girard is everywhere — profiled in the Financial Times, analyzed on politics podcasts, presented in YouTube lecture series by men in tailored suits.

Would Girard be happy about this? Given his warnings about scapegoating, it’s hard to imagine him celebrating his influence upon a vice president who campaigned by accusing immigrants of eating pets. And he’d probably be greatly puzzled by the promotion of his ideas as a key to business success. What strikes me is how the popular versions of Girard leave out his most powerful idea — the one most humbling to our pride. He has been popularized as a propounder of “grand, gruesome theories” about the secret savagery behind civilization. But I see him, before this, as a theorist of identity. This element in his thought seems to have been played down by his new, high-status audience.

Girard’s name for his body of thought is “Mimetic Theory”. It is founded on a single idea: mimetic desire. This is the hypothesis that our desires, beyond our basic needs, are always mediated by a mimetic model: somebody who guides us on what to desire, and what not to. Everyone knows that online shoppers look to influencers to decide which brands to buy. But Girard shows the same dynamic at work in the sophisticated plots of great theatre and novels, not to mention the Bible. Somehow, through some unexpected twists, this hypothesis leads Girard to a theory of human culture and violence.

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Some find Mimetic Theory to be a revelation, explaining everything from social media to the US-China trade war. Others are dubious. But both sides overlook a fundamental philosophical question. Why would our desires be mediated by a model? Why should we need somebody else to show us what to want?

Girard gave a direct answer to this question, one that has been largely ignored. Once we have solved the problem of satisfying our basic needs, we begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: “I have become an enigma to myself.” Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard’s confronting idea is that this is a lie — he calls it the “Romantic lie”. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.

Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.

His most profound and disturbing thought is that we copy not just our desires but our whole identity from others. His preferred term for identity was “being”, as it was for Sartre. Thus, he said: “absolute being — I don’t have in me. I don’t feel it. I feel my emptiness. But the other always seems to have more of it than I have.” As far as I’ve seen, this idea has not made it to Silicon Valley, nor the podcasts, nor YouTube, nor the White House.

Consider Thiel. He draws heavily on Mimetic Theory in a self-help book modestly subtitled: “How to Build the Future”. He is clearly influenced by Girard’s explanation of how mimetic desire escalates into rivalry. Suppose my boss is my mimetic model. I start to dress like her, talk like her, aim at rising to her position, etc. She begins to feel threatened and takes measures to ward me off as a rival. But this makes her position seem even more exclusive and alluring. I emulate her more ardently, intensifying her feelings of rivalry, and so on in an upward spiral. Thiel uses this self-reinforcing dynamic between mimesis and rivalry to argue that competition, via mimesis, has a homogenizing effect. The more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again.

So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodeled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.

The same is true of Thiel’s political use of Girard. This appears most clearly in a paper, “The Straussian Moment”, which Thiel gave at a conference in 2004, on “Politics & Apocalypse”. He personally funded this conference and invited Girard, whose contribution was a modest philological study of some violent language in the Gospels. Thiel, meanwhile, unveiled a grand apocalyptic vision of the world after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He presented these attacks as a wakeup call to the liberal West, which had grown complacent about violence. He ended with advice to “the Christian statesman or stateswoman”, who “would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace”. A not-so-subtle implication is that, in cases that aren’t “close”, the wise Christian should, as Hobbes put it, seek all the helps and advantages of war.

Although he cites Girard, Thiel seems to forget his thesis that conflict is bound up with mimesis. As others have noted, Thiel seems to envisage a “clash of civilizations” between ideologically differentiated enemies — the Christian West and fundamentalist Islam — rather than, as Mimetic Theory would find, mimetic rivals whose conflict stems from wanting the same things, who become more alike the more they fight.

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Again, the most important missing idea here is that of emptiness and identity. For Girard, political organizations, like individuals, don’t come with pre-packaged innate identities. They too have to decide what to be and have nothing to guide them but the examples set by others. At the national or personal level, the dogged pursuit of identity will only lead to rivalry and conflict.

Girard holds that we can’t switch off our longing for identity. But, instead of the heroic self-creation promoted by Thiel, he proposes that we satisfy our craving with a very different sort of model: the model of Jesus. For Girard, Jesus represents not a specific identity but rather the idea of God expressed in every identity. This is the core of Girard’s Christianity, as I see it. His final book discusses Pope John Paul II’s reflections on “an identity of all people”. This “divine” identity is reached when we detach ourselves from any fixed notion of self and open up to continuously being radically transformed in our encounters with others.

