Among Christians in Scotland, there is a striking gap: the average number of children a family believes it needs in order to flourish is markedly higher than the average number actually being raised, a gap the size of one missing child. This difference is revealing. It suggests that Christians still possess a robust vision that children are central to flourishing. Yet, lived family practices no longer reflect that vision. The difference between what Christians say about family and what they live out signals something important about the pressures of modern life and the subtle ways in which Christian practice is being reshaped.

Fertility rates across advanced economies are well below replacement levels (about 2.1 children per woman), including within the United Kingdom. In Scotland, the total fertility rate fell to 1.25 children per woman in 2024, the lowest level on record, and well below the rate needed for simple generational replacement. This trend is part of a broader, long-term decline observed across OECD countries, perhaps symptomatic of broader institutional, cultural, and economic changes with societal secularisation.^[1]

Recently, Logos Scotland, a Scottish Christian think tank, published a report titled Faith, Family, and Belonging in Scotland: A National Assessment of Church Engagement and Attitudes on Scottish Society. One of the main findings focused on fertility rates and the desired number of children for a family to ‘flourish’. Among the sample surveyed, Christians were found to have a higher fertility rate than the national average, but notably still below their own ideal.^[2] The average actual number of children was about 1.8, while the average desired number needed to flourish was approximately 2.8. These numbers reveal a consistent shortfall in lived practice relative to the ideals articulated within Christian communities (not to mention maintaining a stable population in Scotland and the United Kingdom).^[3]

And the gap is present across all Scottish church traditions. Perhaps not surprisingly, we can see differences across church traditions in the desired number of children needed to flourish. As seen below, Catholics desire the highest number (3.5) while Church of Scotland adherents desire the fewest (2.4). But this rich variation diminishes when we observe the actual number of children being born into these families. Across churches, the average number of children born to Scottish Christians is between 1.5 (Baptists) and 2.0 (Catholics and Free Church of Scotland).

These figures raise several questions: Why does this gap exist? Why are Christians noticeably higher than the rest of Scotland, yet still falling short of their own stated ideal? And why should the Church care about this difference between belief and practice?

Minding the Gap

We should care about this gap because it concerns the relationship between Christian belief and Christian practice. As Christians, we ought to pay attention to the space between the ideal and actual number of children because family structures are ultimately reflections of deep communal values, ones that should be rooted in Christian commitments.

We readily ask how many children a family needs to flourish. We never ask how many dogs, for example, it takes to flourish. The difference reveals something important: children are conceived in our moral imagination as irreplaceably significant. Children are not lifestyle accessories; they are bound up with ideas about purpose, legacy, love, and sustained communal life.

The Compression of Christian Practice

A deeper look at denominational differences in the Scottish data complicates simplistic cultural explanations. There is a large range in the desired number of children across Christian traditions. For instance, Catholics reported an average desired number of about 3.5, followed by Independents and Free Church groups reporting lower but still above-average ideals. By contrast, other Protestant traditions report somewhat lower ideals.

Yet when we move from desire to actual practice, this range collapses dramatically. Catholics, Free Church families, and others all converge around similar actual family sizes (around 1.5–2.0 children on average). The differences that exist in theological emphasis appear robust in aspiration but flatten in practice.

The differences in ideals reflect theology. The sameness in practice reflects culture.

This compression suggests that broad social forces are shaping Christian family life in ways that override internal theological distinctions. If Christian identity were the dominant influence on family formation, we would expect more persistent denominational differences. Instead, secular, economic, professional, and cultural pressures exert a uniform constraining effect.

Christian Family Life in a Secular Age

The reduction in Christian family life may be a sign of the tension in living a theologically informed life in a secular age. Modern secular life is characterised by later marriage, delayed childbearing, increased participation in higher education and labour markets, and intensified parenting norms, all of which shape fertility decisions. When individuals and couples delay childbearing, the likelihood of having fewer children rises, and uncertainty about fertility goals increases.^[4]

Research in multiple contexts indicates that voluntary and involuntary childlessness, as well as the decision to postpone childbearing, is influenced by a complex set of social and cultural factors. These include perceptions of the role of parenthood, notions of autonomy, career aspirations, and broader cultural norms around intensive parenting. In some cultural studies, modern parents describe parenthood as mentally and emotionally demanding, requiring significant personal sacrifices, and shaped by expectations that can feel at odds with broader goals of fulfilment and autonomy.^[5]

In this context, Christian families still affirm that children are central to flourishing. Yet many are living as if children are costly additions that must fit within the constraints of modern life rather than gifts that shape the structure of life itself. This is not to suggest that Christians choose lower fertility in a fully rational way; decisions are often contingent, shaped by economic uncertainty, housing constraints, career demands, and social norms that valorise individual self-realisation.

What the Gap Reveals

The gap between Christian ideals and practice is not primarily about demographic decline. It is about the quiet distance between belief and practice. Christians in Scotland still articulate a vision of flourishing that includes larger families. Yet their lived reality mirrors the constraints and priorities of the surrounding culture. This suggests that modern secular pressures may be shaping Christian family life more profoundly than Christian theology is currently shaping Christian practice.

If tradition is no longer guiding practice, what will take its place?

A Pastoral and Ecclesial Question

The question for the Church is not simply whether Christians should have more children. The deeper question is how Christian communities might recover a way of life in which having children is more imaginable, more supported, and less constrained by the assumptions of modern individualism and economic calculation.

Historically and today, the Church has taught that children are a blessing from God: not merely private goods for parental fulfilment, but gifts entrusted to families and communities, through which love, sacrifice, discipleship, and generational faithfulness are practised. Christian flourishing, therefore, is not measured simply by the number of children a family has, but by whether children are received within a way of life ordered towards gift, communion, discipleship, and intergenerational hope.

What would it look like for churches to make family life more possible, not just rhetorically but materially and communally? How might Christian communities bear some of the economic, social, and relational burdens that make larger families feel unrealistic? How should Christians think about children not as burdens to be optimised, but as integral to the rhythms of vocation and mutual belonging?

The gap the size of a child invites the Church to reflect on whether Christian visions of flourishing are still shaping Christian life, or whether Christian life is increasingly being shaped by the world around it. In a society that increasingly perceives children as a means of achievement, or worse, burdens to be managed, it behoves the Church to continue to proclaim that children are a blessing and sign of intergenerational hope in an uncertain future.

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References

1. National Records of Scotland. “Record Low Births and Fertility Rate.” 2024. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/latest-news/record-low-births-and-fertility-rate/

2. This study draws on survey data collected from August-November 2025 through a research initiative sponsored by Logos Scotland and administrated by the Verity Research Lab. The survey captured the perspectives of self-identified Christians across all regions of Scotland on questions of belonging and public engagement, yielding 1,016 responses. The sample reflects a broad cross-section of Scottish Christian life, allowing for descriptive and comparative analysis across key demographic and religious characteristics.

3. Logos Scotland. “Faith, Family, and Belonging in Scotland: A National Assessment of Church Engagement and Attitudes on Scottish Society.” 2026. https://logosscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Faith-and-Family-in-Society-Logos-Scotland-and-Verity-Research-Lab-2026-1.pdf

4. Research on delayed childbearing and fertility outcomes in advanced economies (e.g. Badolato, Luca, et al. “Multiple Dimensions of Uncertainty in Fertility Goals.” Genus: Journal of Population Sciences 81 [2025]: 1-29).

5. Studies on modern parenting norms, autonomy, and fertility decision-making in late modern societies (e.g. Símonardóttir. Sunna. “Unless I Could Be Like the Typical Dad.” Acta Sociologica 67, no.4 [2024]: 463-77).

Originally published on Between Times on July 27th 2026.

What is tradition? How does it develop? How does it relate to our politics? Or the church and our personal lives? Our most recent edition of Between Times, simply titled ‘Tradition,’ has published its last article. The pieces tackle these questions from a range of angles.

Some engage with the concept of tradition itself, beginning with its relation to authority:

• Oliver B. Langworthy’s ‘Tradition and Authority’

• Andrew Torrance’s review of ‘Whoever Hears You Hears Me’ by James Dominic Rooney

Others explore how we might view the development of tradition:

• Jasper Knecht’s ‘The Illusion of a Single Voice’

• Gijsbert van den Brink’s ‘The Treasures and the Troubles of Tradition’

A few engage with how tradition relates to mission, discipleship, and leadership:

• Joshua Cockayne’s ‘Do We Still Believe in the One Holy Catholic Church?’

• David Clayton’s ‘Traditioned Attention’

• Tim Murray’s ‘The Leaders We Deserve’

Several assess how tradition intersects with politics and culture in the present moment:

• Marietta van der Tol’s ‘Tradition, Traditionalism, and Temporal Depth’

• Robert Joustra’s ‘The Politics of the Fifth Commandment’

• Olli-Pekka Vainio’s ‘We Have Never Been Christian’

• Lucy Peppiatt’s review of ‘What is Free Speech’ by Fara Dabhoiwala

• Jared Michelson’s ‘When Your Influencer Disagrees with Your Pastor’

• Timothy Baylor’s ‘Demonic Traditions’

• Dico Baars and Jasper Knecht’s ‘The Dutch Freedom of Education as an Inherited Good’

Read together, these pieces provide not just a glimpse, but a grasp of the questions, challenges, and treasures that tradition sets before us. Our thanks to all our contributors and reviewers for their generosity with their time and expertise.

Our next issue turns to a different theme entirely: Beauty.

More to follow soon. In the meantime, watch out for one-off pieces and new episodes of the Between Times Podcast over the coming weeks.

Originally published on Between Times on July 13th 2026

At times, tradition seems to be treated as authoritative simply because it is old, beautiful, or continuous. What is it, exactly, that gives tradition authority if not these things? This article explores how this question has been wrestled with in the past, and what may be learned from those who have undertaken this work of discernment before us. It argues that tradition’s authority is not self-grounding: tradition has authority insofar as it is inspired by the Holy Spirit and serves the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Scripture itself gives us the first and most basic instance of this discernment. It does not treat tradition as automatically authoritative simply because it has been handed down, nor does it reject tradition simply because it is inherited. Rather, Scripture distinguishes between tradition that serves the Word of God and tradition that obscures or rivals it. In Mark 7:8, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for leaving the ‘commandment of God’ in favour of the ‘tradition of men’ (paradosin tōn anthrōpōn). The problem is not tradition as such, but tradition that has come to stand over against the command of God. A similar concern appears in Colossians 2:8, where Paul warns against being taken captive ‘according to human tradition’ and not according to Christ. Yet 2 Thessalonians 2:15 prevents any simple rejection of tradition, since Paul exhorts his hearers to ‘stand firm and hold to the traditions’ (tas paradoseis) they were taught. Tradition, then, can either hand on the apostolic gospel or obscure the commandment of God.

Two examples of strikingly parallel exegesis of Exodus 12:36, by Augustine of Hippo and Origen of Alexandria, further sharpen this tension. Augustine in On Christian Doctrine 40.60, wrote that even among ‘the fellowship of the heathen’ there is ‘liberal instruction’ which could be turned to the service of truth and ‘excellent precepts of morality’ and ‘even some truths in regard to the worship of the One God’. These, Augustine held, were not their own invention but were ‘dug out of the mines of God’s providence’. Like the gold and silver of the Egyptians, these are to be plundered and turned to ‘their proper use in preaching the Gospel’.^[1] Origen of Alexandria, reading Ex 12:36 in the same way, similarly identifies the gold and silver of the Egyptians with specifically Greek philosophy in his letter to Gregory Thaumaturgus.^[2] Origen recommends the study of both scripture and philosophy to his student Gregory but warns that, even as the Israelites, aided by the wisdom of God, made the things of the tabernacle and the ark from what they plundered from the Egyptians, so too did Ader the Idumean make a golden idol after returning from Egypt.^[3] Origen notes that it is only a few who manage to make something useful from the knowledge of the world, and many more who end up inventing some novel heresy.^[4] Augustine and Origen form, each in their own way, part of Christian tradition. While these examples concern their discernment about philosophy, rather than specifically Christian tradition, they highlight a shared and enduring concern for the priority of scripture and that the products of culture outside scripture can be turned to its use with proper discernment.^[5]

What then of Christian tradition in particular? In 1539, Jacopo Sadoleto wrote to the churches of Geneva, seeking to persuade them to return to the Roman Catholic Church. John Calvin, though exiled from Geneva the previous year, was asked to reply. Sadoleto urges the Genevese to abandon what he presents as the novelties of the reformers and return to what had been handed down through the church. He describes the humility and obedience of the Catholic position in terms of receiving ‘the things delivered to us, and fixed by the authority of our ancestors, men of the greatest wisdom and holiness,’ as things ‘truly dictated and enjoined by the Holy Spirit.’^[6] This is a strong claim about tradition’s authority. Sadoleto is not merely saying that the church’s inherited teaching is ancient, venerable, useful, or beautiful. He is claiming that what has been delivered through the church’s ancestors may be received as dictated and enjoined by the Holy Spirit. Tradition, here, is treated as a Spirit-authorised inheritance, and therefore as something that ought to command the obedience of the church.

Calvin’s reply takes up this claim directly. He laments that he is assailed by ‘the Pope and the Anabaptists,’ who seem superficially different but share a common error: ‘they boast extravagantly of the Spirit’ but ‘sink and bury the Word of God, that they may make room for their own falsehoods.’ Calvin frames this with reference to John Chrysostom: ‘Well, then, does Chrysostom admonish us to reject all who under the pretence of the Spirit lead us away from the simple doctrine of the gospel, the Spirit having been promised not to reveal a new doctrine, but to impress the truth of the gospel on our minds.’^[7] Calvin’s appeal to Chrysostom matters. He is not rejecting tradition in order to defend an individualist reading of Scripture.^[8] He is using tradition to test a claim about tradition. In other words, neither Calvin nor Sadoleto treat antiquity or continuity as self-authenticating. A tradition does not become authoritative simply because it is old, venerable, ecclesial, or deeply embedded in the church’s life. Even a tradition clothed in the language of the Spirit must be tested by whether it leads the church more deeply into the gospel or away from it.

What the exchange between Sadoleto and Calvin teaches us is that although tradition, like philosophy for Origen and Augustine, may carry the weight of centuries and may be woven deeply into the life, worship, and imagination of the church, none of this, by itself, establishes that a tradition bears the authority of the Spirit. Its authority must be discerned by its relation to the saving gospel. Where tradition bears the inspiration of the Spirit, directs the church to Christ, and helps believers hear and obey the Father, it may be received as a faithful witness. Where it obscures the gospel it must be resisted as merely human tradition. This brings us back to Mark 7:8, Colossians 2:8, and 2 Thessalonians 2:15. Mark 7:8 warns us that tradition can become a way of evading the commandment of God while appearing pious, Colossians 2:8 that human tradition can take the church captive when it is not according to Christ. Yet 2 Thessalonians 2:15 reminds us that the answer is not to abandon tradition, but to hold fast to what faithfully hands on the apostolic tradition. What Origen, Augustine, and many of the early theologians of the church demonstrate is that the impetus to look to our traditions, from wherever they may derive, is not at its best driven by a desire to complicate the gospel message of salvation. They did not decide one day to come up with a whole grammar of Christian metaphysics because they felt that scripture was lacking, but because they wanted to more clearly express its fundamental truths.

This matters because tradition can be attractive for reasons that are not theological. It can appeal because it is ancient, beautiful, stable, continuous, or, increasingly, counter-cultural. These are not bad things. Indeed, they may be gifts. But they are not, by themselves, sufficient grounds for spiritual authority. A tradition may be aesthetically compelling and yet fail to serve the gospel. It may be old and yet obscure the Word of God. It may be continuous and yet preserve forms of thought or practice that need to be judged by Scripture. In practice, this means Christians need to learn to ask better questions of the traditions they inherit. To engage tradition well is to enter the church’s long work of discernment. It is to ask where the Spirit has led the church to hear and obey the Word of God, and where merely human tradition has claimed authority for itself. It is to receive the past not as a substitute for Scripture, nor as an ornament to Christian identity, but as a witness whose authority depends on its service to Christ. Tradition is at its best when it does not draw attention to itself but teaches the church to hear again the living Word of God.

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References

1. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 40.60.

2. Origen, Epistle to Thaumaturgus, 1.

3. Idem, 2.

4. Ibid.

5. For an example specifically of late antique Christian counter-culture development see Oliver B. Langworthy, ‘Theodoret’s Theologian: Assessing the Origin and Significance of Gregory of Nazianzus’ Title.’ The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 70, no. 3 (2019): 466.

6. Jacopo Sadoleto, “Letter to the Genevans”, in John C. Olin, ed., John Calvin & Jacopo Sadoleto: A Reformation Debate (Baker Book House, 1966), 37.

7. John Calvin, “Calvin’s reply to Sadoleto”, in Olin, ed., A Reformation Debate, 61.

8. On John Calvin’s understanding of tradition more widely see this recent excellent article: Richard Muller, ‘Traditio and Paradosis vs. Humanas Traditiones: Calvin on the Problem of Tradition’, MAJT 33 (2022): 5-29.

Originally published on Between Times on July 7th 2026.

For many of us living in the whirlpool of American life, it feels like we are starting to lose our grip. In the last year, we have witnessed the public assassination of a prominent political figure; the killing of two citizens that administration officials unjustly accused of being terrorists; another attempt on the President’s life; a new war with Iran, which seems always to be ending, but never quite ended; unprecedented levels of public corruption; and escalating social disruption caused by artificial intelligence. Then, of course, there are the Epstein files, three million of which the U.S. Department of Justice refuses to disclose, and which contain information on the largest child sex-ring in modern history, an operation run by a billionaire who, up until his unusual and untimely death, maintained friendships with world leaders in education, government, and finance, including the sitting President.

At a time when public trust in our leadership was already historically low, when many have been stretched to the breaking-point financially, and when we are increasingly divided by a flood of political messaging designed to be invisible to us, we have experienced a series of traumatic national events, the official explanations of which have ranged from the unclear and dubious to the transparently false. All of this has had a powerfully disorienting effect, which has generated an enormous degree of conspiratorial anxiety. There is a wide-spread sense that the frustrating, scandalous, and inhuman events which we have witnessed in recent days are not coincidental, but in fact conform to a kind of anti-order, one which is orchestrated by a set of actors with a perverse form of wisdom and with evil intent.

Even where credible evidence of conspiracy is lacking, the intuition that forces are conspiring for our misfortune can be difficult to resist.^[1] And that may itself be theologically significant. We might see it, for instance, as evidence of an innate awareness that our lives are subject to cosmic powers that ultimately lie beyond our control. Christian theology has often understood the convergence of inexplicable evils as a possible effect of the demonic arts. This theme has played a large role in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, and in Christian communities of the greater majority world, but it is a significant theme in all traditions of the Christian church. And though it is a theme that often elicits raised eyebrows, it is one that has increasingly been on the mind of a number of public figures.

Over the last year, Vice President J. D. Vance postulated that UAPs, or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena,’ might be explained by demons.^[2] Tech billionaire Peter Thiel expressed worries that technological stagnation would hasten the arrival of the anti-Christ and a demonic, oppressive world-order.^[3] The writer and cultural critic Rod Dreher suggested that artificial intelligence might be a medium for communication with demons.^[4] And most recently, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, argued that the normalisation of violence in American political culture, and the church’s managerial obsession, are both alike products of demonic influence.^[5]

One of the reasons that appeals to the demonic are so resonant these days is that in secular contexts like our own they are generally seen as transgressive, and thus uniquely capable of provoking a larger conversation about our values and beliefs, about the purpose of a society and who it is meant to serve. It is one of the few concepts drawn from our Christian past that remains powerfully evocative in the public imagination, and that is capable of situating our cultural trials in a more transcendent frame of reference. Think, for example, of the recent success of the movie Sinners, which thematises the way that music might become a cultural medium of the demonic, and which ends with the repentance of a musician. Appealing to the demonic provides us with an exceptionally powerful way of expressing the unnatural and inhuman character of our current cultural disorder.

In Scripture, after all, demons are supernatural agents with immense power and global reach, for whom the dethroning of God and the humiliation of God’s creatures are a principal ambition. The devil is the ‘ruler of this world’ (John 12:31),^[6] ‘the prince of the power of the air’ (Eph. 2:2), and the ‘God of this age’ (2 Cor. 4:4) who, together with ‘his angels’ (Matt. 25:41), constitute the ‘thrones, dominions, and principalities’ (Col. 1:16) which have taken the world captive to do their will (2 Tim. 2:26), and which ‘wage war against God’s holy people . . . to conquer them’ (Rev. 13:7; cf. Eph. 6:11-16). The demonic arts are essentially deceptive in character. They aim to facilitate the misperception that is basic to our condition of being ‘estranged’ from and ‘hostile in mind’ to God (Col. 1:21).^[7] In that way they attempt to prevent the repentance necessary for our participation in the reconciliation of all things in Christ (Col. 1:20).

The influence of demons is routinely described in Scripture as extending to human agency, though often in ways that are imperceptible to us. For example, Ephesians speaks of the Devil as ‘the spirit now at work in those who are disobedient’ (2:2). The text then immediately goes on to say of the church that, ‘all of us also lived among them at one time’ (2:3). The implication is that all members of the church have at one time been under demonic influence, whether or not they have conscious knowledge or experience of it. If demonic influence operates primarily by deception, we would expect not to have immediate experience of it. Indeed, the Apostle here references ‘the cravings of our flesh and . . . its desires and thoughts’ (Eph. 2:3) as the principle evidence for and site of demonic hegemony, suggesting that demonic influence is most potent at the level of our own agency.^[8]

That is significant because it means that demonic influence is extended by human agency, not only through our individual actions, but also across our corporate behaviours, cultures, and institutions. The book of Colossians speaks of the salvation of the saints as deliverance from ‘the kingdom of darkness’ (1:13), suggesting that fallen human society as a whole is in some sense held in subjection to demonic powers and habits of life. The book of Revelation depicts the political institutions of the Roman Empire in particular as ‘a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit’ (Rev. 18:2). Even the church can be bewitched and participate in the worship of demons. In fact, some of the harshest warnings about demonic influence in the New Testament are reserved for the threat it poses to the culture of the church and the integrity of its worship (Gal. 1:9, 3:1).

