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.

Hair matters to Suetonius — as it evidently would for his patrician Roman readers in the second century AD. Lives of the Caesars helped to make Julius Caesar history’s best-known exponent of the comb-over, “combing forward the thinning hair from the top of his head”, because advancing baldness “offered his detractors endless material for jokes”. As for the divine Augustus, his successor, Suetonius treats the story that he employed “various stylists simultaneously” while he read as proof that he disdained fancy hairdressing. Really? Vain Otho, in contrast, “wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald”.

The fine — or coarse — details of imperial coiffure have not passed into legend to the same degree as some of Suetonius’s other juicy titbits. More renowned are the scenes of the aged Tiberius having his genitals nibbled while swimming with his young male “minnows”; Nero singing (not fiddling) while Rome burned in the fires that he had himself started, or castrating his toyboy Sporus before marrying him “with all the traditional ceremonies (dowry and bridal veil included)”. Less gamey than such chunks of scuttlebutt, Suetonius’s hairpieces typify the way he writes. Intimate data that high-minded historians would scorn help him to build a full-length picture of each imperial figure. An emperor’s barnet sits, or maybe falls, on the visible borderline between personal habit and public image: a revealing site of individual choice but also — as those imperial slapheads ruefully understood — inexorable fate.

The writer who paid so much heed to hair respected testimony from barbers as much as from senators. As Holland notes in his new edition, Suetonius takes care to source all his stories, however outlandish and outrageous they may sound: “The methodology is careful, balanced, nuanced.” Some of the most striking moments arrive when he draws on evidence from his own home and family, citing his soldierly father and other relatives.

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The Lives of the Caesars spans the 12 rulers of Rome and its empire from the ascent of Julius Caesar (born 100 BC) to the assassination of Domitian in 96 AD. Suetonius probably completed the work in the late 120s, after the Emperor Hadrian had sacked its well-connected author from the job of correspondence secretary. For all its procedural scruples, The Lives nonetheless ranks as one of the first, greatest and most influential fusions of low scandal and high politics in the history of history.

Every breathless “unauthorised” biography of premiers and presidents that currently vies for media and bookstore space aims for the Suetonius touch: what Holland calls an “amalgam of lurid anecdotes” that enriches and extends a full-spectrum account not just of persons and policies, but of a state and a time. As its rocket fuel, or secret spice, this all-round portraiture rests on a targeted deployment of gossip.

Gossip, like the sexual activity it habitually evokes, is everywhere practised and everywhere condemned. Highbrow defences of its means and ends are very hard to find — although Patricia Meyer Spacks, a Yale professor of literature, has elegantly argued for its value. She observes that “for several centuries everyone has gossiped, and everyone has felt ashamed of doing so”. Make that “millennia”. In her 1985 study Gossip, she demonstrates that “few activities so nearly universal have been the object of such sustained and passionate attack”. Spacks warmly champions gossip, in life and in literature, as a “resource for the subordinated” — women above all — and a democratic creator of community: “Gossip emphasises what people hold in common, dwells on frailties, seeks the hidden rather than the manifest.” This charitable, even utopian, vision of gossip as the whispered revenge of the oppressed may fit small-scale traditional communities. Sadly, it hardly suits the partisan campaigns of toxic innuendo now practised by media giants and political enforcers.

Three decades ago, I could, had I so wished, flick past the gossip columns in the paper. Now I visit X to answer a direct message and can’t unsee (just one current example) the ludicrous claim that President Macron is married to a transgender person originally called Jean-Michel Trogneux. In reality, that’s Brigitte Macron’s brother. The siblings sued over this viral fantasy and, last September, won damages of €13,000 against the pair of internet muck-spreaders who began to circulate it in 2021: Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey. Yet algorithmic elves still shovel the manure around as busily as ever. Sought or unsought, hardcore scandal and outright “fake news” now splatter into every screen-facing mind.

The “transgender Brigitte Macron” meme obviously intends to ridicule the president and benefit his enemies. It harks back to the distinctly similar weaponizing of rumor — sexual and financial — via popular prints in the decades before the French Revolution. Think of Marie Antoinette: one of history’s most gossiped-against figures, by repute an adulterous lesbian spendthrift cheat responsible for ruining her nation; in reality a blundering naif guilty of almost none of the crimes and misdemeanors attached to her name. (The apocryphal “Let them eat cake” — Qu’ils mangent de la brioche — is attributed to a fictional princess in Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1769.)

