Last week, I was stopped outside Waterloo station. A young Black kid, maybe about 19, was raising money to fight knife crime. I had to be at an appointment by a certain time, but as someone who takes a fair bit of interest in the dysfunctions of British life, and of London in particular, I felt I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't stop and listen. He showed me some info, told me he was hoping to help his younger brother get to university. I checked the QR code on his lanyard, and after confirming he was legit made a donation and went on my way.

Part of me wanted to linger and talk more. A glance through his pamphlets showed me what "fighting knife crime" apparently involved: skills development, mentorship, community engagement. "Empowerment" was emblazoned everywhere.

I had thoughts. Those three emphases all seemed like admirable but profoundly insufficient symptom relief rather than real treatments. If a charity is offering "skills development", I wonder why this isn't acquired in school. If it's offering "mentorship", I wonder where the fathers are. If it's offering "community engagement", I wonder why integration has failed.

I did not share my thoughts. This friendly, confident fundraiser had a donation target, and I doubted that even the most mutually illuminating conversation on the steps of Waterloo would do much to tackle those problems that no amount of schemes, fundraising, or youth initiatives can solve.

I've thought of that young man regularly since last week however, mainly due to the ongoing news and media brouhaha surrounding the Netflix drama Adolescence.

Many readers will be familiar and bored to tears with this topic already, but for those blessedly out of the loop: Adolescence is a fictional story about an unassuming 13 year old white boy who stabs a girl to death after being radicalised online by misogynistic, Andrew Tate-like content from the "manosphere."

The mainstream media and political elites have been falling over themselves to praise the series, so much so that Kemi Badenoch was shamed on LBC for not having watched it whilst the Prime Minister has lauded it publicly on multiple occasions, invited the writers to discuss the series' themes with him, and backed a plan to show it for free in schools across the country.

The whole thing has the air of a carefully planned marketing campaign. And this is precisely why many conservative folk are recoiling from the show's adulation. It's not that online misogyny and "Andrew Tate shite" aren't real problems—they are. It's that the huge amounts of time, energy, and money that our cultural and political gatekeepers have poured into promoting the series and creating a discourse around it is vastly disproportionate to the scale of those problems.

Misogynistic violence of the kind portrayed in Adolescence does happen—the story of Kyle Clifford is a grim example. But the idea that Britain needs to be having a moral panic over the possibility of skinny white 13 year olds going on misogynistic stabbing sprees, when we are currently living through the Pakistani rape gang scandal 2.0 and spiralling knife crime among Black youths is quite obviously risible.

It's not even that these other problems don't get turned into TV dramas. For instance, many of those crowing (justifiably) about Adolescence over the past few weeks seem to have overlooked the existence of 2017's Three Girls, which dramatised events surrounding the Rochdale rape gang long before Elon Musk took an interest. But no one in parliament took measures to ensure that Three Girls caused paroxysms of national anxiety or was made compulsory viewing for Year 8s.

I haven't watched Adolescence. I don't plan to. I probably wouldn't have anyway, but I've seen enough of the clunky dialogue to decide it's not worth my time (sorry LBC). One reason I feel it's not at all cynical to see the hype around the show as entirely astroturfed is that the key clips from it make it seem like a PSHE lesson trying (and failing, quite spectacularly) to disguise itself as a drama. This impression has been reinforced by Keir Starmer not once, but twice, referring to the program as a "documentary", despite having watched it himself. If I were a screenwriter whose drama made people feel like they’d watched a documentary, I'd rend my garments.

And yet, in the midst of the tiresome and predictable establishment encomium, Keir Starmer said something which I actually found quite surprising:

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After a long hiatus, this is a new entry in my ongoing "Raise Against the Machine" series, which focuses on parenting and family life in the technocratic age.

I've only ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four once. Perhaps that's enough. I recall C.S. Lewis' quip, when comparing the book to Animal Farm: "the shorter book seems to do all that the longer one does; and more."

That said, one scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four has been returning to my mind of late: the fate of Parsons.

Parsons is Winston's neighbour, and an ideal devotee of the Party: uncritical, timid, pliable enough to constantly bend himself and his family with great enthusiasm to the Party's ever changing whims. And yet Parsons comes a cropper. Winston finds him imprisoned in the Ministry of Truth in the final part of the novel—his own daughter, only seven years old, having dobbed him in after hearing him say "Down with Big Brother!" in his sleep.

Parsons is Orwell's illustration of one of the most basic elements of totalitarianism: undermining the family. The Party can only thrive and dominate in Orwell's dystopia because it creates a world in which children are inwardly prised away from their parents. Ironically, Parsons himself is the one who raised his daughter this way. "I don't bear her any grudge for it," he says of the betrayal. "In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway."

It clearly never crosses Parsons' daughter's mind that it will adversely affect her to lose her own father. And the true terror of Orwell's novel, of course, is that she may well love Big Brother so sincerely that it pains her not at all.

For the Party, all children must be fungible. "Fungible" has two meanings: either entirely interchangeable or entirely adaptable. It is the latter I have in mind here.

Nineteen Eighty-Four's children must be so utterly transferrable and flexible that it doesn't actually matter which adults they are with. It could be mother, father, teacher, nursery nurse, Party delegate, whoever. All are merely the avatars of Big Brother. He is the one who matters in the end. His is the firmest and most loving hand. If the Party can convince children (and parents) of this, then the hard work is already done. Why would it matter if your father were taken away when you still have Big Brother?

Insightful dystopian writers like Orwell are usually interested not in the future but the present. Often the only difference between their imagined worlds and our own is that the undesirable conditions in the fiction came about with just a sliver more intentionality and evil moustache-twirling than did the essentially identical conditions in ours.

Parents today are expected to raise fungible children. Our children must be easy to hand over to other caregivers, first at nursery and then in school. The former is supposedly good preparation for the latter, which in its turn is meant to be good preparation for university and finally "working life."

If either parents or children struggle with this arrangement for anything more than the first day or two, it is generally regarded by everyone else as a parental failure. The expectation is that children should easily adapt to being away from their parents, and indeed that it is a parental duty to prepare them thoroughly for this.

What's more, it is assumed that parents are desperate for this to happen and that, after a few "first day of school" sniffles, it will be of no odds to them that they have, supposedly of their own volition, been separated from their children. If they have reservations about this, they are given the side-eye. Many keep their doubts to themselves, and even then they self-rebuke. I think again of Parsons:

'Are you guilty?' said Winston.

'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man do you?' His froglike face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously.

The same thinking, sadly, is often at work in the church. The assumption runs rife that parents should be enthusiastic about removing their children from the church service (having been already largely separated from them during the week), and that they should be entirely comfortable with forcing a distressed child through creche or Sunday school. Later, the assumption often arises on both sides that parents do not need to take on discipling their children because it can be done by their youth leaders. If you have reservations about this system, your commitment to both your own and your children's spiritual health comes under suspicion.

As well as assuming that children should be fungible in the sense of being adaptable, this whole system assumes also that adults are fungible in the other sense: of being essentially interchangeable. The unique and indispensable role of parents (and within that the specific roles of mothers and fathers) is eclipsed. This adult fungibility, however, only goes so far. Many of the professional "caregivers" in the system in fact regard themselves as better suited to the task than parents and seek actively to drive a wedge between parents and children. Parents are a hindrance to the teacher's mission to increase the child's fungibility.

This desire for fungible children is often sold as merely "socialisation" or as "preparing them for the next stage". Certainly, children need to mix with others and parents need to prepare them to stand on their own two feet. But this is simply not the same as what we do with our children today, especially the very youngest. In fact, we often do the opposite. School and nursery often hinder socialisation, in part because they deprive children of the unique and richly textured relationships of family life, in favour of an arbitrary group of local children (with who knows what dysfunctions) who happened to be born in the same twelve month September-August period. Further, school and nursery often do not serve as a good preparation for future life, for reasons that are almost too numerous to mention.

An essential part of learning to raise against the Machine is to realise that children and their parents are not fungible in either sense of the word. The unique, God-given contours of each mother's affection, of each father's discipline, of each sibling's play, are as irreplicable as fingerprints. Certainly it takes a village to raise a child. But this is not the same thing as training our children to be endlessly adaptable to an ever-changing carousel of interchangeable adults and peers.

Although it is not as explicit as Parsons' loyalty to the party, our willingness to follow the script we are given in this area is the same phenomenon: a perverse willingness to have wedges driven between the members of our household in the name of something which we imagine precedes or supersedes the family. And when those gaps open up, the Machine fills them very, very swiftly.

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Spare a thought for anonymous right-wing users of X (formerly known as Twitter) over in the USA.

For the past decade, irreverent anonymous accounts, colloquially known as “anons” and sometimes acquiring millions of followers via their "poasting”, have injected huge amounts of energy into the MAGA movement. They operated anonymously because their ideas were unacceptable to the cultural consensus. Plenty of it was puerile and conspiratorial. Some of it was downright racist and neo-fascist. And it seems obvious that the long-term maintenance of a high-profile online anonymous persona is more often than not cancerous to the soil. Just this week, a popular anonymous Twitter “tradwife” known as @PatriarchyHannah, who claimed to be a mother of 14 and married to a man who built his own town, was revealed to be a divorced singleton who lives with her parents.

And yet more of the anons’ contributions than their critics like to admit were insightful and coherent. At their best, America’s right-wing anons embodied a well-deserved rejection of both the political establishment and the legacy media which refused to scrutinise them. Many attempt to write the anons’ work off as mere "shitposting" and "edgelording". But the history books will surely show that, like it or not, the Overton window of American politics was shifted in no small part by keyboard warriors with frogs in their profile pictures posting “spicy memes”. The anons themselves even like to imagine now that J.D. Vance, the first Millennial Vice-President, might have once lurked in their midst.

And yet, as Donald Trump has rained blow after blow on the decadent US establishment via his Executive Orders over the past month, one wonders if the American anons haven't shed the tears of Alexander the Great. For there are no more worlds left to conquer.

Although Trump, in a very real sense, remains "anti-establishment" despite being ensconced in the Oval Office, the fact is this: the anons won. Sooner or later MAGA will be the establishment—Lord willing, a better one than that which it replaced. But the point still stands. The transgressive frisson of being an American anon will surely dissipate soon enough, especially since some of the biggest anons, either of their own volition or through the efforts of left-wing journalists, have had their identities revealed and actually done pretty well out of it. Those who built their profiles critiquing "the Regime" (which deserved nearly every second of it, to be clear) are now finding themselves welcome in the corridors of power. It's to their credit that some are willing to walk the walk now, but one can't help but think of The Dark Knight: "you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

For conservatives in the UK, watching the US right-wing at the minute feels a bit like peeping over the wall from East Germany in the late 1980s. For all the faults of MAGAism (the sexual profligacy of some of its leaders, Trump’s support of IVF, the list goes on), we can't believe how good they've got it. We see Trump dismantling the trans lobby and forcefully deporting foreign criminals by the cartload; meanwhile, Wes Streeting drags his feet with piecemeal reforms to gender-affirming "care" and Yvette Cooper is pledging to replace all kitchen knives with wooden spoons, or something. This is, apparently, what it looks like to have the Grown Ups back in charge.

