I don’t know what your reaction was to the images of the recent Belfast riots following the attempted decapitation of an Ulsterman in the middle of the street recently? But for many British people, and even some Americans I’ve spoken to so far, the reaction was not what it might have been five years ago. Something has changed.

The Belfast incident happened just a matter of days after the Southampton riots against the police following the release of footage surrounding the Henry Nowak murder by a Sikh migrant. That was another situation in which the political elites blamed not their own inept decisions which created the multicultural tensions in the first place, but the perpetually divisive nondescript forever-demon known as “the Far Right”. As we all know by now, this term increasingly seems to mean entirely normal Britons who do not want the country they love to disappear into multicultural oblivion under their noses without a fight.

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Zachary Garris is an American Presbyterian pastor and author of excellent books on masculinity and feminism such as Masculine Christianity (2020) and Honor Thy Fathers (2024) with New Christendom Press, who are also publishing my own book on masculinity and David’s mighty men sometime later this year. Earlier this week he was suspended indefinitely by the ecclesiastical authorities in the Rio Grande Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) on the charge of “unwholesome speech” (cf. Eph. 4:29). Two examples given for this charge are what appear to be entirely straightforward social media replies to prominent bad faith interlocutors.

His “speech crimes” were specified by two examples which truly boggle the mind. In one interaction, he said to the academic, Anthony Bradley: “Sometimes things are more complex than a PhD can handle.” In another interaction, he said: “You started by misusing a Bible verse and then calling others ‘biblically illiterate’. But arrogance can’t tolerate banter.” You, like me, might also be wondering why such comments could be enough to strip a man of his qualification for ministry and his livelihood?

As I commented on X at the time, perhaps the PCA would feel safer by indefinitely suspending the prophets, the apostles, and the Messiah for their “unwholesome speech” to their detractors too? If only the Bible could be suspended (or at least re-edited) the PCA might finally feel themselves liberated from the “tyranny” of masculine leadership, after all?

It’s not even a surprise anymore that things like this happen to anyone who doesn’t toe the party line today. It’s almost boring how often it happens, actually, following the precise same playbook each time, whatever the institution, whatever side of the Atlantic, it’s always the same result and the same kind of people behind it. If you promote unfashionable truths or challenge fashionable lies, the well-heeled and Highly Educated respecters of Christian fashion and modern convention will come for you, one way or another.

These things keep happening because everyone seems to have caught the same virus. We keep placating anxieties and protecting effeminate leaders who use felt offence and emotive castigation (with a dash of bureaucratic lever-pulling) to override the significance of truth and courage when it is most needed.

The situation reminded me of an article on a similar situation I faced a few years ago regarding “inappropriate tone”, the consequences of which I’m still dealing over three years later. As with Garris’ situation, the “process” is the punishment, and even when fighting for what I hope will be vindication both for him and myself in the long term, in the interim period you are still somewhat held at arm’s length by the establishment.

Indeed, just the other day, I had my second eleventh-hour BBC cancellation when I was due to speak about my experience at the Tommy Robinson rally on BBC Radio 4 (based on them having read my recent Substack article on the topic). However, as has happened before, I was called last-minute to be informed that an executive higher up the chain had waded in with an “editorial change” because of the ongoing controversy surrounding my tribunal. It’s also the reason I still cannot get an academic job in the UK, because however much I may say in my defence, and however much support I may have, the charge of “being institutionally disreputable” still hangs over you, and from afar no one can ever be quite sure you’re not “a problem case”. The same uncertainty will now be hanging over Garris in the eyes of many, however long it may take him to appeal the decision, which, knowing Presbyterianism (which tends to move at ent-like speed) could take a while.

Early on in my Substack life, I wrote various articles in defence of combative Christian speech as well as the new evangelical “sin” of inappropriate tone in light of my situation at the time, which—in light of Garris’ situation now—I am republishing below for your new readerly enjoyment and/or policing…

How should Christians defend their beliefs when challenged? What counts as “appropriate” or “inappropriate” tone for Christians to adopt in public statements or debates?

Most Christian leaders in recent years have emphasised the necessity of softer, non-confrontational approaches to sharing faith or responding to opponents. ‘Softer’ may not always be wrong, of course: “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (see Prov. 15:1). Such answers may well be very effective in personal conversation, but when this becomes the default mode of public interaction there are usually underlying problems. Christians who soften their expressions for too long may find they’re no longer able to “contend for the faith” (Jude 1:3) when the time comes to do so.

Most Christian leaders across Church history would find it shocking that Christians even need to contend for the idea of “contending”. How did we get to this point? Why is robust confrontation almost always seen as a “bad witness”? This ought to raise all sorts of other questions about the appropriateness of our default mode of engagement. Why is gentle winsomeness always deemed to be the “wise” option, by the way? When does so-called “appropriate” speech become inappropriate?

On Inappropriate Tweets

In case anyone needed reminding, this was my highly “inappropriate” tweet for which I was fired from an evangelical Bible college a few weeks ago:

The college swiftly and publically condemned my language as both “unacceptable” and – here’s that word again – “inappropriate”. The Tweet was deemed so inappropriate, in fact, that my refusal to take it down led to the college declaring it had been “brought into disrepute” as a result. Quite why an evangelical college finds the expression of evangelical opinions so disreputable remains a mystery to many, but all may have been different if only I had expressed such an opinion with different language that made it sound slightly less like the opinion that it was. As I argued in an article for Premier Christianity, many western Christians now seem to live by an apocryphal eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not use inappropriate tone”. It would seem Christians can mock the Bible, hang Pride flags on pulpits, and host drag queen shows in church sanctuaries, but heaven help you if you talk about any of these things using strong words.

What do we actually mean when we say “inappropriate”? The word is often brandished like a judge’s hammer, crashing down instantaneously upon the words or actions of any poor soul who happens to fall foul of the latest ever-changeable socio-political conventions for speech. Synonyms for “inappropriate” could be: unfitting, unhelpful, unwise, crass. No doubt there are a great many things Christians say which should be said differently, or not said at all. But Christians who are awake to what is going on in our time need to think about shifting the invisible boundaries of what constitutes appropriate or inappropriate speech. This is because we take our orders from the Bible, not from evangelical platform specialists.

The Sin of Strong Tone

Here was one such offering in response to my tweet, from a fairly prominent evangelical leader in the UK. Notice in particular the “tone” at play: “This tweet was not the one, fella. If I was you I would apologise for the heavy-handed phrasing and graciously withdraw it.”

It seems my greatest transgression was a failure to repent of the sin of heavy-handed phrasing. I can’t remember precisely where that came up in the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount but I’m sure it must be in there somewhere. Notice also the implied assumptions:

1. Backing down from your conviction is the “gracious” thing to do;

2. Apologising and withdrawing is the Christian thing to do.

This is now the common convention on mainstream Christian Twitter. If the mob come after you, the honourable thing to do is shrink back, grovel for mercy, and – if possible – self-flagellate. If you don’t, you are automatically deemed to lack humility, grace, Christlikeness, etc.

In later tweets the same author continued to accuse me of the even greater Twitter sin of “doubling down”. This is another one of those phrases you might be forgiven for thinking must be in the Bible somewhere, given how frequently and sternly it is wielded by one’s opponents. Essentially, if anyone is foolish enough to defend their convictions in public today, one is “doubling down”. And if you refuse to stop doubling down – by continuing to defend your convictions when challenged by other convictions – how does our friendly fella respond? Well, he doubles down on telling you to stop doubling down, of course. The trick is to make comprehensive domination sound like a friendly arm around the shoulder. What they mean to say is: “Just shut up and agree with me!” But naturally, progressives and fauxvangelicals would never dare to speak with such inappropriately toned directness. They have other ways of getting their way.

How to Speak to an Invasion

The most apparently “harmful” aspect of my tweet seems to have been the word “invading”. How else would they like it said? Infiltrating? Creeping in? Assailing? Bombadeering? Or do we not really believe it’s a problem? Should we welcome the arrival of the sin of homosexuality within the Church? Is it something we should celebrate? Are we supposed to put on a great feast as the secular Pride band marches its way into the city of Zion and brazenly sets up shop? If we are not willing to celebrate it openly with the liberals, what should we call this sudden arrival? What are the appropriate words Christians should use for when the aggressive influence of the world has been allowed to take root among God’s people?

Sometimes, we must be frank. When there is a severe situation, severe words should be used. As my pastor helpfully preached about at our church on the Sunday after my tweet, if there’s a fire, those in the building need to be made sufficiently aware of it. What they need is an alarm - preferably, a loud and clear one. It is not a time to chastise the people who sound the alarm on the grounds that it is too loud for the delicate ears of some. It is a time to prepare people for action. “And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?” (1Cor. 14:8).

So, when rainbow flags parade up to the altar of your church, and someone makes a noise about why no one is doing anything about it, the one making the noise ought to be the one you listen to. The cry of “alarmist” is often used (rather loudly, as it happens) to raise the alarm against alarm-raisers. This has protected the compromisers for far too long. Our churches have become replete with passive enablers who quietly declare “‘peace, peace!’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). In reality, it is those who raise the alarm when they ought to who truly seek peace. That is precisely why they must call out sinful toleration among the people of God. As Jesus says elsewhere, equally inappropriately: “But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality...” (Rev. 2:20).

Jeremiah does not hold much back when he speaks boldly and clearly against the religious elites who know their lines: “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’” (Jer. 7:4). Speaking holy-sounding things does not make those things holy. Those who seek to undermine the reality of the truth of God’s Word will usually do so under the guise of a friendly and diplomatically “appropriate” demeanour. But it’s false. It’s telling people things are fine when they are not. If you don’t believe that homosexuality has a place in the Church, then what we are seeing is an invasion of the Church. We must speak what we believe, for the good of the Church, for the good of the truth, and for the good of those on all sides who have been deceived.

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Too many Christians have a problem with offensive-sounding militaristic language. They have been taught to be inherently suspicious of it. They assume that using such language can only ever be thoughtless, callous, and loveless. The problem is, there’s an awful lot of militaristic language and narrative in the Bible. An awful lot. The Old Testament alone ought to bring God into disrepute with many professing Christian institutions today. Perhaps they might have hoped that the New Testament could have gone to the trouble of undoing the damage done to God’s brand. But arguably, the New Testament – though generally rejecting physical violence – makes the militaristic connotations “worse” by ramping them up even within the scope of the New Covenant. And let’s not forget the way Jesus returns at the end, on a big white horse and with a very sharp sword (Rev. 19:11-16). It’s highly inappropriate stuff.

Twitter-Mobbing the Apostles

I do often wonder how not only the Prophets but also the Apostles - and even the Saviour himself - would have fared on Twitter today. I expect they would have found it difficult to avoid castigation by the religious authorities, not least for their tone. Jesus told false teachers who cause little ones to stumble to essentially commit suicide by tying a millstone around their neck and jumping into the sea (Matt. 16:8). Paul refers to the teaching of Hymenaeus and Philetus as “gangrene” and tells Christians to avoid them (2Tim. 2:17). Is this not “heavy-handed” phrasing? Is this not disreputable? Does this not sound “ungracious” by contemporary standards? Indeed, when Paul challenged Peter’s hypocrisy “to his face” in Galatia (Gal. 2:11), should Peter have told Paul to stop doubling down and be “gracious”? Being gracious does not mean backing down and shutting up when something needs to be said.

At the very least, you’d think God might have considered it wise to have taken down many of the verses in the canon which might cause offence to the delicate ears of future generations? God, it seems, doubles down when he means what he says. We should not be afraid to stand by our convictions when we are convinced they are in line with His convictions. And yes, this even means standing by our “inappropriate tone” if we believe it’s the right thing to say, the right time to say it, and the right way to say it.

The Bible chastens our aggression as well as our cowardice. We are called to be gentle and gracious as well as bold and clear. The problem is when one way always seems to win out and the other emphases are quietly airbrushed out of the Bible. Quite simply, many of the “laws” enforced by the Christian tone police today are just made-up. Some of them could even be seen as akin to the “human traditions” of the Pharisees which Jesus challenged so strongly (Mark 7:8). Again, we must ask: why didn’t Jesus give them the benefit of the doubt? Why did he have to seem so rude?

Who told you that you’re never allowed to talk the way the Bible writers talk? Who told you that particular words are never “appropriate” to speak of sin forcing its way into acceptance within the body of Christ? Where did we get the idea that cautionary niceness was the exclusive way to talk Christian? For too long our ears have been attuned to the expectations of this world and not nearly attentive enough to what the Word of God actually says and how it says it.

Inappropriate Responses?

It’s worth noting, by the way, that I have also had people contact me about the language of my tweet (and my defence of it), saying they have now decided to return to God because it woke them up to their own lack of conviction. Others have even said they will now try going to church for the first time in their lives. Perhaps I ought to tell them how inappropriate it was of them to have been convicted by such “inappropriate” language.

In the first part of this double article, I critiqued Peter Ould’s piece in Premier Christianity which criticised those (like me) who spoke out in the wake of evangelical same-sex-attraction advocate, Sam Allberry’s recent removal from the pastorate for having been in “an inappropriate relationship with another man.” I also spoke about how so much of modern evangelicalism is geared to bring judgement upon those who seek to expose the soft-pedalled approach to homosexuality in the modern evangelical Church, while giving a free pass to those who deliberately or inadvertently promote the normalisation of homosexuality by refusing to speak strongly against it.

The charge that Allberry’s SSA theology was misunderstood, is an indication of the misunderstanding of the depth of the issue itself. Ould’s article notably cited an example of Allberry’s teaching on the topic of sexuality, in which Allberry says:

“Sex matters to all of us. I’m writing this as someone who is single and expects to remain so for the future. As a Christian that means I am committed to being celibate—to not having sex unless it is with someone I’m married to. This issue matters to me, just as it does to us all. God cares who we sleep with because he cares deeply about the people who are doing the sleeping.”

Notice the problem here, is not that Allberry commends celibacy. This is good, and far better than those who try to argue for gay marriage. But the “line” he draws is simply at sex. There is no clear and obvious sense that homosexual desire itself is destructive and is indicative of the undermining of so many moral foundations in our time. While Allberry doesn’t go as far as others in embracing Pride or “the LGBT+ community” as such, the fact is, he simply isn’t strong enough in speaking against it.

