A Rock Star Ideas Festival in Brooklyn

Anyone who hasn’t been Very Online since 2020 may be wondering why Mumford & Sons co-founder Winston Marshall, the British guy who helped usher in the 2010s folk rock revival, would be interested in organizing a heterodox thought symposium in Brooklyn. The event website features a cascade of big-think internet names cascading down the screen like bands on a summer music poster. Headliners like Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali appear in large bold font against a neon background. Thomas Chatterton Williams’ name is a bit smaller. “I have a music background,” the Grammy-winning Marshall said when I interviewed him recently. “I think I can sort of apply what I’ve learned there to the ideas space, adding, “this world of ideas happens online.”

After a pandemic-era cancellation, Marshall himself now works as a writer and a podcaster. He said he was being approached by people who knew him through his intellectual work, and they awakened him to a desire for community among people interested in thinking deep thoughts and asking difficult questions. These encounters touched his musician’s heart. “I remember discovering a band, let’s say, when I was a teenager, and feeling like I was quite alone,” Marshall said, “You go to the show and you’d be like, oh, well, there’s hundreds of other people who like this band. And it kind of felt great. You felt like you for that evening. You had a community. So I think that there is that desire in the world of ideas.”

Marshall knows something about the hunt for intellectual community, and about the madness of online crowds.

In March 2021, he tweeted a recommendation of the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by independent journalist Andy Ngo. Social media book recommendations were a practice he had developed during the pandemic, but in this instance, an online blowback followed almost immediately. Social media users branded him a fascist and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. The banjoist had “courted controversy” before, according to a Hollywood Reporter story—in 2018, he had invited Jordan Peterson to visit Mumford & Sons’ studios.

In June 2021, Marshall publicly announced his departure from the band in a Medium post. Although in the initial outcry, he had said he was taking time off to examine his “blind spots,” he ultimately chose the world of ideas over music. “I hope in distancing myself from [Mumford & Sons],” he wrote in his Medium post, “I am able to speak my mind without them suffering the consequences.” Noting the irony of the epithets used against him online, Marshall mentioned that he had 13 members of his family killed in the Holocaust; his maternal grandmother was a survivor.

Marshall has since become an outspoken free speech advocate and cultural critic. A self-described Zionist, he has also been a vocal supporter of Israel since Oct. 7.

Marshall’s religious background is complex. Baptized Catholic, he spent much of his teens and 20s as an atheist. He returned to his Christian faith in 2020 after what he described as “a painful divorce” to Glee actress Diana Agron. Nevertheless, his Jewish background on his mother’s side remains important to him.

They were a family that did “both brises and baptisms,” he said, celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah. He says seeing the play Leopoldstadt helped him make sense of that kind of blended cultural milieu, where assimilation was considered crucial. “I never fully understood a lot about my Jewish side,” he told me. “I think my grandma blocked a lot of stuff out.” She and her family fled Transylvania in 1943, he told me. They changed their names, and spent the remainder of the war hiding out in Munich, Nice, and ultimately Portugal. After the war, Marshall’s grandmother settled in France. He recalls her often denying her Jewishness.

Yet he was able to learn some of that history for himself. “She kept very detailed diaries from her life,” he said. “She had the whole family, write [goodbye] notes when they left Transylvania.” Later, after what he calls “a big investigation” of his family history, he said, “We now know that each person died,” except for one aunt, whose tattoo his grandmother would try (unconvincingly) to explain away.

It is this family history that Marshall carries with him when he sees the anti-Israel protests where he lives, in London. “It’s really shocking to see,” he tells me.

You just don’t meet too many outspoken Zionist, Grammy-winning Christians, I observed. Marshall’s blended background may actually allow him more freedom to speak and think openly about Jewish questions. “Jews in the industry will talk to me privately,” Marshall said, “[They] cannot speak.” He tells me they say they are worried about physical danger, as well as professional ramifications. Although the young people who listen to music the most tend to be more pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist, he said the ideological capture is not yet as bad in the music industry as it is in the world of academia. “But music is not far behind.”

Marshall himself defies labels in many ways, but identity and belonging still interest him deeply. With Dissident Dialogues, the name of his symposium occurring May 3 and 4, he is attempting to provide a haven for ideological refugees of all confessions. “I think that one of the problems online is people get siloed,” he said. “You get ostracized and rejected from one group. Let’s say you’re heterodox on a specific issue: People do want a community, so that they can end up getting pushed into the hands of people that, actually, they’re not easy bedfellows with.”

