The pond had expected the reptile horde to quieten in the sullen silly season lull where time is best spent celebrating family feuds, but if anything there's been a quickening of the spirit.
Just look at this day's offerings. No Monday slump here, here no Monday slump ...
Okay, Pesutto shuffling off into the void known as Victorian Liberal politics isn't that epic, but steady, break out the box on the extreme far right, and the offerings will become clearer ...
Look who's top of the extreme far right lizard Oz digital world today, ma ...
How could the pond ever resist the Lynch mob, especially when today he gives the Irish a damned fine lynching? Why Ireland’s ‘new morality’ thrives on Israelophobia, In Ireland, secular progressivism has become the prevailing orthodoxy, as it goes through its second generation of anti-Catholicism. Israel has fallen foul of it. The deeply entwined roots of Irish and Jewish nationalism have been ripped out by a new political class.
Of all the times to run this story and feature this snap as the Lynch mob's opening thrust, Ireland's Prime Minister Simon Harris arrives prior to the European Council meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels.
Of all times, what with more news of the ongoing genocide, and the Pope suddenly turning Irish ...
Yes, the carnage and the slaughter continues, but the Lynch mob cares not, the Lynch mob is just on the streets for a jolly good lynching:
The Jews and the Irish, two of the great diasporic peoples of history, are in a culture war with each other.
This is a tragedy of Dublin’s making. It has allied with South Africa in prosecuting Israel for its imperfect but defensive war against Hamas.
Australia has flirted with joining their International Court of Justice action. We mustn’t. This is Israelophobia by judiciary.
The fusion of rich, hyperliberal Ireland with an immiserated, one-party South Africa looks an odd one. But there is an underlying logic to it. Both like to see themselves as the underdog, as the survivor of British imperialism, as a beacon of international morality. There is a shared moral self-congratulation that sustains their case against Israel.
Both Dublin and Cape Town lack political diversity. There is no countervailing pressure to empathise with the world’s only Jewish state. Neither country has a significant Israel lobby. Neither has developed a viable conservative politics. South Africans get to choose between the soft-left and Marxist wings of the African National Congress. Corruption and power cuts are endemic to its rule.
A tired form of liberation politics explains South Africa’s anti-Israel position. But what about Ireland’s? Why would a state that prides itself on its diplomatic sophistication, whose own resistance to British rule in the 1910s was admired and copied by Israel in the 1940s, that was the childhood home of Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president, indulge such student politics?
Something is rotten in the state of Ireland and heaven will avowedly not direct it.
At this point the reptiles arranged a visual distraction, a gathering of heretics:
Ireland, Norway and Spain have announced they will formally recognise a Palestinian state. The leaders of the three nations said recognition is in the best interest of a two-state solution. Spain and Ireland have said the decision was not against Israel, nor in favour of Hamas, but rather in support of peace.
Peace? Give peace a chance. Nah.
The Lynch mob cut to the heart of the matter:
Secular progressivism, as it goes through its second generation of anti-Catholicism, has become the prevailing orthodoxy. Israel has fallen foul of it. The deeply entwined roots of Irish and Jewish nationalism have been ripped out by a new political class embarrassed by them.
Indeed, indeed, damn you secular progressivism, though perhaps another infallible Pope should be included:
Back to the Lynch mob, still busy with his lynching:
Old Catholic piety and exceptionalism have mutated seamlessly from “we are the purest and most devout country in Europe, untainted by dirty books” to “we are purest in our care for the Palestinians, disapproval of Israel, and fostering of progressive secularism”. There have been intimations of its creeping intolerance across the past quarter century.
I lived there at its modern beginning. My first book was about the American role in the Irish peace process. Then the Celtic Tiger was beginning to roar. As Ireland’s wealth grew and its priests fell into disfavour, a new religion of luxury beliefs suffused its politics. Rosaries gave way to rainbows, the righteous zeal of the latter replacing the quiet contemplation of the former.
Opening Irish borders to immigrants was seen as a fulfilment of its new morality. Opposition to it was muted. No serious party took up a sceptical position.
