Recently, there has been a glut of outrage on X and other social media platforms about Muslims praying in the street, Trafalgar Square, the King not giving an easter message, and even a Christian buying churches to stop them from closing down; as well as the outrage of churches being turned into mosques, or the raising of crosses, or the prevention of mosque buildings. It has come into vogue of late for several parties to make a punt for the Christian vote, calling for it to be made illegal to turn churches into other places of worship or for CofE churches to be exempt from VAT. Much of this is misplaced quarreling for the right reasons, but on the wrong battlefields. I want to try to explain why. I want to start off by saying: I welcome the desire to preserve, strengthen, and build up our Christian heritage, and to make this country Christian again. My entire life is ordered and oriented to that goal. I campaign for it, speak up for it, and even get in the occasional tussle about it. So, my words should not be heard as a dismissal of this idea or the enthusiasm that is sweeping up sections of the X community in our societies.
However, many of its ‘chosen battles’ are misplaced and ill-considered, and so I will talk about some of the new ‘culture war’ fronts the church has picked. However, before I do, I want to just put my finger on why I think they are misguided. It seems to me that they smack of a panicked response to something already long gone, and they do not align with a Christian worldview of what is of value or important, emphasizing aesthetics over a clear and purposeful vision of what it means to keep the West Christian (something it increasingly stopped being since the late 1700s).
Let’s start with the use of public space. Many people have become vexed over Muslims praying in Trafalgar Square, or on the street, or in Islamic processions in public, or public calls to prayer from bridges. This, of course, is rightly set against the fact that Christians are being unfairly arrested (in our two-tier Britain) by the police, for the horror of praying in their own heads outside of abortion clinics, or for public preaching. However, when Muslims used Trafalgar Square for their event, how was it any different from Christians using it on this Good Friday for our own event? Rather than complain about Muslims having an event in Trafalgar Square, we should simply organize more Christian events in Trafalgar Square. We live in a secular liberal democracy – if, like me, you do not like it, then push as I do, for a Christian Nation State. Christians need to be using the rules and governance and permissions of the Liberal Secular State to push Christianity, rather than complaining or panicking that Muslims are doing WHAT CHRISTIANS CAN DO – BUT DO NOT. Nothing prevents Christians from organising public prayer in the street – so why don’t you? It is also true of Christian processions. Christians can and SHOULD organise processions connected to the faith at Christmas, Holy Week, Corpus Christi, and All Saints. Why not? Showing that we are here and that our faith is vibrant is “being a city on a hill” and a “light in the darkness.”
However, the real battle for Christians who do not want to see Islamic Processions or the call to prayer blasted into their homes via loudspeaker is first to throw off the trappings of Liberalism. The idea of liberal tolerance, multiculturalism, and diversity is where we should be aiming our guns, and offering an alternative vision of a multiethnic, monocultural, Christian state. Christians would do far better to use the public space in the same way as the Muslim community, rather than worry or complain about Muslims doing perfectly legal and law-abiding activities. If you do not like how the laws operate, seek to change them, but before you do that, you must have a coherent ‘why’ behind your ambitions.
Let’s talk about the church buildings. The first thing to point out is that the church is not its buildings; the church is the people of GOD. It is not any one institution, and certainly not any building, but those who, in sincere faith, call upon Christ as Saviour, acclaim Him as Messiah, and seek to be His faithful disciples. Frankly, the church has way too many buildings, which are called properly ‘houses’ or ‘temples’ of the church. I do not like seeing churches sold off either, but if people are not going to use them or go to them, then something must be done. Now, I would rather that they be repurposed; still owned by the church, but used as cash generators for the church by being converted into accommodations, business centres, gyms, or entertainment centres. Money from business rates or rent could then fund the church’s activities and work. Congregations that cannot afford their buildings should stop being slaves to them and instead use them in creative ways to bless and strengthen the congregation’s work. If only Muslims want the building – fine, let them rent it from the church and the congregation uses that money to fund professional evangelists to evangelise the Muslim community and those around about. If the church grows, it can then, in due time, reclaim its building for its own use. Samuel Leeds, for instance, would better use his money to pay for an army of evangelists in this country than to simply keep buying bricks and mortar, and the churches he has bought should be used as discussed. People need to be getting on to the local church governing bodies that are dominated by Liberals with nothing better to do than wreck and ruin the church. (They treat the church as a club – their club, and as a charity of liberal causes).
