Is Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë’s English classic more style than substance? Or can it offer more? (Contains spoilers) 17/03/2026

Please note: this review contains spoilers for Wuthering Heights.

It’s been hard to miss the controversy surrounding Wuthering Heights, British writer and producer Emerald Fennell’s latest release. Starring Margot Robbie of Barbie fame as Cathy, and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Priscilla and Saltburn) as Heathcliff, the film is Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë’s English classic. It traces Cathy and Heathcliff’s obsessive relationship from their first meeting as children, through to Cathy’s money–motivated marriage to Mr Linton, her affair with Heathcliff and her subsequent death.

When the film premiered on the eve of St. Valentines’ Day, it was met with fiercely divided critique. Some were dismayed at the shallow, “sexed–up” knock–off of an English literary classic, lamenting the candy–crush colour palettes and utterly anachronistic soundtrack. Others praised the film, arguing that “style can be substance when you do it right”.

Both appraisals are, in my view, correct. There is no denying that the depravity, the excess, the “colour-saturated, baroque spectacle” is sickeningly alluring. I was sucked in by it: the hunger, the obsession and the insatiability of the characters’ appetites. I was spellbound by its hedonism from the start. And this horrified me. I was horrified at the film and horrified at myself for watching it. 

But then it made sense. If Wuthering Heights is about anything, it’s about humanity’s voracious desires and their dark consequences, and Fennell’s adaptation spoke to that in droves. Even the hollowing out of some of the finer plot points, for me, reflected so much about what we value as a society. More than that, it was a deep reflection of what the Bible tells us about humanity: how our obsession with power, lust and money can corrupt and distort us and ultimately leads to our destruction. 

“Heaven did not seem to be my home,” Cathy cries, when she dreamt of heaven and Heathcliff was not there, asking the angels to send her back to Earth to be with him. We, too, have a hunger which draws us away from the divine; a hunger for more money; more power; more sex; more possessions. But we don’t possess them, they possess us. In our search for satisfaction, we seek things that are easy, quick, and spiritually (and often, monetarily) cheap.

This hunger bleeds into every aspect of human life, even the way we experience cinema. It no longer seems to be enough to simply watch a film or hear a story. We must buy the sweatshop–produced T–Shirt, the travel mug, the “sustainable” tote bag. We can’t just watch, we must consume; we must become. And then we toss what we become aside, in exchange for something else.

When Cathy screamed “we are all ill! You have made us all ill” it was as if she was speaking directly to me. I felt the “devil as roaring lion” who “prowls about, finding people to devour” that Peter, one of Jesus’s disciples, describes in 1 Peter 5:8.

When Cathy died, I cried. Not because I thought it was beautiful in and of itself, but because it spoke to me of our own destruction: “Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain,”, Proverbs 1:19 tells us, for “it takes away the life of its possessors”. And it’s taking ours away too.

As in the film, our roaring greed destroys us: our planet; ourselves; our relationships with each other. We dispose of people just as easily as we dispose of things; we discard them both in places we choose to ignore. Even the film’s superficial Christian aestheticism like the jewel–encrusted cross Cathy wears, and Joseph’s reimagining from a pious religious fanatic to a sexual fantasist, felt disgustingly apt. Just as Emily Brontë’s novel held up a mirror to class–obsessed Victorian society, so Fennell’s adaptation lifts up a mirror to our compulsive materialism and superficiality.

The Telegraph argues “Wuthering Heights [is] an obsessive film about obsession”, and they’re right. But the film is more a reflection of our obsessions than it is its own. It’s tagline, “Inspired by the Greatest Love Story”, is fitting on a deep spiritual level. Not because it tells the story of Cathy and Heathcliff, but because it is inspired by another love story.

As American Evangelist Billy Graham famously said: “The whole Bible is a love story. It’s a love story between God and man” and I saw traces of this story scattered across Fennell’s film, but only half of it. With Easter around the corner, I was reminded that as Christians we believe that the redemption of our brokenness is at the heart of our faith.

The sure and certain hope Christians believe the Bible promises, is not found in Wuthering Heights – it ends in death, despair and decay. But as a diagnosis of the problem the Gospel claims to solve, Wuthering Heights rings true.  It’s intoxicating, grotesque and shallow, and for that reason, I’d recommend it wholeheartedly. Not because I think you’ll like it, but precisely because I hope you don’t. 

Markus Bockmuehl reviews Catherine Nixey’s book Heresy. 09/04/2024

Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age (2017) was a prize–winning, swashbuckling takedown of Christianity as antiquity’s Taliban, single–handedly responsible for the destruction of classical civilization. Here was Edward Gibbon on steroids; reviewers who like that sort of thing found it little short of exhilarating. Others seemed irked by a “one–sided” and “sardonic” argument and a “hectoring” zeal disinclined to “nuance’” say in distinguishing between fringe extremists and majorities, or in bothering to tangle with scholarly views in contrast to one’s own.

Heresy (2024) re–applies that earlier thesis and approach to pluriform Christianity itself in a polished, page–turning sequel, written in graphic and engaging prose. Its twin theses echo long–contested ideas of Walter Bauer and his adherents: first, that Christian faith was always characterized by intrinsically contradictory and kaleidoscopic Jesuses, divergent from today’s Christian story in “almost every early Christian text”. Secondly, and in uneasy tension with the first, that Christianity invariably crushed dissent or “choice” (Nixey’s programmatic translation of “heresy”). From the first, nothing in Christianity coheres, nothing is agreed – and yet somehow, paradoxically, all difference is annihilated.

At one level much of that case is clear and unanswerable, if also hardly news to readers of early Christian literature. Nixey is quite right to stress the gaping contradiction between Jesus as the amoral and homicidal menace of the (marginal) Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the more popular but insufferably saccharine nonsense of the “mild, obedient, good” Victorian Christmas Jesus. And yes indeed, antiquity knew many other sons of God: even the Bible knows that (starting with Israel, its king, and believers in Jesus as God’s children). Magical papyri, apocryphal writings, or the Jesus–lite miracles of the third–century fictionalized Life of Apollonius of Tyana (defending him, like Jesus, against the charge of magic) all show the Roman empire full of many “saviours and gods”, magicians and messiahs, healers true and false. And the second century was indeed early Christianity’s “laboratory”, as the eminent Christoph Markschies puts it; ancient critics routinely poked fun at the bewildering jumble of Christian sects, claims, and counterclaims. What matters to Nixey is not whether the countless alternative views ever achieved identifiable consensus or longevity, merely that the unbelievable was once believed by someone, somewhere – while also being ruthlessly suppressed.

She is rightly impressed with ancient Christianity’s clever and well–informed critics like Celsus and Porphyry. A pity, then, that she almost never stops to hear the responses offered by their Christian interlocutors – whose habit of quoting extensively from their opponents shows them conspicuously more engaged with rival ways of looking at the evidence than is the case in most of Nixey’s own account. The likes of Origen knew well that any philosophy worth its salt will inevitably generate disagreements about the truth.

Underlying the colourful and entertaining presentation is that contradiction between the book’s two opposing theses: from the start, Christianity was (1) always and everywhere hopelessly divided in proliferating sects, with no centre to hold anything together, but also (2) determined to root out all plurality or “choice” in favour of “homogeneity” (“the ‘insatiable’ Catholic Church suppressed almost all rites but its own”). But which shall it be? To be sure, aspects of both concerns are already openly acknowledged by ancient believers and critics alike. And no–one could deny that there is a long and ugly history here, and plenty of self–contradiction, to be embarrassed and ashamed about. Yet in their totalizing form Nixey’s theses cannot both stand up at the same time: each subverts the other, and thereby exposes the shallowness of “nothing but” argumentation. 

She seems at times to be aware of this problem. Is the demise of marginal views because they are actively and efficiently “suppressed” (how? by whom, especially in the first four centuries?) or because they “start to fade away” (presumably lacking the oxygen of adherents or plausibility)? She concedes that perhaps “many” alternative books did after all retain a “profound influence”, indeed that anathemas “were to no avail” – which of course typically they were.

While Christian history clearly furnishes plenty of unpleasant evidence to resource her story, Nixey is an invariably entertaining but only intermittently reliable narrator of it. In the absence of patience with alternative critical points of view, facts must not get in the way of a good trope. The sweet reasonableness of elite Roman culture is contrasted with Christians’ “vicious and aggressive” authoritarianism. Conversely, the persecution of Christians disappears under the magical invisibility cloak of G.E.M. de Ste Croix and his (mostly US–based) latter–day disciples: persecution narratives are not just tendentious but overwhelmingly fictitious, and in any case pale in comparison to what was later meted out on non–Christians. Counter–cultural charity, care for widows and orphans, the founding of hospitals or the like may be despatched with the Emperor Julian’s comment that, “as with slavers”, such acts are clearly just impelled by contemptible motives thinly disguised.

The first Christians, we learn, had “no authoritative Bible” (tout court? news to Paul or Matthew, one suspects). For “the first centuries” (how many?) it was unclear which gospels would prevail; indeed, some apocryphal stories came close to being included in the Bible (perfectly discussable in theory, but which ones? what evidence?). For what it’s worth, 21st–century gospels scholarship has increasingly recognized amidst plenty of diversity the mid–second century emergence of a four–gospel core that was never replaced and surprisingly rarely rejected – even while it continued to spawn and co–exist with a rich plurality of other Jesus books.

Most apocryphal gospels were not in fact “believed and read” by “large numbers” of Christians “for centuries”. (Nor do “Thomas Christians” read the apocryphal Acts of Thomas or derive their belief in the Apostle’s mission to India from it, as is repeatedly claimed.) There are important exceptions, of course, but Nixey consistently fails to distinguish between shared and peripheral beliefs. Any splinter group is just as representative of “Christianity” as every other, whether read empire–wide in hundreds of copies and translations (like the Infancy Gospel of James) or attested on a single scrap of papyrus.

Nixey’s argument proceeds by positing rather than deliberating or investigating. Another case in point relates to Christianity’s aggressive intolerance manifested in book–burning, allegedly on an industrial scale. The truth, once again, is inconveniently more complex. Such symbolic episodes date back to the mid–1st century (Acts 19.19, at the hands of pagan converts) but remained exceedingly rare at least until enforced by later legislation on the pattern of pre–Christian imperial precedent. Since the 3rd century BC, Roman book–burning had been a recurrent if largely inefficient and symbolic tool in managing perceived danger to the public order. In 181 BC the Senate had Numa Pompilius’s books burnt as subversive, while in 12 BC Augustus as Pontifex Maximus burned 2,000 unauthorized prophetical books deemed not authentically Sibylline. Diocletian ordered the burning of Egyptian books of alchemy, Manichean sacred books (rescript of 31 March 302), and the books of the Christians (empire–wide edict of 303). Constantine’s burning of Arian works was governed more by inherited imperial realpolitik than by any specifically Christian convictions – which were, in this as in other respects, at best a thin veneer over received imperial realpolitik, as Nixey herself concedes elsewhere. It is plainly untrue that Christians were “far more thorough” in either book–burning or anathematizing, even by way of the fabled (but very different, if similarly counterproductive) Catholic Index of Prohibited Books. Many such works evidently enjoyed popular use and therefore survived and thrived – unlike those books of Numa Pompilius or non–Sibylline prophecies.

It is also untrue that Manicheism was “utterly wiped out” by Christians: long before any Byzantine Christian opposition, it suffered ruthless persecution under Diocletian but long survived in North Africa; Sasanian and eventually Abbasid Muslim persecution displaced it from its Persian heartland, while in China its gradual demise under the Ming dynasty (14th century) was not caused by Christians but rather coincided with the Church’s own decline in that country. 

Much of Nixey’s point–scoring claims the imagined intellectual high ground of doing “history, not theology”. Yet too often this is a case of grasshopper history, of jumping between sources from across distant centuries and regions in dizzying feats of anachronism. Dating appears irrelevant for an argument merrily juxtaposing the 4th– or 6th–century Ethiopian Book of the Cock, the fluid and volatile story cycle from the 2nd and subsequent centuries known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and late antiquity’s Mandaean literature of highly uncertain date and early modern textual attestation. All serve to illustrate essentially the same point about a Christianity that is all diversity and has no core. Second–century worries by Ignatius and Irenaeus about destructive “heretical” perversions of the apostolic teaching are introduced and juxtaposed – and more than implicitly equated – with the 13th–century slaughter of thousands of Albigensians in Béziers Cathedral. The (mostly ineffectual) anti–heretical strictures of the Theodosian Code are paralleled with the career difficulties experienced by Bertrand Russell. And so on, more nothing–buttery.

The ancient world was no less adept than ours at sprouting its own doomscrolling social media hell of TikTokers, trolls, and conspiracy theorists. Q–Anon’s Messiah Trump riding valiantly into battle against the Deep State and Hillary Clinton’s child ritual murder cabal at Comet Pizza (2016)? A Jewish “Nazi” president of Ukraine threatening the Russian world (2022)? Our fake news merchants have nothing on ancient paradoxographers! The weird and the wonderful equally proliferated, as did the basely grotesque alongside the noble–minded. Christianity grew up in that world of porous competition between history and myth, fact and gossip, learning and superstition, kitsch and culture. For centuries (as perhaps again today), Christians were indeed overwhelmingly poor and uneducated, as their enemies rightly noted. Doubtless many were easily conned.

Yet not all Christian writers were ignorant dunces, as one might discover if one took time to hear both sides of the conversation with Celsus, say. Insanity cannot falsify sanity, abuse does not nullify proper use, and the prevalence of exotic falsehood is irrelevant to the adjudication of even a single astonishing truth. Although an ever–present challenge, the swivel–eyed politics of Taliban–style zealots or Hippie–style flakes cannot usefully attest convictions that will stand the test of widespread reception, debate and consensus over time. That aesthetic retains its merit not just for understanding ancient Christianity, but for any engagement in society’s common good.

A few months after graduating in Classics from Cambridge, Catherine Nixey took to the pages of the Independent to ask, “What’s the point of a classics degree?” (20 May 2004). Answer: nothing much. However “jolly good fun” it was, Cambridge taught her little about thinking or writing, nor even – a matter on which she begins and ends – the ability to locate Athens on a map. Twenty years on, and after jobs as a classics teacher (sic) and writer for the Times and Economist, plus two best–selling books on antiquity, that question might today elicit additional self–knowledge.

Perhaps even about the point of locating a city correctly on a map? Visitors to the Museum of Oxford are shown a city map produced by Soviet military planners for the triumph of Real Existing Socialism in 1972. Oksford and other British cities reflect the world as it might become: Woodstock Road as Ulitsa Vudstok–Rod, that sort of thing. A perfectly consistent and attractive alternative universe, to be sure – it just happened to be incompatible with the ever–challenged but organically grown consensus of those who called the city home, both governed and governing. Might that hint at the benefit of knowing, in religious as in social geography, where and how a community comes to locate itself?

Markus Bockmuehl is Dean Ireland’s Professor and a Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford

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Nathan Mladin reviews three TV programmes/films that centre around the topic of mind uploading and transhumanism. 21/02/2024

Would you create a digital version of yourself that could live on after you die? What about an interactive avatar of a deceased loved one? Or uploading your mind to a super–computer?

These are all questions explored by Dr Nathan Mladin in his review of three television/film plots that centre around the topic of ‘mind uploading’ and ‘transhumanism’.

In this review Nathan looks at: 

Be Right Back from Season 2 of Black Mirror
The Virtual Llama a short film by Owl In Space
Transcendence (2014) a Hollywood blockbuster starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany and Cillian Murphy.

For more on this, have a read of our latest Theos report AI and the Afterlife: From Digital Mourning to Mind Uploading which explored all the themes from this video and more.

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Hannah Rich reviews Lyndsey Stonebridge’s latest book on the life and work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt. 05/02/2024

The world today, riven with conflict, tribalism and despair, feels increasingly dark. Our headlines and social media force us to confront the horrors that pervade and wrestle with the humanity of those behind them. Perhaps ‘twas ever thus. Yet, as Lyndsey Stonebridge’s new biography of Hannah Arendt demonstrates, there is still potential for newness and imagination in our response, drawing on the wisdom of those before us. Above all, Arendt teaches us here, there is power in our capacity to love.

Hannah Arendt was a Jewish German–American historian, philosopher and political theorist perhaps best known for her writing about the “banality of evil” in the wake of the Second World War. Her life spanned eras, continents and identities, and her work resonates still, almost half a century after her death. She wrote incisively about the human condition, power, democracy, totalitarianism, how nations deal with refugees, statehood and statelessness; none of which are any less salient now. This is reinforced by the mention of a young senator who wrote to Arendt in 1975 for a transcript of her final speech. The name of that young senator, to coin a phrase, was Joseph Biden.

In We Are Free to Change the World, Stonebridge paints a tender picture of Arendt as a person not just a brilliant mind. In parts, it is so affectionate that it is hard to believe they are not contemporaries; that the biographer never actually met her subject outside of the pages of her books. If some of the fine details are imagined rather than strictly real, as Stonebridge acknowledges in the introduction, then they succeed in humanising her. I found myself captivated by Hannah Arendt as a character, a woman lying awake at night and smoking cigarettes, not just as a source of wisdom and political imagination.

The physical sites are well imagined too; this is not travel writing, but along with a growing bibliography, it left me with a list of cities to visit and bridges I longed to cross for real. Visiting Arendt’s student digs in the university town of Marburg, we find that “outside, next to the fence there is (what else could there be?) a cigarette–vending machine, the perfect shrine to Hannah Arendt” (p.38). Elsewhere, there are plentiful small details that bring her to life in full colour; the wine–fuelled night she enjoys with friends in Berlin before fleeing across the Czech border, the soft Swiss bedsheets of her time recuperating in the Alps, the glass of Campari with which an imagined Arendt toasts the reader in the final paragraph.

Yet in the face of growing darkness of the sort with which she was familiar, no one turns to Arendt just to learn about the lizards she might have watched bathing in the Alpine sun.