Many in the UK (including my fellow British evangelicals) lull themselves to sleep at night with the assurance that the UK has managed to avoid a "US-style culture war" in recent decades. This vanity, however, seems destined for the ever mounting bonfire of exhausted centrist bromides. For the time of the British right-wing anon is at hand.

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This is a preview of an article I have had published over at The Critic today (link to the full piece at the end). On Tuesday, after cross-posting my Spectator article, I did promise a full, regular New Albion piece this week. However, I was then asked to write this piece up and so will bring you fresh New Albion content next week. Thank you for your ongoing support of my work!

British free speech advocates feel they have something to shout about this week: Kristie Higgs, a Christian school worker, won her Court of Appeal battle against her former employer. Higgs was sacked for gross misconduct from her pastoral and administrative role after two 2018 Facebook posts. These were largely her reposting content which expressed traditional Christian views on sexuality in criticism of the pro-LGBT sex education at her son’s school.

Higgs’ employer argued that her posts were liable to damage their reputation. Judges disagreed, since Higgs “had not said anything of the kind at work or displayed any discriminatory attitudes in her treatment of pupils.” Her beliefs in the sex binary and heterosexual marriage were found to be protected under the Equality Act.

So far, so good. But examination of the small print suggests a pyrrhic free speech victory, especially for Christians

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This is a preview of my latest piece for The Spectator, which has been published today. Follow the link at the end to read the whole thing!

And you can except a regular post from me here at The New Albion from me later this week.

There are some counterintuitive differences between the US and the UK. One of them is this: home education has always been far easier in the UK, legally speaking, than across the Atlantic. But that is all about to change.

In states across the US, the right to home educate, and the attendant level of government oversight (e.g. registration, submitting planned curricula, proving progress etc.) has always varied wildly. But in the UK it has always been very simple: centuries of English common law mean that if a parent wishes to keep their child at home to be educated it is none of the government’s business.

This makes sense after even a moment’s consideration: British mass education is a Victorian social experiment. The Elementary Education Act of 1880 legislated that all children aged 5 and 10 must receive an education. But people have been having children for quite a bit longer than that, and no reform has removed the right to keep one’s children at home.

Indeed, the default status of any British child can be considered to be home education. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 states that the duty to ensure that eligible children are educated, ‘by regular attendance at school or otherwise’, lies with parents, not with the state. The state’s sole duty at this juncture is to provide schooling for those who wish to avail themselves of it or have no other choice.

Properly speaking then, sending one’s child to the local comprehensive is delegating one’s duty of education to the state. Section 437 of the Education Act allows local education authorities to intervene, but not at their whim; rather, only ‘if it appears… that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education’.

This is the legal reality. But in practice, most parents assume education is the duty of the state. Many local authorities, meanwhile, are staffed by zealous ideologues who see elective home education as enough reason in itself to judge that a child ‘appears’ to not be receiving a suitable education, and distress home-educating parents by insisting upon information and home visits to which the local authorities have no legal right.

Yet parents who do know their rights are making more use of them than ever. According to government statistics, the total number of UK children in elective home education as of December 2024 is 111,700, around 1.4 per cent, up from 92,000 just a year earlier and double the 2019 figure.

Why such growth?

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I try not to comment publicly on American politics. My focus here, at The New Albion, is Christian commentary for a changed Britain. As I noted when I launched this Substack back in 2023, there’s a lot of good conservative Christian commentary to be found from an American perspective these days, but I felt strongly there was something missing on this side of the Atlantic.

One of the chief problems on all sides in UK cultural and political discourse is that we are terminally America-brained, obsessed with its dramas as if they were our own. Of course, there will always be an extent to which America’s sneezes become the UK’s colds, and there’s plenty of cross-pollination worth discussing (my last two posts have focussed on Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, after all). But in general, we need to drill down into British specifics more than we do.

But, I’ll be honest, I have bent my rules slightly over the last couple of weeks since the inauguration of Donald Trump. The absolute legislative bonfire he has launched with his Executive Orders, ripping up four years of Joe Biden’s policies overnight, has been a political sight to behold, whatever you think of them.

And yesterday came one Executive Order which should be a source of unequivocal joy and hope to Christians across the Western world, including here in the UK.

Yesterday, Trump signed an Executive Order entitled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”. It is a major swipe, in the clearest possible language, and the unconscionable evil of subjecting children to so-called “gender transition,” cutting all federal funding for any such procedures. Lord willing, it is a signal of more to come.

After four years of gender-bending madness in the White House, and in every other seat of government in the Western world, this was breath taking. It’s not the end of course: a truly sane society would outlaw gender transition for adults, and embrace the obvious truth that “trans” people are either mentally ill, sexually perverted, or both. But, considering the past several years, this is quite a start.

This should give hope to people who want to oppose the trans agenda in the UK, which should include anyone who calls themselves a Christian.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We could undo this in four years. We really could.

For that to happen, there must be real political will from our leaders. Labour have made a few reluctant noises suggesting they want us to think they’re listening to concerns about this issue, for instance announcing an indefinite ban on puberty blockers (whilst calling for a clinical trial on a few lucky children!). But last week Keir Starmer was prominently photographed on Burns Night with a Drag Queen (a traditional auld feature of the celebrations?) at Downing Street, so colour me unconvinced.

But alongside the action and willpower of our leaders there must also be regular acts of dissent from normal people when the boot of the trans agenda attempts to stamp on their face.

And, with hope in the air across the Atlantic, I wanted to share one small act of dissent I made a couple of years ago in the hope that it may provide encouragement and something of a resource for others.

In late 2022, my wife and I were still weighing up whether we would be sending our oldest child, our daughter (now 6), to school. We have ended up home educating, but looked seriously at all the local primary schools.

Around this time, it came to our attention that one local school (generally regarded as the best of the local primaries, and attached to a relatively solid Church of England parish church) had a transgender teacher, a woman pretending to be a man.

After some thought, we agreed that there was no way on earth we could in good conscience send a five year old into a school that tolerated such absolute lunacy. And so, I wrote a letter to the head (and the vicar of the parish) explaining why this was the case.

My sense is that a great many parents, in their gut, feel the same as us, but either don’t know how to express this or accept that this is simply how things are and don’t want to kick up a fuss.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We know that now.

And so I have reproduced the outline of the letter I sent back in November 2022 in the hopes that it might be of use as a template of sorts to other parents. Please feel free to make use of it yourself, adapting it however you like, and sharing it with others.

I redrafted the letter a number of times before sending it, drawing on the advice of some wise counsellors. I attempted to strike a balance between clarity about the high stakes of the issue and generosity toward a headteacher who, unconscionable as her actions were, may well have been running scared and confused herself.

In the letter, I recommend Abigail Shrier’s excellent book Irreversible Damage, and enclosed a copy for the Head. Shrier was tweeting triumphantly about Trump’s Executive Order yesterday. Rightfully so.

The trans Emperor has no clothes, my friends. If enough of us start saying it, who knows where we could be in four years.

November 2022

Dear Mrs. _____,

As a local parent, with a daughter due to start Reception in September 2023, __________ is one of the schools my wife and I considered. It has had a long-standing reputation as one of the best schools in the area, both academically and pastorally.

However, my wife and I will now no longer be considering __________, because it has come to our attention that your new Year 1 teacher is a woman who identifies as transgender and therefore goes by male pronouns and under the title “Mr”. From my understanding, all children and parents have been led to believe that she is a man—which is not the case.

There are two reasons why this means we will not consider __________: a concern for truth and a concern for safety.

First, the concern for truth: your primary role as a school is to teach the children of the community. This, of course, means a basic commitment to truth, and a corresponding aversion to untruth. However, a school in which all staff, children, and parents treat a female as if they are male (and in which children too young to know better trust that, because adults whom they trust have told them so, that said person is male) is a school out of step with its commitment to the truth. I cannot in good conscience send my child to a school in which a fact as fundamental as the difference between men and women is ignored. It shatters any trust I have in your commitment to teach other empirical facts.

This member of staff of course has the right to employment—everyone does. But she does not have the right to request that the school, children, and parents refer to her as a man. I have no doubt that the teacher in question has experienced profound distress due to her condition, and I sincerely wish she could get the right kind of help. However, there is no reason at all that her preferences should result in all social conventions regarding language (i.e. use of pronouns and titles) to be changed within the school, or result in small, impressionable children being told something that simply isn’t true.

Second, a concern for safety: your decision to treat this teacher as a man rather than a woman also physically and emotionally endangers the children in your school—girls especially. This is not because I believe this teacher to necessarily be an active threat, but because by forcing impressionable young children to participate in the accommodation of a trans person’s social transition, you are exposing them to the dangerous and increasingly likely possibility that they may come to wrongly regard themselves as transgender as well.

The meteoric rise in cases of trans identification in the past decade has affected girls in a vastly disproportionate manner. The reasons for this are explored well in Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, which informs some of what I will say below, and a copy of which I have included with this letter out of a sincere desire for you to understand the import of what you are doing in your school.

Historically, gender dysphoria almost exclusively affected males. It occurred and persisted in early childhood, but in 70% of cases it would resolve at or after puberty. Before 2012, there was no scientific literature on gender dysphoria in girls aged 11-21—because it did not exist.

But in the UK, in the last decade, the percentage of children referred for gender transition treatment has increased 4000%. Now, the vast majority of people identifying themselves as gender dysphoric are girls—¾ in the UK. The condition comes on rapidly in adolescence. They have zero indicators of dysphoria in early childhood. It has a very high correlation with high-functioning autism. They largely identify as some other non-heterosexual sexual orientation prior to identifying as trans. It doesn’t occur in isolated individuals, like we would expect medical problems to, but occurs in a domino effect through friendship groups, where one identifies as trans and then swiftly others do too. Over 90% are white. The vast-majority come from what could comfortably be called middle or upper class backgrounds. Over 65% had spent increased time on social media before coming out as trans—the rest, presumably, were on it virtually all the time anyway.

This “rapid onset gender dysphoria” has now become what social scientists call a “social contagion”—a set of behaviours, emotions, or conditions which spread rapidly through social networks. The internet is now awash with the testimonies of “detransitioners”—young women who were unthinkingly ushered into transition, and are appalled that the parents, doctors, and teachers responsible for their care never simply said “no”. A prominent example would be Keira Bell, a young woman who has challenged the NHS’ Tavistock clinic in court. New data has shown that, in the past 2 years, around 15 children have been referred to Tavistock who are 5 or under—the same age as my daughter.

For these reasons, I could not send my child into a school where such a danger exists. If you want to consider further what I’ve said, I can thoroughly recommend the enclosed book. I sincerely hope that this letter, and the accompanying book, will prompt you to reconsider your approach. I would welcome any response you care to offer.

