Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it “the age of depopulation.” For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people.

With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.

Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled.

The last global depopulation was reversed by procreative power once the Black Death ran its course. This time around, a dearth of procreative power is the cause of humanity’s dwindling numbers, a first in the history of the species. A revolutionary force drives the impending depopulation: a worldwide reduction in the desire for children.

Read it all.

"For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people." Nick Eberstadt @AEI https://t.co/Ey2VpERWY5

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) October 11, 2024

According to Professor Jonathan Lanman from Queen’s University Belfast, “Our large cross-cultural surveys reveal that while many factors may influence one’s beliefs in small ways, the key factor is the extent to which one is socialised to be a theist.” He added: ‘Many other popular theories, such as intelligence, emotional stoicism, broken homes, and rebelliousness, do not stand up to empirical scrutiny.”

And Dr Lois Lee from the University of Kent commented: “The UK is entering its first atheist age. Whilst atheism has been prominent in our culture for some time – be it through Karl Marx, George Eliot, or Ricky Gervais – it is only now that atheists have begun to outnumber theists for the first time in our history.”

This is not the first obituary for Christianity. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of Christianity have been greatly exaggerated, largely because its atheist critics resent having to bow to a religion in a society that, they insist, no longer bows to God. In their eyes Christianity is a pernicious influence; at best it is a private hobby that everyone else is forced to fund….

Read it all.

In the UK, according to a recent survey, there are more atheists than people who believe in God. Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast spent three years asking why atheism has grown around the world. Is Christianity on the decline where you live?https://t.co/kjtewirOtP

— Mercator (@mercatornet) October 8, 2024

A bizarre yet intriguing story has recently gone viral on social media, involving a woman who married herself only to later divorce herself. This woman, Suellen Carey, a 36-year-old influencer and model from Brazil, gained worldwide attention last year when she made headlines for marrying herself in London after struggling with the dating scene. The unconventional act of self-marriage was initially celebrated as a bold statement of self-love and independence.

A year after her solo wedding, Suellen surprised everyone by announcing that she had decided to divorce herself. Despite her efforts to make the marriage work—including attending couple therapy sessions alone—she eventually concluded that the union was not sustainable.

Read it all.

Would she demand an alimony ir a maintenance as well? pic.twitter.com/Nng5xmh75z

— Vikrant ~ विक्रांत (@vikrantkumar) September 6, 2024

Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, said: “For the first time ever, the number of those affirming versus swearing an oath has come close to reflecting the beliefs of the population as a whole. We’ve known for a while that the UK is one of the least religious countries in the world. We now have one of the least religious national parliaments in the world, too.”

About 53 per cent of people in Britain say they belong to no religion, and 42 per cent do not believe in a god.

Chine McDonald, director of the Theos religion think tank, said: “What we see reflected here is a falling away of cultural, nostalgic Christianity and a rise in the number of options available in an increasingly diverse and multi-religious society. It’s no surprise that a younger and less conservative group of parliamentarians might be less wedded to cultural Christianity, yet there are still a good number with a vibrant and active faith.”

Read it all (requires subscription).

Record number of MPs chose to take non-religious affirmation rather than swear on a Bible or other holy text this week

Up to 40% from 24% in 2019:https://t.co/3jlvKWTYpz

— Kaya Burgess (@kayaburgess) July 12, 2024

By now it’s a cliché that liberalism in the Anglosphere has become a religion, whether or not its adherents know it. But less often remarked is a fact somewhat in tension with this claim: namely, that its worshippers get to be minor gods too, making up the moral rules themselves. The past few weeks have offered up two new case studies for us to contemplate. The first involves a married couple from the US, Malcolm and Simone Collins, described as the “poster children of the pronatalist movement”, now thrust into an even wider media spotlight courtesy of a viral Guardian interview about their lifestyle. The second is a book by political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life, published on Tuesday.

Since the article about the Collins family first emerged a fortnight ago, most scandalised public reactions have been about the fact that father-of-four Malcolm was observed slapping his toddler’s cheek in a restaurant — albeit that the reporter noted it was “not a heavy blow”. Collins said the practice was agreed with his wife beforehand and modelled on their having watched “tigers in the wild” disciplining their offspring with the swipe of a paw. (Let us hope they didn’t also see the part where an adult tiger sometimes kills a cub for food.) This week, he wrote a further defence, blaming “much of the media” for being “hell-bent on presenting pronatalists as evil and backward”. To my mind, though, Malcolm and Simone could do with being a bit more backward; for even leaving their disciplinary habits aside, they seem to constitute the reductio ad absurdum of attempts to freestyle the moral universe.

