Anglican rector boldly leaps the boundaries of sense and coherence.
Who: Rev Lucy Winkett
What: Christian (Church of England)
Where: Rector, St James’ Church, Piccadilly
LISTEN TO PODCAST
AI transcript of the Radio 4 broadcast
The SecondThought Report (podcast script)
Welcome to the SecondThought for the day podcast. In this episode we dissect a Thought For The Day to expose all in it that is not factful and reasonable.
This SecondThought podcast is in response to the BBC’s TftD from 18 April 2025. It was by the Rev Lucy Winkett. Winkett works as a Church of England priest, currently as Rector of St James’ Church, Piccadilly in London.
Lucy’s inspiration was Easter. Specifically Good Friday, the day on which her broadcast was made.
As for her message, I think that it’s about the potency of the cross for Christians as a symbol. You’ll have to make up your own minds.
Much of what she said bordered on incoherence. The remainder, I fear, was very much lost over the other side. We can at least celebrate the brevity of Lucy’s contribution.
It seems to have been written with a belief that whimsical deviation from reason, purpose and structure is for some reason acceptable during Easter. We’re going to have to dedicate some future episode to the Easter effect on Christian presenters of TftD.
Back to Winkett. To set the scene, a parallel is drawn between the incongruities of Good Friday’s grimness and the Christian faith using a cross as its symbol. Then, in the wake of Lucy’s maudlin traipse though the low lights of human behaviour in recent news coverage, things get a little unusual. Well, unusual at least, for an anti-theistic and irregular frequenter of churches.
Here’s how Winkett opens:
WINKETT: Is it good—this Good Friday?
I’m sometimes asked why a religion would have an instrument of torture as its symbol. How can that be good?
This healer… this prophet and poet… the one who called out the abuse of power in his day—in state politics, religion, and economy—the one who pointed people, all people, to God… always to god. Jesus is not only put to death today by the occupying state, but shamed in public.
Crucifixion is a torturous way to kill a person. And it’s designed to be seen.
Today’s Good Fridays… are not good.
We can begin with the simple stuff. Winkett says, “Today’s Good Fridays are not good.”
Poppycock.
On its own merits this statement is a colossal generalisation and an evidently false claim. Winkett has decided Good Fridays of an unspecified contemporary era are (for all of us, everywhere) bad. Well, thanks, Winkett. But how about you mind your business and we’ll mind ours? Sure, you may have a problem with modern Fridays, Lucy (Good or otherwise) would it really surprise you to learn that many people may find them to be perfectly acceptable?
Winkett then claims possession of superpowers (prophesy and healing) in the character Jesus. If this were a reference to, say, Superman and his ability to fly, we’d all be clear that the context was fictional. Not a problem. Here, though, I think Lucy is claiming non-fiction. In which case, erm, no. Solid example of belief being presented as fact.
We are then told that Jesus pointed, always and all people, to god. I’m pretty sure Lucy isn’t attempting to make sense but let’s go with it. Could be fun.
The population of our planet at the time the events of the Easter story are alleged to have taken place is thought to have been between 150 and 300 million. The American Museum of Natural History updated in 2023 its data visualisation of our population over all human history. It’s an enlightening watch. They put the figure at 170 million. For the purposes of this digression, let’s go with that. Tiny by today’s standards (c. 8 billion) but still quite a lot of people, especially if you have to find them all and point them to a god.
The most populous regions of Earth in this period were in what is today eastern China and northern India. Before we explore what chance there was that Jesus was able to point all people at this time (and always) to a god, it’s worth examining what an unusual part of Earth the Christian god chose for his Jesus landing party.
The area of the biblical lands in 30 AD was about 1.5 million square kilometres. Specifically, this area encompasses, modern Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Syria, the western half of Iraq and the northern half of Saudi Arabia. This vast territory had a population of about 1 million people in the year the Romans killed Jesus. If we extend south to capture the Egyptian lands relevant to the gospels’ description of Jesus’ life, then the population increases to around 2 million, with negligible impact on the area. For simplicity, we’ll refer to this territory as Greater Samaria.
