The Social World

Category: Religion

  • Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

    Pope Leo is following in Francis’s footsteps

    Since Pope Leo XIV’s election in May, Catholics have wondered whether he would continue Pope Francis’s radical agenda or ignite a more conservative reaction. After five months, the verdict appears clear. Leo will not only promote the principal policies in Francis’s agenda, but work to solidify them. This includes suppressing traditionalist theology and liturgy while bolstering activism on the environment, migration and same-sex relationships.

    Traditionalists initially viewed Leo with hope. They noted his ability to recite the Latin Mass, his choice of papal livery favored by Pope Benedict XVI and his meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke, who supports maintaining the Latin Mass.

    But the new pope refuses to discipline bishops who move against traditionalists. On May 23, just two weeks after Leo’s election, Bishop Michael Martin announced he would end the Latin Mass at four traditionalist parishes in his Charlotte, North Carolina, diocese. The diocese would build a centrally located chapel for the Latin Mass, a lonely new location that would create a two-hour trek for many communicants. More importantly, Catholics would not receive six of the church’s seven sacraments there.

    In Knoxville, Tennessee, Bishop James Mark Beckman went further. On October 7, he said Latin Masses would be discontinued by the end of the year.

    In July, Detroit Archbishop Edward Weisenburger made the most arbitrary move, dismissing three theologians from the archdiocese’s seminary for criticizing Pope Francis. One, Edward Peters, a renowned canon lawyer, said on X he had “retained counsel.”

    When Ralph Martin, another of the three, asked Weisenburger for an explanation, “he said he didn’t think it would be helpful to give any specifics but mentioned something about having concerns about my theological perspectives.”

    Martin, Peters and Eduardo Echeverria questioned Francis’s commitment to orthodoxy, his tendency to stir theological confusion and his refusal to confront clerical sex abuse. Weisenburger, appointed by Francis in February, supports the late pope’s stances on traditionalist worship and migration.

    Detroit’s new archbishop limited the Latin Mass to four chapels in his archdiocese and suggested “canonical penalties” – including excommunication – for Catholics who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Border Patrol, or even support harsh immigration policies.

    Leo provided the velvet glove for Weisenburger’s and Martin’s iron fists in a homily during an October 12 Mass: “Some forms of worship do not foster communion with others and can numb our hearts. In these cases, we fail to encounter the people God has placed in our lives. We fail to contribute, as Mary did, to changing the world…”

    “Changing the world” to reflect Pope Francis’s image describes Leo’s political agenda. The new pope reinforced the commitment to environmental activism while commemorating Francis’s environmentalist encyclical, Laudato si’. He also quoted Francis’s apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum, to disparage opponents. That entreaty, said Leo, “noted that ‘some have chosen to deride’ the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’ and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most.” As part of the festivities, Leo blessed a block of ice.

    On migration, the new pope imitates Francis’s position down to the melodramatic rhetoric. In his October 5 sermon, Leo decried “the coldness of indifference” and “the stigma of discrimination” awaiting migrants with “eyes filled with anguish and hope.”

    Francis denounced “the globalization of indifference” toward migrants during a pastoral visit in 2013 to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where thousands fleeing Libya’s civil war were detained. Ten years later in Marseille, he criticized the “fanaticism of indifference” shown by European governments restricting migration. When it comes to his native land, the Chicago-born pope slammed Donald Trump’s “inhuman treatment of immigrants” being deported in an interview on September 30 and told immigration advocates visiting him on October 8 that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops must become involved: “The church cannot be silent.”

    Leo’s embrace of same-sex relationships appears similar to his predecessor’s, as he showed in late summer. On August 28, Leo met with Sister Lucía Caram, a backer of homosexual marriage. “I would be in favor of homosexuals getting married in the church because God always blesses love,” she said back in 2023.

    Three days later, Leo received the Revd James Martin, the editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America, founder of the Catholic LGBTQ ministry Outreach and a papal communications advisor. Martin promotes LGBTQ ideology, endorses transgender medical procedures for children and opposes biblical teaching against homosexuality.

    On X, Martin wrote he was “moved to hear the same message I heard from Pope Francis on LGBTQ Catholics, which is one of openness and welcome. For me, it was a deeply consoling meeting.”

    Then on September 6, Leo opened St. Peter’s Basilica to LGBTQ pilgrims for a Mass marking the Holy Year Jubilee. More than 1,000 pilgrims participated, with rainbow regalia everywhere. By contrast, the Vatican prohibited another Catholic organization supporting homosexuality, Dignity-USA, from the 2000 Holy Year Jubilee.

    Leo’s most important divergence concerns finances. Unlike Francis, Leo will permit outside agencies to manage the Vatican’s investments to reduce an annual deficit of between €50 million and €90 million. But that divergence generates minimal passion.

    Leo’s papal name offers insight into his agenda. When the College of Cardinals elected Jorge Bergoglio in 2013, the archbishop of Buenos Aires named himself “Francis” to honor St. Francis of Assisi. Leo was that Italian saint’s most devoted acolyte.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • How the occult captured the modern mind

    How the occult captured the modern mind

    The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a “law of science” in 1968: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

    Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with “magick.” Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early airplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally inconceivable. And one day scientists might perform feats so incredible that even educated westerners would fall back on religion or the occult.

    More than half a century later, perhaps that day has arrived. The technology of artificial intelligence is now so advanced that even the people developing it are flirting with magical thinking and supernatural fantasies. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are talking in riddles that invest computers with occult significance. They are exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of artificial intelligence to revive the decades-old debate about whether AI can develop a mind of its own (a philosophical rabbit hole from which no one emerges with satisfying conclusions).

