Football and Church

The Sydney Swans saga bears many similarities to church organisations in which the public reality is far from the private reality.

When the gap between public and private becomes too wide, trouble is coming. They didn’t (as the train platform announcer constantly warns us) mind the gap!

The Sydney Swans’ fatal flaw was the same fatal flaw that local parachurch organisations or particular church leaderships can exhibit. They don’t differ in direction, merely degree.

While the immediate story for the Swans is that of immoral and possibly illegal behaviour, their ongoing saga will be the uncovering of the now-obvious gap between the projected image of the club and the personal behaviour of its players.

And then what to do about it. Whatever they do, it will cost. Trust and reputation are hard and slow to grow, and quick and easy to lose. It will cost money, bums on seats, players, finals footy. These things tend to unravel.

Sadly it’s seems it was gap that many within the club knew existed. Yet they sailed on blithely. Perhaps they forgot that while the chances of being caught were small, the consequences of being caught were huge.

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You know what a “black swan” event is, don’t you? It’s something that comes out of nowhere, couldn’t have been predicted, and for which there is no precedent.

Think COVID, or since we all know of the Black Plague, think of the government responses to COVID. That was a “black swan” event.

Well, the very public alleged sexual abuse scandal at the Sydney Swans AFL club is being pitched as a “black swan” event.

Feathers are flying, and are indeed ruffled, as coaches and administrators with five o’clock stubble and slept-in polo tees front the media, declaring they are “Shocked, shocked I tell you!” by the news.

News that players, still in the throes of a finals season are allegedly snorting drugs off the butts of naked lap dancers. At 4am. In a hotel. Posing as tradies.

Actually all of that bit is okay, apparently, because the real concern, and it is one, is that the lap dancers were sexually assaulted.

But the regular football season is over now, so barring that last paragraph, it’s naked lap dancers in AFL clubs (behind closed doors and with heaps of consent obviously) from 50m out for the foreseeable future.

Am I being too harsh? Oh please! Does anyone think it is otherwise? You may want to tell yourself it’s not true. But ask yourself: Do you think it happens less in 2026 compared to 1976, or do you just think clubs have become more adept at covering it up and projecting a different image?

Which really means that what happened in the jock-ified world of AFL muscle and tight shorts the other night was not so much a “black swan” event as a “red swan” event. This time brand billboard slipped and a bunch of red-faced players were caught standing behind it red-handed with their red pants down.

The Sydney Swans just got caught. This time. Other times they have not been caught. Just like every other club. This behaviour is surely long-established in the AFL world.

Isaac Heeney was not chatting with his team mates:

“Look, hear me out. Writing these children’s books about footy isn’t doing it for me this week. How about we get plastered, consume a whole bunch of drugs and invite naked lap dancers over to our hotel at 4am? The kids’ books will have to wait until next week.”

That big a leap would win him the Mark of the Year. No, it’s just something that on other occasions he - and his teammates - have likely gotten away with. The gap between his public persona and his private actions grew to the point that it became an uncrossable chasm.

And like all such gaps, they’re incremental and they fool us into thinking we can leap back anytime we like. Anytime. Just not now.

Here’s a definition - a fairly long one - of a “red swan” event in the world of competitive elite sport across the Western world. Because let’s face it, this is not an Australian, or even an AFL issue, it’s an elite sports issue. And it’s the result of what we can call “the commodification of virtue” that will get bums on seats, merchandise out the door, and diverse and loyal membership through the roof.

“A red swan event is when the gap between how the players at an elite club actually behave when off-camera, and the attitudes they actually hold, and actions they exhibit - especially towards women - contra the public image that a club wishes to convey both about its club and the pin-up boys (and sometimes, though rarely, the women) who take the field/pitch/court.”

Writing in The Age newspaper, football journalist Malcolm Knox made this prescient observation:

When “culture” is turned into a commodity that is successfully financialised, it soon ceases to be a culture in any real sense; it’s a product, and its weak point is that its saleable goods, humans, are not widgets or soup tins. The manufacturing processes of the “football industry” haven’t got these products; it’s family, school, friends, inherited and learnt attitudes, sudden celebrity, the hot mess of life that makes young men.

Which means its weak point are the very people who can make or break you. Which is why the clubs strive so hard to paper over the cracks. Hey look at our commitment to the queer community? Who wants to hear what we think about indigenous matters?

Which is another way of saying “We no longer fiddle around with the baser issues and instincts of the common person. We sit aloft the totem of virtue and offer our vision of human flourishing to everyone else.”

It’s a crock right? And we all know it, yet we all play it. We all know it because once the leash is loosed in these football clubs (Mad Monday, after the regular season is finished, anyone?) the players revert to type.

Why? Because like all untamed animals, they need a leash to behave. Self-restraint is not in the game plan.

My guess is there are more than a few Mad Mondays, or Wacky Wednesdays, or even Freaky Fridays at AFL clubs that we get wind of. It’s just that when these are discovered they are kept under lock and key by the commodification machine that runs the club.

And that it is cross-club, not just the Swans, should be a given. The Swans big sin was pretending to be better. And then proving not to be.

Even yesterday with cellar dwellers Richmond, out of the finals and able to have their Mad Monday, there was a glee and a mockery of the Swans ills, with guffawing re-enactments for all to see.

No sobriety, no self-restraining understanding of how that just might look to “gen-pop”. In other words, when they were finally free to behave how they truly wanted to behave, they did.

And speaking of “gen-pop” once again we had to read the nonsense - from the Swans captain no less - that this problem of objectifying women this way is an indictment on not just the Swans players, but all men.

Yeah nice try. Because if it’s all of us, it’s actually none of us. Which goes a long way to getting you off the hook.

What nonsense. I know my long term friendship cohort. I watch my son and his friends in their lives. I look around the gentle, quiet, thoughtful, faithful men I know. And then I cast my mind back to the sports jocks at school. There was a big gap there. There still is.

Knox goes on to say:

It feels like whenever a football league puts on a show of virtue – a women’s round, an Indigenous round, a multicultural round – its primary aim has been to loosen your grip on your wallet.

Because it is a show of virtue. It is designed to loosen your grip on your wallet. The aim of a modern footy club is to signal just enough virtue across all of the carefully tested modern virtues of woke culture, while simultaneously managing a squad of spinning plates who might just come crashing the floor due to their indulged egos. And to do all that with the hope that this might result in finals football come September. And with that a cash machine.

As Knox says:

While the specific contours vary, these scandals are repetitive. Many famous sportsmen lead double lives. Administrators live on tenterhooks, fearing the truth will come out and the “culture” thing will be exposed as the sham it is.

I pity those administrators. I’m pretty sure once post-season October arrives and the various players troop off for an educational visit to Paris to explore the latest post-modern installation at the Louvre, the management team wipes its collective fevered brow and relaxes for a few seconds.

Then with the clubrooms empty, the smell of Voltaire still lingering, they holler a shout of relief, break out the hard shots, text the local dealer’s number given to them by their champion wingman, and get on the blower to the local Gentleman’s Club to find some lap dancers.

I mean, why not? If they can never close the gap in one direction, they might as well close it in the other.

This one caught me by surprise: In the past two years as my son has reached the age of 18, I have struggled with figuring out how to “dad” him well in this time of his life.

He’s not off the rails, he’s kind, he’s quietish, and he’s at that point in his life where, as with all young adults, he is looking to individuate.

But I’ve felt a bit becalmed in some of the more complex times I have felt backward in coming forward with direction or advice for him.

And here’s why: I have nothing in my memory bank of how my own father “dadded” me when I was in that just-finished-school period of my life.

Why? Because my dad left when I was just finished school. He was gone during an important pivot point.

I don’t have that reflexive “What would my dad have done?” Or more to the point, “What did my dad do?”

Well apart from leave the family (don’t worry we have sorted this out and forgiveness and restoration took place before he died), I don’t have much to go on!

I want to lean into the positive patterns my father laid down (or perhaps even negatively as is often the case for the Gen X types such as myself) lean away from the negative patterns.

But there’s nothing there. So I feel a bit like it’s flying solo.

Of course I have a daughter and she is now 25 and a complete delight. But a daughter was a different experience. For my son, I’m making stuff up on the fly because nothing was passed on to me by my dad.

This is not a pity party. It’s a way of saying that many men my age (I’m 60 next year and an older Gen X), have had the same discombobulating experience. How do we “dad” during the pivot points of our sons’ lives?

It would appear with the number of young men - 18-25 - seeking solace in Stoicism or Jordan Peterson, that there is a deficit in their lives too. Happy for them to go to those places for advice.

Not so happy when they turn to the Nick Fuentes of this world, or even the Tucker Carlsons - who himself is proving less of a dad and more a crazy uncle sitting in the corner chair foaming obscenities at various passersby.

Many more young men are reaching the pivot points in life without a father (or else they have two mothers) and it is taking a chunk out of them. They’re either becalmed or misbehaving.

Of course this is an opportunity for the church as the household of God to think through how it might get alongside such young men. Can the older men in the church take the younger under the wing at times such as this?

We read the household codes in the New Testament about how redeemed relationships work. Titus 2:2 states:

“Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.”

But younger men won’t learn those things by osmosis. Left with a vacuum that many of them are experiencing, other things will fill that void. The online world is not particularly sober-minded, dignified or self-controlled.

Older men - if you want to see the generation of lost boys take the baton from you, then you might need to lean in a little more.

What about inviting young men who have never had a meal around a table, to have a meal around your table, with your family? Model that life to them. Show them the mini-sacrifices, mini-agitations, mini-sanctification moments that no “Tidy Your Room!” moment can actually do.

What about meeting with the older men at church and establishing relationships with the younger men that go beyond the men’s breakfast twice a year at church? Put together an inventory of who you can pray for, who you can meet up with, who you can help with the life skills that you have.

TO be honest, you can do that even for those young men who do have good, available dads. We don’t have all of the gifts. Share them around and ensure a well-rounded cohort of next generation Christian young men.

I thank God for the older men who did input into my life during my self-declared “lost years” (18-25). I think of the older Dutch man (a friend of a school friend), who though not a Christian, helped me learn to drive, and encouraged me.

I think of one or two other men who always checked in with a phone call, or chatted with me after church to see how I was tracking.

I don’t want the father-absence, and the long tail of consequences it brings, to be the new normal in the lives of young men. Sometimes we don’t truly know what we are missing until it is recovered.

