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“The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” That was Hegel’s way of saying that wisdom, especially when it comes to the interpretation of history, is only possible at the end of the day when everything has happened and we’ve had time to reflect on it.Coming to terms with the significance of world events is almost impossible in real time. We’re limited by our emotions, our hopes and fears, our awareness of what’s taking place, the outsize narrative-shaping influence of those in power, and our ignorance of the future consequences—and those limitations mean that it can take years for a considered judgment to be possible. That’s why people love to quote the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who was asked in 1972 about the effects of the uprising in France four years earlier and replied, “Too early to say.” Quite right. Cold takes are better than hot takes. So it’s fascinating that the last 12 months have seen the release of two books that, in different ways, try to make sense of the social and cultural upheavals in Western democracies that peaked in the summer of 2020. (The terminology we use for these upheavals is highly contested: depending on who we are and whether we approve of them, we might talk about the rise of social justice, antiracism, identity politics, cancel culture, racial reckoning, intersectionality, the Great Awokening, or something else.) Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse is a historical and journalistic account of what happened, telling the story of 2008 to 2024 with a focus on the response to George Floyd’s death in 2020. Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite takes a sociological and theoretical approach, defending its provocative thesis using established categories from economics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. There are obvious similarities between the two books. Both are serious-looking hardbacks from prestigious presses (Knopf and Princeton). Both are well-produced, carefully researched, and blurbed by the kinds of people you’d expect: David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, Tyler Cowen, Yuval Levin. Both are brightly and engagingly written, with an audience of thoughtful nonspecialists in mind. Both criticize many of the developments they describe but are eager to understand rather than merely denounce them. Both, significantly, are written by men of color in their early 40s who are fiercely critical of the populist right and cannot be dismissed as part of a racial backlash. And both are excellent: thoughtful, readable, provocative, and illuminating. Summer of Our Discontent Summer of Our Discontent begins on May 25, 2020, with Floyd’s murder. The event is horribly familiar: a white policeman kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine and a half minutes until he asphyxiates, captured on camera and instantly broadcast for the world to see. But Williams frames it in an unfamiliar and important way. “George Floyd was a poor man. That was the most salient fact about his life” (xiv). “George Floyd was not simply or even necessarily killed on account of race . . . his death was very much a function of his being impoverished. He died over a counterfeit banknote the vast majority of black people would never come to possess” (77). Indeed, Williams argues, it can be helpful to distinguish between two Floyds: the complex real one and the simplified totemic one. “On the one hand, there was the son and the brother, certainly down on his luck that long weekend, unemployed and carrying methamphetamines and fentanyl in his system . . . dozing in a parked car, having passed a counterfeit banknote moments earlier” (4). “On the other hand, there is the immortalized George Floyd, whose death exists in footage, on wretched loop in our brains . . . the idea, simmering for years without reaching a rolling boil, of intransigent black pain and suffocating white supremacy” (5). Within minutes of his tragic death, the former was almost entirely swallowed by the latter. Within hours, it was being felt and understood in explicitly Christlike ways: Had Floyd not, in some viscerally apparent way, borne the awful weight of his society’s racial sins on his very own neck and shoulders? And had that weight—all of ours massed and taken together—not in turn crushed him? A man died for us on that squalid pavement, not asking why his father had forsaken him but, shatteringly, calling for his deceased mother. The lethargic executioner . . . had washed his hands of the matter—had buried them deep inside his pockets. (7) The following days and weeks saw thousands of protests and millions of people come together in what were probably the largest protests against racism in human history. This raises the obvious historical question: Why? Williams answers by telling the story of the West from 2008 onward, highlighting four key ingredients. The first was the global financial crash, which caused large numbers of white millennials—already progressive on sexual ethics and wrestling with colonial guilt about the 9/11 wars—to rethink the merits of global capitalism and consider social democratic or Marxist alternatives. The second was Barack Obama’s presidency, the start of which was hailed at the time in The New York Times as a “national catharsis” and even the end of the American Civil War, but which could never have fulfilled these colossal post-racial expectations, especially when confronted with regular video footage of young black men being killed by law enforcement. The third was the way in which Donald Trump’s first term radicalized both the right and the left, from