Make no mistake, at this point in our history, this is a backwater of planet Earth. There were three million people living in Japan at this point, which less than one quarter the size of Greater Samaria.
These pockets of population, though, are dwarfed by what at the same time is in China and India. There were 40 million people living at this time in the central lands of the Han Dynasty, of equivalent size to Greater Samaria. The Han, in total, ruled over 60 million people in this era.
In a stretch of northern India there were over 30 million people living at this time on lands about half the size of Greater Samaria, hugging the south-eastern foothills of the Himalaya massif.
If you had a message you wanted humankind to receive on Earth in 30 AD, assuming you had limited resources and had to start in just one place, you’d have begun outreach in China or India, probably Luoyang the then centre of the Han Dynasty in Henan province of today’s China.
Beginning in Nazareth would have been akin to waging a marketing campaign in the US today by driving from town to town in Oklahoma, shouting loudly from a soapbox in the square upon arriving in each.
From what I’ve been able to gather, Christians believe their god to be all powerful and all good. Putting aside for one moment that almost any news bulletin from the history of news bulletins will likely contain incontrovertible evidence that these two things cannot simultaneously be true, an all-powerful god would not be limited to selecting a single landing spot. If an all-powerful god did choose to run a salvation-for-eternity outreach programme from just one place and with just one envoy, you’d have pretty solid evidence that its motivations were… perverse. Which is about the most pleasant way to put this of which I can think.
Back to Jesus’ task of pointing all the people to a god. Let’s forget for now that there were also pockets of humans in the Americas, in Australia and dotted all over Africa. Imagine all 250 million were on the Eurasian landmass. Luoyang is over 11,000 km, on foot, from Jerusalem. There is a more direct route, but it requires going over, instead of around, the Himalayas. Agra (in northern India) is conveniently the right side of the mountains but is still 5,000 km from Jerusalem. There are no newspapers, email, Santa’s sleighs, telephones, satellites, flu powder or glass elevators.
There was a postal service operated by and for the Roman Empire but given they’d literally just killed god’s messenger, it seems unlikely that Jesus was making a great deal of use of the Roman mail service beforehand.
Biblical scholars have calculated (why is a question for another day) that Jesus walked an estimated 25,000 km, in his lifetime. These travels, though, were concentrated within Galilee and Judea. It seems likely that the longest single journey he took was no more than 600 km.
So, no, Lucy. Even assuming Jesus was particularly good at having his pointing noticed during the few years he was actively ministering, he fell far, far short of your claim that he pointed, always and all people, to god.
Who knows, though, what Lucy actually meant.
There is an element of Lucy’s “Today’s Good Fridays are not good” that is tricky to fathom. There is an implied comparison of those Good Fridays of today with some other Good Fridays. It seems likely that Winkett doesn’t believe the original Good Friday to have been good. So perhaps she’s claiming all Good Fridays are bad? Let’s listen to some more to see if it helps.
WINKETT: “Today’s Good Fridays… are not good.
Shaved heads. Shackled hands. Underground prisons. In our news cycle, we witness free rein being given to the human instinct to humiliate… the human instinct to dehumanise… the human instinct for revenge.
Today’s Good Fridays are everywhere.
And the lies we tell ourselves when we repeat the myth that violence is redemptive, and degradation well deserved.”
No. I’m not sure that does help.
At least, not with her implied Good Friday comparison. She does reinforce her assertion of the badness of today’s Good Fridays with examples from what we’re told is in the news cycle. There really is though no useful information with which to determine what Lucy means. This appears to be an instance of plain incoherence. The tail end of that, though, does provide something with which we can work.
“… the lies we tell ourselves when we repeat the myth that violence is redemptive, and degradation well-deserved.”