Once you have freed the church from its domination, think about how to grow the community of the faithful, with or without the building. I will tell you one example: faithful Christians I know in a major Welsh city wanted to buy a church (that the liberals had crashed and ruined) from one of the usual culprits (Methodists, CofE). The people in charge of the church sale preferred to sell the building to the local Muslim community, as they did not like “clap happy Christians.” This is the real battle to fight, to recapture church government from these church-going liberals, rather than simply stopping churches from being sold on as mosques. Until you control the church’s governance, you will not be able to stop the rot in church sales, because you will not be able to tackle the underlying issues. All listed buildings, Christian or not, were exempt from VAT on repairs, and yes, the CofE is the custodian of many architectural jewels. However, considering its gross apostasy, should Christians really care if the CofE has to pay more money? This change affects every religious group equally. We should instead be seeking either an inquisition to go through the CofE to root out the heterodox and re-establish the church upon its own instruments, or completely seek the replacement of the CofE as by another Anglican Communion, that is orthodox that tradition – such as GAFCON, or the Confessing Church of England, or the Anglican Mission in England, or the Free Church of England, or one of the many breakaway groups from the CofE that continue within the Anglican tradition. We need to be far more radical.
Which brings me to the political parties. It has become vogue for all the parties of the right to pitch their hat to the new, more muscular Christians who are replacing the clueless boomers of yesteryear in the church’s life and direction, which itself is a testimony of how you get noticed and listened to if you adopt a muscular Christian outlook. So, each of the parties, Conservatives, Restore, Reform, UKIP, Advance UK, and obviously the flailing-in-irrelevance-due-to-poor- leadership CPA, have pushed out token policies for the Christian vote, most of which touch upon church buildings or statements about the importance of Christianity. Yet none have given a real push for a Christian vision of Britain, except the CPA. But no one is listening to them. Christians should not be satisfied with tokenism. Here is what we should be expecting and demanding from the parties wanting the Christian vote: the reintroduction of Sunday Sabbath Laws, a clear path to final abolition of the abortion genocide, a recentring of law and benefits around the family (not the individual), a clear solidarity with Christian communities facing persecution across all state functions and practices around the world, including the desire to create Christian states in the middle east, the reversal of euthanasia practices from the NHS, with clear support for the hospice movement, restrictions on divorce laws, prosecution of polygamy, and child marriages, a deliberate plan to restore and preserve the natural world, to secure and police the borders, to filter immigration, and asylum in such a way as it cultivates the Christian identity of the nation, and end to welfare for no-work programmes, support for the honest giving-it-a go poor, continued moving away from fossil fuels but done sensibly (not rashly or ideologically), state support for Christian evangelism of all non-Christian communities in the land, the teaching of Christian ethics in all schools, Christian assemblies to run by certified Christian youth workers in all schools, and to allow those certified Christian youth workers to operate in all schools, support for adoption services, a robust response to the Islamist threat, and the reconquest of our prison systems and reform, thereof, that redeems who it can from crime, but crushes all the criminal elements now running amuck with the system. In short, we want the party that will support the commitment to inculcate Christian ethics, history, values, and beliefs across the entire infrastructure of the state, in all departments. I would support the party that moves closest in that direction. Though, from a merely practical stance, I feel I might vote Reform to stop the Green/Labour alliance this coming election, only to replace Reform with a better party at the next.
A lot of people have been outraged by the fact that Charles Rex has failed to issue an Easter greeting, or mark in any civic public way the beginning of Lent, and I can understand why; it feels like, as Christians, our festivals are being sidelined by a Christian monarch in favour of Islam. However, demanding an Easter message is the wrong battle. Our elites work on an economy of fear; if Christians want this house of Windsor to take Christianity seriously, we should instead be campaigning to dethrone the monarch, skip William completely, or possibly (and as England’s last Jacobite) my preferred option, replace the entire monarchy with another family more faithfully committed to the Christian faith. I think if we are going to say, “but he is the defender of the faith,” we should change the constitutional arrangement so that the king has a veto on the laws of parliament, so long as it accords with a council of faithful Bishops and does not apply to a clear manifesto pledge. This is the kind of radical thinking Christians must engage in and work towards, over and above throwing toys out of the pram because a powerless king, who is part of a fearful elite, behaves powerlessly and cowardly in the face of an increasingly assertive umma. The monarchy must fear the church turning against it and working to replace it. If we are not willing to make such a radical commitments, then we must instead free the king of both the title “defender of the faith” and the vow to uphold the Christian faith in these lands; as for him to make that vow when he has no real ability to do, is to make a mockery of the idea of vows, which are a very serious part of Christian practice. This should be the reason for our outrage, even more than the apparent double standard of what the king considers important. We need to advance the framing of the nation, and thus of the monarchy; according to the story of Alfred the Great, a story in which the king, different peoples, and church institutions all worked together to establish a Christian nation. When any party breaks faith with that objective, it should be seen as replaceable.