The same message was given by another Pope to that other powerful but wayward Girardian, JD Vance. To justify his aggressive nationalism, Vance pointed to the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis then wrote a letter on this subject to the bishops of the United States of America, asserting that “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity”.

Concerning identity, the politicians and business leaders garble Girard’s message. It calls for a fluid, open, and welcoming identity, not one that seeks protection from the influence of others. The Popes get much closer to this meaning. Girard would probably be happy with that.

***

Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane on 19th June.

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

While the past displays a seemingly endless cycle of civilizational rises and falls, Thiel believes that modern science and technology have turned history into a linear progression, as the Bible teaches, with a beginning and a final, irreversible end. From its inception, technology — a political project as much as one of engineering — has dangled before us the shimmering promise of godhood, with which the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the project’s 16th- and 17th-century founders, rightly understood it to be an anti-Christian endeavor that needed to be cloaked with a veil of religious orthodoxy.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which describes a secretive, ostensibly Christian community of scientists devoted to the experimental investigation of the properties and uses of all material things, features a prototype of the modern research university called the College of Six Days’ Works. Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which advances (with a similar veneer of piety) the bold promise of making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature”, has six parts in imitation of the first six days of God’s creation. In both books, the Sabbath — the seventh day devoted to God — falls by the wayside. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration further hints at the transgressive nature of technology. It features a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), a landmark the divine hero established to warn ancient sailors not to exit the Mediterranean into the unnavigable Atlantic. And the book’s epigraph, “Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased,” is from the prophecy of the End of Days in Daniel 12, as if to suggest that the expansion of technological power would bring history to its apocalyptic conclusion.

An early modern conceit that has in many respects become a late modern curse, technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is it the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force mentioned at 2 Thessalonians 2:6 that forestalls the Antichrist (the Greek word katechein means “to hold down”)? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa. In the absence of the existential threat of Communism, for example, Western countries like the US and UK, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state. Even so, there is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”.

The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God. Speech is a living voice that springs from the soul — to give interiority its biblical name — embedded in the body of an existing individual. But AI is not a living being, and it replaces inner plenitude with mechanical, algorithmic emptiness. Embeddedness in space and time expresses itself as concern for, and responsiveness to, the actual conditions of existence, the biblical paradigm of which is Adam’s naming of the animals who live alongside him in Eden. But while AI requires material substrates — servers and other hardware — it inhabits them in purely occasional and contingent ways, like the demons that beg Christ to pass from the mad Galilean to the herd of pigs. Its relationship with actuality is equally contingent. It exists in a digital cloud of pure possibility, where it arranges information according to no criterion of truth besides probability and the rules of logic. That’s why ChatGPT and other LLMs are so prone to hallucinations, like citing books that exist only in Borges’s fictional, virtually infinite Library of Babel.

Yet, like the sham philosopher and bad citizen Plato calls “the sophist”, who is equally indifferent to truth, AI has a seemingly divine ability to imitate virtually anything with lifelike plausibility and vividness, and in multiple media. The market, whose whims have for decades guided the world’s best software engineers, has made this soulless capacity of representation, tailored to the tastes of the individual consumer, available to almost everyone on the planet. It has taught us to spend hours every day in its virtual reality, entertaining or distracting ourselves with the shadows it casts on the walls of our own private caves. Yet, using AI for more serious purposes is no less a Faustian bargain. Every advance AI makes in serving our desires degrades fundamental human capacities and gives it more mastery over human beings. Using AI to navigate makes us less capable navigators. Using AI to write makes us less capable writers. Using it to make decisions weakens our executive capacities of judgment and action. Peak AI, ministering to the inner emptiness and boredom of atomized, directionless selves, will mean peak human debility and enslavement. Aren’t these the goals of the Antichrist — which, whatever form it may take, always seeks to remake human beings in its own image?

Not so fast: perhaps AI is really a katechon. That is the argument of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Karp (a classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford who also studied philosophy and, with Thiel, founded Palantir Technologies) and Zamiska, his longtime deputy, insist that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done using LLMs. They acknowledge that this will require a massive cultural shift among our technological and cosmopolitan elites, who’ve embraced an “ethereal”, “post-national”, and “disembodied” morality that scorns patriotism, and who’ve learned “that belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided”. Yet it is the market’s deployment of advanced technology, including AI, that has above all promoted this “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (the title of the book’s second part), not least by rapidly dissolving social bonds, encouraging pathological self-absorption, and making possible — even incentivizing — digital swarms of doxxing and online cancellation.

