It’s been quite a week for the special relationship. Not just a Chequers press conference and a Windsor Castle state banquet, but also a White House podcast and a Whitehall march: if the first pairing garnered more of the world’s attention, the second signals a trend that is increasing and disquieting in equal measure.
The podcast was a special edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, hosted by JD Vance in honour of the slain activist. On one level, it was Vance’s opening pitch for the top job come 2028: allying himself with Kirk’s youth movement (“If it weren’t for Charlie Kirk, I would not be Vice-President”) and portraying himself as the ultimate conservative warrior for the next generation.
But it was also notable how much Vance and other figures in the administration leaned into the faith aspect of Kirk’s legacy. Vance quoted Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. It is like the precious ointment upon the head.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “Before every briefing, I always pray to Jesus Christ. Charlie was so outspoken with his faith, and I will continue to be [so] in honour of him.” Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr said: “It’s our mission to go out there and embolden young conservatives, young Christians.”
Forty-eight hours before, one of the larger banners at London’s Unite The Kingdom march had proclaimed “God. Family. Country. In That Order – Charlie Kirk”, attached to a picture of Uncle Sam and Britannia standing shoulder to shoulder. Speakers led crowds in chants of “Christ is King”; some marchers were even dressed as medieval crusaders. The far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson, one of the main speakers, would later tweet that “Charlie has inspired me to attend church for the first time in years.”
New Zealand preacher Brian Tamaki told the crowd: “This is a religious war. It’s Jesus Christ versus Satan. Christianity versus the rest. Islam, Hinduism, Bahai, Buddhism, and whatever else you’re into, are all false religions. We’ve gotta clean our countries up. We gotta get everything out that does not know or receive Jesus Christ. Ban any type of public expression in our Christian nations from other religions. Ban halal, ban burkas, ban mosques, ban temples, ban shrines. We don’t want those in our countries.”
Texan congressional candidate Valentina Gomez used her microphone to urge marchers to “send all of these rapist Muslims and dirty rugs back to their sharia nations.” And a man carrying a flag featuring a Knights Templar cross told journalist David Campanale: “It’s a Crusade cross. It represents the Crusaders who drove the Muslims and Islamists from Europe. We need our country back, and we need to keep getting back to what it was, say, in the 1950s when men were men, and they all went to work.”
These are all tactics straight from Viktor Orbán’s playbook in Hungary, a casting of the speaker as defender of a Christian country under existential threat from outsiders. This represents not so much Christianity as Christianism: aggressive, exclusionary and nationalistic. In a nation where Christianity has traditionally been a private, low-key matter, the stridency and openness of such sentiments were striking; so too were the anger and frustration behind them.
There were plenty of flags inscribed with Bible verses such as “Jesus the Way, the Truth, the Life”, “Jesus is Lord”, “Turn back to God”. Anyone who’s driven on a motorway or passed through a town centre recently will have seen a sudden plethora of similar flags without the inscriptions – mainly Crosses of St George, though with plenty of Union Jacks too, hanging from bridges and lampposts. They’re part of an organised campaign called Operation Raise the Colours, designed to show pride or spread fear, depending on who you ask or who you are. Flags tend to come out either at times of national celebration (royal jubilees, football tournaments) or national crisis. No prizes for guessing which one this is.
Behind these headline-grabbing antics, however, is a deeper trend: the explicit linking of conservative values with Christian ones, a crossover imported from the US and taking hold here (as exemplified by the recent defection of outspokenly Christian MP Danny Kruger from the Tories to Reform). One of the main sources of funding for grassroots religious movements is hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall. Marshall owns two influential conservative media outlets, The Spectator and UnHerd, and co-owns a third, GB News: he has also given millions to the Church Revitalisation Trust, whose aim includes, in its own words, “the evangelisation of the nation […] and the transformation of society.”
