history

Changing Politics, Changing Country

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How does the Church of England navigate a Britain of a transforming party system, transforming demographics, and increasing division?

Workshop presentation for the Diocese of Salisbury Clergy Conference, 8 July 2026, Bryanston School, Dorset

A densely detailed satirical illustration in the style of an eighteenth-century engraving. On the left, an angry crowd of working people brandish brooms and placards reading "Fair Wages!", "Tax the Rich!" and "Voices Heard!" beside a cracked classical column labelled "British Institutions". A woman in a red dress and white apron holds up an angel pendant, an angel embroidered on her apron. On the right, anxious men and women in suits and lanyards clutch clipboards, charts and phones as poll data, banknotes, ballot boxes and televisions showing shouting faces swirl away in a vortex between the two groups. Behind them, under a stormy sky, a small parish church with a square tower stands on a green hill, its door glowing with light as small figures climb the path. Signs read "The City of Confusion: where all is flux" and "Truth found only on the hill".

I. On radical cultural shifts

None of us interprets the world entirely as a blank slate. All of us see the world through a set of assumptions, values, and ways of understanding the world that a society or group takes largely for granted. We can call this a paradigm – a paradigm is the collection of usually unexamined beliefs through which people interpret the world, judge what is normal or plausible, and organise their collective life. These are never entirely fixed – they tend to change, gradually and organically, over time. We need these mental models, as reality is too complex for us to grasp in its fullness.  But every once in a while a paradigm that had been convincing starts to become very poor at describing the reality that people experience. When that happens, the paradigm starts not to evolve, but to collapse: the old ways of seeing the world no longer make sense, and for a moment all sorts of new ideas seem possible; after a period of uncertainty, even chaos, a new paradigm starts to congeal.

My argument is that we are inside one of those transitions in the way that people understand the world – a paradigm collapse. Even if you’ve never come across the concept, we have lived through major collapses of a paradigm within living memory. One of them happened to the Church; one of them happened in another part of the world but was of global importance. How the Church responded to the first, and how the world responded to the second, tells us much about how to respond to the one which I believe we are about to experience.

1963: the collapse of Western Christendom

1963 was a time of radical change – television had arrived in every living room, car ownership was increasing rapidly while Dr Beeching was taking an axe to the railways, and the Pill was just starting to rewire people’s most intimate relationships.

Philip Larkin fixed the hinge of the British 20th Century in that year, in the poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which starts:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The joke lands because it is true. Church historians of every stripe now locate in the early 1960s the moment at which a Christendom in place for over a millennium gave way with astonishing speed. Callum Brown, an atheist historian of religion in Britain who positively celebrates the change, insists the data show this “was not the long, inevitable religious decline of the conventional secularisation story, but a remarkably sudden and culturally violent event” – one which followed a 1950s of rising church attendance and sacramental participation. Sam Brewitt-Taylor, who laments the change, has shown that senior Christian leaders suddenly conceded the arrival of the ‘secular society’ in 1963–64, making the collapse of cultural Christianity all but inevitable. The collapse of Christendom was less a case of gradual erosion since the Enlightenment, more an avalanche.

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Christianity and Cargo Cults: Sermon Preached on 7th December 2025 (Second Sunday of Advent)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Isaiah 11. 1-10; Matthew 3.1-12

“The wolf shall live with the lamb… and a little child shall lead them.”

A complex Vanuatu sand drawing made of continuous, looping lines traced into smooth sand. The design features symmetrical, interwoven curves that form leaf-like shapes, diamonds, and rounded patterns. The overall pattern looks precise and flowing, creating an intricate geometric–organic motif characteristic of traditional Vanuatu sand art.
Vanuatu sand drawing, recognised by UNESCO as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. © Philip Capper, 2 June 2006, used under CC-BY 2.0.

For the results of a school exam; for the results of a medical exam. For the interminable process of buying and selling a house to be completed. For the rhubarb to be ripe enough to pick. For the text message from you daughter telling you she’s safely home. Waiting is an unavoidable part of all of our lives.

Far off in the South Pacific, just over a thousand miles east of Australia, lies the island nation of Vanuatu, home to around 300,000 people. In the 1930s, the John Frum movement emerged on the islands, then known as the New Hebrides. It prophesied that an era of prosperity would soon arrive, thanks to American assistance, along with the removal of the European colonial rulers and the Christianity they promoted. Just a few years later, in 1942, the prophecies seemed to come true, when the New Hebrides became an enormous rear base area for America’s island-hopping war against Japan. Briefly, American troops outnumbered islanders, and gave them copious supplies of tents, clothing, and spam.

