I guess the Torygraph is considered “mainstream media” in the UK, and, like American MSM, seems to be touting religion in a way we didn’t see a few years ago. In this short article, which I found through the disparaging tweet below (an accurate, tweet, it seems), Baron David Frost, a conservative political bigwig in the UK, tells us why we should be going to church this Easter. He seems to love “full-fat supernatural Christianity,” which apparently means the whole Catholic hog, from snout to tail. No “skim Christianity” for him!
Go below to read the article.
Hello, I am mental.
— Richard Smyth (@rsmythfreelance.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T07:46:00.501Z
Click the screenshot below to go to an archived version of the Torygraph piece, which describes Lord Frost (is that the same thing as a Baron?) this way:
Lord Frost led the negotiations that finally took Britain out of the EU in 2020. A Cabinet minister in the Boris Johnson government, he resigned in protest at the handling of Covid lockdowns, and has since been a persistent advocate of a more fully conservative approach to policy on the Right. He is a non-affiliated peer in the House of Lords.
Wikipedia adds this:
David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost (born 21 February 1965) is a British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.
Frost spent his early professional career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), becoming Ambassador to Denmark, EU Director at the FCO, and Director for Europe and International Trade at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was a special adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government.
And yes, I have to say, although it’s Easter, the guy is mental, for he thinks that anybody who has had an elevating aesthetic or emotional experience is providing evidence not just for God, but for the God of Rome.
I’ll put a few topics under bold headings (mine). The indented parts are from the article by Baron Frost.
The evidence for a revival of Christianity is weak. First, Frost makes this admission:
The Quiet Revival – the view that people are coming back to church and the long years of decline might be over – has been much discussed in ecclesiastical circles this last year. A YouGov poll in a Bible Society report seemed to vindicate it by asserting the number of 18 to 24-year-olds attending church monthly had jumped from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2024.
It’s fair to say that these figures were a bit controversial right from the start. And the doubts were justified last week, when YouGov, in its latest polling flop, had to admit it had made an error and had not applied proper quality control to its sample.
So are we back to square one? Is the whole thing just confirmation bias and wishful thinking?
So he gives the “evidence” for the revival, which he has to find in places other than the polls. One is in hearsay, another his own behavior:
I don’t think so. Something is definitely happening, if not exactly what the Bible Society described. There is too much other evidence. Numbers coming into the Catholic Church each Easter, here and across the West, are increasing (I was one in 2025). Footballers are open about their faith in a way that didn’t happen a decade back. Sales of printed Bibles have doubled. There is even a mini boom in the Greek Orthodox Church going on.
Summing it up, the Rev Daniel French, chaplain at Greenwich University and Irreverend podcaster, said: “I see considerable curiosity about faith, particularly from young adults, often men. The old assumptions that religious conversations are taboo have evaporated. My week is filled with impromptu chats about God in a way it wasn’t ten years ago.”
Why is the West becoming more Christian? It isn’t, but this is what the sweating Baron says: it’s the Internet and the stagnation of society, Jake!
Why might this be? It’s speculative, but my experience suggests several different reasons. One is the simple availability of different Christian voices on the internet. If your only exposure to Christianity is in your school religious studies class with a dull and inexpert teacher, as it might have been in the past, it could turn you off for good. But if you can hear Glen Scrivener or Bishop Robert Barron online, you are more likely to think: “I need to take this seriously.”
There is also the collapse of the narrative of inevitable progress, the belief that young people will always be economically better off than their parents, the growing dysfunction in society starting with the pandemic, all may be generating a tendency to look beyond economics for life satisfaction.
Of course we know that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and well-being, a correlation that holds across both nations and U.S. states. The worse off you are, the more religious you are. Further, there’s a positive correlation between income inequality (measured by the “Gini index”) and religiosity: the higher the inequality, the more religious people are. That the former produces the latter, so it’s not a spurious correlation, is supported by the fact that religiosity rises a year after inequality rises. Likewise with falls of inequality and falls of religiosity. That’s not proof, but is support for the connection made famous by Karl Marx, a quotation that is often truncated to distort its meaning:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
What Marx was saying was not that religion was good for people because it soothed them, but that it was bad for people because it was what people did when they could not find relief from their suffering and oppression through means that could actually improve their situation. They thus have to turn to the opium of belief.
