As the Premier League and Prime Minister question the prominence of betting companies, Hannah Rich reflects on the knotty ethics of the gambling industry and the need for regenerated community spaces. 14/08/2026

When the Premier League returns next weekend for 2026–27, there will be a conspicuous absence: front–of–shirt gambling sponsors, which have been collectively banned from this season.

You might be forgiven for not noticing, given the plethora of opportunities that will still abound for betting companies to promote themselves, from pitchside hoarding to shirt sleeves (but crucially only the sleeves) and incessant ad–breaks during televised games. But still, it is a gesture in the right direction, in recognition of quite how ridden with gambling the sport has become.

Elsewhere this week, betting shops were one of the entities that Prime Minister Andy Burnham took aim at in his announcement of plans to improve high streets. Town centres, he said, had been “hollowed out” by years of economic decline and in many communities, high streets are unloved and “unrecognisable”. The proliferation of betting shops is part of that, along with vape shops, mini–marts and barbers, all of which councils will be given greater powers to regulate.

There are three times as many gambling premises (including casinos and gaming centres) in the most economically deprived local authorities than there are in the least deprived areas, and betting shops account for the majority of these. A government review in 2023 found that the cost to the UK economy of the societal and health–related harms of gambling was an estimated £1.05 to £1.77 billion, also disproportionately concentrated in already disadvantaged population groups. There is also a litany of evidence for the negative socioeconomic and physical health outcomes of problem gambling in particular. (Closing or limiting the number of physical betting shops is not a panacea; moving gambling online further reduces the social aspect and accountability of the industry, such as it is, and does nothing to tackle the associated harms.)

Conversely, I come from a city where almost everything from the cancer unit in the hospital to the local hospice, and countless other community projects, has received funding thanks to the beneficence and philanthropy of the Coates family, founders of the Bet365 gambling empire. As the potbanks and manufacturers have closed, one by one, Bet365 is now also the largest local employer in the Staffordshire Potteries. Through their charitable foundations, they have given away millions of pounds, much of it directly to the communities where their business is headquartered, where employees live and where the Bet365 brand is itself a byword for the local football club and ground they own. (Somewhat ludicrously, even the road signs directing away day visitors to the Bet365 stadium effectively function as free advertising for the betting company, and being in the lowly Championship this season means they are still free to advertise on the team’s shirts.)

Bet 365 Stadium in Stoke–on–Trent, Andy Sumner/Focus Images Ltd/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

The ethics of gambling funding health care, directly or otherwise, are knotty. At a time when the patchwork of access to palliative care is in the spotlight, it is problematic to say the least that there are parts of the country where hospice provision and a good death is reliant on the proceeds of others gambling away their livelihoods. There is virtue in philanthropy, to be sure, but at what cost? I am not convinced that the charitable contribution of the Coates family and other industry giants like them even begins to erase the human and economic costs and harms of gambling. Almost everyone in Stoke knows someone who has been treated at the cancer unit or the hospice, but almost everyone also knows someone whose life has been ruined on some level by gambling.

Ahead of the budget last autumn, when the government mooted increasing some forms of taxation on the gambling industry, a startling argument emerged in its defence. Far from being dens of iniquity, it went, betting shops are the new community hubs and their workers the new Samaritans. “Our betting shops are sanctuaries. I worry for the men if we close,” ran the headline of a Times article which lauded the contribution of the shops’ staff to the health and wellbeing of their customers. It painted the workers – overwhelmingly middle–aged women – as akin to social workers, with their shops being the only place many of their regulars could stay warm amid a cost–of–living crisis and soaring heating bills. It was an astonishing piece, and one I have found myself thinking about frequently ever since.

Admittedly, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. When my uncle, who ran a bookies’ shop on a less than salubrious Scottish high street, died a decade ago, the local newspaper announcement of his death read ‘late of’ followed by the name of the shop rather than the place he called home so that his regulars could come and pay their respects.

But if the argument that we owe betting shops a debt for their community contribution has any truth to it, then the hollowing out of the high street is far worse than even Andy Burnham fears. Recent polling from More in Common found that the public are more likely to say that they would prefer to see an empty shop front than a gambling shop on their high street. Not only is closing or limited betting shops likely to be popular therefore, but it suggests the public already recognise the flaw in the argument that such premises have community benefit. An empty shop, after all, contributes nothing to the economy or to the quality of life locally, but at least it does less harm.

There is a need, however, to go beyond this and build spaces that genuinely add to communities, rather than sucking the life out of them. For many of us, faith communities and their buildings naturally fulfil this role, and the Co-operative Party’s effort to revive the social clubs that were once the beating heart of communities also responds to the need for shared community spaces.

We cannot resign ourselves to a world where betting shops are the last bastions against the loneliness epidemic, and the gambling industry our strongest hope of regeneration in cities like Stoke. It is not just a crisis of local business or of micro–economic growth, but a crisis of community itself, and one of human dignity. Real regeneration means creating places of belonging that do not depend on people losing money in order for others to survive.

I would celebrate if high streets followed the front of football shirts in the list of places where gambling is no longer welcome, but I would celebrate even more if it was accompanied by the regeneration of the sort of community spaces, relationships and human connection that we are sorely in need of.

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Nick Spencer unpacks the relationship between environmental problems and democratic problems. 06/08/2026

Greetings. I write to you on day 5,379 of the Great Drought. We at Theos are surviving on the occasional eggcup full of stagnant rainwater, while we watch footage of southern England ablaze, and stare longingly at photographs of something The Elders tell us was once called “grass”. We hope you’re coping too. 

A joke, of course, but not an especially funny one. As I write, half of England (and all of Wales) is in drought, having received about 3% of long–term average rainfall in July; the fire service is responding to 19 active wildfire incidents in the UK; huge tracts of France, Spain and Greece are burning; and the temperature is again predicted to hit the high thirties across most of central Europe this week. And then there’s also the rest of the world.  

We can expect more to come. The young Bart Simpson once complained to Homer, “This is the worst day of my life”, to which his father sagely replied, “The worst day of your life so far.” Wags have memeified the exchange for climate change.  

“We all know what to do,” the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean–Claude Juncker, is supposed to have remarked. “We just don’t know how to get re–elected after we’ve done it.” He was talking about economic reform and democracy, but if any arena owns this aphorism, it is climate change. We know what causes climate change. We know what we need to do to slow it (we can’t stop it now). But it is a super–wicked problem – combining all the classic problems of collective action, short–term cost vs long–term benefit, and extreme pathway dependency (the problem is essentially embedded in our daily lives). The environmental problem is, perhaps more so, a democratic problem. 

Alas, we’re not exactly suffering from a surfeit of democratic trust at the moment. Theos research, to be published later this year, has found some eyebrow–raising results among the British population when it comes to the question of whether we need a “strong man” political leader who is “prepared to break the rules.” The virtues of pluralism, political patience, and democratic deliberation have seen their stock fall over recent decades. 

But if the environmental crisis unfolds into a democratic one, the democratic one unfolds into a human one. Whatever ails our politics, its unlikely to be fixed by tweaks to the electoral machine, or even by the election of Count Binface in Clacton, epochal as that may prove. Democracy rests on pre–political foundations and, as Jonathan Sumption recently argued, “even the most carefully designed democracy can be subverted once the underlying spirit has gone.” 

Over a decade ago, in his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis wrote: 

“We urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision. Today, the analysis of environmental problems cannot be separated from the analysis of human, family, work–related and urban contexts, nor from how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and to the environment.” (#141) 

He was spot on. The pressures of the hour call for (what he describes elsewhere in the encyclical as) “a genuine and profound humanism to serve as the basis of a noble and generous society”. (#181) Thankfully, there are signs of this emerging. 

For a depressingly long time, many Christians were resistant to the green movement, because they saw it as pagan, and resistant to humanism, because they saw it as anti–religious (despite its deep Christian intellectual roots). As noted, Laudato Si’ ended the long drought of encyclical letters on environmental themes by rooting creation care in integral humanism. More recently, in 2020, Francis wrote in Fratelli tutti about “faith, and the humanism it inspires”, while just this year Pope Leo XIV’s much–lauded encyclical Magnifica humanitas pitted Christian humanism, against hubristic post– and transhumanism, insisting the while Christian humanism does “not reject science or technology, but embraces them with gratitude and realism”, it does so with the “higher vocation” of true human flourishing in its sights. (#129) 

Earlier this year, a few members of the Theos team spoke at a conference, held at Washington National Cathedral and attended by over a thousand delegates, about Christian humanism and its potential to transform society. Later in the summer, Prof Luke Bretherton, who gave the keynote speech in Washington, assembled an academic conference in Oxford to discuss Reimagining Humanism. The historian of ideas Jens Zimmerman is about to publish a fascinating book on What is Christian humanism? 

In other words, there is momentum here, as more and more people become aware of the way in which the current storms that are buffeting societies across the world are generated by deep weather patterns, originating miles away, in which the most fundamental questions that face human beings – who am I? who are we? to whom (and what) do we have a responsibility? and why? – are worked through. 

As friends of Theos will know, this has been a theme in our work for many years now, linking theology (and, in particular, theological anthropology – the question of who I am, posed in the light of Christ) to everyday affairs. You can watch our most recent event on this topic, held at the National Gallery, in which Rowan Williams, Marcus du Sautoy, Ayla Lepine, Nathan Mladin, and Chine McDonald discuss “Art, creativity and what it means to be human in the age of AI” here. And you can also book to come to our next one, in September, on “Faith in Democracy”, in partnership with, and held at Westminster Abbey, here. 

And as ever, there is a wealth of articles, longreads and reports on the Theos website, including our project uncovering the spiritual, social and political impact of motherhood (Motherhood, Inside Out), another of Emily Downe’s brilliant animations Making a Mother, and (sorry for the plug and even sorrier for the price; I didn’t make the decision) my forthcoming book that applies a Christian humanist lens to the question of future of welfare in the UK. 

Happy August.

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Coco Parkinson–Huggins & George Lapshynov review Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’. What if the stranger we should fear is ourselves? 04/08/2026

Why do stories written nearly three thousand years ago still captivate us today? Because the greatest stories are rarely about the past: they become mirrors in which every generation sees itself.

Few stories have proved more enduring in this respect than Homer’s Odyssey. Enter Christopher Nolan’s take on it, a blockbuster and star–studded screen adaptation of one of the most famous and influential stories in the Western cultural canon. It is perhaps unsurprising that Nolan decided to make his own version of the poem. As classicist Emily Wilson and others have argued, themes of journeying, homecoming, meaning and, indeed, a sense of man (and, in Nolan’s case, only ever of man) standing on the edge of world–historical change, are deeply Nolan–esque, from Interstellar to Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

These are themes of Nolan’s work for a reason; they speak deeply to our contemporary moment. Whether it is the nonchalance with which tech giants affirm that AI may well destroy humanity, what appears to be the ever–deepening polarisation of politics, or the increasing frequency of climate change–related disasters, there is a strong sense that we are collectively on the edge.

That atmosphere permeates Nolan’s Odyssey. Hanging throughout the film is a sense of impending crisis. Within the story’s historical context, this takes the form of the Bronze Age Collapse. Within our contemporary context, to which the story alludes, it refers to notions of a collapse of the West (whether perceived or actual). Characters whisper about the approaching “people from the sea”, mysterious outsiders who will bring about the end of their civilisation. The mood is unmistakably eschatological, and it is difficult not to hear in it echoes of the End Times, including the biblical language of judgement and endings.

What struck us most, however, was what this impending coming of “the people from the sea” was accompanied by: the breakdown of “Zeus’s law”. Whilst questions of travel, migration and the encounters with strangers are certainly strong themes in Homer’s original, Nolan arguably makes xenía, the sacred duties between host and guest, far more explicitly the moral axis of the story. Indeed, Nolan’s depiction of Zeus’s law bears a striking resemblance to biblical ideas of hospitality, as Krish Kandiah and others have pointed out. If the Odyssey has shaped the minds of most Western writers for centuries, then so have biblical stories which repeatedly present the stranger as a figure through whom God (Genesis 18, Matthew 25) and his angels (Hebrews 13) may be encountered. 

Across Nolan’s film, there is a persistent sense that this moral order is fraying. In much the same way, contemporary political language across both the Left and the Right in Britain is filled with anxiety about the erosion of the moral assumptions on which our common life depends. Whether expressed through concerns about the “rules–based international order” governing global cooperation, the decline of trust in public institutions, or the loss of a shared national cultural inheritance, depending on one’s priorities, there is a seemingly universal sense that something which once held society together is becoming harder to sustain. Can a society survive when trust and hospitality cease to be? The Odyssey offers an imperfect (and somewhat gratuitously violent) but compelling parable of what happens when our common life is no longer rooted in shared moral commitments.

In this context, the Trojan horse is not only a brilliant military trick; it is portrayed as a sacrilege against hospitality, an attack on what holds society together. It becomes, argues Joseph Earp, the moment when trust breaks down, when a horse is no longer simply a horse and appearances can no longer be believed. Not simply the lies we tell, but the institutions, technologies and political projects that promise security or prosperity while quietly corroding the trust on which societies rest.

The irony is that through its shallowing and blockbuster–ing of much of its characters, the film undercuts the very themes it wishes to explore. The female characters from Penelope through to Calypso are all but hollowed out. Even the choice to parachute some of Hollywood’s biggest names into leading roles distracts from the serious themes it wishes to discuss. Meanwhile, the film’s breathtaking photography and the scale of the production overwhelm the human stories of suffering it intends to honour.

And yet Nolan’s central insight lingers after leaving the cinema. There is a realisation at the end of the film that Odysseus himself is one of the harbingers of destruction menacing society. Nolan reframes his Odysseus as haunted by guilt where Homer’s is famously cunning, ambitious, and morally ambiguous. The obstacles keeping Nolan’s Odysseus from home are not merely storms, monsters, or hostile gods, but his own conscience. In many respects, he becomes a kind of prodigal son: not merely longing for home but seeking restoration after the devastation he has helped to bring about.

Just as he does not realise that it is his own acts of destruction on this journey home that are contributing to its tearing it apart, the film calls us to reflect – in a somewhat heavy–handed way – on how the forces eroding our own common life are not only beyond our borders but also within our own habits, institutions, and actions. Every civilisation fears the stranger. Nolan asks a more uncomfortable question: what if the stranger we should fear is ourselves?

Perhaps that is why The Odyssey still matters. It reminds us that every civilisation eventually faces the same question: not simply whether it can defend itself, but whether it still remembers the moral vision that made it worth defending.

Nolan’s film cannot fully answer that question. It remains, ultimately, a Greek tragedy in which violence restores order only temporarily. Christianity offers a different ending, one in which homecoming comes not through vengeance but through grace.

