Amid the post-pandemic backlash to cultural progressivism, the Anglophone world just can’t even with atheism anymore. Atheism—of both the old and ‘New’ varieties—is now cringe, blamed for enabling the rise of ‘wokeness’, implicated in the deterioration of social connections, and associated with insufferable neckbeards. The Great Awokening has purportedly given way to the next Great Awakening. Christianity is back, and religious revival is upon us. So, at least, we have been told.

Certainly, this is what a growing share of the public believes. Pew Research found that from 2024 to 2025, the percentage of Americans who said religion was ‘losing influence’ fell from 80% to 68% while the percentage who said religion was ‘gaining influence’ jumped from 18% to 31%—the highest figure in 15 years.

It’s easy to see why. Seemingly everywhere one looks, the press trumpets a return to religiosity while one famous atheist after another appears to recant or backpedal their nonbelief. Ayaan Hirsi Ali notably converted to Christianity in 2023. Her husband, the historian Niall Ferguson, similarly self-describes as a ‘lapsed atheist’ and a believing Christian. Joe Rogan now attends church and is ‘sticking with Jesus’ over the Big Bang Theory, while Elon Musk rates a cosmic ‘Creator’ as the person he most looks up to. Young Turks co-host Ana Kasparian says she’s no longer an atheist and has moved closer to Christianity. Likewise, the self-described ‘reactionary feminist’ writer Louise Perry announced she had become a Christian in 2025. Author James Lindsay says he’s abandoned New Atheism and now takes the Bible seriously. The Australian commentator Josh Szeps said earlier this year that he ‘flipped from being an atheist to an agnostic’ upon seeing a volcano on Easter Island. Douglas Murray still doesn’t believe in God but now calls himself a Christian.

Even Richard Dawkins himself made headlines for identifying as a ‘cultural Christian’ on Easter Sunday in 2024—a statement that was predictably overblown by the religious; Dawkins himself later clarified that he still thought that Christianity is ‘nonsensical wishful thinking’ whose ‘founding myth’ is ‘deeply immoral’.

It might feel like we’re witnessing a sea change, but this ‘New Theism’ is not a true renaissance of faith. It is, like nearly every emergent trend in Western culture in recent years, performative, cynical, and thoroughly postmodern. And that’s just as well. The antidote to the malaise of our time is not the embrace of ‘tradition’ or the jettisoning of rationalism. New Atheism might have fallen out of vogue with culture writers, tastemakers, public intellectuals, and the influencer class, but it was never the cause of what ails modern society. As we blunder through the morass of post-truth, conspiracism, and illiberalism, what we need now most of all is more reason, not less. In fact, it’s high time New Atheism—or something a helluva lot like it—made a comeback.

The first aspect worth clarifying is that the trends being represented as a religious revival are not what they appear. The vibes have indeed shifted, but that’s mostly all they are—vibes. Gallup polls show that American religious service attendance continues to decline alongside the percentage of adults who rate religion as important in their lives. Pew likewise finds an ongoing decrease in daily prayer, Christian identification, and overall religiosity while atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow. Much has been made in the media, especially conservative and ‘anti-woke’ media, about a resurgence of pro-religious views and churchgoing, but this shift appears to be concentrated predominantly among young men in particular—and Gen Z remains the least religious generation in the history of American opinion polling. The only broad evidence I could find for an uptick in faith was in the General Social Survey, but the shift from 2021 to 2024 was so small it falls within the margin of error.

What we’re seeing is a rise, not in faith, but in faitheism, what the late Daniel Dennett called ‘belief in belief’. We see a dip in critical anti-religious views and a jump in commentary extolling the sociocultural utility of religion. But hardly any of these New Atheists turned faitheists or atheists turned ‘agnostics’ have actually begun believing in the existence of God, much less become practising religious congregants. Nietzsche wrote of the ‘will to power’, but there is no similar ‘will to magic’. Sceptics can become believers, of course—usually over time, or, more rarely, after some kind of personal experience they interpret as powerful evidence—but no one can simply will themselves to actually believe that 2+2=5 in a given moment if they don’t already believe it. What people can do is notice which way the winds are blowing and make strategic marketing decisions. It’s remarkable how many anti-woke atheist public figures suddenly warm to Christianity just as the political culture is shifting rightward and rendering their personas in need of a rebrand. The old saying that ‘There are no atheists in a foxhole’ has never quite been right. The more accurate version is ‘There are no politically “heterodox” atheists in a vibe shift.’

And so we’re now awash in commentary about how religion is a primary source of meaning and purpose and that the decline of faith is eroding the fabric of society. But much of this commentary seems to divorce the social and psychological benefits of religion from actual religious practice and faith, as though a nonbeliever can just call themselves a cultural Christian and watch their life improve. Except, the data unambiguously show that nominal identification with a religious tradition, absent regular congregational practice and actual conviction, confers no benefits at all. In surveys about happiness, life satisfaction, and social connectedness, culturally religious people score the lowest of any group, including atheists and the religiously unaffiliated.

We are told by postliberals and their ‘politically homeless’ fellow travellers that secularism has failed us, overlooking the gargantuan advances in human flourishing the secular West has seen in the past several centuries. And we are treated to endless think pieces about the profundity of religious life penned by authors often no more religious than any atheist and whose prose, like a 17th-century French nobleman, is heavily perfumed with flowery language to mask the stench of their unbathed vacuousness.

Indeed, as fashionable as religious cosplay has become, we hear very little in the way of religious apologetics or evangelism from cultural elites. Christianity is proffered as a lifestyle aesthetic, a life hack, and an unironic opiate of the masses by a class of influential poseurs who don’t believe the central truth claims of the faith, make no attempt to save anyone’s soul, and appear utterly unconcerned with truth as a concept. Religion, in this postmodern view, simply works. Who knows why, who cares if it’s true, and besides, it seems like the diametric opposite of whatever zany stuff they’re doing on the far left, so it must be a good counterweight, right?

This deeply ties into the cultural shift over the past decade away from sincerity and earnestness and toward a kind of transactional relativism where truth doesn’t exist, and only whinging midwits pretend otherwise. This, perhaps above all else, was the cardinal sin of the New Atheists: they cared too much about what is true, when any properly jaded intellectual sophisticate knows there’s no such thing. Among elite circles especially, there is nothing cringier and more embarrassing than being earnest, and where one is earnest, they must disguise it in a mask of blasé cynicism to be taken seriously—or as seriously as such unserious times will allow. Yet at the same time, these same people will theatrically wax poetic about the beauty of religion and the dangers of secularism. They simultaneously credit Christianity as the foundation of the West while denigrating the modern world it has supposedly created. They deplore moralising from the perch of their own soap boxes. They pooh-pooh truth as an ideal while ‘embracing traditions’ that fundamentally rest on truth claims. Faitheism, on this score, is the worst of both worlds: all of the sanctimony, none of the conviction.

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that truth isn’t real, or doesn’t matter—putting aside the inconvenient fact that this is itself a truth claim—and evaluate this New Faitheism by its own metric of social and cultural usefulness. Which modern woes can this emerging creed reverse? Not post-truth, as New Faitheism is an outgrowth of it. Not the crisis of meaning and community, since cultural religiosity provides neither. A movement that ridicules rationalism, scientific scepticism, and humanism also isn’t particularly well placed to elevate the character of public discourse, heal tribal divides, promote a shared reality, rebut rampant conspiracism, or improve institutional trust. Aside from helping content creators generate clicks and subscriptions from anti-woke audiences, I cannot identify a single way in which this trend helps anyone. And yet, in each and every area where New Faitheism proves useless, New Atheism—or something similar—can in fact be of genuine help.

As a young adult graduating college in the late 2000s, New Atheism offered me, and so many other Millennials, a framework that reoriented our lives in demonstrably fruitful ways. New Atheism equipped me with the basics of critical thinking found nowhere in my 16-year formal education. It taught me the value of evidence, first principles, logical consistency, parsimony, avoiding fallacies, and epistemic rigour in a way nothing else had ever even attempted to. It introduced me to the life of the mind and helped foster an interest in science, philosophy, and recreational reading. New Atheism gave me and millions of other young people at the time not only the tools to think more clearly, but a social incentive structure that made us want to. Within New Atheist spaces, caring about what was actually true was reinforced, epistemic humility was cool, assertions without evidence were stigmatised, and conceding a point when demonstrably proven wrong was applauded.

Did some people become too pushy or strident? Sure. Did the movement attract a certain kind of pedantic, fedora-clad, spectrumy young man? Yeah, it did. Did everyone fully live up to the ideals they purported to hold? Of course not. But boy, just having those ideals was transformative. And placed side by side with a New Faitheist movement that doesn’t even aspire to seek truth or ground their arguments in first principles, the difference could not be more stark.

In this age of post-truth, misinformation, illiberalism, anti-intellectualism, and above all cruelty, we need a movement that is relentlessly evidence-based, willing to engage those who disagree, unafraid of walking into the lions’ den, and anchored to consistently applied Enlightenment first principles. New Atheism was not without its flaws, but its intellectual core is something well worth recapturing.

We should all want to live in a reality-based society. This is why a return to honest-to-God religion is also no solution to the problems we face. Again, we need less dogmatism and disregard for evidence, not more. If we are to meet the challenges of the 21st century, both individually and collectively, we’re going to need to live in the real world. The current crop of cool kids tell us this is cringe, but all they have to offer is an irony-poisoned postmodern matrix of misremembered nostalgia and cherry-picked religious vibes. New Faitheism is a movement that stands for nothing—a clout-mining operation riding the coattails of an unrelated cultural backlash. It appears ascendent, but a movement this fundamentally hollow and substanceless will fold like a cheap suit the moment it is assertively confronted. And that confrontation is long since overdue.

The post New Faitheism: All of the Sanctimony, None of the Conviction appeared first on The Freethinker.

For those who know some history, the Kitzmiller trial pitted so-called Intelligent Design (ID) theory against evolutionary science. The question at its heart was whether ID should be taught in the Dover, Pennsylvania, district’s public schools as science. President George W. Bush had stated that he thought equal time should be given to the teaching of both evolution and ID, and the movement spearheaded by the Discovery Institute propagandised aggressively across multiple channels, but especially in churches and among homeschoolers and education bodies. Their narrative focused on fairness, and their catchphrase was ‘Teach the controversy’. They claimed that evolution was a highly disputed scientific theory and that students should know this. (For the full story of the trial, see the excellent 2006 BBC Horizon documentary, A War on Science, here.)

To those in the life sciences, this was bizarre. In the scientific community, there has been no real controversy about the truth of evolution for many decades. The entire conflict was manufactured by a well-funded religious movement eager to impose their particular theological agenda through science education. Many scientists with religious faith wondered why a conflict between evolution and Christianity was being posited when one need not be there. What’s more, with the Human Genome Project recently coming to completion and the costs of genomics beginning to fall, evolutionary science was set for its biggest revolution in half a century. In other words, it was a thriving field.

For Professor Miller, the matter began innocently enough. Together with Professor Joe Levine, he was the author of some of America’s most widely used biology textbooks. Not long before Kitzmiller, they produced a new edition of their famous Dragonfly Book. Levine is Jewish and Miller is Catholic, which came in handy when they occasionally needed to reassure more religious schools that they were not presenting evolution in a manner that attacked faith.

In 2004, the Dover Area School District mandated that ID ideas be presented alongside evolution in public school biology classes (teachers were to read out a statement criticising evolutionary theory and directing students to an ID textbook), and Miller and Levine’s textbook, Biology, which was used in these classes, was targeted for attack. Several parents viewed ID as thinly-disguised creationism and the board’s mandate as an attempt to sneak religion into public schools. Backed by the ACLU and others, they decided to sue.