The Baron sees evidence for God every time people have an aesthetic or spiritual experience. Not just evidence for God, apparently, but evidence for Catholicism!:
Reflect on the experiences in your life where you feel, for a moment, you might have had an experience of something beyond this world, a moment in the English countryside, a phrase of music that tugs at the heartstrings, and ask yourself why you feel that, if material reality is really all there is. Consider too that most people in history, and indeed most people in the world today, have not had that belief, and maybe aren’t all wrong. Maybe western secular society doesn’t know everything about everything.
But of course people throughout the world have this kind of experience, people including atheists like Richard Dawkins and me. And not for a minute do we think that emotionality is evidence for gods. Is it evidence for Allah, and also for Xenu and Vishnu?
The evidence that these emotions and epiphanies are the product of material reality can be seen, for one thing, because you can have them simply by taking drugs. I remember once when I was in college, doing a science fellowship during the summer, I took LSD and walked through the quad (the “Sunken Garden”) at William and Mary. There were high-school brass bands having some kind of competition, and, in my psychedelic daze, their ragged, dissonant music seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Was that evidence for God? Had I not been tripping, I would have run away in horror.
The Baron admits that Christianity is meaningless unles you believe its foundational truths. You don’t often see this kind of admission since “sophisticated” believers don’t like to admit it, nor will they say explicitly what they believe:
After all, the important thing about Christianity is not whether it makes you feel better or whether it is good for society, but whether it is true. If it is, we should all want to know that, and if it isn’t, we are right to reject it. The one thing we should not do is not properly consider it. And in Western society that is all too easy.
I’ve considered the “evidence”, which of course is almost entirely what’s in the Bible. And I don’t buy it, as I suspect most of the readers here don’t. And what about the gazillion other faiths of the world. Why does Frost reject Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, and cargo cults but accept the “truth” of Christianity? (Like Christians, adherents to cargo cults keep waiting for a savior who never comes.) I’d like the Baron to tell me how he knows not just the Resurrection and Jesus’s “miracles” were true, but why the writing of the Quran is a bogus story. And why, among Christian religions, are the dictates of Catholicm true? (The Baron touts the revival of religion as involving mainly Catholicism and “Protestant evangelicals.) Gimme that full-fat religion!
The Baron tells us why we should go to Church.
In an essay entitled Man or Rabbit?, CS Lewis gently mocked those who didn’t reject Christianity but tried to ignore it, not from disbelief, but from a suspicion that it might be true after all and that acknowledging it would be inconvenient – rather like someone who doesn’t open their bank statements for fear of what might be in them. Don’t be like that person. Face the issue head on. At least give Christianity a fair hearing. Show up to church this Easter. You never know what might happen.
I ignore Christianity because it’s a full-fat superstition supported by no evidence. I’m amused that he quotes C. S. Lewis, who I admit I find hilariously stupid about religion even though his Mere Christianity is probably the most influential work of popular theology ever. I’ve read it, of course, and I always have to laugh when I read “Lewis’s trilemma“—an argument for the divinity of Jesus and truth of his message. Lewis actually stole this argument from others, as several people had made it before him. Here’s Lewis’s version:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
Of course there are alternatives to “liar, lunatic, or Lord”; I’m sure you can think of at least one: people made up what Jesus said in the Bible. You can read alternative criticisms here.
But the real question is whether Frost himself is a liar, lunatic, or Lord. And we already know the answer: he’s a Lord.
I guess I’m just splenetic on this day when people go to Church to worship something for which there’s no evidence. And, contra Frost, I won’t be showing up to church this Easter. Instead, I’m writing this post.
I asked Google “Is Baron David Frost connected with the broadcast satirist David Frost?” and was not surprised that the answer was No. But I was surprised that the broadcaster one had become a Sir somewhere along the line.
“Maybe western secular society doesn’t know everything about everything.” No friggin kidding. The point the Baron Lord is making here is…? Most secularists know a heck of a lot more about sciences, logic and reasonable conclusions based on evidence than the alternative stories coming from ancient scripture (Revelations being exhibit 1).
Science works because the vast majority of researchers are humble enough to admit that (even when they make major discoveries) they have begat many questions they did not have when they sought particular answers.
