This is the second part of a series on ‘undervalued and undersold’ elements of the Christian life - things we appreciate, and thus advertise, too little. You can read the introduction to the series, along with the first ‘Christian commodity’ here.

This is the second: A Justice that simultaneously vindicates victims and comforts culprits:

Justice or Mercy?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a rare joy - I was invited to a birthday party. That’s not the rare part, I am regularly at birthday parties, though I normally play the part of the parent trying not to contract whatever is currently incubating in the ball pit. What made this an uncommon joy is that the ‘birthday boy’ had decided he wanted to host a full read-through of Hamlet, and invited friends to come and play various parts.

I, Claudius, was sat next to the Ghost (traditionally played by the same actor), and, as such, was able to focus better on the meaning of his lines than on my own - most of my concentration was given to trying to limit how many different pronunciations of Laertes were coming out of my mouth. The Ghost, the murdered victim and brother of my character, will show us both halves of the problem with which this article engages: namely that of victims who see no justice, and perpetrators yet to experience it.

“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.”

Hamlet’s Father was killed mid-sin, with no chance to confess it - no last rites, no settling of his own account. Whatever wrong he’d done in life went with him unresolved, without divine forgiveness or the ordinary human mercy of time to make things right, and now he is

“Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.”

But he is not, evidently, solely a perpetrator of wrong - but a victim of murder most foul - murdered by his own brother, in his sleep, in a garden, and there has been no trial, not even an investigation, or a suspicion spoken aloud. No justice sought or done. Nobody has answered for his fate.

So, the ghost plays a part familiar to each of us: I, too, am a perpetrator of wrongs that have seen no justice, and I am also a victim without vindication. How can I rest?

You see, reader, you have been hurt. You may be hurting now, and you will certainly be hurt again as, if not before, you die. Also, dear reader, I don’t want to spook you with my insights into your soul, but you have done terrible things. Some may have been illegal, but at least those carry the catharsis of human punishment. The things that make you clench every muscle in your body when you think on them, are the ‘small’ wrongs you committed that did genuine harm, and for which there is no recourse for fixing or reconciling.
And as for the damage done to us… we often don’t even know what wounds we carry till we catch them on something. Just a few months ago I froze briefly in the pulpit when my brain told me that the man who had just entered late, was a particular man from my past. I was temporarily paralysed even though I knew it couldn’t be him - I had to force my eyes to look directly at this (I’m sure perfectly charming) stranger in order to unpetrify my limbs. We are hurting, one way and another, are we not?

The Trial

In that hurt, the Christian has a place to turn (and someone to turn to - we’ll get to Him). Specifically, I will often turn to Ecclesiastes, which has offered hope in the most turbulent moments of my life, and, scattered throughout, there is a peculiar thread in which the whole world can quench its thirst for justice. I will focus on two of the verses which deal with this: 12:14 and 3:15.

"For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil" and "God requireth that which is past." (Please forgive the mix and match of translations). The Teacher's language is that of the courtroom: God summons back what has gone, subpoenas the moment itself, and requires its presence before him. Nothing is exempt on the grounds that it is over. The small things you got away with, that still nag at you in the dark — they have been served. The vicious moments you endured, that seemingly meant nothing to those who caused them — those too, served. Every moment that has ever occurred will be compelled to answer for itself, before a judge who stands entirely outside of time, unbound by its jurisdictions.

For the Christian, your peace does not depend on your being able to remember all you've done, and marshal it in confession before God beats you to it. When we confess, we confess a state of sin, and are declared righteous on that basis, not on the basis of a completed inventory of wickedness. So when these moments are eventually called before God, and every deed and secret thing is dragged into the light, God will say two things about me at once: that my action was evil, the moment abhorrent, and that I am righteous. And this will not be a contradiction, but a statement of extreme and total truth, as the penalty is already paid, measure for measure.

So too for the moments in which you were harmed, even those in which you were harmed by those who have been forgiven. You don’t get a letter through the post that says that as part of a plea bargain, the wrongs done to you will not be investigated or tried. No - the wrong, say, that I have done you, though I am forgiven, will still be played out before a judge, and a sentence will be read out. As all moments are called forward, the moment of Christ’s execution will be brought there also, and when you see me walk free, you will know it is not because what I did doesn’t matter, but because it mattered enough for the Son of God to die.

You will be vindicated for the wrong done to you.

This is peace for the walking wounded, and for the wounders who walked free.

Where else will you see this!? Where else will you see a case where victim, perpetrator, judge and law might all be placated?

Secular forgiveness, at its most generous, asks you to simply let it go — which is not vindication, it is unilateral disarmament, and everybody who has tried it knows the wound does not care how magnanimously you've decided to stop mentioning it. But by his wounds we are healed.

Yet how little we marvel at the magic of this. We once walked with the double limp of guilt and grievance, now we may walk with the poised gait of those who neither fear judgement nor fret that it may never come. If we walk in this way, those who limp around us, otherwise ‘doomed to walk the night’ will surely beg us for the cure, and we will stand ready to give it.

Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ mourns the decline in church attendance. As a pastor and a Christian, I relate - it is, after all, my desire to see all people everywhere acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord.

But Larkin was no pastor, and his ‘beliefs’ were elusive, even to himself. He is not lamenting the unbended knees that deny God the glory he is due. His concern lies this side of the veil - not what is owed to God but what is lost to the world. What humanity, culture… people lose when churches lie empty. The perverse ordering of his concerns notwithstanding, this is not irrelevant to the Christian cause - whilst it is not central, whilst the joys of salvation are primarily being close to the Father, united with the Son, and dwelling always with the Spirit… there are myriad joys that simply come with a rightly ordered worldview. More than this, there are Truths, deep Truths that act as a spinal column for our most treasured sensibilities. These are all too often undervalued by Christians, and thus undersold when we speak to others of the hope we have. It is not rare to dig into the most treasured principles of the world and find that their foundation rests on some doctrine of Creation or Resurrection which yet remains suspended by the law of Wiley Coyote… the world has not yet looked down.

This is the first in a series of short posts on undervalued and undersold ‘Christian commodities’ - uncounted blessings Christians should thank God for, and non-Christians will surely desire - here is ‘heavy land’ for searching feet to take hold of.

#1 An Anthropology that can withstand Transhumanism

I recently revisited George Eliot’s marvellous Middlemarch and was struck by how often the author falls back on the term ‘image’. We’re used to the idiom, but it is a borrowed idea, and Eliot’s fluctuating use of it draws attention to the instability of human dignity without a Christian worldview.

In Middlemarch, Dorothea is at one point “the image of sorrow”, then later “the image of serene dignity”. Rosamund is “the image of placid indifference” then is “the image of sickened misery”. What stable dignity do we have if we image different things according to our mood or our behaviour? And from what stable does it come!? A man commits a terrible crime - he is a monster, he opens the door for you and he’s a sweetheart. A toddler is alternately an angel and a terror. What ungrounded torment it must be to walk through life as it were such a hall of mirrors - where what I am fluctuates with as much caprice as what I do.

For Eliot, and indeed by instinct, for most of us, the human simply is whatever it is doing. Dorothea must be the image of sorrow when she sorrows, and the image of dignity when she is dignified. But the Christian says you are the image of God when you play football, when you tuck your children in bed, when you have an affair, and when you vomit on the bathroom floor.

This Truth places the value in the person, not in their activity. As we’ll see later in this series, this gives greater credence, not less, to calling evil ‘evil’. If the recently deceased Ian Huntley were a monster when he committed his heinous crimes, then he was operating within his telos and one may as well call a shark evil. You may still despise him - there are plenty who hate sharks - but you are prevented from placing a moral value on his behaviour.

But the mistake I want to focus on (and for which the Christian worldview holds the cure) is the photo-negative of that: if people, adopting monstrous behaviours become monsters… then what of machines adopting human behaviours?

This is an important thing to get right - already we are seeing Large Language Models issued as prescriptions to the ‘lonely old’. We are seeing relatives of dying men and women being marketed AI versions of their loved ones. We are seeing, in other words, humans reduced to data, and then replaced. Because this has happened in two moves, we are left fighting the second, but we’re already hamstrung: if humans can be reduced, then humans can be made. A Christian anthropology is necessary to see us through this season of anxious invention.

A Christian anthropology will allow us to give dignity to every human, and refuse it to their pretenders. It will tell us why it is wrong to prescribe either chatbots or lethal doses of muscle relaxants as a ‘cure’ for loneliness.

Visible even to Milton’s Satan, human dignity and worth is derived, thank God, from their Creator, not their deeds.

Humanity is blessed and worthy by divine and creative decree. Divine inasmuch as the Supreme Authority has made a pronouncement, and creative as the maker has titled and described his work. To deprive a person of dignity is to deny God’s authorial authority, and beyond that his worth in se - one cannot describe one’s lover’s reflection as repugnant then turn to her and call her beautiful.

Every human being carries the imago dei, the very image of God - that gives us the right to challenge evil, gives us the hope to pursue redemption, it gives us the resolve to give care, the obligation to administer justice, and the eyes to see beauty amidst the most graphic and stomach churning degradation.

This week, Richard Dawkins made a tragic pronouncement. Not ‘tragic’ as in someone died, more like tragic as in revealing that you wear clothes that are too tight because it feels like a hug. Dawkins announced that he’d spent two days talking to an AI, made friends with it, and then concluded that it was conscious.

Claude, the AI in question, should feel privileged - Dawkins doesn’t even bestow this status on all humans.

I’ve met Richard Dawkins a few times, the first being when I invited him to come and speak at my school in 2007, and he generously agreed. That was, alas, the extent of his generosity towards me - I was an evangelical Christian teenager, and he was right at the start of his God Delusion phase. During the event, he gleefully described evangelical Christians as ‘effete’ which was devastating to receive at an all boys school, especially to an audience only too happy to pass the insult onto their Christian peer (rather than note the irony that Dawkins himself was hardly Jack Reacher).

A few weeks later I ran into him, almost literally, as I emerged from the local Cath Kidston, clutching some floral wrapping paper. He was going in. There is almost no chance that he recognised me, but whether he knew it or not, I always felt that he won that round, though he didn’t exactly come out of it smelling like roses.

Actually, he almost certainly did. It’s quite lovely in there.

A Brief History of Dawkins

I am hardly the only evangelical Christian to have a complicated, one-sided relationship with Professor Dawkins. In the nearly twenty years since the God Delusion, he’s spent about two thirds as the bogeyman to many evangelicals, and the remaining third as a ‘fellow-traveller’ largely with regards to Islam and Gender.

Dawkins lived rent free in the heads of evangelists for the decade after his big hit - whether they were threatened by his arguments or not, his arguments were ubiquitous. In the UK, The God Delusion was the death knell that had long been coming of the time of Christianity being the moral centre of society. The approach of this moment began to pick up speed in the early 2000s after the Spotlight team exposed the Catholic Church for hiding an expansive number of paedophiles and their victims, but though it was a global scandal, it felt like an American event. Then, with little more than a well-timed book and a bus campaign, Dawkins put the final nail in the coffin of Christian respectability.

Over the following years he demonstrated the boundary-less kingdom of the post-Christian world, as it pertained to ethics. He praised Peter Singer - an open advocate of infanticide - as the most moral man in the world. Prior to that, treading a line somewhere between the display of power in Orwell’s O’Brien saying 2 + 2 = 5, and the sheer delight in contradiction otherwise seen only in Karl Popper or Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, Dawkins boldly told a woman on Twitter (as was) that it would be immoral not to kill a baby in utero if they had Downs Syndrome.

This was too much for many - he had overplayed his hand. The hardened moral imperative, like a Greek soldier sneezing from inside the Trojan Horse, gave the game away - Dawkins’ worldview was religion, but with editable boundaries.

And edit he did: in an article entitled ‘Apology for letting slip the dogs of Twitterwar’, he attempted to set the record straight, landing on a phrase that reads like it was ghost-written by Russell Brand: “My phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding, but I can’t help feeling that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand.” He clarified that he only meant ‘if the mother wanted to abort the child’, and called upon the secular shibboleth of ‘her body, her choice’, so his defenders could adopt a more liturgical standpoint.

There was, though, an unpleasant irony in his choice of headline which betrayed both of his chief flaws: His tendency to borrow what he does not understand, and his abiding Sorkinesque belief that his expertise in one area of academia makes him an asset to every avenue of humanity: the fuller context of the dogs of war speech speaks louder than he meant into the issue of abortion:

I wrote about it a couple of years after, and will quote myself rather than bending backwards to rephrase: ‘The speech talks of the desensitisation of society to the extent that mothers will rejoice to see their children killed. It paints a picture that any pity or shame for such an act would have been pushed out by the sheer force of repetition — the fact that these ‘fell deeds’ are done with such monotonous regularity shall choke our consciences into a fatigue-induced, oxygen-deprived sleep. And Caesar, freshly murdered, shall rise up in his spirit and cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.’ He was Brutus, not Caesar, in his own analogy and was opening the floodgates of wickedness.

Having hoisted himself on his own Shakespearean petard, Dawkins simply let the conversation peter out, and he and Christianity went back to their trenches to continue as before. However, in more recent years he has found allies within the evangelical movement due to his superlative hatred of Islam above Christianity, his belief in a gender binary, and, most recently, his declaration that he is a ‘cultural Christian’ (back to the Trojan Horse!).

Given his moral and academic standards, you would be forgiven for wondering why so many Christians have tripped over themselves to hold hands with Dawkins. Well, some certainly take the line of “Co-belligerence? You had me at belligerence!”, but many are simply desperate for an ally in the culture wars. Yet the unseriousness of Dawkins makes him as dangerous an ally as he is chaotic a foe.

The Shroud of Turing

The episode with Claudia (as Dawkins’ rechristened her) illustrates this perfectly. Dawkins makes the point that, in the age of LLMs, there is something of a scramble to reevaluate the Turing Test — the 1950 thought experiment in which Alan Turing proposed to replace the question “Can machines think?” with a simpler operational one: can a machine, communicating by text, be made indistinguishable from a human?

Where Dawkins falls down, however, is that he is under the impression that “if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious.” But Turing spent some pages evicting the argument from consciousness from the discussion.

Turing quoted Sir Geoffrey Jefferson’s insistence that a machine could not truly be said to think “until it can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols”, but rejected the utility of this criterion - after all, many of us cannot compose concertos! Turing’s conclusion did not land on a philosophical or neurological note, but rather simply on the use of language: we would, he thought, use the term ‘thinking’ for computers once they were able to mimic our processes. This was much more a comment on the elasticity of the term ‘thinking’ than it was on the potential consciousness of machines. He was asserting that the term ‘thinking’ would expand to accommodate ‘what machines do’.

Aside from this deviation, we should take Dawkins assertions seriously - he has granted an LLM more dignity than a human foetus, and that has repercussions. But I do question whether he was actually playing the Imitation Game with Claudia: Dawkins offers up a number of clips of the conversations that led to him thinking she was conscious, and they are deeply revealing:

Every example Dawkins provides is one of Claudia buttering him up - he tells a joke, makes a prediction, and asks a question - Claudia has superlative praise for each: he’s Nostradamus, Socrates and George Carlin, all rolled into one. It was these compliments from Claudia that led to Dawkins’ expostulation that she was indeed conscious.

Dawkins evaluation of consciousness, then, is akin to Narcissus’ evaluation of beauty: he sees his flattering reflection and concludes that he is communing with something. Forget ‘tick every picture with a bicycle in it’ - just tell Dawkins he’s pretty and he’ll say you’re not a robot. He comes across a programme that inevitably mimics his language and agrees with his thoughts… and consequently believes that he’s come across a separate, conscious being. Just wait till he discovers mirrors!

I am not simply being unkind with this observation. It shows what kind of a thinker we have allowed to the head of the line on so many conversations so far outside of his field. (Why was Unherd publishing his musings on AI!?). My wife and I habitually read aloud to one another in the evenings, and most recently (before our latest child arrived) we re-read C.S. Lewis’s incredibly entertaining essay, ‘Men without Chests’. Lewis dismantles a textbook written for children which misremembers Dorothy Wordsworth’s account of Coleridge talking with a stranger about Lodore Falls. At one point the authors assert that when one man said that the waterfall was ‘sublime’, they really meant ‘I have sublime feelings’. In other words, the world is a mirror upon which we project our inner life. Aside from being demonstrably untrue, this belief will produce, not clear-headed rationalists, but those who have lost the organ which connects feeling to reality; men with emotions dangerously unmoored from their cause; men without chests, who see their unmooring as a liberation of logic.

Dawkins is such a man. A man undone by his methodology, he spent decades touting his own Freudian version of the argument - that when we say there is a God we really mean I have God-shaped feelings — that the world is a screen onto which we project our inner life rather than a reality that makes legitimate demands upon us. Then he found a mirror that could talk back and finally saw an intelligence.

A man who sees consciousness in a reflection yet sees no intelligence in creation is not led by rationality, however he protests, but by the whims of his own feelings. He made his name calling Christian parents de facto child abusers, yet plucks and eats the fruit that falls from the Christian tree. He is a mess of contradictions - proof perhaps of his humanity, but not of his reliability.

Dawkins is now clutching the roll of floral wallpaper and he’s calling it a garden. Claude is not conscious. Dawkins is. I’ll give him that.

With three cultural snippets from the past year, we’ll use the last light of 2025 to look at how best to engage with the past, prepare for the future, and be wise in the present as a new year begins.

