Social attitudes data highlights how ‘Christian Nationalism’ is an American import

New research from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) comparing the UK to the US has shown a broad liberal consensus in the UK on issues relating to reproductive rights and relationships that cuts across religious and non-religious people. Humanists UK says that this highlights the artificial nature of recent attempts to import the ‘Christian Nationalism’ movement, along with US ‘culture war’ media debates, to a more socially liberal UK society.

In recent months, the UK has seen several unusual high-profile incidents where Christan Nationalist slogans, messages, and intimidation tactics have been used to call for the removal of women’s and LGBT+ rights.  A far-right rally drew more than 100,000 people in London where Christian preachers ripped up a flag that said ‘Secular Humanism’ (the American term for ‘humanism’) which was used to invoke a bogeyman responsible for all the supposed ills of society – by which they meant liberal social attitudes, LGBT rights, abortion rights, ‘intellectualism’, and multiculturalism. Others displayed Christian Nationalist signs and flags and chanted Christian Nationalist slogans. Only a few weeks later, a religious mob calling themselves the ‘King’s Army’ organised an intimidating march in military formation through London’s Soho – the heart of London’s LGBT+ community – shouting homophobic and Christian Nationalist slogans to passersby.

What the data shows

NatCen’s report, UK and US attitudes: Two sides of the same coin?, compares attitudes in the UK and US on a range of social issues including immigration, racial equality, same-sex marriage, abortion, and the rights of transgender people. To do so, NatCen replicated in the UK a study conducted in the US before the 2024 election.

The results show that most people in the UK see that legal same-sex marriage (59%) and more people feeling comfortable identifying as gay, lesbian or bisexual than in the past (60%) are ‘good for society’, compared to only a third in America (34% and 30% respectively). NatCen suggests that this is likely due to sex-sex marriage being a ‘settled’ matter in the UK.

Further, there is a much greater difference in attitudes towards abortion and contraception between the religious and the non-religious in the US than there is in the UK. Attitudes of the non-religious in both the UK and the US are similar with 86% on non-religious Brits and 77% non-religious Americans agreeing that ‘contraception being widely available is very good for society’, and 92% of non-religious Brits and 86% of non-religious Americans saying that ‘abortion should be legal in all or most cases’. However, religious people in the UK are far more likely to support access to contraception and legal abortions than their American counterparts. Most religious people in the UK support wide availability of contraception (70%) and abortion (78%), whereas support is lower among religious people in the US (52% and 53% respectively). As with same-sex marriage, NatCen suggests that access to abortion and contraception are ‘settled’ matters in the UK. 

The areas where the UK bucked the trend of being more liberal than the US were in relation to immigration and the rights of transgender people. NatCen speculates that this may be due to the high-profile politicisation and media interest in trans people’s rights in the UK, and the fact that the UK remains an overwhelmingly white society where fewer people have regular contact with people of different ethnic groups and other nationalities compared to the US, alongside an established narrative of the US being a ‘Nation of Immigrants’.

Responding  to the report, Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson said:

‘NatCen’s new report shows that there is a liberal consensus in the UK on most major social issues, from abortion rights to same-sex marriage, that cuts right across the religious and non-religious sections of society. The data also underlines that while some groups and individuals are now actively involved in trying to import an aggressive conservative “Christian Nationalism” into our politics, their agenda doesn’t have much of an organic foothold in the UK.’