This is also an exploration, rightly, of her ideas in the cold light of today. The location of evil may have shifted since Arendt’s lifetime, but the landscape has not: “misery remains, as does the thoughtlessly cruel administration of human beings as though they were little more than freight” (p.2). It is grimly serendipitous that this book was published in the very week in which the UK government is on the cusp of another civil war about how harshly it can get away with treating migrants. As Stonebridge notes, “the tacit acceptance that there are certain categories of people – refugees, migrants, the uprooted, the occupied, the incarcerated, the permanently poor – whose lives are essentially superfluous has not changed much since the Second World War.” (p.1)

“I don’t know if we will ever get out of this,” Arendt writes to Karl Jaspers in 1946, about the powerlessness and political extremes of their time. It is tempting to feel similarly in 2024. Theirs was a generation who lived through the war, moving from pre–war to post–war in a single lifetime. Last month, the UK defence secretary Grant Shapps suggested that we are moving again from “a post war to a pre–war world,” and the cycle continues.

Arendt wrote of her own detachment from the political establishment that “one of these days … I will be able to describe the actual domain of political life, because no one is better at marking the borders of a terrain than the person who walks around it from the outside.” This is not a biography which holds the same distance from its subject, coolly surveying a life from its perimeter. It is clearly on less comfortable ground discussing Arendt’s perceived defence of Adolf Eichmann and the brutal backlash, which “hangs like a brown cloud” over the rest of her work. There is a similar change in tone when it comes to Arendt’s inability to understand the racial dynamics and tensions of mid–century USA. A less rose–tinted portrait would certainly go further in its critique here.

There are lessons here on the difference between thought and action, which are instructive in a world where social media has conditioned us to opine on everything. Hannah Arendt did not have fully formed thoughts on everything, nor did she claim to be a master of her own thoughts.

Journalist and author Jamie Bartlett recently summed up the tendency of social media and the chronically online to render speaking publicly “so easy that not doing it kind–of–implies you don’t know or don’t care about what’s going on in the world”.

It is ironic that Hannah Arendt often features prominently on lists of historical figures people wish had been alive in the social media era, whose Twitter presence we might have enjoyed. Arendt, as Stonebridge understands her, would be entirely allergic to the reactive and absolute nature of social media that Bartlett diagnoses: “There are some heroes who have indeed summoned the courage to shout Think! down the barrel of a gun and have changed history in the process but most people prefer to shout Stupid! into the void of social media which is not especially dangerous at all and is the very opposite of courageous” (p.235).

For a writer best known for her theories and insights on totalitarianism, this book is at its strongest in its exposition of Arendt’s understanding of ‘love’. It is deliberate that it is “love and disobedience” that characterise the lessons from Hannah Arendt according to the subtitle, not evil and power. We learn that Arendt herself initially wanting to call her most influential work not The Human Condition but Amor Mundi (Love of the World), struck by St Augustine’s writing on the “Christian political principle” of love, itself inspired by the first letter of St John.

Arendt knew that “love matters to our politics because it matters to us at the most intimate level of our lives. As we do now, Arendt lived in a world where there was far too much passionate intensity of the worst kind, and not nearly enough neighbourly love.” (p.80) She was seized by the knowledge that love itself can be deadly; the misdirected love of God has killed millions and, at home, it is generally accepted that the perpetrator of violence is more likely to be a lover than a stranger to the victim.

But love is not unredeemable. Arendt saw the banality of evil, the ease with which she observed that ordinary people could slip into acts of unimaginable horror, but also the everyday nature of love that might save us. It is both the beginning of the world and the beginning of a better world. It is “what makes us human, plural, alive to one another and to the human condition itself” (p.90). The way Arendt loved was perhaps her greatest and most original response to totalitarianism. Having stared evil in the face, her reflection on “the great incalculable grace of love” is a lasting gift to politics.

You have to love the world – to let the love of the world dwell in you – to write as Arendt did. I think you have to know what love is, too, to write a biography as beautiful and intimate, if not flawless, as this one.

We Are Free to Change the World. By Lyndsey Stonebridge. Hogarth; 368 pages; page references here from the e–book edition.

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Russia in Ukraine. Hamas murdering Jewish civilians. Israel killing Palestinians indiscriminately. Western airstrikes against Houthis. NATO planning its largest exercise since the Cold War. Civil war in Sudan. Coups in West Africa. Simmering violence in Ethiopia. North Korean weapons testing. Chinese military operations near Taiwan. Under these gathering clouds, Nick Spencer returns to Stephen Pinker’s famous thesis that the world is getting more peaceful and humanity more pacific, and looks at where he was right, where he was wrong, and what kind of angels really govern our nature.

1. Gathering storm clouds

It was Steven Pinker’s great misfortune to publish The Better Angels of Our Nature, his magnum opus arguing for decline of violence, in 2011. The (as–yet unnamed) Arab Spring was just beginning, and Pinker mentioned it only once. “The outcome is unpredictable, but the protestors have been almost entirely nonviolent and non–Islamist, and are animated by a desire for democracy, good governance and economic vitality rather than global jihad, the restoration of the caliphate, or death to infidels.” (443) One decade, around 60,000 deaths, 6 million refugees, ISIS, the use of chemical weapons, and no stable democracies later, his cautious optimism for this “swelling protest movement” seems a bit misplaced.

The Arab Spring did at least get one more mention than Vladimir Putin, who had already been in power for a decade. Over the next decade, the Russian president would annex Crimea, intervene in the Syrian civil war, and bring war back to Europe with a ruinous invasion of Ukraine which, at the time of writing had counted for tens of thousands of deaths, and many reliable reports of beating, suffocation, starvation, sleep deprivation, electrocution, and other forms of torture and war crimes.[i] Russian state television broadcast threats of nuclear strikes against Western Europe and the government declared that it would suspend its participation in the New START treaty, in its last major nuclear–arms treaty with the United States.[ii] Finland, Sweden, and Ukraine rushed to join NATO. Germany pledged to increase its defence spending, after years of evading request to do so.

A few months after Russia’s invasion, China (which at that time had an estimated one million Uigher Muslims in detention centres in Xinjiang) engaged in miliary manoeuvres around Taiwan, involving ballistic missile launches, live–fire drills, air sorties, and naval deployments. A year later Hamas terrorists tortured, murdered and/or abducted nearly 1,500 Israelis and foreign nationals, since when Israel has killed upwards of 20,000 Palestinians, many (the majority?) of which were women and children.

Over the decade or so period since Pinker’s book came out, global defence spending rose steadily and by 2022 has reached a record high of $2,240 billion.[iii] “Believe it or not,” Pinker had written, “from a global, historical, and quantitative perspective, the dream of the 1960s folk songs has come true: the world has (almost) put an end to war.” (364)

Pinker did at least acknowledge that civil wars had increased in frequency over the last 70 years. However, he also insisted that “among wealthy countries in the developed world, the risk of civil war is essentially zero.” (367) A decade later, five people were killed and 138 police officers were injured, when a 2,000–strong mob stormed the Capitol building in Washington, causing $2.7 million of damage, in an attempt to keep Donald Trump in power by preventing Congress from ratifying the 2020 election. This was not a civil war. It was not even close. But it was the first time in 225 years that the handover of power in America had not been peaceful.

All this happened at one end – the big geopolitical end – of the violence spectrum. At the other end, there was a growing problem with intimacy. Since the mid–1990s, but accelerating in the decade after Pinker published his book, there has been an astonishing rise in on–line pornography[iv] which increasingly normalised aggression and violence towards women and girls. One frequently quoted study on the nature of pornographic content found that 88% contained “physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping” with “perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female.”[v] This study was comparatively early (interrogating content that was available in 2004–05). Pornography has become more violent since then. Remarkably, UK research in 2019 reported that over half of 18–24 year–old women in the UK reported having been strangled by their partners during sex.[vi] On a larger stage, a 2013 report from the World Health Organization found that 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced either physical or sexual violence.[vii]

None of this really sounds like a species that has decisively turned its back on violence or is even particularly inclined to do so. Does all this evidence invalidate Pinker’s overarching thesis about humanity and violence? That answer to that rather depends on which Steven Pinker we are being asked to assess. Because his thesis on humanity and violence, a bit like Brexit, comes in either a soft and a hard form, and the strength of his book depends largely on whether we are being asked to vote on Soft Pinker or Hard Pinker.

2. Humans or humanity?

By any measure, The Better Angels of our Nature is a hugely impressive achievement. For an 800–page book covering history, sociology, biology, and psychology, to hold the reader’s attention without ever flagging, which it undoubtedly does, is impressive. It was richly and deservedly applauded on its publication, most memorably by Bill Gates who chose it as his Desert Island book[viii] and tweeted to new college graduates that “if I could give each of you a graduation gift, it would be this – the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.”[ix] The book sold well.

Not all responses to the book were quite so gushing and Better Angels also attracted a fair amount of criticism. Some of it was unfair, failing to read the book with the care it deserved, or ascribing to the author claims he explicitly denied. To be sure, Pinker’s often dismissive and relentlessly confident tone could grate, and some critics responded in kind. But the book put forward a careful, sustained, highly–evidenced case that merited a similar response.

The challenge came in identifying precisely what that case was. On the surface, the argument was clear. Humans and the societies in which they live had become less violent over recent centuries and are more peaceable today than at any time in the past. Through a series of rather–too–neatly–packaged historical processes and revolutions – ‘the civilising process’, ‘the humanitarian revolution’, ‘the rights revolution’, etc. – Pinker traced a long, steady decline in personal, social, and political violence over the centuries. The book is packed with graphs and data detailing homicide rates, the legality of slavery, judicial torture and capital punishment, the rate and mortality of wars, the lethality of genocides, the extension of human rights, and much else. In every instance the arrow points in the same direction. In spite of what the news headlines might leave us thinking, we are living in the most peaceful time in history. His data and the argument he constructed on them was persuasive. Critics picked at the details, but none came close to shredding the overall narrative.

On closer inspection, however, it was not clear what this narrative implied. On one hand, one might say humans have become less violent over recent centuries in the same way as we might say the weather has become less stormy over recent weeks. The claim can be true but without significance, bearing no implications for the future. Clement weather passes and no spring lasts forever. Humans are less violent today, but the next century could be positively “medieval” (the word is in scare quotes for good reasons, as we shall see).

On the other hand, one might say humans have become less violent over recent centuries in the same way as Martin Luther King once said that the arc of the moral universe bent, ultimately, toward justice. By this reading, the phenomenon of ever–more peaceful humans is substantive and consequential. It implies that we can expect, perhaps with a few bumps in the road, that things will continue to get better. Unlike with stocks and shares, past performance is an indication of future results.[x] Humans are less violent today and they will be less violent still in the future.

The difference in these two claims is, in effect, that between humans and humanity. Saying humans are less violent today implies a certain contingency and fragility to this new state of affairs. For various provisional and specific reasons, we are less given to physically harming one another today, but those reasons are anything but guaranteed. Humans may be less prone to violence, but this pacific trend has not passed into collective humanity.

By contrast, saying humanity is less violent today gives the trend a serious weight and substance. It implies that, as a collective entity, we have moved on from violence. Our species is fundamentally different from what it once was. Things have changed, enduringly and for the better.

3. Soft Pinker

The Better Angels of our Nature is caught between these two claims – between Soft Pinker and Hard Pinker – and cannot decide which claim it is making.

Explicitly, Better Angels puts forward the soft thesis about violence. Pinker unequivocally distances himself from any kind of metaphysical “arc of justice”, denounces the prospect of the coming utopia, refuses the claim that the decline in violence is inevitable, and repeatedly rejects the belief that violence is a thing of the past. “The book explicitly, adamantly, and repeatedly denies that major violent shocks cannot happen in the future; this reticence is stated in the book’s opening paragraph and echoed in every summation,” he slapped down one of his early critics.[xi]

This is Soft Pinker, and it is eminently sensible and credible. Historically speaking, we are less violent today than we have ever been. Our chances of suffering or dying violently today are comparatively low. There are good reasons for this, which we can trace through history, philosophy, and psychology. We should not treat doom–mongers with the seriousness we do, though nor should we treat this as a reason to take our eye off the ball. The price of possible peace is unceasing effort.

As I say, this is sensible and credible… but also perhaps a little underwhelming, rather undermining the reach and profundity of the book. In effect, Pinker argues that if we can establish states that successfully claim the monopoly on all legitimate violence; if we can maintain and spread functioning and fair judicial systems; if we can establish mutually–satisfactory agreements for trade and exchange which facilitate rising affluence; if we can encourage the recognition of and adherence to political and civil rights; if we can inculcate virtues of empathy, self–control, and the like; if we can continue to ‘feminise’ power; if we can manoeuvre people into non–zero–sum games… if we can do all this, then we will (probably) continue to reduce levels of violence.

Or, as Pinker says at the end of the book after 800 pages of close argumentation, “if the[se] conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t.” (811) Well, I guess that just about covers it. It’s true but it’s not exactly overwhelming, coming perilously close to platitude and tautology. If the conditions remain right, this good weather is likely to continue for a long time.

Nor, it has to be said, is it especially original. Francis Fukuyama’s excellent books on the development and decline of political order[xii] showed that it was the combination of a functioning state, the rule of law and political accountability that led to the decline of violence (though the manner and order in which these building blocks were put together could have an effect on the nature of the resulting order).

More recently, the political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart demonstrated that there is a clear correlation between people’s perceived security and their openness.[xiii] When resources are scarce, security threatened and survival in question, people favour closed solidarity, prefer strong leadership, and reject foreign ideas and people. By contract, at times of existential security people are open to change and diversity. Hence the amazing “expanding circle” of empathy and rights in the post–war West, about which Pinker gets very excited, is primarily down to the remarkable rise in affluence (and with it, job security, legal protection, welfare provision, healthcare, etc).

This is not, I should stress, in contradiction to Pinker’s argument. No doubt he would heartily countersign Inglehart’s conclusions. But it is better evidenced and, accordingly, more confidently asserted. Modernization changes people’s views and behaviour “in roughly predictable ways”, Inglehart argues.

By contrast, and rather instructively, Pinker pooh–poohs the idea that what he is saying has any predictive power. “The goal of this book is to explain the facts of the past and the present,” he says halfway through, “not to augur the hypotheticals of the future.” (435)

This is an odd statement. What kind of theory manages to successfully “explain the facts” of past and present, and yet is unable to say anything about future “hypotheticals”? Moreover, for a man who prides himself on his scientific credentials, who insists on the importance of hard data (“only by looking at numbers can we get a sense as to whether civilization has increased violence or decreased it” (57)), and who packs his tome with over a hundred graphs, tables and charts, this is a mystifying renunciation. After all, a scientific theory that claimed to account for the evidence but declaimed any predictive power, would be a bit suspect.

A little later, responding to the perfectly reasonable expectation that understanding the past should give us some ability to understand the future, Pinker responds with slightly ham–fisted irony. “Oh, all right. I predict that the chance that a major episode of violence will break out in the next decade… is 9.7 per cent” (436)

His point here is that the concept of scientific prediction is meaningless when it comes to a “single event” like a war and it is a fair one (though hardly knock down: wars are not single events like lightning strikes are single events). But Pinker’s rather defensive and prickly response at this point, disguises the fact that his overarching thesis not only refuses to predict the likelihood of future wars but even to augur the future hypotheticals at all. Indeed, it says little substantive about the future of “humanity and violence” – or at least little beyond the effectively tautologous argument that if the [right] conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; [and] if they don’t, it won’t.

So, Soft Pinker is right – life today is less violent than in the past – and he is instructive – there is a cogent cluster of reasons for this decline that we should seek to entrench if we want to avoid violence. But he is also somewhat unoriginal – not saying anything that good historians or political scientists have not been saying for a long time. And, more importantly, it is underwhelming, denying there is any predictive power to what he says or, put another way, that his thesis augurs anything about the future. Soft Pinker’ Better Angels is a good, comprehensive, thoughtful, well–evidenced book, even an important one, but not really the kind of thing that the world’s richest man would want to give to every graduate on earth. That book is written by Hard Pinker.

4. Hard Pinker

If Better Angels is explicitly a ‘soft’ thesis – offering up history, attempting to explain it, refusing to make predictions about the future, circumventing any deep metaphysical principles – it is implicitly a much harder one, positing a history of humanity and violence that is substantive and assured.

Occasionally, the reader catches glimpses of this in the author’s asides. “Our recent ancestors can really be considered to be morally retarded” (795) “The world has (almost) put an end to war.” (364) “Conflicts have essentially disappeared in the developed world” (373). He describes, in his final pages, the “escalator of reason” that is helping carrying humanity towards its peaceable future, defending its “Whiggish… implication of directionality” by arguing that “it is a kind of Whig history that is supported by the facts.” (836) In his response to Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s early criticism of the book, he wrote, “war rhetoric and war planning have disappeared as live options in the political deliberations of developed states in their dealings with one another.”[xiv] By this reckoning, neither China nor Taiwan, neither Russia nor the countries that make up NATO are “developed states”. The soft thesis evades questions about future hypotheticals; the hard one is rather more confident about our direction of travel.

Such explicit asides are rare. More often, the ‘hard’ thesis is implicit from the way he structures and highlights his grand historical account.[xv] In essence, Pinker simplifies and exaggerates the violence of the past, and qualifies and downplays the violence of the present to develop a narrative in which the move from violence to non–violence is clearer, tidier, and more conclusive than is really merited.

Early on, Pinker insists that humans are more closely related to, and more likely to share an immediate common ancestor with, chimpanzees (who are inherently violent) rather than bonobos (who are rather more peaceable).[xvi] A few pages later, drawing on other sources, he concludes that the average prehistoric death–from–warfare rate was 15 percent. In an essay scrutinising to this assertion, Brian Ferguson, professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University Newark, examined the relevant data to show that “this ‘fact’ – as widely invoked as it is – is utterly without empirical foundation… [and] Pinker’s List [of 21 prehistoric cases presented in the relevant chart] consists of cherry–picked cases with high casualties, clearly unrepresentative of prehistory in general.”[xvii]

It is, of course, very hard to be confident about the level of violence in prehistoric societies. A subsequent paper in Nature claimed that “humans are predisposed to murder each other”[xviii] (a conclusion that Pinker latterly endorsed) but also concluded the level of deaths caused by interpersonal violence among prehistoric bands and tribes actually stood at around 2%.[xix] Moreover, however hard it is to be confident about the level of prehistoric violence, it is harder still to be confident about prehistorical attitudes to violence. That becomes less of a problem as we move to literate societies. From the way Pinker writes about these, one would conclude that such societies enthusiastically embraced and celebrated barbarity and torture in his most ghastly forms, and were therefore little more than a centuries–long orgies of bloodshed. Most of our long existence has been characterised by “war, slavery, despotism, institutionalised sadism, and the oppression of women.” (808) “Human history”, he writes as one point, “is a cavalcade of bloodshed.” (580)

That some pre–modern literate societies did glorify violence is beyond doubt. However, not all did, and even those that did, did so ambiguously. There is no ambiguity in Pinker’s treatment of the Christian middle ages. “Mediaeval” has become a popular synonym for barbarity and this is not an association that Pinker wants to sever. “Mediaeval Christendom was a culture of cruelty” (157) we are told. “Torture was woven into the fabric of daily life,” (157).