Indeed, by continuing to “profile” his ongoing homosexual desires, he has helped to cultivate and normalise them, rather than rejecting them the way any Christian should wish to outright reject other obviously sinful desires (such as rape or incest or paedophilia). The fact is that many evangelicals see homosexual desire as “better” in God’s eyes than those other desires. This is why condemning such desires is unlikely to bring the same evangelical condemnation in reply, as for same-sex attraction. You would never hear a castigation of people deemed too judgemental toward a “rape-attracted Christian”, for example. It would be absurd.

Even making the comparison will incite the evangelical Pharisee chorus: “Are you comparing gay people to rapists now?!” No, but both groups are examples of obviously sinful desires which we know to be immoral in the eyes of God. The difference is that we have been sold a narrative that homosexual desires are not really “bad” at all, that people cannot help how they feel, and that to deny them the opportunity to express them, or to say they shouldn’t have them, is simply “cruel”. If these achingly empathetic evangelicals were being consistent, however, they ought to produce the same kind of judgement upon those who judge those other sinful desires too. The fact they don’t do that, and reserve a special place in their heart for same-sex attraction, evidences the success of the cultural homosexual propaganda infiltrating the Church in recent decades.

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Nowhere is the evangelical attraction to same-sex attraction more prominent than with Living Out, the organisation Allberry co-founded in 2013, offering resources for “same-sex attracted Christians”. It has been the darling of evangelical leaders in recent years who sought to offer “a more pastorally sensitive” approach to the issue. Behind this approach was the mirage that the greatest sin of evangelical churches has been its apparently froth-mouthed judgemental homophobia, brutally castigating these innocent victims of same-sex attraction and forcing them into a life of secrecy, repression, or self-loathing. In mainstream evangelicalism, I simply don’t believe such approaches were ever the norm, especially not within the last three decades, when the cultural push for Pride has been at its most ardent.

Either way, what happened with reverse approaches like those of Living Out is that, in seeking to gather SSA Christians into a kind of community, even if they may avoid the language of “my sexuality is my identity”, they make it difficult for any such Christians to stop identifying as gay, as if their homosexual desires were not themselves a “problem” at all, as if they may even have been a fundamental part of their personality.

The rhetoric within such ministries was never clear enough to be indicting because the focus was always “Gospel-centred” and evangelical, rooted in the greater desire to be obedient to Christ. But in seeking to build that ongoing bridge to SSA, it became clear that it served to “sanctify” aspects of gay culture and identity too, as if—as with Allberry’s focus on who you sleep with—God apparently has no opinion on homosexuality as long as you avoid sodomy.

I remember someone sending me one of Living Out’s blog articles a couple of years ago, which shocked me. It was called “What Can We Learn from the UK’s First Gay Male Dating Show?” (No, I’m not joking!)

Well, first of all, the very concept of the article is a problem. Is a TV show called I Kissed a Boy really something you should be watching and promoting to evangelical Christians struggling with SSA? But aside from the concept, the content of the article itself was even worse. The aesthetic of lip-sticked lips in the background and the playful tone with which the article introduces the show—“ten men coupled up and looking for love”—is inappropriate enough. Can you imagine trying to explain that to any conservative Christian from a hundred years ago? They would think we’d gone mad. And we have!

As you read on beyond the introduction, the article tips over almost into what can only be described as a positive promotion of gay culture itself:

“There are plenty of touching moments along the way. There’s nervous Josh who grew up in a Mormon family, believing homosexuality was a sin, and who has no previous experience of dating other men. There’s Gareth’s tears as he recalls growing up in church in Northern Ireland, turning to girlfriends in the hope of ‘fixing’ his sexuality. There’s Matty getting emotional as he expresses how he’s still not fully happy with himself and his sexuality. And there’s an interesting discussion about marriage as either just an excuse for a big party or an outdated thing of the past for straight people. The show succeeds in eliciting a lot of love and empathy for these men. They all seem to have a genuine desire for a long-term partner. They support each other through all the ups and downs of the series and in the different stages they’re at in coming out and navigating life as gay men. It also looks like a lot of fun, with plenty of partying, edgy fashion, and banter.”

Notice how he refuses to speak against the homosexual lifestyle per se, majoring on affirming and identifying with the “winsome” aspects of it, which apparently even celibate SSA Christians can appreciate, as long as they’re not having sex. But the writer goes even further:

“In some ways, watching the series proved a painful reminder of the sort of life I’m missing out on. In other ways, it provided a beautiful reminder that nothing compares to life with Jesus. As I watched the show, part of me saw the genuine love between these men and wondered, ‘How could that be wrong?’. We all need love and intimacy, and there’s beauty in seeing people enjoy that. There was a lot about them and their lives that I understood and wanted to be a part of.”

Is this really the kind of approach that is going to best help people who struggle with this sin, at just the time when liberal denominations elsewhere are “sanctifying” that sin by pushing through gay marriage or same-sex blessings, offering such Christians further confusing temptations? “Perhaps that kind of life I saw on the TV s possible for a Christian like me…?” Living Out would not condone that, of course; but they certainly don’t close it off with much intent. The writer emphasised that “the way to be my truest and most authentic self is not to build my life around my sexuality, but to build it on following Jesus.”

But is this abstract Sunday School default answer really compelling when the writer has first waxed lyrical about how compelling gay culture is, without exposing how that very lifestyle angers God as an abominable affront to Him? He goes into great detail about the fun and frivolity he’s “missing out on”, the way he empathises with the love they have for one another as “genuine love” and even a thing of “beauty,” but then has nothing concrete or detailed to say in reply, other than, “Jesus is enough”. Of course Jesus is enough, but He is enough for married heterosexual people too, isn’t he?

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This is what I meant in part 1, when I critiqued Allberry over what I saw as his “gnostic denigration of marriage,” devaluing the significance of marriage in order to make the broader point. The writer here makes a similar point regarding the couples he seemed to pine to be a part of on I Kissed a Boy: “These [gay] relationships might provide some temporary satisfaction, but Jesus really is ‘the way and the truth and the life’ (John 14:6).” By putting it like this, he’s inadvertently placing Christian marriage on the same “level” as gay relationships, because Biblical marriage too could be seen as a mere “temporary satisfaction” compared with Jesus.

This general framing is summed up in the final words of the article, where he concludes:

“It won’t necessarily be helpful viewing for everyone, but if nothing else I Kissed A Boy is a window into gay life and culture, and could well increase your empathy and understanding for LGBT people who are so dearly loved by God. It’s a reminder of the things we all long for – love, security, authenticity – and how these desires are only truly met in Jesus.”

There’s that “empathy” word again! That desire to build bridges in order to reach people immersed in gay culture ends up inadvertently glorifying such lifestyles at just the time they should be strongly opposed, for the damage it does to so many individuals, families, and western society in general. True, they keep mentioning Jesus, but in a vague and mantra-like way that doesn’t really seem to put “flesh and bones” on a full-orbed Christian account of sexuality, inclusive of His judgement upon sexual immorality, as well as his love and forgiveness for those who turn away from it in faithfulness.

This is why the problem of talking about “same-sex attraction” is subtler than it seems. Some of these evangelical “SSA” ministries don’t necessarily arrive at heretical conclusions; it’s how they arrive at those conclusions, how they articulate them, and what they don’t say along the way, that so often gives them away.

As the secular media drama encircling the term “Christian Nationalism” and ever-anxious evangelical “concern” pieces continue unabated, I descended upon London recently to chair another meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Nationalists in Britain. Our chief task was to discuss the varying definitions of this ever-controversial term, including the varying definitions among ourselves! While we did not solve every riddle, much was debated that needed debating, and much good fellowship was had along the way, which I pray bears good fruit in the future.

Later that evening, some of us were involved in a panel discussion at St. Peter’s church in Vauxhall, to talk about the Church’s role in the debate over British identity today, in light of the launch of Dominic Muir’s new book, Battle for Britain: Enthroning Christ as King.

As ever, Bob and I had a few friendly but spirited disagreements over one or two details, but the whole evening seemed to go very well. In my talk I emphasised the inheritance we have been given as Christians in Britain today, and the responsibility that comes with that inheritance, to ensure we steward it well and improve upon it for the good of future generations.

In doing so, I referred back to many of the Christian giants of this land upon whose shoulders we stand, from the Victorian era, the Great Awakening, the Puritans, and of course, the man who was surely Great Britain’s Christian Nationalist par excellence, King Alfred. I emphasised not only Alfred’s courageous and victorious stand against the Vikings—no mean feat—but even more significantly, his conscious effort to build an explicitly Christian culture, and to ensure that the identity and laws of the nation were built upon the Word of God.

Later, we went to a Christian-run theatre tea house around the corner, which was a great venue for ongoing conversations, of which there were many! I was amazed how far some of the people had travelled to come to the event. It showed again how important these issues are, and how little encouragement such Christians are getting from mainstream platforms and leaders. I regularly hear from people who follow me that they thought they were the only one who saw the same issues. That’s why I think it’s so important for us to gather some momentum in this fight by working together where we can, to join forces in proclaiming the forgotten Gospel of the kingdom where many corners of the Church seem to have forgotten it.

Hovering in the background to all these events, of course, was the forthcoming Unite the Kingdom rally in London the following day, led by Tommy Robinson. Some members of the fellowship were backstage at the rally, including Bishop Ceirion Dewar, who emerged with a typically thunderous clarion call to the gathered thousands to remind the nation and its politicians that the people will not be silent, and will not surrender to tyranny. I marched alongside Dom Muir, who shared the Gospel at the UTK carol service last year, and who had a mic on him for impromptu preaching moments to the crowds who lined the pavements as we walked through from Kingsway to Parliament Square.

Surprised by Christianity

As for the rally itself, I had to pinch myself at just how much overt Christian sentiment was on display from the stage. We have almost become used to this at Robinson’s rallies now, but we should not take it for granted. This is not “normal” for socio-political events in Britain not run by the Church. I remember seeing Bob on the stage at one of these rallies just a couple of years ago, and being amazed he had the crowd chanting “Christ is king!” in unison, with Tommy’s blessing. Then in the next rally, Tommy invited Bishop Dewar up to the stage, having been stirred by the overt blaspheming of Christ at the Paris Olympics the night before, wanting to give a bolder form of Christianity a voice to the nation.

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Since then, the influence of Christianity seems to have grown exponentially in the messaging for such events, with Tommy himself even having made a profession of faith, despite many Christian pharisees continuing to see him as the kind of sinner with whom Jesus would apparently be too embarrassed to associate. This year, I would say at least 50% of the speeches were either by Christian leaders or involved some overt mention of the importance of Christianity. Even Laurence Fox took up a good chunk of his three minutes to quote Ephesians 6 about the power of Christ over the demonic powers and principalities. There were numerous crosses and flags saying “JESUS IS KING”. Most speeches were also punctuated by the band leading Christian worship songs in between. We’re just not used to this in “secular” Britain. New Labour’s “we don’t do God” has been drummed into us for so long, this feels like a whole new world.

Salty Speech

There is another side to this, of course. With such overt displays of Christianity, comes the expectation that it really is Christianity, and not a convenient counterfeit. As I argued recently in my article, Christian Values and Christian Faith, we cannot assume that a return to conservative values alone with a lacquering of Christian sentiment is sufficient to rebuild the eroded Christian foundations of the nation. While it’s great to see overt proclamations about Christ, there should also be genuine caution over the way this might be abused by some who seek to infiltrate this patriotic movement and utilise Christ for their own purposes.

This, of course, is what all the evangelical naysayers say all the time as an excuse for continuing to castigate the patriot movement (or anything remotely Right Wing) from afar rather than getting involved as salt and light in its midst. But the more this explicitly Christian rhetoric increases, it’s fair to say there will be more responsibility on Christians to ensure Christ’s name is not maligned. There was one sign I saw, for example, that said, “F*** Islam, Christ is King!” We can have grace for such people in their speech, because the point being made about the need to strongly oppose Islam is actually true, and should be shared by Christians; but such people still need to be discipled in how they express it. It is Christ who is king, after all, not Odin! There were also many choruses—sung notably more heartily than any of the worship songs—of “Keir Starmer is a w******!!” That may well be true too (!) but it still isn’t the way to obey basic New Testament teaching: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths” (Eph. 4:29).

This remains true even when the aforementioned pharisaic Christian leaders are often caught missing the wood for the trees by over-focussing on rude words while ignoring far ruder deeds by those who better know how to hold their tongue. We also need grace for these salty-mouthed would-be disciples who don’t yet know all the “rules”. But if they are to be serious about submitting to Christ, rather than simply shouting his name, then their tongues must also be tamed and their mouths washed, for as Jesus said: “out of the mouth, the heart speaks” (Matt. 12:34). I can’t help but notice the irony, however, that Jesus said those words not to the salty-mouthed fishermen struggling to follow him, but to the proud religious leaders seeking to trip him and his disciples up. It is as much about what you choose to say or not say than how it is said. This is the lesson the evangelical pharisees most need to learn as they tut at this rabble from afar.

Missional Moments

In between rally segments there were various evangelistic moments with people nearby. I met my brother, Mark, in the crowd, who ended up praying with three people to give their lives to Christ.

I got into one or two conversations with people in the crowd too. There was a younger group of guys, each perhaps around 16 or 17 years old. They were antagonistic—total unbelievers—and kept asking for evidence of a God, saying it was “all a load of bullsh**”. I picked up some grass and asked him to hold out his hand, dropped the grass on his palm, and asked him to tell me where physicality itself came from, and whether he has evidence or not for it, and whether it is really so crazy to believe that natural material could not arise from other natural material, but rather that a supernatural being might well be necessary for the existence of a single blade of grass, let alone a human being. They just scoffed and said “that’s not evidence”, and retorted to the usual “but who created God?” before resorting to general insults. They were totally unaware of the extent they have been hoodwinked by Enlightenment ideology, totally confident that what they expect from a conversation about absolute truth is already wrong-headed and the product of their brainwashed education, the very product of the policies of men like the secularist Keir Starmer, whom they happily join the chorus of chants to call him a “w*****” while continuing to espouse the very secular views about reality which Starmer & co propagate.

So, there is a reality that, for all the “Christ” rhetoric, there were still many in the crowd with absolutely no sense of who Christ is, who don’t even believe in God. But why should we be surprised at this? It’s an evangelistic mission field, after all! “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom. 10:14). These people need to hear the truth, and ironically, they’ll have a better chance hearing it here—among salty-mouthed patriots unafraid to speak the unvarnished truth—than at the average liberal Anglican church on a Sunday morning from “properly ordained” cowards and vipers.

