Something deeper

English vicars have noticed increasing numbers of young people in their congregations. The Church of England commissioned a report to discover "what was drawing 18 to 30-year-olds to it. .... It investigated those who had come to Christianity from lapsed or atheist English upbringings, and also from migrant backgrounds and other faiths." It was released with "a lack of fanfare," perhaps because it wasn't really what they wanted to hear. From The Telegraph yesterday:

.... It is clear that the spiritual needs of the young, as articulated in the report, are in severe tension with the Church’s own direction.

One notable finding is that many of the young were prompted to start their journey towards Christianity by its literary and intellectual heritage.

Respondents described encounters with C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, and David Bentley Hart, the Orthodox theologian. One 28-year-old, who had not been to university, was engaged by his interest in J.R.R. Tolkien, when he came to understand the role that Christian thought played in The Lord of the Rings. ....

The report dismisses the idea that the young will be attracted simply by slick visuals and hollowed-out presentations of the faith. They are looking for a rigorous understanding of life and morality. Many are put off by the shallowness of modern secular culture and are looking for something deeper.

The beauty of the Church’s artistic heritage was for others the first hint of this deeper world. One 21-year-old spoke of visiting a church in York and finding the light “streaming through” the ancient stained glass windows “and casting rainbows everywhere” as being “the most beautiful thing” he had ever seen. The historic buildings, for the young, can be a powerful form of evangelism.

It is likewise for the centuries-old Book of Common Prayer. “You have a connection to something that…however many generations of your ancestors would recognise and understand, the same liturgy that you’re reading. [It’s] immensely powerful,” said one 25-year-old. ....

These findings are almost a complete catalogue of what the Church is moving away from. .... (more)

Bijan Omrani, "Gen Z craves full-fat religion while the Church acts like a secular NGO," The Telegraph, July 26, 2026.

Drifting away

Ryan Burge, who does statistical research about religion in America, was curious about why individuals become "nones." Once it seemed politics was the most important reason, but now not so much. The quotations below are from his conclusions based on the research. The article includes statistics and additional charts like the one above. Burge:

In the late 1990s, about 15% of liberals were nones compared to 5% of conservatives—a clear divide, but not an impassable chasm. That’s no longer true. Now, 43% of ideological liberals say they have no religious affiliation compared to just 12% of conservatives. A ten-point gap has tripled in size, and there’s no evidence these trend lines will converge anytime soon. ....

Among Catholic “stayers,” 39% are Republicans and 36% are Democrats. For Protestants who stuck around, those numbers are 47% and 29%, respectively. But among those who switched from Protestant to Catholic or Catholic to Protestant, a clear pattern emerges: switchers inside Christianity are consistently the most Republican of any subgroup examined here. ....

And here’s where I had a “holy cow” moment. The types of nones who are the least Democratic are those who have been non-religious their entire lives. Only 38% say they are Democrats, 42% identify as politically Independent, and 20% align with the GOP. In contrast, among ex-Christians who become nones, roughly 45% say they are Democrats—seven points higher than the “always nones.”

This is fascinating because it suggests a mismatch between what drives people to leave Protestantism or Catholicism and what it means to have never been religious at all. People who actively exit a faith tradition aren’t just drifting; they’re making a decision, and that decision appears correlated with a particular political worldview. Leaving a church isn’t religiously neutral; for many people, it seems to be a political act.

The “always nones” tell a different story. They weren’t pushed out of anything; they simply never had a religious identity to begin with. Without that experience of exit, there’s no corresponding political signal. They’re secular by default rather than conviction, and their politics reflect that—more Independent, less reliably Democratic, and harder to categorize. ....

...[A]mong those born in the 1990s and 2000s who left Christianity behind, only about a third identify as Democrats. The political premium that came with religious exit has nearly vanished. These younger “dechurchers” don’t look like political refugees; they look more like people who simply stopped going—gradually, quietly, without it meaning much ideologically one way or the other. ....

The story of the nones, in other words, has changed. The first wave left with conviction. The second wave just drifted out the door. (more)

Ryan Burge, "The First Wave Left with Conviction. The Second Wave Just Drifted," Graphs About Religion, July 16, 2026.

Mistaking suspicion for sophistication

Bryan A. Garner agrees that conspiracies do happen, but:

For some people, a bad outcome is never just a bad outcome, and a coincidence is never just a coincidence. There must always be a hidden hand behind it, coordinating events that, on the surface, look random or trivial.