I tell you what — while we don’t know everything, we know a heckofalot more than we did 2,000 years ago! But funnily enough, religious people don’t seem to be any closer to consensus about God.
Given his role in Brexit, I think we can understand that he was already delusional. So no change there.
And a Covid crank, too!
And a member of the Boris Johnson government!
It seems there’s a running theme in the newly? religious that credits a situation they find beautiful (e.g. a beautiful sunrise/set with birds singing…or a Bach composition, etc., etc.) that convinces that person that there is a wonderful God (of course, their specific version of such). Then what conclusion should they draw when they witness the results of a natural disaster such as an earthquake, tornado, or epidemic, not to mention man-made wholesale carnage?
The same. The conclusion is a priori.
It’s not The Times, it’s the Torygraph.
No wonder we got such a bum deal from the EU if the credulous baron was leading the negotiations!
But where does the term “full fat” come from? It is a new turn of phrase for me, and its only interesting thing he has to say.
I think he made it up. He doesn’t really explain it, though. Does he mean every aspect of Catholicism, including confession, limbo, going to hell for unconfessed homosexual acts, wine and wafer actually becoming Jesus, and so on?
Do you mean that you have not heard it at all? Or just in this context? It is used to refer to dairy products that contain all the natural fat. At least that’s the common meaning.
Actually both. For milk we say ‘whole milk’. I did check and found that the term comes up for some other things like yogurt. But I had not noticed it before.
C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic or Lord” argument falls apart for at least two good reasons.
First, as biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has pointed out in his books, the only gospel account where Jesus made direct claims of divinity is the book of John. And there is no doubt that good portions are John are made up to push a narrative. So why should we believe a claim that Jesus supposedly made about being God but that appears in only one version of his life?
In addition, we know much more about the complexity of the cognitive process than we did when Lewis was alive. It’s entirely possible for people to have delusional thoughts about themselves but be utterly rational in other areas of their thinking. Transgender individuals have convinced themselves that their perceived sex doesn’t conform to the biological sex of the body into which they were born. I don’t accept their argument that they were born in the wrong body; their notion, rather, is a psychological quirk. But that doesn’t mean that these people are completely insane. It surprises me that someone with Lewis’s gifts of imagination and critical thinking couldn’t consider this possibility.
The idea that experiencing something beautiful is evidence of God shows that Lord Frost has a very low evidentiary standard.
Baron Frost omits not only the tenets of Hinduism, Islam, and cargo cults. He overlooks the inspiring religious system of the Mexica in their imperial city of Tenochtitlan, where the Gods Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli were worshiped through a regular schedule of human sacrifice. Our modern religious philosophers disregard the spiritual awareness fostered by these rituals, which must have filled a Huitzilopochtli-shaped hole in the human consciousness.
An English Lord is a Baron, Viscount, Earl, or Marquess. Apparently, Dukes are not Lords, but are in a category of their own. I’m an American; maybe a Brit will have more information.
I am cautious about using country or state-level data to characterize the well-being of religious believers, especially as it relates to happiness and mental health. Such work can conflate nominal believers with active participants. Religiously-inactive believers do not, for example, generally differ from unaffiliated people in subjective measures of well-being. Moreover, religiously-active believers are a minority in many countries, thus having less effect on population outcomes. But when we consider the individual rather than the population, active participation in religion complicates the well-being conclusions tremendously.
A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that “in general, across all the countries analyzed, being actively religious is associated with a greater likelihood of being very happy, belonging to a nonreligious organization, always voting …” In the US, 36% of actively religious adults “describe themselves as very happy, compared with just a quarter of both inactive and unaffiliated Americans. Across 25 other countries for which data are available, actives report being happier than the unaffiliated by a statistically significant margin in almost half (12 countries), and happier than inactively religious adults in roughly one-third (nine) of the countries. … And there is no country in which the data show that actives are significantly less happy than others … .” These patterns held after controlling for age, gender, income, education, and marital status.
A January 2022 Gallup poll showed similar results about “life satisfaction” in the US, with weekly church attenders significantly more satisfied than others—and weekly attendance a stronger predictor than earning $100,000+. The Gallup researchers note that “These findings update a long line of studies confirming the connection between religion and wellbeing—making it one of the more researched and robust findings in all of the sociology of religion. There is an enduring and very well-substantiated finding of a correlation between individuals’ personal religiosity and various measures of wellbeing, happiness and mental (and, in some instances, physical) health.”
