Podcast: Understanding Britain Now With Help From Britain Then

Affinity podcast hosts Graham Nicholls and Lizzie Harewood sit down with Collin Hansen from The Gospel Coalition (TGC) to talk about:

• Collin’s current role with TGC, as well as his previous experience and family background;
• his published works, particularly Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation (2023);
• his current project (which he’ll speak further on at the Affinity Theological Study Conference in March 2027) comparing and contrasting C.S. Lewis and Winston Churchill;
• the post-Christian era and its connections to the Second World War and its immediate aftermath;
• the concept of people being either ‘somewhere’ people or ‘anywhere’ people;
• the differences between ministry perspectives at national, regional, local and parish levels;
• the role of Christianity in Britons’ understanding of their own cultural identity;
• the contrasting impacts of established and independent churches.

Graham Nicholls (0:11) 

Welcome to Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast. My name is Graham Nicholls, Director of Affinity and one of the Pastors at Christchurch Haywards Heath, and I’m joined by my co-host Lizzie, who can say hello and introduce herself.

Lizzie Harewood (0:27) 

Hi, I’m Lizzie. Did you want something more inspiring than that, Graham?

Graham Nicholls (0:31)

Yes, I think you can say for a change what you do as your kind of day job?

Lizzie Harewood (0:37)

Well, I work for the Association of Christian Teachers, an organisation that supports Christians working in education up and down the UK, but I’m also a mum, married to a church pastor.

Graham Nicholls (0:50)

Yes, indeed, and we are very pleased to welcome Collin Hanson, who works with The Gospel Coalition, he works with the Keller Centre and wears various other hats. Collin, welcome to Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast. 

Collin Hansen (1:04)

I’m really excited to be here, eager to have this conversation.

Graham Nicholls (1:08) 

Well, thank you very much. Just introduce yourself to people about where you are and who you are and family situation, those kind of things would be great.

Collin Hansen (1:17) 

Yes, I’m in the lesser Birmingham of Alabama in the United States. I’ve lived here for a good 12 years, have three kids, they’re 11, 8, and 4 years old. My wife and I have been married for about 25 years. Previous to that, we lived outside of New York City, and then previous to that, outside of Chicago. And in all of those stops, I worked for the Gospel Coalition, so started working for Don Carson and Tim Keller in 2010. Previous to that, I’d been at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School studying, and then before that, working at Christianity Today magazine in Chicago as the news editor. So, then grew up on a farm in South Dakota. So, a little bit of a different journey to get where I am, but yeah, a lot of, typically, my focus is always some combination of journalism and history. And so, going back to undergraduate, I was a European history major, so a lot of those things just tend to pop out in my various writings and speaking.

Graham Nicholls (2:22) 

Yeah, and you have a bit of European Scandinavian heritage, I think.

Collin Hansen (2:28) 

More than a little bit, yes. So, on the Hansen side, I – well, interesting fact, this is very uncommon in the United States and uncommon in other places as well – but I knew seven of my eight great grandparents. And so, two my Hansen great-grandparents, again, who I grew up nearby, they came from Denmark, and that family’s not been in the United States for a century. Another great-grandmother, she came as a child with her family from Norway. Got some Swedish blood in there as well. So it was interesting when my family was visiting Normandy a few years ago, there on Omaha Beach in the American Cemetery, there was an American family that walked by and they said, “It’s so wonderful to see Norwegians visiting this site.” Like, well, I mean, we do have the look. So, yeah, so I do a lot of things with the Gospel Coalition’s Norden group. (3:26) We’ll be doing an event at the Faroe Islands this fall, which I’m really excited about, but I’m…

Lizzie Harewood (3:30)

Fantastic. 

Collin Hansen (3:32) 

I know, exactly. I’ve not been there before, so I’m pretty looking forward to it, but I’m usually every year somewhere in Scandinavia doing something, which is really fun and meaningful.

Lizzie Harewood (3:42) 

I bet that’s a complex plane journey.