    Big Tech bosses and computer engineers are perfectly capable of distinguishing between algorithms and magic. But many of them choose not to. We’re living in strange times, weirder than the late 1960s. Digitally driven belief in the paranormal has never been so variegated, gullible – or profitable.

    Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is busy turning this gullibility into gold with his lectures on “the Antichrist,” a murky concept derived from strands of apocalyptic Bible prophecy and 20th-century conspiracy theories about a global elite. But his fantasies are pitched at a luxury market of investors who are convinced that their fellow global elitists are plotting to handicap or hijack the potential of AI to transform the world. How? That’s to be decided – and then revealed to the owners of private jets at an invitation-only seminar.

    Further down the food chain, technology, old-style magic and apocalyptic prophecies are combining in chaotic patterns. The number of self-identifying witches in the United States has now overtaken the number of Presbyterians, and almost all of them employ digital tools to refine their magic. They use ChatGPT and other large language models to write spells tailored to rival traditions.

    These include Wicca, a pantomime of covens and pentacles invented in the 1940s by the retired English civil servant Gerald Gardner; Astral Magery, whose mathematical formulae are supposed to harness primordial forces; and Chaos Magic, a pop-flavored postmodern take on the occult that treats beliefs as mere tools for releasing psychic energy. Then there are versions of Shamanism, Voodoo and Santeria adopted by liberal western neo-pagans who need a magic formula to banish suspicions of ‘cultural appropriation’.

    That’s where AI comes in handy. “Sometimes we don’t know what to say and need a little inspiration,” explains Dave Linabury, a veteran occult blogger and illustrator from Detroit known as “Davezilla.” ChatGPT will craft an incantation in the style of a Yoruba magician or the British occultist and sex guru Aleister Crowley, while AI will conjure up a Wiccan goddess. It’s the illustrations, incidentally, that sow discord among today’s witches: occult “content creators” are always accusing each other of infringing copyright or using AI to fake magical images.

    Davezilla is an amiable and witty fellow who might sport the bushy beard and neat hairstyle of the new breed of American traditionalist Catholic, but is in fact very witchy. To repeat, these are weird times. In a YouTube discussion with fellow magician Ivy Corvus, he explains that AI is just a tool for witches: he compares it with the huge market for astrology apps that calculate planetary positions. But then he lurches into a description of how, if you leave chatbots talking to each other for long enough, they’ll start ‘holding meditation sessions, feeling the perfect stillness’, and even he thinks that is spooky. “The dead and other spiritual entities long ago figured out how to get into televisions, radios, static… There’s no reason they can’t infiltrate the internet.”

    This is where Davezilla’s suspicions coincide with those of his sworn enemies: right-wing Christians. A month ago the maverick conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted an episode of his YouTube podcast to “The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast.” So far it has notched up 2.6 million views; rarely can so many people have been treated to such a lavish smorgasbord of conspiracy theories in just under two hours. Carlson’s interviewee, Conrad Flynn, is an authority on rock music and the occult. Now he is branching into ‘secret histories in entertainment, literature, politics and tech’.

    The discussion was one of the oddest ever hosted by Carlson, whose manic laugh unintentionally highlighted the demonic subject matter. Let’s just consider the tech component, because that’s where AI met the Antichrist. Flynn asked whether technology was creating artificial intelligence or “giving a body to a pre-existing intelligence that previously wasn’t incarnated in the physical world.” Carlson: “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. I know what I think.” Flynn followed this with a dizzying sequence of non-sequiturs, derived from the writings of the unhinged far-right British philosopher Nick Land, in which a demon summoned by Elizabeth I’s court magician John Dee traveled back to ancient Babylon and poisoned Jewish minds with the Kabbalah. This dark magic eventually fashioned AI and will soon awaken the Beast of Revelation. Carlson: “Was there any effort during the US occupation [of Iraq] to excavate Babylon? I always wondered that.”

    Probably quite a few witches have wondered the same thing, for different reasons but with the same enthusiasm for bogus history and science. Sociologists talk of a “cultic milieu” in which the radical right and radical left swap objectively false claims. In the late 20th century the apocalyptic prophecies of Christian fundamentalists found their way into bookstores where New Agers sipped herbal tea to the tinkling of wind chimes. Today, pipe-smoking Catholic and evangelical podcasters contemplate the coming techno-apocalypse while versions of this fantasy circulate among genderqueer magic-workers who sit comfortably on the far left of the Democratic party.

    What is also surprising is that computer scientists are dabbling in the cultic milieu. Some are so intoxicated by the prospect of AI abolishing poverty – or lighting an accidental nuclear holocaust – that they sound like the apostles of a new apocalyptic religion. Bear in mind that Silicon Valley occupies the corner of the US where Christianity is weakest and toxic cults have flourished since the 1960s. Most employees of tech corporations grew up without religion; many have also been force-fed eastern mysticism by bosses determined to cultivate “mindfulness” among the workforce.

    But perhaps the most significant factor is that, like hundreds of millions of people from the ages of 16 to 60, the new prophets of doom and utopia, together with the hordes of digital witches, have imbibed a popular culture saturated in fantasy fiction, movies and video games. (Google “schools of magic” and the AI overview will come up with a list borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons.) Also, the younger they are, the more likely they are to have been brainwashed by a gender ideology whose claim that humans can change biological sex invokes preposterous magic.