Not long ago, this instinct seemed like harmless eccentricity. Conspiracy theorists lived at the margins, alongside doomsayers and end-time prophets. Most people treated them as curiosities rather than participants in serious argument. Today, though, that boundary has eroded. Conspiracy thinking hasn’t just survived into the present — it has moved into the mainstream of political and cultural life, shaping how large numbers of people interpret ordinary events. ....

Conspiracy thinking didn’t become mainstream because people suddenly became irrational. It became mainstream because habits that once signaled intellectual seriousness — skepticism, independence, distrust of authority — have mutated into forms that are less disciplined and less self-correcting.

Consider skepticism in its healthier forms. A skeptic is supposed to withhold belief until evidence justifies it. But conspiracy thinking often inverts that discipline. Official explanations are treated as suspect by default, while unofficial ones are treated as credible precisely because they’re unofficial. The burden of proof is quietly upended. Instead of asking what would make a claim true, people ask what would disprove it — and the claims are structured to resist disproof.

A healthy mind doesn’t begin with suspicion; it arrives there. It starts with a provisional willingness to accept ordinary explanations, then shifts toward doubt only when specific features of the evidence justify it — persistent anomalies, independent corroboration of misconduct, patterns that resist simpler accounts. Suspicion is an earned response, not a default posture, and it remains tethered to standards that allow it to be revised or abandoned when contrary evidence appears. Conspiracy thinking breaks from this discipline by treating suspicion of traditional sources as the starting point and then insulating that mindset from the kinds of evidence that would ordinarily dispel it.

What makes this especially strange is that conspiracy thinking often presents itself as the most skeptical stance available. Yet it routinely demands greater leaps of faith than the explanations it rejects. ....

Conspiracy thinking isn’t going away. It’s too deeply rooted in how human beings respond to uncertainty, scale, and loss of control. The real question isn’t whether it will persist but what conditions we might normalize around it. A society that mistakes suspicion for sophistication, and disbelief for intelligence, may feel more critical, but it’s actually becoming easier to persuade with less and less evidence. (more)

Bryan A. Garner, "The Heart of Conspiracy," National Review, June 11, 2026.

"Back when I didn’t believe in God..."

I found this book review very much worth reading. David Brooks:

Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins, and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As I looked across all these different flavours of atheism, I think I intuited something that Christopher Beha makes explicit in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha argues that it is a fallacy to define atheism as simply an absence of belief.

Atheists sometimes like to portray themselves that way. They like to tell what philosopher Charles Taylor calls subtraction stories: Over the last thousands of years, religious people built up all this mumbo-jumbo about the supposed supernatural world. The job for any reasonable person is to strip all that away and get down to reality itself—the stuff we can see, feel, and measure. In this telling, atheists don’t subscribe to a creed or a faith; they are just taking a neutral, objective look at empirical reality and following the evidence.

Beha counters that this is nonsense. In fact, atheists have a worldview just like anybody else. A worldview is a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, where we should go for wisdom. ....

Humans are structured in such a way that it is hard for us to feel content unless our mess of desires is drawn by something outside ourselves, some supreme love that harmonizes them. Humans were built in such a way that it is hard for us to find peace through self-analysis, as the rationalists might suppose, or self-creation, as the Romantics argue, but only through the self-emptying love that flows from a sanctified soul.

The second advantage of the religious worldview is that it provides a structure for that yearning; it provides a way. Many secular worldviews are neutral about ends. It’s up to each person to define the goal of their life. (This is not true of Marxism, which is a religion without God.) Many secular worldviews have failed to come up with compelling systems of morality precisely because, without a concept of what life is for, it is hard to come up with justifications that separate right from wrong. .... (more)

David Brooks, "More Than Evolution Requires: Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism," Comment

"I know that my Redeemer lives..."

In 1988, I gave my pastor, Rev. Kevin Butler, a sealed envelope containing my "Funeral and Burial Instructions." Recently, his wife, Janet, came across that envelope in his desk. I was curious about my thoughts on such matters almost forty years ago, so I asked if it could be mailed to me. It came today (thanks, Janet). Not much has changed, although my hymn selections might vary a bit. Following the burial instructions, I wrote:

3. I am a Christian. I believe that I will live eternally in the presence of God. I wish a service that reflects that fact. If possible, I would like the following elements to be a part of that service:

• "The Order for the Burial of the Dead" from The Book of Common Prayer, 1559. I do not want a modern language version.
• Hymns: "Amazing Grace," especially the verse: "When we've been there ten thousand years..." Isaac Watts' "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" to St Anne's tune.
• If possible, a soloist and choir to sing "O Taste and See" by Ralph Vaughan Williams from the Sacred and Secular Songs.
• Only the barest and briefest eulogy, or none at all.
• No choruses and as little sentimentality as possible.

