Tim Wyatt in Critical Friend

I have to be honest: when I started writing this newsletter almost three years ago, I basically had zero expectation we’d ever end up discussing Christian Nationalism (except perhaps to roll our eyes at the American version and shudder). And yet without anyone really expecting it, that has become one of the major talking points of this current moment in British church life too.

We can all point to examples of what we think we mean when we say Christian Nationalism, but there has been precious little consensus or clarity who British Christian Nationalists are and what they actually believe. Peter Lynas from the Evangelical Alliance made an interesting stab at delineating four different kinds of Christian Nationalism, depending on whether the ‘Christian’ bit or the ‘Nationalist’ bit was emphasised, back in 2025.

There’s also been oceans of ink spilled about to what extent figures like James Orr (the Cambridge theologian who now writes Reform’s policies) or Danny Kruger (the ex-Tory MP who gave a significant Commons speech about England and faith) encapsulate modern British Christian Nationalism (I’m getting a bit bored of typing that and it’s going to come up a lot, so from here on let’s just say CN). Conversely, another theologian (Oxford’s Luke Bretherton) recently told the bishops of the Church of England that, theologically-speaking, there wasn’t really any such thing as CN.

Now, the thinktank Theos has made a huge contribution to the debate by publishing some original research into the subject. Their report begins by noting the almost total absence of academic study into CN in Britain (in contrast to the United States where it is both more prominent and better examined). And so Theos commissioned a pollster to survey nearly 11,000 across six European countries including the UK. The British sample was 1,765 folk and their data informed this report (there will be other research published later on the findings from the other countries).

They then did some technical statistical work on this data (a Principal Component Analysis and a Latent Class Analysis for the nerds) to statistically group the respondents into clusters. Theos correctly identified that CN is not a label people just opt into or out of, nor can it be simply fitted along a spectrum with the most Christian Nationalist at one end and the least at the other. And so they sought to tease out from their survey data different (and somewhat overlapping) categories of respondent who had distinct approaches to the melding or separating of their Britishness and Christian faith.

But first, they did also try to boil down CN into a single yes-or-no question to get a simple answer: ‘Do you need to be Christian to be truly British?’ Some 17% agreed either strongly or slightly with that. They got similar numbers when flipping the question around: ‘Do people who don’t have Christian values truly belong to our nation?’ About 16% agreed with that suggestion. So perhaps in the region of 15-20% of Britons are CN in that sense. But when asked to select things from a list what was the most important factor in making someone British, only 1% picked being a Christian.

Putting that to one side, Theos then dived into its fancy cluster analysis. It first identified the two major alternative perspectives and pleasingly these divided pretty much exactly half and half. Fifty per cent of the population are Separatists: people who think Christianity and Britishness should be kept apart. And the other 50% are Integrationists, people who think in some way there is overlap between the faith and the nation.

The Separatists they broke down further into two camps. The first they called Committed Separatists. These amounted to 34% of the population. They reject any suggestion that Christianity might be integral to being British, they don’t want faith in politics, they don’t care if a local church was turned into a mosque, and they care even less that Christianity is in decline in the UK. This group is slightly more likely than average to be younger, female, better educated and from a higher social class. They are also less religious in personal affiliation and practice than average, but do still include some believers (23% describe themselves as Christians and 13% say religion is important to them).

The second camp is what Theos are calling Cultural Separatists (16% of the population). They hold similar views about the separation of church and nation/state as the first group, although often with less intensity. Lots of them are noncommittal on some of the statements the Committed Separatists had strong views on. The key difference is that unlike the first group, they’re not airily and dispassionately neutral about other religions taking root in British soil. They absolutely would be unhappy if their local church was turned into a mosque and they are much more strongly anti-immigration. You might assume this group is the more working-class, socially conservative, whiter version of the urbane metropolitan liberals of the Cultural Separatists. But Theos say their data shows there aren’t major differences in gender, income, work status or where they live between the two categories of Separatists. They are a bit older and a bit lower down the socio-economic ladder, and yes, a bit more likely to be white and more Reform-y than Green. They are generally more negative, disillusioned, isolated and have a more cultural rather than civic sense of what makes you British.