In the Collins’s world, every stage of the childrearing process is approached as if to be redesigned from scratch. For instance: the couple have given their two little girls “gender-neutral names” — Titan Invictus and Industry Americus — apparently on the grounds that this will make the girls “more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees”. The fact that future employers are bound to presume such names could only have come from a terrifyingly crazy bloodline seems to have been discounted. A further justification offered by Malcolm is that such “strong names” will predispose their owners to “a strong internal locus of control”: that is, to that inner feeling, identified by psychologists, of being fully in command of whatever happens to you in life, as opposed to a helpless passive drifter. Clearly, he hasn’t imagined having to spell “Titan Invictus” out over the phone.

Wrote for @unherd about the pronatalist Collinses, and the claim that liberalism could be a satisfying atheist religion if only we were devoted enough https://t.co/OzX9Nhzr83

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) June 7, 2024

Q. To what extent is it important for the rights of religious minorities and religious freedom what happens in these elections?

A. Since the BJP and several extremist organisations have been in power, the situation of Christians and other religious minorities, such as Muslims and Sikhs, has worsened.

Modi recently inaugurated a Hindu temple, something a religious leader should have done. His figure has been deified in a way, and his image appears as someone who is very religious, very dominant and very strong, but in reality he is very afraid.

Some have even placed Modi above the Hindu god Rama, creating images and even statues of him. There are temples in honour of Modi. This has never happened before with any prime minister.

Permits for Christians to receive donations from abroad have been cancelled and we are always accused of buying people to change their religion. In Manipur, for example, Christians are very marginalised everywhere.

Read it all.

The world’s most populated country is in the midst of a key general election. “People are afraid that there will be no more elections afterwards”, says an evangelical from India. https://t.co/hTGzbHFGV0

— Evangelical Focus (@Evan_Focus) May 14, 2024

I had not read Thielicke for many years until I recently discovered a book of his that I had never heard of: Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer. This work is stunning, for it identifies the problem at the center of our contemporary culture: a collapse in the cultural consensus about what it means to be human. The book’s context is the anthropological challenges posed by Nazism and Marxism in the twentieth century, but its argument offers insights for today.

At the heart of the problems of his day Thielicke saw the rejection of two basic principles: the idea that human beings had an end, a telos; and the notion that limits were good. In short, what it meant to be human was up for grabs. In practice, this made human beings anything that their will could achieve, given the technological possibilities available in any given time or place. And that was a key component of nihilism.

We have witnessed amazing technological advances since the 1940s. The transformation of humanity from a given, limited, teleological essence to a potency whose limits and ends are merely technical problems to be overcome is now complete (at least in the cultural imagination). Ironically, human technical brilliance has served to make human beings into nothing of any great significance. We are the only creatures on the planet who are intelligent and intentional enough to have abolished ourselves.

Read it all.

This is fantastic from @firstthingsmag https://t.co/IS26rEGPG6

— Scott Howard (@ConservaMuse) March 18, 2024

In this month’s interview, Public Discourse’s managing editor, Alexandra Davis, interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. The two discuss the development of the modern self-help movement and the less-than-desirable fruits of a culture whose consciousness has been shaped by the notion that reality is not discovered, but made.

Alexandra Davis: What initially sparked your interest in this topic?

Tara Isabella Burton: My doctoral research at Oxford was in theology, but specifically it was in the theology of Dandyism. So I was looking at nineteenth-century decadence, particularly in France, and the idea of the person who creates their life as art. I was looking at a particular nineteenth-century phenomenon, but I was particularly interested in the relationship between technological modernity and the idea of art and self-creation as something that was both seemingly a resistance to mass production and urbanization, but also very much a modern theological statement about the self vis-à-vis a natural world or a divinely created world that had meaning outside of what the self makes it. A lot of these later figures were also influenced by philosophical currents, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and so that dynamic was something that I really loved exploring.

After I finished my doctorate, I came to New York, where I’m from, started working for Vox.com as a religion journalist, and wrote my first nonfiction book, Strange Rites, which is much more about the “spiritual but not religious.” It’s more of a contemporary book. As I was thinking about what I wanted to do for a follow-up to Strange Rites, I thought about this idea that, particularly in the internet age, we think of ourselves as our own gods, we want to curate our own bespoke realities. And I realized that a lot of this historical material would be relevant to a much more contemporary story, and so that was the genesis of Self-Made.

Read it all.

https://t.co/3s6AXPhTOa As this idea of self-creation has become seen as the fundamental element of human life, that means those of us who participate more fully in self-creation are more human, and those of us who participate less fully are, in some sense, less human.

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) February 1, 2024

For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan’s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz. Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to remember.

Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.

“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation? For whom? Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an official status as a Senator for Life said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort. She wondered, not for the first time these days, if “I’ve lived in vain.”

