The Social World

Tag: Religion

  • Go to church

    Go to church

    It’s often noted that American society is becoming ever more politicized and polarized. Those who once imagined themselves uninterested in politics find themselves dragged into America’s culture wars. Small children now carry placards and attend political marches. Max Horder and Danit Sara Finkelstein explain the extent to which social media has played a part in this growing radicalism, not just because of the ideological echo chambers we now inhabit, but due to the mindset online algorithms create: rewarding outrage, encouraging extremism. Nuance and balance are anathema; shock and division set each day’s tone.

    Now, however, we have become so used to seeing events through the prism of politics that, when news of an atrocity breaks, Americans of every stripe scour the internet for evidence that the other side is responsible. There are still those on the left who insist Tyler Robinson, who allegedly murdered Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, was far right – a “groyper” or follower of the alt-right commentator Nick Fuentes. After every shooting, Democrats blame the guns. Republicans blame the DEI insanity.

    The good news, perhaps, is that times are changing

    But as Katherine Dee explains in our cover story, there’s another conflict playing out across America, more significant than MAGA versus antifa or the progressive left versus the GOP. The culture war has become a spiritual war. A nation built on faith in God has become nihilistic and lost its way.

    In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis conjures a young devil, Wormwood, sent from Hell to secure the damnation of a man known as “the patient.” His uncle, Screwtape, a senior devil, sends him a letter of advice. “Dear Wormwood,” he writes. “Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing.”

    If America is particularly in the Devil’s sights right now, the signs of his progress are, in the first place, this fixation on politics and in the second, the terrible absence of inner peace, particularly in our children. Consider the trans shooter Robert Westman. A few days before his attack on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, he reportedly put a gun to the head of his girlfriend, (who was said to identify as a “furry”), and felt an icy revulsion, no pity or remorse at the thought of murdering her.

    Lionel Shriver presents the reasonable view, that we should not obsess on the motives of young shooters; that they’re simply psychotic anomalies. But these were once normal children, raised by loving families. In a letter to family and friends, Westman says: “I feel I was raised to be a good person… I was corrupted by this world and have learned to hate what life is.”

    What American children are being corrupted by is not just progressive ideology, but exposure to diabolical horrors via the internet. By his own mother’s account, Tyler Robinson was chronically online from an early age and what he experienced there may have been what eventually led him to kill.

    Offline, the culture that surrounds young Americans offers little alternative. The institutions which should affirm the value of Christian civilization instead pump out neo-Marxist ideas and glorify violence.

    But the good news, perhaps, is that times are changing. Increasingly, people who aren’t ideologically opposed to religion understand that it’s the language of faith, not politics, that best explains what is happening in the hearts and minds of young people such as Robinson and Westman. Until very recently, it would have seemed strange, even in America, the West’s most explicitly Christian nation, for public figures to talk in metaphysical terms of Good and Evil; Christ and Satan. But in Silicon Valley, among the people who create the spaces of the online universe, it’s become normal for the most powerful men on the planet to discuss the reality of demons and of actual evil. Luke Lyman explains how and why Peter Thiel, one of the richest and most influential men in the world, has become obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist.

    Earlier this month, protesters actually dressed as demons gathered on the steps of the Embarcadero building in San Francisco to protest a series of lectures given by Thiel on the subject of the Antichrist. He will comment on “theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist… drawing on René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt and John Henry Newman,” says the advertisement for the lectures.

    But the remedy for America’s spiritual decline isn’t more discussion or engagement online. Screwtape ends his letter to his nephew like this: “Ensure that the patient continues to believe that the problem is ‘out there’ in the ‘broken system’ rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.”

    The right answer, is to actually practice, not just preach, Christianity. Charlie Kirk, a devout young man, understood this well. The Trump administration should encourage not a fiery MAGA response but a return to church.

  • 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.

  • Is political Christianity back?

    There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novelistic essay Testaments Betrayed where he writes about the nature of history. Man walks in a fog, Kundera observes. He stumbles along a path and creates the path as he walks it. When he looks back, he can see the path, he may see the man, but he cannot see the fog. Everything looks inevitable after it has happened.

