Reflecting On Celestial Light

 

I was talking with a friend the other night over a few drinks, and Wordsworth came up. Especially this:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
William Wordsworth

Those are some of my favourite lines from William Wordsworth’s great Immortality Ode, in which he is reflecting on a deep, emotional change in how he perceives the world around him. He describes how, in his youth, nature appeared magical and divine - the “meadow, grove, and stream” seemed “apparelled in celestial light.” - which is one of the great expressions of seeing spiritual or heavenly beauty in nature. Then he turns to adulthood and laments that he no longer sees nature with that same spiritual glow or intensity. The line “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” expresses a profound sense of loss, as he can no longer access the deep, instinctive joy and awe he felt as a child.

Wordsworth is expressing a tragic, more general reflection; that children are closer to the divine because of their sense of deep, untainted curiosity and wonder (wisdom that’s reflected in Christ’s guidance in Matthew 18:3) - but as we age, that connection weakens - "Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy", he puts it. Yet Wordsworth is hopeful that although the childlike sense of transcendence may fade, it is never entirely lost, and can be rekindled through the pursuance of the sacred beauty of existence, and a sense of wonder for our place in it.

I’ve been blessed to live in a constant state of awe and wonder, yearning for more and more of God in my life. But I’ve also undergone, and am still undergoing, some intense life suffering that has not yet abated. Yet despite this, I’m thankful to say that the awe and wonder are almost always powerful enough to keep my life perspective “apparelled in celestial light.” God, through His love and grace, endows me with enough memory and imagination to frequently reconnect to the "intimations" of immortality, even when suffering abounds. Sometimes my mind drifts back to innocent joys of childhood as I reflect on the enchantment of early memory with fondness. Yet equally, each year of life is at least better than the last, in terms of increased spiritual maturity, wisdom and a deeper relationship with God. So the adult awareness of this growth becomes a source of deeper insight, reflection, understanding and immense gratitude - which taps into St. James’s wisdom to ‘consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds.’

For me, the ‘pure joy’ invitation is one of the hardest callings, but it’s so hard only because it’s so potentially transformative. It’s the pathway to a more enriching power of experience, finding a kind of compensation and ultimate contentment in the maturity of thought and a deeper appreciation for the whole journey, good and bad. It’s perhaps the quietest triumph, in that it reflects Christ’s desire to experience life as we experience it, so that we can experience reality as He experiences it, and have that intimacy sustained by the Holy Spirit, from Whom we draw continual strength through the eternal truths glimpsed in our earthly life.

Courageously Seek Inside For The Truth

 

A combination of psychological literature and an honest appraisal of our inner self make it pretty clear that we don’t easily think things through with careful consideration, using rigorous logical and empirical analysis as tools to arrive at our views and then respond with the appropriate behaviour – we actually become driven by our emotional needs and utilitarian enticements in establishing what we want to believe, and then we employ the confirmation bias in looking to justify those beliefs. That is, we put the cart of incentives before the horse of wisdom and the reins of reason, when it should be the other way around.

That doesn’t mean this method is always wrong; emotions and will are a great signpost towards many profound discovered truths and artistic expressions, and should not be gainsaid or trivialised complacently. But with considerations involving complex considerations, dynamical reasoning and important facts, then this cart-before-the-horse tendency is a malady on the human condition.  

In a world which seems to have gone a bit mad, and is overrun with climate fundies, the triggered wokerati, snowflakes, extreme political ideologues (both left and right), religious crackpots, conspiracy theorists and journalistic snake oil salespeople, here’s what you should do to check if you’re on the right side of the empirical propositions in question. Make a list of the political, religious, socio-cultural, economic and scientific beliefs that are important to you, and rank them regarding how certain you feel about your position on them. Then take all the ones you feel less certain about, and even have inner doubts about (don’t worry, you’ll know which ones they are - your gut will tell you and it won’t lie to you).

And then take each one and search yourself inwardly, with as much honesty as you can summon, to distil how these beliefs make you feel. What do those views do to you when no one is looking; do they make you feel strong or weak, proud or ashamed, comfortable or uncomfortable, confident or doubtful – this authenticity is what you need to be measuring. You’ll ask yourself; am I really giving this my best shot? Have I really got a good grasp of the situation? Am I being overly-simplistic? Have I given this the proper investigation or just been too easily convinced by someone else? And if the latter, what do I think of those people – do I really trust them, and do I think their motives are good?

