[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.
November 6, 2025
QotD: The Reformation
October 27, 2025
“The Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet”
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
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
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
Thersites the Historian
Published 31 Mar 2025In 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
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!”
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
History Hit
Published 1 May 2025In 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
Thersites the Historian
Published 23 Feb 2025After 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
H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism As a Literary Force”, A Book of Prefaces, 1917.
August 2, 2025
QotD: The path to salvation
The following is not a theological argument, it’s an observation about human nature: Both faith and works are necessary, because by their fruits ye shall know them. If one has faith, then the works will follow — naturally, as it were. But works without faith are mere mumbo-jumbo, no different than the crudest magic spell. The kind of guy who does what David French does — performs the works solely to be seen performing the works — is what Jesus called a “whited sepulcher”, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
Again, you don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to observe that Jesus commanded what the parlance our times calls “tough love”. Just as you can’t save a sinner by taking away all his opportunities to sin — we are ALL guilty; we are ALL fallen; that alone is sufficient to damn us — so you can’t “save” a drunk, or an illegal alien, or a criminal, or whatever by enabling his lifestyle. The reason I’m not in church today is because the church is exactly like that gaggle of Karens in Starbucks — they talk a good game about renouncing the wiles of this world, but they bend over backwards to enable every possible social dysfunction.
No, Jesus did NOT command us to patch up the gutter addict every time he OD’s, so that he can go out and OD again. He did NOT command us to provide all kinds of food and shelter and medical care to every Squatemalan who broke the very first American law he had the opportunity to break by coming here. No, He did NOT command us to tolerate deviance — there are two clauses in “love the sinner, hate the sin”, and we must obey both.
The only route to salvation starts by admitting that everyone is fallen. You can take that in whatever sense you like, because it’s not theology, it’s just an obvious fact about human nature. Alas, it’s one you have to learn by age 12, or you’ll never learn it at all. That’s the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled.
Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.
July 27, 2025
I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him
It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:
July 18, 2025
QotD: Christianity destroyed the ancient Graeco-Roman culture
Consider celibacy: Fustel de Coulanges examines several ancient legal codes and finds that in all of them the deliberate refusal to procreate was a crime that carried severe punishments. This makes total sense in light of all you’ve said — a man does not belong to himself, he belongs to his family, a diachronic (or transtemporal?) entity that lives in and through and above individuals. Deliberate celibacy would be like your hand or your kidney refusing to perform its assigned function and trying to murder you instead. Cancer, in other words. And the solution to cancer is to cut it out and destroy it.
Now imagine a religion praising cancer and vaunting the tumor as the highest form of biological life, and maybe we can feel a sliver of the horror that the ancients must have felt towards Christianity. And it wasn’t just celibacy either — in area after area Christianity emancipated individuals from the dense, ancient web of obligations, loyalties, and client-patron relationships. Loyalty to the city and loyalty to the family were both such incomparably important qualities for the ancients that Sophocles got several tragedies out of the collisions when they came into conflict, but Christianity in its most radical form says that both are ephemeral and contingent, and must be subordinated to a higher loyalty — fidelity to the Truth. To the ancients I bet this didn’t just seem like antisocial behavior, I bet it seemed like the apocalypse. No wonder there were so many martyrs. No wonder so many of them were martyred by their closest relations.
I’m almost tempted to say that that old snake Gibbon was right, it was Christianity that destroyed the Roman Empire, destroyed the entire ancient Mediterranean civilization that had lasted for a millennium or more, first bit-by-bit then all at once. But of course that isn’t quite right either. By the time Pentecost occurred, the dissolution was already well underway. Christianity massively accelerated a process that was inexorable by then, and changed the shape of what was to come after it, but the collapse was baked in.