Collin Hansen (3:47)

To the Faroe Islands, it is – though you just connect in Reykjavik or Copenhagen, so it’s not quite as complicated as I might have thought, but I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere like it, so I’m excited.

Graham Nicholls (4:02) 

You’ve written a lot of books, well, a number of books. Is there one that was your most enjoyable to write that you can pick out? 

Collin Hansen (4:11) 

Oh, boy, yeah. Well, I would actually say the one that we’re going to talk about here has been my most enjoyable so far. But of the published works, I would certainly say that Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation was the most meaningful project. Just being able to do a journalistic/historical dive back into his life and tell some stories that I knew, but maybe a lot of other people didn’t yet know about his life – but then talk to his family members, his sister, learn what it was like for him growing up and all these different things that spoke into his spiritual and intellectual formation. So, yeah, that was definitely the most enjoyable project so far of bringing together a lot of my own experiences and my own life, my own work, and then to be working alongside somebody that I admired so much in Tim Keller.

Graham Nicholls (5:10) 

Yeah, I enjoyed that book very much. It taught me stuff I didn’t know already and made him seem more consequential than I’d kind of realised. Because I think if you’re just consuming, ythere’s a point in history where you come across Tim Keller – you read Counterfeit Gods or something, and then you hear him speaking at conferences, but you don’t really piece it all back together again, if you know what I mean. You just enjoy the bits you enjoy, if that makes sense. It was helpful.

Collin Hansen (5:37)

Yeah, well, and there are so many different bits. So, if you were interested in cultural analysis, you might come across Making Sense of God. If you’re interested in church planting or church leadership, you just might be using Centre Church. If you’re just an ordinary, everyday Christian and you’re looking for some edifying works, you might look at his Prodigal God book about the Parable of the Two Sons. But yeah, you don’t see all of it then put together. You don’t all see all of it compiled in different stones that hadn’t been unturned. I had written very consequential academic works about the history of the Reformed diaconate and helping to recover the practice of the diaconate as, in terms of just caring for the poor and the community and the beginnings of what (we could see now as the social welfare state emerging from that within Protestant countries, in particular, of Northern Europe. So, yeah, that was a fun element to that project. And the way the book unfolded in this ‘rings on a tree’ analogy that I borrowed from Tim himself worked so well in his life because he just kept adding those areas of influence and expertise in a way that I don’t really think is quite parallel for anyone else. So, it was a very interesting project and meaningful in a lot of ways.

Graham Nicholls (7:02) 

Yeah, thank you for that. You are kindly going to speak for us in 2027 at the Affinity Theological Study Conference, which is Wednesday 10th to Friday 12th of March. That’s in the middle of the country and there’ll be all the booking information on affinity.org.uk and we’ll put it in the show notes as well. But your particular title is ‘The People of God in the Nations of the World.’ I think you’re going to lean into the idea of God’s people as a holy nation, as a holy people amongst a particular nation and looking at the theology of that and how that relates to our view of the actual nation and nationalism and nationhood and so on. So, is this a topic that interests you, that you’re researching, that you’re writing for, perhaps?

Collin Hansen (7:53) 

Yeah, so I was really honoured and grateful for the invitation and it seemed to coincide really well with not only long-term interests of mine, bringing together theology, history, culture, but then also applying it to a specific project that is the culmination of a lot of different years of study and interest and, of course, I think applies especially well to Affinity and where we’re going to be in talking about this. So, what I’m going to be looking at specifically is the year 1945 and the interplay between three different dynamics, looking specifically at Great Britain within the British Empire and then, of course, within the United Nations. So, three different levels there and it’s part of a broader project that I’m working on now of the relationship between Winston Churchill and C.S. Lewis, specifically during the years of the Second World War. But 1945 provides, I think, just an absolutely fascinating window to look at all sorts of different levels as Christians from history in ways that are also biblically and theologically rooted. 

