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Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on today's episode,

we'll be discussing, first of all, whether Christians should start to behave like a minority.

We'll also be looking at how Britain should respond to Trump's foreign policy.

And finally, we'll be asking whether flaky characters are a modern phenomenon we just have to get used to. On to our first topic, Keeping the Faith. In this week's issue of the

spectator, Rod Dreher says that the collapse of religion in Britain has been perhaps the most

striking feature of the last generation. And to be a practicing Christian in the West now

is to belong to a minority. So what can be done? I'm now joined by Rod and Matthew Paris to discuss.

So Rod, in your piece, you suggest that Christians need to embrace their minority status. How has this

come to pass that Christianity is now a minority religion? Well, I think that the process of secularization

has been going on quite a long

time for the last 200 years or so, but it has sped up to the point where Christianity is clearly

a minority in Britain and in Europe. And not so in the U.S., but sociologists confirmed that the

United States is on the same downward slide, religion in America is on the same

downward slide as the UK and Europe has seen. So it's to the point now where Pope Benedict

the 16th said that the church in the West is having a spiritual crisis worse than any since

the fall of the Roman Empire. And you mentioned St. Benedict in your piece. And what lessons

do you think that Benedict can offer to a modern life? Well, I brought him up in the piece because the philosopher

Alistair McIntyre had said that we await a new and doubtless quite different, St. Benedict

to show people interested in the traditional life, how to live, how to hold on to that in a time

of great chaos. Benedict himself was

born at the end of the 5th century, went down to Rome to finish his education, was shocked by

...