Even as Ms. Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, rising anti-Semitism and what she considers a general climate of hate have put her in a pessimistic mood.

Read it all.

“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation?” Liliana Segre, 93, an Italian Holocaust survivor, says the rise in antisemitism has made her wonder these days if “I’ve lived in vain.” https://t.co/u9hfj0292B

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 31, 2024

There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes — even skeptics will pray when facing death. But Hancock, in the time leading up to his execution, only became more insistent about his nonbelief. He and his chaplain were both confident that there was no God who might grant last-minute salvation, if only they produced a desperate prayer. They had only one another.

The two spoke at least once a week, and sometimes multiple times a day. Mostly, they talked over the phone, and provided recordings of these conversations to The Times. Sometimes it was in person, in the prison’s fluorescently lit visitor room, over bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

During their visit the day before his execution, Hancock had seemed mostly fixated on his final meal, that one bucket of dark meat chicken.

Moss stopped his car in front of the three-story building on the prison grounds where he would spend the next hours waiting. He got out and stood still for a moment. He considered the possibility that Hancock had hope for survival, not through divine intervention but through the state’s. Gov. Kevin Stitt — who two years ago said he claimed “every square inch” of Oklahoma for Jesus Christ — could still grant clemency. He had just under three hours.

Read it all.

One year ago I began talking to an atheist chaplain, Devin Moss, who was giving spiritual care to an atheist man on death row in Oklahoma, named Phillip Hancock. I followed along as they wrestled with the question: How do you face death without God? https://t.co/kpiD9rqe4c

— Emma Goldberg (@emmabgo) January 21, 2024

Should we mourn the slow death of the traditional funeral?

The soaring cost of ceremonies and an increasingly secular society mean that fewer than half of Britons now want a funeral, according to a study this week. This raises the question, what do they want instead? The answer — which anyone who watches daytime television will surely know — is a direct cremation.

Also known as a “takeaway funeral”, the rise of a cheap, no-frills cremation with no relatives in attendance started under lockdown, but has remained enduringly popular, now accounting for nearly one in five UK deaths. Costs are kept low by using out-of-the-way crematoria, often very early in the morning before traditional ceremonies with mourners and wreaths begin.

Read it all.

The untimely death of the funeral https://t.co/cT2HaZQjGU

— Finance News (@ftfinancenews) December 2, 2023

Fewer than half (47 per cent) of respondents to a new poll say that they would like a funeral.

The poll of 2569 was commissioned by the thinktank Theos and carried out by YouGov in July. The authors of Theos’s report on the polling, Love, Grief, and Hope: Emotional responses to death and dying in the UK, Madeleine Pennington and Nathan Mladin, speak of a “significant realignment in British grieving practices”. They warn of the potential for a “significant pastoral gap left in the wake of a decline in formal funeral ceremonies”, and that funerals could become a “luxury or niche requirement for a few”….

In total, 24 per cent of respondents said that they did not want a funeral, while 28 per cent were not sure or did not know. Financial factors influenced the responses: 13 per cent of respondents who did not want a funeral said that this was because they did not have enough money saved.

The commonest response was: “I think the money could be better spent another way” (67 per cent); followed by “I don’t see the point” (55 per cent); and “I don’t want a traditional service” (43 per cent).

Read it all.

We get a lot of polling around religious affiliation and attendance. This @Theosthinktank one on public’s attitudes to death and funerals feels very significant. Fewer than half want a funeral with 55% of those who don’t citing ‘I don’t see the point’ https://t.co/C9nI2JZF54

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) November 28, 2023

Now, with antisemitism in America, historically, we’ve had several peaks. There was one in the 1890s and another in the 1930s and 1940s, but these were some of the worst times in American history. During the Great Depression, unemployment reached 25 percent. People lost faith in the American way and as they did, they lost faith in this idea that people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds could work constructively together to make it better for everyone. When we lose that, two things happen. America doesn’t work as well, and antisemitism rises. You can look at those tiki torch boys in Charlottesville back in 2017, or the people marching on campuses today and talking about death to the Jews. They share three beliefs in common: one, they make an idol of ethnic identity. For the white nationalists, if you’re not in the white pure group, you’re only a destructive influence in America, and as for the far left, if you’re white, you’re not right. Two, neither the far left or the far right believe in the promise of the American Dream—that if we follow the American Dream, it gets better for everybody. Thirdly, the far right and the far left both hate Jews. For the white nationalists, the Jews are part of the Great Replacement. For the far left, the Jews are white. They’re uber-white, even. These two groups share these three things in common, and they’re all destructive to what has historically made America work. Our enemies overseas are glad to see the far right and/or the far left rise up. It warms their cold hearts to see us ripping and tearing at each other and denying the truths that over the centuries have made us the most successful large human society in history.