Collin Hansen (9:02)

So, I’ll just give you an example of this. I’m currently in the process of writing about August 1945. I’ve done a good bit of that already, but a lot of people remember August 1945, of course, as the end of the Second World War. It’s the surrender of Japan. It’s the beginning of the beginning of the peace. It’s the dropping of the two atomic bombs, which, of course, is obviously transformative to world history, horrific in so many ways, really impossible to wrap our minds around. But it’s also the year that in England, two of the most famous dystopian novels ever were published. One of them was Animal Farm by Orwell and the other was the third in the space trilogy from C.S. Lewis, the third and final one, That Hideous Strength. And so, you just start with this basic fact: how is it that, at the moment of the British Empire’s greatest triumph in all of its history, do two of its greatest writers of all time publish dystopian novels? What was it they were worried about? And specifically with Lewis here, what was he worried about as a Christian? What was he worried about with regard to the church, about his nation, about the world? What was it that this war did not resolve in his head?

Collin Hansen (10:31)

Now, of course, the interplay then with Churchill coming in is that Churchill was the national leader who was deposed during that time, who was voted out of office. Something that I think even a lot of Americans who basically know Churchill’s life could not fathom could have possibly happened. But of course, it had a lot to do with national hopes and national expectations and national tragedies there. And so, the church was at a very – I mean, I don’t know how else to say it, it’s a unique time in history to try to navigate who are we as the church, who are we as the British nation, who are we as an empire. Because of course, this is the beginning of the end of the British Empire that Churchill fought so hard to defend. So, that victory does not save the empire by any means. In fact, it accelerates the destruction of the empire very clearly.

Collin Hansen (11:26) 

And then also this sense that we need to rebuild the world on a different foundation because nationalism itself has contributed to this horrific result. So, the building of the United Nations – and I’ll just try to bring this full circle now – the United Nations had to be built on a specific philosophical, cultural, and ultimately theological basis. And famously, that basis was built without reference to God. And so, what does it look like to try to rebuild the West, to rebuild the foundations of what we had destroyed without any reference to God? How do you create this secular – basically a secular utopia – to try to make up for whatever combination of Christian and nationalist sentiment was presumed to have resulted in the Second World War? Combined with the complication of the anti-Christian philosophical movements of communism and fascism that had moved in as well. So, that’s all very complicated. I trust that it will not be quite as complicated when I’m actually getting a chance to teach on it. That’s actually what I love about the Affinity Theology Conference, all the interactive components to it, spending days together, conversing about these topics. I think there’ll be more than enough for us to discuss.

Lizzie Harewood (12:55) 

Okay, wow. I mean, I’ve got so many questions.

Graham Nicholls (12:58) 

I can only imagine. Go with some of them, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Harewood (13:03) 

Golly, I suppose, so just thinking about the content of the teaching at the conference, are you going to be unpicking what bedded down the historical platform for what the British nation has become? Are you thinking more internationally? Because I suppose what I’m going to be thinking is, here’s an American guy coming to speak about Christian nationalism to a bunch of Brits.

Collin Hansen (13:34) 

That’s right.

Lizzie Harewood (13:35) 

And although you’ve obviously got a very good understanding of British and European history, and obviously of our greatest leader, Winston Churchill. How are you going to tell us something that we need to know?

Collin Hansen (13:55) 

I have no desires to make contemporary national political recommendations, so you will not be seeing my recommendation on how to vote or whoever the next prime minister is of the UK at that time. I’m not going to be jumping in on any of that kind of stuff. The things that I’m looking at – just to give you another specific example of this – would actually be from Lewis’s Great Divorce. So a lot of people are familiar with The Great Divorce. Maybe not a lot of people remember that that was actually serialised in The Guardian (Anglican) newspaper during the Second World War, specifically, and especially during the year 1945. But I was looking at – I don’t know how many people are familiar with The Great Divorce, but if they’re familiar with it, there are certain scenes – just famous scenes – of these people. They take a bus from hell, they’re going to heaven, and then there’s this question of, ‘Okay, do they get a second chance?’ Do they get to go in? And there’s famous scenes about the vicar who doesn’t want to, or the bishop, actually, who doesn’t want to go to heaven because he thinks Jesus had some things wrong and he’s got a theology conference back in hell he’s got to get back to. That’s a personal, very memorable one.