In this we have an indisputable logical falsehood. Winkett, without grounds, claims that we (presumably all listeners but perhaps all people) tell ourselves lies.
I can find ways to support that. We do. The masters of unravelling cognitive bias, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, illustrated in the 1970s that our minds are almost incapable of not deceiving us. Lucy, though, goes on to specify a deceit.
Apparently we (Lucy and all other people) lie to ourselves that violence is redemptive and that degradation is deserved. Frankly, that’s as rude as it is preposterous. It’s also an entirely unsupportable false claim.
Lucy, go ahead and confess your problem with a belief that violence is redemptive but please don’t project your problems on your listeners, or the rest of the world.
Before we move on to the strangeness of Lucy’s cross observations, we should return to her mention of the news cycle.
While her meaning is indistinct, with respect to Friday comparisons, her recounting of shackles, prisons, dehumanisation and revenge does appear to be a dip into declinism.
Declinism is a fallacy. It’s the belief, contrary to objective evidence, that a society or institution is in decline, commonly resulting from cognitive biases, where the past is viewed more favourably than the future. Rose-tinted spectacles, if you will, but for academics.
Religious types, at least, if those among them presenting Thought For The Day are representative, seem to be hard-wired for Declinism.
In many ways, this is understandable. One might suppose that if people were convinced that modern life were terrible, you would be better placed to offer your ancient religion from a simpler time, to people as a means to find solace from the hardship and pain. It’s not just those preying on your soul who are vulnerable to declinism. We all are. Which is not surprising given the assistance it is provided by news media. Our news is more plentiful and more accessible than ever before, and news outlets have a significant preference for news that is bad. Everybody’s doing it, though, is not an adequate excuse.
In 2017, Hans Rosling’s posthumously published book Factfulness provided a brilliant and entirely accessible guide to how the world is in much better shape than most of us, before reading it, thought. Much of his latter life’s work was based on the idea was that none of us can make or comment on policy choices unless we know the problems we face and those we don’t. His book was almost singularly responsible for initiating a U-turn in understanding among serious journalists in the UK who previously thought that our planet was danger of over population.
The world is not without its problems but those living in it today have things better than any time in our species’ history. Given the prevalence of Declinism and the bad-news bias of our media, it seems likely that claim will meet with one or two raised eyebrows. And so it should. The Royal Society has as its motto, ‘ Nullius in verba’ which translated to ‘take nobody’s word for it’. This is exceptionally good advice. Hence, it’s also entirely understandable if you feel scepticism about that claim I made about what humanity faces today compared to any other time in history. Please read Factfulness, and while you’re waiting for it to arrive, visit gapminder.com, which is the website Hans Rosling set up to help close the gap between what we believe to be true about the world and what is actually true about the world. Conveniently, it provides a selection of simple online quizzes that swiftly reveal how what you think you know compares with what you actually know about the state of the world today. While you’re at it, order Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature which carefully distils tracts of methodical research into a description of how much less violent our world has become. Taking just one measure of violence, even accounting for wars that currently rage, the likelihood of someone alive today suffering a battle-related death is around 2 in 100,000 (a global average). This is astonishingly low. In 1960 that rate dropped below 5 per 100,000 for the first time since 1936. By 1971 it had dropped to below 2 per 100,000 where is stayed until 2021, since then it’s been hovering just above 2 in 100,000. If you graph these figures from 1900 to today on a sheet of A4, the line looks completely flat and almost at zero since the beginning of the 70s. We’re living in one of the safest eras in history and we are most certainly living in the healthiest, wealthiest and most equitable and most educated time there has ever been. Not only is global over-population the opposite of the problem we face, consider these:
- The first/third world comparisons with which many of us grew up, has long been redundant – Only 10% of the world’s population lives in a low-income country (and falling)
- The average life expectancy on Earth is climbing. It was 29 in 1800. It was 32 in 1900. It was 46 by 1950. Today the average life expectancy at birth is 70
- We’re richer and we live longer. We’re also safer:
- In the last 100 years, death from natural disasters has decreased by more than 50%
- 80 percent of the world’s one-year-old children have been vaccinated against at least one disease
- Only 6% of 5-year-olds are underweight
- 60% of the world’s population feels safe walking alone at night where they live
- We’ve also done a tremendous amount to reduce the the impact of discrimination
- Globally, there is only a difference of 10% in the number of years the average 30-year-old spent in school between men and women.