I believe that as the church leans into this pressing cultural issue, and at a time when the default position of the secular world is that young men start off in deficit mode (toxic masculinity until proven otherwise), we will begin to make a difference.

If you’re an Australian perhaps you have seen the article in The Australian newspaper yesterday co-authored by Sydney Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raffel (a long term gospel friend of mine), and Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton, Chief Minister of the Greater Synagogue of Sydney, as they advocate for multiculturalism in Australia.

They were jointly writing in response to the rise - and rise (though it may ultimately prove to be a soufflé) - of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. Their critique was in her recent desire for Australia to have a “monoculture” - a comment that has been jumped upon by all and sundry. Generally in horror, I might add.

But I am not sure that Pauline’s version of mono-culturalism is all that removed from the Archbishop’s and the co-authoring Rabbi’s version of multiculturalism.

No, no, hear me out. I think that she misunderstands the word, and misused it, and that the article misunderstands Pauline.

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One of the most telling admissions in Christian communities that have crashed and burned due to influential but unhealthy leadership is just how intoxicating it is to have high level access to that leader.

The proximity is exhilarating. Intoxicating. Lots of words with “x’s” in them! And that proximity is like crack cocaine. Once you get a taste for it, it’s very hard to wean yourself off it.

Having been involved in the spectacular flare out of a major leader in a UK and US network (it made the front page of Christianity Today), I have seen first hand what this intoxication does to people.

And to be frank, I was almost there myself. And to be more frank, it’s extremely unhealthy and leads to all sorts of spiritual problems, while itself being the result of all sorts of spiritual problems.

For all of our talk about not finding our identity in the opinions of others, especially of others who we admire, the Christian church has been just as susceptible to this as the world has been.

This struck me whilst reading Evan Barker’s best-selling book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which details Evan’s life as a fund-raising guru in the US’s Democrat party.

Her documentation of what the private power behind the public politics looks like is a riveting read. And in the end she stepped away from it. Her decision to step away went viral on TikTok after the 2024 Democratic National Convention in the lead up to the last presidential election, when Kamala Harris was anointed the nominee.

It’s a thoroughly political book by a working class girl made good (it has some Hillbilly Elegy echoes). But it’s what she says about the proximity to the powerful and the famous that rings true for the C-list fame and power of the Christian world.

Here’s what Evan says after working with perpetual Presidential contestant, the famously curmudgeon socialist, Bernie Sanders:

It was also exhilarating to be inside the bubble for a day. The “bubble” is the name I made up for the energy vortex that surrounds someone with extreme power and fame. The feeling inside the bubble is unreal and can be totally intoxicating, even addictive. The world opens. Like life lived in the eye of the storm; a window into something otherworldly.

The energy vortex. The way YOU make me feel! She goes on:

The bubble imprints a feeling on your memory forever making every day outside the bubble dull and ordinary. It’s a blessing, but mostly a curse. I’ll never forget following Bernie in the rope line after his speech. The crowd was roaring … As we got near the end of the crowd, a woman I had known in college saw me standing there with her icon, and she let out a very loud, audible gasp, completely taken aback to see me in the entourage.

You can feel that in your bones, can’t you?

Of course very few Christian leaders are as famous as Bernie Sanders. Granted some are, but the C through to Q list celebrity culture of Christianity in the modern world does something similar.

I well remember how people jockeyed for position around the leader in the network I was involved with. I well remember the feeling of having favour bestowed, or watching the uncertainty of those who had had it withdrawn for some real or imagined sin.

And I well remember how people who found themselves in the inner circle – the bubble – would go as far as joining in the very “gospel-oriented slandering” of those who had fallen out of the bubble.

And boy, did I feel the lure of it. I could see what was happening, but the bubble, and the proximity and approval it elicits from someone who is a someone in the church scene, is alluring.

If we don’t admit to the fact that this could happen to us, we are in danger of having an untested virtue truly tested one day, and come up wanting.

In this church setting, and it’s true of all church settings which are curated by highly controlling, but persuasive personalities, here was a sense that one could maintain their own position two ways: First by being really, really good. And second, by pointing out how really really bad someone else was. Or at least affirming the leader’s viewpoint on that matter.

And all of this was not simply a matter of political alignment, but of gospel fidelity. That’s what makes church settings that have such bubbles around their charismatic leaders so toxic to people’s wellbeing. This is not just about politics in this age. This is about our eternal destinies.

And time and time again, having spoken to many people who have been crushed by terrible leaders in churches, leaders who garnered power and adulation from their followers, the pattern has been the same.

There is a sense that the approval of the leader of the church group that you belong to is almost, if not more, tangible and real than the approval of the Lord Jesus who has placed you in the church (and, incidentally, who you are in complete proximity with by the power of the Spirit joining you in union to Christ in heavenly places).

Evan Barker’s words hit me hard, not because they seem so unusual to the experience of too many wings of the modern evangelical church, but because they feel so familiar.

Once you get a taste for life in the bubble, as Evan Barker says, anything less is dull and ordinary. Yet what makes anything less much worse in a church setting is that so often the lesser is accompanied by a jettisoning from the Christian community in toto.

Our own experience of leaving the church setting in which this bubble existed, was devastating. Once you leave not only the bubble, but the ecosystem surrounding it, it is as if you – Titanic-like – have sunk beneath the quiet waves and been forgotten forever.

When the whole church system exploded, it was surprising and dismaying how many people contacted my wife and I, people we never knew, who had been in the same church system before us or after us, and none of us had heard of each other. That’s the standard routine.

The repair work required afterwards is often painful and revealing. It was for us. It was for me. One of the big questions I had to ask myself was why I was so susceptible to this lure, and to the allure of it all. What was it about me that seemed to require the approval of, and the proximity to, someone whose way of treating those who fell afoul of him was to cut them off completely?

Why would that be something I feared happening to me? While I saw that it was a less-than-godly response, it was the visceral feeling it emoted from me that most required answers. I am just glad that we were not in the setting long enough to test my own untested virtues.

Would I have treated others who were outside the bubble as shamefully as others did? Would my life has been as wrecked as the lives of those who, once jettisoned, found their lives and relationships shattered by what had happened?

Evan Barker’s brave decision to walk away was confirmed by the joy she found in her newborn son. She looked at the bubble once again and realised it was shallow and hollow:

Where there was once bitterness from my years in politics, I felt love for him. Where I was once hard and fierce in my handling of others, I became soft and more understanding. My son’s silky blond hair and sweet smile melted my heart each day; I honestly got lost in caring for him, finding pure joy in being his mom. It was so much more fulfilling that being yelled at by politicians all day, or hunting rich people, shaking them down of their money, caught in a never-ending game of status and power.

Barker is talking about what Puritan preacher Thomas Chalmers called, the “expulsive power of a new affection” – that memorable framing of what something more lovely does to something less lovely in your life: it pushes it out by love. What she had once held on to for fear of what she might lose – the intoxicating bubble – , was overcome by what she had gained – an intoxicating “bubba”!

If you’re a Christian in the same situation as Evan Barker was, or that I sailed close to the edge of, and you’re feeling life is dull and ordinary – or worse – completely wretched, let me encourage you that the expulsive power of a new affection is your hope.

When you come to realise – and it may be a long, painful realisation steeped in weepy prayers- , that the Lord Jesus had star power and fame beyond anything Bernie Sanders could come close to. The bubble around him in heaven was one of constant praise since eternity past.

Yet he gave that up and became despised, rejected forsaken. Why? In order that we might sit with him in heavenly places, high above all authorities. And we, fully accepted, never to be cast out our rejected, have an access and proximity to the Lord Jesus that even the angels will – like Evan Barker’s former college friend – utter loud, audible gasps about into eternity future.

By now every self-identifying male human and their fur-baby will have heard about the scandal at Cambridge University, involving one of their professors, Jason Arday.

And not just any professor, but a real life example of how those who have ticked every victim box in the Western Hemisphere (and then some) came to resign, having been accused not just of plagiarism in his PhD but of actually making up data, of being a fantasist about his life (running 600miles in six days, being in a coma for weeks etc, etc, many other etcs,), of being tenured at universities that have no knowledge of his presence, of writing and publishing a book that was not published (though it may have been written but by who is not clear), of having to go to the police because a pig’s head was sent to his address (the police have no knowledge of it), and having climbed Everest.

Okay, I made that last one up, because the memes have been relentless. Relentless and cruel. The rest of what I wrote above is true however. I left it to marinade in one long paragraph simply to add weight to the fact that there was so much Walter Mitty about this man’s life that it’s hard to know where truth ended and deceit began.

Yet I doubt even he even knows anymore, so much smoke was blown up him by those who should have known better.

Professor Arday is now ex-professor Arday, having resigned due the pressure, and no doubt to the inevitable scrutiny all of his work is now going to receive.

Cambridge University must be relieved. Relieved and possibly ashamed. It’s as if every cynical decision, every determined decision, every diabolical decision to rewrite the sociological framework of the West that they had ever coveted, by anointing Arday the youngest every professor in their history, has been undermined in one fell swoop.

And a good thing too. I hope they are ashamed. I hope it undermines Cambridge. Or re-undermines Cambridge. Why re-undermined? Because Cambridge had already been undermined. The long march through the institutions was seeing to that.

The classical and Christian foundations that built Cambridge had already been undermined and replaced by the putrid foundations of various Critical Theories, sociological neo-Marxist gobbledygook, and the like.

What it needs is a a good re-undermining and a re-filling with some substantial foundations would go a long way to re-establishing Cambridge’s tottering reputation at this point.

Don’t hold your breath though. This is the age of scapegoats after all, and Jason Arday - the once hero who had intellectual palm branches laid before his feet on his march to the professorship - , now finds himself bearing his cross to a particularly lonely Golgotha.

Everyone else is abandoning their erstwhile saviour. No one else will lose their jobs. They will drift away, scatter and deny. Those who were signing their names just last week are now washing the ink-stains from their hands this week.

Which is a pity. Jason Arday is now a rejected academic, and the laughing stock of all of those who were, rightly, appalled at the hard Left’s push to eulogise someone whose main talent was around his identity and experience.

I worry for him. I was speaking with my twin brother yesterday, a senior academic at a major Australian university, and we expressed concern to each other over how this might affect his mental state. Surely there is a time to dial down the glee? I don’t want his career death to be the precursor to his actual death. Time to back off people.