There is, in other words, a biblical theology of demonic traditions. If tradition is the act of passing along cherished practices, beliefs, and ideals, then demonic traditions consist in those subtle deceits by which our lives and cultures are formed in ways opposed to God and to God’s providential order. This formation is consolidated in different kinds of acts, but Scripture explicitly names violence against the innocent (Ps. 106:37), pride (1 Tim. 3:6), participation in idolatrous forms of worship (1 Cor. 10:18-22; Rev. 9:20), engaging in illicit sexual acts (2 Cor. 6:14-7:1; Rev. 2:20-24), practices of greed (Luke 22:1-5; Acts 5:1-11), and entertaining what Paul calls ‘doctrines of demons,’ teachings which subvert the truth of the gospel (1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Cor. 11:1-15; Col. 2:8). It is interesting to note that the above are frequently associated with false teachers. They are described as ‘bold,’ ‘arrogant,’ ‘experts in greed,’ those who ‘despise authority,’ have ‘eyes full of adultery,’ who ‘promise . . . freedom but are slaves of depravity,’ and who are so proud they even ‘heap abuse on celestial beings’ in a false show of their spiritual authority (2 Peter 2; cf. Jude 3, 8-13).

But while humans might participate in their work, it is important to observe that Scripture consistently differentiates demonic agency, which is terminally opposed to God, from the human agencies that become their instruments. That is crucial for several reasons. In the first instance, it resists any absolute identification of the demonic with particular persons or populations of people. A good deal of contemporary theology prefers to speak only of ‘demonic’ qualities of human cultures and institutions, and not of the agency of ‘demons,’ mostly to avoid unnecessary speculation and to maintain focus on the agents and institutions where intervention might be possible. But failing to speak of the activity of demonic powers allows the dependence of human agency to pass out of view. Where that happens, there is nothing to resist the demonic from becoming politicised, so that particular people or populations can be identified as demonic. It needs to be said, of course, that an identification of that sort has often been elemental to ideologies that depict Jews and other racial minorities as embodiments of the demonic.^[9] But an identification of this sort is not possible on a Christian understanding, which leads me to my next point.

Second, this distinction between demonic and human agency reinforces the fact that human action is not only susceptible to demonic influence, but also redeemable from it. A Christian demonology should alert us to the fact that there are no earthly institutions, communities, or cultures that are beyond the reach of the demonic. Not even the church can shelter itself: not in culture, not in the promise of a Christian nation, nor even in its own communion. It can only stand against the assaults of the enemy, armed with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of Spirit (Eph. 6:13-16). But the knowledge that the church has, that it, too, was once held captive, and yet has become a recipient of God’s mercy, should also be a reminder that demonic powers have definite limitations. For in taking on flesh, Christ has made himself the advocate of sinners. The human agents that are now instruments of demonic oppression are thus not like their masters, incurably evil, because they are never beyond the reach of the friendship of Jesus.

Finally, this distinction between demonic and human agency preserves the fact that human action is often unwittingly the instrument of demonic influence. That appears to be implied in the Apostle’s call that we not be ignorant of the devil’s ‘schemes’ (Eph. 6:12), or allow him to ‘outwit’ us (2 Cor. 2:11). If we take this language of the Bible seriously, then we ought to expect that under the power of demonic influence, human actors with very different interests and motivations may, without their own knowledge, contribute to effects that are in reality coordinated.

This conception of demonic influence offers a powerful means of validating the intuition that the calamities we suffer may not merely be the unfortunate effects of coincidence and chance, but do in fact conform to a pattern bearing the marks of organised, malicious intent. Of course, just as demonic influence does not negate personal responsibility, so invoking the agency of the demonic should not undermine inquiry into the bad actors that trouble our time. But having said that, one of the implications of a Christian demonology is that the forces at work within history are not always intelligible to us. We are not God, and so the causes that drive our own actions, or the actions of those around us, are often inscrutable, even in the internet age . . . perhaps especially in the internet age. But because the church entrusts itself to the lordship of Christ, it believes that, in due time, he will make all things plain. When that faith is rightly inhabited, it should free us from the fear and desire to control that drives so much of the conspiratorial speculation of the moment. After all, conspiracy theories can themselves be instruments of the demonic, doctrines of demons that induct our fellow citizens into habits of anxiety, despair, and mistrust, habits that oppose the Spirit’s working by faith, hope, and love. It is far better for the church to entrust judgment to God, who alone judges according to truth.

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References

^[1] It needs to be said that conspiratorial politics is a real phenomenon with a long history. See Jeffrey Bale’s essay, “Political paranoia v. Political realism: on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics”, Patters of Prejudice 41/1 (2007): pp. 45-60.

^[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/30/jd-vance-alien-ufo-are-demons

^[3] New York Times columnist Ross Douthat conducted a fascinating interview with Thiel on the subject. Thiel’s viral remarks on the anti-Christ begin around the 45 minute mark, but the whole interview is worth watching. You can find it here:

^[4] See the following interview with Matt Fradd, where he discusses this claim:

^[5] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/insight/rowan-williams-decries-demonic-u-s-politics-amid-trump-bible-event/gm-GMA7C1DFCB?gemSnapshotKey=GMA7C1DFCB-snapshot-1.

^[6] Unless otherwise specified, all biblical references are taken from the New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011).

^[7] New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989).

^[8] This is the basis of a long and interesting tradition in Christian Theology which conceives of demonic influence in terms of the way that it acts upon our senses and imagination. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argues that though demons cannot know our interior thoughts, they are possessed of powerful intellects that are deeply attentive to us and to our contexts, so that they may have more intimate knowledge of our character and habits of life than even our most intimate acquaintances.^⁠ And because they have powers to act on the world, they can excite our external senses in ways that effectively elicit certain images or ideas within our minds, often making use of the truth as the very instrument of their deceit. ‘Devils strive to lead human beings to lies,’ he writes, ‘by means of the very truths devils manifest’ (On Evil, trans. Richard Regan, ed. Brian Davies [Oxford University Press, 2003], q. XVI, a. 9, r. 7, 13; cf. q. XVI, a. 12, r. 8).

^[9] Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Verso, 2016), pp. 168-208.

Originally published on Between Times on June 29th 2026.

In moments of public controversy, it has become common for pundits on social media to declare that ‘if your pastor does not say something about this issue now, leave your church.’

A friend in the States recounted the angry reaction of young men in their church because of their church’s failure to celebrate Charlie Kirk after his reprehensible murder. A mere expression of grief would (or at least should) have been non-controversial. Instead, listening to online commentators and pastors convinced them that any ‘sound’ church would endorse Kirk as a martyr. Their church’s failure to do so from the pulpit exemplified the men’s broader desire to see their pastor speak with authority and specificity about political issues and events.

A recent interview conducted by Ross Douthat of the New York Times began asking whether ‘Allie Beth Stuckey is…what religious authority looks like in America [and further afield] today?’ Stuckey is a wildly influential (by Christian standards) Youtuber and podcaster who discusses everything from parenting and pop culture to theology and politics. She generated a very large following with videos entitled things like ‘James Talarico [the democratic politician and candidate] is More Demonic Than You Think.’ Why, Douthat proceeded to ask Stuckey, were people turning to influencers like her rather than their local pastor? Her response was stark. Often, cowardly pastors, afraid to alienate their congregation, fall silent on political issues.^[1]

Yes, in some cases, churches that neglect to address public issues fail to equip people for the chaos of modern life. In the marvellous novel The Flight of Peter Fromm, an aspiring, mainline Protestant minister is advised how to ‘hold together’ a congregation divided between liberals and conservatives. It calls for ‘tightrope-walking’ and ‘enormous diplomatic skill.’ When the young man objects that this sounds like the ‘lukewarm,’ Laodicean church (Rev 3:16), his mentor responds: ‘Only the fanatic blows hot or cold. The church today has to be doctrinally tepid. It’s the only way it can survive.’^[2]

No, as Martin Luther King says, the church is not ‘a thermometer that record[s] the ideas and principles of popular opinion’ but ‘a thermostat that transform[s] the mores of society.’^[3]Scripture is not a timeless message of personal salvation or therapeutic well-being but reorders our civic life. The gospel is rarely partisan,^[4] but it is political.

Yet granting this, what are these issues and public events which, for Stuckey, are so straightforward, that failing to explicitly address them amounts to an abdication of pastoral responsibility? One of the first examples she mentions is the shooting of George Floyd. Stuckey thinks it is evident that those protesting the death of George Floyd employ an unbiblical definition of justice. On ‘social justice and race issues’ like these, those pastors refusing to speak out ‘have gone soft.’^[5]

It is noteworthy that an issue Stuckey identifies as unambiguous, requiring taking a side and speaking with clarity more than nuance and balance, is the notoriously complex and historically fraught matter of US race relations. Should pastors preach, not generally regarding equality, justice, and personal responsibility, but specifically regarding unfolding events whose details are in doubt? My aim is certainly not to categorically forbid pastors from speaking to contemporary events or political concerns but to suggest we are wrong to expect the pulpit to regularly be used in this way.^[6] Far from enhancing the church’s authority, it diminishes it.

I was reminded, listening to Stuckey’s interview, of a family member attending a large, city-centre church which—on her reckoning—lost in the course of a few years over half the congregation. Some leaning ‘left’ were horrified by the church’s milquetoast response to George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests. Their concerns were not, like Stuckey, with the ‘unbiblical’ forms of justice on display from the protestors. This moment called for prophetic clarity about racial injustice. When their church demonstrated merely a willingness to speak generally about racial justice but did not publicly ‘take a side’ and join ‘the resistance,’ they moved on.

When it comes to covid restrictions, immigration, or evaluating the legacy of public figures like Charlie Kirk, George Floyd or (more recently in the UK) Henry Nowak, scripture and the gospel are not silent. But the way to apply theological principles to concrete situations and the political lessons which should be drawn from tragic events, are often far from obvious. It is not wrong to feel uncomfortable if a pastor moves too quickly from a principle like ‘immigrants should be cared for’ or ‘God should be honoured’, to more contestable policy prescriptions such as ‘immigration restrictions must be loosened’ or the ‘ten commandments must be displayed in schools.’

John Calvin comments that it is ‘an idle pastime for men in private life’—or, as he might say today, for dudes posting on discord servers and social media—to dispute about what form of government is the best. This is not only because fundamentally changing one’s form of government is highly unlikely, but also because what polity is best in a given place ‘depends largely upon the circumstances.’^[7] He proceeds further to say that while ‘the perpetual duties and precepts of love’—i.e. the natural/moral law—should inform every nation’s laws, there is nonetheless latitude regarding what sorts of laws and punishments are best suited to distinct cultures.^[8] Calvin offers here some basic tools, which we might retrieve and apply to this question of addressing political issues and events from the pulpit.^[9]

Regarding fundamental truths of Christian moral teaching, the church should speak with prophetic clarity, but even then, the particular policies which best foster these basic principles of morality are often a matter of ‘circumstances’. Evaluating policies therefore requires not merely submission to scripture and the gospel but prudential judgments and skill in public policy, as we aim to discern what sorts of legislation best conduce to justice in a given context.^[10] The pulpit should not primarily be a place for such contestable human judgments but is the site where a liberating divine word breaks forth in a hungry world. While not wholly ruling out circumstantial applications, this should keep us alert to the temptation of conflating this divine word with contextual and contestable human judgments.

We need, as Karl Barth puts it, to distinguish the ‘Word of God’ from the ‘word of man.’ This distinction is not impermeable. Barth himself famously applied scripture directly to the challenge of the Third Reich. Nonetheless, scripture rarely speaks with the specificity we desire. ‘How little fundamental information [the bible] offers in regard to the difficult questions of business life, marriage, civilisation, and statecraft, with which we have to struggle!’ This is in part because in the bible ‘the chief consideration is not the doings of men but the doings of God—not the various ways which we may take if we are men of good will, but the power out of which good will must first be created.’^[11] If Barth is right, then those objecting to ministers who do not use the pulpit to regularly speak with authoritative clarity on the latest debated policy or event are—ironically—in danger of encouraging the dilution of the pulpit’s authority.

What pastors choose to say, but also what they choose not to say from the pulpit, explicitly and implicitly commends to parishioners a vision of what constitutes the core of the gospel and as binding Christian moral teaching and what is more contextual or circumstantial. In short, they either explicitly or implicitly distinguish the ‘Word of God’ from even potentially true ‘words of men.’ Augustine famously says ‘To believe what you please, and not to believe what you please, is to believe yourselves, and not the gospel.’^[12] If you stop listening because your pastor is not publicly taking sides regarding each new partisan debate, far from seeking an authoritative public witness you are rejecting the authority immediately before you. While sometimes this is justified, when this becomes our knee jerk reaction, we contribute to the ‘marketplace’ approach to church which is a driver of the church’s anaemic authority in modernity.

Does my argument imply a political quietism? Should Martin Luther King have avoided politics and stuck to preaching justification by faith? No. The church has an important political role.

Tobias Cremer suggests that the public statements of clergy are ‘one of the most important but also one of the most underestimated factors’ determining the ability of politicians to co-opt religion to engender popular support. Cremer’s study—which examines political coopting of religion in Germany, France, and the US—will make both left and right uncomfortable. He suggests that when centre-left and centre-right parties increasingly brand themselves as non-religious or aggressively secular and starkly oppose traditionalist views regarding sexuality and abortion, religious voters feel excluded and without options and often swing to more radical alternatives. Nonetheless, in general across Europe, as Cremer outlines in detail, populist parties tend to be most strongly supported by nominal, cultural Christians who do not propound orthodox Christian beliefs or attend church.^[13] Despite dwindling church attendance, he concludes that church leaders in contexts in which religion is being appealed to in politics retain a surprising moral authority and social influence. When they speak against the excesses of politicians and oppose the co-opting of religious symbols in ways which are detached from the ‘substance’ of Christianity, their voice is surprisingly effective in shaping public perception.^[14]

The church, even in our secular age, sometimes retains unexpected cultural authority. If this is to continue, ministers should not be silent on political matters but should resist the temptation to speak like pundits. Instead, they should bind themselves to the ‘Word of God’ received from the apostles. This does not involve political quietism but the humility and tragic sensibility which recognises that in many instances it is far from obvious, in this vale of tears, what policies will make things better. If we refrain from declaring ‘thus saith the Lord’ in such contestable situations, perhaps when the church does speak, it will do so with a surprisingly resilient moral authority.

This posture of restraint might well make faithful pastors less appealing than online influencers and (minor) celebrity pastors pontificating on the debates of the day. Yet what masquerades as a search for stronger, more authoritative forms of preaching is sometimes closer to what Paul warns about: ‘For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers [sometimes with podcasts and YouTube channels] to say what their itching ears want to hear’ (2 Timothy 4:3). If quoting this verse is a bit harsh, at least I am not going ‘soft.’

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References

1. Ross Douthat, ‘Opinion | Is “Toxic Empathy” Pulling Christians to the Left?’, Opinion, The New York Times, 17 July 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/interesting-times-allie-beth-stuckey.html. ↑

2. Martin Gardner, The Flight of Peter Fromm (William Kaufmann, Inc, 1994), 226. ↑

3. Martin Luther King Jr, ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. ↑

4. Even if at times it does call for explicit partisanship. ↑

5. Douthat, ‘Opinion | Is “Toxic Empathy” Pulling Christians to the Left?’ ↑

6. Thus, I am not objecting to churches which, after consideration, felt in their context it was right to speak about Charlie Kirk or George Floyd. Instead, I object to the claim that any sound church has an obligation not merely to mourn the death of these figures but to offer definitive judgements about them. ↑

7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John Thomas McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Westminster/John Knox Press,U.S., 2001), 20.9. ↑

8. Ibid., 20.14-15. ↑

9. My claim is normative, not historical. Thus it is no objection to my argument to point to the plethora of highly partisan, historical sermons. My claim is about when Christians should speak in direct ways to partisan issues from the pulpit. Examples of when past Christians have done so informs but does not settle this normative question. ↑

10. As Thomas Aquinas likewise says: ‘We can consider just and good things in two ways: in one way formally, and then they are always and everywhere the same, since the principles of justice in the natural power of reason do not change; in the second way materially, and then just and good things are not everywhere and among all peoples the same, and such things need to be determined by law. And the latter happens because of the mutability of human nature and because of the different conditions of human beings and things at different times.’ Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputate De Malo, trans by Richard Regan (Oxford University Press, 2003), q. 2, a.4, ad.13. ↑

11. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (Harper & Row, 1957), 39-40. Of course this can be overstated and scripture’s very real implications for politics or marriage under-emphasised, but Barth is right to think the bible offers less specific practical guidance in these areas than we often would like. What it does offer beyond principles however, is what is more important for navigating difficult moral and political questions, namely, moral exemplars. ↑

12. Augustine, ‘Contra Faustum,’ in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 3., ed. by Philip Schaff (Christian Literature Publishing Co, 1887), XVII.3. ↑

13. European examples present a counterpoint to aspects of James Woods’s defence of cultural Christianity. Granted, I appreciate some of what he says and agree not all forms of ‘cultural Christianity’ are lamentable. Nonetheless, he does not take with sufficient seriousness the problematic forms of cultural Christianity on the rise at the moment, given that it is these forms of cultural Christianity which are engendering the critiques to which he responds. Woods asks, ‘would we rather have leaders who publicly support Christianity, even if hypocritically, or leaders who openly attack Christianity and biblical moral norms and flaunt their degeneracy?’ https://firstthings.com/in-defense-of-cultural-christianity/ This presents a false choice and is, in our moment, potentially a straw man. The objection is not to leaders who, though not personally Christian, endorse Christian morality. Is it so hard to imagine a world leader who ‘publicly supports Christianity’ while also ‘flaunting their degeneracy?’ Aside from examples which might have been closer to home for Woods, in Europe, many populist movements are advocating for a Christian society without the values of Christianity. As Éric Zemmour says: ‘I am for the church but against Christ.’ Tobias Cremer cites this, and multiple other example of populists who explicitly say they are not defending Christianity in a ‘religious’ sense but as a way of defending their culture against the other. Thus, unsurprisingly, as Cremer and Olivier Roy document, populist parties across Europe often appeal to Christianity while explicitly jettisoning its norms, not only regarding love of neighbour but also regarding sexuality and abortion. Tobias Cremer, The Godless Crusade (Cambridge University Press, 2023); Olivier Roy, Is Europe Christian? (Oxford University Press, 2020). Woods suspects critics of his account will worry that in cultural Christianity, ‘Christian language or norms are endorsed…without perfect sincerity’. The more salient worry is that the ‘language’ of Christianity is endorsed while jettisoning its inconvenient ‘norms,’ and that at times a ‘lack of sincerity’ encourages this. ↑

14. See, in particular, Cremer, The Godless Crusade, 89-110.

Originally published on Between Times on June 15th 2026.

There is an aspect of the Dutch world of education that is surprising to many who hold to a strong neutrality of the public square and the state’s funding of educational initiatives. It is a quietly radical provision, enshrined in Article 23 of the Dutch constitution, which guarantees not merely the right to educate but the right to found schools — and to have them funded by the state — on the basis of any religious, philosophical, or pedagogical conviction a community holds. Article 23 does not only create room for religious non-governmental^[1] education to be state funded, but also schools founded on Montessori’s ideals, the Free School tradition, Waldorf schools, Freinet-education, or Jenaplan, just to mention a few. Currently, over 70% of the Dutch schools are non-governmental schools, with less than 30% being ‘public’.

The passing of Article 23 in 1917 is so hard-won, so charged with memory and emotion that for many decades, politicians have been reticent to touch or suggest revising the Constitution, fearing the public reaction to such a revision. More practically, though, Christian parties like the CDA,^[2] the ChristenUnie,^[3] and the SGP have had enough representation to keep this constitutional change at bay. However, important questions remain: for how long will this provision stand? And what can be said in favour of the value of such a historic pressure for the modern educational landscape of the Netherlands? After reflecting briefly on the history of Article 23, we will suggest that defending the constitutional legal provision of Article 23 defends the Dutch’s society’s commitment, and thus that of the State, to a principled pluralism, boldly claiming that religious and philosophical convictions are welcome in the public domain.

The Schoolstrijd, Kuyper, and the Pacification

The Low Countries^[4] were incorporated into post-Revolution France in 1795. This seismic change brought with it the Enlightenment fuelled idea that education, which had long been shaped by the Reformed Tradition in the Netherlands, ought to be a matter of the secular state. Schools were to be neutral ground. Even after the Battle of Waterloo and the ending of French Napoleonic influence in the Low Countries, the liberal consensus remained: schools ought to be a neutral home for modern ‘burghers’ — based in reason, broad, and uninfluenced by specific religious confession.^[5] Communities could educate their own children in their own time, with their own money. This gave the schools funded by the state a financial advantage, and left Protestant and Catholic families paying twice: once in taxes that supported the public schools and once again for their confessional education. This position rested on a particular view of humanity and children, namely that young people in their formative years of learning fall under the supervisory duty of the state and reason, rather than under a confessional community and its traditions.

At the end of the 19th century, Abraham Kuyper’s contribution to the schoolstrijd (school struggle) is of great importance. His ideas regarding schools cannot be seen in separation from his broader theological convictions, particularly his concept of sphere sovereignty (soevereiniteit in eigen kring). It described the idea that God created and ordered society into a variety of distinct spheres, like state, family, commerce or economy, science, church, and importantly, education. Each sphere was subject to the sovereignty of God alone and was not hierarchically placed under any other: each is sovereign in its own area of responsibility.