4. The service must be conducted by someone who is orthodox in Christian doctrine and who believes the words he will say or read.

Today, I might add or substitute the hymn "How Firm a Foundation." The Vaughan Williams is probably a bit much to ask (see below). I would change the Prayer Book selection for the scriptures, prayers, and readings to the 1662 version of "The Order for the Burial of the Dead." By and large, though, it was fine — just a description of the ordinary elements of a Christian funeral with some personalization. I won't mind if the need for such instruction is postponed for a while.

“Either Jesus never was or he still is"

From "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief":

Muggeridge was one of the top journalists of his time. A British newspaperman who became an influential television broadcaster, he was a natural skeptic. This trait served him well in the Soviet Union, where the Manchester Guardian sent him in the fall of 1932. Like many young socialists, the 29-year-old Muggeridge was drawn to the supposed warmth of collectivism. In the cold of winter, however, he heard rumors of deprivation. During Lent in 1933, he defied a travel ban on journalists, sneaked aboard a train and searched for the truth in Ukraine.

As Easter loomed, Muggeridge observed the horror of the Holodomor, a famine imposed by Stalin through state-run farming and the seizure of harvests. He witnessed starving peasants, empty villages and “hard-faced” soldiers. Years later, in his autobiography, he called it “a nightmare memory.”

Then came the wonder. On a Sunday morning in Kyiv, acting on an impulse, Muggeridge entered a church. “It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar,” he wrote. The devotion of the people amazed him. “Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering . . . I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.” ....

His moment of conversion came in 1967, while filming a BBC program on the Holy Land. It happened in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

As at the church in Kyiv, the faith of others stirred him. “Seeing a party of Christian pilgrims at one of these shrines, their faces bright with faith, their voices as they sang so evidently and joyously aware of their Saviour’s nearness, I understood that for them the shrine was authentic,” he wrote. “I, too, became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God.” His faith was still a work in progress. It “remained rather abstract, a useful counterpoint to his attacks on secular liberalism,” wrote his definitive biographer Gregory Wolfe. ....

In his last years, Muggeridge wrote about his deepening faith, culminating in the 1975 publication of Jesus: The Man Who Lives. The frontispiece of the original edition is a photo from a Spanish abbey of what may be a touchstone image for Muggeridge: doubting Thomas touching the wound of Christ in a stone bas-relief.

The Resurrection “seems to me indubitably true,” wrote Muggeridge at the book’s end. “Either Jesus never was or he still is. As a typical product of these confused times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost sincerity, I assert that he still is.” .... (more)

John J. Miller, "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief," The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2026.

"Why do you hide your face from me?"

From "The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It"

In the psalms, lament is a structured form of prayer that follows a discernible pattern: crying out to God, complaining, requesting, remembering God’s works, and—perhaps most surprisingly—often ending in praise of God. And for much of contemporary American Christianity, which we know best and have been studying for years, it has quietly disappeared. ....

...[O]nly about 4 percent of contemporary Protestant Christian worship songs reflect the kind of lament modeled in the psalms, despite the fact that nearly 40 percent of the biblical Psalter consists of laments. The hymnal of Israel was saturated with honest complaint. Ours largely is not. At some point—and this has been well-documented by theologians like Soong-Chan Rah, Todd Billings, and Walter Brueggemann—much of American Christianity internalized a triumphalist posture toward suffering: one that emphasized victory, gratitude, and praise, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the raw petition and protest that fill the psalms. ...

When churches ask suffering people to outwardly project trust rather than speak truth, they are asking a particular kind of thing from a particular kind of person: the person for whom Sunday morning is often the loneliest hour of the week. The cancer patient. The grieving parent. The one whose life has come apart. Even if unintentionally, they are often the ones being asked to manage their presentation, to signal resilience, to express gratitude before they have had space to grieve. When we silence the pain of our most vulnerable members, we are telling them that their full reality does not belong in the community of faith. ....

The psalmists knew the value of inconvenient honesty. The two fundamental questions of lament, as musician and author Michael Card has written, are “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?” Jesus prayed a lament psalm (Psalm 22) from the cross, crying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are not questions the psalms treat as spiritually dangerous. They are questions that Scripture itself models—and models prolifically. Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is one of its most ancient expressions. To deprive suffering people of this practice is to withhold from them a resource that Scripture provides precisely for moments like theirs. ....

