Holy Smoke: why religious societies succeed – with Rory Sutherland
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Advertising guru – and the Spectator's Wiki Man columnist – Rory Sutherland joins Damian Thompson for this episode of Holy Smoke. In a wide ranging discussion, from Sigmund Freud and Max Weber to Quakers and Mormons, they discuss how some religious communities seem to be predisposed to success by virtue of their beliefs. How do spiritual choices affect consumer choices? Between Android and Apple, which is more Protestant and which is more Catholic? And what can modern Churches learn from Capitalism?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Give something clever this Christmas. |
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| 0:17.7 | Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash Christmas. |
| 0:26.2 | Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson. My guest today is Britain's |
| 0:35.0 | most charismatic advertising guru, whose pithy observations of patterns of human |
| 0:41.7 | behaviour have earned him a cult following across the industry on TikTok and among spectator readers. |
| 0:49.6 | It is, of course, Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of the Og Ogilvy and Mailer group and author of The Spectators |
| 0:57.6 | Must Read Wikiman column. Rory, whose wife is an Anglican priest, has the same capacity |
| 1:06.1 | to enlighten and surprise us when he talks about religion as he does when he's eviscerating an ad campaign |
| 1:14.2 | or revealing our secret shopping habits. Rory, welcome. |
| 1:21.6 | It's a pleasure to be here and a wonderful joy to meet. Thank you. |
| 1:25.8 | I was scrolling through TikTok, I must be honest, very taken by you managing to convey the message in one and a half minutes that religious societies can enjoy a competitive advantage over non-religious societies. |
| 1:41.7 | I wonder if you could unpack that, as they say, for us. |
| 1:46.1 | I mean, I don't think it's right to justify religion purely on the basis of what you might |
| 1:55.3 | call empirical results. However, I remember talking to the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, |
| 2:04.7 | who in many ways was the kind of precursor of many of Richard Dawkins' ideas. |
| 2:08.5 | And I simply asked him the question, if you're a genuine scientist, you'd believe in experimentation. |
| 2:21.1 | In other words, it doesn't matter how elegant your theory is. If the results don't match the theory, then you have to reject the theory. And I simply asked |
| 2:27.8 | him the question, if you had two islands with equal resources and you populated one island with 50 evolutionary biologists, |
| 2:38.2 | for that matter, and the other island was populated with 50 Mormons, which society do you think |
... |
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