Miller kept up with the unfolding controversy before being asked by the plaintiffs to be their lead witness. As the author of the textbook and a Catholic, he was well-placed to combat the defence, who were clearly going to present the trial as a matter of science v. religion. Miller, having read ID ‘theorist’ Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, and who was familiar with the sort of ‘irreducible complexity’ arguments—whereby a particular biological phenomenon is said to be too complex to have come about by conventional, step-by-step Darwinian means—put forward by Behe and others, agreed.

During the trial, Miller masterfully dismantled the argument from irreducible complexity, whether for the bacterial flagellum, the immune antibody-producing system, the blood clotting mechanism, and various other protein targeting systems. Miller demonstrated that evolution by natural selection was well capable of, and had indeed, brought about supposedly irreducible biological phenomena. His own work crossed over perfectly with several of the ID arguments, and he could give evolutionary explanations for all of the examples put forward by his opponents. He also demonstrated how ID utterly failed as a scientific theory capable of explaining anything and argued that it was not a scientific theory at all; rather, it was thinly veiled religious dogma which its defenders wanted to impose on students as if it were legitimate science.

Miller was not alone. His fellow witness, philosophy professor Barbara Forrest, used the Discovery Institute’s leaked ‘Wedge Document’ to undermine the defence; the document showed the explicitly religious motivation of the Discovery Institute. Though the Discovery Institute’s involvement with this particular controversy was complex¹, this demonstrated that the ID movement as a whole was fundamentally religious in nature and that its real aim was to get religion into public schools. Miller, Forrest, and the entire legal team went on to receive several awards for their defence of science during the trial.

The trial itself was pure theatre at times, with Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman travelling all the way from England to cover the event and be interviewed by the press. But Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling was clear—and scathing. ID was not science and should not be taught in schools, and the board had acted with ‘breathtaking inanity’. The reach of the ruling did not go far, but the precedent was significant; Kitzmiller was almost a 21st-century Scopes Trial. It was the first legal case involving ID specifically (after a 1987 Supreme Court ruling dealt the death blow to old-fashioned creationists’ attempts to impose their theology in public schools), and it is often viewed as one of the major defeats of anti-evolution litigation in the US.

Yet, more than twenty years on, ID is still here, and growing. The movement’s public relations machine quickly downplayed the ruling and seemed to imply that they didn’t think it was important anyway. The defeat has certainly not diminished the ID movement’s ambition. They are well-resourced, have a wide-ranging propaganda operation, and ID is a mandatory part of the curricula in religious universities such as Biola, Veritas, and Liberty. Their penetration into the homeschooling world is deep, as is that of Young Earth Creationism. Kitzmiller was a significant battle and a great, nearly decisive victory. It weakened the ID movement. But it did not kill it. The war goes on.

1. Aware of potential constitutional difficulties, the Discovery Institute were more cautious in their approach to teaching ID than the board and defence counsel and several witnesses associated with the institute withdrew from appearing at the trial—not Michael Behe, though, who was humiliated by Miller. ︎

The post Over 20 years since Kitzmiller v. Dover, the war against Intelligent Design goes on appeared first on The Freethinker.

Our human rights lead @logomachist is quoted in @JewishNewsUK, describing an award given to an Osama Bin Laden apologist on the anniversary of 9/11 by the archbishop of Canterbury as "obscene" https://t.co/4bd348pOxc

— National Secular Society (@NatSecSoc) September 17, 2026

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s decision to give Pakistani cleric Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi the prestigious Hubert Walter Award on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks did not sit well with many people—naturally, because Ashrafi had once eulogised Osama bin Laden as the ‘Sword of Allah’. Lambeth Palace quickly rescinded the award amid the backlash, but this incident is just the latest example of the mollycoddling of Muslim representatives and Islamic clerics in the West, whereby even those perceived as taking mere baby steps away from the predominant, hostile Islamist line are deemed award-worthy.

Ashrafi was initially given the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation for safeguarding minority rights in Pakistan. Notwithstanding Ashrafi’s support for armed jihad, including his approval of suicide bombings, the entirety of his ostensible work to protect Pakistan’s vulnerable minorities boils down to giving the odd statement in support of a victim and cutting the occasional Christmas cake. Nobody—neither rights groups in the West nor the loud Muslim activists who see bigotry everywhere except within—seems to be interested in asking Muslim representatives the fundamental questions they would normally pose to members of other communities.

Clearly, the Hubert Walter Award committee did not want to ask Ashrafi, a cleric who has held government posts in Pakistan for years, why individuals can convert from other religions to Islam, but face death for leaving Islam in Pakistan; or why not a single Hindu temple has been constructed in the entirety of Pakistan’s existence as a modern state, while Ashrafi endorses mosques being built the world over; or what happened to the Jews of Pakistan, given that he endorses Palestinian jihad aimed at the erasure of Israeli Jews. Ashrafi remains a strong advocate of Pakistan’s bloodthirsty blasphemy laws, which codify death for words and expressions against Islam.

None of this is new, of course. Saudi cleric Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, the recipient of, among others, Italy’s Galileo Galilei International Award and Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Global Interfaith Leadership Award, wasn’t required to condemn Saudi judicial abuses, which he oversaw as the justice minister, before being celebrated by the United Nations. Tunisian politician Rached Ghannouchi, the recipient of the Chatham House Prize in 2012, was long affiliated with Islamist groups, including those linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Tariq Ramadan, once listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and who once worked in Tony Blair’s task force designed to counter Islamic extremism, had a history of jihadist apologia; he has since been sentenced to prison for multiple rape charges.  

What many of these, and others in the Muslim world, have mastered is the art of doublespeak. They use one parlance and language for Western audiences, and another for Muslims, sometimes quite literally. That means pointing towards the marginalisation of Muslims, both real and perceived, as evidence of a targeted assault and widespread discrimination against the entire community, but whitewashing the institutionalised subjugation of religious and other minorities in the Muslim world (not to mention Muslim communities in the West).

As a result, the official Muslim representative organisations in the West largely peddle the same divisive narratives, using exactly the democratic freedoms of Western countries which they often profess to disdain. These freedoms allow open criticism of Western countries, whereas draconian, Sharia-based laws suppress any dissent in the Muslim world. This creates a gorily twisted worldview, wherein Muslims willingly living in egalitarian Western societies are seen to be persecuted, while those stuck in many Muslim-majority states are happily living under Islamic law and supposedly coexisting peacefully with their countrymen. The freedom of Muslims in the West and the oppression of both Muslims and non-Muslims in the Muslim world are omitted entirely from this narrative.

Nowhere is subservience to Islamist hegemony more apparent than in the West’s liberal and leftist circles, where gullible academics and activists are willing to abandon everything that they fight for within their own folds to accommodate, nay, celebrate, draconian Islamic codes. Amid the uproar over the Bin Laden-eulogising Ashrafi’s Lambeth Palace award, the visible erasure of the woman standing next to him is celebrated as a ‘choice’ by Western liberals. Clearly, no one has bothered to speak to the women donning misogynistic Islamic garb, almost every single one of whom would cite the reason for their ‘choice’ of apparel as stemming from their submission to Allah’s command as per Islamic scriptures. It is hardly a choice, let alone a liberal one, if it is between covering your face and burning in hellfire. And this sexist, masochistic choice is definitely not one that those who have long condemned sexism in their own religions and cultures should be defending.

In fact, for members of all other religious communities, condemning their scriptures is almost a prerequisite to gaining access to Western liberal circles. No Hindu would be offered a seat on the liberal table unless they unequivocally condemned Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whereas no Jew would be safe from the liberal-leftist wrath unless they labelled Israel as a genocidal state and denied its right to exist. Meanwhile, not only are Muslims not expected to offer any self-reflection, it is virtually mandatory for them to be West-hating, Islam-endorsing, flagbearers of Muslim victimhood—as long as they peddle Islamist discourse in postcolonial packaging.

As a result, those individuals in Muslim communities and the Muslim world who replicate what Western liberals have done for decades, if not centuries—i.e. question, critique, condemn, even leave Islam, and prioritise this project over critiquing others—are deemed ‘Uncle Toms’ or ‘coconuts’ endorsing ‘right-wing’ narratives. If the liberal left had allowed equal-opportunity critique of Muslim ideas and communities, as it once did, the discourse around these wouldn’t have been hijacked by right-wing ideologues, and certainly not by the racist far right, as it has been. Given the uniquely political components of Islam, and its theological codification and stranglehold over Muslim communities and countries, there is hardly a cause more liberal and leftist than unabashed critique of Islam.

Nonetheless, the onus to change all this—and the only hope of it actually happening—fundamentally rests with the dissenters of the Muslim world. To expect the West, or at least its liberal left, to reconsider its sadistic surrender to Islamists as a prerequisite for a shift towards modernity in Islam is to echo what both the left and the right in the West inadvertently, even if antipodally, peddle: Western supremacy. Instead of trying to curry favour with Western liberals by pinning all the world’s evils on the West, what the Muslim world needs is more self-critique. Such a project might not be deemed award-worthy in the West, and could be fatal in the Muslim world, but it is the most likely path towards progressive reform in Muslim countries and communities the world over.

The post Islam needs self-critique and progressive reform, not mollycoddling from the Archbishop of Canterbury appeared first on The Freethinker.

Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) urges the Zamfara State (Nigeria) government to release and compensate Mr Samaila Bala. Mr Bala has been accused and jailed by the Upper Sharia Court in Tsafe for ‘witchcraft and juju’, an ‘offence’ that has no basis in law, since June 2026. Sources in Zamfara told AfAW that Bala’s case has been ongoing since 2020. This is the third time that Bala has been imprisoned for the alleged offence. 

In 2020, Mr Bala was a teacher at a local school when a female student fell ill and, during her illness, mentioned his name. The student was taken to a hospital, and after some blood tests, she was found to be a sickle cell patient. But the parents and other relatives attributed the ailment to witchcraft and claimed that the teacher, Bala, was responsible. They filed a charge at the local sharia court, and Bala was remanded for six months before being released. In 2024, he was jailed again, but after two months the Grand Khadi, head of Nigeria’s Sharia Court of Appeal, granted him a pardon, and he was released. In June this year, he was again arrested and remanded and remains in prison.

An AfAW contact in Gusau has visited Bala in prison and got details of his case and incarceration. More prison visits have been scheduled in the coming weeks and months. AfAW will provide legal and humanitarian support to Mr Bala. Local and international efforts will be made to free Bala. 

Meanwhile a legal expert in the region has been consulted, and she said this regarding the said offence:

Actually, our laws do not recognise the offences of juju or witchcraft. In the North, where the penal code applies, fraudulent use of charms, obtaining money by false presence, public nuisance, causing harm, etc., are framed by the police in some instances. But witchcraft is not recognised as a crime. The VAPP LAW actually criminalises witchcraft accusations. And since the law does not recognise the offence, the remand has no legal basis under the administration of criminal justice law, as one cannot be remanded for a non-existent offence. 

However, under Sharia penal law, even though there’s no offence of witchcraft, the courts sometimes charge people under broader provisions like sihr (sorcery), which some interpret as an offence against public order, disturbance of peace, or fraud if money was collected, etc. The bottom line is that the person cannot be validly charged or held for witchcraft/juju alone. The police must prove actual statutory offence(s). The best line of action is to engage the services of a good lawyer for the victim to file a preliminary objection. And then seek the DPP’s intervention to take over and discontinue if no offence is found.

