A university appoints a professor whose life story seems almost impossibly inspiring.

He has overcome profound childhood difficulties, learned to speak and read unusually late, become a successful academic, raised millions of pounds for charity, completed extraordinary endurance challenges and broken one of Britain’s most significant racial barriers. His appointment is celebrated across the media. For the university, he becomes more than a professor. He becomes the embodiment of progress.

Then the questions begin.

Large parts of his doctoral thesis appear strikingly similar to an earlier thesis. Academic positions listed in his biography reportedly cannot be confirmed by the institutions concerned. Accounts of charitable fundraising and endurance running begin to require substantial clarification. Then an old recording appears in which he seems to claim that, as a child, he featured in a famous television programme first broadcast more than twenty years before he was born.

At this point, we might expect everyone to stop and examine the evidence.

Instead, many begin by examining the people presenting it.

What are their motives? What politics do they hold? Are they racist? Are they hostile to disability? What damaging cause might be strengthened if any part of the accusation were conceded?

Some of those questions may be entirely legitimate. But they are not the first question.

The first question is whether the claims are true.

Why is that simple question sometimes so difficult to ask? Why, when the evidence against something grows, do intelligent people sometimes become more committed to defending it? Why does contradiction lead not to reconsideration but to greater certainty? Why do institutions preserve stories that are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain? Why do all of us find it easier to investigate the character of a critic than the truth of what the critic has exposed?

The answer lies in one of the most powerful and misunderstood forces shaping our everyday lives: cognitive dissonance.

We usually think of cognitive dissonance as the discomfort we experience when two of our beliefs contradict each other. But more recent developments in the theory suggest something deeper and, I think, far more revealing.

We often resolve contradictions in ways to appease the psychological discomfort around our beliefs. And sadly, we often do not approach contradictions to discover what is true. But neuroscience has discovered something more about our primary mode of dealing with cognitive dissonance.

Often, we resolve it so that we can keep going.

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The Mind’s Need To Keep Moving

The idea of cognitive dissonance is usually associated with the psychologist Leon Festinger.1 His basic insight was that human beings find inconsistency psychologically uncomfortable.

• I believe that I am wise, but I have made a foolish decision.

• I believe that I am compassionate, but I have behaved cruelly.

• believe that an institution is trustworthy, but evidence suggests that it has concealed wrongdoing.

• I believe that a leader is anointed by God, but credible allegations of abuse have emerged.

Something has to give. We might change our behaviour, revise our belief, minimise the evidence, reinterpret what happened or blame the person who brought the inconsistency to our attention.

That familiar account remains important, but it can make cognitive dissonance sound like little more than the mind’s attempt to relieve an unpleasant feeling. Like a psychological irritation that needs to be soothed.

The more recent action-based model, developed especially by the psychologist Eddie Harmon-Jones and his colleagues, asks why cognitive inconsistency troubles us so much in the first place.2 Their answer is that many of our beliefs and perceptions carry implications for action. When those implications point in different directions, decisive action becomes difficult. Cognitive dissonance signals that something is obstructing our ability to move. Reducing the dissonance allows us to recover a coherent direction and act with renewed confidence.

Imagine that I have publicly defended a leader, institution or cause. I have encouraged other people to trust it. I may have donated money, built relationships around it or staked my reputation upon it.

Then evidence appears that I may have been wrong.

The contradiction is no longer between two abstract ideas. It is between two possible courses of action.

I can continue defending what I chose, or I can stop, admit that I may have been mistaken and accept the consequences.

The greater my investment, the more costly the second option becomes.

My mind therefore begins to work. I minimise the evidence. I attack its source. I reinterpret the accusation. I appeal to the importance of the larger cause. I insist that examining the claim will empower bad people. I broaden the argument until the original fact disappears inside an enormous moral controversy.

My mind is not necessarily asking, “What best explains the evidence?”

It may be asking, “What must I believe in order to continue being the person I have decided to be?”

This explains why intelligence offers no simple protection against cognitive dissonance. Intelligent people are not necessarily less prone to rationalisation. They may simply be able to produce more sophisticated rationalisations.

The mind is not merely trying to feel better. It is trying to maintain the identity and story of its actions.

Explanatory Debt: Protecting Virtue Stories

The unfolding controversy surrounding Professor Jason Arday provides an unusually vivid and ongoing illustration, as I write this.

Arday’s appointment at Cambridge in 2023 was widely celebrated as a historic achievement. His public story brought together childhood disability, academic success, racial progress, charitable endeavour and extraordinary personal determination. He became part of a much larger story about access, representation and the transformation of elite British institutions.

Subsequent scrutiny has raised serious questions about substantial textual overlap in his doctoral thesis and other academic work. Liverpool John Moores University investigated his thesis and did not find intentional academic misconduct. Arday has acknowledged errors while denying dishonesty, relating some of the problems to autism, mimicry and inadequate academic supervision.

Further reporting has questioned a series of biographical claims. Universities at which Arday was said to have held visiting positions reportedly could not confirm those appointments. His claim of running 600 miles in six days was later clarified as having taken twelve days. A claim that he raised £5.5 million for charity was subsequently described as the work of a much larger fundraising group. WaterAid could not confirm the form of overseas volunteering that had previously been attributed to him.

His claim about appearing in Seven Up is especially arresting because the chronology is impossible. You can watch him make his claim in this recording. The original programme was broadcast in 1964, while Arday was born in 1985. It is the kind of simple contradiction that cannot readily be absorbed into technical discussions about academic citation, doctoral supervision or differing conventions of attribution.

Some of the original scrutiny has come from people whose views about race are themselves deeply controversial. Arday and his defenders have also described aspects of the campaign against him as racist and ableist. That context cannot just be ignored. But nor can it decide whether a particular passage was copied or a particular biographical claim is accurate.

• A person with perceived objectionable motives can identify a real discrepancy.

• A person who has suffered racism can still make an inaccurate claim.

• Racial hostility can be present, and evidence can still require proper examination.

The revealing cognitive move comes when we treat evidence as morally contaminated because we dislike the person who found it.

The more important Arday became as a symbol, the harder it became to separate questions about his work from questions about racial progress, disability, academic inclusion and the politics of diversity. Scrutiny of one person began to feel like an attack upon an entire moral project.

Cambridge’s difficulty, therefore, may be larger than deciding what to do about one professor. It may eventually have to ask what this episode reveals about its own processes.

What due diligence accompanied the appointment? Was an inspirational story examined less carefully because people wanted it to be true? Did representation, prestige and institutional self-understanding become entangled with ordinary academic assessment? Can Cambridge investigate vigorously without appearing to reward people pursuing a wider political campaign? Can it defend Arday without appearing indifferent to academic standards?

The more an institution has invested in a person as the embodiment of its virtue, the harder it becomes to investigate him without also investigating itself.

This is where cognitive dissonance begins to accumulate what we might call explanatory debt.

Every contradiction we refuse to admit requires another explanation. One discrepancy can be dismissed as a mistake. Another can be blamed on poor supervision. A third can be described as a misunderstanding. A fourth can be blamed on hostile reporting. A fifth can be attributed to disability. A sixth can be absorbed into the wider history of racism.

Some of those explanations may be valid. The problem arises when each is accepted in advance because the alternative conclusion has become morally or institutionally unbearable.

Eventually, we are no longer defending one disputed belief. We are maintaining an entire system of rationalisation.

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Unconscious Dishonesty: The pattern beneath the stories

Beneath the Arday story and all others like them lies a recognisable sequence:

• A person, institution or coalition acquires moral significance.

• People publicly invest themselves in it.

• That investment becomes part of their identity.

• Contrary evidence appears.

• The evidence threatens not only a belief but an existing course of action.

• Attention moves from the evidence to whoever exposed it.

• A new explanation is created that permits allegiance and action to continue.

• Further contradictions require increasingly elaborate explanations.

Eventually, the rationalisations may become harder to sustain than the truth they were created to avoid.

None of this requires conscious dishonesty.

People may sincerely believe the explanations they produce. Dissonance reduction often begins before deliberate deception. We feel drawn towards one interpretation and repelled by another. We notice some evidence and overlook the rest. One explanation feels generous and humane; another feels dangerous and morally contaminated.

Our conclusions feel discovered even when they have partly been selected because they permit us to continue.

It is easy to see this in an elite university or a political coalition. It is much more uncomfortable to see how thoroughly it operates in Christian faith.

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Christian Cognitive Dissonance

Christian commitment can make cognitive dissonance especially intense because faith is not merely an opinion about the world. It involves identity, belonging, worship, eternity, trust, obedience and our understanding of God.

A threatened belief can therefore feel like a threatened relationship with God.

When healing claims cannot be verified

Tens of thousands of people attend a charismatic gathering. The worship is intense. Expectation rises. Leaders announce that healings are taking place. People testify that pain has gone, movement has returned or serious illness has disappeared.

Later, reliable medical confirmation is missing. Some of those presented as healed remain unwell. Yet participants may cling more strongly to the original accounts.

The contradiction is not merely, “I thought someone was healed, but perhaps they were not.”

It may be, “I travelled there. I gave money. I brought a sick friend. I trusted the leader. I testified publicly. I interpreted what I experienced as the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

Accepting that a claim was mistaken now appears to threaten the whole experience.

Christian faith does not require us to protect claims from examination.

I’ll say that again.

Christian faith does not require us to protect claims from examination.

The New Testament commands us to test as well as believe, to discern as well as receive. Faith is not protected by making claims immune from reality. Christian faith is trust in the God of truth and therefore has nothing ultimately to fear from truthful examination.

When a prophecy fails

A leader gives a prophecy with a definite outcome. But it does not happen.

The community could admit that the prophecy was mistaken. Or it can change the date, spiritualise the fulfilment, blame insufficient faith, revise what was originally said or claim that prayer prevented the predicted event.

That last explanation is particularly resistant to reality. If the event occurs, the prophecy was true. If it does not, the intercession worked. The leader and community have created an account in which no outcome can reveal failure.

At that point, cognitive dissonance is no longer merely protecting an individual's faith. It is teaching an entire church how not to perceive what has happened.

When a trusted leader is accused

A pastor or Christian leader may have been involved in our conversion, healing, calling or experience of community. Through that person we received something genuinely good.

Then credible evidence of abuse or serious wrongdoing appears.

Admitting the wrongdoing can seem to invalidate everything we received. We begin defending the leader in order to protect our own story.

We remember the sermons that helped us, the prayers that changed us, the people who came to faith and the ministries that grew. We present these as evidence that the allegations cannot be true.

But Christian theology already gives us a way out of this false choice.

God can give grace through morally compromised people. A genuine encounter with God does not certify the permanent reliability of its human mediator. Good fruit in one person’s life does not prove that a leader did not harm someone else. And telling the truth about wrongdoing does not erase every grace God gave.

Without these distinctions, gratitude becomes captivity. We are forced to defend the person because we cannot imagine retaining what God gave us while admitting what that person did.

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When Our Beliefs Cannot Cope With Suffering

Some Christians are taught that sufficient faith prevents serious illness, that obedience produces prosperity, that prayer always results in a recognisable answer, or that strong Christians will not experience prolonged depression, trauma or psychological distress.

They may be told that faithful marriages and families will remain intact, that Spirit-filled churches will be protected from abuse, or that God will never permit suffering that feels meaningless.

Then suffering comes.

The contradiction does not merely produce an intellectual problem. It interrupts the whole Christian life. The believer no longer knows how to pray, understand God, interpret experience or trust the Church. They may turn to denial, spiritualising, or self-blame for lack of faith.

Or they may eventually abandon Christianity because the inadequate theology through which they met Christianity has been made equivalent to Christianity itself.

Some people lose faith not because Christ has failed them, but because the version of Christianity through which they were taught to interpret reality has become impossible to inhabit.

A mature theology of suffering does not make suffering painless. It gives it a truthful place inside Christian discipleship. It allows us to discover that Christ is greater and more faithful than the theology that misrepresented him.

When Cognitive Dissonance Finally Breaks

Dissonance rarely collapses or is resolved because someone supplies one more fact. Facts matter. But the person also needs a survivable way beyond their former belief.

Admitting that I was wrong may appear to require humiliation, loss of community, repudiation of my whole past, betrayal of friends, collapse of vocation or the destruction of faith itself.

People find it easier to face reality when changing their mind does not require annihilating themselves.

Sometimes the contradiction simply becomes cumulative. One discrepancy can be explained. Ten require a system.

The number of secondary explanations becomes less plausible than the original unwelcome conclusion. Too many records are missing. Too many statements were misunderstood. Too many critics must be malicious. Too many achievements require substantial revision. Too many exceptional circumstances must all have occurred at once.

At other times, a trusted insider changes position. Evidence from an enemy is easily dismissed. A concession from a former defender is harder to absorb. In the Arday case, the reported withdrawal of support by Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu became important for precisely this reason. It weakened the suggestion that only people hostile to Black scholarship were troubled by the evidence. As of today, we can see the process I have described above playing out in real time about Arday.

But when dissonance breaks, it can break catastrophically. Everything was false, everyone deceived me, nothing I experienced was real, every leader is corrupt, and my entire faith was manipulation.

This is why the Christian response cannot and must not consist only of exposure and debunking. People need a way to admit error without destroying every true and good thing within their story.

They need a way to tell the truth without ceasing to exist.

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A Spirituality of Cognitive Dissonance

Understanding the mechanism helps, but understanding alone does not free us from it. We need practices that make us more capable of receiving what we do not want to know. And there are several we can reach for and practice.

Notice the urgency

Dissonance often becomes visible in the body before it becomes visible in our reasoning.

We feel heat, tension, anger, anxiety or contempt. We experience an urgent desire to reply. We compulsively search for something discrediting about the person making the claim. We feel that silence would be cowardice and immediate action a moral duty.

That urgency is itself information. Learning to notice this is a superpower.

The first question is not simply, “Why do I disagree with this?”

It is, “Why do I need this to be false before I have properly examined it?”

Then comes an even more revealing question:

“What action, allegiance, relationship or understanding of myself would become difficult if this were true?”

That question exposes what our rationalisation may be trying to protect.

Separate truth from consequences

We often attempt to decide whether something is true by imagining what will happen if we admit it. Damage to others, loss of faith, bad actors celebrating, etc.

Those consequences may be real and may require wise attention. But they do not decide whether the original claim is true.

To properly evaluate a claim, we must separately examine its definition, supporting and opposing evidence, the claimant's motives and their effect on that evidence, and the potential consequences of it being true. We cannot allow our answer to the final question to decide all the others.

Delay action

The action-based understanding of cognitive dissonance points towards a simple but demanding discipline. It is one we can learn to practice.

When contradiction produces an overwhelming urge to act, do not act immediately.

Do not instantly post, denounce, defend, mobilise, discipline, accuse, sign a statement or reassure your followers.

Your mind may already be creating the certainty required to make the action you want possible. A period of silence is not necessarily cowardice. It can be an epistemic and spiritual discipline.

When our mind is racing to make action possible, Christian patience can keep reality possible.

Name the feared possibility

We should practice stating our most feared conclusions without immediately accepting or rejecting them—whether that means facing the possibility that someone we admire has acted dishonestly, an objectionable person has discovered truth, or our allies differ from our deepest beliefs. This requires confronting more substantial realities, such as a healing claim being mistaken, an institution protecting its reputation over the vulnerable, a trusted leader causing serious harm, or our own theology falling short while Christ remains faithful.

Naming the feared possibility loosens its hidden control over us.

Practise holy indifference

Christian indifference is not apathy. Nor is it a refusal to care about truth, justice or goodness.

• It is the freedom to allow the truth to be different from what I presently need it to be.

• It is the grace to want God’s reality more than the preservation of my own story.

We might pray:

Lord, make me willing for the truth to be different from what I want. Free me from the need to defend my image, my tribe, my institution and my past. Give me courage to receive reality as a gift rather than an enemy.

Holy indifference does not place good and evil on the same level. It loosens the attachments that cause us to call something good simply because it protects us.

Create communities where people can change their minds

Cognitive dissonance becomes especially dangerous when leaders possess no credible route for reconsidering a decision.

Churches and organisations should ask some uncomfortable questions.

• Who is permitted to contradict us?

• Who is protected when they bring unwelcome evidence?

• Have we included anyone who is not invested in our preferred conclusion?

• What evidence would actually cause us to change our minds?

• Have we defined every possible criticism as hostility, betrayal or persecution?

• Can our leaders revise a judgment without being treated as weak?

• Are our investigations genuinely independent?

• Do we preserve a record of what was originally claimed, or do we quietly rewrite the past?

A community without protected dissent does not eliminate cognitive dissonance. It institutionalises its reduction.

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The Particular Danger For Leaders

Leaders turn their private rationalisation into public reality.

An individual’s cognitive dissonance may distort one life. A leader’s dissonance can become organisational policy, institutional denial, theological teaching, public propaganda, disciplinary action, suppression of evidence or punishment of truth-tellers.

The leader’s internal need to continue can require an entire organisation to remove whatever obstructs that continuation.

This is why decisiveness is not always courage. Sometimes decisiveness is what remains after inconvenient information has been successfully eliminated.

The most dangerous leader is not simply the one who occasionally lies. It is the leader whose identity, authority and sense of divine calling require reality to keep agreeing with them.

Healthy leadership therefore requires independent scrutiny, reversible decisions, protected dissent, clear records, external accountability and public correction. It also requires a theology in which repentance strengthens rather than destroys authority.

Leaders often fear that admitting error will undermine confidence. Over time, the opposite is usually true. Refusing to admit what everyone can increasingly see consumes far more trust than the original mistake.

Confession: The Christian Freedom To Be Wrong

At the heart of cognitive dissonance lies a deep fear. If this one important part of my story is false, perhaps the whole self will collapse.

Christian faith should give us unusual freedom here.

At the heart of Christianity is the claim that we are not justified by having made every right decision, supported every right person, interpreted every experience correctly or maintained perfect consistency.

We are justified by grace. That means I can admit that I was wrong.

• I can admit that I defended someone I should not have defended.

• I can admit that I wanted a story to be true because it served me.

• I can admit that I mistook intensity for the Holy Spirit.

• I can admit that I called reasonable scrutiny unbelief.

• I can admit that I protected my institution rather than the truth.

• I can admit that I confused my explanation of God with God.

• I can admit that I dismissed evidence because I disliked the people presenting it.

Confession is more than moral bookkeeping. It is liberation from the exhausting work of manufacturing consistency. In confession, I no longer have to reconcile the belief that I am a good and discerning person with the evidence that I acted foolishly, harmfully or dishonestly.

I can tell the truth about what I did because my identity no longer depends upon denying it.

I’ll say that again too:

I can tell the truth about what I did because my identity no longer depends upon denying it.

Grace gives us a way through cognitive dissonance that neither rationalisation nor self-destruction can provide. We do not have to choose between defending everything and declaring everything meaningless.

God may have met me through a ministry whose leader later failed.

• A prayer gathering may have contained genuine grace alongside exaggerated claims.

• A collaboration may have achieved some good while resting on profound misunderstandings.

• An institution may have pursued a worthy goal and still made a disastrous appointment.

• A theology may have shown me part of Christ while proving unable to carry the reality of suffering.

• Truth does not require us to parse and flatten the whole past into either purity or fraud.

It allows us to distinguish. It allows us to confess. It allows us to retain what was good and release what was false.

The great danger of cognitive dissonance is not that it makes stupid people irrational. It is that it gives intelligent and morally serious people the reasons they need to continue in the wrong direction.

It teaches institutions to protect their reputation rather than practise their values. It teaches political movements to explain away the actual beliefs of their allies. It teaches churches to preserve testimonies, leaders and theologies at the expense of truth.

And it does the same in each of us. Yet Christian faith should make us more capable of facing contradiction, not less.

We do not have to prove ourselves righteous by defending every decision we have made. We do not have to preserve every leader through whom we received something good. We do not have to insist that every prayer was answered as expected, every prophecy was fulfilled, or every claim made in God’s name was true.

Our justification does not depend upon our consistency.

Grace means that I can discover I was wrong without ceasing to be loved. I can confess that I defended what should not have been defended. I can acknowledge that a person I distrusted told the truth. I can surrender an inadequate theology without surrendering Christ. I can change direction without having to declare my entire journey meaningless.

This is why confession is one of Christianity’s greatest gifts to the human mind. It interrupts the exhausting work of self-justification. It allows reality to speak without requiring the self to disappear.

The opposite of cognitive dissonance is not perfect consistency. No human being possesses that. It is the freedom to remain interruptible.

It is the willingness to notice when our minds are creating the certainty we need in order to continue. It is the patience to delay action, the humility to separate evidence from allegiance, and the courage to let the truth be different from what we need it to be.

And it is the discovery that the truth we feared would destroy us may instead be the place where grace has been waiting for us.

At this month’s General Synod, the Church of England voted to commend Kairos II for study across the Church.

