The non-religious are an ever-increasing segment of the population, in the UK, the United States and across the Western world. But what do they actually believe, and indeed not believe, in? In this classic episode from the MOLAD archive we’re joined by evangelist and author Glen Scrivener to discuss the different spiritualities we encounter, especially among younger generations. Are all non-believers Richard Dawkins style naturalistic atheists, or is there a more complex and contradictory set of belief systems out there for those who don’t call themselves Christians? How should the church’s outreach shift to reflect the contemporary mores of Gen-Z and the pick-and-mix spiritualities they often espouse? And are modern social movements, whether ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ functioning like religions without creeds?

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Somewhat unnoticed by many in the British church, in the last few years the UK has imposed draconian new laws which can in some circumstances curtail fundamental religious liberties. In the name of protecting people from intimidating pro-life protests, 150-metre buffer zones now exist around every clinic and hospital which performs abortions in the UK. Inside these zones you can be arrested for doing anything which is deemed to influence women accessing abortion services – but these vague laws have seen a number of Christian pro-lifers arrested simply for standing in silence praying in their heads, or preaching generic gospel messages unrelated to abortion. How did we get to a place where the freedom to express your religion in public is under threat? Are buffer zones a reasonable provision to clamp down on harmful and aggressive fundamentalists? Or are we sleepwalking into a place where basic religious freedoms are accidentally being eroded, and few in the church seem to notice or care?

Tim’s newsletter The Critical Friend has covered this story a number of times: https://tswyatt.substack.com/p/silent-prayers-inside-the-buffer?utm_source=publication-search and https://tswyatt.substack.com/p/normal-for-norfolk

The Bournemouth case cited by JD Vance in his infamous speech h https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo

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An under-reported story of the tumultuous first months of the second Donald Trump administration is how his team are brutally cutting back long-established federal institutions. The National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development have seen huge swathes of staff fired, grants paused, funding slashed and projects reliant on government aid abruptly shuttered. This is already having massive consequences downstream, both in research into devastating diseases and in humanitarian work with some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. Why should Christians care about these federal bureaucracies and what Trump is doing to them? Isn’t this just about trimming away woke excesses and focusing on excellence? And what might be lost, including for the church, if the US government gives up on medical research and international development for good?

The Washington Post has a good article exploring the destruction and chaos at the NIH: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/03/05/nih-trump-turmoil-grants/

And this New York Times article explains the devastation wrought by the almost total shut-down by USAID https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html?searchResultPosition=2

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AI-driven chatbots are becoming a major industry, with hundreds of millions of people spending hours every day talking to non-human personas. They can be friends, therapists, lovers, work colleagues or fantastical invented characters. Or even an uncanny replica of an actual loved who has died. But should we be worried about the rise of AI chatbots? What does it tell us about human intelligence and personality that it is becoming possible for computers to so accurately mimic us? What might be lost by getting enmeshed in relationships of various kinds with a non-human artificial personality, rather than other embodied, image-bearing human beings?

John gave the 2024 John Stott London Lecture on this topic, and goes in more detail into some of the ideas we discuss in this episode here: https://www.johnwyatt.com/lecture-authentic-relationships-in-an-artificial-world/

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Can a pro-life Christian anaesthetist take part in surgical abortions, even if they are simply ensuring the mother is safely put under and do not do the actual abortion? What about the nurse checking blood pressure earlier on the ward? Or the porter wheeling the mother into theatre? Or the person who made the scalpel? In this episode, prompted by a question from an anaesthetist listener wrestling with this precise dilemma, we try to think through the theological problem of ‘co-operation with evil’. To what extent, if at all, can believers do things which enmesh them with other people’s wrong deeds? What did Jesus mean by ‘render to Caesar what is Caesar’s’? Is it ever possible to maintain our Christian integrity in our fallen and ever more interconnected world? How can we decide where to draw the lines?