Not surprisingly, it is his caricature of mediaeval history that has come in for sharpest criticism, and the verdict of mediaeval historians being particularly brutal: “[a] preposterous caricature of the medieval world… Pinker’s brazen confidence in his hypothesis is helped greatly by the fact that he knows nothing about the medieval era”, wrote Sara M. Butler, Professor in British History at The Ohio State University.[xx]

As mediaevalists have pointed out, sometimes his evidence is literally fictional. Pinker draws on Arthurian romances as if they were “historical fact”. Yet, such tales “were intended to appeal to a knightly audience. A modern equivalent would be to regard the Rambo movies as an accurate depiction of the life of Vietnam veterans in America.”[xxi] He republishes two images from Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch – The Mediaeval Housebook – as illustrations of “the everyday texture of life in medieval Europe,” “without noting that they come from a set of astrological allegories about planetary influences, from which he has chosen those for Saturn and Mars rather than, say, Venus and Jupiter.”[xxii]

Reality is not only more complex but less amenable to his ‘hard’ thesis. Torture was not part of the normal legal process but “a last resort”.[xxiii] Courts were reserved about ill–treatment of convicts. Juries were notoriously reluctant to convict when the death penalty was involved.[xxiv] Conviction rates for homicide ranged between 12 and 21 percent, and courts even deliberately undervalued the price of stolen goods “to save the accused from a more severe conviction.[xxv] “Hangman” was not even a profession in mediaeval England, as there was not enough work to keep a man employed.[xxvi] Mediaeval Christians prized charity highly. They understood as neighbourliness as a key virtue. They took the decalogue’s sixth commandment against killing seriously. They placed a great emphasis on hospitality, notwithstanding the limits imposed by widespread scarcity and insecurity.

Pinker says nothing of this, just as says nothing about the almshouses, hospitals, and hospices that littered Christendom, and ignores the Peace of God and Truce of God movements that sought to limit the frequency and impact of noble violence, or the careful deliberations of what constitutes a just war. He also ignores the considerable variation there was in the Middle Ages. To take his example of the treatment of women, a favourite theme for him: early mediaeval English law treated violence against women very seriously.[xxvii] A woman could not be forced to marry a man against her will. She had custody of the children and her share of property protected in the case of divorce. She could own, inherit, and sell land. She could be a litigant or an oath–giver in court. And her life was valued equal to a man’s when it came to compensation for death or injury. In the words of one scholar, “women in early medieval England were more nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age.”[xxviii]

None of this is to claim that early mediaeval women were better off than modern ones. They were not. Rather, it is to say that there was considerable variety in such matters across the millennium of the Middle Ages and that that period was not simply the theatre of barbarous, misogynistic violence that Better Angels implies. Pinker ignores all this, however, because, as one historian astutely observes, “to make [his] narrative a success, Pinker needs a barbaric Middle Ages.”[xxix]

There is a similar massaging of history at work in his glowing treatment of the Enlightenment, which epitomises everything that the mediaeval period doesn’t. (I will say less about this because I have written elsewhere on Pinker’s misunderstanding of the Enlightenment.[xxx]) In the meantime, it is simply worth pointing out the ahistorical weight he puts on the period, even suggesting at one point that “people began to sympathise with more of their fellow humans, and were no longer indifferent to their suffering” (160) during this period. The idea that people knew no sympathy for their fellow humans before 1750 is not persuasive.

Pinker’s gentle massaging of history continues right up to the modern period by drawing out the pacifism of modernity. Sometimes he works the numbers. One might think that the fact the most recent century of human civilisation saw upwards of 150 million deaths through warfare might act as an obstacle to any theory of declining violence, but Pinker manages to circumvent it. In one table, he breaks up the sheer enormity of 20th century mortality in discrete blocks (Second World War, Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, First World War, Russian Civil War, Congo Free State, Chinese Civil War) and then compares them with episodes some of which lasted for centuries (Annihilation of American Indians, Trans–Atlantic Slave Trade, Mid–Eastern slave trade). The result inevitably softens the magnitude of modern genocide.[xxxi]

More generally, he insists that a proportional measure is the only one that can reliably compare levels of violence between different eras. “Two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the United States.” Mathematically speaking it’s a defensible position, but as the author Marilynne Robinson (among others) has said, it feels dishonest to compare solely on the basis of percentages when actual numbers are so hugely different. “Any extended family with twenty–five members suffers a death from time to time. Is this in any way equivalent of the loss of five million people out of the whole population?”[xxxii]

Pinker dedicates a chapter to the years 1945–1990 calling them the long peace, as if 45 years can legitimately be called “long” in terms of human history, and then, even more remarkably, calls the period after 1990 the “new peace”, when it’s not really much more than a historical heartbeat. He caveats himself here, writing at one point that “no reasonable person would prophesy that the New Peace is going to be a long peace… perhaps new leaders in China will decide to engulf Taiwan once and for all or Russia will swallow a former Soviet republic or two.” (454) But if that’s so, is it really right to call it a “peace” at all?

Modernity is decisively tilted to the peaceable in other ways. “People have lost their thirst for cruelty,” (160) he writes early on. Well, perhaps. It is true that we don’t attend the public torture of criminals any more. But then again, we do watch films. Indeed, in the decade before Pinker’s book was published, a range of movies that were subsequently grouped under the rubric of ‘torture porn’, in which ordinary people were graphically abused, humiliated, terrified, tortured, mutilated, and murdered, was fantastically successful. The Saw franchise, in which a serial killer physically and psychologically brutalises his victims, grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. And that is not to mention the streak of violence and cruelty that pervades video games and the internet. Video torture isn’t public square torture, granted, but nonetheless this doesn’t sound like a species that has altogether lost its taste for cruelty.

To be clear about this, none of these corrections, whether prehistoric, mediaeval, Enlightenment, or modern, challenges the soft thesis of Better Angels. Pre–state prehistory (and non–state contemporary) societies were very violent. The Middle Ages were more violent than we are today. Important ethical and legal strides towards peace were made in the Enlightenment.

What such clarifications do, rather, is undermine the implicit ‘hard’ thesis that runs through Pinker’s book, that humanity has made conclusive and decisive progress, and that history is a trajectory, even an arc, from the bloodthirsty barbarity and moral idiocy of the past to the enlightened peaceableness of modernity.

The reality is that the past was not as categorically and unapologetically violent as Pinker makes out, and the present is not as progressive and pacific. The conditions under which so many of us live – strong state, property rights, rule of law, social security, medical care, unprecedented affluence – have enabled us to live less violently than our forbears. But this is all contingent and fragile, having more to do with affluence than morality, with new–found security rather than new–found sympathy, and with there being a lower percentage of young men in developed societies (violence being disproportionately young and male) than it has to do with any radical, new, systemic commitment to reason, peace and empathy.

All of this that leaves us with a question. Why would someone as intelligent and enlightened as Pinker not simply settle for a soft thesis? Put another way, why would he feel the need to caricature and exaggerate the violence of the past and the peace of the present, when he already had a reasonable case? Is this just a familiar authorial temptation – why put forward a provisional, tentative case when you can imply an epochal one – or is there something else going on? I believe there is, and the answer has something to do with Stephen Pinker’s psychology.

5. A Secular Faith

Pinker’s treatment of religion in Better Angels makes his understanding of the Middle Ages seem positively sophisticated. The book opens with a few pages lovingly surveying the cruelty of the Hebrew Bible. “The Bible is one long celebration of violence”, Pinker informs us (7). Here is no God who commands his people to welcome the stranger or to love truth and peace.[xxxiii] The idea that that the lex talionis was an attempt to limit ever–escalating blood feuds, rather than simply a crude approval of mutilation, is not to be found. The thought that God’s promise that “vengeance is mine” might be an attempt to deter human vengeance, rather than to legitimise it, is not considered.

The book quickly skirts over Jesus Christ, whose irksome insistence on non–violence doesn’t fit Pinker’s narrative. In any case, Pinker says, “of course, there’s no direct evidence for anything Jesus said or did.” (15) Christendom’s subsequent interest with “bloody crucifixes” is judged to be part of the Middle Age’s obsession with and endorsement of violence, rather than a warning against violence by showing its impact on God himself. The idea that every week, in every community in Europe, for over a thousand years, people assembled to hear and mark the message of a man who told his followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek is ignored.

At the very end of the book, Pinker distances himself from the anti–theists by claiming that some (highly secularised) forms of religious belief have been peaceable, but it’s an anaemic caveat. Saying you think Christopher Hitchens’ claims about religion are a bit of “an overstatement” does not necessary mean you have a balanced and moderate opinion on the topic yourself.

And yet, in spite of his wholesale dismissal of Christianity, Pinker cites a remarkable number Christian ideas and movements that did and do contribute to peace. He mentions the prohibition against infanticide introduced into the Roman bloodstream by Jews and Christians in the early Christian centuries (510). He mentions Quakers (and evangelicals) and the abolition of slavery (186). He talks about the way in which missionaries helped eliminate human sacrifice in many parts of the world (163). He references how churches added “institutional muscle to women’s civilising offensive” through Sunday discipline and the temperance movement (126). He brings up the “moral energy” of the American church in tackling the upsurge in violence during the secularising 1960s (150). He recalls the way in which conservative Christian movements like Promise Keepers obliged men to take care of their wives and children (152). He references the manner in which many church leaders in violent communities lure young men away from gang life (109). And he alludes to the overall Christian emphasis on virtues like self–control and forgiveness, on institutions like marriage, and on the very idea that human life is sacred (511).

This is a fair list. Recognising and accepting it does not compel anyone to believe that Christianity (or religion) has been the sole driver of the fall in violence, let alone to forget the very real examples in which religious thought and practice has legitimised and encouraged violence. It is quite possible to hold both truths in tension. History is messy.

Pinker’s inability or unwillingness to do so, and to lay the entire reason for the pacification process at the door of secularised reason, empathy, the Enlightenment, and the like, by means of his heavily massaged history, strongly suggests that, his protestations notwithstanding, there is some kind of teleology going on here. It’s not the Christian one, of course. There is no room for sin, redemption, grace, sacrifice, love, eschatology, and the like in his scheme. Except that perhaps there is, with these apparently hackneyed, disproven ideas appearing in heavy secular disguise.

Humans are tainted with a kind of original sin. “Human nature… is not up to the challenge of getting us into the blessedly peaceful cell [of his Pacifist’s Dilemma].”[xxxiv] (840) Our moral faculties, like our cognitive ones, are, well, fallen. “Our cognitive processes have been struggling with the aspects of reality over the course of our history, just as they have struggled with the laws of logic and geometry.” (840) Heaven, or utopia, is not a possibility on earth.

We are not wholly depraved. Pinker is no closet Calvinist. On the contrary, we are capable of, indeed oriented to, grace and peace. “Human nature also contains motives to climb into the peaceful cell, such as sympathy and self–control.” (840) We simply need the right virtues, relationships, institutions, and culture to draw us away from our sinful urgings. The most “comprehensive solution” for doing so is “the principle behind the Golden Rule.” (840) Understanding rather than judging others, being willing to forgive, turning the other cheek: that is what we need.

In the book’s dying pages, Pinker writes how “the nonrandom direction of history is rooted in an aspect of reality that informs our conceptions of morality and purpose” (839). I can hardly think of a better description of a theistic or providentialist concept of reality, traces of natural law detected amidst the randomness of evolution and the mess of history, emerging, slowly, blinking into the light of truth, and steering human history towards a peaceable kingdom. Given such a precedent, it is no wonder Pinker was keen to distance himself from any disreputable religious associations. The book could never claim the mantle of the most desirable graduate present in the world if it were revealed that it was, ultimately just repackaged faith.

6. Everywhere is War

“Everywhere is War”. So ran the headline of Politico‘s morning briefing in mid–January 2024. It certainly felt like it.

US and UK forces had just launched a military strike against Iranian–backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The rebels had been targeting shipping in alleged response to the Israeli killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Israel had been at war for three months in an attempt to eradicate Hamas for their murder of over a thousand civilians the previous October. Estimates varied but the ensuing death toll among Palestinian civilians was well into five figures. Violence bred violence. The Middle East, never long in the peaceable quadrant of Pinker’s Pacificist Dilemma, slid ever further into the most belligerent quarter, where distrust breeds distrust and aggression is met with ever greater aggression.

At the same time, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had just arrived in Kyiv to announce a major new £2.5 billion funding package for Ukraine in its war against Russia, which was about to enter its third year, the only signs of its end coming in the ignominious fatigue felt by some in Washington, or in the nightmarish re–election of Donald Trump. Myanmar continued to struggle with its long–running civil war, which was claiming around 10,000 lives a year, and there were annual causalities in four figures in each of Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria, on account of civil war, ethnic violence, terrorist insurgency, drug battles or some combination of all of these. Whatever else this was, it was not a world that had decisively turned its back on conflict.

To be clear, Pinker never actually claimed it had. He only ever left the claim hanging in the air – “the dream of the 1960s folk songs has come true: the world has (almost) put an end to war” – with just enough deniability in the text to allow him to defend his thesis if things turned self–evidently more violent.

Most people, surveying the state of the world in the early 2020s would be excused for thinking that this is just what it is happening. But we should be careful. Today’s foreboding geopolitical climate should not be taken to mean that the centuries–long drift from violence, which Pinker did correctly identify, is over, any more than a few decades of general calm (interrupted by ‘only’ a couple of genocides) after the hideous violence of the 20th century, should be interpreted as a “new peace”.

We should be cautious about drawing too firm a line from what is happening now, or indeed what has happened over recent years, to making (or, in Pinker’s case, gesturing in the direction of) conclusive statements about what kind of angels now govern human nature. Humans may embrace or abjure violence but that doesn’t mean humanity follows suit. It seems our destiny, as a species, is to be poised eternally between the angels and demons.

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George Lapshynov reviews Katherine Kelaidis’ latest book Holy Russia? Holy War? which sets out to examine why the Russian Orthodox Church’s understanding of its past matters today. 02/01/2024

What does the West really know about the history of Eastern Christianity? About the history of the Russian Orthodox Church? About its Patriarch, Kirill of Moscow and all Rus’? If the answer to any or all of these questions is “nothing”, how then can we hope to understand in any meaningful way what is happening in Russia today?

These are the important and urgent questions that Katherine Kelaidis, Greek–American historian and expert on the Greek diaspora, has set out to answer.

The book’s greatest strength is that it argues – in my opinion, successfully – that a greater awareness and understanding of Eastern Christianity is essential to any Western country that hopes to interact meaningfully and constructively with majority Eastern Christian countries, or indeed to understand what Russia is, where it hails from and where it is headed. And Kelaidis’ post–colonialist lens proves to be an original and very valuable approach to understanding Orthodoxy’s relationship to the West.

In her collection of articles, Kelaidis contends that Eastern Christian civilisation, its history, and its self–perception diverge as starkly from the Christian West as Islamic or Confucian civilisation, and this despite obvious shared creeds. To erase these major differences by placing both into one communal “European” or “Christendom” basket as the West often does, she writes, obscures the East’s complex perceptions of, and relationships with, the West. It “renders flat a complex and multidimensional picture ” (p.157). And I agree: this conflation has acutely political repercussions.

To take just one example from the book, the Christian West – and the Catholic Church in particular – often fails to remember that, for more than half a millennium, it played the role of “aggressor or opportunist” (p.161) against Eastern Orthodoxy. The single most influential event that shaped the self–perception of Eastern Christians as Eastern Christians was not the Great Schism of 1054 (as often emphasised in Western narratives) but the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade – an act of Western Christian aggression that still scars Orthodoxy and Eastern Christian countries today.

Thus, to remain ignorant of this history and of the Eastern view of the West is to condemn us to further misunderstanding not only Russia and the war in Ukraine, but the history of most Eastern and South European peoples.

Unfortunately, the book’s stated (and indeed much–needed) educational purpose is defeated. In her “evangelical zeal” (p.177), as she herself writes, to defend Orthodoxy and distance it from figures like Vladimir Putin who cast long shadows over its beauty and peacefulness, Kelaidis has allowed egregious factual errors and unacknowledged bias to creep into her analysis.

There is a palpable sense throughout that she is desperate for a “modern” Orthodox Church, one in which her American western liberal upbringing and worldview does not clash with the (it seems, to her, unfortunately) conservative and anti–liberal millenary tradition of her forbears, to which she is also very clearly attached. While I have sympathy for her situation (which is all too familiar) she fails to notice the rift that exists between what she portrays Orthodoxy to be – her idea of what Eastern Christianity ought to be – and what it really is. The result is a misleading picture.

Not only does the book hastily deal with complex issues of Orthodox ecclesiology and oversimplify centuries–old intra–Orthodox conflicts, but it focuses extensively on petty issues of Orthodox infighting and blows them out of proportion. It turns the entirety of the internal Eastern Christian debate into a pro–Russia/pro–West binary, thereby committing the very same error which she denounces earlier: that of rendering flat an infinitely nuanced picture.

Kelaidis indiscriminately lumps together conservative Orthodox believers with those cynical figures who exploit Orthodoxy for political or personal gain, or as a medium for political messaging and propaganda. Traditionally minded believers, whether Russian, Cypriot, or otherwise, are cast into the irrevocable role of the villains. They are singled out as the root cause of the perversion of the Western values of freedom, democracy, tolerance and human rights.

Her failure to recognise that the majority of Orthodox Christians are not liberal, Democrat–voting American Greeks, but rather conservative Eastern Europeans, is especially problematic. If you are an Eastern Christian woman who chooses to wear a head covering in church, Kelaidis warns, you are not really being pious – you are “putting on shows of piety” and participating in an “egregious display of self–aggrandizement” (p.189).