In Australia, control of our borders is central to our politics. We have at least one coalition (the Liberals and Nationals) willing to question multicultural assumptions about unchecked immigration. But Ireland?
Imagine an Australian parliament whose views of Israel were determined by Greens leader Adam Bandt and former Labor senator turned independent Fatima Payman. It would not be far away from the contemporary Dail Eireann. It has passed a non-binding motion asserting that “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza”.
Israel has shut its Dublin embassy; Ireland is the first democracy to suffer this reprisal.
Why is a nation that was neutral in a war against Nazi Germany not treading more lightly on the graves of Israelis murdered by Hamas? How is this progressive diplomacy?
Imagine a permanent Labor coalition in control of Australia, with no viable ideological alternative, and you are not a million miles away from the Irish government led by Prime Minister Simon Harris. There, parties of the left and centre-left compete to turn their virtue signalling into a foreign policy. Ireland has no Queensland right. No one speaks for the Jews.
Unlike the US, Britain and Australia, Ireland has a tiny Jewish population, not one strong enough to put their case. Who would want to be one of them?
At this point the reptiles provided more visual evidence of perfidy at work, South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor attends the verdict announcement of the ICJ in the genocide case against Israel.
That set the Lynch mob off again:
Australia has a larger population (27 million versus 5.2 million) and electable conservative parties. Ireland is almost the same size as New Zealand. But even Te Kawanatanga o Aotearoa at its most woke under Jacinda Ardern had to contend with a sceptical opposition – now in office.
Dublin politics lacks this diversity. The nation that gave us Edmund Burke has no conservative movement. Fine Gael is sometimes described as centre-right. In Irish terms, possibly.
But this is not the party Peter Dutton would join. It describes itself as a party of the progressive centre. And, like so many parties of this type, in Europe and Australia, it is now an active prosecutor of Israel for “genocide”. Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the largest party and likely to re-enter a governing coalition with Harris’s Fine Gael, is Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister – Ireland’s Penny Wong. He joined the ANC action against the Middle East’s only liberal democracy. Dublin-based voices of opposition are non-existent.
Ireland’s Israelophobia may play well in sections of America’s left. But Joe Biden’s Hibernophilia could be sorely missed when Donald Trump takes over.
About 60 per cent of Ireland’s corporate tax receipts come from just 10 American firms. Giants such as Apple, Google and Pfizer take advantage of Ireland’s low corporate tax rate. The state is awash in tax revenue – it can afford its luxury beliefs and fund high levels of immigration.
But could it afford a reassessment by the incoming Trump administration? Is being anti-Israel in the age of Trump good for the Irish economy? What if Trump cuts US corporate tax and incentivises Irish-based companies to come home? What if the 47th president uses foreign economic policy to, de facto, punish Ireland in the same way Ireland seeks to use international law to, de jure, punish Israel?
The reptiles then introduced two snaps, so huge they overwhelmed the text, featuring Micheal Martin, Penny Wong, so the hive mind could dissolve into a puddle of fear:
Then it was on to a final gobbet of hate mongering, as only a Lynch mob on the streets or in the lizard Oz can manage:
Ireland’s government has overreached. This is becoming habitual. It keeps wrongly assuming the popularity of its new moral fervour. Attempts to entrench identity politics in the Irish constitution have failed by wide margins. Like the Australian Labor Party after the Indigenous voice referendum, Ireland’s progressive politicians are dismayed that the electorate can keep getting these big questions wrong.
It would be satisfying to claim the targeting of Israel is another example of a disconnect between Ireland’s leaders and the led. The Irish people, surely, don’t have anti-Semitism in their hearts? It is depressing to admit this may be the case.
The quip by Garrett Deasy, the anti-Semitic schoolteacher in James Joyce’s Ulysses – that Ireland is the only country never to persecute the Jews because “she never let them in” – is inaccurate. As Simon Sebag Montefiore has documented, his own Jewish ancestors were attacked, stoned and beaten in Limerick across 1904-06.
