Theo Hobson | The Spectator columnists & writers

When I was 17 I heard the name Dostovesky, and was enthralled. Just the name felt so glamorously intellectual, so deep. I began to read some of his novels, and my hunch was vindicated. A bit later I delved into his ideas, and my admiration became more nuanced. I partly admired his defiance of the rational humanist arrogance of the West, but I was also wary of his reactionary mystical nationalism, his faith in the anti-liberal Russian soul. It seems that a lot of religiously minded intellectuals struggle to get past stage one. They are so taken with the flinty glamour of this writer that their critical faculties atrophy. They allow their aesthetic admiration to influence their religious politics. Rowan Williams is a theologian I admire for the most part, but he has been overly romantic about Russian Orthodoxy, as if its vision of religion and politics in perfect harmony is more authentic than modern western Christianity.

Louis Theroux and the problem with sex scenes

You know the restaurant scene in Notting Hill? The Hugh Grant character defends the honour of his magical girlfriend when she is the butt of some sexist banter from some vulgar brutes, who don’t realise she is sitting round the corner. In many languages, says one, the word for actress is the same as the word for prostitute. Hugh just can’t bear it: he confronts them with an angry eye-flutter, telling them to bloody well shut up, and then Magic Girlfriend appears and tells them that they have small penises. It’s one of those scenes in which Richard Curtis helps us to understand what is good and what is bad these days. Well, at the risk of resembling one of the nasty sexists in this scene, I want to suggest that the new orthodoxy has its limits.

The trouble with Putin’s Christian Orthodoxy

If you are worried about the uncertain fate of democracy in today’s world, what should you do? Become a human rights advocate, maybe, or a campaigning journalist. Or maybe you should consider becoming a Protestant missionary. In today’s Times, Danny Finkelstein draws our attention to the democracy index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It tells us that democracy has been in decline since 2006, and in recent years it has downgraded some of the most seemingly solid democracies, including the US, from ‘full democracies’ to ‘flawed democracies’. I had a look at the top ten ‘full democracies’. Maybe I am biased to notice such things, but it struck that me that eight of last year’s top ten have something in common.

Spectator Out Loud

Douglas Murray, Nyrola Elimä, Theo Hobson

27 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Douglas Murray, Nyrola Elimä, Theo Hobson

27 min listen

On this week's episode, we’ll hear from Douglas Murray on why he thinks that the Coronavirus is over. (00:51)Next, Nyrola Elimä on her family’s experiences as Uighurs living under the rule of the CCP. (08:27)And finally, Theo Hobson on why the different factions of the Church of England need to come together. (16:54)Produced and presented by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

Divided we stand: Anglicans need to agree to disagree

Two years ago the Church of England decided to delay any public discussion of its deepest division, over homosexuality, until 2022. So this might be the year in which an already troubled institution has a dramatic public meltdown. Or it might be the year in which the Church of England sorts itself out a bit. Yes, really. Stranger miracles have happened. There are grounds for hope, and not just on the gay issue. The Church has a core strength that it could draw on, and a core identity that could stand it in good stead, though one it is weirdly shy to assert. First let’s admit that things haven’t been going so well, even while the gay issue has been kicked into the long grass. The pandemic has obviously been a nightmare for church attendance and finances, but it also deepened a dangerous ideological rift.

A Christmas prayer

Dear God, Please help me to keep it together this Christmas. For it is a testing time as well as a joyful one. Help me to make sense of this season, in which the wonderful story of the birth of your Son jostles with all sorts of ghastliness. Give me the calm fortitude to bear the advertising, the tinsel, the pressure to be a perfect family, meaning a self-satisfied bourgeois bunch, worshipping at the shrine of their miserable materialism. Help me not to be too much of a fool at Christmas parties. They are smaller and fewer this year but there are still opportunities to put my foot in it with an inappropriate joke or a stray comment that shows someone what I think of them. Help me not to flirt too much with that foxy young mum down the road.

Katharine Birbalsingh is right: children do have original sin

When my son was about six he heard something at school about slavery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was someone that someone else owned and ordered around and probably mistreated. I waited for the proper response of moral horror to show on his innocent features. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’ I offer this recollection in support of Katharine Birbalsingh’s supposedly controversial opinion that children are not naturally full of the right moral impulses. ‘Britain’s strictest head teacher’ has bolstered her reputation by saying that children are born with ‘original sin’ and must be ‘habituated into choosing good over evil.’ This opinion immediately offended the great and the good, as if her point of view was equivalent to advocating the thumb-screw.