After the debate, I was asked by General Synod member and theologian Ian Paul to write a detailed piece for Psephizo, looking at both the strengths and the more serious theological, historical, and legal issues in the document.

My main point is straightforward: Palestinian Christians need to be heard. But listening to their testimony is not the same as treating contested historical, legal, and political claims as if they are settled Christian theology.

I hope the article helps shift the conversation away from slogans and towards more careful theological reflection.

The article is here 👇

https://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/a-cry-and-a-curriculum-reading-kairos-ii-before-using-it/

For about forty-eight hours earlier this month, you could read on Amnesty International UK’s website a report: A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK.

Then it was gone.1

Published on the 8th, withdrawn on the 10th, replaced by the language of the corporate near-apology: the briefing had gone up “without going through the established internal review processes,” its “use of language does not reflect” the organisation’s position, an internal review is underway.

Take that sentence apart, and it says something precise. Not we were wrong. Not this was untrue. Only: this escaped the building before we had dressed it properly. A process failure. A textual wardrobe malfunction.

I want to make a small and blunt claim in the other direction. The report met Amnesty’s criteria exactly. It reflects the organisation’s position with unusual clarity — which is precisely why it had to be taken down. And there is one thing in it, the most revealing thing, that The Times and the rest of the media coverage sailed straight past.

I’ll come to that. It’s the reason I’m writing this article.

There is an old line, well worn by repetition because it keeps turning out to be true: believe people when they show you who they really are. Not who they say they are when the lawyers’ letters arrive. Who they are when they think the room is friendly and the document is internal, and no one important is looking. Amnesty showed us. The withdrawal is not a retraction of who they are. It is embarrassment at having been seen in their naked, most natural state.

One: making women who protect women dangerous

You can read elsewhere — The Times covered it, so did the broadsheets, so did the lawyers — why the wider world recoiled. So I’ll be brief and again direct about it.

Amnesty took a hundred and seventeen organisations and poured them into a single vat labelled anti-rights. One table. One combined figure. One moral colour. Into that vat, alongside the genuinely troubling, went the women’s groups: FiLiA, Woman’s Place UK, Sex Matters, LGB Alliance, For Women Scotland. And Beira’s Place — the free, confidential service in Edinburgh for women who have survived rape and sexual violence, founded and funded by J.K. Rowling after the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre came to be run by a trans-identifying man.

A charity that exists so that a woman who has been raped can, if she needs to, be heard by another woman — that charity is entered into a national ledger of threats to human rights. Not for anything it did. For what it is. Its offence is the provision of care on the basis of sex.

The report never has to call these women dangerous. The structure of their report does it for them. It puts a rape-crisis centre in the same column as clinic harassers, and the column makes the accusation you were too careful to write. Amnesty’s own numbers give the game away: the gender-critical groups it spent fifty-one entries denouncing account for two and a half per cent of the spending it mapped. £3.6 million, across fifty-one groups, over six years.

This was never a following-the-money exercise. The money was never the point. The listing was the point — the placing of women who protect women onto a register of the accused.

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Two: they only came for the Christians

Then there is something else in the report, commented on by many but not as widely. Read the list of the religious.

Every single one is Christian.

The Christian Institute, CARE, the Evangelical Alliance, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Christian Concern, the Christian Legal Centre, Anglican Mainstream, the Catholic Herald. One hundred and seventeen organisations, and not one Muslim body. Not one Hindu, not one Sikh, not one Orthodox Jewish institution — though every one of those traditions holds, often more firmly than the average Anglican, exactly the convictions Amnesty is prosecuting: that sex is real, that the family has a given shape, that a woman is a woman.

Do not let anyone tell you this is a failure of balance, a regrettable oversight, a diversity problem in the research team. It is not clumsiness. It is deliberate ideological targeting and aim.

Amnesty knows these other communities exist. Amnesty knows what they teach. It chose. And the choice tells us two things at once about Amnesty. It tells us which faith it feels safe to name — the majority one, the culturally Christian one, the one that will write a strongly worded response and perhaps a Substack, but will not make the organisation's life difficult. And then some Christians will take the report and flagellate themselves with it, castigate themselves masochistically, because there is nothing certain kinds of Christians like better than believing how terrible they are. And some will go one step further, siding with Amnesty in a desperate bid to prove themselves a different kind of Christian from the ones named on the list. And the choice by Amnesty tells us which faiths they will not touch, because touching them costs something in their coalitions it cannot afford to fracture.

That coalition has a texture. The activist wing of trans politics and the activist wing of pro-Palestinian politics are fused at the level of theory — bound by an intersectional creed in which every liberation is the same liberation and every oppression the same oppression. So a banner can read, untroubled by their cognitive dissonance, trans liberation cannot happen without Palestinian liberation.

You may find the pairing incoherent. But coherence is not the currency here. Alliance is. And an organisation living inside that alliance will scour the Christian West for its villains and fall silent — carefully, deliberately silent — before every other tradition on earth that believes the same forbidden things.

A principle that is only ever applied to the group you were already willing to lose is not a matter of principle. It is a target.

Three: the anthropology under the report

Now the thing that the media missed, and the thing worth reading in the article.

Strip the funding tables away, and this report rests on a doctrine of the human person. It has an anthropology — a theology of what a self is — and it is stated with a confidence its authors probably didn’t even notice they were showing.

Here is the doctrine. That the self is authored, not given and received. What you feel yourself to be, you are; and your sense of yourself outranks every other testimony — your body’s, your history’s, your maker’s. The report says this without arguing it. It treats the claim that gender is constructed and fluid as established fact — “progress,” it writes, “has been underpinned by changing understandings of gender and social roles” — and it treats the older claim, that sex is a given feature of a given nature, as mere belief, penned inside scare quotes: what these people “view” as “natural,” as “traditional.”

One account, the view of human identity by Amnesty, is given the dignity of being called ‘true’, treated as knowledge, whilst that of anyone who disagrees is pathologised.

And then the Amnesty report overplays its hand so badly that it makes its ideological and pseudo-religious confession. It lists the tell-tale signs of a dangerous movement — the markers of “anti-rights” activity to be watched, defunded, and where possible legislated against. Among them are: Appeals to nature. Appeals to family. Appeals to tradition, to religion, to the good of the community, to the safety of children.

Read that list in the report slowly. It is not a list of harmful acts. It is a list of the sources from which a human being might receive an identity rather than invent one. Nature, family, faith, heritage, belonging — the furniture of a life that comes to you before you choose it — reclassified as the machinery of oppression.

This is the point of the report most people seemed to miss, and it is the point that matters most. We are not watching a policy disagreement by Amnesty. We are watching two ontologies meet, and one of them announces that the other is a human rights violation for having ever existed and currently existing. Behind almost every ferocious argument in public life now — this one, and all the ones next to it — sits this same fault line: not what should we do, but what is real, and where does a legitimate self come from.

The report is one side of that line, dressed as neutral fact-finding. It holds that the human person is unmoored — free not only to act but to define, cut loose from body, lineage, culture, and creed — and that to say otherwise, to insist that some of what we are is given and good and not ours to revoke, is not a different view but a malicious offence against the person.

There is a deep irony sitting within this.

An identity that must be self-created can never be secure. It rests on no given, so it has to be propped up again and again — by affirmation, by agreement, by the removal of every voice whose mere existence suggests disagreement is possible. That is why the report cannot simply state its view and let it compete in the open. It ends, instead, with a request to the Charity Commission: strip the charitable status of organisations that believe the human being is given rather than made. Investigate them. Defund them. Clear them from the public square.

Read that as what it really is. A worldview so unstable it experiences the mere existence of disagreement as harm, and therefore cannot leave the disagreement standing. This is not a competing ontology content to argue its corner. It is one that requires the other to be gone. Not answered — but removed and disappeared.

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Believe them

For a long time the Christian position in this country has been the modest one, and I still think it is the right one: sex is real and good; the person is given before they are chosen; and adults are free to believe what they wish and live as they choose — right up to the point where it harms someone else. Believe whatever you like about yourself. Only do not compel me to say I believe it too, and do not build your peace on the silencing of my beliefs. That is not cruelty. It is the ordinary grammar of living together while disagreeing in a healthy democracy.

But we have often held that position lazily — assumed the givenness of things was so obvious it needed no defence, so secure it could be left untended, so widely shared it would always be there when we reached for it. It is not obvious any more. It is not shared. And an institution like Amnesty that used to defend the persecuted has now published — with, whatever it says, its full authority — a map of the people it would like the state to persecute, and put women who shelter the raped on it.

The report was pulled. It was not isolated, and it grew from the Amnesty report, like a snowball, published in May, which is still online at the Amnesty site as I write. That is the real tell here. Amnesty did not change its mind this July. It changed the draft that got out and is biding its time before releasing its next one.

Believe them. They have shown you who they are.

They will be back, but better dressed. And be ready knowing who they really are.

A door stands at the entrance to every women’s refuge in Britain, and for over fifty years it has run on one unspoken principle.

It does not ask who you are.

It does not weigh your character.

It does not assess your intent.

It asks the only question it can verify, and, depending on the answer, it opens or stays shut.

Most men will never stand at that door. Of those who might, almost all mean no harm. The door knows this. The women who built the refuge knew this. And still it does not open for any of them — not the kind ones, not the safe ones, not the ones who only want to help.

That is not an injustice. It is the design. And that logic is what our public argument about sex and gender has seemed to have forgotten.

Single-Sex Spaces Were Built on a Confession

Single-sex spaces were never built on an accusation. They were built on a confession.

Safeguarding — the real kind, refined over decades in refuges, prisons, hospitals and schools — has never worked by vetting individuals. We do not interview men at the shelter door to determine which are dangerous. Not because we believe every man is a predator, but for a more humbling reason.

We cannot tell.

Predators do not announce themselves. They present well. They are charming, plausible, often respected — not incidentally, but as method. Every safeguarding disaster in institutional memory begins the same way: someone believed they could assess a man’s heart, and was wrong.

So safeguarding anchors itself to the body, which it can verify, precisely because it cannot verify the heart. It has to.

Single-sex spaces were never an accusation against any individual man. They were an admission that intent cannot be assessed at the door. The boundary, not the assessment, carries the protection.

Which is why the standard defence of self-identification — trans women are not a threat — answers a question nobody asked. The refuge door never claimed that men, as individuals, are threats. It claimed that no one can spot a threat in advance. The question was never Is this person dangerous?

It was always can this rule still exclude the dangerous person who will, sooner or later, arrive?

That is the question self-identification changes. A lock that opens to a verified fact and a lock that opens to a declared identity are different mechanisms — and they stay different even if every person who has so far walked through the second one meant no harm. After the change, the door cannot close against any male person who says the words. The predator who once stood outside the category now stands inside it, because the redrawn category tests no one and refuses no one.

This says nothing about trans people — their character, their statistics, their sincerity. It is a claim about what a rule can still do. It does not need a single bad actor to be true. It needs only what safeguarding has always assumed: that one will eventually come, and that we will not see him coming.

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The Noun That Won the Argument

Nobody won the public argument for this change, because the argument, stated plainly, loses everywhere it is tried. Every single time.

Put it to any audience in its plain form — should a male person undress in a communal changing room used by teenage girls? — and the answer is no. Instantly, universally, across every tribe. That argument has never been won because it has never been made. Ever.

Instead, the classification changed, as a verbal sleight of hand, and then entitlements travelled inside, smuggled into the word.

The philosopher Charles Stevenson called this a persuasive definition: change what a word describes while keeping its emotional freight.1 “Woman” carries centuries of moral weight — sympathy, protectiveness, and every sex-based right that women marched and litigated to win. Change the membership criteria while keeping the word, and everything the word entitles its members to transfers automatically. None of it re-argued. None of it even noticed.

You can watch the mechanism at work in just two sentences.

Should a biological male expose himself in front of underage girls? No — instantly.

Should a trans woman be excluded from the women’s changing room? Surely not.

Same person. Same room. Same act. Opposite verdicts, selected entirely by the noun.

The same principle runs through this whole series I have been making about language and reality:

Classification precedes moral judgement.

We do not assess situations and then label them. We label them, and the label does the assessing for us. The side that wins the noun does not need to win the argument.

The noun is and becomes the argument.

The Freeze: When Truth Becomes Unspeakable

Hence the spectacle: intelligent, morally serious women, asked the plain question on camera, visibly unable to answer it.

It is tempting to call this moral cowardice. Research suggests something more precise, and perhaps more forgivable.

Philip Tetlock’s work on sacred values shows that once a community sacralises a value, its members experience the act of weighing it — any cost–benefit thinking at all — as a moral violation.2 They do not reason badly about the sacred; they refuse to reason about it, and they direct outrage at whoever asks. Where trans inclusion has been sacralised — and in elite professional culture it has — a safeguarding question is not heard as a question. It is heard as desecration. The woman freezing on camera is not failing to compute the risk. She is refusing a mode of thought her community has coded as utterly profane.

Timur Kuran adds the second layer: preference falsification. When stating a private belief costs more than concealing it, people publicly profess what they privately doubt. Each believes she is nearly alone, because everyone around her is doing the same — and that mutual concealment manufactures the very consensus that keeps them all silent. The freeze may not be confusion. It may be a woman calculating, accurately and in real time, what an honest answer would cost her.

Kuran’s model makes one further prediction: these equilibria do not erode over time. Rather, they collapse suddenly when enough people discover they were never alone. Britain in the last few years — the tribunals, the clinical reviews, the Supreme Court — looks less like a nation changing its mind than a preference cascade. The moment the concealment stopped paying.

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Steel-manning: The Exception Is Not the Centre

An argument tested only against its weakest opponents (straw-manning) is not an argument. It is a comfort. So here is the strongest opposing case, as its defenders would make it (steel-manning).

Trans people are a small and disproportionately victimised population; a trans woman in male facilities faces real danger. The incidents cited on the gender-critical side are rare relative to the fear around them, and studies from jurisdictions with inclusive policies report no measurable rise. The loaded changing-room question cuts both ways: describing a trans woman in maximally anatomical terms is itself classification doing moral work — exactly the move this series exists to expose. And sex-based rules have hard cases of their own: the fully transitioned trans man, bearded and male-passing, whom a strict sex-based policy places inside the women’s changing room; and the masculine-presenting women who bear the costs of any regime that polices who looks female enough.

These points have real substance. Notice, though, what they touch and what they do not.

Every one of them is about trans people — their rarity, their vulnerability, their sincerity. The boundary argument is not about trans people. The refuge door never needed most men to be dangerous; it needed the ability to exclude the one who was. A boundary that cannot refuse any male who declares he has lost that ability — for everyone, permanently — whether or not any trans person ever misuses it. The people most likely to exploit an unverifiable criterion are, by definition, not the sincere.

As for the hard cases: every rule has them at its edges. The trans man in the women’s changing room is an awkwardness at the margin. A safeguarding door that cannot shut is a failure at the centre. Judge a rule by what it does at its centre, under adversarial pressure — not by which one makes the more comfortable photograph at the edge.

Nor were single-sex spaces ever enforced by inspection! Consensus enforced them — a social agreement so strong that violation was unthinkable, and enforcement almost never needed. Dissolve the category, and you dissolve the consensus. Self-identification does not solve the policing problem.

It creates it.

The Exception Is Not the Centre

Which raises the harder question: why did so much of the church — its progressive wing first, but not only — adopt this framework so quickly, after holding the opposite anthropology for two thousand years?

Because the framework is not secular. It is a religion. And it is one the church should recognise, because most of its furniture was taken from our house.

Émile Durkheim defined religion not by belief in God but by the division of the world into sacred and profane, policed by a moral community.3 Measure the movement by that standard. It has a creed, recited under social pressure — trans women are women — not a conclusion you reach but a confession you make. It has a conversion narrative: the moment of realisation, the old self renounced, the new name taken — baptism, with the certificate reissued. It has blasphemy laws: misgendering as profanation, punishable. It has saints and martyrs, feast days, heretics tried in public and cast out. Excommunication did not disappear from the modern world. It changed its platforms.

It even has an original sin — the wrong kind of birth, the unearned privilege — that can be confessed but never absolved. And that is the tell, the point where the copy betrays itself. This religion has everything Christianity has except grace. There is no atonement in it, no absolution, no road back. The apology is filed as further evidence. Repentance earns nothing, because the record is to be eternal.

Nor is its doctrine new. Beneath the vocabulary sits one of the oldest claims the church ever fought: that the true self is an inner essence, and the body is not you — merely the raw material the real you is trapped in, and may correct. The gnostics taught that flesh was a mistake to be escaped. Orthodoxy answered with the strangest of its claims: the Word became flesh, and the body is not the prison of the self but part of it — created, fallen, and destined for resurrection. A church that has forgotten why it fought that argument will not recognise it when it returns wearing new vocabulary.

Which brings us to progressive Christianity, and painful irony.

Many progressive Christians came out of conservative church cultures that ran exactly this machinery on them. They were handed creeds to affirm whether or not they believed them. They were taught that some questions were not questions but rebellion, that doubt was a deficiency, that the room would become icy cold around anyone who noticed too much. Their wounds and scars are real, and nothing in this essay disputes them.

But having escaped one system of compelled affirmation, they joined another with the mechanics unchanged — the required words, the unaskable questions, the heresy trial by hashtag — believing that because the sacred objects were new, the machine must be too.

But it never was.

The machinery belongs to no theology, conservative or progressive. It belongs to any community that acquires sacred objects and loses the ability to weigh and judge them. The fundamentalism they fled was never a doctrine. It was a tribal method of inclusion and exclusion. And the method has travelled with them.

Their old wound is now offered as the credential — proof that they, of all people, know coercion when they see it — as if having once been burned were evidence they could not be holding the match to set light to others.

This is why the freeze on the sofa when questioned afflicts the progressive Christian hardest of all. She is not choosing between belief and unbelief. She is choosing between tribal identity and congregations.

We are in no position to lecture the culture about dissolved boundaries or borrowed creeds. But what we can do is say why a safeguarding boundary was never the opposite of love — and why grace was never the same thing as affirmation.

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The God Who Separates

The Bible’s first creative acts are separations. Light from darkness. Waters above from waters below. Sea from dry land. Before creation is filled, it is divided — and the dividing is called good. In Genesis, a boundary is not a failure of love; it is the architecture of a habitable world. And when un-creation comes, in the flood, it comes as boundaries collapsing — the separated waters rushing back together.

Scripture maintains this logic wherever it addresses protection. The ark has one door. The fold has walls, and the shepherd calls himself its gate. The law’s fiercest protections — for the widow, the orphan, the stranger — are structural, not sentimental: gleaning rights, sabbath limits, cities of refuge. Israel is never told to protect the vulnerable by assessing, case by case, which powerful people seem trustworthy. It is told to build arrangements that hold regardless of anyone’s charm.

And at the centre of the faith stands a person in whom grace and truth arrive together, undiluted by each other. We have let the culture frame these as competitors — as if love means assenting to whatever a person declares about themselves, and truth-telling is what love does when it fails.

The Incarnation says otherwise.

Love that cannot say true things is flattery with good manners. Truth that cannot protect the vulnerable is accuracy in the service of nothing.

So the Christian position is not complicated, however costly. The trans person in your community bears the image of God — fully, non-negotiably — and is owed protection from real cruelty, some of which, to our shame, has come from people quoting Scripture. That is one obligation. The women and girls in your community are owed the boundaries built from a century of hard knowledge about what cannot be known at a door. That is another. Everything this essay has described exists to persuade you that these are one obligation, and that the second must dissolve into the first.

They are not one obligation. Holding both is not hatred. It is what adulthood in a fallen world requires.

The door of the refuge still does not ask who you are. It never could. That was never its failure. It was its wisdom.

That door was not built because women believed the worst of every man. It was built because they acknowledged the limits of what anyone can know about anyone else.

Have you stopped beating your wife?

Answer yes, and you have confessed you used to. Answer no, and you are apparently still at it. There is no innocent answer, because the guilt has been folded into the question. The problem was never your answer.

The problem is the question.

It is one of the oldest tricks in rhetoric — and some version of it is running through almost every heated disagreement you will have this week.

You raise a concern. You ask a question. You point to a problem.

And somewhere in the next few seconds, the conversation stops being about the problem.

It becomes about you.

“You only think that because you’re afraid of change.”

“The real reason you object is prejudice.”

“You’re spreading hate.”

If you have ever been on the receiving end of this, you know what happens next. Something in you tenses up. You want to explain. You want to clarify what you meant. You want to reassure them that you are not fearful, not prejudiced, not hateful — not the sort of person they have just described.

And that is the moment the trap closes over you.

Because the argument has not been answered. It has been abandoned. Without anyone quite noticing, the subject under discussion has been swapped for the psychology of the person who raised it. You.

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Answered, or Attacked?

There is one question worth keeping close whenever a disagreement starts to feel like this:

Has my argument been answered, or has my character been attacked?