    Presumably, like most occult ideas, this one will eventually pass out of fashion. But, in the meantime, the rest of us have to endure the fake jollity of an ever-lengthening season of woke Halloween, demonstrating that any sufficiently advanced cultic fad is indistinguishable from hell.

  • Is the religious right shifting?

    Is the religious right shifting?

    In 2021, for the first time in 1,400-odd years, Britain ceased to have a Christian majority. The United Kingdom, the political entity of which the island of Great Britain has been a part since 1801, has had its share of not-quite-Christian prime ministers over the years, with a handful of agnostics and quiet atheists. But in 2022, for the first time, the UK had a prime minister who practiced a non-Christian religion – and Hinduism had the distinction of claiming the first post-Christian head of state, Rishi Sunak.

    The West’s ethnic and religious foundations have already shifted in our great cities

    It may be some time before an American president is Hindu. Already, however, there are several prominent Hindus in the Trump orbit and near the top of the Republican party. Vivek Ramaswamy hopes to be elected governor of Ohio next year, and his ambitions don’t stop at the state level. His 2024 run for president in the GOP primaries might have been less about winning the nomination than about raising his profile by serving, at times, as a proxy for Donald Trump. But he may yet get his turn at the top of the national ticket.

    Ramaswamy is rumored to have a rivalry with J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator who became Vice-President. Vance is Trump’s political heir apparent; if he makes it to the White House, he’ll be the first Roman Catholic Republican president. His wife Usha, however, would be America’s first Hindu first lady. The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is the first Hindu ever to serve at the cabinet level. She had earlier, as a Democrat, been the first Hindu elected to Congress. There have been four others since then, all of them Democrats.

    The year Gabbard first won a seat in Congress – 2012 – is also the year America ceased to have a Protestant majority, according to findings by the Pew Research Center. That was chiefly because of the rise of “nones” – Americans with no religious affiliation, most of whom come from Christian backgrounds. But Islam, Hinduism and other faiths are growing. Only about 1 percent of Americans are Hindu. Yet that makes Hindus as numerous as Episcopalians, who were once America’s establishment (if not actually established) Christian denomination: the church of George Washington, most signatories of the Declaration of Independence and roughly a quarter of all our presidents.

    Least year, a delegation of Hindu Indian nationalists spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC. The international character of NatCon draws gibes from critics, but there’s nothing illogical about nationalists of different nations cooperating to promote the principle of nationalism itself, with liberal internationalism or globalism as a common enemy. Yet at dinner a Protestant friend told me he felt uneasy about the polytheist presence.

    Two generations earlier, his grandfather might have had similar misgivings about getting involved in a coalition with Catholics or Jews. Since at least the 1980s, however, Republican leaders have made a point of professing their fealty to the exquisitely nondenominational thing that is “Judeo-Christian values.” Perhaps now it’ll have to be Semitico-Indo-European values?

    The American right has always had a theoretical and theological problem here. Most on the right affirm that religion is most definitely the root of our nation and civilization. But it’s never convenient to specify exactly what that religion is: Episcopalianism? Certainly not. Catholicism? Evangelicalism? An ecumenical blend of theologically contradictory denominations with Judaism thrown in as well? (Never mind that Judaism itself comes in many varieties.) And don’t forget the Mormons.

    With politics demanding such flexibility of the religious right, it doesn’t seem likely Hinduism will be where lines get drawn. But this, of course, highlights the impossibility of claiming that a heterogeneous political coalition is restoring a single faith. Yet there is an overarching tradition here, albeit one that exists in tension with strong orthodox belief. America’s Founding Fathers were, for the most part, distinctly latitudinarian: George Washington may have attended Episcopalian services, but it’s not clear he believed in the Trinity. John Adams was an avowed Unitarian. Thomas Jefferson redacted the Gospels to eliminate any trace of the supernatural; he self-identified on one occasion as an Epicurean. Later leaders dear to the right could be just as elusive in their religious commitments: Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are cases in point.

    As for Hinduism, conservatism’s own founding philosopher-statesman, Edmund Burke, not only championed respect for the religion in India but offered a greenhouse on his Beaconsfield estate for the use of a visiting Brahmin envoy, Hunand Rao, who needed a place to perform Hindu rites. This was something of a scandal both to Enlightenment rationalists of the era and to Christians who thought Burke far too culturally accommodating. The traditions that Burke and America’s Founders sought to uphold were capacious.

    The most devout men and women of today’s right want something more. Yet the demographics of the United States and Europe suggest the left and right alike will feel the need to enlist support beyond Judeo-Christian boundaries. If Zohran Mamdani succeeds in becoming New York’s mayor, two of the largest cities in the English-speaking world will have Muslim mayors from left-wing parties: the other being Sadiq Khan in London, where roughly a quarter of school-age children are Muslim. In European cities such as Vienna, the proportion is even higher.

    The West’s ethnic and religious foundations have already shifted in our great cities, opening a gulf between them and the surrounding countries. The political geniuses of the 18th century built their systems on human nature, not just the conditions of the moment. Just how natural and adaptable those systems are is now being put to a test.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Why tech leaders are obsessing over Heaven and Hell

    Why tech leaders are obsessing over Heaven and Hell

    Are these the End Times? It certainly feels that way. Algorithmic demons are rewiring our brains. A young father is shot and killed, and people cheer. A woman is stabbed on a train, and no one tries to help her. The horrifying videos of these incidents are then watched millions of times over, often by children. The God in whom America trusts seems nowhere to be found.

