There is nothing commentators love more than an argument that makes sense to about 37 people. It is like a sausage to a dog — or a line of coke to an investment banker. So, I can’t help intervening into the argument about the religious character, or lack thereof, of the British right.
This is a comically marginal debate. As Andrew Cusack has rightly pointed out, there is no evidence of Reform, still less the Conservatives, adopting a platform that one might plausibly describe as “Christian nationalist” — or, indeed, anything close to it. “Christian nationalism” is such a marginal force in British politics that when Sky News went looking for its adherents, they found about 20 people at a baptism on a beach.
Still, we have marginal arguments before we have mainstream arguments. Debates about Marxism must have seemed pretty obscure and esoteric in the early 1900s. Soon afterwards, the Bolsheviks took over.
I don’t think that Christian nationalists, or anything like them, are going to take over Britain. Still, they — along with people like them — represent an increasingly loud voice among dissident activists and commentators on the British right.
Tommy Robinson has found God and begun campaigning for a “United Christian Europe”. Nick Tenconi of UKIP aims to push Christianity “back into the heart of government”. Much of this kind of Christian revivalism, on display at the recent “Unite the Kingdom” march, has been animated by the sense that radical Islam need a militant Christian counterreaction — missing the point that much of Britain’s multicultural dysfunction has little to nothing to do with faith, and that the appropriate response to totalising and belligerent religion might not be totalising and belligerent religion.
Elsewhere, political Christianity seems to provide an answer for Britain’s cultural neuroses. In more sophisticated circles, the installment of the religious social thinkers Danny Kruger and James Orr to the upper ranks of Reform raised questions about the future theopolitical course of Nigel Farage’s party.
When Sam Rubinstein, who has often written for The Critic, voiced his scepticism about the prospects of explicitly Christian politics in the UK in the webpages of UnHerd he was attacked in smug anti-Semitic terms. “Samuel Rubinstein wants to know if the Reform UK Party is going “too Christian”,” wrote Jayda Fransen, formerly of Britain First and currently of the Christian Nationalist Party. This inspired her drooling followers to post all kinds of observations about how a man called “Rubinstein” might — who would have guessed it — be Jewish.
A political program which is definitionally and aggressively Christian is itself subversive in a British context
Messrs Orr and Kruger would have been disgusted by these insults, of course (and nothing I write here is targeted at them). But the irony of the insinuations about Rubinstein’s alleged subversiveness is that a political program which is definitionally and aggressively Christian is itself subversive in a British context.
Don’t get me wrong: Christianity has of course been essential to British culture and British politics. Bijan Omrani’s recent God is an Englishman elegantly, eloquently reminded us of that. But when Rupert Lowe MP says that “Christian values” are “what has made Britain so great” it is a reductive monocausal claim that obscures a lot of literature, science and folklore.
Besides, most British people are not Christians. Indeed, most Reform voters are not Christians. British politics has been religiously pluralistic since the first half of the 1800s. Ironically, before that some of the people who are now advocating for exclusively Christian politics would have been excluded themselves. Catholics were not allowed to sit in Parliament before 1829 and Jews were accepted only three decades later.
This is not to suggest for a moment that Christians should not be in politics or that their faith should not influence their arguments. It is to suggest that there is nothing British about a politics which is aggressively and definitionally Christian. Indeed, the sort of empirical cosmopolitan spirit that elevated Britain to the status of the superpower has nothing to do with the tribal dogmatism of today’s would-be Crusaders.
Theirs is an ideology which is worse than useless for the British right. But it is also hard to imagine it being anything but corrosive for the prospects of Christianity. As an agnostic, with a real interest in religion as a platform for truth claims, it seems to me that if the Christian faith is going to become a major force in Britain again, that will require an intellectual and spiritual sea change. To subordinate the faith to a largely functional role in politics — as a spear to poke Muslims with, or as some energising force for disaffected blokes — could only exacerbate its marginalisation.
British right-wingers can agree or disagree on a variety of moral and cultural issues. Britain’s demographic and economic dysfunction, though, has become existential. To resolve it, a government will need a passionate investment in the national interest and clear-eyed analytical abilities. Believers and non-believers should be able to join forces in this task and debate God over dinner.
