It has been hard to miss the ways that right-wing political movements have become marked by Christian rhetoric and language in recent years. Clearly, something about the unstable and fractious era we live in has seen people yearning to turn Western nations back to an imagined Christian past. But is this a mirage, or even an idolatrous worship of the nation state? How should Christians engage in politics in democracies? Is it helpful to think about trying to make a country ‘more Christian’? And what might the gospel have to say beyond our shores to a world where the liberal international rules-based order is collapsing and might makes right once more? This week we discuss all this and more with John Heathershaw, a Christian professor of international relations and former aid worker.
Find more of John’s writing and his latest book Security After Christendom on his Substack blog.
In each episode of Matters of Life and Death, brought to you by Premier Unbelievable?, John Wyatt and his son Tim discuss issues in healthcare, ethics, technology, science, faith and more. John is a doctor, professor of ethics, and writer and speaker on many of these topics, while Tim is a religion and social affairs journalist. We talk about how Christians can better engage with a particular question of life, death or something else in between.
It has been hard to miss the ways that right-wing political movements have become marked by Christian rhetoric and language in recent years. Clearly, something about the unstable and fractious era we live in has seen people yearning to turn Western nations back to an imagined Christian past. But is this a mirage, or even an idolatrous worship of the nation state? How should Christians engage in politics in democracies? Is it helpful to think about trying to make a country ‘more Christian’? And what might the gospel have to say beyond our shores to a world where the liberal international rules-based order is collapsing and might makes right once more? This week we discuss all this and more with John Heathershaw, a Christian professor of international relations and former aid worker.
Find more of John’s writing and his latest book Security After Christendom on his Substack blog: https://johnheathershaw.substack.com
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