BW: So what you’re saying is that when you see the swastika daubed on a school or when you hear about death threats to Jewish students at Cornell, don’t think about those things as a Jewish issue? Think about those attacks as an American issue, because societies where antisemitism is unleashed are societies that are dead?

WRM: That’s right. Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that “the Jews” control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think “the Jews” control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.

Read it all.

Are we tipping into a new world war? @wrmead reads the geopolitical tea leaves on @thehonestlypod.

Plus: @opinion_joe on Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial and @EliLake on the legacy of Frantz Fanon.

Read today’s digest by @ollywiseman: https://t.co/OOryvUvMjC

— The Free Press (@TheFP) November 1, 2023

Story number three. It is February 2023. The setting for this final act of witness is my first-ever trip to Israel under the auspices of The Philos Project.

In the Book of Matthew, Jesus asks, rhetorically, “What did you go out into the desert to see?” It’s a question that travelers to the Holy Land of any faith can only answer for themselves. But one sight that did not exist until the second half of the twentieth century should not be missed by anyone. That is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum.

Obviously, Israel is about much more than the Holocaust. To focus on Yad Vashem is not to detract from any of the country’s enormous historical, social, spiritual, cultural, or other riches. But for anyone who has been to Israel, and even more, for those who have not, to scant Yad Vashem in discussing anti-Semitism would be inexplicable. Let me cite the observation of the late British novelist Martin Amis. Amis, who was not Jewish, was once asked why his mind and work returned so often to the Holocaust. He replied by citing a German novelist, who said, because “no serious person ever thinks about anything else.”

Read it all.

"To love life as Catholics do is to love the Jews from whose roots we grew."

— @EberstadtMary, one of our speakers at @FranciscanU last week, writes on the importance of Catholic-Jewish relations in light of rising antisemitism.

Read in @firstthingsmag:https://t.co/C22ueD4Jez

— The Philos Project (@philosproject) October 28, 2023

“KIDNAPPED,” the posters say, in big block letters above pictures of people taken hostage by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, urgent reminders of the men, women and children still being held hostage in Gaza.

But on college campuses and in cities around the world in recent weeks, people have been caught tearing them down.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” a man says in a video posted on social media as he watches two young people at the University of Southern California shove wadded-up posters into the trash.

“They’re making the conflict worse,” one of the young people replies, adding, “I’m not a fan of Hamas.”

Read it all.

"Those who object to the posters have derided them as wartime propaganda. Critics of those tearing them down have characterized the act as antisemitic and lacking basic humanity." by @katierosman https://t.co/ygoLwNCjXd

— Sapna Maheshwari (@sapna) October 31, 2023

Since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas, Germany has seen a large uptick in the number of recorded antisemitism incidents, including the attempted firebombing of a Berlin synagogue and an anti-Israel riot in the German capital that led to 20 police being injured.

The Federal Association of Research and Information Centres on Anti-Semitism (Rias), has recorded 202 antisemitic incidents since the conflict between Israel and Hamas began on October 7th. The newspaper Die Welt reported that the figure is a 240% increase compared to the same period last year.

The vast majority of the incidents are anti-Israel in nature—nine in ten of those reported. Rias claimed that Israel is largely being blamed for the massacres carried out by Hamas.

In fifteen cases, residences of Jews were marked with a Star of David, evoking scenes from the 1930s when the German Nazi party’s Stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, painted Stars of David on businesses that were later targeted for attacks and boycotts.

Read it all.

🔴German Jews: ‘Berlin Synagogues Are Burning Again’

Over 200 #antisemitic incidents recorded since October 7th. #Germany https://t.co/40fMjt1eTt

— The European Conservative (@EuroConOfficial) October 19, 2023

A degree in magic being offered in 2024 will be one of the first in the UK, the University of Exeter has said.

The “innovative” MA in Magic and Occult Science has been created following a “recent surge in interest in magic”, the course leader said.

It would offering an opportunity to study the history and impact of witchcraft and magic around the world on society and science, bosses said.

The one-year programme starts in September 2024.

Read it all.

Secularism is not leading to a decrease in Religion in the West.

Degree in magic & occult science to be offered at University of Exeter – BBC News https://t.co/DoTBRN7CWO

— David Cassidy (@DPCassidyTKC) October 4, 2023

More French believe in reincarnation and less in heaven, hell, and resurrection.

A survey conducted in September 2023 by IFOP shows new trends in how people in France think about their own death, burial, and what they expect to find (or not) in another life.