Even so, Nolan leaves us with an important warning. The forces capable of unravelling a civilisation are not always waiting beyond our borders. More often, they begin within us, whenever trust gives way to suspicion, hospitality to fear, and our shared moral imagination begins to fade. The question is, what are our Trojan horses?

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Esmé Partridge shares the stories of young Christian converts from new report with the Church of England. 27/07/2026

To grow up in the world today – to grow up online – is to experience culture as a dizzying kaleidoscope of images and ideologies. The beliefs and values held by young people are rarely ones they have inherited, but rather chosen from the vast array of options in a postmodern, digital age: wellness culture, alternative spirituality, “manifestation”, self–optimisation, therapy TikTok, financial gurus, the manosphere.

Yet a curious feature of this strange new world is that it can also throw up ancient ideas and timeless truths in places where they are least expected. In a climate where anything goes, beliefs previously thought outdated or irrelevant may find new expressions and new legitimacy. Even Christianity may become a viable option once again, even if it is only one of many possibilities for spiritual exploration. In this sense the digital world may be seen as the culmination of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called ‘liquid modernity’, in which all socially dominant narratives – including secularism itself – have melted away.

This was the experience of many of the young adults Theos interviewed for its new report on young adult journeys to church, who have found faith in what might seem like unlikely and surprising circumstances. The report, published last week by the Church of England, brings together the stories of thirty 18–30 year olds who have found a spiritual home in Anglicanism. Most of these journeys were long and winding. They did not come about because the Church of England was the default option or something they were familiar with from their upbringing.  Instead, having grown up in mostly secular or other religious families, they came through their own personal explorations, most beginning online and out of the postmodern supernova of belief. Sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, they became open to the idea of Christianity – often having previously held very different views.

Some of these young people had previously been militant atheists, describing having a “teenage atheist phase” before later coming to faith. Farid*, a medical student in his early twenties from a Muslim family, developed strong opinions against religion having spent his early teens on the Reddit forum R/atheism and watching YouTube videos from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Alex O’Connor. “These guys hard launched my atheism in my teens”, he explained. Other men had said they had been enticed by right–wing manosphere influencers and the ideas of self–improvement they promoted. One 18 year old described how he got into bodybuilding, believing that “if you just get muscly, you’ll be happy”.

Others, particularly among the women interviewed, said they had previously dabbled in alternative spirituality. Many commented on the popularity of astrology and manifestation on social media, especially during the Covid pandemic. Abby*, a 24 year old nurse from the East Midlands, described how through encountering New Age spirituality and tarot cards on Instagram, she put her trust in “the universe” rather than God because “that was just what was accessible to me at that time”. She explained that her generation were drawn to these spiritualities because they were searching for some meaning or guiding purpose in life, making them open to just about anything. Among Gen–Z, one 19 year old convert said, “there’s just a longing for truth”.

There were others who pursued this longing for truth in religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Whilst at university, Dom*, a 24 year old from Surrey, stayed up all night listening to talks by the Eastern religious philosopher Alan Watts. Others had been interested in Islam, which another young man said “opened up my mind to what God was as an idea” years before he considered Christianity.

It was sometimes through these other ideas that people, accidentally or otherwise, eventually found Christianity. Marina*, a 25 year old who works in a nursery, had followed alternative spirituality. But one day, a spiritual influencer she had been following on Instagram posted a Christian testimony out of the blue. Seeing her renounce her previous occult beliefs, Marina said, “sparked my curiosity but also scared me…I just never really considered that they were opposing [spiritual] forces”. This revelation led Marina to buy a Bible. In reading it she found deep solace and felt called to explore further, eventually deciding to attend a church near her.

There were others who stumbled across Christian content randomly – or perhaps providentially. Becky*, a young mum from the South West who grew up with an atheist mother and satanist sister, described how one day her phone “started showing me loads of TikToks and Facebook posts, all to do with Christianity”. She thought “OK, I’ll watch a few.” But realising that she “found so much peace and joy” in watching the videos, she kept clicking, “end[ing] up down this rabbit hole of sermons and speeches”. In retrospect, Becky says, this content suddenly appearing on her feed can only be explained by providence; what she described as “the Holy Spirit moving through the algorithm”.

Similar stories included Jake*, a 22 year old aspiring entrepreneur, who only became curious about faith after watching livestreamers on the gaming platform Twitch who mentioned being Christian. For Carmen*, a gap year student in the Midlands, it was seeing an artist she followed on Instagram post paintings inspired by Bible stories that inspired her to go deeper into Christianity, turning what had initially been a purely intellectual curiosity into a personal one.

The result for many people was a period of deep exploration that went beyond short–form online content and into longer podcasts, articles and books. These young people, whether or not they had been to university, were remarkably autodidactic. They spent hours watching theological YouTube channels like “Pints with Aquinas”, studying contemporary theologians like David Bentley Hart, and even reading Christian novelists like Dostoyevsky. These explorations carried them a long way on their spiritual journey, with many seriously considering becoming Christian at this stage.

However, strikingly, these explorations alone did not tend to convert them. Despite first discovering faith in a highly postmodern, virtual way, the deeper spiritual shifts that people described almost always occurred through a personal relationship or real–life encounter. For example, Owen*, a 28 year old from Yorkshire, had been researching the religious beliefs of J.R.R. Tolkien, being a lifelong fan of The Hobbit (with a Lord of the Rings sleeve tattoo to prove it). But it was only after passing his local parish priest in the street one day and getting to know him that he seriously thought about becoming a Christian himself. He described spending hours talking to the vicar, who offered personal guidance and answered his many questions. It was through this relationship that Owen’s curiosity grew into church attendance and, eventually, baptism.

Similarly, Jamilah*, a postgraduate medical student, had also been thinking about Christianity independently, but only made the decision to go to church after forming a close relationship with a pastoral support officer at her university. From housemates and partners to teachers and childminders, almost every story involved some individual who played a decisive role in the journey to church, providing a living example of faith, hope and joy.  

Others were transformed by emotional and spiritual encounters they had upon entering a church for the first time. For Dylan*, a recent English graduate, it was stepping into a medieval parish church and seeing rainbow light beaming through the stained glass windows that first awakened his sense of the numinous. “I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen”, he said. “I didn’t quite know what to do with the feeling…so I kept going back to that church”. At his first service there, he went up to the altar and described feeling an “overwhelming love” while receiving a blessing. He now goes to that church every Sunday, sings in the choir, and was recently baptised there.

Another student who came to church through her university’s Christian Union described going along to a service for the first time and being suddenly and unexpectedly moved by its “atmosphere of safety, people being so vulnerable…but so joyful…it was just an environment that I had never experienced before.” For her and others, it was these real–life spiritual encounters – of kindness, goodness, beauty and truth – that brought them into the Church.

What might these findings tell us about young adult journeys to faith today, in the Church of England and beyond? It is certainly true that the channels through which people discover Christianity in a digital age are novel and unpredictable. And yet, what is striking about these stories is that what really moved people – what turned them to Christ – were real relationships, real places, and real experiences. It was encountering the beauty of a sacred space; receiving a warm welcome from a congregation; spending hours talking with clergy and being able to ask them questions. The spark of curiosity may come from somewhere new, but the factors that sustain faith are unchanging – they are rooted, relational and timeless.

*All names were changed for the purposes of this research.

You can read The Church of England report ‘Understanding young adult journeys to faith’ here.

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Chine McDonald reflects on the life and legacy of Broadcaster and Journalist, Edward Stourton. 21/07/2026

It was rare for broadcaster Edward Stourton’s name to appear without being prefaced by the word ‘veteran’. His style steady, his voice instantly recognisable, Stourton represented the best of British broadcasting and, in particular for us, a British broadcasting that took religion seriously. This week, he died at the age of 68, and tributes have been pouring in.

Born in Nigeria in 1957, Stourton was educated at Ampleforth College before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read English Literature. His career started as a trainee at ITN and then a founder member of the Channel 4 News team before becoming a stalwart of the BBC, where he spent most of his career, presenting Radio 4’s Today programme for a decade until 2008, as well as The World at One and The World This Weekend. Current Today editor Rebecca Keating said she and her colleagues described Stourton as the “Rolls Royce of broadcasting”.

That someone of Stourton’s journalistic stature devoted so much of his career to religious affairs, most notably as a long–time presenter of Radio 4’s Sunday, was significant. When religion can so often be treated as either irrelevant or a culture–war battleground, he approached faith with the seriousness it deserved. He neither sensationalised nor trivialised it; he simply believed it was important enough to understand well.

It was on Sunday that several of the Theos team regularly encountered Stourton. To be interviewed by him was both terrifying (he was the Edward Stourton, after all), but also strangely reassuring. This was a man who knew his stuff when it came to religion. You knew he would have done the reading, that he understood the theological nuances, and that he was more interested in getting to the truth of a matter rather than point–scoring or hearing the sound of his own voice.

He was particularly knowledgeable about the Catholic faith, which played a significant part in his personal life. In a Christmas edition of BBC One’s Mastermind, chaired by his Today co–presenter John Humphrys, his chosen subject was Pope John Paul II. He later wrote a biography of the former pope – John Paul II: Man of History – one of several he wrote about the Christian faith, which also included In the Footsteps of St Paul.

It was his 2023 book Sunday: A History of Religious Affairs through 50 Years of Conversations & Controversies for which Theos hosted a book launch, in partnership with Sandford St Martin Trust and the book’s publishers SPCK. There, I had the honour of interviewing Stourton and his co–author and long–time Sunday producer Amanda Hancox, about the biggest religious affairs news stories over the past five decades.

It was after Stourton disclosed in his memoir Confessions: Life Re–examined that he was living with incurable prostate cancer that we invited him to write the foreword to our report Ashes to Ashes: Beliefs, Trends and Practices in Dying, Death and the Afterlife.It explored how Britain is rethinking death, dying and the afterlife in an increasingly secular age, and how the role of faith communities within the death process is changing, too.

Stourton wrote in the foreword: “Religion – and I am sure this applies just as fully to the United Kingdom’s minority faiths as it does to Christianity – still seems to be a source of strength we turn to when confronted with the enormous enigma of death…“As someone with a slow–moving but incurable cancer, I welcome the greater openness about death this report identifies. It is certainly true, as the report finds, that many people are turning to new and more secular ways of celebrating the memory of those they loved, but most religious traditions can call on the experience of centuries of responding to the reality of death, and they have much to offer in a debate of the kind Ashes to Ashes seeks to encourage.”

Reading these words now is both poignant and insightful into who Stourton was. He wasn’t someone interested in easy answers or saccharine optimism. Rather, he understood that religious traditions carry a depth of wisdom which remains relevant, even (or especially) in a society that often imagines it has moved beyond them.

Edward Stourton was a friend of Theos, once describing it as “an inspired idea” that filled “a big gap in our culture”. But for us, his greatest legacy was in showing that journalism about religion can be both rigorous and generous; that broadcasters can combine scepticism with respect; and that faith, when treated with intellectual curiosity and seriousness, belongs not at the margins of public life but at its heart, offering answers to some of the biggest challenges our society faces today. 

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Chine McDonald unpacks the state of theology and religious education in the UK. TRS is more than just a ‘soft’ conversation 09/07/2026

There may be trouble ahead in the world of religious education. While steps are being made to strengthen RE within schools, theology & religious studies (TRS) departments at universities are quietly disappearing. Over the last 20 years, the number of TRS  departments in England and Wales has roughly halved. While the schools sector is recognising the need to bolster faith literacy and education among pupils, the future pipeline of those equipped with skills to teach the school pupils of tomorrow well is being  decimated.

Added to this, the decline in TRS, social sciences and humanities departments more generally across the UK are coming at a time when we need people equipped with the skills of philosophical, spiritual and ethical enquiry to wrestle with some of the big questions we are asking today: what does it mean to be human? What is the impact of AI on our understanding of who we are? What is a good life? How do we live well together? 

Last weekend, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson announced that proposals to make religious education part of the English national curriculum, having received a consensus of support from the RE sector, would move to the next steps with a public consultation in the autumn. While RE is compulsory in schools in England, it does not currently form part of the national curriculum, leading to significant variation in the content and ways of teaching the subject at school level. The government had last year accepted a call for inclusion within the national curriculum, provided that the RE sector could reach consensus on what religious education in the national curriculum should look like.

With consensus now reached – and ahead of Phillipson potentially being reshuffled out of her position at the Department of Education (DfE) when Andy Burnham becomes prime minister – plans will now begin on the how and what of RE’s integration into the new national curriculum.

“Learning about the world’s great faiths and traditions teaches children not just about the world, but how to live alongside and tolerate one another within it,” the Secretary of State said. “In such fractured times, it should be a source of hope that those representing the full spectrum of religion in this country have reached consensus on the most fundamental of points: what our children should learn about the world’s faiths, communities and traditions.”

This milestone is to be celebrated – it could have so easily been a different story, of no consensus. Tireless work by many across the sector, including our friends at Culham St Gabriel Trust, has led to this historic move towards strengthening teaching of religious education in schools. But who will teach it? And how can religious education wherever it is found – in schools, lecture theatres, and beyond the classroom (see our 2025 report on this) – be seen as not just a nice to have, but a necessity in these fractured times?

Sometimes a defence of TRS can fall into the trap of sounding… well, soft. We speak of understanding and tolerance, of being able to see another person’s point of view. But – good though these things are – it’s about more than this.

Last month, I was at the DfE for the first meeting of its Community Cohesion Advisory Group. Run by DfE in collaboration with the University of Salford and the National Union of Students, the group has been brought together to provide feedback on a research–based approach to developing a cohesion framework for education. There, Minister of State for Skills, Baroness Jacqui Smith, spoke of the important role higher education institutions in fostering a sense of communality and cohesion, as well as tackling misinformation.

This is not just fluffy stuff. Sometimes it’s a question of life and death. Nic Beech, vice–chancellor of the University of Salford, said that we are living in a “period of heightened polarisation” and pointed to the attacks in Heaton Park, Golders Green, Belfast and Edinburgh as examples. “There is an urgent need to come together,” he said.

In this setting, I highlighted the importance of religious education and literacy as something we just cannot ignore. Many of the atrocities we see stem from religious and ethical ideologies. Organisations like ours are among the few in the nation who are equipped try to make sense of them.

It’s why TRS is more important than ever. It’s great that the schools sector is starting to understand this, but the closure of religious education departments across the country suggests higher education institutions don’t.

We’ve long seen this coming. Last year, we penned this open letter, signed by people from across different spheres in public life – some of whom are TRS graduates – calling for the safeguarding of religious education. But it seems very few in higher education are listening. For many university vice–chancellors, theology and religious studies, social sciences and humanities, make little business sense. For prospective students facing extortionate tuition fees, the pressure to study a subject that offers the strongest chance of a job with a high salary (which, dare I say it, aren’t the ones that are instinctively geared towards working for the common good) is strong. It’s a sad state of affairs when everything becomes about financial gain.

