Make Great Britain Christian Again: the ache is real, the project is not

Bible & Society | 31 August 2026

Over the weekend of 22 and 23 August a conference called Make Great Britain Christian Again gathered at Emmanuel Free Church of England in Morecambe. There were addresses on the state of the nation and prayers offered as a kind of spiritual warfare, with patriotic hymns sung between them, Jerusalem and I Vow to Thee, My Country. Christian organisations from several denominations criticised it before the doors had even opened, and reporting in the weeks beforehand had already noted that a number of the billed speakers are familiar faces at Tommy Robinson’s rallies.

There are two easy ways to respond to something like this, and both let you off the hook. One is to sneer at it from a safe distance, which costs nothing and changes nothing. The other is to wave it through because the speakers use a vocabulary you recognise and quote a Bible you love. I want to do neither. What follows is an attempt to say plainly what I think, starting with the part I actually agree with.

The ache is not invented

Something genuine has been lost in this country, and pretending otherwise would not be honesty, it would be manners standing in for truth.

Within living memory an English child could be assumed to know the Lord’s Prayer without being taught it specially. Public life still ran, however loosely, on a calendar the church had set. Whether or not the average person actually believed any of it, the moral vocabulary in general circulation was recognisably Christian, and a preacher could open a conversation on a street corner from shared ground rather than from nothing at all. That world is largely gone. The 2021 census recorded Christians below half the population of England and Wales for the first time the question has been asked. Whatever the causes, the shift is real, and it lands hardest on people who spent decades being told the church was the natural home of the nation, and who now find themselves treated as an oddity in the place their grandparents built and were buried in.

It is worth noticing where this ache tends to be loudest. Morecambe is not a wealthy town. A great deal of what gets marketed today as religious revival is grief about something closer to home, about closed shops and closed churches, about a town that feels forgotten by Westminster. When that grief goes looking for a vocabulary, it does not usually reach for economics. It reaches for whatever story is being handed round, and lately that story has been a religious one. A man in a struggling coastal town who feels something sacred has been taken from him is not a fool and he is not automatically a bigot. He is naming a real loss in the only language anyone has offered him.

The trouble is the language he has been given is the wrong language.

What the conference is actually asking for

Take away the hymns and the flags and look at the argument underneath. It runs: Britain is properly a Christian nation, that nation has been captured by forces hostile to it, and the task of the church is to take it back.

One of the organisers has written online that there is now “an all out war against our Christian cultural heritage.” Another speaker told a crowd at one of Robinson’s Whitehall gatherings that “we are at war” and named more than one enemy in the same breath. A third has called Britain a Christian nation standing against a false god. A fourth is happy to describe himself as a Christian nationalist and says plainly that he wants the church to call the country back to its Christian foundations.

Follow the logic through. There is a nation. That nation has a Christian identity. The identity is under attack from named enemies. The response is war, fought on every front the movement can name, cultural, political, or otherwise.

Every step of that argument is a theological claim, not just a political one, and I do not think a single step of it survives contact with the New Testament.

The nation with the covenant is not this one

This is where my own convictions push me further from this project than many fellow evangelicals go, not closer to it.

I hold, as a matter of settled conviction, that God really does have a national programme, complete with land, a throne and a king. That nation is Israel. The promises given to Abraham and confirmed to David were given to a specific people and will be honoured to that specific people. I have no interest in spiritualising them away into something vaguer.

Which is exactly why I cannot hand them to Britain, or to England, or to anyone else.

The force of a covenant with Israel lies entirely in its being with Israel. The instant England is allowed to slide into the seat Scripture reserves for that one nation, the promises have not been honoured, they have been raided. Jerusalem is a fine tune married to a question William Blake never actually answered and an idea Scripture never authorised. Those feet did not, in fact, walk upon England’s mountains green, and the Lamb of God was at no point a patriot of ours.