According to the 1,013 people aged 18 or more that have been asked, only 31% believe in life after death, compared to 37% in 1970. Most of these (69%) identify with a certain faith, mainly Christianity.

One of the biggest changes is that more 32% of those who believe in an afterlife, believe it will be in the form or reincarnation (up from 22% in 2004). According to the survey, the typical profile of those who believe in reincarnation arepeople aged 25-34, Roman Catholics, with low income and with conservative socio-political views.

Less people believe in heaven and hell (32%, up from 30% in 1980), and resurrection (24%, down from 30% in 1980).

Read it all.

The belief in reincarnation grows among Catholics, finds a survey. The young are more anxious about death than the older generations. https://t.co/o8jbGvnUgy

— Evangelical Focus (@Evan_Focus) September 18, 2023

“People are yearning for something greater than themselves — beyond their own understanding,” said Jack Grogger, a chaplain for the Los Angeles Angels and a longtime Southern California fire captain who has aided many people in their gravest moments.

That search for something bigger, he said, can take on many forms, from following a religion to crafting a self-driven purpose to believing in, of course, angels.

“For a lot of people, angels are a lot safer to worship,” said Grogger, who also pastors a nondenominational church in Orange, California, and is a chaplain for the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks.

People turn to angels for comfort, he said. They are familiar, regularly showing up in pop culture as well as in the Bible. Comparably, worshipping Jesus is far more involved; when Grogger preaches about angels it is with the context that they are part of God’s kingdom.

American’s belief in angels (69%) is about on par with belief in heaven and the power of prayer, but bested by belief in God or a higher power (79%). Fewer U.S. adults believe in the devil or Satan (56%), astrology (34%), reincarnation (34%), and that physical things can have spiritual energies, such as plants, rivers or crystals (42%).

Read it all.

Do you believe in angels? About 7 in 10 U.S. adults do, a new AP-NORC poll shows | AP News https://t.co/ToRPGMUoUW

— James F. McGrath (@ReligionProf) July 29, 2023

“Although [Freire]’s early work was understandably rooted in an almost exclusive concern with class, many of us realized that it had theoretical shortcomings in dealing with the central issues shaping the multicultural debate,” explained Freire’s closest American collaborator, Henry Giroux. “Many of us began to expand the notion of social justice to include a discourse about racial justice. That is, justice could not be taken up solely in terms of the ownership of the means of production, or strictly around questions of labor or the division of wealth. These were very important issues, but they excluded fundamental questions about racism, colonialism, and the workings of the racial state.”

Echoing Marcuse’s redefinition of the proletariat—the white intellectuals united with the black underclass—Freire’s American disciples developed an elaborate framework for categorization and subversion of the ruling order. Their primary pedagogical strategy was to pathologize white identity, which was deemed inherently oppressive, and radicalize black identity, which was deemed inherently oppressed. In the academic literature, this technique is sometimes referred to as “revolutionary pedagogy,” “critical multiculturalism,” or “decolonization,” which entails ridding the education system of the repressive influence of “whiteness” and infusing it with the liberating influence of “blackness.”

Peter McLaren, another Freire disciple who worked in tandem with Henry Giroux, laid out the mechanics of how this new pedagogy of revolution would work in practice. American teachers and students, McLaren argued, must “[break] the imaginary power of commodified identities within capitalism” and “construct sites—provisional sites—in which new structured mobilities and tendential lines of forces can be made to suture identity to the larger problematic of social justice.”

Read it all.

Stalin once said that “the ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” and today we see his words have come to fruition. | @realchrisrufo https://t.co/DSM9ZfcPNx

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) July 18, 2023

In fact we are discovering that the decline of organised religion does not imply the eradication of human irrationality, human tribalism or the human longing for moral certainty. Astrology is — astonishingly — a booming industry. Antivaxers prosper on GB News. Among educated people there is a burgeoning faith in the existence of a quasi-spiritual “personal truth” that trumps objective reality. A fascination with apocalypse afflicts the “doomer” fringes of the climate movement and AI pessimists such as Eliezer Yudkowsky warn that the end of days is near (“everyone will die, including children”). Conspiracies such as QAnon have morphed into quasi-religions promoting visions of a child-sacrificing, blood-drinking elite that would not look out of place in a medieval Doom painting.

Fifteen years ago “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens launched gleeful attacks on religion. It turns out that what they really despised was human nature. Few are capable of living without faith of any kind. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” as TS Eliot wrote. The political theorist Samuel Goldman has proposed “the law of the conservation of religion”. All societies have a relatively constant level of religious feeling. What changes is how it is expressed.

It is no accident that the decline of religion has coincided with the outbreak of an age of secular moralising. It seems we cannot get by without the reassurance of absolute moral laws.

Read it all (subscription).

