It is no great leap to suppose that this kind of talionic thinking decided the fate of one Leendert Hasenbosch, a soldier and bookkeeper for the Dutch East India Company, who was marooned on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean on 5 May 1725 as a penalty for sodomy. Hasenbosch had committed an act that was deemed contra naturam — against nature — and had thereby removed himself from the domain of human society. His punishment, then, was an extension of his crimes. He was to live out his days in isolation and despair.

While doing so, Hasenbosch kept a diary. It was discovered by British sailors in an abandoned tent in January 1726. The first of three English translations, Sodomy Punish’d, was published that very year. Its prelude anticipates cynicism on the part of the reader. “I know there are some People who are naturally credulous,” writes the publisher, “and it is probable such will pay but little regard to the Veracity of this Narration.”

The tradition of authors dressing up fiction as fact has never fallen out of fashion. The entire second half of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), for instance, is presented as a document that the author has found. Similarly, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), an epilogue tells us that the book has been transcribed by historians from cassette recordings. Most germane is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is presented as autobiographical.

But if Sodomy Punish’d is part of that tradition, the author has taken great pains to conceal it. The sheer banality of his quotidian activities — the text includes regular updates on how he secures his tent with stones — would surely be off-putting for readers seeking the thrills of another Robinson Crusoe. Furthermore, we know from corroborating documentation from the Dutch East India Company that an officer called Leendert Hasenbosch was indeed sentenced “to be set ashore, as a villain” on Ascension Island. The original diary has not survived, but the most likely conclusion is that Hasenbosch did keep an account of his final days, even if it was subject to fictionalised embellishments during translation.

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Sodomy Punish’d makes for uncomfortable reading. Many of the diary entries recount Hasenbosch’s ongoing search for drinkable water. He was unaware that Ascension Island had two natural springs, and the one source that he happened upon soon dried up. He resorted to drinking his own urine and killing turtles in order to drink their blood. And even those contemporary readers who baulked at his “obnoxious Sin to God and Nature” would surely have been moved by Hasenbosch’s desperate yearning for rescue:

“It would be endless to take Notice, how often my Eyes are cast o the Sea to look for Shipping, and how my Imagination forms every Trifle for a Sail, then look till my Eyes dazzle, and immediatley [sic] the Object disappears.”

The captain had assured him that ships often passed by Ascension Island at this time of year. Was this a harmless lie to comfort a condemned man, or an added cruelty — an attempt to stir hopes that could only ever be dashed?

No specific details of Hasenbosch’s crimes survive in the records. “I was a Sodomite,” he tells us in his diary, but this designation is unclear: “Sodomy” did not necessarily connote sex between males, but had since the medieval period operated as a kind of catch-all term that could encompass infidelity, bestiality, and a variety of other transgressions. John Boswell, author of an excellent book on Christianity and homosexuality, discounts the term as “so vague” as to be “virtually useless”.

Even usury could be deemed a form of sodomy. In Thomas Pie’s Usuries Spright Coniured (1604), we are told that “to make money breed… is against nature: for money hath no such gendring, or procreating nature, being naturally barren”. The usurer finds a method to make money reproduce, whereas the sodomite removes the reproductive possibility from the act of sexual intercourse. “Therefore,” Pie writes, usury “is called a kinde of Sodomie.” It is no coincidence that Dante depicts the sodomites and the usurers as occupying the same sub-circle of Hell.

Theologians have never been able to agree on the original sins of Sodom that provoked God’s wholesale destruction of the city. While “sodomite” has long been established as a pejorative synonym for a male homosexual, passages in Genesis and Ezekiel suggest that the destruction of Sodom was due to a range of other sins, including pride, dishonesty and inhospitality. Besides, this story of an attempted gang-rape of two angels, and a father who offers his daughters as satiation for the mob, is surely too bizarre to qualify as a straightforward cautionary tale against the consequences of sex between men.

