What a delight it was to be in beautiful Morecambe bay last weekend for the Make Britain Christian Again conference.

It was a wonderful time of proclamation, truth, and fellowship amidst the many attacks upon the conference from all sides, intent on misrepresenting and slandering us at every turn. It seems that some people really don’t want to make Britain Christian again, or don’t understand what it will take to rebuild what has been destroyed by secularism and much else which follows in its wake.

I have been writing on these themes for some time, particularly in a 3-part series last summer which bore the same title as our conference:

• The Moral Decay of a Once-Great Nation

• What Makes a Christian Nation?

• Reawakening the Nation

One of the key tensions I have come across time and again as people respond to these ideas, is the suspicion among some fellow Christians over whether Britain ever really was “Christian” in the first place, whether it’s a fool’s errand to make it so “again”, and whether such a venture is possible without corrupting Christianity into a debased form of nationalism which discourages true conversion and sanctification among patriotic disciples.

Some criticisms come from a place of fairly innocent ignorance, where people may find it difficult to accept something unfamiliar to them—like Christian nationalism—which feels out of sync with the worldview they were taught, or which seems radically different to the vision for Christian mission they inherited, even if such a vision has far greater provenance in the longer history of the Church, one way or another.

For others, however, the nature of their opposition is manifestly more dubious, either because they ought to know better, or because it exposes their own cowardice by moving beyond where they themselves are willing to go, and so they lash out. The idea of making Britain Christian may not even be entirely repulsive to them in theory, but it is when they see what might be required to bring it about in reality that they creep back in the opposite direction. Soon they find themselves not only not supporting the effort but actively undermining and opposing it with whatever means they can, whether via serpentine bureaucracy or full-frontal assault.

A Slandering Bishop

One such opponent in recent weeks was Bishop Matthew Firth of the Free Church of England. He has previously had numerous run-ins with my friend (the conference organiser), Revd. Brett Murphy during and after he pulled his church out of the Free Church of England to join the Confessing Anglican Church. Clearly, there is some “history” there and he disagrees with the kinds of things Brett emphasises, not least his willingness to identify with the patriotic movement in Britain. Firth seemed to be deeply “concerned” this conference might be some kind of further launchpad for radioactive socio-political beliefs which he presumably wished were kept well away from the Church. As such, in the run-up to the conference, Firth took it upon himself to become the conference’s No. 1 public critic.

What I found so odd (and I must confess, slightly amusing) about Firth’s opposition, was how ridiculously obvious it was. It felt like he had read a manual called “How to be a Textbook Biblical Example of a Surreptitious Enemy of God’s People.” (See, for example, the Book of Nehemiah). So determined was Firth to undermine our efforts that he even published and circulated a version of the official conference poster, having doctored it with AI to declare that the conference had been officially cancelled. Some people who saw this could justifiably have assumed he was right. After all, why would someone like that—a bishop, no less—do something like that?

Fake news aside, Firth’s primary “issue” was apparently to do with health and safety regulations regarding the building for Emmanuel Church, Morecambe, Brett’s church. This instigated investigations by the Charity Commission and local council in the days leading up to the conference. The church building is not owned by the Free Church of England, though its deed is held by a committee of twelve “custodial trustees” (of which Firth is just one member). Their sole purpose is not to oversee the building but, quite literally, to be custodians (holders) of the deed which states that the building essentially belongs to the congregation. Firth, acting entirely on his own, felt this gave him the authority to cancel the event outright, despite not being an actual trustee or authority of the church.

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It may be one thing to disagree with the views of the speakers, or even with the remit of the conference (we’re quite used to that!), but in Firth’s case, the opposition became almost obsessive. He continued to speak ill of the conference speakers as Far Right fascists and bigots (all the usual items on the menu!). I do not know what the life of a bishop is meant to entail but his extensive comments for days on end, replying to numerous replies in the comment threads of seemingly any and every person who posted anything positive about the conference, was (and is) bizarre to behold.

At one point I sent him quite a long reply, where I not only challenged him for his increasingly bizarre and slanderous comments, but also imploring him to repent, telling him that it does not need to be this way. He responded within no less than five minutes to tell me I was completely wrong and that he was completely right regarding this matter. He remains welcome to his opinion, but his entire posture seemed more than simply combative; it was genuinely unhinged, unreasonable, and far more interested in his own reputation than the truth. I wondered if at least one of the motivations for his bizarre actions was to raise his own public profile by contrast, but I cannot imagine anyone doing such things and thinking they come across “well” to anyone with a shred of discernment.

As if the fake cancellation was not enough, Firth also put out an additional official statement (whatever “official” now means in this bishop’s ever-developing fantasy world?) which led people to believe he had not only “trustee” authority over the building but “pastoral authority” over the church, as if he was still the functioning bishop or pastor there, none of which was true.

Firth tried to cloak his slander in the veneer of an evangelistic love of “our great nation”, leading the unsuspecting to think, “Ah, it’s not that he opposes making Britain Christian again, it’s just that he rightly opposes these dodgy characters who are going about it the wrong way…” Who could argue with opposing “hatred, abusiveness and bigotry” with “the grace and truth of Christ”?

Please do pray for the “Right Reverend” that the deep and complex problems in his own character will one day be resolved, and that the exposed asbestos may be removed from his heart in Jesus’ name for the good not only of himself but for the good of any believers over whom he actually does bear pastoral authority.

Breaking the Laws of Secular Liberalism

Firth’s slander, of course, was not in isolation. By taking his own (ironically aggressive) line, he was siding with the secular leftists who were already opposing the very idea of the conference, and had been for some time. One leftist media article had come out a few weeks earlier itemising all the supposed “dirt” on all the speakers (myself included!). You can tell the principal reason for these attacks was that they were concerned with the potential connection of this conference to the patriotic movement in general, and the ongoing apparent terror of being associated with the likes of Tommy Robinson. Indeed, the article by Byline Times was titled, “Tommy Robinson's Temple: The Christian Conference Uniting Preachers from the Far-Right Fringe”.

And that wasn’t even all! Just a few days before the conference, even The Metro weighed in. (For American readers, that’s the free newspaper British people get at train stations around the country, with a circulation of around a million copies a day). They released an article insinuating that Brett was an antisemitic bigot, having clipped out some choice cuts from one of his sermons (despite Brett being far more pro-Israel than most evangelical pastors I know!).

The full sermon tells the full story, of course. But even looking at the deliberately selective clips, it’s clear Brett is not saying anything substantially wrong. I’m sure some could be legitimately unsure about the term “retard” in reference to westerners proudly converting to Islam, but is that sinful according to God, or only according to our own standards?

Without going into the weeds on this, much of the furore around “appropriate” or “inappropriate” language in our time is downstream from our slavish obedience to the new secular liberal rules invented relatively recently. In case you need a quick refresher on how this new system of virtue works: basically, you can kill innocent unborn human babies all you want, for no reason whatsoever, and you will be given mountains of sympathy and respect; but if you use words which might offend another grown-up human being’s feelings, you will be labelled evil and possibly imprisoned.

Christians should not seek to offend for the sake of offence, but they should take their cues on virtue from the Bible (which contains plenty of offensive speech), not from the secular humanists who despise God’s Word and ways.

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In all the attacks on the conference, though, from both inside and outside the Church, I can’t shake the impression that this tells us we are over the target. There is a reason the enemy really does not want Christians to mobilise in a way that might actually lead to the discipling of nations like Britain again, knowing the good it would do for the further advance of the kingdom of God in these lands and beyond.

This does not make any of us invulnerable to genuine critique, by any means (least of all in our speech), but those with ears to hear will understand what’s going on when people attack things like “tone” or “phrasing” or “building regulations” as a subterfuge for their deeper ideological or theological presuppositions being challenged. At root, they really just want to keep secularism in power. That’s why they hate the idea of a Christian nation. And that’s why they will keep coming for us.

Joyful Pastors and Miserable Protestors

What I found especially encouraging upon arriving in Morecambe the day before the conference was that despite all the recent public slander Brett had received in the press and from other Christian leaders, he responded to the moment not with the fear, anxiety, anger, and bitterness so characteristic of our enemies, but with good old-fashioned Christian love, joy, and peace.

Despite all the preparation that goes into organising a conference like that (including the arranging of security due to death threats against several speakers), when I popped into the church building en route to my hotel along the seafront, I found Brett with an apron on cheerfully serving people tea, coffee, and pasta bakes at his church’s open cafe. He was surrounded by many equally cheerful helpers, serving their local community, full of salt-of-the-earth peace and joy.

“And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10). This truth should be in our hearts whenever the enemies of Christ stand against the rebuilding or defending or advancing of his kingdom when it matters most.

Perhaps spurred on by our accidental “promoters” at the Byline Times, the Metro, and the Free Church of England, various protest groups turned up throughout the conference to heckle, chant, and placard us. I heard that some of the them were part of an anti-fascism group, with links to Hope Not Hate. There was even a Quaker group holding up signs against us (they were very quiet, of course—the ideal kind of protestor, really!). It was notable that none of them looked happy, and some even complained about the conference delegates being “sickeningly happy”. It really is as if many of them are under some kind of a spell. They see us—and all we stand for/against—as hateful, bigoted, fascists and they refuse to be persuaded otherwise.

What can you do when people have been programmed to see you as an evil person? Conversations have little hope of going anywhere productive if one side already thinks of you as evil fascists who must be condemned, and can appeal to the prestige of bishops and media companies and national newspapers as their “evidence”. We must see the reality for what it is, knowing this can often be the effect of faithful Christian truth upon hardened hearts.

“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?” (2Cor. 2:14-16)

Where our message is received by some as the stench of death, we can take heart and continue to spread the fragrance of Christ, however ill interpreted in the ears of others. I truly hope and pray that many of those protestors—even those who took it upon themselves to interrupt Holy Communion on the Sunday—will have had seeds planted which will indeed lead them to that “another country” which remains at work within this one.

Unity and Laughter

Despite the severity and sobriety of the situation in our nation today, there was a surprising amount of laughter at this conference. The joy of the Lord is indeed our strength, and I believe God is forging a surprising unity among people from different parts of the body of Christ. Such unity—comprised of discernibly evangelical, liturgical, traditional, and Pentecostal flavours—might make some Christians uncomfortable. It seems to be something (for us too!) for which there are few existing categories, the kind of unity we may not have chosen for ourselves but may be just the kind we need for such a time as this. “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8).

As for the conference talks themselves, the first day especially was remarkably “normal” in the best sense. We heard about the centrality of Christ crucified, the power of prayer, the centrality of the Bible, the strategic importance of building robust Christian communities, and the need to maintain healthy spiritual disciplines. Much to the disappointment of our critics, it was more like “Christianity 101” than a nerve control centre for how to make British Christians more “Far Right”, or whatever else they have come to believe about what we are about. At the centre of it all was simply what the conference said on the poster (the real one, not the fake one). As improbable as it might seem, we really do want to make Britain Christian again, and we think that’s not such a terrible thing.

The Sound of Jerusalem

As for my own talk at the conference, I wanted to highlight the analogy between our “post-Christendom” situation in Britain today and that of Israel in the time of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls. Nehemiah also faced a combination of direct and subtle opposition as well as despair and discouragement from among his own people too, especially when faced by the seemingly endless mounds of rubble, the long-term consequence of their exile.

One of the lost cultural elements of Christendom which I felt especially led to highlight was the power of music. In particular, I wanted to talk about the way it interrupts the narrative of secular evolutionary meaninglessness by which so many people now live under secularism. While they come to worship the demi-gods of the modern music industry, there is a detectable ache and longing for the kind of hope that was once part of the fabric of Christian nations like ours but not longer is, buried beneath the mounds of rubble.

You can hear (and see!) the whole talk free here:

While the other nations of Great Britain will have their own particular glories of Christian inheritance to reclaim, as a Christian Englishman speaking in England (the undeniable heartland of the greater nation) it felt as if the words of that most famous of English hymns—sung so powerfully on the first day of the conference—would come to embody something ever more profound for all of us at such a time as this:

“I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
till we have built Jerusalem
in England’s green and pleasant land...”

May it be sung, and may it be so.

In part 1, Aaron unpacks the scourge of secular humanism on Western society and the cowardice of the Church in propping up secular liberal ideals rather than opposing them. He also introduces some of the Biblical foundations for Christian nations and makes particular reference to Britain's role in Christian mission, highlighting why it is especially crucial that we recover the Biblical conception of nations within our own "multicultural" age which undermines the legacy of Christendom at the behest of secularism.

Related articles from That Good Fight Substack:

• "Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism?" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-christian-nationalism

• "What Makes a Christian Nation?" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/christian-nations-and-secular-revivals

• "Reawakening the Nation" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/reawakening-the-nation

• "Questions about Christian Nationalism" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/questions-about-christian-nationalism 

• "Conversation about Christian Nationalism" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/conversations-about-christian-nationalism

Secular liberal western societies like to suggest it is a “bad” thing to judge the actions of others, lest you make such people feel ashamed. The mantra of the secular modern west has been that we should allow people to do (and be) whatever they like, so long as it doesn’t cause “hurt” to others.

You may have noticed that, in reality, there are a few “sub-clauses” to this anti-judgemental display of hospitable freedom towards others, one of which is that if you oppose the secular liberal standards by which our new society is effectively maintained—things like feminism, abortion, anti-natalism, LGBT+, globalism, multiculturalism—you will, of course, be shamed as though you were an evil sadistic bandit or blood-curdling heretical witch.

Despite its claims of love and inclusivity, we all know (don’t we?) that secular liberalism has no problem whatsoever with shame, judgement, and damnation. They just want to be the ones to administer it. Having all but kicked God’s standards to the outer moral darkness, they have merely set up their own humanistic standards in place of God’s. It is a kind of theological version of the French Revolution on repeat. Nothing will satisfy the endless demands for egalité at all costs (demands which never seem to be applied “equally”, incidentally, but let’s not worry about that!). The exclusive elevation of that way of thinking is essentially why the west is the way the west is today.

Sometime last year, Andrew Isker reflected on the decline of basic public standards in many US cities today, speaking of the condition as a terminal disease, the kind most westerners can recognise in many parts of their own decayed cities after decades of degradation of standards:

“The very idea of public decency and enforced social order is seen as anathema in late-stage liberal democracy.

‘Let people enjoy things’ covers prenatal infanticide, gambling, gay marriage, drag queens dancing for toddlers, loud rap music in public, potheads making everything stink, fent zombies bent over on the street.

These things, things that a healthy society would relegate to the margins of society, have been forced into mainstream acceptance. It’s not that you can create a utopia where such things never happen, but rather not having them tolerated by the mainstream, much less celebrated.

This isn’t prudish moralism. These are the prerequisites for a functioning society. To have some sense of shame surrounding socially deleterious behavior. Shame is an antibody. And our society has AIDS.

But that isn’t to say nothing is shamed. Healthy behavior often is. Getting married and having children young is shamed. Large families are shamed. Saving and building wealth is shamed. Faithful Christian living is shamed. A healthy affection for your nation is shamed.

Our society has both AIDS and a fatal autoimmune disorder.”

The reason the good things are shamed and the bad things are promoted is not merely to do with which political parties happen to be in power. When you look at the secular liberal order over recent decades it seems largely irrelevant who has been in power in relation to the overall degradation.

The only difference the distinct parties seem to make is the difference of speed at which they continue the slide. Nobody has been willing to truly arrest the slide, let alone turn back in the opposite direction. After all, that might get them called “Christian Nationalists”—and we couldn’t have that!

