In Defence of Nostalgia

Of the criticisms that come my way about my writings, perhaps the one that most strikes home is the charge of nostalgia. I’ve been more than occasionally accused of succumbing to a yearning for a bygone age, whether in my dislike of mass consumerism and our technological world or in my fondness for classical Anglicanism, with its parochial life and eccentric parsons. My recent musings on The Wind in the Willows can’t have helped my case, nor did my parting invocation of hiraeth in A Pilgrimage of Paradoxes: A Backpacker’s Reflections on God and Nature. What’s more nostalgic than a Welshman sighing for a homeland he may never see again?

Fair enough. Nostalgia does seem to be stitched into my sinews. My mind without effort smooths away the troubles of the past while amplifying its joys and pleasures. This makes me, I confess, a rather exasperating walking companion. I never quite recall the blisters, the steep climbs, or the sodden boots—only the fine view at the summit, or, if it was bloody awful, what a great adventure it all was. The same instinct makes me almost constitutionally incapable of remembering slights. I’ve no talent for grudges. Unreliable as a historian perhaps, but not the worst trait in a friend or husband.

Strangely, this personality quirk has never inclined me to believe in golden ages. I don’t imagine the past as a lost paradise waiting to be recovered. People then were no better or worse than we are now. My nostalgia is of a more wistful kind, closer to hiraeth than to any campaign slogan promising to make a country “great again.” It was this melancholic longing that first drew me to The Lord of the Rings, and later to the sorrowful cadences of Old English poetry—The Wanderer, The Ruin, the ending of Beowulf. My nostalgia is elegaic.

Here I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis, who warned against any romantic notion that the past was purer: “Not […] that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.” He wrote this about books, but the point applies to nostalgia too. Remembering the past rightly doesn’t mean pretending it was flawless, but recognising that its errors differ from ours. Their witness may guard us from arrogance, reminding us that our own age too will one day seem foolish. And if we can learn to meet our ancestors with mercy, perhaps our descendants will meet us with the same—for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.

Nostalgia has long been progressivism’s favourite straw man. To dismiss something as “just nostalgic” is to pass sentence without hearing the case. Architects do it when they wave away Neoclassical or Gothic revivals as unserious. Politicians do it when they cast anyone who remembers “the good old days” as fearful, backward, or selfish. And to be fair, there is a shallow kind of nostalgia abroad on the Right—a yearning for 1950s America, for Britain’s imperial splendour, or for some hazy cultural coherence that likely never existed outside of memory’s wishful retouching.

Yet what’s striking in recent years is how nostalgia has slipped its familiar moorings. I now hear it just as often in progressive voices: the lament over the collapse of the post-war international order, or the wistful longing for the optimism of the 1990s, when liberal democracy seemed inevitable and the internet was still new and promising. Listen closely to the conversations around the fragility of democracy or the rise of authoritarianism, and you’ll catch the same undertone of yearning—the very note conservatives strike when they howl over the decline of western civilisation. Nostalgia, it seems, is no longer partisan property.

That recognition has made me more comfortable with my own tendencies. I see now that nostalgia is, at root, an expression of powerlessness in the face of history. It’s the soul’s cry when the world changes in ways we can’t prevent. It arises from the recognition that something precious is passing, and that nothing can bring it back. Nostalgia is the language of exile. It murmurs its grief over what’s lost and unrecoverable. And in this sense, it belongs not to Left or Right, but to every human heart that has lived long enough to experience loss.

And who among us hasn’t? Human life is, in many ways, a long apprenticeship in parting. The childhood home is sold. The woods we roamed as children are flattened for a shopping centre. The parish church closes its doors. Friends scatter, families dwindle, loved ones die. Every decade brings new vanishings. Nostalgia, far from being an indulgence, is the conscience of memory: a testimony to what once mattered, and still does—even if only to us.

The danger, always, is to turn nostalgia into ideology. That’s the error of golden-age politics on both Right and Left: the weaponising of loss, the transformation of longing into grievance, the false promise of return. This way lies futility, for the past isn’t waiting for us behind some hidden door. To pretend otherwise is to mistake historical cosplaying for genuine history.

But nostalgia need not end there. Properly received, it can be a schoolmaster in gratitude. In remembering what has been lost, we can learn to treasure what remains. It can help us adapt to what is coming in ways that are faithful to what has been. Nostalgia reminds us that the small beauties of ordinary life aren’t negligible but precious. It teaches us to resist the lie that only the new is valuable. In its more honest form, nostalgia isn’t a trap but a heartfelt protest against disposability.

Here, then, is where a theological word might be spoken. For Christians, the melancholy of nostalgia isn’t the last word. Our Scriptures are filled with the voices of exiles, like Israel by the waters of Babylon, singing songs of Zion they can no longer sing in the temple. Their nostalgia is bitter, yes, but also hope-filled. They remember Jerusalem not to re-enter the past but to hope for God’s promised future. Likewise Paul, writing from prison, remembers the fellowship of his churches with tenderness, even while urging them to look toward the consummation of all things in Christ. Christian hope takes nostalgia’s yearning and stretches it forward into promise.

The Christian doesn’t deny loss. What’s gone can’t be recovered. The temple lies in ruins, the old parish church may never reopen. Yet we confess God’s faithfulness. And so the ache of nostalgia becomes a kind of witness to the resurrection: proof that no good thing is finally lost, only gathered into God’s keeping. As Paul puts it, “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21). What nostalgia names as decay, hope names as expectancy.

It’s here that hiraeth finds its true meaning. That untranslatable Welsh longing is more than sentiment—it’s a spiritual ache, a homesickness for a country we can’t yet see. And in Christ, that longing isn’t delusional. Paul says the Spirit himself groans within us (Romans 8:26), stirring in us the yearning for the New Creation: the place where every tear will be wiped away and where remembering isn’t erased but fulfilled.

This is why I can’t quite be ashamed of my nostalgic bent. It’s not mere sentimentality; it’s the ache of love. It’s the soul’s recognition that the world isn’t as it should be, and that we’re strangers here, yearning for a better country. Left on its own, nostalgia can make us bitter. But when it’s taken up into hope, it can make us gentle, patient, attentive. It guards us from false utopias, whether backward- or forward-looking, and instead roots us in the humility of exile and the hope of homecoming.

To be nostalgic is to carry memories of lost friends, vanished worlds, and songs no longer sung. To be Christian is to believe that every good in them is gathered into Christ, who makes all things new. Between memory and promise we live as pilgrims returning home—mourning what’s gone, rejoicing in what’s given, and journeying in hope for what will be. And if we look closely, we can see the faint contours of our homeland on the horizon. We know it as joy.