God goes public: the inauguration and the return of faith-talk

This Inauguration Day, Jack Chisnall explains why the 'Church and State' separation just can't hold.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

The 47th President of the United States of America

Inauguration Day. Donald Trump again makes an oath to defend and uphold, as best he can, the Constitution of the United States. It has always been a fairly swift-moving bit of public pomp - swift compared to coronations at any rate, which typically take hours just to put a crown on a royal head. The Presidential inauguration can take as little as six minutes, and viewers get more bang for their buck: the President is confirmed not only as the head of the ruling government, but the representational head of state too.

It’s all a good lesson in the ‘separation of Church and State’ some will opine. Forget the medieval-sounding solemnities and pageantry, and Archbishops intoning things over altars. Here, a man in a suit enters a civic covenant with the people who have democratically elected him. Before President Jackson’s escort was swamped by 20,000 spectators in 1829 and security protocol had to cordon off spectators, the first inaugurations had a humble, almost mundane aspect: the new president would go about to shake hands with citizens who had popped along to see the ceremony, and to wish the new guy “good luck”. Sources show that Abraham Lincoln shook over 5,000 hands when he was inaugurated for a second time in 1865.

But such well-worn narratives - of humankind progressing from strange, religious druidry to sane, reasonable democracy - are looking creakier than ever, in 2025. Such views were all the rage in the 20th century. But the West is having a fundamental rethink about what exactly it would mean for humans to ‘de-anchor’ themselves from a religious way of being. We have learnt by now - the hard way - that we merely swap one form of worship for another in supposedly ‘irreligious’ societies.

In the first place, the ‘separation of church and state’ history is not as simple as all that. While it’s true that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution did not establish a church on the national level, as in England, there were plenty established at the state level just fine. Connecticut was Congregationalist until as late as 1818 - residents paid taxes to, and were educated by, the church. There was nothing in the law to prevent it.

But it is the inauguration itself which reveals that religious instincts cannot be extracted so easily from human affairs. For George Washington, the first President to be inaugurated back in New York City in 1779, the rather last-minute idea was that he should swear on a Bible. None being found to hand, they borrowed one - from a nearby Masonic Lodge. It was fitting. The Founding Fathers certainly tweaked and trimmed the traditional religions they were raised in - but they could not dispense with them. Even the word, ‘inaugurate’, is snagged on a religious root. ‘Augury’ was the practice of discerning the will of the Gods in Ancient Roman political cult.

Christian imagery and sentiment has, over time, returned to irrigate the dry, rationalistic plains of U.S. civic ceremonial. Certainly the likes of Washington and Jefferson saw their country under the auspices of a Supreme Being, just not necessarily aligned with one of the world’s faiths. But for the George Bush inauguration of 1989, the evangelical tone was explicit. Billy Graham began things with an invocation, and the new President ordered a national day of prayer to follow, in thanksgiving for a successful transfer of power. There will be quite an obvious development of this during Trump’s 2025 inauguration, when Franklin Graham, the son of the famed evangelist, will lead the invocation prayer alongside Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

There is, perhaps, no getting around the human need to call on something larger than ourselves in our most meaningful moments - when we pledge to love someone for the rest of our lives, or swear our commitment to rule justly. The inauguration has been a good indicator of this, in the way that it has increasingly reached for an older, outright Christian language in which to express the profoundest longings and ambitions of a nation. God, it turns out, never quite leaves the frame.

Review

Comedy

Culture

Film & TV

1 May 2025

4 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.

Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins.

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently.

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer).

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone.

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun.

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment.

Comics are funny.

Often the unexpected makes us laugh.

Not laughing can be very hard.

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh?

But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is.

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.”

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control.

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction.

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts.

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things.

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us.

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think.

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.”

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery.

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.