Faithful Without Escape
Paul Kingsnorth, the Machine, and the Danger of Withdrawal
I remember being sent a Youtube link a while back by a friend of mine who is interested in the relationship between technology and society. It was the 2024 Erasmus lecture of a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who spoke on the topic of “Against Christian Civilisation.” [Link] In it, Kingsnorth laid out the problems with our understanding of what Christendom accomplished, and challenged on why we would want a return to it. I dug a little bit, and then in understanding his story, adoption of Orthodox Christianity, and a move to a semi-monastic lifestyle I stumbled upon something weird.
Kingsnorth lives about 20 minutes from me in rural Ireland.
Now, before you think ill of me, (or if Paul is reading), I have no interest to dress in camouflage and stalk him. I promise! But it’s a strange quirk of rural Ireland that there is a kind of monastic draw with the rugged landscape and the sense of spirituality in the air. As I read his book, I began to understand why he would have moved here, and what he hoped to accomplish in doing so. Maybe one day our paths with cross and I can confirm my theory! Yet, as I’ve been reading online since the book launched, I’ve noticed an interesting trend. Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine, has found a receptive audience among pastors and church leaders. That alone should tell us something. Many of us may have read it with the realisation that someone has finally said out loud what life has felt like for years. The exhaustion. The sense that we are managing decline rather than seeing life flourish in our communities. The nagging suspicion that beneath our daily lives, something more fundamental has gone wrong.
Kingsnorth gives this feeling a name. He calls it the Machine. Not technology as such, but a civilisation that desires to ground itself in abstraction, efficiency, and systems over people. This Machine uproots. It hollows us out. It disenchants us while pretending to liberate us. It trains us to think in spreadsheets and results rather than meaning. And it is all around us. Perhaps like Thanos in the Marvel movies, it can say, “I am inevitable!”
At the level of diagnosis, Against the Machine feels almost uncanningly accurate. Kingsnorth is not describing a problem pastors recognise from the outside. He is describing the water we are all swimming in. And that water is deep, and at times both dangerously and comfortably warm. Against the Machine’s power lies in its refusal to offer easy fixes or political solutions, but to clearly identify them. This is not a culture-war manifesto. Kingsnorth is clear that neither progressive nor conservative projects address the depth of the crisis, neither Right or Left are outside enough to affect things. What has collapsed, he argues, is a sacred order. And when a sacred order collapses, no amount of managerial competence can hold a culture together. Nietzsche’s fear that God’s death would spell the end of Western civilisation was a stark prophecy.
Now, this is where the risk lies with Against the Machine. Many of us as evangelical leaders will heartily nod along at this point. As I read the book I regularly stopped to point to something, so much so that eventually my family asked me to stop. It might have been mentioned that I was reading the book, and they were probably not going to need to! Yet, for the most part, they agreed to the points. There is something wrong, something poisonous in society, and what’s worse, it has made its way into the church and our faith. We have watched the Church attempt to borrow the tools of the Machine to save itself. He points to areas akin to our growth strategies, branding exercises, leadership pipelines, and digital optimisation. I have sat in conferences where these are trumpeted as the next-big-thing for churches to make use of. Often with the best intentions. Often with deeply mixed results. Kingsnorth’s critique lands because it exposes the futility of trying to heal a spiritual wound with technical and marketing solutions.
And yet, precisely because his diagnosis is so compelling, it becomes pastorally dangerous if absorbed without discernment. Against the Machine, in a few senses of the way, is a prophetic work. Ministry, however, is not prophecy alone. It is formation, patience, shared life, and hope in community through Christ and His Gospel. The question is not whether Kingsnorth is right about the Machine. The question is whether the kind of resistance he points toward can be translated into faithful discipleship for ordinary Christians who cannot simply walk away. This is where a really helpful book can become a bit of a rocking horse; it gives us something interesting to do, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I wanted to give a little grounding as to why we perhaps need some practical points for discipleship as we consider Kingsnorth’s arguments.
Diagnosis vs Discipleship
One of the first dangers for pastors reading Kingsnorth is the temptation to confuse his insight with practical advice. Of course, Kingsnorth is adept and excellent at naming what is wrong. However, he is far less developed when it comes to showing what faithfulness looks like for people who must remain entangled in the very systems he critiques. This matters because our congregations are not composed of culturally insightful critics. They are made up of parents, renters, shift workers, carers, teenagers, teachers, nurses, students, and retired people. Most of them cannot opt out of the Machine without significant cost. Many already feel overwhelmed simply by surviving. When we import Kingsnorth’s critique into our preaching or teaching without translating it into concrete, achievable practices, the result is often paralysis rather than repentance. Our people can be left with a heightened awareness of their captivity in the Machine and very little sense of how they can realistically escape it. The Machine is named, but the exits appear locked. We have wrestled with this recently as our son was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes. He has an automatic insulin pump, running on an algorithim, with alerts sent to his, and our, phones. Of course, as a 15 year old, he has cottoned on to this, that we are unable to detach him from his phone as he delightfully reminds us, “it’s keeping me alive!” We can debate that of course, but it does give us a reality to consider. Are we able to live without the Machine?
