The
Guardian view on far-right perversions of the Christmas message: promoting a
gospel of hate
Editorial
A Tommy
Robinson-inspired carol service is the latest sign of a burgeoning Christian
nationalist movement. The Church of England is right to push back
Thu 11
Dec 2025 18.31 GMT
The story
of Christmas is a tale of poverty and flight from persecution. According to
Christian tradition, humanity’s saviour is born in a stable, since Mary and
Joseph are unable to find a room in Bethlehem. The holy family subsequently
flee to Egypt to escape the murderous intentions of King Herod. This drama
grounds the New Testament message of compassion for the stranger, the fugitive
and all those who find themselves far from home. “I was hungry and you gave me
food to eat,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. “I was a stranger and you
welcomed me.”
The
spirit of a far-right show of force planned on Saturday by Stephen
Yaxley-Lennon, AKA Tommy Robinson, will be somewhat different. Since reportedly
converting fully to Christianity while serving a prison sentence for contempt
of court, Mr Yaxley-Lennon has energetically deployed his faith to promote his
own gospel of ethnic discord and political polarisation. The Unite the Kingdom
rally he organised in July featured hymns, a plethora of wooden crosses and a
Christian preacher who spoke of a war against “the Muslim”. His latest
provocation is a “carol service” in central London, ostensibly to “put Christ
back in Christmas”.
It would
be easy to mock the absurdity of a seasonal event implicitly dedicated to the
cause of undermining peace and goodwill. But the apparent rise of Christian
nationalism in Britain needs to be taken seriously. Crusader-style rhetoric has
long been a feature of fringe extremist organisations. But Mr Yaxley-Lennon’s
malign influence is popularising it to an extent hitherto unseen. In Reform UK,
there are also signs that national populism in Britain is learning from the
successful weaponisation of cultural Christianity elsewhere. Nigel Farage,
though not a regular church attender, has begun to talk up his affinity with
conservative Anglicanism. The theologian James Orr, an influential figure in
Maga circles and a friend of JD Vance, has been recruited as a senior Reform UK
adviser.
An
ethnocentric politics legitimising xenophobia, cultural exclusivism and
indiscriminate deportations is fundamentally unchristian, as the late Pope
Francis repeatedly underlined. The Church of England has now launched its own
campaign against the far-right misappropriation of Christian imagery and the
gospel message. The Rev Arun Arora, the bishop of Kirkstall and the co-lead
bishop on racial justice for the church, pithily observed that Mr
Yaxley-Lennon’s conversion does not accord him “the right to subvert the faith
so that it serves his purpose rather than the other way around”.
In its
various guises, the contemporary far right is seeking to transform Christianity
into a vehicle for cultural and ethnic supremacism, exploiting and corrupting
desires for meaning and belonging. In Donald Trump’s America and Viktor Orbán’s
Hungary, this project has furnished a spurious religious underpinning to a
politics of authoritarian power and exclusion.
Nothing
could be further from the spirit of St Paul when he asserts: “There is neither
Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female,
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The modern notion of universal human
rights owes a debt to this revolutionary assertion made 2,000 years ago. Mr
Yaxley-Lennon maintains that his confrontational carol service can be a moment
to “reclaim and celebrate our heritage, culture and Christian identity”. There
is a crucial opposition, though, between glorifying nativism and reflecting on
the meaning of the nativity.
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