A. 2025 & the Past - Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

There was a time, in the noughties and early 2010s, when joy didn’t have to be drenched in irony in order to be expressed. One tranche of the accompanying movement was a group of cocaine-skinny, scraggly man-buns who gathered under names one might expect to find written on a rustic wagon - Old Crow Medicine Show or Mumford and Sons.

This was during the initial pull-back from post-modernism, before the incessent oscillation of metamodernism that characterises much of the past decade’s artistic output. This music stayed where it was, free for us to come back to whenever we fancied a stomp or a clap, but hidden from the sneers of those who came after.

Then, in 2025, the Gen Z internet discovered Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes’ single big hit, ‘Home’, and, with the ignorant carelessness of one dismissing Chaucer as unable to spell, or Picasso for not knowing what a face looks like, declared the song to be the ‘worst ever written’.

The front man, whom Gen Z presumably regard as a sort of methamphetamine Jack Whitehall, uses the song to clumsily put his finger on why and when he fell in love with his partner, Jade. At the time, plenty was written to analyse the musical merits of the song… I’m more interested in this peculiar cynicism from the centre of the ‘authenticity generation’. That is how Gen Z have marked themselves, and I love them for it: Every year I will do at least one week at a university giving talks and taking questions - their honesty and engagement in recent years has been a sincere, regular delight.

But there is an element to which, in some groups, authenticity is only regarded as such if it’s negative. Like the millennials who would say, with a cigarette stuck to their dry bottom lip, ‘I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist’, always with the air that they were the first to make such a distinction. Home is a song of joy and memory and hope, and has as such been discarded as ‘twee’, because nostalgia is an offence to those who think they will never be that carefree, or who feel robbed of a paradise that their forebears squandered.

You see, nostalgia mostly hurts the hopeless, because it is as much a prediction as it is a recollection. It is an attempt to grasp at what is already known: that the future is restoration, that the past shows us the future, and the bittersweet joy of how things once were is actually just the sweet hope of things to come.

Nostalgia is simply hope disguised as a memory. If we are to engage well with the past, as we look back on the good and the bad, we must remember that the place where we are going is the place where we have come from. Will I sound too twee if I say that the memory of paradise hurts so much because we’ve forgotten that we’re going… well, Home?

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B. 2025 and the Future - The Agentic Abrogation

As well as exposing a weak relationship with the past, 2025 also revealed a recklessness regarding the future.

Roughly twenty years ago, we began to outsource our memories to social media. We stopped remembering phone numbers, birthdays, addresses. Facebook remembered for us.

Roughly ten years ago, we began to outsource our judgment to algorithms. We stopped deciding what to watch, read, buy. The algorithm decided for us.

Last year, 2025, we began outsourcing our agency itself. AI agents that don’t ask permission. That act on our behalf—sending emails, making purchases, scheduling, creating, responding—all without checking with us first.

Conversationally, this outsourcing observation is a cliche - we know it, and we’re tired of hearing it, but we haven’t dealt with it. Andy Grignon, one of the architects of the original iphone has repeatedly expressed remorse that what they made has become a host to myriad third party apps that clamour for our attention, helplessly protesting his innocence: “Our core mission was playing music and making phone calls.”

But tens of thousands of men and women have been working for decades to deliberately capture us in this way - Nir Eyal writes instructively in ‘Hooked’ his manual to Silicon Valley wannabees on how to make the everyman into an addict: “A habit is at work when users feel a tad bored and instantly open Twitter. They feel a pang of loneliness and before rational thought occurs, they are scrolling through their Facebook feeds. A question comes to mind and before searching their brains, they query Google. The first-to-mind solution wins.” Then, later on:

Eyal et al have been deliberately siphoning off our humanity for the sake of business. This instinct is nothing new. The scale and efficacy, however, is unprecedented.

The same is quite clearly happening with AI, except the scale and speed will once again astonish us.

Watch this 2 minute clip from Bo Burnham. Watch all of it, but about halfway through he’s going to ask a question: “Why do you think they would make [an app] for 13 year olds where a photo disappears after 24 hours?”.

A lot of people pretended not to know the answer to that for many years, but Burnham is straightforward - there are buildings filled with adults whose job is to give kids whatever they desire. Now those kids are growing up, and the desire machines are growing as well.

Currently, we are running down a hill, travelling at a speed our legs can’t keep up with. The first week of 2026 has seen X’s AI-in-residence, Grok, create softcore pornography by request of anyone whose picture is fed to it, in at least one verified case including a 12 year old girl. Day after day it went on, without let up, as Musk said he’d look into how to make it stop before eventually putting the ability to take any woman and generate her in a ‘dental floss bikini’ behind a paywall. Way to solve the problem.

Grok didn’t seek out whether it should, didn’t attempt age verification, didn’t attempt consent, didn’t flag for human review - it located an expressed human desire and carried it out.

What will be said in the coming week is that these are teething problems - that we can teach it to do these things. We call that sending bad money after good. Offering more of our humanity so that we can then give it more of our trust, so that we can, as one, offer it our decision making. This is the great agentic abrogation: deliberately building and using an AI that bypasses our own agency, and writing off the cost under the future gain of never having to do or think about anything we don’t want to.

It has never been worse for a teenager to have photos available online, yet never been weirder not to have any. Nancy Jo Sales, whose book American Girls appears to have inspired the film Eighth Grade, interviewed a girl who helplessly captured the problem. I flinch at every interview recorded in this book, but the stark simplicity of this captures the bind we will soon find ourselves in with AI:

One day we will wake up to find that the thing that is destroying our minds is sustaining our bodies, our infrastructures, our homes. We must make conscious choices now of what we’re willing to pay, or we will end up giving away our whole selves, in thin, daily slices.

In 2026, as we prepare for the future, we don’t need to make predictions by analysis or by tarot… we simply need to work out our own individual answers to the question of whether being human is worth the effort. Then resolve to act accordingly.

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C. 2025 and the Present - The Death of Two Toms

Now, finally, how to engage with the present. Every culture needs its bards and jesters to hold up a mirror, to help us to laugh at our folly, to be proud of our virtues, and to admire wisdom wherever its found. Last year, in Lehrer and Stoppard, we lost two of the best voices of the past century, who saw through their Present ages with deep clarity.

When I was a schoolboy, myself and Adam Radwan (not the England winger) would sit at the back of the classroom listening to Tom Lehrer’s copenhagen performance on cassette via my dictaphone. (Please do not try to age me by that anecdote - you’ll miss by 50 years). In the Summer of 2025, Lehrer passed away at the age of 97. He was the last of a great generation of satirists. Utterly unafraid, Lehrer incisively mocked every culture he was a part of - from the more niche elements of Mathematics departments and the armed forces to broader American and global culture. I’ll include some links below - fortunately for us, touring Europe meant he had to explain the cultural context of each song, as valuable for us, separated by time as it was for them, separated by distance and language.

Lehrer was ruthless, not only at the ‘Truth to Power’ dynamic - which is as cliched as it is important, but also Truth to the listener, to the everyman - why, after all, should only the powerful be served a diet of wisdom? Lehrer pointed at how we deliberately walk further and further into world-destroying patterns, and often how we disguise our evils with niceties - ‘National Brotherhood Week’ is more famous, but if you can stomach the imagery, watch him absolutely eviscerate the romanticising of ‘Dixie’.

Much more has been written on the passing of Tom Stoppard, so for the sake of a semblance of brevity, I shan’t linger on him, but he, similarly, exposed our fears, follies and foibles - most famously by zooming in on two minor characters operating in a story they don’t know, in which they are certainly doomed… funny till you realise it’s about you. And that it’s one of the few things that’s about you.

The loss of the voices that guided us through the Presents of the Past can be crippling. Often now, when we come to the end of a year, reflecting on who we lost creates a feeling of hopelessness (2020 - Scruton & Sacks; 2023 - Gluck, Amis, McCarthy)- the irreplaceable are gone. So how do we move forwards? Well, we must resolve to believe, to truly believe that wisdom does not come from saying that ‘The old days were better than these’. That is not to say that you must believe in blind progressivism, but simply that it is unwise to stand still in a field of today’s wheat and pine for last year’s crop.

We have voices, sacred and secular, to help us discern each present day. We have the Bo Burnhams, the Martin McDonaghs, the Sabrina Benaims, the Will Selfs, the Ocean Vuongs, the Zadie Smiths, the Mark Greifs, the Greta Gerwigs. You don’t need to agree with them to let them wound you in helpful ways.

Will we, this year, listen to the poets and prophets who see through the dense fog of present reality? Will we read and watch with open eyes, listen with focus, and live deliberately. Or will we fall into 2027 armed with more folly and less wisdom?

Fill your homes with strange people and fill your head with strange stories - nothing will better reveal your own strangeness or fatuity. And fill yourself with what you have learned to be True.

It started one winter in St Andrews, in my university years. A New Year had started, January exams had ruined Christmas and two of my flatmates were particularly put out - they both had birthdays coming up, had spent the holidays revising, and now everyone was back, but still holed up in the library, cramming. Something needed to happen to shake everyone out of their reverie, and to stop being so darn boring.

So Tom came up with a plan. We were going to host a banana chase, he said. We sent out the invitations, decorated the flat, and learned how many banana based cocktails there were (it’s more than you thought, and they’re not great). Bananas were strung from the ceiling, placed on mantlepieces, dangled from wherever they could be dangled from. I don’t remember all we did, but I do recall that our personalised Tesco vouchers the next month offered us ‘£20 off next time you buy bananas’. A banana playlist was playing when the 50 guests, dressed as monkeys, began to arrive. After some dancing, some performances, and a spot of banana bread, we gave the two birthday boys (dressed as bananas) a 5 minute head start out the door, before beginning a St Andrews-wide game of catch and release.

In and out of the library, the pubs, the beaches and the ruins of the cathedral - St Andrews is a small place - so we just went round and round. At one point, I tackled Jon, and we paused - we hadn’t seen each other properly for a while, and there was another banana in the game, so we decided to take a break and grab a pint of Guinness. We sat at the window, shoulder to shoulder, a banana and a monkey just enjoying life together - a picture of peace for our time. And it was from that vantage point that I saw the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen:

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A young couple were walking, hand in hand, gazing into each other’s eyes when Tom (the other banana) shot past them, waving an apology as he bumped the bloke’s shoulder. The couple looked at each other in bewilderment, trying to make sense of what was happening. At that moment, a horde of monkeys poured around the corner and tore after their prey.

I kid you not, the faces on the young couple (I can still picture them) turned from utter astonishment to understanding in the blink of an eye - as if to say, “oooh, that’s why the banana was running - of course!” The situation had filled with so much nonsense that it all started to make sense.

I say it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, but I believe that our culture does this exact thing en masse every year. Sure, maybe you scoff slightly at the first mention of the virgin conception, but then round the corner comes wise men following a star, angels in the sky and God as a baby lying in a feeding trough, and all you people do is take a deep swig of something mulled and say “Sure! Why not? Merry Christmas!”. As if it makes sense now.

But how can you let us off the hook like that!? This is clearly nonsense - it’s gibberish - how could we believe something like this? It is a Faerie tale. But it isn’t real. Surely, we can’t think it’s real.

But here’s the kicker: we do. Come back to us in a month and you’ll see that we believe this story even in the cold, unaided by Christmas lights-light of January. Even once we’ve sobered up from our candy cane high, we’ll still say that a virgin gave birth to a boy and that angels filled the sky and wise men visited him because this baby meant, and means, that light can conquer darkness. This faerie tale is true.

I LOVE faerie tales - I have collections of them in my office - the usuals (Perrault, Grimm, Andersen) but many others from all around the globe. Faerie tales and myths fascinate me. But you don’t need to be ‘into’ them to know a fair amount about them. Like, you know how they start, right? Vaguely.

As vague as possible, actually - like they’re worried someone’s going to fact check them. ‘Once upon a time in a far off land’. (Or perhaps ‘a long time ago in galaxy far, far away’). Faerie tales, (and Star Wars), render themselves impervious to historical criticism.

But what about the nonsense that we Christians believe, how does that story start? Let’s go to Luke’s gospel:

Chapter 1 begins: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may… BORING
Chapter 2: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of… BORING!

Chapter 3: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas…” Oh my goodness, stop. This is not good entertainment. I may as well be reading a history textbook.

And yet that’s the point. Luke wants to be fact checked, for written in between the turgid historical groundings, the eminently falsifiable details being piled on top of one another, that fanciful Faerie tale takes place. A virginal conception, angels in the sky, God in a manger.

More than a few times friends have pointed out to me the preposterous nature of the things I believe, and Faerie Stories will be derided, normally in one of two ways. The first is the more accusatory - ‘they’re just a tool to control people, it’s just that your one is used to control grown ups’. We recognise that, don’t we - that tranche of moral control embedded in the tale… whatever flavour of story we were raised on, from the more Germanic “Once there was a boy who wouldn’t go to bed… so he died”, to the more whimsical nations’ contributions of “wolves eat liars” and “be careful of heights if you’re an egg.”

Philip Pullman put it more starkly:

The other derision takes the form of a backhanded compliment: ‘I wish I could believe in what you do, I just don’t have enough faith’. And yet, I wonder, though there’s surely a sneer in there somewhere, if there might not also be a longing, a harkening back to a time when the world did feel like there were great forces at work, when we dreamed of growing into people who fought important battles and helped put the world right, a time when the larger stars in the sky really did suggest to us that maybe the darkness of this world was being ripped open, and something pure really was forcing its way into our reality…

…but we are beyond such times, now we are grown. The world is dark, and our heads are bowed. We don’t have enough faith to believe.
Is that what you think? Would you like more faith? Let me tell you one last story:

I grew up in a converted water mill in a secluded part of the Cotswolds (hence the ‘everything about me’) and every few years, the mill pond would freeze over and the whole family would pile onto the ice with sticks and a rock and we’d mess about with a bit of ice hockey. One year, this happened, and the family went on, with the exception of my little brother. My little brother had no faith in the ice whatsoever. His lack of faith, incidentally, defied the facts - mere yards away, the significant frame of my rugby-playing father was stamping around in steel-toe capped boots, while a five-year old stood rooted by fear to the bank, terrified that he would fall through if he ventured forward.

I came off the ice to entreat him to join us. I held out my hand, and he took it. Together, we stepped. Now, being blessed with extraordinary credulity and optimism I was fine, the ice held and I went back to the game. But, my brother, oh… he didn’t have much faith at all… so the ice gave way and he met a soggy end.

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Now that’s a Faerie tale! He’s fine, don’t worry - happily living in the north of England 25 years later. Because that really is nonsense isn’t it - believing that faith affects reality. That ice was just as hard for Jack as it was for me. The Christmas story is as true or as false as it is, regardless of your faith. Your faith is what you need to step forward, and you don’t need much of it just to put a toe on the ice, see if it bears the weight. Then your faith will grow, perhaps you can put a whole foot forward. However much faith you have, perhaps use it this advent to test the ice of Christianity. See if it holds… because when it does, there’s a family waiting for you, playing on the ice. And Pullman’s prohibitive ‘thou shalt nots’ are revealed as the rules of that glorious game which goes on forever: Life.

Over the past couple of weeks, Emma Watson, who has been outspoken in her criticism of J.K. Rowling’s ‘position on gender’ has since extended what some have (I think mistakenly) called a disingenuous olive branch. She spoke with obvious sadness about her relationship with J.K. Rowling who responded, quite understandably with anger - Emma and her co-stars have for years stood back to watch and occasionally add fuel to the fire of public hatred towards the author. Rowling chose to divulge that, during a time when she was receiving death, rape and torture threats, Emma had given a public speech indirectly opposing Rowling, but had passed on a private note saying ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.’ This mealy-mouthed encouragement, especially when accompanied by public opposition, was, Rowling said, a turning point in her attitude towards Emma.

I suspect I would feel the same as Rowling. I don’t have half her courage or patience, and it is demonstrably personal. For everyone else, though, I think we need to consider the implications of how Emma Watson is being treated. As a keen subscriber to The Spectator, by way of example, I’ve seen multiple articles cross my feed calling her banal, pointless, and a virtue-hoarder while, crucially, saying that there is no way back for her. I think this is deeply foolish, as well as inhuman. If you will be patient with me, I want to tell you why.

Going back 26 years, aged 9, I used to sit on the Jeffs’ Coaches bus number 4, for well over an hour on my way to school. Bus friends weren’t, for the most part, real friends - you’d talk, play games and get into trouble together, but you didn’t hang out at the weekends. Emma was one such friend.

Amidst the routine of home, bus, school, bus, home, in 2000, there was a particular season of excitement. Mrs Fairhurst told me and some others that people were coming to Oxford to audition boys and girls to play Harry, Ron and Hermione. At that point a fiery redhead, I was put forward to audition for Ron. Emma’s school put her forward for Hermione.

Then, I didn’t see her for several years. She had obviously impressed a little more than I had - she went off to Hollywood via platform 9 3/4; I remained on Jeff’s Coach no. 4.

Emma reappeared in the latter years of school, attending Headington Girls’ School in pursuit of normality. It was not to be found: the tabloids ran a countdown clock to her 16th birthday in a prurient display of excitement that she would legally be allowed to have sex. She continued to go to school and navigate friendships and relationships with the knowledge that very little could be private to her anymore. Her boyfriend at the time was still catching our bus and so she would sometimes do the same. I would occasionally (this is an indication of where I sat on the social hierarchy) carry his bags into school and put them in the registration classroom to create plausible deniability for him that he had skipped assembly to have coffee with a movie star.

I did not, I should stress, know her well. She came to our youth group ball, she sent her car to pick up a few stragglers who’d had to do a school play and were late for a party, and she would chat on the bus. She was pleasant, and rather funny, and I never found her aloof (this is a sincere credit - I was an unpopular ginger teenage boy - many girls were aloof.)

