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Jean Twenge’s new book 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World came out last month and is the latest in a recent stream of titles calling out the threat of smartphones and social media for young people. I welcome the news that Australia is hoping to ban social media for under 16s, and am praying that our government does likewise. Twenge’s book contains plenty of research, charts and data that might provide some motivation for major societal change in this regard: “In recent years, 40% of high school seniors (17-18yrs olds) have not read a single book in the last year that wasn’t assigned for school. Back in the early 1980s, that was true of only 15% of high school seniors.” “11-17 years olds get an average of 237 notifications a day from their phones” “College students who used devices for an hour before bed were 59% more likely to have symptoms of insomnia and slept 24 minutes less than those who didn’t use devices before bed.” “In 2008, when few teens had smartphones, 45% of 8th graders (13-14yr olds) said they were often bored. By 2023, it was 61%. Devices filled with bite-size videos were supposed to mean we were never bored, but instead more teens than ever are filled with ennui.” “Meta’s internal research found that 13% of British teen users and 6% of American teen users who had suicidal thoughts said their desire to kill themselves traced back to Instagram.” All of which goes some way to explain the title of tech entrepreneur Jaron Lanier’s 2018 book Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and the reason Sharon and Richard Pursey’s team are being celebrated for creating the first phone with inbuilt anti-nudity technology designed to keep children safe online. It’s obviously true that smartphones have transformed how we live, something that Jonathan Haidt describes as ‘the Great Rewiring,’ resulting in an end to the traditional play based childhood and the advent of the phone based one. In a world like this, one where more than twenty-four thousand minutes of new user video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day, how can the church ensure we’re doing what we can to disciple our young people? Here’s two things every parent, pastor and youth worker needs to know, followed by one opportunity not to be missed: 1) Boys and Girls Are Different Generally speaking phones and social media are affecting boys and girls differently. Already by 2015 we were seeing evidence of the impact that social media was having on girls as distinct from boys. In a study from that year one in five teenage girls said they had experienced a major depressive episode in the last year. Rates of clinical-depression among girls recently peaked at 29% compared to 11% among boys. Among children who spend more than five hours a day on social media, 38% of girls compared to 14% of boys suffer from depression as a result. The reasons for this are well documented as well but stem in large part from algorithms and beauty filters built into the apps young girls are using. Jonathan Haidt believes this is exactly what we would expect to find given the particular social dynamics among girls and the way social media amplifies them. In The Coddling of the America Mind he writes: If we were to put a handgun in the hand of every testosterone filled teenage boy we’d inevitably see a rise in the amount of homicides. If we were to put a device in the hands of our girls that created social comparison and anxiety we’d likely see a rise in the amount of suicides and mental health disorders. Boys, by comparison are spending more time playing video games and getting stuck in the quagmire of porn addiction. According to author John Gray, the reason for this is because a child’s brain on a video game, or a male brain looking at nude images of women, reacts almost identically to a brain on class A drugs. We also know that the presence of testosterone in boys slows down brain development whereas oestrogen in girls speeds it up. In the book Brain Rules, molecular biologist John Medina shares a particularly memorable contrast about the sexes from watching girls and boys at play. Two girls are together, one throws a ball into the air and catches it, the other says ‘me too’ and then does the same thing. Two boys are together and do the same thing but the second boy rather than saying ‘me too’ instead says ‘I can throw it higher.’ Consequently, healthy competition and challenges in discipling boys is perhaps more important to think about than when discipling girls. 2) Parents Matter To disciple young people well we need to do more to engage and equip parents for the task. In her book How the West Really Lost God, sociologist Mary Eberstadt studies trends in religiosity across time and finds a correlation between that and the strength of the family. When the traditional family is weak (or treated as an oppressive institution as has been the case in recent times) church attendance is low but, she says, revival of religion and renewal of the domestic family have often gone hand in hand. Eberstadt calls ‘Christianity’ and ‘the family’ twin columns of a society’s DNA helix that rise and fall together. When one is strong (church attendance say) the other is also strong (committed marriages and strong families), but when one is weak the other is weak also. Generally churches know this, which is why we run baby and toddler groups. But it’s also important to consider when thinking about how we can disciple young people. The first chapter in Twenge’s latest book is for parents: You’re in Charge. Twenge argues for the importance of what she calls ‘authoritative’ parenting as opposed to ‘helicopter’ parenting (hovering over kids), ‘snowplow’ parenting (removing all of the obstacles in their way), ‘gentle’ parenting (never saying no), or ‘lighthouse’ parenting (being a source for insight but not interfering too much). Clinical psychologist and parenting expert Becky Kennedy calls authoritative parenting “Sturdy Leadership”— it’s a combination of validating feelings but also holding boundaries. She suggests parents should respond to kids pushing back on rules with something like this: “One of my main jobs is to make decisions that I think are good for you, even when you’re upset with me. This is one of those times. I get that you’re upset, I really do.” Play the long game. “Your job is not to make your kids happy at every moment. It’s to raise competent adults who will be happy in the long term. Your most important job as a parent is giving your children experiences that help them grow.” Building on what we said above about rates of brain development, author Scott Galloway, who has two teenage sons, says that since the brain’s prefrontal cortex (the part in charge of self-control and decision-making) doesn’t fully develop until the mid 20s, he says: “my job as their dad is to be their prefrontal cortex until it shows up.” That’s a good way of thinking about why parents must not disengage from their children’s tech use. In 2014 Sociologist Christian Smith conducted more than 230 in-depth interviews, and studied data from three nationally representative surveys leading to one significant headline and a number of other important secondary findings. The headline was: the single, most powerful causal influence on the religious lives of American teenagers and young adults is the religious lives of their parents. Not their peers, not the media, not their youth group leaders or clergy, not their religious schoolteachers, not Sunday School, not mission trips or service projects or summer camp… but parents. Church leadership teams who want to disciple young people, need to be trying to equip their parents to live out their faith more in the home. Deuteronomy 6:7 says this: “you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise.” We must be aware, in the words of Tony Reinke, that “in a world dominated by the image instead of the word, interior life gives way to exterior show. Substance gives way to simulation.” Pastors need to help parents and youth leaders work on their interior life so that we might push back against the dominant spirit of our age, not smartphones but performative culture. The Opportunity So those are two things we must be aware of. If you’re concerned about this and wanting to think more about what we can do, consider this. On Saturday 7th February 2026, Newday presents Youth Culture, a conference aimed at equipping parents, professionals, pastors and youth leaders to engage with the biggest issues facing a generation. We’ll be praying for change, sharing ideas and workshopping together about how the church might disciple a generation. For more information and to sign up, click here.    

