Is Christian nationalism on the march?

Something peculiar is afoot in Great Britain. Last year, hundreds gathered on Bournemouth beach to witness a mass baptism. Crowds of young men marched under ‘Christ is King’ banners through the rain-slicked streets of London as part of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protest. MP Danny Kruger, then still a Conservative, went viral after declaring to an empty parliament chamber: ‘The story of England is the story of Christianity… We have to own our Christian story, or repudiate it.’ Meanwhile, as overall church attendance continues its slow slide across the UK, reports suggest young people are rediscovering faith with an intensity that belies the statistics and falling pew counts alike. A quiet revival, it seems, is stirring.

There is much debate surrounding the identity of the new Christians. Outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent have launched head-scratching analyses into why ‘supporters of Tommy Robinson’ are being baptised en masse. The Times questions whether young men have ‘lost their herd immunity to Christianity’. At its kindest, the commentary paints young converts as ‘lost boys’ searching for meaning. At its harshest, it views the revivalists as hostile, hard-right interlopers using the Church’s imagery to further their political causes.

So what do we know about the newly devout? A 2025 report by the Bible Society describes the standard-bearers of the Christian resurgence as predominantly young and male. They are also more likely to be Catholic than Pentecostal or Anglican, suggesting an inclination towards a more liturgical, ritualistic version of the faith, as opposed to something purely experiential. Though we have yet to gain a complete picture, it is difficult to deny that the public face of Britain’s latest generation of believers seems designed to short-circuit every residual Anglican stereotype: not meek, guilt-ridden, or satisfied with the ‘milky’ Church, but bold, politically active and unapologetically online.

While it would be lazy to cast all of Gen Z converts as uncompromising American-style Christian fundamentalists, a brief scroll through Catholic Twitter is enough to confirm that this breed of believer now exists in Britain. X is where one is most likely to encounter what the internet refers to as a ‘TradCath’. Though not all traditional Catholics are TradCaths, all TradCaths are traditional Catholics (and then some). Members of this subculture mix scholarly tweed with crusader flair. They enjoy discussing the grandeur of faith – the meaty theology, the rites, the architectural splendour, the togas-and-sandals of it all – but show markedly less enthusiasm for the unglamorous grind of parish politics and the slow, unspectacular work of keeping institutions of faith alive. Often, they can be found quote-tweeting political opponents with calls to repent, lamenting the liberal church reforms of the 1960s, and slam-dunking Matthew 10:34 (‘I have not come to bring peace, but the sword’) on ‘progressive’ atheists who insist Jesus was akshully an open-borders pacifist. British TradCaths – along with their disillusioned Anglican counterparts – are also intensely proud of their nation’s Christian heritage.

It is clear to see why X has become the natural gathering place for this crowd. In recent years, the platform has offered unprecedented space for theological discussion and zealous performance in equal measure. No longer are British Christians limited to interactions with their local parish priest during surgery hours; now, they can bicker online with top theologians, anonymous monks, unverified shamans, podcasting Dominicans, reformed Baptists and just about everyone in between.

Amid the noise, a handful of figures have carved out more prominent, more politicised platforms for themselves. And this is where we come to an emergent strain of Christian nationalism. Just this past November, pundit and recent addition to the priesthood Calvin Robinson issued the following call:

‘England is a white Christian country. One does not need to be an etho-nat[ionalist] to appreciate that… Christians are persecuted in England. Christianity thrives under persecution. If white Englishmen want to survive, they must return to the faith of their forefathers.’

Robinson is not entirely wrong. For all its ethnic mixing and complex pockets of immigration, England remains majority white. And though the Kingdom of England was not officially Christian when it was founded in 927 AD, it has certainly been culturally Christian for much of its existence. Even after the accelerated decline of churchgoing from the late 20th century onwards, Britain’s institutions, landscape, art, community structure and moral vocabulary are shot through with a distinctly Christian inheritance. If we in the West are goldfish, as historian Tom Holland puts it, then Christianity is the water in which we swim.

At the same time, there’s plenty to challenge here, too – particularly the idea that the ‘survival’ of ‘white Englishmen’ hinges on a return to the faith. As others have pointed out, this sounds like Christianity infused with blood-and-soil nationalism. A form of identity politics rebranded with Templar iconography.

The Church of England leadership has, until recently, had few qualms about mixing faith and politics, especially ‘progressive’ politics. Its leaders have frequently spoken out on a range of issues, from opposing the former Tory government’s attempts to tackle illegal immigration to coming out in support for Black Lives Matter. But it seems they’re less happy if those of an unwoke persuasion invoke Christianity. So they accused those attending the Unite the Kingdom rally last autumn of ‘co-opting’ and ‘corrupting’ the cross in order to divide.