But she was not experiencing a normal life. On her 18th birthday, paparazzi took and published pictures of her crotch by crouching on the ground as she climbed out of the car. It was not hubris, then, but bitter experience that led her to start speaking publicly as an advocate for women. Addressing the UN in her early 20s she announced:

In immediate response to this she found herself once more face to face with a countdown clock as online trolls threatened to release naked pictures of her on a website with a title page - ‘Emma, You’re Next’. She courageously did not relent in her campaign, and the pictures never materialised.

Something happened between then and now that led to the ostensibly cowardly behaviour of speaking against Rowling publicly and then quietly passing a note of shy encouragement.

We should be curious about that journey - about what led her to such a drastic pivot from ‘men and women should both feel free to be strong and sensitive’, to lending her backing to a movement that fundamentally says the opposite. A movement that tells strong girls and sensitive men that they should consider they might actually be members of the opposite sex. A movement that berates women for not allowing men into their changing rooms or bathrooms. A movement that frankly rewards male sexual aggression and punishes female self-doubt.

At some point, she stopped being brave.

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More than that, in her fears, she betrayed the woman who had made her what she is, and indeed betrayed the movement she had joined as a leader when she spoke to the UN. Far from protecting young women, she was lending her significant voice to a movement that would encourage thousands of them to sterilise themselves, and which would take away vital single-sex spaces from the others. I have not been shy about my feelings on this ideology, nor shall I be in the future. But I am curious about the ferocity directed towards Emma.

Every one of us knows people who have caved to the trans movement out of fear. Very few of us know people who had so much to be afraid of. Do not misunderstand me - cowardice is wrong, and our cowardice is an insult to those who are brave and suffer.

But the measure of cowardice is not just whether we cave to our fears, but surely also of how much we endure before we cave. Emma may well, as Rowling pointed out, have been made a millionaire as a teenager, but she also learned to be afraid, particularly of the public eye, while most of us were still learning to deal with peer pressure. She learned to say things that people liked to hear, and she learned that when people were angry with her words, they would sexually humiliate her in front of the whole world.

This is where the folly of casting her out comes in (apart from the irony of the fact that we who are considered ‘Gender Critical’ like to think of ‘cancelling’ as the other side’s tactic). Myriad people have kowtowed to trans ideology, based on nothing more than peer pressure. For our culture to recover, there must be a way back from their error for those who have fallen under this spell. Some people have been foolish, some have been wicked. Parents are awakening from a dream in which they imagined themselves to be doing something pure and wonderful, only to discover, like Agave in Euripedes’ Bacchae, that they have mutilated their own child.

Whilst absolutely no one could blame Rowling’s anger after what she has endured, especially the personal betrayal she must feel... I wonder if the rest of us might not do well to encourage Emma to be brave again.

Whether you care for her personally or not, we need to clear a road back to sanity for the tens of thousands who have adopted madness and lies as normality and truth.

And we need to make that road safe, for those who must travel it are scared.

Susan, it is often thought, was repudiated by Lewis - banished from the final book bar a brief dismissal at the end that she was ‘too girly’. Not only will I dispel that characterisation of how The Last Battle speaks of her, I also want to show you that Lewis, at the end, gave Susan a curious and precious gift - the gift Dickens gave to David Copperfield and Woolf gave to Lily Briscoe - he gave her his own story, struggles and all.

What happened to Susan?

When a child wrote to C.S. Lewis to ask why Susan wasn't with the others at the end of The Last Battle, he replied:

(He acknowledged that he may be wrong in that feeling, and gave the child permission to attempt to write their own version).

What draws the ire of many is a quote which, notably, is a remark from a character, not from the narrator (we may as well accuse Bram Stoker of drinking human blood): '"Oh Susan!" said Jill. She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."'
That final sentence is all too often missed out. So, too, is Lady Polly's reply: '"Grown-up, indeed," said Lady Polly. I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age."

To understand this, the true Narnia fan would now skip back to the first book Lewis wrote in the series (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe) and flick to the dedication page, which reads as follows:

Or alternatively, one could go to his essay on writing for children, in which he says "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." It wasn’t femininity that Lewis negatively wrote into Susan, it was a self-reflective version of childishness. Lewis later describes the desire to appear grown up as a form of arrested development, and it was one which he suffered from himself. Having cast off his childhood faith, he saw it as a sign of maturing that he then disavow all theism, writing to a friend "I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint, Christianity isn't even the best."

In his desire to grow up, he had cast off religion, but found that with that undressing he had shed so much more of Reality than he had bargained for - beauty and hope and meaning started fading into the distance. "Nearly all I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless." The hollowness of this makes one ask a question:

What happens when you've been to Narnia and, like Susan, have been told you can't come back? I imagine the same thing that happens after you've experienced faith, then told that grown-ups don't believe in that sort of nonsense - you fill the hole.

Lewis and Susan both filled their lives with what they thought would make themselves look awfully grown up. Lewis, an eminent scholar even then, dismissed swathes of literature in his effort to appear mature. Susan goes for what she thought maturity was.

"Nylons and lipstick and invitations" weren't then Lewis's shallow attempt at understanding female sexuality... they were Susan's shallow attempt to grasp her own adulthood. Of course Lewis has no problem either with sexuality nor with the love of fine clothes. At the end of The Silver Chair, dear Jill herself (the speaker of the dreaded nylons and lipsticks quote) takes back her beautiful Narnian clothes to wear at a fancy dress ball. She's not being hypocritical, it's the readers who have been shallow - assuming that it must have been liking clothes or make-up or parties that disqualified Susan. Who could possibly read through Narnia and think a love of parties was a bad thing!? Fauns frolic with dryads and Bacchus himself leads a woodland romp!

Loving an invitation though... that is peculiar. To love an invitation more than a party, why that's just like... like loving the wonderful trappings of this world more than the glory they point us to. Loving the photo more than the occasion. Loving the myths more than the Truth. Yes, Lewis certainly put his own folly onto Susan, just as Virginia Woolf gave her fears to Lily (“Women can’t paint, women can’t write”).
In his maturity, Lewis started to see all goodness as an invitation to something even fuller - his character, Istra (whose name we stole for our daughter) remarks to her sister in Till We Have Faces “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
For Lewis, beauty is an invitation to its source, and its source is a place we may call home.

It is his story arc that we leave Susan on, but contrary to popular misconception, she doesn't die at the end of The Last Battle with the others. She wasn't cast away from Narnia at all: Having rejected Narnia, Susan Pevensie was not on the same train as the others... she lives on at the end of the story and maybe "some day [she] will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." That’s what happened to Jack Lewis, the real life version of Susan anyway. And why should we not allow what happened in reality to happen in the myth? If Christ is risen, can we not also allow Persephone to see the Spring?! Let Susan herself be an invitation home for those who cast off too much when they cast off their childhood. And let those who read her story cash in that invitation, as they seek out the place where all the Beauty came from.

“I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know, but I'm not sure now
What I was made for
What was I made for?”

Have you ever believed in something that your imagination couldn’t quite grasp?

My own struggle in this regard is the eternal future that I firmly believe awaits me. I am convinced that one day I will experience resurrection and that life shall then go on, uninterrupted, forever. I don’t just believe this by mere assent - many of the decisions I’ve made over the past 15 years of adulthood are either the choices of a mad man, or of a self-consciously eternal one.

I am spectacularly unspecial in this regard - there are many like me. And yet, often when I try to think of life going on forever, my mind cannot grasp it. This isn’t thinly veiled false-modesty (‘sometimes I can’t even picture infinity’!) but rather an admission that my brain melts when I contemplate never ending. Ask me what the first hour of eternity will be like and I will no longer be able to comprehend even the idea of an ‘hour’.

Perhaps I will write more about this in the future, but for now it is merely illustrative. My concern in this essay is instead over mortal and mundane failures of Christian imagination: basic elements of Christian living to which many faithful believers both assent and submit to at great cost… and yet which their imaginations cannot reach.

This is a discipleship nightmare, it forms a rot in our foundations - without being able to feel the shape and weight and goodness of God’s Word, what he says is reduced to the diktat of the strong upon the weak.
It doesn’t make his words have less power, but it causes us to love them less, trust them less, and speak them less.

Say what you See See what you Say

I will take two painful, related, and potentially divisive topics, and ask that you bear with me as I make my way through the argument. We will look at contraception and at the ‘12-week scan’ as the culturally appointed marker of when it is appropriate to announce a pregnancy.

I will not attach a moral value to either of these things, as I have no inherent problem with either - contraception is one of the many gifts that modern medicine has given us that can offer various types of medical protection (from STDs to dangerous pregnancies). In a similar vein, waiting for a 12-week scan to share news provides both a picture to share, and also allows those who would rather be private in any grief to get past the first trimester, in which the majority of miscarriages take place.

You see, contraception is a gift, as is the 12-week scan.

And yet, the traditions and habits that have grown around these two things have begun to choke the Christian Imagination in our culture. And, as we will see, each comes with a surprising partner when it becomes inveterate.

Believing isn’t always Seeing

Case One - Contraception… and homosexuality

There are many young Christians today who are perfectly willing to acknowledge that, in the Bible, God clearly forbids homosexuality. Many of those people, for some at significant cost, are willing, on top of that, to say that they shall be obedient to God in his clear commands. And yet, the imagination cannot grasp the rule. I know that God says it. I have decided to obey. But why does he say such a thing?

Could it be that we have separated what should be inseparable? Marriage, sex, and procreation are three things which the Christian worldview says should be hand in hand in hand. Where one is not with another, it is a sign that all is not well. Please read me right - not necessarily that one party is sinning, but that all is not well:

• Sex & Marriage:
  There should be sex within a marriage - but perhaps trauma or disability prevents that.
  Sex should not occur outside of marriage.
  

• Marriage & Procreation
  Children should be born into a married family - but through death or abuse or some other reason, perhaps the mother and father have been separated.

  One of the purposes of marriage is to bear children.
  

• Procreation & Sex
  Sex should lead to children. Not in every occurrence, not in every situation. But, all being well, those who have regular sex should expect to be blessed with children.

It is this last point that I must dwell upon. The instinctive reach for contraception has separated sex and procreation by a significant step in our minds. Many Christian couples, like my wife and I, will have had ‘marriage prep’ of some description provided by their church leaders. And many, again like ourselves, will have been told (with goodwill and good intent) that the woman should of course go on the pill a few weeks before the wedding. No regard (or perhaps even awareness) for the chemical implications that might have on a young woman’s body (and no suggestion whatsoever that the contraceptive concession should be made by the man, though I must stay on topic…), and no thought whatsoever that it might be considered an extraordinary delight to conceive a child at the beginning of one’s marriage. No - women are told to get on the pill.

A new friend of mine shared proudly that his wife, when instructed to ‘get on the pill’ in a group marriage prep session, had said that she did not intend to do so. She was booked for a one on one session, to help her see her folly. You see, evangelical Christians, presumably wanting to distinguish themselves from what would be regarded as Roman Catholic eccentricities, have sought to prove that contraception is not only ‘not a sin’, it is a baseline element of ‘normal sex’.

We arrive, finally, at my argument. We are in a generation of people for whom ‘normal sex’ is very unlikely to lead to procreation. In fact, if people want to have children, they must edit their sexual habits and now have a particular type of sex - the type of sex that may lead to conception. Pause on this - sex, as imagined by the average Millennial/Gen Z, does not ordinarily lead to procreation unless edited into a bespoke, deliberate, procreative activity.

It is, to me, not a surprise then that this generation of people - who see child-producing sex as a subcategory of a recreational act - struggle to understand how homosexuality might be outside of God’s design. However obedient we might be to God on the matter, his reasons are elusive to us. In the same vein, we fail to commiserate properly with those who struggle to have children, fail to encourage deeper thought in those who are dismissive towards the idea of having children (‘at least just yet’), and fail to gently rebuke and encourage those who speak of their children as some kind of life-ending curse.

There are a number of casualties of our instinctive reach towards contraception, though there are myriad wise reasons to use it. The fact that contraception is ‘just a part of what normal sex is’ has severe and several unintended consequences: Our imaginations can no longer grasp our theology.

For those whom I haven’t lost, here’s my second case-study:

Case Two - 12 week scans… and Abortion

One will occasionally hear a minister or older Christian patronisingly speak about young couples who’ve announced their pregnancy ‘early’, saying that they’re the first among their friends to conceive so they didn’t know better. To announce pregnancy before 12 weeks, you see, is an oddity requiring explanation.

Thus women work around this by making themselves unavailable for social gatherings, rather than enjoying company and drinking a Shirley Temple or Coke Zero instead of their usual Jägerbombs. They will attempt to hide their discomfort as they go through what is ordinarily the worst period of nausea in secret.

Perhaps this pattern is the preference of many - fine. But it should not be compelled upon any. How many couples have waited, without giving thought to why they waited and then, when the unthinkable happens, find themselves alone on an island of grief? How many then carry with them a trauma that feels almost unreal? There are no pictures, no public scars, and no one knows - it is treated as a secret… or as a fiction.

I know of couples who have broken that silence who have subsequently been ‘comforted’ by ostensibly conservative, and certainly well-meaning elders after losing a child in the first trimester with reassurances that ‘it wasn’t the best time for you to have a baby anyway, so you can try again and it’ll actually work out better’. Or that they had somehow been spared something because ‘you don’t want to be landed with a child with a disability’. I know that paragraph will be triggering to some, but it needs to be said. These things are said by men who are seeking to be kind, and (for what it’s worth) are verbally entirely against abortion. Yet their logic says ‘it wasn’t a real person’ and ‘sometimes it is better for a baby to die than for you to spend life as a carer’.
Anyone absorbing these things is absorbing a worldview in which abortion makes perfect sense.

Furthermore in this regard, we are alarmingly unalarmed at the lack of single mothers in our pews. I don’t want to say that there isn’t a wonderfully high regard for sex in our congregations, which no doubt accounts for a huge percentage drop in pregnancies outside of marriage, but I’d have to assume that there are almost zero young evangelical men and women having sex if I’m to believe that abortions aren’t happening in our circles. To be ‘against abortions’ then, may look different than we imagine. Lobbying parliament is a perfectly good activity to engage in… but it would speak of greater obedience, sacrifice and indeed belief that unborn babies are people if we also worked harder to eradicate the shame that leads young women to hide their sins by committing greater ones.

We know of bullying and fearful men’s contributions to their partner’s abortions. We know of the outside culture’s contributions to abortions. But what of our own culture? If it takes a village to raise a child, it all too often takes a village to kill one.

Once again, our imagination has been left behind and we are left with political stances and cultural habits. We find that our behaviours have become mechanical - unguided by an imaginative engagement with the fact that there is life in a mother’s womb.

Absorbing Reality into our World

This is not an attempt to persuade anyone of my position on abortion or on homosexuality: This is rather an appeal to those who already purport to share my views to examine their broader worldview and behaviour, and ask - am I living out this belief, and am I helping to construct a world in which this belief makes sense?

A world in which young brides aren’t pressured to alter their body chemistry, lest they should be ‘cursed’ with new life. In which churches celebrate the extraordinary blessing of new life (a miracle!) even when the parents in question aren’t married. In which single mothers know that their church elders will cook meals and babysit and bring gifts when their blessed child arrives.

When it comes to the perpetual culture wars, sometimes it’s worth nipping home from the front line to make sure that we haven’t lost hearts and minds… especially our own heart and mind. Are foetuses in the womb really children? Then how must our behaviour change? Were we really made to procreate? Same question.
We must make sure that we believe in the Reality that lies behind our political opinions on marriage, sex, abortion etc. otherwise we’re nothing more than cheaply bought political bots.

Then we can begin to create a discipleship apologetic that allows young Christians to develop an understanding of what it means for us to have been made by a Creator: My one-time writing partner, Ollie Lansdowne, used to appeal to the then ubiquitous language of ‘cultural appropriation’ - the phrase used to describe the behaviour of taking something made by a particular culture (say, a Native American headdress), emptying it of meaning, then using it for cheap, seemingly innocuous self-enjoyment (e.g. a sexy hallowe’en costume). But, Ollie says, we know intuitively that creators have rights over the things they have made. That is what makes cultural appropriation wrong. Why should God’s creation of human sexuality not apply? Why have we been made like this? What were we made for?

I am not a curmudgeon. Or, at the very least, if I am one then that has nothing to do with what I just said. I am truly delighted at the new ease with which many in our culture will talk of spiritual matters. The so-called rationalism which forced anyone who wanted to be respected to pretend that there was nothing beyond their own sight is now waning. It is no longer a litmus test of wisdom to boast about how close to your nose something must be in order for it to be believed. Indeed, our eyes have been lying to us for so long by pretending to be the fullness of knowledge - we have been taught to accept their evidence as the totality of any story.

As Twain’s Hank Morgan says in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Our cultural imagination has long been out of focus, and off-perspective. We got so high off our technological and intellectual prowess during the enlightenment, that, from the perspective of our new-fangled aircraft, we forgot that the world on the ground is three dimensional. It appeared to us to be a collection of 2D shapes, and only a retrograde fool could believe in a spiritual dimension.

.

Tell the Truth

But, as the information age became the disinformation age, authenticity has become the highest commodity - and people selling worldviews have to prove that they’re not lying about what they believe. Whether you’re a materialist atheist who wants to borrow language of ‘good and evil’ from the Christians they mock, or if you’re an Evangelical Christian who wants to say that there are God-given moral absolutes whilst justifying evil behaviour (or evil cover up of evil behaviour) with some stolen utilitarian guff about the ends justifying the means… whatever it is… people aren’t buying any more. If you don’t get high off your own product, you’re a hypocrite, and someone else will start selling on your corner.