This concept formed the basis for Kuyper’s arguments about the need for a plurality of education. Education, having its own ordained authority, is rooted in the calling of parents, educators, and their communities to shape and form the next generation. The state has no supervisory role to dictate or colonise the school system: that is simply not a part of the state’s sphere. Kuyper’s brilliance was to suggest that this is not merely a theological point but was a matter of principled pluralism. He was not asking for a Christian state, still less a Reformed monopoly. He was arguing that a genuinely free society must make room for communities to educate their children according to their own deepest commitments, and that a state which denies this while claiming to be ‘neutral’ is practising a peculiarly aggressive form of cultural imperialism. A similar argument could be levelled against those who, in like manner, would push for forced Christian education–a diametrically opposed argument failing in exactly the same way.^[6]

The pacification of 1917 saw the settlement of a debate that had raged for the previous 70-odd years. It granted that provided that quality standards were duly met, any group of people could establish a school based on their ideas and receive equal funding.^[7] Importantly, the pacification did not constitute a running away from public life into a segregated, privatised understanding of religion. Rather, it was a durable settlement reckoning with the challenge of a diverse and pluralist population with deep religious and confessional differences without devolving into either a theocracy of sorts or a secular monopoly.

As mentioned above, education and the oversight of the educational systems are under pressure in the Netherlands. With some regularity, news outlets report of schools founded on the principles of Islam supposedly teaching anti-democratic ideas, or confessionally reformed schools teaching that same-sex relationships ought to be avoided and cannot be expressed on school grounds.^[8] The debates around this have been fierce and not always coherent. The incoherence is probably also due, not in a small part, to growing religious illiteracy, making an informed discussion on this issue increasingly challenging. Critics of Article 23 argue that it enables segregation, fragments social cohesion, and allows schools to operate with values at odds with liberal democratic norms. Furthermore, some political parties not only question whether Article 23 ought to be changed or removed but even wonder whether informal education, like Sunday schools, Talmud/Thora schools, Islamic weekend schools, ought to be under the purview of the State Inspectorate of Education.^[9] Clearly, we see an ongoing tension between (religious) educational freedom and constitution-informed governmental responsibility to defend certain other rights.

Conclusions

So what did the Schoolstrijd reveal about the nature of tradition? Is this tradition one that should be relegated to history? If not, how can we think about it so as to continue to see it as a resource for continued well-functioning of the state? The Schoolstrijd reveals that the Dutch approach to education transcends the false dichotomy often presented by both secular liberals and Christian nationalists. The former advocate for a public square stripped of religious influence, while the latter seek to impose a single confessional doctrine as the foundation of society. The historic resolution of the Schoolstrijd, however, demonstrates that a third way is not only possible but necessary: principled pluralism. Article 23 is not a relic of the past but a forward-looking constitutional commitment to a society in which religious, philosophical, and pedagogical convictions are not merely tolerated in the private sphere but are actively welcomed into the public domain. It affirms that these convictions have a legitimate role in shaping institutions (including schools) that form the next generation of citizens.

This pluralistic framework, however, does not eliminate tension. The balance between educational freedom and the state’s responsibility to uphold democratic norms remains precarious, particularly as Western societies undergo cultural and demographic shifts. Since the 1960s, the rise of progressive liberalism as described by Hans-Martien ten Napel has increasingly concentrated public authority within the state, often at the expense of recognising the autonomy of intermediary institutions. Yet, as Ten Napel argues, a democratic ethos cannot be imposed by the state alone.^[10] It emerges organically from a society in which citizens and communities are empowered to cultivate their own moral and civic commitments. Schools, as one of these intermediary structures, play a crucial role in fostering the values and virtues that sustain a healthy democracy.

Thus, the defence of Article 23 is not merely about preserving a historical tradition but about safeguarding the conditions for a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. It requires a willingness to respect the institutional autonomy of religious and philosophical communities while ensuring that their practices align with the constitutional limits of a liberal democratic state. In this sense, the Schoolstrijd was not a retreat into the past but a bold step toward a future in which diversity of conviction is not a threat to social cohesion but its very foundation.

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References

1. The Dutch for this type of education is bijzonder onderwijs, which if translated to English would mean something like special education. However, when translated back most naturally, in Dutch this would be speciaal onderwijs, which is education for children in need of extra support. So, in this article, I’ll use ‘non-governmental’ education as the education offered in a particular tradition. Governmental, then, is education without such a basis.

2. A 1980 fusion of the ARP (Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party), the CHU (the Christian Historical Party), and the KVP (the Catholic People’s Party).

3. A 2000 fusion of the RPF and the GPV, both Christian parties with the broad Reformed leaning.

4. The collection of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

5. Education was still broadly ‘Christian’ just without the specific denominational colour.

6. This was a position held by Carl Romme, who proposed, right after the end of the Second World War, to change the constitution again and prescribe that all state funded education was supposed to be broadly Christian.

7. Technically, universal male suffrage was included in the same vote.

8. https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/collectie/14003/artikel/2584482-de-botsende-boodschappen-in-het-religieuze-onderwijs

9. https://nos.nl/artikel/2544248-kabinet-ziet-rol-voor-onderwijsinspectie-bij-toezicht-weekendscholen

10. Hans-Martien ten Napel, Constitutionalism, Democracy and Religious Freedom: To be Fully Human (Routledge, 2017).

Originally published on Between Times on June 15th 2026.

Modernity announced its maturity in the language of independence. When Immanuel Kant described enlightenment as humanity’s emergence from ‘self-incurred immaturity’, he framed freedom as the courage to use one’s own understanding without reliance upon inherited authority.^[1]

The modern imagination largely accepted this definition: to be mature was to be independent; to be free was to be unconstrained; to be modern was to stand on one’s own intellectual feet rather than lean upon tradition.

Yet the lived experience of late modern life complicates this picture. Many people who possess unprecedented freedom of movement, choice, and expression nevertheless describe a persistent sense of interior exhaustion. The problem is rarely described as oppression or lack of choice. It is described as distraction, fragmentation, anxiety, and the inability to remain present to one’s own life. The modern individual may be externally free yet internally scattered, able to choose but unable to attend, able to decide but unable to remain with what has been chosen.

I want to suggest that the contemporary crisis often described as moral, ideological, or spiritual may, at a deeper level, be a crisis of attention; and that tradition, particularly the practice of mental prayer, functions not primarily as a constraint upon freedom but as a pedagogy of attention that helps make freedom possible. If freedom requires the ability to perceive reality truthfully and to act without being governed by compulsive patterns of thought, then the formation of attention may be one of the most important cultural and spiritual tasks of our time.

The modern problem is often framed as a crisis of belief or values, but daily experience suggests something more basic. Many people do not primarily struggle because they believe the wrong things; they struggle because they cannot hold their attention upon what they believe is good. They cannot remain with prayer, with conversation, with reading, with work, or even with rest. Attention is constantly drawn elsewhere.

In accompanying leaders, clergy, and professionals, I have often encountered a similar description of interior life. One man described finishing a full day of meetings only to realise he had not truly been present to a single one. During one meeting he had been replaying an argument from the previous week; during another he had been imagining how a future decision might unfold; during a third he had been composing emails in his head while someone spoke in front of him. He was exhausted, not simply from labour, but from inhabiting several futures and several pasts at once. His body had been present all day; his attention had not.

This experience is increasingly common. Many people live in a state of continuous interior movement: rehearsing conversations that have already happened, constructing conversations that may never happen, managing reputations in imagined futures, and narrating their lives to invisible audiences. The result is not simply distraction but a deeper form of interior instability. We become people who struggle to decide what to notice, what to ignore, what to value, and what to love. The crisis, in other words, is not only moral or intellectual; it is attentional.

Attention sharpens the point. Autonomy depends upon what one can notice, weigh, and love; yet in a media environment increasingly designed to capture and monetise attention, the self never approaches judgment from nowhere. The issue is not whether we will be formed, but which formation serves freedom. The Enlightenment imagined the individual as capable of standing at a neutral height above tradition, selecting beliefs freely and rationally. But psychologically and socially this neutrality is difficult to sustain. Human beings are always formed by practices, communities, and habits long before they begin to reflect upon them.

Tradition, then, need not be understood primarily as the preservation of the past. It can be understood as the transmission of practices that form perception. Traditions teach people what to notice, what to ignore, what to love, what to fear, and what to hope for. They form not only what we think, but how we see. In this sense, tradition operates less like a museum and more like a school: it trains perception before it trains argument.^[2]

Within the Christian tradition, this formation of perception is particularly visible in the ascetical and contemplative traditions of prayer. The Desert Fathers and Mothers were already concerned with the instability of attention. Evagrius Ponticus described recurring patterns of thought, what he called logismoi, not simply as isolated temptations but as habitual thought-patterns such as resentment, anxiety, vainglory, despair, or restless boredom.^[3] These patterns did not merely appear within the mind; if entertained repeatedly, they began to shape how reality itself was perceived.

To address this, the desert tradition developed practices of watchfulness (nepsis), a form of attentive awareness that notices thoughts without immediately obeying them, and aimed at a condition they called apatheia: not indifference, but freedom from compulsive reaction.^[4]Attention, in this tradition, was understood as a moral and spiritual faculty that could be trained, distorted, healed, or purified. Long before modern psychology described cognitive bias or intrusive thought-patterns, the desert tradition had already identified the instability of attention as a central human problem.

This concern for attention later developed into what the Western tradition calls mental prayer. Mental prayer is not simply saying prayers silently; it is the deliberate engagement of attention, imagination, memory, and desire in the presence of God. Teresa of Ávila described it simply as ‘friendly intercourse with Him who we know loves us’.^[5] The definition is striking because it frames prayer not primarily as speech but as presence. The problem of prayer, therefore, is the problem of attention.

The tradition of recollection, particularly in Carmelite and Ignatian spirituality, is essentially the practice of gathering scattered attention and gently returning it to God. Recollection does not eliminate distraction immediately; rather, it trains the person to notice distraction and return again. Over time, this repeated returning begins to form habits of attention. The person becomes more capable of remaining present, less governed by intrusive thoughts, and less reactive to passing emotional states. Manuals of prayer such as those by Dom Vital Lehodey describe mental prayer as a gradual formation of attention, memory, and will toward God.^[6]

Christian attention, however, is not neutral attentiveness or a technique of self-mastery. In mental prayer the heart is recollected before God in Jesus Christ, so the end is not control but communion, obedience, and love. Nor do the practices work automatically, as though repetition itself could sanctify the person. The Christian tradition understands contemplation as grace before it is achievement: receptive disciplines through which the Holy Spirit heals attention, purifies desire, and conforms the person more deeply to Christ. The practices matter not because they possess mechanical power, but because they school attention into a posture in which grace may be received.

Modern behavioural science provides a vocabulary that makes some of these older insights more intelligible to contemporary readers. Research on attentional bias has demonstrated that individuals often develop patterned ways of attending to the world; anxious individuals, for example, may become more likely to notice threatening stimuli.^[7] Later research explored whether attentional patterns can be retrained, suggesting that repeated shifts in attention may alter emotional responses over time.^[8] Neuroscience describes similar processes in terms of plasticity: repeated mental activity strengthens neural pathways, making those patterns easier to repeat.^[9] Habits of attention become habits of perception, and habits of perception become habits of action.

If this is true, then freedom cannot be understood simply as the ability to choose at any given moment. Freedom must also include the formation of the kind of person capable of choosing well. If a person’s attention is constantly captured by fear, resentment, comparison, or imagined futures, then their choices will inevitably be shaped by those attentional habits. Freedom, therefore, is not merely the absence of constraint but the capacity to perceive reality truthfully and to act without being governed by compulsive patterns of thought. Rowan Williams describes the spiritual life in similar terms as learning to see reality truthfully rather than through the distortions of fear and self-deception.^[10]

Seen in this light, tradition appears differently. Tradition is not primarily a set of rules imposed from the past; it is a school in which perception is trained and attention is formed. Practices such as mental prayer, lectio divina, the examen, and the disciplines of silence and recollection are not arbitrary religious exercises. They are methods by which attention is slowly re-educated. The modern suspicion of tradition often assumes that freedom requires independence from inherited practices. But if attention itself is formed through habit, liturgy, desire, and environment, then freedom may require formation rather than independence.

The modern world has largely defined freedom as independence from external authority. Yet the experience of attentional exhaustion suggests that independence alone does not produce freedom. A person may be externally unconstrained yet internally governed by anxiety, resentment, distraction, and imagined futures. In such a condition, the problem is not lack of choice but lack of attention.

The Christian contemplative tradition proposes a different path. Through practices such as mental prayer, recollection, and watchfulness, attention is slowly trained. Over time, the person becomes less reactive, more present, more capable of seeing reality as it is and acting in love rather than compulsion. Freedom, in this account, is not merely asserted; it is formed.

Tradition, therefore, need not be understood as the enemy of freedom. It may instead be one of its conditions. For if we become what we repeatedly attend to, then a culture that cannot attend will struggle to remain free. The question facing modern people may not be whether we are free to choose, but whether we are free to see. And the quiet disciplines of attention preserved within the Christian contemplative tradition may turn out not to be relics of the past, but among the most necessary schools of freedom still available to us.

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References

1. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–22.

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

3. Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972), especially §§6–14.

4. The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).

5. Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1961).

6. Dom Vital Lehodey, The Ways of Mental Prayer, trans. A Monk of Our Lady of Gethsemani (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1946), 5–7, 23–31.

7. Colin MacLeod, Andrew Mathews, and Philip Tata, “Attentional Bias in Emotional Disorders,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95, no. 1 (1986): 15–20.

8. Yair Bar-Haim et al., “Threat-Related Attentional Bias in Anxious and Nonanxious Individuals,” Psychological Bulletin 133, no. 1 (2007): 1–24.

9. Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1949); Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself (New York: Viking, 2007).

10. Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2003).

Originally published on Between Times on June 8th 2026.

In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor expressed concern about our moral formation: how can a sense of self be rooted in morality, community and tradition when the society in which we live is increasingly fragmenting under the pressure of secularism and individualism?^[1]

New forms of traditionalism appear to offer an answer to this question. There is a lot of room to talk about tradition, a newly enchanted posture that is curious about Christianity, traditional family values, and alternatives to the liberalism of the last century. Frequently cloaked in the language of ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’, new traditionalism casts a vision for how the individual can live a good life by committing to one’s family, one’s nation, and one’s God. However, the question is whether this new traditionalism is all that deeply rooted within tradition.

One of the forerunners of this new traditionalism was the philosopher Roger Scruton. His work on conservatism stands out for his neo-Burkean reframing of conservatism. He reframed conservatism as inherently anti-liberal, traditionalist, nationalist, and culturally Christian.^[2] This was quite different from older understandings of conservatism, which explicitly build on the liberal democratic tradition, but emphasise permanence, scepticism about change, and a moderation of all too passionate politics.^[3]

New right-wing movements tend to prefer the Scrutonian reframing of conservatism and even claim they may be the ‘true’ conservatives. The best example of this is Liz Truss, who claimed to be the only real conservative in a room full of members of a conservative party! There is some overlap between the more politically minded conservatism and the more culturally minded traditionalism, however, these days the cultural is political. But what is so traditional about this new traditionalism?

This juxtaposition of the ‘New Right’ and ‘traditionalism’ comes with several fundamental tensions:

1) A reverence for history combined with an intrinsically reactionary behaviour to recent history

This view presumes that historical processes have placed society on the wrong path and that the current generation must bring about radical change to redirect the future. In the last decades, conservatives associated the need for ‘rigorous change’ with Marxism. This appetite for radical change is often a matter of rhetoric, it can come with reckless approaches to policy-making, damage done to democracies, the unsettling of international alliances, and as both the Russian Federation and the United States of America now demonstrate, even open ‘holy’ wars.

2) Valuing religious tradition, but experiencing it mostly online

Online brokers of new traditionalism may or may not be attached to a particular church. The New Right tends to congregate around charismatic influencers who produce and share conservative or traditionalist content. Many such influencers might make significant amounts of money from advertisements and from tempting viewers into subscriptions to access a more ‘exclusive’ layer of content. This contributes to a consumerist posture towards religious tradition. It is difficult to grow deep roots in any specific religious tradition that way. It also contributes to secularisation in that it implicitly endorses Christian formation done outside of traditional church structures, possibly primarily so.

3) A communal orientation that is built on individual moral transformation

The appreciation of family and nation can be an expression of the very social fragmentation that new traditionalism contests: it ascribes moral quality to individual moral transformations, individual commitment to family and individual commitment to the nation. New communities are based on political activism rather than local cooperation, solidarity or social capital.

This juxtaposition is not entirely accidental. New traditionalism is deeply entangled with high-profile fresh converts. It is a highly complex intersection of a hunger for tradition and meaning and finding this in something external to one’s previous reference frameworks. Sarah Riccardi-Schwartz writes about this phenomenon among new converts to Russian Orthodoxy in the United States.^[4] Roger Scruton himself was a convert to Anglicanism; the current Vice-President of the United States is a recent convert to Catholicism; even British activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon converted to Christianity while in prison.

While new conversions are generally welcomed by churches, the Christian tradition has been careful about the process of discipling. In his Teaching Christianity, Augustine understood this as an ongoing process, not a ‘moment’ of conversion – and many of the Church Fathers stressed the importance of mentoring and catechesis over a longer period.^[5] Anyone wanting to join a monastery would be put through a long process; it would not make sense to put a postulant in charge of an abbey.

It takes time to pass tradition down to the next generation and this process needs to be rooted in both morality and community. This is not what new traditionalism offers: it is a form of abstract, fragmented communitarianism that merges cultural with political consumerism. As Madeleine Armstrong rightly points out, the New Right appears to prioritise the nation over the family.^[6] While cloaked handsomely, new traditionalism gives expression to profound questions without offering answers that are rooted deeply within the Christian tradition.

I’m speaking here mostly of what Steven Grosby calls the temporal depth of tradition: where the past is integrated with an understanding of the present. Importantly, this understanding of the present does not choose which part of history it remembers and which it ignores. It also does not rely on a distant history to legitimise one’s criticism of the politics of the last half-century.^[7] Rather, temporal depth holds together the times one regards as ‘golden’ and the times one regards as ‘problematic’. Even if you think of our current time as the Brussels Sprout of your Christmas dinner, it is there because it is. Temporal depth marks a difference between pubertal rejection of our recent history and the mature integration of it into our generation’s historical self-consciousness.

This brings me back to the meaning of tradition. ‘New traditionalism’ acknowledges the paradox between a hunger for tradition and yet embodies a transformation of what tradition means. Charles Taylor emphasised the need for deep rootedness. New traditionalism does not yet have these deep roots but is already ambitious to become the biggest plant in the garden. Or the postulant thinking he should run the abbey.

There is also a political caveat: the language of new traditionalism meaningfully overlaps with Russian discourses on ‘traditional values’.^[8] This overlap is eagerly exploited by a range of foreign actors, as explored in The Next Wave report by Neil Datta.^[9] This comes in the shape of think tanks, funding streams, and policy engagement. But it also comes as content produced by foreign actors and just making something that already exists domestically go viral. When a particular post goes ‘viral’, it is not always possible to tell who is behind it. What we do know, is that these foreign actors are invested in destabilisation, polarisation, and that they seek to undermine democracy to suit their own ends.^[10]

The present political challenges require careful reflection on morality, community and tradition. This includes careful reflection on the web of relationships that have come to form our common life, including the tradition of democracy and the rule of law that offers baseline legal security within all these relationships.^[11] It may not be impossible to think up another form of government than our democracies, but currently, the New Right offers a gospel of strength, even exploitation, with strong social Darwinian overtones.^[12]

Crucially, the consumerist posture of new traditionalism makes the self both the source and adjudicator of tradition. Sometimes this is the individual self in one’s engagement with Scripture, tradition and reason; sometimes it is being part of communities that centre on charismatic influences; sometimes it is by invoking God haphazardly in matters of nation and state. These amount to self-referential, collective imaginations of the self: culturally, nationally and politically.^[13] Only rarely is this new traditionalism truly connected to both morality and community. Perhaps this is simply a juncture in the processes of secularisation and individualisation, much as it seeks to understand itself as an alternative to it.

To treasure tradition today is to deal carefully with the bonds that form our social life. This is a common, shared life to which people bring different political and religious commitments. Whereas the culture wars rip our societies in right versus left, perhaps the true traditionalists will further the truly shared and common dimensions of social life, which are the aspects that bring people together. That does not mean new traditionalism in its entirety needs to be rejected, but it needs to be understood for what it is: interesting and new, but not temporally deep.

For Charles Taylor, it was important that horizons of meaning were not entirely self-referential, but in fact external to us. For him, this is ultimately grounded in God. That seemed countercultural in the context of secularisation occurring during his lifetime, but perhaps it remains countercultural regarding the new traditionalism of today. It is no coincidence that many proponents of new traditionalism and the New Right seek the legitimation of sacred tradition, but churches do not owe this to what are essentially cultural and political movements.

For Christians, the temporal depth of its sacred tradition should be much deeper, and not primarily cultural or political – though many times in history, churches have rallied behind essentially cultural or political movements, even fascist movements. For Taylor, it is essential that the self is formed within a tradition, which means engaging with the historical depth of the tradition. This formation within the tradition is perhaps more about seeking wisdom than about fighting culture wars, or indeed actual wars. After all, like King David was told, those who fight ought not to oversee the building of the temple.^[14]

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References

1. Taylor, Charles. “Sources of the Self.” (1989): 202011-08.

2. Scruton, Roger. The meaning of conservatism. Vol. 21. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980; Scruton, Roger. How to be a Conservative. A&C Black, 2014.

3. For example, Oakeshott, Michael, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, ‘Political Education’ and ‘On Being Conservative’, in his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and exp. edn (1991).

4. Riccardi-Swartz, Sarah. “American conservatives and the allure of post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy.” Religions 12, no. 12 (2021): 1036.

5. Augustine, Saint. On Christian Teaching. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999.

6. Armstrong, Madeleine. ‘The Right, Edmund Burke, and Family Policy: Misappropriations of the “Little Platoon”’. https://canopyforum.org/2024/11/13/the-right-edmund-burke-and-family-policy-misappropriations-of-the-little-platoon/.