Gossip about the great always serves sectional interests. In Marie Antoinette’s case, it became an armor-piercing weapon of revolutionary war. For all his zest, bite and wit, Suetonius also spreads tales initially devised to favor one senatorial faction or another. And he plays on the same drives — curiosity, prurience, envy, schadenfreude — as his mass-media heirs. His enlistment of scurrilous anecdotes cuts imperial titans down to human size. He conjures up a community of readers in the know, united by what Spacks calls “the glamour and the power of secret knowledge”. Have you heard that a posh young blade called Valerius Catullus “boasted loudly” about screwing Gaius Caligula “as though he were a slave”, and of being “left exhausted by the demands he made in bed”? Well, you have now. Pass it on…

That frisson of complicity — half-exciting, half-demeaning — persists across the ages from the pages of The Lives to the latest squirt of online bile. And gossip, as Suetonius knew, contributes not just to the matter of history, but the making of history. Take the (reputed) sexual adventures of young Julius Caesar.

Ancient Rome, as everyone surely knows by now, had no concept of “homosexuality”. It did expect that high-status males should take their chosen pleasures actively. Top boys had to be, well, top boys. Right at the start of The Lives, we learn that Julius Caesar “was rumored” to have submitted to King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s sexual advances. This early surrender of power haunted Caesar as “a lingering scandal, and one serious enough to provide material for endless taunts”. In a droll paragraph, Suetonius primly asserts he “will not dwell” on tittle-tattle about the divine Julius as “queen of Bithynia”. Then of course he does exactly that, right down to the legionaries’ marching songs: “Caesar bent Gaul to his will; Nicomedes bent Caesar”, etc.

Yet Suetonius’s examples blend ridicule and affection. The soldiers evidently didn’t mind seeing their revolutionary dictator taken down a bit. That “lingering scandal” may have won as well as lost votes. Besides, what happens in Asia… Suetonius, a pioneer practitioner of gossip as history, also explores the ambiguous force of gossip in history.

Suetonius has a well-merited name for memorable vignettes of atrocities and debaucheries. However, much of his most piquant hearsay simply underlines the sheer fragility of the attempt to control Rome’s domains via the frail figure of a single princeps. Tortures and fornications aside, Suetonius’s cameos of hidden lives frequently arouse not loathing but compassion: as in his sketch of the always-chilly Augustus, muffled up against the winter cold with “four tunics, a thick toga, an undershirt, a woolen vest, and strips of cloth wrapped around his thighs and shins”. The sort of gossip transmitted here illuminates the vulnerability not only of a princeps but of the system he fronted. In this instance, malice and resentment — presumed to be gossip’s default setting — give way to something nearer sympathy.

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Gossip, in Suetonius’s hands, can turn a man into a monster, as when Nero kills his wife Poppaea by “kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant and sick, after she had scolded him for coming home late from the chariot races”. As so often in The Lives, it’s that final clinching detail that pushes what might count as hostile spin from political foes into an unforgettably plausible vignette. Yet it can also humanize and complicate the princeps, especially when rival rumors push in contrary directions.

Holland believes that the perplexing contradictions of imperial portraiture of The Lives may stem from Suetonius’s dependence on both friendly and hostile sources for a single narrative. Whether the cause, this cross-grained gossip makes the man in full appear. The deep ambivalence towards “laughing stock”-turned-conqueror Claudius planted the seed of Graves’s peerless novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. In Suetonius, what lingers are not the “cruel and bloodthirsty” stunts of Claudius or his “paranoid sense of suspicion” but backstairs memories of the family fool: the hapless scapegoat who had to make “an entire tour of the dining room” before someone would grudgingly find space, before being pelted with olive and date stones and lashed by some toff “with a rod or whip” — “just for the banter”.

Or look at Otho, one of the short-lived rulers of 69 AD, the “year of the four emperors”. Predictably, Suetonius tells us that Otho and Nero had been “in the habit of abusing each other sexually”, and that the former ran around the streets at night, picking fights with the “puny or drunk”. Later, however, he mentions that his father fought with Otho and found him a brave and decent commander with a “horror of civil war”. Confronted with one soldier’s self-sacrifice, Otho said that “I will no longer risk the lives of such men, who deserve so well.” When Nero, his protector, sent Poppaea to him for safekeeping, Otho genuinely fell in love with her. He barred his front door to Nero, who was left “alternately threatening and imploring him to no effect”.

