Competent public voices defending Christianity in the public square are few and far between. Mainstream media platforms allowing these voices public exposure are fewer and further between. So whatever your politics, GB News is to be congratulated on its Easter programme where the Revd Calvin Robinson, Anglican transitional deacon, interviews four guests, interspersed with moving singing and readings from – among other excellent choices – St Paul, St John Chrysostom and St Vincent Ferrer.
Indeed the balance of the content leans impressively and powerfully in favour of Catholic eyes and voices. It was even originally meant to be filmed in a Catholic church, but, due to circumstances GB News were unable to foresee, a small but beautiful Anglican church in Tottenham, London, was asked to step in at the last minute.
In the context of the widespread cancellation of Christianity in the media, it matters all the more that one mainstream outlet should provide Christianity and the Church with a platform to celebrate and explain the Faith.
Catholics should join with other Christians and be sincerely grateful that Mr Robinson was offered this opportunity to give some serious, mature and engaging thought to the resurrection of Christ.
The programme, which airs on GB News on Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday at 6pm, brings together four gifted, competent and attractive exponents of the Christian faith. Once again the balance is interesting: two Catholics, one Russian Orthodox and one Anglican.
The editorial set up for Robinson’s promotion of a major Christian festivals (he did one at Christmas as well) is simple and effective.
You do have to credit Robinson and his producers with good judgement for picking four very powerful voices: Monsignor Michael Nazir-Ali, one of the most compelling Catholic voices in the Church today; Paul Kingsnorth, a former eco-activist and Wiccan who has become an Eastern Orthodox writer of some profound philosophical weight; Professor Robert George of Princeton, a formidable Catholic voice in America, who in his book “Orthodoxies” analysed the coming religious power of progressive ideology over two decades ago, and Dr James Orr, the Anglican theologian from Cambridge who got Jordan Peterson back to Cambridge after he had been cancelled.
Beginning with Mgr Nazir-Ali, a priest of the Ordinariate, Robinson managed to pitch the questions in a way that went to the heart of some of the contemporary issues that we are dealing with.
Because Nazir-Ali left Anglicanism to become a Catholic just at the moment when both churches were swamped with LGBTQ+ propaganda and all the emotional blackmail masquerading as theology that accompanies cultural pressure, it would have been remiss of Robinson not to ask him what the difference was between the way the two churches were dealing with the issue of same-sex blessings.
Nazir-Ali is as polite and measured as he always is and brings a diplomatic but sharp analysis to the problem. A former Bishop of Rochester, one of England’s senior dioceses, he says that problem for the Anglican Communion was that it lacked the ability to know how to make decisions of universal significance and make them stick; and that was why they were getting into a schismatic mess they would find difficult to get out of.
Without precisely articulating what he thinks is going to happen to the Catholic Church, he suggests that, given the weight of the Magisterium, even if problematic decisions were to be taken by, for example, the German Synodal Way, they would not have the weight and authority to affect the settled moral teaching of the Church. They would not stick. This may offer some reassurance to anxious Christians wondering where they can go to find the unchanging moral truths of the Church preserved, defended and articulated.
Professor George and Dr Orr are both heavyweight Christian intellectuals who bring the power of rationality and the highest ends of the Western academy to the defence of the reality and integrity of Easter, the Resurrection and faith in Christ.
If only the mainstream media would allow voices of this calibre some platform to represent the faith, as GB News does, then the popular misinformed impression that commentators like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Fry have anything profound to say either about faith or about Christ and the quest for meaning, would be exposed as the shallow populist rhetoric that it is. Robinson and GB News deserve the thanks and the support of the open-minded and faith-sympathetic community for breaking through the cancellation of Christianity in the public media.
But the star of the show for me is Paul Kingsnorth. He explains the journey he had taken to find his faith in Christ. “I began as a Dawkinsesque atheist, and finding my way to being an environmental activist, protesting against the scarring of the environment. And then I signed up to be a pantheistic pagan, after which I developed into a Zen Buddhist and finally a Wiccan.”
Kingsnorth’s spiritual and intellectual journey took him through the whole range of popular and populist alternatives to Christ that are constantly presented as cool, essential, real, true and better than Christianity.
He says: “In 2021 I became a Christian – what I was looking for was not to be found in politics, activism, or culture or novels – I found I was on a search for God. I was disturbed to find that He was what I wanted, but He was.
“I searched through a lot of places, and found Christ came to me. I felt pursued – and I was wanting to run away for a while, but then I gave up, and he found me.”
He had since found himself reading the Orthodox monk Fr Seraphim Rose: “I discovered through him the important realisation that the Truth was not an idea, but a Person.
“When I was a student I believed we were in the middle of an environmental, economic and political crisis, and whilst that may be true, at the heart of it is the deeper analysis that we are living through a spiritual crisis.
“Christianity is the answer to everything. God takes on human form and intervenes in history and gives us another chance – sacrificing himself rather than sacrificing anyone else.”
But as is so often the case, it isn’t just what he says, but the way he says it.
The GB News Easter Special airs on Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday at 6.00 pm
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