I have also sent a copy of this letter, along with an additional copy of Irreversible Damage, to Rev’d _____________ in his capacity as Chair of Governors, in the hope that it will be noted by the governors that these concerns have been raised by a member of the community.

Yours sincerely,

Rhys Laverty

The wrong people cared about Rotherham.

This is the sad reality. Five years ago, when COVID began, people were reminded of the true meaning of the word "apocalypse". It means not an ending, but an unveiling. And in January 2025, we are experiencing an apocalypse of the British state which has unveiled its frightening lack of capacity, willpower, and care.

This has been brought about by the bizarre explosion of the years-old Pakistani nationwide rape gang scandal into the national consciousness (for which, as Louise Perry notes, the name of just one town, “Rotherham” has become shorthand), alongside the trial of child-murdering Islamic terrorist Axel Rudakubana. Both stories are an indictment of the British state, under both Labour and the Tories, over decades. Ed West has suggested that the rape gangs story is "Britain's Chernobyl", a scandal revealing the hard truth that an ideology cannot, in the end, bend the world to its will. At Chernobyl, the ideology behind both the causes and the cover-up was communism. In Rotherham, Southport, and beyond, it's been multiculturalism (a certain version of it at least, anyway. The predictable response has of course been that "true multiculturalism has never been tried!").

The comparison is apt. Another strikes me, perhaps all the more illuminating since it comes from our own British past: the Suez Canal. If in 1956 the Suez Crisis was the internationally humiliating death-knell of the Britain of the imperial era, then Rotherham in 2025 may be the same for the Britain that replaced it. Suez revealed that an imperial Britain lacked the capacity to uphold the material conditions necessary to maintain an already illusory idea of itself. So too Rotherham (though there is no sign of Keir Starmer doing an Anthony Eden).

The Suez-like nature of the scandal partly explains how it happened and why it is still being wilfully obfuscated by so many. Those who have wed themselves to a narrative in which post-WW2 Britain has been on a steady trajectory to harmonious multicultural bliss (with the main obstacle to this being the intransigent racism of the white British majority) have turned a blind eye to the rape gangs for twenty years or more, and are now continuing to do so. Adherents to this narrative, whether they are part of the state or the media or just your average citizen, frame themselves as the Heroes, those on the Right Side of History. They are the Ones Who Care.

Were they not, their world would unravel.

And that's why they're so rattled. Because the wrong people cared. And chief among them is Elon Musk.

The timeline of how Musk picked up on the rape gang story is slightly convoluted, but worth straightening out I think.

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Back in November, I had the pleasure of presenting my first ever academic paper at the C.S. Lewis Institute of Northern Ireland’s symposium on “Lewis and Last Things.” It was held at Union Theological College, and was a great day of lectures and discussion on Lewis’ thoughts on “last things”—eschatology, heaven, death, and more.

My paper was entitled “On Being Engulfed: Sensory Pleasure and the Eschaton in Perelandra and ‘Transposition’”, and the recording is now available on YouTube!

The paper picked up a line of thinking I wanted to develop whilst I wrote my chapter on Perelandra for my recently edited book Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy.

The paper brings together Perelandra, set on a planet which has never experienced the Fall, with Lewis’ little-known sermon “Transposition” (available in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses). I make the argument that the latter serves as an interpretative key for the former, and that together the two serve as Lewis’ apologia for the compatibility of two Christian eschatological doctrines that can seem hard to reconcile: the Beatific Vision and the bodily resurrection.

An extract:

What continuity can there be between natural things and spiritual things? Why would supposedly spiritual things manifest to us via means of the natural?

The answer lies in what Lewis calls “Transposition”. This, for Lewis, is a movement between two mediums, one higher and one lower. Stepping away from the relation of natural to spiritual, he considers the relation of sensual to emotional. Why can emotional experiences as disparate as falling in love, being unwell, and enjoying the sound of wind music produce exactly the same sensual experience in the pit of one’s stomach? This, says Lewis, is because our emotional life is “higher” than the life of our sensations—“not, of course, morally higher, but richer, more varied, more subtle.” The lower medium has fewer tools at its disposal than the higher, and so when it is called on to express the higher medium, it must make use of the same things twice. Lewis gives the examples of an alphabet with many letters translating into one with relatively few, or a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra. I can’t help but think of it like the BBC props department, which does the best with what it has.

I hope you enjoy! And, Lord willing, my paper and others from the symposium may be available in print some time in the near future.

In case you missed it, last week Joe Rogan (biggest podcaster in the world, kingmaker who arguably nudged Donald Trump to victory) had one of his signature 3 hour rolling conversations with Wesley Huff, a Canadian New Testament scholar and evangelical Christian apologist. It gained a lot of traction on evangelical Twitter, and it was actually quite wonderful to see all the tribe’s factions uniting for once to roundly praise Huff's performance. You can watch the whole thing here:

I said to my brother, a long-time Rogan fan and not himself a Christian (though he is now a reader of this Substack—alright bruv), that Huff is probably the person most like me that you'll ever get on the Joe Rogan Experience: an unashamed but chilled out evangelical, riffing on C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, very into ancient civilisational weirdness, and who has apparently rewatched the cult documentary Wild, Wild Country an unhealthy number of times. A notable difference is that Huff is absolutely jacked (probably another reason he vibed with Rogan). I, alas, am not.

Many are taking Huff's interview, and Rogan's sincere openness to his perspective, as the latest sign of a “vibe shift” in attitudes toward religion among many intellectuals and cultural influencers. I touched on this recently when writing about re-enchantment and Rod Dreher’s recent book Living in Wonder:

Rod’s overall thesis is one that I agree with: that disenchantment (if it’s even really possible) is unsustainable because it is spiritually exhausting for both individuals and societies, and so after a century of trying it out people are now looking for re-enchantment.

Rod’s not the only one banging this drum, as followers of The Discourse will know. In his corner too you’ll find Justin Brierly’s Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God and his Daily Wire Bible series, and a steady stream of high-profile conversions among public intellectuals and celebrities, to take just a few examples.

It’s Kind Of A Big Deal that the most popular podcaster in the world exposed over 4 million people to an extended conversation about the historical reliability of the Bible last week. That wouldn’t have happened 15 years ago.

But Rogan’s place in the vibe shift is different, it seems to me, to a lot of the other big players involved in it, especially those in the “re-enchantment” ballpark (e.g. Peterson, Tom Holland, Paul Kingsnorth).

To understand the difference, it would actually be helpful to think about one of those players: Iain McGilchrist.

Something of a polymath, McGilchrist brings together skills in psychiatry, neuroscience, and literary criticism. In 2009, he published The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In 2021, he released a follow up, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, a 1,579 page tome costing £80 when it was first printed by an obscure publisher and which was a pain in the arse to get a hold of for a good while.

McGilchrist's big idea is a development of the familiar "right v. left brain" dichotomy. The left hemisphere of the brain is typically associated with logic, sequencing, linear thinking, facts, maths; the right with imagination, big picture thinking, intuition, artistry, creativity. We might typically call a computer science nerd left-brained, a fine art student right-brained.

McGilchrist rubbishes a lot of the oversimplified pop psychology versions of right v. left brain thinking. The distinction, he says, is less to do with two different ways of the brain working than it is to do with two different ways of seeing. Dan Hitchens summarises it well in an excellent overview of McGilchrist's work in First Things:

Properly understood, the difference between right and left has more to do with two ways of seeing. It’s the difference between explaining the joke and getting it.

…

And yes—to deal with a final pedantic objection—both hemispheres are involved in everything. But McGilchrist presents a mountain of evidence that the left hemisphere is most skilled at mapping and manipulating things, at “building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick.” The right hemisphere experiences the world more fully: It can recognize a face, tell when someone is lying, pick up new skills or absorb new experiences, discern the moral of a story, rest in ambiguity and mystery, maintain a sense of self. The left hemisphere narrows its attention to an intense focus on what can be divided, categorized, and put to use. The right sees the context, the bigger picture.

McGilchrist takes this psychological insight and applies it at the cultural level: the rationalistic post-Enlightenment West has become a left brained society, semi-lobotomising itself by shutting of its right hemisphere. And it has suffered on a grand scale in all the ways that you would imagine if the same thing happened to an individual. In the metaphor of his first book, the left hemisphere is ultimately meant to be the servant and emissary of the right. But over the past few centuries, the servant has killed the master and gleefully skipped off into the resulting anarchy.

The "religious turn" we've seen of late—the rise of Jordan Peterson, a renewed appreciation for Christianity's cultural influence, high profile conversions—are generally seen as a reclamation of the right hemisphere (or rather, of the right hemisphere, master that he is, reclaiming us). We have been starved of meaning and narrative under secularism, and are hungering once again for something more.

And so, given that that's what's selling, one might expect the biggest podcaster in the world right now to be among the born-again right-brainers.

But it dawned on me whilst watching the Wesley Huff interview that Joe Rogan is a thoroughly left-brained guy.

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Tonight, I’ll be joining Josh Herring, host of The Optimistic Curmudgeon podcast, for a livestream to talk about my recently edited book Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, published with Davenant Press.

We’ll talk about the book as a whole, why I feel it’s so important that Christians reclaim the Ransom Trilogy right now to live well in the modern world, and my essay in particular which is all about what we can learn from how Lewis portrays sensory pleasure in Perelandra.

You should join us!

The livestream will air at 8pm UK time/3pm US Eastern time tonight (Thursday, 9th January, 2025), via YouTube.

Pop a reminder in your calendar, and hopefully I’ll see you there!

Watch livestream

2024 was the year I got back into novels.

Ever since graduating a decade ago last summer (and despite the fact I did so with an English degree) I’ve never been in the habit of regular novel reading. Unlike a lot of people, my degree didn’t put me off novels—in fact a number that I read and studied closely in my final year (The Quiet American by Graham Greene, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood) remain real favourites. Even the novel I wrote my dissertation on remains my all-time favourite, as it was beforehand: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (on whom more later). I think that, rather, post-university, I got seriously into non-fiction reading in my early-to-mid twenties (something I’d never done as a teenager) and then very much into poetry in my late twenties and early thirties.

But last year I decided it was time to get back to it.

This was helped partly by the necessities of my schedule. Flexing my work around other commitments, I tend to work very long days and into the evenings on Mondays and Tuesdays, and need an extended screen-free time to purge all the blue light from my system before bed. And so Monday and Tuesday became bath nights, and bath time became reading time. This was actually the resurrection of an old habit from the heady days of the first COVID lockdown, when I was stuck at home all day with an 18 month old whilst my wife lay bed-bound for 3 weeks suffering hyperemesis whilst pregnant with our second child. In order to firmly draw a line under days which all blurred into one, I obsessively bathed by candlelight every evening just to have a clear marker that there was evening and there was morning. I read and reread a lot of T.S. Eliot. It was a strange time in my life.