Read any of the Roman authors from either shortly before or shortly after the Lord’s birth — Virgil, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius — all of them, in one way or another, are obsessed with the unraveling of the matrix of tribal and familial relationships that Fustel de Coulanges describes. There were a lot of reasons for it, including but not limited to: mass migration to the cities, economic rationalization that replaced freehold farming with massive latifundia (plantations), and just the accumulated stresses from centuries of continuous warfare and expansion. The cumulative effect of all this was that a society formerly governed by ritual, familial and civic piety, tribe, and clan was transformed into an ocean of atomized and deracinated individuals engaging in mass politics.1
One of my favorite passages in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall2 is in the intro to the chapter on Alaric’s invasion of Italy. Gibbon contrasts this with Hannibal’s invasion 700 years earlier, and goes on this beautiful riff about how on paper, the Rome of the 5th century AD looks incomparably stronger than that of the 3rd century BC — it had a massively larger population, greater wealth, a greater technological edge over its opponents, etc. And yet when it came to a responsibility as basic as that of defense against a foreign invasion, all the GDP and technology in the world wasn’t able to make up for a lack of asabiyyah. When Hannibal annihilated the legions at the Battle of Cannae, something like 20% of the entire adult male population of Rome was killed, including most of her military and political leadership, to which the Romans simply gritted their teeth and raised a few more armies. The descendants of those heroes, despite having a vastly larger population to draw from, weren’t able to muster a single legion or a single capable commander, and surrendered their city to the Visigoths almost without a fight.
Rome was a rocket that soared into the sky and then came crashing back down, and it’s easiest to see it right at the apogee, the point midway between the first and the last great invasions of Italy. The first century glory days of Rome, the time that we moderns consider the height of her power, were actually a moment of deep institutional and social decay. Like an exothermic reaction — a bonfire or an explosion or a fireworks display — what we notice immediately is the ebullient, magnificent blaze. But it’s easier to miss all the fuel that’s being consumed: solidarity, economic resilience, social technology, all of it woven through with the tight bands of ancient law and custom that Fustel de Coulanges documents. Just as the Greek philosophy we love was an uncharacteristic flash in the pan, an evanescent moment that subverted and destroyed the culture that had given rise to it; so too the Roman imperial achievement was an engine fueled by a society and a citizen-soldiery that it quickly burned to cinders.
I wonder if every civilizational golden age would turn out to have this unsustainable character if you inspected it closely. If so it would explain a historical mystery, which is why these epochs are rare, and why they never last long. From this angle history looks a bit like a 2-stage cyclic phenomenon wherein the long “dark ages” are actually epochs of patient stewardship of economic, cultural, and demographic resources, whilst the short “golden ages” are a kind of manic civilizational fire sale of the accumulated inheritance. Maybe we need a new historiography founded on the idea that what we have heretofore considered dark ages are the true golden ages, and vice versa. This transvaluation of values would be like a temporal version of James Scott’s attempted reversal of civilization and barbarism.
Alas, while peasants could vote with their feet and migrate across the imperial frontier, our options for time travel are a bit more limited. Would we prefer to live in the cozy but constricting deep prehistory of a civilization, or in the wild glory of its last days? No doubt it would depend a lot on who we imagine being in each of these phases, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because we don’t have a choice. May as well sit back and enjoy watching the blaze. It will be beautiful and exhilarating while it lasts.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
1. If this sounds familiar, it should. Whenever I read about first century Rome I always come away with a weirdly twentieth century vibe.
2. Yes, I’ve read the whole thing cover-to-cover. What? Why are you looking at me like that? There was a pandemic happening, okay?
July 15, 2025
American (religious) exceptionalism
Christianity has been in retreat across the western world for decades, with the United States being the laggard in abandoning the faith. Canada is closer to the western European rate of secularization. On Substack, Fortissax explains why it has become uncommon to find a believing Christian outside the US in response to a query on X about people turning to various neopagan faiths:
First, I believe there are two factors at play. One is the divide between the United States and the rest of the Western world. The United States still has the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers in the West, at around 24 percent. In the U.S., Christianity remains a living tradition. Millions still attend church, or at least try to. Many people share a common faith, believe in God, and are familiar with Christian references in public life, politics, and law. In contrast, in countries like Canada and much of Europe, regular church attendance is closer to 5 percent. That number often includes recent immigrants who tend to be more socially conservative. Among native-born Canadians and Europeans, especially in urban areas, church attendance is even lower. Religion in these places is often kept alive only by older or rural populations. Among the youth, it has largely faded. Second, many Western countries have experienced secularization for much longer.