Yet what about the mental state of the Times Higher Education journalist, Jack Grove, who had pressed him on several of his claims and on suspected plagiarism? For that noble work Grove was subject to disgraceful police harassment.

What about the mental state of those students of Arlay’s who were fobbed off by their professor when seeking better supervision, only to be told - wrongly as it turns out - that they were well on track to good marks and didn’t need any more supervision?

What about the mental state of students who asked for a different supervisor because of Arlay’s poor record and were accused of racism?

These harassments and rejections of clear problems are simple proof of the soft-totalitarianism that the likes of Cambridge have switched into these days.

Mind you, when it comes to totalitarianism, they’ve got form. This comes after Cambridge’s long history of having cuckolded hard totalitarianism in the form of too many ex-students ending up as Soviet double agents back in the 1930s.

But I do worry about Arday now. It’s time to back off and give him breathing room. This is a man whose whole life has been exposed and held up for ridicule. Does he deserve to be a professor at Cambridge? Undoubtedly no. Does he deserve to be shredded publicly, hilariously and frequently day in and day out? Also undoubtedly no.

As a Christian I believe that the level of exposure he experienced is a mere foretaste of the level of exposure we will all face before the Judge of all the earth one day. We should be sobered at the manner in which his life fell apart so quickly and his misdemeanours were revealed so readily. That will be all of us one day!

But the system that allowed this to happen to him does deserve to be shredded and mocked. The people who turned a blind eye to what now seems obvious, because of their ideological commitment to a deeply incoherent, nay, wicked, view of the world, will continue as if Jason Arday never existed.

The cancellers cancel their own. It’s brutal. If you want to know where that brutal cancellation springs from, then watch that stunning movie about the Soviet Empire’s treatment of its own heroes, Burnt By The Sun. It’s one of the most devastating stories you will ever view. And after that, just for a (very nervous) laugh, watch The Death of Stalin.

What we won’t see from our woke Left university departments is any deep reassessment and reflection from those who are the gatekeepers of the sociology departments of our various universities. The ideological capture, so total and so totalising, must not admit a chink in its armour.

The same woke Left will rewrite this narrative because that’s what the woke Left does. This is the same woke Left that reframed the refusal of two conservative Muslim-majority states refuse port-entry to a gay cruise ship as evidence of Trump’s right wing reach across the world. You say white I say Black. You say black, I say whiteness.

Already we see rewritings of the narrative, and that somehow the glee from the conservative side of the chamber is part of the problem. Maybe. But perhaps it’s a case of Schadenfreude.

After all, Arday only had to leave campus on foot, Charlie Kirk was carried out in a body bag, and the glee was palpable from the very halls of these same ivy-clad institutions

What we need in the coming years is a sober-mindedness that is all too rare, and an determination to either cut off the lifeblood of the cynical theories that are paid in money and tenure to divide us along race, religion and gender.

And if that cannot be done, if the money tap is too tightly turned on, if the gatekeepers are too busy welding the gates shut to conservative voices, then perhaps it’s time to work at building new institutions.

Or at the very least classical departments in somewhat sympathetic institutions who firewall those departments from the neo-Marxist sulphurous flames. If you don’t know what I mean, then check out the excellent Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) at Australian Catholic University, led by the exceptional Dr Sarah Irving-Stonebraker.

The barbarians may be within the gates, but the likes of the Western Civilisation program means that, like St Benedict back in the day, a repository of truth and deep learning is still being protected, one that refuses to divide the world using the identity markers of just about every other university humanities department in the West.

Dr Irving-Stonebraker is the real deal - she topped the New South Wales university entrance exams in the late 1990s.

Oh, and you can read about that here, just in case you might think a historian of her ability would rewrite history in the way Arday has done.

I look forward to her students striding the stage of our world in coming years, and making a real difference. In a just world they ought to look forward to shining careers, though if Cambridge manages to shake this thing off too quickly and resume normal services, it won’t be easy. But no noble task ever was.

And Arday? His career is over and his reputation ruined. Which seems sad, and sobering for someone who is only 41. Perhaps Cambridge, in its eagerness to extol Arday, might, instead of now expunging him from its annals, learn from its mistakes, humble itself and take its licks.

Maybe there is a second chance for him, and an academic career somewhere, even if not at Cambridge. Perhaps he can return more soberly and gingerly, with a dose of humility. Maybe someone - someone from the Right - could get alongside him and help him along. He’s clearly got some gifts, otherwise he would not have gotten anywhere.

Personally I would like to see that. If there’s one thing Western Civilisation gave us that the neo-Marxist cancel culture does not have, it’s repentance, forgiveness and restoration. And those are undeserved gifts that Jason Arday desperately needs a whole lot of.

Or to change the metaphor - what we are seeing is the five-yearly arm wrestle between the theists and the non-theists for supremacy over our national narrative: Who we are and who do we wish to be?

The key push by the humanists and atheist organisations in Australia is to ensure that people who don’t have any religious affiliation tick the top box “NO Religion”.

Their recent campaigns have been super effective. The highly memorable slogan touched a nerve with many casually non-religious Australians over the past decade.

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Why did the late, great Glen Hansard’s starring role in the movie Once so affect me? And, achingly, why has his death the other day on a dark, wet Dublin road so affected me, and clearly millions of others?

Let’s start with that glittering little gem of a movie, made on the cheap, but with a story so rich it fills the coffers of your soul with gold.

Was it because of the simple story of Once (I’m a small movie man, not one for epics)? Was it because of the songs, which are deep and rich? Was it because Glen was already well known to me from The Frames? Was it because of the Ireland where I am from? Was it because of the quiet brilliance of the performances?

Those were all great things. But here’s what it so affected me (Spoiler alert!):

The guy did not get the girl, but the girl did get the piano.

This movie flipped the romantic script. This movie demonstrated the truth and beautiful nature of self-sacrificial love. Glen’s character - the guy - despite having his own wishes dashed, pursuing a noble end for both himself, and his married love interest.

The scene-stealer is when she - the girl - wanders out her door to the sound of the removalist van that has left a piano on her doorstep (their doorstep, meaning husband and child and friends). It’s a salvific moment.

And the look of gentle satisfaction on “the boy’s” face as he signs off on his life in Dublin, to head off to a new life in England, with the knowledge of the joy he has imparted before he left.

This is the antithesis of the romantic comedy of its day (a genre itself that has taken a hit in these Tinder/Gen Z times).

This is a spiritually charged romantic gesture, a true expression of the higher love beyond one’s own self interests, one that comes at cost to oneself.

It is a deeply sacrificial act born out of love for the other person’s interests not merely one’s own. There is true pleasure in that moment, pleasure that lasts and is not fleeting. No guilt the next day.

That’s one of two scenes in Once that drives me to tears, the other being the quiet joy on his ostensibly conservative Dublin father’s face as he listens to the musical creation of his son on a tinny cassette player.

There his father sits in his two-up-two-down, in front of the airing cupboard and the gas meter box with the old tea pot on the table. And he pauses before the joy between them kicks in.

There’s a deep father-hunger there, and to see the deep bond between them as the father approves of the son, and says “Play it again!” Well, there’s redemption written all over this tiny, seemingly innocuous script.

In that small, deep moment we catch a glimpse of the deep desire of so many sons who have sought the approval of a father, a father who may be successful, worldly-wise, intelligent and well-groomed. Yet here is a retired, widowed, working class man who has nary left his bricked street. Yet such redemption! Such love! The love of the father!

Once is a “Once Upon a Time” fairy tale that upends the traditions, empowering it to reflect the “true myth” or as we might put it, the “true fairytale” of the gospel in which the lover pursues the blind and lost love interest for that person’s own good and not their own. It’s a Jesus moment for sure.

And the second reason I feel so affected by Hansard’s death is that because, from how the testimonies and shared stories are coming out, he was something of a reflection of that character himself.

I listen to a lot of his music, and there is a depth to it, and a mercy, that is unfamiliar to the music world of hyper sexuality and violence.

There is a pathos and beauty about his music and lyrics that were an extension of his evidenced love of the world and the people who inhabited it. There was a deep generosity to how he lived among others, brought others into his orbit, shared the glory around, and indeed shunned it for himself.

I feel the same way listening to Glen Hansard’s music that I do in reading, Paul Kingsnorth’s words (from England, but now living in the west of Ireland).

A friend and I spoke online about this yesterday after she sent me Bono’s tribute to Glen.

I wrote:

“I feel terribly sad about this one because of his otherworldly nature.”

She replied:

“Some hit different, hey? He seemed to operate on a different plane.”

My again:

“He was almost a wide eyed innocent for his whole life, not just his childhood.”

I am unaware of the sins and foibles of Glen known only to those who knew him most, but there was something about Glen Hansard that made Once feel almost like a documentary (and in many ways it mirrored his life). Something about his death that broke a little bit of a lot of people.

It doesn’t feel like a fairytale ending, and 56 is too young, especially with a wife and young child.

Perhaps it’s an Irish thing, there can be no joy without pathos. God will one day wipe away every tear, but in the meantime we sit in the incomplete fairytale.

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me
Can't you understand?
Oh, my little girl

Enjoy the Silence by British new wave pioneers, Depeche Mode, is one of my top-ten tracks of all time. A stunning piece of post-industrial synth-pop with a great video, and a live version from Berlin that is breathtaking in both delivery and visuals.

The song has rightly racked up more than a billion Youtube views as well as a billion Spotify listens. Not bad for a song written before the advent of social media, and whose remaining members are now in their sixties.

The chorus goes on to explain (in the context of a relationship of course):

Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

Well that second line we often sadly affirm. We’ve been told it often. But a new psychological study has raised another, perhaps even deeper harm: We are talking less and less, and to less and less people. The first line, it turns out, is untrue. Words are very necessary! And turns out we’re saying a lot less of them.

Writing in response to this in The Atlantic, author and columnist, Olga Khazan, observes that we spoke on average, almost 5000 words less per day between 2005 and 2019. A drop each year of well over 300, per day! That’s around 11,900 words in 2019, compared with 16,632 in 2005.

And that’s before COVID isolated so many of us and turned a whole cohort of young people away from face to face conversations at all. Those numbers will be way down.

We can only surmise that in the seven years since, with the ramping up of technologies, and the fact that I can, via an app, order a meal for my family without actually saying more than “Thank you”, or “The chicken schnitzel goes there.”, we’re heading below the 10,000 range per day.

