Just what Nigel Farage needed fresh from his by-election battle with Count Binface: now he’s got a former Archbishop of Canterbury on his case. Rowan Williams, whose headgear in the job was only marginally less striking than the intergalactic candidate for Clacton, has accused the Reform UK leader of using Christianity to stir up anti-Muslim feeling.
In an interview with the New Humanist magazine, Williams said: “I suspect really that Farage and others want to channel anti-Muslim feeling, and it helps to have ‘we’re a Christian society’ to fling back. It gives a sort of ballast.” He also took aim at Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and who has recently professed Christian faith. Williams said he would “really want to ask [Robinson] some awkward questions” about “how attempting to lead a life of Christian discipleship squares with public rhetoric designed to produce hostility and violence”.
Yet, Farage and Robinson aren’t the same people or indeed even the same problem. Farage loathes Robinson, for one thing, and sees his own political movement as the pressure release valve that stops the hard right from taking a hold in the UK in the way it has managed in other countries. Of course, not everyone will agree with this argument: presumably Williams thinks that Farage is part of a slippery slope towards Robinson’s politics. He clearly thinks both are misusing Christianity.
To leave Robinson aside for a minute, why is Farage particularly deserving of criticism for talking about Christianity any more than any other believing politician? He said at Easter that “the Christian values on which our country is built are something to be proud of” – which is almost so anodyne that it could have appeared on Keir Starmer’s X account as well. He doesn’t go on about Christianity all that much.
He does argue that there are “young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, in fact loathe much of what we stand for”, and complained about the Iftar in Trafalgar Square where thousands broke their Ramadan fast together in March. But unlike Robinson, he doesn’t try to cloak himself in Christianity at all: he’s much more likely to be found cloaked in a cloud of tobacco smoke.
Williams is clearly part of the strand of thinking in the higher echelons of the Church of England that involves arguing in favour of immigration and downplaying its impact: this argument is often offered alongside the point that Jesus himself was a migrant at a time of great persecution. The Bible has no real lessons on how governments should police borders or what a healthy level of net migration should look like, any more than it goes into detail about when to go to war, how benefit eligibility should be calculated or standards in schools.
It offers general principles on social justice, on protecting and speaking up for the oppressed, and on equality in the eyes of God. But any leader of any political party could arguably breach these while professing a Christian faith: in fact, the central doctrine of the Bible is that every Christian disciple does daily fail to meet its standards – the senior members of the Anglican Church included.
As for the standards of parishioners, Farage himself has previously argued that the bishops are out of kilter with the views of many sitting in the pews: not all churchgoing Christians in this country believe in open borders or high levels of inward immigration, or indeed in failing to stop dangerous small or large boat crossings. So it’s an interesting fight to keep picking.
The strongest bulwark against any politician “misusing” Christianity, though, is not Williams or any of his senior colleagues. It is that Britain’s cultural Christianity is so very different to that in the US. It has its own safety valve of “steady on”, a very Anglican belief that anyone who gets too fervent about anything should be regarded with some suspicion. Even politicians who do want to talk about their faith in public tend to do so quite gently, rather than seeing it as a particular selling point. We are not a secular country, we are a Christian country. But we are also a rather restrained country.
Aside from his politics, Robinson will also be limiting himself by going on marches where people carry crosses and chant “Christ is King”: that isn’t very British either. In fact, the only people who really get away with that kind of behaviour are also expected to be wearing full archbishop paraphernalia and be doing it in a cathedral, as Williams once did. Otherwise, most people regard noisy and aggressive displays of Christian faith as more off-putting than someone walking around with a bin on their head.
Farage clearly knows that: it’s strange that Williams himself hasn’t noticed.
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