The far right has parked its tanks “on the front lawn of the Church of England” (CofE), a bishop has warned as the church responds to a growing Christian conservative movement.
Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK held two very different carol services on Saturday: one a flag-waving rally involving street drinking and flags calling for “Anglo-Saxon freedom”; the other at one of the City of London’s oldest churches.
St Michael’s Cornhill, a CofE church, hosted Sarah Pochin, the Reform UK MP for Runcorn and Helsby, who recently complained about the number of black and Asian people in adverts, as she launched the Christian Fellowship for Reform, the party’s new Christian affiliate wing.
“Reform will always stand up for Christianity in this country,” Pochin said in a slick launch video. “We are fundamentally a Christian country, and we are proud to be Christians.”
In Whitehall, Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was joined by about 1,000 people for an event purporting to “put the Christ back in Christmas”. Churches including Spirit Embassy, a British-Zimbabwean church that espouses prosperity theology, played Christian rock and sang carols.
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When a man holding a flag with a white dragon saying “Anglo-Saxon freedom” was asked what it meant, he said: “I haven’t given it that much thought. Freedom for us, I guess.”
Waiting for the Unite the Kingdom Christmas carol concert to begin. Jacqueline Lawrie/LNP
Arun Arora, the bishop of Kirkstall in the diocese of Leeds, said: “We are in a place now where in the next three to five years there will be a battle for those who want to pursue a kind of UK Maga [Make America Great Again] agenda as to what Christianity is.
“If the far right are now parking their tanks on the front lawn of the Church of England, how is the church to respond?”
Counter-protesters gathered nearby as part of a Stand Up to Racism demonstration and young Christians staged a protest at St Paul’s Cathedral, holding signs saying “love thy neighbour” and “Jesus was a refugee”, while recreating the nativity in a dinghy. The CofE also released a video entitled Christmas Isn’t Cancelled.
At the carol service in Whitehall, Sally Mann, a Baptist minister, was told by some attendees to “fuck off” when she invited them to pray with her, and said: “Christ wasn’t English. Christ was a refugee at Christmas.”
In an email sent on 4 December, Robinson had encouraged followers to attend the rally and wrote: “Our nation teeters on the brink of darkness, besieged by forces that seek to erode our Christian heritage and patriotic spirit.”
The email focused heavily on the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, calling him “a Muslim extremist who is transforming London, our city, into a Sharia zone” and “a coloniser and unwelcome guest”. It ended: “Can you spare a tenner? If not, could you spare a fiver?”But Robinson’s growing fringe movement, which involves a number of evangelical churches from the peripheries of Christianity, is indicative of a larger shift towards Christian conservatism and Christian nationalism that is perpetuating anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK.
‘We must challenge any agenda that seeks to narrow the Christian faith to one flag’
Bishop Arun Arora
Arora said that he and others in the clergy were acutely aware of Reform UK, Advance UK and the remnants of Ukip promoting a “Christian nationalist” agenda.
Farage has a growing Christian contingent among his closest allies and has had support from US-backed Christian groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, which secured him a three-hour appearance in a congressional hearing examining “Europe’s threat to American free speech and innovation”. He used the appearance to claim that the UK had “become North Korea”.
Advance UK, a small splinter group set up by Reform’s former co-deputy leader Ben Habib, states in its mission statement that the party “promotes and celebrates the nation’s Christian constitution, roots, traditions, culture and values”. The current leader of what survives of Ukip, Nick Tenconi, is also chief operating officer of Turning Point UK, the British arm of the Christian-conservative organisation formerly headed in the US by Charlie Kirk before he was assassinated earlier this year.
Speaking before Robinson and Pochin’s events, Arora said: “We must challenge any agenda that seeks to narrow the Christian faith to one flag, whether that be the union flag, the St George’s cross or the the stars and stripes.”
Photograph by Jonathan Brady/PA Wire