They are not the same thing, though they are easily confused in the heat of an exchange.

Suppose I say, “I don’t think this idea will do what its supporters hope.” A real reply would tell me why it will work. Evidence. Reasoning. An example. Something about the policy.

Instead, I am told: “You only say that because you’re afraid of change.”

Notice what has happened. Nothing has been said about the idea. Nothing has been said about whether I am right or wrong. A claim has been made about my inner life — and the conversation has slipped, silently, from reality to psychology.

The argument is no longer the subject. I am.

The process usually unfolds in the same order. A question challenges a moral identity. That feels like a threat rather than a request for discussion. The brain shifts into defence mode. Instead of evaluating the argument, it evaluates the speaker. Motives are inferred. Character is judged. The conversation moves away from evidence and towards identity. Once that happens, the original question has effectively disappeared.

The trouble with mind-reading

We live in a strange moment, crowded with people who appear to read minds.

Not literally. But rhetorically.

They know not only what you believe but why. Your hidden motives. Your buried fears. Your secret prejudice. The real reason behind your concern — which, as it happens, you were apparently the last to discover!

Of course, they know none of this. They are guessing. Or, more honestly, they are assigning — handing you a motive and then treating it as though they had found it. Most people do not attack motives because they have carefully analysed another person’s psychology. They do it because it is easier than answering the argument. A difficult question creates discomfort, uncertainty, and sometimes the possibility that we may be wrong.

Attacking the person who asked it is often emotionally cheaper than engaging with the issue itself. If I can persuade myself that you are fearful, hateful, obsessed, privileged, or ignorant, then I no longer need to wrestle with what you are saying. The argument disappears, the person becomes the problem, and my existing beliefs remain comfortably intact. In that sense, motive-poisoning is often less about understanding another person’s mind than protecting our own.

And once a motive has been assigned, it is almost impossible to shake off. How do you prove you are not afraid? How do you demonstrate that your objection is not secretly driven by prejudice? How do you produce evidence about the contents of your own heart to someone who has already decided what is in there?

You cannot. That is what makes the move so effective.

The accusation becomes its own evidence.

Return, for a moment, to the question we began with. It was not unanswerable by accident. It was built that way — and it has a hundred imitators, for instance:

A man asks whether biological males should have access to female-only spaces where women may be vulnerable. Instead of engaging with the concern, a female replies;

”Why are you so obsessed with penises?”

Ignore that, and the silence is read as guilt; you are some kind of pervert. Deny it — ”I am not obsessed with penises”— and you have now said those words out loud (try saying that out loud in public, btw), which manages to sound exactly like something said by a person who is. The defence is engineered to look ridiculous and mock you, degrade you and make you look degenerate.

Rhetoricians call this a self-sealing frame. Once you accept it, every response tightens it. The accusation does not merely resist disproof; it contains its own conclusion, and hands it back to you dressed up as a question.

Which is the whole point. The aim was never to actually prove anything about you. The aim was to get you defending yourself instead of your argument. And the moment you begin explaining your psychology, the original question has already been quietly removed from view.

This isn’t always conscious and deliberate manipulation. Often, people sincerely believe they’re responding fairly. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning: we instinctively interpret evidence in ways that protect beliefs we already want to hold.

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Christian Versions: Stop Assigning Motives

Christian leaders should feel a particular unease here, for two reasons.

The first is that we, of all people, claim to know the human heart is not ours to read. The Lord looks on the heart, Samuel is told — precisely because man cannot. To assign motives with confidence is to take up a knowledge that was never given to us; to play God in miniature.

The second is more uncomfortable. We do it too. We have our own vocabulary for it — worldly, compromised, unbiblical, divisive — words that describe a person’s supposed condition rather than answer their questions. The tactic belongs to no single tribe. It is a temptation wherever people would rather win than understand.

Motives don’t decide truth

There is a further reason to distrust this rhetorical move, beyond its unfairness.

Even if the accusation were true, it would not answer anything!

A selfish person can say something true. A generous person can be wrong. A frightened man may see the danger first, precisely because he is frightened.

Truth depends on evidence and reality, not on the emotional weather of whoever happens to be speaking. Two plus two does not become four just because the man saying it is arrogant. A concern about an idea, an institution, or a movement does not dissolve because someone has speculated about why you raised it.

The argument still stands there, waiting. Reality is stubbornly indifferent to our theories about one another.

How to Escape the Trap

The feeling, and the way back

Here is the useful part: this trap is easier to feel than to spot.

There is a particular sensation that comes with it — the sudden urge to explain yourself, to defend your intentions, to prove you are not the sort of person being described.

Learn to notice it.

It is usually the first sign that the conversation has left the issue and arrived at your character.

When you feel the need to apologise for who you are, stop and ask: have they answered my argument, or only offered a theory about my motives?

Then do the one thing that breaks the spell.

To defend it concedes the very point in dispute — that your motive was ever the issue. It almost never was. And with a self-sealing question, even the denial walks you deeper in. So do not answer on the question’s terms. Step outside the frame and trap, and put the real question back on the table.

“That is an interesting description of me. What is your answer to the argument?”

“You have made a claim about me. I made a claim about the issue. Shall we discuss the issue?”

And, best of all, the line that collapses the whole manoeuvre:

“Even if that were true, it doesn’t touch the argument. What is wrong with the argument?”

Watch how hard that last one is to escape. It drags the conversation back where it belongs — to evidence, to reasoning, to the actual subject — and refuses to let it sit on you.

Once you have seen the pattern, you will see it everywhere. A question reframed as a diagnosis. A disagreement reframed as a moral failing. The issue quietly vanishing while everyone studies the person who raised it.

So keep the rule near to hand:

When someone cannot answer your argument, they will try to explain you instead.

Do not help them.

Defend the claim, not your character. Answer the point, not the accusation. And leave the heart to the only One who can actually read it. God.

The rest of us are left with the argument.

Which is precisely where the conversation should have stayed.

The most virtuous-sounding language in public life is often doing something other than what it appears to do. Learning to see this is one of the most important and urgent tasks facing Christian leaders.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called How People Cheat in Arguments. It was a map of the language games. The straw men, the deflections, the tone policing, the moving goalposts and the small sleights of hand by which a conversation about an idea suddenly becomes a conversation about you and your virtue, or lack of.

A way of speaking that, when it occurs, ordinarily thoughtful people seem to lose the ability to think.

Let me show you what I mean.

Consider three of the most morally attractive words you could ever put on a banner.

Hope. Not. Hate.

Now who, exactly, is going to argue with that? Who wishes to stand up and declare himself for hate and against hope? The phrase appears to mark a distinction so obvious that only a wicked person could object to it.

Yet those who use such phrases often seem most consumed by hate.

How is that?

The groups who march most loudly under the banner of hope are often the very ones who appear most consumed by contempt for the people they oppose. The language of love sits strangely alongside the conduct of calls for violence.

You feel it. Yet you likely cannot name it. And because you cannot name it, you cannot answer it.

That is the position a great many leaders find themselves in. They sense that a trick is being played. They simply do not have the words to describe the trick, the categories with which to diagnose it, or the tools with which to refuse it.

So let me try to offer all three.

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The Classification Sleight of Hand

The first thing to see is that a slogan like Hope Not Hate is not making a claim. It is performing a classification.

Before anyone has said a word about immigration, policing, community cohesion, or national identity, the identity politic roles have already been handed out. One side stands in the place of hope. The other is now deemed to stand in the place of hate. Any argument has effectively been settled before it has begun.

And once you start looking, you see the same move everywhere.

A discussion about immigration becomes a discussion about compassion. A discussion about crime becomes a discussion about prejudice. A discussion about schools becomes a discussion about inclusion. A discussion about biological sex becomes a discussion about dignity and safety.

In each case, the actual subject disappears and is replaced by a moral abstraction. And once that substitution has taken place, disagreement becomes almost impossible. You are no longer arguing about a policy. You are apparently arguing against compassion, inclusion, dignity, and hope itself.

This is the genius of it. The disagreement has not been won. It has been relocated — from the level of ideas and beliefs, where it could be examined, to the level of identity, where it cannot.

Sacred Words Become Weapons

Richard Beck has written helpfully about what he calls social nouns: abstract moral words that modern societies treat almost as sacred objects. Justice. Diversity. Inclusion. Equity. Freedom. Hope. They carry an enormous emotional charge. And they are almost never ever defined.

That is not an accident. Their power lies precisely in their vagueness.

Almost nobody opposes justice. Almost nobody opposes inclusion. Almost nobody opposes hope. The disagreement only begins when someone asks what those words actually mean in this case, for these people, with these consequences. But that is the conversation the slogan is designed to prevent.

Instead, one group succeeds in quietly attaching its own interpretation to the word — and from that moment, to disagree with the interpretation is to disagree with the virtue. The abstraction acquires a kind of moral immunity. Question it, and you have not raised an objection. You have revealed a defect in your soul.

This is why evidence so often stops working. No quantity of data competes well with a sacred word. The argument is no longer happening at the level of facts. It is happening at the level of belonging and virtue signalling.

Virtues Are Not Possessions

What is happening is not a matter of rhetoric but of reality itself.

Historically, the Christian tradition treated virtues such as hope, justice, truth, and love as transcendent realities grounded in God. They were not possessions. No person, no party, no nation, no church could claim to own them. We stood beneath them and were measured by them.

And Christianity was deeply suspicious of anyone who claimed otherwise — because Christianity has always understood how prone human beings are to self-deception. We confuse our interests with righteousness, our tribe with truth, our preferences with the will of God. So we are accountable to the good. We do not get to be its proprietor.

Identity politics reverses this completely.

The movement no longer stands beneath the virtue. The movement becomes the virtue. Hope is no longer a standard we all answer to; hope becomes the property of a particular coalition. Justice is identified with a programme. Inclusion is identified with an ideology.

And once that happens, the consequences are entirely predictable.

• If the movement is justice, then to criticise the movement is to be unjust.

• If the movement is inclusion, then to criticise it is to be exclusionary.

• If the movement is hope, then to criticise it is to be hateful.

A political disagreement is transformed into a moral contamination. And that is why these arguments feel so strangely violent. One person thinks they are debating a policy and a belief. The other experiences it as an assault on the sacred — and, by extension, on themselves.

It also explains the contradiction we began with. A movement that talks endlessly about tolerance can become astonishingly intolerant, because dissent is no longer a difference of opinion.

It is heresy.

The hatred is not a betrayal of the headline banner. The banner is working exactly as its users intended.

And this is not a sin of the left. Nationalist movements do it. Religious movements do it. Any tribe can seize a transcendent good and turn it into a private weapon. The issue was never left versus right. The issue is what happens whenever human beings try to capture something that belongs to God and convert it into a possession of their own.

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The Christian Temptation

Which is exactly where we have to turn the lamp on ourselves.

Because Christians are not spectators to this trick. We are often its most fluent practitioners now and in the past.

Consider what a virtue actually is.

In the Christian tradition, a virtue is not a badge you wear. It is the far end of a road. Patience is what a person slowly becomes. Courage is the settled shape of someone formed by grace over time. The virtue names the destination of a process and that process is grounded in something real: a person being remade, by the Spirit, into the likeness of Christ.

The virtue has a telos. It is going somewhere, and it is rooted in someone.

Now remove the road, but keep the badge and slogan. Strip out the long, humbling formation and keep only the marker of having arrived. What you are left with looks like virtue but is something else entirely: the performance of holiness, detached from the process that produces it and the reality that grounds it.

That is purity culture.

A community policing the signs of righteousness while disconnected from the One in whom righteousness is found. A moral vision floating free of its ontological anchor in Christ. And it mutates and ferments into exactly the same thing we have been describing in secular politics: the tribe captures holiness, purity, truth, and makes them its property, and turns them into instruments for sorting the clean from the unclean.

We did the linguistic magic trick first. We simply used churchier words.

So if we are going to name this in the public square, honesty requires us to confess it in the sanctuary.

How To Refuse The Game

None of this means hope is bad, or justice is bad, or inclusion is bad. Quite the opposite. It means they are far too important to be handed over to any tribe — including ours.

So how do we respond? Not by becoming louder. By becoming clearer.

Refuse the role you have been assigned. The slogan only works if you accept the classification. You do not have to. You can calmly decline to be sorted: I have not told you I am against hope, and you have not yet told me what you mean by it.

Separate the word from the interpretation. This is the single most useful response available to a leader. I am not against hope. I am questioning your account of what hope requires of us here. That sentence reopens the conversation the slogan was trying to close.

Ask the diagnostic question. Whenever you meet a phrase that sounds self-evidently virtuous, ask quietly: What argument is this slogan stopping us from having? That question almost always reveals more than the slogan ever could.

Put the good back under God. Refuse, on principle, to let any movement own a virtue. Stand beneath the standard rather than behind it. The most disarming thing a Christian can say is that the very virtue being weaponised will one day judge the person wielding it — and judge us too.

Restore the telos. And in our own house, stop asking are we pure? and start asking, are we being formed toward Christ? The first question produces inquisitors. The second produces saints.

And now the part that matters most of all.

None of this is guaranteed to work. Not because the tools I’ve mentioned are weak, but because the person in front of you may no longer be able to hear them or bear to hear them. When someone has fused their identity with a virtue, a question about it does not land as a question. It lands as an assault on their very being. You are not poking at an argument. As far as their nervous system is concerned, you are attacking who they are in totality

So be ready for the reaction.

You can stay calm, stay precise, refuse the role, separate the word from its interpretation — do everything right — and a person fully captured may still respond with something closer to panic than rational thought. They will declare that they feel unsafe. They will say the conversation itself is harmful. They will announce that they cannot do this and walk away. Or they might just shout an existential scream at you.

Do not mistake that for your failure. It is the diagnosis confirming things.

The dissonance is real, and for them it is genuinely unbearable. To question the virtue is to risk the self that has been built upon it, and their mind would sooner flee than hold two incompatible things at once. The existential alarm, the language of harm, the sudden exit — these are not rebuttals of your points. They are a measure of how much was resting on the slogan in the first place.

Your task is not to persist more forcefully; it is to differentiate. It is to remain the calmest, kindest, least anxious person in the room and to leave the door open.

And you can stand there — present, unthreatened, unmoved — for one reason. You are not holding the virtue up. It is holding you.

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Virtue, or the Signal of It

Here, then, is the distinction underneath all of the above.

Virtue signalling is the claim to own a virtue. Virtue is the willingness to be judged by it.

The signaller stands above the standard and uses it to sort other people. The saint stands beneath the standard and is slowly remade by it. One holds the word as a weapon. The other is held by it as a master.

So there is a simple test for which one you are looking at — in others, and in yourself. Ask whether the virtue is allowed to convict the person invoking it. A hope that can only ever indict your enemies is not hope. It is a flag in the colour of hope, flown over a fortress of virtue signalling.

Real hope, like real justice and real love, belongs to no party. It belongs to God. Every movement stands beneath it. None of us gets to own it.

And the deepest form of power was never the power to make and force people to agree with you. It is the power to persuade them that disagreement itself is proof of moral failure.

That is the achievement of identity politics. It turns argument into contamination, and conversation into a loyalty test.

Our task, as leaders, is not to win that game.

It is to refuse to play it and to keep insisting, gently, relentlessly, and hopefully that the things worth fighting over are precisely the things none of us is allowed to own.

There is a rhetorical manoeuvre that has become remarkably common in public life. It lets people appear morally virtuous while avoiding the substance of an argument entirely. I named it in passing in How People Cheat in Arguments, where it sat among several such tactics.

But it has outgrown that list. It does more damage than most others, and it does so more insidiously, which is why it deserves an article of its own here.

It is called Simpson’s Paradox and occurs when the national average tells one story, but the local data tell another, and the average ends up hiding where the real problem lies.

It manifests like this. Someone identifies a pattern of harm. Not a universal claim of harm. Not collective guilt about harm. Not something prejudiced. Merely an observable data-backed concentration of harm.

The knee-jerk response is now immediate:

“But on average in the UK, most of this [identified] harm is committed by white men within the family.”

This sounds reasoned, and it is presented as morally mature and superior.

But often it is none of these.

It is not an answer to the noted pattern of harm, and it is actually a change of subject and a dangerous rhetorical sleight of hand.

Simpson’s paradox warns:

Never assume the whole tells the same story as the parts.

Drunk Drivers

Imagine someone says:

Drunk drivers are disproportionately involved in fatal crashes.

Nobody responds:

Yes, but statistically, most crashes on average involve sober drivers.

Nobody says it because everyone immediately sees the absurdity. The statement may be statistically true and yet entirely irrelevant. The existence of more crashes elsewhere tells us nothing about whether drunk driving is a concentrated risk that warrants attention.

We understand this instinctively. Which raises a more awkward question.

Why, when the subject changes to a protected ideological predilection, do so many otherwise intelligent people suddenly become unable to think?

Part of the answer is that statistics possess an almost magical authority in modern arguments. Introduce a number, and people assume the matter is settled. But very often nothing has been settled at all. The subject has merely been changed.

So often a concern is raised about a known concentration of harm — in a place, an organisation, a context — and immediately somebody produces a national average to beat it over the head with.

Notice the sleight of hand.

The discussion moves: from this place to the whole country; from a cluster to a total population; from known actors to everybody. And because arithmetic has appeared in the sleight of hand, everyone nods gravely and pretends this counts as thought.

Usually it does not. At all.

And usually, it is simply a different question dressed up as an answer to cover the virtue signalling at work. And yes, not everyone making this move is attempting to display virtue. Many are simply making the sort of statistical mistake that modern people are oddly prone to making.

We have acquired a superstitious respect for numbers. Once a statistic appears, especially a national one, people assume the matter has been settled. But statistics are not arguments. They are answers to particular questions. And the truth of an answer depends partly on whether the right question was asked.

Which means that a statistic may be impeccably correct and yet have almost no bearing on the matter under discussion.

That is not deception. It is confusion.

But there is another reason this move is so effective. The moment identity enters the conversation, reason is crowded out by anxiety. People cease asking:

Is this true?

and begin asking:

What sort of person will I look like if I agree/disagree?

That is where broad statistics become irresistible. Not because they explain reality. But because they provide moral cover. They allow people to display decency while avoiding discomfort.

And so the same person who would laugh at anyone excusing drunk driving by pointing to sober drivers will pull exactly the same manoeuvre the moment the pattern touches ethnicity, religion, or some other protected category important to them.

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Pakistani Grooming Gangs

Take one of the most painful examples in modern Britain.

Over many years, organised child sexual exploitation cases emerged across several English towns. Subsequent inquiries did not merely uncover criminal acts; they exposed institutional failure. Among the more uncomfortable conclusions was that concerns around accusations of racism, preserving “community relations,” and avoiding reputational damage may, at times, have contributed to hesitation in confronting what was in front of people.

In a large number of these cases, many of the convicted offenders were British Pakistani men.

State this plainly, and one frequently encounters an immediate rejoinder:

“But on average, most sexual offences in Britain are committed by white men in the home.”

Now pause for a moment. Suppose this were entirely correct as a statement about national incidence.

What exactly has it answered? The original claim was never:

British Pakistani men commit most sexual offences.

That would be a different argument altogether. The concern was that identifiable patterns appeared within particular organised networks and that institutions were unwilling to investigate them with sufficient honesty or urgency.

These propositions do not compete. One asks:

What does the overall distribution across the population look like?

The other asks:

Was there a concentrated pattern here that demands investigation?

Those are not rival explanations any more than weather and climate are rival descriptions. A population average may be entirely true and entirely beside the point.

And when a statistic is introduced as though it settles the matter, it ceases to function as evidence. It becomes permission not to look too closely. And it insinuates something about the person raising the concern: that the very act of questioning reveals something immoral about them.

That, I think, is the distinction people sense but struggle to articulate when hit with the national average fallacy. They know something is wrong with the statistic, but they do not know how to say what. And worse, the framing has already shifted the focus onto them. They are no longer the person raising a concern. They are the person who needs to explain why they have one.

Abusive Priests

We have lived through this faulty logic before. Consider the abuse scandals within the Church.

When they began to surface, people stood up and said:

Stop focusing on priests — statistically, most abuse happens elsewhere, in the home by non-priests.

We would recognise that immediately for what it is. Not an analysis but a deflection. That statistic may well have been and still be true. It was also, yet again, completely beside the point.

Because the concern was never that priests commit most abuse. The concern was: is there a concentrated institutional pattern being concealed?

So why do we keep losing that clarity the moment the pattern sits in a less comfortable place?

Moral Cover and Signalling

Because at some point in the exchange, something subtle occurs. The question changes. Almost nobody announces the change. It simply happens, and the discussion ceases to be:

Is this pattern real?

and through rhetorical sophism, things become:

What will it imply if I admit that it is real?

That is the move, where attention shifts from examining reality to managing identity and signalling virtue. A statistic no longer serves as an instrument for understanding the world. It becomes a means of creating distance from an uncomfortable conclusion.