Our digital dependency has made public gossip ubiquitous and inescapable save for hermits, Luddites and — paradoxically — the sort of well-staffed magnates and celebrities who become its subject. For the rest of us, however frugal our online habits, it forever spits in the face and lodges in the brain. Suetonius can come to our aid. An analyst of gossip as much as a connoisseur, he shows where it springs from, how it flows, and where it issues. If we can no longer stand haughtily aloof from rumors about authority and celebrity, at least we can learn to recognize their motives, means and effects. Entertaining and enlightening, The Lives may also equip readers with the tools to become more critical consumers of gossip about politics and power — better able to assess both their own impulses as receivers of rumor, and the aims of its diffusers. As always with historical gossip, the reader or listener has to judge. Who told this story? Who spread it? Who gains from it? Who suffers? Whose interests does it ultimately serve? Cui bono?

For instance: did the disguised Nero truly make the rounds of Rome’s cookshops in order to mug customers “as they made their way back from dinner”, or dump his victims’ corpses in a sewer, or break into taverns to loot them and then “auction off the spoils” back at his house? We will never know the nocturnal itineraries of the volatile tearaway born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. But we do know his solidly-grounded later notoriety for theft, plunder and confiscation — which these tales render as a kind of grotesque comic-strip. Many of Suetonius’s wilder anecdotes follow this formula. Don’t always take such gossip literally; but do take it seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) March 29, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Giles Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live on an average Londoner’s wage
James Bloodworth, author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

He announced his intention to run as an independent candidate only a few days ago, but Conservative MP Rory Stewart has already been dismissed by some commentators as not being enough of a Londoner to win the contest.

In this age of identity politics, out-of-towner is not an appellation that Mr Stewart is going to wish to find attached to his name during a mayoral contest. Indeed, Sadiq Khan appeared to win the last contest merely by repeating to Londoners that he was the local son of a bus driver.

So Rory needs some kind of policy gimmick to draw media attention away from any focus on his origins beyond the M25. Fortunately, I have just the plan. Following in the footsteps of former Labour MP Dave Nellist, Rory should pledge if elected to live on the average London worker’s wage.

It’s a gimmick — but it might be just enough of a gimmick to set Stewart’s campaign alight.

As well as being paid an average worker’s wage, Stewart would also have to dispose of his comfy house in South Kensington and live among London’s army of penurious renters. However, his descent into England’s proletariat would be softened by the knowledge that it would only be temporary while he served out his term.

We live in anti-establishment times, and such sacrifice and ascetism would surely be rewarded by the electorate, in whose eyes Rory would be transformed from an effete liberal raconteur to a stolid man of the people. This is a winning formula in today’s political climate.

Let Londoners drink on public transport
Claire Fox, Brexit Party MEP and founder of the Battle of Ideas festival

Rory could do with a bit of an image makeover after that Pret a Manger joke, which makes him look like a healthy-eating stick-in-the-mud. One way he could do it would be to reverse the ban on drinking on public transport.

Firstly, it would be a liberal thing to do, in the classical sense, trusting that the vast majority of people can enjoy a tipple without harassing others.

Secondly, it would be a nice vote of confidence in London’s night-time economy, which has faced many pressures in recent years, yet is vital for anywhere with ambitions to be a “world city”. Let partygoers and clubbers enjoy a drink on their big night out and mark out London as a place that likes to let its hair down.

Last, but by no means least, it would be a poke in the eye to Boris Johnson, who likes to claim he’s a libertarian, but whose first move as mayor was to introduce the drinking ban in the first place.

Make the capital a hedgehog haven
Tom Holland, author of Dominion

Just because Rory is moving from Cumbria to London doesn’t mean that he has to leave behind Mrs Tiggywinkle. Despite all its concrete and tarmac, London can be a surprisingly hospitable place for wildlife, and alongside the foxes nosing around our rubbish bins and the migratory birds who flock to nature reserves like the London Wetland Centre, hedgehogs too provide the capital with a touch of the countryside. Even in the very heart of the city, in Regent’s Park, a tiny population of the animals consistently voted Britain’s best loved wild mammal clings on.

Londoners who want our hedgehogs to be saved from extinction cannot leave the task to conservationists beyond the M25. There is a job to be done in the capital as well. The sheer scale of London means that hedgehogs are unlikely to flourish here without a co-ordinated attempt to link their habitats together.