And so here are the thirteen novels I read in 2024, with some reflections on each, and a glimpse of my first novel of 2025.

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NOTE: regular readers will note that I have been absent since October. Once again, a combination of constant family illnesses and other commitments drastically squeezed my writing time over the past couple of months.

My writing remains something that fits around these other commitments, but I am incredibly grateful for your patience and continued support of The New Albion as I try to build it up to a point where I can afford to spend more time on writing. I anticipate a return to regular posting in the New Year!

Film fans everywhere got a surprise gift over Christmas: the announcement of Christopher Nolan’s next film project, an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey.

Surveying reactions online, it seems there’s no small amount of surprise at this. Certainly there’s a fittingness in possibly the twentieth century’s greatest director taking on one of history’s greatest works of literature. If anyone is up to it in terms of sheer filmmaking chops it’s surely Nolan. But surprise persists, for a couple of reasons.

First, despite being the preeminent bankable begetter of blockbusters, Nolan is a textbook auteur, famously uncompromising in all his projects. It therefore seems odd to some that he would take on a text as well-known as the Odyssey. However, I think this side of Nolan is slightly over egged. Despite the originality of high-concept films like Memento, Inception, and Tenet, let’s not forget that Nolan was catapulted to mega-stardom by three movies about Batman, one of the most famous bits of intellectual property in the world; that Oppenheimer is explicitly based on a 2005 biography; and that The Prestige adapted Robert Priest’s novel of the same name. Nolan, then, is no stranger to working with pre-existing material.

The bigger surprise though, after a little reflection, is that Nolan has never yet really tackled anything resembling fantasy. The Homeric world of gods, goddesses, nymphs, and sirens seems somewhat off-piste for him. To take one example from a Christian film critic:

Regular readers will know that I am a Nolan fan. A few years back, I wrote a kind of overview of his work for Mere Orthodoxy, arguing (with some help from T.S. Eliot) that Nolan’s frequent obsession with time is a synecdoche for a broader concern: creaturely limits, and the struggle to overcome them.

A snippet:

Like Eliot, Nolan uses time as a shorthand for the broad struggle against creatureliness – a struggle which unites many of his protagonists.

This, I would argue, is where we find the depths in Nolan’s cinematic trickery: his directorial battle against time is the means by which he explores his characters’ struggles against creatureliness in its variegated forms. Some are crushed by the struggle. Others embrace it, with the resignation of the unconverted Eliot at the start of “Ash Wednesday”. More latterly, some have (allegedly) overcome it.

I wrote this in 2020, just after Tenet came out. When Oppenheimer took the world by storm in 2023, I felt my theory held up, and wrote about it here at The New Albion:

Oppenheimer, we might say, is all “Waste Land” and no “Ash Wednesday”—all materiality and no transcendence, all rose and no fire. One of the greatest minds of the twentieth century boiled reality down to its defiant paradoxes, and with no way of putting it all back together again unleashed hell on earth for over 200,000 civilians. And why not? Those civilians were mostly empty space, anyway.

The most representative line for Nolan’s view of reality across the whole of his corpus is, I think, from The Prestige, when we’re told by a magician that, really, the world is “simple and miserable, solid all the way through.” Yet by the time the credits rolled on Oppenheimer, I detected in Nolan a newfound dissatisfaction with this assessment:

I was pleasantly surprised by Oppenehimer (as I took it) presenting the shortcomings of an intense materialism. Arguably Nolan’s most repellent trait is the technocratic streak he has developed over the last decade: his characters overcome inherent creaturely limits through technology (Interstellar being the clearest example). But Oppenheimer shows us the dead end of the atomised technocracy: if we reduce men to atoms, what prevents us from reducing them to ash?

And now, here we are at the outset of 2025 with Nolan set to make his first foray into the fantastical. It’s possible that he may give us an adaptation drained of the supernatural, where the gods are illusions and monsters are phantasms of the id, but a fairly reliable source of movie news leaks on Twitter tells us that Nolan intends to keep the fantastical elements. And, to be honest, I find it hard to imagine he’d do otherwise.

If the wildly speculative narrative I have projected onto Nolan’s filmography is correct then, adapting the Odyssey makes total sense for Nolan. Quite possibly, we are witnessing an arch-technocratic-materialist finally having his head turned by a whiff of the heady incense of the supernatural.

This would all track very nicely with the widespread turn toward “enchantment” what we have seen of late. For those of us who labour in the mines of The Discourse, talk about modern disenchantment and re-enchantment is almost old hat at this point. Max Weber, borrowing from Friedrich Schiller, coined the term “disenchantment” a century ago to describe the effect of modernity upon the Western world as it lost its sense of the divine. Charles Taylor’s 2007 book A Secular Age gave the idea a newfound popularity, and it has been nearly ubiquitous among the Anglophone intelligentsia (especially of the religious and conservative variety) for the past decade and a half. Often, Roman Catholics try to pin the blame for disenchantment on the Reformation (Brad Gregory’s 2012 book The Unintended Reformation is the chief culprit here). As an aside, my main employer, The Davenant Institute, has done a lot to refute this incredibly shaky bit of anti-Protestant polemics (see this piece from my former colleague Onsi Kamel, for example).

Although Very Online Christian nerds like me may feel the disenchantment/enchantment question has been done to death at this point, the Trickle Down Effect is real. In my experience, it takes a decade or so for ideas to move “down a rung” on the intellectual ladder. For example, the Incredibly Evil queer theorist Judith Butler wrote her seminal tome Gender Trouble in 1990; in the early 2000s, her ideas were the stuff of postgraduate seminars; when I started my English degree in 2011 they permeated the undergrad curriculum; and now in 2025 even your nan might know what “genderqueer” and “polycule” mean.

Much the same seems to have happened with the idea of enchantment. Case in point, one of the big books of 2024 was Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (note the Charles Taylor nod in the subtitle). Rod (who I will disclose is something of a friend, and who allowed me to see a draft of his book when I interviewed him a while back) has been saying for years that the categories of enchantment and disenchantment were going to go mainstream. And, with his characteristic canary in the cultural coalmine knack, he was right. Rod is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, and so as a Reformed Protestant I’m not on board with all of his recommendations for “re-enchanting” one’s life, nor his analysis of how disenchantment happened (which pins a lot of blame on the Reformation, as mentioned earlier). However, Rod’s overall thesis is one that I agree with: that disenchantment (if it’s even really possible) is unsustainable because it is spiritually exhausting for both individuals and societies, and so after a century of trying it out people are now looking for re-enchantment.

Rod’s not the only one banging this drum, as followers of The Discourse will know. In his corner too you’ll find Justin Brierly’s Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God and his Daily Wire Bible series, and a steady stream of high-profile conversions among public intellectuals and celebrities, to take just a few examples.

A fantastical Christopher Nolan Odyssey, then, could be yet another sign of the turn toward re-enchantment. Not because it is fantasy per se (we can’t get enough of that in our culture), but because it’s Nolan of all people—a huge director whose past work was solidly materialist and technocratic.

Who knows though. This would be a very neat bit of narrative making. I am very cautious about pushing things into the “re-enchantment” narrative. For one thing, this may be an instance of something that Rod Dreher warns about frequently: a turn to bad kinds of enchantment. Re-enchantment sadly doesn’t simply mean people returning to Christianity, but in many instances to paganism in various forms. I don’t want to pick on Nolan for the movie he’s not making, but conservative Christian film fans often justifiably ask these days why we aren’t seeing more adaptations of stories from the heights of Christendom, or of biblical stories. We could have had Nolan’s Elijah or Nolan’s Charlemagne, but alas, few filmmakers seem interested in taking pre-disenchantment Christian stories on their own terms (though Robert Eggers, who has just finished his script for his long-planned medieval epic The Knight may prove to be up to the task). If Nolan’s Odyssey does fit into the re-enchantment narrative, it may be on the side that is more interested in what we could informally call “bad juju” than in real spiritual transcendence. And of course, there’s the point to be made that, from the Christian perspective, Greek mythology is not really transcendent anyway, since its gods are no gods at all. They are dead idols, and their stories are so often simply the projections of human foibles onto the divine.

Another possibility is that Nolan’s Odyssey continues to play into his big theme of creaturely constraints. This would of course chime incredibly well with Greek mythology, in which man’s hubris is ever his downfall against the gods. I noted in my Mere Orthodoxy piece that the protagonists in the first half of Nolan’s career are generally crushed by their attempts to transcend their creatureliness; more latterly however, they’ve been able to overcome them via technology (though Oppenheimer, remember, is likened to Prometheus who, though he wins a technological victory over the gods is doomed to pay its price forevermore). Odysseus would surely be in the former category of Nolan heroes—no matter how hard he tries, “the man of twists and turns” is “driven time and again off course”. It is the clemency of the gods, not the wiles of man, that finally sees him home.

Odysseus’ struggle is, in its Nolanesque way, one against time: twenty years he spends away from Ithaca, ten at Troy and ten at sea. The Odyssey, famously, is a non-linear narrative, one of Nolan’s favourite tricks, and it’s easy to imagine him having a lot of fun with this, juxtaposing the younger Odysseus with the older as he tries and fails to get home. Talking like this, one can see a likeness between Odysseus and Matthew McConaughey’s Coop in Interstellar. In fact, consider Robert Fagles’ translation of the opening of the Odyssey with Coop in mind:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.

Of course, there’s yet another possibility: that Nolan rewrites the story, with Odysseus becoming like one of his more recent protagonists and overcoming his creaturely limits. In Interstellar, man raises himself from the dust and evolves into a five-dimensional being; in Tenet time itself is conquered; in Oppenheimer the atom is split. Perhaps Nolan’s Odysseus will have one more twist and turn than Homer’s and pull himself to Ithaca by his own bootstraps, Zeus and Poseidon be damned.

Or all this could be wildly off base, and we could get something else entirely. These are just (what I hope are) some informed speculations. Whatever we get, it will without doubt be worth the watch and, I am convinced, culturally important. I mean come on: it’s Christopher flipping Nolan. And sorry, I really should be saying Sir Christopher Nolan now.

This week, I’ve not been able to get together a fresh piece, and so I instead offer a round-up of some other things I’ve been up to over the last few months that I’ve not shared here.

Hopefully, if you’ve enjoyed my output here at The New Albion, these other bits and pieces will tide you over until my next proper post.

“The strange paradox of Britain’s treatment of miscarriages” in The Spectator

I was very glad to have this piece published in The Spectator this week. I point out the absurdity of the government’s new “baby loss certificate” scheme when it’s considered alongside the UK’s current abortion legislation, and argue that it would be a surprising European move to drastically slash British abortion limits.

“Stars” in Ad Fontes

A poem I had published some months ago in Ad Fontes is now out from behind the paywall.

Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy

My main job is working for the Davenant Institute, and we recently opened preorders for a book I have edited—one I am incredibly excited about. Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy brings together renowned Lewis scholars and members of Davenant’s network to raise the profile of Lewis’ neglected science fiction trilogy and show how it applies just as profoundly to the Christian life as his other works.

I have an essay in there, and have also written the introduction. You can pre-order it now—publication date is 14th November!

Advent Homilies

We have also opened pre-orders over at Davenant for Advent Homilies, for which I am co-editor. This is a collection of 17 sermons preached by St. Augustine during the Advent season. If you’re looking for a fresh Advent devotional for this year, you won’t do much better than this!

“The British Holocaust cover-up that wasn’t” in The Critic

Back in June, I had the chance to write about something a bit different to my usual fare. One side of my family hails from Alderney, one of the British Channel Islands, a place very dear to me. During WW2, Alderney was evacuated before being occupied by the Nazis and turned into an island of prison camps. After many years of speculation, a report has finally laid to rest speculation about the extent of the camps. I wrote about what the report’s conclusions mean for the island and conspiratorial armchair historians.

Parenting and marriage at Spectator Life

In another few departures from my usual fare, I’ve really enjoyed contributing some pieces to the Life section of The Spectator recently. Pieces published over the last few months:

• “I have three kids. Is that really so shocking?”

• “Parents, trust me, your kids are better off without television”

• “I’m accidentally dating my wife”

Tory MP Kit Malthouse drew some flack from social conservatives last week. He posted what some regarded as a rather sloppy and sentimental tweet in support of Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalise assisted suicide:

Leadbeater’s bill has put assisted suicide back in the UK headlines. We now have to call it “assisted dying” though. (The last result for “assisted suicide” on the BBC website, if you search for it, was 2019—the Before Times). These things are always a war of words. Pro-choice, equal marriage, gender-affirming care—all terms which could have been cooked up by the nefarious dissemblers of That Hideous Strength’s NICE. Linguistic sleights of hand designed to predispose you away from reality.

The Prime Minister has promised a free vote on the issue, possibly before Christmas, allowing MPs to vote with their conscience. This was not mentioned in Labour’s manifesto at the general election we held just three months ago, but Sir Keir made a promise about it to a celebrity, which is apparently much the same thing. 

Malthouse rankled conservatives (though probably not many Conservatives) by talking about “love”. Such a thing seems unpolitical. Better to talk about Reason and Evidence, say those opposed to euthanasia. And, make no mistake, Reason and Evidence certainly should lead any sensible person to recoil at the very prospect of legalising the practice. Reason will tell you that a society cannot coherently endorse both state-sponsored suicide and suicide prevention charities; Evidence will tell you that we will end up with ever-widening euthanasia criteria just the same as Canada and end up killing the depressed and the homeless. 

Love, then, can seem like the problem with our creep toward euthanasia. If only we could get Love, the great muddier of the waters, out of politics we could make some sensible legislation.

However, despite being a cantankerous reactionary by nature, I will go out to bat for Malthouse here, if not for his conclusions. But he is right on this much: law and love belong together. 

Few people have expressed this better than W.H. Auden in his poem “Law, Like Love”. The poem is animated by one question: what is law? The first stanza:

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

This describes what we would usually call “the law of nature”. But there are different kinds of law, of course. The poem works through a number of these—customary, divine, civil etc. He soon seems to despair of any unifying answer to the question, teetering on the edge of anarchy in the absence of an answer.

Then, he advances, haltingly, a definition:

Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

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O here it is!
And there it is!
And no-one knows whose share it is
Nor dares to stake a claim;
But we have seen it in the air
A fairy — like a William pear
With but itself to blame.
A thug it is!
And smug it is!
And like a floating pug it is!
Above the orchard trees
It has no right — no right at all
To soar above the orchard wall
With chilblains on its knees!

This is a favourite poem in our house right now. Specifically, my wife’s favourite. We try to read some poetry aloud most days at the family dinner table. As far as we can tell, this little ditty is anonymous. We found it in an anthology of similar poems we picked up second-hand somewhere—that is, nonsense poems.

We’ve grown to love nonsense poetry in our house. Lewis Caroll, Ogden Nash, and plenty of Edward Lear. Nonsense is a wonderful place to introduce poetry to children; not because it is silly, but because good nonsense poetry is about sheer joy in language, in the words themselves, their jump and jangle. This is true of all poetry of course—poetry is language under pressure. But it is particularly true of nonsense poetry. A poorly chosen phrase can make a poem fall flat, but if it’s a nonsense poem it falls even flatter. Lewis Caroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” shouldn’t work, and yet it does, because Carroll brings all these absurd, dissonant words into an accord that, somehow, he discerned in the ether. 

I will confess that, sometimes (and only sometimes, and only very, very briefly) in our snatches of after dinner nonsense, I feel like one of Plato’s imagined philosopher-kings. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher-kings are afforded leisure—scholē in the Greek, the root for “school” and “scholar”, if you can believe it. Leisure isn’t idleness. Rather, it’s the time and space to contemplate, to develop wisdom, and to consider things in themselves. Leisure is a date with Reality, a chance to be romanced by Lady Wisdom.

In fact, more than feeling like a philosopher-king, I feel… Bombadilish.

Tom Bombadil, the most mysterious of J.R.R Tolkien’s creations, comes lolloping into The Fellowship of the Ring singing nonsense:

“Suddenly he stopped. There was an answer, or so he thought; but it seemed to come from behind him, away down the path further back in the Forest. He turned round and listened, and soon there could be no doubt: someone was singing; a deep glad voice was singing carelessly and happily, but it was singing nonsense:

Hey dol! Merry dol! Ring a dong dillo!
Ring a rong! Hop along! Fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!

— from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien

There are always so many questions about Tom Bombadil, for both fairweather fans and hardcore Tolkien nerds. Is he an angelic Maia? An unfallen man? A symbol of nature? Eru Ilúvatar himself? I’m not going over that old ground today. With impeccable timing, David Rowe noted on Twitter this week that people are so often looking “through” Tom Bombadil to find out what he “really” is or what he represents, rather than simply looking “at” him and remembering that he is simply Tom Bombadil. It’s as his wife Goldberry says when Frodo asks: “He is”.

I’ll indulge one question today though: why does Tom Bombadil sing nonsense?

I asked this to myself whilst my wife and I were hate-watching Amazon’s Rings of Power last week. I truly tried to keep an open mind about Rings of Power when it first broadcast last year. Sadly, my Hyde-like cynicism was vindicated over my Jekyllish suspension of judgement. It was as bad as I imagined and worse (though I do seem to end up occasionally defending bits of it against my wife, who is even more incensed by it than I am).

Returning for the show’s second season, which is currently broadcasting, I tried to hold out hope for one aspect: the appearance of Tom Bombadil, played by Rory Kinnear. I was surprised by the casting—in my imagination, Bombadil looks a touch older and more rotund. But, Kinnear is a top-tier British Shakespearen actor, so I hoped for the best. 

Unfortunately, Hyde won again. The writers could have not given us a more poorly understood version of Bombadil if they had tried.

The most striking thing about Bombadil in Fellowship is his indifference to both the Ring and the fellowship’s quest to destroy it. When he encounters the hobbits, he tosses the Ring in the air without a thought, peers through it, laughs, and is immune to its power of invisibility. When it’s suggested by Elrond that he should have been invited to the Council, Gandalf gruffly states that he would not have come, and that even if he were to take the Ring at the behest of all the free people of Middle Earth he would not see the need to destroy it. He would either forget it or throw it away.

The Bombadil of the Rings of Power, however, seems full of earnest concern for the events transpiring in the outside world. Speaking of the series’ mysterious Dark Wizard, he talks of how the Wizard will combine with Sauron and “there will be no end to burnin’ till all Middle-earth is ashes.” True, Bombadil then declines to get directly involved, saying he will instead gather lilies, but he then rather grandly tells the Stranger (widely assumed to be a younger, yet-to-be-named Gandalf) that it is his task to stop the forces of evil.

This is a very hard portrayal of Bombadil to swallow. If Tom cared not a jot for the One Ring when he held it in his very hand, it is hard to imagine him furrowing his brow over the wranglings of wizards centuries earlier.

Now, there may be a nerdy argument to be made in defence of this portrayal. We know Tolkien’s Bombadil wandered Middle Earth for a long time, seeing a great deal along the way, and being spotted enough to enter the tales of both Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Hobbits. Perhaps Rings of Power could claim to be giving us an earlier Bombadil, more concerned with world affairs before he confined himself to his modest domain just east of the Shire. 

But I just don’t buy it. Most likely, Amazon wanted to cram in as many known Tolkien characters as they could to market the series, and had to find a way to make Bombadil useful.

Returning to our question: it was in the midst of grouchily hate-watching all this with my wife last week that I asked myself “why does Bombadil sing nonsense?” Rory Kinnear’s Bombadil was certainly muttering nonsense songs to himself, but it was hardly the “deep and glad voice” bellowing out “hey dol, merry dol!” that Tolkien writes of. 

Despite all the ambiguities about what he is, Tolkien does actually say a fair bit about Bombadil’s function. One example: 

But Tom Bombadil is just as he is. Just an odd ‘fact’ of that world. He won’t be explained, because as long as you are (as in this tale you are meant to be) concentrated on the Ring, he is inexplicable. But he’s there – a reminder of the truth (as I see it) that the world is so large and manifold that if you take one facet and fix your mind and heart on it, there is always something that does not come in to that story/argument/approach, and seems to belong to a larger story. But of course in another way, not that of pure story-making, Bombadil is a deliberate contrast to the Elves who are artists. But B. does not want to make, alter, devise, or control anything: just to observe and take joy in contemplating the things that are not himself. The spirit of the [this earth] made aware of itself. He is more like science (utterly free from technological blemish) and history than art. He represents the complete fearlessness of that spirit when we can catch a little of it. (emphasis mine)

“Just to observe and take joy in contemplating the things that are not himself.” Bombadil revels. He is the philosopher-king of the Withywindle, growing in wisdom as he knows each tree and acorn and loving that wisdom as he goes. 

And this is why I think it makes sense that Bombadil sings nonsense. Good nonsense poems are sheer love of words and how they sound together, regardless of what they’re about. It requires a loss of self-consciousness—otherwise, you feel too silly reciting it. But if you can take your eyes off yourself, and simply love the words—just like Bombadil’s eyes are off of himself and on each nook and cranny of his corner of the Old Forest—then there are few things more joyful than rattling off “The Owl and the Pussycat.”

And this is why Bombadil is so uninterested in the great sagas of Middle Earth that the rest of us find so absorbing. He is utterly ahistorical. Toward the end of Return of the King, after all the world-shattering heroics of the trilogy, Gandalf comments that Bombadil is “not much interested in anything that we have done and seen.” Harold Macmillan supposedly once said that “events, dear boy, events!” are what knock a government off course, a line often applied to the unpredictability and excitement of history in general. Events are precisely what Bombadil is not interested in. For him it is not events, but “things, dear boy, things!”