There is a difference between complaining to God and complaining about God. The psalms of lament do the former. They bring honest anguish, protest, even anger—directly into the presence of God. This is not the same as griping about God to others. The counterintuitive truth is that complaining to God can be an act of faith: It demonstrates that you still believe God is present, that God hears, that the relationship can bear the weight of honest expression.

This is what lament does. It does not offer an explanation for suffering. It does not promise that circumstances will change. It offers something more basic: a structure for telling the truth about pain in the presence of a God who, the psalms insist, does not despise or ignore the cry of the afflicted. .... (more)

"The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It," The Dispatch, March 22, 2026.

What about evolution?

A recent article at Mere Orthodoxy describes the results of a "Pew Religious Landscape Survey" on American beliefs about evolution. The choices offered were:

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (“pure evolution”).
2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (“intelligent design”).
3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (“creationist view”).

Breaking it down:

The article, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism" intends to be read as analysis rather than advocacy. But it does advocate tolerance among Christians of varying views:

It seems that a central argument of some young-earth creationists is this: “If you deviate from the panoply of interpretations we offer on Genesis 1-11, it is because you are succumbing to secularism and downgrading the authority of the Bible.” But, as soon as you find Christians who deviate from their interpretation, but have demonstrably not been animated by secular science nor have abandoned their high view of Scripture’s authority or the historicity of the miraculous…then the argument starts to fall apart. If young-earth creationists want to regain ground on this issue with the wider culture, it might, paradoxically, come from being more open-minded towards other Christians who disagree with them.

When Copernicus and Galileo strove to demonstrate that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, the church was able to provide sophisticated (if not convoluted) Biblical and naturalistic arguments to refute the claim. But they were wrong. And, in time, the Church realized this and adopted heliocentrism. This wasn’t a concession that science had more authority than God's Word, but an admission that they had simply interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

This realization did not diminish what God’s Word told us about the rising and setting of the sun or the foundations upon which the earth rested, but it moved us closer to seeing what the author originally intended when he used those word pictures. Similarly, if we approach Genesis 1 assuming that its primary function is to refute figures like Darwin, we will miss the meat and marrow of what the Divine Author intended for us to receive from His Word and therefore may fundamentally misunderstand His world. (more)

Marc Sims, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism," Mere Orthodoxy, March 6, 2026.

"Yet I will rejoice"

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines,
The produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls,
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength; He makes my feet like the deer’s.
He makes me tread on high places. 

Habakkuk 3:17-19 [ESV]

The final verse of Cowper's hymn is based on that passage from Habakkuk. It is a favorite hymn of mine, although several others of Cowper's are, too.

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord who rises with healing in His wings:
When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.

In holy contemplation, we sweetly then pursue
The theme of God’s salvation, and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow, we cheerfully can say,
'E'en let th' unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may.

It can bring with it nothing, but He will bear us through.
Who gives the lilies clothing will clothe His people, too;
Beneath the spreading heavens, no creature but is fed;
And He Who feeds the ravens will give His children bread.

Though vine, nor fig tree, neither, their wonted fruit should bear,
Tho' all the field should wither, nor flocks, nor herds, be there,
Yet God, the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice
For while in Him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.
(William Cowper, c. 1779)

Poets' Corner - William Cowper: Olney Hymns

A journey to faith

From another review of Charles Murray's Taking Religion Seriously:

At the heart of Murray’s argument are two points that I find particularly compelling. Like Cardinal Newman and C.S. Lewis (from whom Murray draws abundantly), Murray believes that there is a nonarbitrary “Moral Law” manifest in human conscience that reveals the nature of good and evil and encourages us to “do the right thing.” With Lewis’s help, Murray sees through facile moral and cultural relativism. Even in the midst of genuine diversity of mores and practices, what Lewis called “the Tao” can still be seen. Where on earth have an entire people or culture esteemed in principle faithlessness over loyalty, murder over the obligation not to kill, falsehood over truth, cowardice over courage, rank selfishness over the common good? No, all human cultures at their core see themselves as morally bound and morally guided. ....

