Anyway, let’s begin where this question usually begins, which is Jesus’ statement in Matthew 22:30: At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.

Immediately we have questions, as we should. And what I want to do, which if you have read here for awhile now you’ll know as my wont, is take you on a journey in thinking.

So let’s begin right here, and I’ll suggest that in this verse there are three ‘centers of gravity’ for our thinking. Little orbital points to put our thinking in flight.

The first of these is at the resurrection, and so we’re thinking not so much about ‘heaven’ as popularly conceived, but the new heavens and the new earth, the resurrection of the dead, and life in the New Creation. So our first locus of thinking is “what is life like in the New Creation? And what continuities and discontinuities are there with this life and this creation?”

The second of these is marriage. What is marriage? And does Jesus mean to say there is no sex, or just that there is no marriage? What is the connection between those two?

The third of these is angelic existence. Every time someone makes a simile (that is, makes a comparison in which X is similar to Y), we ought to ask, “what is the point of similarity?” Let me give a banal example. If I say an apple is similar to an orange, you should take away from that statement that the similarity probably applies to being a fruit, or a certain sized edible item, etc., but if I say that an apple is similar to a cricket ball, the point which they are similar, differs. A simile does not apply at all points (otherwise the two things compared would be identical).

Right, and so we have to ask, “what are angels like, and what aspect of angelic existence applies to Jesus’ comparison?”

Before we tackle any of those questions, we need to take a step back, and keeping my gravity metaphor going, we need to realise that we also operating with two poles to our thinking. That is, we have a Creation pole (what was life like in the beginning for human beings and how does that set a course for human existence ‘as it is meant to be’) as well as New Creation (what destination does the course of human life in this world have?). And between those two poles there are questions about the Fall and Redemptive History.

So, to begin at the beginning, God creates human kind as dimorphic sexual creatures. We don’t know any other kind of humans except ones that are either male or female, and that reproduce via sexual reproduction.1 All our existence is conditioned around the fact that we are male or female, and that sexual reproduction is our mode of generation.

I think the history of marriage in human societies, and the anthropological study of it, are both fascinating topics far beyond the scope of what I’m writing here, but I would venture that it’s not too much to say that marriage is a close-to-universal human cultural phenomenon, that it typically tends towards being an exclusive, life-long sexual relationship bound by agreement and sanctioned by the community. Only in late modern Western societies has same-sex marriage become a phenomenon; in numerous cultures polygamy has been prevalent at certain times. On the whole, though, humans have persisted in an ideal of lifelong sexual partnerships.

Christianity complicates the picture in drastic ways. Jesus enters into a historical and cultural context in which both the traditional patriarchal Jewish society, and the Greco-Roman world surrounding it, functioned with an assumption of marriage. That is, most people would get married, and due to both mortality rates and divorce practices, it was typical to remarry throughout your life several times. Partly, especially for women, because society was not ordered in a way that made living as a single viable, except for those sufficiently aged and wealthy.

Jesus himself provides a paradigm, an example or pattern, which makes single celibacy possible for his followers in a new way. If Jesus is the perfect human being, who lives a fulfilled and flourishing human life, and he does so as a biological male, it at least means that it is not necessary or required to (a) get married, (b) have children, or (c) have sexual intercourse in order to “be fully human” or “realise one’s full potential”, or worse yet, “be a man”.2

Christianity creates the conditions for celibate singleness. And, between the difficulty of the passage in 1 Corinthians 7, and Jesus’ perhaps slightly more straightforward comments on marriage and eunuchs in the gospels, the early church followed suit, first creating, and then elevating, the status of celibate singles (probably too highly).3

I think the key point here is this: your sex (male or female) and embodied sexual existence does not have to be actualised in sexual intercourse and having children. And the correlation to this is to start thinking about that second pole: the New Creation.

Let me ask the question this way, “will human beings reproduce in the New Creation?” I think the answer to this is no, but I don’t have 100% certainty on that. The reason I think it’s no is because of the correlatives of answering yes. If you think that, yes, human beings in the new creation will reproduce (I’m presuming sexually, but even asexually), then there will be a class of human beings who are born into a world without sin, and grow up in a sinless state. And that very much seems to me to result in (i) two categories of humans (those who lived in this world, and those who only lived in the world to come), and (ii) the possibility of endless increase of immortal human beings. At least with my limited powers of imagination, they seem like consequences that do not align with the picture of the New Creation we are given in Scripture.

There’s another data point we need to consider, and it’s this: Jesus’ resurrected body. All the other resurrections that occur in the Scripture seem to be of the kind where someone comes back to life, presumably to resume normal living, and then die at a later point in time. Jesus comes back to life, as the first(born) from among the dead, the first of this kind, that is never to die again. His resurrection body exhibits continuity with his deceased body: (i) it can be touched, (ii) he eats, (iii) he is recognised by his disciples (apart from those two on the road to Emmaus!), (iv) he is presumably still biologically male, (v) he bears the marks of the cross.

When we begin to put these data points together, I think we gain a perspective that says that the resurrection body in the new creation maintains continuity with this body, and so you will be raised, healed, still possibly bearing scars (maybe?), but you will definitely be you, and you will continue to exist as male or female. This at the least removes one possibility from the “like the angels” that we started with. Angels, so far as we know, are not sexually dimorphic creatures. They are spiritual beings that sometimes appear in physical forms, or at least visible forms, they presumably do not reproduce (sexually or otherwise), and they do not marry. The point of Jesus’ simile is not that we will cease to be sexually dimorphic creatures, but rather that we will cease to marry.

Everything up to this point, I think is a relatively straightforward and (to my mind) logical set of arguments and inferences based on Scripture, history, and traditional theology. Here’s where I think the terrain becomes muddy and the woods close in.

If the New Creation is characterised by no-death, no-reproduction, and no-marriage, then what sense do we make not just of the question of sexual intercourse, but of having sexed bodies (i.e. male or female ones)? And how does this relate to the trajectory of Eden to New Eden? The traditional threefold purpose of marriage seems to come apart in this picture: there are no children to raise within the family, there is no procreative function to marriage or to sex, and so if there is sex, it is at best unitive and recreative.4

Let me put the question this way, “what does it mean to exist as an embodied member of a dimorphic sexual kind, i.e. a human who is either male or female, when there is no sexual reproduction?” What does it mean to be a man or a woman in a world without sex? Or a world of perfect human beings where there is sex but not marriage?

I don’t have an answer to that question and I don’t think the Scriptures actually provide one. I also don’t lose any sleep over it! As I said at the beginning, it’s not the question itself that I find interesting, it’s the set of questions that it raises that I find interesting.

Anyway, in one of his papers, ‘The Flaw of the Excluded Middle’, he tells the story of how early during his ministry in India he was approached to pray for a sick child. A village had an outbreak of smallpox, and local villagers were insisting that a sacrifice be made to a goddess, and that everybody needed to contribute to the sacrifice for it to be accepted.

The paper itself is a very thoughtful essay, but today I’m mostly interested in this particular story. Hiebert returns to it at the end of his paper, reporting that the girl died.

I’m glad, for our sake, that Hiebert includes the story. If the story was just, “and I prayed for healing and God answered and miraculously healed the girl” then it would be a powerful testament to God’s power, but it would also leave us, as readers, in an ongoing bind.

What happens to the dynamic of faith when you are constantly fed stories of success? When you continually hear stories of answered prayer and God’s miraculous intervention? Then it becomes an expectation that God does, and will, (always) answer such prayers.

So, then, if you are the one in a tricky situation, where it seems like God’s reputation, and your faith, are on the line you will also face a kind of crisis of faith. What if the answer is no, if the answer is silence? Was it God’s failure? Was it yours?

There’s one more part to the story that Hiebert tells. It’s the elder returning “with a sense of triumph.” In his own words, “The village would have acknowledge the power of our God had he healed the child… but they knew in the end she would have to die. When they saw in the funeral our hope of resurrection and reunion in heaven, they saw an even greater victory—over death itself—and they have begun to ask about the Christian way.”2

What’s the key to understanding unanswered prayer? I think that it’s this: that in the silence God’s answer is always good, even when it’s not what we want. Even when we can’t see how it could be good. That is part of faith—it’s the trust in God’s goodness that is prepared to rest in that silence, wait on the goodness of the outcome to be revealed. And the time-frame in which that goodness will be revealed may be beyond us. But the goodness doesn’t cease, just because we don’t or can’t observe it.

If God is who he says he is, then his answers to prayers, even his silences, are always good, and faith means learning to wait in the silence until the goodness is revealed.

My short answer when I get asked this is, “Jesus went to the place of the dead.” That’s it. It’s simple, it gets things right, and it doesn’t get lost in the weeds.

But of course there is a long answer, and here’s my attempt to try to put that into writing.

Why people ask the question?

Frankly, most people ask this question because they’ve heard a version of the Apostle’s Creed with “he descended into hell”. So, they’ve got that in mind, and then they’ve got some vague recollection of the passage in 1 Peter 3:18-22 that’s hard to understand, and if they’re contemporary evangelicals they’ve probably got some notion of Jesus being separated from the Father, helped a great deal by the Stuart Townend song, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us”. That’s all in the mix and contributes to where and how this question tends to arise.

So, to answer it, we actually want to dis-entangle three separate elements: what does the creed mean, what does 1 Peter mean, and what theologically speaking is happening at the Cross. That’s where we’re heading.

The creedal answer

A few years’ ago I did a deep dive to understand the development and origin of the creeds. I have unfortunately not really kept track of all the research I did at the time, but really from the 3rd century onward we have these Rules of Faith and Creeds develop, both as summary type statements or formulations of fundamental Christian belief. The creeds are “here’s what we believe as Christians”, and they form the basis for catechism - instruction in the faith - which leads to baptism, so they also tend to be used as baptismal creeds. We have this range of Latin creeds in the west that vary slightly and develop over time, until around 800 AD the form of the Apostles’ Creed gets formalised and more settled.

The line in Latin is descendit ad inferos, which means ‘he descended to “those below”’. It’s really hard to provide a literal translation of ‘inferos’, but it means something like “inhabitants of the underworld”. Part of our difficulty, then, is that ‘hell’ in contemporary usage means “place of eternal damnation and suffering”, not “shadowy underworld where the dead go”.

The point that the creed is making, though, is this: that Jesus went to the place where dead human beings go. In the New Testament the standard way to talk about this is Hades, because that’s the Greek terminology in use at the time. Jesus goes there because that’s where humans go, and Jesus is fully human, even in his death. He remains human in death, and so naturally goes to where dead humans go. Even if you or I aren’t really clear about all the ins-and-outs of afterlife realms and existences. That’s why a paraphrase like, “to the place of the dead” actually works very well. It’s accurate without over-determining what that means.

The biblical answer

The biblical answer is really to ask, “hey, what does the Bible say about Jesus and where he went when he died?”. It’s important to recognise that the idea that Jesus went to the place of the dead does not rest upon 1 Peter 3:18-22. Arguably passages like Matthew 12:40, 27:52-53, Acts 2:27, 2:31, and Eph 4:8-10 uphold this idea. And, when you put this together with the way contemporaries of Jesus thought and talked about death, and afterlife ‘spaces’, for Jesus to be fully human, and to die, means that you should absolutely expect that after he died on the cross he went to the appropriate place of the dead.

But for the moment I’m just going to talk about 1 Peter 3:18-22. What is that passage talking about? It’s worth, and necessary, to acknowledge that it’s just a very tricky section and there’s lots of scholarly debate about how to understand both the grammar of the passage, and what specific words refer to. Personally, on the balance of arguments, I think it refers to Christ going, after his death, to proclaim to supernatural fallen beings, his victory, without the possibility of repentance or redemption. I don’t think this applies directly to the ‘descent to the dead’ per se, because of the language of ‘prison’ and ‘spirits’ (not typically used of human souls).