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And so, the liberal secular dogmas continue to advance throughout the formerly Christian nations of the West, who continue to call good “evil”, and evil “good”, in correlation with their brazenly anti-Christian standards, irrespective of whatever they say they believe. Unfortunately for them, God has something of a track record when it comes to dealing with unrepentant nations which arrogantly set themselves up against His ways:

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The recent debacle over Cambridge University’s infamously unqualified professor Jason Arday—the “racial diversity” academic who was made Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor before allegations arose that he had actually forged large chunks of his PhD thesis, lied about publications that did not exist, and even about money he had allegedly raised for charity—was not in any way surprising. In fact, I am actually surprised that so many people were so surprised by it.

Perhaps the level of public indignation occurred because many people in Britain and America today still implicitly trust the modern university to safeguard the truth from the destructive ideologies which inhibit it. The pursuit of Veritas is, after all, one of the primary purposes of a university. Both Harvard and Yale in the US gesture to this within their historic mottos, and most of the historically professed mottos of the Oxbridge colleges contain some equivalent regarding the pursuit of knowledge or light or virtue.

While recent decades have given the public numerous laughable examples of “politically correct” policies or statements leaking out from the academy, there still seems to be a dogged public faith in the age-old nobility of the university which encourages us to see such things as aberrations from the norm. While the brazen nature of a fabricated professor certainly does appear unusual, I think one of the greatest surprises which may emerge from the aftermath “Ardaygate” is not that such a thing was allowed to happen, but that the environment in which such a thing was allowed to happen was carefully fostered over many years so that precisely such a thing was always likely to happen, almost as if (but not quite) by design.

Most people who have not worked within higher education still imagine universities will hold true to their raison d’être regarding the unencumbered pursuit of truth while unaware of the fact that, especially within the humanities, this has not been the case on the ground for quite some time. Arday’s particular field was, predictably, the “sociology of education”, a subject which seems especially vulnerable to ideological grift, not least within an era in which the very idea of being educated in or toward something called “the truth” has itself been regarded as a highly dubious tool of control in order to maintain one’s purported cultural or racial privilege over others. The reality is that modern universities have, for a long time now, begun to resemble not vanguards against politically fashionable ideology, but factories which actively manufacture, maintain, and export such ideologies to the public at ever-soaring prices.

The Religion of DEI

Anybody who has worked in academia for any significant amount of time will have seen numerous examples of the kind of dynamic that might lead to a situation like that of Arday’s at Cambridge. In many decision-making processes, from marking to module design to policy, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity” (DEI) observance has been the unquestionable mantra hovering above one’s head which academics often must tolerate at the cost of their reality, and sometimes their sanity. It is like some colossal in-joke with which everyone must play along.

Some eventually manage to suspend their disbelief and become “true believers” in the ideology, but usually only because they know the consequences of not playing along. For some, the feeling of psychological fraudulence in having apparently devoted the best part of one’s working life to the pursuit of truth within a system that increasingly values things like power or money or associational repute above the truth, becomes an unsustainable burden, and is thus easier avoided than confronted. This is especially so given the ever-mountainous bureaucratic tasks which already envelop so much of the modern academic’s time and imagination.

In reality, those academics who do find the time and inclination to notice the ideological captivity of the modern university are made to feel powerless in opposing it. Those who have spoken out meaningfully against this or that branch of the problem soon tend to find themselves becoming a cancellation story of one kind or another. Other academics observe these outcomes shrewdly, learning to keep quiet about what they have or have not happened to notice, perhaps hoping the ideological umbrella which has come to govern virtually every aspect of their work may one day simply drift off in the wind. But it doesn’t. The umbrella only seems to grow larger with every new form they fill in, with every quota they tick, with every policy they execute. The desire to keep their reputation and career intact soon overpowers any scruples they may have had about the increasingly self-defeating nature of the system they have come to serve.

The clubbing together of numerous Cambridge academics to oppose Arday’s bogus claims to professorship may reflect something of a change of wind against the emotive power of “Woke” within the University at large. But it is worth noting that it still took a wider cultural wind-change in general for academics to muster up the courage to oppose what might previously have been seen as “inappropriate” to denounce openly. Perhaps Arday overplayed his hand and exposed the many oversights of those who found his promotion all too convenient to inspect too closely. But it has taken some time for such pushback to become possible. Such support was not shown, for example, to Nigel Biggar, whose research on the legacy of western colonialism a few years ago was deemed beyond the pale for a professor, regardless of Biggar’s exemplary academic credentials within his field.

Ideological rot has been at work in modern secular higher education for some time. The modern university is in disarray, and most academics who are honest with themselves, know this. The modern university still identifies its USP as being “free” from the constraints of ideology, particularly religious ideology. It prides itself on being “critical”, on valuing nuance and complexity over and above “dogmatic” convictions. Yet ironically, in recent years universities have shown an uncanny desire to persecute perceived “heretics” for their refusal to assent to one or another “inclusive” creed with the precision of Inquisitors and the vengeance of Crusaders.

The Prostitution of Knowledge

Why have universities been so keen to prostitute themselves to fashionable ideology when doing so quite clearly undermines everything they claim to stand for and the very reason society needs them? Because ideological lies are profitable, and because the universities themselves have also been lied to, believing that if they do not follow the “progressive” path now set out before them, they will be cast into the outer darkness of public and/or elite opinion, ultimately resulting in the potential loss of funding, all for refusing to assent to whatever latest commandment happens to descend from the sacred mount of “Civitas DEI”.

The sad truth is that the modern university made itself forever for sale. The price of its soul is perpetually subject to change at the behest of its ideological overlords. If the requirement happens to be the acquisition of a recently invented inclusivity award like the mythologically titled “Athena Swan”, then the university may hire less qualified (even wildly unqualified) people in the hope of attaining it, as long as the unqualifiedness can be appropriately packaged in fashionable terms. If the requirement is a certain level of attainment from a particular demographic of international students who pay higher fees, the university will subtly “tweak” (that is, downgrade) its learning outcomes to make them more “fit for purpose”. If the requirement is the maintenance of a particular funding relationship, they will find a way to keep people in jobs well beyond their added value to the institution, and to swiftly extinguish ideological dissenters with remarkable speed and efficiency. This is, of course, what I myself found a few years ago when speaking an unfashionable truth which failed to pay sufficient homage to the commandments of the new gods.

The modern university is broken on such a deep level that it requires deep and lasting restoration. This is particularly so with regard to its de-prioritisation of the pursuit of truth. Most academics within the system know this but are either kidding themselves or are simply preoccupied with fighting to survive within it. That is how one of the most prestigious universities the world has ever known could find itself hiring a professor who could not even profess the truth about his own qualifications for professorship, let alone the truth per se. You could even argue that, as embarrassing as it may be, Cambridge did not “fail” in its mission; it succeeded. While its historic coat of arms still declares, Hinc lucem et pocula sacra (“From here, we gain light and precious knowledge [or, sacred draughts]”), the reality is that on the Mission and Core Values page of its website, the word “truth” (let alone “sacred” truth) is nowhere to be found, and its only two “core values” are now listed as “freedom of thought and expression” and “freedom from discrimination”.

One could even question whether universities like Cambridge still hold to “freedom of thought” at all given that truth itself may often discriminate against the feelings of those who disagree with it (something the truth seems to have an uncanny habit of doing in strange times like these). The impassable contradiction between those two core values—however benevolently intended—is at the heart of the crisis of faith in the modern university, however ancient its crests, buildings, or mottos.

No British university, however old, has proven strong enough to avoid the rushing tentacles of secular modernity. Ideologies—especially fashionable and profitable ones—can be blindingly powerful things. If the academy is to be of further use to our society in future generations, the universities must recover their long-lost love of the pursuit of truth and light over lies and darkness. They must restore the freedom of truth to be true, however unsweet it may sound to the ears of some.

The Death of Arday

In what certainly does seem like a surprising twist to this story—and not long after I had finished writing this piece—Jason Arday was found dead at his home in Battersea, London, at the age of 41. As I write this, the causes are still unknown and the Police are treating his death as “unexpected but not suspicious”. This usually means suicide, which appears to be likely in this case. If so, it only makes the situation even more tragic, though not in a way that ought to make us any more sympathetic to Arday’s “case” as such. If anything, it only further demonstrates just how poisonous this entire problem really is, that the digestion of these ideologies could ultimately lead someone to take their own life in abject shame, having never truly faced up to the truth.

In some ways, it seems Arday had been avoiding the truth his whole life. He resigned from Cambridge just hours after the university announced it was launching an investigation into his academic credentials. By doing so, he was not only evading the consequences of being officially “found out” and dismissed, but even his given reason for resigning was not one of repentance but rather due to the increased public scrutiny over his situation, saying: “The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.” Yet he maintained he was not “a liar” and publicly reiterated that he refused to accept “the narratives that have surrounded me”. This insinuates that he was largely innocent and was being interpreted unfairly by the wider media and colleagues, as if he was not the perpetrator of dishonesty but the “victim” of scrutiny. Not facing up to those charges head-on seems manifestly dishonourable in itself, but to paint oneself as the victim while doing so was even worse.

We cannot know precisely why he took his life, of course, but it is at least plausible that in the midst of whatever stresses and strains he felt, a part of him was attempting to immortalise his carefully curated reputation as the perpetual “victim” of discriminatory oppression. This was the motif, after all, on which he had been trading for virtually his entire academic life. Even in instances where he did not steal the work of others, he was still producing the kind of Critical Race Theory garbage that has been so destructive of the truth in our time. His published book titles (whether he actually wrote them all, or not) included the following: Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (2018), The Black Curriculum: Black British History in the National Curriculum Report (2020), Doing Equity and Diversity for Success in Higher Education: Redressing Structural Inequalities in the Academy (2021).

These books were all published at the height of hyper-awareness of DEI within the academy. There could not have been a less “unequal” time in the history of higher education, and yet inequality was the drum on which Arday—like many other “progressive” academics of his time—continued to beat. Thus, even when Arday was not lying about his research, he was still a dealer in lies, a peddler of ideologies which set themselves up against the knowledge of the truth.

In one sense, of course, it may seem sad—inappropriate, even—to speak so unsympathetically of the recently deceased. Arday will leave grieving family members, who should be in our prayers, and whose grief will be exacerbated by the recent revelations about him. But it is just such situations which highlight the tragedy of the kind of society in which we now live, where misplaced empathy for alleged minority victimhood enables ideological lies to fester and flourish, leading not merely to the degradation of truth but the degradation of life itself. Even to speak of Arday’s death is not so much about Arday as about the system that created him, the system he himself manipulated, and yet also the system that proved to have manipulated him too, and many others like him who have been taught to avoid the truth with open eyes.

I’ve been discussing that curiously novel term, “Judeo-Christian,” which has come to the fore in recent times, and has already gained quite the reputation. In the previous article (part 1), I talked about how the fear of antisemitism is often wielded against those who fail to show sufficient support for the conflation of Jewish-Christian identity or values, and some of the Biblical and theological problems this begins to throw up.

It was Wes Huff who was one of the latest to take flak for using this term, defending himself by saying, “it’s simply the term that describes the combined corpus of Old and New Testaments. The Jewish heritage of the Hebrew scriptures combined with the New Testament. That’s it. I know you want there to be some conspiracy but there isn’t.” That post garnered almost three million views, which is quite something!

Jordan Peterson is one of the more high profile voices who came to Wes Huff’s defence on this. This was in part because it was in the context of lecturing on Bible history for Peterson’s online academy that Huff made the initial comments, but also because Peterson himself (who, though clearly “pro-Christian” on some level, is not a Christian believer), seems to be wedded to the “Judeo-Christian” concept in general. He said:

“With regard to “Judeo Christian”:

The 10 Commandments are Jewish.

The great stories of the Old Testament are Jewish.

The Jews developed the idea of subsidiarity as the alternative to tyranny and slavery.

The Jews established the cultural preconditions for the rise of universal literacy.

The fate of Israel at the hands of the Islamists is the fate of the West.

This rising tide of anti-semitism sickens me. Those of you engaging in it for your oh-so-moral reasons—you’re despicable.

And remember, you proud “Christians” objecting in all your purity to the term:

Christ Himself was a Jew.”

It’s hard to believe that someone as sharply intelligent as Jordan Peterson can seriously believe that the Christians who reject the very modern term “Judeo-Christian” only do so because they either don’t know obvious facts about Bible history or that they hate Jewish people. How are these the only realistically conceivable options to him?

Why do people feel the need to constantly scaremonger about the “rising tide of antisemitism” as though there were Nazi torch parades in our streets? Indeed, why do the Nazis still seem to have so much symbolic power over the western intellectual imagination today that we must live under the fear of their apparently inevitable return unless we pay fealty to whichever alternative ideology we must welcome in as an antidote?

If people wish to extinguish the conspiracy theories they despise about this or that person being “paid by Israel” to maintain this or that public support for this or that Jewish interest, why not welcome more of an acceptable range of views on these issues? Why default to some form of sanctimonious Nazi-hunting or dismissive mockery whenever somebody voices something that doesn’t fit the very modern idea of a sanctified modern Judeo-Christian alliance in the present tense?

While many who speak on these issues tend to draw attention to the geo-political complexities regarding the State of Israel, what I’m principally interested in here is the Biblical, theological, and moral problems which seem to come to the surface whenever someone critiques (or defends) the term. For example, I’ve even seen people who are expressing completely standard New Testament views being described as antisemitic, such as this example on a post by Caldron Pool:

Just to be clear, this commenter was essentially calling the argument of the New Testament book, Hebrews, “antisemitic rubbish”. You could ignore unhinged responses like this when it’s just random people online, but increasingly it is also prominent Christian leaders who harbour similar levels of suspicion against legitimate statements of Christian truth. Why are they too jumping on this bandwagon? Why is this now the “test” of the endlessly tedious pantomime of Nazi-hunting that appears to have engulfed the minds of so many today, who see some imagined resurgence of the Third Reich as the greatest conceivable threat to mankind (right after Christian Nationalism, perhaps)?

Sola Something Else?

The American evangelical, Owen Strachan, predictably weighed in to make the usual antisemitic assumptions, and also tweeting:

“you cannot separate Christianity from its Jewish roots. It’s impossible. The words of Jesus make it so:

“You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).

Jesus was speaking as the JEWISH MESSIAH.”

Is that what those who reject the term “Judeo-Christianity” are saying, that we want to separate Christianity from its Jewish roots? And what on earth is meant by the quotation from John 4, that without an ongoing support for the Judeo-Christian concept, or for Jewish people per se “above” other people per se, then we are denying the root of our salvation? The way some of these (mostly Protestant) leaders are responding on this, it’s as if someone had uncovered a long-lost sixth “Sola” from the Reformation that said: “Sola Judeo-”!

Joe Boot also referred to the questioning of the Judeo-Christian term as though it was some kind of viral mental illness, replying to Wes Huff’s post with:

“Thanks Wes. I agree. We are dealing with lunacy on this and it’s spreading.”

Why is questioning the term “Judeo-Christian” evidence of lunacy? No doubt Joe has in mind there those who question it for some darker antisemitic purpose, and that he sees enough of that around to think there is no value in adding even reasonable voices to the anti-Judeo-Christian chorus. But this overlooks the inherent theological problem embedded in the term itself, to say nothing of the demands by others for its ongoing use, or the apparent incredulity among such defenders that the term usually implies far more than just the standard theological connection between the Old and New Testaments as the full canon of Holy Scripture.

