Tom Holland's Three Options for the West

In a recent podcast interview Tom Holland outlined what he sees as three plausible sociocultural belief systems for the western world moving forward.

Glen Scrivener's video commentary on it is also worth watching:

Scrivener breaks down the three options Holland mentioned in this way:

• Post-Christian Paddingtonism: "(It is a) very lovely gentile liberal progressive view of things where we include the immigrant, the stranger from Peru called Paddington Bear, and we are compassionate towards one another and we establish our society on the basis of kindness. I think that's what he refers to as Paddingtonism. It's a kind of a Christianity light stripped of Christianity."
• Anti-Woke Backlash: This is essentially a repudiation of both Paddingtonism and Christianity, and a move to replace both with a Might Makes Right sensibility in which power and greatness and glory are all that matters. Essentially, this mindset emerges when rich or powerful people say, "but why shouldn't I just do what I want?" and there are no satisfactory answers on offer besides appeals to a kind of vaguely progressive altruism.
• Christianity: Crucially, for Scrivener the Christian option is broadly reconcilable with a form of western liberalism—not the procedural liberalism dominant in recent years, perhaps, but also not at all the illiberal approach favored by many in the US. Glen has made the case for this in his excellent book The Air We Breathe. In the past I've referred to this as "Christian civic republicanism," to draw a contrast between it and Christianized forms of the anti-woke backlash. (I have written about how one might arrive at such a liberalism via Christianity several times in the past. Most notably in this piece on Charles Cornish-Dale (Raw Egg Nationalist), another piece on how to read historic theology, this piece on civic republicanism, and my paper from a 2024 conference in Washington DC.)

From here, Scrivener develops an analysis of this phenomenon working from The Air We Breathe. Scrivener has described the book as a kind of Dominion for dummies, though I think that rather strongly undersells it.

The primary argument Scrivener makes in the book is that most of the values that many westerners now take for granted as part of their ordinary public life in a western democracy are actually only explicable following the Christian revolution. Subtract Christianity and you can still have public expressions of those values, but it is far harder to anchor them or justify them when they are challenged, which is the difficulty we are now living through: Paddingtonism has sought to retain certain Christian values, but detached from Christianity. This, in turn, has provoked an anti-woke backlash which in rejecting Paddingtonism's appropriation of Christian cultural fruit also frequently slides into a rejection of the Christian fruit itself.

The outcome is explained neatly in this chart, which Glen made and shared in the video:

There are several application points here that stood out to me while reading:

First, you can obviously find proponents of both Paddingtonism and the Anti-Woke Backlash within our churches. So one point to consider here is that the actual divisions within networks, communities, and relationships will often not be so neat as they are in the chart above.

This means there will be a heightened need for discernment within churches and particularly amongst Christian leaders so that they can distinguish between Scrivener's "Christian fruit" and these two rival ideologies. It also means that a great deal of patience and forbearance will be needed for our churches to be healthy as we navigate these debates within our own communities.

A second point is related: In practice, it is highly unlikely that any one of the these three options "wins" in any kind of straightforward way. What is far more likely to happen is we will continue to see significant numbers of people endorsing all three options, with the dominant approach any individual encounters being very much a function of where one lives and what circles one runs in.

Consequently, we will need to find ways of coexisting within political communities that include all three groups. Certainly, some communities we are part of can and should be more homogeneous than others. But there is simply no realistic way to completely write out of your life whichever two blocks you are not part of. This, of course, is the political problem we are now facing.

The obvious way in which these three groups can coexist is by all three basically agreeing that we have a freedom to be wrong about matters of great importance and significance and then spelling out in specific ways what "the freedom to be wrong" means. Probably it will end up meaning something very like what one can find in our nation's Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and so on.

But if that is the move we make, then we are on liberalism's home turf, as it were, and that is precisely what is at issue in the divide between these three groups: Paddingtonism simply posits that liberalism is Paddingtonism and therefore anyone who is not with them is inherently a threat to liberalism. That, of course, is how you end up with a political movement that fancies itself liberal but was routinely nightmarish on core liberal rights, such as free speech and freedom of religion. Meanwhile, the Anti-Woke regard liberalism itself as the problem because liberalism inhibits the pursuit of greatness and the triumph of the naturally superior.

One of the most pressing political problems in our moment, then, is whether the Paddingtonians, if we can call them that, can conceive a version of their project that doesn't claim to be the sole arbiter of liberalism and if the anti-woke can offer a compelling answer as to why the mighty should not simply do as they will.

Traditionally I suspect the way both of those things could be achieved is via Christianity, which offers readymade solutions to both of those problems. But apart from that, can we make an (almost certainly) pragmatic case that is existentially compelling to all three blocs as to why they should coexist? And if we cannot... what then?