Happy Epiphany! Wokeism is not post-modern Marxism, but heretical Christianity

Maybe, and maybe not. As Shakespeare remarked, in a play set 44 years before the time of Christ, 'There are tides in the affairs of men.'

It certainly feels like a tide has turned in our affairs. Niall Ferguson has written about 'the vibe' shifting globally, by which he means 'a return to – a championing of – reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition'.

That's the political wave of which Trump's victory is the most momentous because it is in the biggest sea of all, the USA, but it is mirrored in many smaller seas.

Ferguson is particularly relevant – he is a 'lapsed atheist' who has become a devoted Christian. He's not the only one, atheist or not. There are a lot going with the tide (I don't want to impute mere fashion to the movement, or political positioning, or just the result of inertia, but mass movements tend to drag everyone along, believers and fellow travellers).

There is his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim who became an atheist who is now a Christian and credits her conversion with saving her from alcoholism and depression. And my Christmas email inbox has been full of other examples: I Took Religion Out of Christmas. I Regret It, The Cross and the Machine, and How Intellectuals Found God.

Apparently Peter Thiel, the famous venture capitalist and mentor of JD Vance, is a Christian, and is featured on the Hoover Institute website in Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech. While many of the others are conventionally Christian, this is a bit out there, but you can't ignore the impact Thiel has had, and will have, on the USA, and it is on a classically liberal institute's website at Harvard.

I found it intriguing how he identified the 'anti-Christ' (a term we conventional Anglicans rarely use, except occasionally when talking about the dean of the cathedral) with the administrative state – the state that compels, rather than liberates, but only, of course, with your best interests at heart.

Then this morning I came across this interview between one of the heroes, to me anyway, of the Covid disaster, Dr John Campbell, who is almost too conventionally Christian, and Russell Brand, who is a kind of psychedelic convert.

We even have Richard Dawkins, one of the four horsemen of the New Atheism, walking back his comments about being a 'cultural Christian' at the same time hoping we don't lose all our churches and cathedrals.

I'm kind of surprised it has taken these people so long to come around. For around 20 years from my early twenties to my early forties I said I was an atheist, but I remained a cultural Christian. Faced with a moral dilemma I would more often than not ask myself what Jesus would have done.

While I didn't want my children to grow up as 'anything', I knew that wasn't a choice – you have to grow up something – but I didn't want them to grow-up as atheists; I wanted them to make that decision, if they made it, for themselves. How could it be a decision if they just grew up atheist, and without the understanding of belief how could they know what it was they were choosing? They would be cultural orphans making decisions without any understanding of their own cultural DNA.

And how could I inculcate the understandings, the virtues, and the habits of our Western society, if they did not have an emotional and imaginative connection to them, and how would that happen if they were unchurched?