Why I’m paying my daughter to go to church

It would be weird if my 13-year-old daughter didn’t say she was an atheist. It’s what you say in our culture when you’re that age. To be honest it would creep me out a bit if she was all pious. But she is getting confirmed into the Anglican faith. This is a piece of hoop-jumping that her parents have decided to require of their children. I went for coffee with the vicar to ask if my daughter could join the classes. I admitted that she was a bit reluctant. In fact, it was a mixed picture. Whenever I mentioned confirmation she professed her atheism, but when I didn’t mention it for a couple of weeks she asked when the classes were starting. She is not entirely averse to attention, even if it is directed at her eternal soul.

The Edition

Cop out: Boris’s battle to save the climate summit

32 min listen

The Edition

Cop out: Boris’s battle to save the climate summit

32 min listen

Do I have a right to be offended by threesomes?

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night for worrying about the future of liberalism. So I got up and put the telly on. Maybe there would be something soothing on, to help me forget my worries. There was a show on Channel 4 called My First Threesome. The voiceover explained that lockdown had led many of us to be more sexually adventurous, and even to explore ‘what is for many of us the ultimate fantasy’. Before we met some enthusiastic adventurers, a brief historical segment explained that many wise ancient cultures saw sex with more than one person as a perfectly natural desire. ‘Then for centuries religion and shame pushed it to the realm of fantasy.’ Then we briefly heard form a couple of bouncy participants, one of whom cheerily said that sex with two people was doubly pleasurable; another said that the orgasm he had in a threesome exceeded any other he had ever had.

‘Farming is hungry work’: The Yorkshire Shepherdess on life with nine children

The Yorkshire Shepherdess was raised in suburban Huddersfield, not a sheep in sight. Amanda Owen was a romantic type who pored over pastoral images in library books – by chance, one image of some men at a cattle auction contained her future husband, Clive. She determined to head for the moors and, like some Thomas Hardy heroine, make her way in the windswept world of sheep farming. She is now the nation’s chief supplier of pastoral, today’s version of a rural-hymning poet, warbling the woodnotes wild. She is also an icon of motherhood, having produced no less than nine young farmhands. For many of us, Our Yorkshire Farm, the Channel 5 programme that mixes family and farming, was an ideal escape from the stresses of lockdown life.

Does ‘white privilege’ exist?

On Wednesday Radio 4 aired a programme called White Mischief, which promised to trace ‘where whiteness came from and how its power has remained elusive.’ It asked whether white privilege existed. Or rather it pretended to ask. It assumed that it does. Instead of directly admitting that it was putting forward one point of view, it was one of those annoying programmes that affects a sort of light-hearted neutrality, and vaguely claims to be moving away from the unhelpfully limited conversations we have been having so far. So instead of soberly setting out the issue, it began with a jokey clip of Grayson Perry hooting with laughter at some wise brave insight he had just had, and then darting off sidewise into some sociology.

Why can’t men write about sex?

Not long ago I was a regular Tinder user. Having heard that gingers were romantically incompatible, I decided to mix work and pleasure and put this controversial claim to the test. I set up a sort of interview-date with a nice young lady called Laura, a former international gymnast who was working as a waitress, but looking for more permanent work. She sported a lovely glossy dark ginger mane. We weren’t getting on too badly, but not much of a story there. Luckily there was scope for deepening the research: we went back to mine, and a bit of horizontal research definitively established that the alleged incompatibility of gingers is utter nonsense, doubtless put about by jealous eugenicists. None of the above is true.

Can we talk about Emma Raducanu’s Christianity?

I’ve just been looking at photographs of Emma Raducanu again, this time focusing on her upper chest. She usually wears a pendant cross, which suggests that she is a Christian. Yes I know that some people wear crosses for fashion reasons, but I don’t think she’s in that camp. Maybe it’s more a sign of cultural than religious allegiance, maybe a treasured gift from a grandparent? Or maybe a sign of solidarity with China’s persecuted Christians. To what extent is it legitimate to inquire into this? The orthodoxy is, not at all, you meddling creep. It’s her business, and it’s utterly irrelevant to her tennis success. But it is not too out-of-order to ponder the symbols that people in the public eye choose to wear.

Justin Welby is missing a trick on climate change

Justin Welby urges us, echoing Deuteronomy, to 'choose life', so that our children may live. It is an apt use of scripture, in the face of the climate emergency. But his performance on Radio 4 this morning was far from impressive. The Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of the need for ‘meaningful sacrifices’, but when asked which ones he was making he sounded a bit muddled, as if he was not ready for such an obvious question. His first answer was ‘recycling and all that’, a locution with an air of irritation, like a man too often nagged to take the bins out. Asked about meat, he said he had cut down, but mainly for health and financial reasons. (Can’t Lambeth Palace afford daily sausages?) Then he spoke about the Church’s gradual divestment from the extractive industries: make me carbon-free, Lord, but not yet.

The fight for the future of the Church of England

When the Church of England talks of trying new things, I prick up my ears. Back in 2004 it announced the need for ‘fresh expressions’ — new ventures alongside the normal parish system. Maybe some vibrant arty experimentation would ensue, I felt. But the main result was lots of nimble little evangelical pop-up churches, mostly lay-led. The idea of innovation seems to energise the evangelicals, although their version of innovation doesn’t always energise me. On Easter Day this year I dragged my kids to church, but there was no room at the socially distanced inn. The evangelicals round the corner let us in, so I had a glimpse of a style of Anglicanism that I normally avoid. And I quickly remembered why I avoid it: I don’t enjoy being treated like a five-year-old.

Is there anything more uplifting than Our Yorkshire Farm?

I’m not sure what to say about Our Yorkshire Farm, a documentary on the utterly redeemed Channel 5, that doesn’t sound hyperbolic to the point of idolatry and slight nuttiness. If there is anything else in our culture that is as wholesome, pure and good as this, please tell me about it. Amid all the murk and sleaze and bigotry and inverted bigotry and tired complacent mediocrity, there is a family that knows how to live well - a family that has more or less restored the whole notion of virtue. Yes, virtue! Amid all the crappy Netflix shows, there is Sidney, who is learning to run his first sheepdog. Amid all the stale chat about how we’re going to learn lessons from the pandemic, maybe, there is Miles, who looks after the chickens.

Meghan, Harry and the rise of a new religion

The Meghan and Harry show is a window into our spiritual predicament — in Britain, America and beyond. Through breaking free from royal life, amid much unhappiness, they have acquired a powerful story of self-realisation. This is our culture’s new idea of the spiritual life. What exactly is this new idea? How does it relate to what came before? Is it replacing the old or is its appeal limited to certain sectors of society? The rise of the new spirituality has been gradual. We can neatly chart its rise with reference to Harry’s mother, Princess Diana. First we might pause to ask: why is the British royal family such an important showcase for this shift? It is a place of intense psychological pressure and of spiritual significance.

A dialogue concerning modern feminism

To mark International Women’s Day, I decided to attempt a conversation about feminism with my wife. I reproduce it, or a version of it, here. I should say that I offered her the chance to write her own words, but she declined, reminding me of her low opinion of journalism. You can ventriloquise me, she said — isn’t that the sort of thing you claim to be quite good at? To put my opening words in context, I had just brought her a cup of tea in bed. Me: I know it’s early in the morning, but what is feminism? Wife: Go on then. Me: What? Wife: I suppose you have some new theory you want to tell me about. Go on then, let’s see where you’ve got to. Me: Well, OK. I was thinking, feminism seems to be a mix of two things.

Why Meghan and the monarchy were bound to clash

Was Harry and Meghan's departure from royal life inevitable? At the heart of our monarchy is an ideal of serving the public good that is not the same as the currently dominant form of progressive idealism espoused by the likes of Meghan. It is not the same as it, and when it comes down to it, it is not compatible with it. The British monarchy’s ideal of the public good is fairly vague, fairly flexible. But it entails a basic respect for tradition. And it entails the ideal of self-sacrifice. To serve the good means accepting constraints, accepting that you might not get what you want. It means accepting the possibility that you might have to suffer, even in some sense give your life for the sake of the public good.

How the Church of England can bounce back from its Covid crisis

The bishop of Manchester has warned that many Church of England churches are unlikely to survive the pandemic. The normal trickle of church closures (around 25 per year) is set to become a steady stream in the next few years. 'I suspect the pace (of closures) will increase as a result of Covid', the Right Rev David Walker has said. It will be a sad loss to the nation’s social fabric if hundreds of churches become flats, or offices, or are demolished. But there is another possibility. The pandemic has highlighted our need to invest in local communities, and this is an opportunity to do so. The government should give every church that cannot afford to maintain itself the chance to double up as a community centre, owned and maintained by the local council.

Is America now a Catholic country?

'It’s like being in church', said my teenage son. It was a bit — two bursts of prayer, a religious song, a long sermon, and a general air of community-reverence, inclusive piety. We were watching Biden’s inauguration last week, grateful for a mid-afternoon break from other screens. These are quasi-religious events — I knew that. But this time it seemed more pointedly religious than ever. Let’s get back to the true faith, after a spell of gold-plated idolatry. And, if you knew how to spy the signs, this ceremony reflected the new man’s Roman Catholicism — a Jesuit leading the prayers, a quote from Saint Augustine, songs from an Italian-American and a Latina. Has Catholicism become a natural — or even the natural — form of American religion? Or is there still a fundamental mismatch between the two grand ideas? Does Biden represent a liberal Catholicism that has routed Protestant doubts and internalised the American idea? Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for some sweeping historical summaries.

The problem with Sex and the City

So Sex and The City is returning under a new name, and there is a new Russell Davies drama about gay experience. When will television dare to address the experience of heterosexual men with even an ounce of sensitivity? My thoughts were prompted by the American drama A Teacher (currently on BBC iplayer), about an affair between a teenager and his English teacher. On paper, it is sensitive to the male experience, for the conclusion is that he is traumatised by the affair - despite lots of back-slapping from his mates, he is depicted as a victim of abuse. But this conclusion is disingenuous, and so lacks credibility. For he is, from the start, a cool stud, a sexually fluent dude, and the titillating trysts are predictably porny.

Britain needs to revive its festivals

Happy Epiphany! The coming of the wise men means that this strange Christmas is finally over. It used to be a twelve day holiday, but nowadays there’s at least a month of build-up. I have nothing against Christmas (except that it brings out the most hideous bourgeois side of us), but I do worry that it has become the only game in town. Our festive culture is too Christmas-heavy. The phrase ‘the festive period’ says it all. We need lots of little festive periods. In Japan they have about one a month. To Japanese ears, ’the festive period’ would sound as strange as ‘the cultural period’ or ‘the meaningful period’. For festivals are essential to authentic culture, and we have allowed almost all of ours to wither away.

Liberals should stop patronising believers

An editorial in the Guardian on Friday suggests that this year may be a good one for liberal Christians, and gives them a little pat on the back. The suggestion is based on four things: the churches have shown their social relevance during the pandemic; the incoming American president is a liberal Catholic; in his latest book Pope Francis has called for a ‘new humanism’; the leader of the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I, has spoken in favour of social justice. It also notes that illiberal Christianity is going strong, citing Poland’s illiberalism on abortion, and Trump’s recent support from evangelicals, but it opts for optimism: liberal Christians have a vital role to play in creating 'a less polarised, more fraternal public square'.

Christmas raises the most basic political question

A few years ago, around this time of year, I overheard a nice exchange in a charity shop (I was doing my Christmas shopping, I suppose) outside of London, in a middle-England market town. A woman came in, a bit flustered, had a quick rummage through some hangers, and then asked the lady at the till: ‘Have you got anything for a camel? My son’s a camel this year.’ Her meaning was clear, both to the shop assistant and to me: her son was in a nativity play and she needed to cobble together a costume. It gave me a little warm sense of shared meaning, and tradition: something very similar might have happened in these parts 100 years ago – or maybe even 800 years ago. How lovely, to see an ancient festive tradition going strong.

What words are off limits in the race debate?

Greg Clarke, the chairman of the Football Association, stood down this week after saying some politically incorrect things. Chief among his offences, it seems, was his use of the word ‘coloured’, when referring to black players. On the Today programme, an interviewee explained that this term was deeply offensive to ‘people of colour’, as it reminded them of the era of segregation. I can’t have been alone in noticing that the offensive term is similar to the approved term that she used, and in being struck by the apparent irrationality of this. A few weeks ago, the headmistress of Benenden, Samantha Price, got in trouble for giving a talk about racism in which she used the term ‘negro’. But she was using the word in a critical, questioning way, pointing out that it used to be inoffensive; Martin Luther King used it to refer to himself, for example.

Rory Stewart has avoided the traps Boris’s critics usually fall into

In this week’s TLS Rory Stewart reviews Tom Bower’s biography of Boris Johnson. He doesn’t say much about the actual book, but it’s one of the most important articles on the prime minister I’ve read for a long time. Just now, in place of ‘the prime minister’ I wrote ‘Boris’, deleted it, then wrote ‘Johnson’ and deleted it. This sums up the issue: does one buy into the charm, or conspicuously resist it? Just in the act of naming him, neutrality feels impossible: one is either too matey, or too frosty. This stands for a wider decision: does one smile at his wit, or does one wag one’s finger? Few of us want to seem like prigs who don’t get the joke, who don’t know how to lighten up. And Johnson’s stroke of genius is to edge his critics into that deadly corner.

I’m bored of Martin Amis

To say that Martin Amis exemplifies the elevation of style over substance is like saying that Donald Trump is a bit vulgar. An author who makes his name by elevating style over substance so dramatically, I suggest, cannot come back from it. It is a one-way act, like losing your virginity. In recent years, Amis has tried to balance style and substance, to offer wintry-wise reflection amid the verbal fireworks. Reviews of his latest book, Inside Story, suggest that the effort continues. But it doesn’t work. It’s like trying to unsell your soul to the devil. I derived much pleasure from him as a teenager. What a thrill, to find a form of literature so streetwise! Like many other bookish lads, I idolised, for a brief phase, this fearless punkish aesthete with his hyperactive hyperbolic gift.

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