    So we have the “sleepwalkers” explanation of how Europe stumbled into the first world war. We have the “inevitability” of the slide into the second. It is perhaps the greatest of all idiotic modern presumptions that so many people imagine while looking back that they would have known better or acted differently.

    Which brings me to the present. Because the only thing you can do if you are going to try to tread a path well is to use what senses you have to work out what the next step might be. In the past week there have been two events, one on each side of the Atlantic, which have revealed a very interesting sense of the path we are on.

    Charlie Kirk was a proud and devout Christian. When asked what he wanted his legacy to be (a question it is awful to think that a man only just through his twenties was often asked), he always said that he wanted to be remembered first and foremost for his faith. Before being an American, a Republican, an activist or a supporter of Donald Trump, it was that which he wanted to be remembered for. His faith in Christ was the rock on which everything else stood.

    Since Charlie’s assassination there have been many gatherings around the world in his memory, from cities in America and Britain to as far away as South Korea. And these have so far been notable for a number of things. Unlike those in response to, say, the death of George Floyd, these gatherings have not compelled local businesses to board up their windows. They have not, so far, been despoiled by significant violence. What they have been dominated by is prayer. Indeed the memorial gatherings to Charlie have so far been defined by their Christian content more than anything else. That is a rather remarkable thing: in response to a political assassination, the people on the side of the victim have gathered to pray.

    In London last weekend Tommy Robinson held a rally called “Unite the Kingdom.” There is the usual dispute over the number of people who attended, but the area around parliament was full enough to suggest that it was more than 100,000. It has been attacked in the British media as some kind of far-right, white-supremacist gathering, but was in fact marked by its racial inclusivity and peaceable nature.

    In response to a political assassination, people have gathered to pray

    Something that the media coverage almost completely ignored were the efforts to insert a Christian element into the proceedings. Yes, there were various anti-mass migration activists and politicians. Yes, there were musicians, including black gospel singers. But to me one of the most interesting aspects of the events on the main stage was the prominence of overtly Christian figures – including the Maori men who performed a haka with a Christian pastor. The proceedings were kicked off by a fogeyish clergyman called Bishop Ceirion Dewar from something called the Confessing Anglican Church.

    I found his performance a tad bizarre. He seemed to mix up the role of public prayer with that of a wizard in Tolkien warding off the hordes of Isengard. But that is a matter of taste. And I can’t help noticing that various bishops of the actual established church were not available last Saturday. Perhaps like the bishops of Dover, Southwark and Barking, they were too busy denouncing the event to bother praying anywhere near it, or even speaking to the sort of people attending.

    Still, it is noteworthy to me that two movements within a week, at the very edge of the cultural and political struggles of our time, should end up leaning so heavily into the Christian element. Especially in Britain, where the role of Christianity in public life has become no more distinct than a whistle in the midst of a hurricane.

    It is perhaps inevitable. The concern that many people have about the levels of legal and illegal migration over recent decades has a great deal to do with the fact that many people arriving into the West have no desire to integrate into our traditions and a distinct desire to spread their own way of doing things. Prominent historians, including Tom Holland, have noted entirely correctly that Islam seems to have things about it which make it uniquely indigestible to the modern secularized state.

    In reality it is a double whammy. The deep cultural concerns of our time are caused both by the challenges which Islam poses to a secularized society and the push that a new religion of “progressivism” has made into the space where Christianity once was. The concerns are by no means dampened by the way that elements of these two other faiths have found a way, for the time being, to march together, creating a hybrid that might be summed up as “Trans for Palestine”: a clown-car which will inevitably come off the road.

    Amid this fog it is probably inevitable that people will try to return to their firmest orientations. This is what R.R. Reno, the editor of the Catholic magazine First Things, has described as “the return of the strong gods,” Though deeply moving at times and slightly comical at others, there is something significant going on here.

    A sensible society and a wise Church here in England would do something to speak to these urges. But I don’t expect it. The Bishop of Barking, the Rt Revd Lynne Cullens, could be found this week claiming that Robinson’s rally showed it is time for a “refreshed, contemporary and broad-based understanding of British values.” Treading wisely and treading timidly are not always the same thing.