Reform UK plays the faith card, again

Reform UK have unveiled their new multi-pronged pledge to ‘restore Britain’s Christian heritage’. The far-right party plans to introduce a ‘patriotic’ Christian curriculum, as well as attaching listed status to church buildings to prevent them being turned into mosques.

Quite apart from this pointless reactionary nostalgia, the plans would spell the death of those same churches that Reform claims to value. Which is unsurprising really, given that the pack of liars and conmen that make up the party couldn’t actually give a fig about Christianity – beyond its usefulness in stirring up Islamophobia, of course.

‘More things to take pride in’

Reform presented its plans through newly appointed home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, as his first speech in the new role. In an interview with the Times beforehand, Yusuf – himself a Muslim born to Sri Lankan immigrants – called Christianity:

core to the history and the DNA of the country.

However, he went on to complain of the UK losing its Christian values:

What we’ve seen is that sense of high-trust society eroded quite rapidly, actually, and that’s in no small part because of the vast numbers of people who have arrived over a short period of time from low-trust societies. Some people might wince at that phrase, but it’s just obviously true.

To counter this perceived issue, Yusuf declared that his party would institute a “patriotic curriculum” centered on Christianity. This, he argued, would give children “more things to take pride in again”:

I think if politicians play their part, then I’m optimistic that over time … they will have more things to take pride in as they are made to feel proud of their history again, rather than being taught that they should be ashamed of [it].

As such, this curriculum would presumably be incredibly restricted. If children are meant to take pride in patriotic Christianity, they’ll presumably have to skip over the litany of atrocities committed by the British church.

This includes, but is by no means limited to, the witch hunts, the forced indoctrination of colonised peoples (and the legacy of homophobia it left behind), numerous pogroms against Jewish people in the UK, and, of course, all those crusades against Muslim nations in the Middle East?

Actually, who am I kidding? Reform would probably think all of that shit was something to be proud of.

Listed status

Along with this festering lump of a policy proposal, Yusuf also stated that Reform would thrust automatic listed status onto church buildings. This would both require their upkeep and prevent changes in their use.

The home affairs spokesman explained that this would prevent churches from being turned into mosques. Yusuf claimed he’d received emails from “anxious residents” complaining about this very phenomenon, and said that:

Regardless of whether somebody is of faith or not, or which faith they follow, I think the Christian heritage of this country is very important and protecting our heritage and our culture is important, otherwise the country is not a country, it’s just an economic zone.

And so, as one step in pursuit of that, we will end the incendiary practice of converting churches into mosques or any other places of worship by granting listed status automatically to all churches and prohibiting that.

The problem here (or one problem at least) is that it’s a policy designed to whip up the idea of Muslims rocking up and turfing out a bunch of active Christians from an in-use church. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In the last decade alone, over 3500 churches have closed their doors. In turn, they’ve become pubs, clubs, gyms, apartments, and yes – other places of worship. The reasons behind the closures include declining attendance, falling income, and, in particular, the high cost of building maintenance.

In the 2021 census, the number of self-described Christians in England and Wales fell by 13% compared to the previous decade. This meant that Christians made up less than half of the population for the first time in the history of the census.

Empty, expensive and unused

However, for anyone who has attended church regularly in the last few decades, that decline has already been plainly visible. Whilst just under half of the population identify as Christian, only around 5% actually attend church.

Churches are closing, not because of Muslims immigrating to the UK, but because the buildings are old, expensive, and empty. What’s more, I think any representative of the church could have told Reform that, if they’d bothered to ask

Instead, the far-right party plans to burden an already-failing institution with the financial costs of maintaining listed churches. All the while, the buildings still sit idle, when they could instead gain new life and new use in the community – as places of worship or otherwise.

The move marks another step in Reform’s descent into a grim imitation of US-style Christofascism, nakedly motivated by Islamophobia. It’s a vain attempt to appeal to an imaginary, idealised, bygone era of a more homogeneously (white) Christian UK.

Oh, and it would be utterly ruinous to the very institution that Reform is paying lip-service to, to boot.

Featured image via the Canary