The task of ministry is not merely to unmask idols, of course, as Paul’s time in Athens proves. It is to help people learn how to live under Christ’s Lordship in conditions they did not choose. Kingsnorth excels at the first task. He is far quieter on the second. Being fair, he is a commentator, not a pastor. However, the work of translation and communication must be done before we share his insights to an already frightened and anxious people. Just as much as sharing tips on manhood from Jordan Peterson won’t create a Christlikeness in men.
Withdrawal as a Non-Transferable Vision?
Kingsnorth’s own life gestures toward a form of resistance that is coherent, demanding, and deeply admirable. Leaving urban life. Buying land. Growing food. Homeschooling children. Rejecting screens. Simplifying. These are not symbolic gestures. They are costly refusals of the Machine’s system. What’s funny is that he stipulates this as an almost returning to medieval barrenness in rural Ireland that as much as it sounds beautiful, is meant to highlight how sparse, backward, and undeveloped it is as an environment. Hey! We live here! That said, we could do with a half decent coffee shop!
The problem for us as pastors is not that these practices he has adopted are wrong. The problem is that they are not available for everyone. They require resources, flexibility, and insulation from poverty that many of us simply do not possess. When such practices are framed as the faithful response, a subtle hierarchy emerges within our churches. Those who can “really” resist (read, ‘afford to resist’), and those who must make peace with compromise. This is something that has grated on me in the debate over school meals, Jamie Oliver and healthy eating. When it costs as much to buy an apple as it does to buy four bars of chocolate, perhaps we are shouting at the wrong people! In reading Kingsnorth, I found myself putting the book down with a bit of frustration. He acknowledges some of this reality of course, but I can’t afford to buy land, or have the intelligence (or patience) to appropriately educate my children. I can teach them, disciple them, and encourage them, but I have lack.
Evangelical churches already struggle with guilt-driven discipleship. Many believers feel they are perpetually falling short, perpetually failing to live up to an idealised vision of faithfulness. Kingsnorth’s vision, if uncritically adopted, risks intensifying that burden. Withdrawal becomes virtuous. Staying begins to feel like moral weakness rather than missional faithfulness.
Pastors should be especially cautious here. Withdrawal from this Machine may be a calling for some, but it cannot become part of our ecclesiology. The Church is not a collection of successful refusers or dissidents. It is a body in which obedience can look different depending on circumstance, capacity, and calling, yet is held together by shared worship and shared hope.
The Missing of Congregational Life
What is most striking in Against the Machine is how little sustained attention is given to the ordinary reality of congregational life. Kingsnorth is persuasive in arguing that politics and economics can’t save us. But many pastors and Christians then drift toward the opposite error, assuming that exit is the only faithful alternative left. This bypasses what might be called the congregational middle. I have written about this before, but many churches (and their leaders) shouldn’t leave places because they are ‘difficult.’ This is the same of virtual places and systems too. Most of us depend on the Machine’s tools to communicate, organise, and survive. Kingsnorth highlights that he types on a laptop, sends his writings in a digital file, and sells eBooks sold within online bookshops. It’s inescapable. It’s the same for churches. Many of us rent our buildings. Many of us are financially fragile. Many of our members work within the Machine not because they worship it, but because they must feed their families and pay their rent.
The New Testament offers a vision of this communal faithfulness that Kingsnorth rarely engages in the book. The early church did not escape the Roman economy, the Roman city, or the Roman administrative system. It lived within them while refusing to grant them ultimacy. Christians paid taxes, worked jobs, navigated emperial systems, and yet slowly cultivated their place in an alternative Kingdom through shared practices. The ate around tables with people different than them, they engaged in prayer, generosity, sexual restraint, hospitality, and care for the poor. Rodney Stark in his wonderful book, The Rise of Christianity, describes a community that is in but ‘other.’
Resistance, in this way (or Way, if you will), is not primarily about refusal. It is about re-ordering our loves. It is about learning what to treat as desirable and what to treat as ultimate. Kingsnorth is compelling on what must be renounced, but pastoral ministry must also articulate what can be received, endured under, and re-purposed without capitulation.