The John Frum movement, said to be a corruption of the phrase ‘John from America’, is the most famous of the Pacific islands’ cargo cults. After the war, followers of John Frum built symbolic landing strips to encourage American aeroplanes to return and bring them more ‘cargo’. While Vanuatu is nowadays an overwhelmingly Christian country, several hundred Ni-Vanuatu still await the return of John Frum after eighty years. When asked why, a village headman told a foreign journalist, “Eighty years? You Christians have been waiting for your Jesus to return for 2,000 years.”

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Things Don’t Always Get Better: Sermon Preached on 6th July 2025 (Third Sunday After Trinity)

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A large crowd of people is gathered on and around a graffiti-covered section of the Berlin Wall, with the Brandenburg Gate visible in the background. Many individuals are sitting or standing on the wall, some holding a German flag. The scene is lively, with people of various ages and styles, and the sky is clear, suggesting a celebratory or historic moment.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and St Mary’s, Potterne

Galatians 6. 7-16; Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20

“…do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven”

We’re all shaped forever by the world of our young adulthood. Some eras leave a particularly profound mark. Those who were young adults during the Second World War were defined by the words “Never Again”. They were the generation who built international institutions to try to build peace between nations, and social safety nets within them to try to prevent the sort of embittering poverty that did so much to pave the road to war in the 1930s.

Two men in suits are shaking hands and embracing on a tarmac in front of an airplane. The man on the left has dark hair and a red tie, while the man on the right has gray hair and a blue tie. In the background, there is a staircase with "Belfast Int" written on it, and a few other individuals are visible. The scene appears to be a formal or diplomatic greeting.
The years when things could only get better? Clinton and Blair in Belfast, 1998.

That generation has mostly passed to its reward. Many of you here, however, were formed by the Swinging Sixties, when the world changed dramatically in just a few years, with a huge expansion of individual freedom and self-expression, and huge changes in the status of women.

Both of these were times when the Church urgently engaged with the task of making the world a better place. After the war it sought, in the name of the Prince of Peace, to help create the means for a permanently peaceful world. In the Sixties, the Church set itself the mission of updating itself, fearing the rapidly changing world might leave it obsolete.

The era that formed me was the 1990s Golden Age that followed the end of the Cold War. It was encapsulated in the title of the song that accompanied Tony Blair’s triumphal march into Downing Street twenty-eight years ago – D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better. By this time, the Church had become very much weaker. Although the Church itself still expected to play a part in helping things get better, few others expected it to. Mine was the generation that devoured the works of the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, especially after our youthful Golden Age was brought to an end when two aeroplanes shattered a bright September morning in New York

The optimistic world of my youth is now a long time ago—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of President Mandela; the Play Station and the arrival of the Internet. For those of you who are young adults today, the world that shaped my outlook is something you read about in history books.

Your lives have instead been formed by a lengthy economic and cultural stagnation, by plague, and by failing institutions. Nobody believes anymore that things can only get better. The Church invested so much into trying to make the world a better place, but it may be getting worse anyway and, if it is, there’s probably little we can do about it. Like every generation before us, we are carried on great historical trends that are beyond the human capacity to identify fully, let alone control. It was always a bit naïve to think that these cycles of history would cease. Empires always rise and fall. Golden ages always turn to decadence. After any period of unity comes division. Thus it has ever been.

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Life Punishes the Late—Adapt or Die

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A close-up photograph focusing on the eyes, eyebrows, and ears of an older man with light-colorued, receding hair. The man's expression appears serious, with deep-set blue eyes and furrowed brows. Part of a red background, possibly an American flag, is visible on the left side, suggesting a political or patriotic context. The man is Donald Trump.

This article was originally posted on Slugger O’Toole…

A large, cracked globe depicting a world map, resting on a pile of rubble and broken stones, symbolizing the breakdown of the old world order. The globe, shown in shades of blue with visible continents and grid lines, has multiple deep fissures running across its surface. In the background, shattered ruins of buildings are visible, set against a dramatic blood-red sky with hints of gray and purple, evoking urgency and turmoil.

This will be the first of many shattering weeks in 2025. Even the cleverest members of the establishment that is being routed have started to acknowledge publicly that the old order is dead. This isn’t a matter of a change in the personnel in charge, or even of long-standing diplomatic alliances, but of suddenly finding that the assumptions that most of us shared about how the world functions and how it should function are no longer correct. To think through what we might be about to experience, it might be useful to briefly explore the last time a world-historical shift of similar speed and scale took place.

