Quotulatiousness

December 9, 2025

The “Great Feminization” of western culture

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, Barbara Kay outlines the way society has been trending further away from traditional values and more and more toward the values of “empathy, safety, and cohesion” which have been predominantly feminine values in contrast to more male-oriented values of “rationality, risk, and competition”:

In September, public intellectual Helen Andrews caused a stir when she delivered a provocative 17-minute speech, titled “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture”, to the National Conservatism Conference, later published as an article for Compact, titled “The Great Feminization“.

Andrews summarized feminization as the prioritizing of feminine over masculine interests, but additionally prioritizing “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”. All these traits combine, she believes, in institutions where females are numerically dominant, to define “wokeness” and “cancel culture”.

Andrews points to Bari Weiss’ 2020 resignation letter from the New York Times where Weiss was labeled and ostracized for her social ties and cut off by perceived friends. In 2018, the newsroom there had tipped to a female majority which Andrews argues changed the work environment’s dynamics to one where cohesion is preferred, and covert undermining would replace open debate in favour of emotional harmony.

And I would argue that the more feminized society’s institutions become, the more readily extreme, empathic attitudes replace rational decision-making at policy-making levels, and the more society loses confidence in its ability to thrive.

Ironically, instead of directing empathy towards our own citizens, feminization also tends to direct empathy internationally. That is exactly what is happening at our national level, when our government earmarks funds for programs such as “Gender-Just, Low-Carbon, Rice Value Chains in Vietnam”.

This is also happening at a micro-level to the Jewish community in North America. Our spiritual leadership in non-orthodox synagogues is growing increasingly female, and, by no coincidence, is wokeness spreading, and, by no further coincidence, so is alignment with radical anti-Zionism.

[…]

Claims that Israel was guilty of genocide and apartheid, the authors write, were a constant feature of their education. Most shockingly, they write — and this at a rabbinical training institution headed by a female rabbi — that “the sexual violence Israelis experienced (on October 7) was never mentioned, even during Women’s History Month”.

What about the Christian clergy? A 2024 report on female Christian clergy found that in a 2018 sample, about 14 per cent of U.S. churches were headed by a senior female clergyperson. So, churches are not yet in danger of feminization. Good luck to them.

If there is a solution to the feminization-linked problem of anti-Zionism in the non-Orthodox rabbinate, I don’t know what it is. I only know this trend cannot end well for our community. What is essential in Jews’ spiritual homes now, more than ever in our history, is that they be spaces where “ahavat Yisrael” — love of Israel — is the prevailing norm. If we are not for ourselves, who will be?

On a more individual level, the Great Feminization has worked not to make women equal, but to increase their existing privileges and to demonize men who even notice the inequality now runs directly opposite to the narrative:

Image from Steve’s Substack

Over thirty years ago, I knew a woman who felt ecstatic joy taunting men with her nudity. She loved to flash her breasts at truckers on the highway. Thrilled at the thought that she left them frustrated, she would boast about her sexual power.

This is clear, unequivocal abuse. Imagine her taunting a village of starving Africans with BBQ’d steak. She then flees to her 5-star hotel, laughing and bragging that she had left them hungry and frustrated. This is how the West raises women. Self-obsessed, over-entitled and insufferable (insert obligatory, “not-all-women” clause here – yawn).

Feminists have gotten more sophisticated with their abuse since then. We now have transgressions that include absurd accusations like prolonged looking, mansplaining and manspreading. TikTokers go to the gym essentially nude in order to video and humiliate men who happen to notice.

We had the, “Yes means Yes” campaign that insists a man should repeatedly pester his partner with endless questions for permission during every intimate encounter. Never mind that a normal woman is likely to leave the bed after a few of these interruptions, rightly despising the insecure man who obeys that tripe. Anywhere outside of a deep feminist indoctrination camp, a woman will wonder whether your mother dropped you on your head as a child. I’ll bet that not even the most committed believer follows their own advice. This is not good communication — it denies healthy context, body language and facial expression.

And there’s nothing romantic about it; it is designed for feminist power. There is no number of reassurances that could possibly satisfy. The emphasis upon a non-stop verbal Q&A is courtroom strategy. And that’s the point: eliminate the human context, and set a trap for the man. “Did he ask permission to engage in number 17 of the 32 listed steps before sex? No, your honor, that’s where the sexual assault happened.”

