Why I am staying on Twitter

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There has been something of an exodus from Twitter recently, especially from church bodies. The justifications and rationales have been rather entertaining to read, and have made me think of nothing more than the story of the Good Samaritan, specifically the religious authorities who pass by on the other side for fear of becoming contaminated. Whereas those who follow Jesus know that the contamination flows in the other direction…

Which is why I’m staying; indeed, why I have now increased my subscription to the top level, so these articles will be on both the stack and Twitter (slightly tweaked for the latter so as not to fall foul of the algorithm). Let me unpack that a little.

Firstly, principally due to network effects and first-mover advantage, Twitter IS the village square for the world – at least the Western part of it. That’s the reality. All the purported rivals, like Threads, have fallen short because they cannot catch up. BlueSky will suffer the same fate (I’m on there but I hardly use it). Which means that if you need to find out what is happening, and most especially if you want to speak into that common conversation, this is the place to be.

Which leads to my second point, building on my introduction. Christians are not called to withdraw into holy huddles apart from the world – at least, not in general. There are some people who have that specific vocation, and they perform an absolutely essential role in the life of the church – we call them monastics – but for most people our duty is to to go out into the world bearing witness and sharing the good news about Jesus. So we need to do that on Twitter, indeed just as some have vocations away from the world, some might have vocations IN to the world. We need to embody the light, show different patterns of life, become the provocative people that make people ask ‘why do they do what they do?’ To withdraw from Twitter out of distaste for the owner is a bizarrely anti-Christian, anti-evangelistic mindset.

Thirdly, and the best thing about Twitter, it exposes you to disagreement – at least if you use it intelligently (and more on that below). The great blight of the last several decades, and of the last decade most of all, is the increasing polarisation of discourse and in particular the detachment of received opinion (consensus) from common sense. The starkest and most painful form of that resolved around questions of gender and transition, but the rot had spread so much wider. Scott Alexander has a very stimulating discussion of the underlying dynamics here. In his words, for there to be a productive conversation there has to be a Priesthood, there to guard good speech against bad speech. However, when a priesthood goes wrong – as in, when it ends up prohibiting the good speech – it can go very wrong indeed. We have been living through such a situation, and the only solution is to let light and air in on the conversation, in other words, to expose conversations and arguments to a much greater diversity of information and perspectives. It seems to me that most of the people withdrawing from Twitter are simply in shock that reasonable and moral people hold different views.

Which is why Elon Musk is a great man. I think he’s a great man for several reasons – I believe that he will succeed in colonising Mars – but his purchase of X is also of long-term significance (which is what I mean by a ‘great man’ – I don’t mean morally great, I mean someone whose choices have immense consequence for human life). The mainstream consensus, what I call the ‘bubble’, has gone very wrong – and, indeed, it continues to go very wrong. Here in the UK this can be seen with the appalling grooming gang scandal, not just the evils committed but in the (often unconscious, I hope) covering up that has followed. Musk turning a searchlight on to this situation is an immensely hopeful sign. The more people that are aware of what has happened, of just how bad it is – of how widespread, systematic and ongoing the religiously aggravated statutory rape of white working class girls is – the more likely it is that we will start to make the difficult decisions needed to ensure that it stops, and that the guilty are punished. Justice must be done, and justice must be seen to be done, and this cannot happen without a full and open conversation. I am now quite hopeful that, thanks to Musk, there will be a proper national inquiry.

So what is the best way to use Twitter? It is undoubtedly the case that Musk is using the platform as his own personal megaphone. Such has been the way of rich people through the ages – just think of Rupert Murdoch – but the great blessing of Twitter is that there is this remarkable option called ‘mute’. Unlike with, say, the Times (or Bezos’ Washington Post) the voice of the oligarch is not distributed and hidden between many different journalistic voices, giving the illusion of diverse opinion. No, here is the owner in all his idiosyncratic, chaotic, brilliant and contradictory glory. What you see is what you get. Alongside that there are also voices calling Musk a moron – and much worse. How often are there Times editorials saying that Murdoch is a plague and a pestilence?

Which points to the right way to use Twitter. Unlike a traditional newspaper, which can be a leisurely and sedate affair, using Twitter is much more like navigating the rapids in a canoe. So the first and most important thing you need is the canoe – which is the basic subscription (remember if you are not paying for a product then you are the product). To use Twitter without the ability to easily use lists (ie Tweetdeck) is to place oneself at the mercy of the algorithm, the swift flow of water over the rocks. It is still possible to use Twitter in this way, but it requires much more active suppression of content that you don’t want to see (ie blocking and muting). The algorithm, as a first approximation, is set up to maximise the time spent on the site, so if you have spent a few moments looking at a cute cat picture, you will then have many more cute cat pictures to look at. No doubt the AI will become more sophisticated over time, but you can bypass that delay by setting up lists, and lists are THE way to use Twitter intelligently (there may be even better ways that I’m unaware of).