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For all the underwhelming elements of the earlier conversation, I was more encouraged by the responses of another group of lads, probably ten years older, who were far more receptive, and openly saying they need Christ in their life, with a willingness to come to church. The question was: “where do I send them?” What churches would welcome them? Many churches may be better than others at holding the line on basic Biblical truths, but how many of them have been captured by subtler forms of liberal secular ideology making them predisposed to look down upon patriots like this once they come through the door?

After the rally began to disperse, I hung around Parliament Square for a while getting into more conversations about Christ, often ending up praying with people. I met some who had only recently started going to church, and had no clue what a good or a bad church was. I kept thinking how stupid so many evangelical churches are for not being here, offering Gospel clarity and direction from a place of solidarity with what these people are looking for, what’s gone wrong with their nation, what they seek to reclaim. Because such churches have been more concerned for their reputations than the mission field, they have lost the opportunity to bring much-needed shepherding to these souls, and in time will have missed out on a great harvest which could utterly transform the future shape of the front-line Church.

Taking Up Our Cross

At some point during the rally I picked up a cross, temporarily vacated by Dom Muir while he was being interviewed by someone. At the end, not knowing where one is meant to leave a cross at a dispersed rally, I decided to keep hold of it for the journey back. It should not be all that surprising that this cross ending up causing me a good deal of trouble, both good and bad.

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“Oh no, I’m not one of those judgemental type of Christians!” I wonder how many times a winsome evangelical has said that in reply to a hostile question about their stance against homosexuality or gay marriage?

For years, evangelicals have laboured under the false accusation that when it comes to the issue of homosexuality, their greatest sin has not been man-fearing cowardice, but man-hating homophobia. Even among evangelicals who have barely preached against homosexuality for well over a decade, they still seem at pains to point out that the worst thing a Christian preacher can do, is to speak too strongly against it, lest they cause personal offence. They have been trained to fear the wrath of the world more than the wrath of God.

I have, of course, written a fair amount about this issue in the past, including the way some professing evangelicals abuse the concept of “grace” in order to promote LGB lifestyles, the way the Pride movement directly subverts Christian morality, the way evangelical leaders refuse to denounce homosexuality anywhere near as aggressively as they denounce the supposed “inappropriate tone” of others who do, and the way some pretend it can be possible to hold to a conservative view of Biblical authority while supporting gay marriage.

There are, of course, a spectrum of approaches to these issues within evangelicalism, and that’s part of the problem, especially among those who might agree with me on most particulars, yet believe themselves to have carved out a more “nuanced” space where they simply refuse to emphasise the severity of the modern problem of normalising or defending homosexuality within the Church.

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It was a shock to some within the evangelical world last week to hear the news about Sam Alberry, the author of Is God Anti-Gay?, and who for the last decade or so has been the conservative evangelical poster-boy for the normalisation of “same-sex attraction” among Christians. Last week Alberry was removed from pastoral ministry after it came to light that he had had “an inappropriate relationship” with another man, having not previously disclosed the full details when taking up his post. It is a sad thing when things like this happen, and of course such falls happen right across the board, irrespective of one’s sexuality.

Yet sometimes the fall very much correlates with what was already wrong about the particular emphases of that person. This is why there were many who were not all that shocked by this news, as regrettable as it is, such as those of us who have taken a stronger line and seen the gravitation to Same-Sex Attraction (SSA) language as a subtle Biblical compromise.

As is the way with “winsome” evangelicalism, of course, in the online comments that ensued, the greater evangelical condemnation was reserved not for those who promoted the ideas that led to such a situation, but those who called out the hypocrisy as hypocrisy. For example, Sam Hailes, editor of Premier Christianity magazine, posted this on X:

I had only ever come across Peter Ould earlier that day, when he Quote-tweeted me for apparently “attacking” Sam Alberry in my post about the issue. When pressed by others to clarify, he said my critique was made “in bad faith,” and refused to respond to my substantive replies to him regarding his misunderstanding of what I’d said. I was thus interested to hear what he said in that article for Premier, which Hailes had singled out as such a helpful contribution to the discussion in contrast to other “ridiculous” perspectives (which presumably included my own).

But first, some brief context...

Some time ago, Sam Alberry said in a video interview with fellow evangelical leaders that he wears a wedding ring to show that he is “married to Jesus,” and how it’s actually positive that because he’s a Same-Sex Attracted celibate, he gets to “skip the appetiser” (that is, marriage as an analogy for the Church’s eternal union with Christ) and go straight to the main course: Christ Himself.

This is theologically inappropriate on numerous levels. The idea that the Church is the “bride of Christ” is a corporate metaphor. Regardless of how innocently meant it may have been, it is simply a very weird thing for a single man to go around seeing himself as individually married to Jesus, and even weirder when that person happens to wear “same-sex attracted” as at least an important aspect of who they are even if not a full-blown “identity”. The idea also seems to assume that married people—comprising probably the majority of adult Christians—are merely stuck on the “appetiser”, somehow missing out.

All in all, it just seems like a strained attempt to cope with the challenges of celibacy, and to justify the functional acceptance of same-sex attracted “identity” by continuing to talk about it, and almost trying to make it seem like some kind of “ideal”. So here’s what I said, in response to that video:

Obviously, the point was not really to join the “pile on” upon Alberry. As noted above, I do think his situation is indicative of the problem, as was his hypocrisy. However, the main point was not really about Alberry himself, but the way evangelicals have been cowed into taking a softer stance on the normalisation of homosexuality in the Church, and the subsequent devaluation of marriage.

It would be one thing if those who empathise with individuals who experience such temptations to also strongly oppose homosexuality the way it needs to be opposed when it has been found knocking on the doors of the Church and sneaking in through the windows. But in most cases, while such evangelicals may well “hold the line” by not agreeing with gay marriage (as if that should ever have been the mark of faithfulness!) they are often very slow to oppose it the way the Bible does.

This is where the likes of Ould—like so many British evangelicals today—has misread the lay of the land and misunderstood the crux of the problem. It’s true that Alberry’s position is “nuanced” relative to other advocates of “gay Christianity”. Ok, yes. But were his emphases sufficient to stop the softening on this issue within the Church during the relentless LGBT+ assaults upon Christian sexuality over the last decade? Or were they more likely an indirect handmaiden to those assaults?

There seems to be a significant misunderstanding in evangelicalism today about the relationship between sin, judgement, and grace. Ould is concerned that the default of people like me seems to be a mass judgemental pile-on purely to gratify our pharisaic delight in the fall of someone with whom we disagree. The assumption is that we are unkind or moronic or “in bad faith”. There is no other explanation. It couldn’t possibly be that we happen to see this particular issue as especially loadbearing within the Church and culture at large or anything? It couldn’t be that homosexuality is invading the Church, could it? It couldn’t be that “nuanced” positions like Alberry’s contribute to the normalisation of Christian homosexuality as not-really-so-bad as long as you don’t “do anything” about it?

So, to my critique of Ould’s article…

Well, firstly, he seems to make the mistake that those who critiqued Alberry are themselves guiltier because they appear “judgemental”. Certainly, this is something Jesus warned against, often vociferously (e.g. Matt. 7:1-3). But there is an irony at play here too in that those most keen to condemn those who appear to have condemned Alberry are themselves acting more like Pharisees:

“Some have even taken the opportunity to engage in “I told you so” attacks on Sam personally. Typically, these have come from those who vehemently disagree that it’s OK for a Christian to be same-sex attracted or gay while also being very clear on biblical sexual and relationship boundaries (often known as Side B theology). In some senses, that’s a debate for another time, but the idea that Sam’s position or sexuality has led to his ‘fall’ is a nonsense.”

Ould fails to mention the reverse “pile-on” against people like me, where the ever-so-more-compassionate-than-thou folk of Nicevangelicalism™ are quick to condemn those they see as having been too quick to condemn. And no, the substantive issue over SSA language/identity among Christians is not “a debate for another time”, actually; it’s precisely a debate for this very time. To separate it as not immediately relevant is to misunderstand why people decided to speak out about it. This lack of understanding was evident when he discussed particular examples of people’s reactions (including my own):

“It’s simply incorrect to say that Sam’s position on singleness was a ‘gnostic denigration of marriage’ as Aaron Edwards recently claimed on X. Dr Michael Clary had to issue an apology for for misrepresenting Sam’s theology, confirming that he ‘does NOT support someone making homosexuality part of their identity’. Rather than rushing to gossip and thus distorting his teaching, it would be easier to actually check what he believed...”

If you read Clary’s article, his update was quite obviously not an “apology” but a clarification. Where Clary had previously thought that Alberry was a full advocate of “side B” (the concept of a “gay Christian” continuing to identify with “the LGBT community,” etc.), Clary still maintained that Alberry’s problem was that he speaks of same-sex attraction as though it was not sinful, which I think is a correct reading of how Alberry consistently communicates on this issue; and that really is a problem.

But as ever, when performative empathy is the order of the day, the substance of that problem is glossed over and our attentions are distracted by the notion that the worse evangelical sin is to “be judgemental”:

“Sam’s failings should prompt us to reflect on our own lives. Are we able to point a finger, when that leaves three pointing back at ourselves? In truth, we are all a complex blend of saint and sinner and we keep secret the things that only we and God know. While pastors are held to a higher standard, both by their churches and God, we are all capable of moral failing. Indeed, we all sin every day; we just choose to ignore many of the faults in our own lives while being very aware of others’ failures…Are we willing to love, not ostracise, those in our church who are real about their darkest parts? When Christian leaders fall, we need to remember that Jesus died for all sinners, not just the ones who manage to keep a clean sheet.”

Such sentiments see every moment of doctrinal or moral compromise as a re-run of the disputed scene of the woman caught in adultery (cf. John 8:1-11), where Jesus chastises the Pharisees who were instrumentalising the drama of her exposed sin in order to trap Jesus, who then turns it back on them to reflect upon their own sin. That scene utterly dominates the evangelical imagination today, almost as though Jesus or the apostles needn’t have said anything else on sin and judgement in the rest of the New Testament.

Exclusively focussing on what Jesus said/did there also creates the perfect conditions for cowardice in our time, where many Christians are led to feel that, because they too are sinners, they never have the “right” to call out sin, however brazen, however subtle. No one actually lives like that, of course. They are more than happy to call out the less “fashionable” sins like misogyny, abuse, or racial hatred, and nobody turns around to them and wags a finger saying, “Ah, but are you not also a sinner…?”

This is how you know you’re being played, just as the Pharisees tried to play Jesus. But they lost that game, and we should not allow their modern equivalents to keep playing it without putting up a good fight.

Last week I was in Birmingham to speak at what I’m told was the first ever men’s pro-life conference in the UK. It was called “Commissioned” (run by March For Life UK). It was great to meet various Christians of bold conviction from across the breadth of the Church. There was a good spirit of camaraderie among the men who gathered to encourage and spur one another on to wage war on what I believe is the greatest evil of our age.

I was leading one of the workshops on the topic of “Men Inspiring Men”. It was a fairly small room, but I was encouraged to see they had to bring extra chairs in to accommodate all those who turned up, with some needing to be turned away.

I spoke about David and his mighty men (based on a book I’ve been working on), looking to them as examples of Biblical courage for the fight against abortion. I also spoke about William Carey in India, of whom I’ve written before regarding his willingness to confront socio-political immorality despite multiple bouts of intense opposition.

The response to my talk was very encouraging, with several people coming up throughout the day to say how much they appreciated it. The other sessions I observed were very helpful too, especially the keynote speech at the end of the day by the Dominican priest, Toby Lees, who spoke on the impact of the manosphere and what it will take for a reformation of men according to Christ rather than the world.

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There was also a panel of men discussing different front-line approaches to abortion at multiple levels, through social action, political engagement, and crisis counselling. All in all, it was wonderful to see an increasing number of good men across the Church no longer willing to stand back and let abortion continue to ravage our society.

It was amusing, as ever, to be serenaded on the way in to the conference by the portable pro-abortion hecklers, who I recognised from the March For Life in London last year (the masculine haircut of the ring-leading woman was a big giveaway...).

I do wonder what goes through the heads of these people who choose to plan ahead to travel across the country to protest for a “cause” like this. Abortion is already legal, and has now been decriminalised all the way up to birth. What are they trekking across the country to protest? A little less than a hundred men gathering to talk about it? Perhaps we should be flattered. Or perhaps deep down they know how insecure their moral ground really is that they cannot even allow people to contemplate an alternative situation. There was particular venom in the guttural chant of the ringleader: “Keep your hands off our ovaries!!!” What a way to frame people who oppose the killing of innocent unborn children. Suddenly, we are the immoral, barbaric ones, not those who promote abortion.

I prayed for them, and I wonder if, in God’s outlandish providence, we may one day hear from some of these people on the other side of this moral divide, speaking of how they can barely believe that they once used to hold up signs which described abortion as “healthcare”. Given that most of them remain so ideologically brainwashed and impregnable to reasonable persuasion that they actually seem to “love” abortion, prayer may be our only hope for them. In the meantime, however, they must also be opposed because right now, they are not only publicly promoting evil but actively hindering those who seek to oppose it.

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Another point to note is that these protestors had come onto the university grounds, which is private property, of course (though, given they’re probably Marxists, I suspect the concept of private property did not especially register with them!). It was interesting, however, that despite the police turning up, they decided not to remove the trespassing protestors and just drove off instead, saying they couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) do anything to stop them. This, despite the fact that on many other occasions they have been more than happy to arrest Christians for praying too close to an abortion clinic or gently giving out pro-life information in public areas.

I am no longer surprised by such hypocrisy within this morally broken society. But it does make us all the more determined to stand against it. This was, after all, the same West Midlands Police who literally arrested the event organiser, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce for the second time last year, simply for standing too close to a clinic, without saying a word.

It seems that if you challenge abortion with any kind of meaningful purpose, the abortion industry will see to it that you cease to be treated as a valid human being in public, someone whose mere silent existence in a particular place is deemed “problematic”.

This is highly appropriate, of course, because it directly reflects the ultimate devaluing of human beings deprived of life within those dark satanic mills we call “clinics”. The silent existence of those little humans in the particular place of the unwelcome womb is also deemed “problematic”, a harassment to their “host”. Only, in their case, they do not merely get “moved on” by a police officer; they get erased from existence. Nobody can hear them cry or protest. Their extermination was as silent as their life.

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I’m grateful for the many churches and pro-life groups—including March For Life, the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, and Society for the Protection of Unborn Children—uniting to speak truth into the lies that keep these silent deaths an everyday reality. We truly have become a society for the protection of the killing of unborn children, and need all hands on deck to transform it.