Father John Creagh’s pogrom began in the anti-Semitic rhetoric of this Redemptorist priest. It ended with every Jew leaving the city. The so-called Limerick boycott offers a context for contemporary Irish demands to shun Israel. Catholic anti-Semitism seems, inescapably, the foundation of its modern, progressive form.
That the Jews and the Irish, two of the great persecuted peoples of history, should find themselves in enmity is a tragedy. The success of the dynamic, hi-tech, nations built by them has defied their haters and should be a reason for their alliance. Instead, Irish politics remains bound to an ancient hostility, expressed with a religious conviction, dressed in judicial garb.
To the eternal shame of the University of Melbourne, to the celebrator of mass displacement, mass starvation as a method of war, to the glory of genocide in action, credit where credit is due:
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
The pond never had much time for Leunig in his later years, but this tribute in The Conversation reminded the pond of a cartoon which should have had some bearing on the Lynch mob before they took to the streets for that Irish lynching:
And so to the Caterist, in routine election mode, but still reliably turning up on a Monday, when that bloody lazy parrot, the Major Mitchell, was conspicuous by his absence.
‘Gunna-do’ PM’s grandiose plans vanish in the wind, The Future Made in Australia plan was never about creating jobs any more than the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was designed to control the cost of living. The primary goal of these Orwellian-named schemes is to misallocate public funds to dubious projects to tackle climate change.
Naturally the reptiles began with the Satan in chief, the demonic form designed to evoke fear and loathing, Anthony Albanese pictured during a visit to the Rheinmetall factory in Ipswich. Picture: Tertius Pickard
That sent the Caterist in to full election mode, implicit in it all the Orwellian construction, "many four legged renewables extremely bad, a few two legged nukes pretty bloody good":
Anthony Albanese called a press conference at the end of last month to update the gallery on his achievements. He insisted the government was making progress, rattling off a series of numbers to prove his point: 80,000 new homes for renters, 40,000 Australians who would be able to buy a home, tens of thousands of new jobs in manufacturing powered by clean energy and 45 pieces of legislation passed by the Senate in a week.
Sadly, only the last one is an actual figure. The rest were plucked out of thin air to sex up government announcements such as the Housing Australia plan (1.2 million new, well-located homes by the end of the decade) and the $22.7bn Future Made in Australia plan.
The problem for our gunna-do Prime Minister is that he’s running out of time. Plans are all very well for oppositions but governments get rewarded on results, and a mountain of subprime legislation rushed through parliament before the Christmas deadline doesn’t cut it.
The Future Made in Australia plan was launched on April 11. Albanese said his government was “investing in manufacturing to make more things here … building an economy with more secure work and fairer wages”.
The timing was awkward. A week later, Australia’s only polyethylene manufacturer, Qenos, called in the administrators. The company’s plants at Botany, NSW, and Altona, Victoria, have since been closed with the loss of 700 Australian jobs.
In 2023, in the first full year of this pro-manufacturing administration, Australia kissed goodbye to the manufacture of white paper when Opal Australian Paper closed its plant at Maryvale, Victoria. The manufacture of facial tissues and napkins was also pushed off shore when the Sorbent Paper Company closed its plants at Box Hill, Melbourne, and Greystanes, Sydney.
In the second full year of the Albanese government, the forces ravaging domestic manufacturing turned on plastic.
Naturally the Caterist is a plastics lover, and loves the micro plastics in his body. He's something of a plastic man, and he's proud to be one. Plastic people, oh baby you're such a drag, a product of Plasticity ...
Steady, you can't scare the Caterist with cheap plastic stories:
This is the man who keeps the Caterist up at night,
Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen holds a press conference in Sydney. Picture: Jeremy Piper
There's never been a fossil fuel the Caterist hasn't loved and keeps loving.
More than 80 years of petrochemical manufacturing at Botany have come to an end. Feedstock sourced from the Cooper Basin in South Australia, which had been producing 250kT of ethylene a year for domestic and export customers, will no longer be required. The polymerisation plant producing 70kT a year of low-density, moisture-proof, flexible, transparent, hygienic and recyclable polyethylene has gone forever.