There’s not a person who can fail to benefit from this examination, and it’s just about certain that if you do this with a passion for knowing the truth, and are prepared for the full consequences of the adventure and journey on which you’ll find yourself, you will be enriched. 

Non-Random Thoughts On Creativity And Untapped Success

 

Most of the greatest artistic achievements in life - songwriting, non-fiction prose, poetry, painting, design - succeed not by producing grandiose, complex outputs (although there are many exceptions, which are obviously impressive), but by capturing simplicities that have previously remained untapped.

You can see this wide across the artistic landscape - from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which consists of clear, direct writing that changed how people think about clarity itself, to C.S. Lewis’s brilliant Christian writings, to classic songs like Let It Be and Hallelujah, which are musically simple, lyrically straightforward, yet profoundly moving.

Brilliant but simple creativity is there awaiting discovery, and when it is produced in writing, music or other art forms, it resonates because it expresses something we all recognise but didn’t personally articulate, as we were waiting for someone else to notice it. Creativity at its finest often lies in noticing and expressing what’s already there but unseen - in distilling something vast into something simple, essential, and resonant.

And it also reminds me of the wisdom about good listening and paying attention, hearing not just what is said, but unsaid, because what is unsaid is often equally important.

Why The Poor Should Be Thankful To The Rich

 

If you’ve been paying attention in the past 150 years, you’ll know that as a ratio of total beliefs to correct ones, the left gets most things wrong when it comes to economics, capitalism, socialism, labour, wealth, inequality, and the like. To see why, let’s construct a caricature of a leftist - an extreme one who believes all the false things they are told, and campaigns for a so-called fairer world. Let’s call him Torquil. Torquil believes the system is grossly unfair; that the workers are producing all the wealth for the rich capitalists; that the poorest people in the UK are poor because they have been unjustly disadvantaged; that if we had complete equality of opportunity then almost everyone would do about as well as each other; that there is a ‘fair’ hourly wage based on how hard people work and how much we symbolically value those roles; and so on. Every single one of those propositions is almost entirely wrong - and where it is fractionally right, it is nearly always the fault of political interference.

The reality is this: except for the aforementioned political interference, nearly all jobs make important contributions to society - and in accordance with market power, bargaining, sensible regulation, and alongside fluid information, each individual is paid according to their marginal product (that is, for the value they create) in a supply and demand economy. Except for illegal or unsavoury activity, the money you have demonstrates how much productivity has been created. Low income individuals are on low incomes due to lower productivity, which is usually due to lack of useful skills or knowledge, or a lack of motivation, ingenuity and responsibility. And there is an inequality of talent, effort, good choices, industriousness, luck, ambition, intelligence, creativity, conscientiousness, health, positive influences, and good life circumstances.

In a nutshell, the economic right is largely correct about these matters, and the economic left is largely incorrect.

No worker can do what they do on their own - they rely on the ingenuity, risk and investment of the company owners, and the teams around them. And the more productive the worker, the harder it is to replace them - which means at an individual level each one of them is more valuable than each individual worker they employ. If, for example, a chief executive can make his 2500 employees just 0.5% more productive, he is 12.5 times as productive as a single employee. You might find this statement uncomfortable (though it is true), but in most cases in the labour market, if someone is on a low hourly income they are either unwilling to work hard enough to earn more (sometimes for good reason), unable to earn more, or at the start or end of their career, where they will go on to earn more, or used to earn more but are now winding down. There are practically zero cases where individuals wholly unjustly earn a low hourly income. There are one or two exceptions - but the rule of thumb is that people are paid according to their marginal product, and most people in the private sector (and indirectly, the public sector too) earn their marginal product because of those richer than them making capital investments.

And the rich pay for the majority of the public services too, and the lowest quintile pay for a small fraction of them. Last time I checked, the top 1% of earners in the UK paid a whopping 28% of all income tax; the top 10% paid 60% of all income tax; and the top 50% paid about 90% of all income tax. It’s also true that those on low incomes contribute less in absolute terms, but proportionally more of their income, as the poorest 20% pay about 38–48% of their income in taxes. But that is more to do with ratios and arithmetic scaling than unfairness. And any sociological focus on data, causes, and impacts would show that crime rates are higher in poorer areas, the poor require more public services in health, education, housing, social services and welfare, have lower civic participation, and so forth.

