the crisis of the west

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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Afghanistan Exposes the West’s Crisis as it did the Soviets’

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This post originally appeared on Slugger O’Toole

The Soviet Empire was undone by three things – firstly, overstretching itself, especially through the acquisition of a series of Global South satrapies from Nicaragua through Ethiopia to Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s; secondly, misrepresenting realities to itself so as to fit Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy; thirdly, because its leaders no longer believed in that political religion even as they presided over a system that permitted no alternative.

Mohammad Najibullah’s government hung on in Kabul for three years after Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan in 1989; Ashraf Ghani’s kleptostate didn’t even survive until America’s withdrawal date. US and other Western experts were more wrong about Afghan society than the famously self-deluding late Soviet Union; in terms of plain logistics, the US executed a shockingly less competent withdrawal than a USSR on the brink of collapse; and in the shape of Ghani and before him Karzai, it backed rulers so monumentally corrupt that they seem to have been less palatable to devout Afghan Muslims than actual godless Communists.

In the dying days of 1979, Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, fought an initially successful internal battle against Soviet intervention in the country after the Communist coup, convinced that invading Afghanistan would end up in failure; it was feuding between Afghan Communist factions once in power that dragged the USSR in, and fear of losing face in the propaganda game of the late Cold War that kept it there for a while. But it only took the Soviets seven years to realise they weren’t actually being welcomed as defenders of material progress and women’s rights against religious obscurantism, and they were gone in nine. America took twenty.

Soviet APCs depart Afghanistan as part of the first phase of troop withdrawal in 1986.
Soviet APCs depart Afghanistan as part of the first phase of troop withdrawal in 1986. © RIA Novosti archive/ Yuriy Somov. Used under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Yet all the while, the people directing the war in DC knew it was going badly and simply lied, as the Washington Post exposed in 2019 when it got access to the US government’s own report on its failures in Afghanistan. The Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations all lied, knowingly, not just to the public but much of the time to themselves; they couldn’t have sustained this war for 20 years otherwise. Countless experts colluded in the lies, spending time and money to create analyses to fit a consciously deceitful official narrative, nodding along because dissenting voices find their careers limited while nodding dogs get to bill four-figure daily rates.

Governments lying to themselves with the encouragement of experts well-paid to silence truth-tellers is a pattern of behaviour familiar from the story of toxic mortgage bonds and the 2008 financial crisis; something similar will probably turn out to surround the pandemic’s origins and how influential Western medics helped Beijing cover them up. This is not just an American problem. Lying is just as embedded, for example, in the UK, where the political class and punditocracy spent yesterday arguing about the ways in which Britain could have saved Kabul from the Taliban when the same people know British combat troops left Afghanistan in 2014.

Truth is now entirely subject to political ideology in the West, but being liberal democracies rather than a single-ideology state, various nexuses of deceit sell different sets of lies to their own groups of followers. The progressive/left take is that jihadism only exists because of colonialism and White supremacy with British Labour MP Richard Burgon even demanding reparations be paid to the Taliban. The soi disant sensible centre-left-to-mainstream-right were the actual architects of the Afghan disaster, with neocons and hawkish liberals like Blair inventing for themselves an Islamic world crying out to be bombed from the air so they could be free. And, of course, the post-Trump GOP is so far down the rabbit-hole of QAnon-lizardmen-paedo-pizza conspiracy that it doesn’t worry that its lies sound like they come from the secure wing of the local asylum.

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