Not all migration is welcome, it’s true. With Tommy Robinson supporters chanting “Christ is king”, and the insistence on the far right that “Christian” identity is a condition for full citizenship, we are beginning to see the importation to Britain of a style of militant Christian rhetoric more familiar in the US. In British politics, this is still – to use an appropriately biblical image – “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand”. But, with a particular style of nationalist fervour more strident in its public displays than ever, it would be short-sighted to assume that the American variety of Christian nationalism could never be a factor in our public life.
One definition of what full-blown Christian nationalism might mean in 2025 came when the conservative Catholic journalist Ross Douthat recently interviewed the American theologian Douglas Wilson on his Interesting Times podcast. Wilson is one of the most articulate defenders in the US of the belief that society ought to be governed by explicitly Christian principles, ideally enforcing the Ten Commandments, with the government acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ as the foundation of society.
“Christian nationalism is the conviction that we should stop making God angry”: this is Wilson’s typically crisp summary of his programme. He is liable (as Douthat points out) to oscillate between ideas that still have some purchase in mainstream Protestant and evangelical language – society ought to respect and protect Christian convictions, and should legally ban at least some of the things that the Bible condemns – and a much more comprehensive claim that government itself should actively promote Christian faith and morality and inflict appropriate penalties for non-compliance. Legal freedoms around abortion and same-sex relationships must be rolled back as soon as humanly possible. Men must be recognised as heads of households in the majority of cases, and women can only vote if they happen to function as heads of households. Adultery should be a crime. When asked whether this means adultery should, in biblical style, be punished by the death penalty, Wilson is evasive, protesting that of course this is not going to happen overnight or without a major revolution in people’s thinking generally; Douthat wryly observes that even so, this is not especially good news for the current occupant of the White House. It’s not too clear whether members of other religions can actually be citizens in any serious sense.
Wilson’s influence has grown substantially in recent years and become entangled with the politics of the culture wars. While he claims to deplore racial prejudice, his national narrative is one in which the US has been frantically overcompensating for the legacy of slavery, in a way that demoralises and disadvantages young white males. The enormous, online-media-fuelled resentment that feeds and is fed by this version of American history – a version in which the civil rights movement is at best a rather embarrassing side story – increasingly dominates the imagination of the right. This includes the Christian right, even when people angrily repudiate (as Wilson does) the term “white nationalism”. The widespread sense that sexual and gender-related liberties are “making God angry”, that the rejection of older norms somehow soils and compromises the moral dignity of society as a whole, becomes a powerful element in this collective imagination. When the plight of vulnerable or victimised white males, the acceptance of gender fluidity that is supposedly corrupting law and education, and the association of foreign Others with sexual predation as well as murder and drug trafficking are all woven together, it’s a formidable mix. We need to stop angering God; and the best way to be sure of this is to look towards a political order in which God’s explicit revealed will is fully expressed in the law of the land.
Britain has not got much of a tradition of this kind of monocultural dream – not, at least, since the Puritan experiment of the 17th century failed to win hearts and minds. But, while a Douglas Wilson is at the moment almost unimaginable here, the triumphantly globalised media outlets of the right are making this just a little less so. The “battle of the flags” that has spilled over into many of our streets has foregrounded a particular Christian symbol, the Cross of St George. Familiar as this has become as a marker for English nationalist fervour of a particular kind, its Christian origins have not always been noted or discussed. But this has changed in the past couple of years. Its significance as a declaration of this country’s historically Christian identity has intensified along with the rhetoric about Britain as a repository of Christian – or occasionally, with a slightly unconvincing nod to Jewish communities, “Judaeo-Christian” – morality. The flag has gradually migrated from the football crowd to the mob outside the migrant hostel, and is raised to intimidate the supposed enemies of this morality. As those first chants of “Christ is king” make themselves heard, it is hard not to conclude that the transatlantic example is raising the stakes.
It is true, though, that we have not yet seen anything resembling the full-blown “Gilead” aspirations of some in the US. There are already some vocal and eloquent figures arguing for the fusion of Christianity with a recovery of national moral identity and cultural confidence – people like Ceirion Dewar, a bishop in a small independent church who has had a major profile in some recent Tommy Robinson rallies, or the Reverend Calvin Robinson, again ordained in a small independent denomination, who is a fervent Ukip spokesman. But these figures are still cautious about the straightforwardly theocratic ambitions of some of their American brethren, and they represent small and marginal church bodies. Leaders of most of the historic churches in this country, Protestant and Catholic, have not hidden their unease with what they see as the use of the St George’s Cross as a tribal standard associated (especially in recent events) with the violent and abusive demonising of migrants. A number of bishops of the Church of England, in an open letter in September, expressed concern about the co-opting of Christian language in this context. And there is a persistent irony that a significant percentage of all migrants will be Christians, some from historically Christian cultures (in eastern Europe), and some who are in flight from persecution and discrimination at home because of their faith.