Let me be crystal clear, I am not making any accusations here or looking to blame anyone for being poor or on a low income - there are countless circumstances at play. This post is simply to show the utter absurdity of this constant narrative by the left that the poor should be aggrieved at the rich, or feel hard done by them. It’s almost the opposite of the truth. Modern prosperity depends on both entrepreneurs who take risks and workers who provide the effort and skill to make those risks pay off, sure. But the ratio of wealth creation, productivity, and increased living standards falls so heavily in favour of the rich’s influence, that the poor, far from resenting them, should be thanking them in recognition that much of modern prosperity - the jobs, technology, and material comfort we enjoy - exists because of their innovation and risk-taking.

Cosmic Open-Endedness

 

When we consider mathematical patterns describing our cosmos, it is worth exploring the question; is the cosmos mathematically open-ended - that is, does it resist compression into a finite description? This can be a misleading question because - assuming the cosmos is spatially finite - how can it be both open-ended and finite? But there’s a subtle yet important thing to grasp, because 'open-ended' should not evoke a picture of the physical cosmos stretching into the far horizons of infinity, like a cave that just seems to get bigger and deeper the more we enter it (although analogically that seems to be somewhat true of our observable cosmos too through a scientific lens). No, it is a mathematical term about whether or not the cosmos has patterns that can stretch to infinity (stress; patterns, not physical properties), and can be finitely characterisable. The answer is, we don’t know whether or not the cosmos has patterns that can stretch to infinity, but we do know that if they follow rules expressible by a finite description, then the system would count as “closed” in the algorithmic sense.

If we look at a pattern, we may try to extend it to infinity based on its observed order; if the extension is fully predictable and can be described by a finite algorithm, then in that sense the cosmos could be considered algorithmically “closed” - though this would still leave us far short of complete knowledge, of course. It is a subtle concept to grasp: that a pattern extending indefinitely can sometimes allow for a finite description.

However, there is a practical problem that likely prevents a definitive theory of such closure. When searching for patterns in the cosmos, there is no guarantee how far a pattern reliably extends before it is overtaken by another, more complex pattern. Perhaps the pattern we have inferred only applies for a limited range, then shifts according to some higher-level rule. Even if we identify this higher-level rule, it may itself be limited, replaced in turn by yet another overarching pattern. With this potential succession of pattern changes, the cosmos reveals itself as a tapestry of staggering mathematical depth and intricacy, where patterns layer upon patterns in a hierarchy of ever-expanding complexity.

But it’s even deeper than that because, given previous writings on the nature of mathematics and how the cosmos unfolds as a monument to mathematical majesty (see my side bar), the physical creation is, to all intents and purposes, effectively mathematically “open-ended,” because at best our efforts can yield only local, provisional theories, where each is but a fleeting glimpse into the infinite web of mathematical structure that underlies all of physical reality.

Let me explain it another way, for clarification. Consider that every time our "window" on the cosmic patterns increases we find that we require a new or more complex algorithm to describe the broader patterns; in effect, the pattern never stabilises into something describable by a single final, comprehensive algorithm. By the way, this is another reason why I argue in my paper on free will and determinism that determinism and indeterminism are not binary opposites, but part of a spectrum.

As our window into the cosmos gradually expands, the stock of short algorithms would eventually be exhausted, forcing algorithmic descriptions to grow ever longer and more intricate - thereby surpassing human comprehension and reaching a level of complexity that can only be accounted for by the cosmic intelligence underlying mathematics itself. And here we are talking about God - which begs the question: which kind of cosmos would the God of the Bible be most likely to create? Naturally, we can only speculate, but here’s a possible way to do so.

If God created the cosmos as “closed”, He could have created the mathematical engine with fundamental laws that are simple, consistent, and finite in description - a cosmos where patterns can, in principle, be fully captured by finite algorithms. This would be elegant and potentially intelligible - and may be tailored to God’s creative dispensation of exhibiting a cosmos with order and purpose in a background of mathematical wash.

If God created the cosmos as “open-ended”, He could have designed the cosmos to be infinitely rich, with layers of patterns that continually evolve, so that the full scope of cosmic mathematics is never exhaustively describable. This would reflect a depth of creative freedom, leaving room for unpredictability, novelty, and ongoing discovery - and may be tailored to God’s creative dispensation of exhibiting a cosmos with mystery and adventure.

In my view, neither fully satisfies - which may well be why, from our observations, God’s creation appears to deliberately combines both - exhibiting a finite set of fundamental laws (closed at a base level) that give rise to an emergent, open-ended complexity that stretches into a mystery that can only be fully captured by Omniscience Himself.