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The “Judeo-Christian” concept clearly does not simply function as a restatement of the Biblical perspective on the Hebraic roots of the olive tree of God’s chosen people (cf. Romans 11:17-18). It connotes a cultural, moral, and religious alliance irrespective of Christ. As I noted in part 1, given that it only came into existence relatively recently, it is incredibly odd that people tend to assume that anyone who opposes it must be antisemitic or an indirect enabler of antisemitism.

Such default assumptions about “anti-Jewish conspiracy hatred” may—ironically enough—inspire far more actual antisemitic conspiracy theories in the long run by seeming to manifest a conspiratorial attitude that is less open to reason than it seems to think.

Is Christ the King of the Jews?

What’s in a hyphen? Or rather, what’s in this hyphen? Well, at its worst, the use of the “Judeo-Christian” term threatens to confuse and even dilute Christ’s supremacy (cf. Col. 1:15-20). People may easily come to think that being ethnically, culturally, or religiously Jewish still puts people on the same “team” as Christianity, working towards the same general end, and claiming all the good of Christendom for Judaism too, despite Jews explicitly rejecting Christ.

The subtlety, however, is that lots of religiously observant Jews literally do share some cultural and moral values with Christians. Yet the way these are now conflated brings all sorts of theological confusion. It begs the question, for example: what other hyphens might also be applied in future to incorporate other sets of cultural or religious values? Will we see the term “Christo-Secular values” at some point regarding human rights? Or perhaps, “Christo-Islamic values” related to shared opposition to gay marriage or a belief in the importance of Biblical law? What about something like “Judeo-Babylonian values,” given that Israel’s time in exile in Babylon undoubtedly left its mark upon how their values were communicated?

Obviously, the reason people protect “Judeo-Christian” above other possible compound terms is because they might see not doing so as seemingly rejecting the ancient roots of the Christian faith, hence why they would see it as justified in a way no other “qualifier” ever could be. But the ambiguity opened up by the defensive use of the term is significant, implying for some that the values of modern practising Jews (inclusive of their rejection of Christ) are one and the same as those of Christians.

Another prominent Christian influencer who waded in to the defence of the term recently was Allie Beth Stuckey, who said:

“When people talk about America’s ‘Judeo-Christian values,’ they’re…referring to the shared biblical worldview that has shaped the West: that we’re made in the image of God, that our rights come from our Creator—not the government—and that every human being has inherent dignity. And the truth is, Jesus was a Jew, and His Jewish identity is a key part in the history of Christianity.”

The problem is, Jews do not share a “biblical worldview” with Christians because they reject the New Testament, which is the interpretative key to the Old Testament, without which—after the coming of Christ—you cannot understand the Old Testament, let alone honour the God who reveals Himself in it, and then most explicitly in Christ the Son:

“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Heb. 1:1-3)

You cannot claim to hold “a Biblical worldview” while rejecting the Son of God. Perhaps you could say you hold this or that social value in common, but this is not the same as a Biblical worldview.

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And yes, it is true, as Stuckey noted, that “Jesus’ identity is a key part in the history of Christianity,” but in what sense? What part did it play? Though the ancestral link to the Jewish people in the line of David and the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham was, of course, essential, this did not imply some ongoingly shared affinity between Christians and Jews irrespective of faith in Christ. If anything, it was just the opposite. The first-century Jews who rejected Christ vigorously persecuted Christians, with their leaders spurning “the king of the Jews” Himself, not only having him killed (Acts 2:23; 5:30) but explicitly rejecting Him as their king:

“So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’”” (John 19:22)

Clearly, there were many Jewish believers in the first century too (who likely comprised a majority of Jews within the early Church). But they did not worship Jesus as “the king of the Jews”—a term which never occurs again within the New Testament after the death of Jesus—rather, they worshipped Him as all Christians did, as the “king of kings and lord of lords” (1Tim. 6:15), as “the name that is above every name” (Eph. 1:21), as “the Saviour of the world” (1John 4:14).

The Hyphenation of Christ’s Glory?

There is simply far more going on with how the Judeo-Christian term “works” today than simply an expression of our spiritual kinship with Old Testament Israelites, or even for our evangelistic hope that the Jews will one day be saved. By diluting Christ’s supremacy and including Christ-rejecting Jews into the inheritance by default (however vaguely or indirectly), there will seem less of a reason for such Jews to feel “jealous,” as Paul argued ought to be the case when they look at the Gentiles now inheriting what they forsook (cf. Rom. 11:14).

At the very least, the “Judeo-Christian” term merely takes something away from Christ’s exclusive glory, dimming his light with the power of the hyphen. Indeed, for many people, I’m sure that hyphen in the middle actually functions as a “minus” symbol, so that it quite literally functions as something more like: “Judeo-minus-Christ.” Many of the people currently defending the term may well be good Christian people and thinkers who serve the Church well in standing against other worldly ideologies, but on this it seems so many leaders—blinded by their sensitivity to the perpetual potential of antisemitism—do not see the obvious problems with the term.

Such Christians seem to be uniting together to defend a concept which arguably threatens to undermine what they actually stand for, leading them to feel the need to say far more about the potential persecution of Jewish people today than they ever would about the far more overt persecution of Christians who continue to be targeted, mutilated, or beheaded in places like northern Nigeria today.

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I imagine, of course, that some of these Judeo-Christian Christians might say the same in reverse: that anyone speaking against the term aids the resurgence of antisemitism. However, not only are these claims often spurious, but they are unjustly suspicious of the Christians who reject the term, dismissing the fact that the way it is used today really is as a literal modifier to Christianity, something implying that Christianity is less than it is, robbing Christ’s exclusive glory. Where the most ardent supporters of Judeo-Christianity seem convinced that to oppose it is to devalue Christianity by promoting group hatred or uprooting Christianity’s from its roots, it is actually the use of “Judeo-Christian” itself that accomplishes this subversive feat far more potently.

Even Ben Shapiro—perhaps the most influential Jewish right wing voice within the culture war world over the last decade—said himself a few years ago that you should not add “modifiers” (like hyphens!) to perfectly good concepts (like Christianity!), and that if you do, you mutate what you attempt to modify:

“Any time you put a modifier in front of a term that is inherently good, you turn it into a perversion of itself.”

Why can’t what Shapiro said there not be true of the term, “Judeo-Christianity” too, a phrase Shapiro himself now freely uses? He does not say. Perhaps the term has become far too convenient a modifier that it has been decided that its ongoing use should not be modified?

What perplexes me about the way Christians worry about in all this, is that if you see instances of actual Jew-hatred among people—especially among Christians—why not just call it out when and where you see it? Why do we even need a special term for Jew-hatred at all? Is it a worse sin to hate Jews than to hate Muslims or Hindus or liberals or Nazis? Does God care less about such hatred than hatred of someone who is not Jewish? Didn’t the Good Samaritan teach us something about this?

The introduction of the term “Islamophobia” famously threatens to make it impossible to distinguish between criticism of Muslims and criticism of Islam, thus making Islam functionally unquestionable because it becomes elided with who someone is, not just what they believe. The same has already been true for a long time with the term “antisemitism”, which is often wielded in such a way that one never quite knows whether it applies to someone’s Jewish ethnicity or their Judaic beliefs.

The Pre-eminence of Christ

It should not be at all controversial to complain that adding the “Judeo-” modifier to Christianity implies that you are running the risk of presenting Christianity as something different to what it is. Nor should it be controversial to say that the Old Testament is Christian all the way down. If it isn’t, as noted in the previous article, then Christianity has no foundation because the New Testament assumes that the Old Testament is speaking of Christ and even asserts that Christ was present within the Old Testament story itself, such as in the Book of Jude:

“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.” (Jude 5)

Some Christians today—so intensely concerned about profiling their anti-antisemitic posture at every turn—seemingly do indeed need “reminding,” as Jude says, that the Exodus was not merely about the salvation of the ancient Israelites (later called “Jews”) from Egypt, but about all of God’s people, a people who would later become “a new nation” in Christ (1Pet. 2:9). And this Christ was not some new deity, but the One who was there with Israel all along, the One who “was with God and who was God” from the very beginning (John 1:1).

Stay tuned for the third and final piece of this mini-series next week…

I wrote an article which has been sitting in my Substack drafts folder for a couple of years now. Something always seems to get in the way of me finishing and publishing it. But one of the reasons, I think, that it has been easier for me to keep it hidden in the drafts folder is that I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the trouble!

The topic of “Israel” and “the Jews” is so fraught with controversy from so many different angles today that it becomes difficult to wade in unless you have a very good reason to do so. While the greater oversight of evangelicals in recent decades has certainly been to avoid dying on any hills, this doesn’t mean that every hill actually is worth dying upon!

A Dubious Provenance

I have not had especially strong views on these topics other than with regard to the way these themes often seem to be held so fanatically by their supporters that they cannot help but breed the wrong kind of trouble when discussed or critiqued. What is increasingly observable is that whatever one does or doesn’t think about “the Jews” finds a way of migrating into very fundamental matters of the Christian faith, regardless of which “side” of the debates people take, or whether they take a side at all.

I will not post below my drafted article. That will have to wait until the week after next as a “part three”. In this and the next article I want to highlight some of the recent happenings on this issue about which I do have a strong view. This relates to my suspicions regarding the recent uptake in the use of the term “Judeo-Christianity,” the way it may skew our understanding of the Bible, and the way the accompanying term “antisemitism” can be wielded as the sidekick attack-dog to any who dare to question its master.

The use of “Judeo-Christianity” did not come from nowhere. Its normative use—like many things today which we are told to just accept—came within that most troubled of ideological eras, the 20th century. I had previously thought it was invented in the 20th century but have since been corrected by some who have seen evidence of it in the nineteenth century too. Whatever the precise birth of the term itself, it has not been around long at all relative to most of church history, and it seems to have come to ever-greater prominence in the 20th century, especially post-WWII. The first time I came across it being used was not among faithful church pastors; it was either from academics or now-apostate “emergent church” leaders like Pete Rollins or Rob Bell in the mid-2000s.

Dissatisfied with the perceived superficiality of conventional evangelical Christianity, such leaders began to seek a more “ancient” provenance to their faith. Enslaved as they were to the desire for worldly academic acclaim, it is unsurprising that they found the compounded idea of “the Judeo-Christian tradition” far more suitable to their ever-broadening palates and their ever-itching ears.

Both Bell and Rollins were especially fond of citing obscure Jewish rabbis and parables as though such teachings were subtly seen as being on par with canonical scripture (yet without ever coming out and saying so). They needed only to gesture in the general direction of this mystically ancient religion of Judaism as though it knew something which we blunt and straightforward Christians did not.

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It’s hard to imagine how they managed to square this deep appreciation of Rabbinic Judaism with the way the Apostle spoke of the revelatory power of the Gospel as “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Col. 1:26-27). Indeed, just a few sentences later, Paul will speak of the revelation of Christ not as being somehow incomplete without the addition of mysterious rabbinic toppings, but of Christ as the one ^“in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), reiterating that he does not want the Colossians to be “deluded” by fine-sounding arguments, nor “taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition” but to be focussed on Christ above all (Col. 2:4,8).

Quarrels and Diversions

None of this should sound particularly surprising to a Christian today. Yet it’s important to emphasise just how emphatic and exclusive the New Testament is whenever the issue of the apparent significance of contemporary Jewishness to Christianity rears its head, as it often tends to. It’s not even that those who see the ongoing significance of, say, Biblical Law, or the value of particular Biblical festivals or traditions, are inherently off-course. It’s more that the way one views one’s view of Israel and/or Judaism today can easily supplant basic New Testament teaching and cause unnecessary confusions and unloving divisions between fellow Christians, as Paul consistently warns about not only in Romans and Galatians, but also in the pastoral epistles:

“But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless.” (Titus 3:9)

“charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.” (1Tim. 1:3-7)

“Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil” (2Tim. 2:23-24)

When it comes to how people think or speak about Israel and/or Jewishness today, some are especially prone to forget obvious Biblical truths about love, Christ, and the Gospel under generational pressure to conform to particular anxieties of our age about what we’re supposed to be looking out for in every corner of every room, diverting our attention from more foundational matters.

The Fear of Antisemitism

This year I attended the Jordan Peterson-influenced Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, which—like the NatCon conference I’ve written about before—regularly mentions the “Judeo-Christian” term as the descriptor for the values that need preserving in the West. ARC has its own quirks, of course, as it’s not officially Christian—despite clearly attracting a critical mass of Christians to it, and with various speakers this year overtly commending Church or Christianity in general. Even so, officially speaking, it is secular, and is more overtly committed to the concept of, say, “western civilization” than the religion of Christianity in particular, despite the obvious and inevitable crossovers.

One of the final talks of this year’s ARC conference was by Os Guinness, a Christian apologist and author now in his mid-eighties. At one point during his talk, his usual measured tone seemed to disappear and he suddenly erupted in anger, shouting out the word “antisemitism!” with particular venom. This got a rapturous round of applause, as if he was saying something that desperately needed to be said and there was no one else willing to say it (or rather, shout it). These are the kinds of emphases that make me dubious.

Sitting behind that comment was, I imagine, a denunciation of typical Left Wing political support for Palestine in light of the Oct 7th attacks, or simply the baseline antisemitism shared by many active Muslims. Even so, it seemed strange that the most visceral reaction was reserved for an issue which is hardly rampant, let alone being anywhere near being the main problem western civilization faces today.

Indeed, increasingly, the intended targets of such warnings appear to be “right wing” Christians who are beginning to voice concerns over undue Jewish influence within western nations, thus insinuating the inevitable comparisons with which our age appears to have been plagued.

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There seems to be a similar “party line” on this topic with prominent conservative socio-political organisations and leaders, with an elevated fear over the imminent threat of antisemitism that seems to reach bizarre levels. For such people, the test-case for trustworthiness today is not even whether someone is verifiably antisemitic or not, but whether someone is sufficiently concerned about antisemitism or not. If you are not vocally loud about the urgency of the problem of antisemitism—or if you attempt to put distance between Christians and Jews—you are now seen as potentially dubious.

It’s not that antisemitism doesn’t exist as a problem, nor even that it hasn’t been a very significant problem historically; it’s the way it’s spoken of as if it’s the problem at such a time as this. While I see more people willing to challenge the role of Judaism or Israel in the modern world, I don’t actually see many Christians insinuating that antisemitism is a “good” thing. But I do see many people insinuating that antisemitism is the greatest moral evil of our time, or who seem determined to denounce or socially destroy those who see it otherwise.

Earlier this year I was listening to a prominent evangelical leader speak about a new church organisation being launched in the US. Its aim is to train pastors who are more socio-politically engaged and who see the culture war as a key part of the mission field in proclaiming Christ’s lordship. The idea sounded great. But then he added a really strange caveat for the kind of pastors that would not be permitted to join such a network. He said, “any hint of Jew-hate, and you’re gone”. I was taken aback to hear this, not because I think “Jew hate” is good (obviously!) but because there are so many possible options for barring entry to such a Church network, and yet it was “antisemitism” that was chosen as one of the primary red flags.

“Where are all these Christian pastors harbouring inherent hatred for Jews?” I wondered. By “no Jew hate,” they must mean those men on the Right who believe it should be allowed to question Jewish influence in national and/or Christian affairs? It seemed that the word “antisemitism” was becoming evermore elastic to include not simply people who hate Jews but also people who fail to say the approved kinds of things about them. Antisemitism—with the freight of the Holocaust behind it—is so easily wielded as a weapon today with the intention not to clarify discussion but to subjugate discussion, to strangle any genuine conversation before it even gets going.

This is where that increasingly high-stakes term, “Judeo-Christian” comes in, as the umbrella for the concept of Jewish and Christian common purpose, and one which, again, seems to have become a gatekeeper for suspicions of antisemitism. But having assumed its legitimacy, more and more Christians are starting to push back against it.

