Article

Culture

Digital

Economics

Psychology

18 August 2025

6 min read

Do you believe in a coin called hope?

From fiat to faith: the rise of crypto evangelism

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence is a journalist at the Financial Times.

An image show a braclet that has a bitcoin symbol beside a cross, a crescent and a Star of David.

“The bridge from chaos to hope.” This was the rather grandiose language used on social media platform X last summer by one prolific tweeter boasting 4.4 million followers. What they were describing, however, was not a religion or philosophy, nor a social movement or political party, nor a breakthrough in medical technology or a self-help technique. Rather, financier Michael Saylor was talking about the world's biggest cryptocurrency, bitcoin.

Saylor’s profile on X declares that “#Bitcoin is hope.com”. That website contains, among other things, video clips of Saylor talking about how “bitcoin is the manifest destiny for the United States of America”, “bitcoin is economic immortality”, “bitcoin is forever money” and so forth.

Saylor is in fact just one - albeit a particularly successful one (his net wealth stands at around $10 billion, according to Forbes) - of a number of vocal crypto advocates, trying to explain the huge, transformational impact on society that the cryptocurrency will supposedly have. Their precise arguments can vary, but are often along the following lines: the fiat money system is broken due to manipulation by governments and central banks - for instance through money printing - leaving control of the money supply in the hands of a small group of the rich, while the purchasing power of the general public is eroded; in contrast, bitcoin is incorruptible, not controlled by the government, available to everyone and finite in supply.

A common thread running through some of the writings and talks of a number of these bitcoin enthusiasts is a quasi-religious language, used to convey bitcoin’s importance.

Hope.com, for instance, includes a research paper on “The bitcoin reformation”. Its author writes: “It wasn’t until I studied the era around the Protestant Reformation that I felt I’d found a potential blueprint of sufficient scope” to describe what is happening with bitcoin.

Particularly vocal crypto proponents are known as bitcoin evangelists, while some crypto investors will talk of fellow “bitcoin believers”. They can even drink their coffee from a ‘bitcoin salvation’ mug) (which depicts two winged cherubs holding the cryptocurrency). Non-believing sceptics are termed “no-coiners”.

Early bitcoin adopter Roger Ver - who has been indicted on fraud and tax charges, which he says are false - is known by the nickname “bitcoin Jesus”. One non-profit decentralised community is named Bitcoin God.

The precise mix of irony and sincerity being used in such examples is of course debatable and will vary. Nevertheless, among the most fervent crypto investors there appears to be an earnest belief in the transforming power of bitcoin.

But there may be additional reasons why some of the most fervent proponents instinctively reach for such language.

“There’s a link with forms of transhumanism - the idea that we’re in the middle of an upgrade of humanity.”

Dr Roger Bretherton, a clinical psychologist and Seen & Unseen contributor, argues there are elements of tribalism and “the psychology of identity” in some of the most cultic aspects of the crypto world. He sees some similarities there with “old 60s cults of people believing UFOs were going to land in their backyard”, talking about crypto as a cult rather than crypto as a currency.

“People overlap their identity [with a particular movement]. They're saying ‘that's me, that's who I am,’” he said.

“In periods of uncertainty we seek to find certainty in our groups. We're in an individualistic society.”

Use of religious language also points to a belief that bitcoin/crypto/blockchain will bring about some form of a radical global change less on the scale of an incremental technological development, and more akin to a transformational religious experience.

“There's an element of faith and an eschatology attached to crypto: 'this is the new thing that will change the world,'” said Bretherton.

“There’s a link with forms of transhumanism - the idea that we’re in the middle of an upgrade of humanity - the kingdom of tech is coming. It feels like crypto becomes part of the same narrative. The key question is whether our future lies in technology and power, or in love.”

For such fervent bitcoin proponents, attempts to rubbish their beliefs are often futile. Indeed, trying to do so may only serve to strengthen the believer’s resolve that they are right.

“There's a cognitive dissonance,” said Bretherton. “The more ridicule you've had to go through, the more you've given up, the more social difficulty you've gone through - particularly if you've given up a career to pursue crypto - then the stronger your belief. It's the sunk cost fallacy.”

So far, bitcoin believers have proved the doubters wrong. The price of the coin has gone from less than $20,000 in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in late 2022 to around $118,000 at the time of writing. Saylor has turned MicroStrategy (now known as Strategy) - the company of which he was CEO in 2020 when he decided to use it to buy and hoard bitcoin - into a $110bn market cap firm that has spawned many copycats.

But what importance bitcoin eventually assumes in society is still very much an open question. It has not yet become a form of payment for our morning coffee or for buying a house, and maybe it never will. Whether it can really function as “digital gold”, a hedge against inflation or “a bank in cyberspace” (as Saylor calls it) is debatable. But it has already made huge strides, soaring to a market price well above what most people would ever have imagined. In July, US Congress passed a landmark bill regulating stablecoins - a type of cryptocurrency pegged typically to the dollar - in what is being seen as a huge step forward for the industry.

Nevertheless, it seems likely that some of the wilder claims made about bitcoin may not come to pass. What happens if true believers are left disappointed?

Bretherton says such belief systems have to subtly change their “metanarrative” as and when they do not deliver on initial promises.

“It can't make predictions that can be shown to be false,” he said. “If crypto doesn't deliver its promises in the future, it has to find another way that's softer but which lasts. So it either collapses or it finds a way to become more nuanced."

Whatever importance bitcoin eventually assumes in society, our desire to put our faith in it - or in anything else - reveals something deeper about our human nature.

In the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes explores humankind’s attempts to find meaning in human lives without God. The main character tries career, pleasure and wealth. But ultimately, they find that these things are just “meaningless”, “vapour” or “chasing after the wind”.

That search for meaning, for the eternal, is inbuilt in our character. As the book’s author puts it: God has “set eternity in the human heart”.

We are not designed merely to be born, to live and then to die. Instead, each one of us has been created with an inherent desire to know if there is something eternal out there, and to find out whether we can be part of that story. Crypto cannot offer us that salvation. The only thing or person who can, the author of Ecclesiastes would argue, is the One who put that desire in us in the first place.

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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