I told you so

The Quiet Revival is finally put out its misery, and Sarah Mullally's enthronement prompts more clarity from Prince William

Hello! The Bible Society has admitted the pivotal survey which underpinned its Quiet Revival report was fatally flawed. And yet this stunning revelation has not seen the charity back down barely an inch from its bullish claims. What’s going on?

Then we turn to the installation of Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, finally drawing to an end the 18-month interregnum since Justin Welby resigned over the John Smyth scandal. Did we learn anything about her from the ceremony inside Canterbury Cathedral, or was some anonymous briefing from Prince William actually the most newsworthy part of it?

There’s also our latest podcast (How one Christian general made his peace with being both a follower of Jesus and a soldier of war) and lots of links to interesting church news stories from around the internet (including this week the fourth musketeer found under a Dutch church, Muslim prayers in a church school, and American Christian Nationalists praying for the death of their fellow believers).

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I told you so

Almost exactly a year ago, the phrase ‘The Quiet Revival’ appeared for the first time in this newsletter. It came from, of course, a now famous/infamous (delete as appropriate) report by the Bible Society. Based on a YouGov survey, the Bible Society claimed churchgoing in Britain was not in fact steadily declining as it had been for generations. Instead, between 2018 and 2024 it had exploded, shooting up by more than 50%, from 8% of the population to 12%. Among young people, and men in particular, the growth was even more explosive: young men’s attendance had quintupled from 4% to 21%.

If you’ve been reading The Critical Friend for any length of time, you’ll know that I have always raised an eyebrow at these claims. What began as surprise gradually gave way to incredulity, then to scepticism and finally dismissal, as more and more confounding evidence and data emerged to suggest these YouGov figures were just wrong.

But throughout it all, the Bible Society has held firm. They’ve not just stood by their story, they’ve aggressively attacked people like me who have questioned their findings or raised concerns. They’ve dismissed the scepticism of a slew of well-respected statisticians and sociologists who also find the Quiet Revival thesis hard to believe.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, they published a statement admitting that the YouGov survey was faulty and is not reliable evidence of a rise in churchgoing:

‘Earlier this month YouGov informed Bible Society that the 2024 survey sample on which our report The Quiet Revival was based was faulty, and it can no longer be regarded as a reliable source of information about the spiritual landscape in Britain. We recognise that this news may feel discouraging and we share that sense of disappointment.’

The problem was apparently a cock-up by the pollsters about how they filter out low quality respondents in their online surveys. These might be people not from the UK (the area being studied), people who appeared to have clicked random answers to get through the survey as fast as possible, or those who tried to do the same survey multiple times. The Bible Society have also put out an FAQs explaining more:

‘Significant parts of these systems were not functioning correctly during the 2024 survey – the result of human error on YouGov's part. YouGov only discovered this recently, following a thorough internal review. This meant that a statistically significant proportion of responses were of low quality or otherwise unreliable, and the data cannot now be relied upon.’

In their own post, YouGov go into more depth on what they have discovered: essentially that there were a significant number of fraudulent responses among the young and ethnic minority cohorts surveyed, enough that the overall figures cannot be trusted.

This is, ahem, interesting, because it’s precisely one of the potential flaws flagged up just a few months ago by the well-respected American pollsters Pew when they dug into the Quiet Revival hypothesis (covered back in January in these pages). The potential issues with online opt-in surveys of the kind YouGov run are the reason why serious academic sociologists put much more weight on random probability sampling, such as the gold-standard British Social Attitudes survey run each year since 1983. And these surveys, surprise surprise, do not show churchgoing rocketing up 56% in the last few years. Yet when this was pointed out to the Bible Society, they rebuffed concerns.

The Bible Society have now retracted their Quiet Revival report, but despite this are working hard to shift all the blame to YouGov. Their statement speaks about their “deep disappointment” in the pollster’s error and includes a personal apology from YouGov’s chief executive Stephan Shakespeare:

“YouGov take full responsibility for the outputs of the original 2024 research, and we apologise for what has happened. We would like to stress that Bible Society has at all times accurately and responsibly reported the data we supplied to them.”

The Bible Society’s FAQs go further, explicitly saying it would have been impossible for them to have identified the mistakes and insisting they had exercised great rigour and care before publishing the Quiet Revival report.

Clearly, this is not all on them — YouGov messed up and have apologised as is appropriate. And yes, nobody expects the Bible Society to have foreseen how human error might have failed to properly filter the survey answers.