the racist march on Charlottesville to the Jussie Smollett debacle, causing both sides to reject basic liberal norms and ushering in a state of exception. And the fourth ingredient was COVID-19, which—besides fueling fear, enforcing isolation, increasing inequality, and driving people online—created a new menu of issues for people to disagree about: lockdowns, masks, vaccines, lab leaks, and whether or not it was justified to violate social distancing restrictions in the name of antiracist protest. Few public figures emerge from Williams’s story with much credit. He’s unsparing in his criticism of Trump, as you might expect, for his general mendacity and ignorance in public office through to his specific suggestions of treating COVID-19 with light-based remedies or injecting disinfectants into people. But in many ways, he’s even more excoriating about the progressive left’s response to that summer’s events. “In the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street” (78), he explains. We’re still paying the price for that intellectual incoherence today. Williams devotes particular attention to the “cult of antiracism” that flourished in 2020—from the conceptual work of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones to the practical outcomes of institutional repentance in Princeton, policing cuts in Minneapolis, forced resignations at The New York Times, and performative antiracism in Portland—culminating in what CNN notoriously called the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake in August. The book then brings us into the present day, with chapters on the worldwide exporting of American antiracism through social media, “cancel culture,” the spectacle of January 6, and the events in Israel and Gaza since October 2023. Williams has no difficulty in showing that our responses to each of them are colored, often profoundly and sometimes literally, by the summer of 2020. There’s a lot to like about Summer of Our Discontent. Williams is a good storyteller. His narrative blends familiar set-pieces with unfamiliar details; his prose is fluent and occasionally sparkling; and there’s enough humor to compensate for the relentless grimness of the central arc and the unpleasant memories it’ll evoke for most readers. The main piece that’s missing, however, is hope: hope that this uncomfortable story means something beyond a collective plague on all our houses, hope that things either have improved or are just about to, hope that we’ve learned anything at all from what happened. (In fairness, this tone is what we’d expect from a book with “discontent” in the title and “demise” in the subtitle.) Some readers will find it therapeutic to relive that summer in the hands of a confident narrator, safe in the knowledge that we’re all still here five years later. I certainly did. Others, though, will crave positivity: signs of change, a way through, a promising case study, an audacious proposal of some sort. They may need to look elsewhere. We Have Never Been Woke There’s no shortage of audacity in We Have Never Been Woke. In the face of a consensus that the Western world went through a Great Awokening in the 2010s and early 2020s, whether people celebrate or lament it, Musa al-Gharbi calmly but firmly replies, No, we didn’t. Some of us pretended to go through a process of awakening or sincerely believed we had. Others fiercely criticized or ridiculed the awakening and all who sailed in her. But in reality, the so-called Great Awokening never took place: The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. . . . Symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavours. (20) To make this case, al-Gharbi introduces a few pieces of sociological jargon, the most important of which is Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “symbolic capital.” We all have resources available to us (or not) on the basis of prestige, recognition, honor, and status within a social hierarchy. This symbolic capital may come from our position, credibility, experience, or trust within a particular organization; it may come from academic credentials, the books we’ve read, the degree we hold, the institution we studied at, or the expertise we claim; or it may be cultural in nature, deriving from our speech, clothing, manners, tastes, opinions, terminology, and so forth. This is vital to understand because “wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites” (26). One of the main ways in which cultural elites signal their high status, and identify the status of others, is through the positions they hold on issues of race, sexuality, gender, disability, and identity, and the language they use to express them. Progressive views on issues like these signal high status in polite society, particularly if they’re expressed with the right terminology. But they usually make little practical difference to those they purport to represent and frequently function in self-serving and status-reinforcing ways. “As a result of these tendencies, symbolic capitalists and the institutions they dominate may seem much more woke than they actually are” (36). Examples of this disparity between appearance and reality abound. Sexually, people who claim to believe that “trans women are women” don’t act that way when it comes to their dating and marriage decisions. Economically, while the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 sounded like a grassroots protest against inequality, it was overwhelmingly driven by well-paid graduates in symbolic economy hubs who were generally globalization’s winners, not losers. Racially, those who gain the most from the recent surge in corporate and academic DEI programs aren’t poorer employees or