THIS column may be more than usually discombombulated, because I spent three days last week out of touch with my phone, listening only to people in the physical world, and sometimes talking to them, too. I had quite forgotten the intensity of rage and boredom which listening to bad lecturers can produce when you don’t have the means of escape to hand. It took me right back to maths lessons on sunny afternoons at school. The only relief is to be able to make handwritten notes of particular idiocies.
On the other hand, there is a quality of fierce engagement possible with good speakers that phones also eliminate. The machines seem to do this simply by their presence. You don’t have to look at them at all: you simply need to remain aware that there is a portal to another world in your pocket to make this one seem so much less compelling. I’m not sure what the moral is, except that beauty in churches really matters, so that the building can remain fascinating and uplifting when the sermon is neither.
BACK in the world of news, a couple of things caught my eye. The American Roman Catholic website Where Peter Is has campaigned for both Pope Francis and now Pope Leo XIV against the Catholic Right, without identifying with the Catholic Left. This week, as the Lefevrist movement approached formal schism, it carried a chilling report from a woman who was part of one of its communities for seven years: “The SSPX [Society of Saint Pius X] has very good window dressing, appearing to traditionalist Catholics to be a better, purer version of Catholicism. They have lots of children, say the old form of the Mass in Latin, dress modestly, and this all appeals to some. Yet the reality of life as a Catholic, and as a woman, in the SSPX circle, is far different, and often truly bizarre.
“People may not get divorces very often in the SSPX, but couples living under the same roof for decades in mutual, palpable hatred of each other can be worse, certainly for the traumatized children in these homes. . . I have known more than one family who had to flee from a vicious father, running to relatives or cheap motel rooms to protect themselves.
“A common saying was that ‘if you know where you are, and how to get home, your drinking isn’t sinful’. Thus, the male alcoholism and the treatment of women as broodmares and sole caregivers continued, leaving broken fathers, mothers, and children in its wake. I knew one woman who had seven C-sections.”
All this is an American story, of course. Religious conflict in Britain was the subject of an excellent piece in The New Statesman by the Revd Professor James Walters of the LSE. This had a scope and clarity which made an unanswerable case for secularists to take religion seriously. Ideally, these would be thoughtful secularists, but it’s more urgent that the thoughtless ones should do so.
“We are entering a new era of national interreligious turbulence,” Professor Walters writes. “This time the strain occurs not along Christianity’s internal fault-lines but between different religions. . . The right now speaks of the West as a culture rooted in Christianity and endangered by the influx of non-Christian peoples, particularly Muslims.
“Meanwhile, domestic politics are increasingly defined by distant religious conflicts. Minority religious communities now inhabit a digital world that continuously connects them to their co-religionists overseas. Israel and Palestine were remarkably prominent in May’s local election materials and several Gaza independents now occupy seats in the House of Commons. Other international religious conflicts, notably the nexus of tensions between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs emanating from the Indian subcontinent, increasingly influence local politics.
“Today, however, unlike in earlier periods of British history, we are religiously illiterate. . . We find ourselves unable to name or narrate interreligious conflict, let alone discuss it. Soon, we may find ourselves engulfed by a conflict we can’t even explain.”
SOME stories are much easier to explain. Elon Musk has gone on X, which he, of course, owns, to deny that a single person has died as a result of his ending almost all the US government’s foreign-aid programmes at the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. He calls the respected journalist Nicholas Kristof a liar for quoting the figure of half a million children (and another 200,000 adults) dead in the first year of the cuts. Mr Kristof responded with some names of children known to him who had died. The comments, of course, are full of people gleeful at these deaths.