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In an interview conducted a few days after the beginning of Lent, Reform UK’s Muslim home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, outlined a new policy to prevent churches being converted to mosques. This was an “incendiary” issue relating to Christian heritage, Mr Yusuf claimed, which was causing anxiety across the United Kingdom.
Subsequent analysis by the Times – which conducted the interview – concluded that instances of churches becoming mosques were in fact extremely rare, adding up to less than 0.09% of the 47,000 churches active in the 1960s. Mr Yusuf’s solution to this alleged crisis – which involved granting automatic listed status to churches, and changing planning laws to restrict change of use – was also widely questioned. For many churches struggling to fund repairs through the contributions of thinned-out congregations, the onerous bureaucratic obstacles posed by listed status would only be another expensive headache.
Mr Yusuf will not care much about any of that. The point of the policy is to sow cultural division for political gain, and position Reform as the party of a besieged Christian majority. The object of the far-right-inspired Unite the Kingdom march last September, which featured wooden crosses and chants of “Christ is King”, was the same. The Conservative MP Nick Timothy has recently also done his bit to foment discord, describing public Muslim prayers during Ramadan as an act of “domination”.
This insidious agenda flagrantly channels fears expressed in the great replacement conspiracy theory, which claims that migration is being used to change the cultural “DNA” of Europe. It hijacks the Christian traditions of a now largely secular country to legitimise a callous disregard for the rights of refugees, particularly Muslim ones, and inculcate hostility towards Britain’s multicultural reality.
There will be much more of this to come. The Christian nationalist right played a key part in the rise of Maga and Donald Trump in the United States. Figures such as James Orr, a Cambridge theologian and Reform’s head of policy, hope to perform a similar service for Nigel Farage. Last month, Mr Orr was a star guest at a gathering of far-right leaders in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has entrenched his power by using cultural Christianity as a political weapon.
In response, Britain’s churches have rightly begun to make themselves heard in the public square. In February, Anglican bishops sought to reclaim the meaning of the cross in the flag of Saint George, which has been used by the Raise the Colours movement in a transparent attempt to intimidate immigrants. The “true significance of the cross”, read their statement, lay in the “values of respect, compassion and care for all.” Throughout the gospels, of course, accounts of Jesus’s taboo-breaking encounters with reviled outsiders of every description make precisely the same point.
On Easter weekend, this message of universality will have been conveyed in churches of all denominations, as believers celebrated Christ’s redeeming sacrifice on the cross. But opportunists such as Mr Yusuf ignore Christian teaching’s ethical core, in order to turn its traditions into a vehicle for social exclusion and the expression of cultural supremacy. As Britain’s religious heritage is steadily turned into a political battleground, practising Christians and church leaders will need to find new ways to combat those who use and abuse their faith in the pursuit of power.
