“Despair is forbidden”: Nigel Biggar on civilisational decline, culture wars, and Christian courage

The Oxford theologian argues the West is living off borrowed moral capital, and Christians can’t afford a polite retreat.

There’s a particular kind of conversation you only get when someone has spent decades thinking before they started speaking publicly. In Luke Martin’s interview with Lord Nigel Biggar, you hear a man who is neither naïve about the country’s fractures nor addicted to panic.

His headline conviction is simple: Christians must not outsource public courage to activists, politicians, or pundits, and they can’t hide behind niceness when truth and justice are contested.

Biggar is now a Conservative peer in the House of Lords, but his public “late career” turn is not a reinvention. He tells Luke his academic path was political from the beginning: coming to Oxford in the 1970s amid industrial unrest and Northern Irish violence, asking what “2,000 years of Christian moral reflection” could say to a national crisis, and realising ethics, not just history, would be the toolset for public responsibility.

That long apprenticeship matters because Biggar’s basic message isn’t “get angry”; it’s get serious.

 The new censorship: not disagreement, but “shut it down”

Biggar’s cancellation stories are striking not because they prove his opponents wrong, but because they reveal a new social reflex: punish the platform rather than contest the argument. In Dublin, he says, he was booked to speak about free speech and was removed without explanation the night before.

His point isn’t merely a personal grievance. It’s institutional: when leaders cancel speakers and refuse to give reasons, they train communities (schools, colleges, universities) to accept opaque power.

“Basic courtesy says you give reasons,” he notes, adding that silence usually signals embarrassment. The deeper diagnosis is that a “small aggressive minority” can dominate institutions if managers cave quickly enough, and if everyone else stays quiet.

Colonialism, reparations, and the battle for Britain’s moral memory

Biggar’s argument about empire and slavery will continue to irritate progressives, but it’s worth hearing in full: he believes today’s popular story is not merely morally intense, but selectively told.

He doesn’t deny atrocities. He objects to moral simplification, the idea that Britain’s imperial history is essentially, and only, white oppression. His insistence is that empire and slavery were historically widespread; that Britain played a leading role in abolition; and that the moral arithmetic of collective guilt across centuries becomes unstable once you account for intervening events and multiple agents (including African and Arab slave trading systems).

Whether you agree with him or not, the reason he thinks this matters is political: he believes national cohesion is being damaged by a story of inherited shame that offers no constructive future.

This is why he describes his work as correcting the record — not for nostalgia, but for civic health. A society that educates itself into self-contempt will eventually lose the will to defend anything.

Assisted dying: why “normalising” changes everything

Biggar’s approach to the assisted dying bill is one of the more unusual Christian angles you’ll hear: he concedes there may be rare circumstances (he mentions battlefield realities) where euthanasia is morally defensible while still opposing legalisation as a standard, institutional practice.

His warning is classic: once a society normalises killing as a solution to suffering, it reshapes the imagination of what care is, what burden means, and how vulnerable people interpret “choice”.

He also argues the legislative process itself has exposed weakness in safeguards, pointing to widespread amendments and a narrowing margin of parliamentary support.

But the line that lands hardest is not policy detail, it’s spiritual posture: “Despair is forbidden.” Biggar doesn’t mean optimism is easy; he means hopelessness is a temptation Christians must refuse, precisely because the cross rewrites what “defeat” can become. 

Christian nationalism: patriotism without idolatry 

Biggar is careful with labels. He calls himself a Christian patriot, not a nationalist, largely because “nationalism” has been loaded with connotations of racism and contempt.

Yet he refuses the fashionable suspicion of national love. For him, gratitude for a humane, liberal country is morally healthy and the elite reflex that treats patriotism as a near-synonym for fascism is “profoundly unhealthy”.

His version is qualified: no nation is eternal; no nation is divine; nations come and go. But some nations embody institutions that promote human flourishing, and those are worth defending.

This is patriotism with a doctrine of sin, which is another way of saying: love without illusion.

Culture wars: why “winsome” can become complicity 

Perhaps the sharpest moment in the interview is Biggar’s rejection of the “both sides are as bad as each other” posture. He argues that when a vocal minority seeks to punish dissent, and institutions fail to protect lawful speech, then “staying above the fray” functions as permission.

He cites Kathleen Stock’s resignation as a case study: the target is not forced agreement, but enforced silence. For Biggar, that is the point where “winsomeness” becomes a moral cover story for cowardice.

His closing quote from Martin Luther King Jr makes the argument stark: history’s tragedy is often the silence of decent people. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the retrieval question

Biggar largely aligns with Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s diagnosis that the West faces converging pressures, radical progressivism, radical Islam, and geopolitical rivals and that Christianity supplies moral architecture that liberal societies still rely on.

He doesn’t insist everyone must arrive at Christianity the same way. Some come with the head; some with the heart; some with civilisational concern that later becomes personal faith. His wager is that the West cannot live indefinitely off the moral capital it no longer believes in.

And so his call is not triumphalism. It is a kind of sober retrieval: recover what made a humane culture possible and have the courage to say so out loud.

Nigel Biggar is an emeritus Professor of Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, an Anglican priest, and a member of the House of Lords. He is the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning and writes widely on ethics, free speech, and public life.

Listen to the whole show, or watch here.