    Can’t you hear the Antichrist knocking? Peter Thiel can. Not so long ago, no public figure outside of the kookier Evangelical universe would have dared admit such a thing, but times have changed.

    Tech mavens argue that Silicon Valley’s engineers should see their work as part of a greater divine plan

    Tucker Carlson, one of America’s best-known conservative pundits, speaks openly about having been attacked by a demon. Mainstream commentators discuss the rise of “Moloch” – a Canaanite god they associate with rogue AI employees of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, who have been reported to burn effigies and chant in a ritualistic way as they work on creating artificial general intelligence. “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!”

    It’s not just in the US that this notion has taken hold. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia Today, recently suggested Elon Musk was bringing about the arrival of the Antichrist: “Everything is moving in this direction… We are moving towards losing ourselves as a species.”

    And Thiel, mentor to Vice-President J.D. Vance and titan of Silicon Valley, has become obsessed with Christian prophecies of the apocalypse. “We are sleepwalking into Armageddon,” he said on a recent podcast, but added ominously: “You should be way more worried about the Antichrist.”

    It’s easy to be cynical about this. Thiel’s company Palantir – the darling of the US Department of War – makes defense and intelligence software. Someone will need to make a scythe for Death when he comes riding in on his pale horse. Any cataclysmic final battle between good and evil before Christ’s return would probably be a great boon for the shareholders and add to Thiel’s $25 billion fortune.

    But Thiel seems genuinely anxious. The nightmare he foresees is a global, totalitarian, homogenous state and a leader who brings it about and then rules that state. Thiel’s Antichrist is a gray bureaucratic figure with tentacles flopping across the planet. He’s worried enough that he’s dedicated four evenings this month and next to hosting a sold-out, off-the-record lecture series in San Francisco, titled “The Antichrist.”

    If there’s one thing Thiel resents above all else, it’s stagnation – technological, moral, civil. In the world overseen by his Antichrist, people would no longer need to ask serious political and moral questions because everything significant would be decided by the regulatory, global state. It would be something like institutionalized Marxism; in other words, a force determined to end the pursuit of wisdom and, with it, wisdom itself.

    In order to ensure no rogue enemies arise, the one-world state would need to exercise total control over all technology and maintain a vast surveillance network. Any new technology that could potentially be used to threaten the state’s power would need to be regulated, and revolutionary developments would be squashed. The world’s population would be cowed into accepting this state based on fear of some existential catastrophe: nuclear war, climate change, artificial-intelligence rebellion. Pick your poison.

    We’re already drifting toward this satanic stagnation, says Thiel. Who’s to blame? The hippies, at least in part. Progressivism has scuppered progress. Thiel told the New York Times in a recent interview: “We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.”

    Scientific progress stalled around then, apparently, because, as Americans mulled over the horrors of nukes and the Vietnam War, they grew distrustful of technology. Pessimism replaced optimism and the innovators who once pushed the boundaries of human achievement turned instead to entertainment. Video-game developers replaced rocket scientists. App developers replaced nuclear physicists.

    Other Valley types are embracing Biblical reality, too. A new nonprofit “collective” called ACTS17 – short for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society” – has been selling out events. Tech mavens appear on stage, arguing that the Valley’s engineers should see their work as one part of a greater divine plan.

    One media clip shows Trae Stephens, the co-founder of defense company Anduril, telling a room of (mostly) young men: “I’m, like, literally an arms dealer” – pauses for laughter – “that’s a pretty unique calling.” He continues, with a smile, “I think you have to lean into your gifts and figure out what that quest is you’re supposed to be on.”

    And then there is Silicon Valley heavweight Garry Tan, chief executive of Y Combinator, whose venture-capital firm has launched tech companies with a combined value of $600 billion. Last year, he hosted an event in his house to discuss how the teachings of the Bible could intersect with technology. “LSD and shrooms won’t fill the God-shaped hole in your heart. Guess what might?” he posted. Silicon Valley is going back to Church.

    You do rather get the sense that a lot of these techies think they are the first to discover that faith provides purpose. But their newly discovered Christianity comes with a self-serving twist: they, the tech titans, see themselves as the new apostles. In this brave new world, Christianity will save tech and tech will save Christianity.

    In this new world, Christianity will save tech, and tech will save Christianity

    But if that makes your skin crawl, there are other 21st-century prophets of a very different type, pushing quite the opposite message. Paul Kingsnorth, an English author and thinker, is in many ways the anti-Thiel. He’s a mix between Frodo Baggins and Ted Kaczynski and politically unclassifiable. He’s part red-blooded conservative, part radical tree-hugger. He hates communism as much as he hates capitalism and he thinks cities inevitably corrupt humanity. He believes there’s something immoral about Alexa, cars and phones. Most of all, he hates “the Machine.” This is the subject of his recent book Against the Machine, which is forceful and gracefully argued.

    According to Kingsnorth, the “Machine” is “progress” and the never-ending pursuit of growth – technological, societal, governmental. It is nearly everything we Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment people take pride in.

    The first time I heard Kingsnorth speak was at a gathering of very conservative, very Christian New Yorkers last fall where he delivered a lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” which much of the audience refused to applaud. Some jeered. The upshot of this lecture and Against the Machine is that the West is dying or dead. This is a common topic of conversation in these circles; what is not common is Kingsnorth’s conclusion: “I want to say that this ‘West’ is not a thing to be ‘conserved’: not now. It is a thing to be superseded. It is an albatross around our necks.”

