Review

America

Culture

Feminism

Film & TV

6 March 2025

6 min read

White Lotus understands a lot - but not Christianity

Here’s what the girl squad storyline gets right and wrong.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Three woman dining in a luxury hotel in Thailand, turn and look to the camera.

Kate, Jacylin, Laurie.

HBO.

I really rate The White Lotus.

This multi-award-winning show is one of the smartest around. It’s almost like a modern myth. The specificity of the premise alone is incredibly satisfying: White Lotus is the name of an international chain of high-end resorts, a luxurious touchstone for the rich, the famous, and the dodgy. Season one took viewers to Hawaii, season two jetted us off to Italy, and this year we find ourselves welcomed to Thailand.

Each new series has a new location, a new cast and a new set of intelligent storylines. the only thing that ties the three series together is the omnipresence of the White Lotus hotel. Oh, and the presence of murder. Each series opens by telling its viewers that one person that we’re about to meet will die – it just takes us eight episodes to find out who.

I’m convinced that Mike White, the writer and director, must be one of the most perceptive people on the planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before he entails on writing another series, he just sits and watches the world. He endeavours to notice, endeavours to understand. I say this because he seems to discern the way people work: the way they love, the way they hate, the way they rest, the way they hide. And then he turns it up to eleven when crafting his characters.

Honestly, if Mike White hadn’t mastered the art of noticing, White Lotus wouldn’t work. But he pays attention to people; deep, intense and curious attention. That’s the magic sauce, I’m sure of it.

In the latest episode (episode three of season three, as it stands), there’s a scene that caught me by surprise. Its perceptiveness stopped me in my tracks.

Is Mike White over simplifying this, or is he saying what he’s seeing? That people have reduced the greatest, deepest, largest and truest story ever told to an association with red or blue?

We’ve been introduced to three friends: we have Kate (Leslie Bibb), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Laurie (Carrie Coon). They’ve been friends since school, but now in their forties, life has taken them in different directions. Kate lives in Texas with her picture-perfect family. Jaclyn is a newly married and semi-famous TV star, living and working in LA. And Laurie is a divorcee, working hard and raising her daughter in New York City. They’ve come to Thailand (at the invitation and expense of Jaclyn) to re-connect and make some new memories.

But it’s not that easy.

Each woman is caught in a tussle of loving and loathing who the other two have become, they celebrate each other’s ‘successes’ and instinctively compete with them in equal measure. It’s masterfully done. As deeply as they want to be good friends to each other, perhaps for old time’s sake, this trio is not a safe one to be in.

One evening, after Laurie has had an ‘energy healing’ session, Jaclyn mentions that she can get on board with spiritual practices a whole lot easier than she can get on board with ‘religion’ – Christianity, she states, is made for men. She can’t seem to find herself, or any other empowered women, within the biblical story. And so, she finds herself gravitating to ‘witchy’ alternatives.

I’m a woman, a pretty ‘feminist’ one at that. I’m also, first and foremost, a Christian. And so, I think I have the right to say that this is incredibly perceptive of Mike White. I have this conversation time and time again: people wondering why a woman, one who believes in the social, economic, political and spiritual equality of the sexes, would ever hitch their wagon to the Christian tradition. Honestly, sometimes I feel like a unicorn.

Yet, when the ‘Christian’ church was first bubbling up (we’re talking first century) it had the reputation of being a religion for women and slaves. Everywhere it travelled - city by city, village by village - women (of every socio-economic background) flocked to the Christian community in dramatic numbers. It changed the cultural landscape. Jesus, the Galilean saviour that these communities couldn’t stop talking about, kept company with women in a history-making way and they were determined to do likewise. Now, what I can’t deny is all of the patriarchy that has been thrown into the mix since. To pretend it’s not there would be silly of me.

So, I hear you, Jaclyn. But I’ve gone straight to the source (Jesus) and I’ve hit upon a disconnect between the story I believe/the saviour I believe in, and the way it/he has been used against my gender – so I’ve stubbornly chosen to ignore the latter. I’ve never let it drive me away. I find my whole self (my gender included) forcefully loved by the God I know, endlessly drawn into his company, convinced by his assertion that he made me – fearfully and wonderfully.

Oh Jaclyn, they can try to tell me that Christianity isn’t for me, but I ain’t budging.

The dinner conversation moves on, Kate hits back – she tells her buddies that she, in fact, goes to her Texan church every Sunday and finds it ‘very moving’. Jaclyn and Laurie, both wide-eyed, sympathetically state that it must be hard to be around people who voted for Trump. And then it becomes obvious, to those in the scene and those of us watching it, that Kate herself voted for Trump.

It’s an emotionally intelligent watch: two women feeling viscerally betrayed by their friend for voting in such a ‘self-defeating’ way. And the friend on the other side, betrayed that they would think of her so differently as a result of her well-intentioned political leaning.

I live in the UK, and so I was taken aback that these women were able to draw such a confident line between A and B – between Christianity and one particular political party. Because of the perceptive nature of Mike White (as evidenced by the lines that came before these ones), I trust that this is somewhat accurate. It may not be the truth (I’m sure not every Texan Christian voted one way), but it’s certainly a perceived truth.

