The first essay in "The Residue" series explores how Christianity adapts to secularization, evolving from dogma to cultural symbolism while retaining residual authority despite declining belief. As church attendance dwindles, Christianity's influence persists through inherited practices and societal norms, indicating a shift from active conviction to ambient legitimacy.
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The Flexible Absolute
The post critiques the political use of "Christian values," highlighting its dual nature: one inclusive and warm, the other exclusionary and rigid. It argues that such vagueness benefits political agendas, allowing claims to remain unfalsifiable while evading accountability. Ultimately, it asserts that this flexible framework lacks true moral authority.
The Good Old Days
The text critiques the notion of restoring Britain's Christian heritage by questioning what specific values are being sought. It highlights the recent Makin Review, which uncovered historic abuse within the Church of England and questioned the moral framework that allowed such concealment. It argues that compassion and care are human values independent of theology.
The God They Don’t Believe In
British politics currently faces a form of dishonesty regarding claims of the nation's Christian heritage, as highlighted by Reform UK's platform. The assertion that Britain remains a Christian country lacks clarity due to conflicting interpretations within Christianity itself. Politicians use Christian values as a cultural brand, providing a guise for nationalist beliefs rather than genuine theological discourse.
The Rules That Never Applied to the Rule-Maker
Religion says God is the source of morality. But what happens when the same God stands outside the rules he gives to everyone else. Using the Amalekite story in 1 Samuel 15, this piece argues that divine morality collapses into something much more familiar: power issuing commands downward while reserving every exception for itself.
The Neutral State and the Unearned Throne
When the law places Scientology, Christianity and secular humanism in the same protected category, it is not blessing them all. It is refusing to rank them. The older religions are not being honoured. They are being neutralised.
What Religions Know About Each Other
Religious institutions are often at their clearest when exposing invention, revision, and self-interest in rival faiths. The privilege they claim is simpler and uglier: the right to inspect rival revelation as history while presenting their own history as revelation.
Scientology and the Machinery Made Visible
Scientology is often dismissed as a pseudo religion, a fake faith too recent and too obvious to be taken seriously. That is a mistake. If an institution claims religious authority, grounds that authority in claims that cannot be publicly tested, and seeks the deference or protection religion is granted, then it belongs inside the criticism. What makes Scientology useful is not that it is uniquely strange, but that it makes the machinery unusually visible.
When God Changes His Mind: The LDS, the FLDS, and the Mechanism Made Visible
The LDS and the FLDS expose a mechanism religion would rather keep hidden: doctrine declared eternal until political pressure makes revision necessary, at which point capitulation is renamed revelation.
When Christianity Borrows Its Morality
Christianity likes to present its moral retreats as wisdom, growth, and deeper understanding. They are better read as concessions. Again and again, Christian institutions have abandoned old certainties only after secular moral reasoning made those certainties shameful. That is not proof of divine depth. IThat is not proof of divine depth. It is evidence that Christian institutions have repeatedly had to import moral correction from the wider world and then disguise the importation as insight.