Murray has therefore arrived at a position that is not merely theistic but genuinely Christian. With due modesty, he has come to believe that we live in an “intentional universe” and have access to a binding “moral bedrock” amid the chaos of “tumultuous changes in the secular received wisdom about what is right and wrong, good and evil.” He has also come to believe in the reality of sin, as well as in the life-transforming “forgiveness of sins” through the offices of a just and merciful God as proclaimed and made manifest by Jesus Christ. Given Murray’s personal starting point and scientific credentials, the witness of his journey to faith is all the more winsome. One could see him as the antitype and antidote to those, like Richard Dawkins, who speak of a “universe of ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.’” (more)

Daniel J. Mahoney, "Charles Murray, in Good Faith," National Review, Dec. 18, 2025.

From agnosticism to belief

From Barton Swaim's review of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously:

.... A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis’s argument that Jesus couldn’t have been a “great moral teacher” if he wasn’t the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray’s attention. The usual response—that the Gospels don’t record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention—led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels’ origins. (In a series of vignettes, Taking Religion Seriously lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened? .... (more)

Barton Swaim, "Taking Religion Seriously Review: Faith Makes a Comeback," Oct. 17, 2025.

Sons of the Father

From the final chapter of John R.W. Stott's Basic Christianity, "Being a Christian":

We saw earlier that our sins had alienated us from God. They had come as a barrier between us. Put differently, we were under the just condemnation of the Judge of all the earth. But now through Jesus Christ, who bore our condemnation and to whom by faith we have become united, we have been "justified," that is, brought into acceptance with God and pronounced righteous. Our Judge has become our Father. "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are," wrote John. "Father" and "Son" are the distinctive titles which Jesus gave to God and to himself, and they are the very names which he permits us to use! By union with him we are permitted to share something of his own intimate relation to the Father. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century AD, well expresses our privilege when writing about the Lord's Prayer:

How great is the Lord's indulgence! How great are his condescension and plenteousness of goodness towards us, seeing that he has wished us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father, and to call ourselves sons of God, even as Christ is the Son of God—a name which none of us would dare to venture on in prayer, unless he himself had allowed us thus to pray.

Now at last we can repeat the Lord's Prayer without hypocrisy. Previously the words had a hollow sound; now they ring with new and noble meaning. God is indeed our Father in heaven, who knows our needs before we ask and will not fail to give good things to his children.

It may be necessary for us sometimes to receive correction at his hand, "for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." But in this he is treating us as sons and disciplining us for our good. With such a Father, loving, wise and strong, we can be delivered from all our fears.

John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity, Eerdman's Publishing, 1974.

Questing

An appreciation of Christianity is not enough. To be saved requires faith. From The Telegraph on "cultural Christianity":

Being a Christian, I suppose I should prefer Christian jokes about religion, but I often find the Jewish jokes have more bite. Here is one.

The boy who is about to be bar-mitzvahed approaches his instructor with a troubled expression: "Rabbi, I have to tell you something important. You see, I don't believe in God. The rabbi stares at the sad youth with scorn, and replies, "Do you think He cares?"

Even as a joke, it is unimaginable that a Christian priest could speak like that. He would have to tell the equivalent boy that he could not be confirmed without faith. He would probably add, by way of consolation, something like "God loves you all the same."

For Christianity, faith is the thing without which, nothing. Faith is not sufficient — hope is equally great, says St Paul, and love is the greatest — but faith is necessary. The Nicene Creed, 1,700 years old next month, is a statement of what a Christian must believe. This requirement, this "I believe...", spoken by each individual, is something that a great many well-disposed people, especially in the modern Western world, cannot conscientiously say.

Hence the existence of what are known as "cultural Christians". These are people who like the tenor of Christianity, its moral norms, its tenderness towards the poor and weak, the beauty of its liturgy and art, its civilisational benefits, but do not in fact believe that, as the Nicene Creed puts it, Jesus is "the only begotten son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds" etc. ....

Dr [Rowan] Williams is surely right that cultural Christians, because they do not believe, are not fully experiencing the life that is Jesus. There is the world of difference between, as he puts it, admiring Christianity and being "called on to love God". But what I think he fails to recognise is that most cultural Christians know that.

They are not in a steady state of contentment about where they are. They may well be, as the Archbishop thinks Jordan Peterson is, "sad and angry". After all, nearly 2,000 years after Jesus was unjustly killed, the number of things to be sad and angry about seems greater than at any time since 1945. The point, however, is that they are questing. They need help in that quest. ....

But faith, in any case, is not something human beings can create for themselves.

All we can try to be is in the right place at the right time. Cultural Christians do at least recognise that they may be in the right place, which probably means they are looking for the right time. (more)

Charles Moore, "Cultural Christians already know what they are missing from religion: faith," The Telegraph, April 18, 2025.

"He is not here..."

