Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Rupert Shortt: The Eclipse of Christianity? || SLP555

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Rupert Shortt: The Eclipse of Christianity? || SLP555 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
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• 0:10
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• 0:14
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  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I went a little off script there.
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• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
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  SPEAKER_01: Hope to see many of you there.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right, on to the topic for this episode.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: You are about to hear a conversation that Glenn Scrivener, the director of Speed Life, a conversation that he had with Rupert Short about Rupert's new book, The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a wide-ranging conversation to get into all sorts of topics about the impact of Christianity and many things that it has given us in the West that we take for granted.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: They also talk about interesting recent developments, figures like Ayan Hercy R.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Lee, who has also been interviewed on the Speak Life podcast, her journey to faith.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Just before we go to that conversation, there will be a very brief advert, and then I will catch you at the end of the episode.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings?
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• 3:29
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• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest.
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• 3:50
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• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's our great privilege to have on the channel Rupert Short.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: He is the author of many books, including God is No Thing, The Hardest Problem, and his latest book, which is called The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: He joins me on the line from London.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, Rupert.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Hello.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: You have written a book in which one of your opening chapters, I think it's chapter two, you discuss what have the Christians ever done for us?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: Or what have the Roman Catholics and other Christians ever done for us?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, playing on the great Monty Python sketch from Life of Brian.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: What have the Romans ever done for us?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: What about the roads?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course the roads.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: The roads go without saying is a lovely line from John Cleese.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: Lovely line because there is so much in your culture that goes without saying when it is the air that you breathe, which is the name of a book that I've written that's that's quite similar on this topic, in which we look at Christian culture and you you say to yourself, uh, what has Christianity ever done for us?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, human rights they go without saying.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, charity, it goes without saying.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, hospitals they go without saying.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um can you give us a little bit of a potted history of uh what have the Roman Catholics and other Christians ever done for us?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: You really put your finger on it.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I think the the analogy of fish unaware of the waters that they swim in is germane.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's something known as the subtraction thesis, which essentially says, well, we we bel we believe in all these goods democracy, human rights, individualism, science itself.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: We can purge ourselves of the the mumbo jumbo, the belief in the the virgin birth and the resurrection.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And part of the question I suppose is can can first of all can can we really do that?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: But secondly, do you not realize where these goods all really came from?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity really affected a profound revolution.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus represented a transformative moment, perhaps the really decisive moment in the evolution of human consciousness.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's no accident, among many other points I could make, that Christianity the faith spread like wildfire among women and slaves and other marginalized people in particular.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was no part of ancient religious practice for the most part to imagine that care of the widow and the orphan outreach of this kind was integral to religious practice.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: You get shades of it in Stoicism, but even Stoicism is quite an aristocratic vision of the world.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that isn't to say for a moment that the um the church hasn't betrayed its lord, that there haven't been many false starts and and and blind alleys and so forth.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if we're if we're talking about the title deeds and the big picture, then Christianity really is transformative.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think modern secular people struggle with that idea because it's the water that we we swim in.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so the the the kinds of values that we tend to prize having had a Christianized history seem to us obvious, natural, universal, self-evident, um and therefore religious people sound like we are hobbyists off to one side, uh, on the fringes of society, and and I guess we could pursue our religious hobby off to one side.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: But the idea that Christians would have something to say into the public space is often quite a surprise.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I really noticed that with the assisted dying bill and the debates around the assisted dying bill, and people were noticing that um a lot of religious people had religious reasons for forwarding their position, let's say, in the sanctity of life or something like that.