52. Tom Holland: How religion shaped politics and the Western world

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27:38Tom, one of the phrases that I probably get reminded of virtually every day, not least from theology students who are doing theses upon it, is when I said, we don't do God. And what I meant by that was that I don't think the British people want their politicians to be wearing their faith on their sleeves. I could be right or wrong about that, but that's kind of what I've always thought, even though I knew that Tony Blair was somebody of very, very deep religious faith, as have other prime ministers been in the past. What does he say about us that that is, I think, our basic approach to religion and politics?

28:16Whereas in America, you kind of have to go to church and you have to carry the Bible and you have to say, God bless America. And I feel that what we see in American politics at the moment, particularly with the kind of, I cannot for the life of me understand why evangelical Christians sort of are so powerfully for Trump, who seems to me deeply irreligious, deeply unchristian, and a very, very, very bad human being doing very bad things to the world. So first of all, I guess, what does it say about UK and America and our attitudes to religion and to politics? But also, what does it say about the power of religion that the Americans feel they have to co-opt in that way?

28:55I think that since the 60s, we've been going through a process of convulsion that is comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And I think that it is affecting different countries in different ways. Because Christianity has been so saturating in British history, people have been imbibing this stuff for a thousand years and more. It affects us in Britain in a distinctive way. Equally in the United States, it's a country that was founded by Puritans, by Quakers, by evangelicals. That history also has shaped the way that politics is experienced in the US. And this great convulsion that happens in the 60s, where lessons and impulses and instincts that derive from Christianity have been kind of profoundly transfigured.

29:48I quote the Beatles right at the head of the book, and I write about them. They seem to me expressive of a trend that what happens in the 60s is that Christian teaching, theology, scripture is transmuted into a kind of vibe. All you need is love. That's all you need. You don't need to get it from churches or from reading the Bible or whatever. It's just part of your heart. It's in your soul. You know where it's taking you. But of course it doesn't because everybody feels things differently. And so therefore the kind of climate of opinion that has been generated by these centuries and centuries of Christian opinion in the United States and in Britain express themselves in kind of quite different ways.

30:23So my sister always says, well, you may think you don't do God, but God does you. Is that what you're saying? I'm not saying anything about whether God exists or not. But what I would say is that I think you do do God because I think that your beliefs and your values and your assumptions derive from the Christian understanding of God. I mean, whether God exists or not, I mean, that's irrelevant from the point of view of understanding why you think what you do. I think you are very, very profoundly shaped by that legacy. What about my old boss? Because Tony Blair is not a kind of, he doesn't project himself as a godly person.

30:58And yet I know from having worked alongside him very, very closely, the fact that we always used to have to, if we were abroad, we had to find a church. The fact that he travels with the Bible, that he reads it. What's your sense in British politics and in American politics of presidents and prime ministers where you think actually their faith has been fundamental to their politics? I think considering how far Christianity, you know, institutional Christianity, the habit of going to the church and having a familiarity with the Bible has retreated since the 60s. I think it is amazing actually how many prime ministers have been profoundly influenced by a kind of Christian heritage.

31:34So Mrs. Thatcher, obviously, James Callaghan was before her. Theresa May. Gordon Brown, son of the manse. I mean, the degree to which he believes it, I'm never entirely certain, but clearly, I mean, he's absolutely the child of his father. And Theresa May, likewise, kind of very strongly influenced. I think that, I'm sure, I know that the whole point coming on the rest of politics is to give Boris Johnson a kicking, but that's the point of it. I think he Not at all. I think he is the most profoundly un-Christian prime minister we've had, because I think he is properly a kind of neo-pagan figure.

32:13I think that the influence of the classical world on him is much profounder than that of a kind of Christian teaching. And I think that that does a lot to explain what, from a Christian perspective, may seem his kind of distinctive amorality. I mean, obviously, Tom, nothing I want to do more than a return to the fight on Boris Johnson, who I think would be someone even the Romans would be profoundly ashamed of. But I'm not going to get dragged too deeply into that. I'm going to go to another shameful figure of the modern age, which is Donald Trump, who again doesn't seem to me to be a figure awfully kind of imbued with Christian morality and values.

