Monday, October 12, 2026
What is Christian nationalism?
Faced with studied indifference by the owners, the council has twice now painted over these tags, and the culprits appear to have moved on to defacing walls in nearby parks. However, I noticed the other day that a makeshift wooden cross (pictured) has been erected above the billboard in a clear attempt to differentiate the perpetrators from the multi-cultural society we now live in.
The Ku Klux Klan of course, used to brandish burning crosses as they murdered black Americans, thankfully it hasn't come to that here, yet.
The Guardian carries an interesting article about the sort of people responsible for this type of vandalism, labelled as Christian nationalists. They describe this group as being driven largely by people who rarely attend church and are more concerned with defending the country’s Christian heritage.
They focus on a report, by the thinktank Theos, which has identified five different groups within the UK in a survey that looked at their attitudes to Christianity and Britishness. They say that the group whose views most closely resembled Christian nationalism, termed “identity integrationists” by the researchers, accounted for 11% of respondents, making it the smallest of the five groups:
Although 81% of this group identified as Christian, just 13% attended church weekly, only slightly above the 11% average across the population surveyed. Less than a third (31%) prayed weekly, while 47% expressed an interest in the Bible.
The group was strongly hostile to immigration and Islam. Just 19% agreed that Christian values required welcoming and supporting asylum seekers, while 30% supported the equal treatment of religions in public life.
In contrast, another group in the survey with high levels of Christian affiliation, were considerably more religiously observant and less hostile to immigration and religious diversity. They comprised 13% of respondents.
Among these “belief integrationists”, 31% attended church weekly, 46% prayed weekly and 62% expressed an interest in the Bible.
Almost half (48%) agreed that Christian values required welcoming and supporting asylum seekers, while 63% supported the equal treatment of religions in public life.
Although they are the group containing the highest proportion of practising Christians, only 18% of belief integrationists think that defending Britain’s Christian culture and heritage is important for being Christian, compared with 90% of the Christian nationalist group.
At a time when crosses have been carried at Unite the Kingdom rallies and crowds have chanted “Christ is King” at protests, the research challenges the idea that the growing prominence of Christian nationalism in Britain reflects a revival of Christianity.
Instead, the findings suggest that Christianity is increasingly being invoked as a marker of British identity amid wider anxieties about immigration, Islam and cultural change.
These agitators and nationalists are not Christian in any sense of the word, though I am sure that some of them think that they are carrying on the work of Pope Urban II, who initiated the first crusade. But we should give the final word to the Rev Dr Helen Paynter, a theologian who has researched the far right’s use of Christianity:
“The church is and has been since its inception a multi-ethnic, multinational group, and may not rightly be equated with any nationality or ethnicity. In fact, the ‘average’ Christian in the world today is poor, female and black.”
For Paynter, one of most important findings is the starkly different attitudes evidenced by those who are practising Christians, compared with those who claim the label.
“The Christian faith is not just an identity that we can put on like a coat; it involves an encounter with transcendence which must be transformative of all our values.”
If these protestors really embraced Christianity, then they would understand that.