Finally, the book unforgivably sacrifices factual accuracy to sensationalism.

Desperate to save Orthodoxy from the bad name it has acquired through its association with the Kremlin, Kelaidis decides to throw the baby out with the bathwater and resorts to the wholesale condemnation of Russian Orthodoxy without any regard for its actual structure and actors. Of all the book’s astonishing claims, one particular issue, to which two articles are devoted, deserves special attention.

The Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe is an administratively autonomous Paris–headquartered diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, headed by the French–born Metropolitan John (Renneteau), and famous for its St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. The book discusses its transfer in 2018–19 from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the senior and first–among–equals mother Church of Eastern Christianity, to the Russian Church.

With no regard for the autonomous status of the Archdiocese, the origins and inclinations of its hierarchy, its unique democratic procedures or its history, Kelaidis turns the change of jurisdiction into a tale of political manoeuvring, espionage and world domination. The dissolution of the Archdiocese by the Ecumenical Patriarch, the year of intense parish meetings and diocesan assemblies that preceded the move to Moscow, and the fact that any parish that did not want the transfer was free to leave – and many did – are completely ignored. Metropolitan John, who vocally opposed the war in Ukraine, criticised Kirill, and allowed his clergy not to commemorate the Patriarch, is branded Kirill’s “mouthpiece”. And the Archdiocese’s Saint Sergius Orthodox theological institute, previously the most prestigious in Europe, is being called a propaganda machine for the Kremlin – even though it operates independently from the archdiocese and its dean is a liberal Greek.

The book promises to show its readers how Russia’s understanding of its past continues to shape and direct the way it sees its future. Kelaidis however fails to see how her own strong feelings for the cause have shaped and directed the book away from the factual, and towards the ideological. In her quest to reconcile Eastern Christianity with modern liberalism, Kelaidis’ book has become a manifesto for a certain brand of Orthodoxy.

Instead of introducing an undereducated Western audience to the complexities of Eastern Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church, it dangerously navigates through sensationalist waters. And most of it appears to be a sequence of baseless shots aimed at Orthodox believers with conservative views, whom she deceptively depicts as the periphery of Eastern Christianity.

Holy Russia? Holy War?: Why the Russian Church is Backing Putin Against Ukraine is published by SPCK.

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Daniel Turner explores a Christian understanding of suffering in light of Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s bestseller Faith, Hope and Carnage. 16/02/2023

Suffering: a universal experience 

Suffering. A deeply personal experience, and yet one of the few that is simultaneously universal. Across the spectrum of Christian denominations, you will find many (often conflicting) thoughts and opinions attempting to justify the presence of suffering in a world created by a supposedly all–good, all–powerful, all–knowing God.  

Such attempts are noble. I know many people who, following tragic events, have concluded that such a God cannot exist. Often, I fear that this comes from having been sold a false understanding of the role of suffering in the Christian story. That it is something that can be avoided or a challenge that needs to be overcome. A nice idea for sure as then the onus for health and happiness lies solely in your own hands. However, when stacked against the witness of many faithful Christians throughout history, such a theology seems incoherent with the rest of reality. 

Perhaps in such circumstances a good theological and philosophical undergirding would have been enough to prevent friends of mine from falling away. But then again, perhaps not. Whilst they most certainly have a place, such remedies very rarely soothe the real pain and real suffering that people go through. So how best we approach the topic of pain with the human tenderness it requires? 

How can we understand suffering? 

Conversations between musician Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan have proved to be a remarkable source of balance on the subject. Initially listening to the pair’s discussion on The Sacred podcast, and then later reading their book Faith, Hope and Carnage, I found I was not simply faced with attempts to rationalise or explain the whys of suffering. Instead, I had been welcomed into their experiences, and asked to join them in pondering the mystery that it is. 

With life comes the inevitability of hardship, and whilst age and circumstance certainly play a part in how much an individual has been exposed to it, O’Hagan rightly describes it as a club that we will all eventually join. Knowing this, it is tempting to want to prepare for its arrival. But can this realistically be done? 

Cave and O’Hagan would seem to suggest not. The best guide they provide lies somewhere in the realm of surrender. That by surrendering to the ‘valley of the shadow of death’, (Ps 23:4) something more can be found. “Perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things”, Cave says. In this statement, he does not explain the suffering he endured, nor does he turn it into a test for him to pass. Rather he suggests it to be a mode of being, a realm of understanding, a prepared table for him to sit at in the presence of his enemies. (Ps 23:5) 

Furthermore, Cave highlights that pain, suffering, grief, and death are not mere accidents or errors that fall upon the unfortunate, they are essential components of what make us fully human. Just as the highs of life have their place, so too do the lows and the lowest of the lows. Attempts to fight against this harsh, beautiful juxtaposition are futile. And when looking for meaning, perhaps the only answer is as Freddie Mercury sang: “there must be more to life than this.” 

Suffering and loneliness 

The lonely nature of suffering is perhaps one of the hardest aspects about it. Even collective suffering has the strange ability to be experienced in an isolated manner. Cave highlights this acutely when recalling him and his wife grieving their son Arthur’s death. “I have never experienced such aloneness… Susie was the same. We had each other but we were also unreachable, even at times to each other. We were together, but essentially alone.” 

Grief is just one example of this. All over the world, and in each of our lives silent battles occur little below the surface of what appears socially acceptable. Poor mental health, relationship breakdown, addiction, sickness, work stress, each of these bring their own baggage and risk drifting us astray from getting the help we need. In recent times, the COVID–19 pandemic proved to be a good example of this, with O’Hagan aptly describing it as a “collective experience defined to a great degree by isolation”. 

Christ and suffering 

What meaning is there to be found then? “To me it feels that, in this dark place, the idea of a God feels more present or maybe more essential. It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined. It feels that, in grief, you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next.” These words by Cave strike to the core of the Christian message on suffering. That in these darkest of places there remains someone who “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”. (Is 53:4) 

Christ’s response to those in pain around him was not to simply hand them a justification for the presence of evil in the world. It was instead to compassionately descend to their level and join them in their suffering. That despite the depths of pain felt it might simultaneously become the place of most love received. Love and grief entangled in one mystical experience. 

The summit of such entangling can be seen best 2,000 years ago at Calvary, where the cross that hung Christ stood as an eternal expression of the radical lengths He was willing to go to lovingly share in this most human of experiences.

Listen to The Sacred with Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan here.
Buy a copy of Faith, Hope and Carnage here. 

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Nick Spencer reviews Mark Dowd’s latest book My Tsunami Journey which tackles the ancient question – Where is God in a suffering world? 23/08/2022

“Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in the miry depths,
where there is no foothold.
I have come into the deep waters;
the floods engulf me.” (Psalm 69.1–2) 

Of making many books on the problem of suffering, there is no end. When the global publishing industry has been reduced to a single department at Google, housed in what used to be the stationery cupboard, there will still be books published explaining how (an allegedly good) God could allow such pain throughout his creation. It is, to be frank, the only problem, and its depth is unfathomable.  

That being so, it is a brave writer who sets out on this path today, so well–trodden, so steep, so lost in the mists, and from which no traveller has ever returned victorious. Is there really anything fresh to contribute here? 

Mark Dowd is a Dominican friar turned journalist who has presented a number of acclaimed religious documentaries (not an easy genre, still less a popular one). One of these looked at the impact of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and his new book charts and reflects on his journey. (I couldn’t quite work out why it had only now been published, though the delay doesn’t matter very much). 

It seems strange to have to summarise the tsunami, so seared is it on memory of those who were slumped in front of Christmas TV that year. But, nearly two decades later, there will be many readers who have only a fleeting idea of what happened, and less of the horror it induced. 

At around 8am local time on 26 December, there was an underwater earthquake about 100 miles off the western coast of northern Sumatra. At a magnitude of 9.1, it was the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded and, lasting nearly 10 minutes, the longest. The entire planet vibrated by about a centimetre and the quake was detected as far away as Alaska. The ensuing waves spread through the Indian Ocean, reached landfall heights of 30 metres in places, and killed about quarter of million people. We ate leftover turkey and watched in helpless horror. 

Dowd, staying at his parents’ house, was struck by a remark from his father, like him a lifelong Catholic. “God could have stopped that.” Dowd had an answer, but his father was not impressed. The conversation ground to frozen silence. A few months later, his father passed away suddenly. The dispute was left hanging. 

In the meantime, and with astonishing rapidity, Dowd had managed to secure a commission from Channel 4 for a 100–minute documentary on the disaster, which would involve him travelling to Indonesia, India and Thailand, all badly affected by the tsunami, and exploring how its victims reconciled their faith with the tragedy. Mourning himself, this was to be an exploration of suffering from the inside. 

It is this that distinguishes Dowd’s “quest for God in a broken world” from the many other, often excellent, treatments of this subject. All too often, the problem of pain is examined in theory, in principle, from the outside. But suffering, like the Colosseum, looks different from within. It’s one of the reasons why C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed is more affecting and effective than his (nonetheless acute) Problem of Pain. Dowd, himself a grieving and struggling figure, spent time listening to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians about how they squared this impossible circle. Empirical, attentive, multi–faith, uncertain: Dowd’s journey is characterised by virtues that are too often absent in theodicies that set out confidently to justify the ways of God to man. 

The results are instructive and defy easy summary; after all, not all co–religionists respond the same way. Dowd meets two Hindu women who lost family members, one radiant with peace, another curdled by grief. Nonetheless, there are patterns. “If God has taken away my family, then maybe it just means it is time for my family to die”, a young Muslim tells him in Indonesia. “Such children [who died] could well have done wrong in a previous life,” argues a Hindu professor at Tamil Nadu University. “Death is your best friend… he is a companion who will never leave you,” assures a monk in a Buddhist temple.  

God’s absolute sovereignty, the ‘justice’ of reincarnation, the abnegation of desire, the willingness to transcend the commitments of this life: the ideas will be familiar from many a Religious Studies textbook but spoken amidst the torrid wreckage of one of history’s ‘greatest’ natural disasters they take on an authentic, bewildering, sometimes inspiring, sometimes maddening quality. This is how the faithful have squared the circle, not as a means of settling an intellectual argument – Dowd’s questions about whether the disaster has left people doubting the existence of God are commonly greeted with incredulity and pity – but as a way of keeping alive and keeping going. 

His quest ends with a helpfully timed conference at the Vatican Observatory, convened by the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, dealing with ‘Scientific Perspectives on Natural Evil’. Dowd attends and engages with many of the thinkers – Nancy Murphy, Christopher Southgate, Philip Clayton – who will be familiar to readers of this topic. Their arguments, from both a scientific and philosophical point of view, are highly erudite and sophisticated. Materially creative and destructive forces are necessarily two sides of the same coin. Life is preserved by its capacity to recognise negative stimuli (aka pain). A world without tectonic plates would effectively be universal marshland, inhospitable to any life other than the simplest. A frequently interventionist God would render impossible the reliable causality necessary for order, freedom and morality. And so on and so forth. 

These are good arguments; about as good as you will get on the topic. They don’t fully persuade (me) if only because their success seems to come at the cost of the classical conception of God. The God that such theodicies nudge us towards is rather less free than normally imagined. ‘His’ creative potential is repeatedly circumscribed by what is possible. He is also rather less involved in his creation than believers have usually posited. “God cannot step in and transform bullets into flowers some of the time they leave pistols… as human beings could not use their God–given freedom on any sound ethical basis in such an inconsistent world.” Perhaps so, but presumably that does away with the idea of an interventionist God altogether. By this logic, surely any miracles risk destroying the basis of freedom and justice. Easier to have a God that stands aside, in favour of nature’s processes, all the time. Theodicy’s God ends up looking suspiciously deistic. 

To be clear, I don’t have better arguments than those Dowd hears at Vatican Observatory. As I said, the intellectual problem is unfathomable. If there is a tension between reason and faith here, so be it. More to the point, even if the intellectual problem were solved, it would make precious little difference to those searching through the mud and water for the bodies of the drowned children. Suffering is not really an intellectual problem.  

So it is that Dowd’s final chapter wisely shifts the camera away from the conference hall and back to the bloody reality that has occupied most of the book. This time it is the blood of Calvary, of doubting Thomas’s digital probing, and of ‘ordinary’ saints and martyrs that occupies him. It’s an appropriately gritty end to his journey in which he concludes that “faced with suffering, those who respond with selfless generosity arouse in us, in our deepest human dimensions, a sense of awe, a sense of wonder.” (emphases original) Whether that is enough for those who want to retain belief in God in a broken world is open to debate.  

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos 

My Tsunami Journey: the quest for God in a broken world is published by Resource publications  

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Anna Wheeler explores grief, struggling vicars and balloons in her review of Stephen Beresford’s latest play, The Southbury Child. 02/08/2022

Vicars are also human beings.  Other humans are keen to put them on pedestals and then enjoy pushing them off the moment they err into less than seemingly the right behaviour. In The Southbury Child, vicar David Highland has demons – he has been unfaithful in his marriage, and he is a functioning alcoholic.  One gets the sense the community ‘put up’ with him as the person who happens to run the church so ‘ends up’ as the one to run the funerals, and other churchy type stuff. He’s as staid as the building itself – in competition with the local more dynamic evangelical establishment.  But he is kind and wants to do the right thing not through any sense of entitlement or power, but because of his beliefs and how he thinks people should be valued during, and after, life.  As the play opens, he is discussing the funeral arrangements for a young child, Taylor Southbury, with her uncle, Lee.  Lee – and Taylor’s mum, Tina – want balloons.  David does not.  As an audience member, I started to think – who has the most demons?   

Whatever you think of Alex Jennings’ portrayal of David, and whether or not you have empathy with what David does, you are faced with a man who is fully aware he has failed and makes no excuses for himself.  Against rampant opposition, he holds to his no balloons at Taylor’s funeral policy.  And he justifies his position against the general sanitization of death which can easily occur.  To him, balloons can give the optics of showbiz – and ‘death is death’, not showbiz.  

Stephen Beresford’s play holds the audience fast between heartbreak and humour whilst themes of forgiveness, death, conscience, belonging, tolerance, and the meaning of faith itself, are played out on stage.  Indeed, there is a sardonic remark in the play, made by the vicar himself, about dressing up in the Church of England’s garments (a robe).  Actors dress up to tell us stories about real life – and many would say that those inside the church do the same.  Whatever your stance, the issues are all real even if you think the platform on which they are explored is not.  The fact is people turn to ‘the church’ at life changing moments and ‘the church’ is made of individuals who are going through them too.   

Ironically, this vicar’s reason for thinking what he does is brutally de–robed by his parishioners (and has been by some critics of the play).  It’s easy for them, and us, to be against him – although I wasn’t.  Nor was I against those who opposed him.  These are all characters, inside and outside the church, trying to find their way.  The issues they all faced, particularly the planning of a funeral, are ones that have, and will, affect me one day.  I doubt anyone wants to face a dogmatic, bloody–minded vicar (which some critics have called Jennings’ portrayal – I disagree).  But nor do I imagine, would people wish a vicar to be so focussed on the celebration of life that their grief and loss can’t even be acknowledged.  Clearly balloons mean different things to different people, and the play is far deeper than whether they are good or bad.  They float away; grief and the mess of the human condition does not.    

As Beresford says, it’s not fashionable to think about faith and belief; it’s even less trendy for the theatre to talk about it and in the compassionate, honest way that this play does.  It is a comedy, and you will laugh out loud at David’s knowingly whimsical vision of heaven, but I challenge you not to simultaneously weep, also perhaps out loud, over its message of love and loss. 

The Southbury Child is on until 27th August at The Bridge Theatre, London. 

Nick Spencer discerns the truth in scientific lies 27/06/2022

On 5 August 2014, the Japanese biologist Yoshiki Sasai hanged himself in his offices at the Riken Institute’s Centre for Developmental Biology, in Kobe. He had been supervising a young researcher who had made an astonishing breakthrough in stem cell research, which had generated much attention, including two papers for the prestigious journal Nature. Frustratingly, however, no other laboratory around the world was able to replicate her results.  

People became suspicious. The Riken Institute commissioned an investigation, and the findings were damning. The researcher’s work was sloppy, her lab notes were opaque, her data were manipulated, her work lacked integrity and humility, and her supervision was inadequate. The researcher was compelled to retract the article. Nature was embarrassed. Professor Sasai was mortified. 

There are two ways to read this story. The first is that it is an example of science doing what it does well. No scientist is perfect, intellectually or morally. Science is the slow process of winnowing, checking and rechecking people’s work, and outing that which fails to pass muster. 

The second is that it is an example of science failing to do what it claims to. Of course, no scientist is perfect. But you don’t need to be perfect to take good notes, show integrity, and avoid manipulating data. I guess it all depends on whether your test tube is half full or half empty.  

* 

Whichever way you read the sad story of Prof Sasai and his corrupt researcher, the real problem is that it is not a one off. In his perceptive and well–balanced book Fraud in the Lab, the investigative journalist Nicolas Chevassus–au–Louis, charts multiple stories of, well, fraud in the lab. 

There is the well–known tale of Woo–Suk Hwang, the South Korean biologist whose apparent success with cloning was shown to be illusory, not only ethically questionable, but straightforwardly corrupt – he had retouched photographs and faked results – and un–replicable. Hwang was fired, and sentenced to two years in prison for fraud, embezzlement, and violating bioethics laws. 

And then there is the tale of the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel, who was forced to retract 55 of his 130 journal articles because it was revealed he had basically made up the data himself. And the tale of American Neuroscientist Marc Hausser, who was forced to resign from Harvard, despite having several times been elected “most popular professor of the year”, because the Office of Research Integrity discovered repeated examples of data fabrication in his work. And German physicist Jan Hendrik Schon, who had published multiple widely celebrated articles in both Nature and Science and was tipped for a Nobel Prize, until it was revealed that he had used mathematical functions to generate plausible results for experiments he had never conducted. And so on, and so on. 

In one respect, none of this is new. Chevassus–au–Louis begins his book by talking about the mathematician, Charles Babbage, whose book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England fingered hoaxing, data forging, and trimming, was published in 1830(!) Nor is it evenly spread. In spite of Schon’s work, physics is largely spared such fraudulent activity, as is mathematics. Biology, chemistry, psychology, the social sciences, and especially medicine have a much more serious problem. 

