HOW urgent is the need of Christian revival in the West was explored this month at Pusey House, Oxford, by a conference that heard warnings of civilisational collapse.
Confrontations with Islam and the “weirding” effect of digital media were among the conditions discussed. Doubt was cast on the ability of the Church of England to rise to the challenge.
The event, “Christian Revival: Our post-liberal hope?”, was held in partnership with the Danube Institute, a conservative Budapest think tank that promotes civic nationalism.
Mary Harrington, the author of Feminism Against Progress, offered cautionary notes in her opening talk. “I get the impression sometimes that when people talk wistfully about re-enchantment — or perhaps hopefully — what they mean is polite, secular modernity, except everyone goes to church and you can quote the Bible in Parliament,” she said.
“They don’t mean blasphemy laws. They don’t mean witches using the internet to hex Charlie Kirk, and congregations creating AI effigies of him after his assassination. They definitely don’t mean dispensationalists having a hand in Middle East policy. This really isn’t the re-enchantment I ordered. It’s too violent. It’s too tribal. It’s too existential.
“We are used to Muslims who would die for their faith,” she said. “My hunch is that many of us here would get a little bit nervous if working-class English men started saying they would die for Jesus in any great number, and actually I do think this is coming.”
Her talk focused on the end of the print age, and the far-reaching consequences of living in a digital age, in which long-form deep reading — “constitutive of rationalism, objectivity, and even the basic predicates of citizenship” — was being replaced by non-linear forms of media consumption, including short-form video, producing what the writer Venkatesh Rao has called “the Great Weirding”.
Many were turning to the Church “amid these riptides of strangeness”, she said. “In some cases, I know personally people have had encounters with internet phenomena so uncanny that they concluded that it’s best to take refuge in a community that will take you seriously, and offer to help if you feel haunted.”
Christianity was “perhaps the one world-view that has both the fluidity and universality to help us navigate the new tribalism”, she suggested. But new converts sought a “mysterious” Christianity, and it was possible that “people who stayed Christian even through the not-mysterious times are really not going to like this.”
Rod Dreher, a director at the Danube Institute, and the author of Living in Wonder: Finding mystery and meaning in a secular age (Books, 25 April 2025), spoke of the need to help young people “badly burned by the Occult. . . They know that the Church is the only thing that can protect them and give them strength against this sort of thing.”
Esmé Partridge, a researcher at Theos, made the case for “Cosmic Christianity: A vision of faith that is unapologetically metaphysical.” This would appeal, she argued, to young people’s interest in “notions of an inherent purpose and providence within creation”, evident in the popularity of astrology.
The psychiatrist and philosopher Dr Iain McGilchrist decried reductive materialism as a “morally bankrupt and intellectually simplistic philosophy”. Britain had been living in the “afterglow of Christianity”, but the “customary decencies we took for granted” were falling away, he said.
An individual “spiritual approach” would not suffice in response to this crisis, he suggested. “If this civilisation is to be saved — and we all know how urgent that need is — there must be more: nothing less than a return to the place of the Christian tradition at the core of life, daily life.” The Church offered a “treasure house of embodied meaning that our souls can turn to for sustenance”.
Dr Nicholas Naquin, an author, army veteran, and Fellow of the Danube Institute, spoke of an era that “involves the collapse of almost everything all at once. . .
“What’s coming next will be more spiritual. The the big question is: Can Christianity recover enough authentic spirit to combat Islam?”
In the post-Napoleonic era, the Christian faith had been “radically feminised”, he said. “In the Latin world, you never see men below a particular age in church.”
Raymond Ibrahim, another Fellow of the Danube Institute, was introduced as “one of the most outspoken and informed critics of Islam in the world today”. Islam in the West and the UK was “a symptom of essentially the weakening or the dying of Christianity in the West”, he said. Christianity in the region had adopted a “materialist paradigm, not unlike atheists and secularists”, jettisoning the faith’s “metaphysical aspect” and failing to confront “what used to be the greatest evils”, including sexual sin.
“Islam brings a traditional worldview . . . and it’s confident,” he said. “Doormat Christianity’s not going to stand up against Islam, and that’s what we are seeing.”