With all this in mind, I have wondered if there is any more significance to Rings of Power’s portrayal of Bombadil than just an Amazon cash-in. The fact is that a true portrayal of Bombadil would be utterly uninteresting on screen not only because he wouldn’t advance the narrative, but because his nature is arguably more incomprehensible to us now than it has ever been. 

To simply delight in a thing in itself is only possible when that thing is received as a gift. And in the secular frame, nothing is a gift, because there is no divine Giver. Indeed, there really are no things—just the indifferent leftovers of matter being pushed around the plate of the universe. And so things must be given significance by being pressed into some narrative, which itself has been dreamt up and forced upon reality by a world grieving the death of God and the loss of the Christian story. I remember a friend of mine, a Christian who teaches in a secular university, telling me how, tongue-in-cheek, he once encouraged a professing hardcore Communist undergraduate student to walk the walk instead of just talking the talk. He asked the student, “If Jesus isn’t coming, and you’ve got to build heaven on earth, then what are you waiting for?” 

The Christian can rest assured that, ultimately, the Author of reality will conclude his story, and so can rest easy in Bombadilish joy and contemplation of things themselves. But the secularist cannot do so for long without getting itchy feet. For them, the Story won’t write itself. It is a profound irony that materialism leads to the inability to truly enjoy Things.

This then, I think, is why Rings of Power’s Bombadil has been swiftly frogmarched into something so tedious as a plot. As the self-elected Authors of the story of reality, it would irk us to encounter a true Bombadil, to encounter someone utterly uninterested in our great quests and cataclysmic deeds. 

Occasionally, we do encounter Bombadils in real life. My wife and I have noted a few people who are not unlike Old Tom as we’ve discussed all this over the past week. By nature, such people actually get on my nerves. When I wish to talk about Important Matters, they are absorbed, like a child, in a moth that has settled on the table or on the grooves of a man made hill in the distance. 

But time has made me more Bombadilish, I am glad to say—less interested in events, events, and more inclined to enjoy Things, Things, and much happier than ever to sing nonsense.

*Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

NOTE: I owe a huge thank you to regular readers who have put up with my lack of posting over the summer. I last wrote back in June. A combination of family illnesses in July, and the need to take a break over the summer, have kept me from my keyboard. With September arriving however, the new school year’s routine has set in and I am optimistic that I will be back to regular posting.

On the rare occasions that I have seen British evangelical leaders address the topic of immigration, there has been one repeated theme: that mass immigration to the UK has been good for the British evangelical church. It is argued that immigrants add to the numbers of evangelicals on our increasingly godless shores, that they increase the number of voters who have small-c conservative values, that their presence forces British Christians to confront their racism, and that they provide an opportunity to manifest the cross-cultural power of the Gospel in increasingly diverse churches.

I’m not here interested in whether any of these things are true. To some extent, I’m sure they are. What I am interested in is asking “would it matter if they were?”

When the above argument is presented, a small but significant leap is often made. Either explicitly or by implication, many British evangelicals conclude the following: mass immigration is good for the UK church… and therefore British Christians should welcome and endorse mass immigration. 

This is quite flimsy thinking. There are a few reasons why, but the most fundamental, I think, is this principle: what we welcome in providence we need not endorse in politics.

How do we arrive at such a principle? Well, Scripture and church history are full of instances where God has used political events to advance both the spread of the Gospel and the spiritual good of his people. Yet often, these are events which either Scripture explicitly condemns, or which are plainly condemnable for Christians by good and necessary consequence.

Perhaps the most obvious example is Acts 8. Following the martyrdom of Stephen, a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, “and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria” (8:1 NIV). However, the result of this is the further spread of the Gospel: “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (8:4). The persecution of Christians here is, at one level, a political matter. The Jews were afforded a certain level of self-governance in the Roman political order, especially when it came to matters of the Jewish law, and they availed themselves of that here. This is why, in Acts 9, Saul of Tarsus asks the high priest for permission to arrest Christians in the synagogues of Damascus. But I doubt that any Christian reader of Acts expects the early church to have been cheering this political decision on because they believed it would be spiritually beneficial to the church.

People may quibble with this example though. After all, it could be argued that the Jews were going beyond their political jurisdiction in Acts 8-9 (we know that they didn’t always stick to the limits of authority Rome allowed them). Much of the rest of Acts is taken up by repeated episodes of the Jews persecuting Christians—Paul in particular—and the Romans stepping in to protect them, largely judging that the Jews have no right to make a political problem of it.

So, let’s consider a different example: the Roman empire itself. Christians throughout the centuries have generally agreed that, in God’s providence, the Roman empire provided a uniquely effective environment for the spread of the Gospel. The roads, the ship routes, the order and security of the pax Romana, the shared language(s), the extent of the territories from Britain to the Middle East—in God’s providence, all this and more meant that, under the Roman empire, the Gospel could spread to the nations in a way it never would have done at any earlier time in history. The realities of Roman persecution of Christians are often grossly overstated. As already noted, in Acts, Rome is far more of a friend to the church than Jerusalem is. And so, it’s fairly reasonable to say that in many ways “the Roman empire was good for the church.” (I could have worked a “what did the Romans ever do for us?” joke in here somewhere, I’m sure).

But should Christians therefore endorse the Roman empire? Or empire as such? That’s a less straightforward question. And I imagine most British conservative evangelicals inclined to think about it would be reluctant to say “yes”.

Another example, and perhaps the most helpful: the exile of Israel and Judah. Anyone familiar with their Old Testament knows that exile came about as a result of Israel and Judah’s sin. It was forewarned in the law (e.g. Lev. 26:14-45, Deut. 28:15-68) and eventually falls on the northern (2 Kings 17) and southern (2 Kings 21) kingdoms. In God’s providence, the pagan empires of Assyria and Babylon carry out his punishment upon his people.

And yet… exile was good for God’s people, right? It created the Jewish diaspora, which ultimately led to the spread of the Gospel. Along with that, it arguably furthered the advance of “Jewish values” (Jews, for example, were known to rescue infants from exposure much as Christians later were). By mixing them among Gentiles, we could argue that it forced Jews to confront their racism. And, with the post-exilic growth of “God-fearers” (that is, Gentiles who worshipped the God of Israel), it surely helped to manifest the fact that the Gospel promised to Abraham would one day result in blessing to all the nations.

The exile, then, was a political event that was spiritually beneficial for God’s people. 

And yet it is not politically endorsed by Scripture—quite the opposite, in fact. The paradox of God’s providence is that, even though he ordains the exile as a just punishment for Israel’s sin, he condemns Assyria and Babylon for carrying it out. He uses the sins of the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish (and yet spiritually benefit) his people. 

Isaiah 10:5-12, a prophecy against Assyria, is worth quoting here:

“Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger,
    in whose hand is the club of my wrath!
I send him against a godless nation [i.e. Israel],
    I dispatch him against a people who anger me,
to seize loot and snatch plunder,
    and to trample them down like mud in the streets.
But this is not what he [i.e. Assyria, personified as the king of Assyria] intends,
    this is not what he has in mind;
his purpose is to destroy,
    to put an end to many nations.
‘Are not my commanders all kings?’ he says.
    ‘Has not Kalno fared like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad,
    and Samaria like Damascus?
As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols,
    kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria—
shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images
    as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?’”

When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the wilful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.

Here, Assyria is “the rod” of God’s anger, sent against the “godless nation” of Israel to punish its sins. “But this is not what he [i.e. Assyria] intends!” That is, although providentially God uses Assyria to punish Israel’s sins, politically that is not what Assyria is intending to do. No, Assyria’s political purpose “is to destroy, to put an end to many nations”. This is a great political sin on Assyria’s part, and when God has concluded his providential purposes with Assyria, he declares he will punish it for its pride.

Much the same is said of Babylon. Although God uses Babylon to punish Judah, he declares in Jeremiah 51 that he will avenge Judah for this punishment! “Before your eyes I will repay Babylon and all who live in Babylonia for all the wrong they have done in Zion,” declares the LORD” (51:24).

And so, even though, in God’s providence, the actions of Assyria and Babylon are to be “welcomed” as part of his purposes for his people’s good and his own glory, they are clearly not to be endorsed at the political level.

The same could be said of many post-biblical events in church history that have unexpectedly turned out for the good of the church. An oft-cited one would be China’s expulsion of Western Christian missionaries after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Supposedly, this led to explosive growth in the Chinese church, as it had to become truly indigenous and self-sustaining. Although estimates vary by quite a way, there are now at least tens of millions of Christians in China (although growth seems to have stalled in recent years). Yet I doubt any of us want to endorse the Chinese Communist Party’s religious policies simply because they turned out “good for the church” in certain ways.

And so, I think we arrive at the principle I laid out at the beginning: what we welcome in providence we need not endorse in politics.

This is something we need to bear in mind when we try to discuss mass immigration as British evangelicals: the question of whether it benefits our churches is, ultimately, irrelevant. It may well be the case that mass immigration benefits the church in the ways I’ve mentioned above, and perhaps even more besides. But that doesn’t really matter when it comes to determining whether pursuing a policy of mass immigration (as successive British governments at both ends of the political spectrum have done for some time) is a just and prudent political decision. Determining the appropriate amount of immigration is a political matter, not a churchly one. Christians should certainly speak to the issue from a Christian perspective, but this is not the same as saying that it should be judged based on its benefits to the church or on whether it seems to advance the Gospel.

A final point: It strikes me as particularly odd that benefit to the church and the Gospel is offered as a rationale by British evangelical leaders given that, in general, our constituency is usually quick to broadly endorse a liberal, secular public order in which Christianity is not given preferential treatment. British evangelicals (yes, even the Anglicans) generally kick back against any suggestion that the state should be subservient to anything explicitly Christian in any way. And yet, when discussing immigration, many of us seem to become uncharacteristically willing for the responsibilities of the state to become subservient to the mission of the church. 

Now, of course, it may well be that politics and providence coincide. But it ain’t necessarily so.

In a week’s time, Keir Starmer will almost certainly be Prime Minister. What should British Christians, and my fellow evangelicals in particular, be thinkign about as we stare down the barrel of five years of Labour in government?

When it comes to discussing politics, British evangelicals tend to default to three main themes.

The first is fear. In an undeniably post-Christian Britain, one in which we have entered the Negative World (which I wrote about when I launched The New Albion), there are clear threats to Christians being able to exercise their faith. Fear, then, is an understandable response. But of course, the most common command in Scripture is “do not be afraid.” Often it refers to not being afraid of God, but it refers plenty to external threats. Psalm 27:1 leaps to mind for me: “The LORD is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?” Particularly pertinent verses for political fear, ones which have inspired martyrs, can be found in Matthew 10:28-31:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

The basic evangelical thought here is that if you are expressing severe concern about political events, such as election outcomes, then you are living in sinful fear.

The second common evangelical theme is that of trust. The key text is often Psalm 146:3: “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.” Similarly, Psalm 20:7: “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” The basic thought here is that if an evangelical is insisting that a particular political outcome (e.g. a certain party or candidate being elected, a certain law or ruling being passed) would be better for Christians or their concerns, then they are probably sinfully “trusting in princes” to “build God’s kingdom on earth”, which we should not do because Jesus’ kingdom “is not of this world” (John 18:36).

The third theme is liberty. The doctrine of Christian liberty rests on the principle that “all things are lawful” (1 Cor. 10:23) for Christians—and thus, we cannot bind people’s consciences by insisting on or restricting specific behaviours which Scripture doesn’t respectively command or prohibit. And so, people are free to support, or vote for, or not vote for any party they like. Anyone making moral pronouncements about Christian political involvement is legalistically binding people’s consciences and impinging upon Christian liberty.

Each of these evangelical emphases I agree with. Christians should not fear, should not trust in rulers, and should not condemn one another in areas of liberty.

However. The truth is that when British evangelicals—and especially some of its leading figures—bring up these themes, they are incredibly imprecise about what they actually mean, and, through rhetorical sleight of hand, effectively shut down Christian political discussion beyond these basic themes.

Understanding fear

Take fear. What does the Bible really mean when it counsels Christians not to be afraid? I think two things mainly: do not fear for your eternal destiny, and do not fear that God cannot use circumstances for his glory. Matthew 10:28 sums up the first point: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Romans 8:28 sums up the second point: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” 

Of course, none of this means that God won’t ordain awful things to happen to us.“The good of those who live him” may well be their being conformed to Christ by a martyr’s death; the good of the church may come about, in God’s providence, by its frequent persecution and suffering.

Now: is fearing for your soul or God’s ability to ultimately work good the same as having severe concerns about the outcome of an election? Certainly, the temptation for such fear can and does arise there. But it is not necessarily sinfully fearful to dread the election of certain leaders when you know that they will actively make life difficult for you as a Christian, and for your neighbour. 

But the way British evangelicals talk about “fear” in politics acts as if the expression of legitimate political concern arising from legitimate self-interest and love for your neighbours is necessarily a sinful expression of fear. There is so often a sleight of hand here, where even the most concrete concerns delivered in the most measured way are branded as “fear”. It is hard to deny that this is something that we have adopted from the political left, who are always quick to accuse conservatives of indulging in a “politics of fear”. This is an incredibly easy brush to tar people with, and if you succeed then they are effectively silenced in political conversation, as fearmongers are regarded as invalid conversation partners.

Understanding trust

Now consider trust. What does the Bible really mean when it counsels Christians not to trust in princes and chariots? I take it to mean that they should not think that God’s eternal purpose to redeem the cosmos in Christ will be achieved by earthly rulers, or that alignment with a certain political setup grants individual salvation. Such beliefs are incompatible with the invisible, spiritual nature of God’s kingdom (e.g. the Parable of the Growing Seed in Mark 4:26-29) and with the doctrine of justification by faith alone (e.g. Eph. 2:8-9).

Now: is equating a specific political ruler with God’s purposes, or trusting in a political affiliation for salvation, the same as pointing out that some political parties will be obviously better for Christians, and will be better at preserving the God-given structure of society which Christians should support? Again, the temptation to place too much or the wrong kind of trust in rulers can and does arise here. But it is not necessarily a sinful misplacement of trust to acknowledge that certain political parties will be better at allowing Christians to “live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Timothy 2:2) and at preserving the most basic aspects of God-given society, such as the family.

But the way that British evangelicals talk about “trust” in politics acts as if talking about the realities of which parties most support religious liberty or a basically Christian view of society is necessarily a misplacement of trust. But this is just not the case. Again, there is sleight of hand here. When evangelicals start talking about “trust” in politics, they assume it is synonymous with “saving faith”; thus, if they hear someone say “I’ve put my trust in candidate X”, alarm bells ring. But common sense makes it obvious that we use “trust” in different ways. The trust you give a politician is different to that you give to God. 

The problem arises when the two kinds of trust blur, but more often than not it is the apolitical British evangelicals who blur the two, not those who are politically engaged. The former assume that to talk realistically about preferable political parties or decisions is to blur those lines; in my experience, politically engaged British evangelicals are generally very clear that putting their “faith” in a certain leader or party is not the same thing as putting saving faith in them.

I think that this distinction is actually so obvious that when apolitical British evangelicals accuse their more political brethren of “putting their trust in princes”, they are often simply being disingenuous, and priding themselves on staying “above the fray.” They may not put their trust in princes, but it seems often that they are putting their trust in the fact that they do not put their trust in princes—which is not the same as putting your trust in Christ!

Understanding liberty

Last, consider liberty. What does the Bible really mean when it tells us that “all things are lawful” for the Christian? In short, for our purposes, it refers to freedom of conscience in what Christians have traditionally called adiaphora—that is, “things indifferent”, things about which the Bible makes no concrete stipulations. In the New Testament, this is most frequently discussed with regard to Jewish Christians continuing to observe ceremonial parts of the Mosaic law like circumcision and feast days (see Romans 14). They are free to do this as Christians, but neither they nor Gentiles had to do them any more. This principle then carries over into other areas of life in the New Testament, such as eating food sacrificed to idols, which Christians are free to do but may choose not to do because it may causes Christians with weaker consciences to stumble (1 Corinthians 8-10). 

These first-century examples are very alien to us, but the doctrine has long been applied to the question of political engagement in politics, in part to say that no Christian can insist that a Christian must perform certain specific positive political actions—vote for a certain party, support a certain candidate etc.

However, when it comes to politics, many evangelicals often take the doctrine of Christian liberty to mean that our political decisions by definition cannot be sinful, since such things are adiaphora. “You’re free to vote for whoever you want to vote for”, is what we hear. But here, we must hold the doctrine of Christian liberty hand in hand with the doctrine of total depravity, which insists that no human action is totally free from sin. And so, although Christian liberty teaches us that very few things are necessarily sinful, total depravity teaches us that anything can be sinful—and that includes how you vote. Such a thing can be sinful in different ways—you could vote for something that it outright evil, or you could for something good in a self-righteous way, or you could act with an inexcusable level of ignorance—but the point is that matters of political action can be sinful in practice, even if they are adiaphora in principle.

Once again, British evangelicals perform a sleight of hand here. They use the doctrine of Christian liberty to divert attention away from the fact that the political action of the average person is no more sealed off from sin than any other area of human life.

Fear Starmer?

And so we return to the seemingly inevitable prospect of Keir Starmer’s premiership, likely with a very large majority which will allow him to pass whatever policies he likes.

If I could just get one thing across to British evangelicals it would be this: Keir Starmer, and the entire hierarchy of the Labour party, loathe people like you. How we respond to that is up for discussion. But if we cannot begin by agreeing on this obvious fact, we will get nowhere. We may all likely know people who are voting Labour, and they may not loathe us personally, but Starmer and the Labour party do. And they will have no bones about putting that loathing into law. This loathing doesn’t principally arise from historic wrongs committed by Christians for which we must flagellate ourselves; it is demanded by their ideology, and as such there is little we can do about it.

The primary place this will hit Christians will be when it comes to LGBT issues. We mustn’t forget of course that the forward march of Wokeness and the Rainbow Flag has been allowed to proceed unabated under a Conservative government—it’s hardly been a great 14 years for people who hold to biblical and traditional sexual ethics. But this has largely been what I call “Labour in slow motion”. Bar David Cameron’s very personal efforts to legalise so-called same-sex marriage in 2013, sex and gender madness under the Tories has largely been a matter of activists and lobbyists calling the show and the government failing to use its political power to say “no” and promote an alternative—the government has been essentially passive. Labour, however, will be active—and aggressively so. 

See, for example, this pledge from their manifesto:

Delivering opportunities for all means that everyone should be treated with respect and dignity. Labour will protect LGBT+ and disabled people by making all existing strands of hate crime an aggravated offence.

More than enough Christians have been in court over supposed LGBT “hate crimes” in the past 14 years—just take a look at many of the active legal cases currently being contended by Christian Concern. Whilst it is true that many of these cases end up vindicating the Christians in the end, the fact that these cases can go this far under a Conservative government shows us the direction of cultural travel. Labour will make this worse—and actively so.

And the Christian concern over LGBT issues is not simply a matter of our right to express our religious beliefs. It’s a matter of the common good and love for our neighbour. The stable basis of any human society is marriage and family. Without that, the most basic building block is gone. Again, the Conservatives have done a horrendous job of protecting and celebrating the family, in many ways. But in its veneration of the LGBT agenda, Labour will actively undermine the family in ways far beyond anything the Tories have managed. And this is to say nothing of trans issues, on which the Tories have made conservative noises but failed to act, and on which Labour continue to signal their intention to go along with the most absurd levels of trans activism and to undo the little the Tories have done to fight it. How anyone thinks you can govern a society of human beings if you reject one of the most fundamental things about humanity—that is, the sex binary—is beyond me.

A recent survey by the Evangelical Alliance revealed that the most significant factor for British evangelicals in deciding who they vote for is the impact it will have on others—58% said one of the main factors in deciding who they vote for is who will help the most needy. 54% said they are led by which party most aligns with Christian/biblical values. Both of these things should mean an overwhelming concern for the family.

I could go on here about other ways in which Labour will come after Christians and attack the basic structures of God-given society. But the main point should be clear: Labour will legislate in a way that is actively hostile to Christians, and which harms our neighbours by attacking the most fundamental building blocks of society, namely family and the sex binary.

So. Do I fear Starmer? Ultimately, Lord willing, no. In his providence God will use whatever Labour does for the good of those who love him, even if that means great earthly loss.

Do I trust in some alternative to Starmer? Ultimately, Lord willing, no. For one, I don’t see how anyone could equate any of our current political parties as synonymous with the kingdom of God, such is the state of them. And I in no way think my political preferences justify me before the throne of grace.

But none of that means that Christians should not be severely concerned about the effect Starmer will have on us and on our society at large. He cannot harm our souls—but we should be realistic about how he might come for our bodies. His opponents cannot eternally—but we should seek the freedom to live out our faith, and the material good of our neighbour, whilst we live on earth temporarily.

This time next week, there will be many “where do we go from here?” conversations happening. There will be plentiful room for disagreement about the best courses of action among Christians and other social conservatives. But if we’re going to get anywhere—either in political change, or in discipling Christians in how to live under a new Labour government—we need to be clear about the situation. Not fearful, not trusting in princes—just honest.

NOTE: apologies for a bit of a gap since my last post—it has been a busy time! I hope to be back to my regular almost-weekly rhythm again.

Welcome to new subscribers! If you were brought here by my “Raise Against the Machine” series, I reassure you that it is still indefinitely ongoing, but with a general election in the UK at the minute there’s plenty else to discuss for a little while!