The function of a list is to gather together the people that you wish to read under different headings. So I have a list composed of people that I know in real life; a list composed of the people that I most like reading, and which I read every day; I have a list for football writers, a list for Ukraine analysts, a list for my PhD research and so on. With a list, only the tweets from people that you have specifically placed on the list will appear. It is a completely ‘clean’ flow of information, there aren’t even any adverts if you pay at the appropriate rate.

Which means that when I read Twitter, which I do every day – and which has, to a very great extent, largely displaced my newspaper reading – I feel that I am in control of what I am reading, and I am left feeling both informed and challenged. Challenged? Yes, for one of my lists is of my fellow clergy, and it would be fair to say that I am out of step with the consensus political opinion on that list! It’s how I know that so many have left the site 🙂

Twitter is a tool, and it rewards the expertise with which it is used. It is an optional extra to life – as are newspapers generally – but if you want to be informed about the world and, even more, if you want to speak into the conversation that is shaping the world, Twitter is essential. It is not the only tool (I’m a great devotee of RSS feeds too), and there are some tasks it cannot do, but I really enjoy using it – so here I stay. It really suits me.

So that was 2024

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Cordoba steps

Much happened this year, lots of good things, mostly below the surface – and in contrast to some previous years (like last year!) I think it would make most sense to tell a single story which rather governed everything. For at the end of last year I got engaged…

Getting engaged means getting married, and that means finding somewhere suitable for living, and as my fiancée had deep roots in the Bristol area – and as I was happy to be close to Bristol for PhD purposes – at the beginning of 2024 I started to look at the job pages of the Church Times with a more specific interest. I have looked at a lot of parish profiles – most of which were, frankly, quite awful, because so much of the CofE doesn’t know what a priest is for (!) – but that was fine because we were not in a hurry, and I was quite happy in the Forest.

In the early part of the year – February I think – the parish of Backwell with Chelvey and Brockley advertised for a new Rector. This was certainly in the ideal location so we went to have a look. However, after a quick look at the Rectory we decided that it wouldn’t work for us (we have eight children between us, and a four bedroom house presented problems in that respect). So I didn’t apply. However, a few weeks later, Backwell came up in a conversation – ‘a pity that one didn’t work out’ – which lodged in my mind. So when it was re-advertised around May time, as no appointment was made, I thought I’d better take the possibility more seriously. So I studied the parish profile in more depth, and the more I looked at it the more I thought ‘I really like the look of this job’, and I got in touch with the Diocese to register interest. However, when push came to shove, I couldn’t see a way to make it work as a family home, and I again didn’t apply.

Enter God, stage right.

My eldest has been attending the Latin Mass in Bristol, with a view to being received in the Roman Catholic church, and shortly after deciding not to apply for the post I went with him to his Sunday worship, to get a sense of what he was getting involved with. The sermon made mention of the rich young man who asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life, and the story is about giving up attachments in order to follow Jesus. I felt rather convicted after hearing this, and wondered if my attachment to a large house was getting in the way of hearing God’s call, so I said to God – as a bit of a ‘Gideon’s fleece’ – ‘if they don’t appoint, I’ll stick my head up above the parapet’.

They didn’t appoint.

So I sent a message to the Bishop, describing what had happened, and asking if he thought it would be worth my applying – I enclosed a truncated application. This was not replied to, which made me assume that I had breached ecclesiastical etiquette, and that the non-answer was the substantive answer. Come September and the post is advertised again, for the third time. After a few days of pondering I thought – let me just make sure that they got the email… It turns out that the Bishop had been away through much of the summer and I was encouraged to apply.

Which I did. As part of the interview process, candidates need to give a short homily on a bible passage, and you can guess which one was chosen as the text… I felt that God was giving me a big ‘cosmic wink’, which I found reassuring. So I told this story in the interviews, and I have been appointed to the post, which means that I am moving to Backwell in February to take up the post of Rector. It is reasonable to think that this will be my last job before retirement, and there is a freedom that comes from that – I shall write more on that freedom in due course.

I still don’t know how we are going to make the house work, but we – fiancée especially – are in a very strong ‘can-do’ frame of mind, and we are determined to make a success of it. It is, of course, a very nice house! It helps that timings can be flexible, and that soon the majority of children will be at university or completely independent. They are all also mostly reconciled to the prospect of sharing rooms when needed.

So that has really been the story of 2024 for me. There have been some particularly hard moments through the year, but a strong sense through all the testing times that God was leading me and that, despite regular ego-trips making me stumble, I have really learned to trust the Lord.

Alleluia. God is good. I am very much looking forward to 2025, which will end with a wedding 🙂

Previous years: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

HTR: some key principles of righteous resistance

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My last post was a bit of a screed, sorry, I just needed to vent. This one is a little more considered.