Whoever protests us, we will—and must—continue to raise our voices for those many little voiceless ones. May God bring them to justice, where our own systems of justice fail: “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” (Romans 12:19). And He will. But although he calls us not to seek personal vengeance against our perpetrators, those who fear Him are called to seek His heart for justice in the world through our social, political, and legal systems, wherever possible. That’s why we must continue to lay our own personal and political reputations aside in order stand up against the moral and legal evil which leads so many babies out to be slaughtered year upon year under our very noses.

Three years ago I attended the National Conservatism conference at the impressive Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, London. Although it was originally built in the 1920s for the dubious heretical sect known as “the Christian scientists”, three decades ago it was bought by a faithful evangelical church, who often hire out the building for various Christian and/or aligned socio-political events. I was there again last year when they hosted the March for Life speeches, where beforehand I led a sparsely (but wholeheartedly) attended prayer meeting in the corner of the pews.

There was something I couldn’t get out of my head when I was first there three years ago, which I’ll come to in a moment. First, a bit of background. The National Conservatism conference has been a huge influence on the Centre-Right over the last half-decade especially, drawing together most of the key influential voices among the politicians, writers, journalists, historians, scientists, and podcasters who would class themselves as “on the Right” (but “not too far”…). The conference I attended was no exception to this, and included various MPs and notable public intellectuals among the speakers.

Strangely enough (or perhaps not so strangely), it was not so much the speeches or even the people themselves that stood out to me; it was what literally stood above, behind, and around those people as they were giving or hearing those speeches. Seemingly endless panels and keynotes poured forth from the stage about the evils of liberalism, the need to recover national identity and sovereignty, the need to reverse economic decline, the need to recover conservative principles, and above all, the need to recover the lost moral values which once gave the nation its identity. Much of this was all well and good, of course. But I sensed there was also something ever so slightly pantomimic about the whole enterprise.

Some of this was due to the fact that there were several trojan hecklers who stood up to loudly interrupt speeches at various points to the backdrop of various groans from the crowd, before bring forcibly removed by the efficient security team. There were also various liberals standing outside the building at any given time, with placards calling all the conference attendees fascists, with various forgettable chants to that end. Add that to the running line on social media throughout the three days from leftist journalists who began referring to the event as the “NatC” conference. (You have to give it to them, that was quite funny, even if it only works with a northern English or American accent).

But even the liberals jumping up and down about the conference—try as they might!—was not the thing that really made the impression on me. It was, quite literally, the writing on the wall. There was a visible contrast between the words being spoken from the stage and the words lining the interior of the building at various points. It was very evident, after all, that relatively few of these prestigious speakers had first-hand experience of the Christianity of which they spoke so freely and confidently as the thing that Britain somehow needed to return to.

The writings I am referring to, of course, were from the Bible. One particular verse stood out among the rest, prominently flanking the speakers on the stage:

The capital letters seemed to add to the effect of those words: “I AM COME THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE LIFE AND THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE IT MORE ABUNDANTLY” (John 10:10). Those words hung above the stage like some divine placard—or perhaps, a divine heckle—reminding all with eyes to see, that any effort to regain the values we call “Christian”—even if it may be far better than liberal values—is powerless to produce the abundant life the speakers were promising us from that stage, if those extolling those values fail to take seriously the only One with the power to impart abundant life.

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The point is not that cultural Christianity is bad. Our latest podcast, in fact, was on the inherently conservative nature of Christianity, and the need for conservatives to retake the progressively infiltrated institutions. Indeed, many Christian voices in the UK have been emerging of late to speak more directly into this reawakening among many non-Christian British people about the need to conserve the Christian foundations of the nation.

As Bishop Ceirion Dewar recently said in a speech addressed to the British people:

“A nation does not become stronger by forgetting what made it strong. A civilisation does not advance by severing itself from the truths that formed it. A people do not become freer by abandoning the moral vision that gave their freedom meaning.”

The average centre-Right-but-not-necessarily-religious types think they see this problem too, but they only see it to a selective extent. The roots of Britain’s problem today goes far deeper than they would be prepared to admit.

Many today think they can just turn the clock back to a time period when Britain was simply “less bad” than it is now. While that would be something, at least, the decline was already in motion even among our more cherished memories of when things seemed better. Things were indeed “better” because we were still living in the good of what came before us, when Christian values in society were not just seen as a quick-fix solution to plaster over the temporary chaos, but had grown as the fruit of Christian faith, outworked throughout British society among the British people at the social, cultural, judicial, and political levels over many generations.

So much good has been eroded. But you can’t reverse the erosion by teleporting back to a time when we were simply in relatively less spiritual and moral decline than we are now. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t push the nation halfway back up the hill down which it was already in freefall, having largely abandoned the faith. I’m glad that many British people today are beginning to understand the true value of Christian values within their nation as they see the ravages of secular liberalism and Islamism advancing further upon them. But those renewed values will not truly be “Christian” if by citing them we merely mean to trick ourselves into feeling like we have regained a sense of national identity alone.

Our national cultural identity already is inherently Christian, whether we like it or not. But most British people today still either do not know what this means or do not want to do anything about it which might demand repentance and faith from them personally. They want the values of the Christ, but not the Christ Himself. They want to welcome him on Palm Sunday but dare not follow him to Calvary five days later, when the buzz has worn off, when it may cost them even to be associated with Him, with all He stands for, and against.

A nation like Britain was not built on a limp middle class faith that could be picked up or put down depending on the political weather. It was built on strong and resilient convictions hard-fought and hard-won throughout generations of faithfulness rooted in Christ. This is not a summons to revert to pietistic inactivity where we wait for everyone to be converted before taking any kind of political action. Political solutions to the nation’s present malaise absolutely are needed, and will make a difference. But if they are not met with meaningful spiritual renewal throughout the Church and throughout the nation then any gains will be undone before they have any opportunity to bear lasting fruit. Britain cannot be rebuilt halfway back up the rock on which she was first forged. She must go all the way back. We must take His Word seriously again, and live in the light of its truth like we really mean it.

It should be a sobering thought to many people that, ultimately, if Britain does not return to Christ, in a generation’s time there may no longer be a Britain. At a political and even an ecclesial level, the nation returning to Christ might seem difficult to imagine. But at root, we should see that it’s not actually complicated. It could be seen as being as simple as that parable which I’ve been especially fond of quoting in recent years, the one which most of our grandparents were still learning in Sunday school:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matt. 7:24-27)

As on the walls of the Emmanuel Centre, the divine placard of Christ’s words may stand for us but also against us, depending on which path we choose. Jesus put it even more clearly in John 15:

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” (John 15:4-6)

Christ will not be duped by fake allegiance. While it’s true that when a people are faithful to Christ within a nation, even non-believers may also benefit from the fruit, they will not bear fruit for him without faith.

May the foundations, values, laws, and faith of the nation be restored to the rock of Christ, that the fruits of Christ would not be selectively cherrypicked but that a great many people would be truly grafted into Christ Himself, that the nation would be rescued from ruin, and Christ exalted in the hearts and minds of the people.

If you’re in the London area on 15th May and you want to see me discussing these themes with other pro-Christian-nation brothers, come along to this event at which I’ll be speaking, called “Is the Church in the Battle for Britain?”

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The day after the Buddhist temples we went to the Ganges river. This is perhaps one of the most famous (and strange) religious sites in the world, where the goddess Ganga is supposed to have descended to earth, sanctifying the waters forever. Some even see the water itself as divine, as the very being of the goddess herself, and a permanent link between heaven and earth. What Mecca is for Muslims, or the Wailing Wall for Jews, the Ganges is for Hindus.

It is here they come for salvation, for heaven on earth. For a place so revered as the most holy place for hundreds of millions of people, I found it especially remarkable that it was so full of litter, grime, and abject poverty. There were boats waiting to take people across the river. Others were bathing in the river nearer by, or receiving special “blessings” from elaborately dressed Hindus in the water.

Many others were desperately trying to sell you trinkets or begging. Some of the surrounding temples cobbled on the slopes of the river could certainly be described as having unique architectural beauty, for sure. However, they were surrounded by so much trash and stench, other broken buildings, and stray dogs on the floor immersed by flies, that any semblance of beauty feels immediately engulfed by the fog of everything else that chokes it away.

The famous burning pyres (Ghats) were particularly haunting to observe. This is one of the most sacred parts of the Ganges “experience”, where Hindu bodies are cremated outdoors and in full public view, with the ashes seen to further purify the divine waters, their remains somehow adding to the “cleansing power” of the river, enabling their souls to attain eternal liberation.

The stench of burning human flesh was quite something to behold. And everywhere surrounded by the marks of yet more litter, cheap commerce, and decay and dilapidation.

So many millions of souls come here believing they can free themselves from the power of sin and eternal death. This false hope of eternal liberation ends up imprisoning its followers in superstitious ritual for their entire life, promising freedom while only delivering more religious bondage. The smoke continues to rise, the bells continue to bang, and the stench of death continues to sting. You could barely imagine a greater evocative contrast with the Christian belief in the Resurrection of Christ.

The Seed of the Indian Church

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What happens when different Christians disagree about what happened at the Cross? Penal substitutionary atonement (often referred to as “PSA”) is the doctrine that Christ died on the Cross in order to pay the debt of our sins, willingly taking upon himself the just wrath of God in our place, on our behalf, for our sin. Vociferous debates about this doctrine last came up about twenty years ago, when liberal post-evangelicals like Steve Chalke in the UK, and the “Emergent Church” brigade in the US, began to undermine it in various ways. They lost.

It’s been relatively “quiet” on the PSA front since then. I have even occasionally made the comment that the controversy-avoidant evangelical leaders who like to stay out of socio-political trouble will often act as if they are perpetually awaiting another challenge about penal substitution, hence why they refuse to come out to fight on the actual front-line issues pertaining to “the culture war” such as feminism, Islam, LGBT+, or multiculturalism.

Penal substitution needed to be defended by evangelicals twenty years ago especially because many of the attacks came from “within” the evangelical camp, even if many of those bringing such attacks would later become effectively apostate anyway (which should give one pause for thought, at the very least). Challenges existed before that time too, of course, from outright liberal theologians, who have never been comfortable with the idea of a wrathful God who punishes His Son, hence why they have often sought to run around the houses several times in the hope of making the doctrine fall down like the walls of Jericho. As it stands, the doctrine still stands tall, as it should.

New Challenges from Old Traditions

However, the challenges today come not from within evangelicalism but from other ecclesial traditions who have never embraced penal substitutionary atonement, and who either don’t see the significance it holds for Protestants or think it’s outright incorrect.

Previously, most normal Christians within such different traditions probably would not even know of each other’s different concerns, or at least would not be confronted with them in day to day life and so could effectively ignore them. Most Christians would be getting on with their own traditions virtually oblivious to the concerns of the others. But for anyone on social media today, the access to (and confrontation by) what were previously exotic or niche views is now instantaneous. The different viewpoints find themselves interacting and clashing with one another far more frequently than they used to.

Some of this is also due to the growing overlap of conservative Christian ecumenical interests across different lines today, especially as we find ourselves joining forces in the culture war with other Christians and seeking to understand their different emphases more clearly than before.

Last year, for example, I recall seeing Rod Dreher (Eastern Orthodox) mildly pushing back against a Protestant pastor who had called penal substitution “the beating heart of the Gospel”. It’s fair enough for an Orthodox person to disagree with this on the surface, because for them, PSA clearly hasn’t been seen as “the beating heart”, so it would seem to suggest that the hundreds of millions of Orthodox Christians over the centuries have not had the heart and soul of Christianity. You can see how this could get tricky.

Having said that, I often wonder, as have others, that at least some of the issue here is that the disagreement is accentuated by semantics and emphases. Sometimes we use different terms to say similar things. That doesn’t explain all the disagreements, by any means, but it is something that should be borne in mind wherever the differences look more chasmic than they might actually be in reality.

For example, if we were to say that unless you articulate the doctrine of penal substitution then you cannot be a Christian, we are automatically saying that all Eastern Orthodox Christians are not, in fact, Christians. Perhaps some Protestants would be willing to say that. But another way of looking at it would be to say that although Eastern Orthodoxy errs in failing to emphasise the centrality of penal substitution, it still sees the Cross as atoning for sin, and Christ taking our place in suffering for sin, alongside numerous other emphases; so there is no obvious reason why its more prevalent alternative emphases on the “meaning” of the Cross cannot be incorporated alongside penal substitutionary atonement.

Hence I replied to Dreher’s point with:

“Why couldn't the Cross signal the triumph over death by death, the way to human healing and divine participation, and the necessary atonement for human sin? "And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world." (1John 2:2)”

An Orthodox commenter replied to my comment by saying:

“That is the Orthodox view. Defeat of Death by death. Your verse isn't PSA.”

I had quoted from the NKJV (the English translation most used by Anglophone Eastern Orthodox Christians). The word “propitiation” is right there in their Bibles, so they have to do something with it. Hence, I replied with the question:

“Against what was Christ a propitiation?”

His reply repeated the earlier point whilst avoiding my actual question:

“Christ’s victory over sin, death, & devil

Restoration of human nature through His Incarnation, death, & Resurrection

Christ is propitiation for the sins of the world in the sense that He overcomes sin’s tyranny, restores communion w/ God, & grants eternal life to those united to Him”

This begged a further question:

“So what do you believe is actually occurring in the act of propitiation?”

After all, if it is merely the idea of “the tyranny of sin” which Christ takes upon Himself in our place, why was it strictly necessary that He shed his blood in order to achieve that? Why would the Bible speak of “propitiation” at all if the tyranny was already defeated by the death of death (death being the “wages” for sin)?

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More importantly, why would Christ's propitiation not mirror the propitiation of the Old Covenant sacrificial system, which was the means of atonement from divine wrath against sin?

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God” (Rom. 3:23-25)

Clearly, Paul is not there talking about the mere “tyranny” of sin (unless the just penalty that stood against us was the “tyranny”). He is talking about the unrighteousness of sin and the need for that unrighteousness to be absolved before God. The propitiation was about “the remission of sins,” not merely the remission of the effects of sin (e.g. its tyranny over us). The sin itself is the problem and it needs to be removed.

Christ's propitiation enables our redemption from the unrighteousness of sin by Christ taking that sin upon himself:

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (2Cor. 5:21).

In light of the sacrificial system, the Bible seems clear that when the sinless Christ “became sin” he was not merely making a virtue-signalling gesture; he was taking on our just penalty for sin, bearing its guilt and shame on our behalf, that we might receive not the righteous wrath which we had earned but the righteousness we had not earned, that was only Christ’s to give.