It seems there’s only one person who’s had a good couple of weeks in the circus of the UK General Election: Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Whilst Rishi Sunak has been trying to recover from his politically catastrophic decision to bow out early from D-Day commemorations, and Sir Keir Starmer has been letting him get on with like Jigsaw from Saw watching a man cut off his own foot with a hacksaw in the name of “survival”, Sir Ed has been having a whale of a time. It seems like the Lib Dems have decided that Davey himself is their best asset for this campaign. It’s all about Ed.

First, he decided that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much so worth doing as simply messing about on paddleboards. Then, he threw himself with gusto down a giant inflatable water slide. Then, it was drumming an exercise ball between his legs in an old folks’ home. Until Nigel Farage came bursting back onto the scene last Monday, Davey was the most entertaining thing about an otherwise uninspiring election contest.

Davey is my local MP, and so I must confess to feeling a slight surge of excitement and fellow feeling whenever I see him pop up in the national media, despite the fact I’d never vote for him. All told, he’s not a bad local MP, which is one of the things that has held him in good stead here in Kingston and Surbiton, which is always relatively closely contested between the Lib Dems and the Tories (Davey was actually briefly ousted from 2015-2017 due to a post-coalition backlash). 

Last week though, Mission Ed took a serious turn (perhaps intentionally so). The Lib Dems released a video promoting their proposed reforms to UK social care. It was no compilation of emotive music, earnest narration, and B-roll however; it was an intimate and emotional interview with Davey, as he spoke nursing his terminally ill mother as a teenager, revisited his childhood home, and discussed his teenage 16 year old son John, who has profound disabilities and requires 24/7 care. In an accompanying interview with ITV, he asked “Who will look after him when I’m gone?”

These videos struck a chord across the political spectrum—they were refreshingly unpolitical. It did a lot both for the cause of social care reform (on which it is largely agreed that long-term cross-party collaboration is needed, and with which the Lib Dems have headlined today’s manifesto announcement), as well as for Davey’s personal stock. To see a political leader in tears as he speaks lovingly about his disabled son was a beautiful thing.

Curiously, there are a few other examples of high-profile politicians with disabled children, and these came to mind for me. It is often forgotten that David Cameron’s first child, Ivan, suffered from a rare condition called Ohtahara syndrome, and died in 2009, aged six, the year before Cameron became Prime Minister.  A more famous example is Charles de Gaulle’s daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome and died of pneumonia aged just 20. 

There is a great draw in seeing powerful men humbling themselves to care for the least of these. Often, it’s done as a cynical PR stunt, but when it’s their own children, it’s hard to question their sincerity.

But that is precisely why I was profoundly unsettled by Davey’s comments last week, and find myself riled by the prominent place he is giving social care in his policy offering.

I do not, for a moment, doubt his sincere commitment to social care for the elderly and disabled. But I find them bafflingly at odds with the Lib Dems’ stances on abortion and euthanasia—to the extent that I cannot regard Davey as anything other than a startling hypocrite.

Read more

This week, I’ve not been able to get together a fresh piece, and so I instead offer a round-up of some other things I’ve been up to over the last few of months.

Hopefully, if you’ve enjoyed my output here at The New Albion, these other bits and pieces will tide you over until my next proper post.

“Breakwater” in Plough Quarterly

This piece appeared in Plough Quarterly’s recent “nature” themed issue. It’s a historical-cum-reflective-essay on the breakwater in Alderney, the Channel Island which my dad’s family hail from. The breakwater is a half mile long Victorian jetty which tries to hold back the sea from a four by one-and-a-half mile island. It has loomed richly in my imagination since childhood and I was very glad to finally find a way to write about it.

A sample paragraph:

Alderney would become a “Gibraltar of the Channel” – a grand ambition. A few decades later, a critical French writer would say this was a name “which could only have been born at the bottom of a bottle of sherry.” He would be proven right. The bombastic, bellicose endeavor would, in many ways, be the death of the old Alderney. And yet, nearly two centuries later, its legacy is a lifeline for its modern inhabitants.

You can read the whole thing here. I also wrote for Plough last year about my hometown of Chessington.

“Practically Protestant in Every Way” on Cooper & Cary Have Words

This week, I joined James Cary on Cooper & Cary Have Words, subbing in for Barry Cooper whilst he convalesces. We talked about a big one: Protestantism. What on earth is it really? And why don’t many people who are Protestants actually feel like Protestants?

We talked about all that and more. It was in many ways a great chance to sum up a lot of my work at The Davenant Institute, especially our recent book Why Do Protestants Convert?

You can catch it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever podcasts are sold.

“Why Pastors Should Get A Family Wage” at Mere Orthodoxy

One of my most read pieces was “We’re All Muzzled Oxen Now”, back in January—a fairly long piece, inspired by an ad for a highly underpaid pastoral position, in which I tried to think about the question of pastoral wages in relation to the wider economy (and which led to conversations with some friends about whether we need to be investing in gold and which Red State has the most British climate in case we ever need to bail out of the UK).

Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy invited me to write a shorter, more focussed piece of the back of it, laying out a simple argument for paying pastors a family wage. You can read it here.

Also, if you have ever benefitted from the work of Mere O, they are currently in the midst of an urgent fundraising appeal. Do consider giving to support the important work the Jake and co have been doing for nearly 20 years. You can give here.

“Children and Baptism” on For All the Saints

Last month, I joined Paul Sutton on For All the Saints to talk about how I changed my mind on baptism, moving from becoming a credobaptist to a paedobaptist.

For All the Saints is the podcast of a forthcoming church plant, All Saints Exeter, which will launch later this year as part of the International Presbyterian Church (IPC) here in the UK. It was a particular pleasure to join Paul for this, as he is planting out of St. Leonard’s, Exeter, the church I attended as a student (and on the roof of which I proposed to my wife—but that’s another story (as is the fact that an Anglican church is planting with the IPC)).

You can listen on Apple Podcasts.

Early on in our marriage, I asked my wife “what would you like our home to be like?” She thought for a moment, though only a few seconds—a woman who knew exactly what she wanted to say, but had never had to put it into words before.

“Like a small country”, she said.

As our family grows—we have three children right now—I think of those words often. They were a lightbulb moment for me. They’ve been particularly on my mind since I started this open-ended “Raise Against the Machine” series, trying to think out loud about how to raise a Christian family in the digital age. As I’ve stressed in the first two posts (here and here): without a positive vision, you’re doomed. You can’t just be “against”, but have to be raising up toward something. Thinking of home as a “small country” has been very formative for me in that regard.

A home being like a small country means a distinct character and a rich culture. That doesn’t mean other places are necessarily worse—they’re just not yours. A home like this will be a refuge in a world of trouble. It will be a place where, when its inhabitants return, they kiss the sand of the seashore. It will have enough in it to form and fill a person’s identity for the rest of their life. It will be able to say, with a joyful confidence, “thanks, but that’s not how we do things here.” And it will not be insular, but happy to stand on its own two feet on the world stage of other households, gladly receiving visitors and sending ambassadors on its business.

If I were laying down a few core principles for raising positively against the Machine, one would be this: make your home worth being in.

The first thing I thought of when my wife spoke of “a small country” was J.R.R. Tolkien’s descriptions of Rivendell in The Hobbit:

[Elrond’s] house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley.

And likewise, in The Silmarillion:

In all the days of the Third Age, after the fall of Gil-galad, Master Elrond abode in Imladris [i.e. Rivendell], and he gathered there many Elves, and other folk of wisdom and power from among all the kindreds of Middle-earth, and he preserved through many lives of Men the memory of all that had been fair; and the house of Elrond was a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good council and wise lore.

Rivendell is a place thoroughly worth being. All Christian homes should be Rivendells.

Food, sleep, work, story-telling, singing, just sitting and thinking, good council, wise lore—these are the things which make homes worth inhabiting. And, when you then leave the home—either as an emissary to some other household, whether friend or foe, or to establish a new colony over the horizon—you will be thoroughly worth having.

So much of modern life pushes us to be concerned with things outside of the home. Since the Industrial Revolution, the home has shifted from being a place of production to a place of consumption. The spheres of work and family have been thoroughly separated, and our homes have largely become aeroplane hangars, where disconnected individuals briefly dock for food, sleep, and the consumption of passive on-screen entertainment, before scattering themselves to the four winds once more.

For one of my Davenant Hall classes this term, I recently read a couple of chapters from Christopher Lasch’s 1997 book Women and the Common Life. At one point, Lasch quotes Benjamin Rush, a lesser-known American Founding Father, who wrote a great deal about education. In a 1787 tract, Thoughts on Female Education, Rush—writing in the early days of the Industrial Revolution and US republic—inveighed against the early signs of what I’ve just mentioned: the consumptive lifestyle which proliferates under modernity. Rush could see it appearing especially among the affluent women of the new American elite, who were essentially becoming useless coquettes in the style of those Old World aristocrats to which the Land of the Free was supposedly opposed. Rush compared these idle women to “a valuable mistress of a family” who industriously applies herself to the running of a household (which, in the 1780s, was not like being a 1950s housewife):

The business of the one, is pleasure, the pleasure of the other, is business. The one is admired abroad; the other is honoured and beloved at home.

Rush’s remarks are truer even now than they were then—both for men and for women. They put me in mind of a Wendell Berry line, which I know from Paul Kingsnorth’s essay “Learning What To Make Of It”:

Do you think it could be a general rule that the only place one is urgently needed is at home?

It’s good that Berry says “as a general rule.” One has other social obligations than the household—indeed, households have obligations beyond themselves. A household should never be entirely unto itself. Aristotle understood this centuries ago in his Politics:

Further, the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that…. The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.

It can raise the hackles of conservative Christians like me to see Aristotle saying the state is clearly “prior” to the individual and the family—we’re usually very keen to keep the state’s hands off or our household and personal rights. But I don’t think Aristotle is talking about absolute state priority over the family in the way that, say, communism imagines it. Rather, his point is that the individual and the family are not ends unto themselves. Their “final cause” lies beyond themselves, in a wider community of which they are a part. We all know this to be true in practice: healthy families create a healthy society, and a healthy society supports healthy families.

The biblical treatment of this dynamic cropped up in my roamings online this week, when, on Twitter, the excellent Andrew Wilson pointed out the importance that the Old Testament law gives to marriage relative to public and specifically military life. I chipped in with a thought to round out the picture:

All that is to say however: Berry’s instinct is right. We are urgently needed in our homes far more than we realise.

And yet strong forces are mustered against anyone who wants to meet that need and put real thought into the shape of their home. We live in a world in which we are encouraged to make pleasure our business, rather than to make the business of a productive home our pleasure. We are pushed to seek admiration abroad—either in our work, or by attempt to retain the life we had before parenthood—rather than being honoured and beloved at home.

How, then, does one fill a home with the things of Rivendell? 

To give a brief, somewhat practical framework, we could break it down this way: think about space, and think about time.

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