Councils need to be encouraged to allow herbaceous vegetation and shrubs to grow along the edges of parks; public utilities to sink tunnels under roads; householders to open gaps in their garden fences. As a candidate to be mayor, Rory should back the provision across the capital of what the London Wildlife Trust has called “hedgehog superhighways”. The ambition must be to ensure that no hedgehog habitat in the city is an island entire of itself.

A capital that neglects to save its last remaining populations of these enchanting, iconic and authentically wild creatures, at very little cost and inconvenience, will be a capital that has lost something of its soul. I would love to see Rory put this in his manifesto.

Rethink the green belt
Jonn Elledge, editor of CityMetric

The case for rethinking London’s Green Belt will, by now, be familiar to anyone who’s given a thought to the capital’s housing crisis. Short version: we need more homes; we’re not willing to demolish existing streets so we can squeeze them in there; large chunks of the Green Belt are ugly and next to stations, so let’s have at it.

What is sometimes missing from this debate, though, is that a Green Belt with more houses on it might actually be more green. The farmland which fringes the suburbs, after all, tends to be drenched in chemicals which do untold damage to nature. It’s also far less accessible to the public than, say, Victoria Park.

As perverse as it sounds, redeveloping some of that green belt as homes with carefully planned parkland in between might actually increase both biodiversity and suburban Londoners’ access to green space. By reducing the need to commute from far-flung towns like Luton or Southend, it might be more environmentally friendly, too.

This is a hard case to make, of course, but if there’s any higher purpose to an insurgent campaign like Rory Stewart’s, surely it’s to make the case for important but unpopular measures. And if he wants to play on the easy setting — well, he could always restrict himself to promising to build homes on golf courses.

Get Londoners walking and talking
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos think tank

Rory Stewart’s main problem is that his brand — walking about and talking to strangers — is about as un-London as you can get. What works on the fells of Cumbria starts to feel weird when hemmed into a Tube carriage with 120 other sweaty souls.

But he has no choice. A brand is a brand, and his policy platform should be to remake London in his image: the best place in the world to walk, and the best place in the world to make a new friend.

#LondonWalks is the easier proposition. Pedestrianise our high streets. Convert our disused railway lines into strip parks, like New York’s high line. Reward families who walk the kids to school. Ban lorries from the roads between 6am and midnight. Allow people to close off any residential streets on Sundays for children to play outside. We’d be calmer, and healthier, if we all got our 10,000 steps a day.

#LondonTalks will challenge us sceptical city dwellers. But we’d be a stronger city if we made more effort to speak, and listen, to each other. Let’s start with a single day, when every Londoner can pledge to say hello to a stranger. Then a day when everyone who doesn’t know their neighbour pops round to say hello. From there, who knows?

The Mayor doesn’t have to just be a technocrat, pulling policy levers. They can also be a leader of social change. London, Rory-style, might prove a refreshing change.

Introduce an annual London census
Jon Cruddas, Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham

The speed at which people migrate into and within the capital is extraordinary, yet it is barely recognised by the state. This is a critical issue for those living in the poorest parts of the city — those with the cheapest rents and house values. It places extraordinary pressures on public services in these areas of greatest need.

The state is totally ill-equipped to track in real time such movement, remaining captive to a ten-year census cycle. The data is outdated before it is even published, given the velocity of change in a city such as London. The best tracker is the school roll — which is inadequate for effective public policy making.

A new baseline for distributing public resources is desperately required, not least because the poorest communities are disproportionately taking the strain in terms of the escalating city headcount. Such a resource would also be invaluable in lobbying central government over all aspects of public policy from health to education, council allocations and policing.

The Mayor should urgently engage the Leverhulme Centre on Demographic Science at Nuffield College to build a new census model for the capital as an innovative, transparent metric to underscore public policymaking for London.

Take on the absentee landlords
Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

Rory Stewart won’t win on the strength of his awesome Roriness alone — it just gets him a hearing for his ideas. Luckily, as an independent, he can propose whatever policies he likes — so they’d better be bold and brilliant.

To deal with the charge that he’s too privileged to be Mayor, Rory should take aim at London’s most privileged interest group: the city’s private landlords, in particular its absentee landlords. Our capital is a magnet for the world’s money, but if it’s just used to buy into a restricted land supply, it does nothing for Londoners apart from putting up the rent.