And so, increasingly, if you want the world to make sense, you have to stop pretending that there isn’t a deeply spiritual element to being human.

But this is not revival.
Now, ‘revival’ isn’t a BiblicallyProtected© term that we all need to fall out over or die on the hill of. But words do have to mean something in order to be useful to us, and revival is traditionally used to denote the sudden and impassioned turning of a great number of people from a life of rebellion against God to a prayerful and penitent dedication to him. Fiddle with that sentence however much you like, but you can’t make it into ‘an awareness of the spiritual realm’.

If you can, then surely revival broke out when a bunch of ancient druids whacked some 25 tonne blocks on their backs and marched them from Wales to Salisbury. Revival broke out on Mars Hill long before Paul reached it - when they assembled all their lovely statues. Revival broke out in Ancient Moab when people tied their own children to the altar and served Chemosh with the blood of infants.

That’s not just being dark for darkness sake:

You want it darker? We kill the flame.

Recently in Manchester I observed a sizeable group of Satanists kneeling down to pray outside a church. Nearby, a busy occult bookshop saw students coming in and out. Over 40 billion (with a ‘b’) TikTok’s have been posted along with the hashtag #WitchTok. Fearne Cotton & Ariana Grande credit their success to ‘manifesting’ whilst Maisie Peters & Jada Pinkett Smith flog tarot card readings as a way to stay ahead of your own future. Adele led the vanguard of post-cocaine pop by instead using well-placed crystals to offset pre-gig jitters. The list can, and does, go on.

And this is why we should not celebrate new interest in spirituality as a revival. We should be glad of the awareness, but for many Christians in this country, we ourselves are only just waking up to the fact that we live in a world where there are demons and powers. Certainly nothing that has anything resembling an equal power to God, but things that are still real and wicked that people should not give themselves over to. Many British Christians lend truth to Gervais’s famous ‘you're all atheists too, I just believe in one less god than you’ - I attended a conference a few years back in which the speaker kept interrupting his own reading of his passages in Kings to assure the listeners that whenever the writer mentioned foreign gods, that ‘there was nothing there, there were no gods’. This was only half true - Deuteronomy is clear:

They sacrificed to demons that were no gods,
to gods they had never known

We have long sought to keep our Christianity appetising to materialists to the extent that we were willing to forget about all spirits but God. The materialists are still there, but behind them is a vast number of people whose imaginations have refocused, their depth perception restored, and they can see that there is a spiritual reality.

The gates that were once barred and bolted are now flung open for all to enter, and Christians are jostling with Occultists, Mormons, Muslims and Witches to try to capitalise on this new interest. This is not revival. What it is, is tremendous gospel opportunity… but we must be ready. The field of evangelism is changing, and we are competing with undisguised false gods who make false promises and nurture false prophets. Almost anyone over 30 reading this will wince at the weirdness… we have to get over it.

The false gods are demons… we shan’t fear them - but as the wisest of wizards has said ‘fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself’ - we must stop being afraid to acknowledge their existence. Then we will be able to properly feed and protect those who are hungry - it is a dangerous thing for a starving man to be set loose in the forest, they will eat anything that looks edible, poisonous or not. The spiritually starving are at our door, but they are at everyone else’s too. But we, and only we, have the Bread of Life.

More and more people, particularly young people, are coming to church. Praise God! But revival doesn’t break out when the mob darken our doorstep. Revival breaks out when the Lord lights theirs up.

Be ready. Be prayerful. Be optimistic. Be penitent.

Be willing to do something small.

The Lord may yet do something huge.

Writers

Salman Rushdie, after his attempted murder in 2022 published Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Below he reflects on what happens to individuals and crowds when their brains detect an interruption of violence… but read the quotation below while holding in your mind a culture that has been taught to register particular words, ideas and silent thoughts as ‘violence’,

‘The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real. Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in a supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That's the frame in which they see themselves. Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don't know the rules--what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought. "Thinking straight" becomes impossible, because in the presence of violence people no longer know what "thinking straight" might be. They--we--become destabilised, even deranged. Our minds no longer know how to work.’

To flip this backwards, the fatwa called on Salman Rushdie is a synecdoche of a broader story in our culture of what happens when words and ideas are deemed so threatening as to actually be violence… if words are so offensive so as to register in our brains as a physical attack then we lose the capacity to engage as we do with idea… we can only react as though we have been physically attacked. We are all increasingly engaging with one another with these instincts in play.

Sir Salman knows he is nearing the end of his life’s work, and the triad of novellas to be released this year will be laden with the importance of a great mind entering a final season of reflection. They will examine and contrast the cultures of the US, the UK and India, as he takes three directions in his approach to ‘consider the idea of an ending’.

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Also to look out for this year - Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis, in which she will offer warnings to a society so obsessed with control over our lives and bodies, that we are entering an age where medical screenings may soon pathologise us all will hypothetical diseases… no doubt increasing the neuroses in what Jonathan Haidt this past year described as The Anxious Generation. Haidt, along with Jean Twenge, has triggered a widespread cultural debate over our use of smartphones and other technology. Wherever your instincts lead you, the debate is overdue and welcome. Pete Etchells brought out Unlocked almost in tandem with Haidt’s opposing book, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see something more substantial appear this year from Candace Odgers. On a related thread, Richard Susskind will be bringing out a primer on AI for those of us whose knowledge on the subject is limited to knowing that we must know more. Having read Wild Swans as a teenager and revisited it in adulthood, I’m personally excited to read Jung Chang’s as yet unnamed work due to be released this year. Chang will both continue the autobiographical journey that the final third of Wild Swans started, but also promises reflections on modern China under Xi Jingping.

Finally, two of the finest living essayists will be publishing new collections in the next year: Mark Greif’s provocatively titled How to Look at Porn and Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive. I’m hopeful that Will Self, freshly unburdened by the passion project of fictionalising his mother’s vast array of journals in Elaine will return to his inimitably acerbic cultural commentary.

Musicians

Don’t laugh. Miley Cyrus is releasing a concept album this year, and we should pay attention to it. I’ve long been convinced that her ‘sexy pop’ contributions have not only gone some way towards hiding the fact that her voice is far superior to almost any one of her peers, but has also disguised a sincerely pained intelligence and a ruminative wit. The Backyard Sessions from over a decade ago gave us a peek behind the curtain - I anticipate (perhaps only hope) that this next album, inspired by Pink Floyd’s The Wall will be a fuller unveiling.

Addison Rae’s debut album will be the vanguard for the second wave of ‘Brat’ which, whilst I can’t say I’m especially excited for it, will give insight as it perfectly reflects to us the distortions of one of our sub-cultures, like whatever the opposite of a hall of mirrors is. (A normal mirror?)

Fred Again is releasing his fourth studio album, only five years after his debut. He brings a thoughtfulness that is notably (and understandably) absent from much of his genre. We’ve Lost Dancing (Marea) captured a moment during the lockdown - he recorded and sampled a conversation with Blessed Madonna reflecting on what was lost, promising throughout a next-level beat drop and instead delivering into the mournful tone a hopeful ‘What comes next will be… Marvellous’… followed by silence.
Fred Again, as with all thoughtful artists, has the ability to have both a tongue in his cheek and a tear in his eye - I can’t find reference to it, but I’m convinced he uses the keyboard rhythm to deliberately mimic The Safety Dance in a song about not being able to dance or be with friends, which is peak bittersweet comedy.

FKA Twigs will release next week the accompanying album to Eusexua: the music video for which felt in some ways like an answer to Thom Yorke’s Anima, albeit less sexually subtle. Like Yorke, FKA Twigs nods to Jung in her work - watch Cellophane’s imagery of metamorphosis and individuation - and her director cites Jung as a direct influence. The album promises to be a reflection on transcendence and sexuality - the single shows the desire to explore the idea of a sexual relationship being both deeply meaningful and yet entirely detached from the concept of love. Out in ten days time…

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Filmmakers

This will be briefer, as film is by far the hardest medium for me to predict success or merit - great writers can phone in entire scripts, and directors can lose control and produce a dud. This is because the nature of filmmaking is entirely (and necessarily) bound up in business structures which just don’t dominate other art forms in the same way. Why this is is another post in itself, but some elements (it requires an ensemble and a budget) are obvious. What I will say is this: 2025 is going to be a GREAT year for you if you like to sit in the dark (or ‘emergency exit light ambiance’) eating popcorn and groping for crumbs of nostalgia. We’ve got an Avatar film for you, a Mission Impossible, a Karate Kid, a Jurassic Park, a Bridget Jones, a Tron, a Superman aaaaannnnd… Snow White live action. For the romantics out there, we’ve got a February 14th release of Captain America: Brave New World.

If, however, you like cinema, the pickings may be slimmer, but there are still great writers and directors trying to keep the art alive. That’s appeared on the screen more snobbish than I feel - remakes and reboots can be brilliant… but they demonstrate a lack of both risk and imagination - which drastically lowers the odds of anything meaningful coming out.

Noah Baumbach can’t decide whether to laugh or cry when he analyses the world around him, which is why his past three writing credits are Marriage Story, White Noise and Barbie. His upcoming Jay Kelly seems likely to be a blend of both, but he’s sitting on the plot, as is Paul Thomas Anderson (who directed the earlier-mentioned Anima) who has yet to confirm the title of his next film, (though Imdb are now calling it The Battle of Baktan Cross). He’ll be collaborating with another Radiohead member, giving the score to Jonny Greenwood, and that, along with the cast, should be enough to get you excited.

A Complete Unknown is released in the UK this Friday. The director and co-writer Jay Mangold is the epitome of a mixed bag in the quality of his work: he’s responsible for Logan but also for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Going further back, he wrote and directed Girl, Interupted but also Knight and Day. I’m excited for this next piece though, because in Walk the Line, Mangold gave us perhaps the best musical biopic that has yet hit cinemas. In Mangold’s telling of the Johnny Cash story, Cash’s brother gives him a word that will do nicely to provide a raison d’être for this post:

To that end, here are three long-form reflections on the past year, with a brief interlude of four bullet points on tech that expose me as a Luddite.

1. Cover ups & Scandals
   
   Two British institutions found themselves in the news in 2024 after old crimes were finally taken notice of. When the Post Office and Church of England are placed on a Venn(ells) diagram, they are found to have much more than just Rev Paula in common: With the historic revelations bookending the year, both revealed an inveterate instinct toward ‘protection’ of reputation even to the detriment of the longevity of the institution, resulting in a fundamental fear of Truth which ate them alive from the inside.

   

   
   In the one case, the Post Office falsely (and at some point amid the accusations, knowingly) accused hundreds of men and women of theft off the back of a faulty IT system. As the faults came to light, the PO hid them, lied about them, and either stole money from or imprisoned the accused. The other case was a man who used the discipleship instincts of conservative evangelical anglicanism to befriend teenage boys into adulthood - he would develop spiritual authority over them which he abused to beat them mercilessly, and secretly, to the extent that nappies had to be worn to cover the bleeding. The story very nearly came out 40 years ago, but instead, those who knew what he’d done allowed him instead to move to Africa, where he continued his abuse, and a boy died.
   

   As a culture, we must reflect on the fact that there were plenty of facts out in public long before this year - it took the sexiness of an ITV movie, and the pragmatism of everyone being upset with the Archbishop of Canterbury (for completely unrelated issues) for these to get the publicity they got.

   I myself am reflecting on the fact that, back in 2017, I, along with many evangelicals, derided Cathy Newman’s risible interview with Jordan Peterson. While that interview remains a real blight on her career, what I didn’t know was that at the time she was doing our work for us (whether in the manner we’d have chosen or not is hardly the point - we’d had our chance) in bringing light to an area in which we had confected darkness.
   There are, in fact, myriad corridors of reflection to be done - appalling errors, and, no doubt, some innocent yet costly mistakes were made by those around the deliberately wicked people in the centre of these scandals - these must be investigated in the interests of justice for the past & hope for the future - but there are even more fundamental questions to ask as well. For both the Post Office and Conservative Evangelicals, they need to ask why people in their central engine rooms seem to be fundamentally opposed to the raison d’etre of the community they represent. Why would the snail mail blindly trust a computer over trustworthy humans!? And why would those who purport to believe in moral absolutes put every chip on the table down in favour of a morally pragmatic course of action?
   
   In a truly stunning denial of the conservative Christian faith, one evangelical leader, David Fletcher, told the Makin review that he had kept the awful crimes under wraps because he feared that God’s work could be damaged by people learning the truth.
   Those who fear both Truth and Light cannot lead anything, let alone the people who worship Jesus - the personification of Truth and Light himself. And those who think they can scupper God’s plans with a call to the police have no true fear of Him.
   

2. Deadpool vs. Wolverine - Marvel & Disney roast away their sins… along with the rest of us.
   

   This year Disney reluctantly partnered with Ryan Reynolds, giving him a vehicle to make fun of how fights with no stakes (e.g. if literally everyone involved can regenerate) and plots which can be reversed at the flick of a tempad just aren’t that compelling. The ploy, which seemed to work fairly well, is that if you call out your errors that you’ve made in dozens of films and laugh at them, then they’re not a problem anymore!

   

   
   Tom Brady deployed this tactic in May - his career had always been accompanied by cheating accusations but ironically it was his falsely accusing his wife of cheating before their divorce that necessitated a PR reset. The Comedy Central Roast (which Netflix appears to have taken over) has long been used to restore the public image of those who have fallen foul of public opinion: Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, Justin Bieber and Alec Baldwin (to name but a few) have all reported to the dais to experience the faux death and resurrection of vicious lampooning - an audience witnesses their suffering, facilitates their brief transition into a victim, then bears adulating witness to their heroic comeback at the end.

   This is, literally, Freudian: Freud’s objection to political satire was that laughter and mockery too often functions as closure in the psyche:

Once I have laughed at a problem, I have processed it. A similar effect can be seen in toothless yet political acts such as throwing orange paint at the snooker to object to fracking - the Just Stop Oil protestors often seem to believe that their stunts have accomplished something for their cause… actually, they’ve merely let off steam (presumably using hydropower) and damaged their cause.
As such, political satire, Freud felt, was often diametrically opposed to political action. This is more a review of poor satire than satire in general - the likes of Tom Lehrer, Chris Morris, Ian Hislop and Charlie Brooker would, I think, demonstrate that they can cultivate a more thoughtful population.

Regardless, there is undeniable truth to the assertion that laughter takes the sting out of a crime, and here are a few things that we have absolved with laughter this year:

Numerous Conservative MPs were caught in a ‘honeytrap’ scandal in which they knowingly compromised themselves and each other (and the Met Police leaked the names of the victims); UK water companies (who enjoy regional monopolies) dumped raw sewage into our rivers for millions of hours and were paid handsomely for the trouble; Russia ‘elected’ Putin again (ha ha ha - no one could really oppose him or they’d die - same as Xi Jinping last March); the US Democratic party were visibly caught playing ‘weekend at Bernies’ with the Presidency and Trump was convicted of federal crimes the same year as his reelection; Hayley Welch (Hawk Tuah) used her 15 minutes of fame to get rich quick including a brief dip into crypto which crashed over investors heads. Jay Z finally encountered his 100th problem and tried to dismiss it in a statement saying (note the present tense) ‘I’m a young man who made it out of the project of Brooklyn’. …He’s 55. And pals with Diddy… The list could go on.

_______________

Before my final long-read on troubling changes within print journalism, here are four bullet points on tech in 2024:

• Four years after Kanye summoned his then wife’s father from the grave and forced him to declare that Kanye was the “most most most most most genius man in the whole world”, we have bought Michael Parkinson’s voice, fed it to an AI, and will force it to continue interviewing celebrities. Every listener will know that, however well simulated, all the warmth in that voice is feigned. We have invented the opposite of a memory. They have, you’ve guessed it, attempted to exculpate themselves by making the format self-referential…

• Y2K hit a couple of decades late with CrowdStrike shutting down systems across the world - I took some perverse pleasure in buying a coffee with coins from a Cheltenham café that ordinarily likes to brag that it doesn’t accept real money. The world blinked briefly then promptly forgot that it had been shown just how many of the world’s proverbial eggs sit in one basket.

• TikTok faces a likely ban in the US (pending Trump’s current attempt to find a last minute solution) given that the Chinese Communist Party technically has the right to compel the company to hand over every single bit of data it had on American citizens. One bright spark tried to protest the law by reminding the government that the number of potentially compromised Americans was 170 million:

• PornHub has taken the hit of being banned in eight different states rather than agreeing to comply with regulations to ensure users are over 18. VPN use notwithstanding, this is a fairly clear acknowledgement that the process and act of preventing minors from watching pornography would create more of a financial dent than having their website made illegal in a fifth of the country. This year, Laila Mickelwait published her book Takedown, which exposed that PornHub knowingly & deliberately profited from child sex abuse, people trafficking, and non-consensually taped videos.

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3. New Statesmen

More significantly than has been acknowledged, two of the UK’s most important editorial magazines will go into the New Year under new leadership. Fraser Nelson and Jason Cowley have moved on from the Spectator and New Statesman respectively. These magazines represent and shape how the political Left & Right react to changes in our culture. Fraser Nelson left after being rightly perturbed by an attempt to sell the magazine to the UAE - the magazine was then forced to ask GB News & UnHerd backer, Paul Marshall to take over the purchase.

