politics

Politicians are Scared of Calling Out Muslim Homophobia

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Three people embracing in a close group hug at an outdoor event, seen from behind, with the Brandenburg Gate visible in the background under a bright sky. A rainbow pride flag is partially visible at the edge of the frame.

My thanks to Unherd for running my short piece on the comments of Sir Chris Bryant MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on the attack on the Christopher Street Day LGBT+ parade in Berlin last weekend. Sir Chris refused to acknowledge that the attacker was an Islamist even after the German Interior Minister publicly stated that to be the case.

Sir Chris was “ordained as a priest in the Church of England before he first left active ministry and later Anglicanism entirely because he couldn’t reconcile his homosexuality with his Church’s treatment of gay relationships. Naming Christian homophobia is considered laudable in his own support base.

“But naming Muslim homophobia? This, in contrast, threatens the unofficial British state settlement around crimes which undercut the narrative that multiculturalism only has benefits and never brings new problems. The most obvious case is of nationwide grooming gangs. But there has been a constant drumbeat of lesser yet still serious incidents, from the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 to the Wakefield woman forced to go to the local mosque to plead for her son’s life in 2023 after he damaged a Quran.”

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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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Kings Get Killed: Sermon Preached on 23rd November 2025 (Christ the King)

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A large statue of Jesus Christ with outstretched arms stands atop a forested mountain, viewed from above. The iconic Art Deco-style figure, known as Christ the Redeemer, overlooks a lush green landscape in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The statue's serene face and flowing robes are clearly visible against the dense tree canopy below.

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

Colossians 1. 11-20; Luke 23. 33-43

“The soldiers also mocked him … saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’”

A stylized medieval-style illustration of “Christus Rex” (Christ the King).Christ sits enthroned in a red mantle and blue robe, crowned with a cross, radiant halo behind his head. He holds a cross-topped staff in one hand and a golden monstrance with the Eucharist in the other. His bare feet rest on a globe. Six winged angels in soft robes surround him in adoration. Uplifted human hands emerge from below in worship. Bold text at the bottom reads: CHRISTUS REX
Esther Newport, Christus Rex (1940), book illustration

Being a king can be a dangerous business. William II, aka William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, combined unbridled tastes for the pleasures of the flesh with a steady and wise hand in steering the affairs of state. That didn’t stop him being shot by an arrow in a hunting accident that many believe was no accident. Edward II died in mysterious circumstances while in the custody of his wife’s lover. Richard II was another unlucky second, and was murdered while in prison, just like the much later Henry VI. (Henry II actually survived!)

We might think of Presidents as kings in a democratic era, and Kennedy, Garfield, Lincoln, and McKinley were all assassinated, meaning America’s chiefs have a one in eleven chance of being shot dead in office. The leader of Ireland’s War of Independence, Michael Collins, never even got the chance to become his country’s prime minister, ambushed while Chairman of what was still a Provisional Government, shot by his own side (although the people ultimately to blame were – of course – the Brits). From Pharaoh Ramesses III through Julius Caesar to Yitzhak Rabin and Muammar Gadaffi, the head man of any society has always been in particular danger of losing his head.

So, in being put to death, Jesus is very much in the mould an earthly king, despite the humiliating misery of His circumstances in today’s Gospel reading. To be a leader is to be a target. Yet this is happening to Christ even though He has rejected every attempt to have Him seize earthly power, much to the disappointment of His closest followers. Having sought no power He is sentenced to death with, in Luke’s record, neither Pilate nor even Herod having found any possible charge that could stick to Him.

He is executed merely to appease a baying mob and perhaps avoid a nasty bout of rioting. He is literally a scapegoat, slaughtered for the sins of others in the politically tense and often violent circumstances of Roman Palestine. Put to death because the corruption of the Herods, the arrogant brutality of the Romans, and the Jews’ delusions about their own strength combine to create a land constantly bubbling on the edge of violence.

What is the death of one man if it preserves the fragile peace, and is the price that must be paid to spare misery for a million? All states make calculations of this nature from time to time, from blind eyes turned to obvious injustices through to bloody wars of choice. Perfect justice eludes human attempts to create it. There are always difficult calculations and trade-offs to be made in a world of laziness and prejudice, and even where these sins are avoided, a world of clashing perspectives and imperfect information.

