Here are some of them:

Picture the scene. It’s November 1988 in town in the middle of England, and you’re four years old. It’s a Sunday, at precisely 5:40pm. The dishes are washed. The uniforms are ironed. The kettle is on. You nestle into your mum’s lap. And then: the TV is finally switched on, and the unmistakable, magical notes of a theme tune fill the living room. It’s time for BBC’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. For many Brits my age, this TV show was much beloved, and formed the basis of our life-long affection for the world of Narnia.

If you’re unfamiliar with this particular rendering of C.S Lewis’s classic novel, I’d urge you to look it up. It was a show - in the end encompassing four out of the eight books in the series - that had a formative effect on my understanding of storytelling, the beauty of allegory, the thrill of fantasy worlds and, ultimately, although I didn’t appreciate this fully at the time, the message of the gospel.

Sure - there was dubious CGI, and the beavers were adult actors in full-sized beaver costumes so that they towered unrealistically over Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy - but its beauty didn’t come from blockbuster visuals or special effects. Its beauty was in its (often word-for-word) faithfulness to the story: of Aslan as the lion who created Narnia, and the one who laid down his life to save Edmund - a sinner - before roaring back to life and defeating the White Witch. The 1988 BBC version of Aslan - although visibly animatronic in his movement - had such a profound impact on me that I still remember it with some emotion 38 years later.

There won’t ever be a better adaptation of Lewis’s Narnia books. This, of all hills, is the hill that I am willing to die on. So, you can see why some might call me biased, or guilty of being a purist clinging on to Millennial nostalgia, when it comes to assessing what we know so far about Greta Gerwig’s latest adaptation of the very first novel (at least chronologically) in the series - The Magician’s Nephew - due for release February 2027.

The Magician’s Nephew, for those who are less familiar with this novel, is set before The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and tells the story of the creation of Narnia, and the reason for the existence of the Witch there. Just as much as any of the other novels, it showcases Lewis’s brilliant imagination and his ability to create beautiful worlds and characters which help us to understand the Biblical narrative through fiction. I’m sure I wasn’t the only Lewis fan who was thrilled to hear that this novel was the one being adapted. It hinted at Gerwig’s potential faithfulness towards the Narnia series that she intended to make them chronologically, rather than making the more obvious TLTWaTW.

This anticipation was short-lived. Firstly there was Gerwig’s intention to move the time period from around 1900 to 1955, skewing the timeline for the entire series. Arguably just the complaint of a purist. But then came her comments about the inspiration for the thematic identity of the film - David Bowie - as well as her envisioning of the film as a transporting rock opera. Last but, of course, not least, was her choice of Meryl Streep to voice Aslan.

Despite all of this - there was still hope that a thread of faithfulness to Lewis’s original work and the theology woven through it, would remain.

The first trailer for it was released last week. Visually, elements of it are breathtaking. The ‘wood between the worlds’ - where Digory and Polly find themselves before discovering a formless Narnia - is magnificent. The revealing of the wardrobe as the trailer begins is enough to send a shiver down the spine of any die-hard Narnia fan. The ensemble cast, if you disregard Meryl’s Aslan, is pretty impressive: Carey Mulligan, Daniel Craig, and David McKenna - recently excellent as Piggy in the new ‘Lord of the Flies’ - playing Digory.

But as the trailer progresses, its faithfulness to the richness of Lewis’s original writing seems to wane, and we increasingly feel like we are watching an episode of Doctor Who, or the latest sci-fi franchise. The White Witch’s dying land of Charn, whose red sun casts a ‘dull, red light’ across an ‘almost black’ sky in the novel, has been transformed by Greta to resemble a psychedelic version of an Escher painting, and the second half of the trailer is like a Star Wars action scene accompanied by Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’

But, the real problem that is becoming apparent with Gerwig’s Narnia is not actually a cinematic one. Nor is it really a case of disappointed nostalgia. The issue is a theological one. Because one character who has been conspicuous in their absence from much of the discussion surrounding Gerwig’s film, and indeed the trailer itself, has been Aslan. He makes an appearance at the end of the trailer as an ethereal, blue and purple-tinged lion, roaring, looking as though he is made of stars and galaxies, rather than being the one who created them.

Lewis was very clear on Aslan. He viewed him, not as an allegory, but as a supposal: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”

This - with Gerwig - is where the problem begins, because she appears to be disregarding this supposal altogether. It might be too early to say. Perhaps we should wait until the full movie is released to draw our conclusions, But, thus far, it seems that Greta is rejecting the significance of Aslan in the same way that she rejects the significance of Jesus. In fact, in an interview with Crash magazine she stated, “I get uncomfortable around ‘Jesus Christ is my Lord and Saviour’ stuff. I find that uncomfortable.” So it’s hardly surprising that, given this discomfort, she might be tempted to dispense with anything that indicates Aslan could be a supposal for that same Jesus Christ - even including casting a woman to voice him.

In interviews, Gerwig seems set on refusing to commit to the truth of who Aslan is meant to be in Lewis’s supposal. She obviously admires Lewis and said in a recent interview, ‘I would not be who I am without these books’. But when pressed about her own faith and asked how it influenced her work, she said the following:

“The very act of making a film is an act of faith in and of itself…going to movies is faith. It’s gathering in the dark with strangers, and putting yourself in a place of vulnerability, with the potential to be transformed.”

Thus far, Gerwig seems set on emptying Narnia of its foundational truth, painting Aslan as a figure who might be dispensable (or even a woman). This is, of course, exactly what so many non-Christians are prone to do with the Bible, and with Jesus himself. The Bible becomes a set of moral stories open to diverse interpretation. Jesus was just a good man. It’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, that Gerwig does what so many (including us, if we’re really honest) are prone to do - she makes God in her own image instead of acknowledging the opposite. We make ourselves small gods, and the one true God becomes, like Aslan in a Netflix trailer, conspicuously absent.

There’s something that Aslan says in The Magician’s Nephew to Uncle Andrew - Digory’s magician uncle who falls under the spell of the White Witch, and inadvertently travels to the newly created Narnia - which speaks to Gerwig’s view of Aslan. While the other humans and recently created Narnian animals can understand Aslan’s speech, Uncle Andrew only hears the roars and snarls. He has wilfully ignored Aslan, and now he cannot hear his voice at all. Eventually, Aslan says to Digory:

‘He thinks great folly, child. The world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground…But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!’

It’s sad to think that, even though she’s so diligently studied and admired Lewis’s work and the great gospel narrative that runs throughout the Narnia series, Gerwig might still have made herself unable to hear the truth of the Gospel story that Lewis so clearly presents through his Aslan supposal, and everything about it that might do her good.

If Gerwig’s Aslan, inspired by Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust, with multi-coloured eyes and a red-striped face, is stripped of his omnipotence in The Magician’s Nephew, then I wonder how his death for Edmund and his resurrection from the Stone Table will be spun in the next movie. If the Narnia that Aslan creates is just another Marvel-style universe then there’s really no need for him to die for it at all.

It’s probably best to leave the final word to Lewis himself - through the character of Mr Beaver, to be precise. He, probably of all Narnians, is so clear about who Aslan really is. In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, when speaking to the Pevensie children, he says this:

“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight. At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more.

When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death. And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”

I hope, despite the early indications to the contrary, that Aslan is truly in sight in this new Narnia adaptation. That he is allowed to bear his teeth and shake his mane, and that the film might, still, be a vehicle through which viewers of the film glimpse of the true glory, beauty, and significance of Aslan himself.

The reason why evangelicalism is still outstripping Roman Catholicism in terms of growth and conversion - despite the much vaunted returns to Rome - can be attributed to what I call “the five rows back” reality.

Go five rows back in either a Roman Catholic parish building or an evangelical church building and check the spiritual barometer. It’s going to be different. And the further back you go in terms of rows, the deeper the difference.

More on that later.

The reason I make this observation however, is that it aligns with Ross Douthat’s most recent piece in The Free Press.

Douthat is now writing for The Free Press and working at 60 Minutes, having made the switch recently from The New York Times.

I am happy about that. Not lest of all because his switch from the NYT meant that I could finally cancel my subscription to that once-grand, but now shrivelled, echo-chamber.

Which I did yesterday. To great relish. I didn’t even bother to tick the check box that asked if I was leaving because I didn’t agree with the content. I generally don’t, but given since 2016 the New York Times has refused to admit it ever gets anything wrong, my response would only have landed me in “the Deplorables” basket.

Evangelicalism is winning

Douthat just wrote this (as a conservative Roman Catholic himself) in which he pulls the rug out from under the feet of the “Roman Catholicism is the future of religion/all young people are signing up etc, so get on board with Mother Church while the cool kids do” idea.