Many of the new Christians have been outraged about the pro-Hamas supporting marches, and the rise of the Muslim block vote, and naturally, they should be concerned by both. No genius is required to realise that support for terrorism abroad will lead and has already led in terms of Palestinian Action for support for terrorism at home. Nor do you need to be a political savant to see that independent Muslims MPs will try nudging Britain in a Sharia-compliant direction, as they already have on cousin marriages, and on the issue of “burning sacred texts.” However, once again, Muslims are working within the rules of a Liberal Secular Democracy; they are not breaking them, just using them.
So, back to the point I raised above, we need to replace our Liberal Secular Democracy with a Christian State. However, while it is like it is, we, the church, must play the game. We should be focused on standing up for persecuted Christians. Why not organise our own mass movement of marches for the Christians being persecuted in Nigeria, or to end the occupation of Northern Cyprus, or bring the war criminals of Azerbaijan to justice? It is not for lack of causes that the church is being outmaneuvered, but due to ineffective church leadership, a culture of comfort and cowardice, and churchianity, which is entirely too local in outlook and refuses to see the bigger picture. We Christians in the UK and the West should pick a cause of a Christian community, like that of the one million Sudanese Christians, and make them the cause de celeb of the church, building, as the Muslims have, an entire culture of solidarity that draws people into the orbit of the Christian faith, as they have with those who now orbit the Islamic world view. Christians, we need to build a Christian block vote based on a coherent Christian political outlook. Our battle is both to frame that and advance it in the churches and abroad to those (who are now many) who are sympathetic to the idea of Christian Britain. Naturally, a block vote would be greatly strengthened if Christians consolidated geographically, moving into the same regions and cities, thereby amplifying the church’s influence rather than diminishing it. The battle we should be fighting is the one within church culture against the remnants and hangovers of boomer Christianity, which seeks to do nothing except cater to its own dwindling numbers and treat the church like a keeper of civic practices and an NGO to everyone but its own. Making church into a social club, as Generation X has, is marginally better; but whilst not losing ritual, or our concern for charity, or the idea that a church is a place to find community, this generation, Gen Z, must make the church an identity again!
Christians should not be shy about trying to stop the building of mosques or other centres of non-Christian worship. Far more focus needs to be given to reorganising our own use of buildings, sharing them with different Christian congregations, seeing them as multidenominational centres of Christian worship. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem serves as an example of how not to do it well! However, sharing our buildings lightens our loads and allows the necessary redirection of resources. Building unity amongst Christians is more important than stopping the construction of mosques, such as the one being built in the Lake District. However, if you are going to oppose Mosque construction, it needs to be done through a planning law application – protests are pointless in terms of decision makers who only bend when they feel direct pressure on their lives and livelihoods. Protests’ only real utility is in drawing people into a wider cause. They should be used for evangelism, awareness, but above all, networking. I welcome the Disciples of Christ campaign to raise the cross; this cultural assertion of Christianity is exactly what a spirituality of muscular Christianity requires. I hope that if you have not, you will get involved in the campaign. However, we need to frame the battle line of the church in the culture wars as that of a “minority people.” We need to see ourselves as a people with a distinct identity (we can learn much from the Jewish community about how to cultivate this) and then argue from the perspective of “Christophobia” against progressives, Marxists, Islamists, and others, who discriminate and persecute us. This shift is more important than raising crosses or stopping mosques.