For some, the end of domestic plastic bag manufacture will be seen as a virtuous sacrifice. Those with a greater understanding of the plastics supply chain will think otherwise. Iconic Australian brands in the packaging sector face higher costs and less reliable supply.
Qenos polyethylene also was used in rotationally moulded products such as water tanks, moulded plastic products including wheelie bins, and the lining for milk and juice cartons. If green manufacturing jobs are being created, it’s not immediately evident from the statistics.
Albanese inherited a contracting manufacturing sector just like every incoming prime minister since Malcolm Fraser. He has failed to reverse the trend. The proportion of manufacturing jobs in the workforce has halved since the start of the century. It has fallen from 6.25 per cent in February 2022 to 6.06 per cent in November. Manufacturing output as a proportion of GDP fell to 5.39 per cent last year, the lowest level since records began.
It would be wrong to accuse the Albanese government of slacking off entirely on the job-creation front. The tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs may be a mirage but the 91,000 new positions that have opened up in the growth sector of public administration and safety are real. These are government jobs where duties include enforcing the kinds of regulations the Albanese government has been churning through the Senate.
In truth, the Future Made in Australia plan was not about creating jobs any more than the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was designed to control the cost of living. The primary goal of these Orwellian-named schemes is to misallocate public funds to dubious projects to tackle climate change.
Ah, that Orwellian moment foreshadowed by the pond, and a snap of jolly Joe, US President Joe Biden
No doubt readers had been waiting impatiently for that Orwellian construction, "many four legged renewables extremely bad, a few two legged nukes pretty bloody good", to become explicit. Wait no longer:
Like the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Plenty in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Green New Deal projects achieve the opposite of what their names imply. Government spending fuels inflation, and messing with our energy supply kills jobs.
The price of gas was one of the most significant factors that made Qenos’s operations unprofitable. The expansion of liquefied natural gas exports, the decline of southern gas production, the failure to plan new gas facilities and the insidious campaigns by green groups have tripled the spot price of gas in NSW and Victoria from around $4 a gigajoule a decade ago to more than $12 today.
If our Energy Minister had made increasing the gas supply his priority rather than smothering the countryside with turbines and silicon, there might have been light at the end of the tunnel.
Chris Bowen, however, is not a drill-baby-drill kind of guy. The light at the end of his tunnel is illuminated with intermittent renewable energy which, he assures us, will provide energy cheap enough for industry to flourish.
The results from experiments into a renewable-only future have not been encouraging. King Island, the Saudi Arabia of wind, runs on 65 per cent renewable energy. The federal government has invested millions of dollars in public money to up that to 100 per cent with batteries and other technology. If Bowen’s calculations were correct, King Island would be a green manufacturing paradise. Sadly, it’s not.
In September, the Canadian owners of King Island Dairy announced that manufacturing would close by the middle of 2025. Saputo says it has pulled out all the stops to keep the dairy running, including selling it to a third party. Nothing doing, however.
This will probably be the last Christmas Australians will be able to enjoy Roaring Forties blue or Cape Wickham double brie on their cheese plates.
Australia’s descent into a manufacturing wasteland was not part of Albanese’s plan at the 2022 election, when he cited modelling by RepuTex, saying it was the most exhaustive piece of research commissioned by any federal opposition since Federation. That document is remembered most for its confident forecast that electricity prices would fall by $275 a household by 2025 under Labor’s plan.
How weird does it get? Well somehow the AFR and Phil Coorey get dragooned into the Caterist yarn in the form of an AV distraction:
Australian Financial Review Political Editor Phillip Coorey says the Future Made in Australia Act is going to be a “big part” of next week’s federal budget. Treasurer Jim Chalmers will deliver the budget on May 14. “The Future Made in Australia Act, it’s the big political vision for the budget,” Mr Coorey told Sky News Australia. “The PM this week spoke about it in raw political terms … a lot of blue-collar voters have walked away from Labor … and they need to be able to talk to those people again and tell them they’re important to Labor. “This is as much as a policy strategy. It’s also very overly a political strategy about you people are important.”