Especially because sodomites could be women. In the marginal gloss to Deuteronomy 23.17 in the King James Bible of 1611, we find the term “sodomitess” offered as an alternative to “whore”. A 13th-century French legal treatise (Li Livres di jostice et de plet) cites either castration or clitoridectomy as punishment for sodomy, depending on the sex of the perpetrator. Most strangely, the jurist Edward Coke (1552-1634) wrote that women who commit bestiality were guilty of sodomy and liable to execution in accordance with the Buggery Act of 1533, specifying the rather curious example of “a great Lady” who “had committed buggery with a Baboon, and conceived by it”.

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For all these ambiguities, we can be fairly certain that Hasenbosch was punished for homosexual activities. An Authentick Relation, the second version of the diary to be published, clarifies that his sin was that of a homosexual nature:

“I hope this my Punishment in this World may suffice for my most heinous Crime of making use of my Fellow-Creature to satisfy my Lust, whom the Almighty Creator had ordain’d another Sex for”.

And although Sodomy Punish’d offers no explicit details, there are hints that he had been intimate with another man. He claims to be haunted by an apparition, “the Resemblance of a Man I had been well acquainted with”, who materialises so often that he soon becomes acclimatised to his presence. Hasenbosch is “afraid to mention” his name.

Hasenbosch is tormented not only by this apparition but also by various “devilish Spirits” throughout his time on Ascension Island. Of course, we must be alert to the possibility that such events are fictitious embellishments on the part of the publisher. But it is also possible that these were hallucinations brought on by severe dehydration and hunger, perhaps projections of a guilty conscience. In Sodomy Punish’d, one of these spirits identifies Hasenbosch as a “Bougre”, the Anglo-Norman root of “bugger”; like “sodomite”, this term was linked broadly with heresy and other abominations.

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An Authentick Relation and Sodomy Punish’d read like translations of the same text, though we have no way of knowing which is the more accurate. It may be that the publisher of Sodomy Punish’d excised the direct references to homosexuality out of prudence. It is equally feasible that the publisher of An Authentick Relation invented such features as a warning against readers who shared Hasenbosch’s inclinations. Certainly, the added emphasis on ghosts and demons in the latter text would suggest that its editors were keen to capitalise on the diary’s moralising impact.

There was a third translation, too: The Just Vengeance of Heaven Exemplify’d. More judgemental than the other two, it insists that Hasenbosch’s skeleton was discovered along with his diary. For added dramatic effect, this version finishes mid-sentence, as though he perished in the act of writing. There is even an illustration of the skeleton splayed out on the shore. All of this was presumably to reassure the God-fearing reader that our narrator got his comeuppance. But it was a lie; Hasenbosch’s remains were never found. His eventual fate is unknown.

In some ways, the uncertainty is apt. Much of gay history is a patchwork affair, with the lives of same-sex attracted individuals often misrepresented or erased entirely. We are left mostly with intimations and glimpses, and the diary of Leendert Hasenbosch is one such example. An added note to Sodomy Punish’d speculates that he might have committed suicide, or that he might have been rescued by a passing ship. At the risk of incurring the wrath of God, I do hope that this particular sodomite lived to see another day.

Many great thinkers have sought to make sense of Abraham’s deranged vision – Kierkegaard, Kafka, Derrida — and the sort of God that could have sanctioned it. For Kierkegaard, the absurdity of a father trying to kill his own son can only be grasped in its own terms. By some flavour of supreme logic, in the terrible clarity of God’s command, Kierkegaard surmised, Abraham must have expected a deliverance: if not the return of his son, at least a “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. By trusting in the absurd, his faith was commended.

Succession reveals a different element of the parable. As we approach its season finale, its Shakespearean themes of corruption, trauma and power are clear. Yet until its penultimate episode, “Church and State”, its Christian themes were left more subtle.

The funeral of Logan, the Roy’s patriarch, is held in the ornately painted and cavernous halls of a church in New York. The hypocrisy of the ultra-rich and far-Right sat in pews is not lost on his second eldest son Kendall, bipolar and drug-addicted and proud of his “ambition”, who whispers of “money changers in the temple” while plotting before the service. Younger brother, Roman, intends his eulogy as a Mark Antony-esque pitch for the crown. But after his prior claims that he had “pre-grieved”, Roman quickly breaks down. The boy — for he is a boy at heart — can scarcely believe his father has really died: death would surely only be another obstacle for his Titan Father to surmount. “Is he… is he… is he in there?” Roman pleads on the altar steps. “Well, can we get him out?”