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it was very interesting that, you know, Polly Toynbee in The Guardian would say things like, um, well, religious people are um they're free to have their own private views, but they shouldn't bring it into public discourse, or uh Lewis Goodall um said uh religion has quietly played a dominant role in the debate and distorted the conversation, um which it it seems quite a strange thing to say, but uh but I think it goes goes to the you know the point of because Christianity has done such a good job of instilling in us values like the sanctity of life, it feels like um Christianity um has done such a good job, it now no longer has a part to play in public discourse, and secular people want Christian voices um to have less of a say because we have so shaped the discourse.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's an interesting uh kind of uh interesting dialogue there.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the the the the there are a lot of uh questions to to um a bit big cluster of issues there.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that a lot of secular thought does represent a kind of stripped down theology transposed into a uh a different key.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um the question though to me, um granted that we we know what we believe, or many secular people know what they believe, the the the follow-up would be to say, but but but why do you believe what what you believe?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And secular humanism doesn't have very secure foundations philosophically, in my view.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: It it presents an imperative to be kind.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: But when you ask, you know, why we should be kind, um tell me without recourse to metaphysics why we should be kind.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: The answers that you get tend to be much hazier.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Not that we live in particularly kind times anyway, we live in highly polarized times.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So one question would be what else can Christianity bring to the party?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I I was very um struck in the course of my researches by a um uh a priest in the Church of England who who who'd been a uh a school teacher all his life, but who who got ordained quite um late on.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that he wanted to emphasize the extent to which his former pupils from Gen Z tend to campaign on specific issues rather than committing themselves to institutions.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those issues, he added, LGBT rights, safeguarding, are ones on which some churches have questionable records.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: But he added, rights-based campaigning tends towards factionalism and intolerance.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: The trans rights versus women's rights is an obvious example.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, he concluded, I hope, people will come to see the futility of this approach and be open to the attractions of the church, because at its best it transcends differences of that kind.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, love like death hath all destroyed, rendered all distinctions void, names and sects and parties fall, thou, O Christ, art all in all, as Charles Wesley memorably expresses that thought.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: So there's one thought for you that Christianity as its best prov provides resources, it offers tools for helping us navigate.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: It also, as I have employed, has a much um richer diagnosis of the human condition.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Christian anthropology is deeper.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Again and again, you find, I think, with secularists an assumption that somehow we're all fine as human beings, we're we're sort of blank slates, um things only go wrong because of ideology.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Religion is a kind of ideology, remove the ideology and everything will be okay.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity has so much more to say about the fracture in human nature, about the um both individual and structural faults uh that um are other words for sin, of our need for for healing, for for redemption.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, I I should make clear I I want to commend the Christian faith because I I think it's true, that's to say I believe that God was man in Palestine and and lives today in bread and wine, to cite um John Betcherman.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: But even if you are, let's say, in the twilight zone, let's say you're you know you're a Jordan Peterson kind of character and you're dancing a tango on the edge between religion and and irreligion, perhaps you will come to see over time that a faith like Christianity is worth taking more seriously because of the you know the great store of wisdom that it represents.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Visit kingdom.bankslash speaklife.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: We are starting to see people in the orbit of the Jordan Peterson world pay attention to the great store of wisdom uh within Christendom.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking of Aion Hersia Lee, um, interestingly, around about one year ago um at a conference that very much orbited around um Jordan Peterson and certainly his online influence.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: There was sort of Philip Philippa Stroud kind of bringing some more of the sort of political um heft and and more of the um the UK side of things.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: But between polit uh Philippus Stroud and Jordan Peterson, they put on the ARK conference, at which Ayan Hersey Ali, um, who came out of sort of radical Islam and then went into eventually um very much uh the new atheism, she came out at the ARK conference as uh a lapsed atheist um who slides herself into a pew Sunday by Sunday and is learning a little more uh about uh the faith Sunday by Sunday.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: And she credits a number of different things in her journey.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: One thing she credits is the marvellous Tom Holland and um reading Dominion and seeing the ways in which um she is already a fish swimming in some pretty Christian waters.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that that really helped her.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um all sorts of geopolitical moves that she mentioned in her article Why I Am Now a Christian, but also um some very um raw personal um tragedy and personal need, uh, and she seems to have discovered a rich personal faith through prayer and and calling out upon Jesus.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think Ayan Hersy Ali's story is in any way emblematic or or hopeful for other people in the secular space finding faith?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my my book pivots on a paradox.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's called The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters, as you've said.