Collin Hansen (15:13)

But there was an interesting one that a lot of people will – if they’re familiar with it, they’ll remember. And it’s about a mother who’s just completely wrecked and torn apart by the death of her son a decade earlier. She’s really caught up in her grief and she ends up confronting her brother in heaven, and they have this amazing dialogue back and forth about the nature of love, the nature of God, and ultimately, she has a view that, ‘If God’s not going to give me my son back, then I don’t want to be a part of heaven at all if I’m not going to get to meet him.’ And that becomes the basis of idolatry and her representation of idolatry – which by the way, Tim Keller picked up and taught on this quite often.

Collin Hansen (15:56) 

All that’s just to set up to say, as I was reading through The Guardian (Anglican) newspaper – which by the way, there are no copies in the United States of this. I had to buy one from Lambeth and have it digitised and sent back over here. The last copy in the United States was lost in 2020. And I’m looking at this – I’m seeing letters from different people around the UK commenting on events at the time, and there’s a vicar’s wife, and she’s commenting, saying, ‘I don’t understand why everybody’s feeling bad for these Germans. They started it. The Bible says, you live by the sword, you die by the sword; you live by the bomb, you die by the bomb. I don’t really care about this, and if people feel bad for these women and children dying–’ which by the way, this letter was published during the Dresden bombings, immediate aftermath. She’s like, ‘Tell them to read their Bibles.’ 

Collin Hansen (16:49) 

And then she publishes another one later, right at the end of the war. Same thing, same, ‘I just don’t understand. I mean, we can’t let Christian sentiment destroy this basic fact that the German people as a whole, as a nation, need to be made to suffer. They need to be made to pay for this.’ And then I went back and I found a letter that she wrote three years earlier, and I realised that she had been – there was something called the Baedeker Raids all throughout England. And this was the Germans using a tour guide from Germany to basically to find a number of different cultural sites throughout England, especially that they were going to destroy. One of the sites was Canterbury, because of course, Canterbury was very close to occupied France and everything. And when they went over in the Baedeker Raids, it did not destroy the cathedral there, but it did destroy a lot of the vicar’s housing. And sure enough, she lost her house there. 

Collin Hansen (17:44) 

So, the essential timeless question is not necessarily about the UK, and it’s not necessarily about today. The essential question is, as Christians, how do we relate to the suffering that we experience? How do we relate to our nationhood? And when we’re in conflict with other nations, how do we see the people of those other nations? How do we approach them? Do they deserve mercy? And then how do we see this as Christians? Do we simply cheer on our nation as a nation, no matter what they do? Are we supposed to criticise? I’m sure you guys are probably familiar with Bishop George Bell, who was very critical – one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s close friends. In fact, it was meeting with him that got Bonhoeffer arrested and then ultimately executed when they were meeting in Sweden. Well, he traced back and he was supposed to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Why is he not Archbishop of Canterbury?  Because he criticised the bombing. Who removed him from that nomination? Winston Churchill, of course. On the one side, we can give thanks for a political system that allowed the bishops to speak against their nation, even at their most famous leader, at their nation’s moments of greatest peril. At the same time, we can see that fraught relationship between church and state when the state can tell the church what to do. Now, I’m not going to be commenting on American versus British church-state arrangements there, but simply to look at the incredible number of complications, but also takeaways, lessons, opportunities to learn. I don’t know, Lizzie, if that answers your question. It’s probably just going on a whole different rabbit hole there, but it’s really just trying to draw out from this moment of greatest peril and drama and pivot. I mean, we are still all living in the shadow of what happened in the Second World War, no doubt. What can we take away from that moving forward?

Graham Nicholls (19:38) 

Yeah, I’ve got a really sad takeaway that a lot of the critique of, say, some current world leaders would be that they’re dismantling the kind of rule of law and the world order and everything. But what you’re really saying is that that was a secular world order anyway that had some merit, but also didn’t really have an ideological basis, so there is no reason to keep it in a way.