I have spent a lot of time in my life thinking about questions of violence, pacifism and non-violent resistance (see here). I first engaged with these questions properly at university, where I studied Gandhi in particular, but in the long run I have probably been most influenced by Stanley Hauerwas on this question. I love his comment “Why am I a pacifist? I’m a pacifist because I’m a violent son of a bitch.” I understand that comment. I consider his ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ to be the best primer for Christians on this question, though there is much else, and of course there is an immense political literature, from Augustine to Wink, that needs to be taken account of. What I want to do in this post is share a quick over-view of what I see as four key principles for righteous resistance1, which have to be held to no matter what it is that is being resisted.

1. Violence is fallen, and only tragically necessary
In God’s intentions there is no violence, all the violence is in us. The violence is a product of the fall, of our departure from Eden, and every resort to violence represents a failure of humanity. The aim of all resistance is fundamentally spiritual, to change the ‘hearts and minds’ – the souls – of those who are being resisted. Violence is not just the use of physical force as the various social and psychological harms (eg coercive control) are also actions that qualify as violence. Violence is a reduction of a person to person struggle (I-Thou) to a contest of forces (I-It). Gandhi taught that it is an article of faith for every satyagrahi2 that nobody is beyond the reach of ahimsa3. Where violence is resorted to it is always and everywhere to be regarded as a sin. That is not to say that sometimes it isn’t a just choice, it is to insist that when we are forced to choose the lesser of two evils, the only way to prevent further corruption is to recognise that the lesser of two evils remains an evil. Righteous resistance insists upon the shared humanity of those who are being resisted. We do not hate the human for nothing human is foreign to us. In most cases it is more righteous to receive suffering rather than to give it, for this is the way of Christ on the cross, and unless we carry our own crosses we are not worthy to be counted as his disciples.

2. Imagination is primary
This is a point I take from Hauerwas, that we are conditioned by our imaginations long before we come to the consideration of specific situations. If our imaginations are filled with violence, if, in particular, such violence is held up as worthy, then we are all the more likely to indulge in a lust for violence (and yes, it is a lust, a deadly sin). This is why it is essential for our imaginations to be formed on Christ, for Jesus to be the principal source of our mimesis (Girard). In particular much of what is seen as ‘based’ Christianity seems to me to be drinking from imaginatively corrupted wells, where worldly success – military victory – is seen as righteous in an unqualified sense. Such approaches seem to me to have accepted the devil’s bargain from the mountain top. The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, and whilst Tolkien may have overstated things with his perspective of ‘the long defeat’ it is imperative that we do not think that anything is achieved in this world from our own effort. Cromwell: trust in God and keep your gunpowder dry.

3. Never undermine the rule of law
The rule of law is the basis of civilisation, it is what I refer to when I mention ‘the King’s Peace’, and it is far more important than things like human rights or democracy – for those depend upon the rule of law in order to have any effect at all. The rule of law is the bulwark against barbarism, it is the only thing that can keep the bullies of all forms in check, it is our principal defence against σάρξ4. What this means is that even when a specific law is being opposed, as that specific law is seen as unjust (eg a racist law in 1960s Alabama) then the resister must, absolutely must, not resist the operations of the law in dealing with the resistance. The resister must cooperate with being arrested, must plead guilty in court for the offence (if they are guilty under the existing law) and must humbly accept the duly administered punishment – Martin Luther King in Birmingham jail5. Most especially the resister must not physically harm or fight with the appointed officers of the law. Righteous resistance affirms the importance of the thin blue line, righteous resistance loves the police and needs to show it. Which means that the lawless ones (eg the rioters, those who push burning bins at police behind riot shields) have no righteousness and stand condemned.

4. The struggle is spiritual
Jesus says, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loseth his own soul?” In the same way, what would it profit a righteous resistance if a cause ‘succeeds’ and yet simply sows greater alienation and division within a community? The path of righteous resistance cannot be reduced to a particular change of law or regulation; rather it is about the establishment of community and fellowship in place of division, strife and accusation, all the hallmarks of the realm of the enemy. The greatest problem that we face is the spiritual vacuum at the heart of the West, the soul death that preceded, caused, the civilisation death that we are living through. Yet resurrection! It is a good thing that Christianity teaches the conquering of death and we are not without hope. The most important task is to use the tools of righteous resistance to clarify what is at stake spiritually in the struggle. To bring things into the light, so that all might live in the light.

I’ll write further about what these mean in terms of our present distress.

After Southport: Secularism, Scapegoating, Starmergeddon

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I put off writing this for a while, for all sorts of reasons, much of which boiled down to feeling immensely depressed and despondent about it all. That, however, is faithless. The virtue of Christian hope is all about not giving in, about keeping on keeping on – and yes, I’m re-reading Lord of the Rings at the moment, which has that as a major theme. So, for what it’s worth, here is my take, it’s not very cheery, but when I despair I remember that it is to God that we look for salvation, and that we put not our trust in princes.

The rioting and lawlessness that followed the foul attack in Southport must be dealt with by the law, without fear or favour. On the King’s Peace does civilisation depend. Thus far I agree with Starmer, but no further. Most especially the absurd disproportion on display between the sentences given to angry working class white people, and those given to other categories, has become darkly comic. Starmer has quite clearly chosen a side against the white working classes – and, I guess following a government briefing, Mr Welby has done the same. Such things are catastrophic, and the consequences are going to be grim.