TRS provision is patchy and dwindling at a time when we need it more than ever. As my colleague George Lapshynov writes so eloquently in our latest Theos blog: “Critical religious literacy, the ability to understand, interpret and engage with different beliefs, is unevenly distributed. Where it is weak, empathy and cohesion suffer, and misunderstanding grows.”

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George Lapshynov responds to the University of Exeter’s considerations to cut Humanities staff and calls for safeguards to religious education.

Nearly a year on from Theos’s open letter calling for urgent action to safeguard Theology and Religious Studies (TRS) in higher education, news last week that the University of Exeter is considering significant staff cuts – affecting disproportionately the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences – reminds us that the situation has not stabilised. If anything, it has gotten much worse.  

Among those affected, and calling for TRS (and her and her colleagues’ jobs) to be saved, is Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a prominent public intellectual and leading scholar of religion. 

Disciplines like theology, religious studies and philosophy are precisely the disciplines that help us understand meaning, belief, culture and human difference. They gave us Renaissance Humanism, the Enlightenment, and the intellectual foundations of human rights and liberal democracy. The fact that another Russell Group university is now considering shedding them should alarm us. It is a sign we are losing, or perhaps choosing to ditch, our collective capacity to understand belief and worldviews critically and rigorously. 

Exeter is not an isolated case; this moment has been a long time in the making. TRS in UK higher education has been in sustained decline for over a decade. Student numbers have fallen sharply since the early 2010s, driven partly by high tuition fees and a narrow ‘value for money’ logic. Departments have merged, fragmented, and closed; centres of expertise have been dispersed or lost. Two decades ago, there were more than forty TRS providers. Today, that number has roughly halved. An entire academic community is hollowing out. 

But why should we care? 

It might be tempting to see TRS as a niche, confessional subject, attractive only to the dwindling number of practising religious Britons, dispensable when difficult financial choices must be made.  

Thinking this way would be a profound mistake. 

First, the loss of TRS impoverishes the university itself. The study of religion is embedded across the humanities and social sciences, offering distinctive historical, sociological and philosophical approaches to understanding texts, cultures and human behaviour. Well beyond the mere promotion of belief, TRS gives us the tools to look critically, historically, and comparatively at some of the most fundamental and ancestral aspects of human life. This is only made evident by the fact that some of the most prominent scholars in the field – such as Professor Stavrakopoulou herself – are very openly atheist. Additionally, students in TRS mingle with students in other disciplines and cross–pollinate. Debates from different disciplines bleed into each other. Remove it, and the university’s intellectual ecology, including its other humanities and social science subjects, is diminished. 

Second, this erosion reflects a wider fragility in the humanities. In an era dominated by STEM and business, these disciplines are often dismissed as less valuable. This is ironic as it is precisely scientific discoveries and rapid technological change, such as artificial intelligence, that are forcing us to confront now more than perhaps ever before questions about meaning, agency and responsibility. TRS and the humanities are essential to the intellectual infrastructure we need to ensure that technology serves human ends, rather than the other way round. 

Humanities graduates remain also highly adaptable, bringing communication, creativity, and analytical skills that employers actively seek. UK humanities research is globally leading and disproportionately impactful. To weaken it is to undermine one of the country’s genuine strengths and sources of soft power, and our ability to contribute to world culture. 

But the most serious consequences lie, arguably, beyond the university. 

We live in a world shaped (often decisively) by religion and belief. From geopolitics to local communities, from healthcare to education, questions of faith and worldview are ever–present. Yet, as Theos’s Beyond the Classroom report highlights, our collective ability to navigate these realities is uneven. Critical religious literacy, the ability to understand, interpret and engage with different beliefs, is unevenly distributed. Where it is weak, empathy and cohesion suffer, and misunderstanding grows. 

TRS provision helps directly address this. It forms not only more religiously literate citizens but also the specialist RE teachers who shape the next generation. The shortage of well–qualified RE teachers, closely linked to weakening TRS provision, is already a recognised challenge, and will get only worse. 

What is perhaps most striking is that all this is happening just as the need for religious literacy is increasing. Government policy increasingly emphasises “faith and belief literacy” for social cohesion and national resilience. Public services are encountering growing religious diversity and recognise the need for better training. Globally, religion continues to shape political and social realities in ways early–2000 ‘end of history’ supporters could not have conceived. 

In other words, just as demand for expertise grows, we are dismantling the structures that produce it. 

The loss of TRS capacity would therefore be catastrophic, not only for the discipline but for the wider ecosystem of education and public life. Universities lose intellectual depth. Schools lose a pipeline of specialists, even as RE looks set to gain status in the National Curriculum. Public services lose access to essential expertise. Above all, society becomes less able to understand itself. 

Nearly a year ago, Theos and many others called for urgent action. That call remains unanswered. Policymakers, universities, and civil society must recognise what is at stake and act together. Financial pressures in higher education are real – there is no denying it. But if we allow them to quietly dismantle the very disciplines that help us understand ourselves and one another, we will pay a far higher price. 

The questions Exeter and other institutions are answering for us – whether or not they are aware of it – are about the kind of society we want to be, about deciding whether we still value the knowledge needed to live together well in a diverse, complex world. If we do, we cannot afford to let Theology and Religious Studies, and the wider humanities, wither. 

If we wait until the last TRS department closes up shop to act, it will be too late. 

Image credit: Photo by Álvaro Bernal on Unsplash

Interested in this? A more detailed resource on the importance of TRS will be available this August. You can also watch Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s interview on The Sacred podcast here.

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George Lapshynov reviews the new Steven Spielberg film ‘Disclosure Day’. Would alien life threaten Christian belief? 15/06/2026

Steven Spielberg has always looked to the skies for a certain kind of grace. In Close Encounters, the heavens open in light and music. In E.T., the little stranger dies and then comes back to life, showing a lonely child the way to love. The religious imagery was never exactly hidden, but it was usually carried by wonder.

Disclosure Day is different. This time, Spielberg does not merely borrow Christian imagery. He places it centre–stage and asks whether it can survive the plot.

The set–up is familiar enough. A whistleblower has proof that alien life is real. A shadowy corporation wants to keep it secret. The world must be told. Somewhere in the middle of this, a former Catholic novitiate nun worries that revealing extraterrestrial life will make people treat the aliens as gods and abandon their faith. Another (wiser) nun reassures her that God could perfectly well have created life elsewhere too.

So far, so reasonable. Christians do not need to panic at the thought of intelligent life beyond Earth. My colleague Nick Spencer recently made the point well: the discovery of aliens would not make Christianity “ridiculous”, as Tom Paine once claimed. Medieval theologians were speculating about “the plurality of worlds” long before Hollywood discovered flying saucers. There is no Christian dogma requiring alien life to exist, nor one forbidding it. If God is the “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”, then other creatures, however strange, would be creatures of the Creator too. They might enlarge our imagination; they would not displace God. A larger universe is certainly not an embarrassment to the Gospel, as it is already held within it.

The problem is not that it asks this question. It is that it seems faintly pleased with itself for having asked it at all. The film portrays Christianity as a provincial belief system that is easily disturbed by changes in our understanding of the world. The moment we realise that aliens really do exist, the film suggests, we will see crucifixes trembling, nuns wavering in their faith, and the faithful rushing to trade the Creed for a UFO press conference.

This is not serious theology. It is a straw man with (in this particular case) a rosary.

To be fair, some of the Christian reaction online has not helped. A small fake scandal erupted around the claim that Spielberg had said Christians would start “second–guessing their own religion”. In reality, he raised the perfectly legitimate question of what a real ‘disclosure’ would do to people’s “fundamental beliefs” and asked whether God is God only on this planet or in every alien civilisation. It is also a question to which Christianity already has better answers than Spielberg appears to realise.

Yet my actual issue with the film is not its misunderstanding of Christianity. It is the salvation story that replaces it.

Jonathan Pageau, in his typical way, has described Disclosure Day as a “late–boomer propaganda film”: aliens as saviours, empathy as the supreme virtue, the mainstream media as priesthood, revelation as broadcast event. One does not need to follow every part of that (occasionally tenuous) reading to see the central point that the aliens are not simply neighbours; they are moral instructors. They arrive, or are revealed, as higher beings whose suffering exposes our cruelty and whose message can rescue us from ourselves.

This is an old trope now. Humanity is violent, divided, selfish and stupid. Then the ‘visitors’ arrive from beyond the stars, purer than us, wiser than us, somehow less compromised by history, sin, politics, and no doubt, social media. They show us that we must choose empathy. Everyone looks up. The music track swells. Salvation descends, tastefully backlit.

The absurdity is that these cosmic redeemers’ apparent saving mission begins with children being lured away into the woods, taken to “Hansel and Gretel’s house” – which turns out to be the aliens’ spaceship – and left with trauma so deep it marks them for decades. An odd first move as saviours go.

Glorification of kidnapping aside, there is something deeply revealing about this. For all that elements of modern secular culture still find the Christian idea of salvation implausible, embarrassing, even dangerous, it remains hungry for salvation all the same. It wants revelation, transcendence, grace, and a messiah who asks only that we be nicer to one another – only without repentance, judgement, or God.

Empathy is certainly not a bad thing. God forbid a Christian think tank should speak out against it. But empathy alone is a very thin gospel. It does not tell us what is true. It does not tell us what is good. It does not tell us how to order our loves, forgive our enemies, restrain our desires, or face death. It is a good feeling more of us should feel, but not a panacaea.

That is why the film’s (surprisingly abundant) Christian imagery jars. The crucifix, the nuns, the stigmata–like wound, the language of revelation and divine beings: all of it gestures towards something deeper than the film’s actual superficial message.

Disclosure Day is a good watch. Emily Blunt is tremendous. Even now, there is something moving in Spielberg’s refusal to surrender wonder. However, this sentimentality is rather disappointing: the aliens are kind, humans are bad, and empathy will save us all.

The good news for all who panicked online is that Christians do not need to second–guess God because Spielberg has rediscovered UFOs and very cliché–looking little green men. We might, however, second–guess Hollywood’s habit of treating Christianity as the fragile superstition from which its own thinner myths can liberate us.

The aliens may or may not be out there. But they are not coming to tidy up our politics, heal our divisions, or save us from ourselves.

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Chine McDonald explores the recent backlash against our cultural obsession with self–optimisation. Can we resist the pull of productivity? 04/06/2026

Businessman Steven Bartlett – whose influential podcast Diary of a CEO has gained more than a billion listens – has come under fire in recent days for saying that having two glasses of wine “ruined” three days of his life “because of the domino effect that it caused”. Bartlett laments the horror of getting worse sleep that night because of the alcohol, eating poorly the next day because his “dopamine system or the cortisol system or whatever was all messed up”. He then – horror of horrors – “podcasted worse” and didn’t go to the gym the day after. All of his supposed failures could be tracked on his various self–optimisation devices.

The response has been fascinating. Radio 1 presenter Greg James called on people to join him in the anti–optimisation movement because “optimisation is killing fun”, he said. He also might have a book out saying just that.

The backlash to Bartlett’s comments have been less about the specifics of enjoying alcohol (some applauded those who have managed to give it up entirely), but the sentiment was more a tirade against the ‘optimisation movement’ which uses data, technology, life and productivity hacks to improve quality of life. That is, if we measure the quality of life by how much we achieve, how much of our to–do lists we blast through, how much money we make, and how much our bodies are optimised health–wise to achieve the said goals.

We start each weekly team meeting at Theos with an icebreaker question. I regret asking the team last week to share the most ‘self–optimising’ thing they have done recently. Some bristled against the question; some of my colleagues rightly pointed out that we shouldn’t be falling into the trap of thinking that the self–optimising way is the right one. After all, one of the key societal narratives we as a team are hoping to counter in the world through the wisdom of Christian scripture and tradition, is exactly this concept of self–optimisation. Nevertheless, we all had answers: ranging from increasing vitamin intake to lifting weights to being trained on how to use AI.

We were reminded of our senior researcher Hannah Rich’s excellent long read in which she interviews members of religious orders about their rules of life that counter this idea that we are what we achieve. The piece begins with a striking quote from the novel Stone Yard Devotional, which tells the story of the protagonist who flees to a convent in the Australian outback:

“Being here feels somehow like childhood; the hours are so long and there is so much waiting, staring into space. Absolutely nothing is asked of me, nothing expected.”

I confess that I find in this quote both liberation and terror. It’s hard to resist the pull of productivity and self–optimisation when life feels overwhelming. Self–optimisation isn’t all bad, but rather a very human attempt to provide control, order and habits that we think might lead to a better life, especially when the world feels so turbulent. And yet the pull of nothingness – of just being – is a very human hope, too. But it feels counter–cultural because, as I heard Romanita Hairston say so powerfully at Washington National Cathedral last week: “We have not yet learned how to be valuable without being useful.” 

She was speaking at The Understory festival, which Theos partnered in, and which a few of us attended in Washington DC last week. Run by our friends at Comment magazine, the inaugural festival gathered civic, institutional and faith leaders to explore what Christian humanism in particular might offer into this fragile and turbulent political and cultural moment. Anne Snyder, Comment’s editor and creator of the festival, explained the concept of the ‘understory’ as the “hidden unity” beneath the world’s fracture. “Something real and raw is stirring beneath our disordered politics and performance,” she said.

What has this got to do with Steven Barlett’s two glasses of wine and the backlash to a culture of self–optimisation?

What I see in the anti–optimisation movement is an understory emerging that is dissatisfied with the overstories we have been told about who we are. Beneath the overstory that tells us we need to be endlessly productive and optimised to feel ok about ourselves is a desire to express to another person: I think we’re made for more than this. Do you? Or as Czech theologian Tomáš Halík told those of us gathered in DC: “Humanity has had the intuition that we are more than what we currently are.” On Tuesday, back in London, at an event we held at the Royal Society of the Arts on behalf of the Fetzer Institute on the launch of their new book, we discussed too the sacred understories that lie beneath the so–called secular; and encouraged society across sectors to pay more attention to them. 

As we see an increasing resistance to the belief that the overstories we have been told to believe are the only stories, perhaps, as Romanita Hairston said, “there is an understory of connection that is not fuelled by the name tags that we wear.” 

I think a Christian understanding of what it means to be human can help us in this moment to put language around what feels instinctive to many, whether they are ‘religious’ or not. People are increasingly turning to the wisdom and steadiness of faith traditions to help us make sense of what we’re going through. For example, could any of us have predicted that in 2026 the pope’s encyclical would go viral? And yet Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas has received mainstream coverage the likes of which we’ve never seen. 

And that podcast I mentioned at the start of this piece – Diary of a CEO? Well, the latest episode out today is Steven Bartlett in conversation with none other than last year’s National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast speaker, Christian apologist John Lennox.