Fascinating (and admirably candid) material from @j_amesmarriott in today’s @thetimes

‘It is no accident that the decline of religion has coincided with the outbreak of an age of secular moralising. It seems we cannot get by without the reassurance of absolute moral laws.’ pic.twitter.com/2mrBpL2TkR

— Andrew Roycroft (@AndrewTRoycroft) July 13, 2023

Every society—even in the West—defines freedom differently,…[Wissam al-Saliby, advocacy officer for the WEA] continued, and the WEA must keep to an international minimum as it represents evangelical opinion. Hate speech is a significant societal problem, and the global WEA body endorses the UN-backed Rabat Plan of Action to determine when it crosses the line into incitement to violence.

The Christian minimum, however, is drawn instead from the image of God.

“Our ability to reject God and his love,” Saliby said, “establishes the absolute right of freedom of expression, religion, and the changing thereof.”

Secure in God’s love themselves, all Christians should condemn Quran burnings.

“Insulting religions does not reflect our Christian witness,” said Saliby. “Our Lord and Savior is bigger than this.”

Read it all.

“What happened in Sweden was an unwholesome use of the concept of personal freedom,” said one pastor in Baghdad. https://t.co/RyvtD1F0Nz

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) July 12, 2023

Churches dot Linwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Yet drive down a quiet road past Holy Spirit Church of Columbus and Christ Centered Apostolic Church and you’ll find an unexpected sight: a brightly colored Buddhist shrine with ornate gold accents and a pointed roof typical of Laotian architecture.

Twin red dragons guard the pathway to the shine, surrounded by reflections ponds. In the same compound is the Watlao Buddhamamakaram Buddhist temple, built in 2009 by Laotian immigrants. Inside, monks in saffron robes pray in front of golden statues of Buddha.

This Buddhist temple is a visible marker of the changing landscape of the United States. Since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended national origin quotas, the number of immigrants from Buddhist-background countries has grown drastically.

Today, Asians are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, making up 7 percent of the US population, or 22 million people. Arriving to pursue higher education or job opportunities or to escape wars and turmoil, Asians will continue moving to the US, and demographers project the community will grow to 46 million by 2060.

This trajectory means US churches and Christians will more likely encounter neighbors who are Buddhist or from a Buddhist-influenced culture, as the religion significantly influences more than a billion people worldwide. Around 500 million people practice Buddhism, most of whom live on the Asian continent. China has the largest number of Buddhists (with about 245 million adherents), while seven countries have Buddhist majorities, most in Southeast Asia.

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#Buddhism Went Mainstream Decades Ago. US Churches Still Aren’t Ready. https://t.co/ANgpoQmi1I @CTmagazine introduces new biweekly series, explaining the basics and providing pointers for outreach pic.twitter.com/1Uf28xcXbN

— Jayson Casper (@jnjcasper) March 17, 2023

When we first thought about convening a focus group of Jewish Americans, antisemitism was very much at the center of the national conversation. Kanye West’s incendiary comments about Jews had caused a media firestorm, and Donald Trump’s dinner with Ye and a prominent antisemite, Nick Fuentes, did not exactly tamp it down. We wanted to understand how antisemitism was affecting American Jews whose daily lives did not necessarily intersect with these high-profile incidents. How did they experience antisemitism in their lives, if at all? And what did it mean to them to be Jewish in America today?

We spoke with 13 Jewish Americans of different ages and political affiliations from across the country to learn how they connect to being Jewish, what they are scared of, what they are optimistic about and what they hope generations of American Jews will carry forward.

Many of the people we spoke to expressed fear about rising antisemitism, going so far as to hide their Jewish identities in certain circumstances. Several blamed Mr. Trump for the increase, though most pointed to the climate he created rather than animosity toward Jews on his part. The 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh loomed large, with some participants saying it caused them to behave differently in synagogue ever since, checking the doors for intruders. Others, though, felt that America was more accepting of Jews than ever and that their ancestors would be amazed. “I think they would be completely shocked by how successful we are,” said Joel, a 59-year-old in the group.

We held this focus group last month, before the most recent uptick of violence in Israel and the occupied territories and before the protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government swelled to include hundreds of thousands of Israelis across the country. When we asked the group about Israel, few had specific thoughts on Israeli politics or policy. Almost all of the participants, however, expressed great pride in the country. Many expressed a similar feeling of pride in and connection to being Jewish, even if they didn’t practice the religious traditions, using words like “light,” “love” and “belonging” to explain what being Jewish means to them.