So, in this section I would say, “yes, Jesus truly died as a human being and went to where dead human beings are; no, 1 Peter 3 isn’t exactly talking about that; yes, there does seem to be a proclamation of victory delivered by Jesus to fallen spiritual beings”.

The theological answer

Even though it was only written/released in 1995, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” is a relatively widely known song in evangelical-type spaces. It contains the lines:

Which has caused more than some consternation. Is this good theology? Does Jesus experience ‘hell’ on the cross? Part of this goes back to John Calvin, who understood the problem with the Apostles’ Creed, and tended to re-interpret it to mean that Jesus suffered the agony of hell on the cross, because that’s the just judgment he received in our place. That line of thinking tends to go like this:

• Jesus suffered in our place.

• The punishment we deserve is hell.

• Hell is eternal separation from God.

• Jesus experienced eternal separation from God.

That all sounds very logical, until you realise that Jesus is God, and you’ve created a very problematic paradox. What this means for most ordinary Christians, I have found, is that really they have a kind of functional Arianism. That is, they think that Jesus is some kind of second-tier ‘god’ who isn’t quite as much God as “God-God”, i.e. God the Father.

To untangle this knot we need to call in some heavy machinery. Maybe some diggers and cranes. Aka, theological doctrines. Let’s meet our rescue crew:

1. Impassability

2. The Trinity

3. The Incarnation

Impassability has a bad rap, partly because a bunch of evangelical theologians never really understood it and so wrote it off. And people didn’t know how to do historical theology well. In a nutshell, God doesn’t suffer. Why not? Well, he’s not the kind of being who is subject to the vicissitudes of the world, and so God isn’t at the mercy of his feelings, he is in control of them, he in a sense is them. God doesn’t fall in love, he is love. To really dig down into this requires a bit more space than I want to devote to it here, but most attempts to say, “hey, God does suffer”, are either misunderstandings of the incarnation, or else messing with who and what the Transcendent God is.

The doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity help us put this together. The second person of the trinity is the Son, and the Son exists from all eternity, is God from God, is no lesser nor second God, and so is and has all the fulness of God. That, by the by, includes impassability. So when the Son becomes incarnate, he is still fully God, he’s just also now fully human. And human natures can suffer.

So now we have something troubling - one person (the incarnate Son, Jesus), with two natures (divine and human), and one of those natures can do something the other can’t. It can suffer, and it can die.

So what happens at the cross? The one person (the Son, Jesus), dies in and in respect of his human nature. That’s good news, that’s good Friday. But he doesn’t die as God, because God can’t die.

Similarly, Jesus does, I would affirm, experience the just penalty for sin upon the cross, and if it’s right to say that that’s ‘separation from God’, or ‘hell’, then it’s right also to say that Jesus suffers and experiences this in his human nature.

What’s not right is to say that there is separation within the Godhead, and somehow the Father and the Son are severed and the Son is cut-off from the Father. That’s not something the Bible teaches, it’s not something the early church teaches, and it’s not coherent with all the pieces that make up a coherent theological system.

It is, sadly, what many people end up thinking, and Townend’s song tends to lead people to think. I think there is an orthodox way to understand the song, and to sing it, but it requires some of the above. Because there is this twofold thread running through the way the crucifixion is interpreted through the lens of the Psalms, that can speak of both God ‘turning his face away’ and ‘hiding himself’, and yet at the very same time hearing and listening. Psalm 22 ends with verse 24, don’t miss it.

Put it all back together again, Humpty.

So, my long answer after all that is: the divine Son, incarnate as Jesus, suffered and experienced hell and death on the cross in respect of his human nature, went to the place of the (righteous) dead as a human, and at some point also proclaimed his victory over fallen spirits.

One, humans are fundamentally/essentially/basically good creatures. I think a lot of people think this, and then you have to have a secondary account of why good creatures do bad things. So you must explain evil somehow. I’m just stating this view initially, because I want to circle back to it in a little while.

Two, humans are fundamentally bad. I don’t think many people believe this, because it’s a pretty hard world-view to embrace at its extreme. That said, I think there is a less-extreme version of this that basically sees humans as fundamentally selfish, and that either (a) that’s okay, it’s just how it is, or (b) thinks that if we harness that selfishness, we can produce good outcomes for everybody. I suppose that is trying to use bureaucracy + government to legislate our way out.

The reason to start with these two options is that it helps set some polarity up before we talk about a range of other options, as we’ll see.

Three, there’s no such thing as good or evil anyway, why are we talking about this. I think that in our secular west this is a common stated belief, but then not actually one that people really subscribe to. To really believe that there is no such thing as morality, and to become indifferent to moral choices, and others’ choices, and think that when things go wrong/bad/unjust it’s just, e.g. you expressing your preferences, is a difficult way to live. This is why I think that philosophically speaking, atheistic naturalism is bound to collapse into moral nihilism, and I don’t think that’s really viable (either philosophically or existentially).

Four, we are admixtures of good and evil. That’s some Shakespeare-grade philosophy right there. Now I think we’re getting towards a belief system that people actually have and live by. The world is full of people who are all mixed creatures; in some the good predominates, in others the bad, and yet we all have a bit of each mixed in. I think part of the difficulty here is that when you dig deeper, and ask why, it’s hard to come up with good reasons for why it is so. Yet, existentially this seems to be our condition. We know that we don’t always live up to our own standards, let alone external ones, and yet we want to. We also know that there are some really amazingly saintly people out there, and a whole lot more very bad ones.

Five, I think there is also a view that doesn’t really have a good philosophical grounding, but existentially amounts to, ‘there are good humans and they are on our side, and there are bad humans and they are them.’ That might be a discussion for another time though.

When we circle back to the idea that humans are fundamentally good, you come up with a kind of naïve human optimism that basically has to pin the blame for evil on something external. Lack of education, bad upbringing, bad circumstances, bad influences. I think this is why I find versions of progressive ideology so unconvincing - people are just bad because they didn’t have the right upbringing and social structures. If we iron all that out, which we will eventually, utopia.

The idea that humans are basically selfish creatures and we need to restrain them and direct them for their own good, is again a kind of vicious view of human nature, and it actually creates a different problem: trying to account for the origin of ‘good’. What’s moral goodness if nature is innately bad?

There is a version of this, however, that is baked into some versions of Reformed, and Evangelical Christianity. It’s that we are fundamentally sinners. I think it has a kind of counterpart in Catholic guilt complexes. This is the view that we are born sinners, everything we do is affected by sin, so we never do anything good ever, and we are born under judgment for judgment.

It’s important to realise that that is a distortion. Why is it a distortion though? Because it’s half-true at best and misleading at worst, and its effects are deleterious. If we are created as evil creatures, then what is redemption? It’s a change of what we are to be something else. That’s not really the Christian story.

The traditional reading of the Christian story is that we are made good and then our human nature is altered. Sin is not essential to what it means to be human, simply endemic. That difference matters a great deal.

To sin is not something characteristic of humans qua humans. It’s something characteristic of every human being (except Jesus), insofar as every human being is affected by sin’s presence in their constitution.

Imagine that every zebra on the planet was infected with a disease that made their white stripes pink. It was a parasitic infection, and it was transmitted to each newborn zebra. So every zebra you know has pink stripes. But having pink stripes isn’t part of what it means to be a zebra, it’s part of what it means to be a zebra born into this world-full-of-zebra-parasites. That’s the distinction between essential and endemic that I’m drawing here.

Every human being is affected by sin, but sin is not itself part of what it means to be human.

This is why, arguably, the Christian position is actually position one: humans are innately good, but they are always, in this world, fallen. Which means that our experience ends up more like option 3, an admixture of good and evil. This also makes sense of redemption. Redemption is the restoration of humanity’s essential goodness, by removing the endemic parasite. It’s killing the infection that makes our zebra friends pink-striped. Imagine what it would then be like to behold the first zebra with white stripes again!

This is my short attempt to try to explain the logic of why the image of God is more fundamental to our anthropology than that we are sinners. Which is, arguably, the basis for how we also treat others. We treat them as image bearers of God first and foremost, and then fallen and redeemable ones at that.

What does happen to them?

Beats me. Matthew doesn’t seem interested in telling us.

I’ll come back to those demons a little later, so hold that complaint.

Here’s a much bigger question that I ponder: where did all the demons go in the world now that we became the modern secular West?

Reading our old classic Charles Taylor and his account of how-we-got-to-where-we-are, and the coming of the Secular Age, and the disenchantment of the world, and all that, makes you realise that people 500, or 1500, or 2500 years ago really did think about the world in an entirely different way. It was a porous world where the supernatural was ordinary, not extra-ordinary. And so spirits being involved in everything and everyday life was just part and parcel of how you understood the world and explained things.

We, certainly, do not live in such a world. Even if you believe in spirits, of whatever kind, or affirm angels and demons, you choose to believe in these things rather than simply take them for granted as an axiomatic reality that everyone also accepts.

I never explain by recourse to spirit-entities what can be explained by more mundane reasons, and I suspect most of us do the same. That does not mean I don’t believe there are evil spirits, but it’s not an explanation I readily come to. Like anything else, I would want some evidence to ground my beliefs.

I think this makes it incredibly hard to read the New Testament in a way that takes seriously these types of passages, because we can nod along and say yes and agree and all that, but it all seems so academic and removed from our everyday lives. We aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and start attributing all misfortunes to the work of malevolent spirits (nor do I think you should).

It’s compulsory for Protestant writers to quote C.S. Lewis here: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

I think we can ask a different question: do we see enormous, monstrous and ‘inhuman’(e) evil in the modern, secular West? Oh my, we certainly do. On a scale that makes the ancients look like amateurs in human suffering and misery. I don’t even need to be reading the news to know that you know as well as I do that untold, unspeakable evils are being committed around the world in modern secular cultural contexts.

Are demons involved in that? Who knows? I don’t think we need that explanation and I don’t even think it’s that interesting, because if the agenda was piteous and merciless destruction and degradation of human lives, this seems to be proceeding a-pace.

To return to Matthew and the pigs, there are at least a few things the biblical texts allow us to put together. Evil spirits seem to possess or inhabit hosts, primarily animate ones. They are bent on destruction. Their ability to affect the material world when they don’t have a host seems limited. They are cast out of people, not ‘destroyed’ or ‘healed’. They are destined to judgment and torment. They are ritually unclean, inhabit unclean places, and make things unclean.

Matthew studiously avoids answering our questions. But the pigs’ destruction does not really seem to be the demons’ primary intention. Perhaps rather an unintended side-effect of their vicious and violent natures. The demons themselves seem ‘unhoused’ by losing their hosts, but do not then immediately return and seek to possess the two men. They are presumably wandering and disrupted. At least as far as the narrative goes, they are ‘off the scene’, because Jesus has brought deliverance. It’s the two men, not the demons, that Jesus is concerned with. They aren’t dead, but they are cast-out, and they seem to remain cast-out, so long as Jesus is on the scene.

Which is Matthew’s point, no? Which is also the answer to my other question, even though it doesn’t answer that question. The point is not where demons are or what they are doing or whatever. They are cast-out, so long as Jesus is on the scene.

The Moralized Ovid was written around 1340 by a Benedictine preacher, Pierre Bersuire, in Avignon. It is an extended retelling and allegorical interpretation of the stories from the classical Latin poet Ovid’s work Metamorphoses.