In these times of hunger for things that can hold us in this moment, the role of organisations like ours is perhaps to connect the understories bubbling under the surface to a story – and a person – that might help us. In the gospel accounts, when a rich young ruler asks what’s needed for him to gain eternal life, Jesus in effect tells him to let go of all the things that he might find security in and give it all away. For our self–optimisers today, that might be the wealth and the sleep trackers and the things we might grip on to for dear life; the constant need to save time or to master it for our own purposes.

Perhaps Oliver Burkemann is getting to the truth of Christ’s response to the human need to both achieve and control and produce when he writes: 

“There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”

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Theos, the Fetzer Institute and LSE’s Faith Centre recently held an event at the RSA on ‘Exploring Sacred Stories in a Secular Age’, to mark the publication of the Fetzer book Retelling Sacred Stories. Senior Fellow, Nick Spencer opened the event with an exploration of what it means to “speak” human.

Daniel Everett is one of the world’s leading scholars of language, but he started out as a missionary among the Pirahã people, a small, indigenous group living in an extremely remote part of the Amazonian rainforest.

Everett was an SIL missionary, SIL standing for Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical nonprofit organisation whose main purpose was to study, develop and document languages, so they can translate the Bible into them. That meant that, unlike the popular idea of the missionary, Everett’s role was not so much to speak to the Pirahã people but to listen to them. He, and SIL, worked on the principle that if you really want to understand, communicate, connect with – and ultimately help – other people, you must spend your time and energy among them and in particular listening to how they use words. The experience, as he discovered, can be both enlightening and disturbing.

Now, let me beg your indulgence and ask you to imagine a cosmic missionary, a kind of Martian anthropologist, who wants to do for the human species what Everett did for the Pirahã people. It – because I don’t want to speculate about how many Martian genders there are – does a bit of research first. It discovers, courtesy of reading some of the academic work – our Martian is a big fan of Robert Bellah, Robin Dunbar and Neil MacGregor – that our species has long, indeed always, been, for want of a more precise phrase, “spiritually engaged”. For almost as long as we have records of our species, those records show our preoccupation with the sacred.

It shows up in our material culture, in the statues, temples and votive offerings that can be found the world over. It shows up in our fascination with ritual, prayer and meditation. But above all it shows up in the way we talk. Wherever you go in the world, whatever age it looks at, the Martian finds words like “soul”, “spirit”, “sacred”, “presence”, “holy”, “eternity”, in texts it looks at. And it also notices that humans tend to use words like love, mercy, justice, compassion not as if they are contingent and malleable things in the world, but as if they had some kind of permanence to them and some kind of authority over us; as if, in short, they were transcendent phenomena.

And so, just as Daniel Everett learned to speak Pirahã in order to connect with that people, so our Martian realises that if it wants to connect with this species, it’s got to learn to use these terms, to speak “spiritual”.

But our cosmic anthropologist is not naïve. It realises that some parts of the world appear at least to have abandoned the religious infrastructure that supported this spiritual language. And it also realises that attempts to define and determine the meaning of these spiritual words has proved largely fruitless. Our Martian is well aware that certain philosophers have tried to define the ‘soul’, and certain anatomists have tried to locate it, and certain cranks have tried to weigh it – and none of them has met with much success. So perhaps, our Martian anthropologist thinks, the human species is seeing a gradual evolution of language and that maybe, as TS Eliot wrote, “last year’s words belong to last year’s language, and next year’s words await another voice.”

But then the Martian looks again. Are we really losing our religion as a species? Our Martian finds out, courtesy of the Pew Forum, that around 84% of the species today is “religious” and that this is forecast to increase to about 87% by 2050.[i] And – and this is a crucial fact – even in those places where that religious infrastructure appears in a state of decay, people still speak spiritual.

Listen to what people say, what they write. They still use the language of soul, spirit, sacred, presence, holy, eternity, transcendence – even the most non–religious of contexts – as if nothing has changed. Moreover, this isn’t simply a hangover from the past, in the way the language of “sunrise” and “sunset” is a hangover from a geocentric cosmology, because the way we use such terms today was the way we always used to: figuratively, imaginatively, and above all narratively.

When we say today that my yearns for something, we are not making a poorly–phrased statement about how hungry we are. When we say, we feel the inexorable pull of compassion or mercy, we are not making a statement about Newtonian mechanics. When we say someone has a sacred aura about them, we are not talking about a smell they emit. Rather, we are reaching for a language that reflects the deepest, most heartful, most stubborn, most important ideas and experiences we have of being human.

Some of the earliest human documents we have are about trade and tax – and that surely says something about us. But many of the others relate to offerings to the gods, to rituals, to priestly records, to hymns, to funerary formulas. And many of these, from at least 4000 years ago, are narrative in form. Very often, though by no means universally, our spiritual language is embedded in stories. Our Martian anthropologist realises that not only must he learn the language, but also their narrative grammar.

I’ll drop the analogy now but you will, I hope, understand the point I was trying to make. 240 years ago the great Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote the glorious–entitled verse “To a louse”, which contained the lines:

Oh, would some Power the gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!

That is what viewing our species through the eyes of a cosmic anthropologist might help us do. And in doing so it should help underline two points that are central to what it means to be human.

First, we are a spiritual species. Largely irrespective of what we actually believe in any formal sense, and entirely irrespective of what is actually the case – human beings and culture naturally and always gravitate to “spiritual” language. It’s just what we do. We might not be making a religious, let alone doctrinal point, but we need this language – the language of soul, spirit, prayer, sacred, holy, eternity, presence, etc – just to describe the basic human condition and everything that comes with it.

And second, we are a narrative species. Since long before we started writing them down, we told each other stories, as a way of making sense of time, or ourselves, or our world, and yes, of our nagging sense that this is not all there is. Just as the English speak English, and the Pirahã speak Pirahã, humans speak spiritual and we speak narrative. If we are at all serious about understanding, communicating, connecting, helping our species, our selves, we need to do that too. As Retelling Sacred Stories puts it “the elimination of the Sacred severely distorts the human family’s chances for shared flourishing.”

Let me end, by going back to where I started, with a coda which is also a warning. Daniel Everett spent his time among the Pirahã people learning their language so he could translate the Bible for them. In the process, he did end up having conversations with them and in the process he discovered that as soon as he admitted to the Pirahã that he had not personally met Jesus, they were not interested. So much authority did they place on experience or eyewitness testimony that they were not interested in the fact that the evangelists might have met Jesus. Daniel Everett hadn’t & that was enough for them. In one sense their universe was straightforwardly immediate and proximate.

But in other sense it certainly wasn’t. Everett was clear that the Pirahã were not “nonreligious.” They talked all the time about spirits, beings in the forest, supernatural presences, dreams and visions. Everett had to learn that to communicate properly with the tribe he really had to listen, even if it was a disconcerting experience. It’s a good lesson for us today.

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Nick Spencer reflects on the real meaning of Christian humanism after visiting Washington DC. 03/06/2026

I have just returned from Washington DC where, with colleagues, I attended a seriously impressive conference about Christian humanism. Organised by Anne Snyder and the team at Comment magazine, it was held at the National Cathedral and had over a thousand people. The event, called The Understory Festival, comprised art, music, food, conversation, and numerous first–rate discussions, including an excellent keynote speech by Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University. Bretherton and others outlined what Christian humanism is and why it is so important for our age. I predict, I hope, we will hear a lot more of it over coming years.

Oddly, however, it was not the festival itself but a visit to the Lincoln Memorial that most powerfully brought home to me the real meaning of Christian humanism.

I had never been to Washington DC before, so I took some time to do the tourist thing. It’s an impressive city, with some outstanding museums (the National Museum of African American History has to be one of the best in the world) and a stretch of land, from the Supreme Court at one end to the Lincoln Memorial at the other that feels a bit like Rome must have done in its heyday. Magnificent, huge, brilliant white, marble and stone, classically styled buildings and monuments loom over tiny humans as they ricochet between them. It’s all very imposing.

But nothing, in my humble opinion, comes close to the Lincoln Memorial. Thirty metres high, 60 metres long, with 36 doric columns, the edifice is pure Eternal City. Already dwarfed as you ascend the 87 steps to the interior, you finally come face to face with the former president, in the form of a six–metre high statue, raised on a 3.4 metre pedestal, all of which weighs 170 tonnes. It is breathtaking and utterly intimidating.

Arriving there on Saturday afternoon was probably the closest I will ever come to experiencing what it must have been like to enter an imperial temple in ancient world. Only, instead of coming face to face with Honest Abe – whose famous Gettysburg Address, with its talk of human equality, is carved into the wall of the Memorial – back then I would have been confronted by an emperor, a man whose power was total, whose recourse to violent force limitless, whose very being was divine, and whose health, authority and victories I would have been required to honour, through the regular offering of incense, wine, or sacrifices. This was power, total, unrestrained, imposed on any and all that fell under its gaze.

To live in such an environment and to have thought in any way differently about imperial power would have been terrifying. Failure to honour the emperor could get you killed. The early martyrdom of bishop Polycarp, dating from the second century, gives you a sense of what was at stake. “They tried to prevail upon him, seating themselves by his side and saying, ‘Why what harm is there in saying, Caesar is Lord, and offering incense’.” He would have none of it. And “turning round he said prophetically to the faithful who were with him, ‘I must needs be burned alive.’” And so it came to pass.

This, ultimately, lay at the heart of Rome. An assertion not of humanity but of power, utterly raw and undiluted, total and final, destroying anything that stood in its way.

Christianity transformed this. In place of the imperial throne, there was the criminal’s cross. In place of imperial strength, there was human weakness. In place of huge marble, there was vulnerable flesh. In place of the imperial power as the image of divinity, there was the broken, tortured human body. Emperor and Christ were both men, both gods. They were both the foundation for all they surveyed. They were both the final word of authority in the world. They were just very different answers to those questions. Humanism was born here. “Behold the man,” Pilate said.

But, before we get too pious and triumphalist about this, there is a caveat. We should not assume that Christianity necessarily protects us from this un–humanistic power and idolatry. To the best of my knowledge, the largest imperial statue in ancient Rome, was that dedicated to the first Christian emperor, Constantine. Christianity has proved pretty adept at banishing divinity from living (political) leaders, and then smuggling it back in through some theological loophole.

And let us also not assume that, even if we acknowledge this tendency, we are therefore protected from such backdoor quasi–deification of human power. As I walked the capital’s streets, I couldn’t help but notice several huge banners of the current president, a man deeply popular with many American Christians, unfurled over government buildings. It felt a bit odd, to be honest. A bit like stepping back in time.

A banner of US President Donald Trump, photographed by Nick Spencer 

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A team of our researchers attended the Unite the Kingdom rally last weekend to investigate the rise of so–called “Christian nationalism”. 22/05/2026

“How many of our daughters have to be taken?…that’s the real cost of mass, open borders immigration…An invading army of men brought into this nation…raped and pillaged their way through it… a rape jihad”.

These were the words of Tommy Robinson (a.k.a. Stephen Yaxley–Lennon) at the Unite the Kingdom rally last Saturday. Tommy Robinson, a prominent far right and anti–Islam activist, recently announced his conversion to Christianity, contributing to growing discussions about the rise of so–called “Christian nationalism”.

In response to the increasing prominence of Christianity in our political debates, Theos is engaged upon a new stream of work exploring Christianity and ideas of nationhood in UK and across Europe. To try to gain more of an insight into how Christianity and nationalism intersect for those occupying political spaces like Unite the Kingdom, a team of Theos researchers decided to attend UTK for ourselves. We deliberately sought out attendees who were wearing or carrying Christian symbols or signs and spoke with them to try to understand how and why they had found themselves at such a controversial event.

Walking up to Parliament Square, our eyes met a sea of flags: Union and England flags, but also Israeli, Imperial (Pahlavi) Iranian, Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scottish. There were a great many who fitted the usual media stereotypes: white, middle–aged men whose style and swagger felt football–hooligan coded; the baggy tracksuits and chain necklaces with flag–come–capes on backs were a common sight. Some had been drinking and the odd one at the fringes was making a bit of trouble. Speaking to some attendees, we found they had travelled (sometimes alone) from as far afield as Blackpool, Devon, Norfolk and Lancashire, as well as parts of Essex, East London and Kent. They were keen to interact and talk to us, many seemingly looking for kinship and visibility in a society which had often made them feel invisible and disposable. Coming to London was, for some, an act of civic agency: not democratic participation in the conventional sense, but a journey undertaken because other routes to being heard felt closed. 

The variety of people listening was one of the biggest surprises. There were chairs dotted along one side of the square. Small groups of children of various ages scampered in and out of the crowds, often with flags tied around their shoulders. Volunteers in high–vis UTK jackets wandered around picking up discarded beer cans and meal–deal sandwich boxes. One couple we met explained that they’d come last year and that it was great community event for celebrating Britian. We were struck at how much of a calm, open and generally ordinary, retirement–age they were. We could easily imagine them sitting in the café at the local garden centre, having just wandered around the selection of gnomes and terracotta pots. At times, the rally felt almost like a festival. And whilst white men were the majority, there were also the “Pink Ladies”, anti–immigration activists focused on protecting on women and girls, and the odd person from an ethnic minority background, including one Black lady holding a sign with “Christ, Culture, Country” and a cross emblazoned on it, and who somehow still looked like she belonged.

Unifying these groups seemed to be a belief that the “the establishment” — whether that be the government and politicians or the media or indeed the established church — were not working for them and did not represent them: “They don’t listen to us, the media just say we’re a bunch of thugs”, was a common refrain. When a series of photographs were beamed on screen in a pantomime–esque “goodies” vs. “baddies” game, it was Keir Starmer’s face that was met with the biggest boos. “Keir Starmer is a w****r” was the crowd’s most popular chant. The only time this was hushed away, was during a minute’s silence for Rhiannon Whyte, a 27–year–old woman who was murdered by an asylum seeker in 2024. Asked who they thought could solve the country’s problems – including if Tommy Robinson himself should stand for office – their answer was rarely a clear endorsement of any party at all – although Restore Britain seemed popular. More often than not, we were met with a shrug and dismissal of the formal political sphere. It was politics just as much as politicians or political parties, that was to blame.

Scattered amongst this mass of red, white and blue were a number of large wooden crosses. One was being held up by a man in his mid–50s. His cross was noticeably larger than some of the others and had hinges on it so that it could be folded away more easily. “I made it myself,” he smiled. We discovered he’d been a Christian since he was 14 and had gone to a range of different Protestant churches in his life, from Pentecostal to mainstream Church of England. “This country cannot succeed as a nation if it does not have Jesus at its centre. We need to go back to that,” he explained. Asked about Tommy Robinson, he reflected carefully: “Clearly, he’s done some bad things, but something happened to him in solitary confinement and he became a Christian; there’s a rawness about him, you know? And beneath that rawness is an important message”. That message, for this particular man, was that we need to “go back” to Jesus. He was one of a number of Christians present who seemed serious and practising.