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you need to say on page one, or very early on at least, in a book of this kind, uh that of course Christianity isn't an eclipse in the world as a whole.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's growing pretty strongly.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: The exceptions are the Western world, um, particularly Western Europe.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: But e even in Western Europe there there are signs of um regeneration, not least owing to immigration.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean a city like London is is a much godlier place a quarter of the way into the 21st century than it was um twenty-five years ago at the turn of the millennium.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I worked um for uh for for Times newspapers for most of my career.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So another Rupert uh Rupert Murdoch was my my ultimate boss, and in in the big uh office, the the news building in the centre of London, uh it was very revealing to see the number of employees there working in catering or or cleaning and what have you, who are either Catholics or Muslims or ex-Catholic um recruits to evangelicalism or or charismatic um Christianity.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: I I think um somebody like Ayan, who incidentally uh she's done all the things that you said that she's done, but she was also baptized in in September of this year alongside her husband, the historian Neil Ferguson, and I I was privileged along with Tom Holland as it happens to to attend that ceremony.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I I think in her case there is a um a conservative reaction to to what is seen as progressive overreach.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Healthy self-criticism in a culture is is no doubt a good thing.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Self-criticism shading into self-laceration is more questionable, and self-laceration shading into self-hatred can be dangerous.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it it it may well be, and I I think I would be with her on this point, that we have lost so much self-confidence in in the West in recent decades that we are now reluctant to take our own side in an argument.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: If if being woke means foregrounding previously neglected voices, then I don't see how a reasonable person could could disagree with that.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: But if it means, for example, saying um I tick A, B, and C identity boxes, therefore I'm right, and you only take D D and E and therefore you're wrong, uh I think there is a a a good case for for for saying that's um that that's pretty dangerous.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And ironically, of course, it is a well there there's more than one irony here actually.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: What one is um that it's it's precisely that it's inverting Martin Luther King.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it is judging people by what boxes they tick rather than the content of their character.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: The second enormous irony to the the woke revolution is that it has ended up re-inscribing a Eurocentric view of the world, because in focusing on all the sins of European imperialists we have started to overlook awkward truths about many other societies, starting with the fact that almost every human society that has ever reached a certain level of wealth has practiced slavery.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you can of course talk about the industrial scale of the of the um Atlantic slave trade.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it involved fourteen million people or or more, which is um fourteen million or more too many.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: But look at a phenomenon like the caste system, which is in India, which has gone on for for millennia.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the numbers involved in the um Arab slave trade, um which prob probably even more than than than fourteen million.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose that the point is that we're um political campaigners ter tend to be slaves to fashion.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we see um we see certain things not others.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we We are very alive and and no doubt rightly alive to the plight of the Palestinians, for example, but we say very, very little about what's happened to the Kurds of Turkey, or indeed about the fact that the first genocide of the 20th century was of Armenian Christians carried out by Ottoman Turks, and as you know, it's now illegal, has long been illegal actually in Turkey to talk about that uh monstrous crime.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I think in a nutshell, somebody like Ajan is is wanting to say don't be so naive or so ignorant as to imagine that all these goods that we take for granted in in the Western world are shared elsewhere.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the the the notion that all are made in the image of God and are of equal worth and and dignity is not really shared in other cultures.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean one can talk about the um great traditions of of um philanthropy in in the Islamic world, and of course there are um aspects of of the teaching of a faiths like Hinduism and and and Buddhism from which I think Christians can can learn, particularly the the emphasis given to um environmental stewardship.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the belief that all are made in the divine image and belief in political pluralism as a good in itself really are uh they're the products almost entirely of of Judeo Christianity and that that they're worth cherishing.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I mean, you will have gathered a big implication of what I'm saying, which is that we we're a little bit like Waile Kyoti, you know, we we've rushed off the edge of the cliff and we're falling fast, and we're saying, um, you know, so far so good.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, the abyss faces us.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now that that can be that can be misheard as saying that everything in Christian societies has always gone right and everything in non-Christian societies has gone wrong.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I am emphatically not saying that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean just think of the of the Christian heritage that Russia has had, of the easy accommodation that millions of Germans made with the Third Reich, and you know, the the list goes on.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am making the, I think, gentler, humbler, um more realistic claim that Christianity at its best and its most self-critical really does give the richest toolbox available for a just ordering of society, for sculpting a narrative of what counts, what constitutes human fulfillment in all its dimensions, that's um that can't really be equaled elsewhere.