My small class reading this with me is only a few weeks’ in, but it is a fascinating foray into a different world. Bersuire represents a kind of allegorical reading that is not in vogue these days, but also is wildly hard to argue against, and it also does a kind of violence to the text.

Ovid’s work, as the name suggests, is bound together by the fact that all his fables depict metaphorphoses - changes. Bersuire takes each story and provides an interpretation that allows the reader, or the would-be preacher, to extract moral examples and other allegorical teaching points, in a thoroughly Christianised vein.

Let me give an example. The second myth of book one of Ovid tells of Jupiter blasting the Giants, and then other Giants were born from their blood, who were worse than their parents. Bersuire interprets this to refer to ‘the proud and sinners’, whose children are often imitators and worse than their parents, and are punished in turn. He then cites a handful of scripture verses from various texts to back up his claim.

For Bersuire, Juppiter represents God most often. He has no embarrassment about identifying a pagan god with the Christian deity. Other figures are rendered with various associations, the church, rich sinners, the poor, virtues, pious virgins, and so on. Sometimes the identifications are with types of people, other times more abstract qualities.

What it makes me most think of is the difficulty in deciding the limits of allegory. Certainly Ovid didn’t mean to write a crypto-Christian moral text! And yet, sometimes allegory seems appropriate. Certain texts invite, or even demand, a figurative reading. I’m not opposed to that reading strategy in general, indeed I dare say that parts of Scripture invite a typological reading. At the same time, I have myself say and heard people make what I can only consider fanciful leaps of logic and wordplay to connect far-flung parts of Scripture. How do you control for that?

I think there are some answers for that, and in fact Bersuire provides some help here. Because Bersuire represents the absolute extreme - taking a text about something else entirely, from a different time and place, and interpreting it through a very alien lens. It’s almost like reading gnostic interpretations. In doing so, I dare say, he shows us what not to do - allegory gone haywire. This isn’t just bad theology, or biblical interpretation, it’s bad interpretive practice full stop.

It’s still fascinating though! Absolutely wild.

All of which put me in mind of a book I read quite some years ago now, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns (by T. David Gordon). Alas, I do not seem to have a copy, nor a trace of the review I wrote of it at the time.

The core of the books argument is that pop culture and pop music has ‘rewritten the hymnal’, making traditional hymnology inaccessible, and creating a generation of evangelicals who basically sing Christian pop and don’t know and can’t appreciate hymnody.

If I recall correctly, Gordon talks about high vs low culture and musical traditions, and so part of his argument is that what we probably ought to have in churches is low culture congregational singing, except that we already lost congregational folk singing traditions a fair while ago, and so a higher-culture version of that is sacred music, i.e. hymnody. Gordon is pretty anti-pop-music.

I think Gordon’s criticisms are mostly right, but I suspect his solutions are unworkable and impossible. Gordon really seemed to think that we should jettison all contemporary music from church and insist on traditional hymns.

The problems with contemporary music in church are plentiful, even when they are well-mitigated. They include the fact that we tend to sing a diet of songs mostly less than a decade old, always being renewed, and shared primarily by our ecclesiological sub-cultures. Unless you are part of broader evangelicalism, in which case you are probably just getting your music from a handful of prosperity-gospel megachurches.

It also includes the fact that many of our musical models are just pop music, which is driven by performance and not designed for congregational singing. Again this can be mitigated by song-writing and arrangement designed to cater for congregations, but arguably it’s part of the model inherited from pop.

This is where I think that folk traditions of singing in everyday life, which includes actual historical sea shanties, but also other forms of ‘working songs’, provide us a reminder of a way of life we’ve mostly lost, and its form of singing too.2 I’m highly doubtful there are ways to recover such communal singing practices, outside highly intentional commitment to creating such a practice in a group or local church. To do so, however, is also going to create a growing distance between church and world in a way that renders church singing less accessibly to outsiders.

Perhaps there is no good solution, then. perhaps I simply lament what can no longer be fixed.

You know that feeling, that blissful one when you come back from a week of vacation and you haven’t heard any news about the broader world… and you feel great about that. You read a newspaper or some headlines, and realise not that much has happened.

Or perhaps you’ve had the opposite experience (or both): You come back from some time off-the-grid and momentous events have taken place. You were oblivious. But what would knowing have done for you anyway?

Dobelli’s book, with the sub-title, “A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life” cropped up on my radar after a mention by Brad East, and I thought, “hmm, just stop reading the news? Intriguing.” And so I picked up the book, willing to be convinced.

The introduction is the story of Dobelli scheduled to talk to a room full of Guardian journalists about another book of his, when the editor-in-chief asked him on the spot to speak about a recent blog post, a condensed case for not reading the news. You can imagine telling a room full of journalists that their work is “basically entertainment” went down well. The Guardian published his talk as an article. And then Dobelli turned it into a book.

Dobelli makes a compelling argument. He begins by talking about the way that news is addictive, how you probably need to go cold-turkey, and the benefits of giving it up. He addresses all the arguments you can come up with against his philosophy, and he walks us through the kinds of rational biases that news creates and feeds in us (e.g. hindsight bias, availability bias).

One of Dobelli’s primary arguments is that 99% of all news is irrelevant to you (I added the 99%). That is, most of the news we read or consume happens to other people in other places, and makes zero difference to how you conduct your day-to-day. You would still live our ‘today’ with almost no difference, whether you heard about those things or not. All that news does then, is either (i) fuel entertainment for you, (ii) create anxiety for you about things you can do nothing about.

I am a couple of weeks in to my no-news experiment as I write this. And it is working out well for me. I do feel less anxious and less upset about the umpteen things happening in the world that I can do nothing about. There is precious little real power I have to affect the course of events in other countries, even my own country. Most of what I can do day to day happens simply by interacting with the people in my life.

It’s also, as Dobelli points out, a huge time-suck. If you simply stop consuming news, you gain all this time back in your day. Which Dobelli commends to reading more useful things like books, or long-form writing.

I think some of my biggest push-back against Dobelli’s argument is my sense that “I ought to know what’s going on in the world”, and that this is part and parcel of being “an informed citizen”. Dobelli addresses this to some degree in two chapters, “What about Democracy?” First, the question of elections. At those times, Dobelli recommends, go and do your research. Even read news sites, if you need to, but do it as an active researcher looking for information: who are the candidates and parties, what have they done in the past, and what are their platforms. That’s when and how you should be researching politics, not passively consuming it every day.

Secondly, what about the press’s role in maintaining a functioning democracy? Here Dobelli makes the case that we do need journalism, especially of two kinds: investigative journalism and explanatory reporting. Both of these are worth reading, and worth paying for. Most news isn’t this kind of journalism though.

What about feeling ignorant? News leaks into your world. I can’t avoid knowing some of the terrible evils happening in Minnesota, for instance; I’m well aware that half my country is talking about shark attacks. If things really need to be known, someone will mention it, and then you can ask them, have a conversation, ask about what they’ve heard or read, what they think about it, and so on. Most people will be happy to oblige you.

As an aside, setting aside the news has helped me to stop reading pseudo-news sites too, like Substack Notes. Notes is just twitter for litterati anyway.

Dobelli considers one other object that I think is quite a good one: what about caring for the world and giving to charity, etc.? His answer here is also surprisingly good. You don’t really need to know the news to know how to address these things. You’re better off, the vast majority of us, spending some time researching effective and trustworthy aid organisations that align with your values, committing to supporting them, and spending your money that way rather than being driven by reactivity to news (and charity marketing).

If I had another qualm, which I don’t think Dobelli really does address, it would be this. Refusing to read the news feels, to some extent, like a choice to look away from some of the horrors of the world. Whereas there is a part of me that feels that it is important for us to bear witness, to watch with eyes wide open, to see and really see some of the evils going on in the world, so that they are not forgotten. In our time, I think especially of Gaza and Ukraine like this. Is refusing to spend each day reading the latest news on these an abdication of moral responsibility? I don’t think so, because I don’t think the mere fact of my knowing actually changes anything out there. And yet, the ability to look away is… troubling. If I have an answer to this, it is only to read quality materials, every now and again, the long-form investigative and explanatory journalism that Dobelli speaks about.1

Check back on me in a few months and ask how my no-news is going, and if anything happens in the world that you think I should know about, you’re welcome to tell me. Otherwise I’ll be reading books at least 100 years’ old.

1. Why Religion Went Obsolete, Christian Smith

I read most of this in 2025, and just finished the appendix in 2026, while re-reading portions to complete my series of posts on it. I think this is probably essential reading for understanding the challenges of the church in the 21st century. So, perhaps I am cheating since I included it in Dec 2025 as well, but the appendix was long! Review in parts 1, 2, 3, 4.

2. Stop reading the news, Rolf Dobelli, 19th Jan.

I have a separate post about this one too, coming next week. I heard mention of it from Brad East, my interest was piqued, and I picked it up and read it. It’s a short and quick read.

3. The Lady of the Lake, Andrzej Sapkowski, 20th Jan.

I have read this before. It’s the last of the main series of Witcher novels. I commenced a re-read perhaps two years ago of the series, and this last one has been sitting on my pile of books half-read for over a year.

4. The Nones, Ryan P. Burge, 20th Jan.

I have in mind to write about this one too, but I needed a break after Smith’s book above. I think Burge does a complementary job. He explains data well, talks about what’s not significant, what’s misleading, and also shares things where you think, “what about factor X? Turns out factor X has no impact”.

5. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas, 22nd Jan.

Again, my list deceives you because I listened to probably about 30 hours (of 52) in 2025, and just finished it off in early January by listening in every spare moment. Thoughts here.

6. Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks, 22nd Jan.

And yet again! I listened to most of this book in mid-2025 and then abandoned it for technical reasons. This is a great book for listening to, since Matthew reads it himself, and it’s all about telling great stories, which is exactly the kind of thing you ought to listen to rather than read. Of course, now I have to put it into practice.

7. The Odyssey, Homer (trans. Emily Wilson, narrated by Claire Danes)

Well, this one I didn’t ‘cheat’ on. I have listened to this before, but I have made a conscious effort to put both classics, older books, and some re-reads on my list for 2026. The Odyssey is only about a 10hr listen, so it’s very doable in a week if you have a lot of walking on your schedule, which I did.

The Odyssey is so many things. It, perhaps more than the Count of Monte Cristo, is a story of revenge. Half the poem relates the events after Odysseus returns home, and in fact more than half the poem is not about his wanderings and journeys at all. Then it becomes about homecomings after war, of the ambiguous grief of war wives, of a son growing up without their father, and of boys playing at being men; a story of hospitality violated. And a story of death.

Wilson’s translation is wonderful, I highly recommend it. Also, I think the ancient epics are best listened to rather than read, and preferably by someone with a good voice, and in a short time-span, not over months. There are delicious and memorable turns of phrase in Wilson’s. For example, when Odysseus grabs his bow, plants his arrows, and gets prepared to slaughter the suitors, declaring, “Playtime is over.”

It was the summer I turned 23. We were on the back of a truck having crossed the border into Honduras, where we arrived at the town of Omoa. It was pretty small then, but with room enough in local hostels for backpackers like myself. The only problem with the town was that it was experiencing a shortage of fresh water. That meant bathing in the Caribbean. On a small bookshelf in the hostel were books to exchange. And that’s how I found myself reading The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time.

If nothing else, Monte Cristo is a rollicking adventure. I am sure that first version I read back then was abridged, as the unabridged novel is monstrously long, clocking in around 1300 pages. I have just finished listening to the Naxos audiobook version, wonderfully narrated by Bill Homewood, a significant 52h 41m, which omits the name of the translator in all their details, website, and so on. Translators should not be thus obfuscated!