Yet there is no hope of resurrection in Logan’s tragic arc. By the time of his death, he had consciously and unconsciously sacrificed all of his children on the altar of personal ambition. Paranoid and depressed, his absurd trust in “things unseen” — the empty promise of Satanic power — would never travel beyond the emptiness before his eyes. “You’re my pal, my best pal,” he told his bodyguard, before consoling himself with the empty Gospel of Adam Smith. “People are economic units. I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies.”

For the Christian, the coming to earth of God’s son completes the template forged by Abraham and Isaac. Having first set creation free, God knows the inability of humans to overcome the patterns of their lives. So God sends his son to bear man’s sin himself, plunging down to Hell, before the resurrection reveals the limitless power of goodness: an absurd event none of the disciples seemed quite to understand.

Logan, meanwhile, perishes in a perfect and absurd parody of heaven: in the toilet of a private jet. How did our invincible Caesar Logan die? Not through a theatrical stabbing by close friends — but for having not put on his compression socks.

Sin is always built on lies, the Christian understands. That’s what Satan is: “a liar and the father of lies.” The Roys indulge in a similar lie, believing their success to be the fruit of ceaseless business acumen. Their wealth really comes, however, from a happenstance of particular social and economic arrangements, and the fortune of technological advances. Their “business first” approach is a lie, too: the show continually reveals that decisions are not made through an unblinkered process of calculation, but self-regard, pettiness and a lust for control.

The most explicitly Christian moment, however, comes with Kendall’s funeral speech: a tour de force case for the appeal of Evil and the Nietzschean will to power. “He was comfortable with this world. And he knew it. He knew it and he liked it,” Kendall says, shaking but articulate, still afraid of his father. “The will to be, and to be seen, and to do. And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him to denigrate that force. That magnificent, awful force of him, but my God, I hope it’s in me.”

“Evil” has disappeared from much of contemporary vocabulary. It is typically ascribed to “forces” of history, institutions and the unfolding of individual lives. But the Christian believes “evil” to be an entirely real and different kind of force: what David Bentley Hart called “an ontological wasting disease”, whose lies avoid annihilation by sucking on the tendrils of open hearts and truth.

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The Roys can see how the evil of power destroys their family and themselves, yet they cannot help it. It “comes over them”: a possession that still finds resonance in old understandings of demons. While a trauma-based understanding of Succession has a certain merit, one doubts how our Roy children could ever be “saved” by enough psychotherapy while being so close to power. It is not the innocent child who is the true undeserving victim of evil, but the creature, who, once corrupted, neglects to admit their creaturehood.

Logan failed to be redeemed, and we can expect a similar failure for our Roy children. Hopes were raised when they found one other as siblings at the start of the final series, as well as with several of Kendall’s rock bottoms. But true “sacrificial love” — the highest form — was always eclipsed by “mutual love”. Evolution, the post-religious seat of how ethics are said to have emerged, may encourage “altruism”, but only in a reciprocal sense. “You know, Hugo, life isn’t nice”, Kendall tells his sickly PR gofer, Hugo. “It’s contingent. People who say they love you also fuck you…You’ll be my dog. But the scraps from the table will be millions.”

Even if the Roys retain power, the family cannot last. It will exhaust itself, as evil and lies always do. And while Kendall is right to endorse “bloody, complicated life”, the answer is not a Nietzschean embrace of such a world. One answer is what Reinhold Niebuhr called “Christian Realism”: the cliche of being “in the world, but not of it”. It is to accept the realities of power, and that things do matter — which Roman could scarcely believe after helping a fascist become President from his skyscraping New York office. But it also holds the “foolish” hope that the story will complete.

As Kierkegaard suggested, perhaps we each have a choice, an “Either/Or”: we either trust in the Loganesque absurdity of self-worship, that the human can solve the human problem, or we don’t. The choice is ours.