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Due to illness, we weren’t able to record a new episode this week, so instead here’s one from the Matters of Life and Death archive you might enjoy. So-called memecoins – new cryptocurrencies launched solely as tongue-in-cheek speculative online investment assets – have boomed in recent months. Back in 2023 we were joined by Christian tech writer and Baptist minister Chris Goswami to try to unpick how we should feel as believers about cryptocurrencies. What is bitcoin, and is it any different to previous internet-based tech industries we could invest in which have boomed and gone bust over the years? Are they providing financial liberation for some of the poor and excluded communities in the developing world, or simply luring vulnerable under-educated people into shady scams? And how can we grow in wisdom and discernment as believers so that we can pick our way through this wildly accelerating field of technological advancement, avoiding what is harmful while pursuing the good?

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Elon Musk, the mercurial billionaire who owns Twitter, is increasingly wielding his enormous political power via his social media network, interfering in politics in America and far beyond. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, has tried to align his business with the new regime in Washington by abolishing fact-checking. Should we be alarmed at where social media is going in the 2020s, with populist right-wing movements leveraging their online influence in very real offline consequences? Can Christians continue to use their platforms, or should we join the progressive exodus to alternative sites? And how can we work out who to trust and where to get our news from in this confusing post-truth, post-legacy media world?

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Recent research by the abortion provider BPAS has uncovered a striking increase in the numbers of women who use fertility tracking apps as contraception, rather than the more traditional hormonal pill, coil or implant. And, perhaps most interestingly, there has also been sharp rise in women using no contraception of any kind. In this episode we revisit our last conversation on contraception (linked below) with Dawn McAvoy from the “pro-women pro-life” movement Both Lives, and reconsider why so many women today are turning away from hormonal contraception. Several generations on from the introduction of the Pill, what have been the consequences for society and the church? What are the ethical risks for Christians who believe life begins at conception? Do these fertility-tracking apps actually work, or are they just exploiting ignorance and vague notions of wellness?

BPAS research on contraception methods: https://srh.bmj.com/content/early/2025/01/01/bmjsrh-2024-202573

A BBC News article reporting the study: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c391nlxrv4vo and women’s responses: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93lq2w5n44o

Our last episode exploring contraception: https://www.johnwyatt.com/should-christians-abandon-contraception/

Dawn leads Both Lives, part of the Evangelical Alliance: https://www.eauk.org/what-we-do/initiatives/both-lives

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A recent Guardian article looked in depth at advances in neonatology – the care of extremely premature babies – and the complex ethical challenges now faced by parents and doctors alike. Modern medicine can now save the lives of babies born at just 21 or 22 weeks old, but does this come at too great a cost? How are we supposed to decide which babies to throw the full weight of neonatal intensive care at, and which ones cannot be saved? Can Christian parents ever countenance not trying to save a premature baby’s life and instead accept their inevitable death? And what are the Christian roots of the revolution in neonatology in recent years, and how might it be under threat from other competing worldviews present in medicine today?

‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies? – https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/19/look-theyre-getting-skin-the-moral-challenge-of-saving-the-worlds-tiniest-babies The Guardian article which prompted this episode is well worth reading.

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Advances in reproductive medicine in the past half century have meant it is entirely possible for as many as five different adults to be involved in the birth of one child (sperm and egg donors, a surrogate mother who carries the fetus, and the commissioning parents who will raise them, and paid for everyone else). In this maelstrom of competing claims, the state and courts in many countries have been forced to step in and begin to regulate and define identity and kinship for these new children, as procreation gets messily broken down into its constituent parts. In this episode we consider a provocative essay by a legal philosopher who explores the troubling implications of this new reality, and ask as Christians where do we stand on the question: who do children belong to? What is lost when children come into the world not inescapably rooted in one family, but as the result of a commercial transaction? How does adoption, generally held in honour by most believers, differ from surrogacy arrangements increasingly pursued by wider society?

The essay by Jeff Shafer which prompted this conversation: https://mcrawford.substack.com/p/to-whom-do-children-belong

Our previous episode on surrogacy from 2023: https://www.johnwyatt.com/surrogacy/

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