From the hedge-fund billions that bankroll Nigel Farage, and tie that funding to evangelical expansionism, to Nietzsche’s fulminating assault on Christianity as a “slave revolt”: this essay tracks the troubling way religion has reappeared at the heart of British public life. Arriving in London with walking boots, a rucksack, and a philosopher’s skepticism, the author follows the money, theology, and street culture surrounding charismatic Christianity and its seemingly unappeasable growth. At the centre stands Sir Paul Marshall: billionaire financier, Christian media mogul, and embodiment of a faith that feels entitled to reach for elite power.

But this is more than merely an unveiling of the knot that binds together wealth and religion. It is also a confrontation with Nietzsche’s deepest historical claim: that Christianity triumphed because the so-called weak learned to moralize against the strong. Wandering through churches, cafés, and city streets, the essay asks whether contemporary evangelical London represents a new form of that revolt—or its complete inversion.

Part I explores the rise of influential evangelical networks in modern Britain and their uneasy alliance with finance capitalism. Part II, which will appear shortly, returns to the first Christians themselves.

This article is a follow-up to Henry Holland’s account of hiking through Glasgow’s Muslim Southside (part I, part II).

Forests are trending. And this is by no means contradictory to another, even larger trend of our time: digitalization. In this article, Mandus Craiss demonstrates that the forest is a network. Digitalization also occurs in a network-like manner; both phenomena are therefore characteristic of postmodernism.  

In the first part of the article, the forest is characterized as a non-centralized and thus typically postmodern natural phenomenon. The second part defines "postmodernity" and discusses the extent to which this epochal concept is still, or once again, relevant – a discourse whose very early roots can be traced back to Nietzsche. Finally, the third part explains how the network aspect of postmodernity manifests itself and how the human-forest relationship has evolved recently.

This article is part of our special series this year "the forest as a lifelihood".

Throughout his life, Nietzsche was a great critic of nationalism. The burgeoning German national sentiment, in particular, was anathema to him, and he wrote scathing remarks about his home country, such as "definition of the Germanic: obedience and long legs..."¹. At the same time, nationalists and patriots of all stripes count among his fans. How can one be a Nietzschean and a (German) nationalist? What exactly is "nationalism," and is it possible to give this term a positive meaning?

Paul Stephan discussed these delicate topics, which are gaining increasing relevance given the successes of nationalist parties worldwide, in written form with YouTuber, Nietzsche expert, and nationalism researcher Michael Drescher, also known as PhrasenDrescher.

Additionally, they continued this dialogue verbally on YouTube – feel free to check out the result here (or as an audio-only version on SoundCloud).

The following text explores the hypothesis that every philosophy of the zeitgeist finds its onset at something that bothers it: in the beginning, there was disgruntlement. This something is interpreted here as an illiberally disgruntled enlightenment, which is embodied in the current “polarization.” With Francis Fukuyama's help, this trail is explored and the drama of the recognition of modern Enlightenment is described.

The philosopher Fukuyama, born in Chicago in 1952, is primarily known for his essay The End of History? from 1989¹. There, he held that the “end of history” assumed by Hegel had finally arrived with the looming collapse of the Soviet Union. He saw the triumphant liberal Western democracies as the final stage of the process of historical progress. In 1992, Fukuyama published his main work based on this essay: The End of History and the Last Man, in which he combines Hegel's thesis with Nietzsche's diagnosis of the “last man.” Our author is also referring to this book. It caused controversial debates worldwide and continues to provoke today. — Do we really live after the “end of history”? Our author agrees with Fukuyama: While with the form of liberal democracy a final embodiment of the course of history has been achieved, history has been continuing as a conflict within this embodiment. World history has become history of liberalism.

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In the second part of his article on hiking through Glasgow’s Muslim-esque Southside, our staff writer Henry Holland delves into Nietzsche’s impassioned yet scattergun engagement with the youngest Abrahamic religion. He investigates how the experimental novel The Baphomet by French artist and theoretician Pierre Klossowski – which got him hooked on the Islam-Nietzsche intersection in the first place – blends Islam-inspired mysticism, sexual transgression and Nietzscheanism itself into an inimitable potion. With insights on Muslim-esque readings of Nietzsche in tow, Holland returns with Fatima and Ishmael to Scotland’s largest city, thus wrapping up his travelogue whence it began.

Link to Part One.

It is well known that Nietzsche's history of influence has been read and absorbed across all political camps. But what about our present tense? Paul Stephan examines the writings of two authors who are about the same age as himself, in their mid/late 30s, and whose perspectives on Nietzsche could hardly be more different: While French journalist and YouTuber Julien Rochedy declares Nietzsche a pioneer of a right-wing cultural struggle, the German philosopher and political scientist Karsten Schubert attacks him for a left-wing identity politics. Both positions do not really convince our authors; rather, they are entirely within the framework of the prevailing simulation of politics as a cultural struggle, which would need to be countered by focusing on the really pressing life problems of contemporary humanity.