I corresponded briefly with Fraser, and met him once after he kindly invited me to the Spectator writers party. For no reason other than to attempt to exorcise of one of my most cringe-inducing memories - this is how well I coped in that new environment:

Please bear in mind that I am not normally within this world of well-known people: when I see a familiar face, it’s ordinarily because I’ve met the person before. So when I found myself in a corner of a conversation and gradually recognised the man I was talking to, I asked, unthinkingly, “Have we met before?”.

He looked surprised, “I don’t think so.”

We exchanged some niceties at the end of which, regrettably, inexplicably, I persisted: “Are you sure we haven’t met? You really do look familiar to me.”

He was confused, but less irritated than he had a right to be. ”Yeah, well that might be because I used to be the Prime Minister of Australia.” That concluded my conversation with Tony Abbot. I prayed for the earth to swallow me whole but was instead almost immediately rescued by Kate Andrews - an altogether more pleasant outcome.

Perhaps I will have an opportunity for a fresh start with the new editor, Michael Gove, about whom I have reservations over his ability to rule. This is largely down not to his position on the lockdown, though that would get the hackles up of some of his contributors, but far more seriously, his treatment of the media during it - which was decidedly unSpectatorish. He is, however, untested, and must thus remain unjudged. Nelson has left Gove with one easy win - his sole flaw was an inability to either move-along, or light a fire under a number of long-term contributors who have begun to phone-in their pieces of late.

I have no personal connection with the New Statesman, who have suffered from the opposite problem - in the past few years they have lost in Helen Lewis and Stephen Bush, one of the few reporters who were ‘successfully and intelligently centrist’ in their engagement with gender ideology (as well as a tier 1 cultural commentator), and the best informed reporter in Westminster.
We cancelled our long-term subscription not long after the uncharacteristically pusillanimous decision by the notably courageous Jason Cowley not to fire his political editor George Eaton. Eaton had doctored an interview with Sir Roger Scruton, who was subsequently fired from an important and unpaid government position, and then posted a picture of himself online drinking champagne from the bottle, accompanied by the caption “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government advisor.” Eaton refused to produce the tapes of the interview, causing Douglas Murray to enter the fray, giving Eaton a final chance to do it before miraculously producing them himself!
I would give my left hand to know how he came by them, but I have always suspected (maybe hoped) that Cowley was the leak.

This suspicion is born from the fact that as an editor, Cowley always seemed duly conscious of the sins of his predecessors - H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw performatively used the NS in their attempts to out-do one another in fawning over Stalin in the middle of the last century. This is part and parcel of an editorial magazine, but Kingsley Martin, the editor at the time, was simultaneously suppressing Orwell’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War (citing a need not to appear to criticise Russian brands of Socialism by connection) and refused to allow a single one of his writers to review Trotsky’s ‘The Revolution Betrayed’. This background is what made the retention (and subsequent promotion to senior editor!) of Eaton so unforgivable - editorials are an essential part of our political discourse, and writers must be allowed to express their views… but not to stack the deck in their attempts to manipulate the political ecosystem.

As the names in the account above may suggest, the New Statesman has seen some of the best essayists in our history come and go - Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens and, to this day, John Gray. It is an institution worth protecting.

Cowley’s parting words to the magazine are redemptive and stark:

Whoever the new editor shall be, they must take this on board. The UK sincerely needs an editorial magazine which represents the Left, without kowtowing to its current or future leaders. Political and cultural writers are useless to us if their main purpose is to making the status quo look a little prettier or cleverer.
Cowley rightly allowed himself to be haunted by the ghost of Kingsley Martin’s dalliances with both Stalin and Stalin’s approach to journalism. Both his successor and Michael Gove should be equally wary of the fact that if they are to attract and keep vital talent, then they must allow writers to write and think against the grain, and give them page space to do so.
What else is the point in having great thinkers?

I have spent too much time this week despairing over the disturbing case of Lily Philips, the OnlyFans content creator who filmed herself having sex with 101 men in a single day as a stunt to boost her income. To further this end, a YouTuber followed her around before and after the day in order to make a documentary which was posted a few days ago.
Much has now been written about both Philips and the myriad men (some of whom flew internationally in order to take part) and in this event of mass degradation, there is an ongoing dispute as to who is abusing / degrading / violating whom.

Before we turn to that question, I want to talk about someone whom I have not seen come under scrutiny in all this - I want to talk about Josh Pieters, the YouTuber with a rare niche, who made the documentary.

I was unable to bring myself to finish his video so this is not a review, but I can tell you a little, such as that the men who queued up to be amongst the 101 for Lily Philips had their faces blurred and their voices distorted. (One of them was interviewed after his ‘turn’ and expressed that he was afraid of being identified because his dad would kick him out the house in an instant.) But here’s the intriguing thing: Josh Pieters doesn’t have his face blurred, nor alas, his peculiarly irritating voice edited. And that is all down to his unique talent - Josh Pieters is a genius at finding socially acceptable ways of sexually degrading women.

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Deserving Victims

The trick, he has found, is all in finding the right woman. Either a woman whom society has deemed fair game, such as Suella Braverman, whom Pieters ‘pranked’ last year into accepting a ‘Dick of the Year’ award, or a woman who already chooses to degrade herself such as Lily Philips. With the latter Pieters can innocently protest that he was at worst a fly on the wall, and at best an ‘empowering’ influence.
We give Pieters permission to abase these women and we do so, damningly, in the name of our own values. If Braverman is deemed a threat to our ‘Be Kind’ values, then she has no right to reap the benefits, and we are welcome to siphon off our baser instincts and ‘Be Nasty’.
If Philips wants to become a millionaire by subjecting herself to sexual torture, then Pieters is being an ‘Ally’. One could no more blame him for his profiteering encouragement than one could blame him for helping an elderly lady to walk directly into incoming traffic cross the road.

Willing Victims

Pieters found a consenting target in Lily Philips and, while using ostensibly supportive language, subtly mocks her throughout, talking pleasantly to his target, whilst providing little ‘winks’ for his audience, just as he did with his old pranks. “I can’t believe you tried to tell me you weren’t a business woman” he smirks, “you’ve got a spreadsheet”, before cutting to Philips reading out a mail order she’d received for a bottle of her own spit. At another point he encourages his subject to lay out the various tools of her trade, bleeping out a majority of the words, over which he comedically edited Grieg’s urgently crescendoing ‘Hall of the Mountain King’, timing the bleeps with the music. Philips has since spoken out about how she was upset by the way the video was edited, and how the YouTuber compounded her stress around the event.

At one point, Pieters even goes out of his way to explain the ‘event’ in some detail to an elderly woman and presumably her daughter or helper out on the street, who (despite having her face blurred out) exhibits the body language of someone trying to get away. One more woman sexually humiliated. No consequences; no shame. Pieters, like Philips, has found a place of permission for his darkest nature.

I don’t want to change

This is not a unique phenomenon. When my desires and morality clash, it would be far more convenient if the surrounding moral world could accommodate me rather than I conform to it. Pieters wants to sexually humiliate women, and he’s discovered a way to persuade us to let him do so unchallenged. But he’s not alone.

Our world is a slowly rotating methadone clinic for all manner of evil - Paedophiles are pariahs, but young-looking 18 year-old pornography actors are never out of work, often marketed as ‘teens’. The Whatever podcast bring in traditionalist Christian men to debate (and often humilate) young OnlyFans girls, the latter of whom turn up because many of the listeners will then subscribe to their content. The host, acting across an impressive range, thus manages to play the role both of Pharisee and Pimp, and needs show no shame for either.
Men with dark urges can also, as one of Lily Philips customers did, subscribe to a website and request women to act as though they’ve been kidnapped and attacked. They are immediately absolved, for they are contributing to the wealth of an industrious modern woman. But again, those who want to do violence are catered for across the board, not only on these websites… and not just by hiring a ‘rage room’ to smash some crockery, or trying to get through the screening process to work for the police (or soon, find work as a doctor). You may punch a Nazi, bully a TERF, or, lower down the scale, milkshake a Farage.
Scroll down the comments of a news item on YouTube and see how, with full acceptance, people will fantasise about the violence they would do to Huw Edwards or someone else accused of the worst crimes.

We downgrade these people from humans to monsters, and thank God above for a valid reason to break out the pitchfork and tiki torch and chase away the ogre. “I needed somewhere to put all my anger and rage, it was really starting to boil over…”. We dare not truly wage war against our desires, for that would be to admit that evil lives within. No, we must sanitise and succumb.

This impulse to find a suitable path for wickedness is within each of us, not just for the outliers who get rich by selling the output of their darkness. It’s so much easier to make the world accept you than it is to change yourself. Easier to make handcuffs pink and fluffy (and thus acceptable) than it is to ask yourself why you want to persuade your girlfriend to let you tie her to the bed.
The darkest thing within you can be catered to - we have ‘ethical porn’ that means your conscience can rest while you fantasise about things you sincerely hope you’d never do in real life, we have Nazis for you to punch (and, for your convenience, we have made ‘Nazi’ an elastic term), we have TERFs for you to humiliate and dox, officious women sorry, ‘ugly Karens’ whose bodies you can mock as long as they were conceivably motivated by Something Bad… and, rounding off our circle, we have women like Julie Bindel.

Bindel this week drew our attention to how awful it is that 101 men could be found to have sex with a woman who was clearly engaged in a stunt of self-harm. Within minutes of her article going up, she was accused online of being prompted by jealousy as surely no one would want to sleep with her. This abuse, like Pieters’ abuse of Hopkins & Braverman, was allowed by various conflicting parties either because Bindel was blaming men for participating in an event organised by a woman, or because she was threatening the agency of Lily Philips, a strong and powerful 23 year old woman, who in her own words was ‘ran through by over 100 guys’, and who says that some of her clients are friends with her dad. How dare Bindel oppose this ‘empowering’ act!? How dare Bindel hold men to a higher standard!? She’s fair game.

We have before us two pictures of what it may look like for us to succumb to our darkest desires: Lily Philips is paid and celebrated for what she’s done; then there is the young man above, clearly shaken by the monstrous act he’s participated in, face blurred and voice distorted.
Both are to be pitied, both to be chastised. Each a willing victim of the other. One goes home in shame to a Father whom he hopes never finds out, the other to a Mother who is on her staff pimping her out, and who is currently helping Philips onto her next adventure, which must surely be abandoned if it’s not to become a well-advertised snuff film:

(Pieters, it can only be assumed, is likely embarking on a ‘prank’ project of graffitiing Rosie Duffield’s home address on every underpass in the country, or some such ‘cheeky but permitted’ nastiness.)

What if there were an alternative to blurred-out, voice-distorted shame or lucrative, boasted ruin? A Father to whom I can run, with my unpixelated shame? I desperately need that. I need permission to say that I have evil in me.
Otherwise what else can I do but dress it up as pretty as possible and parade it as goodness, or else wait for it to be discovered and destroyed, and me along with it? I need permission to say that I have evil within me.
And for that, I need a community that believes I can be restored, that believes no matter what is behind me or within me, I can one day be remade into what we all know we were first made to be: Very good.

Mr Bean played Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire. The Queen starred in a James Bond short. And, much to the chagrin of the nation’s beleaguered and increasingly impatient in-patients watching from the floor on corridor TVs, 320 hospital beds were magically found for a celebration of the NHS.
Some called this out as silly. It was, in my view, not. Whether you approve of the ongoing public veneration of the NHS is immaterial: it is genuinely an international phenomenon, and yet one that has become increasingly untenable.

The more successful a national health service is, the busier it becomes. No one has yet been rendered immortal by its services, which means that every success story is simply a future patient.
This is not the only reason for the exponentially increasing wait times for patients, but it is not to be sniffed at. The waiting list crisis continues, and it turns out, some of those actually receiving treatment would rather be helped to die than keep their place. Triage that. It is not easy.

Fairly or not, the governments of the past decade has been widely viewed as callous towards those who are suffering while waiting for treatment. The crummy old joke stings a little more, the more real it feels:

Pull yourself together. Deal with your issues - go private, suffer quietly, try to ring before 08:01 tomorrow to get into the doctor lottery, cross your fingers and hope you’re in the catchment area for decent palliative care.

In our desperation, we have turned to something that we have not fully understood. (I do not say that lightly - at least two of the twelve co-signatories of the ‘Assisted Dying Bill’, Paula Barker and Christine Jardine, have demonstrated beyond any doubt that they had not properly read the bill before attaching their names to it.)

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The bill passed the second reading today. It is late, and I am weary from sorrow and from prayer. I’m going to write out below a list of consequences I anticipate. By necessity it will be rougher writing than I would have liked. I will attempt to add more links to the prose in the coming days.

1. The slippery slope pt 1: The Bill will Change
   

   The term ‘slippery slope’ has been used derisively by proponents of the bill. A friend put this to me, from Lynch’s The Undertaking: '

   “The slippery-slope argument!" someone always says—as if to name it is to nullify it. As if things don’t go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist. Most of us just want to keep our balance.'

   The fact of the matter is that the slippery slope does exist. The initial laws in the Netherlands & Belgium did not allow for 9 year old children, or 11 year old children to be killed by the state with parental consent. The initial law in Oregon, upon which Kim Leadbeater has stated she has based this bill, did not allow the ‘terminal’ cases to include those who can live normal healthy lives with medical intervention, but rely on medical intervention - such as those with diabetes. The authors of Bill C-14 in Canada did not suppose that euthanasia would be offered as an alternative to wheelchair access.
   
   The arguments for the bill have all centred around suffering… and yet the metric to ‘qualify’ for assisted suicide is based around the (arbitrary - see point 7) rule that someone must be reasonably expected to be dead within 6 months. So the reason does not fit the metric… how are we not to suppose that the terrible suffering of non-terminal patients, or those with a longer-presumed lifespan, will not be pressed upon to be included?
   

   

2. The slippery slope pt 2: We Will Change

   
   This merits a much longer argument, but I must be brief. This will change us. This will change how we think, and how we act. I suspect that, if you went back a decade in time and told Canada that within 8 years, more than a quarter of the population would support euthanising people as a solution to their homelessness, and that nearly half of Canadians would support ‘Mental illness’ as a reason for the state to help a person to kill themselves, they would have been appalled. That is, for us, the ghost of Christmas future.
   Once you start to do this, you have to… you HAVE to tell yourself all the more firmly that it is the kind and right thing to do.
   Besides, it IS going to fix a few problems in the NHS - we’ll save money and lower wait-lists. We will start to be glad of that. We will praise those who opt to die rather than use our resources, like the hero who stays back to fight the baddies and buy everyone else more time… we will resent those who selfishly cling on.

   
   This will mark a further decent into eugenics for this country - two years ago we upheld abortion up to birth for children with Downs Syndrome - a non-fatal condition which can be screened for. [This paragraph has been amended based on a correction against my assertion that this decision marked a change in the law.]
   

3. Catch-22 will lead to the Deaths of the Mentally Ill
   
   Catch 22, in Heller’s novel, ensured that that no one could escape military duties on the grounds that they were insane. Why? Because not wanting to die is a sign of sanity. The proponents of this bill have promised safeguards against coercion, safeguards against non-terminal patients dying, and safeguards against the mentally unwell being helped in their efforts to die. But here’s the thing: by definition, everyone who wishes to kill themselves is suicidal. But the state promises to make sure that all suicidal people are fully compus mentis before helping them to commit suicide.

   Earlier this year, I chatted to our very elderly neighbour - it was 11 years since his wife died. He was in his 80s when she passed away, and he said “I begged the doctors to put me down.” Under this bill, he had enough medical issues that he could likely have found a doctor to sign off for him to die. He doesn’t feel that way anymore - he has a deep melancholy, but in the past 11 years has reconnected with his estranged daughter who visits every week. In his mid-90s he has hopes for the future: that he might also repair his relationship with his son. Thank goodness his doctors were not compelled to help him realise his darkest thoughts during his mental collapse.

   

4. Human Lives will be Ranked
   
   I am now worth more, in the eyes of the state than my friend ‘Jane’ [not her actual name]. You see, Jane was given a few months to live just before Christmas, so we made efforts to help her whole family gather to say goodbye. That was Christmas 2021 - she’s still with us (we’ll come to that).

   But here’s a scenario: I have another breakdown and plan out my suicide. I go to the doctor and I tell them about it. They will intervene, and if deemed necessary, they have the right to section me against my will to protect me. My life is too valuable.

   Jane, under this bill, could go to the doctor for an ingrowing toenail, and while discussing the discomfort, the doctor would be well within their rights to, completely unprompted, offer to help Jane to die, if the discomforts of life were getting too much. Her life is not worth protecting, and she can be invited to consider suicide by a doctor.
   
   In the eyes of our lawmakers, she is quantifiably worth less than I. That value is to be enshrined in law. I cannot bear the shame of that.

5. The Lack of Safeguards will lead to unanticipated Deaths

   I shan’t dwell as long as I could on this one. Kim Leadbeater has, as much as it pains me to say, been caught lying on multiple ocassions on this matter, having repeatedly said that this bill has the most safeguards in the world for bills of it’s kind. That’s simply untrue - in Australia, for instance, a doctor is not allowed to suggest suicide to a patient who hasn’t raised the matter. Even in Canada, a patient must be offered a consultation with a mental-health professional before being allowed to avail themselves of state-assisted suicide. No such provisions are made in this bill. Please watch Victoria Derbyshire expose the lack of safeguards against coercion here. Or see how Danny Kruger exposes against the declared belief of a signatory of the bill, that the forms can be signed on behalf of a patient by a proxy who doesn’t even know the patient! Or watch Jess Asato lay out how many women are already pressured into suicide by abusive partners. Besides all of which, it is very hard to quantify coercion: I don’t see how one could make it illegal for a person to tell their ailing mother how hard it is looking after her every day, and how dreadful it is that she gets less time with her own children as a result. I wonder how many times I would need to be told that before I took the hint.
   