And yet. I’m more than a little uncomfortable with how the Bible Society are positioning themselves amid the ruins of their flagship campaign. Because regardless of what they now claim, it is not true that they exercised extreme caution around the Quiet Revival. They trumpeted it from the rooftops as a definitive piece of research which had “proven” that there had been “dramatic growth” in churchgoing.

Now, they have sidestepped the core claim of their report and insisted that what they were really talking about all along was a vibe shift, a new cultural openness to Christianity which had been confirmed by countless anecdotes and other smaller bits of research. Here’s another of their FAQs:

‘Were the original findings simply wrong, or is the picture more complicated?

The error means that we can’t rely on the YouGov data, but the amount of corroborating evidence that’s emerged during the last year means that we’re still confident that there is a Quiet Revival going on, with more young people open to faith, a greater warmth towards Christianity, and churches across England and Wales reporting their own experience of growth.

While religious identity overall is shifting from ‘Christian’ to ‘no religion’, Christianity in Britain appears to be moving from a declining nominal faith to a committed and active one, as cultural shifts – especially among younger people – encourage a more proactive search for identity, meaning and purpose.’

Now, as it happens, I’m quite open to this idea. I too regularly speak to church leaders and others who report people walking in off the street wanting to know more about Christianity. It does feel like something is shifting in the culture. But this is a) very much not a ‘revival’ as that word has been used for centuries, and b) not the focus of the original Quiet Revival report which centred on the claim that regular churchgoing, contrary to all other evidence and predictions, had shot up in just a few years over the pandemic era.

It’s not good enough for the Bible Society, having discovered their core thesis is bunk, to then wriggle off the hook by suggesting that was not really what they were talking about anyway. If they had published their infamous survey back in April last year with an appropriate degree of caution and humility, I would have had no issue with it. If they had caveated it with the acknowledgement it was an enormous outlier to other data and needed further exploration, then they might have been able to survive this.

But that’s not the approach the Bible Society took. Quite the opposite. They came out all guns blazing and then only doubled down as the months passed. They set themselves up as the arbiters of revival in Britain and aggressively attacked anyone who questioned their thesis. They tied their entire organisation’s credibility to this one YouGov survey — and look how that’s turned out for them.

I feel particularly miffed about this as their team came specifically after me for daring to raise my, as it turns out, well-founded concerns. As detailed at length in this edition of the newsletter, Rob Barward-Symonns (one of the Bible Society’s researchers) published a quite personal attack after I had the temerity to write a piece in Premier Christianity pointing out that the Church of England’s own statistics entirely contradicted what the Bible Society said was happening in that denomination.

Barward-Symonns attacked me for a supposed lack of faith in the possibility of a revival, and said my position “offers little in the way of constructive progress, and instead leads to confusion and ultimately blocks opportunities for wider spiritual growth”. He also falsely accused me of inventing numbers for the Anglicans and other denominations, rather than admitting I had simply extrapolated them from the percentages given in his own report.

Behind the scenes, I know the Bible Society also sought to shut down Quiet Revival scepticism from being published in Christian outlets at all, even making veiled legal threats on occasion. And yet here we are, just a few short months later, and Barward-Symmons and his team have had to retract their entire report.

As it turns out, there actually was some merit in cross-referencing their single online survey with years of serious statistical analysis, let alone what internal denominational research was finding. It turns out I wasn’t a misanthropic faithless grump who was needlessly inhibiting the “spiritual growth” of other believers.

So no, I’m afraid the Bible Society don’t get to shamelessly pivot away after their central hypothesis has been proven to have been built on sand. We need some accountability here, and more than a little humility. Maybe we could begin with an apology, and go from there?

My feelings right now are pretty similar to those of David Voas, one of the UK’s leading statisticians of religion, who told the BBC:

“We’ve been telling them for the better part of a year that there were serious problems with the data - and even what those problems were likely to be - and they refused to engage with us. I don’t know whether to feel gratified by the vindication or annoyed by the amount of time I wasted in pointing out that the numbers were clearly wrong.”

Largely undeterred by this week’s humiliating climbdown, the Bible Society has now produced a new report: ‘The Quiet Revival - One year on’. I haven’t studied this in much detail, but it underlines the corner they’ve painted themselves into. By making the Quiet Revival so central to their raison d’etre and spending a year forcefully defending it against everyone, the Bible Society cannot now abandon the concept and admit they were wrong. So they have to keep on pushing the same Quiet Revival campaign even after its core premise has been exposed as false.