These Cultural Separatists are obviously not Christian Nationalists by any stretch and want no entanglement between faith and state, and yet they are also the constituency the popular imagination believes CNs are drawn from. As Theos note:

‘Their view of the nation is more traditional, more settled, more natal, more cultural and in some instances more ethnic, and even though they don’t want Christianity to be part of that, they are hostile to the idea that any other cultural or religious identity – most obviously Islam or immigrant identities – should occupy that space.’

Now we come to the other half of the spectrum: the 50% of the population who in some way are OK with an integration of Christianity into nationhood and Britishness. These Integrationists are divided into three sub-categories.

The first are Values Integrationists (26% of the sample). They are still pretty negative about true CN, having no time for the idea you need to be Christian to be truly British or that we need more Christians in political leadership. But they are in favour of Christianity having an influence on the cultural elements of British life, informing our RE lessons etc. They share a lot of the concerns about modern Britain that Cultural Separatists have and worry about immigration and the number of Muslims. But unlike them, Values Integrationists see Christianity as one aspect of Britain they want defended from these threats, albeit not in an especially muscular fashion compared to others we will explore in a moment. Nor are they driven by the sense of alienation or disaffection in the same way as Cultural Separatists: they are much happier and integrated into their communities and feel proud of their nation. Compared to the sample average, however, they’re not much more likely to have a Christian affiliation, go to church and say religion is important to them. In short, these are the soft, cultural CNs:

‘For Values Integrationists, Christianity is a value-based phenomenon, which has pervaded Britain’s history, culture and institutions, which has done it good and which is worth protecting, although not necessarily defending vigorously.’

The next slice are Identity Integrationists (11% of the sample). They are the hard core CNs, who think Christianity and Britishness are close to coterminous. They overwhelmingly believe Christianity should be favoured by the state, that the prime minister has to be a Christian, that laws should be based on Christian values. Strong majorities also believe you have to be Christian to be British. This category also has the most distinct demographic profile, being noticeably more working class, less urban, more white, and older than the population average. They are very anxious about high levels of immigration, the presence of Muslims and asylum seekers, crime, and indeed threats of almost any kind to the nation (whether from compulsory ID cards, Russia, public debt or trans people). This group is also most likely of any to say they are Christian and that religion is important to them. Despite this, their self-professed levels of churchgoing are barely above the average (13% vs 11%).

‘Identity Integrationists are deeply, indeed viscerally, culturally Christian, but their Christianity tends to be a bit more cultural and heritage based than it is practising.’

They are also intensely nationalistic on every metric, not just when it comes to Christianity, being proud of pretty much every version of Britishness offered and also demanding the highest bar of any group to count as British. They are also the most racially-driven: almost half agree that being white is important to being truly British and 84% say Britain is too ethnically mixed.

The fifth and final sub-category are Belief Integrationists (13% of the population). They share, without quite the same intensity, the Identity Integrationists’ desire to see Christianity embedded into Britishness and significant chunks of this group think those who aren’t Christians cannot be truly British. Where they begin to differ is what they think Christianity is. The Identity Integrationists majored on defending Christian heritage and keeping Britain a Christian country. The Belief Integrationists don’t really care much about that. Instead, they were more likely to believe being Christian meant caring for asylum seekers, and were also much more likely to attend church, read the Bible and pray. These are CNs who feel this way because they are actually practising Christians, not cultural ones, and they don’t want to preserve Britain’s Christian identity so much as promote it. They’re much less worried about immigration and the numbers of Muslims, and a bit less concerned about the decline in churchgoing.

Belief Integrationists are a bit younger and less white than average, a bit more urban and likely to be earning less. They’re also the group most likely to be personally contented and integrated into their communities, and intriguingly the most likely of any group to say Britain’s social problems are down to ‘feminism and erosion of traditional masculine values’. Their nationalism is often just as punchy as the Identity Integrationists (they are in favour of ‘strong man’ politicians prepared to break the rules, for instance), but less racialised. That said, two-thirds of this group believed in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory (the idea that elites are deliberately flooding Europe with Muslim migrants to replace its indigenous White inhabitants).

Phew. OK, that was a lot of information. Let’s try to recap briefly. Theos has found Britain is basically split down the middle, with half the population wanting to keep Britishness and Christianity separate and half wanting them to be integrated in some way.

Of the Separatists, there are:

• Committed Separatists (34%) — hardcore secularists who want a total firewall between church and state. Broadly impartial about faith as long as it’s private.
• Cultural Separatists (16% — also anti-CN, but driven more by cultural antipathy towards any religion taking root in British soil. More likely to be white and working class.