However, it is growing, with more and more examples of corrupt science emerging. According to Chevassus–au–Louis, “the proportion of retracted articles [in biology] is ballooning, increasing elevenfold between 2001 and 2010”. (10) Other disciplines show comparable increases.  

It is very important to get two important caveats in place here. Firstly, we are starting from a low base. To give some concrete figures: the rate of retractions in the journal Cell is only 0.16%, Science 0.08%, Nature 0.05%. Even were these numbers to increase elevenfold again, they would still be tiny. Only in fantasy land does this constitute an epidemic. 

Second, not all retractions are fraudulent. Indeed, by the calculations of one study, only about a quarter are. Even if we are to think, as Chevassus–au–Louis does, that this may only be the tip of the iceberg – he reports findings that say that 14 per cent of scientists say they are aware of colleagues who commit fraud – it is still several light years away from being ubiquitous. 

These are important caveats because there are many fringe groups who want to discredit science at the moment, for ideological (or frankly nutty) reasons. Anti–vaxxers and climate change deniers do not need anyone to give them ammunition. 

But that is precisely the irony in all this. Pointing out the fallibility of science can only be considered “ammunition” in a culture in which science is assumed to be infallible. And modern science, from its very origins in the work of Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, is predicated on the idea of human fallibility. As humans, beset by sin, we are unable simply to think our way to the truth. Instead, we must feel and experience our way there. Experiment, in the seventeenth century, was commonly used in association with prayer, experimental prayer pertaining to personal, experiential, as opposed to formalised and ritualised prayer. 

Science only finds itself in this weird situation, in which its opponents think they have scored a hit against it when they point out its errors and flaws, because it has been culturally elevated to the position of unimpeachable authority and certainty. But, irrespective of whether you think it merits that position, it is only there because it is founded on uncertainty, essentially a process of organised scepticism. It is trustworthy because it doubts. 

For many people, this crystallises the difference between religion and science. Thus, some of our interviews in the Theos/ Faraday Science and Religion project told us, religion is a belief system, science is a doubt system.  

It’s a good aphorism but doesn’t bear much weight. After all, belief without (at least the capacity for) doubt is no longer belief. It’s false certainty. For all that religion is about faith, the idea that it is simply about blind, mindless, don’t–care–about–the–evidence faith is a fiction of polemicists.  

Conversely, doubt must stop somewhere otherwise the process simply eats itself, ending up with the orchestrated self–harm of denialism. Doubt systems usually end up believing something. 

The process of discernment and wisdom should lie at the heart of religious faith. As one of my colleagues put it to me, organised scepticism is to science what discernment is to religion. Or as St Paul once wrote to his over–enthusiastic audience in Thessalonica, “test everything [but] hold on to what is good.”  

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos 

Fraud in the Lab: The High Stakes of Scientific Research by Nicolas Chevassus–au–Louis is published by Harvard University Press. 

Nick Spencer looks at how social scientists took over the world 23/06/2022

The emergence of Creation Science marked the final victory of evolution over creationism.  

On the surface, it looked like the exact opposite. Darwinism had never been widely accepted at the grass roots’ level in America, but at least opposition had remained quiescent in the 50 years after the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ in 1925. The explosion of Creation Science in the 1970s looked like a victory (of sorts) for anti–evolutionism. 

However, the way in which the movement aped the vocabulary, method and institutions of science revealed what was really happening. The Creation Research Society was founded in 1963, the Creation–Science Research Centre in 1970, the Institute for Creation Research in 1972. A generation later, having repeatedly lost in the courts, the movement morphed into Intelligent Design which was even more determined to ground its authority on science.  

Of course, all creationists and most IDers still claimed that the scriptures (Christian or, increasingly Islamic) were authoritative but the way in which the language and logic of the movements appealed to science, not scripture, showed where the final authority now lay. Genesis may tell us that the world was only a few thousand years old, but it was science that actually proved it. Science was now the ultimate arbiter of truth. 

* 

In truth, creationism is no more than a side show in a bigger and much more significant story. Hugely more important are the multitude of other disciplines that have appropriated the principles and methods of the natural sciences in their (very successful) attempts to appropriate its authority. 

Such is the subject of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality, the subtitle of which – How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power – gives a pretty good idea of what it’s about. Here’s the story in outline.  

The natural sciences showed themselves, from late eighteenth century, to be astonishingly good at understanding, predicting, and controlling the material world. That being so, people naturally came to think that the principles and methods that underpinned the natural sciences should be equally successful when applied to the human and social worlds. Minds, behaviours, and the interactions between people could be reduced to constituent elements, studied, and then reassembled in the same way that a master horologist might disassemble, examine, and recreate a complex clock. The principle gave birth to the modern disciplines of psychology, economics and the full range of social sciences that measure and make our daily lives.  

There was a problem, however, namely that the approach never quite delivered the goods. Neither economics nor other social sciences were as impressive at predicting or controlling the human world as the physical sciences were the material world. Sometimes they were embarrassingly bad. 

Being shown round the London School of Economics shortly after the financial crash, the Queen famously asked, “Why did no one see it coming?” Why indeed? What Her Majesty may not have known, is that not only did no–one – well, very few people – see it coming, but some loudly and confidently explained that “it” couldn’t ever come. In 2005, Chris Mayer and Todd Sinai, two Ivy League economists, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “economic logic” had established the nonexistence of the housing bubble and that those who thought otherwise were economically illiterate “Chicken Littles”. I wonder if they lost their jobs or homes in the downturn. 

This may have been an extreme example but there are others. Pollsters – or psephologists to give them their scientific name – repeatedly failed to predict electoral shocks. Political scientists failed to predict the Arab Spring and then failed to predict its bloody demise. Some social scientists doubted whether the public would obey a government mandated lockdown. 

It’s not that social science was uniquely wrong, or inaccurate, or even divided. Natural science can be all those things. It is that, compared to the pinpoint accuracy of natural science, epitomised by the rapid life–saving development of vaccines during covid, they have been measured and found wanting. 

* 

The initial response to this is usually “we need better data” or “we must develop more accurate models”, and no doubt both of these would help. But Blakely’s case is that there is a much more fundamental problem at issue here, namely the subject in question. The subject of the social science, human beings, is fundamentally different to the subject of the physical sciences, i.e. the material world. 

This is not because humans are not made of the same stuff as nature. We are. Blakely has no ‘dualistic’ agenda at play here.  

Rather, it is because “human social and political behaviour is not law–abiding or mechanistic in nature… no set of antecedent conditions is ever sufficient to determine a consequent belief or action.” (xxiii) We change and, in particular, we change under investigation. While the material world is inert to our investigations. (We can leave aside the interesting exception of the quantum world here, as that does not affect the argument). Humans are not. “Humans create and embody meanings in a way that requires the art of interpretation and not simply scientific explanation.” (xxiii)  

This makes the human world vulnerable to what Blakely calls the “Double H” – or “double hermeneutic” effect, whereby “an interpretation of the world shapes the very interpretations that comprise it.” (xxvi) The coronavirus gives not a hoot if it finds itself under the microscope and simply carries on doing whatever it does. Human beings and the societies they create do notice, in particular, if the observations and theories of social science are then fed back into society. By observing and interpreting the human world, we alter it. “Social science rarely simply neutrally describes the world, but rather plays a role in constructing and shaping it… it is a poeticizing, creative act of meaning and more merely a descriptive science of the world.” (60) It is, to use the jargon, performative rather than descriptive. 

* 

Where this all becomes dangerous is that, left unnoticed, it becomes a self–fulfilling prophecy. 

There are some things humans do that can be interpreted as if they were isolated, calculating, utility–maximising units. Economics (commonly) interprets their actions in this way. And then interprets the humans who perform such actions in this way. People are told they are isolated, calculating, utility–maximising units. And having been told so, they come to believe they are so. And having come to believe it, they become it. Hence Homo economicus. Hence Freakonomics.  

Or take the human mind. If depression and anxiety and melancholy, and the many similar ailments that have afflicted the human from time immemorial are described by neurobiology to be neurochemical problems, then that is what they become. If brains are not working properly, as Steven Pinker put it, then “tweaking” them with drugs may be “the best way to jump–start the machine that we call the will.” (54)  

And if this thing called the will doesn’t start, after we have cranked the neurochemical engine, we can still keep cranking. The long–term result is a multi–billion dollar and somewhat self–perpetuating industry of antidepressants and other prescription drugs. As Blakley says, “studies of commercial culture surrounding the sale of antidepressants like Prozac found that antidepressant advertising consistently ‘propagate[d] narrowly biological explanations of depression’” (56) In a similar vein, despite the fact that those scientists who first developed the diagnosis ADHD hypothesised that a maximum of 1–2% of children would exhibit the pathology, by 2013 nearly 15% of American high schools had been diagnosed with the disease and were being treated… with pharmaceuticals. 

* 

The way in which social science has appropriated the authority and prestige of the natural sciences has led to Nudge units, and Choice Architecture, and ubiquitous management courses, and much else besides. 

Quite how deleterious all this is will depend on your point of view, and Blakely, I think it is fair to say, views such developments as ominous rather than apocalyptic. I would broadly concur. Science – as the Theos/ Faraday Science and Religion project discusses – is a highly complex, multi–dimensional, overlapping and grey–bordered entity. There is certainly much that is legitimately scientific in the social sciences and those who are inclined to dismiss them altogether on account of their more egregious failures are as guilty of making sweeping statements as those who think they are as solid as the natural sciences. It is possible for something to be partially scientific. 

None of this undermines Blakely’s central point, however, namely that “not all forms of knowledge ought to be crammed into its conceptual boxes, assumptions and standards” of natural science. (xix) There are more ways of knowing the world that hypothesise, isolate, reduce, test, predict, and repeat until you falsify. “There is an art to interpreting human behaviour that is never reducible to a strict of exact science.” (135) It is called the humanities. 

Blakely concludes with a clarion call, for the recovery of a discipline, the name of which has been hijacked over the last two generations to mean something much narrower and more negative, more or less the rejection of organised religion. We need, he argues, a new and enriched commitment to the irreducible significance stories, meaning, interpretation, and the human being. “Where”, he asks at the end of the book, “are the new humanists?” (136) Where indeed? 

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos 

We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely is published by OUP 

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Nick Spencer looks at whether there is a future for electric nuns 09/06/2022

“One thing they’re in the hospitals, the shops, now they’re in the churches.” 

So protests a knife–wielding “Luddite”, driven to violence in a recognisable future when robots have assumed traditional roles in society, rendering unemployed – unemployable – human workers. 

The scene is from the last moments of Tim Foley’s play Electric Rosary, which ran last month at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester but which, I hope and trust, will go on to play elsewhere. 

The plot is simple. The scene is a failing convent, St Grace’s, reduced to five nuns after the death of their Superior, enduring poverty and facing oblivion. In the unseen background, Luddites hunt and destroy automata, not for taking over society in the familiar sci–fi sense of becoming conscious and crushing their human masters, but for the all–too–mundane and credible reason of being versatile, cheap and therefore eminently employable.  

In the midst of this, the convent takes on Mary, a council–funded robot (who comes with a sizeable bursary) in order to help revivify their common life. Is this working with the times or being co–opted by the powers that be? The sisters are divided, their reactions varying from the indignant (“Father O’Gorman will come along, douse the thing with holy water, hopefully rust the circuits”) through the defensive (“We’re children of God… no hunk of metal could replace any one of us”) to the welcoming.  

Mary’s appearance hardly transforms the material fragility of the convent. St Grace’s remains poor and in decline. The senior sisters remain in conflict over who will succeed the Mother Superior. And the long hoped for visit to sistren in Ecuador a point of contention and uncertainty. But her presence within the community of Grace does effect a change of sorts.  

The play lingers and explores the borderland between the human and the machine. Binary code hangs in the background throughout the play, like the digits in the Matrix. The first scene opens with the novice staring out of the window exclaiming “Oh!” in surprise. At the mid–point, Mary breaks down uttering “I am no one. I am no, 0, 1, 1 0 0 0 1…” to the alarm of her sisters. And at the end, one of the elders laments “I am, I am no one” before seeing something that causes her to exclaim in the manner of the novice at the start. Meaningless digits coalesce into meaningful identity and thence into moments of transcendence.  

Questions of language curl around human conversations with Mary (“Is there anything else?” “Yes” “That’s a polite way of saying ‘go away’”) and plunge into theological depths (“You say you will be ‘closer to God’ in Ecuador. I don’t understand.”) Science and religion – or logic and miracles – rub against one another like tectonic plates (“You’ll never understand. No comprehension of what a miracle is. It’s something, outside science, and you are bound by science, your mind’s a… a closed circuit”). 

And beyond all these, there lies the twin motifs of physical presence and of sacrifice. In the production I saw, each of the main characters had her own distinct physical presence on stage – the cautious, hesitant Acting Mother; the bitter, severe Sister Constance; the vulnerable, shuffling Sister Philippa; the buoyant, naïve novice, and of course the rigid, formal robot Mary. Except that Mary’s physical stiffness softens as they play proceeds, and she becomes less tense, less proper, more human as the drama unfolds. To be human, the play seems to suggest, is to have a bounded, vulnerable, fragile physical existence. 

And then there is sacrifice. I cannot say much here for fear of spoiling the plot, except to indicate that the act of sacrifice – not only what we sacrifice but for whom and why – is central to the play, and in particular its climax, as the drama moves from its opening on Shrove Tuesday to its culmination on Easter Sunday. 

So it is that Electric Rosary, from a faintly absurd premise, draws out the themes and questions that are anything but absurd, and invites us to consider who we are and what we owe to one another. It is sometimes said that art is much better at predicting the future than science. Perhaps so, but Electric Rosary is no prediction, nor even a warning. It’s an invitation to a common discussion on what makes us human, and what must we do in consequence.  

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos

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Nick Spencer reviews Naomi Oreskes’ boldly–title book and finds an answer that resonates with an age–old religious problem. 02/04/2022

It feels dangerous even to ask the question. When anti–vaxxers are questioning the effectiveness of medical science, climate change deniers the accuracy of climate science, and young–earth creationists the validity of evolution and geology, the risks of asking why we should trust science at all seem, at first, to outweigh the benefits of doing so.

And yet, if science genuinely is the practice of sustained, structured scepticism that it claims to be, ask it we must. To refuse to turn a distrusting eye on its own activities and conclusions would be not only to betray science’s own core values, but to leave the territory to those whose motives for questioning science are themselves questionable.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard and in an earlier book, Merchants of Doubt, she detailed how a number of unholy alliances between industry, politics and science had sown doubt over the links between carbon emissions and climate change, smoking and lung cancer, coal smoke and acid rain, and CFCs and ozone depletion. These groups sold doubt and they sold it well. If those who are committed to good and potentially disruptive science, don’t ask whether we should trust science, then those who aren’t, will.

Moreover, and more disturbingly, science is not always trustworthy, and there are innumerable examples from the past to prove it. One need not go to the absurdities of phrenology or the horrors of eugenics to show this (though both were considered serious and established disciplines in their own time). In her subsequent book, Why Trust Science?, Oreskes offers many other examples to make the point.

Limited Energy Theory, from the late nineteenth century, argued the women were not suited to higher education on the grounds that it would adversely affect their fertility. Building on the ideas of thermodynamics, medics argued that the female of the species had only a limited supply of physical energy, much of which was needed for reproduction. Higher education would shrivel their ovaries and uteri. The medics who propounded the theory were all men.

Continental Drift, the idea that the earth’s continents had drifted over its surface in geological history, was well established in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, but American geologists had methodological objections to it. The theory, they argued, was insufficiently inductive: too much theory, not enough observation. By why was this an issue in America and not in Europe? According to Oreskes: “American geologists…explicitly linked their inductive methodology to American democracy and culture… deduction was consistent with autocratic European ways of thinking and acting… [the Americans] methodological preferences were grounded in their political ideas.” There are other examples. The point is that sometimes science has been trusted when it has been wrong and distrusted when it has been right – and for reasons that had only a patina of scientific justification to them.

Sure, science’s defenders reply at this point. But such theories have now been shown to be wrong, or right. So science does work, after all. But how do we know, the sceptics reply. How do we know which of today’s theories will stand the test of time, and which will be disproved one day. And if we don’t know, why should we trust any of it now?

Oreskes answer is fascinating, learned and perhaps a little surprising. Once upon a time the answer to this question was respectability. “The results of scientific investigations were trustworthy to the extent that the people who undertook them were.” In the later nineteenth century, this idea withered on the vine, to be replaced by method. Science was trustworthy because of its commitment to a reliable method.

The answer remains a convincing and widely repeated one today. Method is necessary, although not necessarily sufficient. Through the twentieth century, philosophers and sociologists began to pick holes in it. Was there such a thing the scientific method? Did scientists actually follow their method(s)? What guaranteed that that method arrived at the truth? Popular answers – the processes of science enabled theories to be verified, or they enabled theories to be falsified, or they enabled things to be predicted – were each suggested and then shown wanting. Pierre Duhem and W.V.O. Quine showed that theories were commonly under–determined by the evidence available. Thomas Kuhn showed that mounting levels of observation did not necessarily change theories as predicted. Paul Feyerabend argued that there was no scientific ‘method’ at all.

Practising scientists often dismissed such arguments as angels on pins. Science was transparently working. That was enough. But the problem of trust doesn’t go away, and when groups scatter distrust where they can, it remains urgent.

Oreskes’ answer builds on feminist critiques of science. These are easily dismissed, at least in some quarters, and sometimes deservedly so. (When one feminist philosopher of science accused Newton’s Principia Mathematica of being a “rape manual” you want to hold you head in your hands). The underlying point, however, is a valid and important one. “It is not so much that science corrects itself, but that scientists correct each other.” And, as the growing body of sociology of science shows, when scientists are too homogenous, too similar, too close to outside interests, or too vested in certain ideologies, their ability and inclination to correct one another is blunted. “Objectivity [emerges] as a function of community practices rather than as an attitude of individual researchers.” (52)

I have heard certain some scientists sneer at this, along the lines that there are more Asian women working in physics than ever before, and the laws of physics have not notably changed. It’s a catty but not an unreasonable point, and it may be that the importance of diversity among scientists matters more for some disciplines – particularly those closer to the questions of human nature and society – than for others. Nevertheless, it is undeniable and surely no accident that “when scientists were almost exclusively white men, they developed theories about women and African Americans that were at best incomplete and at times pernicious.” As the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology flourish, maintaining diversity among scholars seems eminently sensible.