Human intimacy is negotiated using mostly unspoken signals, and everybody likes it that way. Obviously there’s a need for clear communication, especially in a new relationship. I only need to include this disclaimer because the world is filled with pedantic manhating feminists eager to accuse me of denying women’s humanity. Grow up, child. Healthy women have absolutely no problem setting their own limits during intimacy. I’ve never met one who didn’t.

We cover for even the worst of women’s transgressions. When a woman murders her child, we call it infanticide and blame postpartum depression. When she murders her husband we call it battered wife syndrome, which is the title of a book by Canadian feminist law professor, Elizabeth Sheehy. Feminist lawyers even argue to eliminate female incarceration and close all women’s prisons, and for decriminalization of husband murder. This nonsense from the feminist cult for women with daddy issues protects mentally ill women who need psychological help, and/or belong in prison.

Every woman has a plethora of options, and near-infinite sympathy and support, in Western culture. Maybe that’s the problem: we don’t hold women responsible for their own behavior. Many women have not been socialized into adulthood.

At risk of making this a TLDR post, here’s Mark Steyn on the cultural side of our ever-more-feminized culture:

Welcome to another in our ongoing series of As I Said Twenty Sod-Bollocking Years Ago. Women have inherited the thrones of great powers — Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Victoria — and presided over massed ranks of courtiers drawn from the “pale, male and stale” (thank you, David Cameron). But America and its client states are the first in history in which every significant venue aside from ladies’ sport is now dominated by women. The west is closer than any society should be to the end of men — which is a big source of the terrible confusion in our schools that has led children to offer themselves up for bodily mutilation and irreversible infertility. Helen Andrews’ much noted “viral” essay on the phenomenon informs us inter alia that by 2024 American law schools were fifty-six per cent female and that sixty-three per cent of judges appointed by Joe Biden’s autopen are likewise on the distaff side. Elsewhere, fifty-five per cent of New York Times reporters are women (up from ten per cent half-a-century ago) and 57.3 per cent of US undergraduates are what we would once have called “coeds”.

At the same time, the principal source of immigration to the west is from a patriarchal culture even more severe (if you can believe it) than 1950s sitcom dads. If you live in London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Dearborn, do you see more body-bagged crones on the streets than you did a generation back? Are you figuring on seeing more still in another twenty years? Or are you betting that the tide will have receded?

It is at the intersection of these two not entirely compatible trendlines — a feminised society with a patriarchal immigration policy — where lies the future (such as it is) of the western world. With that in mind, the annual commemoration of the 1989 Montreal massacre each December 6th has a symbolism that extends far beyond my own deranged dominion. Not just because it was an early example of the state hijacking the actual news to impose a narrative more helpful to its own needs. In the dismantling of manhood and manliness, no lie is too outrageous. As I wrote in The National Post of Canada on December 12th 2002 – twenty-three years ago:

    For women’s groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lépine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.

    M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband “had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men”. At eighteen, young Gamil took his mother’s maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name “Gamil Gharbi” has not sullied its pages in the thirteen years since.

The Gazette notwithstanding, that might open up many avenues of journalistic investigation, don’t you think? The potential implications of Canadian immigration policy. The misogyny in particular of Islam, and its compatibility with developed societies. But instead everyone who mattered in the Dominion’s elite decided it was all the fault of Canadian manhood in general — of Gordy and Derek’s, or Émile and Pierre’s, culture of toxic masculinity. That narrative has held for two generations. The only even slight modification has been from a sliver of academics who posit Gamil Gharbi as “the first incel“. I’m not sure “incels” — young men who are “involuntarily celibate” — existed as a mass phenomenon back in 1989: they are a consequence of the societal feminisation Ms Andrews writes about. The “incel” segment was by far the most interesting part of the Tucker/Fuentes convo, and the least remarked upon, but the notion that they’re itching to kill women bolsters the original 1989 framing, so the media are minded to entertain it.

Yet we all know, surely, that the young ladies in that Montreal classroom would have benefited from a little bit of available “masculinity” that day. Alas, the men to hand were in a certain sense far more profoundly disarmed than the wildest dreams of “gun control” advocates. From my book After America:

    To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.

Which is the more disturbing glimpse of Canadian manhood? The guy who shoots the women? Or his fellow men who abandon them to be shot? For me, the latter has always been the darkest element of the story. From my column in Maclean’s, January 9th 2006:

    Every December 6th, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre — the fourteen women murdered by Marc Lépine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn’t know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

So the annual denunciation of manhood in general is the precise inversion of the reality of the event. That was unusual in 1989, but has become routine since: the UK Government’s “Prevent” programme, set up in the wake of the July 7th Tube bombings to “prevent” further “Islamist” attacks, now focuses its energies on the threat from a “far right” boorish enough to insist on noticing all these Islamic provocations; January 6th is an insurrection for which trespassing gran’mas have to be hunted down and banged up in solitary, but Thoroughly Modern Milley telling the ChiComs he’ll ignore his commander-in-chief or James Comey taking to Twitter to urge his chums to “eighty-six” the President is true patriotism of the highest order; in German cities saving democracy is so critical that it is necessary to ban the leading political party.