On 7 October 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorchbachëv visited East Berlin to help the incompetent geriatrics who ran the misnamed German Democratic Republic celebrate the 40th anniversary of their state. Although he was the leader of what was supposed to be their closest ally, East German security forces blocked streets to prevent their citizens from greeting the world’s most senior Communist—only vetted members of front organisations on planned demonstrationswere allowed near his cavalcade. Extra barricades were erected at Checkpoint Charlie, and day-trippers from West Berlin, normally welcomed for the hard Deutschmarks they spent in eastern shops and cafés, were turned away.

Nonetheless, a few East Berliners managed to find their way to vantage points overlooking the route, shouting “Gorbi help us!” in front of the world’s cameras. In private, away from the media, Gorbachëv warned Erich Honecker and his colleagues in the SED ruling party, bitter opponents of his economic and political liberalisation, that the USSR would not intervene to preserve their rule if their own people turned against them.

In October, power in the country still seemed to rest with its fearsome secret services, especially the widely-despised Stasi, far more competent than the SED’s gerontocracy. Many wondered if the Stasi would start shooting at the weekly Monday night demonstrations in the second city of Leipzig which grew into the tens of thousands after Gorbachëv’s visit. In the weeks that followed, events moved with such speed they were almost impossible to process at the time. By December, with the Berlin Wall open and the SED negotiating with the opposition, people wondered if the crowds that stormed Stasi regional headquarters across the country to prevent them shredding evidence of their crimes would lynch the occupants (they didn’t). A montage of West German TV evening news reports from the last three months of 1989 captures the blistering and often bewildering pace of events.

The situation was frequently misread as it developed, especially by the many in West Germany who, while despising the brutality of the SED and its secret police, saw at least some features of the Communist economic and cultural order as being superior to Western capitalism.

Very rarely has a video clip profoundly influenced me; an exception is a panel discussion on West German TV the night after the Wall fell on 9 November, which discussed the extraordinary events of the previous 24 hours. The right-wing journalist Gerhard Löwenthal, long a figure of ridicule on the Left for his televised rants about ‘Linksextremiste’, confidently predicted that reunification would soon follow. In Left-leaning West Berlin, his fellow panellists talked down to him and rolled their eyes; there had been no evidence over weeks of demonstrations, they told him, that East Germans wanted reunification rather than reform.

By February, the only question was how quickly the two Germanies would reunify. It was estimated that around 90% of East Germans favoured reunification. During the campaign for East Germany’s first and only free elections, centre-right parties led by Helmut Kohl’s CDU offered rapid reunification, the centre-left SPD offered reunification at more measured pace, and a slow reunification was proposed, ironically, by both the newly renamed former ruling party and the human rights activists who were the first to raise their heads above the parapet in early 1989 as a potential opposition. Commentators on both sides of the border expected the SPD to top the poll—surely, with democracy secure, East Germans would want to take the time to preserve the redeeming features of state socialism, it was reckoned, especially in this heavily working-class region. They were badly wrong. Kohl’s allies swept to victory, and by the first anniversary of Gorbachëv’s visit, the German Democratic Republic had ceased to exist.

2025—The End of an Era

February 2025 lies at the beginning of a period of destruction of existing structures, but more than that, the destruction of previously reliable political and even psychological assumptions about the way the world works. Trump is ripping up Europe’s post-1990 security architecture, as he promised in his successful election campaign. He is also ripping up the American domestic settlement on identity and race, also as he promised in his successful election campaign.

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What if there were another Dunkirk?: Sermon Preached on 10th November 2024 (Remembrance Sunday)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 8. 31-39

“If God is with us, who is against us?”

On 10 May 1940, Hitler finally embarked on the invasion of France and Belgium which had been dreaded all winter. Within days the allied armies, outmanoeuvred and pummelled by Blitzkrieg, found themselves with encircled on the Channel coast. The German High Command was able to boast with confidence that its troops were ‘proceeding to annihilate the British Army’. Winston Churchill found himself preparing to announce to the public an unprecedented military catastrophe involving the capture or death of a third of a million soldiers.

Arguments about why that didn’t happen, and the Miracle of Dunkirk happened instead, still sell books for military historians. Very few of them, however, allow for the possibility that it may, indeed, have been a miracle.