You see, as those two delicious words “chicken schnitzel” remind us, it’s not just the meaningful dialogues that we no longer have, it’s the little stuff. Which on the surface seems like it is insignificant (we do call it “small talk” after all), has an important effect on us.

But it turns out the chit-chat as we go about our day in the world, with those we barely know, has communal importance. Khazan reports:

Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, studies “weak ties,” or the people we talk with casually throughout the day. She has found that although these interactions might seem meaningless, they boost our sense of well-being, making us feel part of something bigger, even if we’re just buying milk or chatting with a colleague at the office coffee maker. And when we have fewer of these exchanges, we miss them:

The social intercourse of our lives that rounds off the edges of our spiky isolation is critical to the health of both us and our neighbours.

Meanwhile the growing isolation and work from home that many have settled into since COVID has also correlated with/caused(?) a plunge in our mental health. And it’s a self-reinforcing spiral. The less we talk to others, the less likely we are to talk to others in the future.

It’s a fascinating study, and I presume that as technology becomes more interactive, and as we approach even more immersive expressions of it, we will talk less and less to fewer and fewer people.

And of course, it’s also the case that not talking to others tends towards us dehumanising them. Hello social media!

One of the great strengths of the murdered activist and political leader, Charlie Kirk, was his deep desire to get people talking with other people, especially people they disagreed with.

If you watch his videos you can see how dehumanising some of the pushback towards him was. And you can, sadly, watch plenty of videos of people celebrating the silencing of his voice.

Face to face conversations brings empathy with it. Or at least it should. I do wonder of all the words we do actually say in a day, how many of them are “shouty” words. How many are simply slogans - personal protest marches in which we assert our rights over whoever we may have a problem with.

Our deep concern should be the dehumanising process that we are seeing in our world, in which people are reduced to slogans, or vilified by graffiti while never being spoken to face to face. Shouted at, yes. Spoken to, rarely.

There’s a real discipleship and evangelistic opportunity for the church in this space. If, as we see, there is a growing movement of younger people, especially the least talkative cohort of all - young men - coming to our churches, then we’re going to have to train them in conversation.

We’re going to have to equip a younger cohort not given to discussion, face to face disagreement, or even verbal social cohesion, to open their mouths and talk.

For older generations in the church who are used to the social chit-chat as well as the deeper dialogue, this may be a case of doing some version of divine accommodation.

As Calvin described the entrance of Jesus into the world courtesy of our speaking God who comes to us in his eternally first and eternally final Word, the Lord Jesus:

“For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accomodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness” (Calvin’s Institutes Book 1, Ch13, Section 1)

God descended far beneath his loftiness at ever increasing increments in the Old Testament before, as we know from Hebrews 1, he spoke to us in a Son.

Let’s bring this home to the church life and the community of God in which conversation and words are vital.

What might it mean to accommodate a whole generation of new church-goers who are unused to talking on a regular basis, don’t know how to strike up a conversation (especially with a fellow young person of the opposite sex), and certainly don’t know how to navigate a conflict verbally?

Like God is with us, we will have to be “receptor-oriented” to whole people groups who have grown up online, who are terrified at making an actual phone call, and who are constantly worried that they might sound silly, or be mocked, if they say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

What’s the alternative? Perhaps - gloomily - it’s the earthbound version of CS Lewis’s vision of Hell in The Great Divorce, in which people argue and fall out with one another in the “Grey Town”, and simply move further and further away from each other. Eventually they have silence, but they don’t enjoy it, they endure it.

The church will have to work hard to “lisp” to an unspeaking crowd for whom many words have been violence, and who may prefer silence simply because they don’t know how to communicate well.

Oh, and to finish on a upbeat note, I reckon if you put Sunday services into the mix, most Christians speak far more words in a day - and often to each other, and often through singing - than most other people do.

I do enjoy the occasional silence, but my great prayer is “Oh for a thousand tongues to sing/My great Redeemer’s praise.”

There’s an interesting, and telling, article in Christianity Today that reveals how Gen Z is less interested in why bad things happen to good people (the theodicy question), and more interested in why bad things don’t happen to bad people.

Read more

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:44-46) NKJV

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. ESV

What is Jesus Christ saying to his followers? It’s fairly simple isn’t it? No price is too great to purchase the pearl of great price - God’s kingdom. No price compares to the joy in attaining that prize.

A recent article in The Atlantic is a stark reminder that for the tech-bros of So-Cal and their breathless tech-religion, the same is true in the elusive hunt to create sentience from insentience.

Hence at a time when just about every other industry is required to demonstrate its ecological purity, energy efficiency, and economy of scale, the opposite appears to be for the Large Language Models of artificial intelligence.

Read more

The transgender ideology that is wracking – and indeed wrecking - our modern West is reminiscent of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Remember the Black Knight? He finds himself fighting a losing sword battle against King Arthur as he guards a tiny bridge. Yet he never gives up.

One by one he loses both of his arms and then both of his legs to the valiant, but increasingly bemused king.

Finally as Arthur rides over the now unguarded bridge, the limbless Knight – all torso and head – yells in anger “Come back here and I’ll bite your legs off!”

Some people just don’t know when to stop.

That same unwillingness to give up can be witnessed in the transgender debate across the Western world, in which the initial gains of the movement are now being stayed, and sometimes turned back, by legislators brave enough to take on its shrill defiance.

Read more

And as in 2016 and 2021, the “not religious” crowd is out again, to make sure that the average non-religious person ticks “no religion” on the census night.

All for altruistic purposes of course. Just to get an accurate reflection of the worship patterns of our 28 million people.

And if you believe that, I have time shares in Nigeria to sell you.

The main reason that the census no-religion movement is in full cry these past years is to ensure that monies don’t go to causes they don’t like. If there’s a fall in religious box-ticking, then it can lobby hard against religious schools receiving funding etc.

This crew are like the mosquito in the bedroom at night. The odd slap won’t make them go away.

Read more

If the culture does not exactly return to Christianity, is “Christian adjacent” a good enough landing spot instead? Is an inculturated, broad, general approval good enough?

I reckon we’d take any port in a cultural storm at the moment. But what would that look like? Should we settle for it - again?

I asked that question of best selling author Rod Dreher - of The Benedict Option - at a small pub in London the other night, at an UnHerd-hosted event for Aussies, on the eve of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.

The trip’s been great. The conference is fine. It’s fun. It’s fast. It’s not that furious despite the protestors bleating a rather disappointingly lame “Fascist!” as we walked into the Olympia Conference Centre.

Call me ungrateful, but if I’m going to a conservative conference I want some Antifa bloke in a mask spitting venom. Mind you, it’s too hot in London for a mask never mind a keffiyeh. They all looked like they needed an ethically prepared vegan sandwich and a cool drink.

The trains are late or not running because of the oppressive heat. And it is oppressive. I’ve lived most of his life in Perth, Australia, and it’s right up there with the meanest February desert heat of that city.

But back to the conference, and the question. There’s a strong sense at ARC that we need some reconstruction after the deconstructionist decades (centuries) that have piled up like so much guano.

And the speakers - so far - have been probing what it might mean to rebuild. The conversation has been around the possibility of new institutions, a regathering of what we have lost, and a call for a conviction against the craziness that is churning our culture.

And we are being churned. Just as the conference began the UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer was toppled, in what will be a vain attempt at yet another reset for a country that is fast running out of peaceful options.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is convinced that what made the West great, and in turn what was lacking in the places she once belonged to, is the fruit, freedoms and faith of Christianity.

To which Rod Dreher would add one more “F” - the facts.

That was where my question to him was going. Is it good enough in the West to say that the Christian ideas are good ideas that work, rather than good news that happened and has implications?

Rod says not on your life! His latest work is focussing on the hard push to the fascist right among young men in particular in mainstream political life in the USA.

And he attributes that in part - in my understanding - to the forms of godliness without its power. Oh there’s power alright, it’s all that is left, isn’t it? Isn’t that what Foucault would tell us? Isn’t that what the progressive Left, in its deadly dancing death spiral with radical Islam is all about?

Rod’s concern is that the truth of the Christian message is essential to keep it from going somewhere darker. The resurrection really had to have happened. The Christian message works because it’s true. And in that sense Rod is a different beast to historian Tom Holland.

In a memorable exchange with Australia’s iconic musical artist, Nick Cave, recently, Cave asked Holland if he was a Christian. Holland’s posh reply was that his most intense spiritual experiences had involved the Christian faith.

To which Nick, in his sly gothic manner, responded “Yes, but to be a Christian you have to believe in the resurrection.”

Rod says the same. And, like Cave - whose own bitter experiences have boiler-plated that reality into his life - the central thesis of “suffering” in the story is, if you like, its temper valve.

And it’s empowering value. Hope is embedded in the reality of the resurrection. ARC is all about reconstruction, and that’s a good thing. But we are on about resurrection.

And of course Christians need good, solid non-Christian co-belligerents alongside them - the “Christian adjacent” types who we can just sense admire the fruit of the West that was birthed from Christianity.

In the end though, I think it is the truth of the gospel, and only that, that will give us not the optimism, as Rod said, but the hope, that God can yet grant our Western culture some grace in the future.

“Christian adjacent” is fine, maybe better, indeed better, than the current cultural slop we are being served up. But it’s not enough.

And Christian adjacent did not birth this long, astonishingly peaceful (all things being considered) safety net thing we call Western Civilisation. A safety net so recently despised by so many in the confident, misplaced, assertion that they can replace it quite readily with another vision of human flourishing that won’t lead to a slaughter house.

The truth, when it comes to building a society, it boils down to a choice between two operating systems: Either the king you gather around your vision dies for you, or you die for the king you gather around.

I know which I’d rather choose. And the happy fact is that the king who died for me, also rose again. That gives me hope, not optimism.

Two observations to finish with. My son came with me on this trip and he’s loving it. We went to St Paul’s as we must. I decided to climb the 528 stairs that take you first to the wondrous whispering gallery and its seven stations which explore the stunning paintings of the story of St Paul in Acts:

I then - despite my fear of heights - too the plunge (argh did I say that?) and climbed to the very top and went outside for the view of the city, marvelling that poor-benighted religious people who should have made way earlier for progressives, could come up with a building such as this.

I could scarcely look over the edge for fear. What must those pre-industrial era builders have experienced with their platforms and hand-constructed scaffolding?

And my son? Stayed safely below.

When I eventually descended, 1056 steps below, I found him sitting gazing in wonderment (as he’d been doing for almost half an hour) at this:

“Is this the original?” he asked, almost in disbelief, “I just didn’t think it would be here.”