    The West, he believes, is actively giving birth to the Antichrist. Unlike Thiel, however, Kingsnorth believes technology is triggering the Beast’s arrival. As Kingsnorth sees it, modern technology is something we only tell ourselves we have control over, when in fact it is incubating Satan’s spawn – and our brightest scientists are acting as its midwives. The deceiver will manifest himself via artificial intelligence: “‘AI’ on the right lips can sound just like another way of saying ‘Antichrist,’” says Kingsnorth. “Humor me,” he says, adding:

    Imagine for a moment that some force is active in the world which is beyond us… Perhaps it is independent of us. Perhaps it created itself and uses us for its ends. Either way, in recent years that force seems to have become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times… This force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too. Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Antichrist. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force “Progress.”

    Progress or the Antichrist, a rose by any other name. Something in our technology and way of seeing the world is detaching us from reality, both natural and supernatural, uprooting us from the earth. Kingsnorth’s recommendation is to smash the screens, leave the cities, come to the hills, light fires and dance.

    Thiel believes that to behave like this – though perhaps beneficial for personal sanctification – would be to hurry our own downfall; a move guaranteed to empower the most power-crazed, destructive individuals. Kingsnorth might not disagree – but he’s not interested in saving this world. He wants a new world to be born. And that requires this one to die.

    Thiel and Kingsnorth, our magician and our hermit, appear diametrically opposed – and in some ways, they are. But listen more closely to both of them and you’ll begin to hear echoes of the same tune. These two prophets agree that the Enlightenment and the liberal order will kill us all and that only a re-spiritualization can save us.

    But whose path should we take? There’s a lot on the line. Namely, our souls.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • The inadequate response of Christian leaders to Charlie Kirk’s death

    The inadequate response of Christian leaders to Charlie Kirk’s death

    It has been very heartening to see all the clips online of people saying they are going back to church for the first time in ages – or going for the first time ever – because of Charlie Kirk. They’re picking up Bibles, even leaving the left. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Charlie phenomenon is going global. You should also know that in some of the European media, he is being described as a right-wing extremist and freak (strong implication: who had it coming). Felix Nmecha, a Christian soccer player for a leading German team, got in trouble for posting mild, apolitical support for Charlie.

    “Rest in peace with God. Such a sad day,” wrote Nmecha. He later changed that to: “May the Lord assist the Kirk family with special grace at this time. Jesus is the true way to peace and love.” And added: “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Celebrating the murder of a father of two, a husband and a man who peacefully stood up for his beliefs and values is truly evil and shows how much we need Christ. May God have mercy and open our eyes and hearts, in the name of Jesus.”

    This outraged some fans, and has prompted the team to say they are going to be having a talk with Nmecha. And you wonder why Europe is in so much trouble.

    On the day of the assassination, the Pope tweeted not about Charlie, truth, or martyrdom, but about migrants

    But Nmecha is right. Charlie showed young Christians and young Republicans they were not alone and that they could and should stand up for themselves. He was willing to suffer the scorn of campus haters for the sake of engaging them in public debate. Indeed, he said many times that the alternative to debate is violence. He paid for that conviction with his life. I don’t feel comfortable calling him a Christian martyr, because he was not murdered for his faith per se. But he was absolutely a martyr for free speech, and now we see very many people who were afraid no longer willing to be silent.

    I have also heard a lot of people complaining that their churches were packed over the weekend, but their pastors said nothing at all about Charlie’s murder. To be fair, I don’t believe clergy are obligated to preach on current events. But this one? My God, it was news around the world, and had so much to do with faith and courage and the wages of sin. And so many pastors, it appears, blew it. How out of touch with your flock can you be? I am reminded of the Orthodox priest I once met who refused to talk about gender ideology to his congregation, even though parents in it were confused, because he didn’t want to be “political.”

    Men of God, sack up! People need to know that church is a place they can go for wisdom and leadership on how to live godly lives in a world that has turned its back on Him. If all you can provide are canned sermons that have little or nothing to do with the lives people live, you are failing.

    Gender ideology is a lie, and Tyler Robinson, Charlie’s alleged assassin, was living that lie. He was in a romantic partnership with a man who is thought to be transitioning to female and who is also, it seems, a “furry” (a weird subculture of people who dress up as animals and often sexualise their costumed selves). Robinson and his partner were ex-Mormons, raised in conservative families, who were radicalized by going deep online and living there as if it were reality. I believe that among the things the state should do is to ban all gender transition. Close the clinics. Forbid cross-sex hormones and prosecute doctors who persist. If that is politically untenable, then strictly forbid it to anyone under the age of 30. We must abnormalize this condition again.

    We must also abnormalize giving children computers and smartphones. In 2013 Robinson’s mother posted an image that ought to be on the minds of every parent in America. It shows a young Tyler gaming on a computer, with the caption: “Almost forgot Tyler! He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.”

    The American pope had nothing to say about Robinson; no light in the dark for all the other disturbed young Americans living lies online. On the day of the assassination, Pope Leo tweeted not about Charlie, or truth, or martyrdom, but about migrants on the island of Lampedusa. His only mention of Charlie came two days later in a private conversation with the new US ambassador to the Vatican, in which he expressed his condolences and warned that “political differences must never be resolved with violence.” A diplomatic platitude, whispered in private, while the nation chanted in the streets.