Attention has been paid to the rumours that the attacker was Islamic, which led to the attack on the Mosque, and all the consequent disorder. So there has been a crackdown on bad speech, not just incitement, but all that might be considered ‘legal but harmful’ – watch what you post says Big Brother. What this ignores is that the bad speech, the rumour, was simply a match tossed upon kindling soaked in petrol. If it hadn’t been this event and this story then it would have been another one. The firm hand of the law managed to suppress the disorder this time, but it will not always be able to do so. Indeed, the success of that suppression, and the manner in which that suppression was carried out, has added more fuel to the pile. The eventual conflagration will be more severe. In the end something will give.

Our elite supports an ideology of multiculturalism, what I, as a short-hand, tend to call the secular. The secular mindset is premised on the superiority of the WEIRD understanding of the world, within which religious belief is something that can provide all sorts of interesting colour to life, but is not of practical consequence, and best conducted in private. Secularism is in fact intensely Protestant (I might write more about that at some point – the Protestant Grammar of Wokery) and one of the most harmful elements of the secular approach is the way it is unconscious of its own theological premises and biases. After all, every world-view worthy of the name contains theological premises and biases, the point is only to uncover them and bring them into the light to see if they are good, true or beautiful, or simply to be discarded.

So our public order is structured on the dismissal of the validity of religious belief, most especially Christian belief. You can believe what you like so long as you keep it to yourself, and in the meantime the public square will support the values of tolerance, diversity and equality driven principally (this often goes unmentioned) by the need to feed more human fuel into the great maw of Mammon (industrial capitalism). Religious belief is inefficient…

Which leads to our present challenge, and the choice that will inevitably have to be made, publicly, clearly and committedly: do we preserve the freedoms and tolerances that have been granted to those hitherto treated poorly (most especially women and sexual minorities, but also ethnic and religious minorities), or do we tacitly sacrifice those freedoms and tolerances in order to appease one particular religious group? How does multiculturalism cope with a constituency that radically rejects multiculturalism? Secularism, sadly, lacks the philosophical – spiritual! – resources to cope with such a question. It is a vehicle that has been running on empty for some time, and the engine has started to sputter.

As I touched on before, this is the tragedy of the modern left. Cultural conflict is not supposed to happen in a multicultural society, we’re all supposed to just get along. Yet where there are egregious offences committed by one group against another, and where, not only are the criminal group protected by the state, but those crying out against the crimes are themselves criminalised, and oppressed, and victimised even further by the people that are meant to protect them (protect everyone) – this is not the path to peace.

One of the most heartbreaking stories I have read about the child rape gangs was of one father who went to the local police station to raise the alarm, because he was concerned about his daughter, and who was rejected by the police for being a racist. The Jay report put such truths in language accessible to (acceptable to) the authorities, but it is the specific and individual stories that need to be felt in order for what happened at the hotel in Rotherham to be understood.

Secularism cannot cope with this. Multi-cultural ideology is a cruel fiction that abolishes the possibility of peace and friendship across cultural divides. Violence inevitably follows.

Which brings me to scapegoating. The particular cultural conflict that Starmer et al are trying to suppress is a distinctive of the problems that we face in our country in our time. The underlying dark dynamics however are of much more ancient and universal character. When a society is stressed – and so many of our left-behind communities have been dealing with decades of increasing stress – and when that society starts to break down within itself, so that there is conflict with the society, then that society will eventually find a scapegoat. The scapegoat will be blamed and the previous tensions will be consumed in an orgy of newly created unity against that scapegoat. At which point that scapegoat will be purged from the group, either by expulsion or by elimination.

Now that Starmer has committed himself against a path of reconciliation (with Welby, ironically, in tow) the only question is: who will be the scapegoat?

A brief interjection: for nearly twenty years now I’ve been warning about this in sermons, and I’ve assumed that it will be the Islamic community, and I’ve said that the Christian community has to be ready to protect the Muslims (mosques and curry houses and so on) but one reflection from the last few weeks has been that I could have gotten this wrong. There is actually a group that is much smaller in number than the Muslim community, and which is much more widely resented and despised – and that is the ‘new elite’ political class itself. It’s possible that what we are headed towards is less a National Socialist scapegoating of a religious minority than a Revolutionary period of Great Fear and guillotines.

What I know is that there is an immense depth of sheer rage in the country, with insults being piled upon injuries by our clueless political class. We are in an immensely precarious position. There will be an inciting incident. Perhaps it will be something nakedly evil but essentially random like the Southport attack, but more likely it will be an Islamic terror attack, along the lines of all the ones before. Then the scapegoating will start, and the devilish mobs will whip themselves up with self-righteous fury, and shouts of ‘Crucify’ will fill the air, and only the Prince of this World will regard the outcome with joy.