Starmer’s face gets fixed with a faintly creepy spray on grin. His line is that, as he tours the country, no one is saying to him “we need a few more jokes, we need a bit of entertainment”. This feels like a very boring person’s view of what an interesting person is. It is also a Boris reference. Starmer’s calling card is that he is the anti-Boris: safe, steady, reliable, moral. Steve “interesting” Davis with a few more policies — though not that many more, it has to be said.

So is the “boring” jibe anything more than optics? Starmer clearly thinks it’s a lightweight criticism, almost beneath him to answer. He prides himself on being a grown up, serious. He thinks boring is a frivolous line of attack. But it is not.

The trouble with boring people is not that they don’t keep us entertained, but that they don’t engage us on a recognisably human level. They feel flat, two-dimensional  — even when they try to smile. Perhaps especially when they smile. Where is their shame, or hurt, or embarrassment? Where is the joy, the anger, the passion? To call someone boring is to say that, instinctively, we don’t understand what is going on with them; we don’t have any sort of access to their inner world, so they leave us deflated. Somehow, they are absent even when they are there before us. So when Keir Starmer answers the “boring” question with the apparently interesting fact that he once played the violin with Fat Boy Slim, we are even more convinced that he doesn’t get it. This is not what we are looking for.

Take Milton’s Paradise Lost. Why is it that Satan is typically understood as exciting and charismatic while God — the redeemer of the world no less — somehow seems deathly dull? Probably because the bad boy feels more fully engaged with the human condition whereas the divine archetype is distant and unknown. The former is hot, the latter is cold. It is, in metaphysical form, the Keir Starmer problem. Indeed, it’s the same problem that novelists have in trying to write compelling characters that are good people. We often identify so much more with the messily and morally compromised because most of us think of ourselves this way. Saints don’t engage us because they seem to float above the human realm, unaffected by the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence. Starmer doesn’t feel real.

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Simone Weil wrote: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Here, she gives us a clue as to the conundrum: how do we make virtue interesting, compelling? The answer is first to show how real evil is empty and flat — ultimately life-denying. That it creates a wasteland of human flourishing. This is the place where nothing grows. This, Starmer could argue, is Boris Johnson’s Britain. In contrast, virtue really is much more exciting and deeply human – ultimately life-giving. It is the basis for human flourishing. This is how being good connects up with being more fully human.

But Starmer doesn’t give us anything like that. Like the Dementors in Harry Potter, he seems to suck all the hope from the room. He makes virtue feel as life-giving as a traffic warden. Take his reaction to having been exonerated by the Durham police over beergate. “For me, this was always a matter of principle. Honesty and integrity matter. You will always get that from me.” It is such a bad answer. Bad, because it’s way too confident in its own righteousness. “You will always get that from me” lacks humility and, even more importantly, any sense that as human being we get things wrong every single day. There is no openness and honesty in this sentence, no vulnerability to getting things wrong. And — worse still in electoral terms — it says: I am not like you.

Not having any access to Starmer’s hidden inner world, we begin to wonder whether his outer and inner life match up. Whether he’s wearing a mask. And the problem with wearing masks is that we inevitably begin to worry about what is being concealed. Does the reassuringly non-flashy Keir Starmer exist to disguise the persecutory instincts of his “never kissed a Tory” colleagues, the ones who will cancel us for any petty infringements of contemporary metropolitan standards? Is Starmer the safe frontman of the Manichean morality police who divide the country up into those with politically correct and incorrect views, sheep and goats, darkness and light? There never has been a one nation Labour Party, no sense of us all being in this together. Behind Sir Keir lurk the sharks of culture wars ready to feast on our sins.

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Of late, the vices of the Conservative Party have been on display for all to see. They are generally the hot sins of lust and greed. I am not trying to defend them, but you know where you stand with these moral failures. Just as you did when John Prescott lamped a protestor after being egged. But Labour’s virtues I find altogether more sinister. I think they are out to get me. To find me out and bring me down, without forgiveness, without compromise. I find Labour’s virtues so much more frightening than Conservative vices.

