He Spoke Her Name
Easter, Louise Perry, and the moment truth becomes personal
Palm Sunday crowds have faded. Good Friday has passed through silence and grief. Now, early in the morning, a woman stands outside a tomb, weeping.
She does not yet understand resurrection.
She is not making a theological argument.
She is simply looking for the body of the one she loved.
This is where Easter begins.
In a recent Wall Street Journal essay (paywalled), Louise Perry describes what she calls the end of Christendom—the unraveling of a shared moral world once shaped by Christianity. Church attendance declines. Laws change. Moral language shifts. What once seemed settled now feels contested—or even inverted.
But what makes Perry’s voice compelling is not only her diagnosis.
It is her direction of travel.
When she wrote The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, she was not a Christian. She wrote as a secular feminist—critical, independent, but not confessing the faith she was beginning to take seriously.
And yet her argument pointed beyond itself.
When Truth Comes First
Perry found that the Christian vision of relationships—sex, commitment, vulnerability, restraint—was not merely traditional.
It was true to reality.
Not idealistic. Not utopian.
But honest about human nature.
She discovered that Christianity explains the world better than its rivals. This is a path we do not always name.
Sometimes people come through suffering.
Sometimes through beauty.
And sometimes, quietly, through recognition.
Before they can say “I believe,” they find themselves saying,
This explains things.
Truth comes first.
The Gardener
But Easter does not end there. Christianity is not finally a theory about human nature. It is a claim about a person—and about something that happened.
In the garden, Mary Magdalene stands weeping. She sees Jesus, but does not recognize him. She assumes he is the gardener.
She is close to the truth—closer than she knows.
But she cannot yet see it.
Not until he speaks her name.
This is the movement we are now seeing, in a different key, in Perry’s own writing. She no longer writes only as an observer. She writes as someone who prays—someone standing, in her own way, at the edge of the garden.
She closes her essay with lines from Malcolm Guite:
And then she hears her name, she hears Love say
The Word that turns her night, and ours, to Day.
That is Easter.
Not the triumph of an idea.
Not the survival of an institution.
But the speaking of a name.
After Christendom
We are told that Christianity is fading. That Christendom is no more. Perhaps that is true—culturally.
But Easter has never depended on Christendom.
It began not in a cathedral, but in a garden.
Not with power, but with confusion.
Not with certainty, but with tears.
At its center is not a system to defend, but a voice to hear.
Called by Name
There is a kind of belief that comes from observing the world—
from seeing that Christian teaching makes sense of things as they are.
That may be where many begin.
But Easter invites something more.
Not only to see that Christianity is true,
but to hear that it is addressed to you.
Mary does not conclude that resurrection is plausible.
She hears her name.
So the question this Easter morning is not only whether Christendom is ending,
or whether Christianity still “works.”
It is simpler:
Have you heard him call your name?
Because if what happened in Jerusalem is true—
if the tomb was empty,
if death did not have the final word—
then the voice that spoke to Mary
has not fallen silent.
It still calls—quietly, personally, persistently.
Not to a crowd.
Not to a civilization.
But to each of us.
And when we hear it—
when we turn—
night becomes day.
May the risen Christ
who called Mary by name
call you—
and be known to you
in the turning.
For those interested, Louise Perry’s essay “Christendom Is No More” is available in the Wall Street Journal.