The surging far-right Reform UK has routinely touted itself as a bulwark of Christian values. Deputy Leader Richard Tice recently said that the UK is a nation “founded in Christianity”, responding to controversy after Sarah Pochin MP publicly asked Kier Starmer if he would ban the burqa. Amid last year’s summer riots, Rupert Lowe MP took to GB News to assert that “We are a Christian country” and at a speech in Blackpool in 2024, Nigel Farage declared that “everything” about Britain is based on Judeo-Christian values.
We could read these statements as cynical attempts to poach the Christian vote, or even as typical for British conservative politicians (David Cameron famously made the same controversial statement as Prime Minister, after all). But I’d argue we can read Reform’s religious rhetoric in accordance with a trend in religious uptick among the international populist right.
Religion and far right politics: the end of separation of church and state?
Take Trump. On 16 May, he named the advisory board members of the new Religious Liberty Commission, tasked with producing an ‘official report’ on the history of religious liberty in America. Vox calls this an “unprecedented” shift in the perceived relationship of church and state among the MAGA right, in which religion is framed as symbiotic with the political health of the nation.
But this view isn’t new among MAGA hardliners. As ProPublica has reported, Vice President JD Vance admitted in a 2021 private speech to young conservatives that he “believe[s] the Devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society”. The non-profit news outlet Mother Jones has linked Vance to the rise of ‘TheoBros’ – millennial men advocating ethnonationalism and authoritarian theocracy.
We can see this mutation in the relationship between faith and politics as a continuation of a project advanced by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The Guardian, The Conversation, and Vox have all detailed how Orbán and the far-right party Fidesz have systematically hollowed Hungary’s legal institutions since seizing power in 2010, with state consolidation of its media outlets allowing them to hold political control. For years, Orbán described his model as “Illiberal Democracy”. Since 2019, however, he’s preferred the term ‘Christian Democracy‘. Today, Fidesz couches its isolationist xenophobia as a defence of Christian communities and values.
Tracking this trend towards religion around the world
The unholy union between religious rhetoric and far-right politics spreads much further. Karol Nawrocki, the conservative Holocaust revisionist who recently won Poland’s presidential election, quoted a passage from the Book of Chronicles in his victory speech. Elle Hardy, writing for Jacobin, has called attention to the relationship between evangelical Pentecostalism (the world’s fastest growing religion, with over 600 million members) and support for right-wing populism, arguing that the movement has “elevat[ed] a new brand of right-populist leaders including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and Rodrigo Duterte”. The trend even surpasses Christianity: in India, Narendra Modi and the BJP party’s extreme Hindu nationalism has been linked to several anti-Muslim pogroms over the past two decades, as well as the widespread normalisation of Muslim discrimination.
In the UK, we’re also seeing an uptick in religious belief among fascist and radical right groups. Britain First, the movement linked to anti-Muslim terror attacks, has taken to calling their occupations of mosques a “Christian crusade“. Since his imprisonment in 2024, Tommy Robinson has adopted explicitly pro-Christian messaging at his events, with followers routinely chanting “Christ is King” at rallies. Searchlight magazine has pointed to UKIP as adopting a Christian nationalist stance under leadership of Nicholas Tenconi.
Decoration or devotion: understanding the radical right’s religion
Olivier Roy in the LSE Religion and Global Society blog argues that the increased faith-based rhetoric among the far-right has coincided with a decrease in religiosity across Europe. A 2022 report from the Pew Research Centre agrees: Christianity in Western Europe is not only declining, but also increasingly connected to nationalist anti-migrant politics. This trend is not bulletproof – Tobias Cremer demonstrates the role of Germany’s churches in stigmatising support for the extremist AfD and Marzouki and McDonnell point out organisations such as America’s New Sanctuary Movement that justifies activism aiding immigrants with Christian teachings. Still, Christian rhetoric is only on the rise among the global rogues’ gallery of populist politicians.