Collin Hansen (20:06) 

Well, yeah, to put a little finer point on it. My work engages a lot with Solzhenitsyn specifically, and Solzhenitsyn who was fighting during the Second World War and then captured later and everything. Later on he became a dissident and imprisoned and everything like that. This was his critique, of course, and if you go back, Tom Holland makes this observation. Others have made this observation as well. To be able to cope with the tragedy of the Second World War, what had been known as Christian civilisation – to use Winston Churchill’s terminology in the famous speeches of 1940 – was recast as a secular order so that we could then impose that peace on the rest of the world. I mean, I’m not the only person making that argument – that’s one that’s being advanced elsewhere. And so for us going forward, there is a real question: what is there in Western civilisation that can be sustained without the Christianity that ultimately produced it? Christianity is not the only stream that came into Western civilisation, but it is one of the primary, if not the primary one. So how exactly, can we keep going forward without it?

Graham Nicholls (21:26) 

Do you think it explains why there’s a real longing going on in our country for a Christian heritage, but not particularly amongst Christians? There is a strand of Christians who are trying to kind of speak into that – some of them better than others perhaps, one might say from my vantage point – but I can understand the longing because there is a bankrupt ideology that people can see, so although they don’t want to be under the lordship of Christ, they want to be part of something bigger than themselves, don’t they?

Collin Hansen (22:02) 

Well, to Lizzie’s point about having all these sort of questions, I can only imagine the questions that people have for me, but then also hopefully for each other at this conference. I mean, again, I’m not the expert wandering in to try to apply this to every different political situation in the country where I do not live, let alone every local church situation where people are trying to apply that, whether they be in all different kinds of churches as well. But I think the backdrop, of course, that is the easiest to overlook here is Islam. I think that, primarily, what’s driving a lot of that interest is people’s fears of Islam, or that you can take Christianity for granted when there’s no competition, when essentially you’re in a post-Christian environment. 

Collin Hansen (22:52) 

But a post-Christian environment is not necessarily all the good that we like from Christianity without the bad that we don’t like. That, of course, is Charles Taylor’s description of the subtraction story of Western civilisation. What we’re finding in a post-Christian era, especially across Europe and certainly parts of the United States as well, is you have other contenders to that, and Islam is one of those contenders to that. So again, my point is not to make a bunch of contemporary political observations about that. But the last time I was in Scandinavia in Copenhagen, I was asking a number of church leaders, and they have a similar dynamic going on. Their prime minister, actually she just was removed from office, but their previous prime minister said, I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to get people to live and die for Western civilisation without any sort of its Christian history. And of course, these are all in a bunch of countries that have, just like the UK, I mean, have those cross in their flags. I’m not trying to make a statement about Christian nationalism in that sense, but there are a whole host of very complicated issues that we have to work out here, which is, I think, why the Theology Conference exists, to be able to help work those out together in person over meals and over tea and everything else.

Lizzie Harewood (24:18) 

I think that the attraction towards Christianity or Christian nationalism – I don’t think it is monolithic. I think it’s varied depending on where you are, who you are. And I was listening to something the other day that talked about the idea of people being ‘anywhere people’ or ‘somewhere people’. And you probably come across that concept.

Collin Hansen (24:50) 

Well, yes, very much applied to the Brexit vote, as opposed to similar to American.

Lizzie Harewood (24:55) 

Yeah, I suppose the idea that a lot of people are fairly resilient within themselves – perhaps they feel quite robust, they’ve got a nice family setup, they’re fairly economically independent, and they can thrive or survive sort of anywhere because they’re pretty sure of ‘I’m a unit, and I’m okay.’ Whereas there are a lot of people – and I say this is probably true of where I live up in South Yorkshire, on the edge of Doncaster, are ‘somewhere people’ for whom being associated to the place where they or their ancestors have lived for generations, is a really important thing. And I would say that they have perhaps felt, whether it is perception or reality, they have felt the difference in our nation really acutely. And it doesn’t feel like it is something that belongs to them. And I think there’s perhaps a nostalgia and a comfort that is associated with Christianity, even if they have never been to church in their lives.