students but the professionals who hold the “social justice sinecures” that teach them (107–110). Environmentally, the most progressive urban areas in America see less new housing, more aggressive policing, and greater inequality than elsewhere. Romantically, the people who most disparage “traditional families” are among the most likely to have come from such families themselves and to form such families of their own. Financially, affluent progressives give less of their income away to charity than rural, suburban, and religiously motivated conservatives, and their charitable giving is less likely to go to poorer communities. Everywhere you look, symbolic capitalists are claiming to speak for the poor and marginalized while actually reaping most of the benefits themselves. Consequently, “nonelites would be well advised to ignore what symbolic capitalists say and look at what we do instead” (170). Having said that, We Have Never Been Woke isn’t a tirade against progressivism. There’s plenty of posturing and hypocrisy to be exposed, not least in the chapter on totemic capitalism and competitive victimhood. But al-Gharbi doesn’t descend into partisan ranting, preferring to explain rather than to harangue. He’s clear, for example, that he’s a symbolic capitalist himself, and recognizes that the anti-woke are just as prone to flexing and symbolic posturing as the woke. He considers the similarities between the four periods of “awokening” in the last hundred years—in the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2010s—and highlights several parallels, which demonstrate that the last decade or so isn’t as unprecedented as we think. Most importantly, he takes performative wokeness seriously as a sociological phenomenon and seeks to account for it. After introducing the phenomenon of “elite overproduction” (99–103), whereby we educate more graduates than we have jobs for and this causes resentment, he moves on to analyze the emergence of the “creative class” (134–46), and continues right through to the development of “luxury beliefs” (which signal status to the rich but ultimately hurt the poor) and “moral licensing” (in which we hold certain positions to insure us against accusations of racism), tying them together coherently (270–95). His tone is nuanced throughout, and his argument is supported by empirical research and quantitative data rather than anecdotes, undergirded by a hundred pages of references. Yet his argument is so clear that this doesn’t involve excessive throat-clearing or punch-pulling. Here’s an excellent example on critical race theory: Let’s be frank here: the ideas and frameworks associated with what opponents label “CRT” are demonstrably not the language of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. These aren’t the discourses of the ghetto, the trailer park, the hollowed-out suburb, the postindustrial town, or the global slum. Instead, they’re ideas embraced primarily by highly educated and relatively well-off whites, reflecting an unholy mélange of the therapeutic language of psychology and medicine, the interventionism of journalists and activists, the tedious technicality of law and bureaucracy, and the pseudo-radical Gnosticism of the modern humanities. It is symbolic capitalist discourse, through and through. (274) This combination of serious research, lucid prose, and tight argumentation characterizes the whole book and makes it a joy to read. Implications Neither Williams nor al-Gharbi offers solutions as such. Their purpose is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But of the two, al-Gharbi comes closer to pointing a way forward, or offering what I referred to previously as hope. Some of this comes from the books’ respective endings. Where the afterword in Summer of Our Discontent considers the October 7 Hamas attacks and their aftermath, which creates the impression of a permanent doom-loop, the conclusion of We Have Never Been Woke suggests a number of avenues for further study that hint at future possibilities. Some of this difference derives from the time frame. Williams is telling a 15-year story, whereas al-Gharbi is describing a 100-year cycle of which the most recent iteration is just one example. That gives both writer and reader much-needed perspective on a turbulent decade. And some, it seems to me, comes from the implied anthropology. Summer of Our Discontent describes events that happened to us, on our behalf, in which we as readers were observers at best. We’re watching things unfold passively, with minimal agency of our own; our primary role in remembering is to shake our heads in disbelief at what happened in the corridors of power in Washington, Minneapolis, or The New York Times. The central figure of We Have Never Been Woke, by contrast, is us. We’re al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists, or we wouldn’t be reading a book like this—and a moment’s thought will reveal that we’re characterized by many of the same hypocrisies, status games, and moral inconsistencies. And because both writer and reader are in the same predicament, we can internalize and reflect on al-Gharbi’s implied challenge: Where have we become performative in our activism and self-serving in our moral logic? How, if at all, are we expressing our stated ideals in genuine relationships with those in need around us? Who are they? Are we being careful not to perform our acts of righteousness before men? Or have we received our reward in full? With five years of hindsight, there’s clearly a widespread sense that the social upheavals that peaked in 2020 went too far. The years since the pandemic have seen a significant pendulum swing in the opposite direction on issues