I believe this first one is not obvious to a majority of people. There are significant cultural differences and experiences within in the United States and outside of it. I believe it would be appropriate to say that the U.S. is still a Christian country, and not just nominally, regardless of whether or not it was established on Lockean principles and Greco-Romain inspiration (some would say revision), of the liberal enlightenment. Sure, the faith is not what it used to be, but probably the majority of Americans at least understand Christian references in common parlance.
I can share a personal anecdote that I believe is fairly typical.
I was born and raised in a region where Christianity had long disappeared from everyday life, following a slow process of state secularization. My great-grandfather was Catholic, but he changed denominations to marry my great-grandmother in the 1930s. It was a utilitarian choice. He believed in God but didn’t care for the petty tyrannies of ethnic and cultural association by denomination. His son, my grandfather, saw hypocrisy in both Catholic and Protestant institutions. As a boy, he was told he could not be friends with a Protestant by a the Catholic priest of his best friend, and he was kicked out of the house by his mother for attending Catholic mass with his girlfriend, even though his father had once been Catholic. My parents were irreligious agnostics. They were not hostile to Christianity, just indifferent, because they were not raised in it. As for me, I grew up in a post-liberal, post-Christian society. I believe in the divine and understand the importance of religion to civilization, but I have no living connection to what came before. In my country of Canada and among my people, Christianity is no longer part of the cultural fabric. I believe this to be the case in Western Europe as well.
There is a common joke that if someone likes paganism so much, they should try the most pagan tradition of all: converting to Christianity. But the unfortunate reality is that secular liberalism has exercised a longer and deeper influence in the modern West than many realize. In response, one could just as easily say that the most Christian tradition of all is converting to secular liberalism, which has formally shaped the cultural and institutional framework of the West for more than 275 years.
For people raised in multi-generational secularized liberal contexts, there is nothing to return to. Christianity is not a living tradition. They cannot come home to Jesus the way many Americans still can, and they cannot undo the liberal Enlightenment. They can only move forward through it. At best, something new might be reinterpreted or reformed from its remnants. But Christianity was never part of their lived experience. It was not seen, heard, or practiced. Churches were never attended. Christmas and Easter functioned as civic holidays focused on family rather than faith. Christianity resembled a historical artifact, something like a beautiful mantelpiece in an old house. It had aesthetic and historical value, but no emotional, cultural, or spiritual presence. This situation is common in much of the non-American West.
This is why many contemporary efforts at Christian revival often feel disconnected. They are built on the assumption that secular individuals are lapsed believers who simply need to be reminded of what they once knew. But these individuals are not returning exiles. They are cultural natives of a secular world. They did not lose the faith, it was never given to them. There were no prayers at the dinner table, no hymns embedded in childhood memory, no sacred calendar shaping the flow of life. Organized religion belonged to the past, replaced with secular civic cults they’re largely unaware of. It was something other people had, something no longer meant for them. This group is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. In many cases, they admire it. They recognize its role in shaping art, architecture, law, and moral tradition. When foreigners attack these, they defend them. They understand its civilizational significance. But the faith speaks a language they do not understand. Its metaphors do not resonate. Its moral claims appear without context. Its stories feel distant.
A useful comparison can be found in the Heliand, a ninth-century Old Saxon gospel poem that re-imagined the life of Christ using the language and imagination of Germanic warrior culture. In that version, Christ is not a wandering teacher from a distant land, but a noble chieftain surrounded by loyal retainers. His mission is framed in terms of honor, loyalty, kinship, fealty, and sacred duty. The gospel message is not altered in its substance, but it is reshaped so that it resonates with the values, social structures, and poetic traditions of a people for whom neither Scripture nor Roman religious order had any living relevance.