Now, what they are arguing for as Quiet Revival 2.0 is much less contentious (and also much less verifiable). They claim things like ‘culture is changing’ and Christian celebrities are more visible and unashamed than ever. They argue that while nominal Christianity is dwindling away, the remaining few are more committed to their faith. They suggest younger generations are more “spiritual” than their parents and grandparents, that Bible sales are booming, and that there’s been a rise in adult conversions. I would probably agree with all of these, and they are all genuine straws in the wind for a vibe shift.

But I do wonder if it might be better if the Bible Society took a back seat for a while and tried to rein in their relentless boosterism for church growth, having had their fingers very badly burned. Rather than dusting themselves down to relaunch the Quiet Revival 2.0, perhaps this is a moment to instead reflect on how exactly they ended up maligning other Christians for lacking faith in a report which they’ve now had to admit was built on nonsense.

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God did a new thing

The other big church news story of the week was obviously the enthronement, sorry, installation of Sarah Mullally at Canterbury Cathedral on Wednesday as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury.

There’s not masses to say about the service. It was broadcast live on TV and you can watch it back here if you’re so inclined. Even if the traditional liturgy and hymns leave you cold, there were lots of lovely swooping camera shots of the cathedral’s vaulting nave and some fun African dancing. We got the traditional moment when the new archbishop comes to the closed door of the cathedral and has to bang her pastoral staff on it three times to be let in. Inside, she then has to talk her way past three local schoolchildren before being allowed to process up the aisle and actually be installed in her cathedral.

There was a surprising amount of ecclesiastical and legal bumf to be got through, but otherwise it was notable just how many women were involved. Mullally, despite being a trailblazing pioneer for women’s ordination, is far from a tub-thumping radical feminist and rarely makes a big play of her gender. But it was a nice touch for her to have ensured a decent number of those taking part in the ceremonies were also women, including two of the co-presidents of the ecumenical body Churches Together in England, a bishop from Mexico who did a reading, a series of women from around the diocese who offered up prayers, and of course her new junior in the Diocese of Canterbury, the Bishop of Dover Rose Hudson-Wilkin.

It was also notably international: the Kyrie Eleison was sung in Urdu, the gospel acclamation was sung by an African choir (albeit based in Norfolk!), there was the reading from the Mexican bishop (done in Spanish) and also a prayer from the Archbishop of Central Africa in his native tongue of Bemba. Leaders from the 41 Anglican churches around the world were also invited, as ever, and Lambeth Palace confirmed that 26 primates (chief archbishops) would be present. Add to that three primates who wanted to come but couldn’t due to travel problems related to the Iran war. And a further three churches were represented by official delegations if not their primates.

So the number of those not there and presumably boycotting the ceremony on behalf of their churches in protest at Mullally and the C of E’s supposed liberalism was about nine — less than a quarter of the total Communion. The conservative faction leading the global opposition to Mullally, Gafcon, has never been precise about its membership (and indeed just because a primate is involved does not mean all of their bishops, vicars and congregants are equally keen to cut ties with Canterbury). But it is clear that at least some of those international Anglican churches whose leaders have been affiliated with Gafcon’s vociferous condemnation of the C of E were happy to be present to welcome in England’s new and very much pro-gay blessings archbishop.

This equivocation has raised the ire of some other conservatives, including the Anglican Futures blog which advocates for those leaving or considering leaving the C of E. Their quite angry post noted how many of the groups who had helped pay for the installation service were connected to the Episcopal Church in the United States, probably the most loathed of the liberal Western churches. And Mullally herself was installed by the Dean of Canterbury David Monteith, a gay cleric who openly lives with his civil partner. Anglican Futures wrote:

‘There can no longer be any doubt as to where the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s allegiances lie. Whether it is in accepting Monteith or the money, Sarah Mullally has shown she is entirely comfortable with aligning herself with the progressive agenda in the Church. The [service] will offer a clear sign of who has agreed to stand with Sarah Mullally at this time. It is a time when words and actions have to align.’

It would “make a mockery” of Gafcon’s new ‘Global Anglican Communion’ if those who attended the recent gathering in Abuja and issued their stern communique (see this newsletter for details) just a few weeks later were happily celebrating the installation of this kind of Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglican Futures conclude.

They go in hard in particular on the Bishop of Ebbsfleet Rob Munro, the sole conservative evangelical bishop in the C of E who has a special role to minister to parishes who have rejected their official bishop because they are female. And yet despite Munro being a close bedfellow of the Gafcon lot and attending all their meetings, he was not just part of the enthronement service, his bishopric (while national in scope) technically falls within Canterbury diocese and so Mullally will be his superior.