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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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Requiem for a Dream

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Also posted at Slugger O’Toole

European flag carpet, Gift from the Republic of Azerbaijan. World Forum for Democracy 2016, Strasbourg, France. © Northern Ireland Foundation

Today, the Netherlands reinstituted border checks with Germany and Belgium. The new policy, which will initially run for six months, aims “to combat migration and human-trafficking”. According to the EU, fourteen of the twenty-nine members of the Schengen passport-free travel area currently have some form of “temporary” border control; of these all but Malta’s relating to a major international conference feel at least semi-permanent, with Russian sabotage efforts and “risk of violent actions against Israeli citizens” cited by some countries along with irregular migration and organised crime.

This hits me particularly hard because of the ten summers in a row between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s I travelled by buses and ferries from Northern Ireland to Germany – in the early years to West Germany – via Belgium and the Netherlands to spend the summer with a German family. I remember the infrastructure on the Dutch-German border being dismantled in the early 1990s; most traffic was waved through before that, although a differently coloured passport could occasionally attract attention from a bored border guard. But on the Antwerp to Eindhoven motorway, even in the 1980s, I can only ever remember a few trucks being parked up in service areas waiting for a customs inspection. Otherwise there was nobody around to check passports and not even a little booth to house them. I had to Google when was the last time private citizens last faced checks on the Dutch-Belgian border; it turns out to be 1947!

Those of us who have believed in the vision of a united Europe and saw it start to blossom in our lifetimes are watching our dream dying. There are plenty of shrilly self-deluding voices screaming that it has been betrayed by populists and jingoists and paid shills for Putin. The harsh reality, however, is that it is dying because it hasn’t survived contact with reality; and more specifically, it hasn’t survived contact with Europe’s reality of the 2020s being very different from what anyone imagined in 1992, let alone 1947.

We could summarise the history of the European Union over the last 35 years in a rock lyric: “You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the Moon.”

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My Views on the Assisted Suicide Bill

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I wish I had the certainty of so many giving their opinion in favour of or opposed to the assisted suicide bill before parliament tomorrow. I have very mixed feelings about it all. I have no objection on principle to assisted suicide in some circumstances – circumstances that are often too horrible to bear – but this proposal is rushed, and both too little and too much. I would vote against.

This proposal is too little, in that it doesn’t cover the two circumstances where the cases for assisted suicide is strongest. One is the situation faced by Tony Nicklinson, a compos mentis adult with a minimal quality of life expressing a persistent wish to die over many years, but physically unable to do so themselves. The second is that faced by many elderly people who, having lost all faculties, often accompanied by a degrading degree of incontinence or severe and constant pain, are locked away on the upper floors of nursing homes, forgotten by everyone, including by themselves.

I doubt there is anyone alive who isn’t opposed to tomorrow’s bill on principle who won’t also support access to assisted suicide in these circumstances. I do. So, if this bill does pass, it will mark the start of a process of steadily widening access to medically-assisted death. That won’t be a bad thing in every case, but I wonder how we’re going to stop before court cases and pro-euthanasia enthusiasts lead into very dangerous territory. We know that some disabled Canadians have been put under pressure to opt for assisted suicide, that Belgium will offer euthanasia to otherwise healthy young adults with chronic depression, that the Netherlands has euthanised dementia patients who seemed to be resisting. This is not a subject on which one should be blind to long-term consequences and the tendency of courts to make legislation more permissive than originally intended over time.

And that’s why it seems so wrong that we are rushing into legislation that has emerged essentially out of nowhere, without the benefit of the dedicated team of civil servants and parliamentary draftsmen and longer consultation that a government-sponsored bill would have. Labour haven’t even been in power for five months yet; there just hasn’t been time to do the job of drafting the bill properly.

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I Predicted Trump’s Win…

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A screengrabbed online newspaper headline and a photo of Donald Trump.

With no particular pleasure, I predicted Donald Trump’s win, in the week before the election, in print, in the pages of the News Letter (and on their website, here). Then, when everyone got giddy about Harris’ chances after the Selzer Poll that turned out to be a spectacular miss, I doubled down on my predictions on Slugger O’Toole (available here) based on this Twitter thread I posted.

I’ve reproduced the text of both articles below. The polls were clear and the polls were right, but people only see what they want to see in them, which raises wider challenges to the way we think our beliefs about the world are based on hard scientific evidence. But anyway…

Gerry Lynch: The two reasons why Donald Trump will win the US presidential election

A screengrabbed online newspaper headline and a photo of Donald Trump.
Truman Defeats Dewey

Published 1st Nov 2024, 00:01 GMT

Donald Trump is running neck and neck with Kamala Harris in the polls, so if this is an underestimation of his support – as has happened in the past with polls – it looks like Trump will win the popular vote, and win the Electoral College

In his two previous presidential campaigns, the polls significantly understated Trump’s actual result.

This year, for the first time, the polls do not put Trump well behind in the final days, but instead show him running neck and neck with Kamala Harris.

