On our 14th of October episode, we spent the better part of an hour on a phenomenon that ought to embarrass anyone who takes Christianity seriously.
A report from the think tank Theos, based on a survey of 1,765 British adults, found that the group whose views most closely resemble Christian nationalism — what the researchers call “identity integrationists” — makes up 11 percent of the population. Of that group, 81 percent identify as Christian. Only 13 percent attend church weekly. Only 19 percent believe Christian values require welcoming asylum seekers. They are hostile to immigration and hostile to Islam. They have adopted a cultural identity, not a spiritual practice.
What we are watching is not a revival of Christianity. It is the use of the religion as a tribal flag flown over a fortress.
A movement that invokes the name of Christ while rejecting his instruction to welcome the stranger is weaponising the faith, not defending it. The identity integrationists have inverted the Gospel and decided that the stranger is not sent, and therefore not to be received.
The harder question — and the one that matters most for our communities — is why some of our own people are drifting towards this movement.
The answer lies in a combination of imported grievances and geopolitical illiteracy. Reform UK has attracted members from Nigerian backgrounds, drawn by a politics that promises to defend “Christian heritage” while quietly defining who counts as Christian. The grievance politics of home, transplanted to British soil, finds a ready home there. And many Nigerian Christians now reflexively side with an Israeli government that has made common cause with the very European far-right figures who would happily see them removed from Britain. They are defending a political establishment whose ministers welcomed the man who founded the English Defence League.
This is not a failure of faith. It is a failure of analysis.
The deeper problem is trust. Nigeria is a low-trust society, and the reasons are historical and documented. The transatlantic slave trade, colonial indirect rule, the oil economy — each one taught a generation that the only reliable route to security was proximity to power. Trust extended to family and ethnic kin, and stopped there. When a Nigerian moves to the UK, that trust deficit travels with them. They arrive in a society whose institutions they have been taught to distrust, and they find a political movement that speaks the language of strength, order and Christian heritage. It feels familiar. It feels safe. And because no one has equipped them to read geopolitics, they do not see that the people offering protection are the same people who will eventually define them as the stranger to be removed.
Niemöller’s warning was written for a different context. But it applies with terrible precision to African Christians in Britain today. First they came for the Muslims. Then they came for the migrants. Then they came for us.
The answer is not to retreat into ethnic or religious tribalism. It is to build the habits of trust that make collective action possible. That means institutions with rules, not just leaders with followers. It means educating ourselves about the world as it actually is, not as our pastors or our politicians describe it.
The cross does not belong to people who use it to exclude. It was carried to these shores by our grandparents. We should say so — every time someone tries to weaponise it against us.