Suppose somebody says:

There appears to have been a repeated pattern in some organised child sexual exploitation cases involving many British Pakistani offenders, and fears of accusations of racism may have contributed to institutional reluctance to investigate.

Notice how often the reply is not:

That pattern does not exist, and here is the data. Instead, the answer becomes:

We must be careful not to stigmatise communities. We must avoid maligning a culture. Victims deserve better. Besides, most sexual offences in Britain are committed by white men.

Notice what has happened. The question has changed.

We are no longer asking:

Was there a concentrated pattern? Were institutions reluctant to investigate? Were the victims failed? We are now asking:

What sort of person might I appear to be if I acknowledge this?

Imagine applying this to abusive priests and drunk drivers from above:

We must be careful not to stigmatise drivers. We must avoid maligning people who enjoy a drink. Victims deserve better. Besides, most road deaths in Britain are caused by sober drivers.

We must be careful not to stigmatise clergy. We must avoid maligning the church. Victims deserve better. Besides, most child abuse in Britain is committed by family members.

The national statistic enters not as evidence but as moral cover. While it may be true nationally, it fails to answer the question.

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The Corrective

The corrective is almost embarrassingly simple. Remember Simpson’s Paradox and become suspicious whenever someone says:

“Overall…”

When someone reaches for a broad national average, ask one question:

That may be true nationally, but are you saying that because more cases may exist elsewhere, known patterns with known victims and known offenders become less important to investigate?

If it answers the concern, good, then it belongs in the conversation. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t working as evidence. At that point, the statistic may be doing several things at once: signalling moral superiority, obscuring the original question, reflecting a misunderstanding of what averages can tell us, or revealing how quickly the fear of appearing prejudiced can override our normal standards of reasoning.

A mature society should be able to hold two things in its head at the same time:

That most members of any group are innocent and decent.

And that concentrated patterns of offending should be investigated honestly, wherever they appear and whoever they implicate. These two truths do not compete. They depend on each other. The first is what prevents pattern recognition from curdling into prejudice. The second is what stops compassion from fermenting into cowardice.

Naming a pattern is not collective guilt. Refusing to see one is not justice.

If every uncomfortable observation is treated as evidence of racism, then racism ceases to mean anything, and reality becomes impossible to discuss. Once accusation replaces argument, the facts stop mattering, and only moral posturing remains.

Truth does not become prejudice simply because it makes us uncomfortable.

It is happening more and more.

You are in a conversation with someone you know. Someone intelligent. Someone you have disagreed with before, productively, without any major drama. But this time, something is different. You raise a question about what they said, and something suddenly changed behind their eyes. Not disagreement, but something faster than the speed of thought.

Their vocabulary shifts and slogans appear where their sentences used to be. They can’t define the terms they deploy or the ones you then ask them about. They cannot tolerate your good-faith questions. Any. Then they say they feel ‘unsafe’. They withdraw, attack, or sometimes, both.

You leave deeply unsettled and perturbed. Not because you lost a robust argument, but because you never got to have one. And the strangest part is that you remember when they were different, when the ability to disagree and learn from each other used to be possible.

This is our post-truth, post-science world marked by conspiracy thinking, psychological fragmentation, and something like a collective mood disorder. Yet what has captured us is not merely confusion or ideology. It is closer to a spiritual enthralment, a collective possession in which perception, reason, and the capacity for honest conversation have become captive.

What we are witnessing resembles a cultic fundamentalism: emotionally totalising, hostile to scrutiny, incapable of reasoned engagement, sustained by rituals of outrage, purity, and belonging. It functions less like rational conviction and more like therapeutic superstition. Feelings have become sacred, and disagreement becomes harm, while dissent is not something to answer to but is something to silence and extirpate.

We have well-worn vocabulary for this now. Polarisation. Radicalisation. Cognitive dissonance. Identity Politics. These words are clinically, psychologically, and sociologically accurate, as far as they go.

But they do not go far enough.

They describe symptoms without naming the real condition of things, of what passes between two people when a shared common reality has vanished. The deeper why of what is happening…

…We need different words and terms to name this emerging human experience, which is, in fact, not new but very ancient.

There is an older term for this condition.

Bewitched.1

We stopped using it because we thought ourselves too sophisticated for it. It is the word of fairy tales and superstition, cooky TV series and movies. But perhaps we abandoned its real meaning too quickly. Perhaps it survived as long as it did precisely because it names something psychologically and spiritually real that modern language keeps fumbling around to re-diagnose.

To be bewitched, in the old sense, was not simply to be wrong. It was to be enthralled. Where your perception has been captured. Your judgment clouded. Your imagination colonised. Your agency quietly dismantled. And the enchantment worked gradually, through suggestion and whispering and fear, until the bewitched person rarely knew it had happened.

That is what made it dangerous. That is what makes the word useful again now. To name this moment and the danger before us now.

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Tolkien Saw It Coming

Tolkien understood this before most of us did.

When we first encounter King Théoden in The Lord of the Rings, he is not in chains. He is not imprisoned. He is bent. Passive. Spiritually depleted. Unable to perceive reality clearly, suspicious of the people trying to reach him, watching his kingdom deteriorate around him and finding himself incapable of an active and rational response.

Always beside him, close enough to whisper, stands Gríma Wormtongue.

Gríma never overpowers Théoden by force. Instead, he colonises his perception. He tells the king who to fear, who to distrust, why action is futile and why hope is naïve. He interprets every incoming piece of reality through a filter Théoden does not perceive. The king believes he is thinking. He is not thinking.

He is being thought through.

The judgments feel like his. The fears feel like his. But the source is somewhere else entirely.

This is a term to diagnose our age and moment. Because we live surrounded by digital Wormtongues.

The feed whispers. The algorithm whispers. The outrage cycle, the partisan commentator, the sociopathic online influence/commentator who has literally sold their soul for engagement, coupled with the carefully curated emotional atmosphere of whatever platform you last opened: all of it is whispering, minute by minute, hour after hour, month after month and now year after year, shaping what feels true before conscious thought can even begin.

The result is not merely bad opinions. It is something closer to what Théoden had. A pre-processed relationship to reality. People no longer evaluate information freely. They react to it, on cue, predictably, according to a script they did not write and cannot see.

Like Théoden we are being thought through by a source from somewhere else.

The spell speaks first. The person speaks second. And the person thinks they are thinking.

The Spell That Looks Like Enlightenment

We flatter ourselves that modern people are too rational to be bewitched. But modern enchantment is more sophisticated than the old kind, precisely because it never presents itself as enchantment. It presents itself as compassion. As justice. As safety. It offers identity and belonging and the solidarity of shared outrage, and because secular people no longer believe in spiritual enthralment, they have almost no defences against its psychological equivalent.

The enchantment works affectively. Identity becomes fused to ideology. Belonging becomes conditional on conformity. Dissent becomes psychologically costly and self policed. Then rationality eventually collapses completely.

This is why facts increasingly fail to convince or move the bewitched. The problem is not fundamentally intellectual. It is liturgical. People are being continuously formed by repeated rituals of emotional conditioning, doomscrolling, public shaming, and identity reinforcement. They are being catechised. The only question is who is doing the catechising and toward what end.

And so we arrive at what others have called epistemic fragility. The inability to encounter a genuinely hard question without something close to psychological collapse. When identity fuses with ideology, contradiction feels like self-annihilation. So instead of engaging with evidence, people protect themselves through fury, withdrawal or accusation.

“I feel unsafe in this conversation” functions not as an emotional statement but as an attempt to terminate reality-testing itself. The conversation must be stopped to protect the fragile self.

The spell of bewitchment protects itself. That is what spells do.

Dark Enchantment: This Is Not a Metaphor

Tolkien knew where the spell ultimately comes from, like the spells bewitching us today.

Behind Wormtongue stands Saruman. And behind Tolkien’s imagination stands the Christian account of evil itself.

Scripture does not describe Satan primarily as a brute-force destroyer. It describes him as a deceiver. The father of lies. The accuser. The whisperer. “Did God really say?” Notice this method. Reality is not denied outright at first; instead, it is subtly reframed. Trust is destabilised, perception distorted, and then identity collapses into confusion. The enemy works through suggestion, accusation, and the slow manufacture of deception.

This is why Christians should take bewitchment seriously. Not superstitiously, not in a way that becomes some Christian conspiracy theory, but in an apprehension of the supernatural at work. Human beings can become spiritually and psychologically enthralled by systems of lies repeated often enough and tied deeply enough to identity and belonging.

Bewitchment is not a metaphor for something else. It is a description of what is actually happening to people we know. And we are all in danger of falling under the spell ourselves.

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The Practices of Disenthralment

The pivotal scene from Tolkien is not a debate or psychological intervention. Gandalf does not arrive with better counter-information and coping mechanisms. He does not engage Wormtongue’s arguments.

He breaks the enchantment.

He calls Théoden back into reality, into clarity, into courage, into memory, into himself and his true identity.

Tolkien makes something crucial clear. Théoden cannot recover while remaining immersed in Wormtongue’s presence. Disenthralment requires distance. Separation from the source of the enchantment.

That may be the most important thing to understand about our moment of bewitchment.

Many of us cannot think clearly because we never step outside the whispering. We are never not in the flow of the feed. Our emotional atmosphere is never not being curated around us and for us. What is needed to break free is not primarily a better argument.

It is disenthralment.

And for the Christian, that is a word with a long history of practice behind it. The liberation from bondage and servitude, to what holds someone in mental or physical subjection.

What are the spell-breaking practices of Christianity for disenthralment? If we wish to break from and stay free from bewitchment, what are our tools and practices to draw on as Christians have done for two thousand years?

Silence breaks the whispering in the ear, the eye, the heart, the soul, and the mind. Prayer reorients the self toward reality rather than toward the tribe. Deep reading of old books rebuilds attention that the algorithm has systematically destroyed. Letting scripture speak our sacred story and identity back to us. Actual embodied community - being in a room, and staying in the room with people who disagree, remains one of the few environments where genuine thought still has space to occur. These are not aesthetic choices. They are acts of epistemic resistance and spiritual warfare.

These practices are not new. They are not novel responses to a digital age. They are what the Church has always known to be necessary, precisely because the forces of enchantment have always been present. The question is simply whether we are engaging in them. Not theoretically. Actually. Because if we are not, something else is already forming us.

Breaking the Spell: Coming Back to Our Right Minds

Gandalf does not counsel Théoden from a safe distance. He stands in the room. He speaks with authority. He calls the king by name. And something in that naming, that direct address to the person still buried beneath the enchantment, begins to draw the poison out.

“I will draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound.”

Théoden recovers not because he receives better information, but because someone refuses to stop believing the real person is still in there.

This is closer to what Jesus does.

The King Who Could Not Think Was Not the Only One

Bewitchment ultimately does not merely distort what a person thinks. It dismantles who a person is.

The symptom we should be paying attention to is not only the rage or the rigidity. It is the question underneath both. Who am I? The oldest poisoned wound. And the most exploited one. The systems of enchantment that surround us are built to keep that question open and dependent on their answer.

Identity then becomes a project with no completion. The self spirals inward, searching, finding only more mirrors, more tribes, more performance, more fear. Like with Théoden, the goal is not merely compliance. It is a total loss of self. A person so hollowed out that they no longer know what has been taken from them.

This is anti-creation. The father of lies not only deceives. He unmakes. He works against the grain of the one who spoke persons into being, who knit them together, who called them by name before they knew their own. Bewitchment is the unravelling of the soul from its source. The scattering of what God gathered. The silencing of the name that heaven knows.

Then there is Jesus.

The man in Mark 5 is living among the tombs. He cannot be restrained. He does not know who he is. When Jesus asks his name, the answer that comes back is not a name at all. Legion. Many.

A self so colonised it can no longer speak in the singular. There is no longer an I but a we and they.

Jesus does not engage the legion. He does not debate it or reason with it or attempt to understand its grievances. He addresses the person beneath it. And when the townspeople arrive, they find the man sitting, clothed, in his right mind.

That phrase is worth pausing over. His right mind. Not a new mind. Not a reconstructed identity or a therapeutic breakthrough. His own mind returned to him. The self that was always there, beneath what had taken hold of him.

This is the opposite of bewitchment. Bewitchment multiplies and scatters. It replaces our name and identity with the noise. It answers the question who am I with an endless, restless, borrowed legion of answers that never settle and never satisfy. What Jesus does is the inverse. He is the Lord of creation, moving against anti-creation with recreation. He silences the legion and speaks to the person. He restores the singular. He gives the man back to himself.

Speak to the Person. Not to What Has Hold of Them.

Leaders in this moment will need psychology. They will need to understand identity collapse, the sociology of capture, and the patient work of human care. None of that should be dismissed, for it is vital. But there are people in our communities who are not merely confused, wounded, or politically lost. T

They are bewitched.

Wearing an identity assembled by forces that do not love them. Unable to find their way back to themselves. Formed not into the image of the one who made them but into the image of whatever ideology has captured them. Deformed. Their self is not lost but overwritten, occupied, turned against its own deepest nature.

And this is where it all becomes urgent for us. Because the bewitched do not stay still. They speak. They recruit. They carry the enchantment into rooms and relationships and institutions, whispering what was whispered to them, passing on the distortion as though it were revelation. The captive becomes the captor.

The enthralled become the enthralling.

What was done to them, they now do to others, and they experience it not as harm but as love, not as conquest but as liberation. This is how enchantments spread. Not by force. By contagion. One Wormtongue becomes many. One captured imagination seeds others. And the circle of those who can no longer find their way back to themselves quietly, steadily grows.

Until someone stands in the room and refuses to pretend this is normal. Until someone looks past what holds them and speaks to the person beneath.

The spell insists that the person is gone. It is lying. That is what spells do.

Speak to who people are. Not to what has hold of them. We have to learn to speak to the person beneath the bewitching.

Not to the legion. Not to the ideology. The enchantment is too strong for that. To engage it on its own terms is to lose before you begin. And not to the performance of the captured person, the outragfe and offence, not in condemnation of what they have become or what they are saying or what they have done in the grip of what has hold of them.

But in love. In forgiveness. In the stubborn clarity of faith that sees past the distortion to who this person was always meant to be. The image of God, still present, still buried in there, and worth speaking to. To learn to speak to the person beneath the bewitching.

To look past what has hold of them, and say it plainly.

I see you. I know your true name. Come forth!

A like tells me it helped you and landed well. A comment means we get to think about this together. And a share means the conversation gets wider, and a chance to break the spells of bewitchment.

Church leadership has changed.

The noise is relentless. The complexity keeps increasing, and many leaders are carrying levels of pressure, exhaustion, and overwhelm that no amount of strategy or resilience training seems to resolve.

Because the issue is no longer just what is happening around you, it is what that pressure is doing within you.

And if you are honest, you can feel it too.

New Podcast

Over the coming months, with Dr MaryJo Burchard, we are releasing a limited podcast series: Leadership in an Age of Chaos

At the heart of it is a simple but pressing question:

How do leaders remain internally stable in an age of chaos?

To explore this, we have brought together a small group of voices those working at depth across leadership, organisational life, and theological formation

Voices formed by work in:

• Leadership and organisational systems under pressure

• The cultural forces shaping leaders today

• Church leadership in complex, fast-moving environments

Conversations include contributions from people such as Karise Hutchinson, Eve Poole, Simon Walker, and Glynn Barrett, not as headline names, but as practitioners and thinkers helping us engage this question at depth.

Together, we explore:

• The defended and undefended self

• Power under pressure

• Affect, attention, and emotional regulation

• Identity, meaning, and participation in Christ

Not abstract theory. But an exploration of what is happening inside leaders right now
and of a way of leading already given in Christ, waiting to be recovered, activated, and lived. Not something new to add. But something to encounter and to be released into.

The kind of leader you were drawn to become in the first place

Subscribe to receive the first episodes as they are released.

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But insight on its own is not enough. At some point, this work has to be done in you. So alongside this, I will be hosting a one-day, in-person experience:

Saturday 19th September: Waverley Abbey, 20 places only

This is not a conference. It is not content delivery.

Led by Dr MaryJo Burchard and me, this day at Waverley Abbey is designed to meet leaders at the level where leadership is now being formed, the inner life.

A deeply practical and experiential day of formation where what God has already placed within you is drawn together, integrated, stabilised, and activated, so you can return to your life and leadership able to lead from that place in partnership with Christ

You will be guided to:

• Map and better understand the chaos you are facing, and understand its impact

• Recognise how you respond under pressure

• Recover a deeper sense of who you are in God

• Begin to lead from that place

• Draw together your insights, experiences, and calling into a coherent map you can live and lead from

To bring together what you have learned about yourself over the years, so all that can work at a deeper level in your identity, faith, and calling that this moment requires, and you long for.

This is not about adding more.

It is about uncovering and releasing what God has already placed within you

You won’t leave with more to manage. You will leave with clarity, integration, and a grounded stability you can carry back into the reality of your leadership.

If this does not just feel interesting, but necessary, then stay close.

Subscribe to the Affective Leadership newsletter for first access to the podcast and priority invitation to the September gathering

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Because this moment requires something different, and something in you already knows it and longs for it.

Most leaders who struggle with control don’t think of themselves as controlling. They think of themselves as thorough. Responsible. High-standard.

They don’t feel controlling. They feel necessary and what is required in an unpredictable, chaotic, and high-risk world.

That’s the thing about control. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly takes over, right when the pressure is strongest, and the stakes are highest. And in the current climate, where more critical things are on the line, the pressure to control is stronger than ever. The toll of that — on others and on us — is escalating and cascading in a kind of perverse feedback loop.

So how do we understand it and break free from it?

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Defence: Control Is a Symptom

Simon P. Walker’s work in The Undefended Leader unpacks the nature of control and explains why it is a symptom.1 That control isn’t fundamentally a behaviour problem. It’s a defence mechanism. It develops when something deeper in the leader feels at risk and when the self needs protection, and controlling behaviour becomes protective armour.

That’s such an important insight. It shifts the question from What are you doing? to what is happening inside you?

But I want to go a level further in with this. This is hard to hear if control has worked for you. And it probably has up to a point. And it is hard to hear if you cannot conceive of control as something other than a character and competence issue.

But explore with me and see what you think.

Because when I map Walker’s insight alongside the Affective Leadership framework I’ve been building across this series, something becomes very clear:

Control is not simply a defence. It is what happens when the core capacities of leadership begin to fragment under pressure.

Those capacities are four:

• Identity — who you are when the situation challenges you

• Attention — what you perceive when the noise increases

• Regulation — how your nervous system responds to threat

• Presence — the quality of relational space you create around you

When these are integrated, a leader can stay grounded, open, and clear in the middle of complexity.

When they fragment, control takes over. Here’s how each one breaks down.

1. Identity → Control as Self-Protection

The pressure arrives!

Maybe it’s a difficult email. A meeting that went sideways. A plan that starts to unravel. Deadlines are being missed due to a lack of ownership. A colleague who pushes back harder than expected with vague accusations.

For many leaders, something beneath our surface tightens up. It’s not just the situation that feels threatening.

Our self feels threatened.

Walker is precise here: control protects the leader from exposure—especially the exposure of inadequacy, failure, or loss of status. When identity becomes contingent on being right, being respected, and being seen as competent, then any disruption to those things becomes a crisis of self.

So the leader moves quickly and often subconsciously to:

- Set the record and narrative straight

- Reassert their position

- Regain lost ground

What appears to be decisiveness is actually an identity defence, and it's here that the self begins to crack. And once identity is ungrounded, everything else follows in a knock-on effect.

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2. Attention → Control as Narrowing

A controlled identity cannot afford to stay open. Openness is too risky. It might encounter something that confirms the fears around it.

So attention narrows.

Instead of noticing, remaining curious, and staying perceptive, the leader begins to fixate. Interprets too quickly. Moves toward resolution. Their field of awareness is now contracting.

We stop listening, and we start managing.

Walker frames it this way: control reduces complexity. It takes what is nuanced and makes it manageable. That feels helpful, but it comes at a major cost.

When our attention narrows, we stop seeing people clearly. We stop reading the room. We miss what matters most, not because we’re unintelligent, but because our attention has already closed around a conclusion.

Control is what happens when attention can no longer remain open under pressure.

3. Regulation → Control as Nervous System Strategy

Here’s where the neuroscience becomes impossible to ignore.

The amygdala fires. The nervous system moves to high alert. The body—your body and mine—starts scanning even more for safety.

Control becomes the strategy it lands on:

- Create predictability

- Reduce uncertainty

- Limit exposure

- Manage the variables

And it works. Briefly.

The internal noise quiets down. The system we are in stabilises. The leader feels calmer because they feel in charge and in control.

But the cost is high, because there is now:

- Reduced flexibility

- Reduced empathy

- Reduced discernment

The important thing to understand here is that this is not a choice. Control is not chosen at this level. I’ll say that again. Control is not chosen at this level.