What Does the Term Imply?

The most recent iteration of this problem came up when the noteworthy Christian apologist, Wes Huff (innocently enough) tweeted out in response to criticisms he’d received on a recent video lecture where he used the phrase, “Judeo-Christian”. He replied to his critics with a post that went viral, where he said:

“So much noise online regarding the term “judeo-Christian.” Guys -- in academia it’s simply the term that describes the combined corpus of Old and New Testaments. The Jewish heritage of the Hebrew scriptures combined with the New Testament. That’s it. I know you want there to be some conspiracy but there isn’t, that’s the way we’re using it. It has nothing to do with geo-politics or a one world order.”

I replied with the following:

“I think the way most people use that term today is not just in relation to the shared inheritance of the Old and New Testaments but rather to describe shared cultural-religious values in the west, thus including Christ-rejecting Talmudic Judaism as an equal contributor to the cultural heritage of "Christendom", and potentially even diluting (in the eyes of many) the distinctive supremacy of Christ.

It's also a relatively recent term, yet is often treated by its defenders as if it's historic and sacrosanct. That's some of what makes people understandably dubious, irrespective of the conspiracy theorists who are just dubious about everything (except their theories, naturally).”

Most people know that practising Jews “AD” have explicitly rejected Jesus Christ as Messiah. It’s not that they haven’t heard about Him or those who follow Him; it’s that they have explicitly rejected Him, just as many of their people also rejected Him when He walked the earth in the first century.

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There are also many secular Jews in our time—comprising almost half of all Jews in the world today—whose contribution to social and moral values is also implied within the “Judeo-Christian” concept. This makes it even more confusing to people because it introduces an exclusively ethnic element on one side of that magical hyphen. Being Jewish = being favoured by God, irrespective of whether such a person even believes in God, let alone whether they obey Him.

The question is: are Jewish people to be given ongoing special preference among all peoples because of what God said to Abram several thousand years ago?

“I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:3)

For many modern Christians that really is all there is to it. God said it, and God doesn’t break his promises. Amen to both! But how are God’s promises regarding Israel to be fulfilled? Through modern Israel, through modern Jews, or through the Church? Some clumsily refer to what most Christians believe about the Church as “replacement theology”, implying that Christians see the Church as “replacing” Israel, as if God changed his mind about those promises to Abraham. But this is a rhetorical misdirection. God has only one bride, not two, and it is the Church (Eph. 5:25-27; 2Cor. 11:2; Rev. 21:2), comprised of both Jews and Gentiles (Gal. 3:28).

Imagine, for example, if we instead started using the phrase, “Judeo-Gentile Christianity”. In a sense, that might at least be a slight improvement if still not ideal, because you would simply be saying that the former distinction between Jews and Gentiles is not made entirely obsolete, but that—in light of the New Covenant—it makes absolutely no difference to their standing in Christ. But why not just say “Christianity” given that we know that if we mean genuine Christianity, it automatically and obviously includes both Jews and Gentiles in Christ? That’s the point of a good deal of the debates that come up within the New Testament, both in Acts and in the epistles.

Whose Book is the Old Testament?

Ultimately, the danger with the Judeo-Christian concept is that people end up thinking, “Oh, so I guess you don't need Christianity per se because it's more like a 'bolt-on' to Judaism, or an 'optional extra'?” Alongside such thinking, Christians—as noted earlier—can be subtly taught to see the Old Testament as a “Jewish” book rather than a Christian book, something over which contemporary Jewish rabbis have some kind of equal interpretative claim.

Christians too easily concede on this point. Indeed, if the Old Testament is not seen as a Christian book—if it is seen as the true spiritual “property” of the Jews and really only “on loan” to us, or only ours “second-hand,” as it were—then neither can the New Testament be considered a Christian book. Why? Because the New Testament's revelatory authority in and through the Messianic fulfilment in Christ is wholly reliant upon it being a faithful fulfilment of what the Old Testament actually teaches, not what the apostles later decided the Old Testament teaches retrospectively.

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This is not mere nit-picking. It’s hugely significant. If you dilute the authority of the Old Testament as being a book that truly belongs to the Church alone—a book that is primarily for and about the Church—if you think of it really as a book primarily for observant Jews irrespective of their belief in Christ, you have not only short-changed the message of the New Testament, you have also short-changed the Old Testament itself. The Old Testament points to the New as the faithful fulfilment of the Old for the whole people of God, inclusive of Jews and Gentiles. This was always God’s plan through his promise to Abraham, whom Paul refers to as being justified by faith in the same way as all Christians (Rom. 4:3), who are themselves blessed “along with Abraham” (Gal. 3:9).

The Biblical foundation of Christianity is certainly Hebraic, and Gentiles have been grafted onto the tree that was once not their own, and so have no cause for arrogance (cf. Rom. 11:18). But that is now unmistakeably a Christian tree, not a “Jewish” tree (the way most people understand what it is to be Jewish today, whether culturally or religiously). Nor is it even a “Gentile” tree, or a “Judeo-Christian” tree. It is a Christian tree all the way down, whose branches are comprised of those saved not by their ethnicity or their observance of the Law but by Christ alone.

But isn’t all this just “Christianity 101”? Well, from the way some Christians appear to leap to the defence of “Judeo-Christian” Christianity, apparently not...

Look out for Part 2 coming soon…

See also:  "Politics, Pietists, and Patriots: How Modern Christians Are Duped Into Political Apathy"

Modern western society is not geared towards large families. I am reminded of this every time I take my children to some attraction where the “family ticket” often consists of one or two parents and two children. With such expectations for what constitutes a “normal” family, perhaps it’s no coincidence that the population of the west is currently below replacement rate. To reverse the GP’s question: “Do we need to have a conversation about childbearing?”

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This testifies to just how easily influenced modern Christians have been by secular liberal propaganda.

As a posture towards society, this is both incredibly foolish and incredibly dangerous. Most people have simply gotten so used to the declined and morally corrupted state of modern western nations that they have come to call it “better” than any alternative, or even “ideal”.

On Anti-Christian-Nationalism…ism

That’s why so many Christians are still busy publishing anxious concern-pieces like “What’s wrong with Christian Nationalism” and the “Dangers of Christian Nationalism” as if it’s the number 1 ideological threat to civilization, at just the time when Pride marches, vape shops, DEI bureaucrats, rape gangs, multicultural globalists and political Islamists are busy undermining just about everything we ever held dear about our civilization right before our eyes.

Stephen Wolfe—who for the last few years has been systematically vilified by many of the “respectable” evangelical platforms for putting his head above the parapet to explicitly articulate a case for Christian Nationalism—has often made the observation that modern Christians seem to think (1) that any form of nationalism is a modern political idolatry being imposed upon the Church, and (2) that the current political liberal order is how all good Christians have always seen things. As Wolfe recently said on X, summarising two simultaneous opinions commonly held by those who oppose Christian Nationalism:

Anti-CN guy: “Nationalism is a 19th century phenomenon.”

Also anti-CN guy: “Modern liberalism is the timeless politics of Jesus.”

It really is bizarre how common this kind of thinking is. Who can look out at the modern west and say, “Jesus definitely prefers this kind of setup to anything that’s come before it”?

On “Apolitical” Centre-Leftism

Many evangelicals might try to cover their backs here and say, “Oh no, you’re quite wrong. Jesus is not in favour of any kind of political arrangement, and so we don’t support any particular political position. The kingdom of God ‘is not of this world,’ remember…”

But as I’ve said before, this is rarely ever how things work out in reality, whenever concrete opinions are expressed or concrete action is taken. That’s when people’s politics really comes out to play. Their politics come to the forefront not in the abstract but when something significant happens, or when something controversial is said, or when someone stands up to actually do something which threatens to change the present political order. That’s when you find out that everyone was really just pretending to be “apolitical” until something sufficiently “right wing” came along (like Christian Nationalism) that they could suddenly find themselves denouncing with all their heart.

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If you were truly “apolitical” you would not even come out to denounce any political position, however far left or far right it was. But as soon as something comes along that genuinely challenges the status quo, that’s when you know that such people were actually hugely in favour of some form of moderated secular liberalism all along.

Not only are they willing to fight for such a system (by publicly denouncing those who challenge it with something else) but they have even convinced themselves that Jesus would be in favour of that system too. This, of course, is ideological idolatry of the highest order—the very thing they are accusing others of—hiding in plain sight.

Why? Because these are often the very people who are so quick to lambast people “on the Right” for supposedly imposing a political ideology like “Christian Nationalism” upon Christianity or upon society. They seem entirely unaware (or unwilling to admit) that they have already done this with regard to secular liberalism, and continue to do so.

This is also why, as controversial as this may seem to them—and as unwilling as they would be to admit it—such ardently robotic defenders of liberalism today are ironically far more likely to have been paid-up Nazis in 1930s Germany than the Christian Nationalists of today.

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Studious observers might notice that I was sporting the classic 1982 England World Cup shirt during the interview. I happened to be wearing this while travelling on trains and tubes for four hours in the searing heat earlier that day. When I arrived at the church in London where we were recording, after downing several glasses of water, I told Luke I would quickly change into a more “respectable” attire for the interview. He laughed and said there was no official “dress code” so I could wear whatever I liked.

I then thought it might actually be somewhat appropriate to keep the Three Lions on the chest given the nature of what we were going to be talking about! I’m sure my anti-nationalist detractors will happily employ this against me in some way, given that so many in our nation now seem to see any signage relating to Britain or England in particular as inherently “problematic” (England flags continue to be torn down in the middle night in the town where I live, for example). But I say, let them call us “unrespectable” if they like, for it is precisely their love of respectability that most resembles the enemies of Christ, who famously said of the Pharisees:

“They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, and they love the place of honour at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others.” (Matthew 23:5-6)

Obviously, there is also a danger in wanting to “be seen” to not care about the current establishment which could ironically resemble the Pharisees too, and I’m sure is already a temptation even among online influencers who are saying good things. What Jesus cares about is integrity, the state of your heart, which should at some point manifest in your willingness to stand up for what is good, true, and beautiful especially when the “respectable” types of the world want you to be quiet and scuttle back to the shadows. As I have been at pains to emphasise in recent years, your private convictions should come out in your public convictions.

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One “respectable” leader in our time, Prof. Luke Bretherton of the University of Oxford (an “evangelical” by all accounts), joined the pharisaic chorus recently by recommending that the Church of England (an organisation which literally makes no sense at all outside the concept of “a Christian nation”) should avoid using the term “Christian Nationalism” because it will only fuel national divisions. Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we… After all, multiculturalism is doing such a great job of unifying the nation already, it would be a shame to interrupt its progress! As ever, those most responsible for causing the societal divisions are most vocal in castigating those who draw attention to those divisions, so that it is made to seem that naming the division is the same thing as causing the division.

Being seen a disreputable for being politically incorrect is not automatically the same as being seen as disreputable for standing for Christ, of course. But as I emphasise in the interview, standing up for the cause of nations today is more Biblical than many realise, and so—even though we must be wise in how we think about such things—I would argue that standing against the spirit of the age with respect to nations as a Christian could become an increasingly significant test of faith in the coming months and years. To some extent, it already is. We just need many of the Christians made drowsy by the modern secularised and effeminised Church to wake up and act accordingly.

The day of the recording, I had been travelling up from Yeovil, where I had just spent the weekend speaking at Dom Muir’s Goshen Gathering conference alongside Confessing Anglican Church leaders Chris Wickland and Bishop Ceirion Dewar (whom I interviewed last year) before spending an evening with James Cary (who interviewed me last year!). It continues to encourage me the way that God is raising up a new generation of leaders across the breadth of the Church in the UK—most of whom are still seen as “outsiders” from the mainstream—all of whom are articulating, in their different ways, what needs to be said about the true state of the Church and the nation in our time. This is something many of the leaders on the “respectable” platforms have consistently refused to do with sufficient faith, wisdom, or courage.

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I will also be speaking at a conference with all those guys—plus Bob of Speakers Corner and Brett Murphy—at the “Make Great Britain Christian Again” conference in Morecambe later this summer.

Book in and come along, if you can! And even if you can’t, please pray for us, as the attacks continue unabated on those who speak the unfashionable truths before the platformed respecters of the spirit of the age.

We used to live in a beautiful small village in the heart of the Peak District in Derbyshire, England. My wife and I would take our carousel of children daily on all sorts of walks up and down the hills and over streams. At some point we began to notice little violet flowers that began appearing each summer around a brook surrounded by greenery. At first, it was a pleasant surprise. There seemed to be plenty of them around, so we let the children pick them and play with them. They loved to press down on the pods which would send the seeds flying out. We soon realised—pretty as these new flowers may be—that they were known as Himalayan Balsam, one of the most invasive plant species that exist. The nature of those ballistic seed pods sends seven or eight hundred seeds up to seven meters away. Due to the aggressive and monopolising nature of Himalayan Balsam, the native species are soon choked out and disappear from the region altogether—if nothing is done about it.

This comes to mind when I think about a new term that has come to prominence in recent years: “soft Jihad.” Much like the phrase “soft totalitarianism^[1]”—popularised by Rod Dreher in Live Not by Lies to describe the slow but powerful impact of cultural Marxism upon Western culture—“soft Jihad” describes the way the hearts and minds of modern Western people are made apathetic to, and eventually won over to, the inevitability of their own cultural defeat at the hands of Islam.

Like all ideological infiltration of this kind, the key to its success is for those being “softly” conquered to tell themselves (1) that what is happening is not happening at all; then, (2) that what is happening was inevitable anyway, and finally, (3) that what happened was a good thing all along. In this article, I want to show some of the reasons why Islam has infiltrated Great Britain and beyond, expose Islam’s nature of political and cultural conquest, and call Christians to stand up against it.

Immigrants and Samaritans

In my own homeland of Great Britain, mass immigration is justified by the relatively recent idea of “multiculturalism,” the idea that a diversity of foreign nationalities enriches a particular national culture far and wide. It is described by its ardent defenders almost like a magic spell, a liberating force for tolerance and inclusivity. We are told we must keep believing this even when it becomes very clear that it fundamentally erodes vital aspects of that very national culture, leading to the loss of liberties and freedom of speech as a direct consequence. Those who say otherwise tend to be shamed as lacking in education or empathy, leading more and more people to refuse to allow themselves to think or say otherwise.

Migrant Islam has been increasing in Western Europe for decades, some of it more subtle than others. Today, boatloads of fighting-age Muslim men are still arriving on British shores day after day, week after week, year after year, posing as refugees or asylum seekers. They were not invited, and yet rather than being refused entry, arrested, or deported, they are instead welcomed with open arms, put up in free hotels, given free meals, even free phones. If it all sounds a little mad, that’s because it is.

It could be said that the European immigration crisis has essentially been made possible by a mutation in the logic of the Good Samaritan. That’s why even many Christians find it hard to say much against the immigration problem, because secular globalists—in repugnance of the historic “Ordo Amoris” regarding the primary duty to care for one’s own family and people in the first instance—have trained them to think that “welcoming the stranger” applies at a political, national level, even when it may threaten the safety of one’s own people. Those who oppose Islamic immigration too strongly are aggressively attacked and smeared for being “bad Samaritans.” Some are subjected to intensive lawfare in the hope of being driven to silence, while others may even be imprisoned for years for a single social media post in a moment of frustration.

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Few globalists have considered that these “bad Samaritans” actually resemble the dying man lying on the ground, rather than the bandits who put him there. In a roundabout way, the liberal tolerance agenda that led to the multicultural ideology that permeates British institutions today displays more of a tolerance for the bandits than the actual victims of injustice.