Like many of “the usual suspects” who condemned the “Islamisation” of Britain, often using vitriolic language in doing so, these Christians did often speak of wanting Britain to be Christian. But theirs was not a longing to return to England’s green (or rather, white) and pleasant land. Rather, it was a desire for re–Christianisation from below: revival, repentance, evangelisation. Even, as some put it, a new reformation.

These Christians’ opposition to Islam was real, that is certain. But their opposition was not simply defined by what Britain should be against but rather, however controversially, what they believed Britain should become. That was a New Jerusalem yes, but not one of conquest, crusade and the protection of the white man. Unlike many of the signs carried by some of their compatriots — “I see your jihad and I raise you a crusade” being the most striking example — their rhetoric was generally not coded with violent imagery, but instead characterised by talk of “softened hearts”, and minds opened to the “love and grace” at the centre of the Gospel message.

For one man in his 20s, holding a “Jesus is the way the truth and the life” flag in a St George cross style and wearing a selection of large rings and crucifix necklace, being confirmed as a Catholic at Easter had saved him from himself and given him fellowship and community. He said he was there because he wanted England to be built on Christianity. Another man who ran a right–wing, anti–immigration Instagram channel, explained to us he’d become a Christian in the last few months but really struggled to read the Bible. One of us showed him the Bible app we use on our phone, suggesting he try the short videos and search function to help him get started. He took out his phone, downloaded the app right in front of us and thanked us for the advice.

Some we spoke to who were wielding crosses were not practising Christians but nonetheless had a deep respect for Christianity. They wanted to engage with us and were pleased to see evangelisation at the rally, too. As one man we spoke to from Bedfordshire, who was holding a wooden cross he had picked up at the start of the march, explained: “I am not a God–fearing man, but I believe in the Lord. I don’t go to church, but my nan did. Jesus came first, not Muhammad. I believe we should be loving and our country should be centre on love, that’s why I’m here.” He repeatedly thanked us as Christians for being there, kept apologising for drinking, explaining he had a problem and said we were good people, shaking our hands.

And sincere Christian or not, all this felt completely at odds with Robinson’s call to arms for the battle over Britain and its identity; as did a lone “F**k Islam, Christ is King” sign. A stunt from three French anti–Islam activists, in which they removed burqas to calls of “take it off” from the crowds, was also met with a much more lukewarm reception than the viral media clips suggest – and seemed utterly at odds to the tone of many Christians we spoke to.

Beneath the flags and headlines of a “racist and xenophobic” march, then, we observed something much more complex than social media clickbait or political polarisation will allow. Whilst many of those present who were Christian or Christian–adjacent seemed to converge politically, and almost all were anti–Islam, their journey to the rally was not borne out of the same phenomenon.

For some, that journey began with Christianity, in a belief that Jesus was the way, the truth and the life. Calling for Britain to be a Christian nation was, for them, a natural extension of that. Some seemed uncomfortable with the extremity of language, some were handing out scripture, many had been Christians for a long time. They were not just nationalists reaching for Christian imagery, but Christians whose faith had led them to a distinct, and sometimes uncomfortable, kind of patriotism.

For others sporting Christian symbols, their walk to the march began with national concerns and ended up at Christianity; whether that was an actively developing faith, or simply a deep admiration for it. Their language was more militant; their theology was crude—sometimes almost totally absent — but their openness to us as Christians was striking.

Separate, perhaps, from both groups, was what we saw on the stage – that is, the public presentation of the far–right which, while more sanitised at points than might it have been, was nonetheless still strikingly provocative and at times, aggressive.

What we encountered resists easy generalisations or sweeping judgement. If anything, it highlights the importance of acknowledging the various and frequently complex ways in which faith, identity, and grievance are interwoven in such spaces. It might seem strange to say we found a far–right rally interesting, and there are certainly many millions of Britons who would have been uncomfortable and possibly even in danger there. But it is a worthwhile experience if you want to get to know our new political landscape, or at least one region of it, in its good, bad and sometimes ugly forms.

Theos is publishing research examining Christian nationalism in the UK and Europe. Full research findings and analysis for research countries (UK, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania) will be published over coming months. Sign up here to receive this research straight to your inbox upon its release.

This resource unpacks why our cathedrals matter and what you can do to support them. 18/05/2026

What is a Cathedral? Why are they important? And what do they need?

If you’re interested in ensuring that England’s cathedrals are here for generations to come, read our executive summary with practical guidance that get to the heart of how we can best support cathedrals. 

Download it here.

Erratum: Earlier versions of this summary document contained a typographical error. On pages 3 and 6, the figure should read 74% (not 77%), consistent with the report and the underlying data.

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What comes to mind when you think of motherhood? There’s more to it than meets the eye, says Chine McDonald. 12/05/2026

When I tell some people one of the themes we at Theos are exploring in our research is ‘motherhood’, or tell them I’ve written a book about motherhood, I can’t help but sense eyes glazing over, or sometimes even a barely perceptible eye–roll. It might be just me, but I can’t shake the feeling that in public consciousness, ‘motherhood’ is followed by apple pie; it’s sweet and saccharine. It’s dull and unintellectual. To some, motherhood is a smug and exclusive club, swinging from moaning about our plight to talking far too much about the love we feel for our children – a love the likes of which you can only experience once you’re in said club, of course. For some, motherhood represents pain: the pain of loss or the pain of that which may never come to pass. It is a topic fraught with difficulty, almost every sentence needing a qualifying statement in case it implies judgment or disregard towards other people’s choices or situations. We talk candidly about the challenges of a Theos team managing several pregnancies and pregnancy losses within the space of a few years in our podcast Motherhood vs the Machine, which has recently been shortlisted for a Sandford St Martin Award.

And yet despite its difficulties, I am more convinced than ever that it is a profound lens through which to look at what it is to be human. Not all of us are mothers, but all of us were born of mothers. Motherhood elicits thoughts and ideas around embodiment, care, politics, the family, citizenship, the economy, the workplace, technology, and spirituality. Motherhood is about literal births of literal children, but at a metaphysical level, it also represents what philosopher Hannah Arendt introduces in The Human Condition as ‘natality’ – the human capacity to begin anew. Writing in and around the Second World War, Arendt describes natality as the opposite of mortality; beginnings rather than endings. In a world which seems ever turbulent, with destruction of systems and democracies and trust, and nations, natality is for Arendt, “the miracle that saves the world”. This is not an exclusive club, but a task we are all called into – to remake the world, participating in its renewal, bringing hope where there is only death.

Last week, the team and I enjoyed hosting Edward Davies, director of research at the Centre for Social Justice, and heard how they too are increasingly exploring the place of motherhood and family life within wider topics such as nationhood and work: areas that feel more well–trodden ground for Westminster think tanks.

As a religion think tank in particular, motherhood for us presents a space in which the sacred and the secular meet. We felt that keenly and beautifully at an event we held last month entitled Making a Mother: Sacred Rituals for Modern Motherhood. The event drew in a packed audience of women and mothers, including influential thinkers and speakers on motherhood, such as author Lucy Jones, whose book Matrescence was long–listed for the Women’s Prize for Non–Fiction, and Theo Clarke – former Conservative MP–turned campaigner, who led the birth trauma inquiry. The event comprised the debut screening of our stunning new animation Making a Mother by Emily Downe, and a preview of the UK element of our upcoming research Motherhood: Inside Out, as well as qualitative findings from UK mothers of all faiths and none on the socio–political and spiritual changes that happen during matrescence, it will also include some new findings from landmark polling on motherhood we have commissioned, undertaken by Ipsos.

As we sat in the candlelight led by live music and Rev Alice Watson leading us in a reworking of the ancient Churching of Women liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer, I was convinced again that what we at Theos are doing – offering alternative narratives about the wisdom the Christian faith can offer into some of the biggest challenges of our times – can be attractive and compelling. And that it can be both intellectually stimulating and viscerally engaging. We’ve been overwhelmed by the feedback from those who attended the powerful evening. If you would like to be kept in touch about our work on Motherhood, sign up to hear more here. As well as a stream of research coming out on motherhood throughout the year, we’ve also got some fascinating events in the coming weeks, including a panel I’m hosting at How the Light Gets In on gender equality today (featuring Mary Harrington, Kathleen Stock, Lucy Jones and Minna Salami). We’re also partners at the upcoming Understory Festival being run by Comment magazine at Washington National Cathedral in DC at the end of the month, including a panel conversation on Motherhood, Natality and the Future of the World. Our senior fellow Dr Nick Spencer will also be sharing our Christian nationalism work at Understory, as well as taking part in a conversation on nationhood at How the Light Gets In alongside James Orr, Yasmin Alibhai–Brown, and chaired by Mary Ann Sieghart.

These events join a host of others we are hosting or taking part in over the coming months. In just a few weeks, we’re partnering with the LSE Faith Centre on behalf of Fetzer Institute to run an event at the Royal Society of the Arts entitled Exploring Sacred Stories for a Secular Age. Tickets are free, but you’ll need to be fast to book your place. Do also save the date for the next in our Theos 20th event programme – with Dr Rowan Williams and Marcus du Sautoy on creativity, and what it means to be human in the age of AI – at the National Gallery on 10 July.

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Coco Huggins puts forward our case for broadcasters to engage more with religion and worldviews. Could exposure to different beliefs on TV be an unexpected antidote to division? 07/05/2026

The reality is, faith is fashionable. From duelling vicar Rev Rachael Phillips on Gladiators to Muslim Traitor‘s star Faraaz Noor, people of faith seem to pop up on our screens more often than they once did; and they’re not shying away from “doing God”. In March this year, Bournemouth FC and Scotland international footballer Ben Gannon–Doak was interviewed on BBC Sport Scotland’s A View from the Terrace, and openly declared he prays before games and reads the Bible. 23–year–old Christian Jasmine Mitchell, who was crowned winner of The Great British Bake Off in 2025, similarly opened up about her faith, explaining that she thinks she “prayed more during the competition than…ever before in [her] life”.

Despite this growing openness to discussing faith informally, “formal” religion and ethics broadcasting has fallen dramatically. Since 2011, UK–produced religion and ethics content appearing at peak times across public service broadcasters has been cut by 85%.

This is against the backdrop of increasingly poor Religious Education provision in schools, too. In 2023, 15% of secondary schools in England did not teach RE in year 11.  This is closely linked with a decline in subject specialists, shrinking availability and dwindling student numbers, as our Why RE Matters report emphasised: In 2021, more than half of RE teachers spent the majority of their teaching time teaching another subject, and between 2011/12 and 2017/18 alone, the number of student studying theology and religious studies dropped by 6,500. Where it is taught, the RE curriculum is often substandard, according to Ofsted and “lack[s] sufficient substance to prepare pupils to live in a complex world”.  This is something which Theos research identified back in 2020, emphasising that UK RE provision “does not engage adequately with the real religion and belief landscape, both in the wider world and amongst the pupils that it should be serving” (p.109).

It is not the case that informal RE can simply fill the gap, either. Findings from our Beyond the Classroom report showed that RE provision outside schools—in culture, sport or other community or social interactions— was strongest where formal Religious Education was best, leaving some areas severely lacking in provision across the board.

These trends are all the more worrying because of the UK’s increasingly pluralistic religious landscape. Almost 1 in 10 Britons now identify with religion other than Christianity, and a third of those attending weekly religious services are doing so in religious buildings other than churches. Similarly, whilst the 2021 census showed a record number of Britons ticking the “no religion” box, this group of “nones” is hugely diverse. It incorporates those who believe in God or a higher power, those who are “spiritual” and who have intermittent belief, not just atheists, as our 2022 report The Nones, explained. 14% of Nones, for instance, believe in the supernatural power of ancestors and 14% in the healing powers of crystals. In other words, the growth of the “nones” doesn’t mean we’re becoming more similar, but more diverse in our religious outlooks. This means we need more religious education across the board, not less.

Growing community tensions amid faith–heightened global conflicts, have made the situation all the more urgent. The October 7th attacks in 2023 and the escalation of violence across Gaza, Lebanon and more recently, Iran, have had repercussions for communities, driving up religiously and ethnically motivated hate crimes. In the year to 2025, hate crimes targeting Muslims rose 19% and 2024 saw a record 113% increase in hate crimes against Jewish people. Rioting in the wake of the Southport murders, the racially aggravated rape and assault of a Sikh woman (mistaken for being Muslim) in Birmingham and the repeated arson attacks and violence directed against synagogues and Jewish communities in London, all cannot be understood without acknowledging the underlying religious and ethnic tensions which underpin them.

Building social cohesion is now a key governmental priority, as outlined in a recent policy paper by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and building faith literacy must be a key part of this. Recent Theos research has suggested that informal religious education could be a valuable of supporting wider changes to RE provision and in doing so, boost social cohesion. Reality TV shows and other “informal” media coverage are becoming an important source of religious education for a growing number of people, with scientific evidence suggesting that positive exposure can reduce prejudice and hostility towards minority groups.

As the Government undertakes a review of the BBC’s Royal Charter which is due to expire in December 2027, this is a vital moment where we need to be calling for more engagement with religion, ethics and worldviews across mainstream platforms. Research has suggested that the BBC remains a world leader on religion and ethics coverage. BBC iPlayer is “the only platform that gave prominence to the arts, international issues, religion and belief on its homepage in significant numbers”, according to research published by the University of Leeds,  something we must continue to support.

For this reason, Theos submitted evidence to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, calling for religion and ethics coverage to be protected going forwards. As Anna McNamee, Executive Director of the Sandford St Martin Trust, reflected during discussions around the charter: “Historically the BBC has played a vital role in furthering religious literacy and tolerance in the UK. In increasingly fractious and fragmented era, its vital it remains at the frontline of promoting understanding across our differences”  

Whatever happens in the wake of the BBC Charter review and the Government’s social cohesion strategy, there is no doubt that religion will continue to play a vital role in our national conversation. What kinds of conversations we have and their outcomes however, will ultimately depend on how well and how deeply we choose to engage with those who are different to ourselves.

You can read Theos’s full evidence submission to DCMS and its recommendations here.

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What makes a mother? A new animation by Emily Downe exploring matrescence – the hidden metamorphosis of becoming a mother. 30/04/2026

What makes a mother?

A short animation by Emily Downe exploring matrescence, the often unseen and deeply personal metamorphosis of becoming a mother. This film reimagines ancient wisdom for contemporary motherhood, offering language, beauty, and recognition to an experience many feel, but few can name. 

A new mother is in a process of radical change – morphing, transforming, transcending. But does anybody see her? 