ranging from woke capitalism and cancel culture to unconscious bias training and trans rights. The mood in politics and on social media has shifted substantially in many Western nations. But there’s another sense in which they didn’t go far enough. Many racial injustices were left largely unaddressed by the mass outpouring of performative wokeness. Many of the changes that did result were cosmetic and served only to enhance the position of more affluent, educated, and privileged groups within society. Many of our poorer and less advantaged citizens are still waiting for a genuine awakening to come. Many of our churches are just as segregated as they were in 2019. Neither of these books will solve those problems on its own. But both of them, and al-Gharbi’s in particular, have the capacity to challenge and inform us by reframing the narrative of that turbulent year—as long as we read them with a spirit of humility (“Is it I, Lord?”) rather than smugness (“I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that symbolic capitalist over there”). Vibes have shifted many times before. They will again. And thoughtful cold takes on the last one can help us wisely respond to the next one. This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition.

This is a wonderful illustration from Paige Brown. It is all very well knowing a lot and being able to do a lot, she says, but if the fear of God is not foundational then everything will be in the wrong place:I got up one Saturday morning when I was in the tenth grade. I sharpened my No. 2 pencils and walked down to the high school for the PSAT - the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, which determines National Merit Scholarships. Taking the first section, as the administrator repeatedly called out the time, I was right on schedule. When we had one minute left, I was answering the last question of that section, number 70. But as I looked down, ready to fill in my circle for that question, I saw that it was already filled in on my Scantron sheet. I started going back over the filled-in circles in a panic. Where had I skipped? As the administrator called ‘Time!’, I found out that I had skipped the answer line of the third question. So I grabbed my sharp pencils and walked home without even bothering to take the other two parts of the test ... We can be really smart. We can know lots of stuff. We can know all the right answers. But they will all be in the wrong place if the fear of God is not in the first place. It is foundational.

Danielle Treweek’s Single Ever After: A Biblical Vision for the Significance of Singleness is a really impressive piece of work. If you have read books on the subject before, you will recognise some of the emphases: the insistence on the good of singleness, the challenge of being single in the contemporary church, the practical considerations, the debunking of cultural assumptions, the objections to the obsession with being married, and the correction of misunderstandings about the “gift of singleness.” What makes this book stand out, however, is the engagement with Scripture. I’ve preached, taught and written on this subject a fair bit, but I kept finding good biblical arguments I hadn’t considered properly, new ways of saying old things, and exegetical insights that I had missed completely. Here are five passages that stood out to me: Married and single Christians have a different speciality focus. The married Christian specialises in pointing us towards the gloriously intimate relationship which the church will enjoy with Christ forever. The unmarried Christian specialises in pointing us towards the gloriously intimate relationships we will enjoy with one another within the church forever. We are complementary—rather than competing—co-specialists in eternity. (22) When we carefully analyse the original text of [Matthew 19:1-12] we arrive at an unexpected, but I think inevitable, conclusion. The self-made eunuch is not a metaphor for the disciple who chooses never to marry for the sake of the kingdom, but for the divorced disciple who chooses not to remarry because of their obedience to the kingdom. (82) In my early thirties, I twice signed up for online dating. Both times, I selected a dating platform that was geared towards Christians … However, both times, I only lasted a few weeks before I realised I needed to delete my profile and sign out. Why? Because I had found myself compulsively logging in to check if I had any new matches … Online dating made it much, much harder for me to see my singleness as anything other than something to escape from. (96) Yes, the Reformers rightly sought to correct corrupted institutional celibacy and rediscover marriage as a good part of this creation. But in trying to make more of “mundane” marriage and less of “heroic” celibacy, the Reformers ended up making far too much of sex. They overcorrected. And we have inherited that legacy. (123) In [1 Corinthians 7:9], Paul is not raising a theoretical situation that may or may not be relevant. No. He is specifically addressing certain individuals, namely unmarried Corinthian Christians who are actively committing sexual immorality … Paul is not saying that if an unmarried Christian doesn’t think they are cut out for long-term singleness, they are under a moral responsibility to get married. Rather, he is actively calling out unmarried Christians who are not currently exercising self-control … In its context, the verse is saying that it’s good to remain unmarried unless you are enjoying the “perks” of marriage without the actual being married part. It is better to choose marriage than to choose to remain tangled up in sexual sin. (145) It’s a great book.  