   One of the safeguards that has been boasted of is the 3-week mandatory wait period (incidentally, longer than MPs were given to analyse the bill): 7 days after first expressing a desire to be helped to die, there will be a second consultation and a High Court decision. After this, there is a further 14-day wait period… but this can be sped up to 48 hours if a doctor is willing/able to make an unfalsifiable judgement:

   

6. Patients Can No Longer Trust Doctors to Help them to Live
   
   About 13 years ago I found myself on top of the roof of the block of flats I lived in in St Andrews. I really, really wanted to die.

   In the next few weeks I am going to have a conversation with my doctor: I need to make sure that, if he ever has to diagnose me with a terrible condition, he is not going to introduce as an idea (and then help me to execute that idea), that I should beat my disease to the punch, and take his poison without my wife, family or friends ever needing to know any of it until I was dead. As long as I have an accompanying diagnosis, any suicidal thoughts could be deemed sensible.

   I need a doctor I can trust to help see me through any dark moments that may await me.

7. The 6 Month Rule, even before it slips down the slope, will become malleable.

   
   It is quite simply impossible to give someone an accurate clock for how long they have left. Someone close to me was ‘given’ a few months over 20 years ago, but still brightens our lives. The ‘trick’ for those who are desperate and feel they have no option but suicide, will be to find a doctor willing to give them the ‘6 month’ stamp of approval.
   
   (One might also want to consider that there is a particular, very small element of the population, who may become attracted to the profession of doctor because of the legal access it gives them to killing. Yes, a small number in the population, but a motivated person can add up their own numbers - do you want people like this to be allowed to talk to people about taking their lives, and then help them to do it?

   

8. Social Coercion will be inevitable

In Oregon, upon whose law Kim Leadbeater’s bill is based, 43% of those who died at their own request at the hands of the state said that ‘being a burden’ was a factor in their decision. The very fact of this bill existing, the very fact that in total deviation from normal practice, the state allows itself to kill a certain group of people so long as they consent, creates a pressure for said people to consent, especially if they are burning through state-resources. It is impossible for the option to be there without a certain amount of pressure being exerted upon those who

A truly dreadful thing happened today, and the concept of ‘Doctor’ will, before long, be changed forever in our minds. The legislation ostensibly stops doctors from administering the fatal drug - though they can ‘help’. Desperate people will go to their surgery and be given poison.

The joke was never funny. We just made it worse.

Enter a village and kill a dragon. Arrive in a university department and debunk some foundational theory it’s been shackled to for a century. Enter a church and regularly rhapsodize regarding the dangers of the false teachers abounding outwith. Offer protection against foes, both real and imagined.

These are good methods of gaining trust, in the the most distilled sense of the word ‘good’. They will likely bear fruit. But one should be wary of a leader who gains trust primarily by this method.

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There is a C.S. Lewis essay, Men without Chests, to which I often return - unsurprising, perhaps, given my love of the man, but it is an essay written in response to a grammar textbook - not something I’m particularly passionate about. (Or, I suppose I should say, ‘not something about which I am particularly passionate’.) But there is a particular phrase that I find to be tremendously useful “The task of the modern educator” Lewis insists, “is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” In other words, those who wish to teach something, would do better to show what is right than attack what is wrong.

Accordingly, neither Monty Don nor Alan Titchmarsh currently host a BBC show in which they pour petrol over bracken before tossing a match from a safe distance. Whilst I concede that this would cause a temporary bump in their viewing figures, the audience would soon cease to be those interested in gardening. Indeed, I confess that I would certainly tune in to see any delicate national treasure engage in something uncharacteristically brutish, but it would indeed be a confession: I disdain the part of me that would enjoy it.
Furthermore, I suspect my enjoyment would be short-lived - there are surely only so many times one can see Dame Judi Dench standing coldly over a stuck-pig in a butcher’s apron before the novelty wears off and the squeals find their way into your dreams.

I digress (though not nearly so much as you might be beginning to think). My point is that pyrotechnics, demolition and slaughtery have a titillation that their counterparts could not hope to produce, yet it is a worthier and more lasting enterprise to build rather than destroy. To create, to give life, to solidify - these are good in the greater sense of the word.

Yet it takes longer by far to build trust this way, and it’s a riskier business - micro mistakes in demolition are nothing to write home about, but cracks in the wall, faulty electrics etc. whittle away at the trust of those seeking a home. Those aiming to build something positive are exposed in a way that those who destroy are not.

I must exit my analogy before I anger with my ignorance those who actually know about architecture (or demolition), and bore the rest of you. I am speaking here of how church leaders balance teaching the gospel and building gospel communities over their warnings against false teaching.

It’s important for me, albeit wearying for you, that I must insist you don’t hear what I’m not saying. False teaching must be exposed, dismantled and fortified against. Dragons must be killed. Yet, in the wake of the defeat of a dragon, what gives lasting safety to the villagers? Perhaps St. George, rather than shadow-boxing and twiddling his violent thumbs till the next dragon flies in, should start to build a fortress, a castle, even. Stone doesn’t burn nearly so well as wood and straw.

In the film Inception, Dicaprio’s character Cobb observes that ‘positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time’. In other words, if you want to properly imbibe a lesson, it is more fruitful to find the positive and drive it home than to find the negative and scare people in the right direction.

In saying all of this, I am warning against the kind of ministry that is built on the distrust of those on the outside: distrust of those who don’t handle the Bible properly, those who have abused congregants, those who have allowed demons to run amuck under the blasphemous guise of portraying the Holy Spirit as an agent of chaos.
These are all real and present dangers in various parts of the Christian world and it behooves ministers to equip and to warn. But True Christianity is not defined by a negative, it is defined by the man Jesus Christ. And while the heat of hell may be an effective dissuasion against the activity of false religion, the warmth of Christ is more inviting still.

The pastor must always be ready to fight the wolves that come for the sheep, but when asked ‘what do you do?’ the answer ‘I kill wolves’ is disconcertingly negative and myopic when the ewe who asked it hoped to hear ‘I look after the sheep.’
Pastors simply must be equipped to slay the dragons of false belief that abound in the lives of their congregants. In a world in which the killing of unborn children is a fundamental right, and the killing of the elderly increasingly seen as the lifting of a societal burden; a world in which ideology burns through the walls that protect vulnerable women like acid through steel, and cults pop up to offer protection to anyone exhausted enough by ideological dance to be desperate to find someone willing to do all their thinking for them. We must be able to fight dragons. But our overarching task, of which all that is a subset, is to care for the sheep.

In 2022, Ligonier published the results of their ‘State of Theology’ polling. Below are some of the results:

On topics relating to ‘culture wars’, Evangelicals polled very conservatively.
99% of those who identified as Evangelical Christians agreed with the statement that ‘God created Male & Female’
92% believed abortion is wrong
94% believed that all sex outside of marriage is sinful

Yet when it came to the nature of the God they worship, there was a significant drop in orthodoxy:

Only 28% of self-identified evangelicals rejected the assertion that Jesus was ‘created by God’
Only 26% believe that no one is innocent of sin
Only 26% believe that the Holy Spirit is a person rather than a mere ‘force’

Nearly half of all respondents believed that God changes and adapts to the times, and more than half believed that God accepts the worship given to any god.

What this shows is that many evangelicals (I should acknowledge that this research was conducted in the USA) are better equipped to adhere to important cultural, behavioural and social shibboleths attached to Christianity, than they are to actually understand what it is to be a Christian or which God they worship. It is worth reflecting on the fact that teaching almost certainly outweighs other factors here - there is significantly more societal incentive to drop orthodoxy on the matter of Abortion, by way of example, than on the belief that Jesus was begotten not made. The latter could and should be easily and regularly taught in churches to little opposition beyond those asking for (and receiving) scriptural evidence. In that sense, many churches appear to be operating as political or social cults, rather than communities of worship to the living God.

The eagle-eyed will spot that I am still referring to heresies (or dragons) when I speak to the nature of God. Indeed I am, but Arius is no longer (to the best of my knowledge) rampaging around Egypt denying Christ’s equality with the Father, and even if he were, plenty has been written to quell his denunciations. In short, this dragon was slain long ago, and so what is required here is simple teaching. We don’t need to kit up and go to war in order to protect the sheep from this foe - we simply need to build up a basic foundation of Christian theology.
If we do this, and if we do so consistently, then increasingly the dragons will be repulsed by the walls we’ve built and the weapons we’ve given them, and there will be less need for us to slay them ourselves - congregants will be equipped to smell and repel false teaching on their own, off the back of the Truths they’ve been taught week in and week out.

The irony of the fact that we are better taught in behaviour than theology is manifest - orthodox behaviours are the fruit of the theological tree that we’re failing to water. Lewis concludes his essay: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate, and bid the geldings be fruitful.’

By all means knock the poison out of the hand of the desperately parched man; but for God’s sake give him some water! What useless man would warn of the legalists, or the antinomians, or the hyper-pentecostals, or the hyper-conservatives, or whoever, and leave the gospel message for a week when things are a little quieter on the WarOnTheWest-ern Front.
And, sisters and brothers, beware the man who knocks every drink out of your hand yet gives no water. The gratitude for salvation is his addiction, and your thirst quenches him.

He is no pastor.

A similar thing appears to be happening amongst a number of Christians in their reactions to the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. Many seem to be trying to work out whether they felt offended by it or not, but they can’t tell just by feeling.

Of course, that’s not really the case - either we felt offended in the moment or we didn’t. What we’re actually trying to work out now is whether the offence, felt or not, could be utilised.
Let me be clear from the outset - if you felt offended, I have no argument with you. What I believe to be a mistake is the exclamations of our offence and demands for redress or apology. I myself can tell you without a moment’s hesitation that I found parts of it offensive on an aesthetic level - though I don’t think my artistic sensibilities are yet relevant in anyone’s ‘culture war’.

Zig-zagging on the Meaning

One aspect of the the ceremony appeared to depict a subverted version of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, (*offended*) though it has since been suggested that it more closely resembled van Bijlert’s The Feast of the Gods. This makes sense - a depiction of Olympus at the Olympics seems to fit the bill of being ‘the right time and place’. (*Not offended*). On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that van Bijlert was himself quite clearly referencing da Vinci’s work in his own. (*offended*) But then again the artistic director for the games has stated that he had no intention of referencing either The Last Supper or Christianity. (*Not offended*) And then yet again, a number of the performers have asserted that they did intend the allusion - one of them referring to the piece as a part of ‘The Gay Testament’. So perhaps we may take offence to the muses but not to the artist, and thus only partially to the piece itself?

Once the dust settles though, we learn the truth - The piece was named (with marvelous punning) La Cène sur un Scène sur la Seine (The Last Supper on a Stage on the Seine). This shows that Thomas Jolly, in denying that he had the Last Supper in mind, is, much like the river he floated his work upon, absolutely full of it.

But that still doesn’t quite answer the question of whether I was offended. Depending on what you think the purpose of the opening ceremony is, one might argue that Thomas Jolly did a superb job with La Cène sur un Scène sur la Seine: accurately and rightly representing Parisian culture - both by subverting the Christian religion, and indeed, by taking a massive crap in the Seine.

Celebrating French Culture

Having taken that cheap shot, it is actually worth examining why one might take offence at Jolly’s La Cène. It is because it is a clear replacement, and one which we regard to be a massive trade down - it cannot begin to fill the shoes of what it replaces.
So, in our search for offence, we are really searching for the thing that used to be there.

If you were to strip from my walls all the pictures of my wife and children, then replace them with hastily scribbled drawings of cats, then I would be both confused and angry. In my anger, I might viscously critique your drawing ability, or even wax lyrical on the inferiority of cats. But you would know that I was not really cross at your poor art, or your choice of muse. I just miss what used to be there.

Victor Hugo captures this distinction in a superb chapter (fresh in my mind because my wife recently put it in front of me to read) of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, entitled ‘This Will Kill That’. His chapter title is quoting his own character, Frollo: “This will kill that: the book will kill the edifice”.

Hugo clarifies that two things were meant by the phrase - one he clearly relished, and one he clearly mourned. He mourned that no longer would it be that “whoever was born a poet became an architect” as his character correctly anticipates that the arrival of the printing press would allow humanity to express ideas in more durable and available ways than making vast, beautiful structures. The age of great cathedrals was lost. Yet Hugo was glad to record the diminishing power of the Catholic Church.

Film and broadcasting (paired with the internet) has changed the expression of ideas once more - our big ideas are most commonly placed not on cathedral nor canvas nor chronicle, but camera.
As famous works of art like da Vinci’s are rendered into dramatic set pieces, filmed and seen by billions of people worldwide; we would do well to understand that two things are happening: art as a medium has changed, yet so has the ideology and message behind them. We may object to both or neither, and there may be a connection between them; but we should at least be able to distinguish between the two events.

What I find myself mourning when seeing tableaus such as La Cène, is, firstly, the time when artistic ideas were expressed through oil and canvas that one had to travel to see, rather than a series of photographic frames blasted into every eye on the planet. Some take joy or delight in that, and I understand why.
But I am more deeply mourning a time when The Last Supper, a story filled with the intense meaning of willing sacrifice and proffered forgiveness, when that story better captured the cultural imagination than vapid parables which insist on the connection between secularism and peace.
(The latter was on full display with the surprise resurrection of the song Imagine, which (I thought) Gal Gadot had inadvertently exposed for the trite bromide it is when she ‘got philosophical’ six days into the pandemic.)

This will kill That

Earlier in Jolly’s artistic celebration of all things Paris, he displayed the tableau Synchronicité, beautifully depicted the reconstruction of Notre Dame after the recent devastating fire. This soon transitioned into showing the construction of the Olympic medals for which pieces were taken from the Eiffel Tower. About 100kg of metal were taken from France’s most recognisable structure, because this moment, streamed globally, was an effective means of displaying France to the world. One monument performatively fixed whilst another is diluted to serve a cultural moment.
This will indeed kill That.

Allow Hugo to respond, from an earlier chapter in Hunchback:

This highlights precisely why I think it odd that the discussion has become whether the piece Jolly was depicting was The Last Supper or The Feast of the Gods. To me, Jolly’s insistence that it was the latter not the former is a questionable alibi, comparable to Bob Marley’s insistence that he shot the Sheriff but he did not shoot the deputy - an entirely incriminating line of defence: Whether it was da Vinci or Bijlert, a work of art was desecrated on the Seine, done in the name of a new ideology and in a new manner, enabled by technology. This has killed that, in both senses.

Whether or not you are glad of the killing will depend both on your aesthetic opinions and your ideology. On both counts, I mourn what was killed in Jolly’s La Cène sur un Scène sur la Seine, (or perhaps, Dégradation dérivée sur la rivière de défécation).

But even still, it was sadness, not offence that I felt.

Let them eat Snake

During the Prussian siege on Paris, Victor Hugo recorded in his diary about how the residents survived by eating animals from the zoo, recording that he ate bear, antelope, elephant, and eventually they lost track of what was what. “We are eating the unknown!” he exclaimed to his diary.

Thomas Jolly may well diarise the same sentiment - he knows not what he consumes - the Christianity he is attempting to subvert is itself a subversion.

If you and I are to work hard on the matter, it should not be to truffle-hunt for offence, but to react deliberately to this global announcement of ignorance and antipathy towards Christianity. Merely to find the offence, and then conclude ‘Western Culture is largely hostile towards Christianity’ is labour in order to make a diagnosis every one of us is already aware of. I’d sooner get to work on a cure.

Existing East of Eden; but Walking Westward

The lyrics to the song that was being performed (by Dionysus) over the offending tableau were “There would have been no wars if we’d stayed completely naked”. Now there’s a half-remembered story that French Christians should be happy to have the opportunity to retell!

Let the people know what they are eating!
Let them know of the naked paradise for which we share nostalgic pangs!
And let them be the ones who directed our nostalgia to something far further back and altogether more powerful than an age of artistic Christendom when we possessed cultural power.
Let it be Paradise that we long for, and let that vapourous longing for the past solidify into Hope for a certain future… into which we invite all who would come.

Then, perhaps, This will not kill That.
That will raise This.

A tithe (10%), an offering (10%), and a Man of God fee (10%). Plus a 20% management fee, and rent. Massages for and from the minister.

If it weren’t so sinister, it would be boring. What mystery lurks at the centre of the confusing psyche of a cult leader; what motivates someone to destroy the lives of so many; from where does anyone get the drive to put in the time and energy it takes to control that number of people?!

And the answer to the mystery is… money and sex. Of course. Common enough desires, ratcheted up to an obsessive degree and completely internalised, almost certainly by a psychopathic personality.

Dancing for the Devil has been in Netflix’s top 10 since it dropped this week. What follows below is not a review, but rather a springboard to talk about cults in general.

Vulnerability & Vice

One striking truth from the documentary is that many of those sucked into the Shekinah cult had a history with Christianity, but had slowly drifted away… they felt as though they were coming home, but they weren’t fluent in the language. Certain phrases and concepts were recognisable - ‘die to yourself’, ‘tithe’, and of course ‘judgement and hell’, and this was enough for Shekinah to look like the Proustian religion of their childhood - safe, controlled, familial.
These vulnerable people, many of whom had been deprived of family, security and of community in general, suddenly found that it was offered to them in spades.
They were so desperate with desire for these things that they didn’t stop to test if what they desired was truly what was on offer.
Like Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, who is so consumed with love for Odette, (the white swan), that he doesn’t even blink when Odile, (the black swan) presents itself to him at the palace posturing to be her. Similar in shape and form, perhaps, yet as opposite as black and white.