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and you make a good case for that in the book.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And what you don't want to do, and um what I don't want to do, so uh my my book, The Air We Breathe, is is kind of taking a more confessionally Christian angle on the Tom Holland thesis, basically.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've noticed that my book has been picked up in certain quarters and used as a weapon in the culture wars, uh, as a kind of see, um we we need to forward Christian ends in order to have the political outcome that we quite like.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And and because we like Western liberal values, um I've noticed that some sometimes people have wanted to use this kind of argument um almost cynically as okay, well, therefore, what what we really want is this kind of just political order.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Let's use Christianity in order to get that.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: How how do we how do we get heard rightly uh if people are um in in danger of mishearing us on this point?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that that's a really good question, because um I mean some people might think that I am going to uh acquire some unpalatable bedfellows here.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are there are strands within um Christianity that I feel uneasy about.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: In the Catholic world, it would be integralism, which um seems to display theocratic impulses.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the Eastern Orthodox world, you have a sort of ethno-nationalism.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Look at Russia, which has got um quite a lot in common with some of the more unsavoury strands of Islam, I would say.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you have um hard-line Protestant fundamentalists in the United States who would like, for example, to see the Ten Commandments in enacted in in statute.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: And going back a few decades, you had um outfits like the moral majority who were very close to the right of the Republican Party.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So um if you said to me, well, perhaps you're just picking and choosing Rupert and being a bit too subjective here, I would say it's a question of looking at the classical Christian tradition in all its breadth.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm not sure that a um fundamentalist in in the deep south of America is all that connected with the classical tradition extending back um to millennia.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: The resources are much richer than one might think.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, a crucial point is is that Christianity it can articulate some of the best impulses found both on the left and on the right.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I remember a a liberating moment for me was when I heard somebody some time ago saying the left and the right both seem they're both often correct about what they what they care about, um, but they just care about different things.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: So when the left, for example, worries about the left behinds, about um outreach, about severe inequality, the left needs listening to.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: But when the right worries about balanced budgets, personal responsibility, uh, deferred gratification, then the right needs listening to as well.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in a body of um doctrine like Catholic social teaching, I think you have um something, you know, but particularly rich, which is um takes the long view.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for example, it it it looks about human need across the entire life cycle.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: It is respectful both of or of um enterprise, entrepreneurship, but also of solidarity and of the importance of maintaining social capital.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting to me that um when somebody like Trump started standing up for the the left behinds in the Rust Belt of America in in 2016, the one other person on the electoral map who was saying things somewhat like him was Bernie Sanders, namely the the most left-wing candidate.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that they they were both in their different ways echoing priorities that you find in Catholic social teaching.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: But this body of teaching, of course, is, as I've indicated, m much more sophisticated and much more inclusive than you are likely to find in a top thumping partisan um politician.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it probably goes without saying, but perhaps I should just say um I I am a journalist, I know a thing or two about the corruptions of my trade, and bad news sells newspapers or gets um clicks online.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: An exploding aeroplane by definition is is um is news.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: A um volcanic eruption is news.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Underground streams supplying irrigation, stability of life, prosperity to vast numbers of people over many generations, that that isn't news.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm in a strange little class of one in in I think I'm the only person ever to be a biographer of both uh a Pope and an Archbishop of Canterbury, and I've written lives of both Rowan Williams and Benedict XVI.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had to spend um more than my fair share of time in the marble halls of Rome.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: All seems quite uh quite germane this week with the release of this film Um Conclave starring Ray Fines.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I have also investigated in detail the global persecution of Christians in my book Christianophobia, and I have had to visit some of the most benighted places on earth in Africa and Asia, the largest slums in the world.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: And again and again and again, it is the it is Christian outreach, it is the Christian missionaries, it's the religious sisters, it's the friars, the priests who are there alongside the the poorest of the poor.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in you know, often completely unsung ways, Christian-based endeavor is um incalculably important.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I think um it's been estimated to contribute you know well over a trillion dollars a year to the American economy, for for example, let alone what's going on in the rest of the world.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you talk about the social capital uh of Christianity and the church globally, um and and therefore that begs the question, um, what what are we staring down if that social capital shrinks?