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I just read Michael Jensen's interesting Substack piece on Islam and democracy. It's worth a read.

You can find it here.

It raises some interesting questions in that it pits "liberal" democracies against so-called Islamic democracies (Turkey and Indonesia for example) which, when you see the evidence he lays out, are not all that liberal.

Michael espouses what is undoubtedly true:

The problem is that liberal democracy is a flower that has grown from Christian (and I would say Protestant) soil, with its notion of the distinct authorities of the church and state and the foundational understanding of freedom of belief. Jesus called his disciples to ‘render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s’ - clearly delineating the two domains. In Sharia law, though there are different understandings of the relationship between the secular and the sacred, that distinction is not as clear.

Which in some ways makes the question, and the article, somewhat of a moot point.

If Islam did not spring from Protestant soil, and if liberal democracy is fed by that soil, then something radical would have to change in the soil of Islam for liberal democracy to be remotely considered possible, unless held up with sufficient plant-ties and stakes. Which seems unlikely.

To put it another way, if what generates liberal democracies is not simply foreign soil, but poisonous soil to the Islamic vision of public life, then the question is answered before we begin.

However I think the more pressing question we need to ask ourselves is less about whether Islam can countenance truly liberal democracies within its own setting, and more about whether the liberal democracies themselves can maintain the "liberal" part of "liberal democracy" within theirs. That seems a more pressing and urgent question for Westerners to ask.

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But what about Wilberforce?

If I had a dollar for every time that someone raises that objection to my insistence that the political landscape no longer listens to the Christian voice, I’d have more than a few dollars!

The objection is that if Wilberforce was able to steer the ship away from the direction it was going in, through sheer grit, hard work and the Holy Spirit, why not today?

Well first up, show me the money! If anything the opposite has happened.

But primarily the main reason is this: When Wilberforce was pushing for abolition of slavery he was - among other things - shaming his fellow citizens and parliamentary colleagues into doing what they said they believed, namely that humans are created in the image of God, with value, dignity and worth.

That meant, according to the Clapham Sect, ALL humans. There was a common belief - albeit not practiced - of the Creator/creature distinction, and distinctives.

A biblically theistic view of the world was what Wilberforce leaned into. His antagonists could reject its implications, but they had to do so from the same underlying beliefs framework that he held.

That is no longer true. That is not how the modern secular framework views humanity. We are in an anthropological battle. Are humans given identity, meaning and purpose from outside of themselves? Or are identity, meaning and purpose things we create for ourselves?

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Older Christians Don’t Get It

Here’s what many older Christians don’t get.

Non-Christians today are non-Christian in a very non-Christian way. And we are trying to argue with them assuming that they are non-Christian in a kinda Christian way. And then we are left wondering why we are not getting anywhere.

So people watch with dismay as the Victorian Liberal Party in Australia (a historically conservative party) signs up for free abortion up until birth prior to the upcoming election in that state. The Labor Party signed off on that move, and the Liberals rushed to match it.

Why did Christians think it would be any different? Hate to tell you, the Vic Liberals did this for two reasons: One they know it’s a vote winner. And two, it’s their conviction! They actually are committed to it. They’re not hiding a radically anti-abortion agenda, and waiting until election day is over to reveal it. They believe this stuff.

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Pretending God is Real

Perhaps you have watched influencer Brian Guan who commenced a thirty day experiment pretending God (the Christian God) were real, only to actually become a Christian on day twenty.

Check his story out here.

Well to Brian’s surprise, it turns out God is real, the Christian God at least. His short lived experiment on switching sides to Islam had him scurrying back pretty quickly to Jesus.

But Guan leans into his experiment for twenty days and God then leans into him. With ten days in the bank!

Kinda proves the “I will be found of you if you search for me with all your heart”. verse (Jer29:14, taken hopelessly out of context btw).

Guan set up a test for what would appear to be utilitarian reasons: Can God make me happier? Does being grateful to God change my mindset? That sort of thing.

He has four tracks:

1. Pray to Jesus

2. Apply his teachings

3. Gratitude

4. Read about God (the Bible)

His initial aim - to be happier - is a fairly bog-standard approach to what we see today with many of the younger cohort who are seeking fulfilment not so much in what might be true, but in what might work.

Yes, it’s that desperate a time, folks. That’s why the quiet revival, despite being pooh-poohed earlier for some dodgy data is still seemingly a thing.

Guan dutifully goes through the list of 4. If anyone is going to be saved by zealous works of the law, he may indeed be it. He gets onto his bike everyday and rides into work and ensures that he does these four things.

He reads the Bible daily, prays as he rides that bike to work, looks for opportunities to be kind and to serve, and he sets up a booth on a regular basis (that is his work?) to convince people of God.

Salvation Shows Up

And gets saved. Boom. Who woulda thunk? The process of doing those things reframes his “imaginary” so to speak. He lives in New York which exemplifies a completely different social imaginary, so it’s no easy task to reframe reality.

And somewhere in that mix, he comes to put his trust in Jesus. Though as someone who believes the Bible is God’s actual words, I can’t say I’m all that surprised. Most unbelievers have never read a Bible.

If they did God would meet them in those pages. Sin may still blind them, but their reading of the Word would require an even deeper level of sin-suppression of the truth than before.

What’s interesting is that the “happier” issue, while still important, becomes less of a draw for Guan once he’s crossed a line through “pretending” that God is real, and becomes convinced that he is.

Sanctification Shows Up

One day 33, holiness kicks in! Surprise, surprise. His video is about cleansing your algorithm by skipping or refusing the usual suspects, sex, gambling, anger, other vices.

And there’s a great day when he discovers that most modern version of idolatries, the desire to be liked. Once the 30 days is done, his viewing numbers go down. Let me tell you, as someone who posts on Insta almost daily, that desire for views is a deep lure.

What would someone not give up in terms of integrity, privacy, good character, honesty in order to boost their numbers? Nothing, from what I have seen.

So Guan’s conversion tracks with what we assume happens when the Holy Spirit takes up residence in one’s heart. He begins to hate the grubby sins (sex and drugs and jazz) and he begins to recognise the sophisticated sins too (the overt desire to do whatever it takes to be accepted and liked).

This all leads me to believe that God has actually transformed his life. His blind eyes have been opened. And the “happier” agenda seems to have been subsumed.

Reverse Engineering

But here’s what I find intriguing. What would happen if you reverse engineered Brian Guan’s experiment. Because let’s face it, we all know people who no longer claim to be Christian who once did claim to be.

In fact we probably know people who were involved in Christian ministry who are now completely antithetical to the gospel.

Now this is not a post on “once-saved-always-saved”, more an observation of what the trajectory looks like for someone who isn’t leaning into that desire to be “saved” at all because they no longer believe they need saving, and certainly not by Jesus.

So here is, I think, a good way to reverse engineer the process and end up not believing that God is real.

1. Don’t pray to Jesus

2. Stop applying his teachings

3. Replace gratitude with bitterness

4. Stop reading about God (the Bible)

To which I would add a fifth,

5. Stop going to church.

I reckon if you were to give that a go - and honestly I think it would take more than thirty days, you would do a fairly effective reverse engineering job on your Christian faith. You could, as the apostle Paul says “shipwreck your faith” (1Tim1:18-19).

That’s a big mistake, as this Despair.com poster famously points out in line with Paul’s analogy:

Here’s Some I Prepared Earlier

So how do people reverse engineer their faith in that way? How do they end up in the opposite direction of Brian Guan. I’d like to say it’s by the same amount of effort, only backwards.

But it’s likely not. It’s likely no effort at all.

I remember three amazing Christian couples, about six to eight years older than I, who I looked up to at church and who kept me going as a young adult, especially in tough times.

They ticked all the boxes. The fleshly ones: Good looking, funny, compelling, successful, happy. And the spiritual ones: caring, prayerful, biblical, keen to grow, regular in attendance, happy to serve, generous in time and global in concern.

Yet ten or so years later I heard that none of them was Christian anymore. I couldn’t believe how that could happen to all of them. What disaster happened? What spiritual or relational body blow could lead to this?

I found out not long after at the funeral of a man from the church who we had all admired. They turned up, and since you learn more at a funeral than at a party (Eccles 7:2), I asked them what had happened.

Their answer was a little confronting in both honesty and assessment:

“Nothing. Just a long slow decline to nothingness.”

Still friendly, still kind, but zero interest in the things of God. No belief, no actions, no trust, no desire. They didn’t flame out, they faded out.