Our capital should be a welcoming and dynamic destination for the world’s most talented people, not a series of empty apartments for idle speculators to put their cash into. If they want to use London bricks-and-mortar as a safety deposit box while making no other contribution, then it’s a service that should be charged for.

So here’s the policy: levy a hefty annual fee on every dwelling above a given value. This would be reduced in proportion to UK taxes paid by the owner — or money invested into a qualifying enterprise. Genuine entrepreneurs would pay nothing, absentee landlords and tax avoiders would pay full whack.

Oh and the proceeds would go to the regeneration of London’s rundown housing estates.

Reform political lobbying
Tanya Gold, journalist

I am bored with personality politics, saviours-of-the-day and people who claim to be different but go on to be the same. Ennui and the willingness to close your eyes on television is not enough; nor is obvious cleverness, nor unusual sensitivity. I suggest this, if Stewart wants to be taken seriously as a political reformer: reform political funding and political lobbying.

People beyond the bubble, which is growing larger each day, think Westminster is a closed shop, and, even if it were only a belief — I’d say it’s only moderately corrupt for now — it would be dangerous enough. You should not be able to buy privileged political access in Britain, but you can; and if it isn’t useful why would you do it?

At an event at Tory Conference — run by a PR firm posing as a think tank — I sat next to a monied man who heckled the very idea of taxing capital. In his hand was an itinerary including a private dinner with a senior Secretary of State. He didn’t pay for it, you say? Don’t be stupid.

Stewart should start with this – it would be worth it.

Build some decent social housing
Jenny McCartney, journalist

The most obvious policy that Rory Stewart should vigorously espouse in his London mayoralty bid is the one that so many politicians before him have fudged or failed at: a highly ambitious campaign of building good-quality social housing.

Stewart sounds receptive to the idea, having said earlier this month in a letter to Londoners that “It is obvious that we need to build far more houses and flats — not just gimcrack boxes, but homes we can be proud of.” But others have said similar things before, only for their promises to get tied up in complicated contracts with developers and elastic definitions; during Boris Johnson’s term as mayor, “affordable” was redefined to mean up to 80% of market rents, terminology that has not exactly proved accurate.

The current gross disparity between social housing supply and demand has helped create an expanding category of “working poor” in London — a throwback to the Victorian era — comprising people who are squeezed economically by high private rents but unable to access social housing. The implied contract between the individual and the state — that of work for basic security — has been eroded.

Potential pledges could be to end “right to buy” on London council properties; create a consumer regulator to enforce standards for social housing tenants; campaign for more central government money to reach new annual targets for building social housing; restrict the purchase of London investment properties by foreign buyers and encourage high-quality, imaginative constructions.

Aneurin Bevan — who, post-war, steered the UK’s biggest ever building programme for social housing — would have wept to see the housing difficulties of many families today. Some very radical, or very old-fashioned, thinking is required. Come on, Rory.

Good schools, not gangs
Ralph Leonard, Nigerian-British writer

London is one of Britain’s “hotspots” for the knife crime “epidemic” that regularly crops up in the news. At the moment politicians are frantically searching for quick, short-term solutions, such as increasing police numbers, cracking down on drill music and expanding stop and search. Arrest and convict may be the cheaper strategy, but it isn’t effective and doesn’t even begin to address the long-term social causes of knife crime.

No single policy will instantly “solve” London’t knife crisis totally, but a radical overhaul of the education system will help significantly and begin the long process of addressing this problem. Making education more attractive would be central to all this.

Education needs to be better and be seen to lead to better things; instead many of London’s schools are overcrowded, increasingly dilapidated and deprived of resources. The best chances are only for the rich.

Rory should pledge to raise the quality and standards of both middling and struggling schools, and demonstrate how being in school and learning makes a difference — and leads to greater material and psychological wellbeing than getting involved with gangs and knife crime. In doing so, Rory must recognise the damaging effects of the austerity cuts brought about by his spurned party, and commit to reversing them, through an ambitious long-term plan to providing the capital’s schools with adequate resources, teachers and renovated facilities.

Don’t just preach feminism — practise it
Julie Bindel, journalist and campaigner

During the Tory Party leadership contest most of the candidates, including Rory Stewart, declared that they were feminists (after Dominic Raab said he was “probably not” one). Quite frankly, I doubt very much that is the case, but if Rory Stewart wishes to truly set himself apart from the Tories, including former leader Theresa May, he could put his heart and soul into developing and maintaining services for women and girls who have experienced male violence in London.