How We Made a Nation Too Fragile to Cope

 

You’ve probably noticed it’s hard to state tough and unpleasant truths without sounding unsympathetic; but that is quite strange when you think about it - for it’s quite easy to be sympathetic to genuine cases of x but also speak frankly about false claims or instances of x that cause mass harm (see my blog post here for further commentary on this phenomenon).   

Last week, I mentioned a horrible problem to solve, as we hear that Britain is sliding 'into economic crisis' over our £85bn sickness bill. I’ve touched on what I think are some of the problems and solutions in a previous blog post (see here). And I take absolutely zero pleasure in saying that I’ve been warning about this danger for years - especially how we’ve coddled young minds in a way that’s left many of them ill-equipped to face life head on, much less pursue the adventure that life offers all who pursue her courageously and truthfully. And this plight is especially bad for weak young men, because there is nothing good at all about being a weak man (either for men or women). And let me remind you, being strong here doesn’t mean aggressive, excessively dominant, or hard - it means the strength to endure, to be brave, to take responsibility, to be vulnerable, secure, and grounded.

What underlies the UK’s rise in sickness-related economic inactivity, increased anxiety, and a lack of strength, perspective, resilience and responsibility is a crisis that will be very hard to peel back. Hard, but absolutely necessary, as we simply cannot go on like this. The UK has been beset by a culture of dependency and avoidance - where personal responsibility and resilience have been eroded by a system that over-pathologises normal life struggles, and tells too many people they are sick or hopeless when they are really struggling to function adequately or simply unmotivated (the type 1 and type 2 error problem I discussed in the blog linked above).

Everyone knows the positive effects of our becoming more aware and accommodating of illness and mental health (reducing stigma, encouraging people to seek help, increasing understanding, etc). But I think few can deny now that in the past decade and a half the pendulum has swung too far toward medicalising ordinary life challenges, lowering expectations of resilience and responsibility, creating a culture of dependency and over-reliance on the state, and in some cases even producing systemic incentives against work.

Alas, I actually doubt whether there is an easily manageable solution to this - we’ve let things get too out of hand - and there are certain impediments to reversal. One of which is that the people who superficially find advantage from this dependency culture reap most of the benefits while the rest shoulder most of the costs (although the ‘benefits’ enjoyed by the former group are, of course, a poisoned chalice). Second is that the politicians, media and institutions have deliberately orchestrated this to secure compliance and control, and feather their own nests, so it’s unlikely that they will willingly unwind it or champion virtues that undermine it, for fear of compromising their own careers, and of a backlash from the wokerati.

The task of restoring shared responsibility and purpose, while balancing it with compassion and expectation, is hard to achieve at the best of times. But given that the culture has shifted so deeply, it feels prohibitively difficult. But not impossible, because, as with most things, I think the erosion of personal responsibility, resilience, virtue and a more strongly integrated shared moral framework coincides with the decline of Christianity in this country. And plenty of great writers, many before most of us were born, warned societies that a lack of Christianity means the decline of a narrative of meaning, moral duty, and transcendent purpose. It’s one of the many ways in which the decline of Christianity has left a vacuum that secular institutions haven’t filled well.

Everything At Once

 

During the only slow bit in the Thursford Christmas show (the raffle, for those like us, who didn’t have tickets) I was thinking about how, in astronomy, when we look at something very far away, we’re seeing it as it was in the past, not as it is now - like we would if there was a distant mirror suspended in space. And I was thinking about my mum being born 80 years ago, in 1945, and how, if a giant planet-sized mirror orbiting a star roughly 40 light-years from Earth (because light has to go there and back) existed, I could see her on her day of birth (light too faint, interstellar dust, etc, might be a problem, but let’s pretend we’ve solved that issue).

Now, if you think about it, that kind of conceptualisation can act as an analogy for how we temporal physical beings interface with our eternal, timeless God. So, we know from relativity that the universe can be thought of as a four-dimensional spacetime “block”. In that model, all events - past, present, and future - co-exist within a single geometric structure. From within time, we experience periods of it: “now,” “before,” and “after”. But from outside, for God, every moment simply is.

But here’s another fascinating thing, and I think you might know what I mean here; I fancy that our consciousness is a bit like a mirror that reflects the entire block at once, sensing every moment as equally present, equally real, equally vivid, but yet at every moment locked in the present ‘now’ we call the self. Through the mirror, there is a sense in which tomorrow is not really “later” and yesterday is not really “gone.” All of it - the whole history of the universe - is immediately present in the sense that we are made in God’s image and seeped in the Divine plan, like a vast landscape seen in a single glance, where we are always eyeing our past, our present and our potential, and always deeply connected and integrated in the grand narrative.

