Paul Kingsnorth

"The Machine is not a thing. It is a process, a system, a state of mind. It is everywhere, and it is nowhere, and it is in us." — Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2026)

Why he matters

Kingsnorth is the contemporary anti-idolatry voice the Christian conversation about technology needs in the same way that Ellul was that voice in the 1950s and 60s. He is not a systematic theologian and he is not a moral philosopher. He is a writer — a novelist, an essayist, a former environmental activist — who has watched the same set of forces from inside the secular ecological movement, from inside post-Christian neo-paganism, and now from inside Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and who has come to think that those forces are not best described as “modernity” or “capitalism” or “industrialism” but as something more singular, which he calls the Machine.

He matters because, of all the figures in the canon, he is the one whose work most directly addresses the experience of living inside a digital, algorithmic, ecologically degraded technological civilization, in a register the average reader can actually hear.

Who he was, and is

Kingsnorth was born in England in 1972, was educated at Oxford, worked as a journalist and environmental campaigner (including with the Independent and at the World Development Movement), and helped found the Dark Mountain Project in 2009 — a literary movement organized around the conviction that the dominant narratives of progress and ecological reform were both failing. His novel The Wake (2014) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. After years of involvement with Wicca and neo-paganism, he was received into the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2021. Since then he has written increasingly from a Christian framework, most prominently in his Abbey of Misrule essays on Substack, in the essay collection that became the book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2026), and in shorter pieces for First Things, UnHerd, and Plough.

The position

Kingsnorth’s argument has three moves.

First, the Machine is one thing. Industrial agriculture, surveillance capitalism, fossil fuel infrastructure, mass media, the digital attention economy, the consolidation of nation-states into a quasi-imperial global order, and the slow conversion of every form of human life into measurable, manageable units — these are not separate phenomena. They are aspects of a single civilizational tendency that has been gathering force for at least three centuries and that has now reached a phase in which its inner logic is becoming visible. The Machine is not a conspiracy and not a personification; it is the recognizable shape of a long process whose end point is the conversion of every living particular into engineered uniformity.

Second, the Machine is a spiritual phenomenon, not only a material one. This is the move that distinguishes the Christian Kingsnorth from the secular environmental Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain years. The Machine, in his current reading, is the externalization of a posture of the human soul — the refusal of limit, of givenness, of receptivity, of mystery, of God. Its deepest pathology is not pollution and not inequality, both of which it does cause; the deepest pathology is the formation of a kind of human being who can no longer recognize anything as sacred. The Machine builds people in its image. That is why opposing it politically alone cannot work.

Third, the only adequate response is religious. Not in the thin sense of asking churches to take environmental policy positions, but in the demanding sense of recovering the practices, postures, and disciplines that form people capable of perceiving what the Machine cannot perceive. For Kingsnorth this has meant Orthodox liturgy, fasting, monastic friendships, the rhythms of attention to a particular small place, and the writing of essays in a register that allows the reader to slow down. The argument is not that Christians should retreat from technological modernity. The argument is that without the formation that an embodied religious life provides, modernity simply forms people in its own way, and the result is the unmaking of the human.

Where he sits on the maps

On preserve-limits versus accelerate-transformation, Kingsnorth is at the far limits end of the canon. He is more skeptical of the entire framing of “useful technology” than even Illich is, in part because he thinks the contemporary technological order has crossed enough thresholds that the question of “good uses” is now subordinate to the question of soul-formation in a post-Machine landscape.

On idolatry concern, he is at the top. The Machine, in his reading, is most accurately described as a form of false religion that has captured the post-Christian West.

He is among the lowest in the canon on the question of technology as central to Christian hope, partly because he does not share Dessauer’s or Quinzio’s conviction that the contestation of suffering and death through technical means is itself a Christian project. For Kingsnorth, the answer to suffering and death is the cross, the resurrection, and the sacramental life of the Church; technical extension of the conditions of biological life is at best peripheral and at worst a distraction.

The best case against him

The dominant critique of Kingsnorth from inside the Christian tradition is that his account underweights the genuine goods that modern technology has delivered to the world’s poor — vaccines, sanitation, basic medicine, calorie security, infant survival — and that the figure of the Machine, however evocative, can flatten distinctions that pastoral and political life cannot afford to flatten. The same critique applies to Ellul, and the same defense partially answers it: Kingsnorth would say that the goods are real, that they exist inside a system whose total trajectory is destructive, and that pretending the goods can be separated from the trajectory is exactly the optical illusion the Machine produces.

A second critique, more specific to him, is that his constructive program is mostly contemplative and personal, and that the institutional question of how a society of billions actually lives, governs, eats, and heals inside or after the Machine is not really addressed. He is honest about this; the Abbey of Misrule essays do not pretend to be a policy program. But the gap is real.

A third critique is that he is a literary voice making claims that, taken with full literal weight, require systematic theological and sociological support he does not always supply. Read as essays and witness, his work is among the strongest contemporary statements of the Expose False Salvation position. Read as treatise, it asks the reader to do some of the work.

Primary texts

• Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2026).
• The Abbey of Misrule (Substack essay series, 2021–present).
• Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Graywolf Press, 2017).
• The Wake (Unbound, 2014) — the novel, relevant for its imagination of pre-modern English life and the loss of vernacular world.
• Essays in First Things, UnHerd, Plough, and Emergence Magazine.

Secondary sources

• Reviews and engagements with Against the Machine in First Things, Plough, Comment, and The New Atlantis (2026).
• Earlier critical reception of the Dark Mountain Project and of Kingsnorth’s pre-Christian environmental writings.

Related thinkers

• Ellul — the most direct intellectual ancestor; the Machine is recognizably la technique in a post-internet ecological register.
• Illich — Catholic kindred spirit; radical monopoly at civilizational scale is part of what the Machine names.
• Guardini — Catholic predecessor; the loss of measure and the deformation of human-scale culture are Kingsnorth’s themes also.
• Lewis — the abolition of man as the Machine’s destination, in compact early form.
• Francis — institutional Catholic voice whose technocratic-paradigm critique substantially overlaps with Kingsnorth’s diagnosis, though with different pastoral and political instincts.