Lizzie Harewood (26:07) 

And that is what we’re seeing in our church at the moment. We’re seeing folks, particularly men, come to church, who are basically saying, ‘I want to learn more about Christianity, because I want it to mean something to me, because I feel like it should be important.’ And I suppose, yeah, that’s just something that I’ve noticed probably does have a level of legitimacy to the idea that people want to reconnect with something that means something to them. And that doesn’t always come with good intentions. You know, in fact, we’ve had one guy recently who we baptised, who said he came to church because he felt angry and perhaps had some ideas, some points of view that really weren’t very godly – about multiculturalism, etc. And I think we do have to be careful that we don’t buy into an idolatrous ideology, but we also need to understand that there’s a deep yearning in the human heart to belong and to feel like you are at home there.

Collin Hansen (27:20) 

Yeah, absolutely. Every time I get a chance to teach and travel across Europe, it’s always instructive just to ask questions about the local ministry context, both at a regional level, a local level, and a national level, because those can all be different. And people are ministering just anywhere in very different settings. I mean, obviously in the UK, there’s London and there’s other places, but then there’s London and there’s London and there’s London and there’s London. I mean, it’s just so diverse in those areas. So, one of the reasons I love to study history, and then study the history of different places, is because it gives me two different layers to be able to compare my own life situation to, to learn from something that’s somehow familiar, but also very different, and that sheds light on my own situation. And so, I think that’s part of what just happens in these events when you’re hearing from speakers and you’re thinking, ‘Okay, that’s different, that doesn’t really apply to me, but it helps me to see my situation in a different light, which is instructive to maybe expose some things that I hadn’t really noticed before.’ I know that’s been true of my own life. I mean, I grew up on a farm, which is kind of the quintessential ‘somewhere’, yet at the same time, I’m an American. What did I just say earlier? My great-grandparents – they’re not even from here. So, how can you be a ‘somewhere person’ when America is an ‘anywhere people’?

Lizzie Harewood (28:44)

Yeah.

Collin Hansen (28:45)

Some of us – some of my neighbours here, especially who are African-American – did not come here voluntarily, but the rest of us, at some level, our families left something. They were ‘anywhere people’, they left the ‘somewhere’. So, that creates a national character. I always joke about this – this is just a funny little side comment, but British actors do great, great American accents, but when they have to do regional American accents, it’s a total failure. So, it’s just fascinating to see there is an America that, as soon as you get out of this country, you look back and there is a national character that every church experiences, for better or worse, that you have to work through, yet there’s also regional components to that that are instructive, that change your ministry dynamic, and then there’s even local, and then there’s parish level, too. So, it’s just typical of gospel ministry. At some points, it feels very complex, but at some point, it’s simple, and so my hope is to try to be able to help focus on some of the basic principles. It’s an occasion for us in the United States in the 250th anniversary, of course, the Declaration of Independence, to remember some of the same kind of dynamics – which are that, how do you build a national character that is both secular, in the sense that we don’t kill each other over our religious differences, yet is informed by something that’s transcendent and not merely transitory? Well, those are all just fascinating things to have to work out. They all have local implications, and national and international, but it does take a little bit of sifting to get there.

Graham Nicholls (30:26) 

What’s interesting in London is that there’s been a reversal, but it’s fairly recent – that, although you would have thought of London as being multicultural for a very long time, maybe 50, 100 years, the kind of tipping point has happened over the last couple of decades, where the number of people from other nations and other cultures in London is by far the majority now, and that has been a big change. And you’ve got the so-called ‘white flight’, where you’ve got people moving further and further out of London, and so on, and famously, taxi drivers who were in the inner part of East London, just moving further and further out to Essex, and so on, and lots of nationalities kind of moving in. There’s a sociological question about how fast can you integrate, and what does that mean about national character – because, in the end, we’ve all got to agree to behave in a particular way for a nation to function, and that is actually a monoculture. We all agree to the rule of law or something – we’ve got to agree to something, otherwise we’re not really a nation, we’re just a bunch of people who are warring kind of tribes who happen to live near each other.