It is important to note that none of this amounts to a wholesale rejection of scientific method, so much as a question mark over its sufficiency. In her conclusion, Oreskes outlines five “themes” that combine to produce scientific knowledge. One of them is method (another is evidence).

But what is striking is that the other three are consensus, values and humility, ‘themes’ that direct the question away from the narrow confines of what most people consider to be science, and towards the wider social and ethical context in which science takes place. And what it particularly striking here – at least what particularly strikes me – is just how closely this parallels longstanding discussions in hermeneutics, the discipline of studying texts, especially authoritative ones.

The question of who has the right to interpret holy texts is a very old one. Our answer today – anyone – was hardly self–evident in the past. Between 1401 and the late 1530s, even owning a vernacular Bible in England could send you to the stake. Reading and interpreting the text was a highly–charged, highly–political and strictly–limited exercise.

Our interpretative generosity is so much better today, although it hardly gets us off the hook of the bigger question, whose interpretation of holy texts should we trust? This is not theory. When Vladimir Putin appropriates Jesus’s words from John’s gospel, “there is no greater love than if someone gave his soul for his friends”, as a justification for his murderous war in Ukraine, the need to interpret authoritative scripture rightly is vital. If you want to say that hie interpretation is mistaken, you need to be able to say why your interpretation is trustworthy. The question is as familiar, and as intractable, as ‘why trust science?’ But the commonly proposed answers are strangely similar.

Yes, the reader in question should be educated, learned, and informed, as should the scientists. But education alone is not enough. We need a community of readers at work, bringing to bear on the text their various background and experiences. This is not just a question of comfortable, rich, white, Western, Protestant (or Orthodox) men who have finally discerned what Jesus actually meant. Readers, like scientists, must be characterised by integrity, patience, diligence, responsiveness, etc. Their work should be marked by humility, a refusal to foreclose on answers, an openness to new ideas, a reluctance to claim that you have somehow finally fathomed the mind of God. But above all, the community should be varied, so that just as scientists correct each other to make better science, so readers correct each to make better interpretation. It’s one of the strange ways in which science and religion end up having more in common than we often think.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos

Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes is published by Princeton

Naomi Oreskes is a guest on the next series of Reading our Times

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Madeleine Pennington reviews Philip Jenkins’ survey of the historical relationship between climatic and religious changes. 19/01/2022

Few moments in recent history should convince us of our continued embeddedness in the natural world more clearly than the present day.

Most obviously, we are living through a period of collective climate reckoning, as we come to terms with the sobering impact of human activity on finely tuned ecosystems. This is especially pertinent in the wake of COP26: while making significant progress on a range of environmental policy issues, and holding our political leaders to an accelerated ratchet mechanism of annual re–evaluations, the Glasgow Pact will not itself keep global warming to the critical 1.5°C limit so desperately needed.

At the same time, we remain locked in a continued and global struggle to bring COVID–19 under control, reminding us of the limits of modern medicine (and perhaps statecraft), the fragility of human life, and the disturbing consequences of human overreach into natural habitats.

And recent disruptions to our supply chains (the prospect of turkey shortages at Christmas and an ongoing HGV driver crisis to name just a few) remind us that, despite living in a globalised and predominantly urbanised society, we are still inexorably dependent on a complex web of interrelationships and dependencies when it comes to our place in the food chain.

Our globalised economy may have left us feeling more secure than ever, but the necessities of life are in fact vulnerable to a far wider range of variables than they ever were – and underlying all these crises is a fractured relationship with the planet we call home.

Seen through this lens, Climate, Catastrophe and Faith – Philip Jenkins’ thought–provoking, careful, and ambitious survey of the historical relationship between climatic and religious changes, published in April 2021 – is certainly timely.

Stretching from the Middle Ages to the present day, Jenkins’ study considers how shifts in climate and weather cycles have impacted the religious landscape throughout human history. The number of pertinent historical case studies included should not distract us from the unprecedented nature of our own situation; Jenkins makes clear that contemporary climate change is historically unique in its cause and likely impact. Nonetheless, combinations of El Niño, solar, and volcanic activity have ensured people in many other historical eras have found themselves at the mercy of the natural world for extended periods of time.  

How did they react?

Jenkins begins with a positive example: the High Middle Ages, and especially the “Golden Age” of Medieval Warm Period which culminated around the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. This was a long stretch of warmer weather conditions which led to thriving agriculture and, therefore, encouraged a period of economic prosperity, higher populations, and urban growth. In turn, the book suggests that these forces have been neglected as contributing factors to increased creativity and philanthropy, university learning, and architectural and theological innovation. Many of the most well–known religious orders originated in this period, including the Cistercians, Carthusians and Templars, and the century after 1150 alone gave rise to Notre Dame in Paris, Canterbury Cathedral, York Minster and Westminster Abbey to name but a few. This was also a time of religious codification in Europe – most obviously at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, where many of the most well–known Christian doctrines were defined, including transubstantiation and papal primacy.

Nonetheless, the Medieval Warm Period eventually gave way to the Little Ice Age, and the majority of Jenkins’ work is focused on bitter struggles against far more hostile surroundings. The main chapters of the study pivot around especially harsh periods in the fourteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Jenkins chiefly stresses the way in which climate instability drove religious paranoia and persecution, flaring up in years that suffered particularly awful conditions. Perhaps the most striking examples in this respect are the Great Famine of the early fourteenth century (accompanied by the disturbing escalation in religious intolerance and persecution compared to earlier times) and the particularly brutal cold era of the later sixteenth century (which coincided with the peak of European witch–hunts).

The basic link between hostile natural cycles and an unforgiving religious landscape is convincing, and offers a crucial reminder that human societies are highly receptive to material conditions. Of course, our forebears knew that. It is we who forget, and Jenkins’ study should therefore be understood primarily as a work of historical corrective. The strength of the connection is perhaps even less surprising when we consider that “with few exceptions, premodern societies accepted broadly providential worldviews, based on the idea that worldly affairs are controlled by the divine and that human conduct induces God or gods to show their pleasure or displeasure” (p. 13). Simply put: if God is not happy with us, who can we blame?

At the same time, Jenkins is clear that we must avoid simple formulae for the relationship between climatic and religious trends. “Scholars rightly resist the temptation to reduce religion to simple material terms, and environmental determinism has a long and sometimes controversial history. But if the material basis to social and cultural change is not everything, neither is it nothing” (p. 4). It is an important caution. After all, having drawn a link between theological innovation (including doctrinal codification) and favourable climatic conditions in the Medieval period, it is then surely difficult to argue that the increased concern for doctrinal purity in the Little Ice Age was caused by harsher conditions alone, without the acknowledgement of other factors at play. (Indeed, doesn’t doctrinal codification itself make doctrinal purity easier to chase?)

The picture is further complicated by a range of factors which picked up pace in the early modern period, all of which loosened the connections between climate and faith: the increased sophistication of states themselves; Enlightenment suspicion of supernatural explanations for weather and climatic events; increased urbanisation; new technology.

Simply, as people became less reliant (and less aware of their reliance) on the land, the power of climate change to affect our spiritual outlook has diminished. Most of us today have “no inkling of whether the previous year’s harvests [have] been spectacularly good or atrociously bad” (p. 171) – to which end, if you have never considered the relationship between your home refrigerator and your religious sensibility, this book is the place to start.

Nonetheless, Jenkins strikes an ominous note against this learned sense of security: as we are now coming to realise in real time, the general assumption that the natural world cannot touch modern, developed societies is a flawed one (pp. 173–4).

Finally, therefore, we arrive at the present. How might the global religious landscape be affected by contemporary global warming?

Many of the implications Jenkins predicts still originate in poorer global regions. From a Western perspective, the impact of human migration (as millions of people are forced to leave their homes as a result of global warming) will reconfigure not only the geopolitical landscape, but the demographics of countries less affected by – or better able to protect themselves from – the changing climate itself. Jenkins also predicts the rise of religious violence and extremism in key countries that are likely to experience political destabilisation as a result of climate pressures.

These may seem somewhat narrowly–drawn predictions in light of the far wider reassessment of modern values that the climate crisis may demand, though in fairness, as a historian, Jenkins is naturally clear that any significance of his work for the modern day must flow from that historical concern rather than driving it (pp. 200–201).

Still, readers will undoubtedly have their appetites whetted to consider not only the straightforward sociological impact of climate upheaval, but also the deeper existential questions raised. Above all, what will the climate crisis really mean for our collective spiritual psyche, especially in the comparatively non–religious developed world? Previous Theos polling in May–June 2020 found that nearly 1 in 5 respondents had “[felt] a deep connection with nature/the earth” during the early pandemic – a higher proportion than had prayed, meditated, sought out a holy place, read a holy book, or learned more about religion and spirituality in general. We are also living in an age of booming nature writing, the proliferation of new spiritualities, and a reawakening of climate concern among the established faith groups. The current crisis is not one we can hide away or outsource, and it is not a problem only for farming communities, but for all of us.

In that sense, Climate, Catastrophe and Faith raises as many questions as it does answers for anyone with an interest in religious futures. Then again, perhaps it is for the rest of us to answer them.

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Pete Whitehead reviews The Green Knight, directed by David Lowery and starring Dev Patel. 06/10/2021

The original manuscript of Gawain and the Green Knight exists in just one copy – Cotton Nero a.x, in the British Library. Like Beowulf, or the first autobiography in English, The Book of Margery Kempe, there’s only one. Had that copy of each of them been lost, or burned, or ruined, then that would have been it. We might have heard of them – they might have turned up as titles in old records, or a few seventeenth–century pamphlets here and there, but we’d have no clue what it was really about.  

I was lucky enough, a few years ago, to study medieval manuscripts. There’s something genuinely quite magical about them, these books that have been passed on for five or six hundred years. When you work with them, you see the humanity on the page – doodles, corrections, weird snails that no one understands, or scribes doing their best to write around holes in the parchment. You think about all the people who, throughout the years, made little decisions – the right decisions – so that you can read this beautiful book.  

It’s that fragility that was on my mind as I sat down to watch David Lowery’s The Green Knight, starring Dev Patel. Patel carries the film brilliantly. His performance as the young and unproven Gawain is remarkable, aided by both the cast and the setting, which is simply stunning, drawing you in throughout. The original poem tells us quite evocatively that: ‘For werre wrathed hym not so much, þat wynter was wors’ (And the wars were one thing, but winter was worse.) [1] This winter is brought to life brilliantly – without question, The Green Knight is one of the most visually engaging, beautifully–shot films I have seen this decade. See it in the cinema if you can. The mix of CGI and studio effects, combined with the overall visual tenor of the film, serve to get to the weirdness of the Gawain–poet’s original work, the pastoral beauty and folk–horror dread of the landscape.  

There are more subtle, but equally lovely, nods to the source here, too. Much will be made by those in the field of medieval ecocriticism about the brilliant speech about the power of green, for instance, and the use of the ‘turn’, panning the camera around 360 degrees in a circle is a wonderfully inventive visual way of representing the medieval conception of the ‘wheel of fortune‘. 

But Lowery’s vision of The Green Knight it is not a faithful retelling of the original. Certainly, the overall structure is much the same: a large green knight arrives at King Arthur’s court, and offers a ‘game’ – he will be struck, and reply one year hence with the same blow. Gawain decapitates the knight, only for him to get up and ride away. The following year, Gawain must seek him out. 

Where Lowery chooses to place emphasis, however, changes the tenor of the story. More than that, whole scenes and characters are added, others played down and changed. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Stories are made to be changed. But just as fascinating as Lowery’s depictions and additions to the film’s physical landscape is his interpretation of its moral landscape.   

Gawain performs goodness. When it is time to be a hero, and slay the Green Knight, he leaps over the table, and demands a sword. He’s happy to do the right thing for plaudits, and plaudits he gets – the film shows various ‘Punch and Judy’ style puppet shows about him, and Arthur’s court greets his actions with rapturous applause. Little has changed, in this regard. We think of goodness, too, as something to be ‘performed’. One of the defining tropes of contemporary narratives is our postmodern confessionals – a character will admit to wrongdoing, say that they know how and why what they are doing is wrong. They will explain how bad they feel about it. Then they will continue to do it. If you feel sufficiently bad about something, in a very generalised way, that is penance enough.  

Gawain, before choosing to sexually engage with a married woman, declares that he knows he shouldn’t. He declares how bad he will feel, how it will go against his code of ethics. He does it anyway. But none of his ‘moral self–actualisation’ matters against a broader and sincerely held moral framework: she looks down at him, and informs him ‘you are no knight.’ When we do think about moral transformation, it is usually One Big Gesture – the romantic scene at the end of a movie, the moment in which a character chooses to be good.  

The Green Knight’s arrival, or perhaps the culmination of the beheading game, could well be seen as one of those moments. Gawain thinks that how he responds to the game offered by the Green Knight is this moment, the moment that will define him as a hero, an honourable man, a knight.  

Is that truly all it takes? 

A Lord questions Gawain similarly: ‘…and this is all it takes for that part [honour] to be had? You do this one thing, you return home a changed man, an honourable man, just like that?’ 

It’s in answering that question that Lowery’s additions shine. The original poem glosses over what happens between Gawain leaving Arthur’s side and arriving at Bertilak’s castle – ‘So mony mervayl bi mount ther the mon fyndes, / Hit were to tore for to telle of the tenthe dole’ (So many marvels among the mountains / It’s too hard to tell even a tenth of them.) [2] In the original, the moral universe is one rooted in Christianity and chivalry, and the tension between these form the basis of the poem’s primary moral struggle. Gawain is caught between the duties of honour and virtue – his honour as a Knight compels him, for instance, to kiss a maiden – but his virtue as a Christian compels him to not engage with a married woman. Lowery chooses to de–emphasise the Lord’s castle – which is the site of the poem’s primary moral struggle – and emphasise the journey, locating Gawain’s moral struggle in those scenes instead.   

What is Lowery trying to tell us with these scenes? 

In The Green Knight, Gawain’s journey is marked by multiple moments where he is alone, and faced with moral choices. In those small and private moments, Gawain fails morally every single time. He lacks the moral courage to tell his lover his intentions – offering her money, but never fidelity or truth. He allows the love token she gives him to be dismissed as ‘nothing’. When asked to assist St. Winifred, his first response is to ask what’s in it for him before helping. He intends to shorten his journey by – quite literally – standing on the shoulders of giants. He lies to the Lord whose house he stays in, breaking the rules of yet another game. It’s only at the end that he realises the consequences of such a life, as he sees what might be if he does not change. 

Lowery moves away from the moral universe of the original, and reframes it as a more modern parable: that living well isn’t a single act. It’s what we do in the shadows, what we do in our routine and mundane lives. It’s what we do when no–one is watching. It’s what you do when you’re at home after an awful, sweaty commute, and you’ve both had a terrible day at work and are tired and ratty and no one wants to do the washing up. It’s the choices we make when we’re asked to help someone, as Gawain is, and there is no–one around to give us plaudits or reward. 

Moral life would be easier if it was like Gawain’s vision of the world – if we had a set amount of time, knew on what date we’d be tested, and had time and space to gather our thoughts and steel ourselves, and then go out and do the right thing. But life isn’t like that – few of us will be judged on how we make one big decision, and it’s not how we should measure the utility of our moral frameworks. Indeed, one of the final shots sees the Green Knight turn into Arthur, then Gawain’s mother, then Gawain. Our own Green Knights are all around us, and we need not quest to find them.  

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Hannah Rich reviews The Utopians by Anna Neima, which charts the rise and (almost universal) fall of six real–world utopian experiments across the world. 07/07/2021

Amid the uncertainty and anxiety of the last eighteen months, the idea of starting from scratch has scarce seemed so appealing. Conversations about rebuilding and remaking society in a post–pandemic world proliferate. Anna Neima’s captivating and meticulously researched new book The Utopians charts the rise and (almost universal) fall of six real–world utopian experiments across the world in the aftermath of the First World War. The common experience of great loss and grief inspired individuals from Bengal to Devon and rural France to California to dream of social equality, self–sufficiency and the creation of a utopia.

Neima’s academic background is in history, and her book is resolutely historical in its approach to the subject matter. She recounts the collective trauma of the First World War being followed immediately by a devastating flu pandemic – ‘to many, the combined destruction of the war and pandemic seemed so terrible as to destroy any hope for the future.’ (p.4) – without drawing any direct parallels to the present day. The resonance of idealism abounding after a season of global disorientation is clear. What is less clear is whether the lack of any explicit reference to the Covid–19 pandemic and the current feverish political climate is a deliberate editorial choice or down to the timing of the publication process. Either way, it works; the stories are allowed to speak for themselves without labouring the point.

Many of the practical utopian communities described are characterised by a haphazard way of life driven by the ideals of a bourgeois intelligentsia. The stories of the rituals and riotous meals of George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man could be straight from the pages of a Mitford novel. Dorothy Straight, wife of the founder of Dartington Hall in Devon, was a wealthy social reformer frustrated by the inability of philanthropy alone to effect radical social transformation. Neima describes her as being ‘cocooned in the unreality generated by money’ (p64), with her attempts to deny her own privilege seen as more conspicuous than the acceptance or lack of it. At Fontainebleau, the ‘Dickensian lifestyle of hard labour and short rations’ (p.145) was passed off as moral asceticism when in reality it belied financial difficulties. There is little evidence of a strategy in any of these attempts to build a perfect society, even if they are underpinned by deep idealism and the earnest desire to change the world.

All the communities found it hard to maintain unity and financial stability as they grew and diversified. Some sort of leadership became necessary even in those communities grounded in spiritual egalitarianism. The rejection of mainstream ideals and economic systems did not liberate them from all practical considerations; there is a lovely anecdote about how one of the earliest difficulties faced by Rabindranath Tagore and Leonard Elmhirst was in improving the toilet facilities for villagers in Bengal. The first time the students themselves engaged in the process of emptying the latrine buckets was described by Elmhirst as a ‘red letter day in the history of [the] new institution’ (p.35). Toilet facilities are rarely front–and–centre in the envisioning of utopia, but here it is the first demonstrable success in the development of the community.