In Deuteronomy, as Moses addresses Israel on the eve of entering the Promised Land, he makes regular mention of God’s jealousy. This must be one of the least celebrated of God’s attributes. It is certainly one of the most misunderstood.In our culture, jealousy is almost always portrayed as a bad thing. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,” says Iago to Othello in Shakespeare’s play. “It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.” Or think of the chorus of Mr. Brightside by The Killers, with its wails against “jealousy, turning saints into the sea, swimming through sick lullabies, choking on your alibis.” Many even use the word—wrongly, I think—to describe the seething resentment that rival siblings might feel over each other’s toys. In this context, proclaiming God’s jealousy can feel like an embarrassing reminder of the overweening pettiness of Bronze Age religion. A jealous God? How primitive! This awkwardness leaves noticeable gaps in our worship services and our private spiritual lives. When was the last time you sang a song praising God for being jealous? When did you last hear a sermon on the subject? When did you last mention it in prayer? Yet God’s jealousy is integral to the way Scripture describes him. It appears in the Ten Commandments: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:5). It is revealed as part of God’s name: “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (34:14). It is repeated several times in Deuteronomy, and it undergirds the theology of Ezekiel, Nahum, and Zechariah in particular. There is no getting away from it. Here is the problem. In modern English, most people do not distinguish between jealousy and envy. The two words sound identical. Yet in reality they are near opposites. Envy is a fierce desire for something that rightly belongs to someone else. In Scripture, we see it exposed as a disorder-sowing (James 3:16), bone-rotting (Prov. 14:30), Christ-killing (Matt. 27:18) work of the flesh. Jealousy, by contrast, is a fierce desire for something that rightly belongs to you. Envy is when you want to sleep with someone else’s husband or wife. Jealousy is when you don’t want anyone else to sleep with yours. When we grasp that, we can see why a perfectly faithful lover would feel jealous when jilted by a loved one. In fact, no other response would be fitting. If I did not feel jealous about someone else having an affair with my wife or taking my children from me, I would only be showing how little I loved them. The point is much sharper when we consider things from God’s perspective. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt and carried them through the wilderness, how could he greet his people building idols and worshiping foreign gods with anything but fierce jealousy? That is how lovers react when they are betrayed—and the greater the love, the greater the betrayal and the greater the jealousy. This is personal for Moses in Deuteronomy 4. He has experienced the consequences of God’s jealousy for Israel: “The Lord was angry with me because of you, and he solemnly swore that I would not cross the Jordan. … I will die in this land” (vv. 21–22). But he is not bitter. Rather, he urges the people to learn from his experience. “Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol” (v. 23), because “the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (v. 24). Happily, Moses’s sermon does not end there. Granted, it immediately mentions the possibility—later a reality—that Israel may provoke God’s jealousy by falling into idolatry after settling in the land (v. 25) and face destruction and exile as a result (vv. 26–27). But then comes hope. If, after all this has happened, Israel comes to its senses in the pigsty of exile and seeks the Lord, then “you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul” (v. 29). This is a prophecy, not a mere possibility (v. 30). Because, besides being a jealous God, “the Lord your God is a merciful God” (v. 31). His jealousy brings judgment, but his mercy brings restoration. His jealousy will take his people into exile, and his mercy will bring them back again. And ultimately, the consuming fire of God’s jealousy and the overflowing waters of his mercy will meet at the cross. This article originally appeared at Christianity Today