Considered in the context of Karp’s and Zamiska’s urgent call to arms, the revelation of this contradiction is genuinely apocalyptic. Whether it will accelerate or slow the advent of the Antichrist and the bang or whimper of the world’s end depends on our individual and collective capacities to make informed decisions that call for moral courage — capacities that have been eroded by technologically-induced oblivion, historical, moral, and metaphysical forgetfulness, and our ingrained habit of “ced[ing] direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market”. Contemplating our predicament, it is hard not to feel discouraged. Hope alone remains in the Pandora’s box our clever man-gods have constructed — hope, without which the understanding (at least, for those whose prayers delivers no consolation) would be plagued by the perplexity and fear that have flown therefrom. It’s time to take it out of the box and hold it close to our hearts and minds, where it might inspire new growths of wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you know much about the philosopher, such visceral reactions are unsurprising, not least given his electrifying style — to say nothing of his appropriation by some of the darkest forces of the 20th century. Yet, if the Right are welcome to Nietzsche’s more reactionary positions, I’m instead keen to speak to my Leftist comrades and to explain why and where it is still valuable to read Nietzsche productively: as long as we recognize that, in learning from Nietzsche, we are using the master’s tools to fight against his far less thoughtful heirs.

Friedrich Nietzsche began his academic career a prodigy. Winning an academic chair at the tender age of 24, he soon dazzled his contemporaries. But disappointed by the conservative German academy, he came to live as a reclusive wanderer, living off a small pension and increasingly sick and lonely, with madness soon following. Had he remained lucid a while longer, he’d have likely been astonished by his influence, becoming a canonical figure for everyone from Michel Foucault to Julius Evola. Unfortunately, this also included the Nazis, who aped Nietzschean language of will, power, and violence to provide their movement with intellectual glamour. This profoundly chilled the initial reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-American world. Plenty agreed with Bertrand Russell’s characterization of the Second World War as “his” war, with many Leftists characterizing Nietzsche as a proto-fascist thinker.

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Things began to change by mid-century, when Nietzsche’s reputation enjoyed a phoenix-like rebirth. As post-war philosophies like existentialism grew in prestige, Nietzsche was read to be an important predecessor. That was clear enough in Sixties France, when a generation of French intellectuals was tiring of Marx and looking for new sources of philosophical inspiration. Among them was Gilles Deleuze, a man of the Left and a giant of radical thinking. He’d read Nietzsche as the great critic of bourgeois moralism and power, heralding liberation from discipline and control in the name of difference and self-creation.

The problem with such an approach was it was hard to square with Nietzsche’s own insistence that — of all the “rabble” — he most despised “socialists” who undermined the instincts of the lower orders for submission. For Nietzsche, progressive movements from liberalism to democracy were equal expressions of cultural decline. Their roots lay in Christian slave morality: which had the positive effect of deepening the soul of man, but which also meant a collapse into egalitarianism. Socialism itself was, as Nietzsche put it in The Will to Power, “the residue of Christianity and Rousseau in a de-Christianized world”. As for his own political preferences, Nietzsche was often critical of conservatives, but not for being too extreme. Rather, they weren’t active enough to counteract the spreading nihilism now so ensconced in Western culture.

Given these instincts for hierarchy and elitism, it should come as no surprise that Nietzsche has once more become a darling of today’s illiberal Right. But his impact on the contemporary Left is rather more complicated. To be sure, many liberals and Leftists continue to resent him. That’s clear enough from the reception of Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. Written by the Marxist scholar Domenico Losurdo, the book foregrounds Nietzsche’s hatred of egalitarianism, to say nothing of his endorsement of aristocratic radicalism and slavery. As Ronald Beiner, a retired professor at the University of Toronto has put it, there is no whitewashing Nietzsche’s frequent misanthropy against most of the human species.

To be clear, none of these thinkers hold that the Left should simply bid adieu to Nietzsche — as if one could. But they do caution against thoughtlessly failing to recognize his own starkly anti-egalitarian views, let alone painting him as some kind of proto-Judith Butler. As far as it goes, this is good advice. At the same time, though, I think there is still much that liberals and Leftists can learn from Nietzsche.

