In recent times, Christianity has been used by the British far right as a symbol of national identity. However, the historical developments and demographic changes in British Christianity make this invocation more complicated than it first appears. Proponents of far-right rhetoric, most notably Tommy Robinson in his 2025 Christmas Carol Service, often use Christian language to present Britain as culturally unified and rooted in a particular moral tradition. This rhetoric is then used to justify political positions, especially vis-à-vis “wokeism,” immigration, or other religions.

However, within these spaces, Christianity functions as a national symbol under circumstances and realities that complicate its coherence. These include the historical role Christianity has played in shaping Britain’s liberal secular institutions and culture of tolerance, as well as the fact that white Britons attending church and practicing Christianity are declining, with active Christian communities increasingly concentrated among immigrant and minority groups: Christian Britain is less white than some imagine. In light of these considerations, we must ask: can Christianity still function as a coherent and legitimate national identity marker for the far right?

The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is delighted to present this essay in collaboration with The Wilberforce Society at the University of Cambridge.

Christianity and the Formation of Modern British Political Culture

“Woke ideology” is one of the principal irritants of the contemporary far right. This term generally means a discourse emphasizing systemic injustices, particularly concerning race and gender, and, less frequently, class inequality. The right often deems this stance oversensitive, performative, or coercive, arguing that it enables a repressive “cancel culture,” prioritizes identity politics over merit, threatens traditional societal structures, and enforces ideological conformity, thereby eroding freedom of speech. By invoking a rhetoric of Christianity in response, the far-right attempts to construct a moral buffer against the perceived excesses of secularism. For example, when Ceirion Dewar, a bishop in the small, conservative Confessing Anglican Church, opened a Tommy Robinson rally in prayer, he stated that Great Britain was “founded on Christian principles and from the Christian faith” and that this foundation was being “eroded.”1

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Rather than treating modern tolerant society as antithetical to Christianity, one can point to historical links between tolerance and the development of British Christianity. There is significant scholarly discussion over how modern liberalism developed out of Christian values.2 Graeme Smith argues that ideas of individual human worth and dignity, shared public reason, historical progress, and humanity’s ability to investigate its world can all be traced to Christian theological sources.3 Even among Robinson’s supporters, Christianity is framed as the source of an emancipatory civilization rather than strictly devotional or theological. Gareth Talbot, for example, stated:

It’s not that I’ve found God. I’ve never felt you need to go to church to be a Christian, but it’s always been the Christian religion that’s kept our values and freedoms, and that’s why I need to support it now.4

However, others argue that liberalism and a tolerant society are products of early modern secular humanism and the Enlightenment, rather than Christianity itself. Needless to add, political and philosophical ideas do not emerge from the void, and the sources may be multifold. While Enlightenment figures propagated what we now call liberal ideas in nonreligious terms, such as the rights of man, reason, and equality before the law, there were also Christian peers advancing similar arguments. Christian culture and ideas have undeniably played a significant role in British and European history. The Religious Society of Friends, founded in seventeenth-century England by George Fox, emphasized the “Inner Light” and promoted peace, equality, and social justice. It was generally Protestant dissenters, often marginalized themselves, who were key propagators of tolerance and social justice. For instance, William Wilberforce was a devout evangelical Anglican who fused faith and politics in his forty-year campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Meanwhile, at every stage in history, liberal Christianity also had its conservative counterpart. The far right today appears to lean into that conservative strand. Robinson’s appeal to England as a “Christian nation” is ambiguously Anglican due to his affiliations,5 suggesting that his Christianity is civilizational and traditional, rooted in the history of the Church of England, rather than deeply theological or biblical. Historically, therefore, his invocation of Christianity as a source for his politics is not unfounded. Especially in an Anglican context, Christianity has always contained both progressive and conservative strands.

Christianity vs. Civilizational Identity in Contemporary Far-Right Discourse

It is crucial to differentiate between Christianity as a devotion or a belief structure and Christianity as an identity marker. Many far-right figures claim to be Christian because they were born and raised in Britain, a “Christian country,” yet they do not practice in any meaningful sense. Robinson himself converted in prison and claims to practice, yet this isn’t integral because his rhetoric suggests something more civilizational than devotional. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named the next Archbishop of Canterbury in 2025, Robinson retweeted a past statement of hers supporting Black Lives Matter, adding: “Their churches will stay empty; a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine Christianity [sic] is coming not this weak drivel.”6

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Here, he is infusing Christianity with gendered traditionalism to serve as a vehicle for narratives of strength, masculinity, and cultural defense. Similarly in his September Unite the Kingdom rally, some attendants were dressed as crusader soldiers. Gareth Talbot similarly admitted he does not necessarily believe in God but has started attending church because he fears Christianity could be “replaced.”7 This concession undermines the notion that far-right politics’ attachment to Christianity is biblically rooted, or indeed that it even has to be in order to be acceptable. Rather, Christianity functions as cultural heritage and national memory, an integral part of British history and therefore culture. It operates independently of church attendance or doctrinal adherence.