This is primarily an account of the founding leadership of each community, rather than their disciples. Some consideration of the motivations and experiences of the latter would seem equally critical if one wants to understand why so little persists of the envisioned utopias. Only one of the six case studies outlived its founder. The ‘fractious and fractured legacy’ of most of the communities is acknowledged as unsurprising when ‘long–term stability is not to be expected of a community of spiritual seekers held together largely by the force of one man’s personality and vision.’ (p.160)

It would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the longevity of the Bruderhof community is attributable to its basis in the Bible. Yet it is not entirely coincidental that the only one of the communities still in existence is also the only one grounded in a fundamental embrace rather than rejection of established ideologies or religions. While the Bruderhof sought to live out radically the model of the early church in the book of Acts, the founders of Trabuco College in California wanted to replace entirely a Christianity that they ‘felt was not a faith fit for modern times, since it did not incorporate science and had failed to prevent the First World War’ (p.203). Both were disillusioned with a Christian ideology that had been invoked in search of victory by both sides of the war, with very different results. In practical as well as spiritual terms, the biblical blueprint of Bruderhof is missing in the other experiments.

In her introduction, Neima highlights the double etymology of Thomas More’s notion of utopia, commonly interpreted as “good place” when it originates instead in “no place”. The construction of a utopian community, as the book goes on to argue convincingly, is also reflected in this combination of challenge and impossibility. Yet, as the concluding sentence of The Utopians tells us, the eponymous idealists ‘have always refused to accept current definitions of what is possible, and have infused the world with a new, optimistic energy’ (p. 237) that feels vital in the present day every bit as much as a century ago.

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The Theos team give their top picks for Christmas reading. 09/12/2020

Looking for Christmas present inspiration?

Well look no further – the Theos team recommend their top reads of 2020 and there’s something for everyone. 

The recommended books in order are: 

The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming by Henri J.M. Nouwen

The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean by David Bodanis

By Way of the Heart: The Seasons of Faith by Mark Oakley

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

How to be a Craftivist. The art of gentle protest by Sarah Corbett 

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt by Alec Ryrie

The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis

Every Moment Holy by Douglas McKelvey

Why we drive by Matthew Crawford

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Wing by Matthew Francis

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Natan Mladin argues that Netflix docu–drama ‘The Social Dilemma’ reminds us that we are not autonomous as we think we are. 23/09/2020

The revelations from the FinCEN files, the debates over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement at the US Supreme Court, and the second wave of COVID–19 infections are the main stories at the time of writing. In this context, a review of a Netflix docu–drama, two weeks after its release, might seem ill–timed and somewhat frivolous. And it would be, were it any other documentary than The Social Dilemma, which highlights an issue that runs deeper, and is as pressing as any news story of the day: the damage that social networks and the tech companies that shepherd them are doing to us, individually and as a society.  

It’s a familiar story – how the tech industry, and social media companies in particular, for all the good they have brought to our lives, have made us more distracted, more anxious, more isolated and depressed, more outraged and polarised. Addiction, fake news, election hacking, viral conspiracies are just a few of the many unsavoury phenomena linked to our culture’s social media dependence. While the broad outline of this story is known, it’s how the story is told that makes The Social Dilemma essential viewing – through the voices of industry insiders, former tech executives, engineers, and other experts, and, crucially, by lifting the bonnet on the business model as the root cause of what seem like disconnected problems.

An hour and a half of interviews, graphs, animation and drama add up to a bracing and sobering exploration of how social networks have wreaked havoc on our mental health, unravelled the social fabric, and undermined the premises of our democracy.

Tech companies, the film makes clear, are in an arms race for our attention. The digital environments in which we are immersed day in day out are meticulously designed, to the finest details, with this singular purpose in mind: to keep us ‘engaged’ for as long as possible – scrolling, sharing, liking, posting etc. And everything we do, online and increasingly offline, is tracked or surveilled; from the obvious to the creepy: the things we post and share, but also our typing speed and rhythm, our scrolling and clicking patterns, the time we spend looking at an image, and so on. All this ‘behavioural surplus’, as Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it[1], is aggregated and fed through powerful machine learning tools, which then churn out highly accurate models and predictions of our behaviour. It’s these models and fine–tuned predictions that are sold off to the highest bidders, mainly advertisers. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say it, but it’s still true: “If you’re not paying for it, you are the product”, or, as Zuboff puts it, the raw material.

The cycle is relentless and self–reinforcing. With every click and scroll we are unwittingly training the opaque algorithms behind the platforms to ‘know us better’, to predict and ultimately alter our behaviour – what we desire and fear, what we believe or distrust, and – most importantly for the advertisers – what we purchase.

The Social Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski, compellingly shows the logical ramifications of this business model – the alarming increase in depression, self–harm and suicides, particularly among young girls, the increasing difficulty of civil democratic deliberation, conspiracy theories spreading like wildfires, election hacking and so on. It makes for a sobering watch that calls for swift action, chiefly tighter regulations for the tech sector if not a complete overhaul.

The case for the damage being inflicted by social platforms is overwhelming, but what intrigues me is how blasé or resigned most people I’ve spoken to about this topic are.

There are many reasons for this. Sheer ignorance of the facts – how it all works and what’s really at stake – is one. The Social Dilemma should help remedy this (there is also a whole raft of books published on the topic in the last ten years – see, for example this, this, and this). Our addiction to convenience and ‘free’ is another. Thirdly, one shouldn’t underestimate Google’s and Facebook’s sustained efforts to get us off the scent.

But I think there’s an even deeper reason: a particular picture of ourselves, as ‘brains on a stick’, fundamentally autonomous, fully rational, and firmly in control, is holding us captive. While this hubristic conception of human beings – what some refer to as the ‘modern subject’ or ‘sovereign individual’, with roots in Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment thought – may have succumbed in academic discourse some time ago, slayed by post–structuralist literary theory, neuroscience, cognitive and social psychology, alas, it endures, in zombie–form, in our collective consciousness. We simply don’t like to believe we can be manipulated into anything, be it clicking funny cat videos, checking our phone for the millionth time or purchasing yet another jumper.

This is increasing our vulnerability and making us even more susceptible to the dark magic of algorithmic manipulation and control. And the bitter irony is this: because of this false picture, while everyone worries about the Terminator–like AI coming down to overwhelm human strengths in the future, algorithms are already here, overwhelming our weaknesses.[2]

Seen in this sombre light, The Social Dilemma is an important prompt to return to a more rounded and humble conception of ourselves; to recognise, amid mounting evidence, that we are not as strong, as free, as rational as we think we are. This, I suggest, is a crucial step, moving away from a technology that is shrinking our humanity, towards a technology that is truly humane.

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Madeleine Pennington reviews Stephen Tomkins’ book to mark the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower. 04/09/2020

This week marks the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower – the treacherous journey across the Atlantic which began in Plymouth in September 1620, and which took 102 pilgrims to found Plymouth Colony in the colonial ‘New World’.

The Mayflower looms large in the historic imagination of the West, above all as the overture to a dramatic American creation myth. It is deployed as a symbol of the pilgrim spirit, the heroic quest for religious freedom, and the original American dream. We are told that the pilgrims sailed to the New World to live as free Christians – and so, it is implied, American Christianity is that which is quintessentially free. Myths matter: it is arguably the potency of these same ideals that give such weight to the current American president’s (stomach–turning) politicisation of a Christian persecution narrative. ‘I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege,’ Trump told the crowd at an election rally in 2016, ‘Whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it. And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have… Christianity will have power.’ Eighty–one percent of American evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016.  

Recognising the importance of the history we choose to tell ourselves, the Mayflower anniversary celebrations have also drawn closer attention to the neglected links between Plymouth colony and the slave trade, and the whitewashing of colonial exploitation in recent months – on both sides of the Atlantic. Such warnings have perhaps never felt as urgent as they do now, following a summer of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe.

In reality, however, whatever significance we draw from the ship itself necessarily inflates the historic impact of a single journey across the ocean: if the Mayflower offers us a creation myth, it did not sail ex nihilo. A more nuanced consideration of what actually led the pilgrims to undertake such a journey is therefore always welcome, and it is this story which journalist and historian Stephen Tomkins traces meticulously in his most recent work, The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom.

The Journey to the Mayflower does not consider the voyage itself until page 329; after all, it is a book about the journey to the voyage, not of it. Instead, it begins with the Marian martyrs (the Protestants put to death over sixty years earlier in the reign of Queen Mary I), before guiding the reader through a history of English Separatism (that is, those Protestants who wanted to separate from what they perceived as a corrupt state church) and the key personalities of the Brownist movement (the religious affiliation of most of the Mayflower pilgrims, named after the English church leader Robert Browne).

What really motivated the men and women who took the terrifying journey across the Atlantic in 1620? What were the formative influences on their own lives, ideas, beliefs, and choices? What, particularly, should we make of any attempt to portray the voyage as a victory for religious freedom?

In answering these questions, Tomkins does not dispense with a freedom narrative altogether. It’s in the title – and he describes his work as ‘the story of people, but… also the story of an idea: that religion should be free, and that the church of Christ is a voluntary community, not an entire church state’. It is also true that the Pilgrims’ story emerged from a religious struggle that defines global Christianity even today – that is, the Reformation – just as it is relevant that the Brownists were fiercely persecuted at various points in their history. However, Tomkins observes, it was their concern to ensure the purity of the ‘true church’ which fundamentally motivated their desire for freedom, rather than any inherent respect for diversity of belief. Simply, the impure must be allowed to leave the worshipping community if it is to remain untainted – and that is incompatible with a coercive state–sponsored religion. Clearly, this is not a defence of religious freedom as we know it. Neither were the voyagers being persecuted directly by the time they actually left for America; most of them had been settled in the (comparatively tolerant) Netherlands before 1620.

In fact, the reasons the pilgrims actually gave for leaving Europe were ‘intriguingly inconsistent and incoherent’ – the most important being the ‘grim’ reality of life in Dutch cities at the time. And it was precisely this incoherence which, Tomkins argues, necessitated their eventual system of governance by consent:

“Four months at sea together had underlined their diversity, their different religious outlooks, different reasons for coming, different social levels, different skills, in different groupings. If they were to survive, they needed a structure that would tie them together… What they had was the experience of creating and maintaining a community through a mutual, conditional covenant, so they did that.”

In other words, it was the ideas the Mayflower generated almost by accident which played such an important role in the subsequent history of religious freedom and the political history of America.

Before we conclude that our most precious rights emerged entirely by historical accident, it is worth reminding ourselves that this is only a small slice of a much larger story. Once more for those at the back: don’t exaggerate the impact of the Mayflower in the history of religious freedom. After all, throughout history there have also been plenty of voices arguing for (and enacting) what we might consider a more rounded understanding of the right to freedom of belief – including before the Mayflower set sail. Perhaps the greatest inconvenience for those hoping to exceptionalise Western freedom is the fact that the early Reformation in Eastern Europe was strikingly more tolerant than its Western counterpart: Transylvania was the first Christian state to declare that communities should be able to worship God in their own way, without interference, and that was in 1568.[1]

We should therefore take the pilgrims’ place in the struggle with a generous pinch of salt. But Tomkins’ book provides us with some of that salt – and indeed, functions best precisely as a pertinent reminder that there is always – always – a back–story which makes any quick ‘take’ simplistic. Where the long journey towards freedom of religion is concerned, he embraces all the nuance of real life to capture (for better or worse) the people behind the myth. The final paragraph of the book, recalling the closing chapter of Robert Browne’s own life story, appropriately encapsulates such a determinedly unromantic approach: we hear that Browne ‘was asked by his godson… the parish constable, to pay his rates; he responded by assaulting [the constable] and found himself in Northampton jail, where he died a month later’.  

Any historical account which sets out to trace a struggle for freedom and ends with the unlikely assault of a police officer is worth reading – not only because it is a good story, but precisely because it is complex. It is messy and doubles back on itself. And the symbolism is not yet complete, even four hundred years after the Mayflower set sail, as examples of religious and religiously–motivated persecution – in India, China and worldwide – continue to emerge. The path to freedom has not always been plain sailing, and it certainly doesn’t resemble a straight line. As Tomkins himself reflects, in the final analysis, governance by consent – and religious freedom within it – ‘was an idea with a future’.

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Hannah Waite reviews Secularity and Science by Elaine Howard Ecklund et al. 03/03/2020

What do scientists around the world really think about religion? In Secularity and Science, Elaine Howard Ecklund et al. take us on a journey across different countries and cultures in the pursuit of answering this one seemingly simple question.  

During the course of their research, Ecklund and her colleagues interviewed over 600 biologists and physicists in the USA, UK, France, Italy, India, Turkey, Hong Kong and Taiwan – and surveyed more than 20,000 more. Their work is described as “the most comprehensive international study of scientists’ attitudes toward religion ever undertaken” and their findings may come as a surprise to those of us in the UK, for the world is far more nuanced, colourful and varied than has previously been described.

The results demonstrate that, across the globe, scientists are far more religious than we tend to believe. The majority of scientists in India (94%), Turkey (87%), Italy (66%) and Taiwan (57%) interviewed identify with a religious tradition. At least one third of scientists interviewed in the USA (40%), UK (36%), Hong Kong (31%) and France (33%) were religious affiliated.

But within this surprising picture of religiosity across the scientific community, there is also an East–West divide in how scientists think about religion and science: on average those in the East are more religious than those in the West. Indeed, the religiosity of scientists in Hong Kong and Taiwan either mirrored or even exceeded the religiosity of the country. This divide may be due to the fact that religion is more culturally embedded in the East; in India, for example, science and religion are deeply intertwined socially and hard to disentangle. So much so that Ecklund et al. highlight that the cultural context of religion within society meant it was hard for many Indian scientists to comment on the relationship between the two: they were seen as one and the same. Meanwhile, in the West there is a significant difference between the levels of religiosity in the general public and scientists. The highest levels of secularity and belief of a conflict between science and religion were in France and the UK.

In fact, scientists in the UK presented the most “vocal hard–line opinions on science and religion”. As one UK scientist stated:

“I find it very difficult for somebody to be a full, proper scientist [and] to also harbour true core religious beliefs […] if you’re a scientist and you use evidence to support your ideas and work […] but then on a Sunday morning you get up and go to church and take that completely out, you’re living two lives.”

The difficulty for this scientist appeared to be rooted in the acquisition of knowledge, particularly in determining what knowledge is valuable. Of course, we’ve all heard the argument that science is knowledge that comes from evidence, rationality and logic, while religious knowledge is rooted in faith and belief. This understanding presents a dichotomy between what knowledge is respected and valued, with scientific knowledge cast as the preferred and trusted form of knowledge.

We know this argument well precisely because it is particularly common in the UK. Crucially, though, the presumption of a strict dichotomy and conflict between science and religion is not global. Rather, it is overwhelmingly most prevalent in Western countries, whereas Eastern scientists in places as diverse as Turkey, India, Hong Kong and Taiwan are far more likely to see overlaps between science in religion. (Interestingly, there is one exception to this rule – Italian Scientists. Italy is considered as part of the West, yet unlike the rest of the West in this study, scientists in Italy present high levels of religious belief and view religion as two different and non–overlapping facets of life.)

The East–West dichotomy found by Ecklund et al. adds to the myriad of cultural differences between vastly different “worlds” and cultures. There are similarities between contemporary science and Eastern thought. The emphasis of complexity and an ever–changing universe comes naturally to Eastern thought, and has done for centuries. However, this is a relatively recent view of “Western” science.

Secularity and Science is a fascinating read; it is meticulously researched, well communicated, and highlights the vast difference of opinions and beliefs concerning science and religion, especially concerning the conflict narrative in the UK. This is a belief that may have remained implicit, without the recognition that the UK’s attitude to Science and Religion is more hostile even than that of the USA.

Above it all, it demonstrates the unique struggles of the West (and within the West, especially the UK) to find coherence between science and religion. The narrative of conflict between science and religion is ingrained in our worldview, and by acknowledging that it is not universal – that a conflict narrative is peculiar to the West – we can begin further to understand the perceived warfare between science and religion.  In turn, we may begin to see points of connection between science and religion, rather than points of departure. 

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Madeleine Pennington reviews Ben Pink Dandelion’s latest book, The Cultivation of Conformity. 24/02/2020

“This book is about the inter–relationship between religious groups and wider society, and about the way religious groups change in relation to societal norms…”

Thus begins Ben Pink Dandelion’s latest book, The Cultivation of Conformity. And whether it’s the recent private member’s bill to remove bishops from the House of Lords, or the decision by St Hilda’s College in Oxford to abolish its Christian chapel in favour of a multi–faith space, it is tempting to imagine the relationship between religion and society in modern Britain leading in one direction: one submits to the other. In these examples, secularism takes on the role of gracious host – and faith groups should ideally bring a friend, as multi–faith spaces are assumed to be fairer and more neutral than confessional ones.

Should we, then, simply expect to see an increasingly muscular secular hegemony in the coming years? Numerical shifts towards non–religion in the UK as a whole might seem to suggest as much, just as received sociological wisdom tells us that religious groups generally moderate their truth claims to cohere with those of the majority over time. Yet historically such drifts towards the mainstream have resulted from the need to avoid persecution and secure rights – that is, a negotiation between vulnerable religious minorities and the State. Applying the same argument in modern Britain would imply that, even in a liberal democracy, religion must negotiate with the State to ensure its survival. It would also suggest (ironically) that secular states behave in a similar way to hostile religious governments.

Enter Pink Dandelion who, by refreshing and timely contrast, argues that the direction of travel is neither unidirectional nor inevitable. Rather, interactions between religion and society are in a constant state of motion, and change does not follow a straight line. Crucially, this is because negotiation between religion and society is not merely between Church and State, but is just as much (if not more so) directed by the role of wider popular culture and individual believers. This is a four–way dynamic between civil authorities, wider culture, organisational religion, and popular faith. Religion, like anything else, operates in a marketplace of ideas.

Dandeliontakes the Quaker movement as his case study, and his headline argument is that widespread popular non–religion in our own time has led British Quakerism to “secularise” from the inside. This process has not been driven by a desire to placate hostile civil authorities, but by the preferences of Quaker members themselves: many explicitly cite the “lack of religious dogma” as their main reason for attraction to the group, so naturally de–emphasising elements of distinctive belief in their interactions with those outside the movement.