Collin Hansen (31:40) 

Yeah.

Graham Nicholls (31:40) 

So there’s a sociological political question to answer about how quickly can you integrate, what does it mean to be part of a nation if you’re from another nation, and you guys in the States figured it out, but it was significant – but I suppose it was it was not so rapid that it was happening, quite as rapid as you can achieve now with mass migration and so on. So there’s that political question, but then there’s the theological question to say, ‘Okay, on the one hand, we want to be welcoming, we want to accept the gospel is for all nations, there’s great opportunities, we want to love people, some of them are refugees, and we want to protect them.’ So there’s all those theological goods there. And then there’s people asking questions about, ‘Are there any limits to that?’ and ‘Is it okay to think being British is all right?’ and ‘We used to be white British’. And we are feeling a bit insecure, but wouldn’t you, if you were Japanese or Chinese, or in some other country, feel like this is hard for me – to at least express that it’s hard for me, even if I know theologically I should be somewhere else, and there’s a lot of those discussions going on.

Lizzie Harewood (32:55) 

No, I think that’s really legitimate, and I think even going even further back, what does it mean to be a nation? Why is nationhood a good thing? Is it something that we should embrace, or are we at the stage now where God has abandoned the nations? I don’t think he has, but I think the other thing is, Collin – and forgive me if I’m misunderstanding you – but you came from the perspective that seemed to say that you were accepting that we, as Christians, or just we as a nation, are committed to building a secular state. And a natural fact, as you know, the UK isn’t a secular state, and we still have prayers in parliament every day, we still have an established church, we still have in the central lobby in the House of Parliament – just outside the Houses of Commons, there’s the inscription from Psalm 127 that says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vein.” And I just wonder – I mean, obviously, we understand as Christians, when it comes to pragmatic policy, Christianity doesn’t have much bearing on our nation’s laws. However, we aren’t a secular state, in essence. So what/how are you approaching that in your teaching and your understanding?

Collin Hansen (34:32) 

Yeah, so my concern is not about the UK as a secular state, but the West as reconceiving itself as secular. That’s the difference. So specifically through the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically there. One of the challenges that Westerners face, and Graham, I think it speaks to your question as well, or your observation as well. Westerners think that we’re just the normal ones, and everyone else kind of reacts to us. Part of it’s the old colonising impulse that the West chairs, and obviously, the UK is a big part in that – just the sense that we have it figured out, and it’s our job to share that with everybody else. So we are normative. 

Collin Hansen (35:15)

The way Tom Holland puts this – which I think is accurate in a way that I’ve not thought about before – he said, ‘Imagine that you’re working in a post-colonial environment, specifically India.’ That’s clearly the most consequential of those, certainly for the UK, certainly for Winston Churchill. You know, India’s dominion status was precisely the thing that got Churchill out of power, along with Edward VIII’s abdication, whatnot, in there. So, a consequential issues there. But if you tell India in 1945 or 1948, when the UN declaration comes out – if you tell India that human rights are Christian, therefore you must take them, well, India says, well, we’re not Christian, so therefore we don’t have to do this. If you tell India these are universal rights, they’re not even Western, they’re universal – now you have a sense that you can impose them, you can force them on India. 

Collin Hansen (36:12) 

Now, as Christians, we might look at some of those rights and say, well, obviously those are good things. There were all sorts of treatment of people that was just horrible, of women especially, of different castes. So they actually probably would come out of Christianity. But the point was, World War II was a crisis that led the architects of this new order – effectively the United Nations – to recast our own history in a way that hid its Christianity, so that it could be seen as universal and then impose a peace in many ways. And then of course, that then codifies against an East, which is atheistic there. So you have a secular against an atheistic – I know that’s weird to say, but that’s how it’s set up. And then in the United States, you have really significant Christian revivals that come out of that, and a cultural Christianity that becomes dominant for most of the 20th century. 