Some years ago, when a family in his community had suffered a terrible loss, a Lutheran pastor preached an Easter Vigil sermon:

.... For almost two thousand years, humans have heard this story and for almost two thousand years we have been coming up with reasons not to believe it. Perhaps Jesus' body was stolen, it is argued, and the appearances to his disciples were the work of an imposter. Perhaps the appearances were a mass hallucination by the disciples, unresolved grief expressing itself as a sort of denial that he was even dead. Maybe the empty tomb is a later addition to this story. Maybe the whole thing is a metaphor for the power of Jesus' teaching. Maybe it is an echo of the stories of the pagan gods of the ancient near east, who go to the underworld for a season and then come back, bringing spring with them. The sun will come up tomorrow and life will renew itself.

These arguments are, briefly, all balderdash. Yes, the stories are strange and filled with mystery. No, they do not create one consistent picture of that morning and the days that follow. But the doubt and confusion are written into the story from the start. This is not a confidence game or a fraud or a metaphor. The stories would look totally different if they were. The people who were there believed this had happened. What and how, exactly, they couldn't say. But it was unbearably, unbelievably real to them. ....

Yet there it was, and there it is: a tomb with no corpse. A door opening to a possibility we may not even want to entertain. That there is something beyond the grave—not in our warm, rose-tinged memories, not in some distant shore where the souls of the righteous congregate, not in the recurring cycle of nature, spring following winter and day following night, not in our plucky human desire to go on living despite it all—but in the love shown to a broken body as it is knitted back together. In the care shown to a dead body as it is revived to life. In the promise of salvation and in-gathering of all the peoples that is initiated by this one lonely empty tomb. In a new age that begins now, in the devil being cast out from this one cranny of earth, hell being crushed under this one foot, death being deprived of its spoils in this one corpse. .... (more)

Benjamin Dueholm, "Preaching the Easter Vigil," The Parish Bulletin, April 17, 2025.

The day in-between

From "Sitting, Waiting, and Hoping in the Tomb of Jesus" by A.J. Swoboda:

.... Martin Luther said himself that Saturday was the day that God himself lay cold in the grave. Friday was death, Sunday was hope, but Saturday was that seemingly ignored middle day between them when God occupied a dirty grave in a little garden outside Jerusalem. Saturday is about waiting, about uncertainty, about not knowing what’ll happen. ....

So much of Christian faith is Saturday faith. ....

A medieval theologian, Anselm, once described the kind of faith that comes with Saturday—fides quaerens intellectum: “faith seeking understanding.” By that, he meant that faith isn’t something that arises after moments of understanding. Rather, faith is something that you cling to when understanding and reason lay dead. We don’t believe once we understand it—we believe in order to understand it. Saturday’s like that: offering a day of waiting, a day of ambiguity, a day when God is sovereign even if our ideas and theologies and expectations about him are not. It is the day that our ignorance is our witness and our proclamation. Truth is, our intellect will always be one step behind in our love of God. We don’t love God once we understand him; we love God in order to understand him. ....

At times, we are all like the two disciples on their way to Emmaus who were really close to Jesus but didn’t always know it. In Luke 24, two disciples walked away from Jerusalem, where they’d just seen their Lord and Master die on the cross. Leaving, dejected, upset, hopeless, and broken, to find the next stage in their lives and careers. Unbeknownst to them, Jesus had been resurrected and was actually walking alongside them on their way to Emmaus. The hope of Sunday hadn’t dawned on them yet. The Gospels tell us that, on their way to Emmaus, the disciples were “downcast.”

That experience is the kind of experience Saturday is all about. .... (more)

This is from A.J. Swoboda's A Glorious Dark: Finding Hope in the Tension between Belief and Experience, excerpted in Christianity Today.

Sitting, Waiting, and Hoping in the Tomb of Jesus | Christianity Today

"All-or-nothing"

Michael at Shadow to Light usually takes on the arguments of atheists. This time, he posts on a subject that will annoy some Christians: "The First Chapters of Genesis":

There are many Christians who argue that the first chapters of Genesis must be read as literal history. What’s more, if you refuse to embrace such an interpretation, you are rejecting the Bible, therefore rejecting Christianity. I don’t agree. In fact, when I read the first chapters of Genesis, it’s seems clear (to me) that we are dealing with a significant amount of symbolism. In other words, Genesis reads more like symbolic history, an allegory that is conveying deeper truths about our past and who we are. The literalists would disagree, arguing that unless Genesis is literal history, describing things as they happened, it’s nothing more than a fantasy. And of course, atheists everywhere are happy to weigh in and agree with this all-or-nothing thinking. ....