Integral/Incidental/Irrelevant

And the chances are they flamed out by steadily dismantling those four/five things above. Bit by bit the reading of Scripture, the prayer, the godly attitudes, the posture to being like Jesus in daily life, all slipped away. As, of course, did the church attendance, which is often the first thing.

Result? Nothingness. They had reverse engineered their faith.

Those who had first behaved as if God were integral to their lives, then began acting as if God were incidental to their lives, before eventually settling into the pattern of God being irrelevant in their lives.

They didn’t have to go around pretending that they believed God was not real. They actually no longer believed He was. I wonder what that did to their sins both grubby and sophisticated?

That’s how it happens. To others. And, if we are not, careful, to us. That’s why in the book of Hebrews we read: “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.”

Drift away. Reverse engineer. Pretend that God is not real. Different ways of saying the same thing. Don’t think it can’t happen to you.

How do we avoid that? Be like Brian. Even if faith feels weak and desire feels cold today, get on your bike, metaphorically speaking, and do the four things he did. God will meet you where you are, and enliven you were you are dead and cold.

I know those of us in evangelical circles are a bit suspicious of tick-the-box Christianity, and of all of the sign-ups to crunchy daily practices of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism that could supplant the gospel of salvation by grace through faith.

But don’t overplay your hand, or more to the point, don’t underplay it. Refuse to reverse engineer your faith. Get on your bike and be like Brian.

Will you be happier for doing son? For sure. I can guarantee that in a million years times you will be much happier for having done it. And on that day you can rejoice with Brian Guan that you did.

I’m currently writing a new book. Well, actually, I’m currently editing my new book. An altogether different, and vastly more painful exercise.

It’s tentatively entitled: Talking Across the Gap: Positive Conversations in a World that Disagrees with Jesus

Any guess what it’s about?:-)

One of the key chapters focuses on what we call “The Haunted” in our society. Those who are seeking transcendent experiences because, well because we’re spiritual creatures.

The decline of religious observance in the West was met for a time with a renewed interest in atheism, the Dawkins crew etc. Now there are still atheists around, clearly, but the desire for something spiritual is on the rise once more.

Modernity’s immanently framed reality hasn’t been able to carry the weight of our meaning and purpose agendas.

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You’ve heard the crass tale (attributed to many, but sourced to none) of the businessman who propositions a woman for a million dollars. She agrees. He then propositions her again but drops the fee to one hundred dollars.

“Sir, what kind of woman do you think I am?” she retorts.

We’ve already established what kind of woman you are,” he responds, “Now we’re just haggling over the price”.

That’s the cultural moment we are living in when it comes to ethics around the body. We’ve established what kind of society we are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.

What kind of society are we? We are a godless one. One in which humans have no intrinsic value, and nothing, outside of our own will to power, will stay our hand in how we treat the weak and vulnerable of our society.

And with that line crossed, all we are doing now is haggling over the price. Don’t believe me? Here are two I prepared earlier.

Exhibit A: The Lindsay Clancy Jury

The whole post-trial expose of the jurists (no, not the black man who doesn’t fit low enough on the intersectionality tree to not be doxxed, threatened, abused and scorned), but the middle class white ladies, reveals the haggle.

To hear jurists say on national broadcasters that they believed that ushering in a not-guilty verdict would push the case for feminism and a radical overhaul of healthcare for women sounds, at first blush, astonishing.

This was a murder trial. It is not a sociology department lecture at, oh, I dunno where, let’s say Cambridge University.

Feminism and healthcare for woman? Those two issues trump the deaths of three children, aged five, three and eight months.

But remember, we’ve already established what type of society we are. Now we are just haggling over the price.

So where have we heard these twin ideals before? The abortion industry of course.

The abortion industry has swept all before it on the basis of those exact issues - feminism and healthcare. Any attempt to derail the death train from those tracks has been shut down. We have moved from Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” to Oprah’s “Shout your abortion”.

Now all we are doing with abortion - whether that be in trimester one or late-third-term partial birth abortion -, is haggling over the price.

Is there any price not worth paying to ensure the advance of feminism and healthcare for woman? Clearly not, if the protests by the same ideologically minded women outside the trial court is any indication.

If a full term baby is not a high enough price, why should a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and an eight-month-old be off limits? Answer: They’re not.

Christians who are squeamish about this idea need to get with the program. They still assume that sans Christianity the culture will simply tick along with Christian values. Well, as Tom Holland shows in his book Dominion, universal rights are not universal.

If you’re still living in Third Way la-la-Land please parse this for me. Show me the third way that resolves the tension of this matter.

Christians have had a fight on their hands to shut down sex-selective abortion in Australia most recently.

This issue is, ironically, strongly weighted against the survival of women. Sex-selective abortion will abort baby girls almost exclusively.

Though, sadly, the majority of feminists have nothing -absolutely nothing - to say about this appallingly sexist behaviour.

Perhaps that’s because the culture’s that practice sex-selection abortion are a little further down the intersectionality tree in that warped critical theory thinking.

Let’s not forget pagan Rome. Let’s not forget that almost casual letter from a Roman soldier, Hilarion, to his wife:

After he’s done the bit about “Miss you!” and “Don’t forget to pay the car rego before January”, listen to what Hilarion says to his pregnant wife. Knowing he won’t he home to do the deed himself, the solid upright Roman citizen casually states:

“If it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out.”

Not so hilarious Hilarion. But don’t be shocked. We’re back there, aren’t we? We know what kind of society we are, all we are doing now is haggling over the price.

Too extreme? Let’s look at my second offering:

Exhibit B: The Euthanising of a Two Year Old

It’s been revealed in the Netherlands, that last year, a two year old was euthanised with the consent of his parents and the advice of their doctors. That’s right, a two-year-old.

And in the Netherlands too, that most progressive and funky of all lands, where bike riding instead of car driving is pitched by other Westerners as proof of the noble nature of the Dutch.

The whole euthanasia debate in the West has been about kindness. Kindness to the very old and very sick who are on the verge of death and are in agony. Any alarm about the slippery slope was dismissed as tosh, or special pleading by religious fanatics.

Yet the slippery slope argument is weak. Why? Because it assumes we are all on the same side of the mountain travelling in the same direction. Some are moving down that mountain too fast! We need to put a safety brake on.

But the euthanasia push is not a slippery slope argument. It is a watershed argument. Just as with our story at the start: We’ve already established what type of culture we are, now we’re just haggling over the price.

We are on two different sides of the mountain. One believes that humans are created intrinsically valuable, the other believes that humans have utilitarian value only.

The report on this disturbing matter states:

“The child, who was almost two years old, had been born extremely prematurely at 26 weeks and suffered severe brain damage. The toddler had cerebral palsy, impaired vision, frequent epileptic seizures, and serious difficulties with breathing and swallowing. The child could not communicate and had an estimated developmental age of around six weeks.”

Not gonna lie. That is super confronting. Yet it makes sense. It ticks all of the boxes for euthanasia to be not only viable, but preferable, in a society in which we are simply haggling over the price.

The reasoning given by the experts proves it:

The Assessment Committee for Late-Term Abortion and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Ages 1 to 12 has now ruled that the doctor complied with the Netherlands’ requirements.

“All facets of ‘being human,’ regarding motor skills, behaviour, and personality, were severely impaired and were not going to improve,” the committee said.

All facets of “being human”?

All facets? Well yes, all facets, once we’ve already established what type of society we are. When we’ve already established what type of society we are - we are a godless one, a re-minted pagan one.

All we are simply doing now is haggling over the price.

And what is that price? Five, three, eight months, two years, in utero, a baby girl rather than a baby boy. Any price really.

Mind you, perhaps we have a little hope left in us. For Hilarion, bless his little pagan sandals, would find it all quite hilarious that we were even haggling over it.

I’m 59 today. So my 60th year. Do the math.

It’s almost hard to believe, but then again I’ve always been the moody arty type who knows that time is short. Even my early writings are reflective on the brevity of life.

Couple that with a clear understanding of the gospel, and the fact that, as Clapham Sect leader, Henry Thornton, prayed:

O Lord, God Almighty, you are the creator and governor of the world, and have abundantly provided for the various wants of your creatures; you have ordered the day and the night to succeed each other, and when you have refreshed man with sleep, require him to pursue his work until the evening; you have also ordained that he shall be born to trouble, and have appointed the grave to be the end of all living…

No one wants to think of the grave as their appointed end. Indeed they increasingly refuse to have anything appointed for them, which is why euthanasia is one last vain attempt to wrestle back control over the appointment.

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It’s a year since I wrote the words in the two paragraphs below and here we are 365 days later and the shock of Charlie Kirk’s death still resonates around the world.

As does the glee.