Boring is not about the absence of gladhands. It is about not being present to others, not seeming to be on the same journey of messy human experience. The cardboard cut out Starmer will get some short-term benefit from being the not-Boris. But it won’t last long. Boris was popular for a long time and for a reason. Starmer still can’t work our why. The mystery will always drive him mad. 

Whoever wins the Tory leadership contest is likely to compound this issue. Faced with, say, Kemi Badenoch across the dispatch box, Starmer will look uncomfortably like every jibe that the culture warriors have thrown at the Right over the last few years: male, pale, and stale.

Covid-19 doesn’t discriminate, or at least does so on the basis of age and health conditions rather than politics. Why, then, have views on how we should manage it — and particularly how we should treat vaccination — become so heartless, judgemental and politically tribal?

We have a milder case of it in Britain than some countries. But there’s a correlation between (broadly Remain-affiliated) liberal urbanites and the new hygiene-authoritarianism. This has been emerging for a while: back in 2020 the research group UK In A Changing Europe noted that while “it’s not the case that all Leavers are lockdown sceptics” nonetheless “it’s pretty much the case that all lockdown sceptics are Leavers”. More recently, 99 Tories voted against Covid passes before Christmas, compared to 22 in Labour.

In the US, analogous (and angrier) patterns emerge. Free-wheeling, mask-optional Republican Florida is pitted against Democrat California, which mandates indoor mask-wearing, including for all children over the age of two, and announced in October that vaccination would become mandatory for in-person school attendance. Vaccination is already mandatory for employment in the police force and healthcare on public-health grounds.

More interesting than arguing for either one side or the other, though, is what the arguments reveal about our ongoing political realignment. In particular, it sounds the death-knell for a relatively mild-mannered twentieth-century version of progressivism characterised by a desire to ensure the world is fair, and to avoid harming others.

What’s emerging to replace it is more bellicose, more ruthless — and increasingly religious. So-called “secular liberalism” has, in other words, stopped pretending to be secular. It’s been received opinion since the end of World War II that authoritarian religiosity was exclusive to the Right. Theodor Adorno’s 1950 The Authoritarian Personality cited batteries of research to argue that fascism, and the Holocaust, could be explained by the prevalence of an ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’. This ‘personality type’, he argued, was characterised by blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong, respect for submission to acknowledged authority, and a tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group.

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In turn, Adorno’s conviction that these behaviours are characteristic of the Right crops up again in a far more recent, but also influential book: Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind. Here, Haidt argued that the reason ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ routinely misunderstand one another is that there exist five ‘moral foundations’ on which we all base our political views: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argues that liberals are only interested in care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right is attuned to all five foundations.

Does this apply in the Covid debate? Certainly at the surface, calls for coercive measures tend to start off with arguments about protecting people. For example, Scottish public health adviser Jason Leitch told BBC Good Morning Scotland that the aim of Covid passes was “to allow people to attend events and environments safely”.

At the core of this argument is the not unreasonable point that when it comes to physical wellbeing, we can’t be wholly individualistic. The moment you get ill or injure yourself as a consequence of having taken some risk (for example after breaking your leg skiing), you need care and are thus, by definition, no longer taking sole responsibility for your wellbeing.

Does this mean vaxx authoritarians have a point? Hiltzik points out that mandates have long existed on other health grounds where risk-taking imposes costs on wider society, such as seatbelt-wearing, smoking, or drink-driving. Insisting on the individual right to choose whether or not to be vaccinated therefore “places a perverse conception of individual “freedom” in opposition to the communal interest”.

We might simply shrug, and say this is just another data point for that 2021 study which showed that contra Adorno, there is abundant evidence for authoritarianism among left-liberals. Certainly, calls from self-identified progressives to “crush the resistance” to vaccines by making the lives of the unvaccinated a “total misery” might challenge the idea that the ‘authoritarian personality’ can only flourish on the Right.

But it’s the character and chosen terrain of the emerging progressive authoritarianism that’s distinctive. For it’s not merely a matter of progressives waking up to the possibility that they, too, may use coercive measures to pursue their chosen ends. It’s also the nature of those ends. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2020 fentanyl killed more Californians than Covid. But unlike Covid, the drug epidemic inspired few coercive measures — only safe injection sites, billboards encouraging users to take drugs with friends or programmes that pay them not to use.

