Rise and Fall

Some new year news - and a prediction for 2025

A happy new year to all of my readers. This is, of course, the time of year when every pundit with a keyboard - which now means most of the population - wastes their time and yours by making predictions about what the coming year might bring. Most of those predictions will be wrong, which is why I usually avoid making them. If I’m going to be publicly wrong, I’d like to at least be publicly wrong in a less obvious way.

This year, though, I’m breaking the habit, because I do have a prediction to make. I’ll write more about it in a moment. But first, there will be a short break for the news. Here are a few things that you might want to know about:

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News and Events

• At the top of this entry, you can watch the film of my recent conversation in London, hosted by Unherd, in which Esme Partridge and I discussed the rise of ‘pseudo-religions’ in the West. We covered a lot of ground, all of it focused around what I have called The Void of contemporary culture, and what strange creatures are rushing in to fill it.

• Coming up next month is a different kind of conversation, this time in Ireland. Christ and Culture is a day-long conference in Galway featuring myself, Paul Vander Klay, Martin Shaw, Fr Conor McDonough and Fr Paul Murray. It’ll be a day of conversation about how Christianity should intersect with the world around it, and it will doubtless take up some of the themes I’ve been writing about recently here. There will also be music, poetry, and storytelling. I’m looking forward to this; it should be a good day out. You can find out more, and get hold of tickets, here.

• I will be teaching in 2025, for the third year running, on the St. Basil Writers’ Workshop, which describes itself as ‘a 9-month writing program for writers following in the footsteps of the Inklings.’ I’ve greatly enjoyed teaching on this course in the past, which is why I’m doing it again. It’s a great experience for serious writers who want to get better. The workshop begins with an in-person retreat in the US in September this year, after which all courses are hosted online. There are several instructors, each teaching their own courses. As well as yours truly, the teachers are Deacon Nicholas Kotar, Jonathan Pageau, Katherine Bolger Hyde, Dr. Nicole Roccas, and Dr. Samira Kawash. I’ll be teaching a Christian-flavoured version of my ‘Rewild Your Words’ writing course. Applications are open now, and places are capped at 15.

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Newflash over: now I can say that I hope you all had an enjoyable Christmas. Or, for any Orthodox readers on the Old Calendar: I hope you have an enjoyable Christmas on Wednesday. For us New Calendar folk, tomorrow is Theophany, which also happens to be the fourth anniversary of my baptism. I’m planning to spend it in our local monastery, if the snow allows me to get there. After the morning liturgy I’ll be watching the brave/foolhardy among our congregation leap into the freezing Shannon to retrieve crosses cast into it by the priest, as part of the ceremony known as the Great Blessing of the Waters.

This is one of my favourite Orthodox traditions, although I’ve never had the guts, or the necessary insulation, to jump in myself. Tomorrow, I expect to just be taking photographs on the bank, rather like the cameraman in this terrific little report, in perfectly clipped Queens’ English, from British Pathé news, of the Blessing of the Waters in Bucharest in 1932.

I can’t say I’d imagined, when I moved to Ireland a decade ago, that my relationship with the country’s biggest river would end up being a religious one, let alone one connected to Orthodox Christianity. But then, ten years ago there was no monastery here, and no blessing of the waters either. Orthodoxy these days is the fastest-growing Christian denomination in the country - albeit from a virtually non-existent start a few decades back - and Ireland is not the only country this is happening in. Something is afoot. Two pieces of writing I’ve come across in the last couple of days have helped me confirm a feeling I’ve had for a while about what it is. Between them, they provide a basis for my foolhardy 2025 prophecy.

One of them, by Aris Roussinos, is entitled ‘Liberalism won’t survive 2025’, and it does what it says on the tin. Roussinos takes up the theme that I wrote about in my essay In This Free World a while back, and which plenty of people have been writing about now for years: the collapse not just of the ‘liberal order’ but of the ideology of liberalism itself. Roussinos - a writer who is always worth reading - thinks the house of cards is visibly and rapidly coming down now, and I think he’s right, though I’m less convinced than he is about how quickly or thoroughly the holdouts will let go of their power and influence.

But what might replace it - what might rush in to fill the political void? The exhausted and increasingly toxic left has nothing to offer, but there are plenty of answers on the excitable ascendant right. Some of them are interesting and thoughtful, but I agree with Roussinos that ‘much of what is novel’ in this still-forming movement ‘is genuinely harmful, and presents huge risks of even worse political futures than those given to us by millenarian Liberalism.’ Personally, I set no stock in either right or left, if those terms even mean anything in 2025. Society’s problems run much deeper than any of this, and the fact is that there is simply no replacement ideology on offer: which, given the noxious nature of all ideologies, is a good thing. But for this reason I don’t think we can have any idea what the world might look like in the late 2020s. The void is increasingly total.