This highlights a perennial bugbear of the more hardline conservatives. They are infuriated at those who continue to have a foot in both camps, who pal around with Gafcon and put their names to denunciations of Western liberalism, before going off to join some official Communion jamboree and pose for selfies with these same ‘compromised’ bishops. And yet this fury continues to have no effect in forcing these more moderate conservative churches to finally pick a lane.

Once again, we are left to conclude that Gafcon is a bit of a paper tiger. Its bark is a lot worse than its bite, and it’s not really about to trigger a serious schism if it can’t even keep half its membership in line.

What of Mullally’s inaugural sermon then, delivered as she sat in the chair of St Augustine for the first time? As I said after her first ever presidential address at the General Synod last month, I don’t think Mullally is the kind of archbishop who will make a habit of including punchy or newsworthy comment in her public speaking. And as I expected, her sermon this week was similarly straight down the line and safe.

On the Feast of the Annunciation (which in the Christian calendar marks the day the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to tell her she would give birth to God’s son) Mullally chose as her text “For nothing will be impossible with God”.

She reflected on her pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, retracing a route once walked by her murdered predecessor Thomas Becket. And she drew parallels between Mary’s ‘Yes’ to God’s call as a teenage girl, and her own teenage conversion to faith:

“Mary followed in the footsteps of the faithful, her story resonates with the beautiful stories of women like Hannah in the Scriptures. Mary put her hope in God’s future. She trusted that He was with her, and through Mary, God did a new thing!”

So too must the church today put its hope in God doing a new thing, she said:

“In the incarnation, we see God becoming one of us — and this gives me such hope for the church. In the ordinary and extraordinary life of the church, we see God’s hand at work — the church rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck in, where God is already at work: in the local and the global.”

She made the necessary mention of those harmed by the church, holding “victims and survivors in our hearts and in our prayers” and pledging her commitment to “truth, compassion, justice and action”. And she ended by urging the 2,000 people listening inside the cathedral and the many thousands more watching on TV go on their own journey of saying “Yes” to God, and start by visiting a church or speaking to a vicar.

“You can respond to God’s invitation with words as simple as the words of Mary: ‘Here I am.’ As I begin my ministry today as Archbishop of Canterbury, I say again to God: ‘Here I am.’ May we have the audacity to believe in the promises of God: for with Him, nothing will be impossible.”

The final thing to note here didn’t actually happen during the service but just before. Prince William, who was a prominent guest in Canterbury Cathedral, did some very deliberate briefing to the media a few days before the installation, effectively setting out his stall when it comes to the church.

The monarch is, of course, the supreme governor of the C of E, thanks to Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 16th century. In practice, this means almost nothing — they turn up to formally open each newly-elected synod once every five years, they rubber-stamp legislation, clergy all take vows of obedience to them, and that’s about it.

But the connection between crown and church retains a symbolic significance. Indeed, the monarch is obliged by law, dating back to 1701, to be an Anglican. They couldn’t even marry a Catholic until that bit of the Act of Settlement 1701 was quietly amended in 2013. In the latter decades of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, there was lots of ink spilled over her son and heir Charles’s faith. He had hinted that he wanted to expand his traditional role to become defender of faith (as opposed to Defender of the Faith, a title ironically first given to Henry VIII by the Pope for his denunciation of Martin Luther). There was some nervousness that unlike his quietly devoted Christian mother, Charles might be the first modern monarch to move away from an explicitly Christian kingship.

As it turned out, most of that was needless worry. Charles III as king has made no moves to re-imagine his role vis-a-vis the C of E. Indeed, while he has a very different and more inquiring and wide-ranging faith than his mother, those who know him say he is very much a churchgoing, believing Christian who takes his spiritual role seriously (for more on the faith of the King, you could read this article I wrote at the time of his accession).

Now, attention is beginning to shift to Charles’s son and heir, Prince William. Because while the nervousness around Charles was that his personal spirituality was eccentric and far-reaching, the anxiety around William is that he has no faith at all. William, as far as we can tell, is much more like the average 40-something man in Britain: he just doesn’t really think about church at all.

And so, aware of these mutterings and knowing his 77-year-old cancer survivor father will not be on the throne forever, William chose this week to make his position clear on the church he will one day lead. An extensive briefing was given to both the BBC and the Sunday Times, in which anonymous royal aides sought to “draw a line in the sand” and shut down the whisperings about his unsuitability to become supreme governor of the C of E.