The book was so originally realised in a serialised format in 18 parts in 1844-1846, and was apparently so popular that people would hang on the next instalment, and talk about it with great anticipation. Perhaps the closest analogue was the also by-gone days when television episodes were screened a week at a time and people spoke about them the next day.

If Les Mis is a book driven by grace (or perhaps grace v law), then Monte Cristo is a book dominated by the themes of justice and providence. And it is upon the latter theme I want to meditate in this essay.

The story falls into roughly 4 or 5 (unequal) sections. In the opening chapters we meet our protagonist, Edmond Dantès, a youth of great character, talent, and prospects. He is returning from a sea-voyage where he has been acting as captain, the captain having died at sea; and he is on the verge of marrying his fiancée, Mercédès.

All this is not to be, of course, as three acquaintances conspire against Dantès, leading to his arrest, and due to the personal entanglements of the procureur1, Villefort, Dantès is not given a trial but instead sent as a prisoner to the ominous Château d’If, a fortified island-prison.

As we journey along with Dantès in these initial chapters, and travel the unknown road to his prison, our sense of justice is piqued, we are outraged at the injustices done against him, the conspiracy of other parties, our hopes are raised for reprieve or deliverance, until just like Dantès, the doom that has fallen upon him also closes down upon us. Dumas’ skill as a writer and storyteller is such that even when you know how the story goes, you can’t help ride those waves of hope and disappointment.

(As an aside, I tried to watch the recent 2024 mini-series adaptation starring Sam Claflin, and I did not get past the first episode, in part because I did not like the changes made. For example, in the book Mercédès and Dantès’ father do not really know where Dantès has been taken or imprisoned, whereas in the miniseries Mercédès is present when Dantès is being put on a boat at Marseilles and taken to the Château d’If. I think that changes significantly her knowledge as a character and casts events in a different light.)

In the Château d’If we languish with Dantès, experiencing something of the long wait, until we meet the Abbé Faria, who has been digging an escape tunnel but ends up in Dantès’ cell. The Abbé is a remarkable character, and here begins Dantès’ double-transformation. On the one hand, under the Abbé’s tutelage, Dantès acquires a first-rate education, honing his mind into a genius intellect. On the other, the Abbé reveals to Dantès an immense treasure, hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. This, after his daring escape, Dantès retrieves, and thus begins the second part of the book.

II

As a protagonist, Dantès is a superhuman force. He is a lot like Batman. Human, clearly human, but strong, swift, smart, and possessed of an immense fortune, all of which resources he puts forth towards his ends, while maintaining a mysterious veil over himself.

Dantès begins by making inquiries, as to what has happened to his father, and Mercédès, during his long absence (14 years in prison). He thus returns and first finds Caderousse, who if not quite a willing accomplice, was a spineless witness to Dantès betrayal. Dantès then goes on to Marseilles where, anonymously, he intervenes to save (financially and from suicide) his former employer, Morrel, who had tried unsuccessfully to intervene on Dantès behalf time and time again. At the close of this episode, Dantès speaks:

“And now,” said the unknown, “farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been heaven’s substitute to recompense the good — now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!”2

This is one of the first and most direct statements about Dantès self-understanding and the novel’s overarching theme. Dantès acts as “heaven’s substitute” to bring about just recompense: first, to reward those that have done good, second to punish those who have done evil. He is an angel of justice, executing God’s providence on God’s behalf, or so he tells himself. Let us hold onto that thought.

III

Chapter 31 opens in Italy, “towards the beginning of the year 1838”. That’s nine years later than the previous episode (1829), and we are not told directly what the Count (as I’ll now refer to him) has been doing since. But we are introduced to two young Frenchmen, the Vicomte Albert de Morcerf and the Baron Franz d’Epinay, who appear in Italy, have some adventures, and are rescued by the mysterious Count, who promises to come to Paris. This seems an odd kind of interlude, except that it does three things. Firstly, it establishes for us the Count as a new ‘character’. We no longer think of him as Dantès, and we get used to his new ways and manners and mysteries. It’s a “reset” for us as readers. Secondly Albert, as we will learn, is the son of Mercédès who married Fernand, her cousin and Dantès’ rival, who is one of the three conspirators. Likewise Franz, again as we learn later, is engaged to Valentine de Villefort. Thirdly, the Count becomes entangled in some bonds of friendship with Albert and Franz, which will come back to haunt him somewhat.

IV

May 21st, 1838. The Count, prompt to his word, appears in Paris to breakfast with Albert. Thus commences the considerable bulk of the book. The Count moves into Parisian society as a “singular” figure, as Dumas likes to call him. He is peculiar, precise, extravagantly wealthy, charismatic, forceful, and scheming.

What was the Count doing between 1829 and 1838? Becoming Batman. He seems, from the hints, to have spent his time in the East (the Ottoman empire, Greece, Albania) and perhaps Africa. Training and honing his skills, his acumen, and building his fortune into an empire. All, though, preparing for this.

What unfolds in Paris is delicious to us. With meticulous care, the Count unfolds his plans. On each of his betrayers, Danglers, Fernand, Villefort, he begins to play out a series of events designed to ruin them. Yet, the sweetness of this revenge is not just us seeing them get their come-uppance. It’s the poetic justice of the Count’s machinations. For each of these characters is marked by hidden crimes.

The Count works to bring these out from the depths of time and dig them up from the earth, bring them into the light, and place them in face of each of the objects of his vengeance. In this way, there is something de-personal about his vengeance. He doesn’t just turn up and punish them personally and violently, he brings about the consequences of their crimes upon their own heads. And that is what we relish here.

In chapter 48 M. de Villefort comes to visit the Count, and a very philosophical discussion ensues. Here is another place we get a direct discourse on the theme of the novel. The Count compares himself to the angel in Tobias, or to Attila, both instruments of God to bring about his purposes. The Count is an exceptional being, having only three adversaries: time, distance, and mortality. And then, echoing the temptation of Christ, the Count says that he was offered by Satan to become an agent of providence.

That is the thread that runs through Monte Cristo. We live in a world where things are so often not right, and we have an innate sense that things should “turn out right”, and Monte Cristo is the story of a man who suffered great injustice, was plunged to the depths, brought to despair and death’s door, and then raised up with power and might, to make the story turn out right. Unlike Job, whose suffering is mysterious and comes from (mostly) natural accidents, the Count’s suffering is at the hands of wicked men, and so to set things right requires just desserts - reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked. And so, unlike Job, it is the Count himself who enacts that rectification.

For all that the Count seems an unstoppable force, the story would lack some drama if nothing and no-one could stand in his way. It is, however, chance that opposes him. One might say. When Caderousse attemptt to burglar the Count, and meets the Count in disguise as the Abbé Busoni, he is given yet one more chance. The chance to escape, to flee, to get away. And this with the promise - that if he successfully makes it home safely, he will be provided for. This is the Count testing providence:

“Remember my words: `If you return home safely, I shall believe God has forgiven you, and I will forgive you also.’”3

There is in the Count a pious restraint. He raises himself up as God’s angel, but never in the place of God. He trembles before God. So he does not intervene to save Caderousse, instead:

for I saw God’s justice placed in the hands of Benedetto, and should have thought it sacrilege to oppose the designs of providence.”4

Against Caderousse’s complaints against God’s justice, the Count lays out the history of God’s providential mercies to Caderousse, the countless times he had been given grace, a chance to repent, to turn towards the good; and every time he had chosen crime and vice. It is, in the end, that Caderousse is inveterate that he finally falls victim to providence.

The Count’s plans go astray in two other regards. Firstly, in not reckoning upon dealing with the poisoner, and so young Eduard dies and is beyond all saving. Secondly, the star-crossed loves of the younger generation, Maximilian Morrel in particular. These, and his final conversation with Mercédès (chapter 112), create a crisis of doubt in the Count. What if he has miscalculated? What if he were wrong?

V

The final chapters are a denouement to the whole work. There is still Maximilian and Valentine’s storyline to conclude. So, too, we follow Danglars to Rome where his story ends. And it ends with repentance and pardon. The implacable justice of the Count, and the God of Justice who stands behind him, is tempered by mercy, by forgiveness for the one who repents. When Danglars is brought to his lowest point, he alone of the villains finds a repentance, and forgiveness.

The Count’s final words to us come in a letter:

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living. “Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words, — `Wait and hope.’5

What is providence? Boethius tells us that the difference is between merely seeing-beforehand (pre-vision), and seeing forth (pro-vision). There is built into the Latin roots this double sense of “to see (be)for(e)” and hence “to provide”. Boethius, too, helps configure Providence and Fate. It is Providence to God, who exists in Eternal Time, or beyond Time, but it is Fate to us who experience all the countless changes of this mutable world.

We do not know how anything will turn out. The fluctuations and vicissitudes of life may raise us up, but like a wave it may be only temporary and the same may plunge us down. Providence is a belief that it is all going to turn out for the good, but in the end.

The Count of Monte Cristo embodies that temporally. There is justice, and forgiveness; there is happiness for those who have suffered. And there are happy endings.

Yet life is not always like the movies, or the 19th century novels. From our perspective it is more Fortune than Fate. Good people die tragically; faithful people die horribly. Wicked people prosper, and make it to life’s end and die in peace and riches. Monte Cristo’s appeal for us is that we long to tangibly see those ‘right endings’ happen in life, precisely because we know that they don’t always. At the same time, our deep convictions that there must be rewards and punishments and justice in any afterlife, however we imagine that, matches our sense that if the world is to be anything other than a cruel and indifferent void, there must be justice beyond the grave if there isn’t always justice before it.

Christian notions of Providence tend to end up (or start) with Romans 8:28

We, though, know that all things co-operate for the good, for those that love God, they being called according to his intention.

Every part of this verse drips with theological content. It is all things, not some things.6 The providence of God encompasses all the machinations of the universe. They co-operate (or ‘work together’). That is, there is a harmony to the operations of the cosmos according to God’s unseen hand. That cooperative work is ‘for the good’. It has its goal, and result, in what is genuinely good. What is ‘the good’? One way of saying this might be the recapitulation of all things in Christ, the head (Eph 1). This confidence in God’s providence is for those that love God, for believers in Paul’s conception. This doesn’t say anything either way about those that don’t love God - that is not the focus of Romans 8! Paul is working to put into perspective the vicissitudes of life, its sufferings common and particular, and how they fit into the confidence that believers may have.

Was the Count right to take upon himself the role of mediating God’s Providence?

The thing about a strong doctrine of Providence is that it becomes inescapable and counter-factuals become redundant. I mean, granted that we are talking about a fictional story here; that aside. If the Count was the means of God’s providence to bring these things about, then the Count was the means of God’s providence to bring these things about. And if he didn’t, then he wasn’t. You can only ‘read’ providence in hindsight, as a human being, looking back and seeing how things worked ‘for the good’. Even this, however, will fail you. What’s good on the timescale of all of human history? What’s the chronological end-point you need to reach to see how everything worked out for the best? It’s literally the end of history. Which means our wisdom is the same as the Count’s.

wait, and hope.