“Now waking up to the terrible news that Charlie Kirk has been shot and killed at a university reveals the ugly truth: the existential problem of the West has come from the inside. Our borders can be as secure as we like, the people that truly hate us come from within us. We have rotted from within.

We have bred and nurtured a cohort of people who hate everything that the West stands for even while the suckle at its teat. Born into a world in which they are told to spot a micro-aggression at 20 feet, they think nothing of screaming hatred to Jews in the streets, or shouting abuse at Charlie Kirk on campuses. Are our halls of learning proud of these folk? Will they have any legacy other than their hatred to hand on to the next generation?”

One year on my answer to that last question is a firm “no”. They have nothing to hand on except the hatred. The callous indifference of that same crowd, indeed the same “they had it coming” when the Bondi massacre occurred, simply cements my concern.

So, here we are, one year on. What have I observed? What was exposed?

The Existence of Personal Evil

Good evangelical that I am, I am fully aware of the existence of evil. But it came barrelling home to me, not with the death of Kirk so much - after all our screens have been flooded with violent deaths down the years - but with the response.

Kirk’s death exposed the real existence of evil.

And not the evil response from some arcane tribal factions “over there” after a village massacre in some sub-Saharan country that has had six name changes since independence, but “over here”.

Well-educated Westerners. Well-educated Westerners who think they had out-foxed evil with their education. Dark evil walked the corridors of our campuses wearing Che Guevara tee-shirts and Birkenstocks.

It’s proof, if it were ever needed, that education is not our problem. We cannot educate ourselves out of evil. The teeshirt and Birkie crowd did not out-fox evil. They simply rebranded it as progressive enlightenment.

A progressive enlightenment that will only full progress and fully enlighten when its opponents have been silenced. And how should those opponents be silenced? Well, as the handbook of their ideological Herbert Marcuse states, with “repressive tolerance”.

Marcuse would have smiled upon Kirk’s murder for it encapsulates everything he called for.

Watching the sheer glee at Kirk’s death last year was sickening. And now, one year on, watching the continued glee on the so-called “Kirkiversary” demonstrates the evil that lies in the human heart.

It exposes the satanic control of those who are eating cake today. Well go on, eat your fill. You are feasting on your own destruction.

Conversely - or should I say providentially - , the exposure of real evil has been used by God to draw people to himself. The number of people I spoke to who turned up at church because they were shocked by how they saw people respond, has astonished me.

Older men, young men, older women. I’ve had - or heard of from pastor friends - conversations with all sorts of people for whom Kirk’s death and the awful response to it kickstarted their heart. If such evil exists, surely there must be a corresponding good?

Kirk was a saint in the right (evangelical!) use of the term, but like all of us also sinful and perhaps said things he might later regret as an older man, but it is as true of him as of others, that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies there will be no harvest.

The Existence of Ideological Evil

I used to give some leeway to the more progressive view of politics. No longer. It has no handbrake. It is Marcuse all the way down. And conservative young students recognised it. They recognised that if it were they being gunned down for their outspoken beliefs, their peers would celebrate that too.

One Harvard professor just this week was hauled over the coals for posting a social asking people what they were doing for the “Kirkiversary”.

And he is not alone. Far from it. There is a while ideological death-cult in our universities that is based around radical neo-Marxism, critical theory, and an open and consistent self-loathing of the framework of the created order as revealed in Scripture.

This is not for turning. Evil ideologies do not produce evil people, they simply set them loose in the landscape with a college degree.

And here’s the thing: the same people who are even today scorning the murder of Charlie Kirk, are the same people who then created the cult of the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday, a fabricating fabulist who was held up as some form of genius and a standard bearer of all things noble.

Sorry. There was a yawning, uncrossable chasm between Kirk and Arday in this life, and I fear in the next life too.

Even boiling it down to free speech, Kirk was more than happy to be hated on, and given grief day in and day out on campuses across America.

Arday on the other hand? Well he called the police in to shut down a legitimate journalistic inquiry into his academic chops, and proceeded to silence students who complained about their marks, with accusations of racism and white privilege.

Let that last bit sink in. Kirk goes to campuses as someone who never finished college and was happy to speak to students with higher learning than he - and indeed be cursed by and eventually murdered by them.

And Arday? He was punching down the whole time. He was a professor at one of the most powerful universities in the world, and he shut down any dissent about his teaching methods or his marking.

And when he dies at his own hand, the same ideological crowd is writing his hagiography and demanding restrictions on journalism. Zero self-reflection.

The evil of this progressive revolution never sleeps. It never will. If you are a young Christian student do not turn your back on it. Sleep with one eye open.

If you are going to a progressive university to do a progressive humanities degree, then know the truth of Scripture, your own faith, your own sinful propensities, and your own hope and calling, really really well. These will stand you in good stood.

Better still, if you have the entrepreneurial skills and are willing to forego privilege, position, study tours, academic credentials and conference invitations, then spend your life setting up new institutions for the next generations.

You will only lose those things that are not worthy enough to retain.

The Absence of Personal Courage

Which brings me the flip side of what I’d like to see, and that’s a self-interested cowardice among those who should be standing up.

When it comes to actually paying down some of the credit they have earned in the culture, many of those with a well-formed platform are still waggling on the tee.

Of course they are “gonna” swing that driver one of these days. But not today. Not today. It’s not “wise”. Indeed the accusation that my type of response is “not wise” is an accusation I am long inured to, particularly when I note where it comes from.

Hence I was dismayed, but not surprised, by the response, or lack of it, to Kirk’s death by a portion of evangelicals who, while able to comment on just about everything evil to the political right of themselves, had little to say about this.

Nuance suddenly kicked in! Or a bastardised version of “Third Wayism”. To all you Third Wayers, let me assure you that Tim Keller would have come out and spoken about Kirk’s death and he would have done it with a bravery many of you do not possess.

What’s all that about? My observation is that it’s about a deep insecurity among many middle class evangelicals that they are not viewed as too intense about their faith. There is a deed and abiding need to be a “non-enthusiast”.

I mean, look what happened the last time the mainstream culture scorned wide-spread enthusiasm among the churchy folk. Well, hello John Wesley!

If you are a ministry leader, and you’re going to be anyone worth paying attention to going forward in these baldly evil days, then squarely face up to your own insecurities and your own version of “the fear of man”.

Don’t theologise your muted responses to the face of evil such as the death of Kirk. His death is, I fear, a harbinger for even more violence in the coming years.

And worse, don’t make your first response to it, “Maybe it was one of his own side, let’s be careful.” as if your sangfroid is some sort of religious virtue.

Yet unless you have squared away your security in Christ and his acceptance of you, you may be surprised how much of this toxic poison you both imbibe and regurgitate in order to please other people.

If there was one thing about Kirk it was about how fearless he was. I don’t think that simply came from his personality. I think he had squared away his security. He didn’t write people off even when they hurled curses at him.

Non-Christians who spoke to me after Kirk’s death often commented on how he could just take hit after hit after hit until, of course, that fatal hit in which hateful words turned into bullets.

I contrast that with a long time online interlocutor, who just the day before Kirk’s death, cut me off all socials after I privately challenged his public rejection of one of my posts about political division in Australia.

Where To From Here?

More of the same I am afraid. We will see bravery and we will see cowardice. We will see evil and we will see goodness. If anything, we will see it in greater number and across more social media platform.

And perhaps that’s a good wake up call for all of us that we live in a spiritually charged world. Paul reminded Timothy with these words:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

We used to tolerate such vices in people in our Western setting and studious avoid them, in public at least. They have now been turned into virtues and taught at our universities.

The form of powerless godliness in our current setting has for many decades now been a progressive “Kingdom Without The King” human rights project that is both dehumanising and absent of actual rights.

And now we see the correlating pendulum swing of a hard right “Christendom-Without-Christ” powerless godliness project of the likes of Nick Fuentes that is just as demonising and just as absent of human rights.

And incidentally, for the myriad progressive articles that labelled Charlie Kirk “far right”, congratulations, you finally got your far right in the person of the person of Fuentes.

Your overblown shock at everyone who is even vaguely centrist, and your horror at conservatism in general will likely deliver you - and us - culturally what you most fear.

You are going to have to live through times when you sit around your metaphorical campfires, singing the Internationale to an out-of-tune guitar and wistfully long for the day of “far right” types like Kirk.

Maybe if you’d had that conversation with him instead of posting a video laughing at his demise you could have dialled down the nihilist rage on the other side. But you didn’t have it within you to do so.

Yet let us, in line with Paul in writing to Timothy, not descend to despair. Paul goes on to say this:

You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.