Then it was on for a final burst of the Caterist in election mode:
There were other howlers, such as the promise of 600,000 new green jobs, with four out of five in the regions.
Unwarranted faith in grand planning is one of the principal errors of socialism outlined in Friedrich Hayek’s 1988 treatise The Fatal Conceit, which contains a prescient warning for gunna-do prime ministers. “The task of economics,” writes Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Ending this Christmas week column on a redemptive note would be nice. Yet the Prime Minister’s holiday reading list, revealed in Troy Bramston’s annual survey of politicians’ bedside tables, does little to inspire hope that he might return in the new year having discovered the error of his ways.
There is no room for Hayek, for example. Instead, the Prime Minister has plumped for Jimmy Barnes’s Highways and Byways.
Our hopes this summer rest with Taylor Swift, of whom Albanese is a fan. We can only hope the Swiftie classic Evermore is on his playlist since it summarises in 13 words what Hayek took several volumes to explain: “Just because you made a good plan doesn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen.”
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
Dear sweet long absent lord, the Caterist pretending to be a teen ...
Here, have a cartoon to celebrate the valiant flood-waters-in-quarries whisperer's work ...
Now at last, and last only in the sense that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first, here's the real treat.
It was the 9th November that we last heard from the bromancer, under the header Donald Trump’s revolution will transform the world, There’s always the chance Donald Trump will make such a mess of things that his revolution is short-lived ... but he has the opportunity, if he governs well, to produce permanent change.
It was splendid stuff, celebrated by the pond, but then the bromancer went off into the void, and left the pond hanging in a nightmare existential despair.
Then on 23rd December, 2024, at 2.47AM, reptile time - mark it well, it's a glorious hour, and epic minutes, in all a splendid time - he returned to celebrate the spirit of the season with How historian Niall Ferguson became a religious believer, The sharpest historian in the West, Niall Ferguson, thinks throwing away Christianity was pretty dumb. Doing so hurt our culture; more important, it has hurt individual human beings. Striking words, coming from a ‘lapsed atheist’.
Two loons together, in epic form, beginning with a celebration of sages for the ages: Left to right: Douglas Murray, JD Vance, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson.
A veritable karnival of klowns in kollage form. As highly esteemed correspondent Chadders and others have noted, it was like the return of the Messiah.
The pond has little to do here, save celebrate the bromancer's return to reptile HQ, to blather nonsensically about the great glory of Niall, a job which Niall usually reserves for himself, but which he generously allowed the bromancer to do this time:
Niall Ferguson is perhaps the most influential historian, and one of the most influential intellectuals, in the world today.
He has written 16 books, including seminal works such as Civilization: The West and the Rest, Empire: How Britain Made the World and, in the light of Covid, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. He has produced and narrated award-winning television documentaries.
His glittering academic career, from Oxford to Harvard to Stanford, has taken a new turn as he and friends have founded the new University of Austin in Texas.
And he’s well known to readers of The Australian as a prolific journalistic commentator and analyst of geostrategic and global economic trends.
He’s so productive you almost think there must be three of him.
But here’s the most striking thing you’ll learn about Ferguson. Quietly, but with great commitment, Ferguson has become a religious believer. With his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and their sons, he has become a churchgoing Anglican Christian.
He is, in his own words, a “lapsed atheist”. Much more important, he’s a believing Christian. Though Ferguson sees profoundly the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity, this is not primarily a political conversion. It’s a deeply personal and deliberate turn to faith by a man who was formerly a lifelong atheist.
I’ve got to know Ferguson a bit. Happenstance twice put him on conference panels I was chairing, once in Britain, once in Sydney. And we’ve had a number of other conversations. He’s the best kind of Scot, full of fun, happily irreverent, makes and takes a joke, and wears his vast learning easily.