My aim here is to highlight that Christians are fighting the wrong battles in a secular liberal democracy, complaining that others are gaming the system better than they are, and to encourage the church to stop following naïve nincompoops, who know nothing of the real world, and to organise and engage with the game as it is played to a Christian agenda. So, let me try once again to piece together some of the threads of how Christians should play the game. What are the battle lines we should form, and what causes should we get behind in this glorious culture war? (Culture wars are good as they separate truth from error and increase our faithfulness and refine it!). Firstly, Christians must adopt the perspective that they are a people of the Covenant, a singular nation, a unique race of priests. Secondly, they must learn what it means to live out that identity as a culture (we can learn from our Jewish cousins and from our brethren in the Coptic and Aramaic churches). Those who oppose us from doing so should be labeled and opposed as the Christophobes they are. We should not shrink from confrontations connected to our faith but stand up for ourselves more and more sacrificially to defend the Christian community. We should seek to build consolidated Christian communities, each denomination choosing a region and consolidating there, most likely cross-generationally, but a denomination can speed that up through massive, radical re-organisation, and then pursue a Christian agenda in those areas it now dominates as the majority group (The Parish system is killing us). The primary causes the people of GOD should seek to crack are the creation of Christian families. How is it that Christians are the oldest demographic and that so many of our womenfolk are forced to marry non-Christians? The demographic bomb killing the West is more advanced in the church. We need to challenge our witless leaders on why they think their little church programs are more important than tackling this most pressing pastoral issue. We need to address the question of why Christianity is not sticking across generations (a huge topic). But what is clear is that all the ways we are trying to pass on the faith to our children are not working, so WHY, for the love of GOD, do we keep repeating failure so slavishly? This is an area of church life that desperately needs a revolution in our thinking.
So, church, can we please have the conversation about it? We also need to think hard headedly about the advancement of Islamisation, and if you do not know what that looks like, I suggest you look up the incredible work of Tim Dieppe, of Christian Concern, who has catalogued and evidentially laid it out so that only the thick-headed ideologue could argue it is not an issue. I’ve spoken a lot on how we can tackle this, so I will not labour the point here in this article; but to say, this matter ultimately needs a governmental response, a change of elites governing society and church, and a resolve to act that can only come with a serious commitment to the Christian faith. We should be seeking to ban: halal meat (and Kosher by the same logic), ban amplified adhaans, and restrict the adhaan in the early morning and night, ban the burkha, force all marriages to be registered and all fathers to be registered, as well as aggressively prosecute the sin of polygamy, we should treat ‘takfirism’ as an incitement to violence; enforce strict checks and prosecution for FGM and child marriage. Further, we must remorselessly crush the Islamist networks and apply the weight of the state upon those that sympathise it (not just arrest and prosecutions, but removal of children), deny all access to any aspect of the state infrastructure: housing, welfare, NHS, not just for the Islamist but for all their immediate families; the price must be too high to contemplate leaning into the Islamist world view. There is much more that could be said on this, but that might be for another article. Additionally, as Christians, we must separate ourselves from the enlightenment and liberal humanism, seeing it for what it truly is: another religion, a Christian cult that idolises humanity, separates Christian practice from Christian doctrine, offers us as Christians an alternative identity, history, ethics, and metaphysics, and has already captured many Christian institutions in a process we call secularization. But then, because of its own peculiarities, it finds it impossible to resist Islamisation, because of the way in which it envisions the contractual and individualised nature of state/citizen relations. These are the four big challenges the church should concern itself with, and we must create an intergenerational culture of struggle and resistance against the forces that array against us as the people of GOD.
We cannot win this fight through battling on tokenism – a speech here, a mosque there, a prayer event or procession, and certainly nothing can be won by incessant whining. We must look deeply within ourselves to understand what we are fighting for and why. The last and most important battle everyone in this movement needs to fight is the one within themselves. If you are more motivated by fear of the Muslim and Islam than you are by the love of Christ and your fellow Christians, you have already lost; your fear and hatred will burn themselves out, but love sustains! We must struggle not because we are afraid and especially not because we hate, but because we hope for a more Christian future. We have faith that if we offer up our sacrifices, GOD can and will use them to advance His Kingdom, and because we love, we love ourselves, our neighbours, the church, our families, and enemies (those who oppose us). Because of this love, we want a better, more Christian future for all. You will sacrifice more (love greater) when you love than you will if you operate from fear or hatred. We cannot divorce any outward struggle from the path of repentance and the inner struggle of personal transformation; each one must feed the other. We must take the shape that love requires of us to the circumstances we face! Any fight that is not also at the same time a deepening of our Christianity is not a battle we can expect GOD’s favour in. Through this long road ahead of us, the church must grow in holiness. If it does this, then no matter what the worldly outcomes are (and we must give our best efforts for the best worldly outcomes), the church will not have lost, because we are ultimately called to holiness.