Contours of the Millenial Zeitgeist

‘Zeitgeist’ is a tricky term, I think. Smith acknowledges as much in his introduction to the book, where he details key concepts. There he supplies Monika Krause’s definition, “patterns in meaningful practices that are period-specific, cross over different areas of social life, and extend across geographical contexts.” Smith then writes:

I add that zeitgeists are also defined by specific embodying public figures and celebrities, crucial events, representative artistic and symbolic expressions, shared slogans, and other types of meaningful cultural markers present in real time (then) and in collective memory (later).1

Chapter nine is his attempt to do so for the Millenial zeitgeist that emerged in the 90s and developed through the 2000s. How do you describe the vibe, the mood, the ‘spirit of the age’? He works through five things:

1. Big-picture context of the tone of previous decades

2. Central cultural themes

3. Formal properties of the zeitgeist

4. Hypothetical advice from a zeitgeist veteran

5. Three music videos to watch!

Here goes:

The dominant tone of the previous decades:

1946-59 Anxious Normalcy

1960-71 Troubled Optimism

1972-79 Shaken Anxiety

1980-88 Hopeful Rebirth

1989-2001 Boundary-breaking exhilaration

Smith then lists off a cornucopia of key events and cultural trends from the 90s to exemplify this, more detailed than the previous decades.

2000s Depressing Gloom

Interesting, as Smith notes, that the 90s were “overall upbeat and exciting”, the 2000s “somber and hard”, but the overall zeitgeist had an internal change in tone to it.

Thematic Tones: (again, I summarise considerably) connected, virtual, competitive, unregulated, entertained, hypersexualized, unbounded, shameless, relativist, dark, defeated, moronic, floating, fluid, conflicted, re-enchanted.2

Formal Analytics:

Duration: 1991-? (Smith thinks there is no clear end-point for this zeitgeist). But it started in 1991 marked by the end of the cold war, the first major rise in the number of Nones, the world wide web, rollout of mobile phones, release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and numerous other events and cultural markers.

Spatial and Social Scope: Originating in the East and West Coast urban areas, and spreading through multiple media. It eventually became pervasive, touching almost all parts of American life.

There’s some stuff here where Smith lists celebrities that he thinks embody the zeitgeist; there’s not really a way to summarise this. So, too, his list of symbolic and artistic expressions. Lots of 90s tv shows! Then clothing, music, and so on. Smith does think that one of the key songs to embody the zeitgeist is Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. He then suggests watching Wayne Watson’s Home Free, the no.1 CCM song from the same year, and then from 1992, 4Him’s Basics of Life. The point is to consider the discourse of Nirvana which resonated so broadly, with CCM representing religious discourse of the period, and the gulf between them.

After his theoretical advice pitch, Smith offers an analytical model of the zeitgeist. This is actually the best part of this chapter, I think, because

analytical models present in condensed propositional form the kinds of statements that people would make about their cultural cognitions if they were fully self-aware, honest, and articulate about their true assumptions and beliefs organized in their cultural models.3

There are 34 of them, 20 are general, 14 about religion. If I had to try to summarise them, I would put it like this:

Each person is a distinct, unique individual whose purpose in life is to discover and express their authentic selves through subjective and internal intuitions and through individual sampling of experiences; institutions and authority claims are always suspect, and there is no objective truth. No-one should tell anyone else what to believe or do, and religion is a subjective set of beliefs and practices that you shouldn’t share or impose on others. Religion’s value is immanent, and ripe for cherry-picking for interested individuals if certain aspects work for them.

I think Smith has put together a fairly solid profile of the range of beliefs (especially where self-contradictory) that most post-Boomers hold, and which contribute to the decline of religion. He follows this up by pointing out that Americans, although moving on from religion, have not become secular atheists. Indeed, cross-referencing Burge’s work, only 6-7% of the population identify as atheists, and even most of the Nones aren’t that kind of atheist. Smith talks about this as re-enchantment, and backs it up with the range of beliefs in supernatural things that post-Boomers hold, especially paranormal, occult, or New Age ideas.

Religion did not become obsolete because secularity won the day. Religion lost out in good measure because alternatives that are actually more like religion than secularism emerged as cultural options that proved attractive to many post-Boomers.4

Chapter 10: Through the Exit Doors

This final chapter attempts to answer, to some degree, the question of how and why post-Boomers left religion, drawing on interviews to provide some explanation. Think of it like an amassed “exit interview” for people leaving TARs.

This includes a section on major turn-offs for religion: causes harm, social control, exclusivity, leadership, money, politicisation, coercion, outdated, hypocrisy, and so on (those are the major ones, in declining order).

They also attempted to elucidate people’s reasons for actually leaving their religious tradition. These include: religion being a personal matter not institutional; becoming ‘spiritual’; drifting away; life obligations; major life transition points, then a series of grouping mostly related to the kinds of turn-offs listed above.

Key here is that the major reason was that religion is personal not institutional, which maps directly to the cultural zeitgeist, but also deeply echoes evangelical sentiments, and ends up killing institutions.

Smith also has a section here discussing three important minority traditions over this period: American Jews, Mormons, and Black Protestants. I won’t walk through this data, but it is interesting and provides interesting counterpoints and contrasts with the broader data.

Conclusion

What to make of all this? Smith draws some observations about sociology, and social research. He doesn’t answer the kinds of questions pastors, or missiologists, really want to answer. But what he does say is nonethless highly instructive. For instance:

The governing institutions most relevant for the demise of American traditional religion were globalized neoliberal mass-consumer capitalism; its media and communications arm in cable television, the internet, social media, and smart phones; and its proselytizing arm in the advertising and marketing industries; along with growing universities and colleges; immigration policy; and the war on terror (which started as a mission and became a kind of institution)...

American traditional religions, for their part, did little to respond well to these transformations.5

In Smith’s account, “part of religion’s slide into obsolescence involved finding itself caught in complicated webs of no-win situations”. I think this is highly pertinent to some of my local theological conversations, where the prevailing opinion has become something like, ‘the greatest factor in church growth through new converts is the senior pastor.’ The damning rider to that claim is that local churches that aren’t growing, can blame their minister for being sub-standard.

What if you were, as Smith depicts in a vivid metaphor, swimming furiously against the stream? All that effort, but you are still going backwards? I had something like that experience recently, on a paddleboard caught in a current and despite all my efforts unable to make progress.

If there’s a clear lesson here for me, it’s that we (Christians, I mean) need to become much more aware of the world we live in, and reject simple and simplifying explanations. We also need to accept that this isn’t the world we inherited. I’m conscious that the power-brokers in my denomination are almost all Boomers still, with some Gen X starting to take over. But I do think there’s a clear generational divide between Boomers and post-Boomers, and Boomers just don’t get the kinds of societal shift we’ve undergone.

I don’t find reason for despair in this book; I do find that it may force us to reckon with ourselves more. What is the future of traditional Christianity? I think attempts to simply conform to the cultural zeitgeist are foolish and doomed to failure, pragmatically, theologically, and culturally. Attempts to simply dig-in and resist are like building sand-castles in the middle of the river though. Fresh engagement with our cultural moment is needed.

Lastly, it makes me continue to doubt the hope of those who keep talking about a Quiet Revival. I know there’s a little bit of data out there for that, and more anecdata than data, but the idea that there’s this small changing of the tide led by young men yearning for a less woke world is just not really borne out by the research. I don’t think one can pin one’s hopes on the pendulum swinging back to religion in that way, and for several other reasons nor should one.

And that’s a wrap for me on this one. When I have some time to digest some thoughts on Ryan Burge’s book, The Nones, I’ll return to some of this topic and offer a (shorter) set of notes and review on his volume.

January

1. The Navigator’s Children, Tad Williams, 2nd Jan

2. From Strength to Strength, Arthur C. Brooks, 20th Jan

February

3. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley, 8th February

4. After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre, 24th February. Part 1.

5. Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner (Pretzel), 25th February

March

6. The Third Reich in Power, Richard J. Evans, 3rd March

7. Faithful Politics: Ten approaches to Christian Citizenship and why it matters, Miranda Zapor Cruz, 3rd March

8. Swing Low (Vol 1): A History of Black Christianity in the United States, Walter R. Strickland II, 18th march

April

9. Evangelical Idolatry: How Pastors Like me have failed the church, Jeff Mikels, 13th April

10. Why Civil Resistance works: the Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan 21st April

May

11. The Third Reich at War, Richard J. Evans, 6th May

12. Gilead, Marilyn Robinson, 14th May

13. The Anti-Greed Gospel, Malcolm Foley, 17th May

14. Christ in the Rubble, Munther Isaac, 18th May

June

14. Embracing Complementarianism, Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher, 4th June

15. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, 30th June

July

16. Knowing and Being Know, Erin F. Moniz, 3rd July

17. Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr., 7th July

18. The Russo-Ukrainian War, Serhii Plokhy, 12th July

19. The Violent Take it Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, Matthew D. Taylor, 25th July

August

20. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo, 8th Aug

21. In the Shelter, Pádraig Ó Tuama, 14th Aug

The rest of the year

22. How to Talk about Jesus, Sam Chan.

23. Disarming Leviathan, Caleb Campbell, 14th Oct

24. Christians Reading Classics, Nadya Williams, 28th Nov

25. Contesting the Body of Christ, Myles Werntz

26. Why Religion went Obsolete, Christian Smith, Dec 20^th

I only include books I finished, which is why in June I read dozens of books on gender and ministry but only finished one of them while. It also explains why, even though I have listened to over half of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, it hasn’t made any lists.

I’ve begun 2026 well though. I have made some better reading habits, made some lists of books to read, and made a decision to read more older books and less newer ones. I hope to read far less books published in 2026, and work my way through more classics. I’ve already finished my first book of the year, have a few more close to being done.

I’m not sure what I’ll be writing about here this year. Thoughts on books will continue though, don’t worry. I have a few of those in draft form already. Perhaps some thoughts on other topics as well. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy 2026’s offerings.

Chapter 4: Long Term Social Trends

Here, he does both some considerably long term historical plotting as well as some more recent historical work. He begins with the advent of mass higher education. E.g. in 1940, 4-5% of American adults had a college degree, in 2020 it’s around 40%. How is this a factor? Not that higher education directly correlates to religiosity (Ryan Burge’s work shows that is false), but it creates conditions for cultural changes that made it possible. [fn: Smith does think that on the whole higher education corrodes religion).
Secondly, the increase of women in the work foorce since 1950. This is a factor because it reduces the work force of volunteer labor for religious groups, which are predominantly women. it also contributed to deinstitutionalization of traditional patterns of marriage and family.

This is itself a factor. TAR correlates highly with ‘traditional’ families, two biological parents raising 2+ children in a single household. TAR is less appealing to less traditional family structures. The rise of cohabitation, divorce, the significant delaying of marriage and children, all contribute to the decline of the traditional institution of marriage and family, which institution is viewed in a negative light by many people.

In particular, Smith explores the idea that ‘becoming a real adult’ has been traditionally tied to getting married; that life transitions are formative on people’s identities, and that getting ‘serious’ about religion was correlated with getting older. As the marriage age has crept from around 20 towards 30+, we now have a “life script” where a person’s 20s is a new era, ‘emerging adulthood’, in which major life transitions and changes are undertaken without a life partner and generally without the place of religion.

Next up is the decline of participation in face-to-face organisations. This is true across-the-board for all types of membership groups: fraternities, veterans, labour unions, school and nationality based groups, political groups. Post-Boomers don’t feel like part of a community, and don’t “join” groups.

Perhaps most interesting in this section, I found Smith’s discussion of the triumph of Mass Consumerism.

Essential to grasping the key ideas is realizing, first, how historically novel the consumerist way of life is and, second, how powerfully it forms identities, aspirations, and emotions.1

Here, Smith provides a long-term history, of the shift from hunter-gather society to agriculture, to the industrial revolution, fossil fuels, and postwar capitalism. This, the fossil fuel revolution, created “increasingly efficient production of material goods in previously unimaginable quantities and qualities”. But this creates a problem, what do you do with all this stuff? Production outstripped people’s capacity to buy. The solution that makes capitalism work is mass consumerism: to motivate and enable the populace at large to “embrace limitless desires, continual accumulation, and the legitimacy of hedonic pleasure” in place of the millenia old emphasis on thrift and hard-work.