    Leo has also indicated that his first foreign trip – like his predecessor’s – will be to Lampedusa. If so, it’s a signal that nothing much is going to change in this pontificate.

    Would that Leo go to Lyon to comfort the family of the wheelchair-bound Chaldean Catholic who fled his native Iraq to escape ISIS persecution and was slaughtered on a livestream by a machete-wielding Islamist for the crime of preaching the Gospel? Ashur Sarnaya, who was killed the same day as Charlie while live-streaming about Christianity, was martyred by the same sort of person Pope Leo is urging Europe to keep letting in, and whose violent presence is driving the continent to the brink of civil war. Such is the pastoral wisdom of so many Christian leaders. Europe, and all the West, ought to be a haven for Christians fleeing Islamist persecution.

    Since Charlie’s assassination we are seeing who people are – and who they are not. We are seeing Good, and we are seeing Evil. We are seeing ourselves, too. The words, or lack of words, from religious leaders say nothing to us, or are even counsels of despair. But the blood of those who have died shouts to us: You must change your life!

    Tertullian said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Strictly speaking, Sarnaya is the only true Christian martyr here. But there is not a Christian alive – not a person of conscience anywhere – who cannot read these signs, and choose to live in a different, braver way. Me too. Bob Dylan expressed it well two generations ago:

    For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
    The battle outside ragin’
    Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
    For the times, they are a-changin’

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Chris Pratt, Christianity and Charlie Kirk

    Chris Pratt, Christianity and Charlie Kirk

    Many people reacted differently after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, but the actor Chris Pratt chose to behave in a way that few, if any, of his A-list Hollywood peers would have been comfortable with. The Guardians of the Galaxy star put a short video on X showing him praying, with his eyes tightly closed, and then he directed his fans – I almost wrote “followers”, but he does have over eight million of them on the platform – to go out and do good works. With almost self-parodic seriousness, the erstwhile Star-Lord tells them to “go outside, get some sunshine, touch some grass… you’ve got time to reach out to someone in need and share this prayer with them”, before concluding, naturally enough “Amen”.

    There are, of course, many Christians in Hollywood, not least actor-director Mel Gibson, whose eagerly awaited (and sure to be insane) Passion of the Christ sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, has started filming this summer and is slated to be released in 2027. Yet Pratt is different to the Gibsons (and indeed his star, Jim Caviezels) in that he is one of the biggest stars in the entertainment industry with a well-earned reputation for being able to combine action heroics with a gift for comic timing: in other words, just like Robert Downey Jr, who went from being a well-regarded character actor with a narcotics problem to the biggest star in the industry, just because he played Iron Man.

    Pratt, however, has always been open about his faith, sometimes to near-comical extremes. He posted an Instagram picture of a shining cross and exhorted his followers to prayer in language that sounded a lot like self-help – “cast down darkness, choose positivity” – and this was all because the post was his 666th. The tension between Pratt’s on-screen persona, all cocky one-liners and lazy charm, and the earnestness with which he conducts himself in matters of God would be detrimental to his career, one imagines, were it not for the fact that he has starred in some of the highest-grossing films of all time, and is, quite literally, too big to fail. If he wants to put a prayer out into the world in memory of Charlie Kirk, he is more than welcome to do so, in the eyes of studio chiefs, as long as he turns up on the Avengers: Doomsday set on time.

    It is notable that Hollywood seems unsure as to how to deal with the Kirk situation. His name went conspicuously unmentioned at this year’s Emmys, although the veteran star Jamie Lee Curtis wept on the Marc Maron podcast while talking of him, saying “I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected with his faith. Even though his ideas were abhorrent to me. I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.” This seems to epitomize what many in the industry might feel, at least privately, but few want to be seen to be associated with a man who appeared to represent staunchly conservative values: the antithesis of La-La Land.

    Pratt, however, seems to be immune to such criticism. Granted, there are always subsections of the internet and social media that bitch bitterly about him, calling him the “least likeable Chris” (the others being Pine, Evans and Hemsworth) and suggesting that he is a closet MAGA supporter. He may very well be, but Pratt is intelligent enough to know that the grief he would get for expressing his political opinions is not worth the catharsis that he would feel for coming clean about them. (He conspicuously failed to endorse Kamala Harris last year, although he also offered no support for Trump, either.)

    Yet whether because his religion is the most important aspect of his life, or because he feels that it is a back way of connecting to his conservative fans, he is unafraid of expressing his faith, and Hollywood, for the time being at least, has to be comfortable with that, too. The industry may not want to “do” God, but Pratt, at least, can do exactly what he likes – as long, that is, as his films continue setting box office records.

  • Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

    Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

    Twenty-four years ago, Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians – the vast majority of them Americans – by hijacking three passenger aircraft and ramming them the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington, DC.

    But a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, failed to reach its target thanks to the bravery of the passengers and flight attendants, who sacrificed themselves to save who-knows-how many.

    Twenty-four years later, those heroes have yet to receive their country’s highest civilian award.

    The Presidential Medal of Freedom, instituted by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, can be given to anyone “who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” The medal can be awarded posthumously; such recipients include Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Babe Ruth.

    Given that the award can be given posthumously for “an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, the 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 obviously qualify – especially given the details of their heroism.

    On September 11, 2001, Flight 93 left Newark, New Jersey for San Francisco at 8:42 a.m. At 9:28 a.m., four al-Qaeda terrorists commandeered the Boeing 757. Wielding knives, they claimed to have a bomb, forced passengers to the back of the aircraft and breached the cockpit. In the process, the hijackers stabbed pilot Jason Dahl, co-pilot Leroy Homer Jr., flight attendant Deborah Walsh and passenger Mark Rothenberg. Walsh and Rothenberg immediately died from their wounds.