AfAW plans to engage a lawyer to file a preliminary objection. Meanwhile, other options are actively being pursued to secure Bala’s release. Zamfara State authorities should understand that remanding Bala for the offence of ‘witchcraft and juju’ is a judicial embarrassment in the 21st century. His incarceration ridicules the legal system and makes a mockery of the rule of law. The Sharia Penal Code Law of Zamfara State, Section 406, primarily addresses offences tied to prohibited traditional religious practices, specifically the unlawful invocation or worship of ‘juju’. Section 406(d) states:

Whoever presides at or is present at or takes part in the worship or invocation of any juju which has been declared unlawful under the provisions of Section 405 will be punished with death.

Bala did not commit any offence under this section. 

Advocacy for Alleged Witches believes that Mr Bala is innocent and a victim of a state/Sharia based witch hunt. AfAW calls on the Zamfara State Government to:

Free Samaila Bala. 

Drop the charge of ‘witchcraft and juju’ against him. 

Stop the persecution and prosecution for non-existent offences. 

Release and compensate him NOW.

And end witch hunts in Zamfara State once and for all.

Find out more and support Advocacy for Alleged Witches here.

The post Witch Hunt in Zamfara: Free Samaila Bala appeared first on The Freethinker.

For example, on 18 October 2023, the UK abstained from a vote on a UN resolution which would have called for ‘humanitarian pauses’ amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Given that the IDF is guilty of systematic gender-based violence against Palestinian women and girls, this was particularly galling for feminists. Meanwhile, the resolution was vetoed by—a woman! Specifically, the former US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Participation in this sort of thing is presumably not what Mary Wollstonecraft had in mind when she wrote to vindicate the rights of women.

On the other hand, one could make the argument that participating in and reforming such institutions is necessary, precisely in order to reduce, perhaps even entirely prevent, such harms. Or at the very least, it might be said that by not reforming such institutions, they are allowed to become dystopian breeding grounds for jingoism, racism, sexism, and violent conceptualisations of manhood. And for better or worse, the idea of reforming institutions has been the dominant modus operandi of many a progressive, liberal, and left movement in Britain and other Western countries for decades. ‘Make the military woke’ could be the catchphrase of such reformers.

Perhaps this is why, in their recruitment strategies, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has in recent years focused less on ‘God, King, and country’, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori-style appeals, and instead portrayed the military as a place to improve your mental health, give you self-confidence, provide you with technical and practical skills useful in other professions, etc. In other words, they give benign utilitarian reasons geared toward self-improvement, rather than ideological and emotional ones, for joining the military. One could say that the MOD have started to adopt a ‘woke mindset’ when it comes to recruitment. Which is perhaps progress of a kind. And a feminist case might be made that young women benefit from now being able to access such opportunities, especially if they have few other economic prospects.

One could also legitimately argue from a national security standpoint. Just look to theocratic imperialist irredentist Russia, led by the blood-soaked tyrant and war criminal Vladimir Putin, who believes himself to be the Second Coming of Peter the Great and a pseudo-modern-day Czar. Not to mention the Russian Orthodox Church being a megaphone for all Kremlin propaganda (hardly a surprise; there has never been a dictator in Russian history that the church did not justify or collude with), justifying the genocidal colonisation of Ukraine as a ‘war against Satanism’ in the form of degenerate gay liberalism. Then there is the totalitarian techno-surveillance state of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its murderous dictator Xi Jinping, who are conducting a genocide against the Uyghur Muslims of the Xinjiang province of western China, not to mention the 76-year occupation of Tibet or the routine threats of ‘re-unifying’ democratic Taiwan ‘either peacefully or militarily’ to China under the imperialist One China Policy.

All of these are genuine national security threats, and surely demand mass recruitment of British youth, including women, into the military. However, a recent investigation by Georgia Scott of ITV News sheds some light on why young people, especially women, are not, and maybe should not be, enthusiastic about joining the military.

For many years now, the British military has been a systematically misogynistic institution. And this has created a rape culture within the British military that has left hundreds of lives permanently shattered.

In Scott’s report, various servicewomen provided horrific testimonies of being sexually assaulted by their male colleagues; many of them have had their identities hidden to protect their privacy as well as protect them from reprisal. One woman, under the pseudonym of Abby, recounted being raped at least a dozen times: ‘I’ve been raped by 12 different people multiple times and sexually assaulted. I’ve lost count, honestly.’ From this, we can safely assume the true number was in the high double digits. One assault left her with severe head injuries. And as if all that was not enough, she was slut-shamed afterwards as a ‘slag’ and seen as ‘easy’; putting aside the disgraceful and dehumanising nature of that bile, it helped to increase the incidence of rapes against her. She was treated as a nuisance and ignored by senior officers when she reported being attacked, and they even punished her by refusing to fix the lock on her door—presumably in the knowledge that she would be raped again. Just one of her attackers was convicted in a military court and fired; she eventually gave up reporting her abusers, so shoddy and unresponsive was the military justice system.

Abby’s is just one of many brutal cases. Even when they aren’t assaulted, many women in the military face dehumanisation and bullying. Jen Day was left with traumatic brain injury and PTSD after being injured by a bomb in Iraq. When she returned home to join a parachute regiment, she faced abuse by egotistical male soldiers who defined their manhood solely by being physically stronger than women. Their relentless bullying led to Jen abandoning a career that she loved in disgust.

Most cases never reach a military or civilian criminal court due to institutional insouciance and complicity from senior officers whose job it is to report said crimes up the chain of command. Victims become so fatigued trying to report complaints that they give up altogether until they quit or are discharged with PTSD—not from fighting al-Qaeda or ISIS, but from misogynistic abuse, rape, and institutional denials of justice. Victims are condemned to a life of permanent trauma. Abby said that, after her experiences in the military, ‘I can never trust men really ever again.’

Tony King of the University of Exeter was tasked with performing an audit of the treatment of women in the military in 2022. He interviewed hundreds of soldiers; the MOD didn’t make his report public until 2025. He is featured in Scott’s report. He found that there is, among other things, a phenomenon of ‘door knocking’ late at night. He found that, often after drinking, male soldiers would knock on the doors of women to solicit sex from them in an aggressive manner. In other words, try to rape them. Women were seen as pieces of meat, and their attackers felt entitled to do whatever they wanted to them.

The frequency of such incidents helps to show that there aren’t just a few bad apples; there is a pervasive misogynistic culture, and the fish seems to rot from the head. One woman, ‘Sophia’, told ITV News that a male soldier once knocked on her door and assaulted her when she opened it. Afterwards, she refused to open her door again. On another occasion, when a man knocked and she didn’t answer, he shouted, ‘Why don’t you just [fucking] put out?!’ Nobody intervened, indicating mass awareness of this kind of rape culture as well as mass complicity in it. Much earlier in her career, she recounts that, when she was a teenager, she and some fellow recruits were locked inside a room with an instructor—’a well-known person in the forces’—and prevented from leaving until one of them performed oral sex on him. One girl did so, so that they could escape.

Sophia said that the abuse, if anything, got worse as her career advanced, demonstrating that the victims are not just among the lower ranks and that career advancement is no protection against abusers, who seem to be everywhere in the British military. Abby, Jen, Sophia, and countless other women were (and are) trapped in a culture of systemic bullying, silence, and sexual harassment or worse, in which they were systematically denied justice by senior officers. Constant harassment and assault, followed by a complete lack of accountability, led to many women feeling hopelessness, suffering from survivor’s guilt, and engaging in suicidal ideation.

These are just a few examples from the report and King’s findings. There are many more, and other reports, investigations, and news items corroborate the existence of a systematic, institutionalised misogynist rape culture within our military. Some cases have even led to the suicide of victims abused and then denied justice. To give just one particularly horrifying example, just months after a ‘landmark’ report found that more than half of female assault victims in the military don’t report abuse due to a total lack of trust in the military justice system, 19-year-old Jaysley Beck was sexually assaulted by a superior officer, 39-year-old Michael Webber. This was in July 2021. Not long after, during October-November, another superior officer, Beck’s direct supervisor, Ryan Mason, launched a massive campaign of stalking and harassment against her, sending her nearly 5,000 inappropriate WhatsApp texts in the space of about a month and tracking her constantly.

Beck feared a ‘backlash’ if she reported Webber’s assault, according to a friend, but she bravely reported him anyway—only to be treated with scepticism and disdain. She became so disillusioned with the system that she didn’t even think it was worth reporting Mason. This relentless, psychotic harassment, plus the trauma of Webber’s assault, made Beck fearful and miserable. She suffered from panic attacks. And then, in December, abused and abandoned by the system, she hanged herself.

And how did the military respond? Beck’s mother, Leighann McCready, accused the army of making ‘empty promises to her’. And what happened to the psychopaths who tormented her? After the assault, Webber was made to write a letter of apology to Beck, concluding which he shamelessly concluded with the words, ‘my door will always be open’. He was then promoted. In the end, he received just six months in a civilian prison. He is now a free man.

Mason escaped even this paltry level of ‘justice’. He left the military after Beck’s suicide, was never prosecuted, and is also a free man. As for the superiors who covered up the assault and harassment and who let Beck down so completely, just days ago they were found not guilty by a military court of mishandling the case.

Once more, this was not an isolated incident. Larkhill Camp, where Beck was stationed, was swarming with abusers and full of their victims. Very few victims reported their experiences of assault and harassment, reflecting the total absence of trust in the military justice system. It is hard not to seethe with anger at the horrors meted out to Jaysley Beck by those abominable men and the absolute failure—no, the outright complicity—of the institution she dedicated herself to.

According to the MOD’s own figures, around 12.1% of armed forces members are female as of April 2026, and a November 2025 report found that around two-thirds of them experienced ‘at least one sexualised behaviour in the last 12 months compared to 34% of males.’ Despite making the right noises, little progress has been made by the MOD in combating this behaviour. Perhaps they think that ‘woke’ recruitment adverts are enough to assuage the fury of the public that rape culture has been de facto legalised within their military? Benign and banal ad campaigns are far easier than prosecuting rapists, anyway.

The pathetic platitudes and pitiful promises of politicians and MOD officials offer no help at all to the victims. Thankfully, victims receive some solace elsewhere—from family, friends, and charities like Salute Her UK. Tellingly, and sadly, Salute Her is more in demand than ever; they are contacted, on average, by a new victim each day.

In the ITV report, Emma Norton, a solicitor who has represented many women assaulted in the military and the Director of the Centre for Military Justice, critiques the ‘internal military systems which are not independent, are not staffed with people with the requisite skill or training to deal with people who have experienced sexual violence or sexual harassment.’ Norton says that even the Defence Serious Crime Unit (DCSU), founded in 2022 as a supposedly independent unit to investigate crime within the military, ‘has [often] not worked in practice’, with senior officers attempting to influence ongoing investigations to prejudice the outcome against the victim.

In 2025 there were 85 reports of rape within the military, yet only six of the accused were found guilty. Perhaps you might think that if those 79 other reports were adjudicated and found not to be worth pursuing, or went to trial and the accused were found not guilty, we must simply accept the result. Except that, as we have seen, the process is tainted from the outset, and, what’s more, in military court, the verdict is decided by a board of serving military members rather than a randomly selected 12-person jury. The MOD assures us that there is a detailed process by which conflicts of interest are prevented—but why not avoid the possibility of conflicts of interest completely? Not to mention that the process of secret court proceedings with secret evidence and secret witnesses does not inspire much confidence in the credibility of military court proceedings vis-à-vis public disclosure or accountability. The military effectively investigates itself. Lone victims are set against an entire apparatus of patriarchal solidarity.