So the inversion of reality is pretty much standard operating procedure these days. There is, however, a sense in which that terrible one-off atrocity from the late Eighties has become a portent of tomorrow — of a western world thoroughly unmanned. Your average feminist lobby group doesn’t see it that way, naturally. “The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring,” says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta’s Women’s Foundation. “If there were women in power in representative numbers — fifty-two per cent — I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing.”

December 6, 2025

QotD: King Henry wants a divorce

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, it’s 1532 and Henry VIII’s divorce case is at a critical juncture. The King’s former chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, has failed to pull it off. The King was about to have Wolsey tried for treason (technically, for a crime known as praemunire, file that away for now) when he, Wolsey, died, but the fact that Wolsey was on his way to London for trial was a signal to the jackals: Open season. Every gripe anyone ever had about the Church in England fell on Wolsey’s head.

In 1532, then, Parliament presented the King with the Supplication Against the Ordinaries. “Ordinaries” means “members of a religious order” — basically, the Supplication is everyone’s beefs with the Church. You can read the list at the Wiki link, but they all boil down to this: The Church was effectively a state-within-the-State, operating a different system of law, taxation, etc. And that’s what praemunire means, too — “a 14th-century law that prohibited the assertion or maintenance of papal jurisdiction, or any other foreign jurisdiction or claim of supremacy in England, against the supremacy of the monarch”. By accusing Wolsey of it, Henry VIII was saying that he, Wolsey, was ultimately working for the Church, not the King … which is kinda what you’d expect from a Cardinal, no?

That’s the problem.

Long story short, by 1532 the state-within-the-State that was the Church was blocking the upward mobility of new men like Thomas Cromwell.1 There was an entire secular education system; it was cranking out talented, ambitious men; in short, there was an “overproduction of elites”, since there were limited spaces in the nobility and the Church and they were all already occupied by either bluebloods, or guys like Wolsey who had jumped on the gravy train much earlier.

But this was an artificial bottleneck. The Tudor state had plenty of room to expand; they needed far more educated bureaucrats than the old system was capable of supplying. The old system needed to go, on order to make room for the new, and in many ways that’s what the Reformation was: A brushfire, clearing off the deadwood. A political and administrative brushfire, disguised as a theological dispute. It’s no accident that the most Reformed polities — late Tudor England, the Netherlands, the Schmalkaldic League — were the most politically and economically efficient ones, too.

And by Reforming the Church, the brushfire could extend to the rest of the depraved, decadent, moribund, fake-and-gay culture. The Renaissance is obsessive about the old, but it is, obviously, something very very new. People raised in the Late Medieval world were emotionally incapable of a total break with the past — I don’t think any culture really is, but a culture as hidebound as the Middle Ages certainly isn’t. But so long as they could find some warrant for change in the Classical past (and being the inventive types they were, they’d always find such a warrant), they could purge the culture, root and branch, in the guise of “returning ad fontes“.

Severian, “Reformation II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-08.

  1. This is where the analogy breaks down, because Late Medieval men were not Postmodern men — Cromwell was actually loyal to Wolsey almost to his, Cromwell’s, literal death. Men had honor back then. It also speaks to the kind of man Wolsey must’ve been, to have inspired the loyalty of a guy like Cromwell despite it all. Cromwell was a ruthless motherfucker, even by Tudor England’s Olympic-class standards; he’d stab his own mother if he found it politically necessary; but he still stayed loyal to his man even when it looked like that would cost him his life.

December 1, 2025

Why Uncle Sam entered the Vietnam War – W2W 055

Filed under: Asia, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 30 Nov 2025

The Vietnam War didn’t begin with American boots on the ground. It began with a promise — and a break. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Geneva Accords split Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh led the North. In the South, Ngo Dinh Diem struggled to hold a fragile new state together while armed sects, crime syndicates, and political rivals challenged his rule. Washington saw Vietnam as the next battleground of the Cold War, and threw its support behind Diem — believing he could stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

But as elections for reunification approached, tensions rose. Diem refused the vote. The North rebuilt. The South descended into repression, unrest, and quiet rebellion. Former Viet Minh fighters slipped into the shadows. Secret networks formed. Targeted killings began. By 1958, the storm clouds of a new war gathered — one the United States could no longer afford to ignore.