“In my loud and invisible creation, I found that I was Created” 

Credits
Directed and designed by Emily Downe
Written by Emily Downe, Chine McDonald, and Lizzie Harvey
Music and sound design by Jan Willem de With (vocals by Lizzie Harvey and violins by Sofia Yatsyuk)
Animated by Martha Halliday and Emily Downe
Voiced by Clover Stroud, Beverly Shepherd and Emily Downe
Produced by Theos with special thanks to Lucy Jones, The Ideas Workshop, Open Society Foundations.

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Who was St George? This St George’s day, can our patriotism be reimagined by a richer understanding of the saint behind England’s flag? 23/04/2026

On St George’s Day, England marks the feast of its patron saint: a third–century Christian martyr, Roman soldier, and legendary dragonslayer whose red cross has become one of the most recognisable national symbols in the country. Yet in modern Britain, St George is no longer a straightforward figure of shared celebration. His flag now sits at the centre of heated disputes about identity, immigration, and the place of Christianity in public life.

Over the past year or so, the red–and–white Cross of St George and the Union Jack of which it is a part have become an increasingly visible and contested presence in the public space: hanging from windows, fluttering from lampposts, graffitied on countless walls, and sometimes waved outside hotels housing asylum seekers. For some, these displays express perfectly legitimate pride in nation and tradition. For others, they provoke unease, appearing bound up with exclusion, hostility, or a hardening of cultural boundaries.

This tension points to a deeper question about love of country itself. Patriotism can be a powerful and necessary civic force. However, there are clear dangers associated with its anxious and defensive forms. Without a positive shared vision of ‘us’, patriotism easily mutates into ‘us versus them’. It becomes a nervous love of country, one that is afraid of losing its identity and is suspicious of outsiders. When the only people flying England’s flag do so in anger, it becomes a tool of grievance rather than belonging.

It is no accident that these arguments now overlap with wider concerns about Christian nationalism. Over the past year, Theos has begun sustained research into the ways in which Christian language, symbols, and history are being drawn into contemporary national politics. As my colleague Nick Spencer has shown, such appeals can take very different forms: sometimes instrumentalising Christianity as an identity marker to exclude others, and sometimes drawing more deeply on Christian traditions that emphasise humility, hospitality, moral limits, and a shared civic life.

St George’s Day forces us to decide which of these traditions we are invoking.

If the Cross of St George is to mean something more than resentment or retreat, it must be rerooted in a richer understanding of the saint behind the flag. As Nick Spencer has put it elsewhere, we may need to ‘recapture the flag’ and redirect its symbolism towards something lifegiving. On this day of all days, that work can only begin by asking who St George was, and why England came to claim him in the first place.

*

Paradoxically, England’s patron saint was not English at all. But that is perhaps the point. St George was a third–century Roman Christian soldier from Cappadocia (modern–day Turkey) whose mother was from the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. He was martyred for his faith by Emperor Diocletian. His story travelled across the Mediterranean and Europe, and by the medieval period, he had become one of the most venerated military saints in Christianity. By the late 13th century, Edward I had adopted the red–on–white St George’s Cross for his armies, and it swiftly became England’s national flag on battlefields and ships.

England embraced St George as a Christian ideal: a saintly hero who was believed to defend all who called upon him. To medieval Christians, he was a protector of the vulnerable. He was celebrated as a ‘martyr–warrior’, a soldier of faith who stood up to evil and fought for goodness. It was these universal Christian qualities – courage, sacrifice and defence of the weak – that formed the basis of his appeal.

Crucially, English devotion to St George transcended the mediaeval world’s many social barriers. His Mediterranean ethnic background was irrelevant and, unlike earlier patron saints tied to particular regions of England or royal dynasties, he became a unifying figure for a people who were often divided by class and conflict. Contemporary chroniclers recounted how both nobles and peasants prayed to him, and even warring factions adopted his banner. St George stood for England itself. His red cross flag became a rallying standard that allowed the English to imagine themselves as one people – a national community bound by loyalty and shared meaning rather than blood.

St George was so devout a Christian that he died for his faith. It is difficult to imagine that the generations of English people who invoked his protection would recognise their saint in the hard–edged nativism now sometimes associated with his flag. The Englishness St George represents can only be a capacious identity of shared belonging. To invoke St George today should therefore still mean welcoming the stranger, defending the vulnerable in our midst, and forging one people out of many.

This vision is badly needed in modern Britain. Latest census data highlight the cost of our failure to nurture a shared national identity. Almost three in four people born outside the EU and four in five people born in the EU who arrived in the UK since 2011 do not identify as British and do not feel an affinity with any nation of the UK. In other words, a majority of newcomers do not feel that this is their country.

How might we close that gap? Policies and practical support are certainly part of the answer. But so too is patriotism in the best sense: a confident cultural welcome that invites newcomers to participate in English and British life and to learn the moral grammar that has historically underpinned it. The invitation to join a common culture and a shared public language – one robust enough to be learnt, inhabited, and eventually claimed as one’s own.

As quiet leaders in integration, Theos research has found, churches have an important role to play in making this vision tangible. When a new refugee hotel opens or families are resettled, churches often become hubs of welcome, hosting language classes, meals, and drop–in sessions. They also offer something less measurable but just as vital: friendship and a listening ear. Through shared activities, meals, and sometimes worship, strangers become neighbours. In these spaces, refugees begin to identify not only with their local community, but with England (or indeed Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Britain) itself.

The patriotism of St George’s England is not about guarding a fictitious national purity. It is about sharing the traditions of English life with others. It means helping newcomers celebrate St George’s Day as a story of shared identity. It means passing on the stories of England – from the Magna Carta to the NHS, from Shakespeare to the Premier League – so that new residents can adopt these stories as their own and find room for their own stories within them. It means flying the Cross of St George from the church tower not to mark fenced–off territory, but to signal sanctuary, as the Bishop of Leicester recently argued.

On St George’s Day, then, we are not simply remembering a saint from our past but rehearsing a question about England’s future. St George – the soldier, martyr, victory–bearer, and legendary dragonslayer from faraway lands who nevertheless became a hero to the English – reminds us that Englishness need not be defined by narrow ancestry. At its best, it has been an evolving project centred on shared values, moral obligations, and mutual loyalty.

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George Lapshynov responds to Donald Trump’s AI generated image of himself amidst his conflict with Pope Leo XIV. Why are Christians embarrassed to call out blasphemy? 16/04/2026

Was it blasphemous? In the few days since Donald Trump posted the already infamous AI–generated image of himself in flowing robes, radiating light and laying hands on a sick man, in the midst of his bitter and undiplomatic (the understatement of the year) public quarrel with Pope Leo XIV, we have seen Christian leaders tiptoe around the question.

Not only is the question itself perfectly reasonable for any religious person to ask, or indeed anyone who holds something sacred, but the hesitation around answering it has been striking.

That reluctance is understandable. In a liberal democracy, and in a society no longer straightforwardly Christian, “blasphemy” can sound antique, illiberal, faintly embarrassing (i.e. everything I love): the sort of thing one is not supposed to say in a grown–up secular age. In Britain, blasphemy laws are gone (since 2008 in England and Wales, and since 2024 in Scotland), and few believers want them back.

We also live in a society where offense is weaponised so regularly that the risk of being perceived as a ranting polemicist (or even a tinfoil–hatted conspiracist who sees persecution round every corner) when reflecting on whether something is indeed “offensive” or not – still less whether something is in fact “blasphemous” – is real. Small wonder, then, that many would rather sound detached than unreasonable.

But none of that makes blasphemy, as a category, meaningless. As Natasha Moore recently put it, it remains the right word for sacrilege: the violating of something sacred. Blasphemy is not a synonym for “this upset me”. It is (or at least, should be) a judgement that something holy has been profaned.

Which is why, in this context, the obvious thing is also the right thing to say: Trump’s AI slop was blasphemous.

The image clearly traded on Christian iconography and did so for political self–display at the precise moment Trump was publicly berating Pope Leo for (rightfully) criticising the war in Iran. Trump later claimed that he thought the image showed him “as a doctor… making people better”. No, it didn’t. It showed him as Christ.

Even some of Trump’s religious allies recoiled. Bishop Robert Barron called Trump’s remarks about Leo “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful”, while Tony Suarez, a pastor and longtime Trump adviser, said of the image that it “shouldn’t have been posted… and needs to be taken down immediately”.

To be clear, I am not throwing a bone here to defendants of blasphemy laws, nor is this a plea for censorship in any shape or form. Quite the opposite: Trump was free to post the image, however unseemly it may be for a world leader to do so. But so, too, are others free to condemn it. Saying “this is blasphemous” does not threaten free speech; it is an exercise of free speech.

As a former colleague wrote on this site some years ago, Christians are often pushed into a kind of “faux sophistication” in which we pretend not to care when what we love is treated with the seriousness of a novelty snack – or of some offensively shaped chocolate.

But strong moral language is not the enemy of a fairer, more liberal society. In fact, it is what keeps us honest. The real danger lies in being so frightened of sounding prudish, censorious or unsophisticated that we can no longer say what is really at stake. Or indeed see the obvious, even when it is staring us in the face in unholy glowing robes.

What we need, as Teresa Bejan has termed it, is “mere civility”. It does not mean blandness, niceness, or the suppression of strong disagreement. It means having the courage to disagree fundamentally and speak plainly, sometimes sharply, while doing everything in our power to make sure common life remains possible. As Bejan puts it, a merely civil society is one in which we do not pull all our punches at once, but we do stay in the room with opponents we profoundly reject.

Calling Trump’s image blasphemous is not uncivil. It is a forthright moral judgement made without any desire to coerce, exile or silence. It is disagreement in public, not persecution. And any Christian should not have to think twice to reach for the ‘b–word’ when justified.

That is partly why it is heartening that a significant number of known Trump supporters publicly took offence at the president’s anti–Christian icon and at his attitude towards the Pope, and expressed their disapproval in strong yet civil terms. They demonstrated that moral seriousness need not collapse into panic, or censorship, or even abandoning their broader political loyalties.

In that sense, this row matters far more than the one lurid image – though it is now forever engraved on millions of retinas and will, no doubt, be the object of more than one undergraduate dissertation. It is a small test of whether we still possess the moral vocabulary for life together in a plural society. Such a society does not need to abolish strong language; it needs the confidence to use it carefully and appropriately. Some uses of sacred imagery are not merely tacky, not merely “provocative”, not merely “content”. They are profanations.

Though I pray they won’t, the Trumps of today and tomorrow will continue their profanities. The rest of us should have the courage to call them out in the strongest terms every time they do so. If we become too coy to call a spade a spade, we are not becoming more mature; we are growing less capable of honest common life.

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Chine McDonald reflects on 20 years of Theos and interviews previous directors, Paul Woolley and Elizabeth Oldfield. 09/04/2026

When I walk into the Theos office on Great Peter Street in Westminster, one of the first things I’m greeted with is a newspaper clipping with the headline: “Why Theos will fail.” It’s certainly a humbling way to start the day.

Just days after Theos launched in 2006, Martin Newland – writing in the Guardian – predicted that a religion think tank ‘hadn’t got a prayer’ in a world dominated by anti–religious secular humanism. Newland himself had been burned by talking about his own Roman Catholicism in the same newspaper some time before. He had critiqued secular society for its inability to understand the motives behind religious observance, and faced the wrath and ire of critics in the comments section of his piece for doing so.

Newland’s prediction captured something of the cultural mood at the time: religion was widely seen as irrational, irrelevant, even dangerous. Public atheism had gripped the nation in the years post–9/11, and faith was expected to retreat quietly into private life.

It’s why he couldn’t see how Theos’ argument, as outlined in Dr Nick Spencer’s first report Doing God: A Future for Faith in the Public Square, could possibly cut through.

And yet, 20 years on, Theos is still here.

As we mark this milestone, I’ve been thinking of the legacy that was passed on by my predecessors, the two previous Theos directors, and the ways in which our mission remains the same despite the context having changed significantly. Our founding director Paul Woolley, now CEO of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, said of the mission of Theos at its formation: “We believed, theologically, that the gospel of Jesus is good news for the whole of society… We also pushed back on the idea that secularism was inevitable and religion was in decline. In fact, we argued the world was becoming more religious, not less. And that meant that stripping away the Christian foundations of our common life would come at a real cost.”

Paul recalls the launch day as a moment when it all felt real: “We had coverage in every broadsheet… that was the moment it felt like we were part of the national conversation.” But there were challenges too: sustaining momentum, producing research that people actually wanted to read, and weathering scepticism and opposition. Plus ça change. And there was opposition, too. “Some people really didn’t want Theos to exist,” Paul said. “And we had our fair share of tough or sceptical media encounters. So a lot of the challenge was about resilience, staying clear on our purpose and continuing to deliver, even when it wasn’t easy.”

By the time Elizabeth Oldfield took on the directorship in 2011, the landscape had changed. The confident secularism of the 2000s had given way to a more complex and unsettled public square. Her vision for Theos was “to be a credible, visible and persistent Christian presence in public conversations, holding open space for faith as a mainstream element in building a healthy society.”

Of course, challenges remained. “Trying to convince people religion was interesting and relevant” was still part of the task, she says, as was responding to vocal critics. But the questions themselves were shifting.

This year, four years since I took on the role as Theos director, we mark our 20th anniversary, and find ourselves in yet another moment of change. I joined Theos in a post–Covid world; a world of global instability, polarisation, economic and political turmoil, climate catastrophe and violent conflict. The secular ideals we had been led to believe would lead to progress, freedom and peace have not exactly been shown to do so. People are understandably therefore looking for answers in ancient spiritual and religious ideas. Many of us who have worked at the intersection of religion and mainstream secular culture have sensed a ‘vibe shift’ – people (footballers, public intellectuals, national newspapers and broadcasters) are Doing God in public in a way that we couldn’t have predicted.

Our task at Theos today is to continue to show how the good news of the Christian faith can help us meet the biggest challenges humanity faces today. The dominant conversations – about technology and independence, autonomy and progress – are loud, angry and increasingly frantic, and cry out for a vision of human life, love and forgiveness that we believe is seen in the person of Jesus Christ.

As Paul Woolley says: “The good news of Jesus isn’t just private. It’s public. It speaks to individuals, whole communities and societies, and it’s transformative.  And at the same time, it carries a challenge: if Jesus is Lord, then no one else is. Every other claim to ultimate authority is relativised. In a world where a lot of voices still want to play Caesar, that’s a message we really need.”

In this our 20th year, we’re giving thanks for all the doors that have been open to Theos, the excellent staff and fellow travellers that have worked tirelessly to continue this mission. And we’re celebrating big; with a programme of events, talks and public lectures that touch on elements of Theos’ work today. We would love to see you at these events (outlined below) which will take place at St Martin–in–the–Fields, the National Gallery, Southwark Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey. We’re also delighted to be partnering with Comment magazine at the Understory Festival at Washington National Cathedral in DC next month.