How many of you know that in a radio address on Thursday 23 May, as the sheer desperation of the situation became known, King George VI declared that Sunday, 26 May, should be observed as a National Day of Prayer?

Late on Saturday evening the military decision was taken to evacuate as many as possible of the Allied forces. The very next day, this country devoted itself to prayer in a way rarely seen before and never since. Eyewitnesses and photographs confirm overflowing congregations in places of worship across the land. Long queues formed outside cathedrals. Many millions came out to pray for national deliverance.

One woman wrote about her wartime childhood in Hertfordshire: “It is one of my vividest memories as a child of people streaming along the roads and pavements of the Ware Road. All Saints Church was packed with people sitting and standing. Coming out, the churchyard too was full to bursting”

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Choose Your Story: Sermon Preached on 18th February 2024 (First Sunday in Lent)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

1 Peter 3. 18-22; Mark 1. 9-15

 “repent ye, and believe the gospel.”

We see all sorts of patterns in the universe that repeat on vastly different scales. Most famously the swirl of water down the bathplug has the same pattern as that of the clouds in a big storm system coming in off the Atlantic to batter us – like last night’s – and that of the impossibly slow swirl of stars in the arms of a distant spiral galaxy.

Snowdrops, in focus, in front of a church, which is quite out of focus, with raindrops also visible on the lens. The sky is grey. There is a St George's flag flying from the church tower.
Snowdrops and raindrops six Februarys ago at Winterborne Kingston, Dorset. © Gerry Lynch

The evidence of order in the universe is everywhere. At this time of year, we are particularly aware of the natural world following the pattern of the seasons. The flowers have arrived early in this exceptionally mild winter – we have not only the snowdrops but the violets and daffodils and even some of the blossoms. In very different climates, something similar happens. I have been on the South African/Namibian border in August, when the spring rain comes and briefly turns that parched landscape into a riot of multi-coloured daisies. There as here, what we see is new life following death.

In today’s readings, we see this pattern of new life following death, as part of an ordered universe. Jesus, God made human, does not start His earthly ministry until he has been baptised by John the Baptist. John was a great man but still a human being, so this Gospel reading is saying something very powerful—God puts Himself under human authority here, and respects John’s own distinct calling.

Baptism is rich in symbolism—a symbolic drowning before a rising to new life, a drowning of hate and selfishness and contempt and all the sins that keep us from loving God and our neighbours as we should. Our Epistle reading, from St Peter, looks back to the story of Noah’s Ark as a something that pointed towardsbaptism—the flood marks the close on an old and wicked order, a terrible but necessary death so that new life could begin.

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Lest We Forget: Sermon Preached on 7th May 2023 (Coronation Sunday)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Joshua 1: 1–9; Romans 13: 1–10

“For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the high-water mark of British imperialist triumphalism. Seventeen carriages, let by Victoria’s open-air affair, processed from Buckingham Palace through to St Paul’s Cathedral for a service of thanksgiving. Eleven colonial prime ministers and the representatives of more than a dozen overseas monarchies were present, from as far away as Iran, Japan, and Thailand. But the spirit of the day was incarnated by the partying throngs on the streets, enjoying a celebratory special Bank Holiday at a time when workers’ rights were much fewer than they are today. Edward Elgar’s wonderful Cockaigne Overture is perhaps that day’s most enduring legacy, with its rambunctious major-key crescendos capturing the boisterous fun of Cockney celebrations.

A black and white photo taken in 1897 as an escort of Indian Cavalry passes the Houses of Parliament in London watched by crowds for the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, on 22 June 1897
The “pomp of yesterday” – an escort of Indian Cavalry passes Parliament during the Diamond Jubilee festivities of Queen Victoria, 22 June 1897.

One cultural figure we might have expected to join in the mood of artistic imperialist triumphalism was the chief propagandist of Empire, Rudyard Kipling. Yet he only wrote towards the end of the festivities, and even then solely in the form of a poetic commentary on them, sounding a warning note that was particularly surprising from a man only marginally religious.

“God of our fathers, known of old, 
  Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
  Dominion over palm and pine —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

[…]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
  On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!”

All of our blessings as individuals, as nations, as the human race, flow only from God. All of us forget this from time to time. Certainly the policy-makers of Victorian imperialism at their worst often forgot in whose name they held that dominion over palm and pine, forgetting too often also the care for the outsider and the poor that He commanded His followers to bear always in mind.