Evangelisation is the key here. Marshall worships at Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), the single wealthiest and most influential Anglican church in the country. HTB has long been known for its wildly successful Alpha course and celebrity attendees, but it has also taken up conservative stances on issues such as same-sex marriage blessings. “Those with the biggest chequebooks could be allowed to wield excessive influence and pursue their views, especially when they tip over into political extremism,” says religion journalist Tim Wyatt.
In a 2021 essay for UnHerd, Marshall harked back to the radicals of the English civil war. “In all the great struggles of the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “the calls for freedom were inseparable from the deep Christian faith of the protagonists, whether we are talking about the Parliamentarians, the Levellers or Oliver Cromwell himself… Meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible, and virtue from following the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.”
Marshall is clearly a highly intelligent and principled man whose fusion of faith and politics is deep-seated and coherent. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that in many other cases the overlay of religion is more performative and muddled. “When pressed,” Campanale writes of the Unite The Kingdom march, “some people I interviewed in the crowd carrying Jesus flags said they were not Christians and would not be in church on Sunday. This included one young man who was parading a banner with Bible verses.”
Is this a surprise in a country where “no religion” will almost certainly be the largest category by the time the next census comes around in 2031? In a country where fewer than one per cent of the population attends church on any given Sunday? In a country where vicars are obliged to cover ever greater numbers of parishes as there simply isn’t the demand there used to be? We have been in retreat from Anglicanism – at least from the traditional quiet, gentle forms of Anglicanism – for several decades now.
These are not quiet or gentle times, however, and here’s the rub. More than 100,000 people attended the Unite The Kingdom march, and the vast majority were not wannabe fascist thugs spoiling for a fight: they were ordinary, law-abiding citizens concerned about where their country’s going, bewildered as to how it’s got here, and feeling marginalised and ignored in their attempts to have their own voices heard. In this context, a grabbing at Christianity’s hem may indeed be performative, but it’s not necessarily cynical: it is instead more likely to be the product of confusion. When things aren’t working as they should, why not hark back to a time when they did? If not strictly religious Christianity, it’s certainly cultural Christianity, baked in with memories (singing hymns at school, Nativity displays, Easter celebrations) and wider social ideas (stop immigration, defend free speech).
“I think a lot of people are looking for something, and what they’re really looking for is Jesus Christ,” said Stuart Connolly from Birmingham at the march. “That’s what they want when they’re patriotic and they long for another time in England. It’s basically Christian values when we could love one another and trust one another.” Mary from Liverpool agreed. “The country needs more than just some values. They need an anchor, which is Jesus.”
But Jesus would surely not have approved of the flags that echo medieval crusades against Muslims, or of the myriad ways people find to demonise others. (As a man born in what is now Palestine, Jesus would be an immigrant were he to arrive in Britain today: so too Saint George, who hailed from Cappadocia in modern-day Turkey). The danger of allying Christianity too closely with politics is that the Christianity in question can easily become more Old Testament than new. In an era that thrives on tribalism and confrontation, “an eye for an eye” seems more satisfying than “turn the other cheek” and “onward Christian soldiers” feels stronger and more dramatic than “blessed are the peacemakers”.
The limits of Old Testament scripture in contemporary life are memorably shown up in the episode of The West Wing in which Martin Sheen’s President Josiah Bartlet takes a conservative radio show host to task. “I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7,” he says. “She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police? […] Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?”
Countering the perceived wrongs and excesses of one religion by ramping up your own does not solve the problem, it merely perpetuates it. All religion taken to extremes encourages the demonisation of other religions, or even of the insufficiently devout members in one’s own. To take one of Jesus’s most famous quotes: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
For the absolute disgrace of the Rotherham grooming gangs, see the no less awful child plethora of child abuse cases in both Catholic and Anglican churches. Moreover, strictures on women’s behaviour and prejudice against homosexuals apply quite as much to certain strands of conservative Christian thought as to conservative Islamic views. (There’s a reason why six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale have struck such a chord with so many people.)