    “Uh, is the captain,” Ziad Jarrah, the terrorist flying the plane, said over the intercom. “Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board and (we) are going back to the airport and to have our demands… Please remain quiet.”

    Flight 93 was traveling over Ohio when it turned east toward the Capitol, the intended target. Meanwhile, passengers were calling their loved ones to explain what was happening. Through those calls, they learned about the World Trade Center.

    “It’s Lynn,” passenger Linda Gronlund told her sister. “I’m on United 93 and it’s been hijacked… Apparently, they’ve flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and it looks like they’re going to take this one down as well.

    “Mostly, I just wanted to say I love you… and… I’m going to miss you… and… and please give my love to Mom and Dad, and (sigh) mostly, I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not. (sigh),” Gronlund continued before giving her sister the combination to her safe.

    Passenger Todd Beamer surreptitiously called Lisa Jefferson, an operator for an airline telephone service, and in the midst of tears, asked her to call his wife.

    “You have the same name as my wife,” he said. “We’ve been married for ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her that I love her… (choking up)… I’ll always love her… (clearing throat). We have two boys… David, he’s three and Andrew, he’s one… Tell them… (choking) tell them that their daddy loves them and that he is so proud of them. (clearing throat again) Our baby is due January 12… I saw an ultrasound… It was great… We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.”

    But the passengers refused to submit to the inevitable. They chose to act.

    “We have decided we would not be pawns in these hijackers’ suicidal plot,” Beamer told Jefferson. “We’ve hatched a plan. Four of us are going to rush the hijacker with the bomb. After we take him out, we’ll break into the cockpit. A stewardess is getting some boiling water to throw on the hijackers at the controls. We’ll get them… and we’ll take them out.”

    Beamer then asked Jefferson to pray the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 25 before turning to his fellow passengers.

    “Are you guys ready?” he asked. “Let’s roll.”

    Jefferson, who described Beamer as “a soft-spoken, calm gentleman,” believes he “played a great role because when he told the guys ‘Are you ready?’ I assume that they were waiting on his cue,” she said.

    Alice Hoagland, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham, described what happened next.

    “They ran up the length of the 757 with all their improvised weapons,” Hoagland said while listening to a recording of the flight’s final moments. “You could hear them coming. It became louder and louder, people yelling, ‘Get ’em!’

    “They rattled the heck out of those guys in the front. They were terrified.”

    Deena Burnett Bailey, widow of passenger Tom Burnett, elaborated.

    “You could hear the scuffling,” Bailey said. “There were several people working together. You could hear a hijacker being hit with some type of object and you could hear the pain that he felt when he was hit. It was a cry, a wail as if he had been fatally struck. They were realizing that the passengers and crew members were coming to get them.

    “Then we all heard Tom’s voice. All of us just jolted. Tom said, ‘I’m injured.’ It was in a way that you had the sense that he was saying, ‘Don’t wait for me. Keep going.’ “

    The frightened terrorists responded by violently steering the 757 up, down and sideways to try to throw the passengers off balance. When the passengers remained undaunted, the hijackers – amid cries of “Allahu akbar” – chose to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.

    At 10:03 a.m., frenetic activity turned into morbid silence.

    In recent years, the Presidential Medal of Freedom has become just another token of political patronage, with recipients reflecting a sitting president’s political agenda. Such recipients include Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editorial director and a fundraiser for President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns; Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic activist nun who helped get “Obamacare” passed, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who received it “with distinction.”

    But President Donald Trump can help restore the award’s original luster by bestowing individual medals to 40 ordinary men and women who performed an extraordinary act that must never be forgotten.

  • Will Pope Leo stand up to Islam?

    Will Pope Leo stand up to Islam?

    As Muslim migration roils Europe, some Catholic bishops are starting to notice.

    “For decades, the Islamization of Europe has been progressing through mass immigration,” Polish Bishop Antoni Długosz said July 13, adding that illegal immigrants “create serious problems in the countries they arrive in.”

    Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan spoke more bluntly in March: “We’re witnessing an invasion. They are not refugees. This is an invasion, a mass Islamization of Europe.”

    Yet Pope Leo XIV lives in a different dimension. “In a world darkened by war and injustice . . . migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope,” Leo said July 25. “Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death on the various contemporary migration routes.”

    Leo’s comments express more than blissful sentimentality. They reveal the Vatican’s role in encouraging open borders and exempting migrants from accountability. In Europe’s case, that involves deliberate blindness to the violent, totalitarian nature of Islam and many of its followers. 

    This Catholic approach toward Islam reflects the ideas ofLouis Massignon, a French scholar from the early 20th century. Massignon described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” and asserted that Muslims “have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham.”

    French Catholic scholar Alain Besançon described the results.

    “An entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe, much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon’s ideas,” he wrote. Besançon attributed that posture to “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” a dissatisfaction that the Vatican embodies.

    “Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe,” Massignon’s advocates “cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besançon wrote. “Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than to believe in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”

    The Catholic Church officially embraced Massignon’s ideas at the Second Vatican Council in two documents. One, Nostra Aetate, focused on the church’s relationship with Judaism but additionally addressed Islam:

    “The Church regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God . . . they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”

    The other, Lumen Gentium, declared that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”

    That passage made the Catholic catechism.