32:49Can you give us a sense of this weird paradox that here is this kind of amazing, swinging, crass, misbehaving, lying, ludicrous orange figure who suddenly gets embraced by the evangelical movement in the United States? So I think that the culture wars in the United States, which have been raging since the 60s, are in a sense a Christian civil war. It's bred of the civil rights movement, which indisputably drew from Christian wellsprings. Wellsprings, the leaders of the civil rights movement appealed to white Christians in overtly Christian terms. And by and large, white Christians accepted the justice of what they were saying.

33:32But the arguments of the civil rights movement then got picked up by people for whom traditional conservative Christians found it harder to accept. So gay rights, feminism, whatever. And that these then kind of meant that impulses and campaigns that derived from Christian impulses were seen by lots of Christians as being deeply unchristian. And feminists and gay rights campaigners likewise felt that Christianity was the enemy. But in fact, these arguments, which has split America in two, are drawing from the same wellspring. So I would say that there is no aspect of the culture wars that isn't in some way a Christian civil war.

34:12So to give the classic one is, I guess, trans rights at the moment. This is the kind of the big, big issue. So there's no question that it's fundamental to Christian teaching that man and woman are separate. God creates man and woman distinctively in Genesis. And so you might think, well, how could trans rights possibly have anything to do with Christianity? But again, it's couched in the sense that trans people have been left behind by the campaign for gay rights, that they are the most persecuted people, they're the most persecuted minority, and that that persecution, that status of being the ultimate victims in society is what gives them their dignity.

34:47And that, again, I think is unthinkable without deeply held Christian assumptions. So that's what I meant by saying that I think that what we're going through in the West at the moment is comparable to the Reformation, because these are arguments ultimately about doctrines that derive from Christianity. And we know that the fact that these are passionately held is precisely what makes the arguments about them so vituperative. And that, I think, is why evangelicals turn to someone like Trump, who is a completely unchristian figure, a kind of a braggart, a bully, a kind of monstrous, grotesque. And yet, you know, he's their grotesque.

35:25They can feel that he's batting on their side. And he's been compared by supporters of Trump to King Cyrus, the Persian king, who allowed the people from Jerusalem to go back and rebuild the temple. Cyrus wasn't a Jew, but he played the role of the patron of the Jews. And I think that evangelicals feel that the challenge they face from progressives is so profound that they need help wherever they can get it, and that Trump offers that help. Yeah, and they talk about him sometimes as the second coming. I mean, they talk about him almost sometimes in kind of, they feed his sort of Messiah complex.

35:57It's interesting in Dominion, which you wrote some years ago now, but you have a chapter about woke, and I'm fascinated by this as well, because I didn't realize, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sort of springs directly from awakening, and that has a sense of a religious element and a revelatory element to that as well. So what's happened within the debate about politics and religion, that woke has become this kind of catch-all term of abuse for anybody who vaguely wants to make poor people better off and help the oppressed and help the weak. What has happened? I think it's a convenient shorthand for something that is quite new, which is, I think, it's a kind of post-Christian or in cases anti-Christian progressivism that draws on palpably Christian assumptions.

36:47And to repeat, it's this fundamental idea that the last shall be first, the first shall be last. It upends the traditional hierarchies. You know, as we said at the beginning, this is the essence of the Christian story, that the king of the world is born not on the Palatine Hill in the imperial capital of Rome, but in a stable. So that's a deeply unconservative view of the world. It is. And I think that, to be honest, to build a civilization that is founded on the tenets of Christianity is akin to building San Francisco on the San Andreas Fault. Every so often, you're going to get a great convulsion because people are going to say, well, what about the fact that the first should be last?