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um if there is a great dechurching in the States there have been 40 million uh Americans who stopped going to church uh this century.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's the the greatest demographic shift in in US history, it's the greatest spiritual shift, um greater than the Billy Graham Crusades combined with the first and second Great Awakening, all combined, and it's in the opposite direction.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um in the UK, um perhaps you can sketch out for us like where you think um church going is at um in a UK setting.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um what what is the state of play um for the church in the West right now, and what do you fear might happen if these trends continue?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sorry, m maybe I could just round off the answer I've just given, because I it I although I did speak at some length, it it it perhaps wasn't quite full enough, because I notwithstanding the sort of theocratic impulses among some Christians today, and of course examples from the past like the medieval papacy, I do think that that there is something about Christianity as such which is or should be conducive to pluralism.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Islam is of course Islamic societies have flourished, um Muslims have have done many wonderful things in terms of of um building up charitable outreach.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the problems of the Islamic world today is that um they're feeling bewildered because for the first half of the Islamic era, um Islam was civilizationally ahead of the Christian world.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: There are complicated reasons for this, one of which is the embrace of Islam by Persia, which was a very advanced civilization.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: When Spain was invaded by the Moors, it instantly became the most advanced country in Europe because of all the technology that the invaders brought with them.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, I think one has to be candid about differences between Christianity and Islam.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey with the aim of converting the temple into his spiritual body, and Muhammad stood at the head of an army, arguably calling on it to effect global conquest.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it is it is an integrated political and religious vision of the world, and I'm not sure that that Christianity is.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in some ways, if you wanted to criticize Christianity, you would say it's not very realistic about the um the needs of political power, it says, you know, f forgive 70 times seven and turn turn the other cheek.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um but given the exceptionally important emphasis on strength in weakness in Christianity, and the idea, if you like, that the incarnation is itself the supreme act of democracy, because Christians worship a God who removed his crown to share our flesh.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think that that ought to provide um potent means of um reaching out to the other, tolerating the other.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: You you'll know the saying that the church is the one organization that exists for the sake of its non-members.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I have seen that vision go wrong.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike most British Catholics, I grew up in a Catholic country.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't Ireland, even though I am of Irish stock, partly.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was Spain, and this was the tail end of the Franco-era, where um you know non non-Catholics, let alone non-Christians, were forbidden to stage um public worship.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it can it can go wrong, but the resources there are there to enable it to go right.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to come closer to a more direct answer to your question now, it's very striking to me that although those who oppose having bishops in the House of Lords in the UK often put their hands on their hips and say, do you know, the only other um legislative body on earth which has clerics in it as of right is the Iranian parliament.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but unlike the mullahs, the point about these C of E bishops is that they they speak up for faith in general.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll find that among those most in favour of having bishops in the House of Lords in the UK are um Muslims and and Hindus.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, to cut to the chase, church going is in steep decline in this country.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: As I've said, there are exceptions.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: London has become quite a lot more religious since the turn of the millennium.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably true of um of most large cities.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had to travel, as you can imagine, quite a lot while researching my book.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And very often when I would fetch up in such and such a provincial town or city, the taxi driver would be black or Asian, and um he, it it was almost always he, would be um a Muslim or a Pentecostal of some kind.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, Pentecostalism is the Christian counterpart to uh Islamic revivalism, it's spreading like wildfire.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it is also resolutely, resolutely non-violent, which is one reason why the Western media isn't particularly interested in it, because of this lazy narrative that religion is a dead in the west and b violent in the east, and there's nothing in between.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that there's quite a lot going on under the radar.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I went to various uh outer neighbourhoods of London, and if you thought that the centre of Christian life was in the parish church, you'd be very much mistaken.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go to the business park on the edge of the area, where you would find in one particular case, Leighton, which is near the near Stratford, near the Olympic Stadium.