Reclaiming Christian nationhood

Last Saturday, thousands gathered for Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march. Dissident priests took to the stage, and many in the crowd carried wooden crosses. Like the previous march, and Robinson’s “Christmas carol service” last year, this has fueled an ongoing debate over the evils of so-called “Christian Nationalism”, often presented as a sinister US import. 

Why is it considered odd or alien that nationalism should be linked to Christian faith, heritage or identity? 

Yet in a country where bishops sit in the House of Lords, a third of state primary schools are faith schools, and the head of state is also supreme governor of a national Christian church, why is it considered odd or alien that nationalism should be linked to Christian faith, heritage or identity? 

As so often in the sterile, circular, and mindless debates that now dominate British public life, cause and effect have been reversed. Christian nationalism is not some new radicalising force; rather, as the British establishment abandoned a linked Christianity and patriotism, these potent ideas have been left homeless, awaiting the first friendly and open door. Thus it has been left to the improbable Tommy Robinson to retrieve the crown of Christian nationhood from the gutter in which our cultural and political elite had left it. 

A distinction between the idea of a (presumably wicked, bigoted and ethnically defined) nationalism, and a (civic, safely neutral, benign) patriotism has been a long-standing shorthand, but even this rather simplistic distinction has since collapsed. Treating one’s own nation or civilisation as distinct, valuable, or central within national cultural and educational institutions will reliably see you accused of eurocentrism, “othering”, or even overt racism. Outside of supporting the national football team, or twee self-deprecation, patriotism was shoved out of the Overton window. Dubious provocateurs like Tommy Robinson can take full advantage of this collapsed definition to unite actual extremists with a far wider spectrum of opinion and sentiment, operating freely in the now ambiguous and contested space of national identity. 

The problem of definition and the rhetorical games used to denounce “Christian Nationalism” lead to continual errors, a picture that emerged in a recent Theos poll. If you define it as sectarian, exclusionary Christian politics, you might suggest it is the marginal minority of the “17% of adults” that “agree that you need to be Christian to be truly British”, of whom “just under half of them (8%) strongly agree with this statement.” Yet broaden the terms of reference, and the constituency for a more inclusive sense of Christian nationhood and nationalism is much larger, with 4 in 10 Britons agreeing that “the law in Britain should be based on Christian values”, and that “religious education in Britain should prioritise the teaching of Christianity ahead of other faiths”. In other words, there is little appetite to exclude non-Christians from British identity and civic belonging, but significant support for retaining Christianity’s priority of place in national life, ethics and education. There is a risk, in other words, that “Christian Nationalism” is seen as both smaller and more extreme than it really is. 

Responses to Robinson’s “politicisation” of Christianity have exposed the illiteracy around the subject of Christianity’s role in the British constitution and our political history. A recent example arrived at the hands of Fraser Nelson, who in response to Saturday’s march argued that only by “rejecting the ‘this is a Christian country’ logic” can “Enlightenment ideals” be realised along a model of Jeffersonian secularism, as if Britain were merely a flawed and delayed version of America. Nelson’s argument appeared frequently confused, at once praising the role of religious minority leaders in the explicitly Christian liturgy of coronation, yet simultaneously claiming that we are “not a Protestant or a Christian country”. 

Such sentiments are common, even amongst committed Christians like Fraser Nelson. Christian religious leaders in Britain today are profoundly hesitant about linking national identity, citizenship and belonging with Christianity. Ironically, many of the most forceful statements and gestures in this direction have come from those with a non-Christian faith. Non Christian religious people typically welcome the dignity afforded to faith by the highly moderate and tolerant mode of religious establishment Britain has developed, and take it for granted that the Christian identity of British culture and nationhood should be respected. 

This inclusive model of Christian nationhood was, as Nelson noted, elegantly witnessed by the role given to non-Christian religious leaders at the King’s coronation. Whilst this is indeed a remarkable evolution, it reflects a longstanding tradition of Christian humanism going back to figures like writer and polymath Thomas Browne, an early advocate of religious toleration, extending even to “Turkes, Infidels, and Jewes”, and calling for “temperate dispute” to replace harsh religious violence and rhetoric. 

After a long period of interdenominational conflict and contestation, Britain has arrived at a hybrid settlement, with two different established churches in England and Scotland, disestablishment in Wales and Northern Ireland, and a role for all faiths in public life. The toleration of Jews and Catholics, and the expansion of the franchise, transformed British politics and created a new religious order. A distinctly “national” framing of religion across the nations of the union was a central feature of the emergence of the modern Conservative and Labour parties. The decisive force of this can be seen in the Young England movement within the Tories, and of the centrality of patriotic and religious thinking in the early Labour party.