Then of the Integrationists, there are:

• Values Integrationists (26%) — soft CNs, like Christian culture and heritage and want it to somewhat determine Britishness, but not too much.
• Identity Integrationists (11%) — hardcore CNs, think Britishness and Christianity are intrinsic to each other, hate migrants/Muslims, vigorously nationalistic in every way. Typically the white, working-class, older, rural pool in which Reform is fishing.
• Belief Integrationists (13%) — strong-ish CNs, but driven more by actual practising faith and desire to promote Christianity. Bit younger, more diverse.

This little survey underlines the complexity of the debate. It’s just not very useful to talk about ‘Christian Nationalists’ as a single category, as beliefs and practice vary widely within those who might in some way be classified as such. The way each category maps onto nominal or practising Christian faith is also worth pausing on.

Theos has a good chart which lays this all out on page 89. In each category, nominal believers outnumber practising Christians, and nominal believers are also the most nationalistic in each category too. In other words, being an actual Christian who attends church, prays, reads their Bible and seeks to follow Jesus makes you less likely to favour the integration of Christianity and Britishness than those who claim a Christian identity but don’t actually practice.

Through other analyses of Christian motivation, Theos draws out a very important point (and one often lost by secular commentators):

‘This is a salutary reminder that the UK is not America and however Christian the debate around Christian nationalism is, the comparably low proportion of believing and practising Christians in the UK (compared to the US) means that this debate is unlikely to get particularly ‘theological’.

This debate is more about culture, where there is genuine difference, than it is about belief and ideology.’

As the research is pretty much the first of its kind, we can’t say from this data whether CN is increasing in Britain (as we all seem to intuitively feel it must be). But we can only thank Theos for injecting such admirable evidence-based rigour into our discussions. Perhaps we should be alarmed that at least 11% of people, and possibly as many as 50%, could be characterised as a form of CN. But what I appreciated about Theos’s research is how they sought to unpack CN from being just a bogey term for Christians or Nationalists I don’t like, to something much more complex. If you accept the historical fact that much of British political and cultural life was built on a foundation of Christianity and that doesn’t need to be apologised for, then are you perhaps in some way a soft CN yourself? If you are OK with the C of E being the established state church, does that make you a form of CN? None of this is simple.

I also appreciated how their report gave firm evidence to my own assumption: which is that large chunks of those hardcore CNs, waving crosses and shouting ‘Christ is King’ on Tommy Robinson marches aren’t really very Christian at all, in the sense of going to church and trying to follow Jesus in your everyday life. Some in the church will sit back and feel comforted by this fact: ‘It’s OK, stand down, the CNs aren’t really anything to do with us real Christians after all, it’s all for show’. But equally you could find this conclusion disturbing: ‘Why is that people whose faith is almost entirely nominal still find meaning in brandishing our cherished symbols and language to further their political ends which we feel deeply uncomfortable about?’

Before we move on, however, perhaps we should address the elephant in the room. Do we even trust online surveys any more!? I don’t think I’m the only person who’s been so burned by the Quiet Revival debacle that I’m more than a little cynical about Christian organisations trumpeting their findings from online polling. Even more so when you remember that Theos is ultimately part of the Bible Society, the very same charity which commissioned the Quiet Revival.

And so, at the press briefing to unveil this report, I confess my first question to Theos was how confident they were of their data in the light of the Quiet Revival’s retraction. Nick Spencer, the senior researcher at Theos who was presenting the report, said his team had spoken internally about the need for the data to be “cleaner than clean, stronger than strong” and shared more information on the steps taken by their polling partner to ensure this. They used AI to try and flag erroneous answers, checked for people completing the poll suspiciously quickly or giving repetitive answers, used specialist software to look for bots, VPN usage and other fraud detection, and also included trap questions to weed out fraudulent responders. Spencer said at the end of this “quite long process” he was “comfortable and confident” that it was all reliable.

Another Christian social scientist who’s been critical in the past of other Christian ‘research’, John Heathershaw, has written about the high academic-level quality of this study and praised its “rigorous” methodology and cautious, humble approach to what it can and cannot conclude from the data. His blog is also worth reading as he picks out five more questions which come out of the Theos research he believes are worth exploring. Let’s hope this impressive report is just the first in a wave of research which continues to unpick and complexify the growing trend of CN in Britain.