But in fact the irony cuts deeper. The cross on the flag originally represented something that was used to inflict a slow and agonising death on those who were not protected by Roman citizenship. People in occupied countries, slaves, “barbarians”, the people who had no standing in civic affairs and decision-making – these were the people who got crucified in the ancient world. Jesus of Nazareth died as a non-Roman, a non-citizen, a Jew, a man not protected by Roman civic status; as we remember at Christmas, he was born in a context of upheaval, violence and displacement. St Matthew’s Gospel tells us that his earliest years were spent as a refugee in Egypt, the survivor of a massacre by King Herod. Jesus’s associates later constructed an intricate and rather startling system around all this which allowed them to see it as God’s declaration of identification with the social “nothingness” of such outsiders – and as carrying the more general message that no human life was beyond the love of God; and so no human life was without the claims of dignity.
It was a declaration that human community was shockingly larger than what any state or culture could define, and that, to belong in the “realm” of God, people would have to recognise that they stood on the same level as all kinds of unwelcome strangers and let go of their pride in belonging to any kind of privileged, powerful or innocent group. And when early Christian martyrs declared “Christ is king” when faced with torture and execution, what they were saying was not that they were part of a movement aiming at the universal control of society, but quite the opposite. They were declaring that no earthly political system could make absolute demands on its citizens. Ultimately, we are answerable not to some kind of sacred national or imperial authority but to the vision of a reconciled community of people who have met the possibility of love and homecoming at the point of their deepest loss or failure.
In other words, the symbolism of the cross was something that in principle spoke to all kinds of dispossessed and insecure people, and promised a life-giving, absolving, hopeful kind of human association. It is somehow painfully ludicrous that it should be brandished by one group of unhappy, powerless people so as to intimidate other unhappy and powerless people. If this is happening, what exactly is the Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) morality that is being appealed to?
In the US, people like Douglas Wilson have a robust answer, in terms of a wholesale purge of the social order. Just how much this has to do with anything in Christian (or Hebrew) scripture is debatable, to put it mildly. But it at least expresses a consistent programme that knows what it means by the will of God and expects lives to be turned around by its challenge. Its English version seems curiously light on what it might mean to behave Christianly, or exactly what beliefs are involved. The St George’s Cross, instead of being both a deeply uncomfortable rebuke to self-satisfied political and racial systems and a sign of promise for those who have been cruelly forgotten by their societies, becomes a totem for a racial and political identity, and a sign of menace to those who do not share it. The identity it proclaims is not so much a moral or spiritual community as a merely inherited and local one. Its cohesiveness depends on knowing where the strangers are so that the boundaries can be policed – rather than encouraging us to imagine new and more hospitable forms of life together.
Part of the justification of such boundary-policing is allotting to strangers a mythic identity of their own as people whose “values” are polar opposites to our own, people with whom we have nothing in common. It is not just that individual Others are guilty (as are People Like Us) of appalling behaviours, threats and abuse; they must represent for us an entire counter-culture in which mutual respect, the safety of children, the care of the sick or vulnerable, don’t matter. Instances of the organised sexual grooming of children by non-European men are triumphantly deployed to prove that the non-Christian stranger lives in a wholly alien moral world. Never mind the disgust repeatedly expressed by Muslim leaders on the subject. Never mind what you would hear from any ordinary Muslim neighbour at the bus stop (and remember: this was similar to the technique used so lethally against the Jews in Europe for centuries, which sought to depict them as child-killers and blood-drinkers).
In this at least, British activists reflect the starkly binary world of the US. But we have some time left before the Wilsonian ideology begins to gain more of a footing – time to ask just what is going on when the Christian cross is flourished as it is these days. God knows, it has been abused often enough over the centuries as a flag of war; Jews and Muslims know quite a bit about that, not to mention Christians butchered by other Christians. But what if we tried to grasp why the cross has also been a symbol of difficult solidarity, compassion and generosity for diverse groups of powerless people? What if it were experienced as actual good news by so many of those waving it so aggressively today – experienced not as a weapon against the stranger but as a promise speaking to their own hurt and loss, and prompting them to recognise the same hurt and the same hope in the stranger? What if the cross was a symbol that changed things, rather than cementing rival and violent identities? “To an open house in the evening/Home shall all men come,” wrote GK Chesterton in one of his Christmas poems. What if the language and symbolism of Christian faith could communicate and energise that hope, for all who feel embittered, forgotten, despised, threatened?
[Further reading: How not to talk about capitalism]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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