By Bob Soco | Feb 21, 2025
I was honoured and favoured by Fr. Calvin Robinson to gain access to the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) conference – the brainchild of Dr. Jordan Peterson – this week. I am now going to divulge my reflections upon the momentous occasion covered by numerous media outlets including the GB News and the Guardian News Paper.
My impression of what the ARC conference is all about is that it is trying to revitalize Western culture and civilisation from the root. It is positioning itself as an alliance of conservative-minded liberals and the broader right-of-spectrum thinkers, movers, and shakers. I understand this is the second such conference – the first being by invite only! This second conference was opened to the public but aimed at the elites; the tickets were in excess of a thousand pounds, and discounted tickets were still counted in hundreds. The Conference was held at the ExCel London Centre, and to be fair, I can see why the costs were so high: all delegates were fed and watered, security was high, the venue excellent, and helpful staff were abundant in comfortable settings! There were around 4000 delegates from across the world with A-list speakers including Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and Bishop Barron, amongst others.
It is interesting that the conference played on the image of the ARK (spelled ARC) for their motif – Jordan Peterson welcoming people ‘aboard the arc, now pick up a paddle and row’ in his final speech. The Ark as a biblical motif – being a place of GOD’s preservation from judgment and His presence amongst His people – has been used by Church Fathers as references to both Christ as Saviour and to Mary as carrying the Lord’s presence amongst His people. The ARC group wants to commission a movement to go about being activists that deliberately rebuild and restore Western civilisation along its ‘traditional’ lines to save it from the death of overreaching governments governed by progressive beliefs and values. I believe the aim of Jordan Peterson and many is to return to an idealised, individualised, strong but limited nation-state. This is nothing but pure Reaganism, a cult of the new right of the Thatcherite kind (I may be wrong, and I am open to correction). But such a vision – if, in fact, that is so – is too flat and contrived and lacking in the depth of the soil of Western Civilisation for it to work. The West must revisit the question of Christianity as the driving energy of all aspects of society, economy, and politics, and all questions of identity and values. That is how you will best build a culture of responsible citizenship: when you realise we are responsible primarily to GOD and not in the first instance to our neighbour – something liberals have gotten the wrong way round for the best part of two hundred years!
What I found most striking was that Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party and His Majesty’s loyal opposition, openly acknowledged the existential threat and possible collapse of Western civilisation – something no mainstream media outlet seems to have focused on. This is quite the statement. A mainstream party and leader finally acknowledged the mood felt across the Western world by its natural custodians. It is often said that the first step of recovery from a destructive addiction is to acknowledge that there is a problem. So, for this to finally be said from the front and centre of society is somewhat of a relief (so long, of course, as she actually believes it herself). For if the Western peoples of the world do not acknowledge that there is a real and genuine threat, they will do nothing to resolve it.
I was struck, though, by something that was not said or addressed: the threat of Islam in the form of Islamization and active Islamists across our society. This spectre, I would have thought, would be challenged. This draws out well the weakness of any and all liberal movements, classical or otherwise, in that it will not bring itself to tackle Islam on its own terms: that of a theocratic vision set upon world domination and oppression of non-Muslims! How, in a conference about saving the West, was this not addressed directly (not to my knowledge, anyway)? The ARC conference must tackle this question head-on, as we all must, for we cannot save the West unless we accept the reality of the existential threat posed to it by Islam. Liberalism – because of its contractual understanding of the state and in-state sovereignty and its disproportionate use of natural theology – cannot see Islam as a threat but merely one more religion amongst others that the state is bound to uphold as part of its contract with the Muslim citizen. Liberalism is part of the problem here.
I found that there were a number of competing currents at flow across the conference, like waves in water from different directions they would sometimes clash and cancel one another out – a danger, of course, that cannot be avoided in a gathering of people so large. One of those currents was the modernist obsession with innovation; that somehow you could save the West through innovation, through some new piece of technology or enterprise. To be sure, rebuilding a post-progressive society is required for the salvation of the West, and that will take innovation. Still, there was a spiritually unhealthy belief in both the necessity and power of innovation, to which I would like to offer a word of caution. The technological revolutions of AI, DNA Coding, and body augmentation challenge the very narrative of our understanding of what it is to be human. These technological innovations must be pinned firmly to the service of the Christian story if they are not to create a ‘god of the machine’ culture in the future, something that would be just as maniacal as any ‘culture of the self’ that is currently the cancer killing Western civilisation presently.
Innovation without a clear paradigm to guide it is exactly what happened during the industrial revolution: technological innovation led, before our reflections upon its impact caught up, and we have continuously been playing catch up ever since. I know Dr. Jordan Peterson spoke of his desire for a conscientious reset in which we deliberately and proactively rethink the world along socially conservative and classically liberal lines. However, if we are to do that well, we must accept that classical liberalism let the ball roll away from it on this one! Technologies like the pill have done more to kill the West than anything else. Nothing, on reflection, has proven more insidious than the television combined with controlled media. What is needed is a clear metanarrative that should define the limits and direction of a technological innovation and not the pursuit of technological breakthroughs for their own sake. Liberalism is part of the problem here.
The other consideration is quite simply this: values and a sense of a civilisation are going to be passed down and sustained by families that are born into them and feel that they are theirs to own, which obviously requires education. But more importantly, it requires families and a pro-life culture, a pro-family culture. Whilst this was certainly rippling across the conference, the horrific crime and genocide of abortion – killing mostly Western children – was not tackled head-on. You simply cannot have or sustain a Western civilisation without the families and children that are its natural inheritors! I believe that once again, the fault here is liberalism and its emphasis on the freedom of choice, especially over one’s body (an innovation of most recent years as Liberalism metastasised into progressive thought, as classical liberalism did not have this hang-up). ARC must come out clearly and unashamedly as pro-life! Liberalism is part of the problem here!
This brings me to the obvious point: ARC cannot serve two masters; it cannot serve both man and GOD. Liberalism, even classical liberalism, represents a man-centred religion, Christianity a GOD-centred religion. I have drawn out technology, Islam, and abortion, where Liberalism is actually part of the problem of the decay of the West. ARC must see the problems inherent within liberalism – and rather than a return to a more classical liberal state, it should instead row towards a Christian state, a new Christendom! I heard from Konstantin Kisin (who gave a genuinely hilarious speech) and Eric Weinstein (who missed an opportunity to highlight the scandal of the scientific community grifting off the public purse) the pagan undercurrents of the new classical liberals; a Nietzschean call to defy the meaninglessness of decay ‘by holding to the truth’ – I think the irony escaped both – and a scientist extolling a faith-based futurism in the power of science.
When Ayaan Hirsi Ali and His Eminence Baron’s speeches were contrasted, they showed a tension point between the dying new atheistic liberals and the resurgent Christian contingent within the conference. They further highlighted that as the Church continues to embolden, a conflict for the future with atheistic/deistic Liberalism is on the horizon. Christians must keep one eye on the horizon, and when our alliance with liberalism is no longer in the interests of the Church, we must be ready to break the alliance and seize the initiative for the Kingdom. The danger for Christians is that our faith is hijacked as a brand, and distorted and diluted to serve man rather than being as the Lord intended as He founded the Church to serve Him and His Kingdom in covenant. Christianity is useless to everyone if you only see it as useful – a point excellently made by far the best speaker, in my opinion, Os Guinness. Christianity offers a broader, deeper, richer, and more sustainable narrative than the new atheistically led classical liberal movement.
This leads me to reflect upon what I believe should be the stance of Christians within ARC who are already at the heart of the organisation, for instance, Jonathan Pageau, a member of its organising committee. My Kingdom-theology instincts make natural gravitating to capturing the whole conference. But, as Pageau himself observed in conversation with Fr. Josiah Trenham, and as I observed, if we did that, we would be boxed off as ‘that Christian group’ by the rest of the world. I am won over by this argument against my natural instinct, and so I believe the best stance for Christians is to use this ARC conference as a field of mission, in which we bring in the goats! This is an interface in which we should seek to bring in the lost of the liberal elites to the Christian worldview (whilst holding clearly to our own vision) until such a time emerges when we are the overwhelming majority of the movement rather than a significant minority of the movement. When we reach this critical point, ARC will be a Christian movement of civilisational renewal, seeking to revive a Christian civilisation in the West. A point that many in the conference have some degree of sympathy towards in any case.
To that end, there is a snare we should as Christians be using in our evangelism of this Liberal caucus: it was almost a refrain amongst them to cheer the importance of Christian values and rightly so; Christian values are the best values by which to govern life. However, it seems many have not thought critically that Christian values – in fact, all values – are dependent on the doctrines you hold! We need to make this connection strongly within ARC as a way of funnelling down the rabbit hole of the liberal to Christ. As they pursue the root of this connection between values and doctrines and learn Christian doctrines as a means to sustaining those values, they may encounter Christ as Lord and Saviour. We must use those liberal values that are Christian – like the imago dei and the importance of the family – as a way into introducing them to deeper values, which to them will seem more eccentrically Christian, like the importance of the covenant and the Kingdom, and the confederacy of the Church. It is therefore of the greatest importance that Christians active in the ARC network have a clear sense of their Christian values and where liberal and Christian values differ, advocating church over state, for instance, as the locus of identity.
If Islam was the spectre in the room unspoken, then Christ was the Angel of the Lord in the room unspoken! His name needed to be declared but was not. His name needed to be praised, but what was not. There was a latent pregnant energy expectant of Him, but it was not clearly articulated. There was a prayer breakfast organised – as I understand – but I would urge, at the next ARC conference, that somewhere there be displayed the Nicene Creed for all to read as the foundational document of Western civilisation (I hope you are listening, John Pageau), and that the first and last moments be to say the Lord’s prayer. We Christians must be better at communicating how Christ is the Cornerstone, not just of personal salvation, but also the Cornerstone of a civilisational project that we can – for want of better words – call a New Christendom!
I want to give a shout-out to a few people here whom I had the opportunity to meet and whom I hope to work with in the near future. Firstly, and most importantly, to Fr. Calvin, without whose help I would not have been able to go. Please support him and show him some love here (he is having a rough time of it): https://democracythree.org/the-most. Also, Fr. Brett Murphy and Glen Scrivener, both of whom I look forward to working with in the near future, and the now-brave confessor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali of Courage Media. It was great to see you all! Jonathan Pageau was a little weary of me, though I look forward to reaching out to Fr. Josiah in the future. One encounter, which for me was one of the best, was with a Christian businessman, where we discussed over lunch the place of Christian entrepreneurs in the cultural struggle for the life of our civilisation and what role Christian-run and managed businesses have in that. I hope that might bear fruit, as Christian-run businesses are our principal means of unplugging culture and society from liberal indoctrination.