Because if we pay close attention, we can sense that in being conscious there are always glimmers of the same timeless light that holds all things together, yet always at the same time reflecting hints and yearnings of how much more we can yet become. Because we are beings of sequence who sense eternity, and fragments who are always tapping into the whole; every past, present and future thought, deed, hope, regret, mistake, act of love, and so forth is a small reflection of that greater life in which all our moments are already complete in God’s cosmic narrative.

Perhaps we can consider a symphony to further illustrate. When we listen to it, the music unfolds in time - note after note, movement after movement. The beauty exists through succession: beginnings, climaxes, resolutions, and what have you. That is a bit like how we experience our own lives - as a melody played out moment by moment. But….now imagine the symphony not as sound but as a standing wave - a single vibration that contains within its structure all the frequencies, harmonics, and resonances that the symphony would otherwise express through time. From within the music, we would hear the passing of notes; from outside it, an external cosmic mathematician could see the entire waveform at once - the total pattern of the piece existing simultaneously. That’s the difference between the human, temporal view and the Divine, eternal one. Life for us is living through the music, where God is the whole symphony, perfectly complete, with no need for sequence.

Why God Likes Science & Capitalism

Suppose you're sent off to another universe in a super cosmos-travel machine and you land on the first planet you find with evolved life. The most intelligent species (which closely resemble humans) has evolved a belief in a god they call Z as their main religion, sustained over thousands of years, with hundreds of other religions that have come and gone over the centuries. You look at their recent history and find that for 199,800 of the previous 200,000 years their progression has been slow and steady with mostly subsistence level living, high infant morality, widespread poverty, where the pattern has been very slow steps up a very gentle slope. Then in their last 200 years they fused science and capitalism with industry, improved travel, population increase and more widespread communication, and suddenly those very slow steps up a very gentle slope became very fast steps up a very steep slope of progression. In fairly quick time they saw the diminution of subsistence level living, high infant morality and widespread poverty being replaced with better health, wealth and prosperity. On seeing this you might be inclined to think that their religious belief has at least in some part been inadequate to the task of lifting people into genuine progression.

With that in mind I'll give you some empirically verified evidence of how the world has gone for human beings on earth in the past 200,000 years. For the past 199,800 of those 200,000 years we had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality. People's earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes), and despite our being religious or worshipfully inclined for most of that time, our beliefs had no real impact on human beings at a scientific or economic level. Yes it is true that great works were produced by some great religious minds - but compared with everyone who ever lived they amount to a tiny minority. And while it is true to say that fabulous cathedrals and temples were built in reverence to God - it is equally true that around those great buildings most people were still barely subsisting - and nothing built or designed or written from worshipful inclinations changed that with any real significance.

The point being, Christian belief is based on supernatural and metaphysical truths, and truthful beliefs are extremely valuable to individuals and communities at a devotional and communal level, but it would be false to say that in the past few hundred thousand years religious belief had any significant impact on people's health, wealth and material standard of living, or on their economic and scientific development, when compared with the effect that science and capitalism had, because it didn't. The argument that some great scientific innovators and pioneers were religious won't help here, because it still fails to account for their relative scarcity, or for the thousands of years that preceded them where not much progress was being made.

So, despite the evolution of religious belief and moral ideas, for the past 199,800 of the aforementioned 200,000 years human progression moved at a snail's pace. Then a couple of hundred years ago something changed. People started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it's still going on).  It was primarily science and capitalism that caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression. This science and capitalist-based progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb - people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems - and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.  The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper, and the quicker they do so.

Now let's be clear; science and capitalism haven't created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects - but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years than in the previous 198,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, scientific and technological capacity, and overall well-being has improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it.

Failure to recognise this puts one in a potentially knotty situation if one is a theist, because purely on the record of human health, wealth, standard of living, economic development, technological and industrial progress, it cannot be denied that the 200 years when science and capitalism have been most prominent have provided a much better record for humans than the thousands of years prior to that when religious belief was most prominent.

This does not, of course, mean that the progress science and capitalism have provided are the only kind of progression available to us - for it would be impertinent to measure human progression in terms of science and capitalism without mentioning the importance of Christianity in the areas of life into which science and capitalism make no real inroads. It stands to reason that the way Christianity enriches us is both locked into the material tenets of life, but also very much locked into metaphysical tenets too.