It’s one benefit of belonging to a faith community, he has found, where “love your neighbor” is a key commandment. “One of the wonderful things about a church,” Marshall said, “Is that you don’t actually get to choose who your neighbors are.” Sharing a belief in a creed may confer orthodoxy in one area, but total harmony is far from guaranteed when you have people from every walk of life sitting together in the pews.

“Everything happens in such a one-dimensional way online,” Marshall said. With your opponent depersonalized on a screen, he said, “You’re pushed to bad faith.”

If there’s one word that describes Marshall during our conversation, it’s “earnest.” Disarmingly so. Early on, I brought up the “where is Kate Middleton” internet conspiracy theories, and he told me in all seriousness that he hadn’t been following, but he was praying for King Charles’ recovery from cancer

Marshall lives full time in London, although he estimates he spends about a quarter of his year stateside. He’s not sure how long this arrangement will last. “Europe is in a pretty, pretty bad way, and Britain specifically is being held back by political correctness,” he tells me.

Marshall’s heterodox inclinations do have a pretty clear family source: His father, Sir Paul Marshall, is the founder of UnHerd magazine, a bastion of literate heterodoxy committed to amplifying perspectives that aren’t usually entertained by the mainstream media. While his dad may take heat from the British press for donating to the Tories, Winston Marshall denies being a conservative himself. “My character is ‘high trait openness’ which correlates to liberal policies and openness to ideas as well,” he told me. “People try and—even friends of mine will say—I’m conservative. I reject that. Yeah, I’m only conservative in the sense that I want to conserve liberal democratic principles.”

Although he also plans to bring his ideas festival to his native England in the future, he enthusiastically praised the venue for the first Dissident Dialogues, the Duggal Greenhouse, for its view of the Manhattan skyline. “I love New York,” he tells me. When I asked him the source of his hope these days, Marshall said he is much more optimistic about the preservation of those democratic principles in America than in his home country.

“I’m hopeful about America,” he said, “Partly because of the federalist dream,” where the geography and the government allow citizens to up stakes and move to a state that better suits their temperament. “America has a better history of dealing with the truth than Britain,” said Marshall, where people are “terrified to speak hard truths,” although he admits the ideological capture is worse in London than other parts of the country. Marshall is also careful to qualify that “that’s not to say America is doing a great job” either in the free speech department.

Marshall looks to American media figures like Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss, who were able to follow their principles out from ideological silos to begin something different. In America, Marshall said, someone like Weiss can leave a job at The New York Times and start something new and dynamic like The Free Press, and be met with eager demand. “There’s a lot more room for that, I think, here in America,” he said.

If Marshall isn’t a fan of identitarian labels, he definitely believes in identity, at least as it relates to belonging to something bigger than oneself. The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights mean that “it’s very clear when you sign on to be an American what it means to be an American.” Moreover, as a more religious country than Britain, Marshall sees a clearer appreciation in the U.S. for how Judeo-Christian principles undergird liberal ideals. “Liberalism without a metaphysical rigor, the rigor of religion underneath it,” he said, “that’s a future we can all be worried about.”

He asked me about where I look for hope. Put on the back foot, I rambled something about my religious faith, and about living in a small community that invites and requires active participation. Marshall summed it up pithily: “Your hope has come because you’re actually part of a community and engaging with them,” he said.

That’s part of his ultimate vision for Dissident Dialogues. “Originally I wanted to do this in a small town,” Marshall said, “Where we could involve the town and people could discover a new place, and that’s what I hope we can build in the future.” He says that he believes that the word “community” has been “abused” by being conflated with identity: “You say the ‘gay community,’” he said, “I’ve got loads of gay friends. But they’re not all getting together and communing together.” With Dissident Dialogues, Marshall says that he wishes to create “[community] in the literal sense,” by bringing different people of varying beliefs and backgrounds together to debate and break bread. 

“It seems that all my bridges have been burned,” go the lyrics in “Roll Away Your Stone,” a Mumford & Sons single on which Marshall shares a songwriting credit. “But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works.” For Marshall, what changes the heart is “not the long walk home,” as the song has it—the realm of the isolated and the individual. It is a grace that springs forth from a sense of welcome, of belonging somewhere.