‘Many will come in my name’, said Jesus, shortly before his crucifixion, ‘and they will lead many astray’. Certainly, the prevailing view is that the pied pipers have arrived. But for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of this apparent Christian revival, it would be unwise to entirely dismiss Calvin Robinson’s claim that Christians are facing a tough time in Britain right now. Because it’s this sense of persecution, of being culturally threatened, that is partially driving the Christian pushback.

Of course, Christians here don’t face systemic persecution in any life-threatening sense of the word. To suggest as much does a huge disservice to some 380million Christians around the world, from North Korea to Nigeria, for whom persecution is a bleak and daily reality. That said, British Christians have faced a growing range of pressures since the turn of the century. One 2025 report placed the UK among Europe’s ‘most hostile’ countries to Christians; another found that 56 per cent of British Christians have experienced antagonism or ridicule when discussing their faith. Interestingly, this rose to 61 per cent for respondents under 35, suggesting younger generations are even less tolerant of Christianity than their largely secular Gen X parents.

No faith should be exempt from mockery in a liberal, secular society – and in the case of Christianity, whose central claim is that God became man to endure the ultimate humiliation, a certain tolerance for mean-spirited jibes ought to be expected. The same goes for the attempts to deny or distort Britain’s religious past, from English Heritage’s ahistorical assertion that Christmas is actually a refurbished Roman Sun-god festival, to the continued creep of insipid Americanisms like ‘happy holidays’ and ‘festive season’. Christianity is often cast in the post-colonial fantasies of modern academia as the scheming sidekick to ‘whiteness’ (the final boss of Western wrongdoing), and so it has become increasingly awkward for forward-thinking institutions to associate with. But these slights remain of the annoying but largely harmless kind. They might even be understood as the spasms of a newly post-Christian society desperate to prove itself as such. Convert zeal, if you like.

Far less easy to dismiss, however, is the growing number of British Christians facing censorship, unfair dismissal and, in some cases, arrest over matters of belief. In 2025, multiple Christians faced fines or police action for quietly protesting near abortion clinics, including a woman fined £20,000 for holding a sign reading ‘here if you want to talk’. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who was praying silently in her head within an abortion clinic ‘buffer zone’ was told by police that her ‘mere presence’ was deemed ‘harassment’.

These were not isolated incidents. Christian teachers, pastoral workers and medical staff increasingly report a sense of vulnerability over holding views that are central to their faith. There was Kristie Higgs, who, in 2019, was unlawfully suspended from her role at a school in Gloucestershire, after criticising her son’s sex-education curriculum on a private Facebook page. Or the anonymous teacher who was dismissed, referred to a safeguarding board and reported to the Metropolitan Police after telling a Muslim student that ‘Britain is still a Christian state’.

Just like the freedom to mock or criticise Christianity, the freedom to express Christian beliefs must be protected under law. But both Christian and secular observers are beginning to note inconsistency in how such protections are applied. In March 2025, Bristol-based pastor Dia Moodley was accosted by three Muslim men while preaching about the differences between Christianity and Islam. The men began to shove him. ‘I’m going to stab you’, said one. Somerset police officers responded to the incident by threatening to arrest Moodley for ‘breaching the peace’. Moodley had already been arrested back in 2024 for public comments made about Islam.

This incident captures the key ingredient contributing to the turn among some towards a more assertive Christianity – namely, the growing and uneasy awareness that Britain’s Christian heritage is colliding, more and more frequently, not only with official multiculturalism, but also with Islamic sectarianism and extremism.

This unease is not altogether unfounded. Indeed, Christmas markets that once conjured images of tinsel and fairy lights have now become associated with anti-ramming bollards. In the Essex seaside town of Southend, shopfronts were recently vandalised with intimidatory graffiti reading ‘This is a Muslim area’. Last year, police were summoned after a Muslim woman stormed into an Islington church, shouting repeatedly into its sound system: ‘I have come to kill the God of the Jews.’ A month prior, a mob of around 50 balaclava-clad Muslim males had trashed Croydon high street while chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’.

Set against the backdrop of government efforts to enshrine an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’ – one that would render robust criticism of Islam extremely difficult – it is perhaps unsurprising that sections of Britain’s disenfranchised youth are starting to feel apprehensive. And so they are looking to Christianity to provide a buffer against the aggressive strain of Islam that the UK has been incubating.

This brings us to anti-Islam campaigner Tommy Robinson, seen as the combative figurehead of Britain’s Christian nationalism. Although he has long talked up the importance of Britain’s Christian heritage, he seemingly underwent his own road-to-Damascus moment during a prison sentence in 2024, when he is said to have become a Christian convert. He now wants to see Christianity actively celebrated in public life – as a marker not just of faith, but also of national unity.