What would this glorious story be without a wedding day happy snap? Sure enough, Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali on their wedding day.
New Idea could take a few lessons from the diligent bromancer:
Famously, he’s married to Hirsi Ali, who made her own long journey from Somalia to the US via The Netherlands and Britain. She abandoned the Islam of her childhood and became a strong critic of Islamism, embracing atheism and then slowly moving to Christianity. She has placed her own conversion in the context of the civilisational struggle for the West, but she also wrote that she turned to Christianity “because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable – indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”
There seems to be a significant movement to Christianity among some of the most influential intellectuals today.
Jordan Peterson famously says he’s no longer an atheist. Last year he told me he now believes that Jesus Christ is the son of God, not just symbolically but truly. His wife, Tammy Roberts, herself an influential podcaster, this year became a Catholic after a long illness.
Famously?
A delusional junkie becomes an Xian? Quick, there's a sign of magic at work: Jordan Peterson famously says he’s no longer an atheist. Picture by James Whatling/Parsons Media
Back to Niall, in company with many others:
And there's others, why the famous cat lady man was famously once an atheist before he learned to worship the tangerine tyrant as his god:
US vice-president-elect JD Vance went through a long atheist phase, but he too has since renewed his Christian belief and become a Catholic. Tom Holland, the brilliant historian who wrote the influential book Dominion, about the Christian origins of the Western mind, has described his own journey of belief. Paul Kingsnorth, once a radical atheistic environmentalist and a bestselling author, embraced Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Many other intellectuals have done the same.
Prolific author Douglas Murray represents another kind of intellectual who has grown to appreciate more and more the cultural contribution, necessity even, of Christianity but, while immensely sympathetic to it and therefore opposed to the militantly secular spirit of the age, has stopped just short of actual personal belief, though he’s moved, he says, from “Christian atheist” to “Christian agnostic”.
Cue snaps of the pair, US vice-president-elect JD Vance has become a Catholic: Prolific author Douglas Murray says he has moved from ‘Christian atheist’ to ‘Christian agnostic’. Picture: Nikki Short
Huzzah for the cat lady man.
The long absent lord alone knows what Xian agnostic means, but the bromancer values "prolific" - feel the size, never mind the quality - even if he took a break himself from being prolific.
But we must move along quickly, there is still much to cover:
Is there a hint of the 1920s and ’30s? That too was a period of intense political and geostrategic dislocation, and geniuses of that time, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, CS Lewis, Thomas Merton among them, became Christians. Lewis had been an atheist, as had Waugh for a time, Greene a member of the Communist Party, Merton a dissolute bohemian.
It would be wrong to put Ferguson in some neat box or social trend. Probably the quickest way to arouse his suspicion about anything would be to label it fashionable or a trend. He’s the most individualistic and original of thinkers. Yet his conversion to religious belief reflects some consciousness of the time’s social crisis, as well as personal change.
But this is no pro forma move. It’s a revolution in his outlook, born of many factors, not least his long study of history and experience of the world.
After running into Ferguson in Sydney, I asked him if he would share his personal journey and we spoke at length via Zoom.
“I have embraced Christianity,” he tells me. “We were all baptised, Ayaan and our two sons, together in September (2023). It was the culmination of a quite protracted process. My journey was from atheism. My parents had left the Church of Scotland, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a household of science-minded religious sceptics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wisdom of that when I was young. However, in two phases, I lost my faith in atheism.”
It wouldn't be a proper hagiography, without some hagiographic snaps, including Ferguson’s conversion to religious belief reflects some consciousness of the time’s social crisis, as well as personal change.
The pond isn't here to argue the toss, if you want that sort of stuff you can spend hours on YouTube mired in atheists and Xians having at each other, the pond is simply here for the terrifying void of nothingness, the existential nihilism:
That’s an apt formulation. Atheism is a religious faith, as opposed to the simpler I-know-nothing helplessness of agnosticism. In my view atheism requires much more magical thinking, a much more radical ordering, or disordering, of the facts of life and the universe, to sustain itself than does Christian belief. Often in an atheist life, there’s a crisis of unbelief, a sudden realisation of the terrifying void of nothingness, the existential nihilism, that atheism postulates. It goes without saying there are countless good people who are atheists. But human beings are believing and searching creatures; the sense of God lies deep in every human heart.
