Dr John Campbell, one of the more popular documenters of the COVID nonsense since 2020, has done a video on the Shroud of Turin. I’ve mentioned him in the past mainly as a classic example of the phenomenon of helpful explainers of the official COVID narrative gradually coming round to seeing its unscientific awfulness, to the point of seeing it, as many of us do, as a symptom of a totalitarian power grab in the world.
Campbell doesn’t usually stray off the topic of medical science, so this is a one-off for him. Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising he has covered it, since because of new research the Shroud has been prominent in the YouTubosphere in recent months, and I’ve written about it in a couple of columns myself, here and here. His video is not even the best source of information about the Shroud on YouTube, as he admits to its being a recent interest – its significance lies in his interest in it, as a trusted disciple of scientific truth fully conversant with the dangers of misinformation.
It’s not clear whether Dr John speaks from a standpoint of Christian commitment – I’m not aware that he’s ever let his personal religion impinge on his teaching videos. He may, for all I know, only have become interested in the witness of Scripture to the Passion through the anomaly of the Shroud. He is certainly personally invested enough to take seriously not only the New Testament narratives seriously, but the Old testament prophetic witness.
Yet whether he has come to some degree of faith through the Shroud, or whether its impact is simply to have made him more up-front about his existing faith, as usual here I’d like to step back a little to suggest, perhaps, a wider significance. And that is the way in which it seems impossible for so many people to focus on the political and social chaos of the last few years without recognising its spiritual dimension, or rather its specifically Christian spiritual dimension.
I’ve mentioned this before, for quite some time, regarding the common progression from blue-pillers being red-pilled by the truth, then black-pilled by the baleful implications of the truth, and finally white-pilled by some measure of recognition that the situation matches the Christian diagnosis of the world, and that only Christ can, in the final analysis, sort it.
Examples off the top of my head include Russell Brand’s conversion, Mike Yeadon’s espousal of a Christian understanding of evil, and Bret Weinstein’s grudging conflict between recognising the need for Christianity and denying its compatibility with his materialism. We have Douglas Murray and Richard Dawkins supporting cultural Christianity, Ayaan Hirsi Ali accepting the real thing, and (as we saw at the weekend’s London rally) Tommy Robinson’s team beginning the event with a gospel singer and ending it with a ministerial blessing and the distribution of John’s gospels.
In the big scheme of things, perhaps this mysterious relic is, as I have suggested before, a particular means that God has brought before the world to win hearts at this time. But even apart from that, my point is that those who care for truth are, increasingly, becoming vocal about the relevance of that faith so long dismissed in our “post-christian” culture.
Dr John Campbell is, in that sense, the indicator of an important spiritual trend.