In this new world, “shoppers had to be trained to buy products not first for their functional use value but for their status, identity, and emotional value”. Enter the advertising industry. Whose job is to convince people to buy products they don’t need or even want.

In its hugely successful campaign to sell ever-growing quantities of goods, the advertising industry transformed popular culture so that life was understood to be centrally about shopping for, buying, consuming, and discarding mass-manufactured products.2

In all this, our understanding of what life consists in is redefined to be expressing our identity through purchasing. Coupled with this, then, is the rise of “expressive individualism”, with its roots in western interiority, individualism, 19th century Romanticism, an essentialist concept of identity, and yet finding its current florescence in the pre-occupation with authenticity. Smith’s own survey includes questions asking for agreement with 12 beliefs that express ‘expressive individualism’, which show clear majority embrace by all generations. The result is “expressive individualist beliefs are currently so widespread in American culture that it can be difficult to notice them.” This, notably, is not a Boomer/Post-Boomer divide, but it’s the product of Boomers and the mindset inherited by post-Boomers. How does this relate to the obsolescence of TAR? By itself, it doesn’t, but it’s part of a package that creates the conditions in which religion is ultimately ‘judged’ by its value as an expression of my (self-constructed) identity.

Next in Smith’s treatment is the shift from materialist (marked by concerns for scarcity and security) to post-materialist culture (marked by post-scarcity economic conditions, in which other cultural goods become more valuable, e.g. individual autonomy and self-expression.

I mentioned above, in relation to marriage, the concept of “emerging adulthood”. Smith describes this in further detail as a period of life-stage from roughly 18-30, in which young adults delay marriage, often pursuing longer education. One of the factors here is economic: it is far harder for post-Boomers to reach the kind of economic stability their parents have; in turn, parents are pushed to support their 20-somethings longer. Drawing on Jeffrey Arnett, this is “emerging adulthood”:

typically involves intense identity exploration, instability, a focus on self, feeling in limbo or in transition or in-between, and a sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. These are often accompanied by big doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, disappointment, and sometimes emotional devastation.3

By postponing ‘settling down’, this creates a life script that focuses greater attention, for longer, on the individual self, and exploring life, experiences, and identity, in ways that are mostly opposed to TAR.

The upshot of all these trends and forces was to create the conditions, the prepare the ground so to speak, for the shifts that took place in the 1990s.

Chapter 5: The Developing Religious Environment

Then, turns to consider the prior decades, and especially trends within religion, rather than just in society generally.

The first of these is both the organizational decline, but perhaps more importantly the cultural triumph, of the Protestant Mainline. The PM has declined clearly and steadily since the 1960s. What Smith points out, drawing upon Jay Demerath, is that the decline of the PM is paradoxically because of their cultural victory. The values of liberal protestantism: “individualism, pluralism, emancipation, tolerance, free critical inquiry, and the authority of human experience”, ‘won’ in American culture, and yet these same values undermine institutional authority, including the mainline. It’s difficult to maintain an institution founded on “strong individualism, autonomy, and free criticism”! On this reading, the PM was already obsolete by the 1990s, having succeeded, and left itself no place for its own religious institutions.

Catholicism in America has also significantly declined, especially in its organisational form and strength. This was probably, on balance, not helped by Vatican II, since it created drastic and dramatic changes which have led to fracturing within American Catholics, and a significant decline in the institution. One marker of this is the rapid decline in numbers of priests, and vowed religious brothers and sisters.

The third aspect here is that not only most Americans, but many religious traditions, became ‘moralized’, losing a focus on transcendence. This is somewhat chicken-and-egg, but the view of many Americans that religion’s role is to make people moral, is correlated with practices of religion that de-emphasize the transcendent and focus (only?) on the moral. On the religious side, this can be seen in the decline of publishing and discussion in periodicals about ‘transcendent’ topics (heaven, hell, salvation, souls, etc), and on the other side of the equation, surveying views about what’s important to people: transcendent or immanent concerns. Generationally, each generation tends to value the former less, the latter more. 4

What is the outcome of the shift from transcendence to moralism? It creates conditions in which (a) religion requires less commitment from individuals, less buy-in, (b) in the marketplace, religion becomes susceptible to competitors taking its place.

Smith now turns his attention to the rise of televangelism and the Religious Right. There’s a rich body of literature addressing these movements. Smith provides a precis of the history of fundamentalism in the 1920s, the beginnings of American evangelicalism in the post-war period, and the embrace of the medium of television; then, the founding of the Moral Majority in ‘79, and the emergence of the Religious Right in the 80s. What’s of interest to Smith is that the convergence of politics and conservative religion created a backlash effect.

This was another irony: the movement to save Christian America for God ended up pushing many Americans away from Christianity, God, and the church.5

To the arrival of Eastern Religious and the New Age, Smith attributes the importance of new belief systems competing in the marketplace of ideas, but importantly they come with positive associations and attitudes that TAR doesn’t.

Similarly, the cultural narrative that science and religion are competing authorities of trustworthy knowledge, so much so that science is the winner and consequently religion is the loser. Smith acknowledges “that this common view of science and religion is historically wrong”, and yet it is widespread, and in part promulgated by secular activists. Yet, as Smith will later detail, what has emerged now is not the triumph of a purely ‘secular and scientific’ worldview at all.

Why the 1990s? Because of the 1980s. Despite all these forces and trends, up until the ‘70s there was considerable institutional momentum holding religion up. Then, the 80s saw an upsurge or renewal in religiosity and the TAR. That was, in some ways, misleading, as the deeper currents were already running ahead. At the same time, the apparent successes of TARs in the 1980s created a backlash that accelerated the story of decline in the 1990s.

Chapter 6: The 1990s.

If those were the pre-conditions that enabled the obsolescence of TAR, what happened in the 90s that lit the fire? This chapter is Smith’s account of those events.

Firstly, the end of the Cold War. Whereas the Cold War had sustained American national identity over against godless atheism and communism, the collapse of that enemy meant the victory of America, an America in which it didn’t need religion to hold its national identity together. Instead, we had “ascendant Neoliberalist Capitalism”. Again, I think Smith’s description of this is important. The impact of Reaganite and Thatcherite economic policy, the triumph of laissez-faire free markets, and specifically neoliberalist economics, created a world that not only involves certain economic structures, but “fosters a culture, a way of valuing, imagining, thinking, and judging”. What is that way? Smith highlights three crucial shifts.

Firstly, the globalised and competitive economy raised the difficulty of obtaining a ‘successful career’. I think a lot of post-Boomers know this intuitively, but don’t have a way of articulating it. Neoliberalism thrives on diminishing the strength of labour unions, and precarious employment where employees compete for scarce and insecure positions. For post-Boomers, this has meant investing more of their time, energy, emotion, and life, in trying to get and keep secure employment. This, I feel, is definitely a point of Boomer/post-Boomer misunderstanding. Boomers and above simply do not understand how difficult it is for the subsequent generations. In terms of religion, this has meant that post-Boomers do not have those available resources for religious practice and involvement, because they are trying to earn enough money to live on.

Secondly, neoliberalism demands greater worker mobility. Workers are interchangeable cogs, and so workers need to be willing to move, even moreso younger workers. The social and psychological consequence is both that younger generations move more often, but even when they don’t move, they have a mentality of transience. This factor works against putting down roots, getting involved in stable communities, and so-on. TAR tends to require people to invest relationally in the same people, over time.

Thirdly, the cultural sensibilities of neoliberalism values:

autonomous individualism, continual innovation, material prosperity, market exchange relations, consumer satisfaction, endless competition, globalized cosmopolitanism, and the monetizing and marketizing of almost all aspects of life.6

Most of which is antithetical to TAR. Again, this is a point at which we swim in these waters, unconsciously adopting these values even without being able to articulate them.

Neoliberalism defines humans as fundamentally satisfaction-seeking consumers of acquired objects and experiences who pursue lifestyles of continual improvement though technological innovation and economic interactions.7

This is a long way from Christianity’s vision of human life and flourishing. But not so far from what many of us are living.

Next comes the Digital Revolution, the explosion of the internet, mobile phones, social media, and now, arguably, generative AI. Smith covers 10 ways that the digital revolution works against religion. I won’t cover them all, but it ranges the gamut from the spread of information, new non-physical forms of sociality, to sheer time invested, the correlation of decreased attention span with internet usage and social media usage, the erosion of trust, and the reformation of organisational structures.

After this comes “Pop Postmodernism”. I appreciate Smith’s careful articulation here. Very few people encounter, or are shaped, by post-modernism. Whereas postmodernism might have swept philosophy, the humanitities, through the 1990s, the version that most people came away with is a soundbite, watered-down version of the same. It includes a grab-bag of beliefs around the subjectivity and fluidity of all reality, resistance and critique of authority, objectivity, and instutions, and the idea that all claims to truth are really exercises in power.

Similar but different is “social constructivism”, again an idea that has been absorbed into the mainstream with the ill-understood idea that everything is a “social construct” and therefore not real. The outcome of these pop-philosophical currents is radical subjectivity and criticism, and the location of both ‘truth’ and the ability to judge the truth, in the individual alone.

For most people, then, “the meaning and purpose of life is whatever individuals make for themselves”, and if that happens to be religion, cool for you.

Smith’s next few headers cover multicultural education, millenial mobility to cities (i.e. Millenials are increasingly likely to move away to cities), and the rise of Intensive parenting (the shift in the 1990s onwards that parents are meant to do a lot more than simply ensure their kids survive and get through school, but need significant investment of time and energy to become successful adults). The consequence of this last one is again the diminishing resources available for traditional religious activities and community involvement.

The rise of “Not religious” is both the thing that this book is trying to explain, but in Smith’s account also a factor that causes it. That is, once this option was on the table for surveys and censuses, it became a point of discussion, and increased in acceptability so that people who previously would have ticked something else, began to identify as Nones.

Chapter 7: The 2000s.

Here Smith locates the over-determined realisation of these forces in the erosion of TAR. He begins with considering the impact of Sept 11th on religion. Its impact on public sentiment about religion was to shift people’s views from “religion is good” (when it fulfils those functions discussed earlier) to an association of religion with fanaticism, extremism, and violence.8 One indicator of this is increased media coverage of religious violence after 9/11.

Related to this were the efforts of the New Atheists, especially after 9/11, to aggressively attack religion. While a relatively brief movement (perhaps a decade), it generated significant media attention. The impact of the New Atheism was not to convince religious Americans to abandon their faith, but to move ‘the middle’, those without strong convictions either for or against religion, to a more negative view, a viewpoint that now permeates American culture more broadly.

The next factor Smith discusses is the Third Sexual Revolution. From the late 1990s, “diversification, democratization, and ‘de-shaming’ of previous objectionable sexual behaviors and identities.” This includes the blurring of defined relationship boundaries, broader acceptance of non-traditional and non-monogamous relationships, the emergence of hook-up culture and sex positivity. Again, what does this have to do with religion? Most post-Boomers reduce religious sexual teaching to (i) no sex outside marriage, (ii) same-sex relationships are wrong, which views are seen as outdated and ridiculous. It creates a cultural mismatch between modernity and TAR.

Related to, but distinct, is the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ lifestyles, identities, and rights. The outcome for religion is similar.

Religious Pluralism and National Identity is the next section. The growth of religious diversity worked in a few ways. Firstly, the reality of religious pluralism contributed to religious relativity, and the avoidance of particularity.

