The Church of England is dying. More than a third of congregants are over 70; in some dioceses that age group makes up more than half of worshippers. But as the Church ebbs, a reactionary, conspiratorial Christianity is rising in its wake.
When Tommy Robinson led protesters down Whitehall for his Unite the Kingdom rally in May, Christian paraphernalia was as commonplace as cans of cheap lager. This is a very different phenomenon to the traditional alliance between British conservatism and British Christianity. It wasn’t the gentle, village-fete Anglicanism – Disraeli’s “Conservative Party at prayer” – which marched through Westminster earlier this year. That vision has been rejected, in favour of something newer, harder and stranger.
Calvin Robinson was the first figurehead of this new movement. Before his dismissal in 2023, Robinson was a regular on GB News. The priest, whose licence was revoked by one church in 2025 for making a Nazi salute at a pro-life summit in Washington DC, would appear on TV dressed in his cassock and loosely allude to biblical teaching, while taking aim at “neo-Marxism” or homosexuality. The priest has also appeared at hard-right rallies in the UK.
Robinson helped give a disparate Christian fringe a recognisable voice. His own religious journey has been tortuous: since 2022 Robinson has had six different denominations, some of which regard mainstream Christianity as morally compromised. Instead, they advocate for a more traditional and confrontational Christianity, which is increasingly allied with some of Britain’s most right-wing political figures.
The Church of England “has fundamentally moved away from the truth and the reality of the gospel of the Holy Bible and of Jesus Christ”, says Rikki Doolan, a peroxide-haired pastor in the Spirit Embassy church. Doolan is also the frontman of Unite the Kingdom’s house gospel band, whose music videos feature him rapping in front of a green-screened Lamborghini. He is credited with converting Tommy Robinson to Christianity.
The Spirit Embassy church was formed in 2007 by Uebert Angel, a British-Zimbabwean businessman and preacher. In 2021, the Zimbabwean dictator, Emmerson Mnangagwa, appointed Angel as Zimbabwe’s ambassador-at-large. In 2023, as part of an investigation into global money laundering, Al Jazeera recorded Angel saying, “You want gold, we can do it right now, we can make the call right now, and it’s done.” Doolan was also filmed, boasting how Angel’s ambassadorial status could be abused: “It’s a great washing machine, right?” (Doolan denied he was involved in gold smuggling and money laundering.)
Angel’s church espouses the “prosperity gospel”, a pseudo-theological belief that the reward of financial and material gain is the divine will of God for all pious Christians. Doolan discovered Jesus in 2008 after a period of homelessness and substance abuse. He describes himself and the rest of the Spirit Embassy clergy as “just Christian”, not interested in denominational differences. “As long as it lines up with a Bible, it is cool with us.”
Pastor Chris Wickland, like Doolan, is a fixture at Unite the Kingdom marches. The rector is part of the Confessing Anglican Church and claims that God told him the exact day of the 2007 stock market crash. He, too, associates the Church of England with decline and apostasy. “People that are coming to faith don’t trust the Church of England,” he tells me, “because they see it as the bastion of the rainbow flag-waving progressive Christians and they don’t want anything to do with that.”
Wickland came to faith as a teenager when, he says, God spoke to him as he was walking home from a witchcraft ritual. After serving as an independent pastor for 15 years, he joined the Confessing Anglican Church at the start of 2025. Founded in 2019, the Confessing Anglican Church is part of the Convergence Movement, an ecumenical denomination primarily based on Anglican traditions but which also draws from Lutheranism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. It is not recognised by the worldwide Anglican church led by the archbishop of Canterbury, and, in 2023, the Confessing Anglicans condemned the Church of England’s General Synod and the archbishop of Canterbury for allowing same-sex blessings. They abhor modern Britain – one of the Confessing Anglicans’ most prominent churches condemned “a culture that continues to go mad with woke ideology”.
Both Wickland and Doolan found Christianity after Damascene moments – a common phenomenon on the hard-right fringe of faith. In fact, none of the figures I speak to for this article grew up in avowedly religious households. Wickland’s upbringing was “old-fashioned atheist and secular”, and Doolan describes his upbringing as “loose Catholic”. Attending Catholic primary school was “as deep as it went”. Both converted to Christianity when they were young, impressionable or in a vulnerable state.
Despite being representative of different denominations, both Wickland and Doolan preach the Bible and regard Christianity as the key tenet of British identity. The former describes Christianity as “the foundation stone that made Britain”. Doolan and Wickland both highlight the Magna Carta, common law and the fact that the monarch is crowned by the archbishop of Canterbury as reasons for Britain’s historical greatness. In their sermons, the Old Testament dominates; in our interview, Wickland uses the Law of Moses to explain a Christian approach to immigration, and Doolan likens Tommy Robinson to Cyrus the Great as a defender of God’s will.
