Is the far right hijacking Christianity?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, how the far right is hijacking Christianity.

0:22Regular listeners will remember an episode I made back in September from Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom rally. Are we ready to unite the kingdom? So much took me by surprise that day Not least the sheer size and scale of it But one thing I really wasn't prepared for Was how Jesus-y it was We want to appreciate the King of Kings The Lord of Lords There were young men carrying wooden crosses God, you have not abandoned Britain People wearing crusader costumes wielding shields saying deus vault, the Latin for God's will. Islam is our real enemy. We have to get rid of Islam. Islam doesn't belong to Europe.

1:08There were preachers whipping up the crowd. Here's the Islamic terrorist flag. In the name of Jesus, you terrorist organisation, rip it up, boys. They've attacked the family. They've attacked Christianity. They've opened the borders. We are the start of a counter-revolution. Yep, Tommy Robinson has found God. And he says he doesn't need to actually go to church or anything for his militant and hate-filled form of worship. I do believe that there is a Christian revival happening and I think that there is a masculine form of Christianity that's going to rise and it's going to be detached from the church.

1:56This Saturday, he's holding another outdoor rally, this time a carol concert to Put the Christ Back Into Christmas. So join us on December the 13th, where we'll be uniting the kingdom once again in central London to put Christ back into Christmas.

2:19But this Christian revival is bigger than the far right. More and more young people in Britain, and particularly young men, are being drawn into the faith. But why? And can a religion that preaches love thy neighbour really sing from the same hymn sheet as Christian nationalists? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. The Gen Z Christian revival and the battle for the soul of Christianity.

2:48Lamorna Ash, welcome to Today in Focus. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to have you here in the studio today. for this discussion about the, to me anyway, quite surprising revival of Christianity, particularly among young people. But you're the perfect person for this, of course, because you have written a book and it's called Don't Forget We're Here Forever, A New Generation's Search for Religion, which looks at why young people, particularly in their 20s and 30s, seem to be finding God, specifically the Christian God. So tell me, why did you decide to write this book? Well, I heard a story from basically a piece of gossip from a friend who said, did you know those two guys who were at university with who were a comedy double act they both converted to christianity and now they both want to become priests and it was just so far from my social world that i didn't really know anything about why someone our age would convert what the practice of conversion is how your life changes and i started going to church alongside them and trying to understand it that way by being sort of in the space with them realizing how significant prayer had become to their day and slowly started to shift my sense of what I thought faith was.

3:54And so that's when I went to my editors at my publisher and I said, I think I want to write about Christianity because if there's two people converting, there's bound to be more people. And so these comedian friends of yours, did you find that they were outliers or are they just part of a growing trend? At the time, it really felt like they were outliers. So in the last UK census the number of people who identify as a Christian dropped below 50 % for the first time all these different analyses of what's going to happen to Christianity in the future suggests that the Church of England and Catholicism were going to kind of decline into obsolescence by like 2062 and then as the book came out almost I think within the same month this really unexpected survey that's been titled The Quiet Revival which is done by YouGov and the Bible Society found that actually there's been this really surprising shift from, I think it's in 2018, 4 % of 18 to 24-year-olds went to church once monthly.

4:49And that jumped massively to 16 % in 2024. Higher numbers of young men. And these stats keep on coming out. There's more and more evidence that more young people are turning to church. Yeah, and as I said, it really takes me by surprise because for years and years the story has been of dwindling congregations, churches with only a handful of parishioners being sold off to be turned into flats. But I mean, we're talking about Christianity, which is not just one thing, is it? There's all kinds of actually a bewildering number of denominations. Is it a particular branch of Christianity that is seeing this youth revival?

5:23So bewildering, because when I was researching it, what the statistics prove is that Catholicism is rising and Pentecostalism and more charismatic forms of Christianity have higher attendance rates among young people. Anglicanism is continuing to dwindle. The reasons behind that are you can convert instantly you can go in there and immediately confess your life and say I believe in Lord Jesus Christ as my personal saviour and I found that these more conservative forms were also attracting more conservative young people. Also there's just been statistics that show that orthodoxy that's also rising again among young men particularly and then this simile is happening across Europe.

6:01And in terms of the demographic breakdown is it particularly white young people or is it people of colour because when I think about like big churches in Manchester where I live the ones that you can hear the gospel outside they're raising the roof on a Sunday morning those tend to be the African churches yeah so within these stats from the quiet revival 50 % of young black people between 18 and 34 go to church once monthly as well at least and again the proportion of people who are an ethnic minority among the younger generation of people who go to church is higher than the older generation. So there is something here about immigration having a role to play in the rise of Christianity in Britain.

6:41And yet at the same time, there's a lot of young white men who are also going to church for the first time. So it definitely adds the numbers up.