Through all of this, Theos’ calling endures: to offer a credible, generous, and winsome voice in public life. As we look ahead, I’m encouraged by Elizabeth’s hope that we would approach this task “with courage and creativity… and a twinkle in your eye”. Our prayer is that we do just that, supported by people like you.

If you’d like to join us in the mission to provide a compelling and creative voice for Christianity in the public square, join our Theos 20 Club today.

Theos 20th anniversary events 

20 April – Science, faith and the future of humanity, with Dr. Francis Collins, Dr Nick Spencer and Miranda Green (Financial Times) – St Martin–in–the–Fields

10 July – Art, creativity and what it means to be human in the age of AI, with Dr Rowan Williams, Prof Marcus du Sautoy, Rev Ayla Lepine, Dr Nathan Mladin, and Chine McDonald – The National Gallery

September (TBC) – 20 years of religion and democracy, chaired by Mishal Hussain (Bloomberg) – Westminster Abbey

22 October – A Common Good economy with Prof Mariana Mazzucato – Southwark Cathedral

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As supermarkets blur the lines between Christian festivals, George Lapshynov calls for us to remember how to truly celebrate Easter. 31/03/2026

A few days into the New Year and still in the throes of the post–holiday haze, I walked into my local Sainsbury’s for a small shop. And there it was: the Easter chocolate aisle, proclaiming proudly that Easter had arrived on January 5th. It stood there, provocatively, unrequited, mere yards into a supermarket whose air was still filled with the smell of Brussels sprouts and pigs–in–blankets.

There is something absurd about living by a calendar whose holidays seem to arrive whenever the supermarkets say they do. Halloween begins some time in September. Christmas appears the day after Halloween. Easter arrives with prematurely laid chocolate eggs in January, while the last discounted mince pies wait to be cleared from the shelves. Holidays no longer punctuate the year, but smother it, blending into a single, shapeless blob of novelty chocolate.

The result is not that we celebrate more. It is that we celebrate less well.

Festivals are intended to mark the passage of time, distinguishing one day from another and one season from the next. They give shape and texture to the year. The calendar was invented for the very purpose of keeping track of religious festivals. Holidays are therefore moments with a narrative, a rationale, an atmosphere, and historically, a pattern of preparation, restraint, anticipation, and celebration.

The modern liturgical calendar, meanwhile, is made up of promotional aisles, where the days of saints are replaced by confectionery in slightly different shapes to keep track of time. And holidays, have become little more than an occasion to eat chocolate in the general direction of a religious tradition.

This is not a plea for less celebration. Britain is not suffering from an excess of cheerfulness, to say the least. In many respects, ours is a lonely and frayed culture: hyper–connected, overstimulated and often spiritually threadbare. It is very important that we have shared rituals and occasions for celebration and spending time with family. There is nothing wrong with enjoying an Easter egg or a mince pie, giving one away or delighting in the small extravagances of a festival. Christians, of all people, should not be embarrassed to rejoice.

However, rejoicing only makes sense if there is something to rejoice in and a way of distinguishing a feast from ordinary times. Without some downtime, a feast quickly becomes indistinguishable from any other day. If we shop as though it is always Christmas, eat chocolate as though it is always Easter and indulge as though every week were a special occasion, then no occasion will feel special. Celebration that is not connected to anything meaningful becomes, by definition, meaningless, and leads to boredom. Or in my case, exhaustion.

This is why the commercialisation of our religious festivals is more damaging than it first seems. It does not merely democratise ancient holy days. It hollows them out. It renders them unintelligible. It detaches them from the stories and practices that gave rise to them in the first place, offering them back to us as harmless cultural products. They retain the shell but lose the substance.

Consider Easter. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ, the defeat of death, the harrowing of hell, and the emergence of a new creation. It is not just a minor ‘spring festival’ with a few spiritual overtones. It is the theological and historical centre of the Christian year. Yet in public life, it is presented, at best, as a vague seasonal interval marked by pastel colours, extended weekends, and spring–themed edible garden decorations. At worst, it is misrepresented as a pagan festival that belligerent Christianity shamelessly appropriated from the harmless tree–hugging, bunny–worshiping pagans of Europe.

Sometimes this commercialisation is simply lazy. At other times, it is ludicrous, bordering on deranged. A colleague recently showed us a photograph of a pair of oversized glossy, red chocolate lips, marketed as “the most stylish Easter present”. The lips stared into my soul with a kind of mute confidence, as if they knew we had all long since given up asking what precisely any of this had to do with Easter. I hesitate to be po–faced about these things – no one likes a killjoy. However, I also struggle to believe that if they were animated, those lips would proclaim the Paschal greeting, “Christ is risen!”

My objection is neither to chocolate nor to silliness. (God knows I love both too much.) I object to meaninglessness and to us mining Christian festivals for atmosphere after setting aside their truth claims. We are, as a culture, following in the footsteps of those towns that collapse because decades of intensive mining have hollowed out the ground beneath them.

The selective nature of the process makes this more rather than less conspicuous. In a Britain that prides itself on being multicultural and religiously diverse, Christian holy days are often treated as common cultural property, open to parody, dilution, eroticisation and indefinite commercial exploitation. Other religious observances, by contrast, are approached with respect, solemnity and caution. For instance, I struggle to imagine a major retailer launching sweets designed to be cheeky or suggestive for Eid al–Fitr or some other important religious celebration for a minority group – and quite rightly so.

On the one hand, I see the liberties that our confectionery manufacturers, Pontiffs of the modern calendar, take with Christian holy days as a tacit acknowledgement that ours is a Christian country, despite what the naysayers may believe. I take solace in the fact that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. On the other hand, if respect is the right instinct where sacred matters are concerned, why is it so often suspended when it comes to Christianity, treated as a pretext for novelty gifts and commercially opportunistic nonsense?

I enjoy a good Easter egg as much as anyone, especially one indecently full of hazelnut or pistachio cream. However, I also find that chocolate eggs are best enjoyed liberally after fasting for Lent, and best purchased in classical, inoffensive shapes no earlier than one week before. Feasting is more satisfying when it follows restraint and is kept to a narrow time– window. And true joy is more fulfilling when it has actual meaning and substance and is not the product of confectionery marketing departments.

So by all means keep the chocolate. Keep the family meals, the flowers, the laughter, the days off, and even the lip–shaped absurdities if you must have them. But let us at least be honest about the utter pointlessness of having every holiday blend into the next in one big year–long chocolate orgy. It is not making our culture more festive or cheerful; it is making it less capable of celebrating anything at all.

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Across the UK, cities like Doncaster are facing immense social and economic challenges. Can rooted Christianity offer an antidote? 13/03/2026

How do you combat the use of Christianity to fortify a nationalism that excludes minorities? Perhaps you should start in a church.

I fear I was not the preacher that the congregation of St James were hoping for. The Bishop of Doncaster, the Right Reverend Leah Vasey–Saunders, had been the intended guest celebrant and preacher, but somewhere communication went awry and Bishop Leah was now elsewhere. So it was that on International Women’s Day, the sermon on the unnamed woman by the well in John’s Gospel was delivered by a middle–aged man. Hey ho.

As I turned off the M18 and drove towards Doncaster city centre, I saw a few flags hanging from lampposts, although not as many, I think, as when I last drove this way. Doncaster is a city in a political tug–of–war. Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, Ed Miliband has been MP for Doncaster North since 2005. At the 2024 election, Labour won a majority in Doncaster Central, beating the Conservatives by just under 10,000 votes. However, in the council elections the following year, Reform UK swept to power with 67% of the vote and a significant overall majority. Doncaster Central sits a lowly 222nd on Reform’s target seats for 2029, but no–one now takes anything for granted.

The question of faith, nation and belonging has been an extremely live one in this area, which is covered by the Diocese of Sheffield. Churches from across South Yorkshire have seen new worshippers from all demographics. What hope might the church in Doncaster offer to a city that has its unfair share of social and economic challenges? What form might such hope take on the ground?

St James Doncaster is a mid–nineteenth century building, sandwiched between the East Coast railway line and a dual carriageway. Getting there is itself a bit of a challenge. Churches like St James can be found in cities throughout England. They were built to serve the burgeoning working class in the Victorian inner cities, a mission that few of them achieved with any success. Many are now closed.

St James is not facing that prospect. The congregation on this particular Sunday is small (about 25) but welcoming. In the afternoon, a growing Anglican Urdu congregation meet in the church, an initiative begun in 2023 by the archdeacon of Doncaster, the Venerable Javaid Iqbal, and his wife, Mussarat. As the congregation grew, some also began attending the morning service, filling valuable roles on the PCC and adding new life to the congregation. It is Mussarat who was helping to lead the service on this particular morning. An Anglican Farsi fellowship is now also being started.

The congregation may be small, but the worshippers include Pakistanis, Nigerians, an Iranian (who apologises for her English before reading the very long passage from John’s Gospel) and a white working–class family, one of whom may be in church for the first time. As a middle–class Southerner, I am very much the odd–one–out.

After the service, over tea and cake, two women enthusiastically tell me of the positive changes that they have seen in the church. The Boys Brigade, which numbered six in 2022, now regularly attracts over 30, with three families having joined the church as a result. Everyone greets one another in the peace and there feels like a genuine crossing of boundaries in the refreshments afterwards. When I slip away the cake has long gone but the chatting continues.

Just the other side of the dual carriageway, in a converted hairdressers, is another new congregation, established in September 2025 with money distributed by the national church expressly for innovative mission in places such as central Doncaster. Canon Adam Priestley, a highly impressive priest from a genuine working–class background has the credibility to minister in his context that many others (myself included) lack. The St Vincent’s mission is open weekdays (Sunday worship is planned for the future) and attracts a white working–class community with a recent increase in young men who no doubt see in Adam a model that resonates with their own background. Within three months of opening, they had had three adult baptisms. Christian players with Doncaster Rovers give their testimonies and a weekly Christians Against Poverty Job Club runs. The worship might be described as Catholic visuals with evangelical preaching. This is full–fat Christianity in the best sense of the term. Adam runs regular catechism groups, though wisely chooses to describe them differently.

It would be too easy to say that Christianity holds all the answers to Doncaster’s multiple challenges – challenges that may well increase along with popular expressions of nationalism. However, it certainly provides an answer, or at least the beginnings of an answer. Where Christians, ordained and lay, are prepared to root themselves in their local contexts, whether that is a traditional church building or a converted hairdressers in a shopping arcade, and are undefended enough to open themselves without judgement to whomever might walk through their doors, then the love of Christ is displayed and lives begin to be transformed. Transformed lives lead to transformed communities, and transformed communities lead to a diminishing of the barriers of otherness that, consciously or unconsciously, have been erected.

Toby Hole is Director of Mission and Ministry in the Diocese of Sheffield

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Chine McDonald reflects on it means to be human in an age of Artificial Intelligence. 06/03/2026

When did you feel most human today?

For me, it was soothing my three–year–old in the wee hours, after he was woken up by a night terror. It was feeling his skin against mine, his heartbeat slowing to the rhythm of my own. Stroking his hair.

It was feeling the anxiety in my stomach as I doomscrolled through the news headlines when I should have been sleeping, and then trying to steady myself by reading and holding in my hand a real, physical copy of my Lent book (Prof Maggi Dawn’s Giving It Up, if you’re interested).

It was noticing myself as just one of hundreds, thousands, of people determinedly stomping through Paddington station, busily trying to get somewhere. It was that glorious first sip of hot coffee.

To be human is to live an embodied life of texture: ups and downs, anxieties and joys, rage and hope. But in the age of AI and the machine, we’re being pushed towards a flattening. A seemingly perfect, and frictionless life. Optimising our productivity, our health, our family life; controlling life and ridding it of blemishes, ageing, and any suffering – from cradle to death.

Part of the reason so many of us find this quest towards a friction–free life so disturbing is that it is clearly a falsity, a mirage. We can’t pretend that life is perfect when bombs are being dropped, missiles fired, economies faltering, and forever wars looming.

Maybe this is in fact why we think we want the appearance of perfection. Perhaps it’s why social media channels are full of beauty – perfectly–lit reels and posts that put forward the most perfect of lives: beauty, even if merely the semblance of beauty, is an effective antidote to the brutality of the moment we are living in. I can to some extent therefore understand why the tradwife phenomenon – a social media trend of women cosplaying 1950s housewives, in perfect homes with perfect kitchens that produce perfect home–baked goods – is so attractive. When the world is on fire, why not stay home, make your house pretty, and make jam?

Scrolling through social media (again) recently, I came across a woman filming her morning routine as a mum. The kitchen gleamed; the children were perfectly dressed, their lunch boxes immaculate. Then I realised… the “children” were dolls. She was a “collector”. Her carefully staged perfection had none of the chaos of real motherhood: no tears, no crumbs, no sticky hugs.

Beyond feeling creepy, it struck me as a parable for our age. We’ve become experts at simulation, and yet what we simulate bears no cost. Real parenting, like all love, demands patience and resilience in the face of imperfection. It requires loving children that interrupt, that talk back, that wake you up in the middle of the night. But these children can also love you back. They are not tidy, inanimate objects. We see this too in the rise of AI companions – people choosing virtual partners who don’t make a mess, who don’t have a history, and who can’t really reject or love you.

In January, we at Theos began the year with a Reading Week that explored what all of this tells us about what it means to be human in the age of the machine. We live at a moment when technology – particularly AI – is forcing us to pay attention. The core question is no longer simply what will machines do? but what will machines turn us into? And underneath that lies an even deeper one: what does it mean to be human at all? The line between human and machine is blurring. And yet, paradoxically, this technological moment is making us more aware of what only humans can do. Who only humans can be.

Questions of technological solutionism, AI and humanity have already begun to thread their way through our work: in projects on motherhood (do listen to our podcast series Motherhood vs the Machine), and death (see our work on Love, Grief & Hope here), and AI companionship (check out Dr Nathan Mladin’s blog Valentine’s Day against the Machine).

Last month, I had the honour of delivering the Limborough Lecture to the Worshipful Company of Weavers – an 1100–year–old livery company with a rich history tied to the textile industry. Many of us are familiar with the stories of how 19th century English textile workers rebelled against mechanised looms. To later generations they were Luddites, quaint resisters of progress. Yet as many note, their protest wasn’t against machines themselves, but against inhuman systems that stripped meaning from their craft. “Ned Ludd,” the mythical figure, stood for moral economy – the conviction that work should serve life, not the other way around. (See our previous Work Shift series for more on this).

