You can’t side with one form of religious extremism to protect yourself from another

In the face of concerns about rising Christian Nationalism in the UK, the retort from some quarters has been to suggest that it is at least a better option than Islamic fundamentalism. This implies a false binary choice: that we must accept one form of religious extremism in order to guard against another. In truth, both are dangers to a democratic, open, and humane society.

Figures like Tommy Robinson have sought to exploit this dynamic. They present themselves as Christian martyrs and make claims that present Christian Nationalism is the only real ‘defence’ or bulwark against Islamist extremism. But this is a distortion. Both Christian nationalism and Islamism are minority movements in a majority non-religious country. Both draw strength from grievance, alienation, and resentment. They attract largely disaffected men who find in rigid, exclusivist traditions a way to salvage self-worth, and who now seek to impose those values on everyone else.

Far from cancelling each other out, Christian Nationalism and Islamist extremism mirror one another. Each defines itself against the other, constructing an enemy image that fuels its sense of purpose. Islamist extremists denounce Western ‘decadence’, by which they often mean LGBT+ rights, women’s reproductive freedoms, divorce, and freedom of expression in clothing and other forms. Christian Nationalists oppose many of these same things, but also point to the ‘Islamic threat’ as a reason for their support. This often involves calls to deport all Muslims or otherwise say that Muslims as a whole share the political beliefs and opinions of the extremists among them. Each uses the other as proof of its own necessity. To think that either can protect us from the other is to misunderstand how these movements actually operate: they feed one another, each making the other stronger.

That does not mean the threats are identical. Islamists have been responsible for some of the deadliest acts of terror in Britain’s recent history, including the London bombings of 2005 and the Manchester Arena attack in 2017. The threat of radicalisation and violence remains an ongoing challenge and we must guard against creeping attempts to silence speech in the form of de facto blasphemy codes and well-meaning but ultimately socially harmful policies which create a chilling effect around speech. Islamism is, however, unlikely to ever come to political power in the UK any time soon.

Christian Nationalism in the UK has not produced violence on anywhere near the same scale – although white nationalist terror and incidents of violence, along with wider racially and religiously motivated hate crime in society, are growing problems in the UK. Instead, the most pressing danger with Christian Nationalism lies in its proximity to power. With religion still heavily embedded in our politics, education system, and public institutions, the conditions exist for Christian Nationalist ideas to exert influence through more insidious means. We need only look to the United States, where Christian Nationalism has curtailed reproductive rights and undermined secular governance, to see how such influence can reshape society. 

In this sense, it is no different to the danger that Islamism plays in modern Turkish politics, or Hindu Nationalism in Indian politics. In both those places, nationalist movements have gathered up people from the ethnic majority to rail against the invisible hand of secularism, which they portray as overly sympathetic towards unpopular minorities (in India, this principally refers to Muslim Indians) or unpatriotic ideologies (in Turkey, this is more likely to manifest in claims that a journalist or human rights activist is un-Islamic or seditious). 

So while Islamist extremism is more likely to erupt in immediate violence, Christian Nationalism has the potential to corrode our institutions from within. Many Christian Nationalists adhere to a ‘Seven Mountains Mandate’ ideology which dictates that Christians should, by any means, seize control of the media, entertainment, business, education, political, and religious life of the country. 

Such an endpoint was imagined by Margaret Atwood in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale and there are some to whom the imagined theocracy of that novel is appealing.

Both Christian supremacism and Islamic supremacism are threats to equality, democracy, and freedom of thought, expression, and choice. Both replace the values of an open society with narrow dogma.

Yet we do not face a binary choice. Society must reject the idea that to save ourselves from one group of angry religious men, we should run into the arms of another. There is another path: a society grounded in universal human rights, where people’s freedoms are protected by a separation of religion and the state (known as secularism), where everyone has the freedom to to live according to their own values without coercion so long as, and to the extent that, this does not interfere with the rights and freedoms of others. We can safeguard democracy not by privileging one religion over another, but by ensuring that no religion has privileged access to power.

People of goodwill must all come together against this tribalism. Whether humanists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, or simply anyone who accepts that the fairest society is one where everyone is treated equally. One where everyone has the freedom to think and choose and believe what they want, and where everyone is protected from harm by a democratic culture and legally protected human rights. Whether you believe in gods or not, we have more that unites us than divides us. As our patron Bertrand Russell once put it, when contemplating the escalation of violence between nation states in the 20th century: ‘Remember your humanity, and forget the rest!’