It is enacted by a dysregulated system trying to feel safe. Which means the solution is not willpower.

It never was.

4. Presence → Control as Relational Diminishment

This is the one most leaders miss. And it is perhaps the most damaging.

By the time identity has become defensive, attention has narrowed, the body has been regulated through control, and the relational world around the leader has already shifted.

Their presence is now compromised.

Instead of creating space, holding tension, and allowing others to be, the leader begins to direct more and more. To constrain. And this subtly dominates the emotional field around them.

Others often feel it before they can name it.

There is less freedom around them: less openness and more pressure.

Walker puts it plainly: control distances the leader from others. Not intentionally. Not cruelly. But inevitably. The leader is still physically present. But presence—the kind that makes people feel seen, held, safe and free—has been replaced by controlling management.

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The Formation Question

Let’s recap the four key things that happen when control takes over.

Identity becomes threatened → Attention narrows to protect it → The body regulates through control → Presence is diminished.

Each one triggers the next. Each one makes the others worse.

And so we can say this:

Control is what leadership becomes when the self can no longer remain present to reality.

This is where I want to take Walker’s insight further. He names the nature of control as defence. You cannot change what you cannot name and see.

But how do we get beyond naming the problem? This question is one of formation.

And the answer is not:

> Try harder to control less.

That adds a performance pressure to an already dysregulated system.

The actual path we need to take begins with:

• Grounding identity beyond performance — Stop tying your sense of self to how well you’re doing. If your identity depends on succeeding, then any challenge seems like a personal attack. This is about knowing who you are, regardless of outcomes.

• Training our attention to remain open — Under pressure, most people narrow their focus and get defensive or rigid. This is about practising the ability to stay genuinely curious rather than reactive when things get hard.

• Developing regulation under pressure — This isn’t about controlling your environment or managing how things look. It’s about building real capacity in your body and nervous system to handle stress — so you’re not just coping, you’re actually stable.

• Cultivate presence that can hold complexity — When situations are messy or contradictory, most people do one of three things: simplify the problem, avoid it, or try to dominate it. This is about being able to sit with complexity without needing to resolve it prematurely.

You can't just read about control, attend a workshop, or understand it intellectually and then have it down pat. Forming a capacity means it has to be lived, practised, and embodied over time.

A Summary

So control is what happens when identity is threatened, attention collapses, the body seeks safety, and presence is lost. Four fractures with one symptom. And I have been prone to all of them as a leader, as have all leaders.

Leading with accountability, responsibility, goals, and ownership is essential. All too easily, people unwilling to carry these see any review of them as controlling, which it is not. But when an organisation is under pressure — and so is the leader — control creeps in, and these vital things easily become tools of control.

So how can our attention remain open under pressure?

Next: what it actually looks like to train attention under pressure—and why most leadership development misses this entirely.

Most leaders know this meeting.

You walk in with a clear purpose. A project that matters, already stalled long enough, and today is finally the day to move it forward. Then something changes.

One person makes a comment that lands just slightly off — passive aggression at its most effective. Before you’ve processed that, someone else comes in harder. Direct hostility, not bothering to disguise anything. Two people, two very different tactics, and within minutes, the meeting has stopped being about the project entirely.

You scan the room. Silence.

Everyone is waiting. Watching you. As if the fact that the meeting broke down is somehow your responsibility to fix. Which, at that instant, it is.

This is what nobody teaches you about leadership.

When things come apart, the emotional load doesn’t distribute itself fairly. It lands on the leader. You absorb the passive resistance from one side, the open hostility from the other, and underneath all of it, the discomfort of everyone who has gone quiet and is hoping you’ll sort it out. It’s a lot to hold while you’re also trying to think straight.

And so you do what leaders do. You take charge. You speak with more authority. You narrow the options and pull the room back toward you. It feels like leadership.

But at some point in that meeting, you stopped leading and started reacting.

A whiff of exposure. A moment where control slipped, just slightly. Your instinct kicks in — immediate, practised, and entirely understandable. Stabilise. Move toward clarity. Reassert the frame.

Except that what’s driving things isn’t only the needs of the agenda. It’s also yours. The move toward control isn’t purely strategic — it’s also, quietly, a way of managing your own discomfort under the guise of managing the meeting.

This is not a criticism. It’s a pattern that shows up in the best leaders, not only the struggling ones. Still, it raises a question worth facing now, in the room, in the moment itself:

What am I using power for right now?

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Strategies of Defence

Simon Walker has a precise name for what just happened in that room.

In The Undefended Leader, in a chapter he calls “Strategies of Defence II: Power,” Walker makes an observation that is simple, uncomfortable, and difficult to argue with: leaders don’t only use power to lead. They use power to defendthemselves.

Power, in its proper form, is plain enough — the capacity to act, to decide, to influence. But Walker’s insight is that power shifts its purpose depending on the internal state of the person wielding it. When a leader feels exposed, uncertain, or suddenly out of control, the power is still being exercised but no longer primarily in service of the task.

It is in the service of the self.

Not consciously. Not cynically. But the move toward control, toward narrowing the options, toward speaking with greater authority than the moment perhaps requires — these are not only leadership responses. They are, Walker argues, defensive ones. Ways of restoring an internal equilibrium that has been quietly threatened.

Which reframes everything that happened in that meeting. The question is no longer simply whether you handled the room well. The question is: what, underneath the handling, were you actually trying to protect?

Power Isn’t the Problem

Walker is careful here, and it’s worth us being careful, too.

Power itself is not the issue. Walker identifies five forms of power every leader carries into every room: personality, resources, experience, expertise, and position. You cannot lead without them. They are the tools of leadership.

The real issue is what your power is doing for you — because under pressure, each of these modes shifts. Quietly, and often invisibly.

Your personality — your presence, your relational influence — acts as a tool for emotional control when you need others’ responses to stabilise you. Your resources become leverage when you use them to secure outcomes that also secure you. Your experience hardens into rigidity the moment you stop genuinely listening. Your expertise becomes a need to be right. And your positional authority tips into domination — what people more bluntly call pulling rank.

None of this declares itself so that you can immediately consider it. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to catch. All these movements feel like leadership.

Walker doesn’t soften the blow. When power is used defensively, trust erodes. Not dramatically, not all at once, but steadily. People in the room sense it, even when they can’t name it. They comply, but something in them disengages. The discussion continues, but genuine thinking stops. Creativity, which depends on a particular kind of safety, quietly evaporates.

And here is Walker’s keenest observation: the more you reach for power to secure yourself, the less real authority you actually carry. The two move in opposite directions. Positional power can be asserted indefinitely — the title remains, the decisions stick. But authority, the kind that sincerely moves and motivates people, drains away in direct proportion to how power is used defensively.

You can hold the people in the room. But you may have lost something in that mode of holding.

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Why Things Are Getting Worse

The conditions Walker described have worsened considerably since he wrote.

What we face now is not the occasional difficult meeting, the periodic loss of control. The challenge is that instability has become the baseline for us. Cultural fragmentation, relational breakdown, information arriving faster than it can be processed, pressure that is constant but rarely accompanied by clarity — these are no longer exceptional circumstances. They are our day-to-day environment.

Chaos is no longer something that intrudes from the outside. It is ambient. It is the atmosphere we now lead in.

And that changes everything Walker identified, because the triggers he described — exposure, uncertainty, loss of control — are no longer occasional. They are continuous. Which means the defensive use of power is no longer a response to particular moments of pressure. For many leaders, it has become their default mode. Their resting state. The water they swim in without noticing.

This is not a failure of character. It is a predictable human response to a perpetually hostile environment and is far from harmless.

The Affective Layer

What Walker mapped behaviourally, neuroscience now describes from the inside.

Under sustained pressure, our nervous systems shift into a protective state. Our bodies tighten up. Peripheral awareness narrows. Our capacity for openness, curiosity, and genuine responsiveness contracts, and the drive toward control increases. Not as a conscious choice, but as an automatic response to a system that has registered a threat and is trying to restore some sense of equilibrium.

Which means that when you see a leader becoming more controlling under pressure, i.e sharper, more directive, less willing to hear dissent, you may not be seeing strength. You may be seeing a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do when they feel unsafe.

Defensive power is not only a strategic or psychological pattern. It is an affective regulation strategy. The reaching for control, the narrowing of options, the reassertion of authority, are, in part, the body’s attempt to manage an internal state that has become too difficult to bear.

The leader who dominates the room may be doing so not because they have too much confidence, but because something in them is working very hard not to fall apart.

Once you see this, you cannot unsee it. And once you name the pattern, its cruelty becomes visible:

Chaos → Anxiety → Control → Distance → More Chaos.

Every intervention designed to reduce instability actually increases it. The harder the leaders grip, the more the system strains. The more control is exerted, the more the relationships that might genuinely stabilise things are quietly eroded. All of which raises the anxiety, which tightens the grip again.

Most leaders have lived in this cycle so long that it no longer feels like one. It feels like reality. Like the unavoidable texture of leadership in difficult times.

The pattern cannot be broken from within itself. Which means the first move is simply this: to see it for what it is.

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The Real Issue

The assumption, when leadership goes wrong, is usually that someone misused power — too aggressive, too self-interested, too willing to override others for personal gain. And sometimes that is true.

But Walker points us to something more subtle, and considerably more common.

The deeper issue is not the misuse of power. It is the need for it. The moment a leader can no longer remain genuinely present — open, attentive, willing to not know — without first securing themselves, power steps in to fill the gap. It becomes what makes the anxious presence of others bearable. The mechanism by which a leader manages their own internal state well enough to stay in the room with everyone else.

Which means the problem is not, at root, behavioural. It is a problem of interiority.

This is a reversal that changes everything. We have been asking the wrong question. The question is not how leaders use power. Rather, it is what they need power to do for them. Because the moment power becomes what makes you feel safe enough to function, authority has quietly become your coping strategy. And no amount of leadership development that addresses only surface behaviour will touch what is actually driving it.

Power becomes dangerous not when people reach for it out of ambition. It becomes dangerous when they reach for it out of need and protection.

So let’s get specific and move beyond leadership in the abstract, to yours, right now.

Where are you tightening your grip? Where are you needing to be right — not because the evidence demands it, but because something in you does? Where are you leaning on your role, your expertise, your experience, in ways that are closing down the room rather than opening it? Where are you, quietly, making yourself harder to reach?

These are not comfortable questions. They are not meant to be.

But they’re not questions of judgement either. The pattern we have been tracing is not a character flaw. Underneath every place where the grip has tightened, there is something that feels at risk — your credibility, your sense of competence, your ability to hold things together. Or something older than your current role, something perhaps you learned long ago: that control is safer than vulnerability.

Whatever it is, it is worth naming. Not to dismantle or undo you, to make your impossible situation even worse. But because you cannot lead well, and you cannot be well from a place you refuse to look at.

What feels at risk in you right now?

The Jesus Way: The Power of Noticing

Here is where the Christian understanding of leadership parts ways, quietly but radically, with almost everything else on offer.

Christ does not lead by securing himself. He does not manage his exposure or protect his position. He does not reach for control when the room turns against him — and it does turn against him, repeatedly, in every way imaginable. He remains present. In misunderstanding, in instability, in apparent failure, in the kind of loss that looks, from the outside, like total collapse.

And he does not stand outside our instability and call us toward him. He enters it, in his life, in his suffering, in the fullness of what it means to be human under pressure without withdrawing into self-protection. And he continues to enter it now, through his body in the world.

Which means the invitation to the Christian leader is not what we might expect. You are not asked to stabilise yourself before you lead. You are not asked to resolve your anxiety, master your nervous system, and then show up. You are invited to remain present — with him, within it — in the unresolved, uncomfortable, destabilised reality of the room as it actually is.

This is not a technique. But it does have a practice.

In your next moment of pressure, before your grip tightens — notice what is happening in your body. Name what you are feeling. Ask which form of power you are about to reach for, and why. Then pause — just a few seconds — and turn: Christ, be present with me here. Then choose to stay open one moment longer than feels safe. Ask instead of assert. Listen instead of closing.

It is a small movement. But it interrupts the cycle. And over time, it forms something.

Because the most dangerous leaders are not, in the end, the most powerful — they are the most anxious. And the most trustworthy, the ones people will genuinely follow through genuine difficulty, are those who no longer need power to feel safe.

That is not a leadership competency. It is a kind of freedom.

But power is only one of the ways we defend ourselves. In the next piece unpacking The Undefended Leader, we follow Simon Walker into another of his insights — and it may be the one that hits closest to home.

How control becomes a strategy of defence—

and why it is often even harder to recognise than power.

You’ve probably had this experience online.

You make a clear point in a discussion. At first, it seems simple enough. But within a few replies, something curious happens. The subject shifts. Counter-claims appear that only loosely relate to what you actually said. Before long, the conversation is no longer about your point at all.

Instead, your motives are questioned. Your tone becomes the issue. An unrelated example is introduced as though it settles the matter. Soon enough come the familiar rituals: a little name-calling here, a moral insinuation there.

What began as a discussion about an idea quickly becomes something else — a discussion about you: your character, your intentions, your supposed moral standing. The original point quietly disappears beneath a flurry of reactions.

It can feel like trying to hold a bar of soap. No matter how carefully you state your case, the argument slips away. Just when you think you have grasped the issue, it moves again. Before long, you realise you are wrestling in the mud of insinuation and accusation. And as the old saying goes, when you wrestle a pig, you both get dirty — though the pig, of course, rather enjoys it.

So what can you do? Opt out of any online conversations. It’s what many do. Or fall prey to a kind of digital Stockholm Syndrome, and become like our kidnappers, using the rhetorical devices that captured us in the first place.

I’ve been trying something different. Reviewing these conversations more carefully and looking back at exchanges after the dust had settled, I noticed the same rhetorical sleights of hand appear.

What feels chaotic in the moment turns out, on examination, to follow surprisingly familiar patterns and actually be rather predictable.

And once you begin to recognise those patterns, something important changes. You are far less likely to be pulled into them, and there are effective ways to respond.

What follows, then, is not a guide to “winning arguments.” It is something more modest, I hope, and more useful: a map of the most common ways online conversations get hijacked — and a few simple ways to bring them back to the point.

Take a look and see which ones you recognise, and let me know which ones you think are missing.

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The Ultimate Logical Fallacy Cheat Sheet

1. Ad Hominem (”To the Person”)

• The Trick: Attacking your character or traits instead of your argument.

• Typical Line: “You’re just being point-scoring/ignorant/ideological.”

• The Redirect: “That’s a comment about me rather than the point I made, which was...”

2. Whataboutism (”The Deflection”)

• The Trick: Shifting the focus to someone else’s wrongdoing to avoid criticism.

• Typical Line: “But what about the Conservatives / Labour / the other side?”

• The Redirect: “That may be a separate issue, but it doesn’t change the facts of the point I raised here.”

3. Straw Man (”The Fake Version”)

• The Trick: Misrepresenting your position to make it easier to attack.

• Typical Line: “So what you’re really saying is...” (followed by an extreme version of your point).

• The Redirect: “That is a distortion of my position. My actual claim was...”

4. Motte-and-Bailey (”The Retreat”)

• The Trick: Making a wild claim, then retreating to a “safe” claim when challenged.

• Typical Line: “I only meant that nuance matters.” (after saying something radical).

• The Redirect: “That’s a different, much milder claim than the one you originally made. Can we go back to the first one?”

5. Tone Policing (”The Style Critique”)

• The Trick: Focusing on how you said something to avoid discussing what you said.

• Typical Line: “You’re being far too combative/argumentative right now.”

• The Redirect: “We can disagree about my tone, but the core issue itself still needs to be addressed.”

6. False Equivalence (”The False Balance”)

• The Trick: Claiming two things are the same when they differ wildly in scale or evidence.

• Typical Line: “Well, both sides do it,” or “This is no different from [X].”

• The Redirect: “Those situations aren’t logically equivalent. Similarity in one small respect doesn’t make them the same.”

7. Gish Gallop (”The Blizzard”)

• The Trick: Drowning you in a rapid series of many weak claims so you can’t answer them all.

• Typical Line: “Here are ten reasons why you’re wrong...” (followed by a wall of text).

• The Redirect: “That’s a lot of separate claims at once. Let’s take them one at a time—which one is your strongest?”

8. Appeal to Motive (”The Mind Reader”)

• The Trick: Dismissing an argument by claiming to know your “hidden” agenda.

• Typical Line: “You’re only saying that because you’re [conservative/progressive/privileged].”

• The Redirect: “My motives don’t determine whether the facts are true. Can you address the argument itself?”

9. Moving the Goalposts (”The Goal-Shifter”)

• The Trick: Demanding new or higher levels of evidence after you’ve already provided proof.

• Typical Line: “Well, that still doesn’t prove it. I need to see [new requirement].”

• The Redirect: “That’s a different standard than we agreed on at the start. Why is the previous evidence insufficient?”

10. Loaded Language (”The Framing Trap”)

• The Trick: Using emotional or judgmental words to bias the audience before the facts are out.

• Typical Line: “Anyone who supports this dangerous/extremist/cruel policy is...”

• The Redirect: “Those are strong labels, but they don’t explain why the policy is wrong. Let’s look at the data.”

11. Argument from Authority (”The Expert Shield”)

• The Trick: Insisting something is true purely because an “expert” said so, without explaining why.

• Typical Line: “The experts/institutions all agree on this, so you’re wrong.”

• The Redirect: “Expertise is valuable, but the reasoning behind their conclusion is what matters. What is that reasoning?”

Some Help For You

Whilst the above may be helpful, it can feel a little overwhelming to remember all these tactics, let alone identify them quickly in the middle of an online exchange.

So instead, I’ve created a simple AI prompt to help, which you can download here.

If you copy and paste the prompt in this document into your AI chat tool of choice, it will ask you to paste in the comment you want to analyse. The tool will then identify the logical fallacies or rhetorical tactics being used, explain what is happening in the exchange, and suggest a calm way you might respond.

In other words, it gives you a quick way to diagnose the rhetorical moves someone may be using against you — and offers a clear response you can use to bring the conversation back to the actual issue.

I’d love to know which logical fallacies you most commonly encounter, which ones frustrate you the most, and how you’ve learned/are learning to respond when they appear.

Something is taking out leaders. Not burnout. Not busyness. But something much deeper.

In my last piece, drawing on Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader, I named the systems taking out leaders. In this article, we go further — into the mechanisms beneath the surface that quietly give rise to those systems. This is where it gets uncomfortable.

Most leaders intuitively understand the difference between their front stage and back stage. On the front stage, we are composed. Capable, measured, and clear. We preach, present, lead meetings, post online, cast vision, and manage conflict.

On the backstage, it is rather different.

We doubt. We second-guess and feel exposed. We replay conversations. We fear irrelevance and suffer imposter syndrome. We feel the sting of criticism. We wonder if we are enough.

Simon Walker, in The Undefended Leader, uses the front/backstage metaphor to describe how leaders defend themselves in a hostile world. Simon Walker didn’t stumble onto the front stage/back stage idea. It’s grounded in serious intellectual work — specifically Erving Goffman’s social theory on how human beings perform their way through social life.1 Walker takes that framework and applies it with care to the world of leadership. This isn’t a borrowed metaphor dressed up to sound clever. It’s a modality that has been rigorously tested and has earned its place in the real world.

What it shows us is not flattering.

If we are honest, so much of what we call leadership today is really a sophisticated form of performance and image management. We curate competence. We protect reputation. We manage perception with care and precision. We work hard to ensure that what is visible publicly is strong, coherent, decisive, and high-impact. We learn how to speak with clarity even when we feel uncertain. We project steadiness even when we are stretched thin. The front stage must hold firm against a hostile world.

Meanwhile, backstage can feel very different.

Things are not always as secure as they appear. We are often running on adrenaline and calling it resilience. Self-doubt lingers in the background, even when affirmation comes to us. There is anger and disappointment that we quietly spiritualise. There is grief too — grief for what leadership was meant to be, grief for what it has actually cost, grief for versions of ourselves that seem to have slipped away somewhere in the passing of time and our past.

We carry unmet expectations like splinters under the skin—a thousand paper cuts. Some are ours. Some belong to others but lodge themselves in us, turning septic. We feel the pressure to be visionary and pastoral, strategic and available, decisive and endlessly patient. And there is rarely a place to hold the complexity of what this does to us internally.

The front stage does not readily accommodate fragility. It has no obvious category for confusion, fatigue, or quiet resentment. So we carry it, normalise it, telling ourselves this is simply the weight of responsibility, and a season that will pass—until it doesn’t.

Underneath all of it sits a quiet fear that the gap between who we seem to be and who we actually are is widening. Not because we are fraudulent, but because we are so very tired. Because we are human. Because the cost of maintaining the performance slowly erodes our soul. And there is always that subtle anxiety that one day the gap will be exposed — that someone will see behind the curtain and realise how much effort it has taken to hold everything together.