The housing crisis in the capital means that if a woman escapes domestic violence with her children, then unless she is seriously rich, she is going to end up either sofa-surfing or in grotty bed-and-breakfast temporary accommodation. It’s no wonder so many women return to violent men, risking their own lives, when that is the alternative.

Similarly, sexual violence and rape in London is at an all-time high; the conviction rate at an all-time low. And yet at the same time, rape crisis services are being squeezed into nonexistence.

And then there is the issue of women being trafficked into London to be abused in the sex trade. There are barely any services available to these women if they do manage to escape, which means they face deportation. Surely we can do better than that? If Rory Stewart wants to make his mark, he could stand proud as the first ever Tory that took the pandemic of violence against women seriously.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

John Lennon, 1971.

“I don’t like borders. Borders are like scars left on the surface of the earth.” Once again, a senior EU official is channelling John Lennon’s tiresome old dirge, Imagine. Josep Fontelles, EU foreign minister tweeted out his pithy apercu earlier this week — just in time for what would have been the long-gone Beatle’s 79th birthday.

"I do not like borders. Borders are scars left of the surface of the earth. We're building a political community that is not based on who is stronger, but on political agreements and democracy. We, Europeans, must be proud of it"#EPhearings2019 pic.twitter.com/6sOIAaefJL

— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) October 7, 2019

The time before, it was Donald Tusk. “Some of my British friends have asked me if Brexit could be reversed and whether I could imagine an outcome where the UK stays part of the EU. I told them in fact the European Union was built on dreams that seemed impossible to achieve. So, who knows? You may say I am a dreamer but I am not the only one.”

In his latest book on the influence of Christianity upon Europe, Dominion, Tom Holland takes aim at the gob-smacking hypocrisy of this multi-millionaire who can “imagine no possessions” while sitting behind a white Steinway, set within 72 acre estate, within a gated community in St George’s Hill, Berkshire.

It’s a bit like Fontelles saying he doesn’t like borders while fronting a policy that detains tens of thousands of migrants in squalid, rat-infested camps in Greece, refusing them entry into Europe.

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By Tom Holland

But Holland is saying something else too. That the sentiment expressed by Lennon et al, is thoroughly Christian. Lennonism originates in the Christian ideal of universal love. And it is true that Lennon cites a Christian prayer book given to him by the comedian and social activist Dick Gregory as one of the inspirations for the song.

Thus “in its dreams of a universal peace, Lennon’s atheism was bred of Christian marrow”, claims Holland. A borderless world, the dream of universal peace and harmony, all you need is love – aren’t these entirely Christian sentiments? Yes, for many they are.

In a brilliant essay on how much he hates Imagine, the political philosopher Ze’ev Maghen — in the course of a defence of Zionism — makes a very powerful point about the nature of love and Lennon’s deep misunderstanding of it. Love, claims Maghen, is always and necessarily specific and particular. Love in general, the universal love of all humanity, isn’t really love at all.

Imagine the scene:

“My darling, I love you. I love you so much. I love you as much as I love … as much as I love … as much as I love that other woman, the one walking down the street over there. Oh, and that one, too, riding her bike past the newspaper stand. I love you as much as I love everybody else on the planet. … Hey, where are you going my daaaaaaliiiiing?”

Maghen continues:

“No one gets turned on by ‘universal’ love. It doesn’t give you goose bumps or make you feel all warm and tingly inside, it doesn’t send you traipsing through copses picking wildflowers and singing songs about birds, it doesn’t provoke heroism, or sacrifice, or creativity, or loyalty, or anything. In short, ‘universal love’ isn’t love at all. Because love means preference.”

The thing is, and I mean absolutely no offence by this, I love my children more than I love yours. And I think you should love yours more than you love mine. To love someone is to count them as being special. And so to love without preference is not the glorious extension of love to all humankind, it is the eradication of the very possibility of love. And the same argument applies, by extension, to friends, and to communities and nations.

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But even if there is something to this, doesn’t Christianity, as Holland suggests, and as Magev agrees, argue the exact opposite? Isn’t Christianity the religion of universal love par excellence?

Well, it’s not that simple.

