Dispatches from ARC

What exactly is ARC, the hot new conference that drew some 4,000 people to London’s ExCeL center in its second incarnation last month? The acronym stands for “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.” It is the brainchild of Jordan Peterson and Baroness Philippa Stroud, a Conservative Party peer who helms think tanks around the United Kingdom. Baroness Stroud is a Christian, and many of the attendees were Christians as well. But her opening speech, which included many references to the Lord of the Rings, was a call to arms for anyone willing to join the cause of civilizational renewal against those who would destroy it. In her own words, the mission of ARC is to “rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated.”

Attending the conference for the first time, I quickly discovered it was the place to rendezvous with all kinds of like-minded friends. By the last day, I was skipping the main speeches altogether just to spend more time with the remarkable people I was meeting offstage. Those speeches were important though, carefully orchestrated each day to cluster around themes like free speech, sustainable energy solutions, or the promise and perils of AI. Some felt more like passionate homilies, religious in style if not in substance. (One legal scholar described himself as a “missionary” for Greek philosophy.) Speakers’ backgrounds varied, but all spoke in broadly right-leaning, some would say broadly conservative perspective.

How conservative? That depends. Speakers like Paul Marshall, Scott Tinker, Robert Bryce, and others exposed some of the many ways leftism has immiserated people, including the poorest and most vulnerable populations leftists claim to champion. On a day highlighting “builders,” entrepreneurs like musician Oliver Anthony then promoted the tangible ways they’re contributing to human flourishing. There was also space dedicated to artists like Jonathan Pageau, Makoto Fujimura, and war sculptor Sabin Howard, whose work resists postmodernism in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. All of this and more fit comfortably within a conservative vision of civilization.

But the word “conservative” doesn’t have the same valence in the United States as it does in the United Kingdom, where certain third-rail social issues aren’t part of the political conversation. While the conference and speakers’ research set a decidedly pro-family tone—normalizing marriage and children, condemning pornography, discussing policy that puts the nuclear family first—I didn’t hear abortion mentioned even once from the stage. Mainstage speakers also avoided saying anything distinctively conservative about the definition of marriage, although several condemned transgender indoctrination for children.

Yet several speakers were distinctively Christian, which highlighted the conference’s subtle internal tensions. While some eagerly pitched variations on a classically liberal theme, hymning the praises of John Stuart Mill, wise voices like Os Guinness and Bishop Barron preached the necessity of building a civilization on the rock of Christian faith. Freedom is good, but Barron reminded us to ask what are we free to, not merely free from. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, newly confident in her recently embraced Christian faith, asserted that secularization has been the downfall of the West, ending her speech with a string of Bible references. Guinness further warned that mere “Christian values” can’t save civilization without a believing Christian population. “The Christian faith will not do anything for civilization if it's viewed as useful.”

The spirit of Donald Trump was also present in the arena. The conference as a whole felt like an injection of American optimism under a gray English sky, with several shout-outs to DOGE and a lingering buzz around J. D. Vance’s Munich speech. But David Brooks earned some boos with his warning that Trump is no friend to true conservatives or Christians—a classic case of the messenger undermining the message. Still, it is a point worth serious consideration and debate for those of us who, unlike Brooks, are truly committed to a full-throated conservatism. Is it really worth hitching our wagon to Trump’s star? Is he really the champion we seek? Or does the true conservative path lie somewhere in the middle, between the childish tears of the woke left and the swelling triumphalism of the new right?

We ended the week with a weary-looking Jordan Peterson, flinty as ever, delivering his closing sermon with a small orchestra behind him. Having welcomed everyone aboard the ARC, he now fiercely exhorted the audience to “Pick up an oar and row!” The speech landed awkwardly even with Peterson’s fans, like a greatest hits record slowly wearing itself out. I thought of him as I listened to another speaker talk about Benjamin Franklin’s attempt to keep a daily record of how well he lived up to the great virtues. Franklin abandoned the project in disappointment when he kept failing. Others have tried to replicate the experiment with the same predictable result. 

There was certainly nothing wrong with Franklin’s experiment, just as there’s nothing wrong with the experiment that is ARC. But perhaps in quiet moments, Peterson feels the same discouragement Franklin did. Thankfully, when we do inevitably fail, Christians bring a message that comes as much better news than “just keep rowing.”