ONE of the consequences of the collapse of the American Empire is that there will no longer be any war crimes. Atrocities, oh yes: atrocities on a scale that we may find unimaginable; but none of them will be crimes, because crimes require judges and an apparatus of justice. For a country or an army to be found guilty of a crime it is necessary that there be some entity or empire more powerful, whose judgement the wicked have no choice but to accept.

The United States acted the part of that empire in the decades after 1945, but, after this war, there will be no more empire, no justice, and no crimes: only a chronicle of endless atrocity, which may not ever be written down.

We might as well take what comfort we can, and there were some worthwhile pieces on the debris left by the collapse of the basis of the report The Quiet Revival (News, 2 April). The most sympathetic came from Bijan Omrani in The Spectator, under the shameless headline “Why Gen-Z turned back to Christianity”. The one thing we know now for certain is that this has not happened, and the best that Mr Omrani could manage was “a gentle growth in engagement with Christianity amongst the young. Harder to measure, but still perfectly visible to anyone involved in the field, is a change in the attitude of the young towards religion.”

The young, in this instance, turn out to be some Oxford undergraduates, as well as students elsewhere who come to talks that he gives on Christianity. I think that there may very well be a small current of elite opinion that now takes Christianity much more seriously than it was taken ten or 20 years ago. It also seems to be true that there is now what one researcher called “social permission” among the young to investigate religion. This is all good, but it is on nothing like the scale of a revival, and it is to some extent opposed to the loudest political manifestations of Christianity in this country and elsewhere.

Janan Ganesh, in the FT, might speak for the cultured despisers of religion, but he also speaks for the great majority of the British people: “I am looking at a photo of Donald Trump, taken in the Oval Office on March 6. Around him are 20 pastors. A few are laying hands on the wartime leader. All are praying with him. No one’s eyes are open. . . In fairness to the president, he exudes all the enthusiasm of a cat being bathed.”

But, Mr Ganesh goes on to say, the embrace of religion might be remembered as the moment that the populist movement overreached itself.

“Absolutely central to populism’s success a decade ago was a sense of fun: a non-judgmental streak. Remember the Big Three of the Anglo-American right. The unchaste Islingtonian Boris Johnson. Claret fan Nigel Farage. Trump himself. Their masterstroke was to spot that voters had turned against immigration but not against sexual freedom, secularism or much else about the modern world. If populists are to now become a moralising movement, or what Joe Rogan calls ‘a bunch of fucking dorks’, the electoral coalition of 2016 won’t hold.”

And here we come to the really interesting question. If there is to be a religious revival, will we notice it in the strangely warmed hearts of believers, or in their newly kindled hatreds? Will it be Pope Leo or J. D. Vance who is remembered as the significant Roman Catholic leader?

Anyone who thinks the question ridiculous has not been paying attention. The pastors gathered around President Trump, including Paula White, who went on to compare him to Jesus, represent a really powerful and popular form of religion, one that seems to have greater appeal and vitality than mainstream Christianity can manage.

You might say that the Christianity of President Trump, of Viktor Orbán, of Mr Vance, and of Dr James Orr asks only who your neighbour isn’t rather than who is. But that is a question that will become more urgent in a time of disappointed expectations and rising economic misery. When that happens, we are going to need the other sort of Christianity, the sort that is patient and long-suffering, and goes about quiet good works among unexpected and perhaps unwelcome neighbours. Young people going to church or college chapel is no evidence of a revival; those same people producing children and even grandchildren who were still Christian would be.