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: I found not one or two, but three very large Pentecostal congregations.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, my book is chiefly about the I mean there is a chapter on Pentecostalism, but it's chiefly about the decline of traditional institutional Christianity.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: And there the statistics are melancholy.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: I have roots in the English countryside, not too far from Cambridge.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: My parents have been telling me for for years that the congregation at their village church has been falling and falling, and the statistics speak for themselves.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the 2001 census in the UK, over 70% of people claimed a Christian allegiance.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: By 2011, that figure had fallen to 59%, and now it's uh it's well below half.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: The rural church does seem to be dying on its feet, and um the church of the future I think will look very different.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: It will be leaner and more committed and and poorer, but also one hopes humbler and and more committed.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: As we round out, Rupert, let's talk to a jaded secular person who um is warm to um what you're saying about what Christianity has offered in the past, who is warm to what you're saying about how fractured we all are.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um we've we've we've mentioned two very significant votes in the last six weeks.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the vote for Donald Trump um uh reveals all sorts of political fracturings and and new divisions and and new ways of of cutting up the political pie in the States.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think the assisted dying bill also revealed lots of different um strange alliances, you might think, from one point of view, you know, you you you might have you know Diane Abbott and Nigel Farage, you know, on the same side of an issue.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: And um I think the there is a fracturing that's going on in post-Christian society, there is something of a meaning crisis.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: Let's imagine that you're having a fireside chat with someone who is warm to both ideas, they're warm to the idea that Christianity has offered much in the past, that whatever successor ideologies we are attempting in the present uh aren't particularly doing the job.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: What is your next bit of advice to such a person about how to pull at those sorts of threads and and perhaps find faith at the other end of it?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: You you put your finger on something really important there, because there are of course so many people, especially opinion formers, educators, um members of liberal elites, if you will, who will say things like Yes, of course, Christianity has all the grand narratives, it has the memorable rituals, but ultimately the comforts that it offers are spurious because.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Atheism is true.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I would partly want to ask, you know, really some quite muscular conceptual questions.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, far from um reaching straight for the language of faith, which may not mean anything much to uh a lot of people and may indeed strike them as soft-headed?
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: I would say if you're an atheist, your philosophical worldview is is is naturalism.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is the corollary of believing that an inventory of reality consists of nothing but the physical world.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: How reasonable is it to actually say that?
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you are a naturalist, you're committed to saying that the world made itself or the world has always existed.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: How viable are those propositions?
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can't have something unless something else gives.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that that is science as understood by both Aristotle and by contemporary science.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is not possible in the terms naturalism allows to say how anything at all can exist.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, theism is a valid inference of philosophical reasoning, metaphysical reasoning.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: The trouble with somebody like Richard Dawkins and the spate of new atheist polemics that we've had over the past 20 years is that the argument doesn't really get off the ground because the the the the the god in which a figure like Dawkins disbelieves is an idol, really.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sort of science professor up in the sky.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: His argument seems to be: look, we have this perfectly good explanation of reality in the form of the theory of evolution.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Before Darwin, we had Newton unlocking the mysteries of the movement of the planets, and um developments in AI now promise to unlock the mysteries of the human brain.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's all going to be sorted out.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: The mistake there is to see God as one big player on the same chessboard, if if you like, as us.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas what what the classical traditions, Jewish and um Islamic and and indeed um Hindu and Sikh as well as Christian, what they're saying is that God, the relationship between God and material reality is is of a different order.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you if you want an analogy, well, it would perhaps be something like um the relationship of an author to his or her characters.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where is Shakespeare in Hamlet?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: Where is Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice?