This work was part of a broader process of the Germanization of Christianity, a phenomenon that has been studied in detail by scholars like James C. Russell and Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples did not consist merely in the passive reception of Christian doctrine, but in a complex synthesis between Germanic folk-religious consciousness and Christian metaphysics. The resulting Christianities of the early medieval West were distinct, rooted in local mythic frameworks, and expressed through tribal loyalty, sacrificial kingship, and heroic virtue. Murphy, in works such as The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, explores how the Heliand uses alliteration, formulaic verse, and martial imagery to make Christ intelligible to a newly converted warrior society. He shows how the gospel was not just translated into the Saxon tongue, but into the Saxon soul.
This is the historical precedent that today’s Church must study carefully. The peoples of early medieval Europe were not apostates. They were unbaptized, uncatechized, and culturally alien to Christianity. They were brought into the faith through through cultural immersion. Christianity did not ask them to surrender their world entirely. It entered their world, dignified their heroic values, and redirected them toward the divine. Only then did conversion become possible.
Even those outside the Church understand that this work is urgent. The crisis of meaning in secular liberal societies is visible. The desire for transcendence, rootedness, and spiritual structure has not disappeared. It has been redirected into political identity, consumer behavior, and digital escapism.
If Christianity is to succeed, the same kind of work is needed today. Christianity must once again become a missionary faith. This time, the mission field is not a remote foreign land, but the secularized cities and postmodern suburbs of the Western world. The people being addressed are cultural outsiders. Many were born into environments where the gospel was never lived, never spoken, never embodied. Christianity was not abandoned. It was never truly encountered.
A future for Christianity in the West will not be built on appeals to lost memory or civilizational guilt. It will not be recovered through progressive accommodation or through aesthetic traditionalism that treats churches, vestments, and relics as ornaments of cultural decline. It will only re-emerge through an act of deep cultural translation. That act must begin with an honest assessment of what has been lost, and a willingness to reframe the sacred in terms that can again be understood.
The alternative is a continued descent into spiritual confusion and civilizational forgetfulness. Christianity may continue to grow in the Global South. It may endure as a global religion. But in the West, it will only live again if it learns how to speak, once more, to those who were never taught how to listen.
Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that the majority of Christian priests and ministers have already made their peace with the inevitable extinction of their faith and far too many of them are actively working toward that end. Feminist and progressive currents move far more local Christian leaders than the message of the faith itself, hence any hopes of western Christianity reforging itself depend on a tiny minority of the clergy.
July 3, 2025
Nicolas Romero, the inventor who introduced “Spag Bol” to England
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes describes the career of a most inventive man, Signior Nicolas Romero originally of Naples … maybe:
The British interpretation of Spaghetti Bolognese — widely known as “spag bol” — is a pasta dish with a meat and tomato sauce.
The person who tried to bring these coal balls or briquettes to London was one Nicolas Romero — a name that has been almost entirely and undeservedly forgotten. Indeed, the one other historian to have ever noticed a handful of his achievements was unable to find his first name. And so I get the pleasure of being able to give a few glimpses of his remarkable story for the first time in over four hundred years.
Nicolas Romero seems to have originally hailed from the Spanish Habsburg possessions in Italy, most probably Naples. He was personally acquainted with Cardinal Granvelle, who was the regent in Naples from 1570 to 1575, and may have been involved in the Spanish attack on Tunis in 1573-4, where he picked up some siege techniques used by the Ottoman Turks. Romero then moved to Spanish-ruled Milan, where he was apparently the close confidant of one “Dr Sirnige” or “Dr Siring” (as it sounded to an English ear), who received a hefty reward for discovering a “defensative” or preventative treatment against a plague that killed some 15% of the city’s population in 1576-8. Then, Romero appears to have gone to the Low Countries, much of which was in outright revolt against Spain, where he picked up the details of how coal balls were made at Liège.
Then, astonishingly, he suddenly switched sides. Perhaps having fallen afoul of the Inquisition, or perhaps having converted to Protestantism, from some point in the 1580s he was only ever involved with the manifold enemies of Spain. He moved to England, even partaking — and I suspect investing — in its unsuccessful invasion of Spanish-ruled Portugal in 1589, where he was captured and held in “a very cruel prison” for ten months until managing to escape.