This episode explores how the U.S. found itself pulled into Vietnam, how Diem rose to power, why the reunification election collapsed, how American aid reshaped the South, and how the first sparks of insurgency ignited a conflict that would define a generation.

Join us as we trace the origins of a war long before the Marines landed at Da Nang — to understand why Uncle Sam entered the Vietnam War in the first place.
(more…)

November 18, 2025

QotD: Echoes of the Thirty Years’ War

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s much easier to attack cultural institutions than political ones, and because the Church was also a political institution — a big one — it was convenient to attack a guy like Cardinal Wolsey, Tetzel the Indulgence Merchant, and so on. You can always frame it in the traditional medieval way: “The king has been led astray by his evil counsellors”. It’s not a coincidence that Reformed polities were also the most politically efficient; the Prods won the Thirty Years’ War, thanks in no small part to very Catholic France (under Cardinal Richelieu) adopting Protestant attitudes, strategies, and tactics.

The analogy only extends so far, of course. Hillaire Belloc has argued that the dissolution of the monasteries in England kicked out one of the three legs supporting English culture — by putting all that land and money under the State’s direct control (that “Tudor revolution in government” again), the State and the Economy are inextricably merged. It’s proto-fascism (recall that The Servile State was written in 1912). Not only is this true, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Back in 1912, the Church was still alive as a cultural force. The Media was still at least somewhat capitalist — in competition for eyeballs — and in many cases led The Opposition, which also still existed as a cultural force.

Nowadays, of course, not only are the State and the Economy indistinguishable, they’re also indistinguishable from The Media. There IS no “opposition”; whatever anemic resistance to The State is stage managed like pro wrestling. Real dissidents are in the positions of recusants in Tudor England, except that the Church, instead of sending priests to minister to us in secret, is sending battalions of Inquisitors to help hunt us down.

In short, there’s no entry point for a new “Reformation”. As bad as the Period of the Wars of Religion was, gifted leaders had structural ways to achieve their objectives and keep the peace. Henry of Navarre could proclaim that “Paris is worth a mass”; Cardinal Richelieu could proclaim raison d’etat; the old Peace of Augsburg system — cuius regio; eius religio — could work well enough with a prince who understood his people and chose not to push too hard. “Separation of Church and State” wasn’t articulated as a formal political principle until the 19th century (and only there because it was badly misconstrued), but as a practical solution to politico-cultural problems it works just fine …

… provided you’ve got the structures in place to handle it, and we don’t. The Church, the State, the Economy, the Media, Academia, Technology … who can say where the one ends and the other begins? It’s all Poz, and there’s no aspect of our lives that the Poz doesn’t touch, because instead of separate and often competing socio-governmental structures, they’ve all merged. They’re ALL Poz.

Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.

November 8, 2025

QotD: Singing in church

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, this is oriented toward, primarily, Father Erik and Father Tim, who are certainly free to disagree with me, but anyone who attends mass regularly might find it of use. I also do not know if what I see in my church is normal, but suspect it is.

Note: I used to have a good singing voice, not quite commercial quality, IMHO, no, but quite good nonetheless. I loved to sing. I still do, the songs I can still handle, too.

Almost nobody sings reliably in my church. Oh, they can, but they generally do not. The exceptions are hymns everybody knows the tunes to, some of the responsorials, ditto, and, notably, last 4 July, “America the Beautiful”. And, at Christmas, the traditional Christmas songs.

So why those and not the others. Well, the typical hymn in the typical modern church was penned by a couple of nuns from the Order of the Discalced Sisters of Sappho, or priests from the Gay Jesuit Alliance, and printed in the hymnal largely as an exercise in flattery.

Okay, that’s not really true … or not entirely anyway. No, the real problem is that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, NOBODY KNOWS THE BLOODY TUNES, SO OF FREAKING COURSE THEY DON’T SING, WHILE THEY CHANGE THE HYMNS SO OFTEN — WEEKLY, AS A MATTER OF FACT — THAT NOBODY EVER HAS THE CHANCE TO LEARN THE TUNES.

So I propose the following: Pick five hymns — among my recommendations, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “We Gather Together”, “Amazing Grace”, “How Great Thou Art”, “Abide with Me”; but I’m not a fanatic about it — and use only those five for however long it takes for 75% of the congregation to sing all of them. Then change ONE and keep at that until 75% will sing that. And keep doing that until you have a repertoire of 20-25 songs everybody knows and most everybody will sing.