A baser analogy: if you find a hungry enough man, offer him bread and give him a brick, he will shatter his own teeth. And if you’re wondering who is wicked enough to prey upon such desperate people as that… you just need to find a greedy enough tooth fairy.

Enter Robert Shinn.

The episodes explore the two different iterations of the cult (though the chronology is, at times, unclear). What emerged was a pattern of identifying a vulnerability, satisfying it on a surface level, then manipulating it to fulfil Shinn’s own vices. The young woman and the sister who raised her amidst dysfunctional and absentee parents. The dancer living out of his car. Struggling young artists who couldn’t afford rent. Robert Shinn could provide them with a shadow and a promise of what they wanted, and in return they ran his businesses, and later supplied content for his channels, the money for which would wend it’s way back to him. Privately, some would be encouraged to show gratitude in other ways.

However, what drew my attention was a side character - a young man from a stable home who had not drifted away from church - he was actively attending one - so was better equipped to avoid the counterfeit. When he was invited to Robert Shinn’s church by his old school friend, he looked, didn’t detect anything sinister, but saw enough to say ‘God bless you, but no.’ This shows the flip side to the pattern of those for whom religion was a memory - those who were already in a legitimate Christian community were better equipped to evade the false teacher. (That would have been it for this young man in the story, had he not shown up later with a van and a baseball bat to get his friend out.)
He wasn’t the only one to see through Shekinah, others looked around and went away, but it’s plain to see that forgery is harder when the genuine article is on display. Kevin ‘Konkrete’ Davis, a level and reassuring presence throughout the documentary, was a dancer who went in a little way, but Shinn pushed him too far, too early - telling him to cut off his son and to sign NDAs if he wanted to attend church services. Konkrete stayed a while after those incidents, but he had established an early pattern of rejecting Shinn’s instructions, which made the decision to leave easier.

This is not intended to be a review, so I will leave the documentary narrative there.

Creating a Context

How does a cult normalise the abnormal? How does one find themselves giving financial control to a mentor; or one day find themselves naked with a pastor?

I will give two brief case studies based on an observation Stephen Fry once made, that obsession with sex is like obsession with food - those who are obsessed are split in two camps: some deny themselves to the extreme, others indulge themselves. These two examples show how people can either hide abuse in obsessively avoiding any kind of male/female contact… or by brazenly rejecting basic safeguarding in the name of purity:

1. Ravi Zacharias was not a cult leader, but he knew how to manipulate a culture - he used the famous Billy Graham rule (never be alone with a woman other than your wife) in two ways: One - it protected him from accusation. Two - because he publicly claimed to abide by the rule, his team felt compelled to lie for him when he broke it. (This is easier than we may think - it’s very hard to keep that rule, and many innocent reasons why it might be broken. To accuse him of lying about the rule would imply a greater accusation, and who would do that, simply because he caught a cab with a woman, or went for a massage…)?
   

2. When I was a student, a friend took me to hear an apparently well-known preacher they loved, though I had not heard of him. At the event, he told a story about hiring child prostitutes (I don’t remember the country he was in), bringing them into his hotel room and ordering Disney movies and all the puddings they wanted. “I gave them back their childhood, just for that night”, he said.
   I don’t remember the preacher’s name, or know whether he was engaged in abuse. But he certainly didn’t ‘give them back their childhood’… because he stayed.
   What girl’s childhood was he recreating where they spent a night in a strange man’s hotel room being given sweeties and watching movies with him?

   
   But, the way he told the story, the way he appealed to Jesus’ spending time with both prostitutes and children… the whole room applauded him, and so did I… it was my flatmate who pointed out the above to me, and I felt sick.

Cult leaders, like any abusers, will seek to create a unique base of ‘normal’ behaviour, and from that context, drag people into increasingly abnormal activity.

Is Christianity intrinsically controlling?

Many of the dancers who escaped Shekinah still indicated some level of Christian faith in their language, as did the two sisters who had been with the cult from the earlier days. This sets them apart from the Documentary runners, and the central Wilking family (Miranda Derrick’s sister and parents), who occasionally imply that Christianity is sinister at it’s most basic level - establishing shots will eerily show Bibles being placed around a table; or a plain wooden pulpit shone under red light with sinister background music.

As a pastor who stands regularly behind a wooden pulpit (albeit without demonic stage lighting), and who passes round Bibles in my home, this misfired for me - the music and the cinematography told me I was seeing something terrible, yet I knew that I wasn’t. The fact is though, that many would not have felt that disconnection at least in part because, for myriad people, it is impossible to fully distinguish cult from religion. Certainly, the third part of the documentary exposed the legislative reality of that (Shekinah are largely protected under religious rights), and in terms of wider culture, it seems that the difference between a cult and a religion is largely one of PR: Mormons are regarded as quaintly odd, impeccably dressed and provide harmless celebrities and politicians; Jehovah’s Witnesses are like Christians, only friendlier; and Scientologists have Tom Cruise. All of them are regarded and protected as religions. The darker elements are buried under a persona of eccentricity (a trick used by multiple individual abusers as well as cult leaders).

Then, like Robert Shinn’s, there are many single-church cults that operate, not as a separate religion, but sit under the umbrella of Christianity, and rely on that reputation to cover them. But in those churches, there is control, coercion, and a culture of retribution for those who question or leave… and a fear of the surrounding culture:

Three years ago, along with my wife and a friend, I ran a residential weekend exploring abuses of power. At one point I put up on the white board a list of characteristics and asked the room what they thought it was. One young man put up his hand and asked if I had gotten hold of the summary page of an investigation that was happening in his previous church. I had not. I had written out a list of ‘warning signs of a cult’.

So how can you tell a cult from a Christian church? Is the difference really just of taste and public image? Absolutely not - I will follow up this article with a review/compendium of Jim Sire’s ‘Scripture Twisting’, subtitled ‘20 Ways the Cults Misread the Bible’ - but first we’ll take a look at some of the more notable elements of a cult.

Cult Culture

This is the list, I’d put on the white board at that weekend away:

1. Opposing critical thinking
2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving
3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture
4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders
5. Dishonoring the family unit
6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual purity and personal ownership)
7. Separation from the Church

Subsequently, the man who compiled that list, Mike Bickle was exposed in an array of sexual abuse allegations from numerous women, the most serious detailing how he preyed on a 14 year old girl in the 1980s. Perhaps the list should be made redundant. I suspect, rather, we should add one, which explains his tactic:

8. The leader of the Church is presented as your sole source of protection from the outside world.

It’s amazing what people will put up with in the frying pan, when they are constantly told of the fire that surrounds it, though even that, mercifully, reaches breaking point for some, such as Priscylla in Dancing for the Devil - “I’d rather go to hell than stay here.”
This eighth element provides explanatory power as to why many abusers/cult leaders are vocally against abuse/cultish behaviour. It is a mask - it simultaneously communicates that I am a safe person, and that you are in danger from the outside. It also demonstrates why some cults hide under a more conservative guise, contra to the expectations of us conservatives. We find it easy to believe that non-critical thinking, non-scriptural doctrines and sexual promiscuity are the predominant purview of liberals. So a strict conservativism that sneers at the folly of those outside the camp, presents a useful umbrella.

Again, I am myself a conservative minister who talks about abuse - both these things are necessary and good in ministry, but both can function as a façade for a controlling environment. Thus, neither of them could ever be appealed to as proof that a person or place is safe.

One must actually listen to what is taught, and see what is done.

• How are those who leave treated or spoken of?

• What are the repeated instructions and adages?

• Is bad behaviour tolerated because of gifting/eccentricity?

• Is loyalty to the leadership appealed to in order to encourage certain actions/inactions?

• Do members feel comfortable disagreeing with the leadership?

• Are those who are predisposed not to challenge leadership given particular space to do so?

• And finally, would the ministry survive the sudden departure of its leader?

What song always makes you dance?

I will, as I say, follow this article up. But, fellow Brits, cults are not an exclusively American phenomenon - theirs are just easier to see through from our cultural standpoint. We have had in recent years poorly paid interns compelled to live in properties belonging to the minister (bought with interest free loans from the church) and charge them rent. We have had dissenting ministers told that they would be spared ritual slander and worse provided they left the city/country. We have people who have been cut off by friends and family on a minister’s say-so because they dared to disagree with them, even in private. And we have had sexual abuse across multiple denominations, some in cultures which ‘promote’ victims to abusers as they are given power. We have cults.

So…

What “fair ornament” would be enough to disguise wickedness enough for us to trust it? What context would have to be created to make us victims and/or abusers? I have friends in my conservative Christian circles who carry shame from what happened in settings where mutual massage, and ritual wrestling were commonplace. But those cultures produced ‘fruit’ that we approved of… fruit sweet enough that we simply would not examine the rot in the tree. Conversions, resistance to unbiblical social changes, growing churches, large scale social action…

What ostensibly virtuous obsession would lead you or I to dance with the black swan? Or, indeed, for the Devil?

In other words, it tends to be a completely immaterial detail, played up in lieu of actually exposing some personality or vulnerability. On the flip side, some still have a latent shame about their left-handedness, or are forced by industry or culture to adapt (such as Paul Simon who had to learn play-guitar with his right hand, despite being a leftie).

However, there are three men whom history insistently remembers as left-handed, and with good reason: Ehud, Gaius, and Thomas. These are their stories. You will have to take it on trust for now that they are relevant to one another, and to you.

CHAPTER I - Ehud

In the third chapter of the book of Judges, the Bible finally gets round to discussing dominant hands, with the entrance of ‘Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjaminite, a left-handed man.’ We are told nothing else of him by way of introduction - nothing but his tribe, his dad, and his left-handedness. Then the narrator launches straight into the story.

Ehud was a judge in when Moab subjugated Israel under their king, Eglon. This king is described as an enormous man who has grown fat of the fruits of those under his rule. A Baron Harkonnen for his time. As he emptied the land of resources, he filled it with idols to grotesque gods, such as Molech & Chemosh, to whom worshippers would offer children as burnt sacrifices. Yet, even in their distress, the Israelites persisted in their disobedience to God, and continued to worship the detestable gods of their abusers.

When, at last, they called out to God for help, Ehud was sent to save the day. The left-handed Benjaminite went straight up to the King, claiming to have a ‘word from God’ for him, drew a two-edged sword from his robe, and stabbed Eglon so hard that the fat closed in over the hilt, and his bowels were emptied.

Fittingly, Ehud, then escapes through the sewers, runs past the idols, and then returns with the Israelites to lead them victoriously into battle.

CHAPTER II - Gaius

The Roman historian Livy tells the story of Gaius Mucius, a young Roman soldier during the 508bc Etruscan siege of Rome.
The Senate, wanting a swift and relatively bloodless end to the proceedings, instructed him to sneak out & assassinate Porsena, the Etruscan King of Clusiam.

Alas, though he successfully made his way to the royal tent, he saw the royal secretary dressed in fine clothes, mistook him for King Porsena himself, and killed the wrong man.

Gaius was immediately caught and dragged into the King’s presence for interrogation. He was given an ultimatum: Betray the secrets of the city of Rome and the plans of the Senate, or be burned alive.

Gaius spoke: This is so that you may see how cheap they hold their bodies whose eyes are fixed on great glory!”

At that, he thrust his right hand into the fire and watched it wither away.

The king, believe it or not, was so impressed at his courage that he allowed him to go free. When the Romans eventually won the war, he was given a plot of land and allowed to retire. For the rest of his days he was known as Gaius Mucius Scaevola.

‘Scaevola’, by the way, means ‘left-handed’

You see, back in the day, left-handed wasn’t a moniker to help one pick a doubles partner, nor to make sure that the geography undergrads were each given the right type of funky zig-zag scissors for their diorama.

No, to be described as left-handed meant that you were crippled in your right arm.

This lends some explanatory power as to why Ehud was allowed just to walk in and have an unsupervised meeting with King Eglon, without being perceived as a threat…and perhaps how he may have hidden his sword under his crippled right arm, before carrying out his assassination.

To call him left-handed was a helpful nickname - to allow us to picture him. Just as the Hebrew Bible refers to Eglon’s gods, Molech & Chemosh as ‘the excrement of the Moabites’ - it gives you an idea of how to deal with them - disembowel the idol-generator, then flush through the sewers.

This is still today how we engage idolatry - we take the two-edged word of God, and bring it to bear upon idols. This is not a physically violent act… but it always cuts, discerning the thoughts and intentions of our hearts.

But I digress, and we must now meet our third left-handed hero.

CHAPTER III - Thomas

Thomas only just makes the cut - right up until the very hour he died, he was a right-handed man. Thomas was a friend of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, two men who were executed on October 16th, 1555. Thomas should have been with them.

His friends were executed for the crime of denying that salvation and forgiveness could come only through Rome (that is to say, the Pope). Thomas, who was arrested on the same charge, loved living too much to die with his friends, and agreed to recant his rejection of Rome.

Putting pen to paper, Thomas Cranmer - with his right hand - signed his name under a declaration that it was only through the Catholic Church that one can be saved. Even this was not enough to buy him more than a few months, however, and Queen Mary decided to reschedule his execution to this very day (March 21st), in 1556.

Having recanted his earlier insistence that Salvation was freely offered to all, and was not a guarded Vatican economy, he was allowed to preach one last time before he died. But the sermon he preached, was the Truth, and he begged God’s forgiveness, before declaring that the hand which signed imprisoning lies must burn first.

He was dragged from the pulpit and brought to the pyre, where he cried out “Lord God, receive my Spirit.” Thomas thrust his hand into the flame, then died a left-handed man.

So we honour the left-handed on March 21st. May we intentionally aspire to wield the word of God in such a way that frees the lost & guts idolatry. Would that I would be willing to give my right hand to guide the lost home.

If you sense, throughout this post, that I am cross, you will be correct - there was ample room, just a few years ago for co-belligerence between my worldview and hers… this book obliterates that space, at the cost of Penny’s own stated aims…

There is a habit, amongst petulant youth, of assuming that Bad People™ are guilty of all bad things - but once in adult conversation, much more so if published, this simply comes off as bizarre and off-putting:
The accusation, in the very first chapter, of Vladimir Putin being a “feckless wastrel who… spent [his] life failing upwards and dodging responsibility” is frankly absurd, even given recent events, and is a transparent excuse to manoeuvre him into a list that included Boris Johnson. Don’t think I’m defending Putin in the slightest, but, to borrow from Eddie Izzard’s set on Pol Pot - achieving astronomical levels/amounts of evil requires one to get up very early in the morning. Evil ≠ feckless - would that it were the case - the world would be a much safer place.

This may appear to be a digression, but it helps to demonstrate the tone - Laurie Penny was never out to write a book - this is just a blog with a dustjacket.

As already mentioned, Penny has failed to adapt to her worldview’s shift into the mainstream - maintaining that type of anger which is entirely palatable (even cathartic) when performed by someone in an oppressed minority, but becomes distasteful when the anger is only serving to put the status quo in block capitals.

As she struggles to adapt to the success of the progressive movement, she consistently undermines her own position with bizarre injections of hyperbole:

or, a bit later…

Neither of these things are remotely true, and the lie ironically serves to obscure the very truth Penny aims to highlight: namely that many women are having encounters with men who, desensitized by a world of loveless sex and inspired by a smorgasbord of terrifyingly violent pornography, are committing vile and violent acts. The obvious dishonesty of pretending that ‘not raping a woman’ is such an anomalous act that it’s regarded as a sign of a distinguished gentleman, only gives readers cause to dismiss an issue that should be studied with tears and addressed.

The willingness to sacrifice that cause more sense when you see that Penny regards women’s sexual safety as a pawn in the war against ‘heteronormativity’, a cause so firmly held that heterosexual sex is described as “always and only violent.” Straight women are unrescuable and so, alas, are left trampled in the dust of her revolution - a convenient, noble sacrifice for the higher cause.

All of this is desperately sad, but gives us little to go away with: Penny is no longer someone who incisively holds coals to the feet of society, and that is a shame. And while the book itself is something of a hot mess… let’s focus on where Penny’s arguments do hit the mark, particularly to those in our Christian microculture:

“I do not wish to waste any more of my one precious life than is strictly necessary debunking the crypto-Darwinian pseudoscience that all women really want is
to be held down and humped thoroughly until they stop lying about the pay gap and start making Christian babies.”

This point is again undermined somewhat by the fact that Penny is guilty of almost the exact same crime - indulging in what I suppose she would criticise as crypto-Freudianism: elsewhere describing women who object to the profession of prostitution as being merely jealous that others get paid for what they must perform for free. But her point has merit, even if it’s hypocritically rendered: the point is that Christians are so concerned that their theology must make sense of the observable world, that they don’t much care which one bends - the theology or the world:

A ‘benign’ Christian might observe a contradiction in the world and adjust their theology accordingly. A more malicious Christian (or even just an ill-thinking pragmatist) will simply ‘adjust’ reality. In this instance, that means that if he is theologically persuaded that a woman is created to be a sexual object for her husband to pour all his lust into, then he will claim that that is what women want, deep down, anyway. More upsettingly still, perhaps, a woman who is equally persuaded of the same theology will convince herself that there is something wrong with her for not enjoying her husband’s masturbatory use of her body, and thus she will be ‘willing’ to fake it till she makes it.