Most of the reports of rape, sexual assault, harassment, bullying and misogyny are not necessarily coming from female soldiers from a minority background. Only 12.8% of the military is non-white. It is primarily working-class white women that are being systematically beaten, raped, gang raped, slut shamed as ‘slags’, and denied justice. So where are the right-wing defenders of ‘our women’, so loud when it comes to, for example, rape gangs consisting of Muslim men? Well, military women are being victimised predominantly by white men. This explains why, all the way from Reform to Restore and the Homeland Party, the right has chosen to ignore this issue. They cannot attach a xenophobic, nativist, ethno-nationalist narrative to it, nor can they be seen to be attacking an institution at the very heart of patriotism in this country.

We should also not forget that the military is also systemically racist as well, which explains why it contains so few non-whites. We know this from the ghastly case of Kerry-Ann Knight, the literal poster girl for black female soldiers, who suffered from racist abuse as well as sexual harassment to the point of having to leave the army altogether. When she tried to report the sexual harassment and racism, she was discouraged and stonewalled in reporting the abuse and was actually accused of incompetence and having a mental illness. The Army initially refused to give her financial compensation, and only after public backlash did it do so and issue an official apology to Knight. If she had not had the foresight to take secret recordings of male soldiers threatening to sexually harass her and actually harassing her, as well as threatening to lynch her and put her in a hot box, etc., and if there were no brave colleagues who came forward as witnesses despite the possibility of reprisals affecting their careers, then she would have been left to languish like so many other victims.

Why is there not a bigger outcry against such abuse in the military? From social media comment sections, people seem to be more offended by claims of sexual assault and racism than sexual assault and racism themselves. Too many people are unable to accept evidence which tarnishes the prestige of such patriotic institutions as the military. Their deliberate blindness, and in some cases their complete lack of concern, is pathetically narcissistic. It is also an insult to the victims.

Emma Norton suggests that the armed services complaints process needs to be made independent of those branches of the armed services themselves. Victims demand that there is a systemic culture change starting from the top. If successive governments are serious about inspiring the youth to serve their country and help to defend Britain from the numerous national security threats that we do indeed face, then they must start by admitting the existence of the problem in the first place. Then they must take concrete steps, actioning suggestions and plans like Norton’s.

The 2019 Wigston Review advised the creation of an independent investigative mechanism, a ‘Defence Authority for Culture and Behaviours’, as the MOD simply cannot be trusted to investigate itself. But rather than taking such a step, the only thing the MOD has done to address the issue of systemic rape and sexual assault is to mouth platitudes, make empty promises, issue fig-leaf mea culpas, and engage in smoke-and-mirrors avoidance. None of the Centre for Military Justice’s recommendations has yet been implemented.

Only when this problem is resolved can we even begin to increase recruitment numbers to the level required to, for example, repel a hypothetical Russian invasion of Britain or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—both more likely geopolitical scenarios than at perhaps any other time in recent history. The institutionalised misogynist rape culture of the British military today should be seen as a direct national security threat in itself, in other words. Perhaps if the plight of the victims is not enough to inspire decisive action, that thought will.

Unless the British military is purged of this infestation of abusers and rapists, and the system that lets them get away with it, the barracks of our nation’s armed forces will continue to be more akin to rape camps than to boot camps.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Jasyley Beck (2002-2021).

The post Boot Camp or Rape Camp? Crimes, Cover-ups, and Calumny appeared first on The Freethinker.

I considered updating these reflections on Islamic fascism, written for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, but I think it best to let them stand pretty much as they are, with only some minor cosmetic adjustments, primarily formatting and dating changes. I don’t think I would change much, anyway; certainly, the main thrust of the piece I would stand by, and it is as relevant as ever. I have also updated the title above (the original title remains below). But I’ll take the opportunity to make some additional reflections at the end, and I have added a postscript.

On Islamic Fascism: Reflections on 9/11 Twenty Years On

Where were you on 9/11?

Few events are accorded such status in public memory: there is an expectation that, if you are old enough, you will remember to the second where you were and what you were doing when the planes hit.

I was five, so I have no memory of that day. My mother tells me that she had seen the news just before she was due to collect me from school. At the school gates, she learned more from the other parents. My parents chose, as many did, not to tell me what had happened. But later, after Bush and Blair had spoken, my father mentioned that we were now at war. I am told that I was upset when I overheard this, despite knowing nothing about what was happening.

This was in Scotland, not America. The news that day was global—and rightly so. It was a world-historical turning point. It launched the United States and its allies into decades of war around the world. It loudly and bloodily informed everyone on the planet of the arrival of a murderous new ideology. Jihad became a familiar word. Without 9/11, al-Qaeda would have remained a little-known terrorist group, an Islamic caliphate would never have been declared, and we would have been spared so much death.

I disagree with those who downplay the significance of 9/11. Ben Sixsmith in The Critic, for example, argues that:

[9/11] did not have the epochal geopolitical significance that it was assumed to have.

Liberalism was growing weak in subtler ways, at home and abroad. Internal disputes over matters such as migration and supranationalism, and “cold” rivalries with secular China and more-or-less secular Russia, loom larger in our minds than jihadis, as well as more transcendent matters such as environmentalism and pandemic risk. To the extent that militant Islam concerns us, it is generally at home, where it has been idly allowed to spread …

Of course, jihadism could burst into the news again … But the War on Terror was talked into being as if it was the historical successor of World War Two and the Cold War—conflicts that contrasted major geopolitical and ideological powers. Jihadists, for all of their morbid destructive potential, have neither the power nor the coherence for the same to be true …

The attacks of 9/11 were a defining moment for thousands of families, of course, for obvious reasons, but they were also a defining moment for commentators who sought to prolong the twentieth century and its idealised conceptions of ideological conflict between the forces of liberty and the forces of totalitarianism.

But the existence of many other problems does not negate the import of jihadism. China and Covid might loom a bit larger now, but jihadism, despite its many defeats and failures, is the most resilient terrorist wave in history. Islamic State, as the editors of The ISIS Reader (which I review for this magazine here) point out, has declined before, and was able to build itself back up and rapidly seize swathes of territory; it still has affiliates across the world and significant resources and propaganda reach.

Al-Qaeda was able to revive itself after its decimation in Afghanistan (owing to the opportunity of a Saddam-free Iraq) and its friends and hosts have just retaken control of that benighted country. Afghanistan was al-Qaeda’s pre-eminent base pre-2001, and the Taliban’s return to power is likely to make that true again. The last time this was the case, al-Qaeda was able to cause more direct damage to the United States in a single morning than any other enemy since the Confederacy.

As for militant Islam at home and the issues with immigration, I agree with Sixsmith, but his implication is that, somehow, these problems have little to do with official jihadism, when in fact it is the propaganda and, albeit less often, the direction and resources of al-Qaeda and IS that inspire domestic terror attacks in the name of Islam. Look, for example, to the career of Anwar al-Awlaki.

There are, of course, major differences between the conflicts of the twentieth century and the War on Terror, but it is absurd to say that jihadist organisations with global reach and appeal lack power and coherence. Such organisations have at times had the power or backing of nation-states, and their goals are quite simple—the defeat of the United States and the establishment of Taliban-style Islamist regimes and/or caliphates throughout the Muslim world and beyond.

The war on jihadism is a war of liberty against totalitarianism. I don’t mean that the foes of jihadism are all starry-eyed democratic romantics (although some of us may be), but that al-Qaeda and its spawn are expansionist totalitarians. Osama bin Laden and his heirs were and are quite explicit about this. Jihadism is a totalitarian ideology: it demands the subjugation of entire populations to a utopian vision of a Sharia paradise, and it seeks to do this by any means necessary, including genocide (as the Taliban’s erasure of pre-Islamic culture in Afghanistan and IS’s persecution of, among others, the Yazidis demonstrate). To acknowledge this cannot simply be dismissed as a longing for the battles of the past: it is merely to apply the lessons of history (the threats from China and Russia, too, are threats of expansionist authoritarianism).

Jihadism is a form of fascism. Angus Colwell has recently criticised Christopher Hitchens for his use of the term Islamofascism: ‘Hitchens was bright enough to know how historically inaccurate this was: fascism was a historical creation of its place and time, not a moral cudgel.’ But Colwell refers us to an essay in which Hitchens defends the term against just such criticisms, and in which Hitchens reminds us that words are not our masters but our servants. If ideological terms were locked in to specific historical moments, then political discourse would become pretty difficult. If, for example, an antisemitic totalitarian rose to power through manipulations and lies tomorrow, would the word fascist not be applicable? Colwell writes as if there were no debate on this matter, yet the scholars Ibn Warraq and Hamed Abdel-Samad have both examined the historical links between Islamism and fascism and the deep similarities between those two ideologies.

Jihadism and fascism share many features—including antisemitism, the fetishisation of death, leader worship, anti-intellectualism, yearnings for past glories as against present humiliations, utopianism, expansionism, and obsessions with purity—and therefore jihadism can be legitimately described as Islamic fascism.

I don’t wish to single out Ben, whom I regard highly, but his arguments reveal the shortcomings of some conservative views on this subject. Meanwhile, in its idiocy, much of the anti-imperialist left regards jihadism as anticolonial revenge against America for its depredations rather than the murderous theocratic fascism that it actually is.

The apologetics that claims an equivalence between America and jihadism is one of leftism’s great shames. Noam Chomsky’s comparison of 9/11 to Bill Clinton’s 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory is the classic demonstration of the poverty of this view. Even if you believe Clinton was wrong to bomb the factory, as I do, there is no comparison. Clinton’s 1998 strikes were part of a limited response to al-Qaeda’s bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam that year, which killed more Africans and Muslims than Americans. The missiles of 9/11 were packed full of human beings and were fully intended to slaughter as many people as possible in the world’s most cosmopolitan city—all in the name of an avowedly murderous, imperialist, fascist ideology. Osama bin Laden was delighted by the spilling of the blood of thousands in the heart of multicultural New York. All his targets were civilian targets (including the Pentagon). He had no compunction about any of this, nor did he differentiate between military and civilian.

And why did bin Laden target the World Trade Center? Perhaps he thought it represented the evils of world capitalism? Perhaps his attack was a misguided assault by the Third World on the power of international finance? No. In an Al Jazeera interview from October 2001, bin Laden said that:

The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke. [Emphasis added.]

Before 9/11, the Americans had a few opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden. One of the reasons they never took advantage of these was the fear of collateral damage. There is no moral equivalence between the two sides here. Bin Laden wanted to kill as many people as possible in the name of his totalitarian faith, while the Americans rightly agonised over civilian death as they attempted to capture this murderer. Indeed, even after 9/11, when planning the 2011 raid on the Abbottabad compound that killed bin Laden, bombs and drones were ruled out partially because the man believed to be bin Laden frequently walked in his garden with children and the Americans feared killing innocent Pakistanis. And, as Raymond Ibrahim has shown, while al-Qaeda’s statements to the West may have been full of spurious grievances and justifications, its propaganda aimed at Muslims was entirely religious in character.

So, 9/11 was a world-historical event, and jihadism is a form of fascism that must be fought. But what of the man behind the attacks? Some of the details above are taken from Peter Bergen’s new biography, The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. This excellent book convincingly argues that bin Laden was one of a tiny number of individuals who have changed history through sheer force of will.

Bergen has studied and written extensively on jihadism, and he even met bin Laden in 1997 when he produced the first TV interview with the man who would go on to slaughter thousands and mutilate the heartland of the world’s most powerful nation. He was also the first and only outside observer to view bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound before the Pakistanis destroyed it to prevent it from becoming a shrine. Bergen’s first-hand knowledge and decades of experience in reporting on jihadism shine through in this biography, which is a work of lightly worn expertise. It is fairly short yet incredibly detailed and rich. It provides, for the first time, a properly rounded view of bin Laden, in all his dimensions: family man, business mogul, bloodthirsty religious fanatic, spin doctor, strategic incompetent and more—from his privileged birth to his pathetic death (Bergen’s account of the hunt for bin Laden and Operation Neptune Spear is thrilling).