Thankfully, these aides were were honest enough to not try to pretend their master was secretly a serious Christian who spends every Sunday in church. But he does, they insisted, have a “quiet faith” and wished to establish “a strong and meaningful bond with the church and its leadership”. One official told The Times (the same briefing was also given to the BBC):

“His feeling is, ‘I might not be at church every day but I believe in it, I want to support it and this is an important aspect of my role and the next role and I will take it very seriously, in my own way’.

Those who know him well recognise that his connection to the church, and to the sense of duty that comes with it, runs deep and is grounded in something personal and sincere. Faith, service and responsibility are themes that have long shaped the role he will one day inherit, and they are things he approaches in his own thoughtful way.

At a time when institutions can be seen simply through a social or cultural lens, he understands that the Church’s role goes beyond this. It is not only part of the nation’s heritage, but a living expression of faith, rooted in prayer, compassion and a belief in grace and redemption.”

He wanted to approach the church as his “authentic self”, respecting its traditions while believing it must be able to “speak to modern Britain” and “remain relevant and connected to the people they serve”. To that end, William has recently sat down with Mullally to begin building up that relationship (apparently aided by the fact they are both Aston Villa fans). The Times also reported that Mullally’s predecessor Justin Welby had repeatedly put out feelers to William but got nowhere, and speculated this may have been because the prince’s team thought Welby had got too close to his wayward brother Harry and his mistrusted wife Meghan after officiating at their 2018 wedding.

Mullally has warmly welcomed the new ties with the heir to the throne, however. A Lambeth Palace source told The Times the incoming archbishop had a lot in common with the man who will be king:

“The prince and the archbishop are both passionate about the church not being a private members’ club and making it accessible and relevant. The improving relationship is wonderful and enables us to help defend and understand the prince’s position. We would love the [future] supreme governor to be at church every Sunday, but one has to be practical around the fact that they are a couple with young children.”

Sidenote, but as the father of a young child myself, it’s great to know I’ve got official blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury herself to skip church on Sundays. I’ll hold that one in my back pocket in case my vicar ever questions my commitment.

Anyway, what are we to make of this charm offensive? It’s clearly designed to settle the horses and calm down any chatter about William’s accession being the death knell of the C of E as we have known it. And it can only be a good thing if the heir to the throne is on speaking terms with the woman who may well crown him one day.

And yet William’s subtle and coded intervention does also effectively confirm what was suspected about him. Unlike his grandmother and father, he doesn’t have a living faith in any meaningful way. He has no intention of going to church. He’s respectful of the C of E and its traditions and is not about to abdicate from his role as supreme governor, but why would he? It doesn’t actually demand anything from him that he cannot offer as a typically sympathetic but apathetic nominal English Anglican.

Yes, there may be some authentic overlap on the themes of service, charity and responsibility, but for those Anglicans to whom it is important that their supreme governor actually shares their faith in Christ as Lord, prepare to get disappointed.

For the rest of us, that may not really matter. It was nice that the Queen would quite shamelessly use her Christmas speech to evangelise to the nation and was clearly a wholehearted follower of Jesus. But it wouldn’t have really mattered if she wasn’t. The current King’s more unusual if equally heartfelt faith doesn’t really impinge on the church either. I don’t even know what the spirituality of kings and queens in the more distant past was, and it didn’t affect the C of E much either way as far as I know.

Perhaps for some more conservative Anglicans there might be just a hint of a red flag in William’s vague ambitions to encourage the C of E to retain its “relevance” to modern Britain. Is this code for “I want to push the church to become more aligned with my own 21st century social liberalism”? I doubt it, but even if it was, the King has almost zero ability to steer the doctrine of the church and nothing we know about William suggests he is preparing some huge unconstitutional intervention to remake the C of E once he takes the throne. Quite the opposite in fact — he’s clearly going to remain a sympathetic arms-length distance and let the church wind its civic national role down gradually (just as the monarchy has done), while doing nothing dramatic which might startle the horses.

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Faith under fire: Following Christ in the military, with Maj Gen Tim Cross

Tim Cross joined the British army as a teenager, and served in Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Kuwait, the Balkans and eventually commanded tens of thousands during the Iraq war. But how did he reconcile his faith in Jesus with his job to lead men into battle, and, if necessary, to kill? In this episode we reflect with Tim on his time in uniform and his conviction that we need more Christians in the military, not less. And we consider our contemporary volatile and violent world, the current wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, and what our faith has to say in the face of all of this.