37:28And this explains, I think, the repeated kind of seismic convulsions that have shaped and shaken European and then Western civilization over the course of the past thousand years. That first great revolution in the 11th century, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, whatever it is that we're living through at the moment. And I think woke is a convenient shorthand for it. But it took 150 years for people to realize that they'd lived through something called the Reformation. And maybe it'll take us, we don't know what we're living through at the moment, but it's something weird.

38:01Tom, I wonder whether secularism isn't more of a shift than you want to acknowledge, because obviously in your account, we end up in a sort of absurd world where every single thing that you can think of is Christian. It's very difficult to think of anything in the modern world that you don't say is somehow Christian? Somebody could be an atheist, they could be. No, no, there's lots. So I would say Darwinism, for instance, is very subversive of Christian claims that there is an inherent dignity in being weak or disadvantaged relative to the strong. I mean, Darwinism really doesn't, or at least, you know, as it's been mediated through Western history in the 20th century, absolutely doesn't suggest that.

38:43And I would say that in the modern world, transhumanism, the idea that, you know, which is very popular in, particularly in Silicon Valley, the idea that technology offers humans a chance to transcend the limitations of Homo Sapiens is also very subversive of Christianity, because at the heart of Christianity is the idea that every human being is created in the image of God and thereby has an inherent dignity. But if people can transcend that human status, then where does that leave that idea? Tom, I suppose I was sort of pushing on to something else, which is that the drop in faith, the drop in attendance in churches has big social impacts.

39:22I mean, one of the ones that I'm most conscious of is what's happened, for example, in the global campaign against extreme poverty. A lot of the drive in the 80s and 90s to make poverty history, live aid conference, all this stuff, came out of the World Council of Churches, as well as the trade union movement. And one of the most striking things now is in the absence of strong trade unions with their Christian roots and in the absence of a real sense of international Christian solidarity, it's very much more difficult to mobilize people to think about extreme poverty in Africa. In fact, there's a sense of increasing isolation and very difficult to raise.

40:00I mean, international development funding's going down around the world. People are giving less and less to charity. And it's just much less interesting to people that there are people suffering extreme poverty in Africa. And that seems to me to be directly related to the fact that people may be, in your sense, proto-Christian, but the mere fact that they're no longer attending these institutions of churches and that there's no longer that sense of solidarity is having a big impact financially on the extreme poor in Africa. I mean, I think that this is the big question that I don't really try to answer in Dominion, because I'm writing it as a historian, not as a futurist, is what happens.

40:35To what extent are we, as a society continuing to live off the kind of, you know, the accumulated interest of Christianity. And when we burn through that, what will happen? So if the roots are withering, then will the flower continue to bloom? And I guess I would see three possibilities lying ahead. And the first is that the claims of humanists and kind of devout secularists, if I can put it like that, are true, that we don't need Christianity to provide rocket fuel for these, for instance, the idea that the wealthy have a duty to care for those who are poorer than them, that we just accept this as being a kind of almost scientific objective truth, and that therefore we don't need the mumbo-jumbo of Christian teaching to sustain it.

41:20Another darker possibility is that people will kind of increasingly adopt a pre-Christian perspective, which is to celebrate wealth and power and glory, and to think, well, why should we bother with the weak? Why should we bother with the poor? And we've had some experience of what that means. I think one of the reasons actually why institutional Christianity has faded so profoundly since the war is that in a sense, the Nazis and Hitler, people who absolutely celebrated the power of the strong and the mighty, have replaced the old Christian mythology with a new demonology. So we don't need the devil anymore.

41:57We have Hitler. And whereas before the Nazi period, people would say, what would Jesus do and try and do it? Now people are much likely to say, what would Hitler do and try and do the opposite? But if that fades, then maybe a celebration of strength for its own sake will come in and people will say, well, why should we bother with the poor in Africa, for instance? And another possibility is that people will think, well, actually, maybe we need Christian teaching to sustain this. And maybe there'll be a kind of recrudescence of that. But I don't know Which of those options? Maybe a mix of all three.