And we have all watched what happens when the backstage is exposed.

I don’t just mean the truly egregious cases — the abusive, manipulative, predatory leaders whose behaviour is indefensible and must be named plainly. I mean the more tragic ones. The leader who is just overwhelmed. The one carrying unprocessed grief. The one running too long on adrenaline and too little on rest. The one whose exhaustion clouds judgment. Not evil or monstrous. Just depleted and running on empty.

When their backstage becomes visible, the response is often swift. They are removed, transitioned, and sidelined. Sometimes gently. Sometimes brutally. But often with a certain institutional efficiency. The system protects itself as the platform stabilises and the narrative is managed.

And the rest of us watch.

We may not say it out loud, but we absorb the lesson: do not let them see backstage. Don’t let the fatigue show. Don’t admit to confusion. Don’t reveal how close you are to the edge. Keep the front stage polished and keep performing.

So we double down on preservation. We manage ourselves even more tightly. We protect perception with greater vigilance. We convince ourselves this is wisdom, just until this season—which is never-ending—has passed.

Even when we are in environments that are, objectively, safe — where there are trusted friends, wise supervisors, spiritual directors, and overseers who would likely respond with grace — we often cannot see that it is safe. The internal narrative is louder than the external reality. The fear of losing credibility, influence, or trust distorts our vision. So we stay silent.

And then we wait too long.

We tell ourselves we need one more period, one more season, one more event, one more crisis navigated. We struggle on. We push through. We defer the conversations that might actually save us. By the time we finally name what’s happening backstage, the strain has already compounded. Boundaries have been crossed and the real options open to us have narrowed.

The energy that once went into vocation slowly diverts into concealment. The fear of exposure becomes a quiet hum in the background. We grow more isolated, more defended, less porous. And in trying not to become the “tragic” leader who unravels publicly, we edge toward a different precipice.

Because it is precisely this prolonged hiddenness — this refusal or inability to let our backstage be known, accompanied, and held — that has preceded so many of the catastrophic implosions we rightly fear. The worst explosions rarely begin with cartoonish villainy. They begin with isolation. With unmanaged grief and fatigue disguised as faithfulness. With a role that has grown larger than the human soul inhabiting it.

So in protecting ourselves from being discarded, we risk hardening ourselves instead.

Leaders do not collapse because they are human. They collapse because they try not to be for too long, and often alone.

The backstage leaks — through personality, defensiveness, overreaction, and control. And if it is not faced, it eventually explodes. Burnout, in this sense, is not simply overwork; it is the strain of sustaining a divided self. Suppression is not integration and is not a long-term survival strategy.

I spent years living with chronic anxiety. I thought that if I named how pressured I felt — how uncertain, how stretched — it would be the end of me as a leader. So I carried it privately. I became increasingly competent on the front stage and increasingly compressed backstage. Nothing dramatic happened. But the cost accumulated until I had a breakdown and was forced to start admitting the gap between my front and back stage.

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Sociopathic Leaders

And these are the good leaders — the ones trying to carry something heavy with integrity. The ones who feel the strain of the front stage and know, at least vaguely, that there is a backstage that needs tending.

Some leaders are acutely aware of that tension. They know they are managing perception. They feel the gap between public strength and private fragility. Painful as that awareness is, it creates the possibility of confession, recalibration, and integration.

But there are others who do not even realise the dilemma they are inhabiting.

They have so internalised the role that the front stage no longer feels like a performance. It feels like their identity. Competence, clarity, decisiveness, spiritual authority — these have fused with their self. They are not consciously hiding backstage; they just cannot see it. Self-protection becomes instinctive and natural to them. Feedback feels like a threat because it is.

These leaders do not anxiously manage the gap between appearance and reality. It is merely unexamined. And unexamined gaps are the most dangerous of all.

But we must also speak about an entirely different category. The sociopath.

Some leaders relish the front stage. For them, performance is not exhausting; it is energising. They intuitively grasp power, narrative, and influence. They are adept at reading a room, shaping perception, and controlling optics. The front stage is not a burden to endure but a platform to master.

In such cases, there may be a backstage — but it is not a place of tension. It is simply completely private. There is no internal conflict about presenting one version publicly and inhabiting another privately. Concealment does not trouble their conscience; it is their natural identity strategy.

Research over the past two decades has increasingly observed that individuals with high levels of narcissistic and psychopathic traits — what organisational psychologists sometimes call the “dark triad” (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) — are disproportionately represented in senior leadership roles, particularly in politics, finance, and high-pressure corporate environments. These individuals often display charm, boldness under pressure, high risk tolerance, and emotional detachment — traits that can look like resilience in turbulent contexts.

In unstable, crisis-driven cultures, such traits are often rewarded. When the world feels volatile, decisive dominance can be mistaken for strength. Emotional detachment can be misread as clarity. Moral flexibility can be reframed as a needed pragmatism. Studies have shown that such personalities often rise more quickly in competitive systems precisely because they are less encumbered by anxiety, empathy, or self-doubt.

And we are living in an increasingly turbulent world — politically polarised, economically unstable, and all digitally amplified. Systems under stress often select for those who can survive chaos without being internally destabilised by it.

But surviving turbulence and leading humanely through it are not the same thing.

• The fatigued and divided leader needs accompaniment and integration.

• The unaware but fused leader needs awakening and reflective formation.

• But the sociopathic or highly narcissistic leader is not merely difficult; they are dangerous.

The danger lies not in charisma or unconventionality, but in the diminished internal restraints that ordinarily protect others — empathy, remorse, proportionality, the capacity to receive correction.

When those checks are weak or absent, harm is not accidental but deliberate. In parts of the Christian world, sociopathic leaders can thrive precisely because communities are often reluctant to set firm boundaries around visibly “anointed” or successful figures, mistaking accountability for disloyalty and charisma for character.

Without deliberate practices of reflection, supervision, spiritual direction, and courageous institutional oversight, leadership roles will almost always colonise the person. For some, this results in exhaustion and fragmentation. For others, it results in inflation and impunity.

By the time something cracks, it can feel sudden. But it rarely is. It is usually the long erosion of interior honesty — or the long absence of it. The tragedy is not only that leaders collapse. It is that systems sometimes reward the very traits that make collapse — moral, relational, institutional — more likely.

The invitation, then, is not to abandon leadership.

It is to cultivate leaders who are deeply human: self-aware, accountable, accompanied, and, where necessary, structurally constrained. In a turbulent age, that may be the most radical thing of all.

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Why We Defend

Walker is not just psychologically on the money; he is pastorally on it too. He names what most leaders feel but rarely admit. Leadership is inherently evaluative. You are watched, assessed, interpreted. Everything about you is analysed. Decisions are scrutinised and your motives assigned.

Authority is always slightly fragile. Institutions — especially churches — are anxious systems: risk-averse, reputation-conscious, fearful of decline. Add in social media, and any protective membrane between the public and private has dissolved. The front-stage is now continuous, permanent, and algorithmically amplified.

So, of course, we defend.

We curate, we manage, and we clarify perceptions. We pre-empt criticism. In our current climate, not defending would almost be abnormal. It is, after all, how everyone survives.

But the Christian tradition has never been naïve about hiding. It traces concealment not to modern media, but to the Garden of Eden. And here we can extend Walker theologically.

“Adam and his wife hid themselves…”

The defended self did not begin with social media. It began with fear — the fear that exposure means rejection, that being seen means being cast out, that nakedness is no longer safe.

Front-stage and back-stage are not merely sociological and psychological categories. They are symptoms of ontological insecurity — insecurity at the level of being itself, brought into existence by the fall.

When identity rests on performance, competence, reputation, or approval, criticism feels like diminishment, failure like collapse, misunderstanding like erasure. We defend not simply to protect our image, but to protect our very existence. Without a deeper assurance that our identity is received rather than constructed and validated by others, exposure can feel like annihilation.

Defensiveness is rarely arrogance. It is fragility trying to prevent the collapse of the self.

The book of Genesis sees this clearly. Adam hides not because he failed a task, but because he is unsure of his standing. “I was afraid.” Shame here is not merely moral; it is ontological. Nakedness, once safe, now feels utterly dangerous.

Modern leadership intensifies this ancient condition that we all suffer from.

We construct a front stage because we are unsure whether we are held. We manage perceptions because we are unsure we belong. If I am what I perform, failure is a kind of extinction. If I am what others affirm, criticism is obliteration—literally.

And here Walker opens a door that theology must walk through to understand Christian leadership.

Christian faith does not offer thicker skin, better image management, or the development of unlimited resilience. It proclaims a prior holding — an identity given to us to claim, and not be achieved. A self that precedes success, survives failure, and cannot be erased by any misunderstanding.

If leaders are defending, the first question is not moral but is in fact metaphysical:

What, finally, holds them? What is actually holding leaders up inside — what are they really standing on?

Until that is answered, the front stage will stay crowded, the back stage guarded, and criticism will continue to feel like the death of self.

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Participation Not Performance

The New Testament does not primarily invite leaders to become more authentic. It announces something far more destabilising.

“Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

That is not advice, a skill, or a competency. It is ontology. Before Jesus performs a miracle, gathers a crowd, or enters conflict, he hears:

“You are my beloved Son.”

Identity precedes ministry. Belovedness precedes effectiveness.

If this is true, the split between front stage and back stage is not healed by improved self-disclosure. It is healed by participation. I’ll say that again:

The split between front stage and back stage is NOT healed by improved self-disclosure. It is healed by participation.

Participation means my being and identity are not self-generated. They are received. It is grounded in the Son’s relation to the Father. It is not constructed through approval, and criticism does not undo it.

Without this, undefendedness is merely bravery. With it, true undefendedness becomes possible; I am no longer defending a constructed self. I am living from one given by God.

Metabolising Pain

Leadership hurts. Let’s not romanticise or minimise it.

Christian leaders live in an age of accelerated complexity: institutional decline, polarised congregations, perpetual visibility, algorithmic outrage, drama triangles, identity politics that turn pastors into symbols and red meat for tribal battles.

Everything about a leader is scrutinised and judged. And in carrying all this, there is almost no backstage remaining. Even prayer can become performative.

So what happens when the pain from all this manifests?

If my identity depends on the front stage, pain must be managed, neutralised, or projected. Defensiveness is instinctive, and self-protection is necessary for survival.

But in participation with Christ, pain is not denied. It is metabolised.

The Cross is not an inspirational image of vulnerability. It is not a divine TED Talk about authenticity. It is the place where shame is absorbed into divine life. At Golgotha, humiliation is not curated or managed; it is entered into and transfigured. Christ does not control the narrative with a marketing plan. He entrusts himself to the Father — not as a coping strategy, but as ontological truth. The Father holds his being.

This is not theatre. It is participation.

And this is where Theosis — that ancient, neglected doctrine and experience — must be recovered. Theosis is not self-improvement or intensified spirituality. It is the slow reconstitution of the self in Christ. Through participation in his life, death, and resurrection, our being is relocated. This is not a call to perform vulnerability. It is an invitation into ontological change.

This is the Christified life. And it begins with our backstage.

To be Christified means to be so united with Christ that your identity, desires, reactions, and life patterns are progressively shaped by participation in his life, death, and resurrection. It is stronger than “inspired by Jesus.” It is deeper than “imitating Jesus.”

To be Christified is to live from a self that no longer needs defending, because it is already hidden and named in Christ.

A Christified backstage is life lived coram Christo — before the face of Christ — when no one else is watching. It is where hidden reactions are surrendered rather than justified, where defensiveness is exposed to grace. Here, the anxious, self-constructing ego is gradually crucified, and a self rooted in belovedness is received.

But when the backstage is surrendered, the front stage is transformed.

A Christified front stage is marked not by charisma but by congruence. The public self is no longer a mask but becomes the source of our public manifestation. Authority then flows from surrender rather than insecurity. Public visibility neither inflates nor diminishes identity because identity no longer depends on visibility.

From this, we can see that:

• A strong front stage with an unhealed backstage produces charisma without durability.

• A cultivated inner life without public courage produces safety without any influence. Inflating both produces a performative spirituality.

• But when both stages are Christified, something rare emerges: an integrated authority.

Integrated authority does not dominate, collapse under criticism, or hunger secretly for applause and affirmation from others. It can bear weight because it is no longer self-generated.

The undefended leader is not without weakness. They are those whose hidden life has been surrendered into Christ’s death and whose public life flows from his resurrection. Their ego is no longer enthroned and in control. Their self is not erased but now re-membered in Christ.

As this mode of being deepens, the backstage finally grows quieter. The leader’s inner commentary softens. Prayer can now deepen. The compulsion to manage public perception can loosen. And the front-stage now becomes lighter — still important but no longer an ultimate marker of identity.

The goal here is not perfection. It is coherence: the closing of the fracture between who we are when we are watched and who we are when alone.

When our life is hidden with Christ in God, his life becomes our origin, his death our liberation from our false self, his resurrection our new mode of being. Participation means that what is true of him becomes, by grace, true of us — not metaphorically, but in reality.

This is why exposure need not annihilate us. The self that required constant defence has already been crucified. This is why criticism need not erase us. Identity is not generated by others’ approval. This is why loss need not destroy us. Resurrection is not an idea; it is a life we share with Christ.

Theosis is the patient undoing of the anxious, self-securing ego and the awakening of a self held in Christ.

Not curated, not defended, but re-membered.

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The End of the Defended Leader

Christian leaders do not need more performance strategies. We don’t need sharper messaging or another competency framework to stay visible and effective. And we certainly cannot build enough resilience to repair what is most deeply fractured in us and in our world.

What we need is reconstitution.

Much of contemporary leadership culture assumes that the solution to pressure is endurance. If the demands on us are relentless, we are told to become more resilient. If scrutiny increases, we must become more robust. If the emotional toll rises, we must strengthen our coping mechanisms. But resilience, while not unimportant, is insufficient.

You cannot reinforce a divided self into wholeness.

The problem is not simply that our “front stage” and “back stage” require better management. It is not that we need more sophisticated techniques for integrating public leadership with private life. The deeper issue is that something in us created the split in the first place.

Somewhere along the way, we learned that visibility required armour. That leadership required performance. That authority required projection. We constructed a self capable of standing under lights — articulate, competent, composed. And quietly, often unconsciously, we hid the more fragile parts of ourselves backstage.

If we focus only on building resilience, we merely strengthen that architecture. We make the performing self more durable. We increase its stamina. But we do not address the wound that necessitated it in the first place.

Christian leadership dares to go deeper than durability, capacity and resilience.

It calls us to withdraw, deliberately, from the permanent front stage — not to abandon vocation, but to recover our hiddenness. It invites us to allow our wounds to be processed in Christ rather than projected outward onto congregations, colleagues, or causes. It asks us to refuse the subtle seduction of ideology as identity, and instead to anchor our authority not in applause, alignment, or tribe, but in participation in Christ.

We must stop trying to be resilient without being remade.

The real question is not how we can manage the split more effectively, but what caused it. What fear shaped it? What shame hardened it? What ambition or insecurity forged the defended self we now inhabit so fluently?

Until that root is addressed, resilience only helps the divided self function more efficiently.

There is a deeper vision — a larger and louder vision — of Christian leadership. It is not about collapsing the stage or abandoning leadership. The gospel does not call us to retreat from responsibility. Nor does it sanctify fragility for its own sake.

Instead, it heals by relocating the self.

It meets us in the place where the division began and reconstitutes us there. In Christ, the defended self is no longer necessary. In participation in the crucified and risen Lord, we discover that our identity is received, not constructed—self-made.

We are invited to inhabit the stage as a self that no longer needs defending because that self has already been received. Already named and already held by God.

And hidden. With Christ.

A Gen Z Substack writer recently announced that she had just realised the importance of critical thinking. This, she declared, was her breakthrough moment.

Given the current alarming decline in critical thinking, I was drawn in—hopeful that a countercultural recovery movement might begin with her post.

What followed was over 1,500 words of unexamined assumptions, borrowed phrases, algorithm-approved moral signals, and precisely zero evidence that she had actually done any critical thinking at all. Ever. Yet the comments lauded the author for making a huge, much-needed breakthrough for their generation.

It was strangely perfect.

Because we now live in a moment when talking about thinking is often mistaken for thinking itself. And that confusion is everywhere about everything.

Illusions: When Talking Replaces Doing

We have drifted into a world where naming something feels equivalent to actually doing it. We speak about justice, leadership, courage, deconstruction and “doing the work”. And somehow, the vocabulary, just saying the words, becomes a substitute for the actual thing itself.

Psychologically, the reason for this faulty process is disarmingly simple. Speaking feels like doing. When we articulate a value, commit to a principle, or declare an intention, our brains release a small hit of satisfaction—the same neurochemical reward we’d get from actual accomplishment. We announce our gym membership and feel virtuous without ever stepping on a treadmill. We post about critical thinking and present ourselves as intellectually rigorous, yet we never engage in any actual critical thinking.

Language now creates the illusion of action. In our current ecosystem of performative social media, the illusion has become more valuable than the reality. Identity signalling replaces genuine intellectual formation, and performance is mistaken for substance. But there is a deeper problem: critical thinking itself has been reframed as suspect. Even when we want to practise it, we have been subtly disabled and trained away from it.

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Circular Thinking and Epistemic Closure

Universities, once the foremost places for teaching and practising critical thinking, have increasingly become incubators of ideological capture—and worse, sites of intellectual lobotomising that actively disable the very capacity they were meant to cultivate. They increasingly reward fluency in approved language over any rigorous argument. Schools teach students what to think about, not how to think.

Here is a recent example that reveals the poverty of critical thinking within a university: the near-total ideological capture of thought, and the deeper problem it creates—the impossibility of thinking itself when circular reasoning, embedded within modern ideologies, is institutionalised and endlessly reinforced by the university.

When people are trained—subtly or overtly—to distrust independent evidence, or simply lose the habit of seeking it, they enter a kind of epistemic closure. At that point, reality is no longer something to be examined but something to be defended. Truth becomes secondary to their emotional allegiance. Their denial hardens into a kind of denialism, where any evidence is immediately dismissed, distorted, or attacked—not because it has been carefully evaluated, but because it threatens the existing position people hold. Reason itself becomes compromised, and displaced by emotional certainty.

Beliefs fuse with identity, so that admitting error feels less like intellectual growth - and intellectual growth is no longer a desired pursuit - and more like the personal collapse of identity and being. This whole process activates powerful defensive instincts that kick in to defend the self by preserving beliefs no matter how false they are.

And we now have whole ecosystems designed to perfect this where critical thinking does not simply atrophy. It becomes dangerous. Because real thinking always carries the risk of discovering you were wrong. And when belief is fused with identity, being wrong no longer feels like learning. It feels like losing yourself.

Over time, this also reshapes a persons moral perception. Those who disagree are no longer seen simply as mistaken, but as suspect or even less than human. We see this in the extreme name calling of people to denigrate and describe their inhumanity. It explains how everyone who disagrees with someone is now is a right wing, nazi facist or similar.

Neurologically, the brain filters out opposing arguments altogether, making genuine engagement increasingly difficult. People retreat into echo chambers that reinforce what they already believe and inoculate them against any correction. The result is not merely disagreement, but the formation of a post-truth consciousness—where certainty replaces truth, emotional resolution of cognitive dissonance replaces rational coherence, and meaningful dialogue becomes practically impossible.

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What We Lose When Critical Thinking Dies

Tragically as critically thinking atrophies, major pathologies manifest in society and culture.

We become easier to control. Whether by governments, corporations, algorithms, or activists, people who can’t think critically are people who can be led by their noses. They’ll believe whatever confirms their existing biases, reject whatever challenges them, and never notice they’re doing it.

We fragment into warring tribes. Without the ability to evaluate evidence, adjudicate between competing claims, or even agree on what constitutes a good argument, we retreat into ideological bunkers. Everyone becomes partisan, and truth becomes whatever your side says it is.

We lose the capacity for self-correction. Individuals and societies only improve when they can recognise their mistakes. Critical thinking is the immune system of the mind—it identifies errors, fights off bad ideas, and keeps the organism healthy. Without it, we’re defenseless against our own stupidity and ignorance.

We stop being able to solve actual problems. The world is complex. Climate change, economic inequality, mental health crises, geopolitical instability—none of these yield to slogans or wishful thinking. They require clear-minded analysis, uncomfortable trade-offs, and the humility to admit when our first answer was wrong.

We need critical thinking not because it makes us sound smart in social interactions or on tick-tock videos but because reality doesn’t care about our feelings.

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What Critical Thinking Actually Is (And How to Reclaim It)

So what is critical thinking? It’s simpler than we might think—and harder than we’d like.

Critical thinking is the practice of questioning your own beliefs as rigorously as you question others’. It’s intellectual honesty. It’s the willingness to say “I don’t know” and to mean it. It’s the discipline, the practice of asking “What would change my mind?” and then genuinely looking for answers. And it has to start with even wanting that in the first place and to know why thinking better is vital for your well being and others.