Most Eastern Orthodox Christians would agree that loose evangelical and/or progressive liberal views which undermine God’s authority as just judge are wrong, yet I believe that their incomplete view of the Cross actually risks putting them in a similar position (functionally speaking) to the liberals who see God as merely “excusing” our sin at the Cross, rather than suffering and dying as the necessary punishment for it, as I argued.

Scripture and Tradition?

I’ve found a few times when engaging with Eastern Orthodox people that when you are trying to convince them of a particular exegetical argument about the plain meaning of a verse of Scripture, they will just pivot to the wider lens of “the Tradition”, saying that it’s not about convincing them about this or that Bible verse anyway because it’s about the grander picture.

This may make the Protestant appear like the foolish nerdy scientist scrambling around with individual Bible verses in a Sunday school class rather than building a glorious cathedral and conducting a grand doctrinal symphony. In reality, even within Eastern Orthodoxy—which does not hold to the doctrine of sola Scriptura (where Scripture is the final authority over the Church)—the concepts of “tradition” and “Scripture” are not meant to be competitive; they are simply meant to form one part of a cohesive whole: Scripture is Tradition, and is not superseded by some later variant of it.

Some Eastern Orthodox people wrongly misrepresent this, almost resembling a Muslim apologist arguing that earlier verses of the Quran which contradict later verses, can be overlooked. So too with the Eastern Orthodox zealot, who tries to insinuate that the Tradition “trumps” whatever verse of Scripture you may be quoting to them. Even according to their own tradition this is wrong, because their tradition is meant to be a faithful interpretation and continuation of Scriptural revelation and authority, not a contradiction of it.

So, even though we Protestants may not value subsequent traditions the same way, this does not make exegetical arguments with Eastern Orthodox people fruitless. Scripture does still hold authority over them, as the very core of their tradition, and it is a greater authority than later tradition because they still receive Scripture as uniquely inspired by God and infallible in a way that differs from later Tradition, which is perpetually correctible. Some Eastern Orthodox people may need reminding of this.

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In relation to penal substitution, the confusion of Eastern Orthodoxy often arises because the Church Fathers (respected to differing extents by all traditions of the Church, including Protestants) emphasised various aspects of the Atonement and did not emphasise penal substitution the same way Protestants do. But this is a far cry from saying they did not emphasise anything like it at all.

I’m not much in the habit of citing Gospel Coalition coalition articles these days (due to the way the phrase “Gospel-Centred” began to be used more dubiously in recent times) but on this topic—perhaps because it’s a battle they knew how to fight—they have always been insightful. One article by Brian Arnold from 2021, highlighted the early Church Fathers (who comprise an important part of “the Tradition”) emphasising penal substitution in different ways. As I argued briefly in my reply to Dreher, Arnold argues not for some slam-dunk domination of penal substitution but more its inevitability alongside other aspects of the Atonement:

“When a single ray of light shines into a prism, it refracts into the colors of the rainbow. No one color is more prominent than the others, but each contributes to the beauty of light.

We might liken the doctrine of the atonement in the early church to a single ray that enters a prism and refracts into many colors of doctrine. These fathers and mothers of the church appreciated and exhausted the various ways Scripture speaks of Christ’s work on the cross.

Penal substitutionary atonement—the idea that Jesus was punished in our place—is certainly one of those colors, even if it’s no brighter than the other colors in their writings.”

The reality is, the Church Fathers emphasised aspects of penal substitution (regardless of what terms they used for it) because they were themselves seeking to be faithful to Scripture.

The Price of Good News

I genuinely don't understand how some Christians can read the Bible and not see the significance of Christ needing to die on the Cross in our place to pay the divine penalty for our sin.

I can understand that some Protestants might sometimes over-emphasise PSA, perhaps making the Cross exclusively about the removal of personal guilt (thus individualising the Cross in an exclusive way), or ignoring other aspects of the significance of the Cross which other Christian traditions rightly value. But if the Cross did not involve Christ paying the righteous penalty for our sin, then we would have no possibility of redemption from sin and death. We would merely have news that Christ died and came back to life, with no particular implications for us in relation to the consequences of our sin.

Without this personal engagement, it becomes very difficult to know whether somebody is merely participating in religious liturgical practices about Christ, rather than somebody who has truly died to their own sin and been raised up in Christ (Eph. 2:4-6), someone who has become truly “born again” (John 3:3; 1Pet. 1:3).

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It is not merely that Christ died and rose again but that He died for us, “for our sins” (1Cor. 15:3). Why would He have to die “for our sins” if there was no necessity for Him to do so (that is, no just punishment at God’s hand)? We say Jesus died and rose “for us” because we ought to have died. We sinned; He didn't. That's why He had to take our place. It was a “place”, the place of propitiation, where God's righteous wrath was poured out. This is what He ultimately took on our behalf.

And because of what Christ did on the Cross for us, we have a true hope of salvation from the consequences of sin, taking us from being alienated “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3) to “members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19), “so that [God] might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” (Rom. 3:26).

This really is gloriously good news. And it's much better preached and sung about than argued about.

I suspect some of my readers may already have forgotten that I was partway through a series on India late last year. In recent months, among my various writing projects has been the need to write a couple of chapters for a Christian Focus book on Christianity among other religions. My sections on Hinduism and Buddhism, of course, took me right to India, which last year I had the privilege of visiting.

For those less familiar with my “Adventures in India” thus far, you can catch up here:

• I. A Pessimistic View of Indians?: Introduction

• II. The Mysterious Hotel in Delhi I: Dread, Delight, and the Dynamics of Social Trust

• III. The Mysterious Hotel in Delhi II: The Morality of Indian Commerce

• IV. The Abandoned Elderly of Varanasi: Care for Widows, Honour of Parents, and Christian Culture

We pick up from here still in the famous city of Varanasi, where so many have come over so many centuries in the hope of finding something like holiness.

Among the Buddhist Temples

We dropped my bags off at the hotel, and my hosts—Dr K, his wife and children, and the local pastor—joined me in my room as I ate a late (and reassuringly large) lunch which the pastor’s wife had made specially. Butter chicken curry, chapati bread, seasoned potatoes, and homemade fries, followed by syruped mango. It was all very excellent.

They had already eaten earlier on, so I sat and ate my personal banquet in front of them all like a medieval king. We did not dwell long, however, because we needed to head out to see some of the Buddhist sites in Varanasi. One of these included what is apparently the place Siddhartha Gautama (“Buddha”) preached for the first time when he first gathered his followers in 528 BC.

Buddha was essentially a Hindu who—along with several friends—rejected the Veda scriptures and instead pursued a pilgrimage to a deeper spiritual reality, renouncing their personal desires in order to seek “enlightenment”. In the process of this pursuit, his friends became his first disciples, and on it went. Ultimately, there is no sense of divine revelation or even a significant historical event like the resurrection, for example. (If you want to hear my take on Buddhism, you may have to wait for me to finish my book on Christ among other religions later this year!)

As we walked around, Little A was desperate to get an ice cream, and he kept telling me about an advert board which he found hilarious, showing a man with ice cream hair. When I finally saw it, I told him I wouldn’t be surprised if they made it into some kind of a “god” one day, as they seem to worship the most ridiculous things in India often for bizarre reasons.

Outside the temples, there was often a dishevelled looking man sitting on a bench who would offer to “look after” your shoes or sandals for you (for a small fee, of course), which you had to take off before entering. The pastor we were with was very much a no-nonsense kind of guy, and stood watching the shoes instead, much to the charlatan’s discontent. Inside, there were strict rules about not making noise, but strangely there was no concern at all about people taking videos or photographs. This meant the inside of the temples were like witnessing a silent paparazzi party. A very strange approach to supposedly sacred space.

Outside the temples along the roadsides there were several inscriptions of significant Hindu and/or Buddhist stories on the walls which I photographed to show my children. Lots of them involve animals, usually with a particular animal doing something seemingly noble and then a load of people start worshipping it. I’m not even joking; that’s basically what seems to have happened a good deal of the time. Richard Dawkins would certainly have had a field day mocking the folly of manmade religion in such a place, and—on that point, at least—I might be inclined to agree, as would the prophets!

“What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it, a metal image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols! Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a silent stone, Arise! Can this teach? Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it. But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.”

—Habakkuk 2:18-20

At the heart of Indian religions seems to be the concept of protection. Above all they want their gods to protect them from calamity. Hence the concept of “the precious umbrella” which has origins in both Hinduism and Buddhism. While there are Biblical conceptions of divine protection, of course, things like this instrumentalise protection divorced from relationship with God. This is why superstition is so big in such religions, and why—in some quarters—they have been known to practice child sacrifice to placate their gods to remain under their “protection”.

This “precious umbrella” looked like it belonged in a Dr. Seuss book (I’m thinking especially of The Thinks You Can Think!). But in other ways there were symbols even more bizarre which come to mind, like casual swastikas on temple gates.

The Nazis and India

Of course, how we in the West see the swastika symbol today is not really the “fault” of Indian (or Chinese) religions. But nor is it entirely unrelated to some of the presuppositions of belief.

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In this special episode, Aaron talks to evangelical pastor and noteworthy cultural commentary YouTuber, Jamie Bambrick to discuss these important themes and more in another illuminating conversation.

SUPPORT the show on Patreon:

• That Good Fight Podcast: A Reformation for Gentlemen | A podcast calling patriotic Christian men to rebuild Christendom | Patreon

Relevant articles from That Good Fight Substack:

• Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism?: The Ideological Battle Against a Christianity that Changes the World

• Questions About Christian Nationalism: 10 Responses to the Curious, the Confused, and the Concerned

• Conversations About Christian Nationalism: Some More Disagreeable Than Others

Check out Jamie Bambrick's Youtube channel:

• https://www.youtube.com/@jamie.bambrick

I was in London again earlier this week, standing and praying with many pro-life labourers for the proposed amendments to the appalling legislation for abortion up to birth and abortion pills by post. Last year I wrote about my time at one of the rallies during the “week of death” where the original votes were passed in the House of Commons, instigating a new moral rubicon for Britain. However, it still had to get through the House of Lords, which—especially on moral issues of this magnitude—can still hold significant sway.

The failure of the introduction of Assisted Dying in the Scottish Parliament the night before gave some people hope that a similar thing might happen with the abortion up to birth amendment in London. The rally, jointly hosted by SPUC, March for Life, and Christian Concern, brought together different people to speak and pray, including the effervescent and full-of-faith evangelist Paul Song, who led the crowd to call for the salvation of Britain.

When it came to my time to pray in the evening, I felt unsure that it would even “make sense” for anything other than abortion-up-to-birth to go through. Of course I wanted it not to go through, and prayed for God’s mercy and grace; but I could not shake the sense that there is also something else going on with all of this, part of a much greater judgement of God on our society, and that unless the people truly turned back in repentance, we could not readily expect such a corrupt political establishment to overturn their folly without a miracle.

It felt like a time of lament. I quoted the words from Habakkuk which seem so especially prophetic to this cultural moment:

“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralysed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.”

—Habakkuk 1:2-4

It seemed notable that we were standing beside the statue of King George V, sword-in-hand, as he stared across the road toward the gleaming Houses of Parliament. In January this year I gave a presentation to a small group of leaders about Christian nationalism, where I had quoted the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of George V’s death in 1936, where he said of him:

“If we use the old words, the fear of God, in their true Bible sense, as a reverent remembrance of God’s reality and claim, King George was a God-fearing man. A simple religion, but very real. It was expressed in certain habits of life of which he said little, but which he resolutely kept—his daily prayers, his daily reading of the Bible—I doubt whether any layman had a more accurate, if not always fully instructed, knowledge of the Bible.”

That’s quite remarkable, when you think about it. Despite the fact that Britain was already well on the road to religious decay in George V’s time, it still tells us something about the scale of decline in contrast with today.

When we think of King Charles III, for example, who—though a professing Christian—seems to make a mockery of his confession of faith with every new statement on the “beauty” of Islam at just the time when we ought to be standing against Islam, the contrast is palpable. Charles’ sworn oath to adhere to the Bible at his coronation now seems little more than an archaic act of bureaucratic box-ticking than a solemn God-fearing promise before the Lord of heaven and earth.

A bishop of the Confessing Anglican Church, Ceirion Dewar (whom I interviewed last year) recently put out a viral post (already seen by nearly 2 million people) as a letter addressed to the king, in which he said:

“For more than a thousand years the Crown of this realm has stood in solemn covenant with the Christian faith.

The laws of this land were shaped by it.
The liberties of our people were nurtured by it.
The conscience of our civilisation was formed by it.

From the abbeys of medieval England to the parish churches of our villages, from the preaching of the Reformers to the missionary zeal that carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth, the Christian faith has not merely influenced Britain — it has defined her.

Yet today that inheritance is being quietly but deliberately eroded. Across the institutions of this nation there is a growing hostility toward the faith that built them.

Christian belief is mocked in the public square. Christian morality is dismissed as intolerance. Christian institutions are pressured to surrender doctrine in order to conform to the ideology of the age.”

When the abortion up to birth result was confirmed, some people were referring to the fact that, even though the Lords passed it, the king could still veto it because he still officially needs to sign off on any new legislation. However, as discussed on the podcast episode from last year—“Britain’s Decline, the Power of Kings, and the Awakening of the Church”—such notions simply remind us of how unthinkable such a scenario would be in the present context.

The Handmaid’s Dystopia

Naturally, when posting about the disappointing (if unsurprising) result from the House of Lords, I received some of the usual feminist backlash, including this gem:

“Another man outraged by BULLSH*T !! If you don’t have a womb or the means to bare children mind ye f****** business”

I politely reminded her that I'll mind my own business when we stop killing babies in the womb. Until then, it should be the business of anyone with a conscience.

Her reply:

“But you’re spreading lies, it’s only in exceptional circumstances that a termination will be granted; that means if the child wouldn’t survive the birth or would die shortly afterwards; it’s very rare what you say happens, so stop with the Handmaids rhetoric”

Aside from the factual inaccuracies here, as I’ve noted before, The Handmaid's Tale remains the fictional go-to dystopia-of-choice for secular liberals who love nothing more than invoking it as a faultless prophecy against any Christian threatening to bring their faith to bear upon society, law, and politics. The trick is to make such Christians believe that doing so will inevitably end in coercive abuse of women, one way or another. The Labour MP Stella Creasy also came out with a similar line speaking to LBC after the Lords vote, speaking of women who have late-term abortions being criminalised as an outlandish idea (despite the fact that it was still legal literally yesterday!), and scorning increasing pressure on women to have children: “The Handmaid’s Tale was meant to be science-fiction, not a manifesto for a future government!”