The tenets of the New Testament, on the other hand, are largely ones of basic common decency, which is – or should be – the preserve not only of all religions, but of agnosticism and atheism too. A robustly secular democracy should defend such values to the hilt, protecting all faiths without giving legal favouritism to any. This does not mean letting everything go – quite the opposite. There is no requirement to be endlessly tolerant of those who in turn do not tolerate our own general way of life. For example, a radical Islamist who actively works towards the establishment of a universal caliphate has no place in a secular nation state with its own borders, freedoms and history. A young man from a sexually conservative society who feels entitled to harass or assault teenage girls should be equally unwelcome. But, pace motes and beams, crimes such as sexual assault are by no means the preserve of one race, colour or creed, and to use Christ in any way to suggest that they are is disingenuous at best and downright iniquitous at worst.
The separation of church and state is not an optional extra in modern democracy, it is its lifeblood. The clergy were traditionally part of the first estate, with huge powers and influence over monarchs (who themselves were deemed to rule by divine right). Churches defended hierarchy and stood against liberty. The winnowing away of their influence began with the Enlightenment and was gradually replaced by a balance between executive, legislature and judiciary. That change has been pivotal to the development of pretty much every Western democracy, ours included, and we jeopardise it at our peril.
This is not to say that the clergy have no part in modern life, of course: quite the opposite. They are, can and should always be a moral voice, working for the betterment of society in any number of ways that aren’t strictly political, and it’s refreshing and very welcome that almost three dozen Christian leaders (including several serving bishops and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams) have signed an open letter condemning “the co-opting of Christian symbols, particularly the cross, during the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally…. As Christians from different theological and political backgrounds we stand together against the misuse of Christianity. The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other. Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger. Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable.”
This piece began with the special relationship, and it ends there too. We have over the decades assimilated more of American culture than of any other country, much of which has been positive, uplifting and resonant. The best of American politics over those decades – Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill”, the Marshall Plan (George 1948 rather than Paul 2025) – have been equally inspiring.
But we don’t need to import absolutely everything from across the Atlantic, and it’s always worth remembering how much divides as well as unites us. Sir Christopher Meyer, ambassador to Washington, DC, between 1997 and 2003, wrote: “Think of the US as a foreign country, [and] you will be pleasantly surprised by the many things you find in common with this most generous and hospitable of peoples. Think of America as Britain writ large and you risk coming to grief; American attitudes to patriotism, religion, crime and punishment, schooling, sex, the outside world, can be very different from those of Europeans, including the British. [It can come] as a shock to discover that most Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, sophisticate or redneck, believe that their country’s actions in the world are intrinsically virtuous; and more fool those countries that do not recognise this. The attitude of Britain’s Victorians was very similar.”
We are not Victorians: we’ve moved on from that, for better and worse. Meyer was ambassador when Alastair Campbell famously told Tony Blair: “We don’t do God”, and in the context it was meant, it was as sound advice then as it is now. We don’t do God as part of our politics. We don’t (unlike the USA) have “In God We Trust” on our banknotes or expect our politicians to end their speeches with calls for God to bless our country. And we don’t publicly cloak ourselves in religion and implicitly dare others to call us out on such apparent piety. If we do do God, we do so quietly, privately, without fanfare. We can be Christian and we can be nationalistic, but we like to keep the two apart.
A report from the Pew Research Group earlier this year found that six per cent of Americans were classified as religious nationalists, with 58% members of the country’s historically predominant religion (Christianity); the corresponding figures for Britons were one and 42. When asked whether religion mostly helps society, 72% of Americans agreed but only 46% of Britons; conversely, 57% of Britons thought it encouraged intolerance, as opposed to merely 33% of Americans.
And there is more than enough intolerance in the world as it is. One of the most quoted poems in these febrile times is W B Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, written in 1919. Novelists, poets and singers have riffed in particular on “things fall apart” and “the centre cannot hold”. But watching Christianity be hijacked and twisted into something far from its essence brings to my mind two passages later in that poem. The first is a lament, that: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The second, starker and darker, is a warning:
“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. He has written ‘Open Side’ with Sam Warburton, ‘Rise’ with Siya Kolisi, and ‘Leap Of Faith’ with Frankie Dettori