We sat for a few moments more, soaking in the quiet truth of this stunning piece by William Holman Hunt, based on the verses from Revelation 3:20 directed towards the Laodicean church.

While I was seeking loftier goals, my son - like Mary - had sought out the greater thing.

The passage is both a stern rebuke and a gentle, but stern imploring, of a proud, arrogant community that has lost its bearings, yet thinks it has everything. The famous weed and bramble-riven door is locked from the inside.

Laodicea believes it has everything. Their king reminds them they have nothing without him. There is Jesus or there is - ultimately - nothing.

Perhaps that’s where we are culturally in the West. We’re rich, we’re proud, we’re building our own identity, all off the back of a common faith. The fruit of the gospel without the roots.

But here’s a word of warning to the West that wants Christendom back, but not the Christ of Christendom.

The Laodiceans were ever so “Jesus adjacent”! Hey he’s just on the other side of the door for crying out loud! But never so far from him nonetheless, as his warning to the community goes on to indicate.

Christianity is not here to give you its ideas, or impart its wisdoms. It comes into the cultural door with the risen Christ or it does not come in at all. Reconstruction is merely optimistic, but only resurrection has hope.

The other night in a funky cafe on the edge of Perth city that I frequented often - The Crooked Spire (named after the crooked spire of the Chesterfield church in the UK) - Pauline Hanson packed the place to the gills.

The Crooked Spire cafe is about 4km from the Western Australian home that we still own. I know the area and the type of person who frequents it. I have exchanged pleasantries with the owner.

Why is the spire of that English church crooked? Because the wood was not allowed to dry before they built with it. A rookie error.

The subsequent drying process left the spire twisted and warped. Travelling past that church in 1999 on a UK holiday I rubbed my eyes because I thought I wasn't seeing clearly.

Turns out the problem wasn't me, it was with the structure. Turns out the cafe owners had done the same thing when they travelled past that building too. And the name stuck.

The Crooked Spire was packed the other night, not with old timers who are grumpy and remember the Second World War, but with all sorts who are a mix of grumpy (at what is happening) and euphoric (at what they think will happen, but won't).

They're no longer willing to be told that the problem is with them - that they're just not seeing things clearly - when they know in their gut the problem is external to them. They know the problem is the structure.

And that is a sign of how far we have come apart in thirty years. I'm nearly sixty. I remember Hanson when she appeared on the scene three decades ago and thinking "Egads! How can anyone vote for this woman?"

But old timers - including some of my mum's friends (never my mum, she a solid centrist), fawned over her. One old friend of mum's reminded me of Captain Mainwaring in the sit-com Dad's Army.

He chuckled when I expressed my concern about Hanson (and the fact that her racist posturing made my non-white South African wife - who'd grown up with apartheid - nervous), before responding, "Well I think she's brilliant!"

Well three decades later, lots of people clearly think she's brilliant, and they're not all Dad's Army types.

They're dads and mums types who feel desperate enough to head off in the One Nation direction. They feel there is something structurally wrong with Australia, that has twisted things out of whack. A bit like the crooked spire.

The claim is that Hanson is divisive. Which she truly, truly is. From the bottom up. But that is simply in response to the huge divisions they believe we are being force-fed from the top down.

If people are beset with bigger fears they no longer fear division. In fact division taken to its logical conclusion appears to be their only escape route.

OF course most of Hanson's charges cannot fully articulate the divisions in Australia. But that no longer matters, because they can smell them.

And so much of politics is about the smell of a thing. We're not actually rational, individuated people. We're herd people who run with a pack. That's the truth of all sides of politics, as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out in his book "The Righteous Mind".

Hanson simply picked up the division theme already at play in the culture and has now run with it for three decades. She was ahead of the curve, even if she had no philosophical language to frame it.

Didn't she say it the other day? She hasn't changed, it's just that Australia has caught up with her. So I no longer thing "Egads, how can anyone vote for her?" I understand why they do, even if I still don't like it.

But Hanson is not the only divisive character in this play we call Australia. Every well-educated university grad who went on to a good career in a progressive setting, was trained within an increasingly post-liberal university in which the central plank is division.

Righteous division of course. The kind of division that is necessary to bring us to some form of unity and a better society. in that rubric, Hanson’s divisiveness is of the “unrighteous” variety.

That's partly why our campuses are the primary locations of anti-semitic hate. That's why Sydney University - down the road from me - is considered the most anti-semitic campus on the planet. That did not happen by accident. It's “righteous” division.

And that righteous division has filtered down the pipeline. The only way to get true justice - apparently - is to play up divisions in a Marcusean manner in which we declare our love for a tolerant society.

But, and here's the deep irony, in order to achieve that tolerant society, here are a list of the things will simply will not tolerate (add your particular "ism" to the list).

We don't all believe that of course. But we're like the fabled greengrocer in Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" who puts the sign "Workers of the World Unite" in his shop window in communist Eastern Europe .

He places it there, says Havel, not because it's true and he has a conviction, but because it's safe and he has a fear of what will happen if he does not.

So we sit and parrot it back to the trainer at the DEI session - and wear the lanyard (the equivalent of Havel's sign) - , while we seethe or groan or get bored at the sheer tedium.

Post-liberal ethics, for all of its rainbow brightness, is ironically very black and white. There are colonisers and the colonised. There are victims and there are perpetrators. And a victim can never be a perpetrator.

There is a hierarchy - a totem of intersectionality - to ensure this is the case. Believe all women. All of the time. Except if the women were Jewish. Then don't believe them. As cultural perpetrators Jewish women r@ped on Oct 7 don't get to claim victim status.

In this hierarchy women are - among other things, "cis-women" and "trans-women". If a "cis-woman" claims that the "cis-part" is merely a rejection of reality, then the lines of division will not be permitted to fall her way.

The utopian strategy is designed to make things come apart (first), in other to bring them together (later). Division is a necessary precondition on the path to a unity built upon a different set of precepts to the unity we previously had (though even that was fractured).

When will this new unity arrive? Later of course. Much work is still left to be done. 2017's plebiscite on redefining marriage wasn't the settling of the thing, as we were promised, but merely the beginning of the thing.

Yet "later" never fully arrives. It cannot in a democratic society which - so far - has rejected absolute tyranny. Hence Like all soft utopian futures, the pathway to "later" requires the breaking of not a few figurative eggs.

And not a few actual eggs either. Fertilised eggs That's why there is legislation in our Parliaments discussing the merits of sex-selective abortion. Thirty years ago that would have been a bridge too far for progressive feminism. Today? It looks like liberty.

Now most of the One Nation crowd at The Crooked Spire don't care either way about gay marriage (some might even be gay and married!) and most don't attend pro-abortion or pro-life protests.

What they do care about is that too much energy is being pumped into increasingly arcane projects while they are feeling hung out to dry. They want change, but don't believe our current leaders have the courage or will to bring it about.

So we are not "falling" apart, but the crowd at The Crooked Spire indicates that we are "coming" apart. In fact our democratic system is perfectly designed to keep us in the middle of the road.

Which is exactly where a huge swathe of our voters don't want our politics to be. They believe that the lack of political courage among our leaders is failing them.

I believe it is failing us too, but I've got just about enough money - and not all that time left - for it to worry me as much as it does others. But for many people, they're ready to throw their Freedom furniture around the room.

We're dreamin'(g) if we think that somehow 31 per cent of desperate Australians are going to walk away when the dust settles in 2028 and politics continues as normal.

One Nation is Australia's Trump and the UK's Farage. It will parse out differently because of our voting system.

But there's little chance Aussies who turned up at The Crooked Spire will say "Well that's ok then. Let's head back to the footy. Continue as normal political leaders, and we'll see you in four years."

Bread and circuses suppress problems, they don't resolve them. The inability to pay for a season ticket to the Doggies or the Eagles might just tip people over the edge.

So don't tell the people who turned up at The Crooked Spire that the problem lies with them and that all they have to do is rub their eyes and the distortion will go away.

The distortion is external and structural. And that's what brought them out in force the other night at The Crooked Spire. I still don't want them to vote for Hanson, but unlike 30 years ago, I definitely know why they do.

The next post: What do we do as a Christian community in light of these divisions?

“The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then …and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in the whole prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was a beacon … the other, a gibbet with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.”

And so ends chapter one of one of the most memorable English language novels, Great Expectations. Charles Dickens was an early master of utilising location to express the human condition.

The sheer liminal greyness of the Kentish marshlands as the story opens with our hero Pip caught between death and life. He has just passed through a graveyard and finds himself on the marshes.

The landscape’s refusal to confirm a fixed horizon. The muddied intent. The sheer dreariness and ennui, even as danger lurches out of the fog in the form of Magwitch.

Is anything living? Is everything dying? Who is to say? We are constantly caught between, as Dickens intends for so much of the novel, with those great exceptions forever just over the horizon.

Then as if to double down, the subsequent appearance of the fantastical Miss Havisham, locked way as she is into an always impending marriage, as all around her - and within her - crumbles and decays.

The stern liminality of it all is reflected in an exceedingly well-written, and bravely offered, essay in The Weekend Australian, by Sascha Callaghan.

Callaghan writes after having picking up her unused - and now thawed and quite dead - surplus embryos. And as she does, she finds herself struggling to find a fixed horizon to lock in her response to it all.

Why? Because, as I suspect is the case for many women, the space between the white-hot fervour of both sides of the abortion/reproductive rights debate, is more akin to the marshlands of Dickens’ novel. Ethical categories have been absorbed in modernist mist.

While the bright sunshine of certainty burns off the fog of the “Shout Your Abortion” crowd, and it has to be said, parts of the pro-life crowd, there is a vast marshland , in which women - and yes, men too, - are trudging across a smudgy ethical landscape, looking for certain convictions about this matter - indeed about any matter - and finding none.

Callaghan has a dilemma. Her dilemma is that as she pops into a medical centre, - having been told that the embryos will soon be disposed of if she doesn’t collect, - she senses there must be ethical certainty about her decision.

Yet to her dismay she can locate none within herself. Or without. She lives in the aorist tense, constantly searching for a fixed location, but finding it just beyond her.

This was so unlike her experience in past. Following an abortion some two decades prior that threatened her career and her idea of her future, she sensed the disapproval of the GP. The mood was sombre inside, as were the small gaggle of protesters outside.

