This article first appeared in the May 2023 edition of the St John with St Mary, Devizes Parish Magazine.
Recently, the Rector put me onto a conversation on YouTube between Tom Holland, the popular historian, and Paul Kingsnorth, the environmentalist and former Newbury Bypass protestor who converted to Christianity two years ago. Kingsnorth was raised in Buckinghamshire without any particular faith, while Holland grew up attending a village church in South Wiltshire with his devoutly Anglican mother, and recently returned to churchgoing after a gap of decades.
One exchange between them struck me powerfully. Both aged in their fifties, they recalled growing up with a sense that the Church was telling stories about God that nobody much believed in anymore — including the Church itself. The Church was attempting to tell a different story, a “post-Enlightenment myth” presenting itself primarily as a doer of good works and intended to appeal to the sensibilities of a rationalist age. The net result, in a memorable phrase by Holland, was “simultaneously rebarbative and dull”.
Kingsnorth felt the Churches had produced a “version [of Christianity] designed to appeal to the masses, that didn’t really appeal to anyone.” In contrast, as he became overwhelmed by the scale of the environmental crisis and the possibility that humans had already permanently damaged the planet’s capacity to sustain them, it was some of the more visionary and mystical parts of the Bible that began drawing him, to his own initial reluctance, towards Christianity. Firstly, the visions of the end times in the Revelation seemed frighteningly plausible to him, but then he found himself particularly drawn to the creation myths in Genesis.