Well-Tempered: Cultivating Faith in a World Gone Mad

I offer here the first of what I suspect will be a regular series of reflections that will seek to teach something crucial about the Christian faith in the context of a world going mad. But I write these words with some hesitation, not because I lack conviction but because the act of speaking plainly about faith in our disordered world has become a perilous thing. We live in an age where discourse has been stripped of patience, where the habit of reflection is drowned out by the clamour of scoring points, and where to think aloud is to risk condemnation from all sides. Even so, silence is no option when the faith we hold dear is being distorted into something unrecognizable—something wholly at odds with its true nature.

I have spent my life tending, in my own small way, to the work of the Gospel, much as a farmer tends his fields. This work has taught me that faith, like the soil, must be cultivated with care, watered with truth, and guarded against encroaching weeds. It’s no surprise, then, that I find myself troubled by the present state of things. The Christianity that many are embracing—one that seeks power above service, glory above humility, and dominion above stewardship—is not the faith of the Gospels. "Whoever wants to be first must be slave of all" (Mark 10.44). It is something else entirely, a new heresy for an old world.

I don’t say this as one who wishes to scold or to divide. I’m neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary, but a man bound to an older way of seeing, one that finds wisdom in the turning of the seasons and in the slow labour of knowing a place and its people. I am, in short, a conservative in the truest sense—not as the world has come to use the term, but as one who seeks to conserve what is good, to nurture what is true, and to defend what is beautiful. And it’s precisely this instinct for conservation that compels me to write on subjects I’ve previously left to others.

We’ve seen, in these past years, a great confusion taking root among those who claim the name of Christ. It’s a confusion bred of anger, fear, and resentment that equates faith with nationalism, that mistakes cruelty for strength, that trades the humility of the Beatitudes for the bluster of power. It doesn’t seek to nurture the fruits of the Spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5.22-23)—but to use diabolical tools, like “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions”, (Gal. 5.20) to achieve its aims. It’s a Christianity that has forgotten the Sermon on the Mount, that has ceased to love its enemies, that has lost the capacity for mercy. It is, in short, a Christianity that has turned away from Christ.

And yet, as a conservative, I understand why so many have been drawn into its fold. There’s a deep longing in the human heart for belonging, for security, for a sense of order in a world that seems ever more chaotic. There is a justified anger at the failures of an elite class that has grown distant from the lives of ordinary people. There is a hunger for meaning in a culture that often feels rootless and adrift. These are real needs, real wounds. And they’ve been exploited by those who would twist the faith into something unrecognizable—something that serves the ambitions of the powerful rather than the call of the Gospel to “proclaim good news to the poor…bind up the brokenhearted…proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners” (Is. 61.1).

For my part, I have never found my place in the great battle between left and right as they are presently defined. My sympathies are with neither globalism nor nativist zeal. I find myself at home in older things—in the rootedness of place, in the obligation of neighbourliness, in hospitality to strangers, in the quiet and steady work of tending to what is good. If I have any political creed at all, it is the creed of the Hobbit: to love simple things, to distrust the grand designs of those who would remake the world in their image, to seek the well-being of one’s own small corner of the earth.

This, I believe, is the true vocation of the Christian in an age such as ours. Not to seek dominion, but to love the place where we are set. Not to rage against imagined enemies, but to care for the neighbours around us. Not to grasp at power, but to live in such a way that the truth of Christ is evident in our lives. This is not the work of slogans or manifestos nor of political muscle and economic clout. It’s the work of patience, of cultivation, of faithfulness to the small and the ordinary.

Some will say that such an approach is naïve, that the world is too far gone for such modest things. But I don’t believe it. The world has always been far gone; human folly and hubris are not new. "There is nothing new under the sun" (Eccl. 1:9), except, perhaps, the depth of our forgetting. We have forgotten the wisdom of limits. We have forgotten the discipline of listening. We have forgotten that love is not an argument to be won but a way of being in the world. And so our task is one of remembering—of restoring to our lives and to our faith that which has been lost.

I do not expect that that my various posts will find easy agreement. To write anything in these times is to invite misunderstanding. But I offer them nonetheless, not as a partisan, but as a theologian who seeks to be faithful. I don’t claim to have the truth, only that I’m searching for it, that I’m trying hard to listen for the voice of God’s still, small voice amid the noise. And I trust, as Augustine once suggested, that truth is known by the way it fills the heart with delight, deepening our love for God and our neighbours. The clearer the truth, the greater the joy it brings.

So, I offer the posts in this series as a way for readers to step away from the frenzy of the age and return to the quiet, steady work of faithfulness. My hope is that in their own small way, they may help people to build lives, families, and communities that reflect the grace we’ve received. For we must all try together to tend to what is good, speak what is true, and love without calculation. And we must do this knowing that, in the end, the Kingdom of God does not arrive by force or by decree, but as a seed planted in good soil, growing unseen until the harvest comes.