For traditional religions to flourish in pluralistic societies, everyone involved needs to learn how to maintain and express their own particulars with the right balance of self-confidence, humility, and respect for differences. That is a lesson younger Americans did not learn. For them, to respect others meant curtailing if not abandoning one’s own serious beliefs and practices.9

Secondly, the cultural non-diversity of many religious congregations felt alien to post-Boomers used to living in a diverse context. Thirdly, shared religious identity lost its place and value for holding together national identity.

As an aside, and something Smith doesn’t discuss, I think the question of national unity and identity and its relation to Christianity is an interesting one. I think it’s a deal in which Christianity always loses. When national identity and Christian identity get welded together, the trans-national nature of the church always suffers, so that Christians in outside states become identified with the ‘enemy’, and minority identities inside that state become alienated from Christianity. That’s what it’s the Catholic Church that has retained an ability to speak critically to nation-states, precisely because it has remained a supra-national church, whereas Protestant institutions are never supra-national in a meaningful institutional way, and so find themselves ensorcelled with state power and national identity issues.

To return to Smith, his next point has to do with the growth of identity politics and the ‘sacralizing of partisan politics’. In these last two decades, religious affiliation has declined in importance for most politics (except white Christian nationalism), while other markers of identity have become more important, essentialist even. Then, “Politics became sacralized on both the right and the left”. That is, a person’s party is their “tribe”, the other side is damned by definition, and the only salvation is in political victory.

The 2000s were a time of increasing anxiety; the events of September 11, the war in Iraq and the War on Terror, founded on lies, implicated in torture, the total failure of the American mission in Iraq.10 On the home front, polarised politics, economic meltdowns; on the global front, global recession, wars, scandals, and leaders left, right, and centre lying and cheating and manipulating. No wonder the generation that came of age then is distrustful of leadership, authority, and institutions. Add on top of this Climate Change, in the face of which Millenials generally felt that it was real, inevitable, and that the power to stop it rested with Boomers, who were more responsible for it, more in denial about it, and wouldn’t have to face the consequences. Climate Change, among other factors, remains a significant source of anxiety for younger generations.

In this world, “religion’s faith and hope could not overcome cynicism and despair”, it seems more a fairy tale of bygone eras, nice if you could lie to yourself, insufficient for the doom and gloom in our faces.

Linked to this is the disappearance of the American Dream. The ‘made it’ of having a career, stable income, and a place to live in that you own, has become increasingly out of reach, if not impossible, for many of the post-Boomer generations. For Millenials, the twin hits of the Great Recession, and then COVID, as well as ongoing economic difficulties, is crushing.

Throughout the 2000s, there were a plethora of books with titles that all proclaim morality without God. The pillar that religion is good for society when it promotes morals was being decisively cut down with the explicit notion that there are plenty of ways to be good, without religion.

Smith discusses here, too, the “Spiritual but not Religious” group.11 As well, the continued rise of the “Nones” had a snowball effect. Success was good for success.

Chapter 8: Religious Self-Destructions

The final chapter in this section looks at the ways that TAR has harmed its own cause. Here Smith covers religious scandals, occasioned especially by leaders committing various types of moral wrongs. Such scandals violate almost all six of those virtues that people consider religion good for. Smith gives extensive lists of such scandals, and spares no particular denominational group. As he should.

In particular, whereas Boomers are more willing to attribute scandals to ‘a few bad apples’, post-Boomers increasingly considered that scandals and moral failures were the product of religion itself, not exceptions or abuses of religion.

This section also includes discussion of ‘mission drift’ among Evangelicals, particularly the shift to embrace the culture wars, and to trying to win political power. That shift to political power on the Right, aligned white protestantism particularly with Republican politics, and alienated others from religion, creating a backlash effect. The association of Christianity and the religious right is a huge deterrent for many people.

At the same time, the hyper-individualism of evangelicalism also works against itself. If religion is fundamentally about a personal relationship with Jesus, what do you need the church for? Go and read the Bible by yourself, and he will answer.

Smith discusses too the epistemological foundations of Evangelicalism, tied to Modernism, which collapses under the failure of Modernism. Post-modernism renders most Evangelical truth-assumptions problematic, faulty, or otherwise defunct.

I won’t summarise the rest as much, but Smith also discusses Purity Culture, Culture wars within denominations, the perception (and reality) of religion as a tool for social control, and lastly, Boomers holding onto power in local congregations and not making way for younger generations.

And so, all this is Smith’s account of the factors that ultimately made religion obsolete in America.

The opening three chapters of Smith’s book are entitled “1: Setting the stage”, and provide an overview of what exactly the rest of the book is going to attempt to explain. Hence, chapter 1, “What needs explaining”.

The decline of TAR, Smith begins, is well documented, but nonetheless chapter one goes over all this evidence, with an especial attention to his claim that it has become obsolete.

So, for example, religious affiliation is one indicator, and using the GSS data, you can mark that successive generations have declining levels of ‘strong or somewhat strong’ affiliation. That dips below 50% once you move from Boomers to Post-Boomers (e.g., Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z), the gaps is from 65% of the Lost Generation, down to 20% of Gen Z. Secondly, whereas Boomers and older generations tended to become more religious with age, post-Boomers don’t follow that trend. Thirdly, Boomers and post-Boomers head in different directions from the 1990s.

Similar data can be seen in the GSS for religious attendance. Notably, in the early 2010s almost all generations took a downward turn. Average age of religious attendees continues to climb. From 1988, when the GSS started asking about belief in God, likewise shows similar declines.

Another way to look at this, is to look at the rise of the “Nones”, the answer of “None” for religious affiliation. I’ll talk more about this group when discussing Ryan Burge’s book on the Nones after this one. That group has grown steadily from the early 1990s, and by the 2010s rivalled major denominations. Closure of churches is another way to track religious decline. Similarly, declining trust in religion as an institution.

One of the things I enjoyed about Smith’s book is that he will often present data, and then he’ll provide quotations either from interviews or other discussions (see post one for where he gets this from) that provides a human kind of feel to it. There’s a few of these from religious leaders rounding out chapter one.

Chapter two is more interesting, I think, because here Smith articulates a set of criteria for what most Americans think religion ought to do. What is religion ‘good for’? And this is obviously part and parcel of the obsolescence model - if it has been superseded in these functions, it’s no longer required. Here are those six criteria:

1. Morals: Religion is good when it helps people to be good, moral, and nice and to make good choices in life—especially by teaching children the basics of ethics and decency. (p. 44).

2. Positive psychology: Religion is good when it helps people cope with life, sustain a positive outlook, and feel calm, happy, affirmed, and encouraged. (p.48)

3. Getting along: Religion is good when it fosters community, social cooperation, peace, and harmony. (p.50)

4. Modelling: Religion is good when it provides societal role models for basic moral integrity, decency, and honesty—especially by religious leaders. (p.52)

5. Moderation: Religion is good when it is moderate, not too weird, and certainly not fanatical or extremist. (p.54)

6. National solidarity: Religion is good when it strengthens America as a nation. (p.55)

In one sense, this is not very surprising. In another, I think part of the flesh that I haven’t quoted here is Smith showing how these criteria have become more problematic. E.g., criterion 4 and role-modelling, is complicated by the now strongly polarised views of Americans on moral issues, so that taking principled stands on any issue will bring condemnation from a sizeable portion of the population.

In a different sense, what I find most interesting here is that this is an entirely function view of religion - what does religion ‘do’, and ultimately what does it do for ‘me’ or ‘my people’. Which I think is possibly already a losing battle. To rephrase: if your pitch to people about religion is ultimately, “it’s a win on a cost-benefit analysis” then you’ve lost the game before you’ve played.

Chapter 3 is an interesting ‘grab-bag’ of assorted models of complex causal changes. Here Smith is preparing us so that he can deploy some of these later as metaphors. For example, he discusses population ecology species decline, avalanche science, cultural mismatch theory, particulate matter in the atmosphere, and so on. These are all very reasonable theories/explanations of change, and they provide strong illustrative value for trying to understand how a complex constellation of factors can bring about significant social change, which is the thesis of his book.

That’s part two of my review. Part three will be real meat on the bones, so stay tuned.

Why the last 30 years? TAR was tracking healthily in numbers until the 90s, and by 2020 it appears to have suffered both a numerical loss, and a loss of influence, that appears unrecoverable.

This book is Smith’s account to explain why. What’s unique about Smith’s approach? He offers five aspects: (i) wide range of causal factors considered, (b) the concept of obsolescence (see below), (iii) an analysis of cultural zeitgeist, (iv) rigor of quantitative measures, and finally (v) something beyond the simple ‘secularization’ thesis.

By TAR, Smith means multi-generational, established religious groups, institutions, and the like, e.g. mainline Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Black Protestantism, white evangelicalism, but also E.Orthodox Churches, Judaism, Mormons, and similar.

By ‘obsolescence’, Smith writes that “Something becomes obsolete when most people feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest.”1 The use of this concept or metaphor does explanatory heavy lifting because Smith is going to address what functions Americans used TAR for, and how TAR no longer fulfils that function for most people, and they instead use other things.

In terms of cultural analysis and history, “This book tells the story of how sociocultural developments over the past 30 years acted on post-Boomer Americans in ways that made most of them believe that traditional religion was not relevant, valuable, or attractive.”

I won’t cover Smith’s introductory comments on zeitgeist here, but save it for later.

This is also a generational story. In this sense, he says, Baby Boomers are ‘the background’, whereas the shift begins with Gen X, goes full send with Millenials, and Gen Z are the heirs of this new world.

What’s the evidence? Smith outlines the basis for this research before he gets started: 209 personal interviews with a diverse sample of 18-54yos, targeted in part on a prior survey; four focus groups; systematic keyword searches for historical changes in cultural discourse; a subsequent survey to assess views on key issues and claims that Smith had formulated in the course of writing the book; analysis of pre-existing survey datasets, including the GSS; and lastly, broad conversations with people with some knowledge, awareness, or skin in the game.

So, that’s all by way of introduction, and now you’re ready to read with me. Or at least read my summary notes. In the next three posts, I’ll take you through Smith’s arguments and analysis, sprinkled with some of my own reflections.

For example, I read countless pieces about Charlie Kirk after his death, and managed to refrain from saying anything. Nonetheless, I was asked in real life my thoughts.

But really, I had nothing new to say that wasn’t better said by someone else.

All of this to say, between a holiday in paradise last week (hence the lack of a post), the tragedy in Bondi, and the funeral or a precious saint in our local church, writing about other things seems particularly pointless. But I also don’t want to write about those things.

Next week I plan to return to one of my multi-part book reviews, so there is that to look forward to. In the meantime, let’s talk about words and writing.

There’s a reason why old writings are worth reading. Several, really. But the old writers penned their words in fresher times, when ideas and expressions were newer. And fewer people wrote.

As the ages wore on, it gets harder to say genuinely new things. Not that there is nothing new, but so much of our new is built on an edifice of the old.

In today’s world, there is unprecedented literacy and literature production. More people are writing more than ever before, and so it becomes harder and harder to say something new, distinct, valuable.

It also becomes harder and harder to read everything. Not that you could, but even in a narrow field of interest, you cannot possibly hope to read even the things that are valuable.

We are past “peak content”, i.e. that is your life simply cannot possibly fit reading all the things that are worth reading.

To say nothing of the rest of the world of ‘content’ if we set aside texts for a moment, there is such a voluminous amount of video ‘content’ being made daily, most of it garbage, that you could literally lie on a bed in a vegetative state consuming nothing but TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube until you died.

All this makes writing feel more futile than ever. Was it worth your time to read this post, if you made it this far? Was it worth mine to write it?

I think the only answer to all this are the practices of discernment and excellence. Discernment firstly in reading: not everything is deserving of being read. In fact, I shouldn’t even try to read all the things that _are_ worth reading. It’s okay to not read even the good.