“Make a joyful sound unto the Lord” and see if your parish doesn’t grow and if your parishioners aren’t a lot happier in mass.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-03.

November 6, 2025

QotD: The Reformation

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[W]e can thank Henry VIII (really Thomas Cromwell, I suppose, and Thomas Wolsey, and ironically Saint Thomas More) for giving us a good look at how Church administration actually functioned in the late Middle Ages. England was by far the best-governed major polity in Europe, even before the famous “Tudor revolution in government“. Lots of paperwork in Merrie Olde, and so Henry VIII’s little cock-driven temper tantrum gives us a priceless picture of how the Reformation went down.

It’s easy to get lost in this stuff — I had a long bit about Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, the Supplication Against the Ordinaries, the Annates Bill, and so on here — but the upshot is, pulling the Church down in England revealed the massive scale of its corruption. I want to say that the Annates Bill alone doubled the King’s revenue, and the dissolution of the monasteries (well underway in Cardinal Wolsey’s time, incidentally) unlocked unimaginable wealth. But it also fatally undermined the regime, because now an attack on the existing Church structure was also an attack on the King … and vice versa.

What you got, in short, was a total social conflagration. The “Reformation” wasn’t really about theology. Nothing Luther said was particularly new. Jan Huss and John Wyclif said basically the same things 100 years earlier; hell, St. Augustine said them 1000 years before. There’s still an irreconcilable “Protestant” strain in Catholicism now — Cornelius Jansen was just a Catholic Luther, and in a lot of ways a much better one; he was declared a heretic because reasons, and “because reasons” was good enough in Jansen’s time (the very nastiest phase of the Thirty Years’ War), but since he’s just quoting St. Augustine …

The point is, the undeniable rottenness of the Catholic Church made it a convenient whipping boy for any conceivable beef against society as a whole. Because it wasn’t just the Church that was too decadent, depraved, and corrupt to go on — it was the entirety of Late Medieval society. Again, stop me if this sounds familiar, but Late Medieval society looks a lot like spoiled, histrionic children playing dress up. They look like kings, and they act like kings (popes, bishops, etc.), but it’s obvious it’s just an act — they know they’re supposed to do these things (put on tournaments, hold jubilees, preach sermons, fight wars, etc.) but they have no idea why.

Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.

October 27, 2025

“The Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet”

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Conservative Woman, Daniel Jupp considers the recent schism in the Church of England, which has left the original church shorn of the vast majority of Anglican worshippers across the globe:

“Canterbury Cathedral aerial image” by John D Fielding is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Today, though, the English Church is broken. The Anglican Communion, which encompassed all the places across the world touched by English exploration, discovery, trade and power, where English Christian missionaries often led the way, has witnessed a devastating schism. At the start of this month Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. As is tradition, the appointment was approved by the Prime Minister and the King, but the nomination came from the Church.

Whether Anglican Christians worldwide approved doesn’t seem to have been considered. Based on multiple past fissures between the part of the Church active in the United Kingdom and the (much larger) Anglican communities globally which had each time been papered over, it may be that the hierarchy in England assumed that the same would happen again.

If so, they were wrong.

The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (also known as Gafcon) represent the Anglican faith in Africa. Their response was to declare publicly that they would no longer send delegates to Church meetings in the United Kingdom, no longer consider the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals or a seat of authority to which they deferred, and no longer consider themselves in the same communion as the Bishops and clergy of the Church of England within England. Perhaps even more tellingly, they asserted that they were the true Anglican communion, more loyal to the instructions of the Bible and Anglican interpretation of those than priests in England. There’s a subtle but powerful distinction there – they were saying not that they had broken away from an Anglican vision of Biblical instruction and Christian identity but that the Church in England had done so.

African Anglicans now assert that they are the true Anglicans, and that the organisation within the UK is not. And in terms of the number of people who follow their message, they are right to assert this.

In losing the African churches and the global, more conservative branch of Anglicanism, the Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet.

Imagine a company that lost 80 per cent of its customers. Or a political party that lost 80 per cent of its voters. Or a nation state that lost 80 per cent of its territory. These would in each case be recognised as unmitigated disasters.

Now imagine this following a previous disaster, which was the end of Justin Welby’s period as Archbishop over a scandal based on not being firm enough and honest enough about paedophile cases in the clergy. One would think the Church might be looking for a non-controversial appointment intended to restore moral trust immediately and defuse criticism.