In one sense nothing has changed. rampant evil is still prevalent because we live in the last days and Satan knows his time is short. We should look at the celebration of evil from a deeply spiritual perspective and realise that it is the last, frantic death-throe of a defeated enemy.

Which should drive us to prayer, to action, to deeply forming Christian communities, and to a hope that Jesus will sweep away the personification of all evil on the last of the last days, and do so simply with the breath of his coming (2 Thessalonians 2:8).

In the meantime my prayer is that God raises up a few more Charlie Kirks over the coming decades who have decided to face the hate, and who have determined that the likely glee upon their own demise is a price worth paying.

Underlying Achan’s great sin of covetousness in Joshua 7 is the desperate fact that he was too easily pleased. He settled for less and it cost him his life.

When Achan hides a cloak from Shinar (the land of the Tower of Babel), and silver and gold in his tent after the Jericho Battle, he’s simply clutching at a few baubles in the here and now, while all the while the riches of the Promised Land beckon.

CS Lewis puts it this way, when he speaks of the human propensity to settle for less:

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

Far too easily pleased. That was Achan. It led to his death.

Trouble is, it also led to the deaths of of 36 of his fellow Israelites. For when they went to attack Ai, after Jericho, the presumption was that since it was a small city, it was fold easily.

Yet sin in the camp, indeed in one single tent, scuppered that plan. God had devoted everything to destruction from Jericho, but Achan coveted those trinkets. People died! Sin always leads to death.

The sin of one man in the Bible leads to the death of many. That’s a recurring theme.

But it’s not just his covetousness that leads to death. God points out to Joshua the litany of sin that Achan has enacted:

Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep. They have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have lied, they have put them with their own possessions. (Joshua 7:11)

Stolen and lied. There’s two more commands in there. We’re up to three out of ten!

Yet it goes deeper than three sins. As Martin Luther reminded us, the breaking of commandments two through ten, is proof that the first and most important commandment has been broken, having gods before God.

Which is exactly what Joshua implies when he states after Achan is slowly and terrifyingly singled out among the peoples:

Then Joshua said to Achan, “My son, give glory to the Lord, the God of Israel, and honor him. Tell me what you have done; do not hide it from me.” (Joshua 7:19)

Achan had refused to give God the glory due to his name. He had broken covenant with the One who had saved His people, and journeyed with them to the Promised Land.

More than that: He had neglected the grace of God. God had promised his people the treasures of his grace beyond their wildest dreams:

… a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant. (Deut 6:10-11)

Every good thing laid on for them, freely and generously. All they had to do was to take possession of it. Yet they were in danger of failing.

For this is not just Achan’s sin. It is all of Israel’s sin. Sure Achan confessed to breaking the tenth commandment on the steps of the Promised Land. But Israel had broken the first command just mere weeks out of Egypt some forty years before, building a golden calf in very shadow of Mt Sinai.

From Sinai to Ai - it’s sin all the way down with Israel. Achan is merely a representative.

And not just of Israel. Refusal to give God the glory and be satisfied in the riches of his grace is a go-to-woah global human project.

And the cost? Achan’s life and the life of all those attached to him. Stoned to death. Dunno about you, but I reckon the hands of the widows and children of the 36 men killed in battled may have been the first to pick up a stone. The engraving above, from the incomparable William Blake, depicts it chillingly.

And of course this is our sin too. The wages of sin for all of us is death. The question we have to answer is what are we hiding in the floor of the tent of our hearts? What bauble would we covet that would bar our entry to the Promised Land?

Yet more than that, what is the solution? Paul says this to the Colossian church:

My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:2-3)

There’s the promise of the seaside right there! More treasure than you could imagine!

Yet would we trade the vast treasures of Christ for the baubles of this age? Would we rather play with mud-pies? Of course we would. And we so often do.

Whether it’s personal gain, political gain, sexual pleasure, or even to be highly thought of in the world, we are tempted to covet in the same manner that Achan did.

We are tempted to grasp at a bauble now, rather than receive the complete fullness of God’s promises then.

If only Achan had set his eyes on the ultimate prize he would have avoided this trouble. If only we would set our eyes on the ultimate prize we too could avoid trouble.

Yet Achan brought trouble on himself and all of Israel by his sin. The valley where he was executed was indeed called the Valley of Achor, meaning the Valley of Trouble.

And just as a heap of stones of remembrance had been raised when the people crossed the Jordan into the land (Joshua 4), so too a heap of stones of remembrance were raised over Achan and all he had in this chapter.

Salvation and judgement side by side. They are two side of God’s coin.

Which is the same for us today, indeed how much more, given we have the fulfilment of the promise.

So the antidote to the coveting, lying and stealing, and indeed the eventual refusal to give God glory? The way we can kill off the sin that would so easily be killing us?

Try harder? Do more? Grit your teeth? No. These will only work for so long. Eventually the lure will return.

We must do what Thomas Chalmers said, and expel that old affection with a new and deeper one.

We will only counter the allure of those baubles that we so easily hide in the tents of our hearts with an ever deepening discovery of the riches of the treasures of Christ.

Their grip on our lives will only be loosened once we realise the true treasures of grace that our God has stored up for us in Christ. Not merely cities, houses, wells, vineyards and olive trees. Such treasures are ephemeral.

The treasures of God are deeper and richer than even the Promised Land: A righteousness we did not earn; a position with Christ we could not attain, a freedom from sin that we could not achieve, a power in the Spirit to conquer sin we could not purchase. This is the true grace of God’s glory.

My own heart is covetous. That much I know. But I don’t want to be too easily pleased. It is only as I lean into these truths of grace that the tent of my heart is swept clean of idols.

Let’s refuse to settle for any alluring shiny cloak, or gold and silver. Let’s ensure that we reach the Promised Land.

It’s a year ago this week since the murder of Charlie Kirk.

And 25 years ago this week since the Twin Towers were destroyed by Muslim terrorists.

I put that last line in there deliberately because I’ve seen a lot of articles that talk about the Twin Towers “falling”. As like “London Bridge is Falling Down”. I mean, how on earth did that happen?

But this second week in September is a big week in terms of recent history. A lot going on.

It’s been a busy twenty five years, no more than in this week. But the one thing that I want to note about both of those events - the towers and Kirk - was the deep celebration that occurred.

The more progressive news agencies in 2001 were busy trying to shut down the video clips of people across the Middle East celebrating and whooping and hollering at the deaths of more than 3000 people in the towers.

It was unsightly. Unseemly. But at least it was overseas. Better we not show it so that liberal Americans don’t get the “ick” about progressive politics.

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“Our Father in heaven”.

What an amazing blend of sovereignty (Heaven is God’s place of unrivalled rule and reign and righteousness), and intimacy (that our God is that close to us!).

My father has been dead almost a decade, and it wasn’t an amazing relationship - indeed it was primarily an absent relationship -, though we loved each other deeply by the end.

But his own father - my grandfather - was no saint - a hard drinking, womanising Belfast shipyard worker.

I wonder how Dad experienced that? Dad was a mummy’s boy, - my grandmother’s “wee Raymond”, the youngest of a whole older brood some of whom survived him and some of whom died in childbirth.

I am fairly sure his father never told him that he loved him. That would not be an Ulster thing to do.

Yet love him he must have. Indeed my dad’s father dropped dead helping he and my mother move house as newly weds. He was holding one end of the couch. And then he wasn’t.

My mum tripped over his body as she came rushing out of the apartment elevator having been alerted by shouts. As an aside, my mum never knew her dad either. Mum - conceived out of wedlock - was fostered out the day she was born and her dad had fled her mother for another woman within the year.

Dad’s dad had died as an unbeliever, never knowing or longing for the Heavenly Father.

In a slightly bitter twist my own father also died the day that Jill and I moved house. Yet by that stage my dad was trusting his Heavenly Father.

I still remember the phone call I received from the aged care facility, after I’d sat up most of the night with him, placing a dampened cotton tip on his dry lips from time to time. I left late.

The next morning I was rushing to get a key handed in - our keys from our family home of 17 years - before hopefully heading off to the hospital again for a last goodbye.

Too late.

“Mr Raymond has died in the night,” said the lovely, kind Nigerian voice on the other end of the phone.

And that was it. Gone. But finally with a Father who loved him and expressed that most fully in the death of his own Son.

Which is a reminder that dad too needed the sovereign rule and intimate relationship of God, and indeed longed for it. And maybe the mistakes he made in his life were partly driven by that search.

So despite the gap between us, we both long for and need the same thing - the love of the Father.

Which should just soften us all a little bit as we either rejoice in, or perhaps lament, our fathers today. Our Heavenly Father knows our needs, cares for us, and should I drop dead moving house for my son (hope these things don’t come in threes!) he will welcome me with open arms.