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The "New York Times" did a focus group of American Jews, and there's a lot to parse here: https://t.co/9zeN7pmnB8

— Joel S. (@jh_swanson) March 7, 2023

In Britain’s Jews Freedman seems notably at ease with himself, and merely amused by the kind of contrariness and kvetching that means those working in Jewish communal organizations find “everybody else knows how to do their job better than they do, and nobody is afraid to tell them so”. The author explores everything from the plight of the “chained wives” unable to obtain a religious divorce to “the Jewish psychedelic movement” (which believes that “chemically assisted mystical encounters are a normative part of Jewish spirituality”), from the EcoSynagogue project promoting carbon neutrality to the Jewish schools in which the majority of pupils are Muslims. He cites the success of Jewish Book Week, the annual Limmud educational festival and the JW3 cultural centre on London’s Finchley Road. The last of these is modelled on the Jewish community centres that are a notable feature of American life. While British Jewish buildings “tend to be discreet, barely visible, blending in with the environment”, Freedman says, JW3 has “a large, unmissable, gaudy sign on its façade … It deliberately shouts, ‘Look at us!’ JW3’s brash building is an essential part of its brand. It wants to be noticed”.

Another theme is the way Jewish institutions now reach out well beyond their core constituency to apply “Jewish values” to broader concerns. Successive chief rabbis Immanuel Jakobovits and Jonathan Sacks were both prominent figures in wider ethical debates in the UK; although Freedman doesn’t specifically mention him in this context, the incumbent, Ephraim Mirvis, is too. The main Jewish charities no longer focus solely on relieving Jewish suffering. World Jewish Relief, for example, works in Rwanda, and its president argues that “We helped refugees in the 1930s because they were Jewish, and we help refugees today because we are Jewish”. According to Trevor Pears of the Pears Foundation, a philanthropic fund “rooted in Jewish values”, volunteers may still enjoy “gap year programmes in Israel”, but it is “just as empowering Jewishly” to “go on a fact-finding mission … to Ghana”. XR Jews, a group within Extinction Rebellion, “consider non-violent civil disobedience to be a religious duty”, Freedman reports, since “their actions in defence of the environment are rooted in the Jewish value that prioritizes the saving of life over everything else”. And the very existence of a lobbying charity called Nahamu, specifically designed to “speak out against harms systematically arising in the haredi community”, points to a “new, more open, even self-critical, attitude” among British Jews.

Even when it comes to antisemitism, Freedman suggests that “the situation is not as grim as it is sometimes portrayed”. He cites a range of views about the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, from a woman who, despite having what she describes as a “ridiculous English schoolgirl accent”, “began to feel like an alien in my own country, like the mask has been ripped away” during the recent period of Labour’s antisemitism crisis to those who believe that Corbyn was unfairly targeted by the right-wing press. Freedman clearly believes there was room for serious concern during the Corbyn years, yet he also puts a positive spin on the way Jews responded so forcefully to the perceived danger. While there has long been talk of a “Jewish vote” in the US, it was hostility to Corbyn, Freedman argues, that meant that, during the 2019 general election, “there was clear evidence of a Jewish vote” “for the first time in British history”.

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'During the 2019 general election 'there was clear evidence of a Jewish vote’ ‘for the first time in British history'.' (@MatthewReiszTHE)https://t.co/BGB4p4Xfoe

— The TLS (@TheTLS) March 3, 2023

Bush never stipulates that the rest of the world must “become like America” in so many words. How could he? The whole point of his rhetoric was to assure himself that he was at the helm of the gigantic killing machine that is the United States military not merely to protect and promote American interests, but in order to bring the blessings of liberty to every corner of the earth. The final paragraph of Bush’s introduction reveals the self-deception:

Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person—in every civilization. Throughout history, freedom has been threatened by war and terror; it has been challenged by the clashing wills of powerful states and evil designs of tyrants; and it has been tested by widespread poverty and disease. Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom’s ­triumph over all these foes. The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.

One is hard pressed to imagine a more utopian vision—freedom’s triumph over all its foes! But Bush was president of the United States, not of the world. Moreover, this document and its urgency stemmed from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. There can be no doubt that Bush was concerned for the weal and woe of Americans.

We can substitute America or American interests for the key word “freedom” in this final paragraph without altering the strategic implications. Indeed, if we make these substitutions, Bush’s words become more faithful to events. Here is my rendering in that spirit:

Being American is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person—in every civilization. Throughout history, American interests have been threatened by war and terror; they have been challenged by clashing wills of powerful states and evil designs of tyrants. . . . Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further America’s triumph over all these foes. The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission.

To speak about America in this way seems rather grandiose. But in truth, both versions, Bush’s actual words and my rendition, border on the delusional. This is perhaps to be expected. Baby Boomers were intoxicated by the fusion of hard responsibilities with the most exalted moral idealism. An intoxicated person has blurred vision and a tenuous grasp on reality, and he often makes bad judgments.