They did not do this. Knowing the much more conservative and traditionalist stance held by the majority of Anglicans, they chose not to listen to those people, and did something it knew to be passionately opposed by them.

There is an intense irony here that gets to the heart of the self-inflicted problems of the Church of England today. Sarah Mullally has been very clear on the kind of Church she believes in – she’s a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and activism, she has strongly backed asylum and migration, she is a self-declared feminist, and she is both politically and it seems religiously progressive. As Bishop of London, she boasted about representing a diverse and multicultural city, and put her experience in handling diversity as one of the key qualifications and evidence of positive experience she could bring to being the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This was an intensely reality-averse selling-point. London’s slightly lower trend on the relentless decline of Christian faith and attendance compared with the UK as a whole is based not on Mullally’s competence and persuasion. It is based on traditionalist, conservative-minded members of the African Anglican communion in London being more likely to go into a church.

And these people hate woke attitudes and politics.

Update, 28 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 13, 2025

QotD: Christian observance in the late Middle Ages

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s hard to convey just how overwhelming spiritual life was in the late Middle Ages, but I’ll try. If you can find a copy for cheap (or have access to a university library), browse around a bit in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars. I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly, not least because I never managed to finish it myself — it’s dense. This is not because Duffy is a bad writer or meager scholar. He’s a titan in his field, and his prose is pretty engaging (as far as academic writing goes). It’s just that the world he describes is mind numbing.

Everything is bound by ritual. Hardly a day goes by without a formal religious ceremony happening — over and above daily mass, that is — and even when there isn’t, folk rituals fill the day. Communal life is almost entirely religious. Not just in the lay brotherhoods and sisterhoods that are literally everywhere — every settlement of any size has at least one — but in the sense that the Church, as a corporate entity, owns something like 30-50% of all the land. In a world where feudal obligations are very real, having a monastery in the vicinity shapes your entire life.

And the folk rituals! The cult of the saints, for instance — reformers, both Lutheran and Erasmian, deride it as crudely mechanical. There’s St. Apollonia for toothache (she had her teeth pulled out as part of her martyrdom); St. Anthony for skin rashes; St. Guinefort, who was a dog (no, really), and so on. The reformers called all of this gross superstition, and it takes a far more subtle theologian than me to say they’re wrong. But the point is, they were there — so much so that hardly any life activity didn’t have its little ritual, its own saint.

And yet, as suffused with religion as daily life was, the Church — the corporate entity — was unimaginably remote, and unfathomably corrupt. Your local point of contact with the edifice was of course your priest, who was usually a political appointee (second sons went into the Church), and, well … you know. They probably weren’t all as bad as Chaucer et al made them out to be (simply because I don’t think it’s humanly possible for all of them to be as bad as Chaucer et al made them out to be), but imagine having your immortal soul in the hands of a guy who’s part lawyer, part used car salesman, part hippy-dippy community college professor, and part SJW Twitter slacktivist (with extra corruption, but minus even the minimal work ethic).

Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.

October 12, 2025

Inventing boring Sundays – a British innovation

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West ruminates on the phenomenon of boring British Sundays and explains how they got that way:

Nietzsche thought that this was the whole idea, that the English designed Sundays that way in order to encourage people to appreciate the working week. In Beyond Good and Evil, he described how “The industrious races complain a great deal about having to tolerate idleness: it was a masterpiece of the English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so tedious, a form of cleverly invented and shrewdly introduced fasting, that the Englishman, without being aware of the fact, became eager again for weekdays and workdays.”

There may be some truth in this, so that before the Industrial Revolution there was the “Industriousness Revolution”, with a new emphasis on work rather than leisure. This is something which Joseph Henrich noted from studying reports from the Old Bailey between 1748 to 1803, and “spot-checks” observations about what Londoners were doing at a particular moment:

    The data suggest that the workweek lengthened by 40 percent over the second half of the 18th century. This occurred as people stretched their working time by about 30 minutes per day, stopped taking “Saint Mondays” off (working every day except Sunday), and started working on some of the 46 holy days found on the annual calendar. The upshot was that by the start of the 19th century, people were working about 1,000 hours more per year, or about an extra 19 hours per week.

Before the Industriousness Revolution it was common for people to enjoy a number of saints’ days as holidays, including the three-day weekends offered by these “Saint Mondays”. That all changed with the arrival of Protestantism, with its scepticism towards saints’ days, William Tyndale arguing that these were only celebrated by convention and that there wasn’t anything special about them.