- Homosexuality is legal in 65% of countries.
Any reference to how terrible the world is today, needs to be understood in this context. When anyone seeks to advance their own views by making a general contrast between how bad things are now compared to some earlier time, they are engaged in deceit. Perhaps they’re just lazy, and the convenience to them of the comparison outweighs the risk that might accompany researching the truth. Perhaps they know they are spouting bullshit and are misleading you deliberately.
In fairness, Winkett’s declinism dip was fairly mild. We’ll revisit the topic in the company of another TftD broadcaster several of whom lean on the fallacy more heavily.
Then, and finally, to Lucy’s conclusion.
WINKETT: The reason this cross is powerful, and this day can be called “good,” is not because we look at it—but because it stares at us.
At humanity’s cruelty today.
And it invites us to confront our fear, set aside our weapons, and live differently.
The questions it raises are urgent:
Is it possible that we can choose another way?
Can we imagine that there is a love in eternity that holds the stars apart, and that endures beside all whose hearts are breaking in quiet despair or cacophonous pain?
This cross poses a question.
Throws down a challenge.
It’s a provocation—to see the world as it is… imagine it to be different… and resolve to make it so.
So help me God.
What are we to make of that? I heartily echo that final sentiment. On listening to Lucy’s conclusion I too think of such phrases as, (lord), give me strength!
The cross stares at us? Claptrap. Although, that really has nothing on love as an eternal restrainer of stars. Perhaps some poetic licence should be granted here but in a broadcast already struggling against a tide of nonsense, it seems unwise to indulge anything that swells the waves.
Lucy manages here to be quite right, whilst also being profoundly platitudinous and astonishingly blinkered. First the platitude… Wouldn’t it be great if we all could be nice to each other and live in peace. This is a near perfect example of the TftD banalities about which Jon Humphries complained in a 2017 interview. But Winkett is far from done. I think that she’s right about this cross asking questions. But perhaps so narrow are her horizons, so insular her thinking and so arrogantly held her belief, she sees nothing wrong with the questions she then chose.
Unavoidably, this cross is a symbol of division. No more or less than a crescent or a star. They each represent an exclusive claim on supernatural knowledge of this world and a next world. They each claim to provide the only path to enlightenment and to salvation for all humanity.
How can it be with all that we’ve done to improve human life on Earth, to improve our understanding of the universe in which our Earth sits that we have emissaries from a medieval past who drone on about mysticism and superpowers, quite unaware of some genuinely powerful questions? Do you believe in immortal beings that live in the sky? Do you believe in magic? Do you really believe that your magic and your magical beings are true and heavenly, but not those of billions of others, which are false and hellish? And surely here’s the real challenge thrown down by this Christian symbol. How does Lucy not see religion as anachronistic fuel for global antipathy? If only Winkett responded to the cross’ invitation that she confront her fear, to set aside the weapon of her ideology and to live differently.
It seems clear that the cross is for Christians a potent symbol. A reminder of all the terrible human things that Lucy lists, and a reminder that humans inflicted these things on the hero of their story. Why dress this message in so much meaningless twaddle? Quite aside from the Declinism, the false claims and the ease with which we can use a cross of wood to generate almost any question, if the message matters, why has Winkett put so much effort into scrambling it?
Please don’t listen to this broadcast, I’ve forced enough of it on you already. It is nonsensical, cliched and wildly unaware of its shortcomings.
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