42:28But Tom, just flowing from that, so I call me sad, but I watched a lot of the Rwanda debate in Parliament recently. And there was one contribution that really, really hit me quite hard. It was an MP from Don Valley. I think his name's Fletcher. And he was essentially totally in favour of, you know, stick him on a plane, etc, etc, etc. etc. And said this utter nonsense about how if you go into an A &E in Doncaster, nobody speaks English. I mean, I know that hospital very, very well, because before my brother died, he was in there for many, many weeks. And the guy's talking absolute nonsense. And I know that to be the case.

43:07They've got 4 % non-white in the area. Anyway, so that was annoying enough. But then when it came to the immigration minister winding up the debate, he singled out this MP for saying, I know he comes under a lot of attack because he's so open about his religious faith. And I thought, my God, so this guy isn't just spouting nonsense, being vile about the poor and the oppressed, coming up with simple populist solutions and lies about the state of the world. He parades, I presume he will be spending Christmas Day with his maker, with his faith. And I just think, I don't know what I thought at the end of it, but I felt revolted by it.

43:45Well, there are many ways to be Christian and there are many opportunities for hypocrisy in Christianity. I mean, hypocrisy has been the shadow of Christian charity right the way from the beginning. And I'm not saying there's one way to be Christian. And on the issue of, say, of refugees in Dominion, I write about two very different responses to the Great Migration Crisis of 2016. There was Angela Merkel's. She's the daughter of a minister raised with the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And I would say that in the assumption of progressives and liberals that refugees should be welcomed, that would be unthinkable, I think, without the residual cultural impact of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

44:33But equally, there is Victor Orban in Hungary, and the Hungarians experience conquest and occupation by the Muslim Ottomans, who of course feel that Christianity needs to be defended. And so he put up the fences. And those are both Christian responses that you can trace back through centuries and centuries. And they're both equally Christian. Tom, you and I have just done a BBC thing on Caesar. And I was very interested. I just take you back for a second before the birth of Christ to reflect on political leadership. I was fascinated by it because it seemed to me at times that you were really enjoying the figure of Caesar, enjoying his glory, enjoying his success, enjoying his triumph.

45:17Whereas Rory saw him as a Poundland Johnson. And I know who Rory saw himself as. Exactly. Deeply, deeply troubled. I wonder whether you could reflect a little bit on the role of character or what maybe people following Aristotle would have called virtue in politics and whether you believe in that at all or whether as a historian you've become so cynical and structural in your views that you no longer do feel that that's something that's relevant in political life? Well, I think that different societies and different cultures and different periods have valued different things in political leaders.

45:53So I would say that Julius Caesar, for instance, he is the embodiment of greatness. And there is something about greatness that thrills and inspires people. It still does. Even in our contemporary world, Caesar is a figure of immense charisma. And one of the things that set me on the road to writing Dominion and to realizing how Christian in my assumptions I was, was thinking about how people in Rome responded to Caesar's commentaries on his conquest of Gaul, in which it was said that he slaughtered a million Gauls and he took another million as slaves. And there is nothing apologetic about Caesar's presentation of his conquest of Gaul.

46:33It's all about the glory. And people in Rome loved it. They adored it. That is something that obviously is expressive of a very profound difference between us and them. I was writing about Julius Caesar in Rubicon, my first work of history, as the Iraq war was going on. And in that, American generals were coming on the TV every evening to boast about how few people they'd killed. Whereas in Rome, people would carry placards boasting about how many people they'd killed. That's quite a profound difference. and your sense of who is a good leader when you have such different societies is obviously going to be very different.

47:09Tom, maybe this relates to the point you made right at the top that you couldn't understand why we'd asked you to come on leading. But the one thing that Rory and I always do with our interviewees on leading is to go right back to their beginning. So what is it in your life and childhood that made you a historian? What is it in your life and childhood that developed the relationship that you have with Christianity? I was one of those boys who was obsessed by dinosaurs. In fact, I am sat here wearing a Merry Wrexmas. I've got a picture of Tyrannosaur with a Santa hat on. To go with your ABBA. I've got ABBA.