On some level, I think these imagined dystopian invocations act as a kind of salve to the conscience of the pro-abort feminist, suppressing what must be a somewhat schizophrenic impulse warring against their maternal nature. The real power of their repeated fearmongering dystopian scenario, however, is that it distracts them from seeing the very real dystopia which they actively promote, the one which results in 300,000 dead children per year in this country alone and over 10 million since 1967—all legal, all “above board”.

It was Hannah Arendt who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to refer to the bureaucratic administrators of the Holocaust like Adolf Eichmann, who performed their jobs like mere functionaries, to their own mind entirely unaware that what they were doing was wrong, and thus unable to contemplate taking personal responsibility for it.

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People tend to think that, because something is “legal” it can’t be bad. This is the cultural power of law, creating and enforcing norms, sending an indirect message to the people about what is right and wrong. In Britain, new norms have been spawned leaving us with the cacophonous situation in which you can be put in prison for offending a Muslim or a gay person, but you can’t be put in prison for deliberately killing your unborn child right up to the point of birth.

This, to borrow from Arendt’s phrase, is what we might call “the legality of evil”, a concept with which the prophet Isaiah was very familiar:

“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their prey!”

—Isaiah 10:1-2

It is the feminists, above all, who have been the most effective handmaids to the legal abortion dystopia we see today, with all its grimly inevitable attachments.

A little over ten years ago, for example, British newspapers were reporting that the bodies of aborted babies were being used as “fuel” to heat underfunded British hospitals.

Such a reality is dystopian on a far greater scale than Margaret Attwood could conjure. Yet in another sense this practice was actually consistent with the secular ideology which sees vulnerable unborn human beings as sub-human. While the practice of using aborted babies in this way was later banned by the Department of Health (probably more due to the optics than the principle), why shouldn’t they refer to those babies' bodies as mere “foetal matter” and then “recycle” them like anything else?

You can’t extract the sanctity out of an unborn baby’s body and then complain that it feels “inappropriate” to dispose of that body like it was any other medical waste. If it feels wrong to dispose of an embryo like common refuse (and they know it is, of course), this only goes to show that abortion itself is profoundly wrong—all of it. You can’t have it both ways.

But that, of course, is precisely what dystopias always do.

A Call for Revelation and a Commission for Men

And so we find ourselves back with Habakkuk’s lament, looking to God and saying, “How long, O Lord?” as yet more unjust law pours forth:

“So the law is paralyzed,
and justice never goes forth.
For the wicked surround the righteous;
so justice goes forth perverted.”

This is what happens in a nation that rejects God and gives itself over to moral decay. This is why I was compelled to pray for a greater revelation of justice and righteousness in the nation.

It really is this that our nation needs, and it needs it more desperately than any of us realise, even those of us who regularly come to such rallies hoping, standing, and praying for change.

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While I thank God for wonderful activist heroines in our time like Isabel Vaughan-Spruce and Andrea Williams (both of whom were at the rally, among many others), we also need more men across the Church to stand up on pro-life issues, willing to push past the noise and emotive feminist assaults about men “controlling women’s bodies” and proclaim the real truth about abortion. We need men to stand up and defend the unborn, and thus to defend the moral foundations of the nation.

To that end, I am speaking at the Commissioned day-conference (March For Life UK) on Saturday 18^th April 2026. The remit of the conference is specifically to galvanise men across the country to stand against abortion, given that men often find themselves on the outskirts of the issue. My session will look at inspirational men, like David’s mighty men, who stood against the grain to “defend the field” from the enemy.

Please pass the invitation on to any men in your circles who would benefit from a greater sense of brotherhood in the pro-life cause, that we might encourage one another to greater action, not being like the many Christian leaders of our time content to hold vague and inconsistent pro-life convictions “on a personal level” without ever acting on them “on a public level”. Christians within nations like Britain—where abortion ideology feels most entrenched—must be those whose convictions become once again etched into the foundations of the nation. Just as Bible verses were once etched into buildings and gravestones across this land, we need our convictions to come down to earth and take root in institutions, policies, statements, decisions, and laws once more.

What is the point of such convictions if we leave them locked away in our personal drawer? If God has convicted you that the most vulnerable babies in our society are worth protecting, at such a time as this do you not have a duty to not hide that light under a bushel, but to say and do something about it?

Christian Nationalism continues to be the bogeyman of choice for anxious Christians and secularists. Despite the rotten fruit of the secularist order all around us, in the moral decay of the West, many Christians would still seem to prefer us to leave liberal secular globalism in charge rather than reclaim the idea of a Christian nation.

Strong critiques of Christian Nationalism continue to populate Christian media, including a piece in the Church Times several weeks ago called “The Rise of Christian Nationalism” and another in Premier’s Christianity magazine called, “What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism?” The way these engagements are framed very often misunderstands the point of those who advocate for it.

In December last year I wrote a piece called “Questions About Christian Nationalism” engaging with (mostly) good-faith interactions on the topic of Christian Nationalism, often from evangelicals who had been given no framework for understanding it. We also did a That Good Fight episode recently talking about differences between American and British expressions of Christian Nationalism as a necessary response to western cultural decay. I’m also due to take part in several conferences and debates on these themes over the spring and summer. More recently, Bob of Speaker’s Corner hosted me on his channel to debate the issue (he and I are largely on the same page with Christian Nationalism but we also have some significant differences in how we define and apply it).

The idea behind the livestream was to invite lots of detractors to come and disagree with us. However, we did not get anywhere near the kind of critique we had hoped for (perhaps they were too scared of Bob!). I think such conversations are helpful to observe, especially where there is disagreement, which can often help observers make up their minds on issues that seem strange or “new” to them (even if the point is actually that this is not a “new” idea at all!).

One overtly more “disagreeable” conversation I had on this last year was with a British academic leader who, it is safe to say, is not simply not on the same page as me, but in an entirely different book altogether! The context of our debate was an online evangelical forum in which I had posted my article, “Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism?” which (unsurprisingly) had garnered a number of tuts, groans, and anxious gesticulations from detractors. Those who haven’t yet read that might find it helpful to skim that article first as a refresher, to see what my critical interlocutor was responding to. For the most part, though, the conversation should still make sense on its own.

I shall resist the temptation to add my own “post-match analysis” of how the conversation went, what can be derived from the attitudes revealed, and especially how it ended. I shall leave you readers to “judge for yourselves” a la 1Cor. 11:13. Enjoy!

“1. You lose me, Aaron, when you start by insulting those Christians who disagree with you. Right at the start of this you write: ‘… the predictable bucket of slander from the evangelical Sanballats and Tobiahs of our times … their failing credibility as leftist evangelical sell-outs’. Later you write about ‘the cabal of evangelical leaders’ (those whose crime is to not agree with you). For me that way of behaving and speaking undermines the credibility of your claim to be speaking for Jesus.

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• That Good Fight Podcast: A Reformation for Gentlemen | A podcast calling patriotic Christian men to rebuild Christendom | Patreon

Relevant articles from That Good Fight Substack:

• Rupert Lowe and the Restoration of Britain: Is There a New Hope for Britain?

• Politics, Pietists, and Patriots: How Modern Christians Are Duped Into Political Apathy 

The charge usually levelled against any Christian who cares too much about a particular political position, policy, or party, is that they have been duped by political ideology. According to their accuser, the conclusion can only be that they were bewitched by the worldly interests of that political idea or group; or they are being used as a pawn in a much larger game of political chess.

This is at least one reason (among many) that so many Christians in modern Britain—especially evangelicals—have largely stayed out of politics on any significant public level. What such Christians fail to see when this happens, however, is that they are the ones who have been duped.

The Myth of Secular Freedom

For decades now, swathes of Christians have been led to believe that secularism is actually a good state of affairs, something God approves of, something which allows them to get on with their Christianity in peace and quiet.

There is a small "fee" for this arrangement, naturally. The modern Christian must promise not to cause too much trouble to secularism by never bringing their Christianity out in public, especially not to the world of politics. That world must remain sacred and enshrined. It must remain the holy of holies to the secularist, the place where no practising Christian ought to tread. It’s all very ironic.

While this may at first seem to be a significant compromise, the modern Christian comforts himself with misapplied snippets of Bible verses, such as when Paul says that we are “to aspire to live quietly, and to mind [our] own affairs” (1Thess. 4:11), or that “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits” (2Tim. 2:4). They end up assuring themselves that Paul would agree with them that secularism is actually rather a good thing, actually.

The secularist never states this rule out loud, you must understand. That would be uncouth. They would never dream of telling a Christian, “You must not enter politics.” In fact, they would point to the opposite being the case, that there are all sorts of religious people—Christians included—in the world of politics. The trick, of course, is to ensure that the Christians are never too Christian about their Christianity, to ensure they never bring their Christianity out in their politics. When someone does—whether a Jacob Rees-Mogg sharing the Catholic view of abortion, or Danny Kruger, pointing to the historic Christian laws of England, this tends to be used as evidence that they could never Prime Minister. In any case, such people tend to be seen by the rest of the Church as the exceptions that prove the rule.

And so the modern Christian retreats back into his socio-political catacomb, not under compulsion, not under threat of persecution, but willingly, by choice. The modern Christian pays this price because he thinks it is secularism that "protects" his religious freedom, and that without secularism there would be inevitable chaos, social injustice, or theocratic tyranny.

But just like those who politely refuse to pay for the "protection" of a local mafia boss, the Christians who refuse to recognise the authority of secularism, who refuse to keep their Christian values private, tend to be swiftly "dealt with" by the very same people who were previously offering to "protect" them.

The Pietistic Ceiling

Even speaking about the problem in general terms of “political engagement” doesn’t quite explain the reality properly, because the kind of reactions you get from modern evangelicals when you talk too much about this or that political party or policy is not done with equal weights and measures.

If an evangelical touts leftist politics or centrist politics too much, you rarely hear complaints about it. Why is it only ever when someone advocates for Right Wing politics that the evangelical gatekeepers come out to play?

When I published my recent piece on Rupert Lowe and the launch of Restore Britain, one evangelical responded:

“I just prefer your articles that reference the Bible and the gospel rather than push a political agenda towards a man so obsessed with expelling immigrants that he tried to get charity rowers "sent back home". As you admit, the man (like most politicians) is not a Christian. I am not saying don’t support him, but to claim that Christians need to "wake up" and see this ideology is the only way Britain can see the power of the gospel break out powerfully in our nation? I’m sorry but I think the God I read of in the Bible is bigger and more powerful than that.”

Aside from the odd misunderstanding that to support a political might party automatically mean you think it’s the hope for the Gospel, such responses fail to see that the anti-political position they themselves articulate is a “political” position, and a very strong one at that.

There is a general belief among such people that Christians should only talk publicly about the Bible and/or the Gospel rather than politics (as if the Bible and the Gospel are disinterested in such things). This, of course, is the “politics” of pietism, whereby any Christian argument that seems too supportive of a particular political position is deemed contrary to the Gospel. But across the history of the Church, even within evangelicalism, nothing is more obvious than that there have been swathes of godly Christians who have not seen it this way, who have not seen the fruit of the Gospel and earthly politics as contradictory.

In reality, the reason a Christian showing enthusiastic support for a (right wing) political party grates on pietistic evangelicals today is actually because it challenges the left wing biases they don’t believe they have. Such evangelicals are “coded” this way precisely because they have opted for the aforementioned bargaining pact with secularism.

But if we shouldn’t care too much about particular politics anyway, then why should the pietist be concerned about these right wing parties or policies at all? Indeed why not let the party you most hate gain power? What difference would it make? What does it matter either way if the standard evangelical refrain upon hearing of a Christian’s particular political support is, “Don’t you realize it’s God that changes nations for good through the Gospel, not politicians...? Have more faith!” Such Christians ultimately just prefer the political status quo, or are too afraid to change it. In which case, who is the one who lacks faith?

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This is a key reason the modern evangelical Church shies away from the kind of political engagement which even threatens to threaten the status quo—anything that will cost them; anything that will get them called names. They may say the odd thing now and then when it’s reputationally safe to do so, when the Centre/Left approves, and (of course) when there is no possibility of any association with anything that sounds too far “to the Right”.

This is also why the major socio-political issues of the day like multiculturalism, immigration, and national identity will often seem so strange to the modern evangelical. They have no framework for why such things should matter to a Christian, and have been indirectly trained to view with suspicion anyone to whom such issues do matter. “It doesn’t affect the Gospel, so why should we care? Leave it to God…”

Politics Against Abortion

But there are some issues that break through the pietist’s wall of defence, such as abortion. While many evangelicals are just as cowardly when it comes to abortion as they are with other socio-political issues on the Right, there are still a good deal of pietistic Christians who would like to see the law change and would be willing to back a political party that could do it. It “doesn’t affect the Gospel” and yet they would care about it.

Any why wouldn’t they? In terms of “Christian values”, is there any social immorality in the nation that is more important right now than abortion? The Rape Gangs scandal is truly abhorrent, and yet even that is not on the same level of injustice as abortion, if we really think about what abortion is. As a society, we have simply gotten used to abortion as a “normal” thing over the last half-century or so, so that it no longer feels urgent or pressing for most people; but we really shouldn’t have gotten used to it, and the Church should not have let the nation get used to it.

As I mentioned in the last article, the abortion stance remained a question mark for some Christians over Restore Britain too, though I did note that there was hope afoot. It did not take long to come out in the open, with their public declaration to repudiate the “week of death” last year—that is, the astonishing decriminalisation of abortion up to birth and the Commons vote in favour of Assisted Suicide.

This is really good news, and hopefully the springboard for further moral clarity on challenging abortion well beyond those recent over-reaches. Much must be restored, and if Restore Britain really is serious about fighting for Britain’s Christian heritage, it simply cannot be content with the annual tragedy of well over a quarter of a million unborn babies being legally slaughtered in this land year on year, not least with so many people somehow still believing the chilling “justification” that the victims are not really human beings (or not valuable human beings) anyway.

It should go without saying that Christianity is unashamedly anti-abortion and pro-life from conception to death. If more churches were less compromised by reputational safeguarding and more courageous about speaking up about the severity of this most unjust of moral injustices, the wider populace of the nation would know that to be serious about Christianity is to not be ok with the killing of the most innocent and/or vulnerable humans on earth.