While they were keen to abolish holidays, the reformers also believed in making the Sabbath more godly, and so the Boring English Sunday was invented. This followed from a growing sense that leisure time was wasted time, but it was also the case that many of the Protestant reformers just didn’t like people having fun. In God is an Englishman, Bijan Omrani noted how “From the end of the 1500s, Puritan preachers condemned the way people generally spent their Sundays: ‘full heathenishly, in taverning, tippling, gaming, playing and beholding bear-baitings and stage-plays, to the utter dishonour of God'”.

Theologian William Perkins believed that Sunday “should be a day set apart for the worship of God and the increase in duties of religion”. Lincolnshire cleric John Cotton said in 1614 that it should be unlawful to pass Sunday without hearing at least two sermons; the idea of going to church twice would have filled my ten-year-old self with intense horror.

Hugh Latimer asked: “What doth the people do on these holidays? Do they give themselves to godliness, or else ungodliness … God seeth all the whole holidays to be spent miserably in drunkenness, in glossing, in strife, in envy, in dancing, dicing, idleness, and gluttony”.

Latimer also disliked holidays for quite modern-sounding reasons related to social inequality, noting that “in so many holidays rich and wealthy persons … flow in delicates, and men that live by their travail, poor men … lack necessary meat and drink for their wives and their children, and … they cannot labour upon the holidays, except they will be cited, and brought before our officials”.

The reverse argument is now made against allowing supermarkets to drop Sunday trading hours – that it pressures working people into excessive toil so that Waitrose shoppers don’t suffer any inconvenience. Although, reading Latimer, I can’t help but suspect that his real objection was to people having fun.

The reformers won, and English Sundays became notably dull. Banjani quoted children’s writer Alison Uttley, who said of Sundays that “Nobody ever read a newspaper or whistled a tune except hymns”.

October 8, 2025

History of Britain IX: New Arrivals in the British Dark Age: Angles, Saxons, and Jutes

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Thersites the Historian
Published 31 Mar 2025

In this episode, we look at the invasion and overrun of most of southern Britain by newcomers from the European mainland, who set the stage for the transformation of that region into the Kingdom of England. We also explore the thorny issue of what a dark age is and why the label fits in the case of Britain.

September 11, 2025

The Archbishop of York misunderstands a recent child poverty report

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, Food, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall knows that it’s unrealistic to expect a prelate of the Church of England to believe in anything, but in this case His Grace Stephen Cottrell, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Archbishop of York appears to believe that child poverty in Britain is a very serious problem:

His Grace Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York since July, 2020.
Photo 2014 via Wikipedia Commons.

So we’ve the Archbishop of York here telling us all how it should be. Of course, given that that prelacy is Church of England he doesn’t actually believe anything, of course not. But he does roll out what he considers to be facts. Which, sadly, are not.

    With all children across the UK back in school as of this week, I am reminded that almost one in three are in poverty. That statistic is shocking enough – but behind every number is a child, and what this statistic means is children arriving at school hungry, living in insecure housing, and missing out on the activities that help them thrive.

Well, no. His near one in three comes from this JRF report. Which is not measuring poverty at all. It’s measuring inequality — the number of people living in a household on less than 60% of median household income. Which is not, in fact, poverty.

No, think on it. If we doubled the — real — income of everyone in the country then clearly we’d have less poverty. But by this measure, the one of inequality of incomes, the number in poverty would change by not one single person nor child. Equally, if we halved everyone’s incomes — real incomes that it — there would be a lot more poverty. But by this measure there would be no change at all.

There’s also this:

    I visited a school in the north-east of England a couple of years ago where many of the pupils turned up with empty lunchboxes. There was a breakfast club that fed them on arrival. They were eligible for free school meals, so got a hot lunch. After school, trestle tables were set up in the playground laden with food donated from the local food bank. As they went home, they filled up their lunchboxes so that they could have some tea.

    I have rarely been so shocked. This is the reality of child poverty.

Kids are packed to the gunwales with food and this is a sign of poverty? Eh? Sure, sure, I know consubstantiation is pretty heady stuff but really, a little contact with reality please? Kids get two full meals and tuck to take home. This is all free. So, logically, their parents send them to school with empty tuck boxes so that they get two free meals and stuff to take home. I mean, free stuff, who wouldn’t?

Who goes to the pub to pay £7 a pint when booze is flowing free from the town fountain?