Back to Ferguson: “The first phase was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history. But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family.”
Ferguson has three older children from his first marriage. During that time, though a conscientious and believing atheist, he maintained a kind of cultural affiliation with institutional Christianity: “I got my older children baptised because I had a sort of (Alexis de) Tocqueville view that religion was good for society. It was part of Western society and I felt I should embrace it. But I would attend church (occasionally) in a spirit of scepticism and detachment.”
Oh dear, a believing atheist. There was a time when atheism was construed as an absence of belief:
Atheism is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. (here)
Silly American atheists, what would they know. Xians gonna insist everyone's a believer, just like that song:
For Ferguson, in his atheist phase, going to church was almost a political act, as it has often been in history. Millions of east Europeans rallied around their national churches during the communist period because the church was often the only institution communists couldn’t quite crush. That’s not to say going to church under communism was a cynical act for Poles or Hungarians, but the political and religious mixed.
Ferguson: “I felt that if I was a conservative, and believed in the institutions of tradition, living in England it was kind of preposterous not to go to one’s local church. It was a kind of Tory impulse. I was in that state of mind where if the left was against religion, we should be for it. I was in favour of it. That was enough.” Now it’s different: “Now I attend church in a spirit of faith. Also I’m a learner. I learn about Christianity every week. I try to understand it better.”
Naturally I ask Ferguson if he believes that Christianity is actually true. He replies: “The extraordinary figure, Jesus of Nazareth” led a moral revolution that swept through the Roman Empire.
Time to cue a last hagiographic snap, For Ferguson, in his atheist phase, going to church was almost a political act, as it has often been in history. Picture: NewsWire/Monique Harmer
Then it was on with an epic final burst:
Ferguson: “What Jesus taught us was that there were things we couldn’t know. We couldn’t know God’s intent. When I read the Bible I don’t say: show me the miracle. My attitude is that this extraordinary document is describing the life of a unique individual whose power to transform the world has never been equalled. That’s good enough for me.”
But does he think it’s true that Jesus rose from the dead, and the rest? “I just don’t think that one can know that with certainty. But I think the teaching about how one should live, and the relationships one should have with one’s fellow human beings, is so powerful that I prefer to live as if it’s true. I can’t know, but it seems to me it’s preferable to live as if those claims are true. It’s hard to feel bound by the teachings if they’re lies. Faith is fundamentally different from reason. One can’t reason one’s way to God, at least I don’t think one can.
“The nature of faith is that one accepts that these apparently far-fetched claims are true. That’s the nature of faith.”
The idea you can’t reason your way to God would be contested by many Christians, and some ancient Greek philosophers, but it’s surely true you can’t prove God through reason. Christian apologists seldom try that. Rather, they aim more modestly to demonstrate there’s no conflict between faith and reason.
No Christian could possibly criticise Ferguson for the genuineness and honesty with which he shares the thoughtful, reflective, evolving state of his belief. Doubt routinely accompanies belief. It’s a kindness of him to share these inner thoughts; it’s a public affirmation of Christianity. And it’s inherent to the human condition to be faced with a situation that requires a decision, that requires action, even though the information, or the judgment, is in doubt.
As Ferguson says, faith involves belief that is beyond the rationally proven, not belief that contradicts reason but that is certainly beyond that which can be proven. The decision to believe is bold and brave, and it chimes with human nature. But it involves a positive decision. Belief is always an act of the will rather than an act of the intellect.
Let’s approach from another angle. Does Ferguson pray? “Yeah, I pray.”
Do you feel you’re praying to someone real? “Absolutely, just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there aren’t many atheists when your child goes missing, when the life of somebody you love is threatened. Is it a kind of delusion to pray to an invisible super intelligence? I probably used to think that it was. But I prefer to think that prayer is meaningful, on the basis of faith in Christ. I don’t think of it that I’m on the phone to God but I am trying to convey to that which is beyond reason my fervent desire that my son not be killed or my daughter won’t have gone missing.