Yet if we were tempted to view the “liquid religion” of Quakerism merely as an unusually vulnerable recipient of culture – or indeed, even as a canary in the mine foreshadowing the wider implosion of religion in the United Kingdom – Dandelion alsonotes how the same four–way dynamics can produce unexpected reversals. His most compelling example in this regard is the Quaker response to the First World War, interrupting a time of increasing assimilation for the Religious Society of Friends. Internal Quaker regulations around endogamy and plain dress were relaxed in the mid–nineteenth century, Friends were finally allowed admission into British universities in 1871, and responsible citizenship had gradually been accepted as a legitimate expression of faithfulness. However, the outbreak of war – and especially the introduction of conscription in 1916 – meant that “citizenry was no longer an adequate response” for the pacifist Quakers. They instead “chose to be outlaws”, and many faced prison as a result. Even those whose conscientious objection was approved faced significant social stigmatisation. This led, in sociological terms, to the reassertion of sectarian tendencies within Quakerism even from a time of growing coherence with wider society.

Taken together, these two vignettes – the internal secularisation of contemporary British Quakerism, and the Quaker response to war a century ago – present a compelling challenge to fatalistic readings of Britain’s religious landscape. Things can (and do) play out in unexpected ways where interactions between institution, state, believer and culture are concerned – and Dandelion’s re–orientation of our attention towards the popular is particularly appropriate to the modern world. It is not that the choices of our civil authorities are unimportant. But in today’s Britain, “soft” forces can be just as transformative as the hard edge between Citizen and State. This is demonstrated by Theos’ upcoming report on the religious demographics of London: immigration plays a particularly significant role, and globalisation – so often portrayed as the preserve of a liberal, cosmopolitan elite – can in fact increase levels of religiosity rather than undermining them. The result is that London is now the most religious place in the UK.

The Cultivation of Conformity is a thoroughly readable and consistently thought–provoking reflection on the future of religious expression in an increasingly non–religious culture. At a time when the place of faith in society is changing along multiple axes, the search for solid ground is understandable – but Dandelion encourages us to look beyond lazy assumptions of neutrality and inevitable secularisation. Where we go next is far from certain.

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Hannah Waite reviews Religion after Science by John Schellenberg. 06/02/2020

“Act your age, not your shoe size.” It’s a comment many of us have heard before. A ‘joke with a jag’ (or an insult) that we don’t want directed at ourselves. It is to be deemed immature, and in the scope of normal conversation, being called immature is an insult. It is belittling and communicates that our argument or behaviour is not worth taking seriously. 

Yet, there is an exception to this. If you call a movement immature you are as likely to be suggesting (genuinely, rather than patronisingly) that it is developing and will advance to more significant stages. Given that religions are among the oldest social ‘movements’ on the planet, it may seem odd to call them immature. Yet, that is the premise of Religion after Science, by the philosopher John Schellenberg.  

John Schellenberg is a Canadian philosopher. He is a Professor of Philosophy and advisor of students at Mount Saint Vincent University and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, both a sceptic and an atheist. It is within this nexus that he begins to open up a new path to religion, a path that defines religion as evolutionary and immature, and enables a new way of responding to the age old science–religion debate.  

Religion, or the ‘religion project’ as he refers to it, is indeed acting its age. In the 50,000 years humans have been on the planet, we know perhaps 6,000 years of religious history and thought. However, we have not yet been able “to see and internalise what deep time [the millions of years of earth’s history] means for religion” in both the deep past, and the deep future. As such, religion may be several millennia old, but in the grand scheme of time, it is “immature and needs more time to develop.”  

Schellenberg argues that viewing religion in this way enables society to stop seeing it as either a “success or a failure.” Rather, he claims that seeing it as “immature” demonstrates the ways in which religion may grow and develop, and that in turn may encourage those of no religion to learn from it. He states that religion “allows us to treat the world and human things [that are within the world as] imbued with value and fulfilment,” in a way that is not possible outside of religion. Simply, religion enables humans to see and treat the world with dignity, respect and value that is not possible in secular society. It is on this premise that religion deserves “a second and third look,” particularly from the nones (those of no religious affiliation).  

Schellenberg is “especially concerned to address those who take a negative view of religion.” Through his work he gently guides those hostile towards science and religion (on both ends of the spectrum) “from new atheists to evangelicals,” to recognise that neither group has the final say on religious matters. Schellenberg both views and places the New Atheists’ opposition to religion, and evangelicals’ (alleged) opposition to science, on the same plain, stating that New Atheists and evangelicals alike “believe it is either God or Science.” 

This is, I think, unfair to evangelicals. In their book Science vs. Religion, US scholars Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher Scheitle report that “evangelicals are actually significantly more likely than the general population and any other religious group to see religion and science as having a collaborative relationship” (emphasis added). Evangelical participants made comments such as “the more wonders scientists discover everyday makes me believe that [science] must be created by God,” and “science… has made me really appreciate the complexity and beauty in life.” Schellenberg’s comment on evangelicals is somewhat misrepresentative, or at least views them as a class through the lens of its most anti–scientific members.  

Both the New Atheists and evangelicals, Schellenberg argues, are blinkered by their own opinions and as such end up engaging with one another in a hostile way. Rather than religion itself being immature, it may be those who discuss it who are immature. Therefore, Schellenberg highlights that “we could do better” at learning how to engage and disagree with others in a healthy way, as it is only in being open that both sides can engage in critical thinking and learn from one another.  

There is a strong relational message to Schellenberg’s argument, his objective being to turn conversations of hostility into ones of hospitality. To foster a hospitable conversation is to sit with people, in disagreement and tension (which is uncomfortable for most of us), and not impose or force our views on someone else. It is to be willing to learn from the other person. It is to start from the right place, not immediately to try to convert others to your point of view or to impose your opinions on another person. It is to listen and learn, to be accepting of difficult and different viewpoints and to realise that even though there may not be agreement, each party can learn from the other. (It is – as an aside – the very basis of my colleague Elizabeth Oldfield’s podcast, The Sacred) 

Calling religion immature is risky (and potentially condescending) and will stick in the throat of many believers. Moreover, it risks also the kind of progressive mind–set that ultimately will discard any religious commitment or creed just to appear modern and acceptable. Yet, if thinking of religion as “immature” can foster conversations of generosity, humility and self–reflection when it comes to religion – and science – it may be a price worth paying. Ultimately, it is only when we enter hospitable dialogue that difficult conversations may flourish, be fruitful and work towards the maturity and development of both science and religion alike.   

Hannah Waite is a Researcher on Science and Religion at Theos. 

Religion After Science: The Cultural Consequences of Religious Immaturity, by J. L. Schellenberg.  

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Anna Wheeler reviews A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 04/02/2020

 There are few films which make you feel you are being spoken to, and cared for, directly.  And even fewer which show what it is to live a life of deep faith in a very public way.  A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which looks at the life of Fred Rogers from the perspective of a journalist assigned to profile him, is such a film. The American television personality, writer, puppeteer, musician, producer, and Presbyterian minister is best known for the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001; and Fred Rogers Productions continues today.

Tom Hanks utterly inhabits Rogers with never a hint of impersonation.  Matthew Rhys plays journalist Lloyd Vogel, the investigative journalist who receives an assignment to profile him for an article on what constitutes a ‘hero’ (the film was inspired by the 1998 article ‘Can You Say … “Hero”?‘ by Tom Junod, published in Esquire). What begins as a work trip which Vogel carries out with his usual cynicism turns into a meeting which will change his life and his family’s, that Rhys interprets with rawness and integrity. 

The film opens on the TV set of Rogers’ show and his ‘Neighborhood of Make–Believe’. Early on he introduces us to the words forgiveness, sadness, and anger – asking the viewer how they feel, and asking them if they will be his friend. Existential philosophy for little ones. We’re then shown a scene from Vogel’s complex and less–than–happy family life. There are two defaults on view here – Rogers’ positive default of kindness, empathy, unhurriedness, and complete openness to discuss peoples’ difficulties. And Vogel’s negative default of just wanting to get the job done with a belief that Mr Rogers, and the human race generally, cannot really be that good or kind. Vogel is going through a family crisis of his own combined with a belief that he is broken, which is the catalyst for the lifeline that Rogers throws him.

Rogers doesn’t tell Vogel what he needs – he doesn’t even presume to know. He is simply there for him, and within that, his faith in Vogel allows him to see what he needs to change in his life. At one point, Vogel exclaims, ‘it’s me who is supposed to be interviewing you, not the reverse’.  Their two defaults clash and Vogel finds he is unable to cope with the vulnerability he feels wrapped in Rogers’ honesty and love. The chemistry between Hanks and Rhys at these key moments of truth bearing is completely believable.

The beauty of the film is in the simplicity with which it portrays the sheer messy business of being human. Fred Rogers’ devotion to God is clear in the film (well done Hollywood!) but it is not ostentatious and embodies the opposite of aggressive evangelism. When he prays quietly each night, he names each person in full. When asked by Vogel how Rogers himself can afford to be so good and kind, his wife Joanne lets on that it’s not easy. It is a discipline, she says, it takes work and it’s not something that happens solely through his own efforts. One of the exercises he does to help himself, she says, is to consult the Scriptures. But he also allows himself to get angry and express this. He doesn’t aim for perfection – he aims for normality – which is not to be all good all the time – ‘and that’s ok’, says Rogers.  The Bible passage Romans 7 v. 15 nudged at me, which speaks of not understanding our actions, of wanting to do good but failing to.

So what do we learn about being a child of God and the mess of being human from this portrayal of the American saint? Well, therein lies the answer. He was not a saint and would be the first to say so. He did not put himself on a pedestal. Through his constant concern for the other, Rogers showed how, if you are able to listen to someone, you yourself become richer in love.  He had a talent for communicating truth to very young children and used it to remind people of all ages that, because we are ‘loved into being’, each person is enough.

The more I read about Fred Rogers and the more I dwell on the film, the more I think that the essence of heroism is grace itself – in his words, ‘knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people’.  Recognizing that we are enough as we are and that within ourselves is a freely given Spirit to flourish, love and be loved – because that is the tool to be the best we can be.  And this is a big deal to come to terms with in a world that rates the very opposite: results, competition, and speed, as the acts of heroism.  To go against this is to be brave.  The path Vogel was on before meeting Rogers advocated buying into this false sense of heroism; where the given–ness of grace is pushed aside and the natural direction to be loved and flourish was crushed.

Rogers’ ‘Neighborhood of Make–Believe’ might be labelled for children, but it is as real for adults as life itself.  Precisely because within that neighborhood is the opportunity to recognize souls who are just like us: it is where we all start – and should keep returning. Vogel finds himself back there to re–learn his worth and how to opt–out of the negative default where adult life had pulled him.  Jesus says ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 18 v.3).  Children have capacity to be receptive and give in equal measure, and the challenge is to hold onto those skills as adults – without them we lose the avenues to love, which have been given.   

I left the cinema wishing Mr Rogers could be my mentor. His heroism was simply presenting everyone with the option of accepting themselves. ‘The best thing we can do is let people know they are precious and ask for help when we need it’, says Rogers.  ‘And is that heroic?’, Vogel replies. The abundance of love which pours out at the film’s end should answer that.     

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Natan Mladin reviews Terrence Malick’s new film. 27/01/2020

A Hidden Life is one of the most profound and searching films I have ever seen. It is director Terrence Malick’s most explicitly religious work to date, surpassing The Tree of Life from 2011. Though thankfully not a ‘Christian film’, it offers one of the most complex, beautiful, and uncompromising portrayals of faith on the screen.

At the heart of A Hidden Life is the story, based on real events, of Franz Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl), a simple Austrian farmer and devout Catholic who, drawing deeply from his faith and the love of his wife Franziska or Fanni (played by Valerie Pachner), refuses to swear allegiance to Hitler and fight in his unholy wars. Unlike the more famous Sophie and Hans Scholl or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Franz’s heroism lies not in a public act of bravery, but in the quiet refusal to call evil good. Throughout the story, his silent witness speaks with searing clarity. Ostracised by his community in the mountain village of St Radegund, counselled by priests to compromise, he is uprooted from his home and family, imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately killed.

A masterpiece of Christian existentialism, A Hidden Life is a remarkable study in choosing what is right, at great personal cost, and bearing witness to truth through quiet opposition to evil. At just under three hours, it unfolds patiently like a cinematic oratorio, yet never drags. In contrast to Malick’s earlier films, A Hidden Life is more conventional, at least from a narrative point of view. The story develops linearly even if the camera work, pensive voice–overs, breathtaking landscapes, the mystical play of light, and other Malick trademarks are all there in the film.

At once inspiring and discomfiting is Franz’s remarkable moral clarity. ‘Don’t they know evil when they see it?’ his voice whispers early on in the film, although scenes of Hitler’s war and Nazi concentration camps are conspicuously absent. A simple intuition of what is the right thing to do blossoms into a principled refusal to strike a pact with the devil. In a scene reminiscent of Jesus before Pilate, he says plainly to the judge who is about to pronounce his death sentence: ‘I have this feeling inside me and I can’t do what I believe is wrong. I want to save my life, but not through lies.’

Throughout the story, Franz is relentlessly tempted to yield, his decision challenged from all possible ethical angles. ‘Consider the consequences of your actions for your loved ones’, counsels the village priest. ‘Your sacrifice would benefit no one’, says another consequentialist voice. ‘You have a duty to the fatherland,’ the bishop reminds him. ‘You think you’re better?… This is pride!’, says a prison official. ‘You think you can change the course of history?’ ‘What can we do, little people, here…?’ ask a number of fatalist voices. And on it goes, as Franz is taken through the wilderness of temptation and agonising taunts. With each counsel and question, the pressure to give in grows stronger, but his resolve grows stronger still, as he digs deeper into his faith in a suffering God and clings firmly to his ‘true fatherland’.

Watching A Hidden Life with the benefit of hindsight, we naturally identify with Franz’s stand. We applaud his course. ‘Surely, it was the right thing to do,’ we self–assuredly think to ourselves. But if we’re honest, we feel the force of all the dissuading voices, the pull to ‘just say the words, and think what you want’, the awful pain of making your loved ones suffer, unavoidably implicated in your costly choice. Malick is unsparing and masterful in conveying the seeming absurdity of Franz’s act.  

There are many things that lie at the root of his moral clarity and steadfastness. But among them, and perhaps less obvious, is his (and Franziska’s) closeness, through hard work and moments of wonder, to the rhythms and orderliness of an enchanted creation. Franz is formed as an individual to see evil for what it is by being attuned to the goodness, truth, and beauty woven into the world. In all of Malick’s films, A Hidden Life being no exception, nature is ‘charged with the grandeur of God’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it. The fertile ground, the trees, the mountain peaks, the skies, the rushing rivers and waterfalls, all have a voice in Malick’s A Hidden Life. Though they are silent, they speak loudly, aiding Franz to see the truth and stay the course in defying evil.

In a world where exclusionary tribes proliferate, contractual relations are the norm, and nature ‘groans’ plundered, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a powerful call: not just to a steadfast if costly resistance to evil – this is obvious – but also to a covenantal existence, a life of committed responsibility, to each other, to the natural world, and to our future.[1]

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Hannah Eves reviews Justine Afra Huxley’s book on millennial spirituality and social action. 14/01/2020

The millennial generation is many things to many people. The avocado on toast generation. The political correctness generation. The generation of the gig economy and high housing prices. The ‘spiritual but not religious’ generation.

Generation Y, Spirituality and Social Change is a collection of interviews and stories of millennial spiritual leaders, but it does not seek to define a whole generation. In fact, the strength of this collection lies in its diversity of profiles. Split into seven parts – Natural Leadership, Evolving Traditions, Sacred Activism, Complex Identities, New Spaces, Challenging Orthodoxy, and Protecting the Earth – the collection includes voices from the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Humanist, Atheist and non–religious traditions. It’s a wide lens view into millennial culture. Once you have reached the final page, it’s hard not to be struck by the far–reaching social vision of these Gen Y activists, and the spiritual elders who support them.

The central thesis of the book is that that Gen Y are doing spirituality in a way which cannot be detached from their calling as sacred activists. This generation has “an uncomplicated readiness to walk the talk, out there in the messy, complex, screwed up world”and they are building their own definitions of the sacred. Those represented in these pages are almost all engaged in their communities and committed to the practical outworking of their inner spirituality. Rarely is ‘God’ or ‘church’ ever mentioned, but instead the ideas of community, authenticity, and spirituality are used to describe the places these leaders are building and the movements they are helming.

Another finding is that Gen Y are unafraid to mould language to suit their understanding of spirituality. The phrases used are striking, especially when it comes to definitions of leadership:“roles include: Gatherer (who constellates communities of meaning), Seer (who helps us approach the sacred), Maker (who uses imagination and art to offer new rituals and cultural expressions of spirit), Healer (who helps us move through pain and break cycles of violence), Venturer (who invests resources in new expressions of human flourishing), Steward (who creates new infrastructure for spiritual life) and Elder (who connects us to lineage and tradition)”. 

These definitions may leave the reader with questions as to what the practical responsibilities of these roles are, but they also represent a generation who is ready to pave its own way, to build its own spirituality. By telling their stories, Huxley demonstrates that Gen Y is engaging with spirituality in a creative and responsive way. It’s a deeply hopeful depiction of millennial spirituality with leaders responding to the challenges of globalisation and the internet age. 

The collection left me with the question of what we lose when we take this loose approach to spirituality. Can spirituality be custom designed to suit the needs and desires of the individual? Is this a good thing? Despite the nod to the gatekeepers of established religious institutions and spiritual practices, I was left wondering – what is lost when we revolutionise and individualise the spiritual in this manner? 

On the other hand, can faith leaders afford not to pay attention to these trends? With what feels like an ever–widening generational divide, it is important to have things that seek to bridge that gap and bring understanding. For Gen Y, faith is not just about what is said in the Sunday service, or what is professed to the priest. It is not just about belief but, as one interviewee said, “faith is how you walk on this planet”. Generation Y, Spirituality and Social Change is an engaging and potentially useful read for anyone challenged or intrigued by how this generation is engaging with spirituality and what they are seeking which traditional religious structures don’t offer.

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