By looking at bin Laden and his influence on history, Bergen is able to clarify bigger issues, such as the successes and failures of the American War on Terror. And he shows that bin Laden, despite not being a religious scholar, was a deeply religious man who consciously modelled himself on the Prophet Mohammed, and that, above all else, it was his religious beliefs that inspired him:

Of course, bin Laden’s beliefs were not a mainstream view among Muslims, but assertions that Islamist terrorism has nothing at all to do with Islam are as nonsensical as claims that the Crusades had nothing to do with Christian beliefs about the sanctity of Jerusalem.

Bergen’s portrait of bin Laden also shows us how laughable the man was. He would cover his ears at racetracks if music started to play over the loudspeakers and avert his eyes from uncovered women. In his grotty Abbottabad compound, as the Arab Spring went on without his or al-Qaeda’s help (inspired by liberal and anti-corruption campaigners rather than religious fanatics), he felt abandoned by history and pontificated to his family members so that he could feel important once more. His lack of intellectual curiosity, his egotism, his arid spirituality, and his pathetic exile would be enough to make one pity him if he were not also a mass murderer.

Osama bin Laden was ultimately a failure. Though Bergen harshly criticises George W. Bush’s strategy and actions (such as the barbaric and futile use of ‘enhanced interrogation’, viz. torture), he also shows how bin Laden blundered. Bin Laden believed that 9/11 would destroy America and make it withdraw from the Muslim world (thus allowing Taliban-style utopias to topple the corrupt Arab regimes), when in fact it led America to become ever more involved. Rather than causing the downfall of a superpower, as bin Laden absurdly believed he had done with his paltry part in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, 9/11 led to the utter annihilation of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden’s spectacular tactical success on 9/11 was also a staggering strategic error.

Alas, things changed. Bergen criticises Bush’s invasion of Iraq for leading to the revival of al-Qaeda, and although I still believe it was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein, it is hard to disagree with this analysis. I think it likely that Saddam’s Iraq would have imploded anyway, and the fortunes of al-Qaeda would have been revived in an even worse way had there been no intervention, but the historical record is clear that events in Iraq led to the resurgence of a defeated bin Ladenism.

Still, bin Laden was never able to launch a 9/11-level assault on the United States again. This was his aim until the end, unlike Awlaki, who thought the way forward was to instigate lone wolf attacks in the West. In that sense, at least, the War on Terror has succeeded.

But perhaps that is about to change. The Taliban has retaken Afghanistan following Joe Biden’s withdrawal of US forces. I believe that international forces should have stayed for as long as necessary. Even if it proved impossible to transform Afghanistan into a properly democratic state, the relatively small mission there was all that stood in the way of the Taliban’s return. Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban is castigated by Bergen, and rightly so. The Taliban has repeatedly reiterated its support of al-Qaeda, whose leaders have sworn oaths of allegiance to each of the successive Taliban emirs as ‘Commander of the Faithful’, meaning leader of all the world’s Muslims (hence the rift with Islamic State, whose head also claims to be the global leader of Islam). Since day one, the Taliban has broken its promises to be a more moderate version of the old fundamentalist regime. By betraying the people of Afghanistan, and especially its women and girls, the West has also gifted its avowed enemies a base from which to launch apocalyptic attacks once more. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, if he is still alive, is no doubt smirking. The US will rue the day it agreed to leave Afghanistan, as the people of that country are ruing it even now.

I have been against the withdrawal from very early on, and the horrors of the last month have strengthened my conviction. What has occurred in Afghanistan is a real-time refutation of the dogmas of both the anti-imperialist left and the isolationist right. It was and is our business to be in Afghanistan, as it was and is the business of the Afghans. For all its many and deep flaws, and all the mistakes and failures of the intervention, the West will regret its abandonment of the ousted Afghan regime. (The Uyghurs of Afghanistan are also at risk, fearing a Taliban-China alliance: the withdrawal, therefore, may turn out to benefit the CCP as well as jihadism, allowing it to extend its influence and its genocidal aims ever further.)

I only hope that the resistance being mounted in the Panjshir Valley by Ahmad Massoud, son of the late anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud (who was known as the Lion of Panjshir and was assassinated two days before 9/11 by al-Qaeda), succeeds in carving out a non-Taliban space in Afghanistan. Ashraf Ghani’s former Vice President, Amrullah Saleh, has, unlike his boss, bravely stayed in the country to fight alongside Massoud. The situation in Panjshir is looking tenuous, but all is not lost. For some heartening words, I recommend a read of Saleh’s defiant and coruscating despatch from Panjshir and Peter Bergen’s interview of Massoud.

Joe Biden should never have left the country, and certainly not in the disastrous way that he did. He should swallow his pride and send the troops back in. If he has even the remotest spark of honour, he will commit to helping the Panjshir resistance with all the resources he can muster, but I don’t have much hope that he will. (As Bergen amusingly points out, bin Laden wanted to have President Obama killed but told his men to leave Vice President Biden alone as he was ‘totally unprepared’ for the role of president. For once, I agree with bin Laden.) Let us hope, at least, that Biden, and the West more generally, gives Afghan refugees, especially the women and girls and those who risked both their and their families’ lives to support the intervention, safe harbour.

There is one small spark of hope. However long it takes and however much it destroys, jihadism is a self-defeating ideology. It has demonstrated the need to reform or enlighten Islam. Its actions have led many—including former dogmatists—to criticise or leave the faith. For example, Ibn Warraq relates that one pious young Iraqi girl who originally celebrated 9/11, after seeing what al-Qaeda did to her country, remarked: ‘Now I hate Islam. Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing … [The clerics] are making a society of nonbelievers.’ That story comes from Warraq’s book (reviewed by me here) on the heartening wave of disbelief in the Muslim world, which is in large part a response to the horrors committed by the faithful. It will take a very long time, no doubt, but the ideology of jihad inscribes its own destruction. It is to the heretics and infidels that we must look for hope.

The 9/11 assault on the United States was committed by filthy fascists, and now, twenty-five years later, those fascists are resurgent. Jihadism has evolved and become less centralised, and the rift between al-Qaeda and Islamic State has been fascinating to watch. IS, too, I predict, will make a return in the coming years. The West’s supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who have, respectively, sponsored the Taliban and spread fundamentalist Islam around the world, are friends the West is better off without. The West should have stood by its commitments in Afghanistan: one does not defeat this sort of evil quickly. It was a forever war, and so what? All wars against totalitarianism are forever wars. If you leave fascism in peace, it won’t return the favour.

All we can do is understand the enemy, and to that end Peter Bergen’s biography of Osama bin Laden is one of the few pieces of essential reading. Bin Laden, whose first name meant ‘lion’ and who had vowed to die a martyr’s death, died pathetically in a shabby compound, having been sidelined from great historical events and reduced to vainly applying dye to his greying hair. But his vision lives on. Twenty-five years after al-Qaeda’s evil attack, it is necessary to recommit to opposing the totalitarian Islamic fascism that has destroyed, and continues to destroy, so many and so much—and to honour those, all around the world, of all faiths and none, from the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 to the new lions of Panjshir, who have stood against it, often at the cost of their lives.

Further Reflections on Islamic Fascism (17 September 2026)

To begin where I left off. Sadly, my hopes that Ahmad Massoud and Amrullah Saleh’s National Resistance Front (NRF) might ‘[carve] out a non-Taliban space in Afghanistan’ came to nothing. The NRF lost the Panjshir valley and now operates in exile, but it remains probably the most influential face of the pro-democratic, anti-Taliban resistance. Alongside the other main military opposition group, the Afghanistan Freedom Front (led by General Yasin Zia and founded in March 2022), and civil society groups, including women’s rights advocates, the NRF is part of the Vienna Process for a Democratic Afghanistan, so named in contrast with the Doha Process which ultimately stripped Afghanistan of its hard-won freedoms. Though there are many factional, tactical, strategic, and political differences between the groups involved in the Vienna Process, it remains the best hope for a Taliban-free Afghanistan. Its broadly progressive and democratic (and arguably quasi-secularist) ethos shows that the dream of a free Afghanistan, so briefly and imperfectly realised, still lives. The Taliban is not, and never has been, Afghanistan.

Indeed, I wish it were better appreciated that Afghans were not passively ‘democratised’ by the US. They were not ‘unready’ for democracy, and many more Afghans than Westerners died fighting for a free Afghanistan. They did not simply surrender to the Taliban in 2021; they were systematically betrayed by those they thought were their friends. See Terry Glavin’s recent essay for more on this theme. A taste:

“Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country,” Biden said, deliberately omitting the fact that what he had told the Afghan leadership to do was hand over several ministries of the Afghan republic to the mass murderers the leadership had been fighting from long before 9/11. Biden was asking Afghan soldiers to fight on behalf of a new Popolzai-Ghilzai khanate the Americans had themselves designed.

As predicted, the Taliban very quickly abandoned even the pretence of moderation. It has restored a brutal theocracy and returned the women and girls of Afghanistan to a state of serfdom. And, of course, it has given succour to their old al-Qaeda friends. The killing of Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, by US forces in Kabul in July 2022 was ample demonstration of that. Their alliance, which gives al-Qaeda a haven to regroup and rebuild, is an open secret. Thankfully, the Taliban also restrains al-Qaeda somewhat, desirous as it is of protecting whatever international reputation it can be said to have. But this isn’t so different a situation as before; Taliban leaders were wary of bin Laden decades ago, and failed to restrain him in 2001—or turn him over when the towers came down. That al-Qaeda is weaker than ever, thanks to the War on Terror and the growth of rival groups, is only a very little comfort. Glavin again:

Al-Qaida’s franchises in Africa command up to 10,000 fighters and earn about $100 million annually in taxation, smuggling and expropriation, according to Yale University’s Graeme Wood, author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State. This is a state of affairs that confounds the notion that Al-Qaida has been reduced to an irrelevant, incompetent rump, Wood points out. “It’s hard to accept that your enemy is an idiot and that somehow you are losing to him anyway.”

And I didn’t even bother to footnote Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. . .

(For a slightly contrary view of al-Qaeda’s present capabilities, see Kyle Orton’s 9/11 anniversary retrospective, here. These analyses are not incompatible, and it is my view that both contain much truth. The War on Terror successfully and hugely degraded al-Qaeda, yes, but it is resilient and patiently rebuilding, and far from defeated.)

Five years after the fall of Kabul, the world is changed. Wars in Ukraine and Iran, Israel and Gaza, the return of Donald Trump, and the rise of the New Theism and an aggressive Christian nationalism in the US and beyond are but a few of the developments that have supplanted the threat of jihadism in the West’s public consciousness. But jihadism, in its most lethal al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) forms, remains a global concern. It strikes me that Ben Sixsmith’s words, quoted above, are extremely Western-centric; in addition to continuing IS-inspired attacks in the West, IS and al-Qaeda’s presence has reached Iran, Russia, and swathes of Africa. Meanwhile, an Iran-inspired Shia wave of jihadism is on the horizon, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid has written in this magazine. Despite the theological and political splits between these groups, it is folly to argue that there is no powerful, coherent, global jihadist threat. For all their differences, every jihadist group is, at bottom, the same: they are Islamic fascists. German, Italian, and Japanese fascism were distinct and even at odds in very many ways, but fundamentally identical. One does not need a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all definition of fascism to grasp the point.