7. Grosby, Steven Elliott. Nationalism: A very short introduction. Vol. 134. Oxford University Press, 2005.

8. Stoeckl, Kristina, and Dmitry Uzlaner. The moralist international: Russia in the global culture wars. Fordham University Press, 2022. See also, Elsner, Regina. ‘Gender, Russian Orthodoxy and the invention of traditional values’. https://canopyforum.org/2024/10/31/gender-russian-orthodoxy-and-the-invention-of-traditional-values/.

9. Datta, Neil. The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Regaining Power (report, 2025), https://www.epfweb.org/node/1147.

10. See various reports by Justice for Prosperity, https://justiceforprosperity.org/investigations/.

11. Bretherton, Luke. Christ and the common life: Political theology and the case for democracy. Eerdmans, 2019.

12. Field, Laura K. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Princeton University Press, USA, 2025.

13. See also Van der Tol, Marietta, and Philip Gorski. “Secularisation as the Fragmentation of the Sacred and of Sacred Space.” Religion, state & society 50, no. 5 (2022): 495-512.

14. Comp. 1 Chronicles 28:3.

Originally published on Between Times on June 1st 2026.

For anyone interested in the history of ideas concerning free speech in the political arena from a left-wing perspective, this book has a wealth of material. Fara Dabhoiwala is an historian and senior research fellow at Princeton. Of Indian heritage, he was born in England, brought up in the Netherlands, and is now an American citizen. His background is evident in his interests with the book tilted towards an attempt to discover how the US has become a place where freedom of expression is viewed as a fundamental personal right with what he describes as the ‘sacred nature’ of the First Amendment. In his view, there is a mismatch between how Americans talk about ‘free speech’ now and how it was conceived of in Britain, Europe, India, China, Indonesia, or almost anywhere else. His book sets out to prove his point.

Dabhoiwala’s focus is primarily on the colonial and postcolonial West while almost exclusively dealing with both press freedoms and political speech. He begins with some reflections on the power of speech to heal or harm, before turning to explore the background to what he calls the ‘invention’ of the modern concept of free speech in the early eighteenth century. Here he introduces the reader to two texts he returns to often: Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty(1859). The former, he claims, ‘essentially invented the modern idea of political free speech’ while the latter consolidated these ideas. Both, he argues, have had far-reaching (negative) impact with untold influence on the modern American absolutist concept of free speech.

He then turns his focus to how the idea of free speech ‘was manipulated to different effect in contrasting global settings’. (6) Included in this list is the white supremacist slave societies of the Caribbean and North America as well as colonised India, Scandinavia, France, and the US. He charts the impact and effect of Scandinavian free speech laws, drawing out here some of the more positive aspects of European laws in terms of balancing liberty with restraint. He also notes the confluence of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the US Constitution in history meaning the ‘intertwined early free-speech history’ of these two nations ‘had remarkable, far-reaching consequences’. (6)

In line with his own personal interests, he has a concentrated focus on India, demonstrating how colonial laws of the 1800s, designed to control the masses and prevent insurrection, established a problematic foundation for modern day India. These laws specifically relate to religious offense, which Dabhoiwala argues fomented rather than curbed religious fanaticism, precipitating grievances and attacks between Hindus and Muslims. He concludes with a long chapter on how and why contemporary Americans view free speech through an absolutist and individualist lens. He sees American law as the most powerful free-speech law in the world, while elsewhere he sees ‘the right to speak freely is balanced by the obligation to do so responsibly’. (64)

There are many claims I have not researched personally: the impact of Cato’s Letters; the Scandinavian history of free speech laws; the impact of British colonial law on modern day India; and American jurisprudence. I was interested and appreciative of the wealth of information and much of his perspective despite the obvious bias which permeates the whole work.

What particularly interested me were some of his more general claims from a British and European perspective as they are both important and problematic as well as deserving of further consideration. Dabhoiwala’s questions are good questions, around truth, harm, public good, social order, regulation and censorship. ‘The real questions are never “Should people be allowed to say that?”, let alone “Do you support free speech?” They are, rather—what should “freedom” mean? What is free speech for? And, whose speech are we talking about, where and to whom? Starting from these propositions probably won’t make it easier for us to agree with one another: but it would surely produce a more honest and constructive conversation’. (180) And further, ‘Why should bad-faith spreaders of disinformation be treated as responsible or persuadable interlocutors?’ ‘[W]ho ends up bearing the burden of the spread of poisonous lies and hatred?’ ‘How are ordinary citizens meant to navigate and judge the veracity of an unregulated stream of dubious and untrustworthy information?’ (308) All of these are important questions. Unfortunately, he does not really provide any detailed answers.

One of the difficulties with the book is that Dabhoiwala deals almost exclusively with freedom of speech in relation to the press which, in my view, leads to some rather gaping omissions for a contemporary book. Notwithstanding that he has a fairly uncompromisingly negative attitude towards the press, he does raise important questions around money, power, and partisanship, where and how news is reported. His scepticism at least made me grateful for the Leveson Report, the result of an inquiry initiated by Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom to investigate the ethics of the press, which has, in theory, led to regulation around fair and unbiased reporting.

A further difficulty is Dabhoiwala’s lack of real attention to the reality that we are flooded with ‘news’ that comes at us from a plethora of unregulated, biased, and unverifiable sources. Whether we engage with it or not, Google, Meta, X, YouTubers, AI slop, bots, trolls, and misinformation are all part of our lives and attitudes to speech on the internet matters deeply. Only at the very end of the book does Dabhoiwala raise the question of current tides shaping popular opinion. Here, he only mentions Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and Facebook, which does, of course, put him out of date.

Dabhoiwala believes that English-speaking people today, unlike their premodern ancestors who saw the dangers of speech, believe ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’. (264) This I disagree with given that we have all watched the fearful eviscerations that go on under ‘cancel culture’, and these through words, words that are vicious, personal, threatening abuse, often laced with threats of sexual violence and death to women. We do not live in a society that believes words do not damage. I would also suggest that it is not entirely true in the UK and Europe that ‘Despite the principle of equality of voice, the speech of women, trans persons, people of colour, the poor, the disabled and other relatively disempowered groups is still routinely marginalized’. (177) It may be true for some of the above, but it depends on a person’s situation whether this pertains fully for all the groups mentioned. We live in a more complex world.

All in all, Dabhoiwala’s work raises questions it does not really answer, misses some important issues, and is very partisan in its outlook. It is, however, a good conversation starter. I bought the book because it strikes me that we really need to be doing some good thinking around free speech. Here are some further questions: Is it true that if everyone can speak freely the truth will inevitably triumph? Does everyone deserve an equal hearing? If so, why? What do we do with concepts such as obscenity, blasphemy, sedition, slander, defamation, and disloyal speech? How might censorship function in relation to those categories? What do we do with free speech in art, humour, satire, and theological discourse? How is religious toleration linked to freedom of speech? Interestingly, Dabhoiwala observes that the authors of Cato’s Letters were both from nonconformist backgrounds. In his view, Gordon and Trenchard ‘had simply taken existing arguments about religious liberty of expression, and twisted these to fit political speech’. (50) Dabhoiwala sees this as a ‘twisting’ or distortion and treats this with suspicion. However, for me, this highlights the very pressing need for further conversation around the intersection of religious freedom, tolerance, and political freedom of speech.

He concludes: ‘Current western theories of free speech, with their focus on individual rights, and their relative neglect of the public good and the realities of the media landscape, are poorly equipped to address this vital problem’. (282) His one solution is rooted in a ‘sound scholarship model’, academic freedom, peer reviews, testing, double-blind reports, and fact-checking, as well as scholarly respect and civil expression. (342) This is a good suggestion, but it will not hold any sway over the flood of unregulated internet speech.

For a way forward, I would highly recommend engaging with Peter Hyman’s work on ‘discernment’. Like Dabhoiwala, he notes that context is everything but posits the regulation of speech with the recipient. He cites Jeffery Boakye, a teacher of discernment in schools. ‘When you’re presented with what feels like infinite options, avenues, volumes of content, the real skill is being able to discern what is valuable, to understand where that value comes from in a very specific context, because it might change from context to context, and to have some basis of knowledge that gives you the confidence to know that your conclusion, that your choice, is the next best step forward’.^[1]

It strikes me that both Boakye and Hyman are sounding exactly the right chord and I find it interesting they choose a word used in the New Testament to describe a spiritual gift in relation to testing the provenance of a spirit or spirits (1 Cor 12:10; Heb 5:14). They also bring out the idea of the ‘moral’ value and impact of a text and how to weigh this up. Hyman writes ‘[t]here is something appealing about the word discernment. It is a serious, almost old- fashioned word. It is more than judgement and more than critical thinking. It says not just that I am making a judgement but that I can truffle out truth and quality’. Precisely. In light of what they call ‘the AI juggernaut heading towards us’, it seems the onus now needs to be not only on wise and protective legislation (which does matter) but on educating individuals and communities in a type of intellectual and spiritual formation that means we are able to discern truth from falsehood, fact from fiction, the potential to construct and create or to destroy and decimate, and to act accordingly.

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References

1. Peter Hyman on Substack, accessed April 20, 2026:

Changing the Story

​​The lost art of discernment

“My aim is to teach discernment…

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4 months ago · 59 likes · 9 comments · Peter Hyman

Originally published on Between Times on May 26th 2026.

In my hometown I am part of a fine group of people who study ancient texts. We meet on a weekly basis to read these texts in a contemporary translation, while usually at least one of us can read them in their original language as well and explain them from that perspective. We usually gather around one or two of these texts for over an hour or so on a fixed day of the week. Interestingly, the group does not just consist of academics. It also counts among its members retailers, farmers, truck drivers, IT-specialists, plumbers, teachers, pensioners, and others. Most of these people have been part of our group for many years – some had even stayed for eight decades or so, until their age forbade them from coming to the place where we meet (usually a clearly recognisable building constructed especially for our purposes). We even have children in our group – we attempt to explain to them the most important take-homes of the ancient texts to be discussed on their own level. Most of our members are very committed to our sessions (some will even gather twice a week). They seriously want to know what the ancient texts we read have to tell. When they move houses to another place, they will typically join a similar group in their new environment.

The groups I am writing about are, of course, religious congregations, and the buildings where they meet are called churches. Imagine there were no churches at all. What an enormous amount of time and energy it would take to establish the worldwide network of them that we have today, and to properly organise everything that is going on in their sessions! If this were possible at all … The reason why we have them and continue to have them over time (since all the time new generations find themselves attracted to these reading groups) can be captured in one simple word: tradition. We come together because members of the previous generation – often our parents, but sometimes others – stimulated us to do so and tried to explain to us the relevance of the ancient texts and the sessions around them. The people who initiated us were themselves introduced to the sessions in a similar way by their own parents or caretakers, and so on. That is how tradition works.

To be sure, most congregational meetings on Sunday are not just reading sessions but at the same time worship services, prayer hours, occasions for philanthropy and for rites de passage, social events – and many more things. Yet, the reading and interpretation of ancient texts takes centre stage in them. The substance matter of the texts is not seen as just ‘nice to know,’ but as somehow divinely inspired and therefore of utmost importance. We listen to them in order to find the good life, and to grow in our living this good life.

How did we come to hold such high views about these ancient texts? Well – they did not dawn on us out of the blue but were handed over to us by people and institutions (our parents, churches, schools, etc.) who went ahead of us. That is to say: they were traditioned to us. Thus, all this testifies to the central importance of tradition and traditioning in the life of faith. A tradition – to borrow a famous definition – is ‘an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined.’^[1] Note that, on this definition, a tradition is far from a bastion of narrow-minded conservatism, hostile to argument, reflection and revision. On the contrary, traditions are characterised by never-ceasing processes of argument, reflection and revision. And yet, they pivot around ‘fundamental agreements,’ such as, in the case of the Christian tradition, the conviction that God has spoken and speaks to us through the Scriptures.

Therefore, both in our faith and in our culture we owe a lot to traditions. In fact, it would be impossible to live our lives without participating in traditions. We always find ourselves dropped somewhere in midstream of them. Those who are critical of all traditions, or think they can do without them, usually suffer from myopia. Even the attempt to break away from traditional Christianity by going back to the first Christian community as portrayed in the book of Acts is actually quite traditional – the 16^th-century Reformation emerged from this ideal, as did many later evangelical and charismatic movements. And those who play off tradition against the motto sola Scriptura should realise that, as biblical scholars have abundantly shown, Scripture itself is full of traditions – whereas the motto itself emerged within a specific 16^th-century historical tradition.

It seems better to realise this and to discern what we can actually learn from the traditions we are part of. The best way to prevent ourselves from belittling tradition or caricaturizing and dismissing voices from the past that have shaped our culture, as well as our ways of being church, is to actually study them and listen to them.^[2] That is also a matter of fairness – for why would we prioritise the input of our contemporaries at the expense of these voices from the past? Why would present-day views and voices be the most meaningful or profound ones? Can’t they just as well lead us to confusing the truth with the spirit of the age – something which often can best be seen with the benefit of hindsight? At the very least, we must acknowledge G.K. Chesterton’s point that tradition is ‘democracy extended through time.’

And yet – all this is not to suggest that we should adopt tradition wholesale. We should not do so for at least three reasons. First of all, it is impossible since (as Calvin already saw) our ecclesial tradition is, in fact, hopelessly divided. The voices of the fathers and mothers of the church are not just nicely ‘diverse’, but oftentimes contradictory. So we have to make choices. Second, it is part of the brokenness of our lives and of world history that also deeply ambiguous traditions are handed down from generation to generation, with many people imbibing them consciously or unconsciously. Such traditions can even go underground for a long time, so that we may be tempted to think they are gone for good, only for them to reappear in the open when the cultural atmosphere has changed – as is happening these days with fascism in parts of the world.

Third, in the life of the faith we should not adopt tradition wholesale because sometimes the tradition – even where it is united – has it wrong. This may seem a harsh, perhaps even an arrogant statement to make. But I believe it is undeniable. A plain and relatively innocent example of this is the Christian tradition’s habit of reading the Bible in a way that supports a geocentric world picture. Some theologians of the past – e.g. Dutch theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) – were adamant that the church should not give up on this interpretation. Voetius thought that the church would fall if it allowed for such a change – for if it is possible to change the meaning of one or two biblical verses, what would prevent us from changing the meaning of all other texts as well?^[3] Today, however, Christians unanimously agree that Voetius was wrong; it turned out that the church could live very well with a new interpretation of biblical verses. Less innocent, of course, are examples that involve the issues of slavery and racial discrimination. Both of these have been defended by major voices from tradition in ways we can only firmly reject today. Of course, it is relatively easy to agree on this in hindsight, but it is less easy to discern in real time when some part of the tradition has to be critically revisited.

In any case, it is for such reasons that in Protestantism tradition has never been made sacrosanct (at least not officially). It was acknowledged, as I think it should be acknowledged today, that the Spirit of God guides the followers of Jesus in all truth (John 16:13). Jesus promised that this ‘Spirit of truth’ would stay with the church forever (John 14:16), so throughout the ages. Apparently, the Spirit could not stay just for a while until tradition could take over. Rather, we will continuously need the Spirit to help us discern when we should cherish some traditional view or practice and hold on to it (if necessary even stubbornly so), and when the riverbed of tradition takes a new turn which the Spirit urges us to follow. The latter does not mean abandoning the tradition, but reinterpreting some of its outworkings in the light of its inner core. This is what Peter had to do in Acts 10-11, when the Spirit prompted him to reinterpret the traditional Jewish food laws in light of their fulfilment in Christ.

One of the special gifts of this Spirit is the gift of discernment (1 Cor. 12:10; cf. 1 John 4:1-3).^[4] It is this gift that we need sorely, since left to our own devices we may easily be misled (either by giving up on a certain tradition or by sticking to it). Yet, appeals to the Spirit easily become subjective and by extension, as tradition (!) has shown, divisive. Therefore, even having the promise of the Spirit, we need a criterion that shows us in what situations re-adjusting and re-applying the tradition is pertinent. This criterion can only be found in the Word of the gospel. In other words, recalibrations of tradition should always be inspired by the desire to further the tradition’s core – that is, the gospel of Jesus Christ as the Incarnate one who was born, lived, died and rose again for us and for the world.

Let me end with one example of what this may mean. For a long time in the past, Christians have justified slavery as a societal institution by appealing to the Bible and to the majority of authoritative Christian thinkers (Gregory of Nyssa being one of the very few exceptions). It is only when believers started to re-examine this tradition from the heart of the gospel that they gradually came to critique slavery and to launch the abolitionist movement. With the benefit of hindsight, Christians agree that this way of critiquing tradition in the name of its very core was a matter of proper spiritual discernment.

Today, we may wonder what this might mean for discerning the way of the Spirit in such contested contemporary issues as the propriety of female leadership in churches or the acceptance of evolutionary theory.^[5] Given their various traditions and cultural backgrounds, Christians will not easily reach consensus on such issues. And yet, there is no other way than to sincerely attune to how the Spirit leads the church. Therefore, whenever Christians come together in their weekly ancient-text-reading-sessions, they pray for the Spirit to enlighten their hearts and to show them how to continue their tradition in ways that are true to the gospel as its very heart.

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References

1. Alisdair McIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 12; cf. my comments in Henco van der Westhuizen (ed.), Letters to a Young Theologian (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2022), 272.

2. Important pleas to this effect include Stephen R. Holmes, Listening to the Past. The Place of Tradition in Theology (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2002), and Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

3. Gisbertus Voetius, Thersites heautontimorumenos (Utrecht, 1635), 256-283 (esp. 271, 281, 283). Cf. Gijsbert van den Brink, Reformed Theology and Evolutionary Theory (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020) 72-73.

4. Cf. e.g. Cornelis van der Kooi and Gijsbert van den Brink, Christian Dogmatics: An Introduction(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 522-524.

5. On the latter, see e.g. Gijsbert van den Brink, Reformed Theology and Evolutionary Theory(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).

Originally published on Between Times on May 18th 2026.

‘The Church of England is dropping the word “church” to be more “modern”’!^[1] So read the headline of a national newspaper summarising a report we had recently published from our church planting research centre in Durham.^[2]

Contrary to the national press attention, the report did not state that the Church of England had sought to give up the word ‘church’ in a push towards modernisation (be careful what you read!). However, the report did find that across the new contexts represented by the research, there was a lack of consistency in terminology in how churches described new initiatives. Some talked about starting ‘new worshipping communities,’ some ‘new congregations,’ and others ‘fresh expressions.’ None of the contexts we engaged used the language of ‘church’ or ‘church plant.’

While the report focused on the Church of England, the broader question about what counts as a ‘church’ is not unique to this setting. The ‘Emerging Church’ movement in the United States sought to experiment with ecclesial forms to find ‘new ways of being church.’^[3] As Stuart Murray observes, within this movement, ‘There is no consensus … about what language to use…“fresh expressions of church”; “future church”; “church next”; or “the coming church”’ are all used.^[4] A new worshipping community, or a fresh expression of church, might take the form of surfers gathering to pray on the beach, young mums engaging in bible study, or a worship service held in a cafe. While there is no one form common to all (indeed, this is precisely the point), the movement is united by a desire to experiment, to find fresh ways of communicating the gospel to a new generation.

Many have found the shifts in ecclesiology occurring within these movements concerning. Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank provocatively describe these experimental liturgical forms as a kind of ‘lavender scented cat litter,’^[5] seeking to dispose of the historical traditions of the church in favour of whatever fad might happen to be most effective at present. The worry many have is that in their desire to engage with culture afresh, they have disposed of something crucial about what it means to be church.

So what is at stake for our ecclesiology in the shifting use of language and form? While there is surely many ways we might examine this question, a helpful place to start is to examine this question through the lens of the Nicene Creed. This is because, as Luke Timothy Johnson describes, in using the words of the Creed, ‘we affirm that the denial of the church leads to a distortion of authentic Christian life, in which something essential is lost.’^[6]

One, Holy, Apostolic Thing?

Let’s consider two particular clauses of the Creed which concern the Church:

‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.’

First, we profess that the Church is one. We should note that the church is one not because of any humanly imposed unity, but because of the work of the Triune God. The New Testament word used to describe the church – ekklesia — quite literally refers to the gathering of the Lord’s people; and as Lesslie Newbigin observes, this term ‘by itself tells us nothing more than the English words “meeting” or “gathering”. To know more about the nature of the church, we need to know who called the meeting and for what purpose.’^[7]

Indeed, in the very structure of the Creed, we can see that these claims about the Church and her life are not simply an addendum to the prior claims about the persons of the Trinity. Rather, in T.F. Torrance’s words, ‘the clauses on the Church …follow from belief in the Holy Spirit, for the holy church is the fruit of the Holy Spirit.’^[8] Thus, what makes a church a church is not its adherence to certain forms or practices, but its participation by the one Spirit in the one body of Christ. Tom Greggs puts it succinctly: ‘The being of the church is not held in the particular contingent phenomena of the church’s forms; the being of the church is held in the constancy of the Holy Spirit.’^[9]

In some respects, then, worries about shifting ecclesial forms feel misplaced. If the Church is a gathering by the Spirit into the life of Christ, then all who gather indwelt by the Spirit and professing Jesus as Lord belong to the one Church, however or wherever they gather, whether in Georgian churches and uncomfortable pews, in houses and schools, or around surfboards.

But caution is also needed here. While we must acknowledge that the boundaries of the one Church may indeed lay beyond our human forms, we risk missing something about the church’s character if we affirm that any gathering in the name of Christ should be recognised as an instantiation of the one church. As John Milbank puts it, ‘St Paul wrote to Galatia and Corinth, not to regiments or to weaving-clubs for widows. He insisted on a unity that emerges from the harmonious blending of differences.’^[10] The gathering of Church around interest groups risks missing precisely the point Newbigin makes above; the act of gathering alone is itself not enough, we must pay attention to who is gathering and how. In finding common points of cultural interest and gathering the Church around these, we risk doing the gathering ourselves, rather than allowing the work of the Spirit to gather us across difference and divide.

