Thames Valley Police have (through some legal device or other) cancelled an Oxford Union Debate, promoted by the Union’s female Muslim president, on whether Islam is compatible with Western civilization. She had invited Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox and Rev Calvin Robinson, and reportedly even Jacob Rees-Mogg, to speak.
So far so Marxist Critical Theory – our captured institutions, including the police, follow Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School in espousing “repressive tolerance,” whereby tolerance is only applied to things progressive, and anything else is repressed mercilessly. The idea is that eliminating opposition will usher in the post-political socialist utopia, where all dwell together idly in sweet agreement. The inevitable result, in actuality, is a powder-keg of suppressed resentment on the part of all not actually on board with the opinion du jour. Only totalitarian repression can control that – so much for utopia.
It is not hard to see the same ideology at work in the joint plea by the Bishop of Oxford and a Muslim Imam, before Thames Valley Police issued their edict, that the event be cancelled. In their case, it was simply the (assumed without hearing) racist views of these speakers that conjured the censorious spirits (in the name of both Christ’s and Muhammad’s long battle against Islamophobia). In the case of the police, the excuse was more the danger of violence, which would without doubt only have come from an Antifa and Islamist mob, because the way Critical Theory advocates settling all differences is by shouting (or cudgelling) down views they might not like to hear, if only they ever heard them. Rational discussion is, of course, itself an oppressive product of “whiteness.” In this light the Oxford Union itself is on borrowed time.
Now, I’m not concerned about the “Islamophobic” issue here, nor even the incontrovertible authoritarianism of the anti-authoritarian progressives. Instead, I’d like to discuss the way that even Evangelical church leaders have similarly silenced discussion of the much broader question of Christian patriotism. The ethics of progressivism have infected even those Christians who reject it. As we shall see, the curse of self-censorship of Christians generated by blanket condemnation of the label “Christian Nationalism” actually prevents the kind of clarifying discussion that would weaken false teaching, and consolidate genuinely biblical truth.
I say this because I’ve been having my own thinking refined on this, partly by an excellent 2025 book by Joseph Boot called Think Christianly, which lays down the theological groundwork and many of the issues very effectively. The biblical teaching on truth and untruth is not, as we once knew, about shouting down or cancelling those who (may) disagree with you, but:
The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. (Proverbs 18:17)
And
Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Boot’s take is to distinguish Christian Patriotism (which includes, in his view, the realisation that only one ideology can ever govern a nation, and that ours must become Christian again, or necessarily become Islamic or Neo-Marxist) from “unbiblical” Christian Nationalism. The latter he largely critiques as Ethno-nationalism. The fact that some might self-identify as Christian Nationalists but reject Ethno-nationalism tells you that there are semantic issues involved, as well as substantive differences. The latter cry out for biblical clarification, and the former for some agreed definitions. Neither of these can result from censoring discussion.
Informal censorship there certainly is. There is no doubt, if you listen to the man’s conversation now and from the very start of his career, that Tommy Robinson is no Ethno-nationalist, let alone a racist. Even his anti-Islamism is primarily about dealing with Islamist crimes against humanity (and young girls), and, secondarily, the claim that our national governance should be entirely Christian. This makes him, in philosopher Joseph Boot’s parlance, a thoroughly biblical Christian Patriot.
But to many (or most?) Evangelicals, the branding of Robinson (by Neo-Marxists) as a Far-Right racist tarnishes the whole UTK movement – which is predominantly, to all appearances, about using your vote Christianly as a Patriot – as something to be shunned, not engaged by dialogue. As I have said before, in my view this avoidance is preventing the established churches from noticing a grass-roots working class gospel revival, and it’s mainly the fault of leaders too ready to imbibe progressive propaganda.
There is, in fact, a wide range of possible Christian or Pseudo-christian views on this topic, but because discussion is discouraged, most Christians are uninformed about them, and therefore all the more susceptible to being seduced by non-biblical errors.
At one end Ethno-nationalism takes the view that one can only be considered truly English if one’s ancestors grew up in this nation, and adopt its ethos and culture. But on the one hand, it is well-nigh impossible to agree to what degree this ancestry must comply. Am I non-English because I am 3/16 Irish? Does my wife’s 17th century Huguenot ancestry disqualify her? Or my son-in-law’s reputed black ancestor in the distant past? Is Norman invader ancestry a no-no?
Then again, is the mistake of having a foreign ancestor simply a matter of acceptance and useful definitions like “adopted English,” or would it mean a yellow star on your passport, or expulsion of anyone who cannot, like Nehemiah’s Levites, prove their British purity? The latter is Neo-Nazi, and is incompatible with even Mosaic Law. Whereas the first can be simply informative (my Irish roots remain a source of pride for me), or certainly justifiably prescriptive: there might be a case for restricting the right to stand for Parliament, for example, for a generation or three after immigration.
At this Ethno-nationalist end of things, there are also distinctively religious doctrines needing to be discussed and understood. A range of Pentecostal revivalist offshoots, including the New Apostolic Reformation, have espoused forms of “dominionism” such as the “Seven Mountain Mandate.” These have their origins in frankly racist streams like the Ku Klux Klan and British Israelism.
People coming into sound Evangelical churches may have imbibed this teaching in other churches, and there was indeed briefly a British Israelist family in my own, just a few years ago. The doctrines can sound plausible if a persuasive pastor has often talked about the curse on Ham being black skin, or about (white) Britain or the US being specially appointed by dint of being descended from lost tribes of Israel. Such misapprehensions can only be exposed, or corrected, if they are discussed openly in the churches.
At the other extreme Christians, adopting the arguments of the Neo-Marxists, have espoused open borders and even the dissolution of the nation state, misusing the New Testament teaching that all are now one in Jesus Christ. They misuse it firstly because unity in Christ is not about jihadists or Hindus, and secondly because in Christ the differences between Jew and gentile, men and women, slave and free, were not abolished, but subordinated to a higher unity. The discussion here needs to include some hard work on the ideological realities of nations, not to mention that the Christian mandate takes on that of Adam to glorify God’s name in all the earth, and not to “grit our teeth till Christ returns.”
These last injunctions ought also to be discussed with those whose pietistic biases lead them to equate the Kingdom of God only with the Church, and to shun all political issues. In the first place, this withdrawal from public affairs (shared by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in fact) is not taught in Scripture. In the second, it is demonstrably self-destructive. Acquiescence in the Third Reich was acquiescence in Jewish genocide and a suicidal war. Acquiescence in the Bolshevik Revolution led to 70 years of atheist tyranny. Acquiescence in the Muslim expansion from the 7th century on lost most of the Christian world to forced conversion, abject dhimmitude or death, up to the present day.
Tut-tutting at those Christians with naughty nationalist views more or less guarantees such an outcome. This is what many church leaders are doing, so they need to be by-passed (or ideally, replaced) by those willing to do the hard work of managing a national Christian debate on the biblical responsibilities of a nation with a history like England’s (and Scotland’s, Ireland’s and Wales’s). This must be centred on the substance, not on terminological buzz-words (that’s the progressive game) like “nationalism,” which has the same semantic meaning as “patriotism,” but is definitionally more inclusive, as it allows all mankind to bless their nations, whereas “patriotism” only blesses my own.
Most of all, we must recognise that there is no neutral ground: this nation is not “Post-Christian” but “currently Neo-Marxist” or, to an alarming degree, “currently Islamising.” Let’s instead make it “currently recovering Christ.”