6:55It's so interesting. It really is a plot twist that I didn't see coming because I came of age in the 90s and I come from I would say like a fairly evangelical Christian family I used to dismissively call it a happy clappy church because there was an electric guitar and a drum kit I love that and people waving banners and weeping and I was really embarrassed about the fact that I had to go to church I'd get picked up after a sleepover at like 9am on a Sunday I was like oh no I'd get the mick taken out of me it was so uncool and at this point in history you saw the kind of rise of the new atheists so you had Richard Dawkins Christopher Hitchens it was just so lame to be a Christian it was something that was to be hidden actually and so how have we got from there to here you know we're talking at a time when like the biggest album in the world Rosalia's looks is seeped in Christian imagery all about saints so how have we got to this point so many different reasons because I met again I met about 60 young people who all had their own very particular idiosyncratic way of getting to faith.

7:59But I think the kind of things that we can point out are, one, this sense of financial insecurity and fear about the future among young people, this horror that we're in this present with these like accumulating crises everywhere, whether that's the genocide in Gaza, whether that's the inevitability of climate collapse, whether that's feelings of isolation. We know that mental health crises are up so much with younger generations, feeling lonely, the kind of difficulties of feeling judged on social media. And suddenly a lot of young people thinking, hang on, aren't there these spaces where I can feel accepted and welcomed into a community?

8:34Somewhere where I can put my phone away and be part of something with other people? Aren't there places that can tell me that there's a larger meaning towards which my life can be directed? So there is this sense that when the world feels more horrifying, people are more likely to turn to faith. That happened a lot in the pandemic. Yeah, I was going to say, now that we've had the pandemic, things that previously would have seemed to me completely implausible. the idea that I might experience civilizational collapse doesn't seem as far-fetched as it would have done five years ago. I feel a bit bonkers even saying it but it's really changed the way we view the world hasn't it?

9:06Totally. It also provided this quite beautiful lacuna for a lot of people to think I'm home alone and again if you think about what you were saying about judgment from other peers to actually think what do I care about? What matters to me? What's significant? And suddenly it meant without judgment young people could enter a religious space virtually and start to see if that was something that interested them. And then there's also the crisis of masculinity. There is also a huge amount of young people who are kind of horrified by what they think of as modernity, the sense of what their place is in society.

9:38And so there's a whole swathe of more conservative churches that tend to have a more kind of patriarchal system that maybe don't allow women preachers, that maybe have quite intolerant views towards LGBTQ people. And I met, for instance, a young man who converted to orthodoxy and he, during the pandemic, had become, as he told me, a conspiracy theorist and felt so deeply isolated in his views. And he turned up in orthodox service and suddenly he felt that he was allowed to join in, that suddenly he was welcomed in. There's suddenly all these Christian influences, mostly from America, but also more in Europe as well, who might be catalyzing conversions, who might be saying to young men, if you're feeling lost, be welcomed into the church.

10:27It's something that had really passed me by, I confess, until, honestly, this September, when I and a producer from this show, we went down to Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom rally. And I think what astonished me most was just the amount of Christian regalia, Christian imagery, young men carrying wooden crosses, like the kind of cross that Jesus was crucified on. And then when we finally managed to squeeze onto the Whitehall where the big event was taking place. Honestly, the first hour and a half, it was like a gospel concert. Yeah. And we were really flabbergasted. We were like, what the heck is going on?

11:01What did you make of that? So I guess it was just coming off the back of Charlie Kirk's assassination. There was a pastor from New Zealand who was talking about, you know, this spiritual war. There is no other religions. There's only Jesus Christ and then all the rest. This is religious wars. We've got to clean our countries up. Ban halal, ban burghers, ban mosques, ban temples, ban shrines. Talking constantly about this idea of spiritual warfare, which feels new in Britain and older in America, which is a war against Islam. And so I think when I was looking at what was happening to unite the kingdom, a kind of useful distinction that I found, and I heard this in your interviews actually, is between cultural Christians and practicing Christians.

11:47and people who are embracing Christianity for what the identity means, for that sense of nostalgia, often Christianity becoming synonymous with whiteness in this kind of nationalist, fascist form of Christianity. Definitely, there's one conversation I look back on in that crowd when I was talking to a man who was talking about Britain is not the Britain that it used to be and nobody goes to church anymore. No, I think this country's gone. Churches are failing, so people are not going to church now. Do you go to church? No, I used to. Let me go. I mean, I don't go to church either. I don't. I don't know any children that do now.

12:20They're selling off churches anyway, the mosques. That's because none of us are going. Well, that's why, because you've got a government in here that's not driving people to do it. We've got this moment where suddenly there's Christian terminology being thrown around in right and more right circles. But then there's also this tension between those who maybe were brought up in the church and those who are adopting it now. So there's also Neville Watson, who left reform after seeing the Unite the Kingdom protest because he said, what I saw there was not Christianity. But I say as someone, as a follower of Jesus Christ, look at the rhetoric.