Technological advancements and AI mean we face new versions of the questions that (literally) loomed during the industrial revolution – we are grappling with the same questions the Luddites did, and perhaps coming to similar conclusions. Robots can weave, print, and design faster than any artisan, but when work is reduced to productivity, could something sacred be lost? Maybe, as writer Paul Kingsnorth notes in his book Against the Machine: “Everything deeper, older and truer than the workings and values of the Machine has been, or is in the process of being, scoured away from us. We turned away from a spiritual, rooted understanding of the world in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands.” It’s less about the technology itself and more about what the technology does to us, how it attempts to reshape the things we hold as fundamental to being human, and who exactly it tells us that a human is. We are at great risk of humanity being shaped in the image of Silicon Valley.

You’ll see this become even more prominent in our work over the coming years. This, perhaps the defining question of our age, is something we feel the Christian tradition and scripture can helpfully offer a world that is searching for answers and for meaning. Soon, we’ll be marking Easter, and churches up and down the country will read of Pilate pointing the crowd towards a broken and bruised Christ in the hours before his crucifixion and saying Ecce Homo – “behold the man”. To me, this points to an understanding of what it is to be human as not flawless or without blemish, but vulnerable, embodied and yet still beautiful. 

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Nick Spencer responds to Reform UK’s proposed law which would prevent disused churches from becoming mosques. 05/03/2026

When Zia Yusuf, the Reform Party’s Home Affairs spokesman, recently announced that his party would change the planning law to prevent churches from becoming mosques, he was no doubt aware he was entering into a dense theological debate that went back centuries.

In 1633, two young scamps, Nicholas Lucas and William Mattock, devised a great game of “tossing a ball against the wall in a narrow place between two windows” of the chapel of Williton in Somerset. Predictably, the windows were broken. Repeatedly. “The people whose seats in church were near them suffered from ‘the drift in of foul weather’.” The insolence and the expense enraged local inhabitants but the boys “flatly refused” to stop. Eventually, faced with punishment, they took a brave – if somewhat facetious – stand, denied they had done any damage to the church, and asked the villagers, ‘Where is the church ? [Surely] the church is where the congregation is assembled?”

Greater theological minds than Lucas and Mattock have grappled with this question. Over a millennium earlier, the recently converted Augustine of Hippo witnessed thousands come to faith under the not–so–gentle encouragement of the Emperor Theodosius I, as the empire was formally Christianised at the end of the fourth century. Augustine was, at first, exultant. He soon became disaffected, however, as he saw the same people who filled the churches “on the festivals of Jerusalem, fill the theatres for the festivities of Babylon”. He became disillusioned with the idea that any institution could be Christian. “What is Rome but the Romans?” he asked later. “A city consists of its citizens, not its walls.”

The reason why minds as great as Augustine, Lucas and Mattock’s have found this matter so debateable over the years is that it emerged from a tension inherent in Christianity. Place is important in the scriptures, to put it mildly. There are well over a thousand place names mentioned in the Old Testament and above 200 in the New. Sometimes reading the Bible can feel like reading a gazetteer, except for the fact that some of these places are not merely place names. Jerusalem overflows with meaning. It is presence, home, joy, refuge, hope, transcendence, destiny. The religion that emerged in these places is embodied, located, rooted, named.

And yet, Christ subverts so much of this in his life and mission. Not only is his life peripatetic, with nowhere to lay his head, but he firmly relocates the hope of Temple and Jerusalem onto himself, onto his body. “A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”

This tension between place and person runs through the New Testament letters. Paul and a few other apostolic megastars travelled a lot, but the churches he founded did not, and much of his time was spent advising them on how to make their new faith real in the places they lived. The Church is indeed where the congregation is assembled, around the word and body of Christ, as Lucas and Mattock so heroically insisted. But it is assembled in a place.

All this orients me towards the Lucas and Mattock school of theology when it comes to our presenting issue. We should, I guess, mention that this is really a non–story. As The Times has shown, the actual number of churches becoming mosques is minimal, vastly outnumbered by the numbers that have become wine bars, bingo halls, carpet warehouses, and rubble. When the Reform party loudly proclaims that it is finally taking a stand on this issue, you don’t need to be a Guardian columnist to know what’s going on.

But even if this doesn’t really merit as much attention as it’s getting, it is an interesting topic in as far as it picks up on so many of the themes – Islamisation, secularisation, immigration, Christian nationalism – that swirl around the witches’ cauldron of the culture wars. Seeing hundreds of Muslim worshippers praying in a space that was once full of Christians – well, maybe not full: many of these churches were rarely full even in the first place – is powerfully symbolic. I would personally much rather they were being used for their initial purpose.

But would I prefer them to be used as mosques than wine bars, bingo halls and carpet warehouses? Actually, yes. I can believe the Qur’an is not a true revelation, and that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, while still appreciating Islamic practices of veneration, respect, and community that I believe are fundamentally good for human beings. I don’t buy much carpet these days, and prefer pubs to wine bars, but I hope I don’t disrespect them by saying that neither has ever really lifted my soul.

So, would I ban the conversion of disused churches to mosques, or indeed bingo halls? Of course not. Because ultimately, I agree with our ball–playing Somerset miscreants. And although I love (many) churches for their capacity to life the spirit, for the way in which they preserve an exquisite palimpsest of national history – for being serious houses “in whose blent air all our compulsions meet,” – I do ultimately believe that the church is people not the place, and that “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

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Pausing football matches so Muslim players can break their Ramadan fast is nothing new. Hannah Rich responds to recent backlash. 03/03/2026

As religious diversity among elite sportspeople has grown, and the lunar calendar meant that Ramadan has most recently tended to fall during the football season, attention on Muslim players in the Premier League has intensified. So too has the discussion of what it means to include religious belief and practice at the heart of the sport which is regarded by many as our national religion.

For several years, the Football Association protocol has allowed brief pauses in evening matches so that Muslim players observing Ramadan can break their fast at sunset.

The impact on the game is minimal; indeed, there are time–wasting goalkeepers who have squandered more seconds with their delaying tactics than the cost of a fleeting, improvised iftar. Meanwhile in France, where the secularist principle of laïcité means the football federation makes no concessions for Ramadan or any other religious observance, players are still reliant on the solidarity of their teammates or opponents feigning injury to allow them to break their fast.

In our recent Theos report, Beyond the Classroom, we found that this example of top–flight footballers visibly breaking their fast during televised matches constituted a powerful form of informal religious education. We heard from teachers about the impact of this on young people wanting to discuss this in their RE lessons and thus becoming more animated and engaged in the religious education curriculum than they otherwise had been.

It is not ‘religious programming’ per se, nor is it done with any explicit pedagogical motivation, but the pitchside information screens which display a short explanation of what it means to break a fast and why Muslim players observe it are perhaps the most concrete form of religious education many of the crowd will have had since they left school.  Where else do 30,000 middle aged men passively learn about the tenets of a religious faith? The reasoning for the protocol has also been covered widely in the press.

This has largely gone unremarked upon, either embraced as easily as a favourite striker, or simply ignored. This weekend, however, was different. When play paused briefly 13 minutes into Leeds United’s match against Manchester City so that a number of City players observing Ramadan could break their fast with water and dates, a contingent of the Leeds fans began booing.

Online responses were mixed, to say the least, and the contested nature of Islam amid Christian nationalism reared its head. Tommy Robinson’s pastor of choice, Rikki Doolan, queried on X why games are paused for one religion when the “Premier league [sic] doesn’t do anything for the religion of the nation, Christianity… it’s wrong and must be corrected.” He has since continued this theme, calling on followers to boycott upcoming matches in which there will be a fast break.

Others have questioned why there is no equivalent allowance made for Christian players observing Lent. It seems that the calendars of the two seasons coinciding this year has heightened the potential for drawing parallels – see also last week’s pseudo–outrage about there being no Lent lights on Oxford Street – but find me a player observing Lent by refraining from eating or drinking during daylight hours on matchday, and we can talk. Further, contemporary ideas of Lent are shaped by choice rather than outright obligation; you choose what to abstain from and how in a way that is not true of Muslims observing a Ramadan fast.

I will concede that calls for matches not to be played on Easter Sunday, or on any Sunday, hold slightly more weight. The sanctity of the Saturday 3pm kick–off not being televised is afforded more respect than the Sabbath, and in the service of mammon and ticket sales rather than God.

But, in any case, demonstrations of Christianity in the beautiful game are hardly absent these days. Since 1927, the FA Cup Final has begun with a rendition of ‘Abide With Me’ and nearly a hundred years later, crowds still sing lines including ‘hold thou Thy cross before my closing eyes / in life, in death, O Lord, abide with me’ with gusto. When Crystal Palace won the cup last year, there were more players on the pitch praying together after full time than back in the dressing room.

Perhaps we might leave the final word to Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, who underlines the potential for the Premier League to be the biggest arena of all for informal religious education. In criticising the Leeds fans booing his players, Guardiola simply said that in a modern world, in a modern footballing environment, we must all “respect religion, diversity, that is the point.”

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One year on from the UK’s cuts to aid spending, Catherine Masterman explores a biblical perspective on international development. 25/02/2026

One year ago, the Prime Minister announced a significant reduction in the UK’s budget for international development. This followed the cancellation of USAID as one of President Trump’s first acts in office, which J.D. Vance justified with reference to Biblical principles (then hotly contested by Rory Stewart). Christian leaders in the UK expressed outrage but wider political protest was muted, reflecting the decline in public support for aid. In 2026 governments are wrestling with the disruption of all international co–operation frameworks, including the future of development assistance. Does the Bible have anything to offer the current debate?

Historically, the Church has contributed to the UK’s previous claim to be an ‘international development superpower’. For over a century churches have had direct links with international projects, initially mission–funded hospitals or schools, then organisations partnering with local churches. Major development organisations started in the UK from Christian principles or church structures, including those now with a secular basis (e.g. Oxfam) as well as those retaining faith foundations. A strong awareness of global poverty was evident in the Church’s role in fair trade, and political campaigning, particularly Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History.

Today’s decision–makers are confronting a choice between a world governed by raw power, used to pursue the gain of individual actors, or an international policy where actors work together to enable mutual flourishing.

Debating whether public resources should purchase outcomes in other countries as a zero sum choice for outcomes in the UK obscures the fundamental principles at stake.  Aid, like all government spending, is an intervention in structures of power and wealth creation that reflect particular principles. Even without a moment of international rupture, those principles need to be subject to ongoing, robust debate, as Rowan Williams argues, in order that policies are based on what democracies consider to be ‘lawful’ and ‘good’. Without such a debate, institutions are merely brokering power between different interests.

This article looks at three biblical principles, which many would consider fundamental to democratic governance: the equal worth of all people; the use of power in the interest of all, not the few; and building of relationships founded on trust, not just transaction.

First, aid is one way to demonstrate a commitment to the equal innate value of all people. In theological terms, this is called ‘solidarity’, coming from the shared identity of all humanity, made in the image of God. This is echoed in the global human rights framework and, by definition, requires action beyond a country’s own borders. The overall volume of aid and its implementation plays a real and symbolic role, including but going beyond a humanitarian response to crises. Programmes to counter violence against women and girls are a statement that people are not defined by the way they are treated. Extending primary health care to vulnerable communities and vaccinating children reflects an ideal that the value of life should not be a factor of circumstance. This principle means that human dignity needs to be at the heart of international co–operation, reflecting local agency. It also matters for the health of our own democracies, bolstering a defence against the use of power for degrading or inhumane treatment on grounds of difference.

Secondly, development aid is a reminder of the need to use power to enable all to flourish, not just for the advantage of the few. Bearing the image of a relational God means that humanity flourishes or fails together. However, the universal human tendency is to use power and wealth to the advantage of the few. The Mosaic Law said that authorities need to strive to balance the drive for wealth with provisions to counteract ‘coveting’, (where wealth is created through exploitation of other people and/or the natural world). For Christians, working towards the new creation and the ultimate future (powerfully described in Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope), addressing the use of power in political and economic structures is as much part of a life of faith as dealings within church and family life.

The Law included three specific provisions: enabling opportunity (gleaning); ensuring fairness in terms of credit, trade and employment; and establishing ways to address entrenched poverty (jubilee).

‘Gleaning’ requires those with assets to forego full exploitation for their own benefit (such as not harvesting to the very edge of the field) to provide opportunity for the poor.  International development assistance, itself a foregone resource by OECD governments, enables concessional finance for countries where capital borrowing would be prohibitive, an opportunity that declines as aid budgets  shrink. The idea of foregoing resources is highly relevant to the question of how to phase out fossil fuels, given the impact of climate shocks on poor countries.

The second principle is that of ensuring fair treatment, in terms of justice, credit and employment. The UK has supported a range of relevant interventions. These include improving labour conditions, (e.g. in the wake of the Rana Plaza fire in Bangladesh) and giving more people access to bank accounts, as well as supporting access to justice.

Finally, the concept of Jubilee provided for a periodic restoration in property rights to avoid entrenched poverty. The term is familiar as the movement to address high indebtedness in poor countries in the 2000s, again an issue as debt repayments outstrip budgets for health and education in some countries. In a globally interdependent economy, the principles governing the pursuit of wealth have an impact on who flourishes in rich as well as poor countries. Pope Francis’ Our Common Home argued that the interconnected social and environmental crises would only be addressed by looking at global economic and financial structures. 

Thirdly, development assistance can contribute to building relationships based  on trust, not just transaction. Ministers, whilst visiting or speaking about relationships with other countries, often use the term ‘partnerships’ and the idea of a commitment to mutual flourishing. Williams argues that healthy relationships are formed through ‘gifts’ (in the widest sense), which are offered in trust for the common good. Looking at aid only in terms of whether it benefits the UK or only benefits those in other countries underplays the contribution it makes to the wider relationship. This is not an excuse for naivety nor careless financial management; after all, Christ cautioned his followers to be ‘wise as serpents, innocent as doves’. Development co–operation can offer a platform for robust exchange and collaboration on issues of shared concern (ranging from local climate resilience to transnational crime). It can build trust in both bilateral and provide an anchor for multi–country and multi–stakeholder collaboration.

As the future of aid is debated there is an opportunity to shift the narrative, beyond whether it is ‘moral’ or ‘in the national interest’, or basing its legitimacy on the ability to count ‘results’. Democracies wishing to uphold the principle of global solidarity need to act and allocate resources outside their polity. In a globally interdependent economy, governments need to use their power to make specific provisions to prevent exploitation that affects the poor in both rich and poor countries; and international collaboration to address shared challenges requires trust, built when resources are used for the common good. Development assistance is not a discretionary stand–alone programme, but part of a wider international capability which is deeply connected with domestic flourishing, and a core part of a government’s global identity and impact.  

Catherine Masterman: Independent consultant

Catherine worked for DFID, FCO, Cabinet Office and FCDO on international development policy and programmes from 2002–2024 and now works as a freelance consultant on illicit finance and development. Catherine writes on faith and life at www.grainofsand.blog and in 2022 started a church forest playgroup.

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