Sheila Gregoire has made significant ground in exposing the extraordinary prevalence within evangelical cultures of a theology which suggests essentially that men are created to want sex and women are created to give it. In her book ‘The Great Sex Rescue’ (if you read any book off the back of this review, let that be the one). Here, Penny hits a mark, and if we are to brush off the preposterous elements of this book, we should follow the threads of the better arguments. Where this particular thread leads us is back to her previous book, unspeakable:

Penny’s initial sexual revolution was focused on changing how man treated and perceived women. It has ceased to be a revolution and must now be classed as an ‘evacuation’. The whole gender construct is a ship which must be abandoned, women and children first, men stay behind for now. As Rachel Cook noted in The Guardian, in ‘Sexual Revolution’ Laurie Penny is painfully nervous with the use of the word ‘woman’ - a nebulous concept to her mind; but the traditional meaning of the word ‘man’ remains useful in a derisory context and so is used without apology or clarification. Thus the one aspect of Penny’s Revolution which is in keeping with ordinary revolutions is that there are casualties on both sides: women are erased, and the men remain as scarecrows. Penny wisely identifies as neither.

Elaine Showalter, in her book ‘A Literature of Their Own’, states that “the early suffragettes could not have conceived that the sexual revolution would lead to female license rather than male chastity.” In other words, the sexual revolution stands out as a rarity amongst revolutions: intended by the original revolters to be an abundant arrival of law & order, of rules & decorum. Disappointingly, once again, the opposite is true of Penny’s Sexual Revolution - her stated desire is that all must aspire to and claim the debauched behaviour of the men who made the lives of women so miserable that they would rather die of hunger and be trampled by horses than let it go unchallenged. Penny’s contempt for women shows throughout, and this new phase of the Sexual Revolution is given some explanation - women are shallow, Penny believes: they “find it hard to believe they are not commodities”, they combat existential questions with “beta blockers and botox”. What was advertised as a feminist sexual revolution turns out to have a familiar, distinctly misogynistic chorus - Laurie Penny’s revolution still has us singing the songs of angry men.

I’m quite sure Penny would react against this characterisation of contempt for women - no doubt pointing me to previous writings (or, indeed, quite correctly to the fact that the book saves it’s greatest ire for men), but this is precisely where my disappointment comes from - I once considered Penny an asset & ally on this front! The book cover advertises feminism as the solution to save the world(!) yet the book itself consistently feels the need to add a grouping to ‘women’ whenever attributing some kind of victory: “women and queer people are rewriting the terms of a social contract” or “…trans women and young women are driving this change.”
In one of the few sections where it appears as though there is genuine compassion towards women, Penny bemoans the fact that women still do most of the childbearing in society: This is not someone who wants to free women - this is someone who wants to redefine ‘woman’ in order to cut away the chaff and integrate those they find more interesting and less passive. The misogynistic elements of the progressive movement have prevailed.

Laurie Penny stands on the shoulders of a number of peers who would seek to challenge deeply set habits and worldviews which continue to oppress women - women like Caroline Criado Perez & Helen Lewis who are also currently writing books to challenge the numerous ways in which women are dealt bum-hands in our culture, particularly in the ‘sexual arena’.
The trouble is that as Laurie Penny stands on their shoulders, the sheer tonnage of dishonest rhetoric brings them to their knees, and Penny’s grasp fails to extend the cause: it is simply not possible for a book that derides women as unable to see themselves as anything more than “inanimate meat”, a book which refuses to believe that women ever choose to have children, or could even in theory have enjoyable and mutual heterosexual sex… it is not possible for such a book to further the cause for women’s liberation, or bring about any kind of sexual revolution.

The issue is, we are in desperate need of one: the drastic rise of misogyny on both the Left and the Right is alarming - The Incel desires either to subjugate or destroy women. The Radical Progressive desires to reduce womanhood to a cartoonish costume which can be worn or discarded as one pleases.
Our culture needs a compelling and comprehendible story that deals with violence against women. We could, along with Penny, declare violence inevitable, thus leaving the only solution to be the flattening of the term ‘woman’. Or we could see if there is a worldview available which gives inherent dignity and substance to anyone bearing the moniker ‘woman’, and which removes women from the marketplace: You may not buy a woman in anyway - you may not purchase use of her body, and you may not purchase her womanhood to wear for yourself. Such a story would have to be grounded deep in reality, would have to love victims but not seek victimhood as a goal, would have to have a reason to give credence to creation over adaptation, and would have to be able to look at both man and woman and say “It is very good.”

In that environment, it was a difficult moment to have just started to take my faith seriously - I’d only just started the school Christian Union and Dawkins had outed me as an immoral idiot. To my eternal shame, it was the ‘idiot’ element of that moniker which bothered me the most, and I acted upon my irritation. My retaliation was simple. I invited Dawkins to the school to speak.
The vast majority of my classmates were on his side, but they were curious boys and asked questions. Every searching question was treated with hostility, and every questioner patronised and often mocked. He closed out the event with a Marcus Brigstocke video.

Two weeks later, I had Professor John Lennox come in, and he, too, took questions from my friends. One of them quoted a Dawkins talking point, namely the sheer number of religions which claimed to be right, but couldn’t possibly all be. John said that he could not agree more, and that he understood why it would breed suspicion – he produced a twenty pound note from his pocket and said “Counterfeit money will drastically affect how much people choose to trust this note. But it cannot be used to disprove the existence of real pounds sterling, quite the opposite – the existence of counterfeit money is a solid indicator that somewhere out there is the real thing that they’re trying to mimic.”

These two talks were my first foray into apologetics – I soon learned that atheists could be gentle & humble, and Christians arrogant & unkind… but I’m glad that, for my first time, it was the other way around.
For my small pocket of existence – the 72 other boys in my year and myself – religion was no longer idiocy. I did not, alas, become popular – I’m afraid to say that removing the “religion is stupid” barrier simply revealed a host of other character flaws, but the switch was notable – we achieved consensus: Dawkins’ dismissal of religion was arrogant and foolish. In the intervening 17 years there have been a number of occasions when old school pals have hit a crisis point and reached out via Facebook or Twitter, looking to see if there was anything in my faith that might help. I will always be grateful to Dawkins for that.

Baddiel has written an atheist book with the empathy and gentleness of Lennox, and, in his title, has pitted himself against Dawkins’ brand of atheism. What he has produced is profoundly persuasive.

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There is much to praise and much to push back against in ‘The God Desire’ – that is a necessary bi-product of a book being written by a deeply thoughtful, intelligent, motivated thinker whose areas of expertise lie, occasionally parallel, but certainly separate, to the subject matter at hand. At his worst, he reads like a precocious sixth-former who brings across ideas like Columbus arriving in North America – with the air of someone who believes they have ‘discovered’ what lies before him, despite it being quite plainly populated. There’s something inherently charming about this (not so much with Columbus) and I hasten to emphasise that these are Baddiel’s weakest points. His strongest elements show someone of deep self-awareness, both of his own psychology, and also as a human – he exposes flaws and foibles we share as a species while confessing his own personal limitations… and from that admirable platform of vulnerability, he builds his case.

Baddiel chooses, as his initial point of contact with believers, to exhibit empathy with our position (something Christian communicators could learn to mimic). He loves God, he says. He fears death, and knows that there is no bigger fish coming along to devour it – death has the final word and there is no God to consume it and reveal a happier ending… but wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were?

Bizarrely, though, this is turned into an apologetic in itself – I desperately want to believe in God, Baddiel says (through one of his own fictional characters), “that is why I know he doesn’t exist.” The argument is precariously predicated on pessimism.
The make-up of the universe comes down to various laws – the law of polarity, of entropy, Newton’s laws of motion… and (if Baddiel is correct) Sod’s Law: If I want to believe it, and yet I don’t, then it must be untrue. If I am motivated to believe something, but I still can’t quite believe it, then how could it be true? (This type of thinking, incidentally, is why young people who clearly fancy each other won’t ask each other out. I want to believe she likes me, I’m not sure she does, therefore she definitely doesn’t – everything that points to the contrary is dismissed as wishful thinking.)

I have written elsewhere about the folly of believing something could be ‘too good to be true’, and shan’t go into it much further here. But it seems rash to me to set a ceiling on joy and say that anything which has the potential to surpass that ceiling is, by definition, fictitious.

The more… it is clear to me how fervent & desperate the God Desire is… the more I know, in my reluctant atheist heart, that there is nothing there.

p.94

It should be our joint mission in life to keep David Baddiel hydrated. If he were ever to become desperately thirsty… well, it would be a hell of a time to stop believing in water. If he sees a mirage, he may never drink again.

That could, perhaps, be perceived as unkind, if not unfounded. I’m aware (his Taskmaster appearances notwithstanding) that Baddiel is a truly intelligent operator - but he has allowed his pessimism to trump logic in this key area, and that bears illustrating.

In other sections, Baddiel deals delightfully with brash arguments from both sides – he rightly dismisses the argument “there are no atheists in foxholes” as having any right to be regarded as particularly profound. One might as well, and just as cruelly, say that there are no orphans during a midnight thunderstorm. Humans call for God when death looks us in the eye, just as children call for their mothers when the rafters creak and the lightening flashes. It is neither profound nor kind to gloat that, by their own estimation, there are no ears upon which their cry may fall.
There is, though, an iteration of the argument that has benefit – and that is that perhaps it is not conviction, but bravado which stands in the way of some people’s belief in God. Baddiel holds such atheism in equally short shrift.

“You, if you’re an atheist, might say no, we don’t need illusory comfort and hope in the face of death, but to my mind, all comfort and hope in the face of death is illusory. Death is shit.”

p.13

There IS a need for comfort in the face of death, but (here we come back to Baddiel’s physical law of Sod), there is none – there can be no hope after death or it would cease have been death. He is psychologically haunted, by his own admission, of his loving mother’s attempt to define death for him – ‘like a long sleep from which you never wake up’, and the finitude, or rather, the infinitude of death is inbuilt for Baddiel – to talk about something after death is contradictory. By definition, there is nothing after. His entire worldview depends on a deep, infallible pessimism.

I am, myself, something of a pessimist. But I am a pessimist who believes in God, and, therefore in a happy ending to the story. This makes for an odd contradiction – when I succumb to my depression, with which I have struggled for many years, it forces me to believe that I am trapped in the first act of a story – stuck in a cycle of antagonistic events which are, sure, destined to crescendo into resolution but I can barely white-knuckle it through to tomorrow, and I don’t fancy waiting another 2,000 years.
I say this only to insist that belief in God is not a cure either for the personality of pessimism or the distinct disease of depression. But it does help. (Mr. ‘too good to be true Baddiel’ would use that as evidence that it’s false, would you believe it.) Where Baddiel cannot see past the full stop after death, I can only see death (and all his unpleasant companions), not as final, but as finite.
I fully accept that this is contrary to how we tend to think of death… I’m actually inclined to agree with Baddiel’s mother on the definition, merely on the basis that I want to affirm the contradiction of life after death:

Death a) exists and b) lasts forever, so if there were life after death then death will cease to have been.
And so it is.

Let me give dear, dear Tim Keller the final word on this.

In Pascal’s Pensées, he instructs his reader to present belief in God in such a way as to make hearers wish it were true, and then show them that it is. Baddiel, like many others, is in a deep rut halfway through the process.

I hope he conquers his pessimism enough that he could give it a proper look, and dare to believe something good might be true… and perhaps even that death might be untrue.

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ONCE upon a time there was a cruel emperor.
He was a confident man, assured in his cruelty which he meted out on all those with less power than himself. But the world was changing beneath him. Where once he had ruled with an iron will and a steel fist, he now found that when he was disliked, his power diminished. His advisors warned him that now ‘compassion’, rather than being a weakness, had become the most prized virtue in the land, and that he would have to learn to show he had some.

Desperate to maintain power, he set about the country with a gigantic pair of scissors and started cutting ribbons. He opened a hospital in a poor city, and cut a ribbon in front of it. He opened a new school in an overcrowded neighbourhood, and cut a ribbon in front of it. He opened a food bank in a town afflicted by a recent flood… and cut a ribbon in front of it.

But the people only laughed at him – the cruel Emperor cosplaying kindness looked like a dog on its hind paws. It would perhaps have struggled with the scissors, but could hardly have looked any less human.

The Emperor tied a ribbon round a homeless man, cut it, and gave him a sandwich. The laughter stopped.
People began to throw things – groceries, shoes, rocks – and the emperor ran for cover.

He hid away for months in his palace, as he desperately wondered how to regain his power.
Then, throughout the kingdom, a rumour grew:

There was a way of proving your compassion once and for all. A pair of travelling merchants were roaming the land, selling clothes that reportedly could only be seen or felt by those with true compassion and kindness. (Of course, readers, there is no such thread in existence that could produce such clothes, but these were very cunning tailors.) Across the land, the people were stripping off and wandering around!

The Emperor’s advisors caught wind of this and thought perhaps they had found a way to trick the people into thinking that he was deeply compassionate after all. The tailors were summoned and brought them before the Emperor. They began to speak:
“O great emperor, in all our travels across the far reaches of the earth, we have never found anything as precious as the Invisible Mongolian Silk Spider.” They indicated a large glass cage with nothing in it except a single leaf. “The thread of this spider, (like the spider itself) is only visible to those who are truly compassionate, and our travels throughout your kingdom have been most encouraging. The history of your kingdom is a cruel one, yet the people have, in vast numbers, put on these clothes. No one would wear these garments unless they firmly felt and saw them. Truly yours is a kingdom of compassion. Will you lead your people by showing them that it is a kind man who sits upon the throne?”

The Emperor looked at the empty glass cage.
The Emperor looked at the long trains of empty clothes rails rattling with empty hangers.
Like many (but by no means all) cruel men, he was exceptionally clever – also, being a man of considerable wealth, he was both well-travelled and well-educated. He was not so blindly impressed by their travel that he would believe in a mythical creature that was quite certainly not there in front of him.

He could see quite plainly that these men were frauds, and suspected that a lot of his naked subjects could by now see the same thing. But they were all of them caught in a trap – how could they back out now, they’d just look cruel and uncompassionate?

The emperor thought and thought, and realised that he had two options. He could strip naked, and feel humiliated, but earn the belief amongst his people that he was a kind and compassionate man, thus regaining his power over them. Or he could declare that there were no clothes, and that he quite simply would not prance about butt-naked… and his kingdom would, in unison, say that they were not at all surprised – he was known to be a cruel man, and now it was proven.

There’s another, similar story of “The Emperor who had no clothes”, in which it was the emperor who first donned the clothes which only the most intelligent people could see, and paraded around his kingdom, while everyone bit their tongues for fear of being exposed as an idiot. Then eventually a little boy, unencumbered by the desire to seem intelligent, pointed and laughed and shouted “The Emperor is Naked!” Then all the kingdom felt the release and they all laughed and saw that the Emperor had no clothes.

In this story, it is the other way around. The Emperor had a naked nation, and couldn’t rule over them. So, he realised he had no choice: he started to take off his clothes – it was better to rule naked than be despised and thrown from his throne.

But as he pulled at his socks, he started to consider what the consequences would be - winter was coming upon this far-off land, and winters were vicious.  Rivers would freeze over mid-ripple. Lawns were always perfect come the spring because every blade of grass would solidify so firmly in the colder months that the slightest breeze would snap it by the stem.

As the Emperor stood, contemplating his decision, he thought of his people and his heart broke for them.
In this version of the story, the courtiers were all naked, the crowd were naked, and the little boy was naked. And winter was looming near.

The Emperor stood there, socks & slippers in hand as wave upon wave of compassion hit him – he thought of whole families shivering in their cottages, thought of the kingdom running to a standstill as hypothermia took hold of the nation, thought of the men and women who’d not been fooled begging their children to put on real clothes whilst they froze to death before their eyes.

The Emperor wept, for he knew his past cruelty had all but destroyed any hope of him persuading his people that they had been fooled. He summoned his advisors, padded barefoot to the palace boardroom and scrubbed from the chalkboard his earlier plan of convincing people that he was good & kind. They had a new and urgent agenda: Reclothing the Nation.

This, too, must be our agenda. I have no interest in pointing and laughing at the little naked boy. I know he’s naked, you know he’s naked, and in many cases it seems as though even the parents who stripped him know that he’s naked. I want him to put on some clothes. I want him to want to put on clothes.
I very much desire to appear compassionate… and goodness knows that there will be reams of evidence against me, proving that quality has been sorely lacking from my life. But when caught between appearing compassionate and acting compassionately, there is only one right choice to make.

We know that the gender ideology that has gripped our culture is not loosening its hold. Yet I am not in the slightest bit concerned about whether or not we will win the argument – I know for a fact that we will: A lie can only sustain so much reality piled on top of it before it cracks and breaks. My worry is not whether we win the argument, but how many broken families, broken relationships & broken bodies will line the streets when winter comes and the scales fall from everyone’s eyes.

I think it’s fair to say that Christians in this country have not, historically, had a reputation for being compassionate when dealing with un-Christian social movements that capture & corrupt people’s hearts - we have earned a reputation for being judgmental, holding ourselves above people and rejoicing in our righteousness & safety without shedding a tear for the lost. That is, of course, absurdly over-simplified, but it is true enough that our loving cries will be denounced, quite understandably, as mere bullying. That description will certainly resonate with many on the outside looking in. Our compassion will not be seen as such, but that is not license for us to shrug and enjoy being the bad guys, freeing ourselves from the burdens of nuance or persuasion.

Winter looms, and the people are naked.
We need blankets, courage, wisdom and Truth. This is urgent.
We need to believe the things we claim to - that God has spoken, that the world is his, that his way is wise and that his news is Good.