12:53We cannot just blame all our ills on immigration. The only black branch leader of reform, and he's left and he's moved to the Christian People's Alliance, who are really interesting at this tiny, tiny fringe party. And they have both positions like the need to kind of get family values back and probably some really anti-LGBTQ views. But they're also huge on homelessness and huge on trying to do prison reform by looking after people who've come out of prison so they wouldn't go back to prison. And that sounds more like the Christianity that I recognise, albeit I turn my back on Christianity. But to me, I was brought up to believe that it's about loving your neighbour, about loving the most vulnerable people in society and not about putting your own first, which is kind of the message that I got from the Unite the Kingdom rally, that we look after our own in this country and therefore we don't have space for foreigners coming over here.

13:42It just seems, I sort of heard so much hate and prejudice that just felt antithetical to me to what I thought Christianity was supposed to be about. I thought the same. And then I had, I read this really interesting book, The Claimed Christianity, which is about far right movements and their adoption of Christianity across Europe. They're both theologians. They said that often what the left in Christianity can do is say what the far right are doing is not Christianity at all. But in fact, there is a theological basis for quite a lot of what is being said. There is a bit in one of the Gospels where Jesus Christ said, I came not for peace, but with a sword.

14:14There's another moment in the Gospels where Christ says that the violent take it by violence. There are these moments where spiritual warfare and this desire to battle in Christianity does exist, as they do in all religious texts. And the Pakistani academic, Akbar Ahmad, who was mostly writing about Islamic fascism, he was suggesting that in each religious text, there are beautiful moments where they talk about peace and pacifism and generosity to strangers. and others, but there are also moments of violence because these attacks written thousands of years ago and the world has changed.

14:50Yeah, I'm a Christian. And I've also seen the decay in British society. And the fall of Britain has come from the fall of belief. And what built Great Britain? Christianity. Since people have left it, it's left a void. And that void's being filled. And how cynically do you think we should take Tommy Robinson's conversion to Christianity, this carol concert that he's got. He's advertised it saying, this event marks the beginning of a new Christian revival in the UK, a moment to reclaim and celebrate our heritage, culture and Christian identity. I think it's so hard to know how cynically to take an individual conversion because we can never know if faith is at root.

15:29It's like deeply private experience. But I think what we do know about Tommy Robinson is that he gets lots of funding from big Christian American organisations. It is politically expedient for him to therefore align himself with Christianity. It's also cynical to the extent that there's this idea of a new way of articulating one's racism, that you can camouflage racism under the idea of religion. So what we know about Tommy Robinson is that his Islamophobia has been central to his politics since he came into the public sphere. Show some respect. Show some respect. Show some respect. The reality is this is a war.

16:03These people are waging war on us for time. This has gone on for 1 ,400 years. This is nothing new. What you can then do by saying it's about religion is you can say this is not about Islamophobia. This is about a fear of Christianity being taken away in this country. Danny Kruger, when he gave a speech before he defected to reform in the House of Parliament in July, talked about Islam and also a religion that he called wokeism moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected. This is a Christian country, if it is a country at all, and I cannot be indifferent about the extent of the growth of Islam here in recent decades.

16:36But it's the other religion that worries me even more. It's the combination of ancient paganism and Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply... I mean, Tommy Robinson is always at pains to say that it's not about skin colour. It's about religions that are incompatible with the Western way of life and the way that we treat our women and our girls. Do you think that Christianity can sort of provide a useful cover but for people like him to sort of denounce skin colour-based racism. Yeah, I think definitely. But I think those categorisations very easily do slip back into racialised ones.

17:13I also think something I've been thinking about is some of the things that Tommy Robinson purports to most hate about Islam, which is often to do with a kind of entrenched misogyny or patriarchal tendencies, seems to be what the more right form of Christianity or Christians want as well. Yeah, the tradwives of Christianity. Exactly. So there's a kind of a sort of psychoanalytic interesting thing happening here where it's like, oh, the thing you fear is sort of the thing you desire. By calling it tradwives, you're saying it's something distinct.

17:49And what we all have to understand is the fundamental underpinning of everything that we call Western civilisation is our Judeo-Christian culture. That is at the heart of who we are. And when it comes to religion in politics, again, it's a revival I didn't see coming in this country. Again, I came of age in the 90s, the era of New Labour, where Alistair Campbell, before he became a podcaster, was, of course, Tony Blair's spin doctor. And he famously said, we don't do God, even though Tony Blair then leaves office and becomes a Catholic. He also prayed whether a veteran should go into Iraq. But it was a very private thing, right?

18:32In contrast to people like Danny Kruger, who you already mentioned, Tory MP, son of Prue-Leath of Bake Off fame, now a Reform MP for whom it's front and centre. What do you make of how Reform UK is using Christianity? I think, again, it's seeing what's happening in America and seeing that this is useful or valuable. But I think also they are bringing in people who are more Christian. So James Orr, who's a divinity professor who is now a senior advisor within Reform. Both Danny Kruger and James Orr had conversions to a more kind of evangelical form of faith as adults, are good friends with J.D.

19:06Vance, or at least meet with J.D. Vance. There's a group called the Alliance for Defending Freedom. Together, we work to build a future in which the law affirms and protects religious freedom, free speech, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family. And they're an organization that provides legal counsel in high-profile legal cases, first of all just in the states and they were important architects in the overturning of Roe v. Wade in Britain they have a kind of lobbying role to an extent they try and make sure that conservative Christian messaging is going out across Britain so they might be running seminars and universities or trying to make sure that there's enough articles coming out from more right-wing press about these people who are protesting in buffer zones of abortion clinics but mostly what they're doing is providing legal aid for cases that they think have a Christian slant to them.

19:58And when did they start operating here? They started operating here I think in 2017 but fairly recently but in the last few years their funding has gone up I think it's doubled and their team has quadrupled within Britain but I was really interested in a piece recently that was looking more there's vast differences of course between the way that American people practice Christianity and British people and they're actually practicing Christians in Britain are more likely to be Labour voters, that actually those who, again, are cultural Christians are more likely to have more authoritarian, hard right views.

20:33And so maybe those are the ones who are going to be useful reform voters. But it does feel like this sudden shift that is kind of both surprising and perhaps inevitable because of America. Yeah, and not just surprising, but also worrying if you're somebody who doesn't want to see abortion rights eroded here. And, you know, you start to see just little hints of that, right I mean Nigel Farage says that he doesn't want to ban abortion but he is starting to say well maybe 24 weeks is too he called it absolutely ludicrous 24 weeks and at the same time so something that the Alliance for Defending Freedom and anti-abortion activists in America did before Roe v Wade was you start making cases against buffer zones so outside abortion centers in the UK there's these buffer zones and if you go into them and protest or pray you can be arrested and And in that way, you start gradually eroding abortion rights by saying, this is absurd.

21:22This is a freedom of speech issue that we can't pray outside an abortion clinic. That's been happening more and more in Britain. There's been sort of three or four cases relatively recently of people who then become clients of Alliance for Defending Freedom. Legal counsellors who will come in and say, this is an erosion of our freedom of expression. And then in that way, you start bringing abortion into the public domain. recently it's been shown that young men are more likely to not think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases than older men so there is this sense of being reminded that public consensus can be manipulated and that something that we think in Britain is absolutely safe could be shifted and I find the free speech thing so strange because it's so one-sided and that it's a free speech issue when it's something that seems to affect the far right and say yes abortion is a free speech issue but expressing your gender identity actually that's not a free speech issue at all and so it's used in this very clever cynical way I think.

22:22Why are these views getting so much airtime? Because I kind of understand it in the US where a quarter of all adults are evangelical Christians but I think in the UK the proportion of evangelical Christians is like a tenth of that so what's going on? I think again it's always looking where the money is coming from So Paul Marshall, who owns GB News and also The Spectator, he's an evangelical Christian as well. Again, thinking about this money from the Alliance for Defending Freedom, when you see what their plans are for each year, they are trying to make sure that they have press releases or they're having articles by people who work for the Alliance for Defending Freedom in The Spectator and The Telegraph.

22:59So as ever, it's always using media, using mass media as a way of stoking the fire.

23:08Coming up. How to counter the far-right exploitation of Christianity.

23:25The Free Birth Society made millions selling a simple message to pregnant women. You don't need ultrasounds, doctors or midwives. You can free birth. But behind the scenes, terrible things were happening. I feel ashamed about this, but I didn't think that the deaths were bad until a year after I left. Subscribe to The Guardian Investigates feed to get all the episodes of The Birth Keepers. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Out now. And as part of your Christian odyssey for your book, spoiler alert, you did find faith. And would you call yourself a Christian now? I change my mind all the time.

24:06I go to my local churches relatively often. I go to Quaker meetings more often, often before protests. I'll go to a Quaker meeting because I find that silence fortifying and I find those spaces really valuable for trying to work out what I'm doing and trying to hold me into account each week. But it definitely fluctuates all the time. But clearly you found there's something in Christianity that has really connected with you and maybe given you some kind of peace or joy or calm. I think when I was interviewing people, so many people come to faith via grief that that is maybe the first time that you have contact with a church is through maybe a funeral.