Football and Church

The Sydney Swans saga bears many similarities to church organisations in which the public reality is far from the private reality.

When the gap between public and private becomes too wide, trouble is coming. They didn’t (as the train platform announcer constantly warns us) mind the gap!

The Sydney Swans’ fatal flaw was the same fatal flaw that local parachurch organisations or particular church leaderships can exhibit. They don’t differ in direction, merely degree.

While the immediate story for the Swans is that of immoral and possibly illegal behaviour, their ongoing saga will be the uncovering of the now-obvious gap between the projected image of the club and the personal behaviour of its players.

And then what to do about it. Whatever they do, it will cost. Trust and reputation are hard and slow to grow, and quick and easy to lose. It will cost money, bums on seats, players, finals footy. These things tend to unravel.

Sadly it’s seems it was gap that many within the club knew existed. Yet they sailed on blithely. Perhaps they forgot that while the chances of being caught were small, the consequences of being caught were huge.

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You know what a “black swan” event is, don’t you? It’s something that comes out of nowhere, couldn’t have been predicted, and for which there is no precedent.

Think COVID, or since we all know of the Black Plague, think of the government responses to COVID. That was a “black swan” event.

Well, the very public alleged sexual abuse scandal at the Sydney Swans AFL club is being pitched as a “black swan” event.

Feathers are flying, and are indeed ruffled, as coaches and administrators with five o’clock stubble and slept-in polo tees front the media, declaring they are “Shocked, shocked I tell you!” by the news.

News that players, still in the throes of a finals season are allegedly snorting drugs off the butts of naked lap dancers. At 4am. In a hotel. Posing as tradies.

Actually all of that bit is okay, apparently, because the real concern, and it is one, is that the lap dancers were sexually assaulted.

But the regular football season is over now, so barring that last paragraph, it’s naked lap dancers in AFL clubs (behind closed doors and with heaps of consent obviously) from 50m out for the foreseeable future.

Am I being too harsh? Oh please! Does anyone think it is otherwise? You may want to tell yourself it’s not true. But ask yourself: Do you think it happens less in 2026 compared to 1976, or do you just think clubs have become more adept at covering it up and projecting a different image?

Which really means that what happened in the jock-ified world of AFL muscle and tight shorts the other night was not so much a “black swan” event as a “red swan” event. This time brand billboard slipped and a bunch of red-faced players were caught standing behind it red-handed with their red pants down.

The Sydney Swans just got caught. This time. Other times they have not been caught. Just like every other club. This behaviour is surely long-established in the AFL world.

Isaac Heeney was not chatting with his team mates:

“Look, hear me out. Writing these children’s books about footy isn’t doing it for me this week. How about we get plastered, consume a whole bunch of drugs and invite naked lap dancers over to our hotel at 4am? The kids’ books will have to wait until next week.”

That big a leap would win him the Mark of the Year. No, it’s just something that on other occasions he - and his teammates - have likely gotten away with. The gap between his public persona and his private actions grew to the point that it became an uncrossable chasm.

And like all such gaps, they’re incremental and they fool us into thinking we can leap back anytime we like. Anytime. Just not now.

Here’s a definition - a fairly long one - of a “red swan” event in the world of competitive elite sport across the Western world. Because let’s face it, this is not an Australian, or even an AFL issue, it’s an elite sports issue. And it’s the result of what we can call “the commodification of virtue” that will get bums on seats, merchandise out the door, and diverse and loyal membership through the roof.

“A red swan event is when the gap between how the players at an elite club actually behave when off-camera, and the attitudes they actually hold, and actions they exhibit - especially towards women - contra the public image that a club wishes to convey both about its club and the pin-up boys (and sometimes, though rarely, the women) who take the field/pitch/court.”

Writing in The Age newspaper, football journalist Malcolm Knox made this prescient observation:

When “culture” is turned into a commodity that is successfully financialised, it soon ceases to be a culture in any real sense; it’s a product, and its weak point is that its saleable goods, humans, are not widgets or soup tins. The manufacturing processes of the “football industry” haven’t got these products; it’s family, school, friends, inherited and learnt attitudes, sudden celebrity, the hot mess of life that makes young men.

Which means its weak point are the very people who can make or break you. Which is why the clubs strive so hard to paper over the cracks. Hey look at our commitment to the queer community? Who wants to hear what we think about indigenous matters?

Which is another way of saying “We no longer fiddle around with the baser issues and instincts of the common person. We sit aloft the totem of virtue and offer our vision of human flourishing to everyone else.”

It’s a crock right? And we all know it, yet we all play it. We all know it because once the leash is loosed in these football clubs (Mad Monday, after the regular season is finished, anyone?) the players revert to type.

Why? Because like all untamed animals, they need a leash to behave. Self-restraint is not in the game plan.

My guess is there are more than a few Mad Mondays, or Wacky Wednesdays, or even Freaky Fridays at AFL clubs that we get wind of. It’s just that when these are discovered they are kept under lock and key by the commodification machine that runs the club.

And that it is cross-club, not just the Swans, should be a given. The Swans big sin was pretending to be better. And then proving not to be.

Even yesterday with cellar dwellers Richmond, out of the finals and able to have their Mad Monday, there was a glee and a mockery of the Swans ills, with guffawing re-enactments for all to see.

No sobriety, no self-restraining understanding of how that just might look to “gen-pop”. In other words, when they were finally free to behave how they truly wanted to behave, they did.

And speaking of “gen-pop” once again we had to read the nonsense - from the Swans captain no less - that this problem of objectifying women this way is an indictment on not just the Swans players, but all men.

Yeah nice try. Because if it’s all of us, it’s actually none of us. Which goes a long way to getting you off the hook.

What nonsense. I know my long term friendship cohort. I watch my son and his friends in their lives. I look around the gentle, quiet, thoughtful, faithful men I know. And then I cast my mind back to the sports jocks at school. There was a big gap there. There still is.

Knox goes on to say:

It feels like whenever a football league puts on a show of virtue – a women’s round, an Indigenous round, a multicultural round – its primary aim has been to loosen your grip on your wallet.

Because it is a show of virtue. It is designed to loosen your grip on your wallet. The aim of a modern footy club is to signal just enough virtue across all of the carefully tested modern virtues of woke culture, while simultaneously managing a squad of spinning plates who might just come crashing the floor due to their indulged egos. And to do all that with the hope that this might result in finals football come September. And with that a cash machine.

As Knox says:

While the specific contours vary, these scandals are repetitive. Many famous sportsmen lead double lives. Administrators live on tenterhooks, fearing the truth will come out and the “culture” thing will be exposed as the sham it is.

I pity those administrators. I’m pretty sure once post-season October arrives and the various players troop off for an educational visit to Paris to explore the latest post-modern installation at the Louvre, the management team wipes its collective fevered brow and relaxes for a few seconds.

Then with the clubrooms empty, the smell of Voltaire still lingering, they holler a shout of relief, break out the hard shots, text the local dealer’s number given to them by their champion wingman, and get on the blower to the local Gentleman’s Club to find some lap dancers.

I mean, why not? If they can never close the gap in one direction, they might as well close it in the other.

This one caught me by surprise: In the past two years as my son has reached the age of 18, I have struggled with figuring out how to “dad” him well in this time of his life.

He’s not off the rails, he’s kind, he’s quietish, and he’s at that point in his life where, as with all young adults, he is looking to individuate.

But I’ve felt a bit becalmed in some of the more complex times I have felt backward in coming forward with direction or advice for him.

And here’s why: I have nothing in my memory bank of how my own father “dadded” me when I was in that just-finished-school period of my life.

Why? Because my dad left when I was just finished school. He was gone during an important pivot point.

I don’t have that reflexive “What would my dad have done?” Or more to the point, “What did my dad do?”

Well apart from leave the family (don’t worry we have sorted this out and forgiveness and restoration took place before he died), I don’t have much to go on!

I want to lean into the positive patterns my father laid down (or perhaps even negatively as is often the case for the Gen X types such as myself) lean away from the negative patterns.

But there’s nothing there. So I feel a bit like it’s flying solo.

Of course I have a daughter and she is now 25 and a complete delight. But a daughter was a different experience. For my son, I’m making stuff up on the fly because nothing was passed on to me by my dad.

This is not a pity party. It’s a way of saying that many men my age (I’m 60 next year and an older Gen X), have had the same discombobulating experience. How do we “dad” during the pivot points of our sons’ lives?

It would appear with the number of young men - 18-25 - seeking solace in Stoicism or Jordan Peterson, that there is a deficit in their lives too. Happy for them to go to those places for advice.