For these men, one of the primary reasons for Britain’s decline is its supposed move away from the Bible. Doolan associates the rot with postwar liberalism. “The country prospered for 2,000 years and became this wonderful place to live because of Christianity. In the last 50 years, they have separated and that’s the reason why the country is on a downward spiral.” (His account represents a considerable historical exaggeration, not least given Christianity was not adopted by native Britons until at least the late 7th century.)
Wickland claims the decline began much earlier than the 20th century: “From the Enlightenment movement, people started to resist religion and wanted to move away from religion. The French Revolution is a great example of where secularism is saying we’re not going to be governed by that book any more, and all the chaos that it caused for France in doing that.” But he also recognises the postwar period as a turning point. “After the Second World War there has been an increase in liberalism, where instead of seeing the Bible as the word of God, we’re just going to interpret it as we see fit based on current ideas or current morality.”
The timeline is revealing: their turn towards Christianity was prompted by politics as much as theology. Wickland wants Britain to celebrate “a muscular kind of Christianity, that speaks to power, and is about calling a nation back to traditional biblical values”. For Doolan, Christian values lead directly to a radical, nativist politics. “Love is the commandment that Christ gave us over everything. But what has happened as a society is that people have wrongly conflated love and tolerance, because loving somebody does not mean you tolerate everything… Even the 70,000-a-year that are coming on the boats from France. I love them, I want the best for them, but it doesn’t mean that I tolerate or agree with the fact that they’re entering the country.”
Doolan and Wickland want a Christianity that is both a source of pride and defiance against what they perceive to be a dangerously liberal, hedonistic state. Wickland wants “true righteousness, rather than a cultural-Marxist form of DEI” (the US acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion, although the UK version is EDI). And what is true righteousness? “Good living, right living, we’re talking about a good legal system, about living in a culture where there is fairness and where there is a sense of what is right, and what is wrong.”
Wickland goes on: “Every great empire that collapsed on itself, even the Roman empire, when they moved away from basic righteousness, from basic character integrity, the nation starts to fall, because then you have corrupt politicians, and then you have all kinds of crazy sexuality that’s not set in the confines of that which is deemed appropriate; society starts to fall down.” His analysis was unorthodox: the collapse of the Roman empire coincided with the legalisation and then spread of Christianity within its borders, and Enlightenment scholars like Edward Gibbon blamed Christianity for its downfall.
The Unite the Kingdom marches offer Doolan and Wickland an opportunity to defend their conception of British culture, which they perceive to be increasingly at threat from Islam and multiculturalism. Doolan tells me multiculturalism “is against God, full stop”, adding that to “erase national cultures and make everybody to be a one-world culture is exactly in opposition to God’s will – the spirit of antichrist”.
For Wickland, “The trouble with multiculturalism is that it states that the primary culture must deny their identity and deny their own culture for the sake of the incoming culture, and so that is a death knell to British identity and Christianity, because it means we have to say no to ourselves and yes to everybody coming in that in itself is a form of cultural suicide. And you create a culture vacuum, then you create a spiritual vacuum.”
The present Ukip Leader, Nick Tenconi, uses the same language, advocating a “muscular Christianity”, focused on hyper-masculinity and physical fitness to address what he refers to as a “void of testosterone and testicular fortitude in our young males”. Tenconi is undoubtedly explicit about his political support for a Christian Britain. But the language is beginning to travel further up the food chain of the populist right, and Christianity is increasingly invoked as shorthand for a particular conception of British identity.
In 2015, Nigel Farage, then Ukip leader, wrote that the UK is “fundamentally a Christian nation” and that “should be recognised by the government at all levels”, in a special message on “Ukip Policies for Christians”. More recently, in his 2026 Easter video, he claimed that “cities and towns all over our country are really, really shy” about celebrating the holiday and “it is our Judaeo-Christian culture that underpins everything in our country”. It was the time to assert this culture, he argued.
At the launch of Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe declared that “Britain is a Christian country, and under a Restore Britain government it will remain a Christian country”. Restore’s campaign director, Charlie Downes, went further, telling Talk TV that “in order to be British, you need to be Christian.”
Not all Christians agree. Last week the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told the New Humanist magazine, “I suspect really that Farage and others want to channel anti-Muslim feeling, and it helps to have ‘we’re a Christian society’ to fling back. It gives a sort of ballast.” And as for Tommy Robinson, Williams said: “If Tommy Robinson is doing his best to lead a life of Christian discipleship, I’m very glad, but I would really want to ask him some awkward questions.”