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If avoiding harm justified coercive interventions, surely we’d have seen more of them in Californian drug policy. But their absence in the case of drug abuse, and fervent application in the case of virus control, suggests there’s a different motive at work than the prevention of harm.

In an Evening Standard piece last week, former editor Emily Sheffield argued that our capital city’s unvaccinated residents should “pay with their freedoms, not ours”. And on social media, we saw the same punitive ferocity recently when one American mother reported that when her son tested positive she didn’t just quarantine him but also “took the X-Box”, a measure more consistent with chastisement than infection control. The only reason she didn’t also confiscate the phone, she says, “is so he can text for food and water”.

Recently, we’ve had news that Omicron appears to be more infectious but milder, and research that indicates vaccination does very little to prevent transmission of the virus. So rationally, none of these vengeful attitudes make much sense. What’s going on?

The recent furore over the entry into Australia of (unvaccinated) tennis superstar Novak Djokovic offers a clue. One Melbourne journalist tweeted about how, since he was allowed into the country, fans “won’t want to come” to the tennis matches. Objectively, one single unvaccinated tennis player would make a negligible difference to someone’s risk of catching Covid; the only possible reason someone might skip the Australian Open because of Djokovic’s presence is if the fear was of a subtler, more metaphysical contagion.

In the Bay of Kells, in Ireland’s County Kerry, there’s a small secret graveyard that until recently was overgrown with brambles and largely forgotten. It was a place where grieving parents buried babies who died before they could be baptised — for the unbaptised were spiritually unclean, and therefore not permitted burial on a churchyard’s consecrated ground.

In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), GK Chesterton observed that “it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism”. Today the prescience of Chesterton’s remark is clear, as is the convergence in terms of social meaning between vaccination and baptism.

The growing tendency for ‘the vaccinated’ to treat ‘the unvaccinated’ as other or impure recalls the willingness of an earlier age to deny others simple forms of inclusion on the basis of baptism. Never mind what studies say about the efficacy of Covid vaccination in protecting us from severe illness (which evidence strongly suggests it does) or mitigating further infection (perhaps more debatable). Increasingly, vaccination carries a social meaning as well as a medical one. It’s a ritual infusion — albeit via injection, not anointment — of sacred liquid, whose application confers freedom from spiritual taint.

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Perhaps it’s just that the correlation between left-liberalism and secularism in both Britain and America has left progressives especially hungry for something to fill the God-shaped hole, and the yearning for measures that speak to the fundamental moral instinct Haidt calls ‘sanctity/degradation’. This might help account for the ongoing, fruitless, rationally debunked but nonetheless persistent obsession Tom Chivers recently noted, with disinfecting surfaces ‘because of Covid’ despite mounting evidence that the virus is airborne.

An increasingly post-Christian West, then, finds itself grabbing gratefully onto Covid hygiene theatre, in pursuit of a purity more metaphysical than bacterial. And as we’ve now spent two years clapping for carers, sharing dancing nurse videos, and creating window iconography and even altar-cloths to venerate medical professionals, it’s probably a bit late to rein this blossoming spiritualisation of hygiene.

For to imagine we can do so would be to say we still live in a world of reasoned debate. And when ‘experts’ offer ‘evidence’ to counter rumours of Covid propagandising, only to be met with derisive accusations of using fact-checking to propagandise, we might as well abandon ‘reasoned debate’ altogether and, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, stick two pencils up our noses and wear underpants on our heads.

Or, alternatively, start praying. Progressives spent half of the twentieth century telling us that this was pointless: the search for metaphysical purity was low-status, ‘authoritarian’ or simply obsolete, and reason replaced all that. Their children, though, have discovered that purification rituals don’t have to be confined to the individualistic realm of ‘juice cleanses’ or ‘clean eating’, but can be imposed on entire societies.

We can expect them to go on chasing that high. And meanwhile, it seems enough of the rest of us like having something to worship, and a suitable group of sinners to despise. If you don’t already pray, you might as well start; we all once again live in a religious world.