Les Miserables : trajectories in Christian Nationalism

One of my favourite stories both as a novel and a musical is Les Miserables. It tells lots of individual stories against the backdrop of social upheaval in France.  The story has been on my mind as I’ve been thinking about where we have got to with the Christian Nationalism debate.  Why will come clear later. First though, here’s some big picture stuff – a kind of recap.

I want to come back to what I wrote about dreams, war and civil war again. You can read the comments made by one of the so called “patriot pastors” there.  It is also worth watching this video he shared of a conversation with those putting up flags in his area below.

The first thing I want you to observe is the trajectory we have seen in terms of our dialogue.  As I’ve noted previously, a few months back I tended to get bafflement and bemusement whenever I talked about Christian Nationalism. It was seen as some kind of fringe American, pseudo-academic thing, of no interest to us. I think there is a bit more awareness of its relevance now, though few Christian leaders (I think John Stevens of the FIEC is one of very, very few exceptions) are addressing this head on. 

Secondly, there is the trajectory we are seeing within the movement in the UK.  I first want to pick up on the bigger, long term trajectory.  For the past 20 years or so, there has been significant activity around Christian freedoms. It has never been about freedom of expression/human rights generally but about the right to hold specific positions as Christians.  So much of the focus for a long time was on things like the freedom of people to wear Christian symbols in the workplace and to make business decisions based on Christian ethics (eg admitting same sex coupled to guest houses or baking cakes for them).  This has also seen a lot of focus on street preachers making themselves into martyrs by focusing heavily on gender and sexuality issues.  Christian parachutch organisations have grown with a specific focus on these matters.

Another trajectory has been the growing influence of Federal Vision thinking.  This has primarily had an impact on reformed contexts, particularly paedobaptists either Conservative Evangelical Anglicans or a growing Presbyterian presence in the UK.  Within this theological movement is an emphasis on growing God’s kingdom through having lots of children, Christian education, through private schools and colleges as well as a home school movement and political engagement. The result of this has been the turning of VAT charges on private schools and legitimate state concerns for the well-being of children not in school provision into “Christian persecution” issues by the same parachutch organisations mentioned above.

A final trajectory in terms of the big picture from the  church perspective was the effect of the COVId-19 pandemic. Not only did Christians feel the direct impact of church closures but there was a suspicion of any measures seen as constraining liberties and freedoms.  Unfortunately, a lot of the COVID/lockdown sceptic and anti-vax communication was traceable back to conspiracy theory websites often with far right links. 

I think that this was where we started to see a coming together.  Frankly, the far right have seen the opportunity for alignment with naive Christians.  So we need to be alert to the trajectories that they have been moving on, true not just in the UK but also in wider Europe. Back in the early 20th Century, the far right’s focus was antisemitic.  Jews were seen as the main threat and so we saw their dehumanization and the horrific genocide by Hitler and the Nazis through the Holocaust. However, the far right are primarily ethno-cultural nationalists and so will stoke any threat. Through the mid to late 20th Century immigration in general including black Afro Carribeans was in their sights.  Antisemitism has never gone away of course and finds outlets across the political spectrum though that far right have learnt to be more subtle, posing as friends of Jews whilst dropping  dog whistle signals by referring to communist and globalist threats whilst also identifying wealthy Jews like Soros as shadowy and sinister figures.  However 911 and the Islamist threat enabled them to pivot towards a new external threat. Muslims were increasingly demonised as seeking as a homogeneous group to invade and Islamise the West.  Here was another point of contact with politicized conservative Evangelicals.  Sadly, too often the church failed to welcome Christisn immigrants or to show hospitality and engage evangelistically with Muslims.  Mission to Muslims has long been presented as a hard mission field, the select preserve of a hardened elite few. And so many Christians don’t actually know or have contact with Muslims. Islam has therefore been seen primarily in terms of dangerous threat, a Goliath for our time.

And so we come to the trajectory of 2025, in fact the trajectory of this past month or two. At tht Unite the Kingdom rally in September, Christians were seen marching with the far right and being given prominent platform space. At first we were told that they were merely there to witness, they then increasingly insisted that we must understand the grievances and issues of those marching. This has moved to the promotion of an overtly nationalist agenda with the thinnest veneer of Christianity. 

This has moved on to recent talk of violence, revolution and even civil war. See this example:

This has moved from prediction to the increased sense that some are agitating for it. When we read a social media posts talking in terms of the establishment i as an Islamist/Communist alliance, how are we meant to read calls for Christians to take sides with the British people against this in a predicted uprising.  The trajectory is now that Christians are moving beyond even the rhetoric of the far right to saying the things that even they consider unspeakable. 

All of this echoes the language of Psalm 1, the warning not to be those who walk, stand and sit with the wicked.   And meanwhile, too many Christians fluff their lines unwilling to point out that the real invasion is that if wolves bringing demonic idolatry into the church.  Reformed conservatives are too taken with the pseudo academic nonsense of Wilson whilst Charismatics want to give anyone who claims a prophetic word a chance even when they do clearly do not sound anything like the voice of the Great Shepherd of the Sheep. 

Now, and this is where the title comes in, I don’t think we are on the brink of civil war. I could be wrong of course but the kind of talking up of conflict and uprising reminds me too much of Marius and the students in Les Mis.  They make great speeches and sing songs of revolution but when they go to the barricades, they die alone, the uprising doesn’t happen.  I suspect this is the  coming reality, a few hot heads are going to get themselves caught up in some trouble.  They won’t however manage to trigger some great uprising.  They are unlikely even to obtain true martyrdom, though they may get themselves arrested.

And at one level, we could just ignore this.  Except for two dangers.  First that a way of thinking has still taken root in the church that distracts is from the Gospel.  An idol has been brought in, designed to look a little like Jesus but which in fact is nothing like him. The second is that the noise and stench created is becoming an offence, a stumbling block other than the Gospel, a strategy of the true enemy to make the Gospel look undesirable to the very people we are called to take it to.

This is grievous because one of the things I have seen during my time in Gospel ministry is that where the church failed to welcome immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, we have been given. A second chance and for the past two decades have been running a good race.  As Paul would ask “who cut in on us?”