There is something about Revelation 4-5 that seems to bamboozle certain songwriters. Preachers and commentators on this passage, and most readers in my experience, can see that the One seated on the throne in chapter 4 is God - surrounded by the sevenfold Spirit, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders - and that in chapter 5, the Lamb enters the scene and takes the scroll. The songs of chapter 4 ("Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty" and "Worthy are you, our Lord and God ...") are sung to the One seated on the throne: in Trinitarian terms, God the Father. The songs of chapter 5 ("Worthy are you to take the scroll ..." and "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain ...") are sung to the Lamb: in Trinitarian terms, God the Son. Chapter 5 concludes with both Father and Son being distinctly addressed as clearly as they are anywhere in Scripture: "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might forever and ever!" (5:13). But a number of modern songs get in a bit of a muddle about this. In my most recent Christianity Today column I mentioned an obvious example: Bethel Music’s “No One Like the Lord” begins: “There is one on the throne / Jesus, holy.” It continues: Worthy is the Lamb Who was slain and seated on the throne … And the elders, creatures bow, Giving praise to him and him alone The song is powerful, sweeping, and melodic. I am confident the songwriters believe in the Trinity and are trying to reference the glory due to God. The problem is that Revelation 4–5 say something quite different. There is indeed one who is seated on the throne, but he is clearly distinct from the Lamb who was slain (5:7). The elders and living creatures bow down and praise the one on the throne as worthy (4:9–11), and they also bow before the Lamb (5:8–14). But the two persons are not identical. This is vital to our view of God. We do not praise the Lamb “alone”; we praise Father, Son and Spirit. Revelation chapter 5 concludes with all creation saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power forever and ever!” (v. 13, emphasis added). When songs are doing the liturgical heavy lifting—as they often are in low-church evangelicalism—this is a problem. This is not an isolated instance. Admittedly, you could read the chorus of “Who Else is Worthy?” as referring to Jesus’s worthiness to open the scroll, as opposed to his worthiness to receive worship—although I’m not sure most people singing it think that’s what they’re declaring. But you get something similar in “Worthy of It All,” which has one of my favourite choruses introduced by a puzzling line: All the saints and angels bow before your throne All the elders cast their crowns before the Lamb of God and sing: You are worthy of it all You are worthy of it all For from you are all things And to you are all things You deserve the glory The problem is that they don’t. The elders cast their crowns and sing worthy to the One seated on the throne (4:10-11), well before the Lamb has even entered the picture (5:6). To which you might well say: who cares? Surely the members of the Trinity are not jostling between them over who gets sung to by whom? Presumably not. But it does not help us worship our Trinitarian God if we so freely confuse the persons of God and Lamb, Father and Son. Nor does it help us understand Revelation 4-5. Nor does it help us defend against Oneness theology when it pops up (as it occasionally does, and increasingly will if distinctions like this are lost in a fog of congregational confusion). And it misses out on the extraordinary Christ-exalting drama of the moment when the Lamb receives worship along with the One on the throne (5:13-14), and is then seen at the centre of the throne, shepherding his people as the Father wipes away their tears (7:17). We don’t have to sing hymns every week (although at the moment, in or church, we do). We don’t even have to mention all the members of the Trinity each week (although I think we probably should). But as long as our songs are doing the liturgical heavy lifting in our churches - which I suspect they are for most readers (see Sacrament, Spirit and) - we should try and get the Trinity right. Here is how I concluded my column: To some this will all sound insufferably pedantic, if not mean. To others it will sound indefensibly sloppy, if not heretical. I hope it is neither. I have no doubt that these songwriters believe in the Trinity. Yet their lyrics unintentionally undercut that belief in ways that will confuse those who sing them. And the more popular the song, the more that matters.

Matthew Syed's book Black Box Thinking is a fascinating exploration of why failure is your friend. In this passage he considers the common practice of brainstorming, whereby everyone throws out ideas and nobody is allowed to criticise them. Counterintuitively, the data suggests this hinders rather than enhances creativity:Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation has nothing to latch on to. It loses its pivot. As [James] Dyson puts it: ‘Creativity should be thought of as a dialogue. You have to have a problem before you can have the game-changing riposte.’ Perhaps the most graphic way to glimpse the responsive nature of creativity is to consider an experiment by Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues. She took female undergraduates and randomly divided them into five-person teams. Each team was given the same task: to come up with ideas about how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay Area. These five-person teams were then assigned to one of three ways of working. The first group were given the instruction to brainstorm. This is one of the most influential creativity techniques in history, and it is based on the mystical conception of how creativity happens: through contemplation and the free flow of ideas. In brainstorming the entire approach is to remove obstacles. It is to minimise challenges. People are warned not to criticise each other, or point out the difficulties in each other’s suggestions. Blockages are bad. Negative feedback is a sin. As Alex Faickney Osborn, an advertising executive who wrote a series of bestselling books on brainstorming in the 1940s and 1950s, put it: ‘Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.’ The second group were given no guidelines at all: they were allowed to come up with ideas in any way they thought best. But the third group were actively encouraged to point out the flaws in each other’s ideas. Their instructions read: ‘Most research and advice suggests that the best way to come up with good solutions is to come up with many solutions. Free-wheeling is welcome; don’t be afraid to say anything that comes to mind. However, in addition, most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticise each other’s ideas.’ The results were remarkable. The groups with the dissent and criticise guidelines generated 25 per cent more ideas than those who were brainstorming (or who had no instructions). Just as striking, when individuals were later asked to come up with more solutions for the traffic problem, those with the dissent guidelines generated twice as many new ideas as the brainstormers. Further studies have shown that those who dissent rather than brainstorm produce not just more ideas, but more productive and imaginative ideas. As Nemeth put it: ‘The basic finding is that the encouragement of debate – and even criticism if warranted – appears to stimulate more creative ideas. And cultures that permit and even encourage such expression of differing viewpoints may stimulate the most innovation.’ The reason is not difficult to identify. The problem with brainstorming is not its insistence on free-wheeling or quick association. Rather, it is that when these ideas are not checked by the feedback of criticism, they have nothing to respond to. Criticism surfaces problems. It brings difficulties to light. This forces us to think afresh. When our assumptions are violated we are nudged into a new relationship with reality. Removing failure from innovation is like removing oxygen from a fire ... Imagination is not fragile. It feeds off flaws, difficulties and problems. Insulating ourselves from failures – whether via brainstorming guidelines, the familiar cultural taboo on criticism or the influence of cognitive dissonance – is to rob one of our most valuable mental faculties of fuel … Failure and epiphany are inextricably linked.

Ideally, a good translation of the word authenteō in 1 Timothy 2:12 – “I do not permit a woman to teach or have/exercise/assume/take/usurp authority over a man” - would provide satisfying answers to four related questions. In order of importance:1. Contextually, does this translation make sense within the flow of Paul’s argument about men and women, Adam and Eve, learning, teaching and quietness? 2. Lexically, does it fit with the way authenteō is used in other Greek literature of the period? 3. Translationally, does it make sense of the ways that the early church fathers and subsequent translators rendered and understood authenteō in their own languages? 4. Etymologically, does it shed any light on the ways that subsequent words (like “authority” and “authenticity”) have derived from it? So here’s my suggestion: what about stepping away from “authority” language for a moment – which is where almost all of the debate, online and in print, is focused – and think in terms of “mastery” instead? That would leave us with this: “I do not permit a woman to teach or master a man; she must remain quiet.” Contextually it fits, but then most of the options do. Despite the lengthy online exchanges over whether the word is “positive” or “negative” (like here and here), in this context at least, Paul clearly thinks of it “negatively” enough to prohibit women from doing it, but not so negatively as to prohibit everyone from doing it. (That is why the recent NIV went for the more neutral “assume authority”, which could go either way.) “Mastery” could be good or bad, depending on the context. Lexically, it fits very well with the way authenteō is used elsewhere. (The first example below involves someone celebrating their “mastery”, and the third involves someone decrying it, which is why none of the “authority”-based translations can make sense of all three texts.) Try these on for size: I was surprised that there was no argument. And since I had mastered him, within the hour he agreed to secure for Calatytis the boatman at the same fare. (Letter from Tryphon to Asclepiades) If Saturn alone is ruler of the body and masters Mercury and the moon, if he has a dignified position with reference to the universe and angels, he makes his subjects lovers of the body. (Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos) Masters will master their servants savagely, and servants will assume an unruly demeanor towards their masters. (Hippolytus, On the End of the World) Translationally, it helps too. Plenty of writers have pointed to Jerome’s use of dominari to translate authenteō into Latin - which, if you are interested, was later changed by Erasmus to the stronger usurpare, hence the King James’s choice of “usurp authority.” “Mastery” language shows clearly how you get from authenteō to dominari, given that a dominus was a master or lord, and from there to the more negative connotations of English terms like “domineer” or “lord it over.” (When you see those terms in an English Bible today, as in Mark 10:42 and 1 Peter 5:3, they translate a quite different word, katakurieuō). The most surprising payoff may be the least important, namely the etymological one. How on earth, we might wonder, does the same Greek word give rise to the words “authority” and “authenticity,” which sound so very different? Again, think about mastery. Clearly, a “master” is an authority figure. But it is also the word we give to the “master copy,” the authentic and original version of something, the one from which other versions derive both their “authority” and their “authenticity.” No doubt there is a broader point to be made here about the way Western people (wrongly) see “authenticity” precisely as a rejection of “authority,” but that’s for another day. So that’s my translation suggestion for the day. Any takers?