As if this wasn’t enough, Peter Bergen’s recent anniversary piece in the New York Times reminds us that jihadism, despite its barbarically medieval soul, moves with the technological times:

Fanaticism, religious or otherwise, can drive dangerous, nihilistic attacks by those who don’t care what happens to them or their followers. That is particularly worrisome in an age when artificial intelligence could be used to develop and deploy bioweapons against which we have only weak defenses.

I also now raise an eyebrow at Sixsmith’s ‘more-or-less secular Russia’. Putin’s Orthodox bent and backing was quite apparent in 2021; now that his genocidal war against Ukraine is cheerfully championed by Russian Orthodox clerics and presented by them and him as an ‘anti-woke’ holy war against the decadent, limp-wristed West, as represented by Ukraine—well, ‘secular’ doesn’t seem to be the word, whether it is qualified or not. (For some reason, I’m reminded of George W. Bush’s foolish claim to have gotten ‘a sense of [Putin’s] soul’ after listening to Putin’s vapid religious murmurings.)

If anything, many of the developments I mentioned buttress my case by broadening it. For a long time, jihadism seemed to be the main threat presented by religion to the world. This was always too narrow a perspective, of course, but it was understandable. Now, it is clear to all. It is not only Islamic fascism we are contending with now. It is a resurgent religious fascism, and it is everywhere. Islamic fascism, Christian and Hindu nationalism, and Jewish fanaticism, to name the most egregious varieties, spread theocratic misery wherever they appear. The Christian and Hindu versions of theo-fascism are, between them, destroying the world’s two greatest secular democratic republics, while any chance of even a moderately fair settlement of the Palestine question is being ruined by apocalyptic bigots on both sides.

In a world where nuclear powers are led by zealots, where nuclear proliferation is rife, and where terrifying new AI and bio-weapons of mass destruction will soon easily be procurable by even the dullest of terrorists, theo-fascism is as potent and as dangerous as ever. Perhaps more so. Yes, after all, it is still liberty against totalitarianism. Yes, the Enlightenment is at stake.

And therein lies the essential fact: this war is not between West and East, between Christian and Muslim. It is a war between the Enlightenment and its opposite. Some things are just that simple. And it is a war being fought out within the East and the West, or between the Global North and the Global South, or between the First World and the Third World; both contain forces of—if this isn’t too much—light and dark. Christopher Hitchens understood that there is not so much a clash of civilisations as a ‘clash about civilization—a clash where Muslims are on both sides, and where the uncivilized have already created the conditions for their own eclipse.’

Being white/European/Christian, etc., is no guarantee of holding the right principles, and vice versa. I have much more in common with secularists of Muslim background, and indeed Muslim secularists—minorities within minorities, the most beleaguered of all—than with, say, Danny Tommo. And this should be enough to dismiss any temptation to side with Tommo and his ilk—Reform, Restore, Trump, and the even farther right. Religio-ethnonationalism is always and everywhere the enemy. Combatting Islamic fascism, and facing up to the difficulties of immigration (of which there are many, including the regressive social views of many Muslims and the growth of oppressive, parallel, Sharia-based legal systems in the West) and integration, need not involve anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant/anti-refugee bigotry or racism of any kind. Opposing fascism with fascism is to replace universalism with particularism, principle with chauvinism.

In my original piece, I mentioned fools on both the right and the left, and nothing has changed there, either. The current darling of the American left, Hasan Piker, once said that the US ‘deserved’ 9/11 (and he has prevaricated on that statement ever since), and he happily defends Hamas. His anti-imperialism sees little to no difference between the US and al-Qaeda; Noam Chomsky’s withered soul lives on. Condemning Israeli depredations against Palestinians, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of Tanakh symbolism in justifying these, does not mean one has to glorify the fascist and evil Hamas, themselves truly enemies of the Palestinians and opposed by many of them. Meanwhile, the far right, as represented by the likes of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, stick it to the Enlightenment-lovin’ libs by drooling over Putin, Tehran, and the Taliban. See what I mean by the Enlightenment and its opposite? Give me Rojava over any of these, any day; whatever political differences I might have had with those now-vanquished democratic confederalists, they saw things much more clearly than the Western left and right.

(For a good analysis of the left’s continuing moral and intellectual failure, see Rio Veradonir’s 9/11 anniversary essay, here. A couple of important quotes: ‘Whatever one believes about Israel’s conduct, history, or treatment of Palestinians, describing the October 7 attacks simply as “anti-colonial resistance” substitutes the relative power of the combatants for judging the political values they actually represent.’ ‘Liberalism does not assign moral virtue according to which country, religion, or ethnic group possesses less power.’ )

Give me a proper left, a robustly secular left, a left that has no compunction about defending free speech against Islamic fascists, a left that can actually identify Islamic fascism as both real and an active and potent threat in and of itself. (As Peter Bergen also reminds us, the 9/11 attacks were, in bin Laden’s own words, ‘fundamentally religious’ in motivation. Also, as it happens, it will soon be the twenty-first anniversary of the Jyllands-Posten ‘controversy’.)

Here’s a story that would be funny in its absurdity if it weren’t so shamefully revealing: Last week, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 itself, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury presented an award for ‘interfaith cooperation’ to an Islamic scholar who glorified Osama bin Laden as a ‘Sword of Allah’. Archbishop Sarah Mullally wants to promote interfaith concord and has vowed to fight misogyny both within and without the Church of England, yet just look at the photograph. There she is, guileless and smiling as she celebrates a man who once went all starry-eyed about that interfaith champion and daring feminist Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi’s wife stands almost entirely invisible in her niqab. The National Secular Society rightly called this farcical event ‘obscene’. At least an embarrassed Lambeth Palace has now rescinded the award.

Such sights are nothing new. Christopher Hitchens called it ‘reverse ecumenicism’ in light of various shades of religious leaders choosing to condemn Salman Rushdie in 1989 for offending an ancient religion. Better to protect religious sensitivities than to stand up too firmly for free speech. Between concessions to Muslim and other religious feelings, the idiocy and short-sightedness of the Western anti-imperialist left and nationalist right, and the rise of theo-fascism the world over, one does have to wonder: Where has the Enlightenment gone?

This isn’t the place to go into Palestine or Iran, but I will just say that the secular and democratic forces which represented the best hope in these areas seem now to be powerless against the theo-fascist onslaught. Donald Trump’s stupid war on Iran, ostensibly in support of the brave Iranian opposition, has just hardened and perhaps even strengthened the regime which they looked set to topple just a few months ago. The fourth anniversary of the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini has just passed as I write these words; the revolution she inspired is at its nadir, but it must go on.

And that brings me to the most important point. Amid all this gloomy talk, let us not forget ‘those, all around the world, of all faiths and none, from the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 to the new lions of Panjshir, who have stood against [Islamic fascism], often at the cost of their lives.’ To list all of these would take too long, but standing tall among them are the women of Afghanistan and Iran. Just as theo-fascism is diverse and dangerous but still a broadly coherent threat, the secular democratic resistance to it is varied and enduring and still alive. The revolution is delayed, not deceased. The Enlightenment is still, as Günter Grass once put it, the only source of light—and that light still flashes out. On the global and longue durée view, the Enlightenment has made great strides, and, though much remains to be done and though victory is far from inevitable, the worst of the forces arrayed against it are still self-defeating (we shall just have to be optimistic they don’t take the rest of us down with them).

So I think, and certainly hope, anyway.

A non-exhaustive list in no particular order of recommended Freethinker reading related to the foregoing:

A Small Light: Acts of Resistance in Afghanistan, by Zwan Mahmod

Islam’s tyrannical costumes, by Nicholas E. Meyer

Iran: Between Bombs and Theocracy, by Maryam Namazie

For Mahsa Jina Amini and Woman, Life, Freedom: Summoning an Age of Humanity in an Age of Hate, by Maryam Namazie

Verses of Life: A Review of ‘Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution’, edited by Bänoo Zan and Cy Strom, by Daniel James Sharp

The Racism of Anti-Racists: Bourdieu, Said, and Inverted Orientalism, by Siavash Shahabi

The end of American idealism, by Matt Johnson

Afghan Tourism or Taliban Whitewashing? by Zara Kay

The Taliban’s unceasing war on Afghan women, by Khadija Khan

The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali, by Ehtesham Hassan

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

‘Words are the only victors’ – Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The Rojava Women’s Revolution Under Threat: ‘Once she smelled her freedom…’, by Rahila Gupta

Image of the week: 20 years since the Jyllands-Posten cartoons controversy, by Daniel James Sharp

Islam and free speech, 20 years on from Jyllands-Posten: interview with Jacob Mchangama, by Daniel James Sharp

Is Modi India’s Zia-ul-Haq? A Clear Warning from Pakistan to India, by Ehtesham Hassan

Salwan Momika and the right to burn books, by Noel Yaxley

The problem with ‘Islamophobia’, by Mark Lilly

Image of the week: first edition of ‘The Satanic Verses’, by Daniel James Sharp

Defending liberalism: interview with Helen Pluckrose, by Daniel James Sharp

Judeo-Christian religionists cannot ‘liberate’ Muslims (or Iran), by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

10 years since the Charlie Hebdo attack: a message from the Freethinker, by Daniel James Sharp

The Rise of the British Radical Right—First Reform, then Restore? by Zwan Mahmod

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

How Trump will reshape America’s global role in his image, by Matt Johnson

On Israel, Hamas, and Refusing the Binary, by Maryam Namazie

The Iran-Israel war is not a war of liberation or a pursuit of justice, by Fariborz Pooya

A Call to a Post-Islamic World, by Tolga Theo Yalur

Postscript: Ground Zero

Extracted from an account of my November 2022 trip to New York, originally published on 7 December 2022 on my Substack. All photos mine.

One day, feeling rather oppressed by the cold I must have caught on my first night in New York, I attended a 9/11 tour at Ground Zero. Now, I know this sounds rather incongruous. A 9/11 tour? What next, the Holocaust funfair? But it wasn’t cheap or gimmicky; it was an outdoor walking tour conducted by a New Yorker named Brian with a personal connection to that terrible day. From St Paul’s Chapel (The Little Chapel That Stood and the oldest church building in Manhattan, where George Washington prayed on his Inauguration Day in 1789) through the Oculus Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center to Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial, this young man was both funny and profound as he told the story of that day and his various connections to it. If you ever have a chance to go on one of these tours, I recommend it, even if it is wretchedly chilly and you are suffering from a vile cold.

The 9/11 Memorial itself is quite something. You’ve seen the images: where the towers once stood there are now huge black square holes in the ground, water running down the inner walls into a smaller, deeper hole below, the names of all who died on September 11 and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center incised on the upper edges of the pits (these names were very carefully arranged to place people who had some sort of connection, however distant, near to each other).

But, as with everything in New York, second-hand images are insufficient: you have to actually experience it. It’s peaceful and quiet at Ground Zero and very difficult to assimilate the fact that you are standing in the exact spot where the towers blazed and collapsed, where burning bodies came hurtling down from the sky, and where an evil, toxic smoke engulfed and choked the surrounding area.

But memories of death and terror are antithetical to the spirit of the Memorial, which is intended to be a place of life and energy and meeting, a peaceful spot in the city that never sleeps, where you can sit and read or reflect or just sit. Brian told us that his uncle, who died on September 11, would have wanted people to be smoking cigars and partying at Ground Zero. He also told us that he’d once witnessed a couple leaning against the edge of one of the pits, kissing, and also (I presume but cannot be certain that this was on another occasion) someone dressed as the Joker paying his respects to the deceased. Meanwhile, lines of trees are everywhere at Ground Zero, and there is one very special tree which was recovered from the carnage of September 11 and nursed until it stood tall and green and defiant once more.