But it is for this reason that I think the shift away from using the word ‘church’ to describe every new initiative might in fact be precisely what this movement needs. The ambiguity might be a gift for our ecclesiology. One of the points which is consistently made in favour of new forms of church is their ability to reach unchurched communities. My own experience of fresh expressions in the 2010s was that they can often be incredibly transient communities in which people needed to be held in a safe context while exploring faith or undergoing a period of faith deconstruction. In the community I led during this time, a simple weekly breakfast was combined with a discussion around a passage from scripture, in which any and every opinion was welcome. We always concluded with some creative way of reflecting on the passage. For many in this community, the simplicity of honest conversation, the openness of unfussy spiritual practices, and the time to develop deep friendships kept them engaged with faith at a time when otherwise they would likely have let go. Was this a church? I’m not entirely sure. But was this the most important question in the lives of those it impacted? Categorically not.

The Church as Sacramental Body

Second, the church is sacramental in nature. As Brian Hebblethwaite notes, the mention of baptism in the Creed can be taken to ‘symbolize the sacramental nature of the Christian religion.’^[11] The language of ‘gift’ is helpful again here—in the sacramental life of the Church we gather not around our own agendas and best ideas, but around the pure gift of Christ’s life in and amongst us. In the breaking of bread and the pouring of water, we recognise that it is mysterious agency of the Triune God which is the centre of our lives together, not our shared belief, or sense of community.

Problematically, however, for many fresh expressions and emerging church contexts, there exists an ambivalent relationship to the sacraments at best. For many critics of such contexts, it is this disregard for sacramental tradition which is most problematic about new church contexts. In their desire to find new forms of church to engage afresh, something crucial is lost in the disposal of the gifts of baptism and eucharist.

But in emphasising the essential sacramental nature of the church’s life and the church’s traditions, we need not give up on the desire for the Church to engage deeply with communities. I think of a café church I served at in Dundee in which recovering drug addicts and adults with complex needs worshipped alongside teachers, police officers and students. This was a community that was deeply sacramental, gathered regularly around the eucharist and yet looked deeply unconventional in its forms. Sermons would regularly be interrupted by those wanting to share stories of their own experiences or to ask the preacher to explain more carefully. Hymns were combined with familiar melodies of Beatles or Rod Stewart songs. There was a regular cigarette break in the liturgy. I would go as far as to say that in the 6-months I was on placement with them, I received a more profound sense of what it meant to be ‘eucharistic’ than what I had encountered in decades of inherited church.

The Gift of Ecclesial Ambiguity

Perhaps the loosening of ecclesial language is a gift. Indeed, such a shift might allow us to take the pressure off every missional activity to be an innovative form of church planting. This does not mean that there are no boundaries to the church’s form, indeed, the sacraments present one such boundary. Rather, in being freed from the need to start new churches, and released to start new communities, congregations, or whatever else we might call them, we can create space for the missional innovation that is often needed, and a freedom to discern the work of the Holy Spirit outside of the restrictions of whatever tradition we find ourselves in.

However, given the reflections on the church’s boundaried nature, we should also hope that participants in such communities eventually come to participate in a diverse and sacramental community. This might mean participants joining existing church communities as a result of their newfound faith, but it might also mean a new initiative becoming a church, moving away from existing as a narrow interest-based community, and becoming a community open to all, in which the church’s historic sacraments are celebrated. In sum, rather than being a sign of moving away from tradition, perhaps some ecclesial ambiguity might be embraced as a gift: allowing us to insist both that not every spiritual community is a church but also acknowledging the profound missional benefits of new contexts for engaging afresh with today’s world.

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References

1. “Church of England dropping word ‘church’ to be more ‘modern’”, Janet Eastman, The Telegraph, 16^th August 2024, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/16/church-england-dropping-word-church-more-modern/

2. Will Foulger, “New Things: A theological investigation into the work of starting new churches across 11 dioceses in the Church of England” (Durham: Bede Centre, 2024), https://www.cranmerhall.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/New-Things-Final-1.pdf

3. Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World (After Christendom). (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2004), 73.

4. Ibid.

5. Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank, For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (London: SCM Press, 2013), 128.

6. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians believe and why it matters. (Image, 2004), 255.

7. Lesslie, Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of Church, Eugene, (Eugen OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008), 27.

8. TF Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church. (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 252.

9. Tom Greggs, Dogmatic Ecclesiology: Volume 1: The Priestly Catholicity of the Church. (Baker Academic, 2019), 19.

10. John Milbank, “Stale expressions: The management-shaped church.” Studies in Christian Ethics 21, no. 1 (2008), 123.

11. Brian Hebblethwaite, The Essence of Christianity - Fresh Look at Nicene Creed (London: SPCK, 1996), 169.

Originally published on Between Times on May 5th 2026.

Listen to the author explore this further in the podcast episode below:

The Catholic intellectual Joseph de Maistre wrote in the early 19^th century that ‘every nation gets the government it deserves,’^[1] a sentiment that has been restated repeatedly over the last two hundred years and is no less relevant today as we experience widespread despair at the calibre of our leaders, and anger at how we have been ‘let down.’^[2] Might de Maistre’s quip prompt us to self-reflection both with regards to the polis (our political leadership) and the polis tou theou (the church)?^[3]

What do we most want from our political leaders? The dominant demand is that they increase our short-term prosperity (or rather, that they increase my prosperity), so that much of our politics is now reduced to ‘how much I get.’ I still remember my incredulity before the Brexit vote when the local Labour representative knocked on my door and encouraged me to vote ‘remain’ because their analysis had concluded that this would be slightly better for my wallet. As if such a significant decision about whether or not to withdraw from a union established primarily to prevent war should be determined by a few hundred quid of personal income. Yet this is in keeping with our times and priorities. Now we must be ‘sold’ manifestos, in which our key analytical task is to discern whether or not we (as a household, not as a wider community) will be better off.

We also demand that our leaders are confident and clear at all times. When our politicians attempt to provide nuanced views they are accused of either not understanding the ‘essential points’ or of obfuscating. We demand that they make it clear what they mean, which means in practice: ‘say something simple.’ This is a hopeless situation for very little of importance can be reduced to the sound-bite catchphrases or twitter-length comments that count as ‘clarity.’

We must also note what we most certainly do not want – which is a leader who will challenge our beliefs or require us to change. We have managed to corporately achieve an infantile mindset in which we consider all of our problems to have nothing to do with our own actions. It is always ‘the system’ or ‘the institution,’ or in the last resort ‘someone else’ (the rich, poor, immigrant, Tories, liberals, etc…) – and it is that which needs sorting out, never me. This has become so entrenched that now even statements of fact are unwelcome. This was strikingly demonstrated when the chief economist of the Bank of England stated that due to a lengthy period of high inflation people had to accept that they were poorer.^[4] That was a simple statement of fact, but it was attacked by all the major political parties and mocked by the media. The idea that I may need to change my spending habits in response to reality is deemed unacceptable. We are narcissistic and immature in equal measure.

Why then should we complain about our political leaders? Given our unwillingness to face up to reality and our lack of attention to anything beyond short-term, self-focused issues, we should not be surprised to get opportunistic leaders for whom deception is the default modus operandi and who will inevitably be unable to solve our real problems because we will not tolerate real solutions. We get the leaders we deserve.

Much of what we seek from our politicians we also expect from our church leaders, although the forms in which we demand it may be slightly more subtle. We want leaders who will increase our prosperity, only in this case the demand to ‘make my life better’ is not usually about money, but about meeting my felt emotional, psychological or spiritual needs. We want them to make our spiritual lives easier – to provide us (somehow) with a clear path to intimacy with God, a meaningful life and spiritual vitality.

A clear path is important – we are just as impatient with our church leaders when they are nuanced, uncertain or change their minds. In our insecurity we demand their certainty. And we want it quickly.

The kicker, once again, is that along with all this the one thing we don’t want is to be required to change. Of all things this seems the most unlikely to be replicated in the church, for are we not those who are being changed from glory to glory?^[5] Is not ongoing change the normal Christian life? So it should be, but we still struggle to accept leaders who require this change from us. We may welcome being told stories of change or even being advised to change in sermons, but when our leaders look us in the eye and ask us directly to change our defences rise as high as ever.^[6] Is this not why we perceive most deficiencies in church life as a problem of the institution (or the leaders), rather than something that we are partly culpable for and thus requires us to change? Give us leaders with a clear and simple plan to solve such problems in a way that successfully meets my felt needs whilst requiring little or nothing from me! These are the leaders we want, but they are not the leaders we need.

The picture of church leadership that we find in the New Testament is a far cry from what I have just described. Instead, the heart of church leadership may be summed up in Paul’s expression in his letter to the Galatians where he said that he was in anguish ‘until Christ is formed in you.’^[7] That is what it is all about – seeing men and women formed into the image of Jesus – becoming like him in character, mature in faith, walking in the ‘obedience of the gospel of Jesus Christ.’

What then does this mean for our church leaders? If they are truly to pursue the formation of people into the image of Jesus, then they will have to repeatedly require us to change. It is ‘built in’ to the vocation: ‘teach them to obey everything I have commanded you’ said Jesus;^[8]those with particular responsibility to do that are lashed to the mast: they cannot but require us to change. Moreover, far from making our lives easier such leaders will make them harder, because following Jesus is hard! He warned us that ‘whoever would come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me…’^[9]

The process of formation is by its nature slow work. It is often hard to see and progress is inconsistent. It is impossible to measure in any truly meaningful way and is irreducible to a system. People cannot be programmed or organised into the image of Jesus – they must be formed. Obviously, then, a totally different definition of ‘success’ is called for that has far less to do with meeting felt needs, numerical growth or having lots of activity (which are the things we most naturally seek). There is nothing wrong with these things, but they are subservient to the formation of people. Thus church leadership, if it is to be consistent in pursuing its true goal, will be inconsistent on another level. Sometimes busyness is called for, at other times quiet; sometimes directive teaching is necessary, at other times space must be opened for discussion and exploration. One person must take responsibility within the life of the church family, another must refrain from doing so. We must learn to think about the work of God in years and decades, not just days and weeks. The bigger picture matters far more than the perceived urgencies of today.

The leaders we need will be those who will lead by example. As they labour in anguish that Christ might be formed in us, they must walk before us in that journey. To state this is to expect, therefore, our leaders to walk into failure, uncertainty and change over time. We may want infallible leaders, but anyone seeking the transformation of God will be shown to be weak, broken and wrong – many times over! To lead by example is to face the necessity of change, to repent, to lack answers; to be obedient enough to risk enough to fail. To lead by example is to become vulnerable.

If we are to be formed into the image of God, we need leaders who will pursue this good as their chief task. Who will refuse to promise what we want but do not need, or to accept simple and easy lies over difficult truth. We need leaders who will require us to change, and do so with integrity because they are walking these paths themselves. Leaders who are willing to disregard our immediate wants, where necessary, in order to help us pursue our most profound flourishing. Are these the leaders we deserve? Probably not. Our hope then is firmly set on the grace of God, for ‘even when we are faithless he remains faithful.’^[10] If he always gave us what we deserved we would all be lost – let us pray that he be graceful to us in the leaders he gives us.

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References

1. Joseph de Maistre, Lettres et opuscules inédits, 2nd ed., ed. Rodolphe de Maistre, vol. 1 (A. Vaton, 1853), 264.

2. In this article the ‘we’ refers primarily to those who live, like me, in the United Kingdom. That being said, I would argue that the posture towards leadership I describe holds fairly accurately across much of contemporary western culture.

3. Although in this article I suggest a few ways in which our postures toward these two spheres of leadership are alike (and deficient), I focus on a positive vision of leadership only with regard to the church for reasons of space and personal priority, not because there are no biblical and theological resources for a positive vision of political leadership.

4. See, for example, Michael Race and Vishala Sri-Pathma, “Bank of England Economist Says People Need to Accept They Are Poorer,” BBC News, April 26, 2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65308769.

5. 2 Corinthians 3:18.

6. By using the language of ‘requirement’ here I do not mean to describe or validate abusive or authoritarian church leadership, as I hope the rest of the article indicates. Rather, I mean pastors who are honest enough to present an uncompromised vision of the Christian life and directly encourage us to live it.

7. Galatians 4:19.

8. Matthew 28:20.

9. Matthew 16:24.

10. 2 Timothy 2:13.

Originally published on Between Times on April 27th 2026.

Contemporary society often treats ‘dogma’ with suspicion, associating it with rigid authority, intellectual repression, and a loss of personal freedom. Against this cultural backdrop, James Dominic Rooney’s Whoever Hears You Hears Me offers a timely theological intervention. Writing from the Catholic tradition, Rooney argues that dogmatic authority is not a regrettable addendum to Christian faith but a necessary expression of it. By grounding faith in the reality of divine speech, he seeks to overcome the perceived opposition between personal relationship and propositional truth, insisting that to trust God is inseparable from trusting what God has said. The result is a substantial contribution to contemporary theology, particularly in its refusal to concede that Christianity can remain coherent without public, authoritative judgments about truth.

At the heart of the book lies Rooney’s claim that faith is a responsive attitude to God’s personal communication. His definition of dogma as ‘public judgments about truths that are essential to Christian faith’ (1) rightly situates the Church as fundamentally receptive: dogma is not an ecclesial invention but the Church’s obedient response to divine address. Revelation, for him, is grounded in the unified work of Word and Spirit, and faith is fundamentally a matter of hearing and trusting God’s testimony. In this respect, the book offers a welcome corrective to subjectivist or purely experiential accounts of belief that detach faith from shared confession and normative truth.

Rooney is particularly effective in resisting popular suggestions that propositional claims are inherently inimical to personal relationship. He insists that personal relationships depend upon testimony and trust in what others say, and that a personal God who speaks cannot be encountered apart from the content of that speech. This insight allows Rooney to mount a compelling challenge to theological minimalism and to contemporary forms of Christianity that seek to preserve relationship while neglecting doctrinal truth.

Nevertheless, aspects of Rooney’s argument would benefit from greater nuance, particularly in his account of how divine authority is mediated through human institutions and how faith functions as a lived, Spirit-enabled reality. While his concern to defend the objectivity and normativity of revelation is well founded, the book sometimes places disproportionate weight on formal structures of testimony (especially ecclesial authority) at the expense of sustained reflection on the material content of revelation: God’s self-revelation.

While faith, for Rooney, does consist in believing specific truths on the basis of God’s authority as the one who speaks, he also insists that faith is primarily directed toward persons and only secondarily toward propositions, describing propositional truths as the ‘vehicle or necessary means’ (6) of personal relationship with God. Yet this important clarification does not always shape the overall argument. The sustained focus on the duty to believe authoritative testimony can suggest that faith is chiefly a relation to statements about God rather than a living relation to God through those statements. A fuller account of how dogma participates in, rather than merely points toward, the divine reality it names would strengthen Rooney’s position and help forestall this misunderstanding.

These concerns re-emerge in Rooney’s discussion of the rationality of faith and the so-called ‘motives of credibility.’ He rightly rejects Enlightenment demands for indubitable proof as a prerequisite for belief, noting that such standards ultimately undermine all knowledge. His insistence that faith is properly grounded in the virtue of faith itself coheres with the Christian conviction that belief is a gift of grace rather than the conclusion of an autonomous rational process.

Yet Rooney’s strong emphasis on ecclesial authority as the primary normative reason for belief sometimes risks overshadowing the internal work of the Holy Spirit. This risk is partially mitigated by his careful distinction between mere rational assent and saving faith. Rooney is explicit that genuine faith must be enlivened by the Spirit. Without this, belief remains lifeless, resembling the intellectual conviction of demons rather than a virtuous response to God. But despite this qualification, the overall thrust of the argument can still make faith appear as a sophisticated inference from historical and institutional premises. If faith is truly infused by God, its warrant is often more immediate than Rooney’s careful arguments concerning ecclesial procedures might suggest. The Spirit does not merely authorise trust in the Church but produces a direct certainty regarding the truth of the Word itself—an encounter with the self-authenticating Word of God rather than a conclusion reached by institutional reasoning.

This tendency is reinforced by Rooney’s political analogy for dogmatic authority, especially in his treatment of heresy. Rooney employs the analogy to clarify the sin of the will involved in heresy. The heretic, for him, is not merely one who errs intellectually, but one who insulates themselves from communal accountability, effectively redrawing the Church’s boundaries on their own authority. This framework offers a helpful sociological description of how doctrinal unity functions in historical communities. However, it also risks obscuring the Church’s distinctive theological character. As Rooney himself recognises, the Church is not simply a political body but a community constituted and sustained by the ongoing mediation of Christ and the Spirit. When doctrinal development is framed primarily in terms of legitimate representatives and normative procedures, the account can drift toward ecclesiological legalism, underplaying the Church’s dependence on divine agency.

A related concern arises in Rooney’s emphasis on the Church’s capacity to make irreversible doctrinal decisions. From my own Reformed perspective, I think his emphasis on this point ends up overstating the case. Rooney does leave room for protest and internal reform, carefully distinguishing the heretic from the reformer. He notes that the Church has at times recognised in retrospect that what once appeared to be settled dogmatic consensus (on matters such as religious violence or slavery) proved not to be genuinely normative. Still, while the Church must be able to identify and reject heresy, it remains a community of forgiven sinners whose judgments are always rendered under the judgment of the living Word. Even the most solemn dogmatic definitions do not exhaust the truth they confess. They bear faithful witness without ever possessing the truth in a way that eliminates the need for repentance, listening, and reform. Rooney’s defense of dogmatic authority is an important corrective to modern relativism, but I think it would be strengthened by a more consistently operative affirmation of ecclesia semper reformanda—a principle he explicitly acknowledges (245) but which exerts limited influence on the book’s overall structure.

Rooney’s critique of theological minimalism is among the book’s strongest sections, yet even here the argument occasionally presses too far. The claim that Christianity without authoritative dogma is theoretically indistinguishable from agnosticism risks overlooking the often simple and direct character of Christian faith. Rooney negotiates this concern by acknowledging that individual believers may hold innocent mistakes without forfeiting the objective virtue of faith. On his account, dogmatic authority is necessary not to perfect every individual belief, but to provide sufficient normative reasons to prevent the Gospel from dissolving into communal anarchy. Still, framing the issue as a stark choice between ecclesial infallibility and scepticism risks creating a false dilemma that underestimates the Spirit’s work in preserving the Church in truth through, and sometimes despite, its broken structures.

A further area I would like to see developed further concerns the relationship between God’s living speech and human propositional language. Rooney acknowledges that God reveals himself through human concepts, but his emphasis on belief as assent to propositions can inadvertently reinforce a gap between theological words and the reality they represent. Christian theology has long insisted that, when taken up by the Spirit, human language does more than represent God; it participates in the reality it proclaims. Faith, therefore, is not merely obedience to authority but illumination—a coming to see the truth as true. Without sufficient attention to this participatory dimension, faith can appear as submission rather than joyful recognition of the light that enlightens the mind.

This issue also connects with Rooney’s account of moral obligation in belief. The suggestion that one may have a duty to believe what one does not yet see as true risks misconstruing the psychology of faith. Genuine faith cannot be produced by obligation alone; it involves the renewal of intellect and affection. One cannot simply will oneself to believe a dogma because it has been authoritatively declared. Rather, one prays for the Spirit to open one’s eyes to the truth to which the declaration bears witness. Rooney’s emphasis on normativity would be enriched by a fuller pneumatology that explains how the Spirit brings about free, joyful assent rather than mere compliance.

Despite these concerns, Whoever Hears You Hears Me remains a formidable and impressive work. Rooney is right to insist that a Christianity without dogmatic boundaries cannot sustain a meaningful relationship with the God who speaks. His book powerfully reminds readers that truth is received, not constructed, and that listening to God is an irreducibly communal act. The concerns raised here are best understood not as objections to Rooney’s core thesis but as cautions regarding its framing. Dogma exists not to replace the living God with human formulations, but to serve as a window through which the Church beholds God’s glory. Rooney has defended that window with clarity and conviction; the remaining task is to ensure that it is always understood as transparent to the living reality of God, mediated by Christ and made present by the Spirit.

Originally published on Between Times on April 20th 2026.

‘Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.’ - Exodus 20:12

Parents are hard. I think, sometimes, about the old adage that when we are children our parents can do no wrong. As we get older, as we push beyond them, that feeling of dependence, of admiration, can be twisted into its opposite: condescension, annoyance, frustration. Some days, our parents can do no right. The mark of maturity is moving beyond our parents as heroes and villains and seeing them more clearly for who they are, for what they are. Flawed, definitely, but also inescapable, inevitable. They are, for better or worse, our origin apart from which we ourselves make little sense. It is true that they live on in us, I think. Much of life is coming to terms with and sorting out the lifeblood of our parentage.

Footprints in the Snow

They say it takes a village to raise a child, probably true. We had our son during Covid lockdowns and we missed that village in those first months, I assure you. But what this makes me wonder is whether mothers and fathers might mean more than our birth parents. I expect, given persons like Rahab and Ruth in the record, it probably means adoptive parents, too. And so I wonder if it couldn’t mean our cultural and spiritual parents. I wonder how the command sounds when put to our ‘parents,’ as inescapable as any biological lineage, who set the cultural, political, and social ground onto which we were born. Alasdair MacIntyre argues that ‘we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.’ That we, ‘enter a stage’ not of our making, and ‘into a drama’ not of our design.

Calvin Seerveld puts it like this: ‘tradition is a person’s spiritual parentage and educational life-blood.’ Jaroslav Pelikan famously called tradition the ‘living faith of the dead.’ Edmund Burke called society itself a ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.’ The Westminster Larger Catechism agrees, styling mothers and fathers as all those God has given us in authority.