I have always regarded (and defended) the BBC as impressively neutral. My general rule of thumb is that when you hear people complaining about the national broadcaster being biased in favour of something, you can usually tell more about the person complaining than you can about the BBC. But clearly that is not true in every case. This week's resignations in the wake of the Panorama affair have brought them under the spotlight again, and these comments from Matthew Syed's column in The Times (which I came across via the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore) are well worth considering:This is why I’d argue (perhaps optimistically) that this week offers a window of opportunity for the BBC. The courageous move would be to acknowledge Prescott’s findings, perhaps even to admit what is, I think, undeniable: that the corporation suffers from institutional bias. I mean, it is not as if it is alone in this. A survey last month by Electoral Calculus showed that 75 per cent of what it called “the establishment” voted for left-of-centre parties at the general election. The think tank More in Common found that many institutions are dominated by “progressive activists” who constitute just 13 per cent of the population. And it is worth briefly noting how we got here. Perhaps the original sin was the progressive march through our universities: since the 1960s the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has shifted from 3:1 to 8:1. This has not just tilted young, often impressionable minds in a decisively more liberal direction but had further consequences too. It is striking, for example, that graduates today migrate in huge numbers to metropolitan areas (nearly 40 per cent of Russell Group graduates with firsts and 2:1s are living in London within six months of leaving uni), where they join narrow friendship networks connected to the institutions at which they work, creating a double whammy of social convergence. This is why ensuring true diversity of views at an elite institution like the BBC is about far more than diversity of colour, class or gender. It is about appointing senior editors who (wait for it) are sympathetic to Reform UK; hiring many more who are super-bright but didn’t go to university; constantly encouraging new recruits to express their opinions rather than converge on the predominant ones; perhaps above all, recognising that impartiality is not a destination but an orientation requiring a disciplined awareness of one’s limitations and an insistence on transparency, method and the humility to constantly test assumptions against alternative ones. The BBC will instinctively feel defensive this week and may be tempted to argue that it has all the necessary policies in place. I’d humbly retort (as a friend) that this would be a terrible strategic error. The role of the BBC has never been more important and it is not too late to preserve it from those who wish to bring it down. But all executives should remember that while a liberal world-view predominates within the walls of the organisation, a majority of licence fee payers believe in the following heresies (ie, common sense): national borders matter; love of nation is admirable; biological males shouldn’t compete in women’s sport; people should be judged on merit, not colour; western history is broadly admirable, not shaming. Indeed, how about reading out the previous paragraph at the outset of every editorial meeting? It might help mitigate the otherwise irresistible tendency towards elite groupthink.