Update, 12 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 8, 2025

“Down with this sort of thing!”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates part of Ed West’s post on the Graham Linehan case in Britain, he identifies one of the reasons that Linehan’s Father Ted became so popular in the country it was situated in:

I don’t think I’d seen a “down with this sort of thing” placard in the flesh since I watched the Protest the Pope march back in September 2010. Those were the heady days of New Atheism, before the movement evolved into something more explicitly progressive.

The sign references an episode of the 1990s comedy Father Ted, in which the protagonist and his dim-witted sidekick Fr Dougal are forced to protest the screening of a blasphemous new film called The Passion of Saint Tibulus. Among the many catchphrases popularised by the comedy, back in 2010 this one suggested an ironic and gently mocking attitude to religion; that it was ridiculous, rather than evil.

This week, outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court in Marylebone Road, the sign appeared in a rather different context, carried by supporters of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan as he faced charges of harassment and criminal damage in an ongoing trial, following an incident at last year’s Battle of Ideas involving a young transgender activist.

Linehan had been bailed before trial, allowing him to travel to the United States to work on a new comedy project. When he arrived back at Heathrow on Monday, however, he was arrested by five armed police officers over three tweets he had posted back in April. The situation was as absurd and surreal as anything that had emerged from the writer’s fertile imagination.

As Linehan described it on his substack: “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists’. The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.”

The incident is embarrassing to Britain as it faces increasing scrutiny in the US for its poor record on free speech, especially over the Lucy Connolly case. It was unfortunate timing that this arrest happened just as Nigel Farage was heading in the other direction to talk about this very issue in Washington. But Linehan’s ordeal is also part of a much longer and sadder story about the perils of the political meeting the personal.

Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan had worked on The Fast Show before renowned comedy producer Geoffrey Perkins had taken to one of their ideas, about a group of priests stuck on a remote Irish island, proposing that it be written as a six-part sitcom. It was brilliant, and hugely loved, and in its timing was significant.

Conor Fitzgerald wrote of Father Ted that, while well-loved in Britain, in Ireland it is more like “the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us”. It also appeared at a crucial time in history.

    Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.

    When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.

    Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally.

Those establishment hierarchies collapsed across the West in the late 20th century, first in more secularised nations such as Britain and France and later, and more quickly, in places like Ireland and Spain where the Catholic Church still held on.

The Church lost its power to patrol its taboos, without which it became a sitting duck for satirists; the Passion of St Tibulus was influenced by the protest against Life of Brian, successfully banned in Ireland until 1987. As a teenager, Linehan had to join a film club to watch it, but such censorship was disappearing everywhere.

Father Ted was a work of genius, employing a surreal style of humour that has often been characteristic of Linehan and Mathews, and later seen in their under-appreciated sketch show Big Train – including the brilliantly bizarre sketch in which Beatles producer George Martin is kidnapped by Hezbollah.

The clerical comedy bequeathed numerous catchphrases. “I hear you’re a racist now, Father”, which features in an episode where Fr Ted is wrongly accused of anti-Chinese prejudice, is still a popular meme. Likewise, “These are small, but the ones out there are far away“, Ted’s explanation of perspective to his idiotic housemate, is still used to mock the gormless.

The show was also charming, and its treatment of religion was far from vicious. Rather than being a vitriolic attack on Church authority, Father Ted poked gentle fun at the absurdity of the old order, a kind of mockery which is perhaps a more dangerous threat to a belief system that relies on awe and fear. It was innocent, and many years later Linehan said he would find writing Father Ted much harder in light of the abuse scandal.

Ancient Historian Reviews Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Deep Dives

Filed under: History, Humour, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published 1 May 2025

In this new video, classicist Honor Cargill-Martin delves into the iconic Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is it historically accurate or is it a very naughty film?

00:00 Intro
00:53 Judea A.D. 33
01:55 Colosseum?
06:56 People’s Front of Judea
10:28 “What have the Romans done for us?”
16:05 Roman Grafitti
19:44 Hypocaust
23:30 Biggus Dickus
28:42 “Crucifixion?”
30:37 “… release a wrong doer from our prison”
32:09 “I’m Brian!”
(more…)

August 28, 2025

History of Britain VII: Fall of Roman Britain

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thersites the Historian
Published 23 Feb 2025

After its efflorescence during the 2nd Century, Roman Britain entered steep decline during the 3rd Century and the benefits of Roman civilization had all but vanished by the time that the Romans withdrew their forces and support.

August 15, 2025

QotD: American Puritanism

Filed under: Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession.

H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism As a Literary Force”, A Book of Prefaces, 1917.

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