This is what I have begun to think of as Starmergeddon. It is the logical end-point of the mainstream mentality of this country, it is what happens when God is abandoned: violence, disorder, hatred, the collapse of all human fellowship and friendship. I don’t know what it would take to shake the elite out of their mind-set. For when the first tremors are seen – as in Southport – then the secular view is not yet shaken in its certainties. For these are bad people doing bad things, have we not always said as much? Aren’t they revolting? And the elite continue, convinced of their rectitude. How bad might it have to become before they recognise the unsustainability of their path? How many mosques will be burned, how many asylum seekers will be lynched, just what would it take to bring them to a better acquaintance with reality? How big must the catastrophe be? Is it even possible for them to ask ‘are we the baddies?’

In my book I talked about the ‘accumulating crises of our time’ – well, the crises are now starting to crescendo. Ecological overshoot, resource wars, migrant flows, ethnic strife, economic stagnation if not collapse… such are trends that have been in place for so long that we have become accustomed to them, yet ‘if something cannot go on forever then it won’t’. I believe that in so many areas we have now reached the ‘won’t’! I do rather suspect that Peak Oil is going to knock loudly on the door and say hello too.

Which is why I have been feeling so despairing. Cassandra mode, however, is not a fit state for a Christian to occupy. Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope…

God is not mocked. Reality is one of the names of God, and we are driving head first at great speed into the brick wall of reality, on so many fronts. I cannot help but think that the revival of a religious sensibility, which is the only element that might enable us to navigate the furies effectively, has already started. There are enough people, and their number is growing, who see that the tools we used to create these problems are not the ones which will enable us to solve the problems. Deep down we know the truth, and the truth is a person.

Moses only really started to make headway when the court magicians could not keep up with the signs of YHWH. I look for the day when our court magicians run out of words; that is when the divine speech will be heard: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

How to resist: a decision made on holiday

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I have been in Cordoba, pondering the Reconquista. One interim conclusion of my reflections is that I’m going to drop the word ‘Islam’ from the title of this sequence, and I’m going to go back and edit it out of previous elements. This is for three reasons.

Firstly, I have no wish to be arrested for airing opinions that are ‘legal but harmful’. On the whole I find the present political situation in the UK unbearably toxic, and I have much that I would like to share – look out for something long called ‘After Southport’ which I’ll finish writing once I’m back from Greenbelt – but I’m not going to be reckless in what I write. I’d never support rioting or attacking mosques or refugee centres, but I don’t trust the bubble and the servants of the bubble to see that, so I’m going to try to be exquisitely precise and clear. In particular nothing that I shall be writing is ever to be taken as advocating a breach of the King’s Peace. The preservation of the King’s Peace, the maintenance of the rule of law applied to all without fear or favour, it is on this that our whole civilisation (British and Christian) is built.

However, if that was my only concern then I might not change things. So the second element in wanting to remove the word Islam from the title is that I don’t want to do anything which adds to the scapegoating process. As I have said repeatedly the logical endpoint of the path that we have embarked upon is inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife when it will be the task of the Christian to defend the ones that society will scapegoat. I’m expecting that to be the Islamic community. I thought the way that Bristol residents surrounded the Mercure hotel (to defend it) was a good demonstration of what we will need to do, when the crises come. And come they will, increasingly, and more violently, for so long as the tragedy of the modern left plays out. I remain convinced that as an ideology, Islam is pernicious – but in a situation of civil conflict those concerns (and I will still write about those concerns) are beside the point. We protect the vulnerable.

Which leads to the third thing, and what I was most conscious of whilst in Cordoba. Islam is expanding in Britain because it is expanding into a spiritual vacuum. What I most want is to renew the historic spiritual centre of this land. England has only ever been a Christian nation (that is, Christianity in England predates the establishment of England as a nation). If we were spiritually robust then we would have no need to fear Islam, our spiritual immune system would be able to cope. So I am more persuaded that the locus of ‘resistance’ needs to change. It is the Starmtroopers, both physical and spiritual, that we need to tackle as a higher priority.

Spelling out what that means remains the burden of this sequence.

~

I’ve been saying this for a very long time. In searching for something else I came upon this Remembrance Day sermon from 2010:

20101114 Remembrance Sunday

We have gathered together today to remember before God those who have gone before us, who gave their lives in war in order that those whom they loved would be saved.

In the news this morning the newly appointed Chief of the Defence Staff is alleged to have said that defeating Islamic militancy – the enemy against whom our armed forces are presently fighting – that defeating them was “unnecessary and could never be achieved”. Now I know that the Telegraph cannot always be trusted in its reporting, so I don’t want to focus my remarks upon General Richards himself. I would however like to say a few words about the attitude that those words express, because, even if they are not a faithful report of General Richards’ views, I’m sure they do reflect the views of other people in this country.