“These are powerful human impulses it seems utterly cruel to deny.
“To say, as I would have done as an atheist, this is all utterly pointless, the fate of your child is a matter of statistical probability, prayer is the equivalent of voodoo or the witchdoctor, don’t pray, it’s pointless – this is a cruel injunction. I’ve spent 60 years on this planet and I’m convinced that we can’t be spiritually naked, we can’t be spiritually void, it’s too miserable. I have five children, and in the life of every child there’s at least one disaster that seems as if it might be fatal. If you don’t pray in those moments you’re not flesh and blood.”
Now the pond could have interrupted with crude arguments, but the pond has discovered the general rule that arguing with fanatics only tends to up the quotient of fanatacism.
The pond might have interrupted with a crude cartoon, seriously questioning the meaning of it all in a deeply philosophical way:
But that would be wrong, it's better just to let the two of them strut off together in a final burst of bromancer love, the only question being whether Niall has now replaced the onion muncher as the object of the bromancer's deepest affection:
In becoming a Christian, it’s not like Ferguson has just put on a new jacket, changed his fashion sense. He has effectively revolutionised his intellectual outlook. As he says: “Going from atheism to Christianity is a big change.”
Ferguson was not previously an especially anti-God atheist but you could see the atheism in his books. By 2021, and the publication of his marvellous Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which is fast-paced, witty and a bit fevered itself, Ferguson expresses the beginning of anxiety about the consequences of the loss of Christian belief.
He writes: “The advance of science led to a decline not only of magical thinking but also of religious belief and observance. As GK Chesterton foresaw, this had the unintended consequence of creating spaces in people’s minds for new forms of magical thinking. Modern societies are highly susceptible to surrogate religions and magic, leading to new forms of irrational activity.”
He observes that those social trends have worsened: “I think there are a bunch of militant cults and religions, some derived from Christianity, that compete now in a deeply disorienting pseudo-secular civilisation. I say pseudo-secular because I agree with Tom Holland (author of Dominion) that a lot of Christianity is still there in the operating system but people are in denial about it. They don’t even recognise the Christian roots of much that they believe. This goes to the environment movement and the strange cult of wokeism. There are lots of curious mutant forms of Christianity afoot, I think. But that’s not the bad thing. I suspect throughout history the true culture, or milieu, has always been quite eclectic.”
Ferguson can live with that. What really upsets him is this: “We’ve given up on religious observance. This is a mistake – the empty churches on Sundays, people not saying grace at dinner. We’ve lost observance and in doing that we’ve lost something very powerful and very healing. It’s not so much that we’re culturally floating in an eclectic mishmash of half-remembered theology, it’s that we’ve just stopped being Christians. That seems to me a more serious problem.
“What strikes me, as a regular churchgoer now, not having been one before, is how much one learns every Sunday morning. Every hymn contains some new clue as to the relationship between us and God. I think the educational benefit of going to church almost equals the moral benefit, the uplift, the sense one gets of being somewhat reset.
“All of this matters hugely and as a society we’ve turned away from it. That explains, much more than the rise of social media, the mental health problems that characterise our societies today. We’re all sort of running this experiment, without God and without religious observance. And it’s not going well. But we blame it on the smartphone or on Twitter.
“I think the real explanation for the mental health epidemic is that we’ve thrown away those wonderful support mechanisms that evolved over centuries to get us through.”
The sharpest historian in the West thinks throwing away Christianity was pretty dumb. Doing so hurt our culture; more important, it has hurt individual human beings. Ferguson and his family joining the wider Christian family is significant in itself and perhaps a green shoot of wider hope.
A green shoot of a wider hope?
Oh yes, there's a wider hope, no doubt about it ... and the sooner the bromancer gets back to his day job, the sooner we can all enjoy the existentially terrifying void ...