No case demonstrates the current multicultural problem more prominently than that of the Englishman, Henry Nowak, an eighteen-year-old student who was stabbed by a Sikh man while on his way home from a night out, only for the man and his family to call the police and claim that Nowak had racially abused them. Due to the freighted “anti-racism” priorities of the British police, when the officers arrived on the scene they immediately favoured the Sikhs’ testimony while denying urgent medical care to Nowak, whose quiet pleas of “I’ve been stabbed” and “I can’t breathe” were initially not believed, ultimately allowing him to bleed to death in front of them. So entrenched is multicultural ideology that a spurious accusation of “racism” may even hold the power over life or death.

The Reality Before Our Eyes

It’s true that the native-born population of Britain—like those in the US—are hardly immune to perpetrating many social ills, and especially as they move away from the moorings of Christianity in their lives. That’s why we must continue to remind patriots to return to Christ, rather than simply bemoaning the death of the culture which countless faithful Christians helped to build.

Many Britons are only just waking up, recognizing the steep price to be paid for abandoning the Christian faith in this land. A video circulated in 2025 of a Muslim man gloating over the latest Islamic takeover of an old church building in Sheffield, England. I’ve driven past that building several times before. As he walked alongside it, videoing its architectural features, he narrated gleefully: “Christianity is depleting, atheism is unfulfilling, Islam is here, and it’s here to stay . . . So, carry on making those churches for us, keep them empty, we’ll buy them in a few years’ time and make them into a mosque.” Slowly, the Himalayan Balsam grows, and the native plants are choked.

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It’s helpful when Muslims are honest and consistent about Islamic expansion. I expect there are far more Muslims who think what that man says, but just don’t say it out loud. He’s partially correct, too. Atheism is unfulfilling, and many churches are declining for good reason because they stopped believing their own historic beliefs and capitulated to the secular apathy all around them.

Even so, you would have to have been hiding under a multicultural rock in the Arabian desert to not have noticed the social problems that have arisen in Britain in correlation with the unprecedented levels of Islamic immigration in recent years. To take the most obvious and most harrowing example, there has been a discernible increase in police-recorded rape offences in the UK, which went from around 8,000 a year in the early 2000s to a staggering 74,000 per year today. Astonishingly, this is an almost 1000% increase, with the very highest spikes all coming from 2021–2025, a time during which Britain has also experienced record numbers of mass immigration by people of Muslim background.

“That’s just a coincidence,” says the oblivious multicultural liberal. Really? And I suppose the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs scandal in multiple towns and cities across England was also just a coincidence, as was the fact that many of the local Muslim communities who knew about it said nothing in order to protect the perpetrators? And what about the fact that the details of those grooming gangs were covered up by police authorities for years, in fear their exposure might incite a “race war”? And was it also a coincidence that some Imams in Britain teach that underage white girls are “fair game” for abuse because they “deserve it”?

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Reports of Muslim rape gangs are not isolated incidents. An independent report compiled by the survivor-led Rape Gang Inquiry estimates that at least 250,000 girls have been exploited by Muslim rape gangs over the last few decades and has documented evidence of grooming-gang activity in at least 149 local authority areas—nearly forty percent of the United Kingdom. These gangs were religiously motivated to carry out these rapes under the theological teaching of al-walā’ wa-l-barā’, which demands subjugation of the infidel, including sex slavery as a form of subjugation.

The cold reality is that these things are not coincidences. They don’t happen by accident. They happen as a result of our toleration and placation of wicked ideology, hiding beneath a respectable veneer. We told ourselves that wildly oppositional cultural backgrounds and values could be allowed to take root with no adverse effects for the existing culture. In what transpired, we were trained to shame the exposers of deviancy, rather than the deviants themselves.

Read the rest of this article in full (free) at the Christ Over All website.

It should not be possible to be a serious Christian and not hate abortion: “O you who love the Lord, hate evil!” (Psalm 97:10). If you love the Lord, you will not only love what He loves but hate what He hates, especially child sacrifice (cf. Lev. 18:21).

And yet while many Christians would claim to hate abortion, they would not want to put it that way. Perhaps they might say they are “not in favour of” abortion, or that they are “pro-life” rather than “anti-abortion.” Even if, for many, it can mean essentially the same thing, some undoubtedly prefer the term “pro-life” as a distraction from the reality they wish to avoid, similarly to those who call themselves “pro-choice” to avoid calling themselves “pro-abortion”. “Hate” is an awfully strong word, after all, and should be reserved for something really bad, like abortion.

It’s remarkable to me that in many churches abortion is still seen as “too nuanced” to oppose too strongly. This is a compromise with the spirit of our age which wants to enshroud the light in darkness, confusing you with caveats to weaken your convictions into passivity. But what often appears tactical and prudent is often little more than reputational safeguarding and cowardice. We must encourage one another to care far less about what picketing feminists will say of us and far more about what Almighty God will say of us. The opinion of God is of infinitely greater value than the opinion of loud women and quiet men who oppose you for exposing what they prefer to keep hidden.

Dubious Misdirection

Some Christians will occasionally respond to me online by pointing out that they think that people like me pointing out how bad abortion is will not make much difference relative to the more immediate need to help women who are facing the agony of the choice first-hand. This kind of position is subtle but troubling because it treats women who have abortions as the equal victims of abortion. This is not true. The reality is, abortion is an evil in which abortive women are implicated too, even when coerced by some who may be the greater perpetrators of evil. Seeking to understand and help those who are themselves victims of abuse is not unimportant by any means, but it can never be a means of justifying or softening the moral evil of abortion itself, including the implications for those involved who know that what they are doing is heinously wrong.

It would be one thing for a zealous anti-abortion campaigner who is working to lobby Parliament and send the message out via street outreach and other public events, to also say: “It’s really important to be gracious and compassionate to the women in the midst of all this too.” But the norm is for people who are not especially active in standing against the moral evil of abortion with any kind of sharpness to then say something like: “What we really need is to do more to prevent the desire for abortions and to show more compassion for the women going through abortions, rather than sounding judgemental and condemning.” This is to deliberately avoid the point. Given the moral significance of what we’re dealing with here, to deflect and paint yourself as the truly “compassionate” voice strikes me as filibustering of the grossest kind.

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There’s no reason why caring for women need be seen as a separate mission to standing against abortion, not least when it is already quite obvious that lots of Christians still don’t seem to realise how wrong abortion really is. It is quite possible to condemn abortion while showing love and grace to those affected by it, remembering always that the worst affected are the babies themselves. The greater need in the Church today regarding abortion is moral clarity regarding this problem, and the courage to say so.

As with many other moral evils in our time, the reason many Christians are unclear on this issue is that we have often worried about appearing judgemental by standing against it publicly, often caring more about the perception of “judgementalism” than the reality of the mass slaughter of innocents. If paedophilia or slavery was entirely legal, would churches worry about appearing “judgemental” by opposing it or would they just get on and do all they can to promote its re-illegalisation?

Other detractors tend to focus on more holistic “causes” for abortion, such as this response:

“I am not commenting on the topic of abortion. But I do ask, as a people and a church, should our focus not be on how to reduce the “demand” for abortions? Focusing on education, health, healthy relationships, family planning, instead of just forcing people to stop? Have we considered what would the UK do with 300,000 unwanted children each year? How would the system take care of them? Can it handle it? How would we help?

I would love to see that number reach its minimum, but I don’t think forcing abortions to stop will cure the actual problem, the actual problem takes a lot more effort, energy and love on a daily basis to make an effect.”

Again, imagine for a moment that murdering toddlers was somehow legal, and then imagine re-writing the above but replacing “abortion” with “toddler murder”. Would that person make that same argument? Would they say, “maybe our focus should be to reduce the demand for toddler murder, instead of just forcing people to stop?”; “Have we considered what would the UK do with 300,000 unwanted toddlers each year?”; “I don’t think forcing toddler murder to stop will cure the actual problem of toddler murder.” We can all see how ludicrous that would be. So, morally speaking, why is such madness tolerated when it comes to abortion?

Death By Caveat

The caveats which come parading out of the moral closet in such cases are designed to gain special pleading for abortion in a way that distracts from the moral force of the issue. In reality, people (including lots of Christians) simply don’t see abortion as a clearly evil moral issue. Political change is essential to reverse this. This is how slavery was abolished. It will require a full-orbed approach, of course, but at the heart of the problem is the need to change and enforce the law, which first requires a clear sense of the present law’s gross immorality.

It should not be difficult to point out that other “problems” like the question, “but what would we do with all those saved babies?” are obviously entirely irrelevant to whether or not it’s a good or bad thing to kill them in the first place! Indeed, to even raise such questions evidences the utter dubious evil of the entire position. The moral clarity must precede any strategies for a better holistic approach.

Behind the call for that more “nuanced” or “holistic” approach to tackling abortion is the avoidance of confrontational action and top-down societal transformation. We prefer to change hearts and minds over the long haul, to make abortion “unthinkable” rather than, say, “illegal” and “shameful”. That way, we don’t need to speak about judgement. To successfully abolish abortion would mean making it illegal and, over time, unthinkable too. There are different approaches to how this may come about, of course. But at the very least should be a desire among Christians to have it abolished as a legal “medical” practice. This will push it to the margins so that for most people it is indeed seen as essentially murderous.

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Illegalising abolition would not absolutely guarantee the eradication of abortions, of course, any more than abolishing slavery totally eradicated all instances of slavery. But the change of the law and the severity and clarity with which the moral issue was seen, undoubtedly had an immense impact on the western consciousness. Virtually all westerners now think of enslaving others as essentially “unthinkable”. Two hundred years ago many did not see it this clearly. They saw it as “nuanced” too. This radical change in perspective was downstream from its legal abolition in tandem with the wider narrative.

As for other factors which contribute to the widespread practice of abortion (such as fornication, etc.), we can certainly seek to evangelise men and redirect their considerable energies to God-given purposes, including marriage and family under the authority of God’s Word. But we can also seek to evangelise women and redirect their own considerable energies to God-given purposes, away from the presuppositions of feminism, for example. How many churches are really prepared to do that, I wonder?

One thing that must be done is to make it loud and clear that all human beings are made in the image of God and deserve equal protection under the law, however little they happen to be. None of this is easily done, but it is the task that lies ahead of us for those who seek to advance his kingdom in the midst of the darkness on this issue, and it is one for which we have been better equipped than we often realise (see Ephesians 6!). We need to move past our timidity. There is simply far too much at stake.

The Devil in the Details

One classic tactic that keeps anti-abortionists timid is that abortionists prefer to discuss the “concept” of abortion rather than the “details” of abortion. There’s a very clear reason for that. The horrific nature of the details of abortion confront them with the horrific nature of the concept of abortion. This was especially evident in that viral tranche of questions asked by Congressman Brandon Gill earlier this year, where he forced:

This was a case against anti-abortion protests. The refusal by the “expert witness” to face the details and to rather keep the issue “abstract” was highly indicative about the nature of the abortionist mindset, how it even tries to fool itself by avoiding the reality of the immorality.

I spoke about the reality of abortion and the Biblical view of the unborn at a church in the north of England a few weeks ago. When I asked the congregants how many abortions they think occur in Britain each year, one person said 10,000. His face dropped when I told him it’s actually 300,000.

I’m convinced that more people in this country would change their mind about abortion, or would become more active in standing against it, if they:

1. knew what abortion actually entails

2. saw the rising trajectory in abortion statistics

3. clearly understood the intrinsic value of an unborn human life from a Biblical perspective and our duty to defend it.

If you’re in the UK and you think your church would value this kind of input, Brephos (of CBR UK) has speakers all across the country. Email: bookaspeaker@brephos.org

I don’t know what your reaction was to the images of the recent Belfast riots following the attempted decapitation of an Ulsterman in the middle of the street recently? But for many British people, and even some Americans I’ve spoken to so far, the reaction was not what it might have been five years ago. Something has changed.

The Belfast incident happened just a matter of days after the Southampton riots against the police following the release of footage surrounding the Henry Nowak murder by a Sikh migrant. That was another situation in which the political elites blamed not their own inept decisions which created the multicultural tensions in the first place, but the perpetually divisive nondescript forever-demon known as “the Far Right”. As we all know by now, this term increasingly seems to mean entirely normal Britons who do not want the country they love to disappear into multicultural oblivion under their noses without a fight.

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Zachary Garris is an American Presbyterian pastor and author of excellent books on masculinity and feminism such as Masculine Christianity (2020) and Honor Thy Fathers (2024) with New Christendom Press, who are also publishing my own book on masculinity and David’s mighty men sometime later this year. Earlier this week he was suspended indefinitely by the ecclesiastical authorities in the Rio Grande Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) on the charge of “unwholesome speech” (cf. Eph. 4:29). Two examples given for this charge are what appear to be entirely straightforward social media replies to prominent bad faith interlocutors.

His “speech crimes” were specified by two examples which truly boggle the mind. In one interaction, he said to the academic, Anthony Bradley: “Sometimes things are more complex than a PhD can handle.” In another interaction, he said: “You started by misusing a Bible verse and then calling others ‘biblically illiterate’. But arrogance can’t tolerate banter.” You, like me, might also be wondering why such comments could be enough to strip a man of his qualification for ministry and his livelihood?

As I commented on X at the time, perhaps the PCA would feel safer by indefinitely suspending the prophets, the apostles, and the Messiah for their “unwholesome speech” to their detractors too? If only the Bible could be suspended (or at least re-edited) the PCA might finally feel themselves liberated from the “tyranny” of masculine leadership, after all?

It’s not even a surprise anymore that things like this happen to anyone who doesn’t toe the party line today. It’s almost boring how often it happens, actually, following the precise same playbook each time, whatever the institution, whatever side of the Atlantic, it’s always the same result and the same kind of people behind it. If you promote unfashionable truths or challenge fashionable lies, the well-heeled and Highly Educated respecters of Christian fashion and modern convention will come for you, one way or another.

These things keep happening because everyone seems to have caught the same virus. We keep placating anxieties and protecting effeminate leaders who use felt offence and emotive castigation (with a dash of bureaucratic lever-pulling) to override the significance of truth and courage when it is most needed.

The situation reminded me of an article on a similar situation I faced a few years ago regarding “inappropriate tone”, the consequences of which I’m still dealing over three years later. As with Garris’ situation, the “process” is the punishment, and even when fighting for what I hope will be vindication both for him and myself in the long term, in the interim period you are still somewhat held at arm’s length by the establishment.

Indeed, just the other day, I had my second eleventh-hour BBC cancellation when I was due to speak about my experience at the Tommy Robinson rally on BBC Radio 4 (based on them having read my recent Substack article on the topic). However, as has happened before, I was called last-minute to be informed that an executive higher up the chain had waded in with an “editorial change” because of the ongoing controversy surrounding my tribunal. It’s also the reason I still cannot get an academic job in the UK, because however much I may say in my defence, and however much support I may have, the charge of “being institutionally disreputable” still hangs over you, and from afar no one can ever be quite sure you’re not “a problem case”. The same uncertainty will now be hanging over Garris in the eyes of many, however long it may take him to appeal the decision, which, knowing Presbyterianism (which tends to move at ent-like speed) could take a while.

Early on in my Substack life, I wrote various articles in defence of combative Christian speech as well as the new evangelical “sin” of inappropriate tone in light of my situation at the time, which—in light of Garris’ situation now—I am republishing below for your new readerly enjoyment and/or policing…

How should Christians defend their beliefs when challenged? What counts as “appropriate” or “inappropriate” tone for Christians to adopt in public statements or debates?