To begin with, it is, of course true, that an ideology cannot be defeated on the battlefield. Particular expressions of an ideology can be – as was the case in the Second World War – but an ideology itself cannot be defeated by physical force. So in that sense of ‘can never be achieved’ I understand the point that is being made. Yet what is missed, so it seems to me, is the truth that ideologies can be defeated in their own terms; that is, they can be shown to be false if they can be shown not to achieve what they claim to achieve – and it is that, so it seems to me, which is our task.

In the case of Islamic militancy, the central claim is that the Western world is in a state of barbaric ignorance, cut off from God, as a result of which people cannot flourish. In contrast to that, those who have embraced Islam, most especially through accepting Sharia law, are able to flourish in their lives. The armed struggle is undertaken as a struggle to advance human liberty and happiness – throwing off barbaric regimes that destroy people physically and spiritually, and exchanging that state for one in which true human freedom is established. The argument is not, therefore, between one side that seeks freedom and well-being, and another that resists those things, but rather a struggle between different visions of what human freedom and well-being actually are.

Islamic militancy is a view which has very deep roots, going back at least two hundred and fifty years to the Reform movement in Saudi Arabia known as Wahhabism, and taken forward by others. It long predates the establishment of Israel, or the Western invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, and we would be gravely mistaken if we ever thought that withdrawing from Afghanistan, or abandoning Israel, would solve our problems. Most importantly Islamic militancy is not a trivial ideology, and we must not dismiss it trivially, nor is it one which does not contain any truth. In criticising the West, they are right to point out the ways in which we fall short of God’s intentions for us – because we do – and there is in fact a very great deal of overlap between the critique of our society given by the Islamist militants, and that given by faithful Christians. There is also, of course, a very great deal of difference between what is seen as the solution.

For we do still live in a place where we are free to pursue a Christian faith, even if that freedom is starting to break down at the edges. Whatever our concerns about being allowed to wear a cross if you are working for British Airways, or whether you will lose your job as a nurse if you offer to pray with a patient, we are not like the church in Baghdad that was recently attacked by Islamic militants, with great loss of life. And we have that privilege for the simple reason that people have struggled for it – struggled with force of arms, and struggled spiritually. The greatest victories for Christian faith were won by the martyrs of the first centuries, who would rather have been fed to the lions than renounce their Saviour. They were the ones who demonstrated the true nature of freedom, who demonstrated what it meant to live an abundant life, and it is their spirit that we need to emulate.

The only lasting victory over Islamic militancy will come from demonstrating that we are not a Godless society, and that, in pursuing God to the best of our abilities, as we have known him revealed in Christ, we show in our lives what it means to live as free and flourishing human beings. And what does that mean in practice? What is it that I am actually saying we need to do? To answer that, I would like to share with you a passage from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. St Paul writes:

“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is noble and right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

We will not overcome the ideology of Islamic militancy by simply fighting suicide vests with cluster bombs. We will overcome it by remembering what it is that those we remember today fought for, remembering it and renewing our commitment to it – that is, the values of a Christian civilisation – which is one that takes those words of St Paul seriously. Let us not be overcome with evil, but let us overcome evil with good. Those we remember today fought and died in order that we might enjoy the freedom to pursue a Christian life in peace – so let us honour their sacrifice by renewing our commitment to our Christian inheritance, trusting in the God who sent his Son, not to condemn the world, but that the whole world might be saved through Him. Amen.

How I became a climate sceptic

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My journey from the first book to the second…

My earliest recollection of an environmental awareness dawning in me was when I was reading an Enid Blyton book, the name of which I cannot now recall – I must have been aged around seven or eight years old. It wasn’t one of the Five or Seven sequences, but within it there was a description of some children playing in the outside, beyond a wood, a long way from home (something that I did a lot in real life) and coming across some rubbish that had been left. I think it was paper wrappings rather than anything more foul, but from memory Blyton talks about the way in which the rubbish would remain, marring the environment. That situation struck me as a wrongness; this wasn’t an argument, just an instinct, a seed.

That seed only really started to grow after I had left school. First, and fundamentally, reading Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance helped me to put that instinct into a wider context. In particular, I still often find myself remembering a scene where Pirsig and his son cross over a highway, and look down on a traffic jam. The contrast between those two experiences of technology has always resonated with me; that is, I am fully convinced that the Buddha can be found within the pistons of an internal combustion engine! The point is to make the technology serve the human, not to conform the human to the Machine.

At University my understanding of the green perspective properly started to broaden out. Amongst many other books I was particularly influenced by Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jonathan Porritt’s Seeing Green. This was also when I read The Limits to Growth; whilst I found that analysis plausible on an intellectual level, it didn’t grip me in the way that the other books did. For me being Green was about living in the world in a certain way, with a certain set of virtues and with a view towards harmonious and community-centred living (I was also getting to grips with liberation theology at this point). I wasn’t particularly politically involved (the reasons for that are a story for another time) but I remember knocking on doors and campaigning for Mike Woodin at one point.