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the answer is everywhere and nowhere.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: The author is invisible, but um he or she inhabits every line of of the narrative.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so even Dawkins, I think, now is saying, well, you know, maybe maybe we can take deism as a as a kind of hypothesis for how the world came into existence.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: But you Christians, you believe all this rubbish the vicar tells you about the the resurrection.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: To which I would say, well, getting to the the God of the philosophers, as it's known, you know, getting to the to the idea of a creator is not, it doesn't give you a full faith in Christ, of course not, but it's not negligible.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it it can perhaps get you to the threshold of where you might be willing to make some kind of um venture, a venture of faith, or what I would prefer to call a venture of the imagination.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the Christian claim is that by listening to what Jesus says, by um doing what he commands us to do, then one's whole vision of the world starts to change, and you start to see that God lives in Christ in an absolutely unique way.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: Can I prove that in a um logically coercive way?
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, I can't, but there's something about the knowing that is involved, that it's about your whole being, it's about heart as well as intellect.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit like some someone's someone being asked, you know, how how do you know that your husband or wife loves you?
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's it it's a different dimension of knowing, and I would um hark back to to Aristotle, who who said in his ethics, only a juvenile expects a knowledge, sorry, a model of certainty that corresponds to a mathematical model.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that there are other spheres of our knowledge that um where, as I say, um heart and emotions are in play as well as as intellect.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I like um I like the line of one of my teachers at university who said it it's not reasonable to think that only reason discloses the world to us.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's reason allied to our ethical and aesthetic impulses.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if you uh if you do make that that that leap of imagination, yep, yeah, I can see everything starting to come together.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is unlikely to come about first and foremost through a philosophical seminar.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, being being a Christian is about doing things that change you.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: People tend on the whole to live their way into a new way of thinking rather than think their way into a new way of living.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, of course, we are um reliant on the grace of God um enlightening our our minds and hearts.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: If it if it weren't for the action of God, then there wouldn't be much point in having this conversation in the first place.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that line.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I've I've used it from you many, many times.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: We live our way into a new way of thinking rather than think our way into a new way of living.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that emphasis on imagination as well.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a venture of imagination even more than it's a venture of faith.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that's a little bit what Aion was getting at when she was on stage with Richard Dawkins and he was, you know, firing questions at her.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: Do you believe in the virgin birth?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: And she just said in such simple language, she said, Well, Richard, let's let's think about our I mean, she didn't use this language, but let you know let's let's think about our metaphysics here.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's think about our epistemology.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: You think there is nothing, I think there is something.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: And then actually what Aion was doing was was pointing to once you start from this foundation of um the imagination where we are like Hamlet living in Shakespeare's world, once you start with that, then something like a virgin birth becomes um far less problematic than if you start with that that there is nothing.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: That really it's a it two different imaginations were on show on that stage in New York.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_02: Is is Yes.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I have indicated that as an atheist you are left with something of a lunar landscape metaphysically.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: Dawkins has said there is just DNA and and we dance to to its tune.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now what's curious is that at other times he talks very much as though meaning matters, and that meaning not just that it matters, but it's something we discover as well as some uh sorry, not not something we invent.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now the claim of the Christian, among other things, is that we can um belief in God provides a secure home for all these dimensions of our experience, than just imagining, I don't know, like say a Platonist, that the good, the true, and the beautiful somehow subsist out there in a kind of blob in in ways that we we we don't know.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: So um belief in God is is a valid principle, as I say, a valid inference of philosophical reasoning.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if if this is a creation rather than a squilly into one accident, um and if we're thinking in terms of enchantment, then everything that happens at at all times ultimately is due to the grace of God.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean when I when I perform a trivial act like raise my arm, when I perform a morally more significant act like buy a meal for um a homeless person.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: The classical tradition says, on the one hand, those are my free acts, but at a deeper level, they are the acts of God because God, the divine energy, is bubbling up beneath the surface at all times.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a big mistake over the ages that Christians, let alone non-believers, have made, is to think of creation as something that happened a very long time ago and then stopped.