If things like science and capitalism show themselves to be good vehicles for human progression, or beneficial tools for lifting us out of poverty, curing diseases, feeding the impoverished, communicating globally, and generally enhancing our knowledge of the world, then they are not at odds with faith, and can work alongside Christianity so long as they enacted with a Christ-centred heart. And that's why if God is a God who values the kind of human progression with which we can lift people out of poverty, cure diseases, feed the impoverished, and generally enhance our knowledge of the world, then it seems to me that God must like science and capitalism at its best, as history has shown them to be the two best vehicles to achieve those things.

Sleight of Hand Environmentalism Problem

 

When it comes to spending money, there are things we spend our own money on directly that we can manage well ourselves (clothes, wine, holidays), things the government spends our money on, on our behalf, that we couldn't so effectively manage locally (defence, rule of law, welfare), and things the government spends our money on, on our behalf, that we (or they) would better off not spending money on. 

Using cars to illustrate, the government model for provision, as everybody knows, is roughly this. They take your money, buy you a Ford Fiesta, and tell you they are doing you a favour because you really need a Ford Fiesta. The people who wanted a Ford Fiesta don't mind as much as the people who wished they could have used their own money to buy a Honda Civic, or a motorbike, or a bicycle and a holiday - but even the recipients of Ford Fiestas could have bought them with their own money if the government hadn't taken it. The real beneficiaries in this equation are the suppliers of Ford Fiestas, and the politicians who take the money to buy each of us a Ford Fiesta and keep some for themselves. Ford makes many sales it would not otherwise have made, and many consumers end up with Fords they wouldn't have otherwise bought.

Cronyist organisations, like those seeking to sell their wares off the back of environmentalist dogma, lobby the government for more and more money, under the pretext that the planet is going to hell in a handcart, and we should therefore be forced to spend money on their products. Most climate policies are like Ford Fiestas in those scenarios - we get them whether we want them or not, and we have no easy way to opt out of them.  

What’s The Future Of The Church Of England?

 

With the way it’s been going recently, with their continued descent into wokeness, moral relativism and leftish identarian politics, I honestly wonder whether the Church of England will survive its current identity crisis; whether there’ll be a big split, or whether it will disintegrate as it continues to dilute or abandon many of its sacred doctrines.

I’m reminded of Alice’s Red Queen, where it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. Many factions of the Church of England are running twice as fast to remain chameleons that blend into transient values and misguided cultural whims, while gradually losing their voice, and with that, much of the power of the gospel it was founded to proclaim.

Ordinarily, assuming this trend continues, I would have predicted that during the next century the Church of England will fracture: some factions will attempt to remain a force for, while others will accelerate further into misjudged conformity and compromise, leaving it divided and diminished beyond repair. But I have an element of doubt, because the Church of England is enormous, and deeply intertwined with British society, law, and governance - so a split would be complex and messy.

The Church of England is the established church in the UK; the monarch is its Supreme Governor, and bishops sit in the House of Lords. Splitting would involve complex legal and possibly parliamentary processes. Churches, cathedrals, schools, and endowments are legally held by the institution. Dividing assets would be chaotic, costly, and litigious. And we all know that bishops, priests, and dioceses are tied to the formal structures of the church, and millions of people identify as members - so convincing them to follow a new, separate body could be slow and uneven, especially at there would be inevitable disagreements over what the split would even look like.

Maybe these trends won’t last, and the church will wake up and see sense. Or maybe it won’t see sense by itself, but the trends themselves will die, as many hopeless things do, and the church will no longer be able to court popularity and relevance through these diluted vogues. Or maybe it can’t split, but will become more and more divided, leaving it to be a continued but ever more fractious mix of institutional dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and spiritual compromise, with a regrettable loss of clear identity. As someone who always felt that I could vibrate to a slightly conservative Anglicanism, I’d hate to think that the church would become an even more hollowed-out institution, struggling to speak with authority, losing members, and drifting further from its founding mission.

It’s my faith in Christ as Lord that keeps me believing that the Church of England is worth saving. For all its current confusion, the Church of England still carries immense beauty and weight. Its liturgy remains one of the most profound expressions of Christian worship ever written; its cathedrals and parish churches still anchor countless communities in prayer and continuity; and its historic rootedness gives it a unique moral and cultural authority. If only it could recover the courage to speak timeless truth with grace and conviction, it might yet become again a steady moral compass in a disoriented nation. If it cannot recover its soul, the Church of England may eventually endure only in name, but not in spirit.