If the past tendency of polls underestimating his support continues, we would expect Trump to win the popular vote for the first time ever, and to win the Electoral College comfortably. I think it is that simple.

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Earthly Power or Eternal Glory?: Sermon Preached on 20th October 2024 (Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity)

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

Hebrews 5. 1-10; Mark 10. 35-45

“Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”

What do you want to get out of the Bible? Some of us seem to want a collection of wise sayings and inspirational quotes, and the Bible certainly contains these. Some of us get more from the earthier and more frank stories of sometimes appalling human behaviour, that speak to the human condition in ways that we often prefer to avoid thinking about. There are plenty of those sort of tales.

Russell Brand in 2020, By Raph_PH on Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY 2.0

This morning’s Gospel reading is one of my favourite stories from the Bible because it does both. It gives us one of Jesus’ most significant sayings, that those who wish to be great should be the servant of all; and then it addresses the reality that, even in the presence of God incarnate, most of us aren’t actually capable of being as good as that all of the time. We’re a bit more self-interested than that, or at least the vast majority of us are. While I hope I’m not as shameless in my desire for a comfortable, influential, life as James and John, when I’m honest with myself I know that I certainly don’t approach the Christlike ideal of pure self-sacrifice all that often. I may not be vain enough to demand to sit at Christ’s right hand, but I certainly enjoy being ‘the Rector’ and the social rôle that even in 2024 still goes with that in a place like rural Wiltshire.

The truth is that we all approach the throne of heavenly grace with mixed motives. There is, I hope, true faith and genuine devotion there for most of us. There are also other things. Sometimes it’s hope for an answer to a prayer that is really quite self-serving. ‘Go on, God’, I find myself saying as I see the Euromillions signs in the village shop, ‘I don’t want £112 million: but think of all the wonderful things I could do – for you, of course – with five numbers and a bonus ball.’

Our mixed motives aren’t always as avaricious as that. For some of us, church gives us a nice group of friends and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some of us are looking for an institution that will give a moral lead to a society that seems quite rootless, and there’s nothing wrong that that either. Still others want to be part of an institution that can campaign for justice for the poorest and most vulnerable, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But if earthly goals are the only aim of our Faith, then we miss much that is important about what Jesus Christ actually taught.

I suspect most of us have heard of the celebrity Russell Brand. Brand has been at the end of a number of very serious allegations about his behaviour towards women, and back in the days when he was still the darling of the BBC, he often had a notably cruel broadcasting style. But everything is OK now because in May, Brand was baptised in the River Thames by no less a figure than Bear Grylls, the celebrity survivalist and England’s Chief Scout. By September, Brand was baptising people in rivers himself.

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Wilderness and the Garden: Sermon Preached on 31st March 2024 (Easter Day)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-18

“Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).”

When we get to the end of a journey, it’s sometimes helpful to remind ourselves where it started.

Painting of a garden, in which Mary Magdalen, in a red dress and bending down, is trying to touch Jesus cloak - he is walking away from her, but looking back at her, and putting his palm out in admonishment.
Fra Angelico, Noli Me Tangere (1440-2), in the Basilica di San Marco, Florence.

Jesus’ public ministry started with His baptism by John the Baptist, then immediately being taken out into the wilderness for forty days. His public ministry ended with His crucifixion, or so it seemed. Because on the first Easter morning, a few of His closest followers encountered Him risen from the dead. They were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.

The season of Lent consists of forty days of fasting that are intentionally modelled on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Lent also ends on Easter morning—in other words, it too ends in Resurrection.

So travelling through the wilderness seems to be an essential part of experiencing Resurrection. In the wilderness we are confronted by the sheer scale of God’s creation, and how much of that creation lies outside our normal day-to-day experience. In the wilderness, our illusions of being in control die, and we learn just how limited the power of human beings is.

It seems to me that the Western world is entering a wilderness. The financial crisis of 2008, and the very slow recovery from it, was perhaps first warning signthat the existing political and economic order might be in trouble. Other signs include the ever widening gap between the rich and the rest, the fact that it’s often easier to make money by speculation than doing something worthwhile, and the increasing difficulties even relatively well-off young people have in finding security. All these have been warning signs, throughout history, of civilisations in trouble.

A gathering sense of crisis became acute after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One thing the two years since have told us is that the Western world is weaker than is thought by our pundits, our politicians, and the lobbyists and campaignerswho try to influence them. Western attempts to hobble the Russian economy through sanctions have, regrettably, been at best partially effective, and have been ignored by the rising powers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Western fantasies of power and control lie in tatters, and we seem to have entered a geopolitical wilderness.

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