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, God made something and put it on a shelf and went away.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: The correct way to understand things from a classical standpoint is that the relationship between God and creation is much more intimate.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: We can be chisels for the invisible hammer blows of God, to cite one of my favourite analogies.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll never forget another of my lecturers at university saying something which has stayed with me and really sort of changed my view of the world.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, you know, Christians believe that Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes at the feeding of the 5,000.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: But from a Christian standpoint, the power of God was also made manifest in the germination of the wheat in the first place.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that is a very, very good perspective from which to view things.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: When Rowan Williams, incidentally, was confronted by Hecler once, who said, you know, people don't rise from the dead, he said very um shrewdly, I think, given he you know he only had a moment for a short answer, there is nothing in a Christian worldview to go against a um a mainstream understanding of cause and effect.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: But if if you believe that underlying all of reality is the unconditioned action of God, then yes, you may be very surprised by reports of a resurrection, but you might not necessarily rule it out of court in principle.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and I I think that's a lot of what Ayan was getting at with, you know, I believe there is something.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_02: Because she had met something in opening herself up to God in times of great crisis.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: I believe there is something, you believe there is nothing, therefore we assess the evidence in different ways.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, fascinating stuff.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: We we've touched on um so many um areas that are that are covered in this book, The The Eclipse of Christianity and Why It Matters.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um you've also um written um some other works that touch on some of the things that we've been speaking about, Rupert.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: If people want to take some next steps and uh and hear more from you, what should they do?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: Where should they go?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: What should they read?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: This was my tenth book.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: Over 20 years or so, I've produced um uh a quartet of books, uh, four four brief ones, broadly connected with defending a uh belief in God in general and a Christian worldview in in particular.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: We mentioned three of them already, God is no thing, that that's subtitled Coherent Christianity.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: And um it draws on a comment I once heard from a preacher, God is no thing but not nothing.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the the pun I think works better in print than in speech.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: God is no thing, and then does religion do more harm than good?
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then Outgrowing Dawkins, God for Grown Ups, which is a rebuttal of outgrowing God, a beginner's guide.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: And lastly, The Hardest Problem, God, Evil and Suffering.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: Before that, there were three biographical studies, two um Rowan Williams' and Introduction and Rowan's Rule, which is the main biography, and A Life of Benedict XVI, as I say, and then two freestanding works, Christianophobia, I've I've mentioned, A Faith Under Attack, and a more academic book called God's Advocates, in which I um travelled round the English-speaking world and also parts of Europe and interviewed some leading Christian thinkers.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the the book is edited transcripts of uh conversations with leading Christian theologians and philosophers of religion, and it's all about the remarkable recovery of nerve that has taken place in Christian thought in in recent decades.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: And um perhaps I should end just by pointing out that it is in the nature of an eclipse that it ends, and you know, we we may be in the doldrums now, but I would be rash, I think, to make too firm a prediction about um what may or may not happen in the future.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Church of England, as you know, in the 18th century was a pretty sorry institution.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um what happened?
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: We got the Methodist Revival, other evangelical revivals, and um religiously speaking, the 19th century was was much more vibrant than the 18th.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you you never know what God has in store around the corner.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Rupert, you've been so very helpful and uh so generous with your time.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're an excellent writer and an absolute delight to read, and uh, even though we come from different parts of the church and view things uh differently on uh lots of different matters, I have learnt so much uh from this book and really look forward to digging into those other ones as well, as I'm sure many will be.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Rupert Schul, thank you so much for joining us.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there we go.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: Do feel free to get in touch with the podcast.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: You can email Thomas at speaklife.org.uk, and people do, which is great.
• 1:00:10
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• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we do read all of those.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: We can't necessarily do all of them, uh, even though many of them are great ideas, of course.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: But uh thank you very much for those.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: We we really appreciate uh being able to interact with you guys, and your input is very much valued.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening, and we will be back soon.