He intends to do a series on the subject: "First, I want to lay out some of reasons I think Genesis is meant to be interpreted as symbolic history. Second, consider some of the truths that Genesis is conveying. Finally, consider what would be the historical truths."

Michael, "The First Chapters of Genesis," Shadow to Light, April 6, 2025.

George Washington and a Providential God

Today is generally known as "Presidents' Day" but legally it is Washington's birthday, moved from the actual anniversary of his birth to a Monday in order to give federal employees one more three day weekend.

A while back, on another "Presidents' Day," I published the following about what can be known about George Washington's religious faith:

Mark Tooley republishes his review, "George Washington's God," "in honor of Washington’s Birthday and of Michael Novak, who died Friday, February 17, 2017." Michael Novak and his daughter, Jana Novak, were authors of Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country, published in 2006; it was written at the request of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. From Tooley's review:

.... The assumption of the last century’s scholarship that Washington was irreligious is partly his fault. Reserved and emotionally reticent, he left no extant theological treatises on his personal religious beliefs. The clues must be extracted from Washington’s ecclesial habits, his family life, his character, and the numerous references to the Almighty in his public writings and personal letters. ....

Most of Washington’s family, friends, and associates assumed he had at least conventional if not necessarily expressive Christian faith. “He took these things [religion] as he found them existing, and was constant in his observance of worship according to the received forms of the Episcopal Church in which he was brought up,” James Madison matter-of-factly observed of his fellow Virginian. ....

Washington was indeed tight-lipped about the specifics of his theology. But he was surprisingly frequent in his references to the Deity. His God was not remote or impersonal. Washington’s God, as he described Him in his public declarations and personal letters, was quite active and quite personal. This deity saved the young Washington several times from French and Indian bullets, saved Washington’s army from near destruction by the far larger British army, and saved the young republic from chaos and division. ....

Washington’s few specific references to Jesus Christ and his lack of Trinitarian language helped fuel the assumption that he was a deist. The Novaks devote a whole chapter to deism, which they explain as a rationalization of Christianity. The deist God is a creator whose world is governed by natural laws and who desires moral living by humanity, whose conduct will be judged in the afterlife.

Much of early Protestantism initially rejected Catholicism’s use of human reason, choosing instead to focus on faith alone. Deism, the Novaks suggest, allowed Protestants to incorporate the language of reason during the Enlightenment. Some deists remained Christians, while others would follow the European model of strict rationalism. Washington, as he related the many interventions of his God, clearly believed in a continuously active deity who was more than the detached “clockmaker” of strict deism. ....

The Washingtons usually attended Pohick Church near Mount Vernon and sometimes Christ Church in Alexandria. Either trip by carriage involved a couple hours of travel round trip. Washington financially supported both churches and gave considerable personal time over the decades to his work on the church vestry. Throughout his presidency he regularly attended churches in New York and Philadelphia. ....

Washington’s spiritual life within his family appears to have been conventionally orthodox. He prayed before meals, read sermons out loud to Martha, and bought devotional material for his stepchildren. When stepdaughter Patsy was dying, he prayed audibly while on his knees at her bedside. ....

.... Washington’s public utterances about God were unifying rather than divisive and were admired by Anglicans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and even Jews. He carefully wrote to their congregations, visited their places of worship, and received their delegations, commending their faith and urging their loyalty to the new republic and its promise of religious liberty to all. .... (more)

From 10 George Washington Quotes Pointing to God's Providence":

“Whereas it becomes us humbly to approach the throne of Almighty God, with gratitude and praise for the wonders which his goodness has wrought in conducting our fore-fathers to this western world…and above all, that he hath diffused the glorious light of the gospel, whereby, through the merits of our gracious Redeemer, we may become the heirs of his eternal glory.” — Washington’s General Orders, November 27, 1779

 George Washington's God - Juicy Ecumenism, 10 George Washington Quotes Pointing to God's Providence - Juicy Ecumenism

A noble lie?

Ross Douthat, author of just published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, on those who would promote belief for the wrong reason:

There is, however, a different kind of relationship to religion that does deserve critique. This is the category of person who likes religious ideas when other people believe in them, who wants religion to exist for its civilization-shaping qualities without personally accepting any of its impositions, who draws pleasure from what the late Richard John Neuhaus called “regretful unbelief,” who only really believes in belief.