She felt - she says - “sad about the process”. The smell of judgement was, if you like, something of a spur. A negative something perhaps that would enable her to lean into righteous conviction, but something nonetheless. Something to push back on.

Now? Two decades later? Nothing. The sheer Scandinavian efficiency of it all disturbs her, as modernism often does, but always too late.

There is no opposing force to push back on culturally, at least not in any meaningful way.

Some 20 years later, I went to pick up six dead – unalive? – little embryos floating in fluid-filled straws from the IVF clinic. This ­solemn errand, which I had put off for too many years after we’d completed our family (one IVF son, and one naturally conceived one), barely registered a moment’s concern from any person near to me. This included my husband, the clinic staff, or any of those ­inclined to protest about the fate of fetuses. I might as well have been picking up the dry cleaning. So I proceeded glumly and alone to perform this sad little duty no one had any words for. Six little individuals in vitro, second-class unborn to the protesting types I guess, had been left to turn into a puddle on the lab bench, and I had decided – in what was framed by those around me as a bizarre choice – to go pick them up. No one knew what to make of it; it was one of those strange new modern things we simply have no cultural framework for.

Callaghan is disturbed that no one is disturbed. The quality of her writing is such that there are no histrionics, no large flourishes, just simple observations. And as all writers know, it’s the little details that give the weight:

Why all this sentimentality now and not all those years ago at the abortion clinic I cannot say. Maybe it was because the termination was already so serious and full of mourning that I could resolve my ambivalence with a shot of defiance and feminism. But this was full of … nothing.

The lab tech handed me a little box full of ­defunct peoplings that were kind of my family, and I went on my way. There were no protestors outside to witness my guilt. No admonitions I could courageously take on the chin and complain about in women’s circles. No one to regret it with. When I got home I noticed they were numbered 1 to 7, with straw 4 (my son) missing. I wondered if the doctor had paused for a moment over them before choosing. How close was it to being number 3 and not him?

Full of nothing. That’s Dickensian. And no one to regret it with. We have so parsed our ethical horizons, so blurred our understandings of rights, that Callaghan realises that there is no longer a community to share her grief or misgivings with. Indeed to do so would be tawdry. Non-modern.

So what is she to do? Perhaps what we all do with trinkets to which we attach great value but which no one else considers of consequence. It’s worth nothing to anyone. But to us? We can’t price it, but its weighty costliness is in there somewhere.

Callaghan explains:

I put them in my undies drawer five years ago, and there they have remained. Never had embryos felt so viscerally close to being “a baby”. I still do not know what to do with them.

For years I kept my father’s old silk scarf, a striking peacock black and blue, with one annoyingly fraying end, in my undies drawer. Or should I say drawers. I have moved often, but that scarf has stayed there, since the day I discovered it in the box of things Dad had forgotten to take with him. It means something, but like Callaghan observes, just exactly what?

It would have been nice if a protestor had thought to scowl at me or pray for me in ­honour of the six in the box. But no one really cared. No one seemed to be able to grasp the nature of the act — what it was and what it meant. Not me, or policy makers or the religious folk who care about these things. Honestly that seemed worse.

Callaghan contrasts the two non-marshland sides:

What pro-lifers get wrong is to overstate the relative value of an embryo compared with its mother…What the pro-choice crowd get wrong is to frame abortion as morally neutral – as a matter of mere “health care” like a tonsillectomy, or a teeth cleaning, or picking up IVF embryos.

I disagree from first principles with the “relative value” argument, yet it makes sense of the ethical marshlands of our modern secular time. The sheer horror of sex-selective abortion being given an airing in our Parliaments in Australia demonstrates that we not only parse unborn and born life, we parse the types of unborn life too.

Yet I get her dilemma. Her liminal entrapment. Her ethical confusion is a perfectly well-formed assumption to make. And it aligns with Philip Reiff’s ideas about anti-culture: the concept that cultures are defined by what they forbid.

For Callaghan? She recognises that when it comes to reproductive rights, the culture forbids nothing, even while her God-fashioned body is viscerally seeking cultural propulsion or pushback.

But, alas, those days of certainty - even if it were scowling certainty - are over. The fact that she cares at all is a problem. Her problem. Is she looking for therapy? Is she seeking absolution? Who can tell. And who can offer it anyway?

Callaghan is insightful enough to realise that she has reached peak freedom in the modern West. This is the top of Mount Progress, where the air is clear and the stale, gassy marshlands of religious restriction and ethical certainly are far below.

She knows that should be experiencing great expectations, and enjoying what she has with nary a thought of anything else. But the undies drawer must be opened every morning.

Callaghan cannot see the supposed vista. Sixty years of one-way traffic in our legislation, arts, politics, education, social imaginary, and still she is unconvinced. It’s as if we were created for far more.

It’s as if to create something - someone - and then leave them in suspended animation, is to curse them to the soulless drudgery of an ethical marshlands of our making.

And in a supreme irony, it is Callaghan in particular who is left in a state of suspended animation - much like those foetuses - those tiny humans. And, as all good writing does, her piece draws us into that reality as well.

Here we all are in the anti-culture, ethically suspended between who knows where, caught between important life-changing decisions that we are told do not amount to anything, but which feel like they ought to.

Callaghan ends with this ethical admonishment to the anti-culture that would reduce all such decisions to their convenience factor:

These questions about the meaning and value of early human life, and the phenomenon of motherhood, persist as we grapple with new situations – from commercial surrogacy to artificial wombs, to the use of embryos for research and beyond. The truth about women, embryos, pregnancy and birth is deeper, harder, and less convenient than you think.

I said yesterday that I would write a piece on abortion, but this seems more complex than that, even as I hold to the fact that abortion is a great wrong, a rejection of God, and that IVF embryos that are surplus to human requirements are greatly valued by God.

And I suspect that the majority of Westerners are trudging through the grey, ethical marshlands that I have described, half inclined to celebrate the fact that there are no convictions around this matter (and indeed no actual convictions), yet unwilling, as it were, to remove the foetuses from the undies drawer and wash them down the sink.

So they, like those tiny humans, will continue living in the aorist tense, doomed to strive for great cultural, ethical and moral expectations, that will stubbornly never arrive.

This is the cultural inheritance that Sascha Callaghan has been bequeathed. It’s been hammered into her head - and ours - that such decisions are the sunlit plateaus of peak freedom.

Yet we are like the pirate of Pip’s imagination. We in the West, having been given freedom in the living and life-giving gospel, in whose power the Spirit blew the anti-cultural death-works away, have returned to the gloomy gibbet to hook ourselves back up again.

**********************

I received this DM yesterday in light of me signalling this Substack article. It’s very helpful as we think through these things:

We are a Christian couple who can’t have their own biological children. We have been so blessed to be gifted embryos from another Christian couple who used ivf to have 2 children, are unable physically to have more children, but had embryos they believed were potential lives and they were not willing to have them discarded or used for science. We now have our little daughter because of this amazing gift.

Many people with ‘extra’ embryos are not told they can donate them, although it’s slowly becoming more common. Unfortunately the demand for embryos is huge as anyone, single, SS couples etc, are able to access them. There are also, sadly, hundreds of thousands of embryos suspended in time around the world, and clinics are overwhelmed with the need for space to keep them all in storage.

There are Christian agencies in America which are specifically for this type of adoption. They are often known as snowflake babies, or snowflake adoptions, because they are little frozen bubs at adoption.

How should we respond to the death of a young man held in handcuffs by UK police, even when he said he could not breathe?

What should we do about the death of someone who was handcuffed first upon a false accusation of racism, even though that was a cover for the fact he had been stabbed five times?

How should Christians respond? It’s complex, but it’s going to have to be different to how the culture responds.

This does not mean that we should not have serious concerns - and yes, a level of anger, at the clear divisions being foisted upon our societies by ideas that were born in the test tubes of our universities.

While we all want tribalism to end (don’t we?) the actual fact is that the bulk of the modern university sector’s Humanities departments are build upon highlighting tribalism, and reinforcing it. Increasingly their reason for existence is grievance.

What happened in the UK is the bitter fruit of people who want tribalism, because it offers them a chance to overthrow a system they despise.

And now it’s clear that things have come full circle in our Western nations and the tragic death of Henry Nowak in the UK is the closure of that particular orb, an orb that began with the death of George Floyd in the US.

I suspect that cities won’t burn this time, but there is anger.

Spare a thought for the police forces in the UK, who are clearly unsure how to undertake their duties, when their heads of the force - the National Police Chiefs Council - come up with directions such as these (as reported in The Times this morning)

“In March 2025 the NPCC published an “anti-racism commitment” document that advised officers to treat suspected criminals differently depending on their ethnicity.

It said officers should “respond to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences, with understanding that these will be racialised and with the aim of reducing harm. It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality)”.

It also warns officers they should be aware of the risk that the police “criminalise people” and that arrest and charge rates should be made equal between groups, even though levels of criminality are different.

Further guidance published by Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary, the force under fire over its handling of Nowak’s murder, advises its officers to understand the “impact, trauma and history” of policing ethnic minorities.

In a sense what happened - post-Floyd- was inevitable.

The police responded in the way that you would naturally respond when you have to look over your shoulder and see what the bosses want you to do. That makes the role complex. Who would be a police officer when lady justice has slipped the blindfold?

Yet how should Christians respond to such injustices? Carefully and soberly I believe. Just as the Christian response to the Floyd murder should not have been rioting on the streets, neither should it be here either.

There are a number of ways to consider going forward. For one, if you’re working in the public square in politics, law etc, then work hard to rid our systems of two-tiered approaches to anything.

I believe that this is not the time for Christians to quietly fold their wings, but to be involved in the betterment of society and seek the good of all. Part of that good is exposing lies, including the well-established lies of modern theories around evil

Ideas that have sprung from critical theory are a cancer and a blight on our societies. They are not intended to create justice for all, but to “expose” and “overthrow”. Yet they are inherently unstable. Witness the manner in which advocates for critical theory ideas around sexuality are consuming themselves.

Such destabilising ideas are antithetical to the gospel, indeed they intend to overturn any and every system they confront and see the Christian message as the most problematic of all.

Neither are they interested in dialogue to see improvement and civilisational stability. That they ape Christian concern makes it even worse, but then again, all Satanic ideas are unoriginal.

So Christians, work hard in your lives to expose these ideas and overturn them by intellectual argument, legal wins and a bigger vision of humanity.