In the present age God is not building a nation. He is calling out a people from every nation, which is a larger project than a national one, not a smaller one, and it is the actual commission Christ gave when he told his disciples to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). He did not tell them to make a nation Christian. He told them to make disciples out of the nations, and those are different sentences pointing in different directions. Peter writes to scattered believers that they are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9), and in the next breath calls the same people “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). That is where the New Testament’s Christian nation actually is, and it comes with no flag, no border and no Home Office. Paul writes from a Roman cell that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). A man who says that has not stopped loving the city he lives in. He has stopped confusing it with home.

An answer given under interrogation

The clearest word on all this comes from the one moment a national restoration movement would have served Jesus best, and he turned it down flat. Standing before Pilate he said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world” (John 18:36).

Pilate had asked a political question and received a theological one in return. Jesus was not saying his kingdom is unreal or private or confined to the soul. He was saying it does not run on the world’s fuel. It does not advance because his servants fight for it, and the one time a disciple did draw a sword in his defence, he was told to sheathe it, and the man he had wounded was healed on the spot, which must be among the sharpest rebukes in the Gospels.

That is why the language of warfare coming from this movement troubles me as much as it does. Paul is not squeamish about martial imagery. He simply insists on naming the right enemy. “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12). “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh” (2 Corinthians 10:4). When a speaker tells a crowd that Britain is at war, and names a religious neighbour as one of the fronts, he has swapped the enemy Paul names for a human one, and at that point he has stopped fighting the battle described in Ephesians and started fighting a different one, for a different kingdom, with the wrong weapons entirely.

Islam, my neighbour, and where I actually stand

I am not going to pretend the underlying question is imaginary, because it is not, and dodging it would be its own kind of dishonesty.

I am an evangelical. I believe Jesus is the only way to the Father (John 14:6), that there is salvation in no one else (Acts 4:12), and that Islam, whatever moral seriousness it contains, does not save. I will not soften any of that, and I am not troubled by speakers at this conference saying similar things. What troubles me is a different move entirely, the one where a theological verdict on a religious system quietly becomes a civic verdict on the people who hold it, so that believing Islam is false slides into treating a Muslim family as an occupying force. Those are not the same claim, and I refuse to let the first one carry the second one in on its coat-tails.

On religious liberty itself my own position is straightforward, and I think more consistent than the nationalist one. I want the same freedom of religion, and the same restriction, applied without exception to every faith practised in this country, and to none at all, Christianity included. Britain holds no covenant standing before God, which has been the whole argument of this article, and a country with no such standing has no theological ground for giving the church a legal advantage over the mosque, or the temple, or the humanist society down the road. One law, evenly applied, holds me to a higher standard than most of what was reported from Morecambe, because it carves out no privilege for people who happen to share my convictions.

None of that removes the ordinary business of government. A state has every right, and I would say a duty, to take real care over who is permitted to settle within its borders, to screen for those who mean its people harm, and to ask sober questions about integration rather than simply hoping for the best. That is not a covenantal project and it does not require Britain to be, or to become, a Christian nation. It is Romans 13 work, the plain and unglamorous task of a government restraining evil and keeping order, and I see no contradiction between wanting more of that care from Westminster and insisting that whatever law results from it should watch the church door with exactly the same attention it gives the mosque door.

It is worth being honest about the numbers too, because loose figures do this argument no favours. Within the United Kingdom specifically, MI5’s own director general has repeatedly put the current split of the Security Service’s counter-terrorism caseload at roughly three quarters Islamist extremist and one quarter extreme right-wing, and the most recent counter-terrorism policing figures show around six in ten of those currently imprisoned for terrorism offences convicted as Islamist extremists, against roughly three in ten convicted as right-wing extremists. That is a clear majority, not so overwhelming a one that a serious homegrown far-right threat can be waved away, and MI5 has said publicly that these labels increasingly fail to capture a messier picture, particularly among the very young people being drawn into either camp.

Looked at globally rather than domestically, the picture does tilt further. The 2026 Global Terrorism Index found that four organisations, every one of them Islamist, were responsible for around seven in ten terrorism deaths worldwide in 2025, and Islamic State remains the single deadliest terrorist organisation on earth. On the global stage the underlying claim holds. But it is worth sitting with who actually dies in that violence before drawing a conclusion from it. The countries carrying the heaviest toll, Pakistan, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are disproportionately Muslim-majority nations, and the believer standing nearest the blast radius on any given day is far more often a Muslim in a Lagos market or a Peshawar street than anyone in Morecambe. That fact does not cancel the security concern. It does mean the honest name for the evil in question is a specific, identifiable, violent ideology that preys on Muslims first and hardest, not “the Muslim” as such, and getting that name right matters both for truth and for what it does to a listening neighbour.