Yes, that seems to be the spirit of New York: even among the wreckage and death and horror wrought by religious fascism, there is life and love and resilience and eccentricity. Life and love against death and terror—this is the fundamental thing.

After the tour and the Memorial, I perused the 9/11 Museum, which contains, with its many exhibits, a tasteful account of New York’s darkest day and a moving memorial to the dead. Then, to One World Trade Center, or Freedom Tower, the 1,776 feet tall replacement for the twins. It’s another grand sight, an elegant feat of architecture and engineering. I went up to the One World Observatory, apparently the highest observation deck in New York, for yet another spectacular view of Manhattan from the azure.

The post Legacies of 9/11: Reflections on Islamic Fascism, 25 Years On appeared first on The Freethinker.

I spent a fair amount of time listening to Danny Kruger at Reform UK’s conference. The former Conservative MP, who defected to Reform last year, is one of the party’s most prominent intellectual voices – and a committed Christian whose faith clearly runs deep.

But at Reform’s conference, he went noticeably light on the God stuff. He spoke several times, yet unless directly asked, said remarkably little about one of his more striking political convictions: that Britain should be an explicitly Christian country.

Perhaps he knows his audience. Among those who voted Reform at the 2024 general election, a substantial 41% said they had no religion. That said, the appeal of Christian nationalism does not seem to depend on its supporters being particularly religious themselves. More than 90% of Reform members agree that “the Christian faith is an important part of Britain’s culture and should continue to be so”, compared with 44% of the public as a whole.

For many on the populist right, Christianity appears to be valued less as a faith to be practised than as a marker of culture, heritage and national identity.

Kruger has become one of the clearest advocates in British politics for Christianity being the basis of national identity. Speaking in Parliament last year, he said the country needs “a revival of faith” and a recovery of “Christian politics”.

In his recent “Doctrine for Government“, he argues that Britain urgently needs “a singular national identity to which all citizens subscribe” and a programme of “compulsory integration”. He says the Church of England should remain privileged in the constitution and describes Christianity as the “cultural technology” which created our institutions and worldview.

His version of pluralism is revealing. Other religions, he says, can be “easily tolerated” within a Christian country, provided they remain minorities. That’s not equal citizenship. It is a hierarchy of belonging: Christianity defines the nation, while everyone else is accommodated within it. Non-Christians may be tolerated, but it’s Christians who truly belong.

Kruger’s argument contains a basic contradiction. He wants a shared national identity to which all citizens can subscribe, while insisting that identity must be explicitly Christian. But in a country that is increasingly religiously diverse and largely nonreligious, a national identity built around one religion cannot plausibly unite a population that does not share it.

Reform’s drift towards Christian nationalism has also been driven by Cambridge theologian and JD Vance ally James Orr. Orr stood down as Reform’s head of policy following an undercover investigation into alleged attempts to circumvent rules on overseas political funding. He denies wrongdoing. It will be interesting to see whether his departure slows the party’s Christian nationalist turn, or whether the ideas he helped cultivate have already taken root.

Signs are that they have. Reform’s education spokesperson Suella Braverman used the conference to promise that every school would be required to sing God Save the King and “our great hymns”. These requirements would be imposed through law and guidance, with “consequences” for schools that did not comply.

There were also signs of a growing religious-right ecosystem around the party. The few civil society conference stallholders at the conference included Christian Concern and the anti-assisted dying group Care Not Killing. A Christian Fellowship for Reform event was addressed by Rupert Evans from Right To Life and Simon Calvert from Christian Institute, two organisations that campaign against abortion. None of this alone makes Reform a Christian nationalist party.

But alongside the rhetoric of Kruger, Orr and Braverman, it is reasonable to ask where the party is heading.

Kruger offers a familiar justification. Speaking in Parliament, he argued that “in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths”. He went on to identify Islam as one of those religions.

The argument goes that a muscular Christian state is needed as a bulwark against Islamism. It’s a false choice.

The rhetoric is increasingly visible among anti-immigration activists and politicians. But it remains a fringe view. Recent polling from the Christian think tank Theos found that 83% of the public reject the idea that someone must be Christian to be truly British. Just 1% regarded Christianity as the most important component of Britishness.

Nevertheless, figures such as Danny Tommo, whose balaclava-clad followers chant “Christ is King” during anti-migrant protests, Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain are leaning into a combative form of cultural Christianity as the answer to Islam’s growing presence in Britain. Christianity becomes less a matter of personal faith than a marker of who belongs – and a political weapon against those deemed not to.

We need to be clear-eyed about the threat from Islamic extremism and the challenges posed by uncontrolled migration and the importation of sexist attitudes shaped by societies that systematically devalue women. We need to be willing to defend freedom of expression, equality between men and women, freedom of religion or belief, liberal democratic government, and the rule of law robustly. But these values are strengthened by belonging equally to everyone – not by flocking to a tribal form of Christianity.

The best defence against Islamism isn’t Christian nationalism. It is a secular constitution which applies the same principles to every religion and belief. It should prevent Islamists from imposing their beliefs on others, but place precisely the same limits on Christian nationalists.

The problem is that Britain does not have a fully secular settlement. It has a network of religious privileges, often dismissed as quaint or ceremonial, which could become far more consequential in the hands of a government committed to asserting a Christian national identity.

The Church of England is established by law, the monarch is its Supreme Governor, and its bishops sit and vote in Parliament as of right. Both Houses begin their sittings with exclusively Christian prayers. Conservative-backed legislation passed in 2015 (in response to an NSS court victory) expressly allows councils to include religious observance in their formal meetings. Ironically, this has opened the door to Islamic prayers at some local authorities.

This illustrates a wider problem with religious privilege. Once the state gives one religion a privileged place in public life, others will understandably demand equivalent treatment. Christian privilege therefore opens the door to sectarian squabbling and broader religious influence in public life.

The same is true in education, where Christianity is baked into the system. Laws require every state-funded school in England to provide a daily act of collective worship – even in schools without a religious designation. Meanwhile, thousands of publicly funded schools are now controlled by religious groups, which enjoy equality law exemptions that allow them to impose their beliefs (not to mention religious modesty codes) on pupils and discriminate against nonbelievers in admissions and employment.

A Reform government intent on establishing a Christian state would not be starting with a blank sheet of paper. It would inherit an established church, bishops in the legislature, Christian privilege in Parliament and schools, statutory provision for council prayers and an extensive state-funded faith school sector.

What is currently sometimes regarded as a benign or largely symbolic Christian establishment could be hardened into a much more assertive programme. Ministers could enforce collective worship more aggressively, prescribe an explicitly Christian curriculum in schools, impose religious observance in civic life and instrumentalise the Christian state as the guardian of national values – putting hard-won freedoms, from women’s reproductive rights to equality for gay people, increasingly at the mercy of religious politics.

Our laws and institutions already concede the central Christian nationalist idea that Christianity is entitled to a privileged place within the state.

Church of England figures have spoken out about rising Christian nationalism, suggesting Christian nationalists are “neither patriots nor Christians”. But the Church is unlikely to relinquish the privileges which give constitutional expression to the very idea that Christianity should enjoy a special place in the life of the nation.

Reform would not need to create a Christian state from scratch. It would merely need to utilise and expand the one we already have.

That is why the Government’s defence of the status quo is so complacent. Its position is that the Church of England is “by law established as the Church in England”, that the monarch is its Supreme Governor, and that this relationship is “a core part of our constitutional framework that has evolved over centuries”. It has no plans to change it.

But the fact that an arrangement has evolved over centuries does not make it suitable for the century we are living in – and nor does it mean that it will always remain benign.

Politicians who defend religious privilege on the basis of tradition cannot assume it will only ever be used inconsequentially. Constitutional arrangements and public institutions must be judged partly by what a future government could do with them.

A secular constitution is not an attack on Christianity and it does not require us to deny Christianity’s influence on British history. It is a safeguard against any religious movement claiming ownership of the nation or using the state to advance its beliefs.

If Britain needs a stronger shared identity, it should be based on equal citizenship, democratic freedoms and the rule of law. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and atheists alike can embrace those principles.

With American-style Christian nationalism gaining ground in a party with serious political ambitions, it is time to stop treating Britain’s archaic church-state settlement as harmless.

The post Britain’s archaic Church-state settlement could enable Reform’s Christian nationalism appeared first on The Freethinker.

Islam incorporates many ideas and characters from both Judaism and Christianity. (It also denies Christianity’s central claim that Jesus was crucified, though that doesn’t stop Muslim and Christian legislators from collaborating to block assisted dying laws.) However, the idea of heaven as a really good retirement home with a variety of 24/7 spiritual, gastronomic, and fleshly delights didn’t come from Judaism, which was always a bit vague about the possibility of a physical afterlife (and still is). Christianity’s biggest selling point was the promise of resurrection, a particularly attractive prospect at a time when half your children died in infancy, childbirth was lethally dangerous, and many adults didn’t make it far beyond forty. The imprecise nature of the Christian heaven merely encouraged Christians to put their own interpretations on it.

Naturally, quite a few people argued that if heaven is such a wonderful place, why wait?  Let’s crash the party! The first Christians who took this idea to its logical conclusion were extreme members of the Donatist sect. In the fourth century, many of them opted for suicide, even inviting their friends to watch. Possibly worried about empty pews, the church—led by St Augustine of Hippo—progressively anathematised suicide, penalising it with posthumous excommunication as well as denial of funeral services and burial in unconsecrated ground. As I described in a recent Freethinker article, this remains Catholic doctrine, now fudged by pretending that all suicides are insane. Yet despite the penalties, it was two centuries before Donatism disappeared, though Christianity continued to celebrate martyrdom. The plenary indulgence that soldiers were offered if they died in the Crusades must also have sounded very like a shortcut to heaven.

The garden theme is common to both faiths, but unlike the typical Christian heaven (chaste family reunions, pretty but asexual angels, perpetual Choral Evensong, and white and gold interiors like Buckingham Palace), Islam’s version is unashamedly hedonistic and sensual. Muslims, like Christians, are supposed to enjoy the perpetual presence of God, but for them it doesn’t stop there. They get to enjoy the company of heavenly virgins, or houris, who are supposedly both virginal and well-endowed—and far from coy: ‘And (there will be) Companions [i.e. houris] with beautiful, big and lustrous eyes,- Like unto Pearls well-guarded. A Reward for the deeds of their past (life).’ (Qur’an 56:22-24, Yusuf Ali translation.) (Incidentally, the 72 virgins come from less authoritative hadith collections; according to the more ‘reliable’ accounts, the chosen get just two houris.)  

And, according to verses 56:15-21, these lucky participants recline

on Thrones encrusted (with gold and precious stones)… Round about them will (serve) youths of perpetual (freshness), With goblets, (shining) beakers, and cups (filled) out of clear-flowing fountains: No after-ache will they receive therefrom, nor will they suffer intoxication: And with fruits, any that they may select: And the flesh of fowls, any that they may desire.

Add a bottle of decent Burgundy, and Muslim heaven might as well be a fusion of Love Island and a Michelin-starred Gordon Ramsay restaurant. (As it happens, some Qur’an translations are less coy in explicitly naming the contents of those goblets as wine—but even then, it is apparently non-alcoholic wine, which prevents drunkenness and hangovers. So even the hedonism of this conception of heaven has its limits.)