Everyone wants to be happy. They may not always agree on what happiness is, and they certainly do not always agree on how to experience it. But whatever it is, they want it. So do you. “All men seek happiness,” wrote Blaise Pascal. “This is without exception. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal … This is the end of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.”So it is not surprising that an awful lot of books have been written on the subject. There are books on happy habits, brains, diets and chemicals; books on happy families, philosophies and religions; books on the science of happiness, the sociology of happiness, the theology of happiness and the history of happiness; books on how you can be happy if you really want to be, and books on how you will actually be happier if you stop trying to be. In such a flooded landscape of ideas, anyone releasing a new book on the subject - which I will be next year, with the title Happiness: What It Is, Where To Find It, And How To Make It Last Forever - had better explain themselves. The book is an attempt to bring together three types of writing on happiness. All three types have influenced me in important ways, but they are almost always kept separate from one another. The first type is biblical and pastoral, in which the case is made from Scripture that God is happy and wants us to find our highest joy in him. The second type is theological and philosophical, and mounts an argument for considering happiness as the result of living a virtuous, loving and good life, in dialogue with Christian theologians and ancient and modern philosophers. The third type is psychological and sociological, full of studies and charts and all kinds of practical recommendations on how to live a happier life. The second and especially the third types often have bright yellow covers. The first type never does.  Some writers combine two of these three genres. C. S. Lewis, who wrote about joy in most of his books, bridges the first and the second. Jonathan Haidt is an influential example of someone who blends the second and the third. But I am seeking to integrate all three. I am convinced we can learn from pastors, theologians, philosophers and psychologists on the subject of joy—and that some of our greatest thinkers, from Paul to Augustine to Pascal to Lewis, were comfortable wearing any of these various hats if the situation required it. I have also found it both intriguing and encouraging to discover how often the best thinkers in each category are saying very similar things. Structurally, the book is organized around six questions: why, what, who, when, where and how. I start by considering why enjoyment is possible, rooted in what Scripture says about the character and purposes of God (chapter one). Then I explore what happiness actually is, and how the wide range of words we use for it overlap and differ from one another (chapter two), before looking at who we are, and how our bodies, souls, natures, minds, emotions and brains collaborate—or not—in our desire to rejoice (chapter three). In the next two chapters I think about the when and the where of enjoyment, drawing from Ecclesiastes and the Psalms in particular to reflect on how happiness relates first to time (chapter four), and then to space (chapter five). I finish in chapter six with the very practical question that most people are asking: how we can actually rejoice in the Lord, live the good life, and experience joy. It will be out next summer, published by Crossway. Enjoy.

