WELL, this I did not expect. Thirty-five years since I started writing about politics, I am both astonished and fascinated by the ever-increasing importance of religion, spirituality, and the quest for metaphysical meaning which I encounter everywhere in the public sphere. If you want to investigate contemporary power, democracy, and political argument in 2026, the old secular lens is no longer even close to sufficient.
Most obviously, it is impossible to understand President Trump’s grip on the American psyche — now faltering, it is true — without grasping that religion has been the through-line of the 11 years since he descended the golden escalator. But there is much more to it than that.
In addition to the Church Times — of course — I find myself turning with growing frequency to other religious sources, voices, and platforms to help me to understand what is happening in the turbulent political world.
In the often manic and polarised controversy over artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on the new technology has, quite correctly, been awaited as an overdue intervention on behalf of humanity as a whole, as well as the Holy See. Among the many books that I have read in the past year about the challenge of polarisation, nothing holds a candle to Rowan Williams’s recently published Solidarity: The work of recognition (Bloomsbury Continuum).
The daily newsletter that I most eagerly await is Rod Dreher’s — not because I agree with everything that this Orthodox American Christian conservative writes, but because he explores the marchlands between politics, faith, and identity with such a deft touch. In trying to understand the evolution of Englishness, I have found Malcolm Guite’s magisterial new Galahad and the Grail (Books, Podcast, 27 March) more instructive than the torrent of narrowly secular books on the subject.
WHAT exactly is going on? There have been, I think, three phases, overlapping but distinct in focus. They trace an arc that has much to tell us about the changing character of politics in the past three decades.
First, there was the post-Cold War era. I turned 21 in 1989, the glorious year in which the Berlin Wall came down, and so I am, inescapably, a member of “Generation Fukuyama”: the cohort that bought the core argument of the Washington analyst Francis Fukuyama that we were seeing “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy”.
Ironically, this was no more than a secular version of providentialism: a repurposing of divine teleology to rationalist ends. It soon came unstuck, as China showed that hyper-capitalism and authoritarianism could coexist successfully; and 9/11 shattered the illusion that the rest of the world was simply waiting politely for Western democracy to solve all its problems.
This brings us to the second phase. In response to the threat of jihadi terrorism and, to a lesser extent, the challenge posed by Christian creationism in the United States, there arose the age of the “New Atheists”. Parallel to this was a growing conviction among commentators and polemicists that politics was now “downstream from culture”.
It was no longer plausible to argue — as had been commonplace in the 1990s — that politics was simply a branch of economics. Everywhere, the old certainties of the Davos class, of those who believed that every political question was reducible to statistics, were being swept aside by identity politics, by digitally turbocharged social narratives, by online tribal conflict.
That was plenty to take on board. But it was not, as it turned out, the end of the story — not by a long chalk. The New Atheism fizzled out as quickly as it had burst into life. The culture wars rage on, but they generate much more heat than light.
SO, NOW we are in the earliest stages of a third phase, whose precise shape is not yet clear, but it undoubtedly marks a significant shift in political discourse, social patterns, and both private and group allegiance. I would characterise it broadly not as a surge in institutional religion, or church attendance, but a more nuanced flourishing of religious sensibility and the accelerated rolling back of what Max Weber famously called “disenchantment”.
Everywhere one looks, the sacred, the numinous, and the mystical are reasserting themselves — not always in traditional form, of course: what Tara Isabella Burton aptly calls the “Remixed religions” of the young are customised, consumerist, and made-to-measure rather than doctrinally coherent (Features, 7 August 2020).
That said, there is indisputably a discernible Christian edge to what is happening — and not only the “cultural Christianity” that Tom Holland’s wonderful book Dominion has nurtured in so many (Features, 27 September 2019). There have been specific, high-profile conversions, of which the most striking was the public announcement of the former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in 2023, that she was now a committed Christian.
Alongside this, one cannot begin to comprehend the contemporary tech world without understanding the grip of AI millenarianism and the growing fixation with the Revelation of St John among Silicon Valley oligarchs such as Peter Thiel, who has been lecturing around the world on the advent of the Antichrist. It is remarkable — and quite normal now — to hear “tech bros” talk with enthusiasm about the Christian theorist René Girard.
You cannot hope, furthermore, to get a handle on modern post-liberal ideology without reckoning with the Roman Catholicism that undergirds the ideas of its leading champions: Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. And, whereas Tony Blair’s spin doctors insisted that “We don’t do God,” today’s politicians — Labour’s Wes Streeting, Reform UK’s Danny Kruger, and the Conservative Nick Timothy — speak much more candidly about their Christianity.
WHY should we be surprised? The collapse of trust in public institutions, the fragmentation of old social structures, the wretched prevalence of deaths of despair, and the atomisation of traditional communities — all these have contributed to a crisis of meaning, and a consequent recourse to the most resilient and fire-tested belief systems of all.
There is nothing theocratic about this; nor is the shift as straightforward as a collective embrace of traditional piety. In an age of great psychic and social stress, it is, I think, an instinctive recourse to ancient forms of metaphysical explanation which offer transcendence, communion, and wisdom to those who lead increasingly volatile, precarious, and disaggregated lives.
I do not mean to say that secularism is doomed. Rationality is essential to any civilisation. But, unaided, it has been shown to lack the sinew, stability, and heft required to hold a complex society together. That old assumption has been tested to destruction. In times of pulverising change, human beings look for an anchor.
This, I should emphasise, is not a faith claim, but an empirical observation: the recognition of what, I think, is the beginning of a hugely significant shift in politics, culture, and behaviour. It is real. And it is changing everything.
Matthew d’Ancona is editor at large at The New World.