Crucially, appeals to Christianity in this rhetoric often function as a boundary marker against Islam. While the far right mobilizes Christian language against “woke ideology,” its primary usage of “Christian Britain” emerges in debates about immigration and perceived Islamic cultural difference. Some argue that Robinson’s rhetoric about this being a Christian country is code for a “white” and specifically “not Muslim” country.8 However, this boundary-marking becomes unstable when confronted with demographic realities.

Demographic Transformation of British Christianity

The demographic transformation of Christianity in Britain is central to assessing the validity of the far right’s invocation. According to the 2021 Census, for the first time less than half of the population of England and Wales, 46.2 percent, or 27.5 million people, described themselves as Christian. This was a 13.1 percentage point drop from 59.3 percent, or 33.3 million people, in 2011. Furthermore, while the Muslim population increased from 1.5 million to 3.8 million between 2001 and 2021, and Hindus from 0.5 million to 1 million, the number of people with no religion rose far more dramatically, from 7.2 million to 20.7 million.9 This suggests that secularization, rather than Islam, is the most significant shift. Therefore, the invocation of a Christian Britain against a perceived outside threat does not hold as much weight as one may initially think. Church attendance is even lower, with only around 5 percent of Britons attending church on a typical Sunday.10 Thus, the 46.2 percent identifying as Christian includes many nominal rather than practicing believers.

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At the same time, there has been a dramatic shift in ethnic makeup. In 2001, 82 percent of white British respondents identified as Christian. By 2021, this had fallen to 49 percent. Among young people aged 16 to 24, religious practice among persons of color is two to three times higher than among white youths.

Migration has also significantly shaped the Christian population. Between 2001 and 2011, 1.2 million Christians migrated to the United Kingdom. Between 2011 and 2021, that number rose to 1.9 million. Christians were the largest group among the foreign-born population at 50 percent, comparable to Great Britain overall at 54 percent at the time. The proportion of foreign-born people with no religion, 18 percent, was half that of Great Britain overall at 36 percent.11

These data indicate that immigration has not diluted Christianity in Britain but rather, in many respects, has sustained it. More Britons are atheists than immigrants, and so advocacy for a “Christian Britain” cannot coherently function as a buffer against immigration as it is migrants themselves that significantly contribute to Christian vitality. Christianity in Britain is increasingly ethnically diverse and globally connected, and although the diverse Christians may not all be of the Anglican profession, they are increasingly the carriers of Christian values or ideology in whatever form. In fact, many of the Christian immigrants from the Global South may themselves carry conservative cultural values. In any case, the “Christian nation” invoked by the far right, implicitly white and ethnically British, diverges sharply from sociological reality: if one wishes for a more Christian Britain, one arguably ought to support current immigration trends, not oppose them.

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Conclusion

Historically, invoking Christianity against liberal cultural values has fair grounding, given Christianity’s complex relationship with liberalism: there are definitely conservative streams within historical Christianity. Using Christianity as a civilizational counterpoint to Islam also has historical precedent, whether through crusader narratives or broader European self-understandings. However, the invocation of Christianity is not useful in pursuit of an anti-immigrant or ethnically exclusivist program. Christianity in Britain is on average more common amongst a given migrant community than an increasingly secular white or British-born population, and the demographics within the faith continue to shift in this direction.12 This is why many Christian leaders have expressed discomfort with the far-right positions. In September, a group of Church of England bishops joined leaders from other denominations to condemn what they described as the “co-opting of the cross” at Robinson’s rally as a means of causing division and excluding others.13

The morality of co-opting is not the primary concern here. Observationally, the tension lies in this: an increasingly ethnically diverse and immigrant-sustained faith is being instrumentalized by a movement that positions itself, at best, as anti-immigrant and, at worst, as racially exclusionary. Given that young people (especially those of color) are often more politically disengaged,14 and given that young Christians of color are statistically more religiously active than their white counterparts, this dynamic may produce unexpected political realignments. As a result of the projected link between Christianity and right-wing politics—or at least with aspects of cultural conservatism—some Christians of color might be drawn toward conservative voting habits or at least lead them to align with more “traditional” political stances, for example, around gender politics. However, this is a speculation at this point and requires more evidence.

Anita Ukaenwe is a penultimate-year History undergraduate at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She is interested in using historical research to better understand contemporary social and policy issues.