Click below to find it on your podcast app of choice and subscribe to get new episodes every Wednesday sent straight to your device:

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Quickfire

• The eccentric American tech billionaire Peter Thiel is still doing his weird private lecturers on the antichrist, and has even brought that circus to Rome, prompting a desperate attempt by Catholic universities and the Vatican to distance themselves from him. Thiel gave his lectures at the same Catholic university where Pope Leo studied years ago, although that institution has insisted they were not at all involved in the event.

• The ripples from last week’s attack on the Trafalgar Square iftar continue: the Bishop of Kirkstall Arun Arora wrote a piece in the Guardian defending the event and noting he and other Christian ministers regularly led acts of public worship across Britain without once being accused of “acts of domination”. The Bishop of Willesden Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy (who leads on interfaith stuff for the C of E) has also put out a statement, describing the “open, generous and peaceful” iftar as a “moment of hospitality”, not a “signal of division”. Meanwhile, Christians of all camps in Liverpool quite successfully counter-protested a far-right Christian Nationalist march. But in Lincolnshire, a Reform MP has complained to Sarah Mullally that his local C of E primary school encouraged the children to perform Islamic prayers during an RE lesson. The local diocese has insisted the teacher simply showed the kids how to do some of the movements involved in ritual prayers and said it was not an act of worship (albeit not part of the lesson plan per se!).

• A church in the Netherlands believes it has found the long-lost remains of the famous French musketeer D’Artagnan, later immortalised in Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Three Musketeers. It has long been known the real Count d’Artagnan, the right hand man of France’s 17th century Sun King Louis XIV, died during a siege in Maastricht, but now the church of St Peter and St Paul have stumbled across a skeleton buried under their altar and are “99%” sure it is him.

• A very interesting long read on the Church of England and its future from The Economist’s 1843 magazine. Lots of this will be familiar to Critical Friend readers, but it’s well put together and also encouraging that the mainstream media continue to think the church is interesting enough to be worth writing about at such length.

• Pete Hegseth, the disturbing Christian Nationalist who currently runs America’s Department of Defence War, has been holding evangelical worship and prayer services inside the Pentagon for some time now. But at a recent one he prayed a frankly alarming prayer, urging God’s violent intervention in the US’s current war on Iran: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Yikes.

• Speaking of Hegseth, his pastor Brooks Potteiger recently appeared to pray for the (spiritual) death of the Christian Democratic politician James Talarico. Potteiger got into a discussion with another Christian Nationalist podcaster, who cited the “imprecatory psalms” against the progressive pro-LGBT Talarico, ending by praying that God would kill him. Potteiger agreed, saying he wanted Talarico “crucified with Christ” (although later clarifying in a statement he meant this in the sense of conversion not literal death). Talarico tweeted back that he loved his right-wing antagonists despite their strong language, and added: “Jesus loves. Christian Nationalism kills.”

• An epic Vatican corruption trial of a cardinal has been stunningly re-opened after an appeals tribunal declared a mistrial on technical grounds and quashed the conviction of Angelo Becciu and others. Becciu (once seen as a possible future pope) had been convicted in 2023 over a botched €350m investment in a London property, accused by the Catholic Church of extorting tens of millions in fees and commissions. The defence has long claimed the trial was unfair, pointing to a series of secret decrees made by Pope Francis to speed the prosecution, and they have now won the right to a new trial, raising the possibility of more Vatican secrets leaking out during the blockbuster proceedings.

• A survey has suggested a majority of the British public want to remove the C of E from its traditional role in schooling. Thousands of state-funded schools retain a Christian tradition and ethos connected to the church, which can have a role in admissions, but the poll found 61% agreed no religion should have control over state schools, compared to just 21% who backed the church retaining its historic position.

• The BBC has published a long exploration of the rise of anti-abortion activism in the UK, which they report cannot be easily disentangled from the growth of Christianity among young people too. The role of Christian activists from America, including the now assassinated Charlie Kirk, is also highlighted, as well as money flowing across the Atlantic too from the well-funded US pro-life movement.

• And on the subject of right-wing Christian pressure groups, here’s an investigation into Christian Concern, a ultra-conservative evangelical group which lobbies against everything from abortion to single-sex spaces for women, and is also involved in high-profile legal cases trying to stop doctors from removing life support from brain-dead children.

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