To use an English working-class phrase, there is a bit of “ding-dong” between Christians this month. Christmas carol services are not usually flashpoints of controversy. They are meant to be unifying, nostalgic, and a soft reassertion of a story that once held the English together. Yet last weekend in London, a carol service organized by Unite The Kingdom (UTK), which aimed to “put Christ back into Christmas,” prompted a defensive reaction from the Church of England. Like the European Referendum in 2015 (which I wrote about in Church Times here) and the election of Donald Trump (which I wrote about in The North American Anglican here), it has once again exposed deep fault lines between local parishes and the established Church that serves them. It is about authority, class, politics, race, evangelism, and who gets to speak for Christianity in the public square.
The difficulty is that one of the most controversial grassroots campaigners in England, Tommy Robinson, who founded UTK, has experienced a genuine Christian conversion in prison and is now applying his organizational skills and public reach to evangelize the nation. This is running parallel to his political objectives of warning against uncontrollable Islamic immigration crossing the English Channel. Clearly, for “Tommy” (not his real name), the target has extended to a new enemy he must now confront: aggressive secularism.
The response from the Church of England was first a glitch in its mental circuitry (can we really criticize a carol service?), followed by outright hostility from several bishops, complete with all the usual ideological accoutrements aimed at the bogeymen of a newly minted Christian “far-right.” The Bishop of Kirkstall, Arun Arora, who is also co-lead bishop for Racial Justice in the Church of England, said: “We must confront and resist the capture of Christian language and symbols by populist forces seeking to exploit the faith for their own political ends.”
The irony is striking. The UTK carol service, defamed as “Christian nationalist” and racist, turns out to be a carol service led by Black gospel singers and is explicitly Unionist—even in its name. The Nationalist charge collapses under minimal scrutiny. Indeed, if there is a contender for Christian nationalism in England, it is the Church of England: legally established, bound into the constitutional order, and historically charged with upholding the Christian jurisdiction of England.
So serious was the perceived threat that the bishops rushed out some bleak posters making Christmas feel miserable, alongside a rather nice film saying that Christ was always in Christmas. For all the sweetness of this advert (watch it here), it functions less as a proclamation of the Nativity and more as a reaction to what it perceives as a rival carol service in London. For decades, clergy have warned that secularism has hollowed out Christmas and marginalised Christ from public life. Yet when a Unionist carol service is marketed as “putting Christ back into Christmas,” the response is a counter-advert insisting that Christ has been there all along.
So, which is it? As far as I can tell, this about-face in messaging reveals episcopal anxiety. Having invested vast amounts of money, resources, and leadership capital in a leftist pottage of identity politics, postcolonial guilt, managerial DEI frameworks, and Eurocentricity, the Church of England now faces a serious contender: a public Christian expression that shares its faith and concern over secularism, but counters its political narrative.
UTK has explicitly said its carol service is not about politics; it is only about faith. This has been met with suspicion, but Robinson seems very serious about his new religion, and secularism is his next target. Over the summer he led what was easily a million people on a rally through London. I went to observe it, and they were chanting his name across the city for hours. His following is enormous, and he is trying to evangelize them.
Unfortunately, the attitude of some senior clergy towards the newly baptized Christians within his movement is that they are too sinful to be welcomed (where have we heard that before?). What I do not understand is that the Church of England has worked for decades to find ways to overcome polarisation, but on this matter, instead of employing its own commitments to mutual flourishing, “multiple integrities,” “difficult conversations,” and “grace-and-disagreement,” it has chosen to react with censorious mud-slinging.
As I listened to Tommy’s testimony, it felt sincere and moving—very unlike the man I have watched from afar for over twenty years. As passionate as ever, but softer and broken. Those doubting his motives are quite wrong to do so, but even if they were right, it is neither particularly Christian, Anglican, nor Roman Catholic to scaremonger his attempt. St Paul had the ability to celebrate Christ preached even from false motives: “The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice” (Phil. 1:18).
The Church of England’s suspicion of Tommy Robinson’s conversion revives, unwittingly, a very old heresy: Donatism. St Augustine confronted the claim that the moral failings of a minister could nullify the gospel itself. The principle extends beyond clergy: any Christian, however flawed, is a vessel for Christ’s message. If Christ can act through Peter and even Judas, He can act through anyone genuinely proclaiming Him. To dismiss the message because of the messenger is to insist that the gospel only works when delivered by the socially or morally approved—a logic that Article XXVI of the Church of England rejects, as does the Roman Catholic doctrine of ex opere operato. The Church once believed the gospel could travel in cracked vessels. Now it insists the vessel must first pass a DEI audit.
With the decline in faith and moral scandals rocking the institution on their watch, the bishops are acting as moral commentators long after losing credibility. Despite the incredible access they have to the national stage, no one listens to Church of England bishops anymore outside their own echo chambers. Nor do the working classes marching for UTK care about the pectoral-cross-clutching outrage of privately educated bishops whose advocacy demands their communities receive unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants and accuse them of racism for fearing for the safety of their children. One of the deeper theological disagreements here is about what it really means to welcome the stranger. The Church of England morally postures as a champion of hospitality, seemingly endorsing an open-door approach. It represents the needs of those delivered here by criminal gangs while refusing to hear the suffering of English communities forced to accommodate them.