The existence of this Christian fringe is one question; its political potential is another. Doolan and Wickland may have found in Christianity a language for their hostility to liberalism, immigration and multiculturalism, but it is not clear that the wider populist right needs, or even wants, Christianity in return. The question is whether this new religious zeal can travel beyond the churches and marches in which it has flourished, and become part of actual policy rather than a vague concept of British identity.
The mainstream hard right tends to keep the most radical Christianity at arm’s length. But it does tolerate its presence among its activists, not least in the figure of “Young Bob” (real name Gregory Moffitt). Bob is a Christian pro-life re-migration activist who has found internet notoriety for copying Charlie Kirk’s signature strategy of setting up an outdoor table under a large sign that read “Prove Me Wrong” on British university campuses.
Bob is also one of Restore Britain’s biggest online cheerleaders. I found him at a private Restore Britain vs Reform UK debate held at Oxford University. After being smuggled into a dimly lit lecture theatre in order to avoid a potential protest, Moffitt and Jack Hadfield, a Reform-supporting commentator, debated who the radical right should unite behind ahead of the “potentially apocalyptic” 2029 general election.
In front of an audience of 12 men, and no women, neither debater mentioned Christianity in the entire two-hour debate, which was largely propelled by a paranoia about demographic change. Eventually, I asked how, if at all, the two parties are implementing Christian identity into their policy. They both acknowledged that this is a key difference between British and American politics. Political Christianity, they agreed, “just doesn’t work here”. Christianity only seemed beneficial to them chiefly in that it is not Islam. Young Bob even poked fun at Unite the Kingdom attendees dressed as crusaders, espousing a 21st-century Holy War and chanting in support of Tommy Robinson. If an anti-abortion Christian does not see the electoral viability of intertwining Christian values with electoral policy, then who will?
The revival, if that is what it is, may tell us less about the state of Christianity than about the state of the British right. For Doolan and Wickland, the Bible provides a language for a politics of national decline, immigration and cultural threat. Their Christianity is not simply a religious belief imposed upon politics. Increasingly, it is a way of making political grievances feel sacred.
[Further reading: Steve Bray is ready to move on]
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Subscribe here to commentA journey through the more lurid examples of right-wing Christianity is interesting and entertaining, but how much does it tell us about the politics of Christianity in general in Britain? For example it ignores the Roman Catholic Church (of which I am a member), which is not in decline but even increasing in numbers. And the last two popes, Francis and Leo, have taken a progressive stance on issues such as ecology, migration and artificial intelligence. A broader and deeper analysis of Christianity in Britain would be more useful to NS readers.
Christianity was born as a religion that favoured the poor and sick over the rich and healthy. That is why it was so successful in replacing the multi god religions of the ancient world which did not care for the poor or sick. The multiple plagues, famines and natural disasters also helped with a promise of eternal happiness in the afterlife. Christianity also had social care for members!
“Wickland came to faith as a teenager when, he says, God spoke to him as he was walking home from a witchcraft ritual. ”
yes….that’s one of the most reassuring rebuttals I can think of
Which Bible do these people follow? Is it the original text, in Aramaic or Hebrew? Is it the Greek translation? Is it the Latin translation of the Greek Translation? Or is it one of several English translations of the Latin Translation of the Greek translation of the original? Ignorance of even their own religion has always been a weakness of Christians generally, but at least they weren’t using it to foment discord and hatred.
As a recovering Catholic I had long hoped that Christianity would sink into oblivion. The Bible as a text does not stand up to examination – all but 7 of Paul’s letters are forgeries – the Nerw Testament books were chosen by a church/business that denied to roles that women had played in early Christianity and also picked and chose which texts they wanted – so out went the Apocrypha . The OT is mostly a collection cf texts cobbled together by wandering tribes and includes Leviticus which tells us all that we can murder our neighbor and enslave his children if the annoys us. I thought we had all grown up but hadn’t reckoned for the lunatics joining the Far Right in an attempt to take over the asylum. The Bible once again becomes a useful tool in the hands of the powerful – the irony is of course that Jesus Christ (if he ever existed) was actually the first Marxist – he opposed Poer and Money, beat the money-changers out of the Temple, preached Socialism and died for denying the poers of both Rabbis and Emperors.
The Book of Genesis is the best summary of human nature written. Even St Augustine recognised it was not a version of history rather a story by which we could understand our true nature. John Gray acknowledges this irony.