This is a special temptation for the intellectual. Think of the sociologist who has a thousand data points proving the advantages of joining and belonging and practicing a faith tradition, and an indifferent attitude to the tradition’s truth. The psychologist who stands ready with a thousand fascinating mythic readings of the Old or New Testament but dances away whenever he’s challenged about whether the events in question actually took place. The self-proclaimed “cultural Christian,” whether of the Elon Musk or the Richard Dawkins school, who loves some aspect of the Western inheritance and fears some dark post-Western future—but not enough to actually embrace the West’s metaphysical foundations. The political philosopher with many religious friends and allies in front of whom he would never explicitly use the term “noble lie,” even though you know he’s thinking it.

This tendency is especially suited to eras like our own, when the pendulum has swung away from militant atheism and toward some recognition that religion might be useful for society after all, though it takes somewhat different forms on the right and on the left.

The right-wing believer-in-belief will often defend the most traditionalist and fundamentalist forms of faith—though he would never be caught dead sharing their literalist or supernaturalist premises—because he likes how those forms shape culture and politics. ....

We (the religious) like being liked, we appreciate being appreciated, and belief-in-belief provides a useful language to translate between the strangeness of some of our convictions and the world of secular priorities and routines. To talk about faith’s benefits rather than its truth claims. To promise therapeutic advantages when talk of heaven seems embarrassing. To remain in the natural and material and psychological because that way you don’t lose anyone by mentioning the Devil. ....

...[M]y new book is a deliberate attempt to leave this kind of halfway argument behind, and to persuade readers to accept religious ideas on their own terms—to transcend the merely sociological and talk directly about why there’s probably a real God with actual demands and expectations, a real supernatural realm that plays some role in human life and history, and yes, a real heaven and a risk of hell. .... (more)

2/17 I've changed the title of this post to more accurately suggest its subject. 

Ross Douthat, "Everyone Should Believe in God," The Free Press, Feb. 16, 2025.

Is Pascal's Wager a good bet?

Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist. He is also a Christian, author of the soon-to-be published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. A recent column was titled "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God." From that:

...I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. ....

[An] underrated argument I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.

The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” ....

.... We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. ....

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon? ....

As the previous line suggests, the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Douthat's column is behind a subscription wall. I read it by getting a free, limited, subscription.

Ross Douthat, "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God," New York Times, Feb. 7, 2025.

Integral to humanity

From a review of Alister McGrath's Why We Believe:

His latest book, Why We Believe, provides McGrath with another opportunity to defend belief in the face of those who deride it as at best irrational and weird and at worst, dangerous. It coincides with the 1,700th anniversary of the Christian Nicene Creed, first adopted by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and still used today as a profession of faith by those with official positions in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran Churches.

But as McGrath rightly says of a creed – a word taken from the Latin credo, “I believe” – it might be a description of what a Christian believes, but it’s a limited statement. To truly understand belief, he argues, we need to see it lived. As he reminds his readers, CS Lewis, one of the 20th century’s most high-profile atheists-turned-Christians, as well as the creator of Narnia, understood that “the Christian narrative is primary; Christian creeds are secondary… creeds cannot convey either [Christianity’s] imaginative appeal or its subjective impact.”

McGrath’s basic premise is that belief, rather than being outmoded and unscientific superstition, is integral to being human. In a rewriting of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, he argues that homo sapiens needs to make sense of life, not merely survive it. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson would put it, we are meaning-seeking creatures. Beliefs, whether humanist, or Christian, or that of another religion, shape the way we understand and experience the world.

The most interesting issue about faith and its understanding of human nature, after all, is how it keeps bubbling up, not only in people’s everyday lives but in public discourse. While humanists, as McGrath points out, believe in the inherent goodness of people, a Christian such as Miss Marple understands the simultaneous capacity for its opposite. Only this autumn, forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead reached for Christian theology in her Reith Lectures to help explain evil. It was, she argued, an absence of good, and its antidote to evil was therefore to practise goodness – in other words, the development of virtue that theologians and philosophers from Aquinas onwards have been advocating.

McGrath uses this book to take on Dawkins et al once more: he complains that the New Atheists “degraded and rationalised faith”, and treated it as though it were “simply a form of data”. But he also gives an account of belief’s many facets, from the search for a big picture to the difference it makes to navigating a difficult world. He perceptively comments on how suffering, once seen as a connection between Christians and Christ, is now often perceived as a problem by Christian thinkers drawn into trying to rationalise pain. .... (more)

Catherine Pepinster, "Atheists, you don’t even understand what ‘belief’ is," The Telegraph, Jan. 9, 2025.