Tim Suffield thinks that the modern version of Christian Nationalism is coming to the UK, and I think he's right. Until recently it could be understood as an essentially American phenomenon, which British readers could dismiss as the sort of thing you would expect from people who own guns and oppose state healthcare. But that appears to be changing. I say that for all sorts of reasons, some of which are international in scope (the vibe shift online, Trump II, the collapse of the centre in many European countries, the combination of economic stagnation and global migration, the gender split whereby young women lean left and young men lean right), and some of which are more distinctly British (flags, marches, boats, hotels, the poll lead of Reform, and the response of the other parties to this new reality). Christian Nationalism: coming soon to a church near you.This, as Tim points out, is going to catch a lot of British pastors unawares. Most of us are not comfortable with political theology, let alone adept at it. We may occasionally address political issues - especially when they relate to the Ten Commandments (life, marriage, etc) - but we are mostly untrained in political thought and unused to political conflicts within our congregations. In a world where political discourse operates symbolically more than logically, and online more than in person, this may prove tricky. “When everything is symbolic, but we don’t share the same key to understanding the world, reading other people’s behaviour becomes difficult,” Tim explains. “When the keys we are given to the world through a variety of media that are themselves fractured and polarising, we are inclined to read those who are different to us in the worst possible light.” We are indeed. So one thing we need to get clear on is what we actually mean by the term “Christian Nationalism.” Tim argues that it could (and sometimes does) refer to any of at least fifteen different things, ranging from the self-evidently good to the totally unacceptable. Six of them, it seems to me, are biblical-theological in nature, differing over the extent to which we should expect to see God’s ways taught, lived out or even legislated for in the current age. They form a kind of spectrum, ranging from innocuous, kingdom-not-yet amillennialism to muscular, kingdom-now postmillennialism: 1) Christians who think that God’s word contains wisdom for running a nation 2) Christians who think that churches should be able to preach God’s wisdom for the nation to the nation 3) Those who think it’s appropriate to consider what the political theology of a Christian nation would look like, though they might expect this to be brought into being through conversion or revival 4) Those who want a “Christian nation” to be formed (presumably, whether its citizens have converted or not) 5) Those who want “Christendom” back 6) Theonomists, who think a nation’s laws should look like the Bible’s law code Another six are practical-political in nature, differing over the extent to which “nations” - cohesive, self-governing and usually ethnically related groups with shared history, that are larger than a tribe and smaller than an empire - are natural, biblical, beneficial and in need of defending from globalist mush. (The remaining three, as I read them, are essentially common misunderstandings of the term.) Again, these six form a spectrum, with patriots at one end and downright racists at the other: A) Those who are patriotic and love their nation and are Christians B) Nationalists, in the broad sense of ‘anti-empire,’ who are Christians C) Nationalists in the much tighter, protectionist sense, who are Christians D) Those who are democratic post-liberals (or ecclesiocentric ones) E) Those who are anti-democratic post-liberals F) People who think a Christian nation means a white nation of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ Needless to say, most people (though not all) who think of Christian Nationalism in terms of 1A will probably be favourable towards it. Most people (though not all) who think of it in terms of 6F will probably be hostile towards it. And those of us who do not make any of these distinctions, and use the “Christian Nationalist” label indiscriminately of G. K. Chesterton, Viktor Orban, Danny Kruger, apartheid South Africa, Charlie Kirk, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Putin, C. S. Lewis, Queen Elizabeth II and the KKK, will find ourselves either baffled or enraged (or both) by what is coming. More to follow, I suspect.