The other day I visited the place where, for thousands of years, Christians have believed that Jesus Christ was baptised in the River Jordan. The place, known as Qasr el Yehud, has only recently been partially reopened, having been covered in anti-personnel mines following the end of the Six Day War in 1967. These mines were laid to stop the possibility of a Jordanian counter-attack and to resist the incursions of so-called “terrorists”. A dozen or so monasteries, built to mark this holy place of baptism, lie stranded, inaccessible, marooned in a sea of mines. Many are booby-trapped. And the river itself, just a few meters across, is marked with a sign in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian: “border ahead” it warns.

On the Israeli side, where I am standing, a number of Christian pilgrims from India cover themselves with water. On the other side of the muddy waters, in Jordan, and close enough to catch a gently thrown ball, another group of Christian pilgrims are doing the same thing. Aren’t we all brothers and sisters in Christ, irrespective of borders and national divisions?

Didn’t Jesus – and even more so St Paul — reject precisely the very existence of borders and divisions that separate us, one from another? Didn’t they sing Imagine first? “There is neither Greek nor Jew, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3.28).

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As Vicar of a church in London where people have gathered from all over the world, and where we speak many different languages, this passage from Galatians has long been a source of comfort and solidarity. Many times I have preached about how (the) water (of baptism) is thicker than blood. And I passionately believe this. In baptism, Christians are re-born as new people, re-created within a new community, a holy demos, as it were.

But does this mean that I, as a Christian, have to accept the sort of non-specific universal wave-your-lighter-in-the-air love that John Lennon sung about? Maybe not.

In his essay, Maghen tells the story of a group of Iranian Jews who fall out with the local authorities, and whose presence in Iran is under threat. In order to make peace, one of the Jewish community leaders takes two carpets to the local governor, and offers him a choice of one of them as a gift.

The first is a beautiful carpet of many swirling colours, all weaving in and out of each other, an intricate design “with colourful curving calyxes and designs of gold and green and turquoise, intricately intertwined with whirling waves of purple petunias which spiralled ceaselessly and centripetally towards the centre”. The other carpet was red. Just red. Nothing but red.

The political message was obvious. Do we want “a world of dazzling diversity, of independent and self-respecting societies and communities that value, retain and revel in their own uniqueness”. Or does “love” mean that we should all be the same, an eradication of our distinctiveness in the name of an all-consuming one-ness? Lennonism is the philosophy of the red carpet.

What makes Qasr el Yehud so challenging for Christians is that it is both the place of Jesus’s baptism, and also, as it happens, the place where Joshua is said to have first led the people of Israel out of the wilderness, across the Jordan and into the Promised Land. That is why it is also a border — a place that “people kill and die for” as Lennon would have it. And many people have indeed killed and died here.

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Qasr el Yehud is thus a place that speaks of “the brotherhood of man” to Christians and yet also of the specificity of God’s promise to the people of Israel to Jews. And that means land, and that means borders. A Christian faith that recognises that it grows out of the Jewish experience, and is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, is about holding these two things together. Luke’s gospel, for instance, speaks of God’s love for us as being so specifically about the particular person that he knows and values the very number of hairs on our head (Luke. 12.7). This isn’t love in general.

There is no inconsistency here if we start to think about our rootedness in, and love for, a specific community — our community — as being the basis for our love of others; its grounding, rather than its contradiction. I may love my children more than yours. But it is precisely because I love my children as I do that I understand and value the love that you have for yours.

Likewise, my patriotism, my pride and commitment to the historical and cultural specificity of my own community, is not a denunciation of other people’s. It is the reason I appreciate why others will want to do the same. This too is love. Perhaps it is too much eros and not enough agape for some. But it is love, nonetheless.

Yes, of course, a community that doesn’t look outward and value its neighbours is often narrow, small minded and sectarian. And that can lead people to war. But just don’t be fooled into believing that the world of the red carpet would be a place without anything to kill or die for. Think of Hong Kong for a moment. I suspect the words ‘red carpet’ — and the one size fits all philosophy it represents, complete with its own version of ‘imagine no religion’ — may currently have a much more sinister feel for the people over there.

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How long can Hong Kong hold out?

By Fred Attewill

To widespread gasps of disapproval, the new president re-named the job title of the EU’s senior migration official as that of “protecting our European way of life”. One Dutch MEP, Sophie in ‘t Veld, who specialises in migration law, decried the move by saying: “The very point about the European way of life is the freedom for individuals to choose their own way of life.”