So, now let’s consider that command: honour your father and mother. Honour, argues Smedes, is ‘a willingness to at least listen to the voice of one’s father and mother, those whom God gives to be our teachers and guides.’ The command addresses us as children, children who do not always understand or know why their parents do what they do. It is an invitation to political and cultural maturity, to curiosity. The Fifth Commandment reminds me in this context of Chesterton’s Fence: you should not remove a rule, or structure, or tradition until you’ve first discovered why it was put there. That invitation to curiosity rhymes a bit with love. How, after all, can you honour a thing, honour a person, or a tradition, without knowing it. Smedes again:

‘Honor and love need each other. Without love honour is frigid, strained, forced, infected with resentment, a hollow shell of polite anger. Without honour love lacks structure and is eventually destructive.’

And conclusively,

‘Honor is the moral fiber that holds the family together so that all the warm loving, cold and hateful feelings between parent and child can be enjoyed and endured in a structure of loyalty and respect.’

In the Torah, in the ancient world, this was not just narrow family wisdom for the private home. This was social wisdom. It was social justice. And so, this yields a kind of political posture. It is not submissive to error or injustice, but it is curious and cautious. It moves with the tenderness and intimacy of a father and son, of a mother and child. It does not ask us to lie or to pretend. It does ask us to honour.

What to do with John A. MacDonald?

Celebrated philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the fifth commandment is an especially hard one for modern people to keep. We have, what he calls, a ‘pitiless ingratitude to the past,’ married to a kind of a progressive arc to history. The past, the modern man feels, is a place of disease and darkness. If we have feelings about these spiritual and cultural parents it is probably pity: for their deaths to cholera, the bacteria-infested drinking water, the brutality and the squalor and the crushing poverty.

It is a hard mindset to be in when commanded to honour; to stand astride the decks of our homes with their knobs and switches for power and heat and clean water, their vaccines and antibiotics. We might feel a kind of gratitude, but mainly that the world we entered had these marvels, and pity that theirs did not. Honour is a command, in other words, that pushes against many of our modern sensibilities. Few have focused this more for me than Sir John A. MacDonald.

Here in my home of Canada we have been having some difficulty honouring the memory of Sir John A. He was the first Prime Minister of Canada, and one of the indispensable fathers of Confederation. He was, after a fashion, our ‘George Washington’ if the crossing of the Delaware could be likened to a quiet, featherbed conference in Charlottetown with a nightcap. He was also something of a crook. And a drunk. And a racist. This is not casting aspersions; these facts are well established by Canadian historical record. He resigned in disgrace in 1872 after a railway scandal in which he took large sums of money while in office offering preference on a national railway contract (he returned to power in 1878). He was well known for his public drunkenness, including vomiting during debates. His policies regarding Canada’s First Nations, including residential school systems, were so abhorrent that their legacy remains an issue of substantial public debate and inquiry to this day.

But as the saying goes in Canada, no John A. MacDonald, no Canada. That’s certainly true. What do we – Canadians at least – owe John A, MacDonald in the fifth commandment.

What we do not owe him is largely what we’ve done: pulled down statues, renamed schools, expunged records and plaques. Honour cannot mean erasure, in part because it is a double falsehood: it not only fails to tell the truth, it fails even the test of acknowledgement. Honouring our parents must at least mean recognising them, horrors though their actions and their attitudes may contain.

The Economist reported last year that TherapyTok is awash with adult children going ‘no contact’ with their parents.^[1] I am sorry to say that in their reporting the fifth commandment did not come up. But what did come up is that after the rush of severance and liberation is a certain ennui, a certain sadness, even listlessness. Even in the rejection of our parents, we never escape them. That rebellion itself now defines us, we are still in their shadow, we are still their children, whether disobedient, ungrateful, or even righteously angry.

The problem with ‘no contact’ is it makes it very hard to live long in the land the LORD your God has given you. What is this land, our home, this community, after all, if we cannot speak of its past? Or if we cannot speak of it with any reverence, or respect, or tenderness? ‘No contact’ is painful for people. It’s terminal for cultures.

If Ye Break Faith

How do we keep faith with our spiritual and cultural lifeblood? I think we do it by honouring the best of our parents’ intentions while being clear-eyed about their flaws and failures. This is something like what the American Martin Luther King meant when he called the Declaration of Independence a promissory note. He was not unaware of the failures and omissions and sins of the men who founded that Republic. He did not ignore or somehow omit the horrors of American history. But he knew, also, that their genius, their best intentions, their legacy, was better than their own shortcomings. He honoured his parents, even parents who would not – in their own time – have recognised him as their son, which he most surely was.

Politically, I wonder if one of the ways we keep the fifth commandment is to make legible, stable, fixed, the covenant with our parents. We often write down covenants like that. We call them constitutions.

On the 150^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence American President Calvin Coolidge put it this way,

‘About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.’

That sounds to me like the politics of the fifth commandment. It is no sloppy veneration. It is no whitewashed adulation. It is a retrieval and respect, with deep moral seriousness, about the gifts – yes – and also the burdens we have received from our parents, whose ideals have been all too imperfectly realised. That seriousness is the only path to maturity. It is the only way for children to become adults. And it is a seriousness that not only persons but cultures, not only children but civilisations, must embrace to ‘live long in the land.’

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References

1. https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/01/18/no-contact-when-adult-children-estrange

Originally published on Between Times on April 13th 2026.

The Eastern Orthodox theologian and pugilist David Bentley Hart once quipped about Christianity in the United States: if Christianity ever truly reached American shores, it would find a nation fiercely opposed to its values. This is a fine example of Hartian hyperbole, yet like much of his wit, it carries an uncomfortable truth. Taking Hart’s provocation a step further, I wish to offer a few unconventional reflections in the same vein.

The British historian David Starkey has recently criticized Tom Holland’s acclaimed Dominion, which traces Christianity’s influence on Western culture. According to Starkey, it was not Christianity itself but the Greco-Roman philosophical heritage that, for the most part, shaped European values. Christianity, he argues, largely skirted around the halls of power, occasionally making useful interventions but rarely steering the course. Holland, and probably Hart as well, would disagree, but let us follow this line of thought and see whether it reveals something about the nature of Christianity in the so-called Christian West.

Throughout its history, Christianity has occupied an uneasy space between rulers and ordinary people, striving to exert power over both with mixed success. Its ascendancy in the West was due in part to its willingness to ride on the backs of Caesar and Mammon. The more honest factions within Christendom recognized this with a guilty conscience, knowing that this was not how things ought to be. The Radical Reformers saw through the arrangement and attempted to build intentional communities that embodied heaven on earth, free from princely influence. Yet such movements were usually crushed by the powers that be—often with the support of the established Church—or they imploded from within when it became apparent that heaven on earth was unattainable without severe compromises, and the fall of these communities resulted from their dealing with this cognitive dissonance.

Faced with this discord between lofty ideals and grim realities, Christians repeatedly redefined what ‘Christianity’ meant. Pietistic movements, for instance, often slid from rigorous otherworldliness into insipid liberalism that justified the status quo and at times even fused with extreme nationalism. The early twentieth-century German example is notorious in this regard. Starkey, himself from a Quaker background (though now apparently an atheist), recalls his own ‘red pill moment.’ As a young man, he observed to Quaker elders that the Holy Spirit seemed always to endorse whatever was printed in the liberal press. Their response: naturally so, since it was the Holy Spirit who wrote the editorials in the first place.

Caesar and Mammon have always been available to the Church, sometimes offering deals it could not refuse. Occasionally, someone has remembered the New Testament’s unsettling stance toward worldly powers, ranging from Jesus’ almost detached indifference to Revelation’s open hostility toward Rome. As Holland notes, such moments of clarity occasionally shook the world and changed things for the better, though the events themselves remained deeply ambiguous.

Life After Apocalypse

Alasdair MacIntyre begins After Virtue with an analogy drawn from Walter M. Miller’s science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. After an apocalypse, survivors encounter fragments of scientific blueprints from a lost civilization. They recognize individual details but cannot reconstruct the whole. In time, they rediscover the lost knowledge—only to unleash another cycle of destruction.

MacIntyre employs this as an image of our moral landscape in the modern West: we have inherited fragments of moral traditions, but the coherence that once bound them together is gone. I suspect our condition today is even more fractured than MacIntyre described in 1981.

Anyone who has read even a single Gospel should recognize the radicalism of Christian ethics. Sören Kierkegaard, perhaps the only Nordic philosopher of global stature, perceived this with piercing honesty. His pseudonymous works examined the consequences of a faith that demands the ultimate sacrifice. His writings provide perhaps the most powerful exposition of the sheer terror and extremity of the Christian ideal. They are like a darkened glass through which one may look at the sun without going blind.

I recall discussing Kierkegaard once with Robert W. Jenson, who remarked that everyone should read some Kierkegaard, but no one should read only Kierkegaard. We agreed: looking at the sun for too long, even through a darkened lens, is destructive. Yet Kierkegaard’s point remains: Christianity demands an imitation of Christ so radical that it presses the believer toward martyrdom.

Meanwhile, Western culture has gradually distanced itself from Christian identity. Politicians such as Keir Starmer now explicitly affirm multifaith national identities. In Russia, by contrast, Orthodox nationalism has been revived with full pomp and ritual—though it is virtually indistinguishable from a baptized, yet not born again, paganism.

One of the more perplexing phenomena in the West is the imposition of extreme Christian altruism—most visibly expressed in the Sermon on the Mount—upon societies and individuals who have no grounding in such radical ethics. Late modern culture has taken both the highest and lowest of nominally Christian inheritance: lofty moral ideals have been wrapped in fideistic dogmatism, enforced with inquisitorial zeal. Those who dare question them may face a fate not unlike Servetus’. Chesterton was not wrong when he observed that ‘the world is filled with virtues gone mad.’

Modern Martyrdom

The highest ideal of Christian life is martyrdom. While there were distortions in early Christianity that led some to actively seek death, the basic logic remains: the Christian life is an imitation of Christ, and this may well end in suffering or death. The classics of Christian spirituality, from Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi to Johannes Gerhard’s Meditationes Sacrae, testify to this extremity.

Modern post-Christian culture has distorted this ideal through a simple but ingenious transaction: the transfer of costs. The political commentator Rob Henderson has coined the term ‘luxury beliefs’ to describe this phenomenon. These are convictions held and advertised primarily by the privileged and grandstanding elite, who pass on the real costs of those beliefs to others.

Luxury beliefs function like evolutionary ‘costly signals’—extravagant peacock feathers of the moral life. However, their cost is borne not by the believer but by those less privileged. The luxury believer gains prestige, while others pay the price.

The more privileged the believer, the more radical the belief. Within the insulated bubble of privilege, competition erupts over who can signal the most dazzling moral stance. The New Testament reader will recognize this pattern immediately. Luxury believers, like Pharisees of old, thank God that they are not like ‘those people.’ They enlarge the tassels on their garments—or, in today’s world, their social media profiles—while placing unbearable burdens on the shoulders of others.

In practice, luxury beliefs purchase symbolic capital at the expense of the vulnerable. They produce souls twisted into knots, and they hand stones to those who ask for bread. Modern Pharisees may hesitate to say it aloud, but in effect, their message is clear: it is good and just for you to die for my beliefs.

Before his death, Jesus explains his fate: ‘Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out.’ (John 12:31 NIV). The cross is the place of judgment of the world, and the death of an innocent victim, persecuted by both secular and religious powers and crushed by the whims and desires of the simple masses, should tell us something about the orders of creation. Jesus tells us, ‘See, this is who you are.’ And maybe even: ‘this is how you will always be.’ The cross remains as the sign of the world’s judgment till the end of time. While the prince of this world is driven out, it looks like we are very keen to invite him back inside. The history of the Church, like the story of Israel in the Old Testament, seems to be a tragicomical revolving door.

Both Hart and Holland probably see the history of the Church in a slightly more positive light than Starkey. There are moments when someone is able to escape the eternal recurrence of the same old stupidity in new forms and somehow participate in whatever it is that Jesus means when he says: ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12:32 NIV)

Maybe this is something that we all experience someday. But this is not the day.

Returning to Hart’s provocation, it is a valid question whether Christianity has ever fully arrived in America. That said, the deeper question is whether there exists, anywhere in the world, a form of Christianity capable of offering a living alternative to contemporary culture, and to the Church that uses the Lord’s name in vain.

Jesus himself asks quite unsettlingly: ‘When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’ It is probably wise not to answer this question too hastily.

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Originally published on Between Times on April 11th 2026.

At times, the twenty-first century seems exhausted with the potentially illusory turn away from tradition that, while intensified in twentieth-century postmodernism, has its roots in the Enlightenment. In a world where many constitutive aspects of one’s private and public life are presented as the result of personal choice, the possibility of escaping this stress-inducing rat race by defining oneself through submitting to a prescriptive tradition can appear quite enticing. It is precisely this tendency that we can observe in parts of European society today. To mention two examples: there is a growing, renewed interest among Evangelicals, Magisterial Protestants, and those with no prior religious affiliation in the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Eastern or Oriental Orthodoxy.^[1] Furthermore, political parties advocating more traditional social-ethical positions—and appealing to the importance of Europe’s “Judeo-Christian heritage”—have been achieving strong results in recent elections.^[2]

These tendencies sometimes rely on a false, overly idealised dichotomy between a free-thinking, self-determining individual who defines themself, and a person who is defined from ‘without’ by submitting to a singular tradition which need not be questioned or critically evaluated. Both sides of this dichotomy are misleading. First, our reasoning and thinking are always influenced by, tied to, and—dare I say—shaped by the societal, scientific, and philosophical traditions that surround us. To state the obvious: ‘neutral’ thinking is impossible. Second, and this will be the focus of what follows, tradition is never univocal or singular; nor is it static or unmoving. The ‘tradition’ we allow to inform our day-to-day decisions is the result of a dynamic interplay between the sources received and the way in which those sources are placed into a coherent constellation.^[3] Furthermore, and just as essential a factor, it is determined by the kinds of sources we decide to use and those which we disregard.

One of the strongest examples of this tradition-shaping activity can be seen in the so-called Carolingian Renaissance—though purists would probably call it a Renovation.^[4] After Pepin the Short took the Frankish crown from the Merovingian kings in the middle of the eighth century (AD 751), the succeeding Carolingian dynasty grew dramatically in influence and reach.^[5] Pepin’s successor, Charles I—better known as Charlemagne—ascended the Frankish throne in AD 768 and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Leo III on Christmas Day, 25 December 800. Charlemagne’s accession to the Frankish throne not only signalled the rise of a significant European power, uniting much of Western Europe under one ruler, but also marked the beginning of strong efforts to unify these regions under a single Christian rule and order.^[6]

Charlemagne, with the help of a group of court scholars, theologians, and administrators—among whom Alcuin of York looms large—was convinced that his rule represented a continuation of Roman classical culture and early Christianity. As rex et sacerdos (King and Priest), the king oversaw and ruled an explicitly Christian empire. Charlemagne encouraged his court to demonstrate this continuity with the classical and Christian past by preserving relevant sources and promoting their study throughout the empire.^[7] It is largely because of this concerted effort that many antique and late-antique texts have survived, with a significant proportion of classical works preserved in manuscripts whose earliest extant copies date from the ninth century. The preservation of antiquity was therefore not neutral. The Carolingian scholars selected which texts were worth copying and transmitting, thereby shaping what later centuries would understand as the classical and patristic inheritance.^[8]

Importantly for our purposes, however, this development also shows that the “Tradition” Charlemagne sought to promote was not a naturally occurring phenomenon that could simply be discovered and applied. Rather, the Carolingian understanding of the past—and of what that past required—resulted from careful engagement with both Christian and classical sources, combined with a willingness to allow those texts to inform their own political and religious self-understanding. Tradition here appears not as something simply ‘received’, but as something actively interpreted, curated, and institutionalised. In this manner, the renovatio emperii, the Renovation of the Empire, and the interpretation of the past did not merely serve ‘academic’ interests but furthered the political project of showing the Carolingian legitimacy as rulers and continuing Christian Roman rule.

A second phenomenon that illustrates this dynamic is the widespread medieval conviction that the Fathers of the Church—or “Tradition” more broadly—spoke with one voice. This sentiment had already been formulated succinctly in the fifth century by Vincent of Lérins in his Commonitorium: “We must hold to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone.”^[9] Yet the very effort to uphold this principle required significant interpretive work. Medieval theologians frequently encountered tensions or apparent contradictions among earlier authorities, and they therefore sought to harmonise the tradition.

Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae provides a prime example. When earlier sources he regarded as authoritative appear to conflict with one another, Aquinas consistently attempts to interpret them in a way that maintains agreement. Although Aquinas arguably succeeded in ‘spinning’ the sources so as to present them in harmony, his readings do not always fit neatly within the wider corpus of the authors he engages, and his explanations are often quite strained. In doing so, he not only preserves the appearance of a unified tradition but also integrates that tradition into the systematic theological framework he himself is constructing. Regardless of whether we follow Thomas’ rather broad assumption of traditional agreement, or Abelard’s cynicism in his Sic et Non (who presented divergent opinions on fundamental dogmatic issues, to show the diversity of the tradition), or look for a more nuanced middle ground like the one proposed by the Magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth- and seventeenth century^[10] or modern Roman Catholics: tradition is something that needs to be worked with when received. It must be interpreted.

To reiterate, even in church traditions that hold a strong view of the stability of tradition, a purely Thomistic approach is no longer widely maintained. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the notion that tradition speaks with a single voice is no longer viable. Nevertheless, I would encourage proceeding in the spirit of Aquinas: affirming a fundamental harmony while critically examining where that harmony can be located. Such a process inevitably privileges certain sources over others. The criteria by which this harmony is discerned will differ across church traditions, but one point remains clear: a naïve picture of tradition as unmoving, static, and immediately received is untenable.

So where does that leave us today? Though an increased interest in what the past has to offer for contemporary life is certainly something worth encouraging, we must resist presenting tradition as a ‘sure foundation’ or ‘simple’ or ‘straightforward.’ Though helpful in many ways and selectively authoritative, tradition does not function as a self-interpreting body of texts that can simply be retrieved and applied to current circumstances. As the historical examples above illustrate, the content of the Christian ‘tradition’ is produced by interpretation, selection, and harmonisation—even in contexts where tradition is valued highly. The work of the Carolingian courtiers and of medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, shows that what later generations come to regard as ‘the tradition’ is in fact the result of sustained and, explicitly or implicitly, critical engagement with earlier sources. To appeal to tradition, therefore, is not merely to repeat the past but to participate in an ongoing process of interpretation that seeks to I) select elements of the past which are more abiding and valuable than others and II) make inherited authorities intelligible and meaningful in new contexts.

In closing, and as we said before, whether one looks to the rise of nationalism, embrace of antique wisdom, online popularity of trad-wives and theobros, penchant for liturgy and pilgrimage, or to the reaction against cosmopolitanism, ‘tradition’ is all the rage. This second edition of Between Times, in which we will look at ‘Tradition’, tackles some of these issues in more depth. We are looking forward to publishing pieces on the place and use of tradition in politics, church life, national formation and self-understanding.

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References

1. As an example: in France, the Easter Vigil will see ca. 20.000 adults baptised in 2026, which is up from 13.400 in 2025 and from 4.100 in 2016: https://www.catholicregister.org/item/3663-in-france-record-breaking-number-of-catechumens-to-be-baptized-at-easter.

2. Think particularly of parties like the AFD in Germany, the PVV/FvD in the Netherlands, FPÖ in Austria, PiS in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary, or RN in France.

3. Tradition is distinct from something like ‘habit’, ‘custom’, or ‘ritual’. For our purposes, tradition will be seen and discussed at the reception and passing on of authoritative ideas and practices over time, because of and through which the past continues significant for today in a normative manner.

4. Janet L. Nelson, “On the Limits of the Carolingian Renaissance,” in Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 51-69. Nelson cautions that there was a renaissance, but that it was confined to the clerics and monastics. John Contreni, however, while agreeing with Nelson, adds that “the renaissance was aimed at society as a whole.” Contreni, “The Carolingian Renaissance,” in Renaissances Before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 59.

5. Cf. Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History (London: Longman, 1992), 64-94.

6. One should think of the harmonisation of calendars, liturgy, education, language (including the Carolingian miniscule), monastic rules, the law, and general societal structures.

7. For a helpful analysis of this dynamic, see Thomas F.X. Noble, “Tradition and Learning in Search of Ideology: The Libri Carolini”, in The Gentle Voices of Teachers: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. Richard E. Sullivan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 227-60. Drawing conclusions for his analysis of the Libri Carolini, Noble concludes: “The Libri Carolini constitutes an elegant metahistory that can in every way bear favourable comparison with the more famous works of Eusebius and Orosius and even, in a way with that of Augustine. It is a metahistory that seeks to locate the Franks in their own time but also in all time.”

8. Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion(Cambridge, UK-New York, NY: CUP, 2001), 2-3. Johannes Heil, “Labourers in the Lord’s Quarry: Carolingian Exegetes, Patristic Authority, and Theological Innovation, a Case Study in the Representation of the Jews in Commentaries on Paul,” in The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 77.

9. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, I-II: “Magnopere curandum est ut id teneatur quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.”

10. Katherine Sonderegger, “The Doctrine of God”, in The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology, ed. Michael Allen and Scott Swain (OUP, 2020), 390-3.

Originally published on Between Times on April 6th 2026.

On a Sunday celebrating ecumenism, our church participated in a ‘pulpit swap.’ I preached at a ‘broader’ congregation while one of their clergy preached in our evangelical church. When our church’s elders had previously raised concerns about the wisdom of this ‘swap,’ I foolishly assured them my ministerial colleague would emphasise not our differences but what our, quite different, congregations shared in common. As it turned out, the minister referred, in a central moment of their sermon, to God with a female pronoun. The response on Sunday, as you might expect from an evangelical, British congregation, was merely uncomfortable fidgeting and raised eyebrows. It was on Monday that I began receiving emails and hastily arranging coffee meetings. I perhaps unwisely began referring to the ensuing controversy as ‘she-gate’.