Here’s some basics on how to recover it for yourself:

1. Steelman, don’t strawman. Before you dismiss an argument, make the strongest possible version of it. If you can’t articulate your opponent’s position in a way they’d recognise, you don’t understand it well enough to reject it. Can you imagine how just this practice would revolutionise our world?

2. Seek out disconfirming evidence. Don’t just Google things that prove you right. Actively hunt for information that challenges your beliefs. Read the best version of the other side’s argument, not the worst.

3. Distinguish between what you believe and what you can demonstrate. You’re entitled to your beliefs. You’re not entitled to present them as facts unless you can back them up. Learn to say: “I believe X, but I could be wrong” or “The evidence suggests Y, but it’s not conclusive.”

4. Practice intellectual humility. The smartest people in history got massive things wrong. So will you. So will I. That’s not a reason to stop thinking; it’s a reason to think more carefully. If you find yourself consumed by anger and offence with your instinct to existentially scream at someone as your sole response to their beliefs you are probably suffering epistemic closure and ideological imprisonment. Notice it and in others.

5. Engage with people who disagree with you—charitably and kindly. Not to win debates, but to test your ideas. Iron sharpens iron, but only if you’re both sharpening.

Why does recovering critical thinking matter personally? Because you can’t navigate a complex world with a simplistic mind. You’ll get exploited, manipulated, and led astray. More importantly, you’ll never grow.

Intellectual cowardice keeps us so very small.

The Gift of Critical Thinking to Others

But here’s the real reason to care about this: critical thinking isn’t just for you.

When you think critically, you make everyone around you better. You model intellectual courage. You demonstrate that it’s possible to disagree without demonising. You show that changing your mind isn’t weakness—it’s strength. And universities that used to embody this, have becomes places that do the complete opposite.

You become someone others can trust, because you’ve shown you care more about truth than about being right. In a world drowning in bad-faith actors and tribal loyalties, this becomes a gift to others.

You can also create space for honest conversation. When people know you won’t punish them for doubt or curiosity, they’ll bring their real questions to you. And those conversations—the ones where people are actually thinking, not just performing—are where real change happens. It is possible to discover the power and pleasure of critical thinking. And you can be the door out of ideological fundamentalism that others are trapped in.

Critical thinking is contagious. But so is its absence. We get to choose which virus we want to spread.

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Why Christians, of All People, Should Champion Critical Thinking

The properly Christian training of the mind is not a training in ‘religious’ subjects, but a training in how to think. C.S. Lewis

Finally, a word to Christians: We need to recover critical thinking not despite our faith, but because of it.

Christianity has always been, at its core, a truth-seeking faith. That said, there have been—and still are—forms of Christianity that resist critical thinking. Both these expressions, and modern secular ideological bubbles, rely on self-reinforcing environments that shield individuals from dissenting views.

The key difference between the Christian and secular versions lies in the ultimate anchor for their reasoning—but that is beyond the scope of this article. What matters here is that today’s post-truth epistemic closure and anti-rational thinking function, in many respects, like a form of fundamentalism. Increasingly, people are becoming fundamentalists—of whatever ideology they have adopted or been absorbed into.

But Christianity in its more major forms, did not merely tolerate critical thinking; it helped create the intellectual conditions that made systematic critical thinking possible. This happened through deeply interwoven theological, institutional, and cultural developments.

Christianity did not invent human rationality, but it did provide powerful plausibility structures—social, institutional, and moral frameworks—that reinforced the value of truth-seeking, intellectual humility, and rational accountability. These structures helped sustain habits of critical thinking across generations.

Critical thinking does not survive on technique alone. It depends on deeper cultural and moral commitments—especially the belief that truth exists, that it is worth pursuing, and that one’s identity can survive being wrong.

Christianity provided one of the most historically powerful frameworks for sustaining those commitments. When that framework weakens, as it has exponentially, critical thinking does not automatically disappear—but it becomes more fragile, and harder to sustain at a societal level. Which is what we have arrived at today.

This helps explain why societies can retain the language of critical thinking, the suggestion of it while gradually losing its actual practice.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Apostle Paul told the Thessalonians to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The Bereans were commended for examining the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul taught was true (Acts 17:11). Faith is not the absence of questioning—it’s the commitment to keep questioning until you find answers that are real.

The greatest Christian thinkers—Augustine, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer—were all rigorous critical thinkers. They didn’t fear reason; they wielded it in service of truth. They knew that a God who is Truth Himself has nothing to fear from honest inquiry.

Too often, modern Christianity has retreated into anti-intellectualism, as if thinking hard is a threat to faith. But the opposite is true. Lazy thinking leads to shallow faith—the kind that collapses the moment it meets a challenge. Critical thinking forged in the fires of real engagement creates a faith that lasts and bears testimony to reality.

Moreover, we worship a God who became incarnate—who entered into reality, into flesh and blood and history. Christianity is not a gnostic escape from the material world; it’s a full affirmation that the world is real, that truth is knowable, and that we are called to seek it with all our heart, soul, and mind (Matthew 22:37).

Critical thinking, rightly understood, is not rebellion. It is worship.

The world doesn’t need more Christians who can repeat talking points. It needs Christians who can and are willing to think—who can engage culture, answer hard questions, and give a reason for the hope within them (1 Peter 3:15). And that requires the courage to think critically.

And that would be a revival our world desperately needs.

Christian leadership is haemorrhaging at both ends—older leaders collapsing under defended survival, and younger leaders refusing to inherit a model that burns people out. Yet the answer is not the abandonment of leadership, but its re-formation—towards a way of leading that no longer survives by defence, but is sustained by freedom, and a deeper participation in the life of God.

We are living through a collapse of leadership trust and, just as quietly, a collapse of leaders themselves. This is not primarily a crisis of competence or strategy, but a formational crisis — a crisis of the leader’s interior world. That is why I’m returning to Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader, a book that names with rare clarity how leaders fail not through lack of skill, but through the loss of interior freedom.

I began this series just before the end of last year with an overview of The Undefended Leader (read it here), and this second piece continues a step-by-step walk through the book.

Leadership organised around defence slowly erodes interior freedom, relational authority, and spiritual depth. Before we can speak meaningfully about a better future for Christian leadership, Walker insists, we must first tell the truth about the storm—and about why so many leaders, often with the best of intentions, have learned to armour themselves, or quietly step away altogether.

Let’s begin where Walker begins: with the truth about the hostile world of the leader.

The Storms of Exposure

There is a particular loneliness to leadership that few people talk about honestly. Not the loneliness of being busy or burdened with responsibility, but the deeper loneliness of being permanently exposed.

To lead today is to live in a permanent state of exposure. Leaders are:

• Assessed before they are understood

• Criticised before they have finished thinking

• Condemned for the very patience and discernment we later complain they lack

Walker names this reality with particular clarity. He describes the leader's world not as occasionally difficult but as structurally hostile.

This reframes what we often misdiagnose as leadership failures. The issue is not primarily a lack of skill, courage, or even integrity. It is the conditions under which leadership is exercised and practised.

Walker’s claim is essentially this:

Leadership never happens in calm, indoor conditions. Leaders don’t get to work from a sheltered control room. They stand outside, exposed to the elements.

He uses the image of a weather system to describe the ambient pressures that come with leadership, almost by default. Leaders become the screen onto which others project their hopes and fears, their idealism and their disappointment, their gratitude and their blame. Leaders live with a level of scrutiny and visibility that few can escape, where actions are watched, motives are interpreted, and silence is often filled with assumptions. Alongside this comes a chronic ambiguity: decisions must be made without full information, for outcomes that remain unclear, and all with a persistent sense of operating without a solid place to stand.

Much of what lands on a leader does not properly belong to them at all. Disappointment that has nowhere else to go often settles on the leaders, simply because they are there. Even changes people have explicitly asked for can generate resistance once they begin to unsettle familiar patterns. Gratitude is fleeting; frustration is additive and adhesive.

Crucially, Walker’s point is not that leaders are doing something wrong when any of this happens. This is not bad weather caused by poor leadership techniques. You do not choose this weather, and you cannot opt out of it. It comes with the role and is intrinsic to it. To lead is to step into exposure, and the question is not how to avoid the weather, but how to stand in it without becoming hardened, defensive, and lost.

So before we talk about being “undefended,” we need to be honest about the weather system leaders are standing in.

Only leaders who are honest about the hostility of their environment can choose not to be defended.

This isn’t about pretending the storm isn’t real. It’s about learning how to stand in it without becoming someone you’re not.

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Defensiveness as an Adaptive Response

Walker observes that leadership today demands greater exposure than previous generations faced—a reality that has intensified exponentially since he first identified the trend.

• Decisions are exposed before they are mature

• Judgments outpace reflection

• Narratives are set before meaning can settle

The leader’s interior world—which should include hesitation, doubt, prayerful wrestling, and slow discernment—has been hollowed out by environments that deny them room to breathe and be.

This produces what Walker describes as a hostile field. Importantly, this hostility is not primarily personal. It does not require bad actors, although there are plenty of those these days. It arises from systems that prize speed over wisdom, clarity over truthfulness, and performance over presence.

Some leaders are indeed morally bankrupt. But the hostility directed at most leaders cannot be explained by moral failure alone; leadership itself has become a site onto which anxieties, projections, and unmet longings are placed.

In such a world, defensiveness is not a moral failure. It is an adaptive response.

Walker is careful here. Leaders develop defences because defences work. They protect against misunderstanding, against attack, against being consumed by expectations that are impossible to satisfy. Defensiveness allows leaders to function. It enables them to survive.

In fact, many of the traits we reward in leaders—certainty, control, emotional distance, message discipline—are simply socially sanctioned forms of defence. They signal competence in a hostile environment.

The tragedy, Walker suggests, is not that leaders defend themselves.

But what begins as protection slowly becomes imprisonment.

Over time, defended leadership reshapes the self. Leaders lose touch with their own vulnerability, not because they deny it, but because it becomes too dangerous to access.

• Feedback gets filtered

• Relationships are thinned out

• The interior life narrows and constricts

• Leadership becomes about performance rather than presence

What gets lost is not effectiveness, at least not at first, but something more subtle and more costly: authority rooted in honesty, influence grounded in relationship, and vision born from depth rather than protection.

The world of leadership has grown more hostile since Walker’s book was written. Leaders now operate within attention economies that reward outrage, flatten any nuance, and archive every misstep forever. Social media and digital permanence mean that mistakes are not merely remembered; they are curated and weaponised again and again.

The possibility of repair has diminished, and redemption has been removed from public life. The costs of exposure are increasing, and protection mechanisms are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Here is our catch-22. Our world seems to require more defence than ever, which will lead to more of what we are already suffering.

Is there an alternative?

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Undefended Naivety

In this context, undefended leadership can sound naïve, even reckless. It raises a genuine and pressing question: Is it possible to lead without defence and still remain safe?

The rest of Walker’s book answers this question, having allowed us to ask it honestly upfront. Because the deeper issue is not whether leaders can afford to be undefended, but whether leadership that is permanently defended can ever point beyond itself.

One of the quiet tragedies of the hostile world of leadership is what it does to those watching from the edges. Younger leaders are not rejecting responsibility just out of apathy or fragility, but also because they have paid close attention. They have watched leaders endure relentless storms, public scrutiny, moral failure, and institutional collapse. They have seen the personal cost of leadership borne not only by individuals, but by families, friendships, and faith itself. And they have noticed how often leaders respond by armouring up—controlling, managing impressions, defending territory—only to discover that these very strategies eventually cause their downfall.

What many younger leaders see is not simply failure, but a lack of alternatives. Leadership appears to demand either heroic invulnerability or quiet self-betrayal. When those are the only options on offer, opting out can feel like the most honest choice. In that sense, leadership avoidance is not cowardice but is discernment shaped by observation.

This is where Simon Walker’s work becomes rather radical. The Undefended Leader does not ask leaders to become tougher, louder, or more resilient in the usual sense. It offers a different imagination altogether: leadership that remains open under pressure, truthful under threat, and present without resorting to defence.

Walker names the cost of defended leadership with rare and penetrating clarity. And more importantly, he gives us an alternative path that younger and perhaps older leaders have scarcely seen embodied. Not a denial of storms, but a way of standing within them without losing one’s soul.

This is where a theological horizon begins to emerge.

The Recovery of Interior Freedom

Although Walker does not write a theology of leadership, his vision is unmistakably shaped by his Christian imagination and theological convictions. The undefended leader he gestures toward is not simply emotionally intelligent or psychologically integrated, but grounded in a different source of security altogether. This is leadership that does not derive its legitimacy from performance, approval, or control, but from a prior belonging. Most leadership advice teaches you how to survive the system. This one teaches you how to live in a different one.

At its deepest level, the invitation here is Christological.

In Christ, God does not bypass the hostility and vulnerability that deform human life, but recapitulates them—entering our pressures, misunderstanding, abandonment, and threats, and reorders them from within. Christian leadership, then, is not heroic survival in a hostile world, but a participation in Christ’s own way of inhabiting it.

From an Ignatian perspective, the task is not the removal of storms, but the recovery of interior freedom within them. Discernment begins by telling the truth - speaking out loud - about the pressures we face and noticing how fear and defence have organised our responses. Our task is not to eliminate vulnerability, but to learn how to stand undefended before God—honestly, attentively, and free enough to choose where we place our trust. Which is often where we started when we first chose and responded to a call to leadership.

In a world organised against vulnerability, this is not weakness. It is participation in a different reality and a form of leadership that does not require sacrificing one’s soul to survive.

Chapter Two of Walker provides a necessary reckoning. It names the real pressures leaders face, legitimises the defences they have built, and quietly prepares the ground for a more radical question: what would leadership look like if it were no longer organised around fear and self-defence?

The chapters that follow look at this possibility.

Why not join me as I unpack the rest of The Undefended Leader?

I’m planning a series of paired posts: one engaging each chapter, and a second reflecting more personally on my own journey into—and ongoing practice of—being undefended.

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Disagreement has become an almost intolerable strain on the modern moral imagination. It now triggers reflexive withdrawal, ritualised indignation, and the familiar theatrics of virtue.

So few people seem willing to remain in the presence of difference; fewer still are ever permitted to. The real question, then, is this: how do those who still wish to stay do so without being captured by the immense gravitational pull of identity politics?

The Three Practices, developed by Jim Henderson, are among the most significant resources I’ve come across for navigating precisely this terrain. They are profound in their intent, and disarmingly actionable in practice.

They are simple to name:

I’ll be unusually interested in others.

I’ll stay in the room with difference.

I’ll stop comparing my best with your worst.

I’ve been trained in the Three Practices and have experienced their impact firsthand. As our world continues to fragment and polarise, they have become increasingly compelling — and increasingly necessary as a response and antidote.

Recently, I interviewed Jim Henderson about how the Three Practices were conceived, how they developed, and how they are being lived out today.

(This post also appears on my other site SpEx.so)

A year ago, I wrote about Jesus — who he was, and who he is — as my anchor in life and in the growing chaos around us. Over the past twelve months, the world has not calmed. If anything, it has become more unstable. Ideologies harden, propaganda multiplies, and the pace of opinion accelerates faster than wisdom can keep up. There is more noise, less depth, and a growing sense that the ground beneath us is shifting further.

And yet Jesus remains. Utterly. Radically. Different.

He is my place to stand when everything else feels uncertain. He is the measure by which life makes sense, the source of identity and meaning when borrowed certainties begin to fail. He is not an escape from the storm, but the liferaft within it — and the quiet assurance that the storm does not have the final word. He is my hope not only for this life, but for a life yet to come.

This Christmas, I find myself returning to Jesus — not sentimentally, but deliberately, and desperately. The King of creation comes into the world, unlike any other. Not as power and ideology expect. Not as culture demands. As the world seems to devolve, I find that he does not recede. He becomes clearer and nearer. More sharply opposed to what is distorting our culture and our times. More compelling, not less.

So I offer this updated reflection on the Christ of Christmas, as we step once more into the liturgy that receives him tomorrow, on Christmas Day.

—

Jesus was unlike any other leader,

past or present.

Not simply better. Not merely wiser. But wholly other.

Fully God.

Fully human.

He lived without disguise,

died without resistance,

and rose without revenge.

And yet it is not only this that arrests me now.

He did not rape, torture, or kill.

He did not abuse the vulnerable.

He did not lie to survive,

cheat to win,

or steal to secure himself.

He did not manipulate crowds,

coerce loyalty,

or terrorise enemies or take hostages.

He raised no armies.

He incited no violence.

He had no political sponsors

and no machinery of power behind him.

He did not court the rich

or flatter the influential.

He stored up no wealth

to insulate his life

or guarantee his future.

Instead, he took the lowest place.

He knelt.

He washed feet.

He touched the unclean.

He ate with outcasts.

He crossed boundaries others fortified—

religious, ethnic, social, and gendered.

He honoured women.

He welcomed children.

He demanded the protection

of their dignity

and their bodies.

How utterly different.

And this difference matters so much now as it did then.

For we live in an age where identity is forged through opposition,

where belonging is secured by enemies,

and meaning is sustained by grievance, offence and denial of reality.

An age where politics has learned to behave like a religion,

and ideologies demand devotion, loyalty, and purity tests.

Many now turn to movements

to tell them who they are,

who they must fear,

and who they must oppose.

Intensity is mistaken for truth.

Outrage becomes a moral currency,

as identity politics creates people as tools of cultural warfare.

But Jesus does not offer an identity

constructed against others.

He does not gather followers

by naming enemies to be defeated

or tribes to be defended.

He does not baptise our causes,

sanctify our anger,

or lend divine authority

to our resentments.

He will not be reduced to a symbol,

deployed as a slogan,

or conscripted into our campaigns.

He is life.

He is truth.

He is reality itself—

the ground beneath my feet

When every ideological platform begins to crack.

Those captivated by ideologies

promise clarity but deliver captivity.

They offer belonging

at the cost of complexity,

certainty

at the price of love.

Jesus refuses our categories—

left and right,

progressive and reactionary,

pure and impure.

He stands before us,

not as an idea to agree with,

but as a person to follow.

Not as an identity to perform,

or someone to baptise, and recognise our self creations

But as a life to receive.

To follow him is to be loosened

and delivered from every false certainty

and re-anchored in love.

To belong to him is to be freed

from the exhausting labour

of self-justification and self-generation.

This is why he unsettles us still.

He cannot be captured by our movements.

He will not be weaponised for our causes.

He remains stubbornly,

mercifully,

real.

And in a world addicted to ideology,

He offers something rarer,

and far more costly still:

a life,

a way,

a truth

that we can actually stand on.

This Jesus captivates me. This Jesus consumes me.

To see him as he is leaves me only one response:

my soul,

my life,

my all.

Over the last few days, my social media feeds — shaped by the strange, selective algorithms we all live under — have been replete with progressive and left-leaning Christians condemning the upcoming “Christ in Christmas” event in London linked to Tommy Robinson. Anecdotally, those are the voices I see most loudly. And beyond my feeds, the national news and radio have been wheeling out predominantly Anglican clergy (as they always do) to denounce the gathering in firm, moral tones, with warnings of the ‘Far Right’ and ‘Christian Nationalism’.

I understand why people feel uneasy. I am no Tommy Robinson supporter. But I also sense that something deeper is happening here — something revealing, something uncomfortable, and something worth paying attention to. Because if we only focus on the personalities involved, we risk missing what this moment is saying about the soul of the UK, and perhaps the state of Christianity itself.

We seem to have had Christian groups who have spent months entirely at ease under pro-Palestine banners, Islamic slogans, rainbow flags, LGBTQ+ causes, BLM symbolism, climate change flags, and anti-colonial rhetoric, who are suddenly and seemingly scandalised by a carol event — and not primarily because of the carols. That contrast alone should make us pause.

Anglican and other priests have been arrested for supporting a proscribed extremist organisation—Palestine Action—whose activists violently assaulted a police officer with a sledgehammer. Yet many of the same voices express horror at a proposed carol service, immediately castigating it as ‘far right Christian nationalism’. It is a revealing moment in our public discourse: outrage is not always proportionate to actual harm, and moral energy is, I suggest, often spent denouncing the wrong thing.

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Policing Faith

For years now, huge numbers of ordinary Brits have felt ridiculed, unheard, and publicly shamed simply for being British. And the moment some of them reach for Christian symbols, language, and tradition — the very things Christianity once assumed belonged to all — those who preach tolerance respond with moral panic and purity tests. The contradiction is hard to ignore.

Beneath that reaction lies something more uncomfortable: the instinct to decide who is “allowed” to reach for Christ, who may “recover” Him, who counts as worthy of invoking His name. As though Christ belonged to some ideological tribe or moral elite. As though we could curate where Christ is permitted to appear.

But here is the truth few want to say aloud:

The most unsettling element of this carol event will not be Robinson. It will be the Crosses, the icons, the voices publicly shouting, “Jesus is King.”