Somehow making his way back to London, Romero there befriended the barrister, alchemy enthusiast, and wannabe inventor Hugh Plat. It was via Plat, who plied all of his acquaintances for their technological know-how, and recorded his sources in his manuscripts, that Romero introduced various innovations to England.
Romero told him of how mere bags of linen or canvas, when filled with whatever dirt or sand was to hand, could be used to instantly create a “musket-proof” trench — in essence, the modern sandbag — which had been used by the Turkish army in their successful siege of La Goleta near Tunis. Plat saw a wider potential too, hoping to use these sandbags in reclaiming land from both marsh and sea.
In 1593, when a deadly plague gripped London, Romero gave Plat the recipe of Dr Sirnige’s defensative pills, as used in Milan, and together with the apothecary John Clarke they produced and distributed hundreds of them, including to Queen Elizabeth I and her entire Privy Council, apparently with great success. Clarke published their case notes under the boastful title The Trumpet of Apollo Sounding out the Sweet Blast of Recovery in 1602, though it was a little premature. Just a year later plague returned to London with a vengeance.
Most enduringly of all, Romero told Plat the details of making pasta, which Plat then made and marketed as a cheap and long-lasting food for the English armed forces. What Plat called his “macaroni” even won plaudits from Sir Francis Drake, and in 1594 he published the first known depiction of a pasta extruder. To Nicolas Romero, then — a name never mentioned by even specialist historians — belongs the considerable distinction of introducing the English to pasta. He is the patron saint of “Spag Bol” (if you are Italian, and do not wish to suffer a heart-attack, under no circumstances should you look up this term).
Romero was full of other ideas too. Romero gave Plat his methods for preserving wine, chestnuts, butter, turnips, and quince. He revealed to him the principle behind the diving bell; how to make a metal rotisserie oven; how to catch crayfish; how to engrave glass; how to make vellum paper translucent; how to keep snow from melting over the course of a year by storing it underground; and how few drops of sulphuric acid might be added to a ship’s water supply to keep it fresh for longer. Along with various recipes for Italian salads, and how to make smoke grenades, he even told him how to raise water using atmospheric pressure — perhaps the earliest record in England of what would eventually be developed into the steam engine. In papers seized by the government from the soldier Sir Thomas Arundel, who was arrested for being a Catholic in 1597, are mentions of not just of Romero’s sandbag “trench”, but “also his bridge, his boat to go without wind or sail, and his device against horsemen” — which according to Plat’s manuscripts was a kind of rest for muskets that could also serve as a pike.
Throughout the 1590s, Plat tried to commercialise some of Romero’s inventions, including a method to replace the expensive copper vessels for boiling water for home-brewing with a supposedly more efficient tub made of treated wood; some kind of light, portable water pump; and the Liège-style coal balls or briquettes. But with little success. By 1594 Romero was running low on money and had given up on trying to make it in England, having apparently passed up various opportunities to serve some German princes. So he left Plat in London to keep trying to sell his inventions, while he himself went to Holland to become an engineer in the service of Count Maurice of Nassau, who was fighting to free the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
While in the Netherlands Romero patented his water pump and the wooden boiling tub — an invention apparently “very much needed in the present time of cities under siege”, for whom fuel supplies were scarce. And having gained Count Maurice’s trust and backing, he wrote to one of Elizabeth I’s favourites, the Earl of Essex, in a fresh bid to get the two inventions, along with the coal balls, patented in England. Naturally, Hugh Plat served as his go-between.
Despite such allies, however, they once again failed. Romero would patent more inventions in the Netherlands in 1598 — a means of reducing the friction on the axles of carts and carriages, and a winch for more easily lifting heavy items like anchors and cannon — but he wasn’t to get a patent in England until ten years later in 1608. Just months before Plat’s death, Romero, with one James Jackson, presumably an investor, was finally granted an English patent for some kind of universally-applicable method of saving fuel. Unfortunately, the wording of the patent gives no indication whatsoever of what it involved.
I’ve traced no further record of Romero — if anyone is familiar with German, Dutch, Italian or Spanish sources and has ever come across the name, please do get in touch