Quoting from The West Wing in 2025 is a sure sign of one’s advancing age. Indulge me. About the only conservative character portrayed sympathetically in the show is Ainsley Hayes, a young Republican lawyer (and she only appears in twelve of the 154 episodes). Here she is debating her boss over that touchstone of left-right disagreement: gun control. Sam Seaborn: It’s not about personal freedom, and it certainly has nothing to do with public safety. It’s just that some people like guns. Ainsley Hayes: Yes, they do. But you know what’s more insidious than that? Your gun control position doesn’t have anything to do with public safety, and it’s certainly not about personal freedom. It’s about you don’t like people who do like guns. You don’t like the people. Think about that, the next time you make a joke about the South. You don’t like the people. How often is that the underlying reason for the political (or theological) positions we hold? Last week Andrew posed the question, “What does the flag say?” Another way to phrase that question is, “Do you like the people who fly those flags?” And that feels the deeper question as it gets closer to the root of our responses to the flags. If I don’t like a particular flag being flown what about the person who put it up – how do I feel about them? A friend who ministers in an area of Birmingham close to the origin point of the campaign to fly the St George’s flag, raises helpful points around this. His perspective: that as well as affirming the concerns and fears many may have at the flags going up, we also need to do better at affirming the legitimate concerns and fears of those putting them up. This probably isn’t easy to do for those of us who live in areas where there are few flags flying. The reality is that we don’t often have to mingle with those in areas where flags are abundant. And we probably don’t often have to deal with the issues these people are concerned about. Here are the concerns my friend observes in his community – some of which are specifically related to Birmingham: Freedom of speech/expression, arrests for online comments, grooming gangs, unlawfulness, radical Islam/Islamists, desire for sharia law, potential islamophobia laws, the currently predicted demographic flip, illegal and mass immigration, rising living costs, bankruptcy of the council, lack of bin collection, LGBTQ+ agenda/ideology, and the difference between how the council seems to have reacted to the raising of Palestinian and English/British flags. Any of these issues can make for uncomfortable conversations – the kinds of discussions that polite middle-class society would rather avoid. It is far easier to dismiss the people who have these concerns as racist, or irredeemably right-wing, or ‘deplorables’. Which brings us back to Ainsley Hayes’ argument with Sam Seaborn: not liking guns is one thing, but not liking the people who like them is quite another. So, do you like the people? If we don’t, it might not be the flags that are the real issue.   Photo by balesstudio on Unsplash      

Are all the large numbers in the Bible meant to be taken literally? Did two million people leave Egypt for Sinai? Were there really more Judahites fighting for King Jehoshaphat than Russians in the Battle of Kursk? Or do some of these large numbers - or even all of them - communicate something besides what the Office of National Statistics would say if they were recording events afterwards? If so, what? And how can we know? This is one of my favourite Mere Fidelity episodes, in which I talk these things through with Matt Anderson and Alastair Roberts:Mere Fidelity · Fishy Numbers in the Bible

Flags speak. All symbols do. They communicate instantly, boldly, viscerally, and often—which is my reason for mentioning it—ambiguously. Consider a few examples.In March 2022, Ukrainian flags appeared all over my neighbourhood. Some of them may have been raised by Ukrainian refugees arriving in the area, as many did in the opening months of the war. But most were raised by British people wanting to express solidarity with Ukraine. They were unfurled on flagpoles, hung out of windows and on lamp posts, and stuck in car windows. The ambiguity was minimal. The flags said “We stand with Ukraine,” and “Putin must be stopped,” and “Bullies cannot annex other people’s countries,” and “Ukrainian refugees welcome here.” During the England-Ukraine match at Wembley Stadium in early 2023, they even said, “We don’t really mind if we lose this one, because we stand with you (and will probably qualify anyway).” Three years later I was in Birmingham, driving down a long street in which every single lamppost was flying a Palestinian flag. What did those flags say? A range of things, I imagine. For many they were exact equivalents of the Ukrainian flag: “We stand with Gaza.” “Palestinians welcome here.” “We grieve the deaths of innocent children.” But reading the posters and graffiti in the area alongside the flags, it was clear that for some people—and it is hard to say how many—they said more than that, from “Stop the genocide” to “Britain should not support Zionism” or even “Israel should not exist.” Flags speak, but they speak ambiguously. Needless to say, the message that a Jewish person would hear on driving down that street is different to the message that I heard, which may well be different again from the message that many of the residents intended. Two months after that, I went for lunch with my wife in a local café that was festooned with Pride flags. I don’t mean that there was one in the window, or a notice about Pride month; I mean that there was rainbow bunting across the entrance, a large rainbow flag on the