Today, von der Leyen bowed to pressure and decided that it wasn’t such a great job title for someone charged with preventing immigrants from making their home here. Nonetheless, there remains a valid question about whether there is indeed such a thing as the “European way of life”.

It is not insignificant that in ‘t Veld is an Honorary Associate of the UK’s National Secular Society, which awarded her the Secularist of the Year prize in 2011. For the Dutch MEP, the very point about Europe, and institutions like the EU, is that they exist in a Rawlsian way, not to prioritise one particular way of life over another, but simply to maintain a neutral and level playing field; one in which, as far as possible, very different conceptions of the good and the good life may flourish alongside each other.

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Crucially for this vision, the state, and a quasi-state like the EU, must not take sides. That’s why all talk of “a European way of life” is an anathema, since it implies that the state should take a view as to what constitutes the best way of life. And the fear for people like in ‘t Veld is that this is a sneaky way of referring to Christianity – or, at least, our European Christian inheritance.

The story told by secularists is that Europe is simply about “the freedom of individuals to choose their own way of life”. But what is the basis on which people choose the good life – is it through their own private inclinations and feelings, a kind of individual creation of values ex nihilio? Or does there need to be some pre-existing moral landscape in which such judgments are rooted and by reference to which our moral values make sense?

The godfather of in ‘t Veld’s liberalism is Nietzsche. For him, the solitary individual must be his own god, creating his own values, directed by his own light. The task for authentic human existence is to give birth to yourself. Nothing has a value that you yourself have not given it, and only the weak adopt their “way of life” from others, off-the-shelf. This is the Europe of in ‘t Veld: “the freedom of individuals to choose their own way of life.”

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Why can't we talk about Brexit?

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Another and highly contrasting view of Europe is powerfully expressed by the historian Tom Holland in his new book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Here Europe is not, and should not be, like Rawls’s “original position” – it is not a neutral playing field that has no position on what constitutes the good. Such a political conception of Europe would have no memory and no history.

This neutral idea of Europe vainly pretends that we make life choices detached from our surroundings and our past. It imagines that we are born into a featureless landscape, with only our own intuitions and choices as a guide. No, Holland insists, Europeans have a moral inheritance, a world view, and it has patterned our moral choices, and continues to pattern them, even when we think of ourselves as operating without it. Not least of which, it has given us a sense of the basic equality of all human beings, that we are all made in the image of God irrespective of colour or creed.

Indeed, by holding up as worthy of admiration – worship even – a man who ended his days strung up on a Roman instrument of torture, a life thrown away on the rubbish dump, Christianity makes a powerful statement about the intrinsic and supreme value of even the most apparently worthless existence. Holland emphasises how revolutionary this way of thinking was, how contrasting to the brutality of the Romans.

Should this be built into our modern “European way of life” – or is it just another one of those things that must be up for grabs in the free-for-all that liberals perceive as essential to the freedom of human beings?

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By Tom Holland

Nietzsche, of course, hated Christianity. For him, it was the celebration of the weak. His new world would instead celebrate only the powerful, only those with the wherewithal to push themselves up, only those capable of forging their own identity through their own choice and their own choice alone.

But even Nietzsche would baulk at what this has come to mean. For him, choice was a kind of quasi-spiritual quest, something that required huge resources of self-discipline and imagination. He viewed self-creation as a kind of artistic project, making oneself up as one might make up a great work of art.

What he did not live to see was that, in practice, self-creation and choice would come to be conscripted by the all-powerful market; that choice would come to be little more than code for shopping, the Mall replacing the Temple as the site of public worship. In such a world, “the freedom of individuals to choose their own way of life” often means little more than self-definition through new trainers – our individuality being the most easily manipulated thing about us.

Tom Holland’s thesis is that the European moral imagination has been so schooled by the Christian story that, whether we are religious or not, we would be lost without it. It is not, however, a contribution to the debate about immigration. Christianity, as he tells it, is not a membership organisation for insiders, and certainly not for insiders defined by ethnicity.

It is a way of looking at the world that has saturated our European values. And as such, for Europeans, it is not one choice among others, but the background against which things make moral sense. And without it, we are at the mercy of brutal forces that would define our values in terms of power or commerce. From this perspective, in ‘t Veld is not defending all that makes Europe a force for good in the world. She is undermining it.