The sermon, positively, offered our community an opportunity to reflect upon some questions that might otherwise have remained merely academic. We wrestled with God’s transcendence of sexual categories, whether Christians could adjust the triune name (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), and whether one should distinguish masculine and feminine metaphors or pronouns from proper divine names.^[1]

Yet the more acute question raised by the sermon was ‘what sort of differences can we tolerate, and when?’ Secular westerners pride themselves on their ‘tolerance,’ yet the scope of tolerance sometimes seems to be narrowing. In The Guardian, progressive Arwa Mahdawi says ‘I hate to say this – like, I really, really hate to say this – but JD Vance had a point when he told Keir Starmer that Britain has a free speech problem.’^[2] She cites a study suggesting British police arrest approximately thirty people per day for posts online.^[3] An increasing amount of speech, it seems, cannot be tolerated.^[4] Or consider the remarks from political commentator Douglas Murray, who expressed disgust with ‘hand-wringing centrist dads’ who are intent that ‘liberal’ values inform the nation’s response to immigration. ‘At every time of national emergency in our nation’s history we gave something up to survive…. This is the thing we give up; extending tolerance to people who do not extend it back to us.’^[5]

These anecdotes call to mind academic objections to tolerance. For some, toleration is a ‘loser’s creed’.^[6] We only praise tolerance when in the minority. When in the majority, we inevitably impose our ideology or religion on others. Others present tolerance as ‘anything goes’ relativism.^[7] Others argue societies ‘progress’ not by tolerating prejudice but attaining moral consensus.^[8] Finally, others assert tolerance is inherently condescending, with the ‘tolerated’ patronisingly treated as inferior.^[9] A cartoon recently flooded my social media feeds, exemplifying this concern. It depicts a sheep, emblazoned with the LGBTQ rainbow, being told by another sheep, ‘I don’t hate you. I just hate everything about you, and that’s love.’ People, this objection suggests, desire not mere toleration but a form of recognition which embraces their identity and life-choices.

Given our society’s intractable polarisation and enduring pluralism, recovering a durable vision of tolerance is indispensable. For Christians however, tolerance is not merely a social necessity but a moral imperative. Toleration is the virtue which fits us to patiently endure objectionable difference.^[10] As a number of recent studies have shown, the view that tolerance emerged ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’) with the Enlightenment after centuries of religious intolerance is a self-serving, secular myth.^[11] For North African theologians like Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Augustine, one of the key foundations of tolerance is the attribute of divine patience (μακροθυμέω).^[12] As Tertullian says, ‘To us, no human affectation….furnishes the warrant for exercising patience…[but rather] God who scatters equally over just and unjust the bloom of his light,…bearing with the most ungrateful nations…[as well as] with luxury, avarice, iniquity’ is our model for patient toleration.^[13] Christians have aimed, with mixed results,^[14] to patiently endure objectionable difference not merely to facilitate a common life in diverse societies but because Christ enjoins them to imitate their father in heaven (Matt 5:48), a Father who ‘is patient with [us], not wanting any to perish’ (2 Peter 3:9).

When tolerance remains a vague sentiment rather than a well theorised virtue, it is both easily ‘weaponised’—we will come to that in a moment—and vulnerable to skeptical objections. John Bowlin’s account of tolerance as a virtue, inspired by Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, goes some way to addressing these concerns.^[15] Bowlin explains that tolerance, like every virtue, has false ‘semblances’ which should be distinguished from the virtue itself. Foolhardiness should not make us scorn courage. Dithering does not delegitimise prudence. When we are alert to the danger of conflating tolerance with its semblances, we can affirm that many of the objections to tolerance rightly identify its misapplications without undermining tolerance as such.^[16]

Those who insist there are limits to tolerance are correct. Tolerance, as Michael Sandel says, is inherently judgmental. It is far from relativistic indifference.^[17] A society which tries to maintain a relatively ‘secular’ public space in which distinct religions and philosophies of life are respected^[18] will have to exclude forms of intolerance which threaten the community (something similar applies to any community, including a university or church, thus something ‘like’ church discipline is not only biblically authorised but unavoidable).^[19] This is not a betrayal of tolerance but an expression of the sort of moral judgments necessarily underlying it.^[20] Tolerance is only required in view of a judgement that certain beliefs or acts are objectionable. Furthermore, tolerance is not absolute. Some objectionable differences cannot be tolerated. Nonetheless, we must resist the urge to move from this banal affirmation to the cynical, relativistic conclusion that all societies or communities are equally hegemonic and therefore ‘tolerance’ is a mirage. A ‘tolerant’ person or community judges what sorts of differences can be endured under which circumstances. This is not a denial but an expression of the virtue of tolerance.

Similarly, critics are correct that patient ‘toleration’ can be expressed with self-righteousness. A central motivation of virtuous tolerance is love, which funds a desire to maintain fraternal relations despite disagreement.^[21] Yet there are a host of ways one can ‘formally’ tolerate another while nonetheless exhibiting an attitude of superiority or scorn. In this case, the loving motivation of tolerance has been replaced by patronising condescension. For example, a friend observed that while their church services aimed to be ‘welcoming’ to persons of all sexual orientations, the sidelong glances a teenage boy with painted nails and flowing hair received suggested that in practice, patronising condescension had replaced loving toleration.

While recognising the danger that tolerance can become distorted into paternalism, to insist that the only way someone can be tolerated is if their life choices or self-discerned identity is affirmed, is a paradigmatic instance of intolerance. Remember, tolerance is a response to objectionable difference. There is no need to ‘tolerate’ differences one does not find objectionable. Thus, ironically, when one demands as a condition for ‘love’ that the other forsake their deeply held moral convictions and celebrate one’s own lifestyle or viewpoint, one has identified not tolerance but consensus as the condition for fellowship.^[22] As the philosopher who helped inspire the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Jacques Maritain says, ‘The man who says: “What is truth?” as Pilate did, is not a tolerant man…There is real and genuine tolerance only when a man is firmly and absolutely convinced of a truth…[and] at the same time recognises the right of those who deny this truth to contradict him…not because they are free from truth but because…he respects in them human nature and human dignity and those very resources…of conscience which make them potentially capable of attaining the truth he loves, if someday they happen to see it.’^[23]

Our society increasingly struggles to explain why we should tolerate perspectives or lifestyles we find objectionable. For the Christian, the motivations are evident. Out of love, God in Christ patiently endures our persistent and destructive wrongdoing. In light of this, we lovingly tolerate others. As Bowlin says: ‘When others resort to coercion or contemplate exit, [the tolerant] stay put and muddle through…[they doubt] this corner of the world can be set right…[if] outrage is unleashed…and unity compelled.’^[24]

We are wrong to think it is the religious or irreligious, the progressive or the conservative, who are uniquely intolerant in our age. Why begin an essay on tolerance speaking about church? The virtue of tolerance is not merely ‘political’^[25] but pertains to all our relations. No abstract rules for how tolerance should be applied pertain to all situations. Exercising tolerance requires contextual judgments about what sort of differences can be tolerated in what relations, under which circumstances. What can be tolerated in the ‘pulpit,’ is much ‘narrower’ than what can be tolerated in many other contexts. As explained earlier, this is not a betrayal but an exercise of tolerance as a virtue.^[26] Yet in all our communal contexts, Christians’ decisions regarding what we can tolerated should never be motivated by indifference or moral/theological laxity but needs to be informed by the example of divine patience after which we model ourselves.

In the end, while I can strive to appreciate why my fellow clergy member felt compelled to give the sermon they did, I do not agree (and would approach future pulpit swaps differently!). Yet I wonder what might have happened had things been reversed? How might their more progressive community have responded if in their pulpit I espoused traditionalist views regarding transgenderism? What might their response have been, had I offered an exclusivist interpretation of Jesus’s claim that ‘no one comes to the Father but through me’ (John 14:6)? Might their response have questioned our too quick assumptions about conservative intolerance and progressive toleration?

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References

1. I will not litigate these issues here, for some helpful resources (none of which I wholly endorse), see: David Steinmetz Taking the Long View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 28-36; R. Kendall Soulen, The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011); Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008), 66-82; Elizabeth Achtemeier, ‘Exchanging God for ‘No Gods’: A Discussion of Female Language for God’ in Theology Matters,12 (1995), 1-8.

2. “I really hate to say it, but I agree with JD Vance. Britain has a free speech problem,” The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi,10 June 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/10/i-really-hate-to-say-it-but-i-agree-with-jd-vance-britain-has-a-free-speech-problem.

3. “Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways - Muddled laws give them wide discretion,” The Economist, 15 May 2025, https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police-are-restricting-speech-in-worrying-ways.

4. See the UK’s downgraded status in a recent ranking of freedom of expression: “The UK is no longer an “open” country for free expression - Britain is now a world leader in censorship,” The Critic, Freddie Attenborough, 3 July 2025, https://thecritic.co.uk/the-uk-is-no-longer-an-open-country-for-free-expression/.

5. Douglas Murray, “This is About Survival,” interview, n.d., Triggernometry, YouTube,

6. On this phrase, see: Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620’, in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Bob Scribner and Ole Peter Grell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198. This sort of approach to toleration, in which toleration is not ‘principled’ or valued but arises only when one is unable to secure uniformity, is associated with Hobbes. See, Bernard Williams, ‘Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?’, in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 21.

7. Ratzinger critiques the ‘ethic of tolerance’ in these terms, though he subsequently praises a rehabilitated, Christian inspired form of tolerance. Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004). Istvan Bejczy argues for figures like Voltaire and in much modern discourse, ‘“Tolerance” came to mean little more than “indifference”.’ Istvan Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept’, Journal of the History of Ideas 58, no. 3 (1997), 383. Williams likewise suggests skepticism about religion and increasing moral ‘indifference’ is more promising for defending pluralism than the virtue of tolerance. Williams, ‘An Impossible Virtue?’ 20; 26.

8. Barbara Herman, ‘Pluralism and the Community of Moral Judgment’, in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 61-3.

9. These are only a few of the criticisms of tolerance in: Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Many of her concerns relate to the unhelpful power dynamics she sees as inseparable from toleration.

10. This is a deliberately broad but widely accepted definition of tolerance as a personal virtue. See, e.g., John Horton, ‘Toleration as a virtue,’ in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, 28. It can then be theorised and applied in distinct ways, particularly with respect to politics or communal life. For example, Forst influentially identifies four conceptions of toleration: the permission, coexistence, respect, and esteem conceptions. The first three are compatible extensions of this more general definition of tolerance as a virtue, whereas the last, as Forst himself notes, is in danger of not really being a version of tolerance at all. Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 27-31.

11. Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept,’ 365-84; Jed W. Atkins, The Christian Origins of Tolerance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024); Robert Louis Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

12. See Atkins, The Christian Origins of Tolerance, 17, 138; 143; 147.

13. Tertullin, ‘Of Patience’ in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3. ed Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.), 2.

14. Insofar as, in modernity, the scope of what can be tolerated by the state has in certain ways expanded in many western nations, this is–at times–something to be praised. Nonetheless, the rationale underlying the decision about what can and cannot be tolerated is less divergent between Patristic, Medieval, Reformation, and modern approaches than we might assume. See, e.g., John R. Bowlin, ‘Augustine on Justifying Coercion’, The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 17 (1997), 49–70.

15. I do not endorse every aspect of his account, e.g., see the helpful, critical dialogue between Cary Nederman and Bowlin in: ‘Tolerance among the Virtues by John Bowlin,’ Syndicate Theology, Accessed 2 July 2025, https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/tolerance-among-the-virtues/.

16. John R. Bowlin, Tolerance among the Virtues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 23; 33-4; 37-8; 60.

17. Michael J. Sandel, ‘Judgemental Toleration’, in Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106–12.

18. Secular, not in the sense of irreligious or even neutral, but in that adhering to one religion or philosophy of life is not required for participation in public life.

19. Church discipline is much more than this, of course.

20. I worry about some of the ways Douglas Murray might apply the argument I cited earlier, but his claim that refusing in some circumstances to ‘tolerate the intolerant’ contradicts ‘liberal’ values misses that defenders of liberal versions of toleration have always affirmed that a tolerant society will not tolerate all intolerant perspectives. See Karl Popper’s famous discussion of the ‘paradox of tolerance’. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 581-2.

21. Bowlin says tolerance is annexed to justice whereas forbearance is annexed to love but they are sibling virtues, not to be pitted against one another. Bowlin, Tolerance as a Virtue, 2-3; 9-10. In contrast, for Atkins, tolerance is a species of forbearance. Atkins, The Christian Origins of Tolerance, 97. I am not here sharply distinguishing tolerance and forbearance.

22. Olli-Pekka Vainio and Aku Visala argue it is inadequate to suggest ‘esteem’ or ‘affirmation’ of someone’s identity is required in all circumstances rather than tolerance. They suggest, for example, it is unfair to require someone with weighty moral objections to circumcision to abandon those convictions in order to ‘affirm’ or ‘recognise’ a Jewish person’s identity. Olli-Pekka Vainio and Aku Visala, ‘Tolerance or Recognition?: What Can We Expect?’, Open Theology 2 (2016), 563-5.

23. Jacques Maritain, On the Use of Philosophy (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2015), 24. Another essential motivation for tolerance is intellectual modesty, which, for Christians, is engendered not only by the recognition of our fallibility but also our awareness of the way sin hinders our capacity to judge accurately (Matt 7:3). Nonetheless, while intellectual modesty is an important motivator of tolerance, uncertainty is not a necessary condition for the exercise of tolerance. Further, the decision about what differences to tolerate should not always correlate to our degree of certainty. Sometimes we tolerate even when we feel certain the other is wrong. Thanks to Greg Restall for pressing me to clarify this.

24. Bowlin, Tolerance Among the Virtues, 104-5. This of course does not rule out political coercion altogether. Coercion is inevitable and tolerance is not absolute.

25. I use ‘political’ here in a narrow sense since in a broader sense the church is a political entity.

26. This also means calling out wrongdoing is not incompatible with the virtue of tolerance. Augustine offers some helpful diagnostic questions regarding when to remain silent and when to object to injustice, in: Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. William S Babcock (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2012), I.9.

Originally published on Between Times on March 2nd 2026.

Listen to the author explore this further in this episode of the Between Times Podcast

If there is a popular or important new emphasis in Protestantism, it’s innovation. Everyone seems to be talking about innovation… congregations, denominations, colleges, foundations, camps, parachurch ministries. Institutions and leaders across the church have innovation fever.^[1]

And why not? After all, innovation has predominantly been, and remains, a force for good. It would be naïve to argue that technological progress and the societal advancements of the twentieth century had not improved human well-being significantly. Medical innovations have reduced infant mortality and increased the duration of our lifespan, while preventative treatments and pain management are constantly improving through groundbreaking research. Few, if any, would choose to return to a time before the innovations of electric lighting and central heating.

Given its positive record, it seems reasonable to employ innovative thinking in the church, especially given the current context of dwindling numbers and an apparently irreversible trajectory of decline. For all that sounds promising, however, is innovation the ticket out of crisis that many in the church tout it to be? In what follows I highlight four potential risks of innovation that, if nothing else, ought to provoke pause for thought.

1. Innovation can be motivated by fear

The common narrative is that fear stifles innovation. Tim Kastelle, director of the Liveris Academy of Innovation and Leadership at the University of Queensland, however, contends that fear can be a powerful catalyst.

As an example, he cites IBM’s response to two predicaments. When the technological environment changed in the 1970s, and it became clear that personal computers were the consumers’ preference, rendering shared mainframes (IBM’s then stock-in-trade) less profitable, IBM had to innovate to survive in a changing marketplace. Likewise, at the advent of the internet in the 1990s, IBM realised the need to innovate away from hardware to software. Kastelle argues that fear was the motivating factor behind both innovations: fear of obsolescence and, ultimately, liquidation.^[2]

Indeed, Vinsel and Russell believe innovation’s exclusively optimistic phraseology to be fundamentally dishonest, arguing instead that ‘it is in fact the rhetoric of fear.’^[3] Failure to innovate, particularly technologically, results in familiar anxious outbursts: ‘our nation will not be able to compete in the global economy; our businesses will be disrupted.’^[4]And far from a phenomenon unique to big tech, Steven Kotler contends that this is the case in ‘science, politics, religion, medicine and everyplace else.’^[5]

In the church in the United Kingdom, while some denominations and individual congregations are bucking the trend, the overall picture is one of rapid decline. 2022 census data shows that in Scotland, for the first time, ‘the majority of people said they had no religion.’^[6] That picture is mirrored in England and Wales, where those describing themselves as ‘Christian’ fell by 13.1% in a decade.^[7] It is hardly surprising, then, that many in the church are concerned about decline, nervous of perceived insignificance, and fearful of obsolescence, motivating a turn to innovative practice. As Kastelle puts it, when ‘the old ways stop working… we have to innovate or we won’t survive. That’s pretty frightening.’^[8]

If fear is a potential motivator of innovation, the question is whether such a stimulus is appropriate for the church? If driven by fear, does our desire to innovate betray a lack of trust in God’s sovereignty and scepticism regarding his providence? It is difficult, for example, to harmonise fear-based innovation with Christ’s exhortation to ‘not be anxious about tomorrow.’ A dissonance reverberates between acknowledging God’s provision of food for the birds and resplendent clothing for the lilies (see Matt. 6:25-34) and innovation born of a fearful disposition.

2. Innovation fosters pragmatism

Commenting on economic stagnation, Andy Haldane observes what he terms ‘“something must be done” syndrome.’^[9] The church’s current emphasis on innovation reveals the same malady amongst its members. In the face of falling profits – or shrinking congregational rolls – “something must be done” can be felt with such urgency that it is not necessarily accompanied by careful, considered reflection, descending instead into pragmatism: just do something!

Churches often mistakenly interpret secularism spatially: the secular is the public, areligious, and supposedly neutral space standing in opposition to the sacred.^[10] Against this backdrop, rather than addressing widespread cultural suspicion regarding the plausibility of transcendence, the questions most often asked concern how to ensure we do not lose members to the secular world. Consequently, faith is reduced to and measured by institutional affiliation and participation. And when institutional affiliation and participation are in freefall (as per the statistics cited above), “something must be done” syndrome rears its head in hope of averting a crisis of faith evidenced by decline.

Without considered theological reflection, we default to innovative approaches in the hope of remaining relevant. This approach, however, risks reducing ministry and the Christian life to pure pragmatism, unintentionally placing our trust in method and technique.^[11] In the rush to safeguard our sacred spaces and protect congregants from the encroachment of the secular, we fail to recognise that ‘theological reflection on the Church… is closely related to the practical problems of Christian life in the Church.’^[12] Rigorous theological reflection on the church and its ministry, in other words, is the balm that relieves the symptoms of “something must be done” syndrome.

3. Innovation’s problematic view of history

It is not simply that innovation favours the (hoped for) future over the past; it sees the past as part of the problem, somehow having held back the realisation of a better today. ‘Innovation-speak,’^[13] relentlessly promotes novelty and blue-sky thinking, demanding ingenuity, originality, and perpetual progress. As a direct consequence, it devalues, disrupts, and denigrates the past, suggesting that our shared history is wholly accountable for the present lamentable situation. That, in turn, gives rise to a belief that innovation is indispensable, from which flows the enthusiastic disruption of history to make way for the new.

In that light, if ‘the church needs innovation’ and ‘new ideas for a hurting world,’^[14] what becomes of the riches of the church’s heritage and tradition? The church is a diachronic community: The Lord gives to Paul what Paul delivers to us (1 Corinthians 11:23); one generation has a sacred obligation to commend God’s mighty acts to another (Psalm 145:4). Innovation’s appeal to ‘creative destruction’^[15] and the imperative to ‘move fast and break things’^[16] clearly betray a disregard for such tradition. And while this denigration and indictment of former things might create freedom for fresh expressions, it risks rendering the church ‘languageless, cultureless, historyless.’^[17]

4. Innovation’s understanding of self-identity

Cultivating an ethos of innovation risks capitulation to a particular modern understanding of the human self as sovereign: the “expressive individual” dwelling in the “immanent frame,” repudiating transcendence and suspicious of external sources of authority. This motivates an inward turn in search of meaning, purpose, and a sense of identity.^[18]Innovation depends upon just such a narrative of identity that promotes self-determination, independence, and autonomy: the individual unconstrained by transcendent factors or external restrictions, free to experiment and create.

At the same time, innovative action, or a lack thereof, profoundly effects one’s sense of authentic selfhood and originality. Andrew Root cites the case of a young adult group in the USA, challenged to develop and implement a new initiative in their church. They ‘felt that if they couldn’t come up with a singularly unique idea that was deeply innovative, their very selves would be less creative, less unique, than others.’^[19] As such, our capacity for innovation determines whether we are authentic, expressive individuals.

Innovation, then, simultaneously requires and promotes an identity of uninhibited autonomy.

Divorced from transcendence and external sources of authority, however, the expressive individual carries a heavy burden all on its own. The inspiring narrative of self-determination towards self-actualisation proves deeply onerous: I must make myself – creatively, authentically, and uniquely – without external help or reference to ultimate reality. Beyond the optimistic façade, when divorced from the structures and norms that once held our identities together, you are left to make yourself as best you can.

But can ‘a wholly secular language for the self resist… trivialisations and reductions?’^[20] Going further, John Webster argued that ‘self-liberation is precisely the “yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1) from which [the Christian has] been set free?’^[21] Innovation, in other words, relying upon, embodied in, and promoting the uninhibited, autonomous individual, risks emphasising an identity contrary to that proclaimed in the Scriptures.

Biblically speaking, we are creatures – unilaterally dependent upon the power of the Creator and existing within divinely established limits proper to our being. Recognising this counteracts ‘the myth of self-creation and isolated self-regulation,’^[22] problematising innovation’s identity forming effects. It means that our creatureliness, ‘properly understood… is the most liberating affirmation we could ever hear.’^[23] We do not actualise, determine and realise our own being; rather, ‘we are, because of the look, the word, the act of God.’^[24]

By way of an example, The Independent’s report on young Christians living in secular Britain featured Lou, a twenty-four-year-old Londoner:

[Lou] was chatting on a dating app, when the subject of her religion came up in conversation. The man she was talking to, she says, got “really confused. He was like, ‘So you’ll only date a Christian… isn’t that really restrictive?’” Her response? “I think it’s actually liberating not to think that I’ve got endless amounts of choice, that actually, I have a specific idea of who I want to spend time with.^[25]

Regardless of your opinions on Christian dating, Lou recognised that proper creaturely limitations, without the requirement to be innovative and the corresponding burden of autonomy and self-determination, is, in reality, an easy yoke and a light burden. Far from prohibitive, she found submission to creaturely limits to be positively joyful and truly liberating.