way in, and rainbow coloured streamers on every table. What did those flags say? To the proprietor, they may well have said no more than “LGBTQ people welcome here,” or “Pride month gives us a chance to make this place more colourful.” But they communicated more than that to me. They also said, “We support unlimited sexual freedom,” and “Bigots (including evangelical pastors like you) are not welcome here,” and “If you believe in traditional marriage, you might want to have lunch somewhere else.” And it said those things to me whether the proprietor—or interior decorator—intended anything of the sort. So what does a St George’s Cross say? It depends. During the World Cup there is no ambiguity: it means, “I am cheering for England rather than Germany / Argentina / Brazil.” During a coronation or royal jubilee it means, “I love my country and am grateful to live here” (and possibly also “I am hazy on the difference between England and Britain”). But what about when it appears on flagpoles and bridges all over the country one August, as if from nowhere? Does it mean something different if it appears at the same time as a major protest against migrant hotels? Or when hung alongside banners saying “Stop the boats”? Or when waved on a march at which Tommy Robinson is speaking? Would my decision to hang a St George’s Cross in my front window today say something different to my neighbours than it would have during the last World Cup? Even if my convictions are exactly the same now as they were then? Of course it would. Flags speak. And they do so in a context that is much broader than the intention of the person who flies them. I cannot possibly know the motivations of all the people who have flown St George’s Crosses in the last few weeks—I suspect they range from the respectfully patriotic (“I love living in England”) to the politically pointed (“uncontrolled migration is a major problem”) to the downright racist (“reclaim England for white people”)—or the proportion of people characterised by each. But to many in this country, especially people of colour, they will be heard to carry an insidious message of chauvinism and white supremacy, even if the person flying it has no such agenda. And I think that is worth considering carefully. I love England. People who know me at all will have heard me go on about it: castles and pubs, cricket and football, Sussex and London and Yorkshire, rhododendrons and village greens, the industrial revolution and the Royal Navy and the West End and the final scene of Dunkirk. But at this point in time, that flag means more than that to a lot of people, and not in a good way. Many of my brothers and sisters respond to it with apprehension, or fear, and I can see why. It’s worth thinking about.

Two interesting comments on preference falsification, apparent consensus, and the difference between explicit and implicit beliefs. First, here's George Orwell:At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. And here is Musa al-Gharbi riffing on Orwell in his excellent We Have Never Been Woke: The behaviours of those who profess that ‘trans women are women’ suggest strongly that most do not literally believe that trans women are the same as cisgender women. Proponents who are romantically interested in women typically do not treat these two populations equally as women with respect to their own dating and marriage decisions - not even remotely. Yet these same people, who overwhelmingly fail to behave as though trans and cisgender are equivalent or indistinguishable (that is, who implicitly disagree with the idea that ‘trans women are women’), may nevertheless pillory others who explicitly disagree with the proposition that there is no meaningful difference.

If we could only take one book of the Bible to a desert island with us, many of us would choose the Gospel of Luke.It is the longest and fullest Gospel we have. The two most celebrated of Jesus’s parables are found here and nowhere else. Luke fills his nativity, crucifixion and resurrection accounts with details that are unique to him—Mary and Elizabeth, Pilate and Herod, the road to Emmaus—and his interest in prayer, women, the poor and the Gentiles give even the most familiar passages a distinctive angle. It is theologically rich, narratively compelling, rhetorically masterful and evangelically joyful, as well as being filled with interesting questions and challenging stories. So from 7th to 9th July 2026, we are going to devote some time to reading, understanding and rejoicing in it. We are delighted to be joined by Dr Peter Williams, the Principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, as our guest speaker. Peter is both a brilliant biblical scholar and a sparkling and engaging communicator, and I can honestly think of nobody in the world I would rather have teaching on the Gospel of Luke. He is also the author of The Surprising Genius of Jesus (2023), a superb study of the teaching of Jesus in particular, and the outstanding Can We Trust the Gospels? (2018), which has been translated into fourteen languages. The conference will comprise plenary sessions, breakout discussions, meals together, rich times of corporate worship, and time for Q&A. Practically speaking, we will be hosting it at King’s Church London, SE3 9DU, starting at 3.30pm on Tuesday 7th and finishing at lunchtime on Thursday 9th; the cost for the event is £170, which includes lunch and dinner on both days. What’s not to like? One of the greatest books ever written, taught by a world-class scholar and surrounded by brothers and sisters who want to know, apply and delight in God’s word. So come. Take time. Be refreshed. Think. You can book in here.