That will disturb many who have been perfectly comfortable with other ideological symbols dominating public space all year. The offence is not nationalism; the offence is Christ showing up in a place we did not approve.

And if anyone imagines the attendees will be the fever-dream caricature of the “far right,” it is worth remembering how elastic that label has become — a catch-all category deployed for almost anyone who disagrees with a dominant progressive moral imagination. It functions like a modern heresy charge, shutting down conversation rather than opening it.

This caricature stands in stark contrast to Trevor Phillips’ firsthand account after attending the Unite the Kingdom march with 150,000 taking part in London this year. Many of whom might well be at this Christmas Carol Event:

“The vast majority seemed normal, not like the stereotype of some far-right extremists.”

Exactly. The people attending will mostly be ordinary folk — neighbours, parents, tradespeople — people reaching for meaning, identity, and yes, perhaps even faith.

And that prompts a difficult question:

If we casually call this gathering “far right,” are we prepared to label everyone condemning it “far left”? Of course not — and that’s precisely the point. These labels are flattening our moral vision and impoverishing public discourse. They tell us more about our cultural anxieties than about the people themselves.

Here is another irony:

Some of the voices denouncing this event come not from worshipping communities or from people living a discipleship-shaped Christian life, but from cultural and professional Christians — those whose functional faith has migrated into ideological symbols, activist liturgies, and moral slogans. Their causes have become their creed, baptised with Christian symbols and terminology.

Yet they insist that those gathering in London have “no right” to use Christian imagery. Misappropriation is a serious charge — but it is being levelled by many who have done the same thing with their ideological beliefs. And they can appear as cultural middle-class Christianities, offended by their sensibilities, unable and unwilling to have empathy for those in their sights.

And yet, to be fair and truthful, not everyone raising concerns fits that description. There are many thoughtful Christians genuinely troubled about co-option, distortion, or Christian symbols becoming vehicles for grievance or identity conflict. Those concerns matter as much to me as they do to you.

But even here, a question lingers:

Why is it so easy to publicly denounce this event, yet so hard to critique the ideological culture of the progressive left and their ideological capture in public?

Their symbols, chants, and moral framework have dominated public space for months with scarcely a murmur from the same people now speaking so forcefully. That asymmetry reveals something about the state of Christianity in Britain — people often more willing to critique unfashionable expressions of faith than fashionable forms of ideology.

The danger of co-option is very real. Christian symbols can be bent into political tools and have already been used by the progressives and left this year. But it is hard to name that danger without first acknowledging how we ourselves — left and right — are discipled by cultural ideologies that function like anti-Christian liturgies.

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Resistance Is Futile

Tommy Robinson now speaks openly about having found faith and believes a kind of revival is stirring outside the established church — among people who, like him, feel they would never be welcomed by its leaders. Whatever we make of his claims, the dynamic he is describing is not unfamiliar. Time and again in Christian history, those on the edges of church respectability have insisted they are encountering God, while the institution has responded with suspicion, distance, or outright rejection. Often, the church has been uneasy not only with the individuals involved but with what their presence might say about its own life and witness.

Throughout the centuries, many of the Church’s most significant renewal movements began precisely in these marginal spaces. In nearly every instance, the resistance was shaped as much by cultural anxiety and political concern as by theology: fears of instability, the loss of control, and the unsettling presence of people who did not fit the accepted norms. Yet history shows how often these same movements became agents of renewal, mission, and reform that reshaped the Christian landscape, no matter how much people condemned them at the time.

There is a pattern to such moments in history:

1. God meets people in unexpected places — often outside established structures.

2. Authorities denounce these encounters as spiritually suspect, socially disruptive, or politically dangerous.

3. The “outsiders” form new communities around their lived experience of God.

4. Some of those communities become significant renewal movements in theology, mission, and prayer.

5. Within a generation, the church often adopts what it once opposed.

What begins as illegitimate spirituality at the margins often becomes the birthplace of renewal for the whole Church.

This is the cautionary note for our current moment. The increasingly alarmist efforts to proscribe the carol event associated with Tommy Robinson may end up driving more people toward it, not away. When leaders resort to sweeping denunciations, collapse every distinction into the language of extremism, or speak as though attendance is itself morally suspect, they unintentionally reinforce the narrative that the church and the cultural establishment neither listen nor welcome. People already wary of institutions often interpret such reactions as proof that something genuine must be happening beyond official boundaries. Ironically, history teaches us that attempts to shut down fringe religious gatherings rarely diminish them; more often, they consolidate them.

If we are wise, we will pay attention not only to the very real risks but to the deeper questions being revealed — questions about belonging, credibility, and the gap many now feel between the church and the people it is called to reach.

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Looking In A Mirror

This moment, if we are willing to receive it, is a mirror.

It reveals the ideological purity cults we build, the idols we defend, the boundaries we draw to gatekeep Christ, and the strange comfort we find in labelling others rather than examining ourselves.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy is pastoral.

Instead of denouncing and deepening polarisation, this could be a moment to reach out —

…to listen,

…to understand the woundedness beneath the rhetoric,

…to invite people into a relationship with Christ and into communities that actually form disciples of Jesus.

For many who participate in the carol service, there is pain there. There is longing. And beneath the surface noise, there may be genuine hunger for God. Christ often appears where respectable religion least expects Him. As mentioned above, we only have to take a cursory glance at church history to see this. What if this part of a ‘dirty/messy revival’ as messy as other moments in history, to lean into instead of condemn?

Grace always begins when we stop gatekeeping Christ, lay down our ideological idols, and open our eyes to the people right in front of us.

Summary

Given the minefield I have stepped into on this topic, let me summarise what I have attempted to express:

Post-Church Condemnation: Those outside the church in post-church life who have made cultural ideologies their mission are as guilty as those charged with Christian nationalism.

Genuine Concern & Suggestion: Christians who sincerely want to follow Jesus, in whatever form that takes and with Christ at the centre of their lives, are right to feel uneasy. But before reaching for the reflex of condemnation, I am suggesting it is worth asking whether something deeper may be happening — something that might actually be an opportunity to help people find faith in Christ.

Opportunity: What if there are hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who, amid the political and cultural turbulence of our age, are instinctively reaching for Christianity as a stabilising identity and source of hope? And what if, instead of being dismissed or denounced, they were listened to, welcomed, and gently guided toward a relationship with Jesus by those who have one — one not captured by nationalism or by progressive ideology, but shaped by the gospel itself?

And for absolute clarity:

If anyone reads this as support for the event or for Tommy Robinson, they have not read what I have written.

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Statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital - Aaron Levenstein

There’s a strange move I keep seeing in online arguments about thee major issues in my world - UK grooming gangs, trans access to women’s spaces, and immigration.

It goes like this:

• Raise a concern about grooming gangs?

  → “Well, actually, on average, most sexual offences are committed by white British men.”

• Ask questions about specific risks around trans access to women’s spaces?

  → “On average, most violence against women is from cis men, not trans people, so this is an unnecessary waste of concern.”

• Point to patterns in crime or exploitation linked to migration in a particular context?

  → “Statistically, migrants commit fewer crimes in total than UK nationals, so your concern is irrelevant.”

On the surface, this sounds intelligent: “I’m the one talking about the data/facts; you’re just emotional/irrational.” And very quickly, the use of these national average stats is used to hit verbal nails into people with concerns, declaring them racist and transphobic.

But this kind of statistical sleight of hand is, at best, a basic failure to understand how data works and, at worst, a deliberate fog that denies reality and props up the indefensible. And yes—I’m fully aware of how statistics are weaponised to stoke anti-immigration fears.

To be clear: this post isn’t taking a position on immigration, gender ideology, or grooming gangs. My aim is far narrower—and aimed at something particular and pernicious that quietly corrodes all these important arguments: the habitual misuse of statistics in our public discourse. These issues I have used are simply some of the most vivid illustrations of the problem. But the same statistical error shows up everywhere—distorting political debate, muddying cultural conversations, and quietly sabotaging our moral reasoning.

This error is called the base rate fallacy — the fallacy of misapplied aggregation.

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The Drunk-Driving and Clerical Abuse Test

The tyranny of the collective leads us to ignore extremal events. But extremal events often matter the most. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Imagine someone saying:

“Most car accidents are not caused by drunk drivers.

Therefore drunk driving isn’t a serious problem, and we shouldn’t focus on it.”

You’d recognise instantly how bad that argument is.

We know:

• Yes, most accidents involve sober drivers.

• And also drunk driving is a serious, distinct, and massively dangerous subset that deserves laws, campaigns, and targeted enforcement.

The fact that drunk drivers are a minority of all drivers does not mean we ignore the risk they pose.

We can hold two truths at once:

1. Most drivers aren’t drunk.

2. Drunk drivers are still a serious problem.

But when the topic is grooming gangs, gender, or immigration, that basic common sense disappears.

And imagine applying the same logic to clerical abuse: “Most young boys are abused by family members, not priests—so claims against priests don’t really matter.”

We now recognise that kind of reasoning for what it is: a grotesque misuse of aggregation that helped entire systems look the other way while children were harmed.

We learned—slowly and painfully—that aggregate data must never be used to dismiss abuse within a specific subgroup. Today, it’s culturally unthinkable to wave away accusations against priests or pastors with national averages. We know better.

And yet, for some reason, we’re willing to grant certain populations—whether ethnic groups or gender-identity categories—a similar shield of cultural protection.

The aggregate is invoked to smother the particular.

And it isn’t justified.

The Tyranny of the Mean

Beware of the single story that claims to explain everything. - Hans Rosling

Averages and aggregates are powerful tools. But they are clumsy.

An overall mean tells you something true about the population. It does not tell you everything you need to know about subgroups, patterns and mechanisms of harm.

• You can say, “White men commit most sexual offences in the UK,”

  and still need to ask, “What’s going on in these specific grooming networks in these specific towns?”

• You can say, “Most violence against women comes from male partners and family members,”

  and still need to ask, “What about this particular context — prisons, changing rooms, refuges — and how do we protect women there?”

• You can say, “On average, migrants don’t offend more than natives,”

  and still need to ask, “Are there specific cohorts, routes, or exploitation systems that need targeted attention?”

Using the big aggregate to dismiss the smaller pattern is just as irrational as pretending the smaller pattern is the whole picture.

In other words, it’s entirely possible to:

• acknowledge who does most of the harm overall,

• and take seriously where there are concentrated pockets of distinct harm.

Leaders must be able to do both. That’s what data/truth and care for people demand.

I’m exhausted by those who take one incident and falsely smear an entire people group with it. And I’m equally weary of the virtue-signalers who use national average statistics like a moral sledgehammer to shame anyone raising real, local concerns.

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Why Do We Hide Behind the Mean?

The average is often the refuge of the politically frightened. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Because it’s emotionally and cognitively convenient.

• Identity protection – If a specific problem feels like it will fuel “the other side,” we instinctively reach for statistics that make it go away.

• Tribal fear – We’re terrified that acknowledging one problem (say, grooming gangs, or specific migration harms) will hand ammunition to racists, bigots or culture warriors.

• Cognitive dissonance – It’s easier to silence a concern with a clever-sounding stat than to live with tension: “This problem is real, and it can be misused by people I disagree with.” Imagine how different our public life would be if we modelled the courage to hold that tension rather than flee from it.

Instead, we weaponise aggregates to police conversations and justify our cognitive bias:

“You’re talking about X pattern?

That’s statistically small compared to this big mean.

Therefore, you must be a racist/transphobe/bigot/fascist.”

And just like that, real victims vanish behind our need to win the argument, our tribal virtue-signalling, and—far too often—our sheer ignorance of the issues.

What Good Leadership Looks Like

If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will - Mother Teresa

If you are a Christian leader in church, business, politics, or community, I believe we are called to resist this intellectual laziness. Good leadership does at least four things to resist the misuse of aggregates and related fallacies - four practices we can all undertake if we choose to:

1. Refuses to use the mean as a shield

   • You never dismiss a specific harm just because it doesn’t dominate the overall statistics.

   • You don’t say, “Most abuse looks like X, so we don’t need to talk about Y.”

2. Holds two truths together

   • “Yes, the majority pattern is here.”

   • “Yes, there is a meaningful, smaller pattern there that also needs honest attention.”

3. Names the fear openly

   • “We’re afraid that talking about this will be hijacked by extremists [insert the names of groups we fear and feel pressured to placate].”

   • Say it. Be courageous and name the fear. Don’t pretend the problem itself doesn’t exist.

4. Protects people, not narratives

   • The question is not, “Does this topic help or hurt my side?”

   • The question is, “Who is being harmed here, and what is a truthful, proportionate response?”

Misapplied aggregation isn’t just a statistical mistake — it’s a spiritual one. It’s what we do when we prefer the safety of our narrative over the uncomfortable, searching light of truth. It lets us hide real victims behind averages. It lets us feel righteous while avoiding repentance. It lets us win arguments without loving our neighbour.

But Christians are called to something better.

Statistics means never having to say you’re wrong. - Manfred Eigen

Jesus never dismissed the one suffering person because “most people aren’t like that.” He never hid behind the majority pattern to ignore a minority harm. He saw the one bleeding woman in the crowd, the one wounded man on the roadside, the one sheep that wandered. The kingdom is built on the truth that the one matters.

As ever, comments are welcome. And just to be clear and a reminder: this article isn’t about gender, immigration, or any other hot-button topic per se—it’s about how statistics are misused to prop up arguments for those issues and others.

Our task, as human beings, as human leaders, is far more humble and close to home. It is to grow up. It is to learn, through the experiences we are given, who we are—what it means to be courageous, what it is to serve, what it is to be loved and to love, what it is to be real, what it is to be fully human. True leadership is leadership of ourselves and others into this kind of life: embracing our full humanity, discovering what it is to be fully human, to participate fully in the world. Once we understand this, we begin to understand that leadership is not restricted to the narrow range of activities it is often supposed to be.—Simon Walker, The Undefended Leader Trilogy Book 1

We are living through a collapse of leadership trust. Moral failures, abuses of power, burnout, narcissistic patterns, anxious systems, and communities left wounded or disillusioned have forced a painful reckoning. Our crisis is not primarily strategic. It’s not about competence - as if there is some new leadership practice we need to develop to solve things. It’s not even about culture.

And we are also living through a collapse of people wanting to lead and being able to survive in leadership. Everywhere I turn — in churches, charities, and mentoring conversations — I keep hearing a similar confession from leaders:

“I’m not sure I can do this much longer.”

It’s not just pressure or tiredness, although those are bone-crushingly present. It’s something much deeper.

There is a profound sense of disorientation — as if the familiar maps for leadership no longer match the landscape we’re actually walking through. And our landscape has changed so rapidly that, like the tide going out, it has revealed the nature of our leadership crisis.

It is a formational crisis — a crisis of the leader’s interior world.

Working harder, smarter, and with greater competencies is not enough to navigate the world we now lead. Something else, much more fundamental and intrinsic to the nature of leadership, needs our attention.

This is why I keep returning to Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader. Long before we were talking widely about trauma, attachment, differentiation, or systems theory, Walker was naming something fundamental:

Leaders fail not because they lack skill but because they lack interior freedom. They become defended.

The Defended Leader

Defendedness is not a kind of villainy or wickedness. It is a survival strategy.

Walker explains how a defended leader protects their core, their self: guarding wounds, managing fear, holding on to identity, projecting strength, over-functioning, withdrawing, charming, controlling, over-working, numbing, protecting. What sits backstage inevitably leaks onto their front stage. And when the front stage outstrips the maturity of the back stage, and when the off-stage (that hidden life in Christ) is thin or neglected, power becomes distorted.

The result?

• Anxious leadership

• Reactive leadership

• Ego-driven leadership

• Leadership that cannot be questioned or held, learn, and admit to being wrong.

• Leadership that fails to metabolise pain and grief

This is the story behind so many leadership collapses in the church today. In a world marked by volatility, cultural fragmentation, and relentless political tension, formation is no longer optional. The world is already shaping—and often misshaping—our inner lives. Which is why who we are as leaders now matters more than ever.

Integrating Psychology, Theology, and Reality

What makes Walker’s work so compelling is its integration:

• psychology (ego structures, defences, attachment)

• theology (kenosis, humility, cruciformity, hiddenness)

• leadership theory (power, trust, presence, formation)

And what makes Walker’s integration so valuable for Christians is that it brings together three domains we too often keep apart—our inner psychology, our lived theology, and the real dynamics of leadership and power. Most Christian formation falters precisely at the points where these worlds collide. And the world we now inhabit is forcing those collisions with seismic intensity.

We preach kenosis but have no language for the ego; we teach humility but ignore the attachment wounds that sabotage it; we call leaders to cruciformity without attending to the psychological structures that make self-giving unsafe or impossible.

Together, these three create a coherent account of leadership.

This is what makes Walker’s work so compelling: it refuses to let Christians live split lives. Healing (psychology), holiness (theology), and vocation (leadership) belong together. Integrated, they offer a pathway into the freedom Jesus promises—freedom from the defended, anxious self; freedom for the self poured out in love; freedom to lead in ways that are courageous, compassionate, and deeply Christ-shaped.

This is not an optional extra for Christians. It is the very texture of Christian leadership.

And Walker insists that this kind of leadership is not, at its core, a technique. It is a way of being. A leader’s authority flows from their interior world, their relationships, and their spiritual grounding. It is a matter of formation — and this is precisely the arena in which God meets us, shapes us, and equips us.

If we give ourselves to formation as leaders, we discover that God is already there. The journey toward becoming an undefended leader is not something we undertake alone; it is the very place where God chooses to take part with us.

An undefended leader then is one who:

• doesn’t need to protect their own status

• can hold power without dominating

• can release control without losing identity

• can admit to being wrong

• can face conflict without collapsing

• creates safety rather than threat

• lives from being, not performance

This is the kind of Christian leadership that can navigate any context.

This is the kind of leadership the church desperately needs.

Why Walker’s Approach Matters

One of the reasons Walker’s Undefended Leader model speaks so powerfully today is because it’s based on what researchers call a constructivist understanding of how people learn, grow, and make sense of life.

That sounds technical, but the idea is actually very simple — and deeply biblical and Christian.

1. What “constructivist” means (in plain English)

Constructivism says that:

• We don’t just receive truth like data being downloaded.

• We build meaning together, over time, through relationships, experience, and interpretation.

In other words, human beings co-create the world they live in — how they see themselves, how they understand others, how authority works, how trust grows, and how communities hold together.

2. In other words

• Understanding is relational. We learn from how we interact, not by standing at a distance pretending to be “objective.”

• Meaning comes from experience. People form beliefs and behaviours through their lived story — not because they were told the “right answer.”

• Reality is co-created. In any church, team, or ministry, things like identity, belonging, power, and trust are created by how people relate and behave, not by rulebooks alone.

3. Why this matters for Christian leaders

If reality in our communities is something we help build, then leadership is not first about techniques or fixing people.

Leadership is about:

• Creating the conditions where truth can be heard.

• Making space for people to discover what God is doing.

• Helping communities shape healthy patterns of trust, identity, and power.

• Owning how we contribute to the culture we live in — good or bad.

This is precisely what The Undefended Leader is trying to do:

To show leaders how their inner life, presence, trustworthiness, and self-awareness help build the very reality their people inhabit.

Undefended Leaders in one sentence:

We become undefended leaders when we realise that leadership is not about enforcing a reality, but participating with God and others in constructing a truthful one.

The Undefended Series

In a time when the church is rightly asking hard questions about power, narcissism, emotional maturity, trauma, institutional fragility, and the formation of leaders, we need a model that:

• Takes the emotional life seriously

• Understands power relationally

• Honours the complexity of the human person

• Is deeply aligned with the way of Christ and a cruciform

• Emphasises interior truthfulness and freedom

• Refuses to reduce leadership to techniques and practices

This is what The Undefended Leader offers: a way of understanding and practising leadership that is psychologically mature, spiritually grounded, relationally wise, and attuned to how leadership is actually constructed in real communities.

Walker’s Undefended Leader is a trilogy that has shaped me for years. I’ve recommended it widely — including to my Doctor of Leadership students — yet I’ve never taken the deeper personal dive it deserves. I’ve long felt its impact, but I’ve not paused to excavate its core lessons and press them firmly against the contours of my own life and leadership as I have wanted to. And the condition of our world has made me reach for it more and more.

So I am going to do that now and post my reflections on the trilogy here. I hope you will join me.

Over the coming posts, I’m going to unpack from Walker:

• Identity — The defended vs. undefended leader

• Authority — How authority is actually formed, granted, sustained

• Power — The moral weight and spiritual responsibility of power

• Presence — Leading through grounded, un-anxious presence

• Formation — The inner journey that makes leadership possible

• Responsibility — The moral horizon of true leadership

We need undefended leaders.

And the hopeful truth is: they can be formed.

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