Yet don’t be more pious than Jesus, as I might say. Don’t just ignore injustices like this. The left side of Christianity has long called for more public attention to injustices - but I would say only those from a certain side of the aisle.

I had Facebook friends in 2020 state that they would be attending the BLM rallies even in the midst of COVID because it was more important. This was a hard circle to square also, given the almost rabid attempts to label anyone who ignored COVID advice as potential killers.

I see little evidence of that side of the faith saying much about this situation, even though back in 2020, all and sundry on Facebook were bowing virtual knees. This should be called out.

In the same way, conservatives, don’t be captivated by this. Don’t make it your reason to exist. Generally conservatives in their framing of the world are more aligned with reality because they like to breathe the Christian air (unlike the progressives who see that air as the problem).

I tend to agree with much that the Right is saying on this issue, but I am not sure that “blind rage” is much of a solution. The hard Right, unhitched from a Christian framework - will end up as furious as the hard Left. So, righteous anger yes, “blind rage” - no.

Serious minded Christians should therefore be sobered by the way our society is being fractured by extremes on both sides. Yet even in saying that, I ask, Did the critical theory crew not believe that the pendulum would swing back hard in the other direction? A cursory read of history would tell you so.

Our actions - and I believe actions need to be taken, such as striking out such terrible ideas as those proposed by the NPCC - ought to be tempered by the fact that the Judge of all the earth will do what is right.

Hence we ought to work hard for justice on this earth not because there is no judge of all the earth, but because there is. And that means when “our side” loses, we don’t burn the place down. There is a God in heaven, as Daniel reminds us in Dan 2.

The immanently framed world of our secular age is not the ultimate reality. If it is, then sure, go ahead and burn the place down!

A final reminder: The most monstrous evil of all times was committed against Jesus - the most unjust thing to ever happen - yet God’s intention from eternity was to use that act to defang evil.

“Leave room for vengeance”, as Scripture reminds us. That the killer of Henry Nowak is now imprisoned for at least 21 years reminds us that earthly justice, however imperfect, still reflects the just God we serve. And we should be grateful to live in societies that built their justice system upon a deep awareness of the God of the Bible.

The goal of humanity outside of God appears to be to loose ourselves from the surly bonds of our earthiness and become whoever we wish to be. To not only make a name for ourselves, but to forge new identities for ourselves. Humans 2.0.

In that sense everything on the spectrum from transgenderism to transhumanism is a Tower of Babel project. And in 2026 we now have the most amazing transformative, technologies, ones that we did not have before but could only imagine in the sci-fi works of the past one hundred years.

We are not only at Humans 2.0, we are at Babel 2.0, a supercharged version that the original builders could only have dreamed about.

The Babel text in Genesis 11 states:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. ² And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. ³ And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

The new technology of bricks and mortar - as opposed to mere stone - permitted humans to build much higher, with more stability, than previously. With the power to do so, they decide to build a tower to the heavens. The morality of such a decision is not up for grabs when one has the technology.

This struck me recently reading about Noir Siddiqui’s genetic pre-testing corporation, Orchid. Some 2300 genetic predispositions can be screened in embryos, ensuring maximum baby and parental happiness. Siddiqui is quite relaxed to figure out the morality after the event, as if somehow we would “be kind and rewind” if we sensed we missed a huge ethical problem with the tech:

I think this is something that society has been waiting for. For generations. So much had to develop in the history of humans for us to be able to get here. It’s up to us to decide the morality and how it’s used. It’s just data on embryos at the earliest possible stage.

Humans would make a name for themselves outside the parameters of God’s design for humans. God had identified and named humanity. He set their boundaries. Now, thanks to the technology, they could operate wildly outside their remit.

The famous painting of the tower, pictured above by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, has always fascinated me, and I have memories of a copy of it in the home of one of my grandmother’s.

What’s fascinating about the painting is that Bruegel rendered it theologically and sociologically accurate, rather than historically accurate. There’s no doubt that the Babel tower was a ziggurat, an ancient Near Eastern worship structure that was much more rudimentary in its design.

This is not that.

Bruegel’s rendition is a mash up of Roman and medieval structures. And the men overseeing the work to the left hand side of the painting are dressed in contemporaneous clothing to Bruegel.

But that’s the point he is making. Every generation is Babelish. It is the fallen human condition to take new materials and fashion them, not to give glory to God, but to give glory to the self. Breugel knew his theology. In that sense everything from the original Tower of Babel is Babel 2.0.

We are certainly seeing our new technologies recast our vision of what is possible for humans to do. We are experiencing a supercharged attempt to make new names for ourselves and reach for the heavens.

Transgender Babel

This encompasses the transgender issue so vexing us in the West, in which the foundation stones of God’s building project are undermined, then removed, in order to be replaced by new social realities and new medical advancements to underpin those new realities.

Perhaps the language confusion we experience today in which the great and the good of our political, legal and educational institutions are incapable of telling us what a woman is, is simply the latest expression of Babelish confusion. Rather than merely something that will be judged, perhaps this confusion is the judgement itself.

This is why we get the Giggle versus Tickle fiasco in Australia, in which biological women are prosecuted for biologically gatekeeping social media apps. The long running case - lost by biological women by the way - was birthed in a Babelish rebuild of our anti-Discrimination laws in 2013, reinforced by our Federal Court in 2026, and patrolled by our once-intelligible education system.

We have the technologies to deny what God states clearly about the binary nature of sex and gender. Yet in interview after interview with Sall Grover, the unfortunate owner of the social media app, you can sense the frustration at our elites’ ability to define what a woman actually is.

And of course, Roxanne Tickle, once and always a man, had to make a name for himself. That he chose the almost farcical first name of a famous song about a prostitute, and accompanied it with an invasive body movement that makes us squirm (note that you can’t fully tickle yourself), speaks volumes about this movement’s desire to supplant and usurp reality.

And incidentally, as many a biological woman will attest to in this ongoing battle, “tickle” is not the primary physical response to their rejection of the transgender agenda. More like “punch”, “kill”, “slap”, etc.

Transhuman Babel

Of course the real goal is not transgender. That is a mere stepping stone - or more to the point, a first stage bricks and mortar building project - towards the ultimate goal, transhumanism.

To fully be free of the meat-sack and to deny its ongoing worth in the eyes of either God and society, compared with the sheer “Ubermenschen” ability to reach the heavens of immortality, that is the goal!

In a revealing interview with tech-bro, and gay religious billionaire, Peter Thiel, Ross Douthat of The New York Times, drills in on this latest Babelish drive and its rejection of God’s purposes for humans.

Thiel is most reluctant to advocate for a fully human future, unless it is augmented by the new bricks and mortar of transhuman technologies and AI. Douthat expresses worry. Thiel acquiesces, eventually, but his comments are revealing:

The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that.

We are well beyond the “What is a woman?” category here. Thiel’s desire is to see the tower of transhumanism reaching into the heavens in a way in which transgenderism can only point to.

Yet he is not without his concerns:

And then orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.

That is “super” revealing. Thiel admits the tension. How do we transform our souls when, according to the biblical understanding of what it means to be human, dualism is out of the equation.

Both transgenderism and trans humanism are deeply dualistic. The Bible only acknowledges separation of body and soul at one point in life: death. In the end every Babelish expression of bending technology to our will is to escape the awful reality of that ultimate separation.

Yet that won’t stop us trying for new Babels as newer and more integrated bricks and mortar become available to us scientifically, are championed to us culturally and intellectually, and enforced among us legislatively.

The one rejoinder to all of this is that, despite the lofty heights reached by the original Tower of Babel, God had to “come down” to check it out. Seen from the throne of the actual heaven, their efforts were risible.

And so too, when God’s new Jerusalem comes down and squashes our Babels under its tremendous spiritual weightiness like so many pancakes, the risible efforts of technology, politics and legislation will be exposed.

Our warning light is on. Our language is more and more confused. God is confusing and confounding our efforts.

Our only hope is that Genesis 12 - and the Abraham narrative that leads to global blessing - comes right after Genesis 11. God has a Humans 2.0 project of his own in mind.

What’s intriguing about the impending population decline across the world is that it is hitting every part of the globe, irrespective of culture, ethnicity and religion.

In an intriguing article in The Free Press, entitled, Peak Human Is Coming Sooner Than You Think, two of the world’s leading demographers, Nicholas Eberstadt and Patrick Norrick, unpack a phenomenon that is exactly the opposite of the 1970s fears, population collapse.

We tend to think that slowing down the birthrate is both a good thing, and a long term trend towards a gentler, more sustainable number of people sucking oxygen on this planet.

But in a sense, as Eberstadt and Norrick show, it’s more complex than that. It’s a little like going bankrupt. It happens slowly, slowly, then quickly. Here’s what they say:

For decades, demographers simply assumed that the postwar drop in worldwide birth rates would lead to an eventual equilibrium, with childbearing converging in one region after another at a little over two births per woman, the level required for long-term replacement. They envisioned a mere slowing of the explosive worldwide population growth from the 20th century, the extraordinary period in which human life expectancy more than doubled and the global population nearly quadrupled (from 1.6 billion to over 6 billion).

Instead it is now apparent that we are witnessing a worldwide march into the terra incognita of prolonged sub-replacement fertility, with no hints yet of how far humanity’s birth rates will ultimately fall—or when they will recover, if ever.

In nearly every place with the statistics to track fertility trends, birth rates are falling relentlessly, hitting new lows and shattering old records on all but an annual basis. It is as though some invisible gravitational force were at work, locking on to local birth rates and pulling them ever lower.

“In nearly every place”. That’s interesting isn’t it? Westerners like to point to “local conditions” such as modernity and the decline of religious values (as well as the emancipation of women and modern contraceptive technologies) as key issues.

But as Eberstadt and Norrick show, this decline is almost ubiquitous. It’s as if we are playing out the dystopian sci-fi novel/film Children of Men, but no one is holding an infertility gun to our collective heads. We’re doing this - or not doing that so to speak - to ourselves.

The only country that bucks the trend is, yep, Israel. Both Jewish and Muslim members of Israeli society. And that’s not simply down to the hyper religious communities. Secular and traditional Jewish women are having on average 2.5 children. Bad times clearly don’t mean you shut life down. It’s astonishing as a figure, even as the great and the good of progressives line up to say that Israel is the most hated country in the world. Not within Israel apparently.

Now while sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has a higher birth rate than even that, there are already sub-Saharan major cities that are now below replacement rate. The trend towards depopulation, and a collapse of viable replacement, is global.