In conclusion

To be clear, I am not advocating an outright rejection of innovation. When understood as the creative and imaginative response to God’s own creative acts, there is scope for innovative action. Trevor Hart, for example, helpfully highlights the analogous relationship between ‘God’s primal actiones ad extra, and… the processes and significance of certain creaturely acts of artistic making.’^[26] Central to creatureliness, in other words, is emulation of the acts of the Creator, including the deployment of our imagination in deeds that could be considered innovative. We must always be wary, however, lest innovation be divorced from its analogous dependence on the divine precedent. If, or when, it does, we would do well to embody confident trust over perpetual worry, resist the temptation to pragmatism, gives thanks for the saints that have preceded us, and cheerfully admit to our creatureliness. Our well-being, and by extension that of the church, is not contingent on embracing innovation, but upon our learning to live and flourish within the proper limits established by God in his grace and mercy.

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^[1] Andrew Root. The Church After Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), ix.

^[2] Quote: “[B]oth of those innovations were motivated by fear”. Tim Kastelle. “3 Innovation Triggers: Fear, Fantasy & Frustration,” The Discipline of Innovation (blog), 31 March 2014, https://timkastelle.org/blog/2014/03/3-innovation-triggers-fear-fantasy-frustration/#:~:text=Trigger%20%231:%20Fear&text=This%20trigger%20happens%20when%20we,with%20their%20business%20model%20innovations

^[3] Lee Vinsel & Andrew L. Russell. The Innovation Delusion: How our Obsession with the New has Disrupted the Work that Matters Most, (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2020), 11.

^[4] Vinsel & Russell, Innovation Delusion, 11.

^[5] “Running Scared: The Powerful Relationship Between Fear and Innovation” Forbes, Steven Kotler, Last modified 1 December 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/11/30/running-scared-the-powerful-relationship-between-fear-and-innovation/.

^[6] 36.7% in 2011; 51.1% in 2022. National Records of Scotland. Scotland’s Census 2022 – Ethnic group, national identity, language and religion. Published 21 May 2024. https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/2022-reports/scotland-s-census-2022-ethnic-group-national-identity-language-and-religion/. Whether or not census data and sociological analysis are an accurate measure of religious vitality is a pertinent question.

^[7] The Office of National Statistics. “Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021”, §2. Last modified 5 December 2022. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/bulletins/religionenglandandwales/census2021#how-religious-affiliation-varies-across-england-and-wales.

^[8] Tim Kastelle, “3 Innovation Triggers”.

^[9] “Innovation and the Cult of the Firestarter”, Financial Times, 19 February 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/0979fe9f-50ff-45b4-8acb-9e35b873654f#comments-anchor.

^[10] Charles Taylor challenges a definition of “secular” as antonymous to “sacred” (the spatial definition). He argues that, in the late-modern West, we now inhabit the world in a fundamentally secular way, as “buffered-selves” within an “immanent-frame,” seeing transcendence as implausible and belief in God as one option among many ‘and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (Charles Taylor. A Secular Age, [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018], 3). What is key, here, is not what one believes, and therefore which space one affiliates with, but a shift in the very conditions of belief, whereby the plausibility structures of our societies make everything contestable, reducing faith to a subjective choice, and where, ‘for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism [comes] to be a widely available option’ (Taylor, Secular Age, 18).

^[11] This form of pragmatism also risks creating the conditions in which abuses of power can emerge, reducing people to means towards achieving certain outcomes envisioned by those prioritising innovation.

^[12] Christoph Schwöbel. “The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers” in Colin Gunton & Daniel W. Hardy (eds.). On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 110-155, 117.

^[13] See Vinsel & Russell, Innovation Delusion, 10-13.

^[14] See Ministry Incubators, Ministry Innovation Consultants – turning Innovative Ministry Ideas Into Reality, Accessed 7 March 2025, https://ministryincubators.com

^[15] See Joseph A. Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3^rd Edition, (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950), 81-86. ‘Creative destruction’ for economic innovation is often attributed to Schumpeter, though the notion can be traced back to the writings of Marx.

^[16] Cited in Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to Facebook’s investors, 1 February 2012, as a ‘core value’. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way’,” Wired, 1 February 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuck-letter/.

^[17] Janet M. Soskice. “The Ends of Man and the Future of God” in Graham Ward (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 68-78, 74

^[18] See Taylor, Secular Age, 539-593

^[19] Root, Church After Innovation, 17

^[20] Rowan Williams. Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, (London: Morehouse Publishing, 2003), 7

^[21] John Webster. Holiness, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 94.

^[22] Rowan Williams. On Christian Theology, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 76.

^[23] Williams, On Christian, 72.

^[24] Williams, On Christian, 72.

^[25] “‘People looked at me like I was oppressed in some way’: Young Christians on life in secular Britain”, The Independent, Katie Rosseinsky, 3 September 2023, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/christian-uk-atheist-britain-young-secular-b2403282.html.

^[26] Trevor Hart. Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry, (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 2.

Originally published on Between Times on February 23rd 2026

Imagine the scene: May 1521, Pamplona. The Habsburg army, led by Ignatius of Loyola with a skeleton garrison, faces a vast French force. Smoke thickens, cannons roar, and for six hours the defenders hold the walls. Then a cannonball shatters Ignatius’s legs, his men are overrun, the white flag rises. By conventional standards, he has failed. In fact, this moment became the threshold of Ignatius’s transformation, the pivot from soldier to pilgrim, from ambition to discernment.^[1] How do we define success and failure?^[2]

Defining something as failure presumes we also have a clear and authoritative definition of success. Success and failure are interpretive acts, contingent on cultural narratives, temporal perspective, and evaluative norms.^[3] What if failure were not a closed judgment but a transitional space, formative, reflective, even necessary? The French recognised Ignatius’ heroism, allowing him to convalesce and return home. In his apparent defeat, a safe space opened for self-reflection and realignment.

In this essay I propose a reframing by placing the notion of Psychological Safety drawn from business management theory^[4] in dialogue with the Spiritual Exercises written by Ignatius of Loyola in the years after his fateful battle.^[5] These frameworks, one organisational and secular, the other spiritual and theological, offer complementary visions of failure not as a terminus, but as an essential threshold, a critical ‘tipping point’ at which new vistas open up for growth and learning. Drawing on Victor Turner’s notion of ‘liminality’,^[6] I will argue that failure is a suspended state of possibility, neither fixed nor final, but generative. In integrating these perspectives, the essay suggests a praxis of failure that is not only tolerable but formative, for individuals, teams, and spiritual lives, inviting a release from the paralyzing grip of fear and creating space for authentic growth, creative risk-taking, and the freedom to innovate.

Psychological Safety, as articulated by Amy Edmondson, refers to a shared belief that a group is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.^[7] In such an environment, failure is not a personal deficit but a source of data, an opportunity to learn, adapt, and improve. Research shows that organisations that normalise open discussion of error are better positioned for innovation and resilience.^[8] In punitive cultures, mistakes are concealed, leading to stagnation. In psychologically safe cultures, they are disclosed and examined, enabling collective growth. A shame-based culture inhibits the acknowledgment of failure, obstructing personal and collective growth. In professional contexts such as medicine, it may even prove dangerous when practitioners are unable to admit mistakes and learn from them.

This reframing has epistemological consequences. Psychological Safety shifts the status of failure from a “bad outcome” to an informative moment in an ongoing process of development. Teams learn not by avoiding mistakes, but by engaging with them openly. The stakes are both practical and philosophical: how one sees failure shapes how one responds to it, and ultimately, what one becomes through it.

The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, composed in the 16th century, approach failure from a different register.^[9] The ‘Principle and Foundation’ frames human life as ordered toward praising, reverencing, and serving God. This telos is not abstract but existential: all created things are to be used insofar as they serve that end. The meditations for ‘Week 1’ invite the partaker to confront disordered attachments, patterns of desire or behaviour that misalign with that foundational orientation. In this schema, failure becomes invitation rather than condemnation; a moment of reckoning, self-knowledge, and reorientation. Barry notes that recognising one’s own limitations marks the beginning of authentic transformation^[10]while Fleming describes failure as essential for discernment and spiritual maturation.^[11] Where Psychological Safety grants external permission to fail, Ignatian spirituality provides the inner framework to interpret failure as spiritually instructive. The former speaks the language of behaviour and learning; the latter, of grace and teleology. Together, they provide a dual-axis model for failure: external processing and internal integration. This model finds a parallel within the biblical narrative, where failure is likewise framed as both an external event and an interior transformation—seen, for instance, in Peter’s denial and restoration (John 21:15–19), David’s repentance (Psalm 51), and Paul’s assertion that divine strength is made perfect in human weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).

Turner’s concept of liminality—a threshold state where identity is suspended—provides a unifying lens. Failure becomes neither purely negative nor automatically redemptive, but a space of disorientation and potential. As Keegan and Lahey note, true growth often begins with disorienting dilemmas.^[12] Failure is not simply a problem to solve but a generative pause to inhabit, one that can lead toward alignment and wholeness.^[13]

Integration is not without tension. Secular and spiritual languages diverge sharply, particularly around grace. In Ignatian terms, failure may reveal sin—relational rupture or moral compromise—not just limitation. Where secular models describe error in neutral terms, Ignatian spirituality confronts culpability and offers a pathway to transformation through examen, confession, and discernment.^[14] Naming sin alongside failure introduces a paradox: only by acknowledging the full weight of our actions can we receive grace not as consolation, but as transformative gift.^[15] In this light, Christian theology claims that failure never needs to be final, however, can serve as a catalyst for learning and transformation. Grace precedes and reconstitutes identity: we are not defined by our worst moments, but by our ongoing actualisation; our journey of conversion rooted in the fact that we are made in the image of God (imago Dei) and called toward the fullness of that likeness.

While this essay centres on Ignatian thought, broader Christian theology also resists reductive accounts of failure. The Psalmist could invite God to examine him (Psalm 139:23-24) in the confidence that the Lord already knew him inside out (Psalm 139: 1-6). Paul’s vision of divine power made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on redemptive suffering, and the Protestant insistence on grace alone all reveal frameworks where failure is intrinsic to spiritual formation. Though their idioms differ, all hold space for failure as transformative. Ignatian spirituality provides one particularly structured, practical expression of this wider Christian tradition.

From this synthesis emerges a practical anthropology of failure—one that integrates behavioural, spiritual, and organisational dimensions. At the personal level, contemplative disciplines reinterpret failure not as the collapse of identity but as an invitation to reorient desire and action toward purpose. Within organisations, the framework of Psychological Safety provides the social and cognitive infrastructure through which risk, reflection, and growth can coexist, displacing the dynamics of shame with those of curiosity and learning. Engaging failure well thus entails a deliberate, developmental process comprising three interrelated movements. First, cultivating psychological safety establishes the precondition for honest discourse about failure: a climate where mistakes can be named without fear of exclusion or blame, supported by leadership vulnerability, transparent norms, and a shared framing of error as information for learning. Second, Ignatian practices introduce a slower moral and affective attentiveness, an examination of what failure discloses about underlying attachments, assumptions, and unintegrated drives. Third, disciplined reflection yields renewed intentionality and purposeful re-engagement with one’s vocation or task. Failure, in this model, assumes a cyclical form: fall, reflection, reorientation, and action, a rhythm that sustains both ethical formation and vocational discernment. Ignatius’s own journey mirrors this pattern: from the shattered walls of Pamplona to the pilgrim’s road, his apparent defeat became the engine of transformation, reframing weakness as the generative site of spiritual and psychological growth.

In conclusion, failure, viewed through these lenses and the experience of Ignatius of Loyola, ceases to be a verdict and becomes a threshold, a liminal space between disintegration and formation. Psychological Safety provides the interpersonal container; Ignatian spirituality offers the intrapersonal compass. Together, they frame failure as a site of truth-telling, grace, and growth.

If success is defined merely by measurable outcomes or organisational performance, then failure represents the negation of those goals. Yet when success is reimagined teleologically, both as the deepening of the imago Dei in persons and as the maturation of organisations toward integrity, wisdom, and shared purpose, failure assumes a different meaning. It becomes not the opposite of success but an instrument of formation, refining identity and vocation at every level. In this integrated anthropology, the telos of the individual and the community converge; each is called into alignment with its originating image and its intended purpose. In a culture that fears collapse, such a vision proposes something braver still, that authentic growth, whether personal or organisational, often passes through the very terrain of failure. Failure is not the opposite of success but often the path toward it.

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^[1] Ignatius of Loyola, A Pilgrim’s Journey: The Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola. Trans. Joseph F. O’Callaghan. (Ignatius Press, 2001).

^[2] Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. “failure.”

^[3] M.D. Cannon and A.C. Edmondson, Failing to learn and learning to fail (intelligently): How great organizations put failure to work to improve and innovate. Long Range Planning, 38.3 (2005):299–319.

^[4] A. Edmondson, Psychological Safety and Learning Behaviour in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44.2 (1999):350–383.

^[5] Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Ed. S.J. George E. Ganss. (Loyola University Press, 1992).

^[6] Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. (Cornell University Press, 1967). Turner, building on Arnold van Gennep’s foundational work on rites of passage, “re-discovered the importance of liminality” during his 1960s fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia. In The Forest of Symbols, particularly in his essay Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage, Turner broadened the concept beyond small-scale ritual to illuminate wider human experiences. He observed that liminal states—periods of being “betwixt and between”—dissolve conventional identities, evoke ambiguity, and suspend ordinary social structures. These thresholds, while disorienting, create opportunities for new perspectives, heightened agency, and critical reflection on cultural values. Turner emphasized that liminality is inherently transient: it either resolves through reintegration into established structures or crystallizes into “normative communitas,” a temporary social form that stabilizes the intensity of the threshold experience.

^[7] A. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. (Wiley, 2019).

^[8] Edmondson, Fearless, 2019; Cannon & Edmondson, Failing, 2005.

^[9] Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, (1992).

^[10] W.A. Barry, Finding God in All Things: A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, (Loyola Press, 2004).

^[11] D.L. Fleming, Draw Me Into Your Friendship: The Spiritual Exercises – A Literal Translation & Contemporary Reading, (The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2008).

^[12] This reflects the pedagogical understanding that growth frequently emerges through disequilibration—a state of cognitive or affective imbalance that prompts re-evaluation and restructuring of meaning. See J. Mezirow, Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning, (1991); J. Piaget, The Development of Thought: Equilibration of Cognitive Structures, (1977); and R. Kegan, The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads, (1982; 1994).

^[13] Alignment denotes the dynamic coherence between belief, desire, and behaviour—an interior and exterior attunement that supports integrity, discernment, and purposeful action.

^[14] The Ignatian Examen is a daily reflective exercise combining cognitive and spiritual awareness, inviting recognition of emotional patterns, motivations, and choices in order to cultivate self-knowledge and intentional alignment with purpose.

^[15] R. Williams, The given self: Grace and the shape of identity, (SPCK Publishing, 2018).

Originally published on Between Times on February 18th 2026.

The controversial English theologian Don Cupitt once suggested that the notion of ‘life’ has taken the place traditionally attributed to ‘God’ in our contemporary society. Instead of saying ‘thank God for giving me this or that’, Cupitt observes many are now in the habit of saying that ‘life has given me this or that’ or even that ‘life has given me many blessings’, just as God used to be designated as the giver of gifts and blessings in traditional religious lingo. When we are grateful for blessings or even for our existence, thankful for existing or being alive, expressing what we may call existential gratitude, the one we thank may no longer be ‘God’ but ‘life’ instead: many now just say that they ‘love life’ just as old religious folks used to say that they ‘love God’.^[1]

According to Cupitt, although there is still a somewhat ‘religious’ character to the contemporary world’s ‘devotion’ to life, the replacement of God with life constitutes a kind of ‘secularization’: Once we believed in God, now we believe in ‘life’. The idea of secularization, at least as formulated or understood in this way, involves an emphasis on change: We used to believe in God, now we don’t. To say something is ‘secularized’ implies a progression from a religious state to a now non-religious or even anti-religious one.

The idea of change or progress over time is prevalent in common conceptions of the ‘secular’. Take for example the three definitions of ‘secularity’ given by Charles Taylor in his influential 2007 book A Secular Age: ‘secularity’ may refer to how religion and politics or church and state have become separate in modern society, how modern society has becomeless interested and involved in religious activities, or indeed how religious belief is no longer a default but has becomeone option among many in one’s way of navigating the contemporary world. There is a historical formulation of ‘secularization’ at work in all these ways of defining what Taylor calls ‘secularity’: We were not always secular; we just became so over time. We have become secular—or, more accurately, we have become secularized.^[2]

But is being ‘secularized’ the same as being ‘secular’?

Let’s reconsider the case of Cupitt’s account of ‘life’ and ‘God’ mentioned earlier. The understanding of life as something sacred need not be the result of some ‘secularization’ of religion or of the idea of ‘God’: one can easily imagine how traditional religion, especially a monotheism that speaks of God as ‘Life’ itself, can foster a sense of the sanctity of life without any process of secularization. Similarly, one may argue (as I do in my book Spiritual Life and Secular Thought, where I say more about the secular/secularized distinction^[3]) that the postulation of life as an object of spiritual devotion need not to be a secularized version of some religious devotion to God, but rather an outworking of secular—but not secularized—philosophical analyses of human experience and existence. Something can be ‘secular’ without being ‘secularized’.

Indeed, the word ‘secular’ did not always mean ‘secularized’. Rather, in its original meaning, the ‘secular’ or ‘secularity’ refers to clergy who did not belong to a religious order. The ‘secular’ were not ‘religious’ in the sense that they weren’t part of a monastic order or other forms of ‘religious’ life, but it did not mean that they did not hold religious or spiritual beliefs. The ‘secular’ simply designated a particular worldly way of life, whereby one lived in the world and not in some secluded monastery. The association of secularity with worldliness was not to distinguish the secular from religious practices (as we now understand the term ‘religious’ colloquially), but to distinguish them from the transcendent God who is not of this world. As Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook put it in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Secularism:

“The origin of the word ‘secular’ is Latin: saeculum typically meant a fixed period of time, an age… The saeculum was not defined in contrast to any sacred concerns, and had a freestanding usage in Latin. In Christian Latin of medieval times, saeculum was a useful term for distinguishing this temporal age of the world from the eternal realm of God.”^[4]

To live in the saeculum – to live a secular life – is to exist ‘between times’: between creation and eschaton, between the beginning and end of the world as we know it.

Whereas God is eternal and unchanging, our world – our secular temporal realm – is full of flux and change. Indeed, if one adheres to a monotheistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo, one might also think that, unlike God who is ‘necessary being’, our world that is created out of nothing – one that need not exist but is somehow called into being by God – is radically contingent. To live an authentically secular life, one might say, is to attend to the ‘secular’ fact that we live in a temporal and indeed contingent world: that we do not exist self-sufficiently or eternally like God does; rather, we are dependent on structures and conditions that make our lives and existence possible. Instead of understanding our times or our world as ‘secularized’, recognizing the ‘secular’ character of our existence in a temporal, changing world is to recognize the kinds of beings which we are: finite, volatile, and indeed contingent.

To conflate the ‘secular’ with the ‘secularized’ is thus to not only misconstrue – to quite literally ‘secularize’(!) – the original meaning of the ‘secular’. It is, moreover, to project that which is ‘not secular’ or ‘pre-secular’ onto some historical past: to an idealised past that is (now) fixed and unchangeable, to another world that is ‘purely religious’ or even ‘sacred’, as though citizens of that world were somehow all in perfect communion with the eternal God. It is, to some degree, to mistake our contingent world – one that is in continuation with a ‘pre-secular(ized)’ past – with that which it is not: the eternal, perfect, unchanging life that properly belongs to God alone, who ‘does not change like shifting shadows’ (Jas 1:17).

To differentiate the ‘secular’ from the ‘secularized’ is of course not to deny that some secular things are indeed secularized. There is undoubtedly much critical power and insight in diagnosing (and critiquing) how various phenomena we encounter in our world are secularized versions of things from a more visibly ‘religious’ time. However, should one uncritically treat all things secular as ‘secularized’, always weighing them against some idealised ‘pre-secular(ized)’ counterfactual ‘religious’ world (or even some crypto-heavenly para-eternal realm), one may inadvertently come to overlook the goods we may find in our present world or indeed the good – or even gift – of life that we have been given.

It is only by recognizing one’s own existence as contingent – that one need not exist yet somehow does – that one can properly recognize one’s life as a gift and, in turn, be grateful for the life that one has been given—whether the giver or object of devotion to which one is grateful is named as God, ‘life’, or otherwise. In other words, to allude back to Cupitt’s observations, if one cannot recognize the contingency of one’s life, then one may not only be able to properly ‘love God’, one may not even be able to ‘love life’ either or be existentially grateful for one’s life or existence. There is no escape from our contingent – ‘secular’ – worldly existence. It is only by attending to our ‘secularity’ and recognizing the kind of finite contingent beings that we are that we can begin to properly appreciate the life that we are given, the world in which we find ourselves, and indeed ‘every good and perfect gift’ that we may receive and encounter in this life and in this world that we have between times.

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[1] Don Cupitt. The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech (SCM Press) 1999.

[2] Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (Harvard University Press) 2007.

[3] King-Ho Leung. Spiritual Life and Secular Thought – A Phenomenology (Oxford University Press). 2026.

[4] Phil Zuckerman and John R Shook (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Secularism (Oxford University Press) 2017: 4.

Originally published on Between Times on February 11th 2026.

Listen to the author explore this further in the podcast episode below: