We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Justin Brierley’s article from our Easter issue on the revival of Christianity.
Tom Holland recently invited me to attend a service of Evensong with him at London’s oldest church, St Bartholomew the Great.
Holland, who co-hosts the phenomenally popular The Rest is History podcast, has been a regular congregant for a few years. He began attending while researching Dominion, his bestselling book which outlined the way the 1st-century Christian revolution has irrevocably shaped the 21st-century West’s moral imagination. It also recounts how Holland, a secular liberal westerner who had lost any vestige of faith by his teenage years, came to realise he was still essentially Christian in terms of his beliefs about human rights, equality and freedom.
Christianity is not just a useful lifeboat for stranded intellectuals. If it isn’t literally true, it isn’t valuable
Holland is not alone as an agnostic trying out church again.
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