The place of Islam was a recurrent theme at the conference; some speakers suggested that the conversion of Muslims should be a priority.
David Oldroyd-Bolt, a journalist and another Institute Fellow, spoke of a Christian revival dominated by “young bearded men in ill-fitting suits who spend all their time online rather than going to church”, and who used AI-generated imagery of “extraordinarily large men on extraordinarily large horses going through the Middle East carrying the cross of St George.” There was “very little in there again about the Gospels”, he said.
“If it is purely a form of ethno-nationalism dressed up as Christianity, in order to make it more palatable for the voting class, then it is as dangerous as its corollary in Islam. And we should not be, on the Right, worried about pointing this out, merely because they happen to be Christian.”
There was hope to be found in the fact that such converts were still being formed in the faith, he said. But they did not expect the Church of England to play a “great role” in this. “As far as a majority of young men on the Right are concerned, it is an insipid milequetoast gynocracy offering them absolutely nothing but derision. Those from a working-class background are looked down upon for social grounds, and those of more educated backgrounds are either considered to be class traitors or simply fascists.”
To shore up a “full-blooded Christian revival” entailed “telling people it is OK to believe these things about our history which have been under attack for the last 30 years. It’s okay to believe the British Empire was not a complete travesty. . .
“But, at the same time, you still have to go to church. . . You have to understand that, for the last 200 years, we’ve lived in a religiously plural society. . . Rejuvenating Christianity does not mean the suppression of other creeds and faiths: it means that they must understand their place in the hierarchy. I think that’s a fairly standard British message.”
Responding, Dr Graham Tomlin, director of the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace and a former Bishop of Kensington, defended the breadth and health of the Church of England, but acknowledged the presence of “this sort of general cultural Christianity, where you like Christian carols and going to Handel’s Messiah at Christmas, and get your kids baptised in the church, and that’s basically as far as it goes, and it’s got nothing to offer a secularising or paganising or Islamising society.”
The Church could be “captivated sometimes by a very middle-class Christianity”, and “not very comfortable with people who want to put flags on lampposts who are uneasy about the drift to the secular. . . That’s something we need to repent of.” There could be a “sucking of teeth and clutching of pearls” about such flags. “Maybe that’s the beginning of a genuine working-class revival.”
Other speakers emphasised the strength of the Established Church. In the midst of a “frightening absence of a shared discourse narrative or understanding of the world” at the heart of the national discourse, the Church was “uniquely trusted to hold the ring” and to be “self-consciously supportive of other faith groups in the UK”, the Rector of St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, the Revd Marcus Walker, said. But, to play this part, it must hold on to its own centre: “A deep commitment to Christ, and a love and affection for the way in which Christ has been worshipped here in this country organically by our Church in our particular way.”
Among those offering a European perspective was the Roman Catholic Danish theologian Iben Thranholm, who identified two groups present in the Christian revival: one comprised political activists who had “rediscovered Christianity in the defence of Western civilisation” (“less about belief, more about heritage, borders, and cohesion”); the second, quieter group, mainly consisted of Generation Z, who were “searching for the truth, transcendence, clarity, and substance”.
“We have to resist the temptation right now to immediately turn the revival into a new political programme, because that is actually secular thinking,” she said. “We have to learn, now, how to go from secular thinking to what I would say is sacred thinking — to put the soul first, and not the civilisation, and not politics.
“I actually do think that God is acting, that God has taken pity on our generation, and our apostasy.”
Amid talk of political upheaval, clergy sought to elevate religious devotion. The Revd Dr Matthew Burford, of Samford University, Alabama, drew on his Baptist tradition, in which revival — at its best — “has never meant excitement or religious atmosphere. It has meant repentance, renewed responsiveness to the word of God, awakened preaching, deeper holiness, and a fresh dependence upon the work of the Holy Spirit.”
The Vicar of St Mary’s, Charlbury, the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie, pointed to the Book of Common Prayer as the English, Christian version of the pattern of public prayer practised by Muslims. “The business of prayer is all of ours,” he advised. “That will be the thing that radically changes the public sphere that brings it back into the overarching purposes of God.”