Most Christian leaders in recent years have emphasised the necessity of softer, non-confrontational approaches to sharing faith or responding to opponents. ‘Softer’ may not always be wrong, of course: “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (see Prov. 15:1). Such answers may well be very effective in personal conversation, but when this becomes the default mode of public interaction there are usually underlying problems. Christians who soften their expressions for too long may find they’re no longer able to “contend for the faith” (Jude 1:3) when the time comes to do so.

Most Christian leaders across Church history would find it shocking that Christians even need to contend for the idea of “contending”. How did we get to this point? Why is robust confrontation almost always seen as a “bad witness”? This ought to raise all sorts of other questions about the appropriateness of our default mode of engagement. Why is gentle winsomeness always deemed to be the “wise” option, by the way? When does so-called “appropriate” speech become inappropriate?

On Inappropriate Tweets

In case anyone needed reminding, this was my highly “inappropriate” tweet for which I was fired from an evangelical Bible college a few weeks ago:

The college swiftly and publically condemned my language as both “unacceptable” and – here’s that word again – “inappropriate”. The Tweet was deemed so inappropriate, in fact, that my refusal to take it down led to the college declaring it had been “brought into disrepute” as a result. Quite why an evangelical college finds the expression of evangelical opinions so disreputable remains a mystery to many, but all may have been different if only I had expressed such an opinion with different language that made it sound slightly less like the opinion that it was. As I argued in an article for Premier Christianity, many western Christians now seem to live by an apocryphal eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not use inappropriate tone”. It would seem Christians can mock the Bible, hang Pride flags on pulpits, and host drag queen shows in church sanctuaries, but heaven help you if you talk about any of these things using strong words.

What do we actually mean when we say “inappropriate”? The word is often brandished like a judge’s hammer, crashing down instantaneously upon the words or actions of any poor soul who happens to fall foul of the latest ever-changeable socio-political conventions for speech. Synonyms for “inappropriate” could be: unfitting, unhelpful, unwise, crass. No doubt there are a great many things Christians say which should be said differently, or not said at all. But Christians who are awake to what is going on in our time need to think about shifting the invisible boundaries of what constitutes appropriate or inappropriate speech. This is because we take our orders from the Bible, not from evangelical platform specialists.

The Sin of Strong Tone

Here was one such offering in response to my tweet, from a fairly prominent evangelical leader in the UK. Notice in particular the “tone” at play: “This tweet was not the one, fella. If I was you I would apologise for the heavy-handed phrasing and graciously withdraw it.”

It seems my greatest transgression was a failure to repent of the sin of heavy-handed phrasing. I can’t remember precisely where that came up in the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount but I’m sure it must be in there somewhere. Notice also the implied assumptions:

1. Backing down from your conviction is the “gracious” thing to do;

2. Apologising and withdrawing is the Christian thing to do.

This is now the common convention on mainstream Christian Twitter. If the mob come after you, the honourable thing to do is shrink back, grovel for mercy, and – if possible – self-flagellate. If you don’t, you are automatically deemed to lack humility, grace, Christlikeness, etc.

In later tweets the same author continued to accuse me of the even greater Twitter sin of “doubling down”. This is another one of those phrases you might be forgiven for thinking must be in the Bible somewhere, given how frequently and sternly it is wielded by one’s opponents. Essentially, if anyone is foolish enough to defend their convictions in public today, one is “doubling down”. And if you refuse to stop doubling down – by continuing to defend your convictions when challenged by other convictions – how does our friendly fella respond? Well, he doubles down on telling you to stop doubling down, of course. The trick is to make comprehensive domination sound like a friendly arm around the shoulder. What they mean to say is: “Just shut up and agree with me!” But naturally, progressives and fauxvangelicals would never dare to speak with such inappropriately toned directness. They have other ways of getting their way.

How to Speak to an Invasion

The most apparently “harmful” aspect of my tweet seems to have been the word “invading”. How else would they like it said? Infiltrating? Creeping in? Assailing? Bombadeering? Or do we not really believe it’s a problem? Should we welcome the arrival of the sin of homosexuality within the Church? Is it something we should celebrate? Are we supposed to put on a great feast as the secular Pride band marches its way into the city of Zion and brazenly sets up shop? If we are not willing to celebrate it openly with the liberals, what should we call this sudden arrival? What are the appropriate words Christians should use for when the aggressive influence of the world has been allowed to take root among God’s people?

Sometimes, we must be frank. When there is a severe situation, severe words should be used. As my pastor helpfully preached about at our church on the Sunday after my tweet, if there’s a fire, those in the building need to be made sufficiently aware of it. What they need is an alarm - preferably, a loud and clear one. It is not a time to chastise the people who sound the alarm on the grounds that it is too loud for the delicate ears of some. It is a time to prepare people for action. “And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” (1Cor. 14:8).

So, when rainbow flags parade up to the altar of your church, and someone makes a noise about why no one is doing anything about it, the one making the noise ought to be the one you listen to. The cry of “alarmist” is often used (rather loudly, as it happens) to raise the alarm against alarm-raisers. This has protected the compromisers for far too long. Our churches have become replete with passive enablers who quietly declare “‘peace, peace!’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). In reality, it is those who raise the alarm when they ought to who truly seek peace. That is precisely why they must call out sinful toleration among the people of God. As Jesus says elsewhere, equally inappropriately: “But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality...” (Rev. 2:20).

Jeremiah does not hold much back when he speaks boldly and clearly against the religious elites who know their lines: “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’” (Jer. 7:4). Speaking holy-sounding things does not make those things holy. Those who seek to undermine the reality of the truth of God’s Word will usually do so under the guise of a friendly and diplomatically “appropriate” demeanour. But it’s false. It’s telling people things are fine when they are not. If you don’t believe that homosexuality has a place in the Church, then what we are seeing is an invasion of the Church. We must speak what we believe, for the good of the Church, for the good of the truth, and for the good of those on all sides who have been deceived.

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Too many Christians have a problem with offensive-sounding militaristic language. They have been taught to be inherently suspicious of it. They assume that using such language can only ever be thoughtless, callous, and loveless. The problem is, there’s an awful lot of militaristic language and narrative in the Bible. An awful lot. The Old Testament alone ought to bring God into disrepute with many professing Christian institutions today. Perhaps they might have hoped that the New Testament could have gone to the trouble of undoing the damage done to God’s brand. But arguably, the New Testament – though generally rejecting physical violence – makes the militaristic connotations “worse” by ramping them up even within the scope of the New Covenant. And let’s not forget the way Jesus returns at the end, on a big white horse and with a very sharp sword (Rev. 19:11-16). It’s highly inappropriate stuff.

Twitter-Mobbing the Apostles

I do often wonder how not only the Prophets but also the Apostles - and even the Saviour himself - would have fared on Twitter today. I expect they would have found it difficult to avoid castigation by the religious authorities, not least for their tone. Jesus told false teachers who cause little ones to stumble to essentially commit suicide by tying a millstone around their neck and jumping into the sea (Matt. 16:8). Paul refers to the teaching of Hymenaeus and Philetus as “gangrene” and tells Christians to avoid them (2Tim. 2:17). Is this not “heavy-handed” phrasing? Is this not disreputable? Does this not sound “ungracious” by contemporary standards? Indeed, when Paul challenged Peter’s hypocrisy “to his face” in Galatia (Gal. 2:11), should Peter have told Paul to stop doubling down and be “gracious”? Being gracious does not mean backing down and shutting up when something needs to be said.

At the very least, you’d think God might have considered it wise to have taken down many of the verses in the canon which might cause offence to the delicate ears of future generations? God, it seems, doubles down when he means what he says. We should not be afraid to stand by our convictions when we are convinced they are in line with His convictions. And yes, this even means standing by our “inappropriate tone” if we believe it’s the right thing to say, the right time to say it, and the right way to say it.

The Bible chastens our aggression as well as our cowardice. We are called to be gentle and gracious as well as bold and clear. The problem is when one way always seems to win out and the other emphases are quietly airbrushed out of the Bible. Quite simply, many of the “laws” enforced by the Christian tone police today are just made-up. Some of them could even be seen as akin to the “human traditions” of the Pharisees which Jesus challenged so strongly (Mark 7:8). Again, we must ask: why didn’t Jesus give them the benefit of the doubt? Why did he have to seem so rude?

Who told you that you’re never allowed to talk the way the Bible writers talk? Who told you that particular words are never “appropriate” to speak of sin forcing its way into acceptance within the body of Christ? Where did we get the idea that cautionary niceness was the exclusive way to talk Christian? For too long our ears have been attuned to the expectations of this world and not nearly attentive enough to what the Word of God actually says and how it says it.

Inappropriate Responses?

It’s worth noting, by the way, that I have also had people contact me about the language of my tweet (and my defence of it), saying they have now decided to return to God because it woke them up to their own lack of conviction. Others have even said they will now try going to church for the first time in their lives. Perhaps I ought to tell them how inappropriate it was of them to have been convicted by such “inappropriate” language.

In the first part of this double article, I critiqued Peter Ould’s piece in Premier Christianity which criticised those (like me) who spoke out in the wake of evangelical same-sex-attraction advocate, Sam Allberry’s recent removal from the pastorate for having been in “an inappropriate relationship with another man.” I also spoke about how so much of modern evangelicalism is geared to bring judgement upon those who seek to expose the soft-pedalled approach to homosexuality in the modern evangelical Church, while giving a free pass to those who deliberately or inadvertently promote the normalisation of homosexuality by refusing to speak strongly against it.

The charge that Allberry’s SSA theology was misunderstood, is an indication of the misunderstanding of the depth of the issue itself. Ould’s article notably cited an example of Allberry’s teaching on the topic of sexuality, in which Allberry says:

“Sex matters to all of us. I’m writing this as someone who is single and expects to remain so for the future. As a Christian that means I am committed to being celibate—to not having sex unless it is with someone I’m married to. This issue matters to me, just as it does to us all. God cares who we sleep with because he cares deeply about the people who are doing the sleeping.”

Notice the problem here, is not that Allberry commends celibacy. This is good, and far better than those who try to argue for gay marriage. But the “line” he draws is simply at sex. There is no clear and obvious sense that homosexual desire itself is destructive and is indicative of the undermining of so many moral foundations in our time. While Allberry doesn’t go as far as others in embracing Pride or “the LGBT+ community” as such, the fact is, he simply isn’t strong enough in speaking against it.

Indeed, by continuing to “profile” his ongoing homosexual desires, he has helped to cultivate and normalise them, rather than rejecting them the way any Christian should wish to outright reject other obviously sinful desires (such as rape or incest or paedophilia). The fact is that many evangelicals see homosexual desire as “better” in God’s eyes than those other desires. This is why condemning such desires is unlikely to bring the same evangelical condemnation in reply, as for same-sex attraction. You would never hear a castigation of people deemed too judgemental toward a “rape-attracted Christian”, for example. It would be absurd.

Even making the comparison will incite the evangelical Pharisee chorus: “Are you comparing gay people to rapists now?!” No, but both groups are examples of obviously sinful desires which we know to be immoral in the eyes of God. The difference is that we have been sold a narrative that homosexual desires are not really “bad” at all, that people cannot help how they feel, and that to deny them the opportunity to express them, or to say they shouldn’t have them, is simply “cruel”. If these achingly empathetic evangelicals were being consistent, however, they ought to produce the same kind of judgement upon those who judge those other sinful desires too. The fact they don’t do that, and reserve a special place in their heart for same-sex attraction, evidences the success of the cultural homosexual propaganda infiltrating the Church in recent decades.

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Nowhere is the evangelical attraction to same-sex attraction more prominent than with Living Out, the organisation Allberry co-founded in 2013, offering resources for “same-sex attracted Christians”. It has been the darling of evangelical leaders in recent years who sought to offer “a more pastorally sensitive” approach to the issue. Behind this approach was the mirage that the greatest sin of evangelical churches has been its apparently froth-mouthed judgemental homophobia, brutally castigating these innocent victims of same-sex attraction and forcing them into a life of secrecy, repression, or self-loathing. In mainstream evangelicalism, I simply don’t believe such approaches were ever the norm, especially not within the last three decades, when the cultural push for Pride has been at its most ardent.

Either way, what happened with reverse approaches like those of Living Out is that, in seeking to gather SSA Christians into a kind of community, even if they may avoid the language of “my sexuality is my identity”, they make it difficult for any such Christians to stop identifying as gay, as if their homosexual desires were not themselves a “problem” at all, as if they may even have been a fundamental part of their personality.

The rhetoric within such ministries was never clear enough to be indicting because the focus was always “Gospel-centred” and evangelical, rooted in the greater desire to be obedient to Christ. But in seeking to build that ongoing bridge to SSA, it became clear that it served to “sanctify” aspects of gay culture and identity too, as if—as with Allberry’s focus on who you sleep with—God apparently has no opinion on homosexuality as long as you avoid sodomy.

I remember someone sending me one of Living Out’s blog articles a couple of years ago, which shocked me. It was called “What Can We Learn from the UK’s First Gay Male Dating Show?” (No, I’m not joking!)

Well, first of all, the very concept of the article is a problem. Is a TV show called I Kissed a Boy really something you should be watching and promoting to evangelical Christians struggling with SSA? But aside from the concept, the content of the article itself was even worse. The aesthetic of lip-sticked lips in the background and the playful tone with which the article introduces the show—“ten men coupled up and looking for love”—is inappropriate enough. Can you imagine trying to explain that to any conservative Christian from a hundred years ago? They would think we’d gone mad. And we have!

As you read on beyond the introduction, the article tips over almost into what can only be described as a positive promotion of gay culture itself:

“There are plenty of touching moments along the way. There’s nervous Josh who grew up in a Mormon family, believing homosexuality was a sin, and who has no previous experience of dating other men. There’s Gareth’s tears as he recalls growing up in church in Northern Ireland, turning to girlfriends in the hope of ‘fixing’ his sexuality. There’s Matty getting emotional as he expresses how he’s still not fully happy with himself and his sexuality. And there’s an interesting discussion about marriage as either just an excuse for a big party or an outdated thing of the past for straight people. The show succeeds in eliciting a lot of love and empathy for these men. They all seem to have a genuine desire for a long-term partner. They support each other through all the ups and downs of the series and in the different stages they’re at in coming out and navigating life as gay men. It also looks like a lot of fun, with plenty of partying, edgy fashion, and banter.”

Notice how he refuses to speak against the homosexual lifestyle per se, majoring on affirming and identifying with the “winsome” aspects of it, which apparently even celibate SSA Christians can appreciate, as long as they’re not having sex. But the writer goes even further:

“In some ways, watching the series proved a painful reminder of the sort of life I’m missing out on. In other ways, it provided a beautiful reminder that nothing compares to life with Jesus. As I watched the show, part of me saw the genuine love between these men and wondered, ‘How could that be wrong?’. We all need love and intimacy, and there’s beauty in seeing people enjoy that. There was a lot about them and their lives that I understood and wanted to be a part of.”

Is this really the kind of approach that is going to best help people who struggle with this sin, at just the time when liberal denominations elsewhere are “sanctifying” that sin by pushing through gay marriage or same-sex blessings, offering such Christians further confusing temptations? “Perhaps that kind of life I saw on the TV s possible for a Christian like me…?” Living Out would not condone that, of course; but they certainly don’t close it off with much intent. The writer emphasised that “the way to be my truest and most authentic self is not to build my life around my sexuality, but to build it on following Jesus.”