47:53Your monstrous ABBA t-shirt. And to be honest, it was the fact that they were big and fierce and glamorous and terrifying and safely extinct, I think, that made me fascinated by them. And I then moved seamlessly onto the Romans. So everything that I was saying about Julius Caesar, I found it very, very thrilling and exciting and glamorous. And it seemed to me that the past was in a way more exciting, more thrilling than the present. And I remember being in a multi-story car park in Salisbury when my mother was out shopping and I was in the back seat and looking at the kind of the faded gray concrete and kind of wishing that I was in ancient Rome or something.

48:37It would have been so much more exciting. And it may be that because I grew up, I grew up in Wiltshire outside Salisbury. It's got, you know, you've got Stonehenge, you've got the cathedral, you've got castles all around. You've got the very famous spire that the FSB love. The spire. maybe it just kind of subliminally gave me a sense that the past in a way was more exciting. But also, you were from a mixed marriage, weren't you, in that your dad was an atheist and your mum was a believer. Is that right? I'm never entirely sure what my father was really, because he never talks about it. He's just not interested in it.

49:12So maybe that's even more kind of anti-Christian than to be an atheist. I mean, I think atheism in a way, if you're a militant atheist, it's a kind of extreme form of Protestantism in this country. I mean, you believe it. He doesn't really believe anything. For my mother, yeah, it's been very, very important. And she's always been a kind of great moral role model for me. And so I've never been kind of ideologically opposed to Christianity, because I think of my mother and I think of my godmother, who were both great influences on me. And I admire them so much that I've always kind of admired Christians.

49:43Tom, as my final question, obviously, for me, being a conservative, is partly about a respect for what we've inherited from our predecessors, respect for tradition, for history, respect for the constitution we've inherited and defending those things. And obviously that's part of what we're playing out in this BBC documentary and my love of Cato and his attempt to defend the old Roman constitution and the old Roman Republic against Caesar. I'm interested in the way in which, oddly as a historian, you don't seem to feel a particular instinctive veneration for tradition and history politically in the way that I do.

50:21And I wonder whether as your last thought, you'd reflect on why that might be the case. Oh, I say I have a very strong small C conservative. I don't like old things being broken, which is one of the reasons, for instance, why I've been so opposed to the government's plans to drive a road tunnel through the landscape that surrounds Stonehenge. I mean, it really offends me. But what I also think is that we live in a society where our traditions inherently breed upheaval. So the paradox, I think, of living in a Christian society is that our traditions inherently foster the desire to kind of recalibrate and in some cases eradicate those traditions.

51:04And that's the paradox, that the French revolutionaries, when they're trying to overthrow the monarchy and the church, are doing it for reasons that are deeply Christian, that are deeply rooted in the traditions of France. And I think you see that in the United States at the moment. That's part of what's going on, that people who are opposed to the traditions of the United States are doing it for very, very American reasons, which is why I think that the relationship, say in this country, where it's such an old country, that the relationship between conservative instincts and radical instincts are more complex than they're often represented as being, because radicalism in Britain is itself quite a conservative tradition.

51:44Now, my very final question, Tom, you know, I hate to lower the tone, but it's kind of my constitutional duty on this podcast. We're going into an election year, Labour v Tory, what would Jesus vote? Jesus, I think, probably would, because he is obviously been dead for 2 ,000 years, would have no idea what was going on at all. The whole scenario would be so alien to him. What a copper. But what I would say is, I think that what is deeply subversive about Christian teaching and about the teaching of Jesus as he's portrayed in the Gospels is that he proclaims the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is set apart from earthly rule and earthly kingdoms.

52:28And when he's arrested before his crucifixion, he's brought before the Sanhedrin, the Judean religious leaders, the people who administer the temple, and he rejects them because he sees them as interfusing the dimension of the divine with the dimension of the earthly. And then he's brought before Pontius Pilate, the representative of Roman power. And likewise, the Romans also interfuse the worship of the gods with a sense of Caesar's earthly power. And he rejects that as well. And that is what is unsettling about Christian teaching for people in his lifetime, is the idea that he says that there is a truth that transcends politics.