Jesus was loving and forgiving but he was deadly serious and uncompromising about injustice against the vulnerable, especially children:

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6)

The British people would do well to put that Bible verse on a fridge magnet to remind themselves of who they’re dealing with when they talk about “Christian values”. Christ is both merciful and just; like Aslan, He is not “safe” but He is “good”.

Just a few days after that post by Restore, I was leading a pro-life prayer meeting in Sheffield for Brephos, specifically praying for British politicians and party spokespeople to stop avoiding abortion via political cowardice and to be willing to speak more boldly against it in public. As I saw later—literally during the time of our meeting, in fact—Charlie Downes (the campaigns director and spokesman for Restore Britain) posted this on X: “Britain has aborted over 11 million babies since 1967. Just another rotting stain on our national soul.”

This was such an encouragement to see just after a prayer meeting on that very issue. It also suggests hope that Restore could be open to doing more than just repealing the week of death. This is territory on which so few British political parties have dared to tread (which tells you a lot about the state our nation is in). But it’s a great prospect that pro-life issues might no longer be parked to the side for fear of losing votes, but placed front and centre as a key to the restoration of the nation.

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This is where all those other issues Christians are prone to getting squeamish about—multiculturalism, immigration, and national identity—come into play. For what use is the morality of a “national soul” if there is no sense of a nation at all? If there is no pride in being Britain or saving Britain, then why should British people care about the immorality that they endorse by their culture and laws?

This brings us back to the aforementioned evangelical disposition noted earlier, the fear of changing the political status quo of secularism. A by-product of the now-standard irrational fear of right wing views is a default concern about Christians becoming too patriotic.

Politics and Patriotism

It is undeniable that there is a genuine patriotic fervour awakening in the nation right now. This post by one X user was representative of many who recently joined Restore Britain in this vein:

“I became a paid member of a political party for the first time in my life this morning. I can no longer just watch what is going on around me and do nothing. I never voted for mass immigration. I want my country back. I want my homeland back.”

Many more posts by others chimed a similar patriotic note, often among people never previously interested in politics nor—like me—never felt especially comfortable being affiliated with a particular party, let alone becoming a member. There is a genuine sense across the nation that people know why they want their nation back and want to take action to see it done.

This is why those who still hiss at Restore because they think it will merely “split the vote” on the Right, have underestimated the detail of this awakening patriotic spirit among the British people to do what they once hoped Reform would do. This is why the current wave of enthusiasm for Restore Britain feels like more than just a flash in the pan.

I think it’s because these patriots have felt the depth and weight of the problems that have been sinking Britain so strongly and for so long that they know in their gut that real change is needed and they also know in their gut that Restore is more likely to do it. As Rupert Lowe posted:

“It is abundantly clear that there is now one option for the silent patriotic majority. Restore Britain. This is how we get our country back - this is the only way. Join us.”

The evangelical pietist, upon seeing such rhetoric, might roll their eyes here and say, “But that’s not true. Jesus is the only way!” Yes, of course, but you can’t just invoke eternal salvation as a trump card every time you face a difficult problem in life—a problem like politics. This national situation requires political solutions as an outworking of the greater spiritual solution.

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Most evangelicals in Britain know deep down that politics matters because they know Christian values in Britain matter; they are just too afraid to come out and say that politics matters, and certainly less willing to adopt party colours, because they would say, again, “a particular party is not Jesus”. Yes, but lots of things are “not Jesus” and yet you still support them; you still make your choice to follow all manner of other things under the lordship of Christ which are themselves not Jesus Christ. To strongly promote a particular political direction does not automatically make you a slave to this world, your nation, or your chosen political party; it just makes you grounded in a commitment to action over abstraction.

Chris Wickland, one of the relatively small handful of British evangelical pastors who comes out to speak on such things out loud, made a point about this in light of the recent victory of the Green Party in a highly publicised by-election, saying,

“Christians who choose not to engage should understand something: disengagement is not neutrality. It is consent to whatever direction the culture drifts. We are at a crossroads culturally and politically. Britain must decide what moral framework will shape its future. Will it be rooted in historic Christian principles that shaped our laws, institutions and liberties? Or will it be shaped by a new ideological framework that redefines nationhood, borders, family and moral order?…If Christians withdraw from public life, they should not be surprised when public life no longer reflects Christian convictions.”

Christians must stop using Jesus as a get-out clause for political apathy. Politics affects the lives of everyone, whether they care about it or not. If you love your neighbour, you should not want your nation to collapse into moral and social degradation and be indifferent about it. There really are things you can say and do to prevent it.

You may say, “well, this nation is unrepentant and godless and deserves whatever happens to it. Leave its fate to God.” Fine, let God do what He will do with our nation. That's God's business. But what about your own responsibility? Would you say “leave it to God” if your neighbour's house was on fire with them trapped inside, or would you call the fire brigade and help get them out?

If you truly care for the soul of the nation, let your actions align with your prayers, rather than letting your prayers replace your actions while others continue to lead the nation further astray.

None of this means a political interest cannot be pushed too far. I don’t agree with Wickland saying in the same piece, for example, that “If we do nothing and the Liberals win, this nation is finished forever. This is our last chance now. Choose life or death.” I understand the need to put it strongly. I happily do so when it’s warranted. But I just don’t believe you can say, theologically speaking, that the nation is “finished forever” if this or that political event does not happen. God’s ways are not our ways, and He may have all sorts of surprises up his sleeve.

We are not, after all, talking about eternal salvation, even if this is precisely where the pietistic evangelical will jump to agreement with me in order to flatten out all political statements and affiliations into nothing. So, political alignment is not and can neither be “everything” nor “nothing”. The space between these two is no safe “middle way” but a living tension, the tension of what it means to be “citizens of heaven” (Phil. 3:20-21), seeking not a temporary earthly city but “the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). Such verses are often used to justify exiting the public square entirely; but this is to misunderstand their power to envision us for the present by the eternal.

As Augustine said, in his epic City of God:

“the earthly city which does not live by faith seeks only an earthly peace...The heavenly city, meanwhile – or, rather, that part that is on pilgrimage in mortal life and lives by faith – must use this earthly peace until such time as our mortality which needs such peace has passed away. As a consequence, so long as her life in the earthly city is that of a captive and an alien…she has no hesitation about keeping in step with the civil law which governs matters pertaining to our existence here below. For, as mortal life is the same for all, there ought to be common cause between the two cities in what concerns our purely human living.”

—Augustine, City of God (XIX.17)

There is a correlation between the earthly and heavenly city, and those who are rightly ordered by the ways of the heavenly city ought to be of most benefit to the life of the earthly city, not least if we hope to lead the earthly city by the light of the heavenly city.

As my friend Nathan Paylor noted in an episode we did on this topic a couple of years ago, “this is not our home, but it is our house.”

As such, we are called to steward that house well, to upkeep it, to see that it does not fall into dilapidation, to see that it may be a place of peace and joy, a place we can keep well for those who will come after us.

This is how we ought to see the plight of our nation. A patriot is someone who loves their country, is proud of its heritage, believes in its future, and refuses to let it fall into decay and ruin without a fight. Is that really such a bad thing? Is that really such an “unchristian” thing?

The Glory and Light of the Church

The danger of national idolatry is not an irrelevant concern. There have been many historical examples we could point to where this became a problem. But it is not an inevitable problem. And it is indeed possible to order our love for our nation appropriately, and to truly fight for its good on heavenly terms yet in the earthly political realm. Indeed, depending on the state of your nation at any given time, it may seem not just wise but essential to support and promote a particular political party or figure within the earthly city as the best means of seeing the principles of the heavenly city outworked “on earth as it is in heaven”.

This is not the same as saying that a particular party or leader is singlehandedly bringing the kingdom of God on earth as God’s newly anointed ambassador! But nor is it to say that that particular party or leader is irrelevant to advance of the kingdom, either; or that a different party would make no difference to the good of the nation in God’s eyes.

The ways of God with the nations is mysterious. It is not always possible to second guess His providential hand at work. Where is He bringing judgement? Where is He bringing blessing? Why does he permit some nations to fall into ruin, while to others he shows mercy despite their sin? Why are some bad leaders justly eliminated while others drag on for years or decades? Where is He advancing His kingdom and where not, and does the nation know its role in God’s purposes? We have various indications in Scripture over these questions (the many judgements against the nations in Isaiah 13-18, Jeremiah 46-52, and Ezekiel 25-32, for example, or the national warnings of Deuteronomy 28) but not in a way that allows to say with total confidence, “God votes for this party!” However, that doesn’t mean we cannot apply Biblical wisdom and discernment of the moment and apply this politically, in faith.

Christians find engaging in particular politics so difficult precisely because they fear the concerns of the Church (the pilgrims of the heavenly city) will be corrupted by political entanglement, damaging the purity of its mission, and its faithfulness and allegiance to God. Yet ironically, those churches that stop engaging in front line issues may, in the end, wind up losing both their holiness and their mission. They who—like the Pharisees—wish to keep themselves “clean” from any association that would make them seem unholy, often lose sight of their own holiness along the way. Choosing not to be on the front line, choosing not to fight where faithfulness is most needed, has consequences which are far from safe.

“But the glory and light of the Church will be dimmed if you promote a right wing party,” says the pietist, “for then you will cause divisions and become corrupted! That’s why it’s best to stay neutral!” Somehow, whatever is said or done, the modern evangelical will always end up with a conclusion that keeps secularism “in power”. In this rather depressing interpretation of Jesus’ reply to Pilate that his kingdom is “not of this world” (Jn. 18:36), there is no sense that the Church might actually be less bright, less holy, by refusing to be salt and light within the world of politics. How did we become so timid? How did we become so easily led by the ways of the world (even in our proclamations against the “worldliness” of politics)?

Does God really want us to refuse to proclaim His standards to the political order? And as we proclaim them, does God really not want us to work towards their application for the good of all? And if that application ends up meaning we support or stand for this or that party for the sake of that cause, does God tut and shake His head at our “unholiness”? Does He turn His face away in embarrassment because we associated ourselves with ideas that will get us called unsavoury names by the press? How dim our expectations have become of what it means to be the light of the world!

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Darkness is not a contributor to the light. It is to be extinguished by the light. Yet instead of being a city on a hill that cannot be hidden, bold and glorious in its light, for too long the modern Church either hid away in its self-chosen socio-political catacombs, or—among the more adventurous—it became embroiled in “dialogues” with the darkness in an attempt to build bridges to it. It thus became ever more attentive to the many “concerns” which the darkness had with the light. Listening all too attentively to what the darkness had to say, the modern Church began to see the light from the perspective of the darkness rather than seeing the darkness from the perspective of the light.

In time, without even realising it, many began to slip down from that city on the hill to hide their lights under the many bushels which the world was only too willing to offer them. If we would see lasting change in the world in our time, the Church must recover the glorious light bestowed upon her. We can be bold not because we are arrogant but because we are the humbled recipients of a light that is not of this world.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.” (Isaiah 60:1)

These are glorious words indeed. Drink them in. Know that this light came not from us but from the very glory of God. It cannot possibly be extinguished by the darkness, whatever names we may be called for shining it brightly when the time comes—yes, even to the politicians.

They say a week is a long time in politics. If what we have seen in the week following the launch of Rupert Lowe’s new party, Restore Britain, the political landscape could be witnessing the equivalent an earthquake.

The massive groundswell of support they received in such a short time—including 50,000 members within the first two days alone, and over 80,000 before the end of their first week—is surely unprecedented for a brand new party. Various polls also suggest that if a General Election was held tomorrow, Restore would get a higher percentage of the vote than the Liberal Democrats and only a little less than the Conservatives.

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But it’s also the kind of support, the recognition that this is not just the launch of yet another party on the Right of British politics, but something far more seismic, almost revolutionary. Lowe’s launch video, filmed at his own farm, was seen by some 30 million people within the first couple of days, and clearly evoked a powerful response among many people, for good reason.

Lowe captured the palpable sense that exists among the British people of having felt downtrodden for so long, bullied by the political establishment into ignoring the destructive realities of multiculturalism, and forbidden from standing up for themselves without fear of censure.

But he also articulated a way forward. The British people have now been given a genuine alternative, a genuine sense of hope from somebody who isn’t half-lying to them, somebody willing to be called names for the sake of the truth, for the protection of women and children, and ultimately for the protection of our nation’s future.

American reactions to the video were also effusive, with many big accounts on X reposting the video supportively, including Christians, like the Baptist leader William Wolfe, who said: “This is the single best political ad I’ve ever seen in my life”, and the world’s richest (and perhaps most influential) man, Elon Musk, whose reposting of the video garnered 23 million views alone, in which he added: “Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!”

None of this should come as a surprise to those who have been following Rupert Lowe’s public activity since being unceremoniously kicked out of the Reform party last year. As an independent MP, free from party constraints, he found himself making even louder and even clearer his already strong and uncompromising voice on the issues that really matter to the British people.

When asked about the political situation in the UK over the last year, I have often told people I would probably end up voting Reform but that I really wished Rupert Lowe would just start a party, because it was clear he had all the makings of the kind of bold, honest, uncompromising, yet gentlemanly leader Britain needs in these times of high compromise on every side, including from his former party.

To Reform or to Restore?

This is why, contrary to some on the socio-political Right in Britain, I don’t believe the launch of Restore is an arbitrary “splitting of the vote” between themselves and Reform (along with all the many other parties on the Right, including Reclaim, UKIP, Britain First, etc.).

Reform themselves had already split the vote in the last election, of course, between themselves and the Tories. This is what enabled Labour to win with the lowest vote percentage (33%) of any elected government in British parliamentary history. Now Reform are leading in the polls, having since won over a good deal of not only Tory voters but also Tory MPs. However, with this influx has also come a gravitation back to the safety of the centre, the very Westminsterial centre which enabled or promoted many of the problems which many of these new “Re-” parties exist to reverse!

As Lowe himself said in that already-famous video, and the many speeches and comments which have accompanied it in the week following, the point of Restore is precisely not to “reform” the current system, but to restore what came before it—to restore what Britain ought to be rather than what was imposed upon it within the last few decades.

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This is why Restore and Reform are not simply two similar parties with different personalities whose voting blocs will be “split”; they ultimately stand for different things at root: Reform want to tweak the political status quo and manage the problem, keeping things more or less the way they are.