But is this abstract Sunday School default answer really compelling when the writer has first waxed lyrical about how compelling gay culture is, without exposing how that very lifestyle angers God as an abominable affront to Him? He goes into great detail about the fun and frivolity he’s “missing out on”, the way he empathises with the love they have for one another as “genuine love” and even a thing of “beauty,” but then has nothing concrete or detailed to say in reply, other than, “Jesus is enough”. Of course Jesus is enough, but He is enough for married heterosexual people too, isn’t he?

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This is what I meant in part 1, when I critiqued Allberry over what I saw as his “gnostic denigration of marriage,” devaluing the significance of marriage in order to make the broader point. The writer here makes a similar point regarding the couples he seemed to pine to be a part of on I Kissed a Boy: “These [gay] relationships might provide some temporary satisfaction, but Jesus really is ‘the way and the truth and the life’ (John 14:6).” By putting it like this, he’s inadvertently placing Christian marriage on the same “level” as gay relationships, because Biblical marriage too could be seen as a mere “temporary satisfaction” compared with Jesus.

This general framing is summed up in the final words of the article, where he concludes:

“It won’t necessarily be helpful viewing for everyone, but if nothing else I Kissed A Boy is a window into gay life and culture, and could well increase your empathy and understanding for LGBT people who are so dearly loved by God. It’s a reminder of the things we all long for – love, security, authenticity – and how these desires are only truly met in Jesus.”

There’s that “empathy” word again! That desire to build bridges in order to reach people immersed in gay culture ends up inadvertently glorifying such lifestyles at just the time they should be strongly opposed, for the damage it does to so many individuals, families, and western society in general. True, they keep mentioning Jesus, but in a vague and mantra-like way that doesn’t really seem to put “flesh and bones” on a full-orbed Christian account of sexuality, inclusive of His judgement upon sexual immorality, as well as his love and forgiveness for those who turn away from it in faithfulness.

This is why the problem of talking about “same-sex attraction” is subtler than it seems. Some of these evangelical “SSA” ministries don’t necessarily arrive at heretical conclusions; it’s how they arrive at those conclusions, how they articulate them, and what they don’t say along the way, that so often gives them away.

As the secular media drama encircling the term “Christian Nationalism” and ever-anxious evangelical “concern” pieces continue unabated, I descended upon London recently to chair another meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Nationalists in Britain. Our chief task was to discuss the varying definitions of this ever-controversial term, including the varying definitions among ourselves! While we did not solve every riddle, much was debated that needed debating, and much good fellowship was had along the way, which I pray bears good fruit in the future.

Later that evening, some of us were involved in a panel discussion at St. Peter’s church in Vauxhall, to talk about the Church’s role in the debate over British identity today, in light of the launch of Dominic Muir’s new book, Battle for Britain: Enthroning Christ as King.

As ever, Bob and I had a few friendly but spirited disagreements over one or two details, but the whole evening seemed to go very well. In my talk I emphasised the inheritance we have been given as Christians in Britain today, and the responsibility that comes with that inheritance, to ensure we steward it well and improve upon it for the good of future generations.

In doing so, I referred back to many of the Christian giants of this land upon whose shoulders we stand, from the Victorian era, the Great Awakening, the Puritans, and of course, the man who was surely Great Britain’s Christian Nationalist par excellence, King Alfred. I emphasised not only Alfred’s courageous and victorious stand against the Vikings—no mean feat—but even more significantly, his conscious effort to build an explicitly Christian culture, and to ensure that the identity and laws of the nation were built upon the Word of God.

Later, we went to a Christian-run theatre tea house around the corner, which was a great venue for ongoing conversations, of which there were many! I was amazed how far some of the people had travelled to come to the event. It showed again how important these issues are, and how little encouragement such Christians are getting from mainstream platforms and leaders. I regularly hear from people who follow me that they thought they were the only one who saw the same issues. That’s why I think it’s so important for us to gather some momentum in this fight by working together where we can, to join forces in proclaiming the forgotten Gospel of the kingdom where many corners of the Church seem to have forgotten it.

Hovering in the background to all these events, of course, was the forthcoming Unite the Kingdom rally in London the following day, led by Tommy Robinson. Some members of the fellowship were backstage at the rally, including Bishop Ceirion Dewar, who emerged with a typically thunderous clarion call to the gathered thousands to remind the nation and its politicians that the people will not be silent, and will not surrender to tyranny. I marched alongside Dom Muir, who shared the Gospel at the UTK carol service last year, and who had a mic on him for impromptu preaching moments to the crowds who lined the pavements as we walked through from Kingsway to Parliament Square.

Surprised by Christianity

As for the rally itself, I had to pinch myself at just how much overt Christian sentiment was on display from the stage. We have almost become used to this at Robinson’s rallies now, but we should not take it for granted. This is not “normal” for socio-political events in Britain not run by the Church. I remember seeing Bob on the stage at one of these rallies just a couple of years ago, and being amazed he had the crowd chanting “Christ is king!” in unison, with Tommy’s blessing. Then in the next rally, Tommy invited Bishop Dewar up to the stage, having been stirred by the overt blaspheming of Christ at the Paris Olympics the night before, wanting to give a bolder form of Christianity a voice to the nation.

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Since then, the influence of Christianity seems to have grown exponentially in the messaging for such events, with Tommy himself even having made a profession of faith, despite many Christian pharisees continuing to see him as the kind of sinner with whom Jesus would apparently be too embarrassed to associate. This year, I would say at least 50% of the speeches were either by Christian leaders or involved some overt mention of the importance of Christianity. Even Laurence Fox took up a good chunk of his three minutes to quote Ephesians 6 about the power of Christ over the demonic powers and principalities. There were numerous crosses and flags saying “JESUS IS KING”. Most speeches were also punctuated by the band leading Christian worship songs in between. We’re just not used to this in “secular” Britain. New Labour’s “we don’t do God” has been drummed into us for so long, this feels like a whole new world.

Salty Speech

There is another side to this, of course. With such overt displays of Christianity, comes the expectation that it really is Christianity, and not a convenient counterfeit. As I argued recently in my article, Christian Values and Christian Faith, we cannot assume that a return to conservative values alone with a lacquering of Christian sentiment is sufficient to rebuild the eroded Christian foundations of the nation. While it’s great to see overt proclamations about Christ, there should also be genuine caution over the way this might be abused by some who seek to infiltrate this patriotic movement and utilise Christ for their own purposes.

This, of course, is what all the evangelical naysayers say all the time as an excuse for continuing to castigate the patriot movement (or anything remotely Right Wing) from afar rather than getting involved as salt and light in its midst. But the more this explicitly Christian rhetoric increases, it’s fair to say there will be more responsibility on Christians to ensure Christ’s name is not maligned. There was one sign I saw, for example, that said, “F*** Islam, Christ is King!” We can have grace for such people in their speech, because the point being made about the need to strongly oppose Islam is actually true, and should be shared by Christians; but such people still need to be discipled in how they express it. It is Christ who is king, after all, not Odin! There were also many choruses—sung notably more heartily than any of the worship songs—of “Keir Starmer is a w******!!” That may well be true too (!) but it still isn’t the way to obey basic New Testament teaching: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths” (Eph. 4:29).

This remains true even when the aforementioned pharisaic Christian leaders are often caught missing the wood for the trees by over-focussing on rude words while ignoring far ruder deeds by those who better know how to hold their tongue. We also need grace for these salty-mouthed would-be disciples who don’t yet know all the “rules”. But if they are to be serious about submitting to Christ, rather than simply shouting his name, then their tongues must also be tamed and their mouths washed, for as Jesus said: “out of the mouth, the heart speaks” (Matt. 12:34). I can’t help but notice the irony, however, that Jesus said those words not to the salty-mouthed fishermen struggling to follow him, but to the proud religious leaders seeking to trip him and his disciples up. It is as much about what you choose to say or not say than how it is said. This is the lesson the evangelical pharisees most need to learn as they tut at this rabble from afar.

Missional Moments

In between rally segments there were various evangelistic moments with people nearby. I met my brother, Mark, in the crowd, who ended up praying with three people to give their lives to Christ.

I got into one or two conversations with people in the crowd too. There was a younger group of guys, each perhaps around 16 or 17 years old. They were antagonistic—total unbelievers—and kept asking for evidence of a God, saying it was “all a load of bullsh**”. I picked up some grass and asked him to hold out his hand, dropped the grass on his palm, and asked him to tell me where physicality itself came from, and whether he has evidence or not for it, and whether it is really so crazy to believe that natural material could not arise from other natural material, but rather that a supernatural being might well be necessary for the existence of a single blade of grass, let alone a human being. They just scoffed and said “that’s not evidence”, and retorted to the usual “but who created God?” before resorting to general insults. They were totally unaware of the extent they have been hoodwinked by Enlightenment ideology, totally confident that what they expect from a conversation about absolute truth is already wrong-headed and the product of their brainwashed education, the very product of the policies of men like the secularist Keir Starmer, whom they happily join the chorus of chants to call him a “w*****” while continuing to espouse the very secular views about reality which Starmer & co propagate.

So, there is a reality that, for all the “Christ” rhetoric, there were still many in the crowd with absolutely no sense of who Christ is, who don’t even believe in God. But why should we be surprised at this? It’s an evangelistic mission field, after all! “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom. 10:14). These people need to hear the truth, and ironically, they’ll have a better chance hearing it here—among salty-mouthed patriots unafraid to speak the unvarnished truth—than at the average liberal Anglican church on a Sunday morning from “properly ordained” cowards and vipers.

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For all the underwhelming elements of the earlier conversation, I was more encouraged by the responses of another group of lads, probably ten years older, who were far more receptive, and openly saying they need Christ in their life, with a willingness to come to church. The question was: “where do I send them?” What churches would welcome them? Many churches may be better than others at holding the line on basic Biblical truths, but how many of them have been captured by subtler forms of liberal secular ideology making them predisposed to look down upon patriots like this once they come through the door?

After the rally began to disperse, I hung around Parliament Square for a while getting into more conversations about Christ, often ending up praying with people. I met some who had only recently started going to church, and had no clue what a good or a bad church was. I kept thinking how stupid so many evangelical churches are for not being here, offering Gospel clarity and direction from a place of solidarity with what these people are looking for, what’s gone wrong with their nation, what they seek to reclaim. Because such churches have been more concerned for their reputations than the mission field, they have lost the opportunity to bring much-needed shepherding to these souls, and in time will have missed out on a great harvest which could utterly transform the future shape of the front-line Church.

Taking Up Our Cross

At some point during the rally I picked up a cross, temporarily vacated by Dom Muir while he was being interviewed by someone. At the end, not knowing where one is meant to leave a cross at a dispersed rally, I decided to keep hold of it for the journey back. It should not be all that surprising that this cross ending up causing me a good deal of trouble, both good and bad.

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“Oh no, I’m not one of those judgemental type of Christians!” I wonder how many times a winsome evangelical has said that in reply to a hostile question about their stance against homosexuality or gay marriage?

For years, evangelicals have laboured under the false accusation that when it comes to the issue of homosexuality, their greatest sin has not been man-fearing cowardice, but man-hating homophobia. Even among evangelicals who have barely preached against homosexuality for well over a decade, they still seem at pains to point out that the worst thing a Christian preacher can do, is to speak too strongly against it, lest they cause personal offence. They have been trained to fear the wrath of the world more than the wrath of God.

I have, of course, written a fair amount about this issue in the past, including the way some professing evangelicals abuse the concept of “grace” in order to promote LGB lifestyles, the way the Pride movement directly subverts Christian morality, the way evangelical leaders refuse to denounce homosexuality anywhere near as aggressively as they denounce the supposed “inappropriate tone” of others who do, and the way some pretend it can be possible to hold to a conservative view of Biblical authority while supporting gay marriage.

There are, of course, a spectrum of approaches to these issues within evangelicalism, and that’s part of the problem, especially among those who might agree with me on most particulars, yet believe themselves to have carved out a more “nuanced” space where they simply refuse to emphasise the severity of the modern problem of normalising or defending homosexuality within the Church.

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It was a shock to some within the evangelical world last week to hear the news about Sam Alberry, the author of Is God Anti-Gay?, and who for the last decade or so has been the conservative evangelical poster-boy for the normalisation of “same-sex attraction” among Christians. Last week Alberry was removed from pastoral ministry after it came to light that he had had “an inappropriate relationship” with another man, having not previously disclosed the full details when taking up his post. It is a sad thing when things like this happen, and of course such falls happen right across the board, irrespective of one’s sexuality.

Yet sometimes the fall very much correlates with what was already wrong about the particular emphases of that person. This is why there were many who were not all that shocked by this news, as regrettable as it is, such as those of us who have taken a stronger line and seen the gravitation to Same-Sex Attraction (SSA) language as a subtle Biblical compromise.

As is the way with “winsome” evangelicalism, of course, in the online comments that ensued, the greater evangelical condemnation was reserved not for those who promoted the ideas that led to such a situation, but those who called out the hypocrisy as hypocrisy. For example, Sam Hailes, editor of Premier Christianity magazine, posted this on X:

I had only ever come across Peter Ould earlier that day, when he Quote-tweeted me for apparently “attacking” Sam Alberry in my post about the issue. When pressed by others to clarify, he said my critique was made “in bad faith,” and refused to respond to my substantive replies to him regarding his misunderstanding of what I’d said. I was thus interested to hear what he said in that article for Premier, which Hailes had singled out as such a helpful contribution to the discussion in contrast to other “ridiculous” perspectives (which presumably included my own).

But first, some brief context...

Some time ago, Sam Alberry said in a video interview with fellow evangelical leaders that he wears a wedding ring to show that he is “married to Jesus,” and how it’s actually positive that because he’s a Same-Sex Attracted celibate, he gets to “skip the appetiser” (that is, marriage as an analogy for the Church’s eternal union with Christ) and go straight to the main course: Christ Himself.

This is theologically inappropriate on numerous levels. The idea that the Church is the “bride of Christ” is a corporate metaphor. Regardless of how innocently meant it may have been, it is simply a very weird thing for a single man to go around seeing himself as individually married to Jesus, and even weirder when that person happens to wear “same-sex attracted” as at least an important aspect of who they are even if not a full-blown “identity”. The idea also seems to assume that married people—comprising probably the majority of adult Christians—are merely stuck on the “appetiser”, somehow missing out.

All in all, it just seems like a strained attempt to cope with the challenges of celibacy, and to justify the functional acceptance of same-sex attracted “identity” by continuing to talk about it, and almost trying to make it seem like some kind of “ideal”. So here’s what I said, in response to that video:

Obviously, the point was not really to join the “pile on” upon Alberry. As noted above, I do think his situation is indicative of the problem, as was his hypocrisy. However, the main point was not really about Alberry himself, but the way evangelicals have been cowed into taking a softer stance on the normalisation of homosexuality in the Church, and the subsequent devaluation of marriage.

It would be one thing if those who empathise with individuals who experience such temptations to also strongly oppose homosexuality the way it needs to be opposed when it has been found knocking on the doors of the Church and sneaking in through the windows. But in most cases, while such evangelicals may well “hold the line” by not agreeing with gay marriage (as if that should ever have been the mark of faithfulness!) they are often very slow to oppose it the way the Bible does.

This is where the likes of Ould—like so many British evangelicals today—has misread the lay of the land and misunderstood the crux of the problem. It’s true that Alberry’s position is “nuanced” relative to other advocates of “gay Christianity”. Ok, yes. But were his emphases sufficient to stop the softening on this issue within the Church during the relentless LGBT+ assaults upon Christian sexuality over the last decade? Or were they more likely an indirect handmaiden to those assaults?