Discernment and excellence should also apply to writing. I shouldn’t strive to write everything I possibly could, or about everything. Both my time and yours are more valuable than that. At the same time, we should strive to write well. The world has enough drivel, and pursuing the good in writing is striving to produce the best writing I can. As an offering, an act of crafting good words in good ways to good ends. Something worthy to be read.

We become what we read

~ Nadya Williams

I needed a break. My over-ambitious self had set my hand, or my ear if you will, to listening through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age on my daily drive to and from my daughter’s school. I can be a hardy audiobook listener, but there’s only so much dense philosophy one’s ears can take.

So when I realised that I had unspent credits on my libro.fm account, and that Williams very recent book was there, it was a no-brainer to take a break from Taylor and enjoy this pleasurable trip through the classics.

Williams book delivers exactly what its title offers: Christians reading Classics. It is an introduction to the Greco-Roman literary canon, from Homer to Boethius, explicitly shaped by Christianity and written for Christian readers.

For those perhaps not familiar with the literature of ancient Greeks and Romans, I think it does a fine job at that. It introduces texts and authors, explores their works, discusses their themes, and gives a Christian angle on them. In doing so, Williams provides a kind of argument for reading these classics. They are worth reading.

I spend part of my days reading all sorts of Latin and Greek literature, authors canonical and not, ancient and more modern.1 I am, however, far from a classics professor. However that fits in here, I enjoyed Williams’ tour of the classics, with some fresh insights, reminders of things I’ve forgotten, and new angles I hadn’t considered.

Perhaps most engaging, or perhaps simply most recent in my memory, is some of the discussion in the final sections of the book. Why read classics? What are classics anyway?

Williams answer is that the classics are books that are always worth re-reading. And that they are timeless. And that’s why the Greco-Roman classics are worth our attention. And I half-agree with this.

Something worth reading once, is worth reading twice.

That’s a paraphrase, of the argument of a book I read in university, Michael Riffaterre’s The Semiotics of Poetry. Part of Riffaterre’s argument is that you can’t understand a literary text as whole without reading the whole of it, which means you also can’t truly understand the parts of it, until you’ve read it once. This is why jokes don’t make great literature - once you’d hit the punch line, there’s little value in going back to the start. Think of a poem, or a book or film, in which you gain more the second time around. If it isn’t worth reading the second time, then it probably wasn’t worth it the first time.

Williams’ argument is not quite along these lines, but rather that these works have some quality that means they are worth re-reading, that they raise, discuss, and sometimes answer (even incompletely) the deep questions of life, the human condition.

And, I agree with this, but I also have to quibble. Why these classics? That’s the question of canon. What gets ‘in’ and what is left ‘out’? Are these books timeless?

I think this is possibly a form of bias. People who end up in classics tend to like classics, unsurprisingly. They get a lot out of it. They enjoy and are stimulated by classical literature. But are classical texts unique in this?

In the past few years, I have spent a good deal of time in reading Gaelic poetry, and to a lesser degree prose. There we have a culture and language and a body of ‘literature’ that also deals with the human condition, with the questions we all face, and some of it is astoundingly good quality literature. Are these classics? Not as widely held… but I don’t think it’s innate qualities that makes this the case.

Some of it are accidents of history and culture. Gaelic prose as a genre only really dates back a few hundred years. The Greco-Roman classics have a couple of advantages. The dominance of the Roman empire, the spread of Latin, the shape of European history, and so on, all contribute to Greek and Latin texts being foundational for the shape of Western history. That could have been otherwise.

At the same time, I think it’s a mistake to say that these are timeless works. As I read them, I am reminded that they are also very much ‘time-bound’. Ancient Romans and Greeks share so much with us because they are humans, as we are, and our human condition is more or less the same. That’s why good literature speaks across the ages. At the same time, the more I read ancient works, the more I am also reminded of how different they are. Their culture, ways of thought and being, are radically alien to my 21st century life, that we do disservice to them and us when we truncate, or ignore, that gap.

I would contend that any good literature, worthy of its name, is going to provoke us and converse with us, and bring us to contemplate the meaning of things and the human condition. Greek and Latin authors are indeed one way of doing so, and a pretty fun way. But they are not the only way.

And yet, to give the other side once again, the nature of historical contingency, and the history of Christianity and Christendom in the West, means that to understand our world, and our church, demands some amount of engagement in Latin and Greek. To access the early church fathers, for instance, requires not only language, but culture, and a certain amount of education into the world in which they were educated. This is unavoidable. There is a unique place for Greek and Latin classics, if you want to engage in the history of thought bound up in Western Christendom.

I will comment on something else that struck me as curious on the way through. Talking about Sappho with no mention of any non-heterosexual reading of the texts. I can buy that there are reading approaches to Sappho that are hetero-normative, but given that there is a huge standing debate around a range of sexuality issues and Sappho’s poetry, this seems frankly a pointed lacuna. Not that I’m asking Williams to take a particular position, I just find it strange that you would provide an overview and introduction to an author like this and not mention this.

I’m glad for the way the book ‘ends’ with Boethius though; Boethius is indeed a janus-type figure, standing facing back to the classical tradition, while also forwards to the medieval. As much as we might (rightly) complicate the way late antiquity overlaps, hinges, interlocks, even bleeds, into the early medieval, Boethius is just such a figure. And his writing yields a rich reward.

At the end of the day, I think Williams does exactly what she sets out to do, and does it well. A book written for a Christian audience, that makes a partial plea for engagement with the classical tradition, at the same time that it serves as a guide introducing that literature and inviting the reader in to the joys, and questions, it raises.

The Age of Heroes

In my long-suffering language classes, I teach students that the Greek word aretē (‘excellence’) and the similar Latin word virtue (‘virtue’, but really ‘the quality of being a man’) change over time. In their beginnings they both tend to denote “prowess on the battlefield”, because that is what it means to be a man in the heroic age. It means to defeat one’s foes, defend one’s kindred, and win immortal glory by deeds of renown.

The heroic age is as much about cultural ideals and values as it is about actual heroes and their deeds. It’s a world of rather fixed roles, of the importance of clan and kindred, of men as warriors and hunters, and the quest for glory. Glory, indeed, is a kind of currency of meaning and worth.

But something happens in Antiquity. The rise of the city-state, the polis. And with it, it no longer becomes viable to live in that same cultural mode anymore. The individual warrior-hero gets outflanked, and outgunned, by the hoplite phalanx. So too, what it means to be a man changes.

The Civic Age

When you come to read the Greek philosophers, especially from the 5th and 4th centuries BC, aretē changes from primarily being about martial excellence and courage, to being that quality which makes for a great citizen. So, when Plato’s Socrates debates (both sides) of whether aretē can be taught, he is largely discussing the excellence of being a political man, a man of the polis. Which, of course, largely pertains to wealthy men of nobler families (even Athenian democracy has its limits).

That political contribution is summed up in the twin functions of speechcraft and getting-stuff-done. For politics is partly the art of persuasion, and persuasive speech reached its height at these times. But it is also the art of getting results, not least in being willing to shoulder one’s burden and fight for the city-state as needed, as well as take part in expeditions and the like.

Binding all this together is a sense of civic virtue, civic duty, that one is contributing to an entity greater than oneself. That one’s purpose and meaning in life is found in serving the polis, and in doing so one find’s a purpose greater than the self.

The long tail

I don’t think it’s exactly right to say that heroic age is driven by individualism and the civic age by collectivist concerns. In fact, that is not what I’m saying and a gross misreading. But the notion of serving an ongoing collective, the city-state, and later the nation-state, as a ‘thing’ greater than oneself, persists in much of European political thought ever since.

As a tangent, one of the things I have learned in my studies of Gaelic language and culture, is that for Ireland and perhaps even more so for the Scottish Highlands, the heroic age kind of lasted to the 18th century. That is, the cultural patterns that you see in Homeric Age Greece have a lot of parallels to the kind of cultural and social forces you see in Gaelic culture until the 18th century: notions of hospitality, the role of the bard, the types of poetry, the clan system, and the competition for glory through deeds. Dramatic and drastic cultural change, and the impact of English-speakers and their empire, forced that world into the modern one in a violent way.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

In my reading of things, the two world wars create a successive impact that demolishes the civic age in a startling way. There’s more to it than this, but looking at it through the lens of warfare is a helpful way to think about this.

When Horace, a state-sponsored poet, penned the line

dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

(Sweet and proper it is, to die for one’s country. Odes III.2.13)

I don’t think he was at all being ironic. Greek and Latin literature is pretty full of this sentiment, though it is not universal. Even the ancients found (good) reasons to question war. Nonetheless, there was a sense, a deeply embedded one, that to die in battle was good, and to do so for one’s civitas was best. Even Herodotus’ Solon thinks so.

And that notion had real bite up into the 19th century. Reading through Taylor’s A Secular Age, and even Richard Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich speaking about the 19th century, people full-heartedly believed, and ordered their lives, on this idea.

But Wildred Owen was right, it is the old lie.

The horrors of WW1, and perhaps more importantly the sheer scale of human suffering, changed the mental landscape of whole cultures. To be repeated in a few short years by the even more unspeakable evils of WW2.

That, and the death of old social orders, the understanding that so often war is, and always has, been waged at the behest of the rich and powerful for their own agenda, they who stand to gain the most and risk the least. It is no bad thing that we have learnt, collectively and at last, that leaders are to be subject to greater scrutiny. In the words of lesser poets System of a Down:

Why don’t presidents fight the war / Why do they always send the poor?

So it is that across the 20th century the ability of the general public to accept casualties in conflict has, on the whole, diminished. The human cost, if it is ours to bear, no longer seems worth it in western liberal democracies.1

To return to my primary point, however, the notion of serving one’s country, and being willing to die for it, as a greater enterprise than one’s own short life, has basically disappeared from view.

One clear sign of this is in military recruitment. I’ll speak to my local perspective here. The Australian Defence Force frames its advertisement around the following themes: unique opportunities, experiences, mateship, helping others, and getting useful training.

Primarily, signing up for military service is seen as a good way to fund your education, get job skills and experience, while having a great time doing adventurous activities (submarines and helicopters feature prominently here) and forming wonderful friendships, while finding a sense of purpose and fulfilment in… helping others (disaster relief).

What’s curiously absent from military recruitment are two key things: patriotism and killing. Neither of these are very surprising. The appeal of patriotism is very weak in contemporary society. The selling point is an individual career, not a sacrificial service.

Killing, I confess, is a much more interesting dynamic. No military force actually wants to acknowledge that its primary function is to be effectively ready to kill people for the state. That’s why a military exists. But militaries generally don’t want to recruit people who want to kill or enjoy killing. They make for unfit soldiers. So militaries in general have this weird paradox - they want people who are willing to kill but don’t want to kill, and then they try to train them to be willing to kill, which is quite a difficult thing.2

Meaning Collapse

To return, finally, to the main point of the main point. Arguably, across the 20th century we saw the genuine collapse of transcendent meaning in multiple domains, which is what finally made our society shift to Taylor’s Secular Age, one in which belief in God is an option, not a default. In line with that and in light of that, several domains where people found transcendent meaning and purpose no longer provided that fulfilment. One of those key domains is that of the nation/state/society/city. Our sense of civic duty and purpose is weak, very weak, and the idea that people, men in particular, would find their fulfilment in serving that trans-personal and trans-generational entity is almost laughable in today’s society. We are far more creatures now bound by social contracts than anything else.3 Our commitments to our fellows, and our commonwealth, are driven by quid pro quo, and when that equation no longer favours us, we feel free to uphold our interests first.