It is in this context that we are seeing a lot of commentator-types picking up on something: a growing surge of interest in serious religion. We touched on that in our recent conversation at Unherd, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about it next month in Galway too. Suddenly, in fact, the ‘return to religion’ theme seems to be everywhere. Something has happened since 2020 (I think the pandemic and its response very much played a part) which has pushed people, often unexpectedly, towards Christianity in particular, and especially its more traditional forms. I myself am an example of this phenomenon, and like a of of other people I didn’t expect it to happen to me. But it did.

It is especially happening to the Orthodox Church. I hear often from Orthodox people I know in the US, including monks and priests, of the huge surge of people coming into the Church there. The same thing is happening, though on a smaller scale, in the UK, and even here in Ireland. Now come the first signs that the always-five-years-behind-the-curve ‘mainstream’ media have noticed. I have been watching out for this for a while. Sure enough, today, I see that the Daily Telegraph has a feature article about ‘young single men’ flocking to the Orthodox Church in America at least partly as a result of ‘online influencers’. I’ve seen similar article in a few publications in the US over the last few months. It seems that Orthodox Christianity is, as they say, having a moment.

Blimey. And I thought only old ladies went to church.

The Telegraph article is a straightforward and fair report. It focuses especially on young men who are attracted to Orthodox Christianity because it is uncompromising in its teachings, and offers a physical and spiritual challenge quite unlike anything that the Western churches have to offer. This is true, and it is something that is heard increasingly now by those who are new to Christianity. It was certainly a consideration for me. While Western Churches have, for the most part, been hacking away since at least the 1960s at both their exoteric forms (mass, liturgy, ceremony, festivals) and their esoteric ones (fasting, prayer rules, monasticism, mystical practices), the Orthodox are still doing much the same thing they were doing in 1450. They - we - are doing it because it works, and that is the attraction.

The attraction, however, brings baggage and some risk. There’s no doubt that some of the young guys coming into Orthodoxy now have been influenced by various misleading online voices, for whom the Eastern Church is less about following Christ, giving yourself to God or following a path of renunciation, love and transformation, than it is about being based, sticking it to the libs, keeping women in their place and generally play-acting life in Byzantium, only with bigger muscles. I understand at least some of the temptation - we’ve all been through our initially zealous phase. I also see that young men in today’s West are looking for something that our increasingly nihilistic consumer culture simply can’t offer them. Personally, for these reasons, I don’t worry too much about most of these people. However they got here, once they get offline and into an actual Church, they’ll be put right, or they’ll leave. We all arrive in this strange destination by different paths, and usually, I think, what we imagine we have come for is not what we will end up getting. It turns out, you see, that we barely know ourselves at all.

Still, the rise of Orthodoxy and the parallel collapse of liberalism presents both opportunities and dangers. The opportunity is obvious: that Orthodox Christianity continues to put down roots in the West, and helps to rejuvenate its exhausted Christian soil. The danger is twofold: firstly, that some people head towards the Church for the wrong reasons, and cause problems once they get there; and secondly that Orthodoxy itself, as a result, becomes a target for those who want to attribute blame for the ongoing crumbling of liberal norms.

It’s easy enough to imagine a flurry of opinion pieces in the likes of the Guardian or the Atlantic, which issue stern warnings about the ‘far right’ Orthodox church. It will be simple enough for them to find a few Orthobros who love Putin and holy war, and are willing to talk at length about the need to ‘retvrn’ to the kind of social set-up that puts the willies right up the defenders of the vanishing order. Ignore the actual spiritual teachings of the Church and go looking for its most controversial online (or, indeed, offline) advocates, and hey presto: you have yourself a new scapegoat for the ructions of the moment.

In that context, then my prediction for 2025 is a simple one: the Orthodox Church in the West will continue growing, and as a result it will attract enemies, often public and sometimes powerful.

The first of these things, in my view, is to embraced, and - well, so is the second. Being defensive about the matter will help nobody. God does work in mysterious ways, and whoever thought they could be a Christian and live a peaceful life in a world like this? No, the ructions will come and we should stick with our path, try to practice what we preach, and explain, if we need to, what we believe, without fear. If Christianity, Orthodox or otherwise, means anything at all, it surely means trying to live by the teachings we have been handed down. Orthodoxy’s great advantage is that those teachings have not been bent out of shape by modernity. So we can keep praying, keep attending liturgies, keep visiting monasteries and, if we are feeling especially macho, keep jumping into rivers. If we are feeling weedier we can stay on the bank and take photos. It’s all permitted, and it’s all good. We just keep walking on.

On which note, I’ll end my little new year message by saying that I’m going to be away for a week from next weekend, on a short pilgrimage to Mount Athos, with a few Orthodox friends of my own. When I return, I’ll be beginning my new series, The Sunday Pilgrimage, which will certainly contain some reports from my trip to the Holy Mountain. In the meantime: many blessings to you all as the new year unfolds.