‘There should be a massive Christmas event put on by our government’, Robinson insisted towards the end of 2025. ‘Did you see Poland’s this year? Did you see the Christmas market switch-on? All the lights, lit in the colours of their country.’ Soon after, Robinson announced his own alternative: a carol concert entitled ‘UNITED FOR CHRIST THIS CHRISTMAS’, each letter emblazoned with the colours of the Union flag. While publicly framed as a peaceful celebration – ‘not about politics, immigration, or other groups’ – promotional emails sent out on the lead-up to the concert told a slightly different story:

‘The left-wing elites are waging a ruthless war on Christianity, tearing down our crosses and silencing our prayers in the name of their globalist agenda. Lefty cities like Sheffield (which has a Muslim mayor), have cancelled their Christmas lights this year… But we will not yield our Christian heritage demands we fight back with unyielding resolve.’

Another email cast the event as a kind of festive resistance: ‘This isn’t just a concert, it’s a rally for our values… a statement that Britain belongs to the British people.’ In the same message, London mayor Sadiq Khan was labelled ‘a coloniser’, ‘unwelcome guest’ and ‘Muslim extremist’ who ‘will hate the fact that real Christians are celebrating Christmas on his patch’. While Khan had allegedly transformed ‘London, our city, into a Sharia Zone’, Robinson’s event would be ‘a shining light in the midst of turmoil caused by unchecked immigration and the fading of our cultural identity’.

In the end, the 13 December concert drew only a fraction of the attendees that Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally had just two months earlier. Nonetheless, the media responded as if this sparsely crowded carol concert was a 21st-century equivalent of Mussolini’s March on Rome. ‘A far-right perversion of the Gospel’ dedicated to ‘undermining peace and goodwill’, bleated the Guardian. Anglican priest and commentator Giles Fraser described it as an event for those with ‘thuggish anti-immigrant intent’, conjuring images of cross-wielding skinheads chanting ‘In-gur-land’ between verses of ‘Hark the Herald’. Yet a cursory glance at the footage suggests that if the concert’s aim was to wage spiritual warfare, it was a dismal failure.

Even so, Tommy Robinson and others have unwittingly exposed the biggest hole in the ‘Christian nationalist’ movement – there’s a lot about Christianity they don’t really get.

Put simply, the story of Christianity is not one of worldly glory. It has never promised civilisational dominance or cultural protection. It does not promise a comprehensive socio-political order in the way that Islam can. It therefore struggles to provide certain young Christian converts with what they want – which is something like the muscular, totalitarian convictions that they see exhibited among certain Islamist factions. This should come as a surprise to no one. The people of Israel once prayed for a king, a general, a liberator from the oppressions of Rome; what they got was a Nazarene carpenter who told them to ‘render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. Christ promised a separation of temporal and spiritual powers. He offered no equivalent to Sharia, nor instructions for a militaristic branch of discipleship. Where Islam’s revelation assumes governance, Christianity’s assumes non-sovereignty. Christianity carries within it the promise of secularism. The upshot is that it leaves room for the very religious plurality that Islam has historically choked out – and that today’s Islamists and Muslim hard-liners are exploiting.

As Tertullian suggested some 18 centuries ago, and St Paul a couple of centuries before that, Christians conquer not by killing, but by dying. Conversely, in almost every instance that Christianity has become the reigning authority, its following has waned. It operates under the painful juxtaposition of being strong when it is weak, appealing when it is out of fashion. In that light, it is hard not to wonder if Tommy Robinson might have achieved more simply by picking a struggling parish (of which there are many) and attending a carol concert there – thus encouraging his millions of followers to do the same. Indeed, if there is a Christian revival underway, it is precisely because the British state has not been propping up the church, rather than in spite of it.

There is plenty about the state of modern Britain to be angry about. And it is entirely reasonable to want to preserve and renew one’s national culture. But those hoping Christianity will serve as a ready-made tool for national, cultural revival will be disappointed. This was clear even to the earliest Christians, hence Didache, writing in the first century AD, says nothing of Christianising the state, and everything of Christianising the men within it. Its leaders did not riot, stage protests, or attempt to reclaim Rome. Many went singing to their deaths in the Colosseum, transforming the world around them through witness, not force or fear. For some, this emphasis on inner renewal over political triumph will be a source of solace; for others, it will be a thorn in the flesh.

The temptation to make Christ a mascot for national renewal is not new. It was the temptation of Peter in the garden, of Constantine on the battlefield, of countless kings, clerics and national leaders since. But Christianity was born of exile – and its power has always come from being willing to lose. Whether Britain’s new Christians are willing to endure the sacrifice Christianity demands still remains to be seen.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.