For one thing, he offers important insights into the religious roots of modernity and its politics. These remain under-appreciated by progressive thinkers, many of whom treat religion either as one worldview to be tolerated like any other, or else as a ruling ideology to be ruthlessly crushed. Certainly, the Right isn’t particularly engaging here. At their most facile, many conservatives see Nietzsche’s militant hatred of Christianity and paint him as an unbridled atheist. Somewhat better, but still crude, are those like Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray who note Nietzsche’s stress on the cultural nihilism that emerges with the death of God. And yet they see few problems in trying to oil and water Nietzsche by drawing on his insights to defend a kind of “cultural Christianity” — while ignoring his claims that it is the woke activists who are the most obvious standard bearers of the Christianity’s herd morality today.

The philosopher’s most careful readers have always observed how Nietzsche argued that Christianity religious beliefs were not decaying because they encountered some external enemy, but because of forces internal to Christianity itself. As Nietzsche himself chronicled, Christianity’s universalistic morality — focused on defending itself as the “truth” — led Christian thinkers to develop increasingly sophisticated and proto-scientific approaches to the world. Finally, Christian morality’s idealization of the truth led Christian thinkers to the most striking inference of all: that the Christian metaphysical worldview itself is false.

This is key to understanding Nietzsche’s seemingly bizarre claim that the modern Left represents a more sincere inheritor of Christian morality than the Right. After the Christian will to truth led to the secularization of the metaphysics, the morality of Christianity continued in secularized form as liberalism, socialism, democracy, alongside many other progressive doctrines. It wasn’t Frantz Fanon who coined the phrase “the wretched of the earth” but the Gospel of Matthew, where the apostle wrote that the poor will know God is on their side. Understanding their religious roots, in short, can help many on the Left better grasp their own history — with Nietzsche an incisive if hostile guide.

Nor is that the only reason the Left should take Nietzsche seriously. After all, he offers vivid insights into the nature of resentment. Nietzsche often lampooned the conservatives and nationalists of his day as petty tyrants avenging themselves on the world. By and large, however, Nietzsche’s writings on resentment locate it in the psychologies of the lower orders, who disdain the aristocrat’s pride and seek to elevate themselves by presenting their suffering as divine. This concealed desire for revenge, dolled up in moralistic grandeur, is characteristic of Christianity and its contemporary Leftist offshoots.

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How woke is Nietzsche?

By Giles Fraser

There’s obviously some truth in this accusation — just consider Leftist efforts to indulge in what progressive philosopher Richard Rorty, in Achieving Our Country, called the “America sucks” mode of public discourse. All the same, many Nietzscheans underestimate or dismiss the extent to which resentment can equally motivate the Right. Their condemnation of victim rhetoric aside, many conservatives clearly love to present themselves as victims of Left-wing silencing. This continues a longstanding Rightist tendency of exempting themselves from condemnation for participating in cultural practices (think: cancellation and victim posturing) they otherwise criticize. Not that resentment is quite identical across the political spectrum. For progressives, it often emerges in those who lack power and status, and who use a moralistic screen to assail the elite. On the Right, though, resentment usually means punching down.

To explain what I mean, consider the example of race in America. As the civil rights movement got going, in the middle of the last century, many southern whites saw equality as an unbearable attack on their race-based aristocracy. Even now, the Right rejects plenty of social programs, even ones with undeniable benefits like student debt forgiveness and universal public healthcare, by claiming that “if I didn’t get help, neither should they”. And, of course, an enormous amount of the racist rhetoric around being “replaced” by immigrants isn’t really about the idea that whites will disappear. Only the most paranoid fanatics suggest white Americans will literally be prevented from existing as before. Rather, it’s a classic example of Nietzschean resentment: that whites will no longer be an unambiguous majority, losing an abstract but strongly sentimentalized claim to call America “their” superior country at the expense of all others.

The examples can be multiplied, but I think the point is clear. Nietzsche’s account of resentment is indispensable to understanding swathes of Right-wing discourse, including the statements by some of the loudest and wealthiest men on earth. More to the point, this theoretical value echoes in the realm of practical politics. Consider religion. To be clear, there’s every reason for Leftists to be fiercely critical of reactionary and idolatrous forms of religious nationalism, especially the Baalesque version of Christianity popular in the White House these days. But when we follow Nietzsche in recognizing the genealogical links between Christianity and the morality of modern Leftism, we can better acknowledge that more radical, progressive side to religious doctrine, clear enough during abolitionism or the civil rights era. Nietzsche’s disgust for humanity notwithstanding, that surely makes him useful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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