Five years ago today England went into the second full covid lockdown. This was a truly significant event, the repercussions of which on work patterns, the economy, education and mental health are still reverberating. But this is an anniversary that seems to be passing entirely unremarked.Given the impacts of lockdown it is extraordinary that it has been so effectively erased from the national narrative. There are no headlines on the BBC website commemorating the date and analysing the consequences of the decision. There is endless comment and speculation about the measures Rachel Reeves may or may not introduce in the forthcoming budget, but barely a nod to how our current financial predicament is linked to lockdown. The amnesia is really quite weird. November the fifth has long been a date to remember. Sadly, now rather overtaken by the nonsense of Halloween, November fifth is a key date in our national history. Even if people are shaky on the details, Guy Fawkes and the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament are part of our story. Stories matter. They locate us in space and time, giving a sense of identity and defining culture. (Which is why the flags have the significance they do.) The people of God have stories that help locate who we are, where we have come from, and what our mission is. If we are to know these things we need to know the stories. Amnesia about scripture and church history leaves us scrabbling to understand who we are and what our purpose is. In his excellent book on the role of the Holy Spirit in the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Philip Eveson highlights the significance ‘the doctor’ placed on knowing our story. For instance, the 1859 revival loomed large in Lloyd-Jones’ thinking and was seen by him as, Similar to the supernatural activity of God at the river Jordan, when Israel crossed over dry-shod into the land of Canaan. Telling future generations of what happened in Church History was like answering the question ‘What mean these stones?’, stones which God had commanded to be taken from the middle of Jordan and set up in Gilgal (Josh. 4:21-24). He taught his congregation the importance of monuments and reminders of the great things God has done and that Christians are called to consider historical facts, ‘significant and miraculous facts.’ We see another example of this intentional memory in the longest prayer in the Bible, that of Nehemiah 9. In this prayer the Levites bring to memory the ‘stones’ of God’s acting among them: His work as creator, the covenant with Abraham, the story of the Exodus, the conquest of the land, and God’s constant forgiving of His peoples frequent rebellion. It is these memorial stones that provide a sense of identity, the certainty of hope, and the scope of mission for God’s people. These stones are our story too. We need to know the Bible story. We need to know church history. We need memorial stones to help guide our steps into the future. We should not forget. Six days after Guy Fawkes Day comes Armistice Day: Lest we forget. The slogan stands as a warning – forgetfulness is not simply failing to remember; it is losing a part of who we are. Forgetting lockdown makes it harder to understand our current social woes and more likely we will repeat the mistakes of 2020. Forgetting Guy Fawkes separates us from our national identity and culture. Forgetting the memorial stones of scripture’s story and church history leaves us blowing in the wind of every kind of teaching and deceitful scheming. Remember, remember, the fifth of November.        

Does Nehemiah become self-righteous towards the end of the book that bears his name? When we are introduced to him in chapter 1, he is repenting thoroughly for his own sins as well as the sins of the nation: "we have sinned against you. Even I and my father's house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses" (Neh 1:6-7). By chapter 13, however, he is frequently insisting on the goodness of his actions:“Remember me, O my God, concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds which I have done for the house of my God and for his service.” (13:14) “Remember this also in my favour, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love.” (13:22) “Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.” (13:29) “Remember me, O my God, for good.” (13:31) Does this indicate a spiritual decline in Nehemiah’s life? Has success gone to his head? Have the numerous confrontations with recalcitrant Israelites - some of which, famously, involving beating people and pulling out their hair (13:25) - fostered a degree of self-righteousness in this great leader? D. A. Carson wonders about this in God’s Word, Our Story: Learning From the Book of Nehemiah. Here are his reasons, and even if he turns out to be wrong, his punchline is well worth heeding: Why doesn’t this book end up with: “Remember, O Lord, so to work within us by your power according to your covenantal mercies, that we will again revere your name”? Why do we get this repeated refrain in this chapter: “Remember me, Lord, because I’ve done quite a lot of work. I’ve done a pretty good job. I mean, they failed, Remember them, too, for the bad things they’ve done. But remember me for the good things I’ve done”? In other words, this feels like a kind of spiritual declension, a slightly disappointing focus on self, with overtones of self-exoneration. That might be too harsh. Doubtless God will pronounce his own verdict on the last day; he will sort this one out ... There are some people who are used by God to bring along the church of the living God in some wonderfully powerful ways for a period of time, but who end up, late in life, destroying what they build. This may happen for a lot of reasons. Some people get cranky. They discover at 75 that they cannot do what they did at 45, and they resent the younger folk who are following them. Wittingly or otherwise, they begin to destroy what they built. It’s a wise challenge.

“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.