Not so happy when they turn to the Nick Fuentes of this world, or even the Tucker Carlsons - who himself is proving less of a dad and more a crazy uncle sitting in the corner chair foaming obscenities at various passersby.

Many more young men are reaching the pivot points in life without a father (or else they have two mothers) and it is taking a chunk out of them. They’re either becalmed or misbehaving.

Of course this is an opportunity for the church as the household of God to think through how it might get alongside such young men. Can the older men in the church take the younger under the wing at times such as this?

We read the household codes in the New Testament about how redeemed relationships work. Titus 2:2 states:

“Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.”

But younger men won’t learn those things by osmosis. Left with a vacuum that many of them are experiencing, other things will fill that void. The online world is not particularly sober-minded, dignified or self-controlled.

Older men - if you want to see the generation of lost boys take the baton from you, then you might need to lean in a little more.

What about inviting young men who have never had a meal around a table, to have a meal around your table, with your family? Model that life to them. Show them the mini-sacrifices, mini-agitations, mini-sanctification moments that no “Tidy Your Room!” moment can actually do.

What about meeting with the older men at church and establishing relationships with the younger men that go beyond the men’s breakfast twice a year at church? Put together an inventory of who you can pray for, who you can meet up with, who you can help with the life skills that you have.

TO be honest, you can do that even for those young men who do have good, available dads. We don’t have all of the gifts. Share them around and ensure a well-rounded cohort of next generation Christian young men.

I thank God for the older men who did input into my life during my self-declared “lost years” (18-25). I think of the older Dutch man (a friend of a school friend), who though not a Christian, helped me learn to drive, and encouraged me.

I think of one or two other men who always checked in with a phone call, or chatted with me after church to see how I was tracking.

I don’t want the father-absence, and the long tail of consequences it brings, to be the new normal in the lives of young men. Sometimes we don’t truly know what we are missing until it is recovered.

I believe that as the church leans into this pressing cultural issue, and at a time when the default position of the secular world is that young men start off in deficit mode (toxic masculinity until proven otherwise), we will begin to make a difference.

If you’re an Australian perhaps you have seen the article in The Australian newspaper yesterday co-authored by Sydney Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raffel (a long term gospel friend of mine), and Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton, Chief Minister of the Greater Synagogue of Sydney, as they advocate for multiculturalism in Australia.

They were jointly writing in response to the rise - and rise (though it may ultimately prove to be a soufflé) - of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. Their critique was in her recent desire for Australia to have a “monoculture” - a comment that has been jumped upon by all and sundry. Generally in horror, I might add.

But I am not sure that Pauline’s version of mono-culturalism is all that removed from the Archbishop’s and the co-authoring Rabbi’s version of multiculturalism.

No, no, hear me out. I think that she misunderstands the word, and misused it, and that the article misunderstands Pauline.

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One of the most telling admissions in Christian communities that have crashed and burned due to influential but unhealthy leadership is just how intoxicating it is to have high level access to that leader.

The proximity is exhilarating. Intoxicating. Lots of words with “x’s” in them! And that proximity is like crack cocaine. Once you get a taste for it, it’s very hard to wean yourself off it.

Having been involved in the spectacular flare out of a major leader in a UK and US network (it made the front page of Christianity Today), I have seen first hand what this intoxication does to people.

And to be frank, I was almost there myself. And to be more frank, it’s extremely unhealthy and leads to all sorts of spiritual problems, while itself being the result of all sorts of spiritual problems.

For all of our talk about not finding our identity in the opinions of others, especially of others who we admire, the Christian church has been just as susceptible to this as the world has been.

This struck me whilst reading Evan Barker’s best-selling book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which details Evan’s life as a fund-raising guru in the US’s Democrat party.

Her documentation of what the private power behind the public politics looks like is a riveting read. And in the end she stepped away from it. Her decision to step away went viral on TikTok after the 2024 Democratic National Convention in the lead up to the last presidential election, when Kamala Harris was anointed the nominee.

It’s a thoroughly political book by a working class girl made good (it has some Hillbilly Elegy echoes). But it’s what she says about the proximity to the powerful and the famous that rings true for the C-list fame and power of the Christian world.

Here’s what Evan says after working with perpetual Presidential contestant, the famously curmudgeon socialist, Bernie Sanders:

It was also exhilarating to be inside the bubble for a day. The “bubble” is the name I made up for the energy vortex that surrounds someone with extreme power and fame. The feeling inside the bubble is unreal and can be totally intoxicating, even addictive. The world opens. Like life lived in the eye of the storm; a window into something otherworldly.

The energy vortex. The way YOU make me feel! She goes on:

The bubble imprints a feeling on your memory forever making every day outside the bubble dull and ordinary. It’s a blessing, but mostly a curse. I’ll never forget following Bernie in the rope line after his speech. The crowd was roaring … As we got near the end of the crowd, a woman I had known in college saw me standing there with her icon, and she let out a very loud, audible gasp, completely taken aback to see me in the entourage.

You can feel that in your bones, can’t you?

Of course very few Christian leaders are as famous as Bernie Sanders. Granted some are, but the C through to Q list celebrity culture of Christianity in the modern world does something similar.

I well remember how people jockeyed for position around the leader in the network I was involved with. I well remember the feeling of having favour bestowed, or watching the uncertainty of those who had had it withdrawn for some real or imagined sin.

And I well remember how people who found themselves in the inner circle – the bubble – would go as far as joining in the very “gospel-oriented slandering” of those who had fallen out of the bubble.

And boy, did I feel the lure of it. I could see what was happening, but the bubble, and the proximity and approval it elicits from someone who is a someone in the church scene, is alluring.

If we don’t admit to the fact that this could happen to us, we are in danger of having an untested virtue truly tested one day, and come up wanting.

In this church setting, and it’s true of all church settings which are curated by highly controlling, but persuasive personalities, here was a sense that one could maintain their own position two ways: First by being really, really good. And second, by pointing out how really really bad someone else was. Or at least affirming the leader’s viewpoint on that matter.

And all of this was not simply a matter of political alignment, but of gospel fidelity. That’s what makes church settings that have such bubbles around their charismatic leaders so toxic to people’s wellbeing. This is not just about politics in this age. This is about our eternal destinies.

And time and time again, having spoken to many people who have been crushed by terrible leaders in churches, leaders who garnered power and adulation from their followers, the pattern has been the same.

There is a sense that the approval of the leader of the church group that you belong to is almost, if not more, tangible and real than the approval of the Lord Jesus who has placed you in the church (and, incidentally, who you are in complete proximity with by the power of the Spirit joining you in union to Christ in heavenly places).

Evan Barker’s words hit me hard, not because they seem so unusual to the experience of too many wings of the modern evangelical church, but because they feel so familiar.

Once you get a taste for life in the bubble, as Evan Barker says, anything less is dull and ordinary. Yet what makes anything less much worse in a church setting is that so often the lesser is accompanied by a jettisoning from the Christian community in toto.

Our own experience of leaving the church setting in which this bubble existed, was devastating. Once you leave not only the bubble, but the ecosystem surrounding it, it is as if you – Titanic-like – have sunk beneath the quiet waves and been forgotten forever.

When the whole church system exploded, it was surprising and dismaying how many people contacted my wife and I, people we never knew, who had been in the same church system before us or after us, and none of us had heard of each other. That’s the standard routine.

The repair work required afterwards is often painful and revealing. It was for us. It was for me. One of the big questions I had to ask myself was why I was so susceptible to this lure, and to the allure of it all. What was it about me that seemed to require the approval of, and the proximity to, someone whose way of treating those who fell afoul of him was to cut them off completely?

Why would that be something I feared happening to me? While I saw that it was a less-than-godly response, it was the visceral feeling it emoted from me that most required answers. I am just glad that we were not in the setting long enough to test my own untested virtues.

Would I have treated others who were outside the bubble as shamefully as others did? Would my life has been as wrecked as the lives of those who, once jettisoned, found their lives and relationships shattered by what had happened?

Evan Barker’s brave decision to walk away was confirmed by the joy she found in her newborn son. She looked at the bubble once again and realised it was shallow and hollow:

Where there was once bitterness from my years in politics, I felt love for him. Where I was once hard and fierce in my handling of others, I became soft and more understanding. My son’s silky blond hair and sweet smile melted my heart each day; I honestly got lost in caring for him, finding pure joy in being his mom. It was so much more fulfilling that being yelled at by politicians all day, or hunting rich people, shaking them down of their money, caught in a never-ending game of status and power.

Barker is talking about what Puritan preacher Thomas Chalmers called, the “expulsive power of a new affection” – that memorable framing of what something more lovely does to something less lovely in your life: it pushes it out by love. What she had once held on to for fear of what she might lose – the intoxicating bubble – , was overcome by what she had gained – an intoxicating “bubba”!

