Turning the ARC Around

Initial Reflections on the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship after ARC2025

EuroTrip Winter 2025

I’m in the Netherlands now visiting with Estuary leaders and holding Estuary meetings. Tomorrow I had to Germany to do the same. After that back to London to do it all over again. I love doing Estuary work. Encouraging the leaders, meeting the participants. It’s all wonderful.

Living Stones gives me 4 weeks a year to travel to support the Estuary movement and so when I get to Europe I try to do as much as possible. I spent last week getting to Ireland to do an event with

Paul Kingsnorth

and

Martin Shaw

. I was thrilled to spend time with them and to continue to develop our relationships. I spent a few days living with the Dominican Friars at Galway which was truly a privilege. Lots of new things for this American-Dutch Calvinist.

ARC’s Maiden Voyage

After Galway I headed to London for the ARC2025 conference. I attended the inaugural ARC conference in 2023 and I considered it a success as an inaugural effort. Like many I was drawn in simply by faith and interest in Jordan Peterson that he was going to try to mount a larger effort to positively impact “Western Civilization”. With an effort this large there are a lot of things to say. It is natural to try to summarize large things like this into a simple positive or negative but I think it is more helpful to see the strengths, weaknesses and trade-offs.

After Day One of ARC2023 I made this assessment of their overall effort. Nothing this year changed some of my impressions of an attempt to return to the age of lions.

As the conference developed the value of Jordan Peterson’s attractional pull became evident. THIS was the place where you could see, and possibly have a brief conversation with many of the players downstream from the old IDW. While there was obviously a green room separated most of the higher status individuals from the rest of the 1500 participants you could strengthen connections with individuals more or less at your status level. For me ARC2023 was all about building and strengthening relationships with Rafe Kelly, Nathan Jacobs, Glen Scrivener and others who prefer to stay a bit more beneath the social media radar (you know who you are).

I was happy I attended and nudged me to be predisposed to attend again.

I also found a number of the plenary sessions important and fruitful from ARC2023. My favorite was Jonathan Pageau’s talk but other were also impactful for me.

ARC seemed to NOT be content to put on a good show or an event that could attract the right people but wanted to go deeper and further into the culture. Even though his name is not as well known by many of the ARC crowd I consistently heard David Stroud’s messages as most clear articulating the vision behind the effort. ARC is supposed to renew the culture which will renew the civilization. Stroud again at one of the evening dinners this year comment on the importance of a dense network of senior leaders to move societies, cultures and civilizations. This to me is what I see is behind the ARC project despite the clamber of discordant agendas that seem emerge from the all the voices given the stage.

From ARC2023 to ARC2025, Size Matters

I sat on the fence a while as to whether or not I would come this year. I thought my time last year was valuable, but these trips are a big deal for me. I get four weeks, and strengthening the European Estuaries are a priority for me. Is the ARC time worth my while?

ARC2025 was once again in London, that’s not terribly convenient but London is fun. What would be different and what stayed the same?

The major difference this time around was their decision to increase the size.

Anyone who has done any event planning knows that size impacts a lot on many levels. The larger the event the tougher the logistics and the more those logistics are going to shape people’s experience of the event. You want to widen the tent to potentially have more impact, but how will this impact what people realistically take away from the event?

Because my priority was definitely to make new relationships and continue to strengthen existing ones the size change and venue change had a negative result. My after-day-one livestream this year was a bit of a rant.

As I mentioned above the signal-to-noise messaging at ARC2023 was often not clear. When you elevate the volume (increase the size) you subtleties of missional tensions beneath the effort become more obvious and discordant. As the old preacher saying goes, a mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew. The most repeated after-initial-introduction question I received from people this year was “What do you make of this?” not “Oh did you get a chance to talk to Eric Weinstein or Douglas Murray…”

The Mission Fog of ARC2025

When I opened up Substack to compose this thing I saw that

Rod Dreher

had just blogged a bit about the conference.

Should We Climb Aboard The ARC?

He quoted Paul Kingsnorth at length on ARC.

The Vagabond King

At our event in Galway Paul’s take on “Christian Civilization” was once again the topic of conversation. I think Paul is blessing us by stirring the pot on this question because I think it is an important one. I’ve discussed it repeatedly on my channel and the TLC has chewed on it regularly.

After the death of the Lion Cultures in the West the questions swirling ARC, Kingsnorth, Dread Christian Nationalism, the Machine and Transhumanism ARE the important questions of our day and they are by no means close to being settled.

Lions vs Foxes

In my “After Day 1 ARC2023” video I touched on an observation about Lions vs Foxes. I got that from Erik Torenberg’s Substack.

Group Narcissism

Since then I’ve remodeled some of my ideas on how our Western cultures went from Lions to Foxes.

One theme that came our regularly on stage at ARC2025 was that of confidence. We heard it from Baroness Stroud, Kemi Badenoch, and Ayann Hirsi Ali. The West needs to regain its confidence so that it can resist various tyrannies that wish to seize control whether from wokism or Islam. This means going BACK to when we were lions and immigrants assimilated to western “Judeo-Christian” values and we were strong and prosperous.

There was a lot of propagandizing on these themes but very little exploration or analysis as to why our lion cultures were lost. And it is not as if the same people involved in ARC are unaware of these conversations.

In the United States and Great Britain our Lion Cultures were WASP Cultures. In the UK the Church of England was the state church. In the US an implicit WASP consensus beneath Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist and other Protestant denominations were sufficient to act as culture glue even without a unified church institution. Culture and civilization flowed from a sufficiently secularized religious consensus.

It is the anxiety about that lack of consensus that tends to invoke the post-liberals to deeply question Liberalism and to try to explore what might evolve in its place. This is provoking thought leaders on the right and the left and includes many who were here at ARC2025 but never on stage.

I’ve long called bullshit on the attempts of the religious left in America to cry “Christian Nationalism” against their right wing rivals when they have long practiced Christian Imperialism with a pluralistic, multi-faith fig leaf which Donald Trump and JD Vance have now torn away.

Lion cultures FELL because first Catholics and Jews, and later African Americans needed to be welcome into the tent. The Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the counter-culture exploded the confidence of Lion Culture and gave birth to Fox culture where now everyone is a plucky rebel fighting against the evil empire either of Wokeness or the Patriarchy.

On one hand ARC STILL raises the cry to regain Lion Culture but so often can’t help but revert to fox culture narratives. Look at the titling of this thumbnail.

Again and again in speeches you’ll hear the victim card being played. Victim cards are for foxes. Lions don’t play victims.

Calls for confidence also sound hollow. Confidence emerges from competence and consensus, not self assertion.

The tensions beneath the loss of Lion Culture will have to be sufficiently resolved to achieve the sort of consensus required to sustain a new lion culture. If the ARC leadership wants to be a part of that development, which I think it does want to be, it will need to figure out what sorts of roles it can play in pursuit of that achievement.

The Internet Has Disrupted the Conference Format

The established conference format is somewhere downstream of the Protestant triumph in the West and ARC’s plenary sessions are decidedly Protestant in format. Sermons, called Speeches, are supposed to achieve something. As a Protestant minister it’s not that I don’t disbelieve in sermons, but I do know their limitations and liabilities. The ARC plenary sessions are homilies which often reprise the far longer, often better conversations and lectures readily available on YouTube by the same people on stage. Many Protestant churches realized this before the Internet disruption and added many other tactics to their program beyond the sermon to achieve what they are attempting to deliver. ARC needs to get far clearer on what it wants to achieve and how it will pursue it.

Many other groups are getting creative with the large gathering format and finding ways to build engagement not just at large events but by using large events to punctuate what they are doing in between.

Do you want to merely try to promote ideas via speeches and then push them out over YouTube or do you want to facilitate the creation of a network that will spawn other productive endeavors beyond what you can achieve. The creation of a civilization is the knitting together of many networks into a practical consensus of the good, the true and the beautiful and common practices of how they are pursued.

ARC I think has potential of playing an important role in the rejuvenation of Western Culture but its going to have to get far more creative, innovative and serious about how to pursue its agenda. Conferencing with speakers in loud cavernous spaces is simply not going to cut it.

While I think they need to go WAY beyond just conferencing here are a few tips from what we have learned in our Estuary movement about how to hold bigger-than-small-group events and how to maximize knitting together a community fabric.

Turning the Ship Around

I suspect unless the leadership of ARC makes some serious changes the next scheduled conference in June of 2026 will probably be their last. These sorts of movements are VERY difficult to sustain and many such efforts appear and disappear quickly.

What’s happened around Jordan Peterson for almost a decade now has been important. I saw that when I came across his work in 2017. I’ve been paying close attention to the people he has helped change, but many have moved on.

ARC is clearly downstream from Jordan. David and Philippa Stroud have been working on some church stuff but nothing has seemed to have caught to the degree that Jordan’s has.

I think Paul Marshall’s work through Unherd has been important. It hosts who in my opinion are some of the most important thought leaders of this generation. Leaders like Tom Holland and

Mary Harrington

. They more than any other major media outlet seem to have their finger on the pulse of what is important in the West.

ARC has the potential to bring together a lot of very interesting voices. I agree with

Rod Dreher

that they need to figure out a way to bring in others who might feel a bit off message for them. For this reason I was very pleased by how they included David Brooks in the lineup even though he ruffled some feathers. Feather ruffling is essential. It just requires that you surround the ruffling with many other ways of integrating the discordant themes to afford a synthesis and a robust network that builds a strong culture where the serious tensions within are used to the culture’s advantage.

In 2023 ARC built some momentum. I think they stumbled a bit in 2025 but the ship is not lost. I’d love for their leadership to get together to get far more clarity on their vision, their strategy, and what they will need to pursue it. I want them to succeed. They just need to figure how what success looks like.