Wanting that ideology kept out and watched for, whilst wanting the same religious liberty and the same restriction applied to every faith under one law, is a different project entirely from the one running in Morecambe. And none of it, not one word of it, licenses treating the settled, naturalised Muslim family down the road as anything other than a neighbour Christ has told me to love, and, please God, to win.

What this costs the gospel

Two things suffer if this project is left unanswered, and I care about both of them.

The first is the Muslim neighbour himself. Believing Islam is false and campaigning to have him removed from the country are not the same act, but treating him as a combatant in a war forecloses the one thing I am actually called to do, which is plead with him to be reconciled to God. Paul walked into Athens full of idols and preached to it. He did not organise a rally against Athenians.

The second casualty is the gospel itself. If Christianity becomes known as the badge of a national grievance movement, anyone who does not share the grievance will hear the gospel as the house religion of a political faction and decline it without ever really having heard it. One commentator on this movement has called the pattern church washing, the use of Christian symbols as respectable cover for a politics that would otherwise have to defend itself on its own terms. That is an uncomfortable phrase to sit with, and it is not wrong.

A word to the Christian who is tempted

If any of this has pulled at you, I doubt it is because you woke up wanting to be a nationalist. More likely you are tired of losing, and here at last is a room full of people who are not embarrassed by Jesus and will not apologise for the Bible. That pull is real and I understand it.

Test it by one measure. Does the room send you back to loving your actual neighbour, or away from him. Does it leave you more likely to sit with the family down the road and tell them about the Lord Jesus, or more likely to resent them. Does the preaching return you to the words and works of Jesus, or mostly to the news. And be honest about how badly we all want a story about Britain turning back to God, because that appetite is exactly why so many of us believed the Quiet Revival figures when Bible Society itself later withdrew that report after its own polling was found to be compromised. We will believe a flattering survey, and a flattering politics, faster than we should, precisely because we want them to be true.

Something better than making Britain Christian again

There is a way of loving this country that Scripture positively commands, and it is not the way on offer in Morecambe. Jeremiah told exiles living inside a pagan superpower to seek the welfare of the city, to pray for it, whilst remaining unmistakably what they were, exiles with a citizenship elsewhere. Seek its welfare. Not seize its institutions back.

That is slower work than a weekend conference with hymns, and far less exciting. It looks like food banks and funerals, patient preaching to half-full rooms, telling the truth about sin when it costs you something, and loving people who will never vote the way you do. It converts nobody in bulk and everybody one at a time, and as far as I can tell it is the only method the Lord Jesus actually gave his church.

So here is the question worth putting to anyone who bought a ticket to Morecambe, or to the next one like it. If Britain were made Christian again by pressure, grievance and the winning of a cultural war, what would actually have been made. A nation of the converted, or a nation of the compliant. And which of those two did the Lord Jesus go to the cross to secure.

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Jeremiah 29:7

Sources

• Religion news, 24 August 2026 — Religion Media Centre: religionmediacentre.org.uk
• Tommy Robinson’s Temple: The Christian Conference Uniting Preachers from the Far-Right Fringe — Byline Times, 29 July 2026: bylinetimes.com
• The Book of Revel-hate-ions: How Christianity is being co-opted by the far right — HOPE not hate: hopenothate.org.uk
• Bible Society withdraws ‘Quiet Revival’ report as it admits data was ‘faulty’ — Christian Today: christiantoday.com
• Was the Quiet Revival fake news? — Premier Christianity: premierchristianity.com
• MI5 Director General gives annual threat update — Counter Terror Business: counterterrorbusiness.com
• Counter Terrorism Policing: Our Mission, factsheet, February 2025: counterterrorism.police.uk
• Global Terrorism Index 2026 — Institute for Economics & Peace: visionofhumanity.org