We should not damn the Victorians entirely for their worst faults, which were real but not the whole story. From the factory acts to universal free schooling to the final suppression of the slave trade, they sincerely believed in bettering the lot of all. Yet it is hard to see the spirit of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth in the deliberate suffocation of indigenous leadership in the emerging Church of Black Africa, or the many famines of Victorian India, or the big famine in Victorian Ireland.

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Our Best Laid Plans: Sermon Preached on 30 April 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)

Readings – Ezra 3: 1–13; Ephesians 2: 11–22        

“And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks unto the Lord; ‘because he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever…’”

Tonight’s Old Testament lesson is one of those ones that can make little sense when we hear it read. It can seem to be a confusing mass of difficult names, of Shealtiels, Zerubbabels, and Jozadaks. So, let me explain what it’s all about, and why it matters today.

The return from exile is depicted in this woodcut for Die Bibel in Bildern, 1860, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

The story comes from the Restoration of Temple in Jerusalem, seventy years after its destruction by the Babylonians. This architectural wonder of Hebrew culture and civilisation, built by King Solomon, full of beautiful art and craftsmanship, had been looted and then razed. Jerusalem was intentionally destroyed, and its citizens were deported to hundreds of miles across the desert to Babylon.

For long decades afterwards, the idea that the Temple would be restored must have seemed like a pipe-dream. Then, however, the political situation changed. The Persians became the new great power in the Middle East, and under Cyrus the Great they swept away the Babylonians and allowed the many nations kept in bondage in their mighty capital to return to their homelands. Among them were the exiles from Jerusalem.

The portion of the Book of Ezra we heard from this evening records the restoration of the Temple from its modest beginnings, when Jews first re-gathered on the ruined foundations of Solomon’s Temple, meeting in fear of the people of the neighbouring lands despite their sponsorship by their new friends, the Persian imperial authorities. Then it outlines how, through hard-work and sacrifice, the means were found to lay a foundation stone for the new Temple. There were even some elderly people present when it was laid who remembered King Solomon’s one before its destruction.

What did they people do when the foundation stone of the new Temple was laid? They praised God; they praised God in music and praised God at the top of their voices; they praised God because ‘his mercy endureth forever.’

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Salt, Light, and Doomed Rulers: Sermon Preached on 5th February 2023 (Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany)

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Preached at St John’s, Devizes

1 Corinthians 12. 1–12; Matthew 5. 13–20

“I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified … so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”

You may know the famous poem by Shelley, named Ozymandias. In it, he gazes at an enormous, ancient, shattered statue lying in the pieces in the middle of a desert. The face has broken off from the main body of the statue, and now lies half buried in the sand, but its “sneer of cold command”, artfully and accurately sculpted, still bears witness to a long-forgotten ruler who was used to having his every instruction obeyed.

The inscription below reads:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

This was a man who could clearly strike terror into the hearts of his subjects and his enemies alike. The wise thing was obviously to not put yourself at the wrong end of Ozymandias’ power. And yet the poem concludes:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

A stonecarved bust of young and handsome man with some damage to the skull, in a museum room. The young man's expression is a sneer of cold command.
The famous bust of Ramses II (ca. 1250 BC) immortalised in poetry by Shelley. © Pbuergler and used underCC BY-CA 3.0

It is said that Shelley penned those lines after reading descriptions of the statue of the Pharaoh Ramses II, who lived 3,200 years ago and whose bust now stands in the British Museum. He ruled Egypt shortly before the great crisis of climate and economics that we now know as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which upended the Mediterranean world of its day. For all his might and power, Ramses’ legacy was swept away by forces of history beyond human control.

As St Paul reminds us this morning, the rulers of every age before us have passed away. Those of our age are doomed to pass away also, through forces that they are unlikely to be able to detect in advance, let alone control. The last remnants of the world that I came of age in, that of the long boom between the end of the Cold War and the financial crisis of 2008, have just been swept away by a virus invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps some future poet will see the wreckage of an ancient statue of President Putin, or President Macron, or Boris the Unsteady, and write a meditation of the quality of Shelley’s on the transience of power and the shortness of human life. This poem speaks to us not so much because it teaches us something new, but because it reminds us of things that we instinctively know, but which the world, and especially the media locked into its over-excited twenty-four hour news cycle, risks making us forget.

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View from Yerevan in The Tablet

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It’s good to be in print in this week’s The Tablet (11 August 2022 edition) with a “View from Yerevan” – a piece about beautiful town planning, the revival and the absence of churches, losing a war, refugees from far away, and having one of the world’s most difficult geopolitical positions. It’s easy enough to … Read more