The issue of course is that the replacement rate does not remain steady. Put mortality and ageing into the mix (both things come to all of us apparently despite the skin cream ads assurances), and the replacement rate rises inexorably.

What we are going to see is not an empty-ish planet, replenished and teeming with fit young naked things eating berries and making passionate love, like a cross between Eden and the Blue Lagoon.

No, what we will see is the likes of what we already see in rural Japan - empty villages and towns, peppered with old people, infrastructure ageing alongside its population, a shrinking tax base, and no vigorous youth to put out the fires and clean the gutters. Or protect you from vicious foes.

Of course, there are some local conditions pertaining to the West, but the primary local condition that the West has imported - wealth - , seems to be playing a factor.

There’s something of a mantra that the cost of raising children has become prohibitive. Well, perhaps, but only because children are increasingly being factored in first and foremost as economic units.

Children have become commodified, as we would expect when we either demonise them (and get rid of them before birth), or worship them, and then pour all our energies and monies into crafting the one or two children that we do have into the gods and goddesses we are told that they undoubtedly will become.

That is if they attend the right school, do the right lessons, play the right sports, have the perfect holidays and think the right things.

Eberstadt and Norrick observe:

And even if the birth crash is mainly caused by changes in demand for children, this does not mean our current revolutionary plunges in fertility are mainly a function of economics per se. The argument that children are becoming less “affordable” needs to be put in the context of competing alternatives for parental decision-makers. Economic constraints on childbearing today of course matter—they always have—but this doesn’t get around the fact that budget-constrained individuals are choosing to cut back on children rather than on something else. In fact, modern societies the world over have more of almost everything than ever before—more income, more food, more education, more healthcare, more housing, more private vehicles, more travel, more free time and vacation. Practically the only thing they don’t have more of is children.

In other words, there is now nothing intrinsically distinct about children - or at least having them - in the modern West - that separates them out from the other lifestyle decisions that people make.

And of course that’s the case. We are having conversations in Australia about how to ensure that surrogacy is not outsourced to poor women in India having babies for rich gay couples in Sydney. We may have outsourced our call centres, but let’s bring the baby-selling industry back onshore for goodness sake!

I suspect that when a child - in the abstract of course - is reduced to the same status as any other desirable commodity in a well-crafted, authentic life full of rich experiences, it (and it is ostensibly an “it” in a desacralised world at least until it is both born and wanted), has to compete with any number of other desirable object or experience for time and money and attention.

Eberstadt and Norrick make this pointed remark:

A worldwide change in mentality, and a revolution in attitudes about family and children, is seemingly revealed by these new birth trends. It would appear that tradition, duty, and sacrifice are exerting less of a call on our moderns than they did in the past, while the allure of convenience, autonomy, and self-actualization are increasingly affecting even family formation. Whatever else one can say about their many marvelous attractions, children are definitely not convenient.

Children are inconvenient. It’s obvious that they are when those are the metrics.

And, of course, having too many of them is no longer seen as virtuous on our apparently dying planet. Yet two decades after Al Gore’s overblown documentary An Inconvenient Truth, that scared the hell into everyone, there’s just as much chance we’re headed for a colder, emptier and older planet than anything else. That’s the inconvenient truth of 2026.

There’s more going on of course, but in a desacralised world it’s hard to see how we might turn the population decline around. Even if we thought we should.

And that’s central to the issue. If humans are no better or worse (though word on the well-heeled streets is that they are worse) than any other organism on the planet then what’s the fuss, really?

If we’re no different in essence, but merely degree, then who is to say a planet devoid of humans at all is a good thing or a bad thing?

Apart from God, that is.

The Quiet Revival data may be debunked, but there’s yet another article in the MSM exploring the return to church - in this case Roman Catholic churches in New York.

And once again, it’s Gen Z that is leading the charge. Once again, as all the data that cannot be debunked, and the anecdotal evidence from hundreds of churches, confirms.

The Wall Street Journal reports that churches in the Big Apple that were on the verge of closing are at standing room only. In that most hipster of locales, Greenwich Village, the WSJ describes the scene at St Joseph’s parish:

A recent 6 p.m. Sunday Mass felt like a sold-out event. Every inch of pew space was filled, mostly with young adults. Latecomers squeezed into makeshift rows of plastic folding chairs or stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the foyer, peering through glass doors. Others squatted on balcony steps or leaned against walls for the roughly 90-minute service. When Eucharistic ministers moved through aisles to distribute Communion, they had to tiptoe around knees and handbags.

Gee, the hippies who established the Village as a post-religious, spirituality only, haven, must be appalled. Whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?

And, as is well documented elsewhere, the return to faith among a younger cohort is sheeted home to various factors:

Worshipers and churches give a variety of reasons for the rise, from the social to the spiritual: Many young people began searching for community after the pandemic, while some parishes saw a surge after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, part of a wave of high-profile incidents of political violence nationwide.

I also noted that rise in attendance after Kirk’s murder. I was speaking at an apologetics conference on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast not at event preceded by the current headline act of online apologetic buffed manliness, Wes Huff.

The place was packed. And among the many turning up to hear him were unchurched - or long dechurched - young men whose online life that past month had taken in Huff going viral on Joe Rogan’s show, and then the Kirk murder.

The online world taketh, but it also giveth. And what it gave with those two events was some startling clarity about the nature of truth and how we arrive at it (that’s the Wes Huff part), and the nature of evil (sadly that’s Kirk’s murder).

For many hard progressive’s Kirk’s murder was an event worth celebrating, and they duly did online, gleefully and forcefully laughing about it. That was a turn on for a huge number of folk.

But seemingly a turn-off for even more. Want to see true evil? Watch the supposedly “love is love” crowd crow over someone’s bloody death because they disagreed with him. They’d likely crow over your death too. So much for the non-judgemental world that we’ll have experience when the Christian faith is excised from our lives.

Is it any wonder that with the churn and hatred in the world people are looking for any form of connection? For some that means run clubs (I approve, your Honour), and for many it means church.

Now let’s hold our horses a little, for as Tim Thorburn presciently writes in The Gospel Coalition Australia, being religious is not the same as being Christian. Being in relationship with Christ is not the same as attending a Mass, or for that matter, a Pentecostal or evangelical service.

The language used by the early Christians reflects this wonderful reality. It is the language of personal relationship, not religious language. It expresses the reality of being welcomed into God’s family by his remarkable mercy to us, not by any religious activities we perform. It reflects the truth of the Christian gospel. What we often classify as the spiritual realm has become for Christians a relational realm—we know God and are known by God. It is not a mysterious grasping for something spiritual.

I’ll grant that. But we have to start somewhere. And religious activities can cement home that reality. That’s what liturgy is designed to do. That’s why it was written. It was written for people such as I who struggle along with a mixture of doubts, fears and faith.

I for one don’t believe that we can ritualise ourselves in a new creation reality. But in a post-liturgical Protestant world that gave rise to the seeker-sensitive movement and the removal of all religious artefacts (and even the whiff of liturgy), I can’t say for certain that many long-term church attendees even understand the basics of the gospel. At that level they are on par with an eager Gen Z attending their first Mass.

Now I don’t want the return to church and the growth in run clubs to track in terms of their social and personal benefits. I want it to be that over time, people who turned up to church for less than noble reasons (there’s likely more than a handful reading this who have done the same), understand the gospel and are spiritually born again.

As I read the WSJ article I was looking for the signs that Tim is looking for, and within their secular framing of what is happening in places like New York, there are some encouragements:

St. Joe’s conversion class this year has ballooned to roughly three to four times its usual size. Some newcomers have “never opened a Bible, and know absolutely nothing,” said Rev. Boniface Endorf, a priest at St. Joe’s. The post-Mass young adult discussion group, once a gathering of about 25, now draws upward of 200. Church leaders are considering adding Mass times and an additional spring conversion class, something traditionally reserved for fall.

Now I am a reformed Protestant so I clearly have some (okay, more than some) problems with significant aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine, but there’s an assumption among well-churched Protestants that somehow young people should be able to discern the differences and choose wisely.

Really? You mean a generation whose parents, never mind themselves, grew up ignorant that there were two testament in the Bible never mind 66 books, or who have zero clue about one Bible story or reference, and were never taught it at school? You mean they should be switched onto this thing from get-go?

Among the added benefits for many of the mass of new Mass attendees, was the sheer horror of online and dive bar dating experiences, the deep loneliness in a supposedly inter-connected world, and the sheer horror of world events.

And the article throws a sop to us low-church folk too:

Taylor Donoghue, 25, grew up outside Philadelphia in a household that was, as she put it, “Christian, but didn’t really go to church.” She skipped services through four years of college. Then she moved to New York and started attending a nondenominational parish near Times Square—Fount Church—with friends.

“I’ve grown so much in my faith,” she said. “I don’t know if I didn’t move to New York City if I would’ve gotten such a calling.” Now Sunday is a ritual: dress up, meet friends at the 10 a.m. or noon service, sometimes get brunch after. “My wholesome Sundays,” she calls them, posting videos of her church outfits and routine to nearly a half-million TikTok followers.

So, not a word about Jesus in there, but hey, that’s the article right? Coulda been cut out. So let’s hold our fire, it could end up being friendly fire and people could get hurt. Take Gamaliel’s advice from the book of Acts and tread carefully. Let’s see where this thing goes.

And intriguing of course, that the focus is on the Big Apple. That’s the place you run to be secular, right? That’s the place where the prodigal ends up. Yet as Taylor Donoghue observes, it was in New York that things changed for her.

Of course Tim Keller’s Redeemer Church has been doing this for years. So there’s that.

Is it a revival? Well there are theological questions to ask. We want to see a bucket list about holiness and preaching etc. So maybe not.

But then again, why are we despising the day of small (and not theologically aligned) things? Sure there is ritual and patterns and deep meaning. But so many of the doomsday sayers were predicting religion - especially historically rooted dogmatic religion - to be done by now. Especially in the Big Apple. And especially among Gen Z.

Yet here we are. Perhaps when you’ve had to cross a New York street one too many times to avoid the baying crowd of anti-Semites with their faces masked and their loud-hailers screeching hate at Jewish restaurants, you might be forgiven for wondering why Christians were singled out in our progressive cities and universities as the bigoted, hate-filled zealots.

Will it last? Will it stick? Will religious zeal become love for Jesus? Perhaps just do a Gamaliel and wait and see.