Sacred Order Without an Ecclesiology
Perhaps the sharpest critique I have concerns Kingsnorth’s treatment of the Church itself. He rightly insists that cultures require a sacred centre. He convincingly argues that when Christendom collapsed, money and technique rushed in to fill the vacuum. And yet, the Church as a living, present community is largely absent from his view. Perhaps his conversion and baptism in the Romanian Orthodox church could give us an answer. I may be overlooking something obvious, but it appears his spirituality is isolated in nature. He enjoys belonging to the historic creedal church within Orthodoxy, but I don’t appear to read that he is part of a faith community that grounds his life both in community and on mission. His worship is in nature, in meditation, in grounding, but also it appears, isolated physically. It’s ironic that the future he dreams of away from the Machine, is probably best served in living within a messy and beautiful community of faith.
He is right of course when it comes to his explanation of Church at present. Christendom appears as a ruin. The broader Church appears as compromised, at best. However, what remains for him is a vision of resistance rooted in personal asceticism, marginal living, and small-scale cultural refusal. For pastors, this should raise alarm bells. But we have continued to see this movement grow. Christian discipleship by Youtube videos, Instagram reels and online services still appears to be growing.
Historically, resistance to dominant systems has not been sustained by heroic individuals alone. It has been sustained by communal life. The Church, for all her failures, has been one of the few institutions capable of carrying practices across generations, absorbing weakness, celebrating diversity, and discipling people who are not especially insightful or courageous. It is, as I was reminded recently at a conference, one of the very few organisations that exists for non-members. The ‘others.’ The outsiders.
When the prophetic is detached from our ecclesiology, it tends toward a kind of elitism by default. Only the strong can endure it. Only the resourced can live it. Only the truly convinced and enlightened can carry it forward. Pastoral ministry, by contrast, is the long work of forming people who are tired, distracted, bumbling, inconsistent, and often deeply compromised, yet still beloved and still called. And in that description I’m talking about myself as the pastor! But I found myself wanting to go out to Kingsnorth’s house (NB – I promised I would never do this!) and tell him that there is a messy, weird, inconsistent and loving community that Christ invites him into. He is welcome. He will raise the bar of community, not by his gifting, but by his weakness and presence.
Kingsnorth wants roots. The Church, when she is faithful, is how roots actually grow.
Realism, Despair, and the Weight of Hope
Kingsnorth insists he is not a nihilist. He points toward crucifixion and resurrection. He speaks of “tending small fires”. And yet, the tone of Against the Machine is relentlessly sober. Collapse feels inevitable. The West is already dead. Our culture is already hollow. Sometimes I find my pessimistic Irishness slumps into agreeing with him. When our government ministers before Christmas argued for the abortion of children up to birth, and then without shame on the same day, argued for the protection of foxes from hunting, my heart sank considerably. We as a society are doomed, or at least well on the way to it..
And yet, for us as pastors, our tone matters as much as content. Because, as the Apostle Peter tells us, we can be sober minded because of our living hope (1 Peter 1) we always have a well from which to draw from. Our congregations are already anxious. Many are feeling overwhelmed. Many of us as leaders feel like stewards of something fragile and fading. In such a context, realism can easily slide into despair pretending itself as honesty. As us thinking we are ‘real.’ Authentic.
Christian hope is not optimism. It does not promise cultural renewal or civilisational rescue of the Western world. But neither is it simply the courage to accept defeat, becuase what we are called to save is not Westernism. Indeed, we are not called to save, but be saved. Hope is rooted in resurrection. Not as a metaphor for personal renewal as Kingsnorth seems to suggest, but as a claim about reality itself. Faithfulness is never wasted. Obedience is not measured by neat outcomes. And God’s purposes are not exhausted by cultural trends, even if they appear inevitable. Kingdoms have always risen and fallen.
Pastors must therefore be careful not to baptise Kingsnorth’s realism without also insisting on resurrection-shaped imagination. The Church does not exist to outlast the Machine. She exists to witness to a different Kingdom, even as machines rise and fall.
Faithfulness Without Escape
If Against the Machine is read carefully, and with Gospel lenses, it becomes a gift rather than a threat to evangelical ministry. I read it when it first came out, and then listened to the audiobook a few months after, and it was interesting that both caused me to ‘feel’ differently. As I read it, it exposed our addiction to growth, scale, and efficiency. But as I listened after a few month, I realised that it was convicting me to repent of baptising the values of the age. It reminded me that technique cannot substitute for holiness.
Our task of ministry is not to escape the Machine. It is to form people who can live under Christ’s lordship inside it, without worshipping it, without despairing, and without pretending they can simply walk away. That work is slower, messier, and far less romantic than fiddling about on the margins.
It is also how the Church has survived every ‘Machine’ before this one.
Kingsnorth has done pastors a service by naming the depth of the crisis. The challenge now is to resist turning that clarity into a burden our people cannot carry. The Church does not need more prophets of inevitability. It needs patient shepherds who believe, stubbornly and quietly, that faithfulness is still possible where God has placed us, even here, even now.
And into the future.
Whatever that might look like.
Wow, pastor's embracing Kingsnorth's book? Your insight hits.