When it came to deciding what to do after graduating I was tempted by academia – I have always been tempted by academia – but the lure of earning a living was stronger. Most of the commercial options had no appeal and I chose to further my environmental awareness by joining the Department of the Environment. Here I was involved right at the sharp end of environmental debate from the beginning, as my first job centred on the safety of nuclear power! Although the postings were only supposed to be for a year, my first one was extended in order for me to run the ‘THORP consultation’, which was fascinating, and I got to see green politics from the inside, both how decisions are made by No 10 and the Cabinet, but also how the external bodies and campaigning groups made (or didn’t) any impact (without going into details, I was massively more impressed by Friends of the Earth than by Greenpeace).

Whilst I stayed in the DofE for a few more years, and learned an immense amount, in 1995 I got ‘clobbered by God’ and my attention turned to vocational matters. All matters green started to take a back seat, and after much change and moving around, it was only in 2005 that I started to look again at environmental concerns. This was triggered by reading an article by Bryan Appleyard that introduced me to the issue of Peak Oil, and this became an abiding passion for me. From working on the nuclear industry I had developed some awareness of questions around power supply, and I remain very interested in questions around energy.

So this reawakened me to the analysis offered by the Limits to Growth perspective (Peak Oil is simply one facet of that, albeit, for me, the most salient) and my dormant green concerns now started to wake up again. At this time – as had been the case ever since I became aware of the issue after Thatcher’s speech in 1988 – I accepted the mainstream consensus around what was then called global warming. That was when I bought the Jeremy Leggett book illustrated at the top (in 1990). What I want to sketch out now is how I became more and more detached from that consensus, and now regard it as a bad religion, a form of insanity.

The first knock came when in 2007, via the excellent (sadly now moribund) website The Oil Drum, I came across the work of David Rutledge. Rutledge pointed out that the IPCC estimates for available fossil fuels took no account of the ‘Peakist’ perspective (peaking applies to all the fossil fuels, not just oil), and that the most alarming models were radically unrealistic. This was a surprise to me. As I found the scientific understandings around resource limits persuasive and ‘hard’ (ie grounded in solid data) this meant that there was, for the first time, a question mark against the IPCC. I was working on my book at this time, and I wasn’t sure whether to use as the precipitating challenge global warming or peak oil; discovering Rutledge’s work made the choice very easy.

More radical was the impact of Climategate in November 2009. The IPCC not taking the Peakist arguments into account I thought was a simple mistake, that would be corrected over time – an innocent assumption on my part. Climategate persuaded me that there were bad actors involved, Michael Mann foremost amongst them. As this was deeply challenging to my preconceptions I felt the need to dig into the details of this (and learned a lot about paleo-climatology in the process) and I particularly benefited from Andrew Montford’s writings. I go into some detail here, but the gist of my conclusion was simply that a) the Hockey Stick is very bad science, and b) the perpetuation of the Hockey Stick was not driven by scientific considerations but by social and cultural ones. I am persuaded that the understanding of historic temperatures that prevailed before the malign Dr Mann got involved is essentially correct, ie that there were previous warm periods in human history that reached higher temperatures than we now face (Minoan, Roman, Medieval warm periods).

This was an uncomfortable time for me in many ways. I remained (so I thought) within the overall environmental, green worldview, I was just more and more persuaded that the greens were making a great mistake in placing all their emphasis upon climate questions. I read a lot by people on all sides of the issue at this time, from Watts Up With That to Real Climate, and my principal take away was that reasoned argument was being lost beneath the politics, that is, the ‘scientific consensus’ was being enforced by social pressure and force – by bullying. The science simply wasn’t strong enough to win arguments on its own, so unethical behaviour had to be relied upon to make up the difference. Round about 2011 or so I settled on one main person to follow, who had earned my trust as someone who took a genuinely scientific approach to these questions: Judith Curry at her Climate Etc blog, and she is also interested in the philosophical aspects, which are my bailiwick. I still read a handful of others (Steve McIntyre, Roger Pielke) but I have stepped away from following all the detailed arguments.

Whilst I am open to further arguments on the technical questions, it is the wider sociological aspects that interest me now. I am persuaded that the present noise is essentially a bad religion, a conclusion that I had reached before coming across this book (which I have purchased but not yet read). When truth becomes subordinate to political questions, and those questions are shaped and structured by prior political interests, then the scientific discussion is compromised by human nature. That is, as I have argued more substantively elsewhere, good science is a subset of good religion. It is impossible to carry out good science without the context of a robustly embedded good ethic (= it is bad to falsify research), and that good ethic cannot subsist without a grounding in a religious, narrative framework (= ‘this is why it is bad to be bad’). It is not possible to be a good scientist without a sense of holiness (and, I suspect, it’s not possible to be a good scientist if your metaphysic is antithetical to the Christian worldview – I might go into that more on another occasion).