For the 19th century social reformers, Christianity was both central, and often expansively defined. The campaign against slavery included high churchmen, methodists, evangelicals, and Catholics like Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell. Jews, who were arriving in Britain in ever greater numbers, were defended by many prominent Christian leaders, not least two-time Tory PM Disraeli, a Jewish convert to Christianity who argued that “Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing”.  Indeed, Judaism was adopted into Christian nationhood in highly intimate ways through nationalist narratives like British Israelism — the idea that the British are one of the lost tribes of Israel. This potent, romantic politico-mythological model has far more bearing on the emergent British religious settlement than did the secularism of France or the New World. 

The ongoing closeness of Christianity and British nationhood was witnessed in the effective baptising of the post-war settlement by Archbishop William Temple, and in the language with which that settlement was presented by politicians like Attlee who, though an agnostic, spoke of the British nation as “a great crusading body, armed with a fervent spirit for the reign of righteousness on earth”. Even for a rationalistic, non-believing socialist like Attlee, it was straightforward and uncomplicated that Britain was and would be a Christian country in its ethics, culture and the biblically-derived language of public discourse. 

For all that Christian faith has declined at a popular level and been excluded from the public square, it remains at once important and dangerous

This deep implicit Christianity undergirded the nationhood that Britain forged in the wake of world war and global empire. When Maragret Thatcher sought to refound Britain on “Victorian values”, she naturally reached for a religious language of virtue and prophetic vision. Only very recently indeed have British governments decided “we don’t do God”, and it has coincided pretty neatly with the decline of British national identity along with the fracturing of the two party system and the collapse of trust in politics and institutions. The cult of the NHS and Paddington Bear have not proven adequate substitutes, especially faced with the bitter and explosive political impact of Southport, Rotherham and the Channel Crisis. 

For all that Christian faith has declined at a popular level and been excluded from the public square, it remains at once important and dangerous, and nowhere more so than in its relation to nationhood. Ironically, American secularism has made religion a “free market” in which religious nationalism can freely thrive, whereas in England an established church has acted to restrain it. But that restraint has gone much too far. In Britain, a quasi official inter-faith establishment has gone from a moderating and convening force to a deadening and paralysing one. An NGO-industrial complex has co-opted faith leaders, rendering them as respected but irrelevant “stakeholders” in a non-stop state-backed talking shop. Bishops, rabbis and imams parrot the establishment line, and keep the explosive combination of faith and nation safely apart, never to combust.

That is starting to change. Tommy Robinson, like a modern day Guy Fawkes, is busy piling up gunpowder under that cosy consensus. Desperately trying to pretend away deep divisions when figures across the political spectrum are exploiting them is not going to stop the bomb going off. The gulf, for example between what liberal Muslims say on the TV, and what the median British Muslim thinks, says and believes was exposed in stark terms in the recent Understanding Islamopopulism report, which revealed widespread support for extremist groups, with 1 in 4 British Muslims having a favourable view of Hamas.

In this context, concern about the role of Islam in Western societies is not a racist fever dream (though it’s certainly a fact easily exploited by racists, especially when nobody else will touch it), and embattled natives with valid concerns may well reach for the powerful narratives of Christian nationhood. In France, Catholic conservatives have formed coalitions with concerned liberals and feminists, in an unlikely but potent new alliance, with more women than men voting for Le Pen and the nationalist National Rally party in 2019. This new alignment was well attested by the provocative presence at Saturday’s protest of Collectif Némésis, a nationalist and feminist group which argues that migration has fueled violence against women, and appeared on stage wearing Niqabs, which they promptly stripped off in front of a cheering crowd.

Whilst Judaism was able to accommodate itself with British and Christian nationhood, that same leap has not occurred with contemporary Islam. It might well have happened — British attitudes to Islam had often been more positive than towards Judaism or Catholicism, and they were often a favoured group in the context of Empire. Yet Islam and Britishness moved in contrary directions. The respectable 1950s norms of post-war Protestantism and the increasingly moderate tenor of a fast modernising Muslim world were soon pulled apart by social revolutions in Britain and a wave of religious fundamentalism across Islamic cultures. As Muslim immigration soared in the 21st century, Britain found itself out of touch with its own national and religious identity, and locked in an unwelcome struggle with Islamic terrorism at home and abroad. This divide might yet be bridged, but certainly not on the current trajectory of open borders, post-national politics and self-hating secularism, which has seen Muslims pushed into the arms of either sectarians, or a post-national progressive politics. 

In this fast moving world of contested identity, borderless globalisation, and civilisational rivalry, people are desperate to reconnect with the deep roots of their identity, reassert some sane and politicised cultural boundary, and feel that the authorities are once again acting in the national interest. Christianity has profound answers to these questions, and it is unsurprising that nationalists are appealing to it. 

This is a development that should be seen as at once dangerous and opportune for Christian leaders. Faith is easily distorted by crude, divisive and venal political imperatives. Instead of offering real alternatives, Christian public figures all too often simply throw in behind a discredited and dying liberal internationalism.