Standard correlation vs. causation caveat applies.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/01/31/religions-relationship-to-happiness-civic-engagement-and-health-around-the-world/
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/389510/religion-wellbeing-update.aspx
I have written two posts on this, here and here You can track down the links if you want.
Here’s what Grok said:
From JAC: Grok gives references.Readers can decide for themselves, but I don’t want to argue back and forth on it.
A few years ago, I decided to dig a little deeper into this claim that religious people are happier than non-religious people, to see if there was any actual evidence for it beyond the mere fact of self-reported happiness. At the risk of running afoul of our host’s word limit for comments, here’s what I found:
The nations with the highest homicide rates are all highly religious nations with minimal levels of voluntary atheism, while nations with the lowest homicide rates tend to be highly secular nations with high levels of voluntary atheism. (See http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Ath-Chap-under-7000.pdf).
The divorce rate for the “bible belt” states is 50% higher than the U.S. average, with “conservative” Texas having twice the divorce rate of “liberal” Massachusetts (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/10/31/walking_the_walk_on_family_values/). In contrast, the divorce rate for atheists and agnostics has been reported to be lower than the overall rate for Christians (see http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm). And, a 2006 survey of church pastors by the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute of Church Leadership Development (previously mentioned above) found that 77% did not believe they had a good marriage. (http://www.intothyword.org/apps/articles/default.asp?articleid=36562&columnid=3958).
The bible belt states of the South have the highest incarceration rates of any area of the country — nearly twice the rate of the “liberal” Northeast — with Louisiana and Mississippi having incarceration rates that are 330% and 280%, respectively, of the rate of Vermont (the least religious state). While approximately 5% of the U.S. population identifies itself as being “atheist,” the atheist population of the U.S. prison system as of 1997 was reported to be a mere .2%.
The CIA World Factbook (2004) reports that the 25 nations with the lowest infant mortality rates (number of deaths per 1,000 live births) are all nations containing significantly high percentages of voluntary (i.e., non-coerced) atheism, while the 75 nations with the highest infant mortality rates were all nations with minimal levels of voluntary atheism.
The United Nations’ Report on the World Social Situation (2003) found that of the 40 poorest nations on earth, all but one (Vietnam) are highly religious nations with statistically minimal levels of voluntary atheism.
A survey by the Pew Forum found that the percentage of Jews and Hindus in the U.S. earning in excess of $100,000 was double that of mainstream Christian groups, and more than triple the percentage of evangelical Christians who earned that much (see “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey 2008,” at http://pewforum.org/Income-Distribution-Within-US-Religious-Groups.aspx).
A 2010 study reported in the Personality and Social Psychology Review found a positive correlation between increased religiosity and racism, resulting from the fact that religious in-group identity promotes ethnocentrism (http://psr.sagepub.com/content/14/1/126.abstract). In contrast, the study found the highest degree of racial tolerance in agnostics.
A 2005 study entitled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” published in the Journal of Religion and Society, found that: “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.” (See, http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html)
Thus, if religious people are happier, it doesn’t appear that they have any actual reason to be. It appears that George Bernard Shaw was correct when he said: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.”
This exceeds the word count, but not by much so I’ll let it go because it bears on the discussion. Please do not do it again, though!
Yes. Out of body, worldview altering psychological experiences aren’t particularly rare – though they routinely have a huge effect.
As a dedicated psychonaut I’ve had many similar experiences as the William and Mary Sunken Garden experience written above.
Excellent. I’d call many of them religious like.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
If there is any Christian revival in the UK, I suspect it may be largely a reaction to the growing presence and aggressiveness of Islam. For many, Islam is an existential cultural threat.
Yes, a baron is a lord. The word baron is rarely used, and in the UK this person will always be referred to as Lord Frost. He is a life peer, and the title is not hereditary. Hereditary peers can still be created, but this is now very rare. Harold Macmillan was one of the few in recent times, being created Earl of Stockton in 1984 (though Prince Edward was also given a hereditary earldom – Forfar, but then he is a member of the royal family. Since also being created Duke of Edinburgh, that title takes precedence, although like all royal dukedoms it is a life peerage in the gift of the sovereign.)