We're delight to begin our new term of Keene Lectures with Alec Ryrie, Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. He'll be discussing the topic, Jesus, Hitler and how to win a culture war. Since 1945 Hitler and the Nazis have been the Western world’s one fixed moral reference point: the way we know what evil is. But that consensus has always been more fragile than it felt, and now it is unravelling. This lecture will trace how we came to build our values around the memory of the Second World War, why that consensus isn’t enough to deal with our current predicaments – and why the resolution to all this might be more hopeful than you think.
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, former professor of divinity at Gresham College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books range from Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013) and Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World (2017), through Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019) to his recent The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (2025), some of whose themes will be explored in this lecture.