In contrast, religions that encourage suicide (as Hinduism used to do for widows until the Raj outlawed suttee), or at least don’t anathematise it, have less need to offer celestial carrots. Paradise gardens are much less prominent in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shinto. Paradise-free Confucianism also accepts honourable or altruistic suicide.

Barring the more obvious types of insanity, dying—and killing—for an idea usually requires the sort of shared ideas that we call ideologies. (Fidel Castro was prepared for Cuba to be wiped out if the USSR would initiate and, he hoped, win a nuclear war against the USA.) During the Second World War, the kamikaze pilots’ basic ideology was that dying for the Emperor was what good Japanese did if commanded, a hi-tech version of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Surrender was shameful, and kamikaze attacks were airborne versions of the suicidal ‘banzai’ charges of the remnants of Japanese garrisons when the Americans had almost conquered a Pacific island. More recently, some North Korean soldiers captured by Ukraine tried to kill themselves or asked their Ukrainian captors to do the job for them.

In the final months of the European war, the Nazis toyed with a ‘Leonidas’ suicide squadron using a piloted adaptation of the V1 flying bomb like the Japanese purpose-built rocket-powered ones, and though that incarnation of the project never went anywhere, the ‘Leonidas Squadron’ did indeed conduct desperate suicide missions. That seemed to be the final manifestation of the suicide bomber. Afterwards, there was the occasional self-immolation—Buddhist monks in Vietnam, Jan Palach in 1968 Prague—but they harmed nobody apart from the suicides themselves. These suicides harboured no murderous motives; quite the opposite, in fact. They were political statements against oppression and affected public perceptions of the Vietnam War and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that ended its brief ‘Prague Spring’.

By the 1980s, aggressive suicides seemed to me so much a thing of the past and so unthinkable that I included them in one of my very few experiments with fiction. Having been co-opted to the committee of the old Voluntary Euthanasia Society and predicting, correctly, that legalisation in Britain would take a very long time, I made some notes for a blackly comic short story involving an imagined group of elderly Society members with near-terminal cancer who had once been politically active. Now, instead of dying uselessly and unpleasantly, they would start attending political meetings again and get to know selected movers and shakers. Then, at the right moment, they would conceal explosives in their clothes or colostomy bags and explode both themselves and the politicians and bishops opposed to law reform. As the military historian Clausewitz might have said, it was ‘the continuation of individual politics by other means’.

Apart from its very questionable taste, one reason the idea never got beyond the note-making stage was that life started imitating my embryonic art. In 1983, suicide bombers driving a lorry filled with explosives destroyed the US embassy in Beirut and several hundred sleeping marines. Then the Tamil Tigers turned my tasteless fantasy into a terrible recurrent reality when, in 1984, a woman wearing an explosive belt blew up India’s Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, at an outdoor political meeting. This set an enduring precedent that became a regular news item after the Soviet- and American-led invasions of Afghanistan, followed by the invasion and implosion of Iraq and the rise of Islamic State—and, of course, most notoriously of all, 11 September 2001. Now that 11/9 is being remembered and residents of Western conurbations wait uneasily for the first AI-assisted chemical or biological suicide bomber, I have been updating my thoughts. It has not turned out to be an optimistic exercise.

Being a psychiatrist is not much help here. The typical psychiatric suicide is depressed (which usually means ‘understandably unhappy’) or, less commonly, schizophrenic. The change from coal gas to non-toxic natural gas and the phasing out of barbiturates and other once-popular farewell drugs has made traditional suicide methods less lethal, forcing a change to hanging and car exhausts. Catalytic converters make the latter method difficult, so hanging is now a common method for the unskilled, unemployed, and all too often unemployable young men who now contribute disproportionately to European suicide statistics. Among the suicide bombers, there may be some young men of this kind. If you feel that life has little to offer and are thinking of ending it all anyway, there could be an obvious attraction in dying in notoriety rather than failure, but most Muslim suicide bombers don’t seem to come from this underclass. The 11 September group and their UK imitators on 7/7, for example, certainly didn’t, and far from being depressed, they were probably high on martyrdom. One psychiatrist, evidently of the psychoanalytic faith, claimed that these generally young, unmarried, and thus—he alleged—sexually frustrated bombers experience their sacrifice as ‘a massive explosive orgasmic catharsis’, an explanation that seems to me as unlikely as it is therapeutically, prophylactically, and politically unhelpful.

Though the nearly 3,000 death toll from 11/9 was high, we should not forget the steady accumulation of deaths from US mass shootings since then. AI gives a figure in the thousands, counting only those that involved at least four deaths, excluding the shooter. That figure would be much higher if recent wars hadn’t enabled doctors to develop much better techniques for keeping people alive once they have reached medical and surgical help. In many cases, the assailant either shot himself or was shot dead by police. Often that is what the shooter had expected or even wanted to happen to him. Very few of those mass shooters were Islamists/jihadists.

Running Amok: Inside the Mind of the Lone Mass Killer, a 2025 book by British-Australian psychiatrist Paul Mullen, is very informative about the personalities of people who do that sort of thing. Many of them are obviously troubled and disturbed, and there are warning signs, but so are lots of people who never kill anyone. Mullen concedes the difficulty of both identifying and stopping them before they cause mayhem. The recent report on the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana showed that even when several red lights were flashing, the system impeded timely intervention. Mass shootings would be less likely if the media didn’t report them, thus depriving many shooters of their longed-for moment of notoriety, but that is not in the nature of the media in democracies. Only totalitarian states can hope to suppress the news.

Perhaps we can get some useful information by looking at suicide in the military. Most Muslim suicide bombers are of military age and apparently see themselves as soldiers fighting in a just war. If they don’t play it by the Geneva Convention, well, neither did many British and Allied soldiers and agents who operated without uniforms behind enemy lines in WW2. Here we come up against a problem: the generals apparently don’t like talking about suicide. British figures for both world wars are unobtainable because suicide was not recorded separately from other deaths in areas of combat, and a computer search at the Public Records Office drew a complete blank.

The short-lived rise in firearm suicides in Britain from 1939-45 suggests a connection, but the numbers were small. That terrified or exhausted soldiers occasionally use guns to shoot themselves rather than the enemy is hardly surprising, though the deaths are often disguised as ‘accidental’. However, soldiers not infrequently do things on their own initiative that are virtually certain to cause their deaths, like throwing themselves onto a hand grenade to protect their comrades from the explosion. Such ‘heroic suicides’ were recognised as a special category by Émile Durkheim, the 19th-century pioneer of suicide research. He also thought that such acts were commoner among NCOs than officers, and among the leaders rather than the led. Some of this ‘heroism’ (such as charging an enemy machine-gun post single-handed) is actually thinly-disguised suicide but sometimes earns a posthumous decoration because acknowledging the truth would be bad for morale. Occasionally, of course, the equally frightened enemy surrenders and the would-be suicide undergoes a rapid change of role to living war hero.

One reason for the ease with which several thousand kamikaze pilots were recruited was the very high attrition rate among ordinary pilots as Japan started losing the war. If your chances of both hitting the target and returning alive are small, and if a one-way ticket looks as if it might achieve at least the first objective, and if surrender is simply not part of the national or personal ethos, why not try to die usefully rather than uselessly? The Japanese imperial kamikazes died with WW2, but I see no early end to their latest incarnation. Islamic would-be martyrs will hardly be argued out of martyrdom by appeals to secularism.

My fictional technology also needs updating. Many drug-smuggling ‘mules’ can swallow, with practice, twenty or thirty packets of cocaine to pass through immigration undetected, motivated simply by money and with no ideological agenda. There is no need to imagine what a young fanatic might be willing to swallow (or insert) to glorify God because a few suicide bombers have already detonated internalised explosives in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. The Tamil Tigers have gone; the Islamists have not. Islam is very much opposed to ‘ordinary’ suicide and even more to assisted dying, but being a suicide bomber in the service of Islam gets you the equivalent of those Crusade-era plenary indulgences.

Compared with Japan’s tradition of honourable or altruistic suicide and its equivalents in ancient Greece and Rome, Christianity’s excommunication of suicides and the ritual desecration of their bodies that continued in the United Kingdom until 1824 possibly reduced suicidal behaviour but certainly didn’t abolish it. Suicide notes often indicate a hope that God will understand and forgive. The Pope still wields near-total authority among Roman Catholics, but male suicide rates per 100,000 in largely Catholic Poland (21.6) and Lithuania (33.9) are notably higher than in England (17.1). In contrast, the struggle for doctrinal ownership in the Anglican Church, increasingly split between the Church of England and the Church of Africa, is as nothing compared with the lack of any central authority in Islam.

Like the wider Protestant church(es) since the Reformation, Islam contains numerous nonconformist sects, some of them more puritan than the Puritans and equally determined to found their own ‘shining city on a hill’, but it is not only people who regard themselves as devout Muslims who join such sects. Puritanism also attracts sinners anxious to cleanse themselves of sin—like that repentant fornicator St Augustine—and our prisons harbour many home-grown potential converts. Justifiably pessimistic about their prospects in this world, they are willing to consider trying their luck in Islam’s tempting version of the next.

In 1911, Admiral Lord Fisher (the man who introduced Dreadnoughts to the Royal Navy) argued for a common interest and alliance between the Ottoman Empire and the British one, given that over 300 million Muslims lived in India and present-day Malaysia. (If Britain had taken his advice, Turkey might have stayed neutral in 1914 or become an ally, avoiding both the failed Gallipoli campaign and the Balfour Declaration.) However, Fisher’s advice came with a very prescient warning: ‘The world has yet to learn what the Mohammedans can do if once the holy fervour seizes them’. Well, we have certainly learned now, thanks to September 11, 2001—and all the bloody years since.

Related reading

Legacies of 9/11: Blurring the Boundaries of Terrorism, by Rahila Gupta

The post Legacies of 9/11: On Suicide and Paradise appeared first on The Freethinker.

Find out more about Nadler and his work here.

See also a review of Spinoza, Atheist, by Matthew Stewart for the Freethinker, here.

Related reading

Freethought History Webinar #12: The Atheistic Radicalism of America’s Founding and Refounding. With Matthew Stewart (5 July 2026).

The radical atheism of the American revolutions: interview with Matthew Stewart, by Daniel James Sharp

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

The post The Atheist Spinoza: Interview with Professor Steven Nadler appeared first on The Freethinker.

The webinars will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel. (This post will be updated and the video of the webinar—on which more in a moment—will appear below once the recording is available. All posts about these webinars will be accessible here, and all such posts will also be updated in due course when the webinar recordings are available, thus forming a complete catalogue of the series).

Register for Freethought History Webinar #15: Atheism and Vegetarianism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Match Made in Heaven? With Nathan Alexander.

The webinar will take place on 20 October 2026 at 7 pm UK time (2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MDT/11 am MST/11 am PT) via Zoom.

About the webinar: Historically, atheists and freethinkers have adopted progressive stances on issues like women’s rights and abolition before they became widely held. The same is true for vegetarianism and animal rights more broadly. This talk explores atheists and freethinkers’ interest in vegetarianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly with reference to figures like Percy Bysshe Shelley, G.W. Foote, and Henry S. Salt.

About the speaker: Nathan G. Alexander is a lecturer in history at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850-1914 and the co-host of the Beyond Atheism podcast. He holds a PhD in modern history from the University of St Andrews.

You must register to secure your place at the webinar. To do so, click here or on the image below, which also contains other ways to access the registration link. I can’t wait to see you there.

With thanks to Bob Forder for suggesting these seminars and helping to organise them.

The post Freethought History Webinar #15: Atheism and Vegetarianism in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Match Made in Heaven? With Nathan Alexander (20 October 2026). appeared first on The Freethinker.