In contrast, Restore want to overhaul that status quo, recognising the decades of failure and decline the present system has produced, and how, without a more radical solution the same problems will only continue to manifest, just as they did in the 14-year “Conservative” government which oversaw more liberalisation, multiculturalism, and immigration than the Labour government that preceded it (largely because that Tory government essentially functioned as a continuation of the Blairite posture of New Labour anyway).

I can understand, however, why it might be difficult for lots of British people who already felt it was difficult to admit to their neighbours they might vote for Reform, to now contemplate the prospect that Reform are nowhere near as as radical as they need to be, and that such people actually need to vote for an even more “controversial” party. Yet if we are serious about tackling the problems strangling Britain today and want to see an alternative future, then we must indeed be willing to go against (“contra”!) what we’ve been told were the only political possibilities.

It was inevitable that Restore’s stance would challenge the distinctive value of Reform, and would likely garner a sour reaction from some. But even if predictable, it was nonetheless lamentable that Reform immediately adopted the classic tactic of the Left to denounce Lowe & co in the usual hyperbolic fashion, with one Reform leader labelling Restore “neo-Nazi” on GB News.

In response to a question about Restore’s meteoric rise since the launch, Nigel Farage all but admitted that he had essentially hyped up potential criminal charges against Lowe in order “to get rid of him as soon as possible” from the Reform party due to their disagreement over mass deportations, ever happy to paint Lowe as some kind of unhinged extremist.

On such accusations, in refreshing defiance of the endless postcolonial guilt weaponised against western nations for decades, Carl Benjamin (of The Lotus-Eaters) was resolute in his defence of Restore on the point of national identity:

“We have had enough. We don’t care what you think constitutes "racism". We are going to assert our claim to our country and restore what was taken so our children may have the lives they deserve.”

There needs to be a cultivated and principled apathy to the spurious racism accusations to which so many men have become numb in recent years. Could such attitudes potentially open gateways to greater apathy toward actual racial hatred in future? Who knows, but if so it will be the Left’s incessant name-calling that is more likely to blame for pushing young men to become what they were called.

In reality, however, this is nowhere near being the clear and present danger in this discussion. The urgent priority remains the redress—and indeed, the “restoration”—of the national balance. But the multicultural bug will not go down without a fight.

On Multicultural Folly

It may take the liberal centrists a good while to grasp this, but the palpable shift of the political landscape in Britain right now is inevitable.

As I argued in an article from a couple of years ago, Multiculturalism and Rootlessness, what we’re seeing now is the result of decades and decades of enforced multiculturalism which left many British people feeling like their home no longer feels like home. At just the time when many of their beloved towns and cities are disintegrating into vape shop takeaway dystopias, even their beloved countryside has come to be labelled "too white" and thus insufficiently welcoming to Muslims.

The naïve folly of “multiculturalism” in modern Britain is laid bare as soon as you imagine trying to apply the same principles within non-western countries. One British comedian pointed this out quite hilariously in a viral sketch of what it would be like for a British person to turn up in China and demand the same things which are demanded of him by Muslim immigrants in his own homeland.

This kind of social fragmentation did not happen by accident; it happened by policy. For decades they were told to welcome all cultures except their own, and to promote all identities except their own. Those who disagreed with the mass renovations to their societal home were not consulted. There was no planning permission. No referendum. It just started to happen. And then it kept happening.

Those who opposed it too strongly were demonised as hateful. It became increasingly inconvenient to oppose what was happening, so for a long time most people simply gave up. They were made to feel not only that it was "a political impossibility" to do anything about it, but that it was a moral impossibility, that to try to reverse the effects of this enforced multiculturalism would be somehow "wrong".

And so for a long while, most people who saw the problem opted to keep their heads down and tried to forget about it and to live their lives as normal, as if the industrial diggers all around them and upturning the foundations of the world they knew, were not really there at all. But now people are beginning to survey the cataclysmic damage of those diggers and they are finding the courage to say "no". And they are finding that they are not alone.

It is this very context of the societal destruction wrought by naïve liberal multiculturalism and Islamism which made Restore Britain’s message resonate so strongly, particularly when Lowe said these words:

“Britain is not just an economy. Britain is not just an idea. Britain is not just a passport. Britain is a people. Our people. And Restore Britain will never allow that to be erased. We will celebrate our Christian heritage, and the identity that built and shaped the identity of this country.”

Without a clear sense of what Britain is, Britain cannot and will not remain Britain.

Political Anxiety and Political Cowardice

There may well be many Christians who don’t yet understand many aspects at play here (especially those who have not read my Substack over the last couple of years!), including:

• why we should oppose multiculturalism rather than welcome it

• why we should reverse mass immigration (even the legal kind)

• why we should care about national identity rather than avoid it

• why we should care about the restoration of Christian values in the nation

• why Christians can and should be very public about who to vote for without fearing they will automatically descend into Gospel-denying political idolatry.

We cannot escape the fact that, for many Christians, this is a time of political awakening, where themes and topics of thought which once seemed “off limits” are now front and centre and must be dealt with, however uncomfortable they make some people feel.

As Lowe said of the restoration of the nation, we might also say (albeit in a different way) of the reform of the Church: “What’s needed will be incredibly painful.” But it must be done. We must face the reality of what we have overlooked if we are to be serious about standing for truth and light in a time of deep darkness.

The concrete example in many people’s minds in all this talk of saving Britain, of course, is the Rape Gangs scandal, which was sharply in focus in the preceding weeks due to Restore Britain’s own public inquiry (Feb 2026).

The accounts of what some of those girls went through is truly shocking, off the scale, and—unlike the many ludicrous accusations of “systemic” racism made against white people in recent years—often genuinely racist against white girls in particular. When one mother called the police to report that her daughter was being picked up and abused by Asian men, she was told off for referring to them as Asian men because that sounds “racist”, and instead that she should be glad that her daughter gets to experience a different culture.

Rupert Lowe himself spoke out about the (no doubt politically motivated) lack of coverage of the Inquiry on the BBC, which seemed to find all sorts of frivolous things to talk about rather than what is surely one of the most significant news stories of our time.

It seems clear that the BBC is now, officially, a national disgrace. How they love to virtue-signal their feminism by decrying "toxic masculinity" behind every corner, and yet they cannot bring themselves to shed light on the most egregious systemic abuse of women we have seen in this country in any of our lifetimes! It seems they would happily sacrifice justice for hundreds of young female victims simply because of the political "optics". If this is not misogyny of the highest order, I don’t know what is?

And what is the BBC’s response to such complaints? Well, they released a response statement (not a news story!) in which they simply belittled Lowe’s Inquiry and said: “We have limited resources and it is not possible to report on every story which is of interest to our audiences.” Yet somehow they still found sufficient resource among their rations to report on the Gruffalo!

We’ve come to expect such duplicity from the ideologically intoxicated BBC. But is it too much to expect a little more backbone from evangelical leaders? These days, sadly, many Christian leaders seem to take their socio-political cues from the BBC anyway. While many were quick to publicly decry systemic racism after the death of George Floyd, or to champion the cause of the #MeToo movement, or to denounce the rise of Christian Nationalism, they have been remarkably slow to say anything at all—let alone to denounce—the rape gang cover-up, probably because they fear being labelled “Far Right” for doing so.

As my friend Jamie Bambrick noted in a recent video that, upon hearing the actual testimonies of what happened to some of those girls—including what was said to them, both by their abusers and the authorities—makes the silence of church leaders ever more disgraceful in light of all else they’ve chosen to publicly oppose in recent times.

The fact that Lowe has gone ahead of both the political and the ecclesiastical cowards to not only speak about these grievous injustices in our nation, but to actively do something about it, even at great risk to his own reputation (and potentially even his life) speaks volumes for his character.

It is this, above all, that I genuinely believe could ultimately win over the voting majority by the next General Election. If a week is a long time in politics, three years should be plenty.

I do, however, have a few final questions for Restore…

Christian Questions for Restore

When Lowe talks about Christian values, though I do believe he actually will do something about implementing them, what does he think Christian values are, in reality?

In his video he listed a curtailed list of values including responsibility, duty, forgiveness, fairness. While unmistakeably British and Christian, these virtues are at best, selective, much like the standard “Easter messages” we saw during the David Cameron era, where “Christian values” tended to magically align with the current party values, irrespective of whether any of its MPs actually believed in Christianity.

What is Rupert Lowe’s stance on abortion, for example? Some have said he has asked questions in Parliament previously regarding data on later term abortions, but nothing about the moral issue itself. He also initially voted for Assisted Dying when it first came up, later changing his mind.

So, at best, Lowe is inconsistent. But from what I have heard from within his team, there is every chance Restore could embrace a public pro-life position of some kind in future. It would certainly be out of character with much else they say and do, that’s for sure. More Christians need to make it known that standing up for life is one of the most essential Christian values there is.

Someone recently said on X that their one criticism of Restore is they should stop talking so much about Christianity because most British people are not actively Christian and because religion is divisive. I believe just the opposite: if I had one criticism of Restore at this point it is that they ought to talk about Christianity more, not less; and they ought to show how much they really mean it.

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If we want real national change, we need to be thinking about restoring Britain further back than the 1990s when New Labour came in. Britain may have been better than it is now in many respects, but it was already well on the way to decline even then.

The excavation of the rubble must go back far further. It was not this or that government that pushed the red button on Britain. It was the loss of active faith coupled with the normalisation of secular liberal values which, over time, made orthodox Christian beliefs appear exotic and/or strange as a result so that they largely fell out of practice. It’s encouraging that the British people are starting to wake up to the presenting issues undermining the nation. But in order to wake up to the deeper lying issues, they will need a Greater awakening, the kind of wake-up call only Christ can provide.

I’ve heard some who know Rupert Lowe refer to him as “an almost Christian”. This brings to mind the title of that famous sermon of that greatest of Great Awakeners, John Wesley, in 1741 in Oxford, where Wesley spoke of the danger of the man who lives by a Christian moral code but does not yet know how much he needs Christ Himself.

It would, of course, be wonderful if Rupert Lowe did truly believe and follow Christ, especially for his own soul. But if he didn’t, if he wasn’t a regular churchgoer, could he still do a good job of restoring at least the Christian values Restore have articulated? I think so, yes. The civil magistrate is separate from the Church, even as the Church should continue to influence it. We need not see Rupert Lowe as a fully-fledged “Christian prince” in order to be able to stand up and support him wholeheartedly. Lowe is clearly several heads and shoulders above any other British politician inside or outside of Parliament today.

He is also one who—like Donald Trump—is not really “a politician” at all. But he is a leader, a man of courage, honesty, integrity, and justice, who in a very short time has been able to tap into and galvanise many of the sleeping lions of this nation. As such, he and his party just might do Great Britain a very great deal of good.

There will no doubt be many who wish to do him—and the nation—real harm as a consequence of the growing momentum, and the fact that Restore Britain genuinely threatens the very political status quo that has done our nation so much harm. May God protect him, may God be with him, and may God have mercy on Britain that she might return to His ways and be restored in this generation.

From That Good Fight Substack:

"Christendom Aesthetics, Protestant Iconoclasm, and the Danger of Safe Sermons: Postcards from Vienna I" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/postcards-from-vienna-i?r=1ksz6z

"Cultural Quality, Ideological Vandalism, Tortured Souls, and the Gospel of Christ: Postcards from Vienna II" https://thatgoodfight.substack.com/p/postcards-from-vienna-ii?r=1ksz6z 

This week the General Synod of the Church of England voted to deny blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples, ultimately signalling the end to the “Living in Love and Faith” process, whose various meetings and reports and focus groups have cost the Church of England £1.6m and an unquantifiable volume of stress, pain, and division. But ostensibly, as the BBC reported it, the Church of England has technically “abandoned proposals for same-sex blessing ceremonies”.

Well, sort-of. In classic Anglican style, there is still a healthy dose of fudge baked into the foundations.

A Cacophony of Compromise

It’s still possible, for example (as it already was, ludicrously) for a gay couple to be “blessed” within a church meeting, with specially written “prayers of love and faith” even without being allowed their own set-apart liturgical ceremony, which might look too much like a wedding. (For more “insider” details of the implications of the Synod for the LLF process see Ian Paul’s recent article.)

The language of Synod was, of course, smothered in lashings of apology for “letting down the LGBT+ community,” etc. In reality, the Church of England still won’t speak against homosexuality the way the Bible does, and yet won’t fully “affirm” it either. Somehow, clergy are still allowed to “bless” a gay couple in church if they want to, which tells the rest of that Church, “God is ok with this,” but clearly also tells the church that God is not so “ok with this” that they’re allowed to marry. And yet despite God not being ok with them marrying, He is apparently not so against their relationship that He frowns upon their relationship at all. If it sounds confusing, it’s because it is. It’s all very confusing. It’s all very Anglican.

As a brief aside (though perhaps tangentially related to weddings!) the General Synod also found time to make a public statement about the importance of the sustainable use of flowers in churches. So at least they’re showing they’re on the front line of the social issues that really matter…

I commented on social media that perhaps the Church of England’s next initiative will be working towards a “sustainable use of Christianity”. While the CofE bishops have clearly been working hard to limit the amount of Christianity they put into the atmosphere in recent decades—what with all the harm it does to their reputations in the eyes of Islamists and secularists—perhaps they’ll eventually stop all these compromises and launch a new campaign for “Net Zero Christianity by 2036”! I suspect, however, that the Anglican bishops’ love of compromise will be too strong to do something so consistent with their general outlook.

The official ending of the Living in Love and Faith process is one such compromise. It “tolerates” the traditional position more because the hierarchy know that, to change its position on marriage is far more complicated for the established Church of the nation than for any other. But of course, as with Methodism’s infamous “contradictory convictions” doctrine, there is always a way to make what is ludicrous seem sensible, and there is still a sizeable progressive splinter group within the Church of England (whose name, ironically, is “Together”) who remain belligerently optimistic that despite the official ending of LLF this year, same-sex blessing ceremonies (and even same-sex weddings) will happen; it’s just a matter of time, by hook or by crook (emphasis on the crook…).

The Rhetoric of Reverend Bell

One especially outspoken progressive voice at Synod was Charlie Bell, of whom I’ve written before. He is a gay vicar already “married” to another man even though the Church he represents technically still does not believe in same-sex marriage. He has habitually been the most angry of the pro-LGBT platoon within Anglicanism, and gave a powerfully emotional speech condemning the Anglican Church for “shamefully hurting” the LGBT+ community by their decision, leaving them confused and bereft of hope.

Bell is nothing if not bombastic, and a perfect example of why it was so foolish to let the LGBT agenda in the door at all.

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