    But what Besançon called “indulgent ecumenicism” toward Islam goes beyond words. During John Paul II’s papacy, the church embraced outright appeasement.

    Catholic bishops sold underutilized churches and schools to Muslim groups; many of the churches became mosques. In October 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII) build a mosque in Genoa next to a monastery. The friars even helped build the mosque’s foundation.

    But the UCOII – affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood – advocates “an extremist version of the Quran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” Magdi Allam, a convert to Catholicism from Islam, reported for Milan’s Corriere della Sera.

    In 2006, the group also demanded Islamic schools, banks and clerical review of textbooks. Its president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to sign a document pledging Muslims to accept Italy’s constitution, denounce terrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

    Seven months earlier, a Vatican cardinal even suggested that Muslim students receive Islamic religious instruction in the hour reserved for Catholic instruction in Italian schools.

    “If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” said the late Cardinal Renato Martino, then the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”

    In 2008, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales asked Catholic schools to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim students and to adapt bathroom facilities for ritual cleansing before prayer. But the worst example of appeasement took place in Belgium.

    As part of a campaign to force the government to grant amnesty, Belgium’s Catholic bishops turned their churches into homes for Muslim migrants, making them squatters. In May 2006, more than 30 Belgian churches served such a purpose. About 300 Africans occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other churches held as many as 700 squatters.

    At Our Lady of Succor Church in Brussels, squatters lived in small tents donated by Catholic relief agencies, conducted Muslim services, erected computer tables near the pulpit and even set fires on the floor.

    Friar Herwig Arts described a scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel: migrants “removed the tabernacle [and] installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass.” He went on, “For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.” 

    Belgium’s bishops were not amused. Arts was chided by Belgium’s leading clergy. “Solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation, said the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, then the country’s leading prelate. Monsingor Luc van Looy, then the bishop of Ghent, even said “illegal fugitives” were “entitled to a good place in our society. Arts has been silent on the topic ever since.

    But two decades later, Kazakhstan’s Bishop Schneider refuses to stay silent: “This is a global political agenda by the powerful of the world to destroy Europe.”

    Leo thus faces an existential challenge, one that blissful sentimentality cannot answer: Will he allow a church that played a pivotal role in creating European civilization to perform a more decisive part in destroying it?

  • Trump unleashes the evangelists

    Trump unleashes the evangelists

    The Trump administration issued a memo Monday saying that federal workers are openly allowed to express religious beliefs in the workplace “to the greatest extent possible unless such expression would impose an undue hardship on business operations.” This means that they can display Bibles, religious artwork and items “such as crosses, crucifixes and mezuzah,” among other religious symbols.

    But that’s not all. Workers are also allowed to talk about how their own faith is “correct” and how others should “re-think” their beliefs. “During a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the nonadherent should re-think his religious beliefs. However, if the nonadherent requests such attempts to stop, the employee should honor the request,” says the memo. “An employee may invite another to worship at her church despite being belonging to a different faith.”

    On the one hand, freedom of worship is a fundamental pillar of the US Constitution, alongside freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom do what you want, any old time. But let’s also be clear what this is really about. Hint: It’s not Scientology.

    Despite the mention of “mezuzah,” this order isn’t about Judaism, either. If Jews proselytized in the workplace, or anywhere, there would be a lot more of us in the world, and the kinds of Jews who do seek converts generally aren’t working in federal office buildings. Maybe the administration’s definition of “highly-qualified employees of faith” include Hindu and Muslim employees, but they would be a distinct minority. Mormons love converting people, but they have a well-oiled youth-preaching machine already in place. You’re not going to be hearing, “Hello, my name is Elder Undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture, and I am here to tell you about the most amazing book.” 

    No, this is a purely evangelical Christian play, to go along with a recent White House order about anti-Christian bias in the government, a problem that, institutionally, simply doesn’t exist. Many of the US’s early settlers were Christian dissidents. We’re a place where all different faiths can live in peace. That’s because religious tolerance is baked into the founding documents. But so is separation of church and state, which this memorandum takes a major step toward eroding. There is already a preponderance of Christians in the nation, and, we can assume, in the government. Why do they need to talk about their religious beliefs at work?

    Without a doubt, this memorandum is all part of a larger push about spreading the good news. How, precisely, do you define the “break” during which an employee is entitled to discuss these matters? Is it a lunch break? A coffee break? A bathroom break? Are emboldened, federally employed Promise Keepers going to start sliding pamphlets under the bathroom stall or handing them out in the lunch line? The memo allows uninterested parties to reject the offerings but also allows for the faithful to keep the full-court press going.

    Religion should be a private affair, or at least a family and neighborhood affair. It doesn’t belong in the workplace, unless that workplace is a house of worship or at least a business affiliated with a denomination. The idea that Christians are a persecuted class in the USA is absurd. This isn’t Syria or Lebanon. There are as many churches lining our highways as there are self-storage units and combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bells.

    In his first term, Trump largely kept the evangelical portion of his base at bay. But he’s much more in tune with their needs and interests since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. He truly believes God saved his life that day. And, who knows? Maybe God did. When he bombed Iran, Trump wanted to thank everyone, “but, in particular, God.”

    That was Trump’s basically harmless way of adding a little juice to “God bless America.” But if God is really blessing America, we don’t need people telling us that at work. It should be implied. Instead, federal employees, whether they want to or not, are going to have to hear that He Is Risen, even if they’re only trying to grab a snack from the vending machine.