53:09So that is a kind of cop-out, but it's a very Christian cop-out. And I'm sure you would expect nothing less from me. the producer has just put a message in so does he vote lib deb yeah maybe maybe that's the answer no no no no we're not giving jesus the little dems tom it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you i'm sure our listeners will thoroughly enjoy that as they get over their festive whatever the only sad thing is that we haven't had a christmas carol out of either you or alistair but i can play carols on the backpipes you don't think you could sing a little line of a carol for us just as the final end of our Christmas special?

53:43Go on, Tom. Do you know, I'm not going to, because as someone on a rival podcast, well, a sister podcast, I am singing there, and people who want to hear me sing can look forward to the series that we're doing on the Nazis in Power, where I sing Edelweiss as the introduction to our episode on the Anschluss. Yeah. So it's not a hymn, but in a way, it's a Christmas song, isn't it? Happy to greet me. Exactly. Great song. Great song. So anyone who wants to hear me sing, do tune into the rest of history in the new year and you can hear me sing Adolf Heist. And I can also, to emphasise the point that Tom does a lot of his own research, he was sitting at the Archbishop's carol service with one of the thickest books on the Third Reich I have ever seen.

54:35Yes, it was the most inappropriate book to have brought. It made Lawrence Reese's tomes look like Booker's Eids. It was huge. Well, thank you guys and thank you for your reflections. I think there's a lot of really important interesting thoughts about Christianity there and a good, if somewhat serious way of marking Christmas Day. And maybe we can do the same on Islam. I'm interested in us maybe doing a special episode around Eid this coming year. Thank you all very, very much indeed. All the best. Happy Christmas, everyone. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. So, Anastasia, what did you think of Tom Holland?

55:13Well, I really enjoyed that. I once defined myself as a pro-faith atheist, although it's interesting that Tom clearly thinks that I'm not an atheist and that I'm a sort of deep, devout Christian. But I've always been very interested in faith. And I'm ashamed to say I hadn't read Dominion until he advised the other night that I should. And so I've been skim reading, fast reading. I'm going to read it properly over… It's quite a big book. It's a very, very big book, but it's really, really interesting. This is the great thing about something like Tom Holland, because, I mean, to have all that stuff in his head, I know that when he does The Rest is History, he and Dominic Sandbrook, they have papers.

55:49I know that. But there's so much stuff in his head. And I think, too, when you read this book, I'm just in awe of the reading that he must have done, the original research he must have done. And he does say some very, very, very interesting things. I think that the chapter that we talked about in relation to John Lennon, it really, really makes you think differently about Beatles. So one of the things that I wish I'd been able to do more on with him is to discuss Islam. Because he grew up in a Christian context, and I partly grew up in the Muslim world. I spent part of my childhood in Malaysia, and I then obviously spent life living in Indonesia and Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.

56:31And I find it difficult to say that everything that we think about human rights or dignity or compassion is purely Christian. I feel that Islam is so shot through profoundly with a sense of human dignity, a profound sense of equality, a profound sense of justice. Now, we probably, if we'd had longer, he could get into trying to explain why that's different and that's not quite the same and why that doesn't quite add up to human rights. But certainly, I feel that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drew on a lot of different religious traditions. And I definitely often felt with Afghan friends that they had an incredibly strong sense of justice.

57:17So anyway, we didn't have time to get into that. But I'm a little bit worried, the idea that everything good, everything progressive is Christian. I guess the point that he made when you put that term was that Islam is, as it were, everything is God-made. Whereas the rules and norms and conventions that he says are deeply Christian have been man-made, as it were, following the lesson and the teachings of Christ and Christianity. and of course don't forget we didn't have time to get into this but one of the other things that Tom he makes very interesting documentaries and he made a documentary about Islam some years ago which ended up in him receiving death threats galore and it became incredibly controversial I do think it's I do think I mean it's one of the things that he does which takes a lot of courage and I think he he deserves credit for is speaking about a huge range of issues but there is a problem with representation.

