We stood by as greedy US capitalism hastened Britain’s spiritual decline

John Mac Ghlionn• June 25, 2025

When Angus Hanton released Vassal State in April last year, he aimed his crosshairs at Britain’s economic servitude. It’s a sharp, absorbing read – a forensic dissection of how the UK has been reduced to little more than a corporate outpost for American capital.

But if you stop at the spreadsheets, you miss the real story. Hanton tracks the economic collapse with precision. Vassal State is, in many ways, an autopsy of sovereignty. It catalogs the institutions gutted, the utilities sold off, the high streets bulldozed to make way for yet another Starbucks. It reveals how American investors dictate British policy, how US tech firms extract rents from a country they don’t even bother to live in. Every page feels like a ledger of loss.

But what he leaves unsaid is what’s most unsettling: that this isn’t just an economic crisis. It’s a spiritual one. A country that no longer owns what it builds eventually forgets who it is. Buried beneath the economic analysis is something even more disturbing: the slow, deliberate disintegration of Britain’s religious backbone. A cultural decapitation, if you will. And nowhere is this more visible than in the quiet death of Catholic consciousness.

This isn’t just about GDP or supply chains. This is about metaphysics. Because for centuries, Britain’s identity was bound to a sacred architecture – monasteries, abbeys, holy days, saints’ feast days. These weren’t just decorative. They were rhythm and order. And while the Protestant Reformation may have clipped the wings of Catholicism in England, it didn’t erase it. Not fully.

In the shadows of Anglican restraint, the Catholic imagination endured – smuggled through literature, hidden in stone, kept alive in immigrant parishes, and whispered in Latin. Even George Orwell, who couldn’t stand the Church, acknowledged its psychological power.

That power – mysterious, ancient, unyielding – is now being drained out, pixel by pixel.

American capitalism is overpowering, even obnoxious. It drowns out Gregorian chant with podcast ads and TikTok loops. It replaces theological depth with dopamine hits. And slowly, a different form of liturgy takes hold.

Apple Stores are the new cathedrals – white, sterile, aspirational. Communion is no longer bread and wine, but content and convenience. Instead of the homily, we get corporate emails and marketing campaigns – cold, calculated and written by teams with KPIs, not convictions.

Instead of monks, we get gig workers and “creators” peddling “merch” and product codes, praying not for grace but for reach. And instead of the Sabbath, we get Prime Day – a hyper-engineered ritual of panic-buying and ill-advised indulgence. There is no stillness, no mystery, just sales funnels and shipping deadlines.

We haven’t stopped worshipping – we’ve just changed gods. The altar is digital. The incense is data. And the sacrament is whatever’s “hot” on social media. The sacred has been replaced not with nothing, but with everything – loud, monetised and disposable. And the tragedy is that this new faith offers no salvation. Only subscriptions.

Catholicism demands reverence. American consumerism demands attention. The two are incompatible. You can’t meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation while Alexa is reminding you that your groceries are out for delivery. You can’t train your soul toward eternity when every impulse is hijacked by the next sale or the next swipe. And you can’t teach children about sin, sacrifice and redemption in a world where even sacred suffering has been replaced by push notifications. In this brutal new economy of distraction, God becomes not feared, not even denied, but forgotten.

Vassal State doesn’t dwell explicitly on religion. But it doesn’t need to. The erosion is there, between every line. Hanton describes how US-owned firms have quietly taken over British education, how curricula are adjusted to suit global HR sensibilities, how even school lunches are privatised and branded. And once you control the food and the facts, what’s left? A society that can no longer imagine anything higher than “efficiency”.

But Catholicism was never about efficiency. It was slow, sacramental and dense. It trained people to sit still, kneel and contemplate. It said: “You are not the centre of the universe.”

Forming a person with conscience, discipline and memory is bad business. It makes you harder to sell to, harder to steer. It gives you weight – and that’s a problem for a system built on motion sickness. It doesn’t want citizens; it wants consumers who’ll trade conviction for convenience, swap Sunday for same-day delivery, and baptise their identity not in holy water, but in whatever’s trending.

And so the altar is cleared, not with fire but with apathy. A thousand years of liturgy replaced by “seamless UX”. The sacred becomes embarrassing. The eternal becomes inefficient.

The most troubling aspect, I suggest, is not just that Britain was sold. It’s that nobody noticed.

When the sale was finalised, there were no tanks or treaties, no flags changed. Just smaller prints, more cameras, and more signs of a people slowly detached from their past, from their divine duties, from the Church that once taught them that suffering had meaning and that salvation could not be bought.

Today, Britain kneels to a different trinity: Amazon, Apple and Alphabet. These aren’t corporations anymore – they’re cosmologies. They shape how people think, how they love and how they grieve. And if you don’t believe me, walk into a church on Sunday. Then walk into a shopping mall. One is empty. The other is packed. You tell me who’s winning.

The deepest colonisation isn’t economic. It’s metaphysical. It’s when the soul of a nation is no longer shaped by sacraments but by slogans. When it stops believing in confession and starts believing in customer satisfaction. Britain doesn’t need another trade deal. It needs an exorcism.

A vassal doesn’t dream. It obeys. And increasingly, Britain obeys an algorithm.

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Photo: Stock market numbers are displayed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading in New York City, 23 June 2025. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.)