It intrigued but mostly troubled me. It made me wonder what the meaning of ‘Christian’ is becoming, or perhaps has already become – people holding the cross in one hand and a political party in another, claiming that to love one is to love the other. Are we really known as people who are wanting a messiah in the White House, a Saviour in the Senate? Is Mike White over simplifying this, or is he saying what he’s seeing? That people have reduced the greatest, deepest, largest and truest story ever told to an association with red or blue?

To Jaclyn, Laurie, Kate, and all those you represent – I’m sorry if we haven’t done the best job at representing ourselves, or Jesus, to you.

To Mike White – watch us a little longer, watch a little deeper. We Christians are neither a patriarchal nor political tribe; don’t squeeze us into the boxes that we’re pretending we fit in. That’s our bad. There’s more to us than that. You have my word.

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Column

Church and state

Creed

Feminism

Leading

9 October 2025

4 min read

Why Sarah Mullally’s appointment is about more than just breaking the stained-glass ceiling

Not just history-making, it’s a challenge to the Church to rediscover its soul

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Sarah Mullally.

Church of England.

Every new Archbishop of Canterbury has a honeymoon period, before this impossible job ends in tears. The priority should not really be who does it, as what it is they’re doing. As it is, they’ll have to spin too many plates, until one or more fall off their poles and it all ends in tears again.

Sorry to be such a Jeremiah, such a prophet of doom. This column isn’t going to be a gloomy one, promise. Rather, I’d just like to say that Sarah Mullally, in her translation from the bishopric of London to the archbishopric of Canterbury, represents something more than a triumph in a gender war.

Very little coverage of her appointment so far has got beyond the historicity of it. Wow, it’s a woman for the first time in the Church of England’s half-millennium. Yes, that’s the news hook, and yes it’s astonishing, both in good and less good ways. But we should scrutinise for a moment what a female distinctly brings to the Anglican party.

Without this becoming a rehearsal of the past 30 years of women’s ordained ministry in the Church of England, it may be sufficient to say that it must be a whole lot more than having a primate for the first time without a Y chromosome. So what is it when we ask a woman, specifically, to perform this role?

We have to look to history to scrutinise the question. First of all, if we accept scripture as history – either as metaphor or literal record – then women’s apostleship has been there from the very beginning. The first witness to the risen Christ on the first Easter morning, Mary of Magdala, was instructed to go and tell her brothers and sisters what she had seen. You don’t get a bigger apostolic mission than that, the apostle to the apostles.

Women facilitated and bankrolled the nascent Jesus movement in Asia Minor. Wealthy people such as Lydia, a purple-dye merchant. Others get name-checked for financial and material support such as Joanna and Susanna. There was no word “deaconess” in the early Church, only deacons, and Phoebe was one in Rome, to whom St Paul wrote. These were the very foundations, the cornerstones on which women’s priesthood was built. I couldn’t be a priest in a Church that didn’t ordain women.

But, again, that only gets us so far. It doesn’t tell us what is distinct about women’s witness, let alone women’s episcopacy. For that, one might need to look to the tradition of medieval mysticism, women such as the anchoress Julian of Norwich, or Margery Kempe whom she mentored. When the latter wasn’t annoying everyone by wailing in ecstasy (the “gift of tears”), they and others opened a via feminina as a route to encountering the godhead.

The self-sacrificial nature of Christ was consequently co-extended, along with the foundational figure of Mary and the divinity of her motherhood, with nurturing and the bringing forth of new life. The Church Fathers couldn’t hold on forever to gender specificity (though it took long enough) and the women brought us a more holistic experience of the divine.

It may be that a first woman Archbishop of Canterbury has to step up to this plate. No pressure then. What I think I mean is that there is a distinctive and authentic thread of women’s witness throughout history. So this isn’t just about a historic moment for women, it’s about womanhood. When Teresa of Avila founded a tradition of reformed Carmelite monasteries in the 16th century, she wasn’t just an indefatigable woman, she was standing up to and against the patriarchy of Rome.

It’s anachronistic to call these Mothers of the Church feminists, but they point to the feminity of God and that is something ontological for Mullally to consider, not just a chromosomal novelty. It makes her job very different from the political sphere. From Margaret Thatcher to Kemi Badenoch, Angela Rayner and Shabana Mahmood, top political women have not exactly had to pretend they’re men, but have had to emulate them. Wisecrackers used to say of Thatcher’s all-male cabinet that she was the best man amongst them.

That is not Mullally’s task. Women’s sacramental ministry is distinct from men’s and inauthentic if not lived as such. She needs to find a voice that is congruent with some of those mentioned above and it’s a prophetic voice, not simply priestly.

To do so, she’ll need to break with the bureaucracy and managerialism of the Church, which led to our churches being locked up during the covid pandemic and the parlous state of its safeguarding, which cost her predecessor his job. Mullally led on both those issues.

So this is a big moment for our Church, not just because she’s a woman, but for women’s prophecy. Can she do it? We hope so.

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