Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are increasingly espousing Christian ‘values’, and a wealthy US legal group is becoming influential – this could have dire consequences
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arlier this year, not long after Tommy Robinson embraced evangelical Christianity while in prison, the then Conservative MP Danny Kruger spoke in parliament about the need for a restoration of Britain through the “recovery of a Christian politics”. Less than two months later, Kruger joined Reform, and shortly after that, James Orr, a vociferously conservative theologian who has been described as JD Vance’s “English philosopher king”, was appointed as one of Reform’s senior advisers. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, now frequently invokes the need for a return to “Judeo-Christian” values.
The British right is increasingly invoking the Christian tradition: the question is what it hopes to gain from doing so.
Until recently, there were no obvious British analogues to political figures on the US right such as Vance, the Catholic-convert for whom religion plays a foundational political role. With Orr and Kruger, both of whom converted to conservative evangelical Christianity as adults and attend church regularly, we have some contenders. Kruger has said he is in agreement with Vance that to solve the “plight of the west” there needs to be a “substantial revival” of “governance and culture”; he believes this can be achieved through a return to Christianity.