Collin Hansen (37:10) 

But of course, in Europe you have the opposite. You have a significant decline of affiliation in Christianity during that same period. So look at all just the complications there of trying to tease that out. And then you have some of the academic work that I did last year, just some of the empirical studies. I was trying to understand from an empirical basis, what are the characteristics of modern secularism? – by which I mean, and keep in mind in Charles Taylor’s kind of terminology, there’s three different kinds of secularism. I’m talking here about the kind of secularism, not of the state – which you rightly pointed out, Lizzie, is a different kind of matter – but a secularism of people just not having reference to God any longer, that kind, which is more typical of Northern Europe now. 

Collin Hansen (37:57) 

One of the things I noticed is specifically there are two traits that, when they combine, lead empirically – again, I’m looking at the data out there – have led to secularism most acutely. Those two things are Protestantism and an established church. And keep in mind, people are confused about the United States because the United States has never been an established church, but states had established churches. States had established churches well into the 19th century, states like Massachusetts, which of course was the old Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. So these states in the United States that are the most secular are also the Protestant established states. Then you look at places like Europe, where Christianity is stronger – top two: Slovakia and Poland. What do you have there? Well, they’re not Protestant. That’s the big difference. And they were in conflict. They were in conflict with communism there, and the church was resilient. Then also you have Ireland and Italy – they’re not as secular as the UK, but they’re not as religious as Poland. Well, once again, you have the Catholic-Protestant thing is a dichotomy there. And we also famously know that the most secular places, along with the UK, are Scandinavia, which were Protestant and established. In the United States, the places where they are the most religious, especially where I live, you have a Protestant church, but not an established church. So again, not trying to make a bunch of arguments exactly how things should run or why, as a Baptist, I might disagree with some of the Anglican establishment in the UK. That’s not my primary point.

Graham Nicholls (39:41)

You can make that point if you want.

Collin Hansen (39:43)

I know it’s part of Affinity’s history certainly as well. That’s not the primary point I’m trying to make, but I just think bringing these conversations into the open, historically, empirically, they shed light theologically, and then ultimately in our application of how do we because our theology doesn’t tell us exactly how to handle every public situation. And Graham, you point out immigration as one of the clearest examples of that – where there are clear principles that we abide by and how we treat other human beings, and a recognition, and keep in mind, I’ll stop here. One of the reasons I’m looking at Churchill and Lewis as a contrast is because Churchill had obviously the highest regard for the British Empire somebody could, and of the UK, and was willing to give everything to be able to defend that, and was uniquely used because of those views that were considered so outdated and so Victorian to accomplish that. 

Collin Hansen (40:44) 

Lewis is a stark contrast. It would be ludicrous to say that he was not British, obviously from Northern Ireland, but spent most of his life in England. It’d be ludicrous to say he was not British or that he didn’t care about the state of the British nation, and people, and the status of the war, but he emphasised over and over and over again how little he cared about that compared to the kingdom of God. And my book opens with Churchill offering Lewis CBE – recognition – and him turning it down because he said, people always thought that apologetics was about being a conservative. And keep in mind, he was a Churchill supporter – he didn’t support Atlee – but he said, ‘Because I don’t want people to think that Christianity is about the nation or about politics, I’m going to decline this award.’ And so it’s an interesting dynamic, the interplay between those two, so that’s why Churchill and Lewis themselves offer a constructive contrast between these options.

Graham Nicholls (41:55) 

That is really interesting. I’ve learned a load just in this podcast, and I’m sure we’re going to learn a load at the conference as well. We’re going to have to draw things to a close because we try and keep them to about half an hour, 45 minutes, and so thank you very much, Collin. That’s really whetted our appetite for the Affinity Theological Study Conference. You’re going to find more about it on affinity.org.uk, and all the booking information will be in the show notes. So thank you very much, Collin.

Lizzie Harewood (42:25) 

Yeah, can’t wait.

Collin Hansen (42:26) 

Thank you.