There are many ways to think about this link. Meredith Warren, Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield, understands the right’s Christianity as dog whistling, where ‘Judeo-Christian’ simply stands in for ‘white’. Trump’s 2017 ‘Muslim ban’ and the more recent ban on dozens of African nations makes plain the white-supremacist motivations at play. Understanding the right’s weaponisation of Christianity as a dog whistle tells us something that might already be intuitive: that their use of religious fundamentalism is fundamentally hollow. Sociologist Rogers Brubaker, discussing Marine Le Pen and the history of France’s National Front, dubs this ‘Christianism’: “It’s a secularized Christianity as culture […] It’s a matter of belonging rather than believing […] We are Christians precisely because they are Muslims. Otherwise, we are not Christian in any substantive sense.”
Conspiracy theories fan the flames
The right’s mixing of religious rhetoric and iconography with conspiracy theories arguably supports this read. The QAnon movement, purporting that Trump sought political power because he was fighting a Satanic paedophilic cabal hidden in the upper-echelons of Hollywood and the Democratic elite, made repeated reference to scripture and was seen to have an over-representation of white evangelical Christians.
Fidesz has long made effective use of the conspiracy that billionaire George Soros has been intentionally undermining Western democracies by supporting refugee resettlement programmes, a belief that bears resemblance to antisemitic and white-supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theories.
India’s Hindu Nationalist movement has popularised the ‘Love Jihad’ conspiracy claiming that a syndicate of Muslims have been working to seduce and convert Hindu women; this pernicious theory (discredited by the country’s supreme court) has led to the imprisonment of 208 Muslims and the murder of 24-year-old Arbaaz Aftab Mullah in 2021.
Across the globe, the lines between religion and conspiracism are being blurred by demagogues. Religious rhetoric adds a sense of historical continuity and mythic resonance to these otherwise outlandish claims.
Negative messianism and the new nation state
There’s another concept we can consider: ‘Negative Messianism’. The term comes from Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics, a work of postcolonial theory exploring how certain classes of people are designated the right to live while Others are left to die, as a technology of control.
Negative Messianism unites a host of interrelated phenomena: religious terrorism, the technological militarisation of borders, apocalyptic conspiracist fantasies and Silicon Valley’s ‘Dark Enlightenment’ movement are just some. For Mbembe, it leads to a new “politics of survival” focused on erecting walls to keep outsiders out, or paranoiac fear around the ‘trans indoctrination’ of children, for example. On a national sense, it turns authoritarian, crippling democracy from the inside and subordinating state institutions to the hunting of ‘outsiders’. I would argue that the right’s religious turn is another instance of Negative Messianism.
Orbán’s Christian(ist) Democracy helps justify his expelling of migrants, and Israel’s technocratic theocracy is intimately bound with its industrialised apartheid and genocide. The material conditions that give rise to Negative Messianism in all its forms are also inviting the Bible’s most anti-democratic tendencies out to play. This shift we’re seeing around the world might be the new model for the nation state, as the surging right sanctifies its scapegoating with scripture.
A warning for the UK
This trend is worrying. A radicalised religious right is a recipe for violence. Belief in a holy mandate has been instrumental in persuading much of Israel’s population to accept almost two years of genocide, and the increasingly precarious position of India’s Muslims should be cause for alarm everywhere.
While the UK’s overwhelmingly secular culture might seem a far cry from religious fervour (with 37% of census respondents identifying as holding no religion in 2021), it would be a mistake to rest easy. Reform’s comments are the tip of an iceberg in the country’s far-right undercurrent; Christian nationalism has taken root in Britain. The increasing prevalence of belief in conspiracy theories among the UK population makes this even more alarming. Polling by HOPE not hate indicates that up to 61% of Reform voters support the statement that “parts of many European cities are under the control of Sharia Law”, with the same proportion arguing that official accounts of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust were purposely exaggerated.
The unification of religious belief with conspiracist thinking and anti-migrant sentiment could be enough to sweep Reform into power in the next general election, the way it did in Hungary, in India and in America.
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