Why does this matter? For all my life I have had what I would now call an environmental concern, and I have often been either a member of the Green party, or a green member of another. I still think of myself as ‘green’, but what I see in the present Green movement seems insane, and not just about environmental questions. So in part, I wanted to tell this story in one place, so that I can refer to it in future. I sometimes think of myself as ‘a deep green climate sceptic’ – I remain convinced that we are in a state of overshoot, I’m sympathetic that we might be in an olduvai gorge situation, and we certainly have to reckon with the nature of the one-time ‘carbon pulse’ (we will go back to coal as we descend the down-slope). In particular our general cultural conversation is ‘energy blind’; most especially the ways in which, even now, investment in renewables is dependent upon the ready availability of fossil fuels, especially diesel, and the way in which our economy is influenced by the availability of oil (which was the underlying cause of the 2008 financial crisis). From my point of view the attention given to climate change is a great green herring.

This is slowly becoming obvious. When the bad science is only (literally and metaphorically) in the stratosphere, the ordinary person quietly ignores it. Now that it has triggered the idolatry of Net Zero it is beginning to impact upon most people’s daily life. When it gets to the point of saying ‘you must not heat your home because of climate change’ resistance gets stronger and the standard of evidence that the science has to meet becomes much more important. As that evidence doesn’t exist, the modern green movement is about to have its very own ‘Wile E Coyote moment’ and be left behind. Pointing out that the climate is changing is not enough (it clearly is); even pointing out that human activity is involved in that change is not enough (our behaviour does have an impact). It is the catastrophising which is the bad religion – and bad religion can only be overcome by good religion, not by the absence of religion at all.

Which is why, in the end, I’m a Christian not a green.

Here I stand, I can do no other; God help me.

On the use of this blog

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I had thought I would keep this blog for more personal elements, and use my substack for longer opinion or essay pieces. That isn’t working. I’m also conscious of the need to keep some control over my published output, and this website is hosted by me (via GoDaddy) and it costs me, so as well as being more secure I want to get my money’s worth!

So going forward I’m going to publish all the substack essays here as well (and I’ll slowly add in on this site the ones I’ve published there already). I will also resume using this page for the more chatty, social media type elements. I’ve abandoned the media round-up, and deleted those posts. They weren’t adding anything of real value! But there will be a bit more of ‘me’ here; this will resume as my principal blog, my penseive. It might have some ‘meta’ commentary on my posts (especially the HTRI) stuff.

Going forward I am hoping to publish (via Kindle) two books this year, sourced principally from existing writing: a revised ‘2nd edition’ of Let us be Human, including additional material (including a chapter on Islam that I cut from the first edition), and a themed collection of my writings around national identity, especially Brexit, called ‘La La La’ – One Land, One Law, One Language. There might then be a third, next year, covering my writings on the CofE, working title of ‘Haunted by Herbert: Reflections from the front line of Parish Ministry’, and which will include some of the more autobiographical stuff here. That will require more work, hence the delay.

My writing output, especially my more personal stuff, is directly correlated with my peace of mind and heart and soul. That’s why the writing here fell off a cliff in the 2010s. It’s also why my writing in the last few years has taken off again, as my life is much more settled. This is about taking it further, and committing to it.

Here is something I’m listening to a lot at the moment, from James’ new album:

“Yet a simpler life is calling me
A spit of land, community
Can you come around and rescue me?
How blessed I am, your love to receive”

Living with lacunae

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I’ve recently had cause to ponder situations where my need to understand something has been bouncing up against limits. Where it has become clear that there is no explanation to be had, that, instead, wisdom requires a living with the absence of an explanation – what philosophers call a lacuna, a gap in the understanding. I think this is healthy, but it has made me reflect on some areas in my life where I have come to what I now think of as premature certainty, a premature closing off of the gap, a refusal to live with the lacunae.

Two examples from the United States, as they are matters far from my daily life, and therefore quite clearly areas where there is no need for me to seek any certainty, where it is easiest.

The first is the collapse of WTC7. This does not make sense to me. The official explanation is that it was brought down by fire. The official explanation has been proven false. To an outside observer it looks very like a controlled demolition, but positing a controlled demolition requires a large amount of other hypotheses which very rapidly enter into the realms of madness. If I ponder this for too long then I end up in a place of extreme cognitive dissonance. So now I say: I don’t know what happened. I don’t understand what happened. It’s a gap.

The second is the 2020 election. I remember when it happened thinking that it was odd, and in particular I remember the fact that 18 of the 19 hitherto ‘bellwether’ counties had voted for Trump, so Biden winning in that context seemed very odd (the conventional explanation for that oddness is here). The ‘down the rabbit-hole’ explanation is here. Pondering the way in which US elections are carried out – and the role of the ‘voting machines’ – makes me think that, if there isn’t fraud, that is a result of divine grace rather than a robust system. I have no idea what the truth is. I don’t know what happened. I don’t understand what happened. It’s a gap.

I’m coming to see that desire for premature certainty as the high road to delusion (and also all sorts of conflicts), and I interpret it now in the light of lateral hemispheres. The desire for certainty is a sign of left-hemisphere capture, a hall of mirrors. Whereas sitting with paradox, with ignorance, with acknowledged lacunae – this is the way.

I am slowly becoming healthy again. Thanks be to God.