There seems to be a significant misunderstanding in evangelicalism today about the relationship between sin, judgement, and grace. Ould is concerned that the default of people like me seems to be a mass judgemental pile-on purely to gratify our pharisaic delight in the fall of someone with whom we disagree. The assumption is that we are unkind or moronic or “in bad faith”. There is no other explanation. It couldn’t possibly be that we happen to see this particular issue as especially loadbearing within the Church and culture at large or anything? It couldn’t be that homosexuality is invading the Church, could it? It couldn’t be that “nuanced” positions like Alberry’s contribute to the normalisation of Christian homosexuality as not-really-so-bad as long as you don’t “do anything” about it?

So, to my critique of Ould’s article…

Well, firstly, he seems to make the mistake that those who critiqued Alberry are themselves guiltier because they appear “judgemental”. Certainly, this is something Jesus warned against, often vociferously (e.g. Matt. 7:1-3). But there is an irony at play here too in that those most keen to condemn those who appear to have condemned Alberry are themselves acting more like Pharisees:

“Some have even taken the opportunity to engage in “I told you so” attacks on Sam personally. Typically, these have come from those who vehemently disagree that it’s OK for a Christian to be same-sex attracted or gay while also being very clear on biblical sexual and relationship boundaries (often known as Side B theology). In some senses, that’s a debate for another time, but the idea that Sam’s position or sexuality has led to his ‘fall’ is a nonsense.”

Ould fails to mention the reverse “pile-on” against people like me, where the ever-so-more-compassionate-than-thou folk of Nicevangelicalism™ are quick to condemn those they see as having been too quick to condemn. And no, the substantive issue over SSA language/identity among Christians is not “a debate for another time”, actually; it’s precisely a debate for this very time. To separate it as not immediately relevant is to misunderstand why people decided to speak out about it. This lack of understanding was evident when he discussed particular examples of people’s reactions (including my own):

“It’s simply incorrect to say that Sam’s position on singleness was a ‘gnostic denigration of marriage’ as Aaron Edwards recently claimed on X. Dr Michael Clary had to issue an apology for for misrepresenting Sam’s theology, confirming that he ‘does NOT support someone making homosexuality part of their identity’. Rather than rushing to gossip and thus distorting his teaching, it would be easier to actually check what he believed...”

If you read Clary’s article, his update was quite obviously not an “apology” but a clarification. Where Clary had previously thought that Alberry was a full advocate of “side B” (the concept of a “gay Christian” continuing to identify with “the LGBT community,” etc.), Clary still maintained that Alberry’s problem was that he speaks of same-sex attraction as though it was not sinful, which I think is a correct reading of how Alberry consistently communicates on this issue; and that really is a problem.

But as ever, when performative empathy is the order of the day, the substance of that problem is glossed over and our attentions are distracted by the notion that the worse evangelical sin is to “be judgemental”:

“Sam’s failings should prompt us to reflect on our own lives. Are we able to point a finger, when that leaves three pointing back at ourselves? In truth, we are all a complex blend of saint and sinner and we keep secret the things that only we and God know. While pastors are held to a higher standard, both by their churches and God, we are all capable of moral failing. Indeed, we all sin every day; we just choose to ignore many of the faults in our own lives while being very aware of others’ failures…Are we willing to love, not ostracise, those in our church who are real about their darkest parts? When Christian leaders fall, we need to remember that Jesus died for all sinners, not just the ones who manage to keep a clean sheet.”

Such sentiments see every moment of doctrinal or moral compromise as a re-run of the disputed scene of the woman caught in adultery (cf. John 8:1-11), where Jesus chastises the Pharisees who were instrumentalising the drama of her exposed sin in order to trap Jesus, who then turns it back on them to reflect upon their own sin. That scene utterly dominates the evangelical imagination today, almost as though Jesus or the apostles needn’t have said anything else on sin and judgement in the rest of the New Testament.

Exclusively focussing on what Jesus said/did there also creates the perfect conditions for cowardice in our time, where many Christians are led to feel that, because they too are sinners, they never have the “right” to call out sin, however brazen, however subtle. No one actually lives like that, of course. They are more than happy to call out the less “fashionable” sins like misogyny, abuse, or racial hatred, and nobody turns around to them and wags a finger saying, “Ah, but are you not also a sinner…?”

This is how you know you’re being played, just as the Pharisees tried to play Jesus. But they lost that game, and we should not allow their modern equivalents to keep playing it without putting up a good fight.

Last week I was in Birmingham to speak at what I’m told was the first ever men’s pro-life conference in the UK. It was called “Commissioned” (run by March For Life UK). It was great to meet various Christians of bold conviction from across the breadth of the Church. There was a good spirit of camaraderie among the men who gathered to encourage and spur one another on to wage war on what I believe is the greatest evil of our age.

I was leading one of the workshops on the topic of “Men Inspiring Men”. It was a fairly small room, but I was encouraged to see they had to bring extra chairs in to accommodate all those who turned up, with some needing to be turned away.

I spoke about David and his mighty men (based on a book I’ve been working on), looking to them as examples of Biblical courage for the fight against abortion. I also spoke about William Carey in India, of whom I’ve written before regarding his willingness to confront socio-political immorality despite multiple bouts of intense opposition.

The response to my talk was very encouraging, with several people coming up throughout the day to say how much they appreciated it. The other sessions I observed were very helpful too, especially the keynote speech at the end of the day by the Dominican priest, Toby Lees, who spoke on the impact of the manosphere and what it will take for a reformation of men according to Christ rather than the world.

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There was also a panel of men discussing different front-line approaches to abortion at multiple levels, through social action, political engagement, and crisis counselling. All in all, it was wonderful to see an increasing number of good men across the Church no longer willing to stand back and let abortion continue to ravage our society.

It was amusing, as ever, to be serenaded on the way in to the conference by the portable pro-abortion hecklers, who I recognised from the March For Life in London last year (the masculine haircut of the ring-leading woman was a big giveaway...).

I do wonder what goes through the heads of these people who choose to plan ahead to travel across the country to protest for a “cause” like this. Abortion is already legal, and has now been decriminalised all the way up to birth. What are they trekking across the country to protest? A little less than a hundred men gathering to talk about it? Perhaps we should be flattered. Or perhaps deep down they know how insecure their moral ground really is that they cannot even allow people to contemplate an alternative situation. There was particular venom in the guttural chant of the ringleader: “Keep your hands off our ovaries!!!” What a way to frame people who oppose the killing of innocent unborn children. Suddenly, we are the immoral, barbaric ones, not those who promote abortion.

I prayed for them, and I wonder if, in God’s outlandish providence, we may one day hear from some of these people on the other side of this moral divide, speaking of how they can barely believe that they once used to hold up signs which described abortion as “healthcare”. Given that most of them remain so ideologically brainwashed and impregnable to reasonable persuasion that they actually seem to “love” abortion, prayer may be our only hope for them. In the meantime, however, they must also be opposed because right now, they are not only publicly promoting evil but actively hindering those who seek to oppose it.

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Another point to note is that these protestors had come onto the university grounds, which is private property, of course (though, given they’re probably Marxists, I suspect the concept of private property did not especially register with them!). It was interesting, however, that despite the police turning up, they decided not to remove the trespassing protestors and just drove off instead, saying they couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) do anything to stop them. This, despite the fact that on many other occasions they have been more than happy to arrest Christians for praying too close to an abortion clinic or gently giving out pro-life information in public areas.

I am no longer surprised by such hypocrisy within this morally broken society. But it does make us all the more determined to stand against it. This was, after all, the same West Midlands Police who literally arrested the event organiser, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce for the second time last year, simply for standing too close to a clinic, without saying a word.

It seems that if you challenge abortion with any kind of meaningful purpose, the abortion industry will see to it that you cease to be treated as a valid human being in public, someone whose mere silent existence in a particular place is deemed “problematic”.

This is highly appropriate, of course, because it directly reflects the ultimate devaluing of human beings deprived of life within those dark satanic mills we call “clinics”. The silent existence of those little humans in the particular place of the unwelcome womb is also deemed “problematic”, a harassment to their “host”. Only, in their case, they do not merely get “moved on” by a police officer; they get erased from existence. Nobody can hear them cry or protest. Their extermination was as silent as their life.

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I’m grateful for the many churches and pro-life groups—including March For Life, the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, and Society for the Protection of Unborn Children—uniting to speak truth into the lies that keep these silent deaths an everyday reality. We truly have become a society for the protection of the killing of unborn children, and need all hands on deck to transform it.

Whoever protests us, we will—and must—continue to raise our voices for those many little voiceless ones. May God bring them to justice, where our own systems of justice fail: “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” (Romans 12:19). And He will. But although he calls us not to seek personal vengeance against our perpetrators, those who fear Him are called to seek His heart for justice in the world through our social, political, and legal systems, wherever possible. That’s why we must continue to lay our own personal and political reputations aside in order stand up against the moral and legal evil which leads so many babies out to be slaughtered year upon year under our very noses.

Three years ago I attended the National Conservatism conference at the impressive Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, London. Although it was originally built in the 1920s for the dubious heretical sect known as “the Christian scientists”, three decades ago it was bought by a faithful evangelical church, who often hire out the building for various Christian and/or aligned socio-political events. I was there again last year when they hosted the March for Life speeches, where beforehand I led a sparsely (but wholeheartedly) attended prayer meeting in the corner of the pews.

There was something I couldn’t get out of my head when I was first there three years ago, which I’ll come to in a moment. First, a bit of background. The National Conservatism conference has been a huge influence on the Centre-Right over the last half-decade especially, drawing together most of the key influential voices among the politicians, writers, journalists, historians, scientists, and podcasters who would class themselves as “on the Right” (but “not too far”…). The conference I attended was no exception to this, and included various MPs and notable public intellectuals among the speakers.

Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely), it was not so much the speeches or even the people themselves that stood out to me; it was what literally stood above, behind, and around those people as they were giving or hearing those speeches. Seemingly endless panels and keynotes poured forth from the stage about the evils of liberalism, the need to recover national identity and sovereignty, the need to reverse economic decline, the need to recover conservative principles, and above all, the need to recover the lost moral values which once gave the nation its identity. Much of this was all well and good, of course. But I sensed there was also something ever so slightly pantomimic about the whole enterprise.

Some of this was due to the fact that there were several trojan hecklers who stood up to loudly interrupt speeches at various points to the backdrop of various groans from the crowd, before bring forcibly removed by the efficient security team. There were also various liberals standing outside the building at any given time, with placards calling all the conference attendees fascists, with various forgettable chants to that end. Add that to the running line on social media throughout the three days from leftist journalists who began referring to the event as the “NatC” conference. (You have to give it to them, that was quite funny, even if it only works with a northern English or American accent).

But even the liberals jumping up and down about the conference—try as they might!—was not the thing that really made the impression on me. It was, quite literally, the writing on the wall. There was a visible contrast between the words being spoken from the stage and the words lining the interior of the building at various points. It was very evident, after all, that relatively few of these prestigious speakers had first-hand experience of the Christianity of which they spoke so freely and confidently as the thing that Britain somehow needed to return to.

The writings I am referring to, of course, were from the Bible. One particular verse stood out among the rest, prominently flanking the speakers on the stage:

The capital letters seemed to add to the effect of those words: “I AM COME THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE LIFE AND THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE IT MORE ABUNDANTLY” (John 10:10). Those words hung above the stage like some divine placard—or perhaps, a divine heckle—reminding all with eyes to see, that any effort to regain the values we call “Christian”—even if it may be far better than liberal values—is powerless to produce the abundant life the speakers were promising us from that stage, if those extolling those values fail to take seriously the only One with the power to impart abundant life.

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The point is not that cultural Christianity is bad. Our latest podcast, in fact, was on the inherently conservative nature of Christianity, and the need for conservatives to retake the progressively infiltrated institutions. Indeed, many Christian voices in the UK have been emerging of late to speak more directly into this reawakening among many non-Christian British people about the need to conserve the Christian foundations of the nation.

As Bishop Ceirion Dewar recently said in a speech addressed to the British people:

“A nation does not become stronger by forgetting what made it strong. A civilisation does not advance by severing itself from the truths that formed it. A people do not become freer by abandoning the moral vision that gave their freedom meaning.”

The average centre-Right-but-not-necessarily-religious types think they see this problem too, but they only see it to a selective extent. The roots of Britain’s problem today goes far deeper than they would be prepared to admit.

Many today think they can just turn the clock back to a time period when Britain was simply “less bad” than it is now. While that would be something, at least, the decline was already in motion even among our more cherished memories of when things seemed better. Things were indeed “better” because we were still living in the good of what came before us, when Christian values in society were not just seen as a quick-fix solution to plaster over the temporary chaos, but had grown as the fruit of Christian faith, outworked throughout British society among the British people at the social, cultural, judicial, and political levels over many generations.

So much good has been eroded. But you can’t reverse the erosion by teleporting back to a time when we were simply in relatively less spiritual and moral decline than we are now. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t push the nation halfway back up the hill down which it was already in freefall, having largely abandoned the faith. I’m glad that many British people today are beginning to understand the true value of Christian values within their nation as they see the ravages of secular liberalism and Islamism advancing further upon them. But those renewed values will not truly be “Christian” if by citing them we merely mean to trick ourselves into feeling like we have regained a sense of national identity alone.

Our national cultural identity already is inherently Christian, whether we like it or not. But most British people today still either do not know what this means or do not want to do anything about it which might demand repentance and faith from them personally. They want the values of the Christ, but not the Christ Himself. They want to welcome him on Palm Sunday but dare not follow him to Calvary five days later, when the buzz has worn off, when it may cost them even to be associated with Him, with all He stands for, and against.

A nation like Britain was not built on a limp middle class faith that could be picked up or put down depending on the political weather. It was built on strong and resilient convictions hard-fought and hard-won throughout generations of faithfulness rooted in Christ. This is not a summons to revert to pietistic inactivity where we wait for everyone to be converted before taking any kind of political action. Political solutions to the nation’s present malaise absolutely are needed, and will make a difference. But if they are not met with meaningful spiritual renewal throughout the Church and throughout the nation then any gains will be undone before they have any opportunity to bear lasting fruit. Britain cannot be rebuilt halfway back up the rock on which she was first forged. She must go all the way back. We must take His Word seriously again, and live in the light of its truth like we really mean it.

It should be a sobering thought to many people that, ultimately, if Britain does not return to Christ, in a generation’s time there may no longer be a Britain. At a political and even an ecclesial level, the nation returning to Christ might seem difficult to imagine. But at root, we should see that it’s not actually complicated. It could be seen as being as simple as that parable which I’ve been especially fond of quoting in recent years, the one which most of our grandparents were still learning in Sunday school:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matt. 7:24-27)

As on the walls of the Emmanuel Centre, the divine placard of Christ’s words may stand for us but also against us, depending on which path we choose. Jesus put it even more clearly in John 15:

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” (John 15:4-6)

Christ will not be duped by fake allegiance. While it’s true that when a people are faithful to Christ within a nation, even non-believers may also benefit from the fruit, they will not bear fruit for him without faith.

May the foundations, values, laws, and faith of the nation be restored to the rock of Christ, that the fruits of Christ would not be selectively cherrypicked but that a great many people would be truly grafted into Christ Himself, that the nation would be rescued from ruin, and Christ exalted in the hearts and minds of the people.

If you’re in the London area on 15th May and you want to see me discussing these themes with other pro-Christian-nation brothers, come along to this event at which I’ll be speaking, called “Is the Church in the Battle for Britain?”