Category Archives: Politics and sociology

On singing Bethel songs in church.

Posted on 24/07/2025 by Jon Garvey

“O.K. Listen up, Guys. I’ve got a song for the worship band to do. It’s from Ike Watts’s new album.” “That’s good, His ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ is glorious. But isn’t he – well – a little… old? That song must have been written back in the 1990s.”

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Lessons from Civil War history

Posted on 21/06/2025 by Jon Garvey

I first became aware of William Allen, eventually a Colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, when I was researching my 2019 (privately printed) book commemorating the tenth anniversary of our Baptist chapel’s burning down shortly before I moved to Devon. As Captain Allen, together with his lifelong friend Captain John Vernon, and a couple of other Baptist “other ranks,” he was an early leader, and almost certainly founder, of the Baptist Church, Kilmington, now active and growing with weekly congregations upwards of 150 people.

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Tying a few (or a lot of) COVID loose ends

Posted on 02/06/2025 by Jon Garvey

I’m reading Debbie Lerman’s The Deep State Goes Viral. It is deeply satisfying as it explains almost without remainder, with as much documentation as one is likely to get, all the nonsense of COVID, on which I wrote tens of thousands of frustrated words.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

Southport protests – silenced truth and spouted lies

Posted on 10/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

The new report from the police, or specifically His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, has created a stir on the Internet, though not so far in the mainstream media, by concluding that there is not (and never was) any evidence of the involvement of Far-Right groups in the protests after the Southport massacre, and that most of the disorder involved angry locals, and not mindless thugs traveling in on buses and trains.

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Is “moderate Charismatic” an oxymoron?

Posted on 05/05/2025 by Jon Garvey

The reason for posing this question is that whilst the excesses of the “Hypercharismatic” megachurches are plain to see, and have been so for many years, they still seem remarkably attractive to the undoubtedly sane and generally sound Charismatics in most British Evangelical churches.

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Societal revival

Posted on 22/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

My last blog picked up on the widespread talk of Christian revival in this country, and discussed how true revival is far broader than the usually-held idea, recalling the Great Awakening, of big meetings accompanied by spectacular spiritual and/or psychological phenomena. As was actually true in the eighteenth century too, the key thing was a general realisation that the current religion was failing, and a God-given hunger directed at biblical salvation in Jesus. The rest was contingent detail.

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Revival v. Revivalism

Posted on 18/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

In the past I’ve expressed scepticism about the whole concept of Christian “revival,” suggesting that this non-biblical word became fixed in the Evangelical mindset in a particular form through the atypical spiritual, sociological and psychological example of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. I wrote about this in Prophecy Today in 2003, in two articles which I later re-posted on The Hump, here and here.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

Putting on the agony, putting on the Lifestyle Christianity

Posted on 13/04/2025 by Jon Garvey

Another week, and yet another miracle working apostle is exposed as a fraud and abuser. In this case, a bevy of YouTube clips tell me, it’s some dread-locked ex-addict called Todd White, who founded an outfit called Lifestyle Christianity but has now been exposed by his own people as living the lifestyle of Satan instead.

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To save Judaeo-Christian values, or to be saved?

Posted on 29/03/2025 by Jon Garvey

To the Messianic Judaism that informed my last post, I must add, firstly, a book I was recently lent on the importance of Christian Unity. The author, to me, seems a confused individual in that in stressing the centrality of unity, he condemns on nearly every page all those Christians who don’t, those who are lukewarm, those who aren’t really Christian (by whose definition?) etc.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Science simony

Posted on 20/02/2025 by Jon Garvey

Our own commenter Shopwindows recently coined the excellent Virgilian aphorism for corruption in science: “I do not trust Geeks bearing grifts.” Physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder gives an excellent, and disturbing, example of this not in the politically controversial fields like climatology or vaccinology, but in fundamental science.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment