Be not conformed

British novelist and poet Paul Kingsnorth was a popular figure among radical eco-activists until he began to write about “dark ecology,” which he called “a personal philosophy for a dark time.” The modern world has made ecological collapse inevitable, he wrote in 2014, and activism is worthless. So he moved to rural Ireland with his wife and two kids and took to mowing grass with a scythe. That made him less popular than the proverbial garden party skunk among environmentalists, but he continued to write and founded a popular Substack newsletter called The Abbey of Misrule. Critics on the left and right frequently misunderstand his critiques of modern technology and the West, which are severe but thoughtful.

Then, six years ago, he became an Orthodox Christian. “It’s been profoundly altering,” he told me, “in the way that I see the world, and in the sense I have of the future. Because being a Christian gives you hope.” His latest book is Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (see WORLD, November 2025).

What is “The Machine”? It’s a matrix of technology, politics, and a kind of technological and cultural system that since the Industrial Revolution has risen around us to the point where we have gone beyond being a species that uses tools and become people who are in service to a technological system.

For a very long time we have been trying to replace nature with technology, trying to build a world in which we are in control and can manage every aspect of life. We think that we’re able to do things like create superintelligences, artificial minds, and potentially not just extend our lives but end death. At least, this is the dream. It’s the same story that played out in the first book of Genesis, where we decide that we’re going to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and become as gods.

You write that the foundations of a culture are the four P’s: people, place, prayer, and past. They provide us with roots, but The Machine uproots us, replacing the four P’s with the four S’s: science, self, sex, and screens. We end up with this very rootless world in which we identify ourselves as individual consumers, fulfilling our needs through technology and through consumerism. We have to be uprooted for the Machine to succeed.

Is The Machine what the Bible calls “the world”? The Machine is a product of the world, if you like. It’s a kind of technological manifestation of exactly that force that St. Paul talks about: powers and principalities. We are supposed to be in it, but not of it. In that sense, it isn’t new. Its intensity is new, and the technological power that it has is new.

You also write that the West has become an idol in part because too many Christians have bought into the myths of The Machine: progress and technology. Defenders of the West admit parts of it are corrupt, but say it’s the best way to encourage human flourishing and restrain evil. Your response? The West is the thing that evolved from what used to be Christendom. It’s a very particular way of seeing, which is very rationalistic, very scientistic, very mechanistic, which has actually given rise to this Machine. I wouldn’t say that the West is a Christian culture anymore. It’s the culture of the Enlightenment, and it’s decided that, because there is no God, we can build God ourselves. A lot of Christians think they need to defend the West. If we’re defending anything, we ought to be defending Christian teaching. But a lot of what the West is doing at the moment is valorizing the Seven Deadly Sins. We’ve abandoned a culture that’s based around God and the teachings of Christ, and we’ve replaced them with this culture of growth and progress and money and capitalism and power. And we say that’s the West.

It’s a perfectly good thing to want to do, defend your culture and nation, especially when you see them under attack from the progressive left and all the other stuff that’s been going on for years. And so your instinct is to say, “I want to defend my culture.” But you can’t confuse that with the Church.

Tell us about your conversion to Christianity. Does your Orthodox ­theology shape your approach to these kinds of questions? I got down on my knees in my garden and I said to God, “If you exist, show me what truth is. Because I want to know. I need to know.” Soon I started having dreams about Jesus, and meeting Christians everywhere. I decided to read the Gospels, and I found a story I’d never heard before. I had a number of experiences which basically convinced me Christianity is true.

Orthodoxy has a deep well of mysticism, and there’s a sense of God being very present in the world, and a very traditional sense of the devil being very present in the world as well. I think that has really helped me to understand what’s going on with the Machine. There’s a spiritual element to the construction of the Machine and our experiments with technologies. I often think that the internet feels like a giant Ouija board, opening up portals that things can come through. If C.S. Lewis were to write The Screwtape Letters today, he’d have a lot of letters in there about how Wormwood should be using the internet to corrupt people. We’ve turned half the human race against the other half. We’ve got them all addicted to pornography. They’re obsessed with their phones. They’re losing touch with reality. If you were a demon, you’d be thinking that was a job well done.

You write that both socialism and ­capitalism are products of The Machine, and that they’re based on power and equally destructive. Have you undervalued liberty and the importance of free markets? [Regarding] capitalism, I’m talking about a system in which giant corporations dominate the economy, own and manage most of the capital, and crush all of their enemies. Markets are one thing, you know, people freely trading. That’s all good. But capitalism isn’t free. With the Machine, the real question is about scale. A moral economy would be based on notions of things that are good and true, a [local] economy that comes from the ground up, and that serves human beings at a human scale.

Is it still possible for Christians to live godly lives under The Machine? Being a Christian is excellent training for living a godly life under an oppressive system. This is the life that Christ and the apostles were living. How many of the early Christians were martyred by the Romans? How many Christians have had to live in hostile systems? The premise of Christianity is not that we create a perfect world and live in it. It’s that we try to live a Christ-like life in a world that is basically the kingdom of the devil. In that sense, it’s nothing new. The technologies are new. I think the scale is new, but the actual job of being a Christian is the same, I suppose, as it’s always been.