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2025 has been a year for what might be some of the last large scale commemorations of the end of the Second World War in both Europe and Japan. And the anniversary has brought to light too the many ways in which war – then as now – demands new thinking, forces innovation – and reminds us that when a nation is fighting, there is nothing that can’t be made into a weapon. Even art.

A film will be shown this month at Bletchley Park about the gift given by a troupe of Russian Boy Scouts to the US ambassador in Moscow 80 years ago in 1945. The gift was stunning: a large, beautiful hand-carved maple wood replica of the Great Seal of the United States of America. It hung in the ambassador’s residence for all to see before it was discovered to be in fact a listening device, activated from time to time by Russian intelligence agents, able to hear confidential conversations within the office. About two feet across with no wires or batteries, this bugging device was incredibly successful, undetected for seven years.

As a weapon of the Cold War it revealed not only secrets and confidences, but held up a mirror to the assumptions that made it so effective. Assumptions that operate still today. That something beautiful is probably good. That something decorative is peripheral, trivial even.

Our unspoken assumption is that a weapon is made of something like steel; is probably noisy, disruptive, disturbing. Not a silent, beautiful decoration on a wall of a diplomat whose currency is courtesy and, well, diplomacy.

Christian teaching has always challenged this assumption. The personification of evil in the Christian scriptures: called Satan in Hebrew – or Diabolos in Latin – is a deceiver and a beguiler – not unattractive or immediately threatening. And right in the middle of the Cold War in 1958, the sculptor Jacob Epstein portrayed evil to be a handsome man, defeated at the foot of St Michael. Not repulsive but charismatic, captivating, appealing. But in the end, defeated all the same.

This Christian challenge to deep seated human assumptions about beauty and goodness is itself a powerful weapon in today’s war against fake news and the relentless falsehoods of the internet. That evil can be attractive as well as deceptive helps us question what we see at first: and, importantly for our age, provokes independence of thought and individual conscience. It says to us, even while we look at something we find alluring, attractive, even beautiful; challenge your assumptions, be open to what you can’t imagine – and never passively accept the status quo.

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