Not content with expending calories by chasing pigs and sheep on the farm, I decided 2025 was the year to join a gym.
Has it done anything to mitigate my pot-belly? You’d have to ask my wife. But one thing it has done is give me a clue about the future of Christianity on our island.
That’s no small claim. But I make it advisedly and because of a series of conversations I’ve had at the gym with a man half my age and yet twice my size.
His identity I won’t share. But I know he wouldn’t baulk at me disclosing these essentials: that he has rejected a lifestyle (and the people that went with it) he considered meaningless, to embrace a buoyant Christian faith.
Not being brought up in a professing household, he starts from a point of religious illiteracy. But, as the ancient Greek parable of the fox and the hedgehog instructs us: he may not know many things about Christianity, but he knows one big thing. And that is simply this: that God is real.
He came to this life-changing conclusion, like many before him, not because of a Damascene moment of conversion or the ministering of a honey-tongued preacher, but through a series of small signs and coincidences, decipherable only by him.
His faith is strong. But will it prove ephemeral?
There is a line in the great Welsh hymn I chose for my wedding ’Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ which runs: “Let the fire and cloudy pillar/ Lead me all my journey through.”
Has my friend found a belief that will lead him all his journey through? Through the ups and downs, the knocks and the setbacks, the vicissitudes of life; until his final days?
For faith to stick - for life - it needs to be nourished by an institution. It requires a Church that will guide through good times and bad. That will be there when the “fire and cloudy pillar” has faded and worship becomes a reflexive habit. An organisation capable of helping us transmit our faith to our successors, while keeping us connected to the eternal verities held to by our ancestors.
The Church of England may be the last institution to be freed from wokery - if it ever can be - Colin Brazier | Getty Images
I thought about what kind of institution can do all this, this Advent, as I sat on a pew in the City of London. It was the magnificent setting for a carol service organised by a newly-formed Christian Fellowship for Reform.
The church was packed to the rafters with Reform party activists and the singing full-throated. The spectacle offered a kind of winter counterpoint to this summer’s other memorable moment mingling politics and faith. That was when my local MP, a recent convert to Reform, stood up to deliver a speech to a virtually empty House of Commons.
Footage of Danny Kruger’s lament for the eclipse of Christianity - delivered by him as if the Chamber was not a sea of vacant green leather, but filled with the ghosts of our great bygone Christian parliamentarians - became an online phenomenon.
But while it made for a striking image, a lonely-figure standing up for his faith, it was the words which mattered. Kruger called for a revival of Christianity in politics, arguing that Britain’s Christian faith was being supplanted by two rival creeds: Islam and the new ‘religion’ of ‘woke’.
He said wokery was: “a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities, and nations.”
I absolutely agree with Danny that the Christian Right needs to be in the vanguard of a slow march through the institutions which have been captured by woke. But I fear that his own Church - the Church of England - may be the last to be freed and may, in fact, never be recoverable.
Because the kind of Christianity which my friend in the gym craves is not what’s on offer. He wants a muscular, mystical Christianity, rooted in our history (not embarrassed by it).
He cannot understand why his local Anglican churches are closed or in disrepair, while the bishops discuss how many millions should be paid in slavery reparations. He does not want cathedrals sprayed with graffiti or fitted out with crazy-golf courses in a ludicrous attempt to be ‘relevant’.
He wants a devotional practice which speaks to Eternity and Last Things, not trendy vicars wearing tinsel and advocating for trans-rights.
Danny Kruger spoke movingly this year about the importance of our established church. And there is so much to admire about the Church of England, for all its faults. The Reform carol service this month, with its beautiful liturgical rhythms, is but one.
Another is our ancient system of parishes. As Danny Kruger said: “We are all members — we all belong. Even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, and even if you do not believe in its teachings, it is your church, and you are its member.”
But in a world of internet communities, how much does this matter? My friend in the gym feels no connection with his physical parish. He does, however, feel a sense of spiritual fellowship with like-minded men online, including those martyred for their faith, like the American free-speech evangelist Charlie Kirk. The recent conversion of Tommy Robinson has not gone unnoticed by him either.
Whatever the cause there is, undeniably, a Christian revival underway in Britain right now. It is empirically real and observable. If you go to Church this Christmas, you will see what I mean: congregations spilling out into the street, standing room only.
A study by the Bible Society earlier this year claimed that young Britons - those aged 18 to 24 - were the leading edge of a wave of religious recruits. More than a fifth of men in that age bracket reported going to church once a month. A massive rise on previous years.
My friend in the gym is keen to ‘shop around’. He’s drawn to the strength of Eastern Orthodoxy, but such churches are thin on the ground in Wiltshire. I worry that, without the institutional rootedness of a physical church, his faith will wither over time.
If you’ll forgive what sounds like proselytising, this is one of the reasons why I fight hard to keep my six children hitched to the Catholic faith of their baptisms.
The Catholic Church has its own - well-documented - problems. The abuse scandals have been ruinous, and I wish the Pope would copy both the Orthodox and Anglican communions by allowing priests to marry.
But that is a decision only the Holy Father can make. As a Catholic, I believe in the Magisterium, the infallibility of the Mother Church. The idea that so much power can be vested in one person is anathema to Islam.
To the woke, that such authority should be in the hands, not just of a man, but only ever a man, is scandalous. But I love the fact that this structure, the most enduring institution in the history of mankind, is a bulwark against the whims of modernity.
It offers the strength and history, and fortification that my friend in the gym yearns for. I pray that he, along with some of you, might give it a chance this Christmas.
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