They squirm out of defining the limits of that “welcome” to avoid the accusation they make of others—that of lacking charity. This is activism, not serious policy formulation. They are silent about the Christmas problem of European celebrations now having to be patrolled by armed police. As I write this, a massacre of Jews on Hanukkah has taken place on Bondi Beach. For many observers, we have a church that now cares more about Muslims than it does about Christians. It may still be the Church of England, but it is no longer the Church for England.
Open-border policies in the UK come with very real consequences—strain on hospitals and schools, rising pressure on social housing—disproportionately felt by poorer and working-class parishes. Violent crimes committed by recent migrants, including horrific rapes and murders across England, underscore that unqualified “welcome” has tragic human costs. Hospitality without limits is not charity; it is sentimentality with someone else’s consequences.
Unite The Kingdom navigates this tension differently. Its supporters include many from immigrant backgrounds who welcome the genuine asylum seeker, like themselves or their parents, but are not afraid to listen to the felt needs of local communities because its members are from these communities. They speak far less about race than the “anti-whiteness” racial justice experts accusing them of racism, and who racialise everything. For Robinson and UTK, the question is not whether England welcomes the stranger, but whether it is moral to promise welcome without the means to deliver safety, housing, or social cohesion. Theirs is moral realism, not racism, driving the agenda.
UTK believes our nation must protect its Christian heritage because it is fundamentally good and true. The Church of England is established for this task but can no longer face the scandal of particularity, so it advocates for a neutral secular space instead, where all can coexist equally. It sounds nice on paper, but it is not honest about how rights and beliefs between religions and cultures will clash rather than overlap, as history never fails to violently prove. The dilemmas of immigration are far more complex than the Church of England’s simplistic binary of inclusion versus exclusion.
I, for one, am not convinced revival is breaking out across the UK as some are claiming, but something is happening. There are many new believers, and new leaders are rising who do not look like the current crop. Thank God—something had to change before it was too late for Christianity in our nation. Is Tommy one of them? I do not know. He makes me very nervous. His brand is toxic, and millions of his followers are angry, with no religion other than football. A minority of them are as violent and racist as the bishops fear. I have seen it with my own eyes. Tommy once beat up a policeman who tried to stop him assaulting his girlfriend. I was a cop for ten years before my priesthood, so I do not particularly like him. Yes, he is not afraid to acknowledge the dangers of Islamic immigration into Europe, but to a fault. I have worked with many extremist Muslims, and they are indeed lethal. But I have also known many
well-integrated, morally upright Muslims too. If the Church of England is too soft on Islam as a religion, then Tommy is too harsh on Muslims as individuals.
If Tommy matures from activist to Christian leader, it seems like a very messy future to me. The clergy around him are a rag-tag bunch of patriotic outsiders with eclectic theological perspectives. I wonder how long it will take for their theological distinctives to catch up with them. Social conservatism alone will not hold them together for long. Its most competent theologians are priests, but some of the nonconformist pastors are already rallying against priesthood on the UTK YouTube channel. There are some serious Roman Catholics getting involved, but they will not stay long if the worship group keeps playing “Mary, Did You Know.” History shows that movements born in enthusiasm splinter into rival factions once they grow, and UTK will likely face the same fate.
Tommy’s success is not just his organisational skills, but that grievance scales easily. The trouble is that holiness does not. If his followers will not follow him into repentance as he hopes, they may outright reject the new religious Tommy Robinson. If so he may have to decide whether he still leads to the army that made him, or shepherd the remnant he now inspires. Only a thousand showed up to his carol service, that is not enough to warrant much concern from the Bishops and too few to expect a revival within his movement.
Despite these challenges, why should we expect God to choose the men religious leaders would choose? He appoints the least likely men in the New Testament to lead. So why not Tommy? He is not racist, he is highly intelligent, courageous, carries a lot of pain, and is now spiritually illuminated. Is he irredeemable to God? Of course not and why would a revival not be a messy revival anyway? Time will tell, and I might have to change my opinion of him.
For me, the trouble is not with Tommy Robinson or Unite The Kingdom; it is much closer to my own house—the double standards of the Church of England, which tolerates all kinds of doctrinal ambiguity while demanding unpopular political homogeneity.
And this is why it has reacted so strongly against a small, perfectly reasonable carol service. Most of the marketing for it was the reaction of the Bishops themselves getting the media so worked up everyone heard about it. I suspect that what the Church of England really fears is not Scylla of far-right extremism or the Charybdis of Christian nationalism, but the loss of narrative monopoly over which political instincts are permissible for Christians to proclaim. But whether I am right or wrong there will be another UTK carol service to get worked up about next year.