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Cursed by the Boomers by R. R. Reno | Articles | First Things https://t.co/qLylAU4XXl

— Allen Mendenhall (@allenmendenhall) February 14, 2023

Direct cremations, when the body is cremated without a service and the ashes are returned to the family, have risen in popularity in the last few years, partly because they are the cheapest option.

Janet Jones, 70, of Attleborough, Norfolk, is considering whether to book one for herself and her husband, as she wants to make sure her two children can benefit from whatever money they have left.

Janet worked for 30 years in a GP surgery and her husband Chris, who she has been married to for 50 years, worked for 33 years in a factory.

“We’ve worked all our lives and we want our children to have that money to do something to remember us in their own way,” she says….

Average funeral costs were £4,056 last year, compared to an average cost of £1,647 for direct cremations, which now account for 18% of all funerals, according to insurer SunLife.

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Andy Vermaut shares:Cost of living: 'I don't want a funeral, it's a waste of money': Cremations without a service are on the rise, but others say they need a funeral to deal with grief. https://t.co/WFVgbTRskC Thank you pic.twitter.com/LdmfDDZQyJ

— Andy Vermaut (@AndyVermaut) February 21, 2023

For the stringent materialist, everything I’ve just described is reasonable as long as it’s understood to be playacting, experience hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.

However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I’m describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness.

Yes, plenty of New Age and woo-woo practices don’t make any sense or lead only unto pyramid schemes; there are traps for the credulous all over. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age (and even sometimes to professional skeptics), makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe’s mysteries — if you’re starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.

But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it’s also important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror movie but nonetheless skated over in a lot of American spirituality: the importance of being really careful in your openness and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.

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My Wednesday column: Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful:https://t.co/zkkGJh4JPw

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 1, 2023

The census was of ‘religious attitudes‘, and not religious practice, so there was no question here about any kind of attendance. This leads to some key observations.

First, there is a large disparity between those identifying as ‘Christian’ and actual regular attendance at churches, on Sundays or midweek. C of E regular attendance is around 850,000, and (according to the work of Peter Brierley) this represents around a quarter of all attendance, which would then be 3.4 million, or just under 6% or the population. That attendance figure is a small part of the 27.5 million identifying as ‘Christian’.

(An interesting comparison is football viewing and attendance. In 2020/21, a record breaking 26.8m people or 40% of the population watched a live Premier League match at some point during the year. During football season match days, total attendance at matches of the first four divisions is 720,000—so the Christian faith is still far more popular, in terms of commitment and affiliation, than football!)

So the question is, what did people mean by saying they identified as Christian? For some, they will be aware of the heritage of Christian values which has shaped our culture—but I suspect for most, particularly those who are older, the term is effectively equivalent to ‘decent’, ‘moral’, ‘respectable’, or even ‘traditional British’.

This is very different from any reasonable working definition of ‘Christian’. In the gospels, it is clear that the core of Jesus’ message is ‘The time has come, and the kingdom of God is at hand—repent and believe the good news!’ (Mark 1.15). We might express this in contemporary terms: ‘the kingly, ruling presence of God is on its way; change the direction of your life, and trust your life to me.’ St Paul sums up Christian commitment as confessing that ‘Jesus is Lord’ (Rom 10.9, 1 Cor 12.3), that is to say, it is to Jesus we owe the faithful allegiance of our lives as we receive the forgiveness, hope and confidence that he offers through his life, death and resurrection. As an ordained Christian minister, I confess I am much more concerned with how many people are Christian in this sense, than how many tick a box on a census form!

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Good article, and I think a secular country needs to hear the challenge of this paragraph. https://t.co/zzTKST5FFc pic.twitter.com/hZjl79R08C

— Phill Sacre (@phillsacre) December 1, 2022

Christians now account for less than half of England and Wales’ population for the first time in census history, government figures reveal.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) results show that 46.2 per cent of the population (27.5 million people) described themselves as ‘Christian’ in 2021. This marks a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3 per cent (33.3 million people) in 2011.

The census data also shows that every major religion increased over the ten-year period, except for Christianity.

Despite this decrease, ‘Christian’ remained the most common response to the question about religion. ‘No religion’ was the second most common response, increasing to 37.2 per cent (22.2 million) from 25.2 per cent (14.1 million) across the ten-year period.

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⛪🚨 BREAKING | Christians now a minority in England and Wales for first time, according to census.

Proportion of the population of England and Wales describing themselves as Christian has fallen below a half, ONS figures from 2021 show.https://t.co/F9u0PT1Kou

— Telegraph Breaking News (@TelegraphNews) November 29, 2022