If you’re a Christian in the same situation as Evan Barker was, or that I sailed close to the edge of, and you’re feeling life is dull and ordinary – or worse – completely wretched, let me encourage you that the expulsive power of a new affection is your hope.

When you come to realise – and it may be a long, painful realisation steeped in weepy prayers- , that the Lord Jesus had star power and fame beyond anything Bernie Sanders could come close to. The bubble around him in heaven was one of constant praise since eternity past.

Yet he gave that up and became despised, rejected forsaken. Why? In order that we might sit with him in heavenly places, high above all authorities. And we, fully accepted, never to be cast out our rejected, have an access and proximity to the Lord Jesus that even the angels will – like Evan Barker’s former college friend – utter loud, audible gasps about into eternity future.

By now every self-identifying male human and their fur-baby will have heard about the scandal at Cambridge University, involving one of their professors, Jason Arday.

And not just any professor, but a real life example of how those who have ticked every victim box in the Western Hemisphere (and then some) came to resign, having been accused not just of plagiarism in his PhD but of actually making up data, of being a fantasist about his life (running 600miles in six days, being in a coma for weeks etc, etc, many other etcs,), of being tenured at universities that have no knowledge of his presence, of writing and publishing a book that was not published (though it may have been written but by who is not clear), of having to go to the police because a pig’s head was sent to his address (the police have no knowledge of it), and having climbed Everest.

Okay, I made that last one up, because the memes have been relentless. Relentless and cruel. The rest of what I wrote above is true however. I left it to marinade in one long paragraph simply to add weight to the fact that there was so much Walter Mitty about this man’s life that it’s hard to know where truth ended and deceit began.

Yet I doubt even he even knows anymore, so much smoke was blown up him by those who should have known better.

Professor Arday is now ex-professor Arday, having resigned due the pressure, and no doubt to the inevitable scrutiny all of his work is now going to receive.

Cambridge University must be relieved. Relieved and possibly ashamed. It’s as if every cynical decision, every determined decision, every diabolical decision to rewrite the sociological framework of the West that they had ever coveted, by anointing Arday the youngest every professor in their history, has been undermined in one fell swoop.

And a good thing too. I hope they are ashamed. I hope it undermines Cambridge. Or re-undermines Cambridge. Why re-undermined? Because Cambridge had already been undermined. The long march through the institutions was seeing to that.

The classical and Christian foundations that built Cambridge had already been undermined and replaced by the putrid foundations of various Critical Theories, sociological neo-Marxist gobbledygook, and the like.

What it needs is a a good re-undermining and a re-filling with some substantial foundations would go a long way to re-establishing Cambridge’s tottering reputation at this point.

Don’t hold your breath though. This is the age of scapegoats after all, and Jason Arday - the once hero who had intellectual palm branches laid before his feet on his march to the professorship - , now finds himself bearing his cross to a particularly lonely Golgotha.

Everyone else is abandoning their erstwhile saviour. No one else will lose their jobs. They will drift away, scatter and deny. Those who were signing their names just last week are now washing the ink-stains from their hands this week.

Which is a pity. Jason Arday is now a rejected academic, and the laughing stock of all of those who were, rightly, appalled at the hard Left’s push to eulogise someone whose main talent was around his identity and experience.

I worry for him. I was speaking with my twin brother yesterday, a senior academic at a major Australian university, and we expressed concern to each other over how this might affect his mental state. Surely there is a time to dial down the glee? I don’t want his career death to be the precursor to his actual death. Time to back off people.

Yet what about the mental state of the Times Higher Education journalist, Jack Grove, who had pressed him on several of his claims and on suspected plagiarism? For that noble work Grove was subject to disgraceful police harassment.

What about the mental state of those students of Arlay’s who were fobbed off by their professor when seeking better supervision, only to be told - wrongly as it turns out - that they were well on track to good marks and didn’t need any more supervision?

What about the mental state of students who asked for a different supervisor because of Arlay’s poor record and were accused of racism?

These harassments and rejections of clear problems are simple proof of the soft-totalitarianism that the likes of Cambridge have switched into these days.

Mind you, when it comes to totalitarianism, they’ve got form. This comes after Cambridge’s long history of having cuckolded hard totalitarianism in the form of too many ex-students ending up as Soviet double agents back in the 1930s.

But I do worry about Arday now. It’s time to back off and give him breathing room. This is a man whose whole life has been exposed and held up for ridicule. Does he deserve to be a professor at Cambridge? Undoubtedly no. Does he deserve to be shredded publicly, hilariously and frequently day in and day out? Also undoubtedly no.

As a Christian I believe that the level of exposure he experienced is a mere foretaste of the level of exposure we will all face before the Judge of all the earth one day. We should be sobered at the manner in which his life fell apart so quickly and his misdemeanours were revealed so readily. That will be all of us one day!

But the system that allowed this to happen to him does deserve to be shredded and mocked. The people who turned a blind eye to what now seems obvious, because of their ideological commitment to a deeply incoherent, nay, wicked, view of the world, will continue as if Jason Arday never existed.

The cancellers cancel their own. It’s brutal. If you want to know where that brutal cancellation springs from, then watch that stunning movie about the Soviet Empire’s treatment of its own heroes, Burnt By The Sun. It’s one of the most devastating stories you will ever view. And after that, just for a (very nervous) laugh, watch The Death of Stalin.

What we won’t see from our woke Left university departments is any deep reassessment and reflection from those who are the gatekeepers of the sociology departments of our various universities. The ideological capture, so total and so totalising, must not admit a chink in its armour.

The same woke Left will rewrite this narrative because that’s what the woke Left does. This is the same woke Left that reframed the refusal of two conservative Muslim-majority states refuse port-entry to a gay cruise ship as evidence of Trump’s right wing reach across the world. You say white I say Black. You say black, I say whiteness.

Already we see rewritings of the narrative, and that somehow the glee from the conservative side of the chamber is part of the problem. Maybe. But perhaps it’s a case of Schadenfreude.

After all, Arday only had to leave campus on foot, Charlie Kirk was carried out in a body bag, and the glee was palpable from the very halls of these same ivy-clad institutions

What we need in the coming years is a sober-mindedness that is all too rare, and an determination to either cut off the lifeblood of the cynical theories that are paid in money and tenure to divide us along race, religion and gender.

And if that cannot be done, if the money tap is too tightly turned on, if the gatekeepers are too busy welding the gates shut to conservative voices, then perhaps it’s time to work at building new institutions.

Or at the very least classical departments in somewhat sympathetic institutions who firewall those departments from the neo-Marxist sulphurous flames. If you don’t know what I mean, then check out the excellent Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) at Australian Catholic University, led by the exceptional Dr Sarah Irving-Stonebraker.

The barbarians may be within the gates, but the likes of the Western Civilisation program means that, like St Benedict back in the day, a repository of truth and deep learning is still being protected, one that refuses to divide the world using the identity markers of just about every other university humanities department in the West.

Dr Irving-Stonebraker is the real deal - she topped the New South Wales university entrance exams in the late 1990s.

Oh, and you can read about that here, just in case you might think a historian of her ability would rewrite history in the way Arday has done.

I look forward to her students striding the stage of our world in coming years, and making a real difference. In a just world they ought to look forward to shining careers, though if Cambridge manages to shake this thing off too quickly and resume normal services, it won’t be easy. But no noble task ever was.

And Arday? His career is over and his reputation ruined. Which seems sad, and sobering for someone who is only 41. Perhaps Cambridge, in its eagerness to extol Arday, might, instead of now expunging him from its annals, learn from its mistakes, humble itself and take its licks.

Maybe there is a second chance for him, and an academic career somewhere, even if not at Cambridge. Perhaps he can return more soberly and gingerly, with a dose of humility. Maybe someone - someone from the Right - could get alongside him and help him along. He’s clearly got some gifts, otherwise he would not have gotten anywhere.

Personally I would like to see that. If there’s one thing Western Civilisation gave us that the neo-Marxist cancel culture does not have, it’s repentance, forgiveness and restoration. And those are undeserved gifts that Jason Arday desperately needs a whole lot of.

Or to change the metaphor - what we are seeing is the five-yearly arm wrestle between the theists and the non-theists for supremacy over our national narrative: Who we are and who do we wish to be?

The key push by the humanists and atheist organisations in Australia is to ensure that people who don’t have any religious affiliation tick the top box “NO Religion”.

Their recent campaigns have been super effective. The highly memorable slogan touched a nerve with many casually non-religious Australians over the past decade.

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