58:13I mean, I've spent a lot of, as I say, my life living in the Muslim world. I'd still be very, very cautious about speaking on behalf of Muslims or defining what Islam is. But I guess that's what he has to do. I mean, he's trying to explain complicated ideas from around the world. I guess he'd say he doesn't need to be a Roman to talk about Julius Caesar and he doesn't need to be a Muslim to talk about Islam. But I do still feel that we sometimes, all of us, even Tom, may be blind to dimensions of other people's religions, partly because religion isn't just a set of things that you can read in a book.

58:44This was one of the ways that I slightly disagreed with your former boss, Tony Blair, when he'd say, you know, Islam is this kind of religion, and I've read the Quran three times. I thought, you can't really work out what Christianity is just by reading the Bible or Islam by reading the Quran. It's also about history and society and community and how you grow up and the way that you instinctively treat each other. And that's, I think, we're often missing with Islam. I do think that in relation to the way that politics and religion and faith intersect is probably, well, I don't think there's any probably about it.

59:15It is very, very different in the Islamic world. If you look at some of the current leaders in the Islamic world, they couldn't possibly lead and be effective and popular unless they were absolutely committed to their faith. Erdogan in Turkey essentially has built what some would argue is a sort of proto-dictatorship around it. Likewise, you look at Imran Khan. I mean, I don't know what Imran Khan in his heart. I don't know. I don't see inside his heart. But I think he would definitely be in that category because he's a kind of internationalist figure who knows the West very well. Yeah. I also think there's something we maybe need to explore more in the podcast, which is the point that you kept making about how often these politicians in a secular society present themselves as religious.

1:00:05Because the truth is that Britain has fewer and fewer people going to church. I mean, our churches are largely empty. And there are a few changes. I mean, obviously, there'll be some clergymen listening to this who will say, oh, no, it's not quite true. There's some bits of the evangelical movement that are growing. But broadly speaking, we're becoming a more and more secular society. And actually, it's even true in the United States. I mean, many more people go to church in the US, but the trend is on its way down. And yet the politicians are still very much presenting themselves often as Christians.

1:00:36Although actually, interestingly, I mean, I think Rishi Sunak doesn't claim to be a Christian. And I think one of the things that was interesting and potentially awkward about the coronation was that he as a Hindu was then reading, I guess, a lesson from the Bible in Westminster Abbey. I noticed when he gave evidence at the COVID inquiry, he swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and I don't know the truth, but in relation to a different God. And that's really interesting because I can remember when I was a journalist, one of the stories that we used to cover was when Chris Patton was being identified as a possible Conservative Party leader.

1:01:11It was just a given, well, this is going to be impossible because he's a Catholic. Right. And that was very recently. That was sort of 1997. Very recent. And now Sunat comes along, he's the Prime Minister of Hindu and nobody about St. Ireland. Yeah. That's an incredible change, isn't it? In sort of 25 years. Yeah. No, no. So I think that's amazing. I wonder what it is. Is it that psychologically, the fact that so many people present themselves as religious, do the public sort of psychologically feel reassured if somebody talks about having a faith, that they somehow think that that's going to result in better political leadership, even if they don't believe themselves?

1:01:47I mean, what's going on here? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, Tony Blair, as I said in the chat with Tom, was deep faith. I think if he'd had his own way, he probably would have converted to Catholicism before he did. But he knew that it would be such a big deal within the political construct of the United Kingdom with the church and state allied in the way that they are, that he waited. But it is interesting, isn't it, that you've now got, so whether it's Sunak here, Hamza Youssef in First Minister in Scotland, it's just not a deal anymore. No. Very interesting. Well, I think it's a very, very strong and very impressive development in Britain.

1:02:29Anyway, thank you very much for that. And really, really fun to engage on a tricky and interesting subject. Maybe we need to return to. And enjoy your Christmas break. Happy Christmas. See you soon.