Fairly old news, this vid from 4 months ago (don't know why youtube doesn't put the actual date on vids):





Could be a stunt to ingratiate himself with the American right, I suppose, but he has always been a bit 'spiritual' in one way or another, so not entirely out of the blue. Maybe it's just me, but it has coincided with him having nothing interesting to say, and adopting highly dubious stances like presenting Yaxley-Lennon in a positive light, which we talked about before. I've noticed it with other recent converts whose work I used to value like Paul Kingsnorth & Martin Shaw. Also with Dylan, and I'm sure there are some others I can't think of right now. They lose their edge, get all comfortable, start spouting off boring platitudes, making tedious attempts to fit Jesus into their previous ideologies, trying to make him cool in some way or other. It never works. And they never discuss the toxic social role of Christianity and other religions - all the stuff about eternal damnation, pacifying and depoliticising people who might otherwise resist, getting people to focus on the supposed next world instead of this one, missionising, justifying genocide and the spread of imperialism, persecution of heretics and unbelievers, peadophilia, hatred of the body, of nature, of women, of homosexuals etc etc. Somehow it never crops up in discussion of their groovy new spiritual identity, which is dishonest IMO. You can't just parachute in to a 2,000 year old tradition without examining and coming to terms with how it has behaved in the real world for all that time. Otherwise it's just about you and your stupid new-agey feelings which you're projecting inappropriately onto a religion that for the most part would utterly reject them.

Happy as ever to be proven wrong!
I