The Church, The Far Right, and The Claim to Christianity

The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity

The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity

Edited by

Helen Paynter and Maria Power

© Editors and Contributors 2024

Published in 2024 by SCM Press

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Contents

Biographies

Foreword – David Gushee

Introduction – Helen Paynter

Part 1: From the Coal-face

1. A Norwegian Perspective

Steinar Ims

2. From Prejudice to Pride: Towards an Organized Anti-racist Community

Henrik Frykberg

3. Putting the Semantic Struggle into Practice: A Response to Steinar Ims and Henrik Frykberg

Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel

Part 2: The Interfaith Perspective

4. A Lebanese Perspective on Religion-inspired Political Extremism

Martin Accad

5. Beyond the Far Right: ‘Respectable Racism’ and British Muslims

Shenaz Bunglawala

6. Contextualizing the Claim to Christianity: A Response to Martin Accad and Shenaz Bunglawala

Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel

Part 3: Politics of the Far Right and the Church

7. Encountering and Countering the Far Right in the UK Today

James Crossley

8. ‘Stop waving crosses around and making them a symbol of hate’: Localized Christian Responses to the Populist Radical Right in the UK

William Allchorn

9. Probing Challenges and Chances in UK Politics: A Response to James Crossley and William Allchorn

Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel

Part 4: Christian Theologians Respond

10. The ‘Semantic Struggle’ against the Christian Far Right: Learning from the Good Samaritan

Nick Spencer

11. Challenging Far-right Claims to Christianity: A Northern Irish Perspective

Chris Wilson

12. Taking Theology Out of the Trap: A Response to Nick Spencer and Chris Wilson

Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel

Conclusion: The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity: Towards Some Recommendations

Helen Paynter

Afterword: Lived Theology

Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel

Biographies

Dr Martin Accad is a professor, researcher, author and activist in the fields of theology, interfaith relations, peacebuilding and political theology. He is on the faculty of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary and the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, as well as at the Fuller Graduate School of Intercultural Studies in California. He is now also founder and director of Action Research Associates, an institute that puts research at the service of change activism and dealing with the past for the purpose of dialogue, peacebuilding and reconciliation.

Dr William Allchorn is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Richmond American University in London, and is an expert on far-right extremist social movements in the UK, Western Europe and globally. His first book, Anti-Islamic Protest in the UK: Policy Responses to the Far Right, was published by Routledge in 2018.

Shenaz Bunglawala, MSc, is a writer, researcher and strategist specializing in policy, media and advocacy relating to British Muslim communities. Her most recent work has been published in I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security, by Manchester University Press in 2020, and Hidden Survivors: Uncovering the Mental Health Struggles of Young British Muslims in partnership with the University of East London in 2021. She is a Trustee of The Muslim Institute.

Dr James Crossley is Professor of Bible, Society and Politics at MF Oslo and Academic Director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements.

Revd Henrik Frykberg, MDiv, is Bishop’s Advisor on interfaith and integration for the Church of Sweden in the diocese of Gothenburg. He is a long-standing member of the Nordic Nonviolence Study Group (NORNONS), an organization dedicated to the promotion, development and discussions on non-violent actions.

The Revd Professor Dr David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is the elected past-president of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics. Dr Gushee is the author, co-author or editor of 28 books, including the bestsellers Kingdom Ethics and Changing Our Mind. His other most notable works are Still Christian, After Evangelicalism, Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, and the recent Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies. With his works read around the world, and an active lecturing schedule on several continents, he has global impact in the field of Christian ethics. A leader in the growing post-evangelical movement, he has also put feet to his faith in several activist campaigns. Gushee and his wife, Jeanie, live in Atlanta, Georgia. Learn more at https://davidpgushee.com.

Revd Steinar Ims, MDiv, works at the Council on Ecumenical and International Relations in the Church of Norway. He is the Senior Adviser on religious and life-stance relations and dialogue, and is currently board member from the Church of Norway in the Council for Religious and Life Stance Communities in Norway (STL).

Revd Dr Helen Paynter is a Baptist Minister with the Baptist Union of Great Britain, and Tutor in Biblical Studies at the Bristol Baptist College. She is the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Bible & Violence.

Dr Maria Power is a Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice, Blackfriars, University of Oxford. She has published widely on religion and the conflict in Northern Ireland, most recently Catholic Social Teaching and Theologies of Peace in Northern Ireland: Cardinal Cahal Daly and the Pursuit of the Peaceable Kingdom (2021) with her monograph on The Bible and the Conflict in Northern Ireland forthcoming in 2025.

Dr Ulrich Schmiedel is Professor of Global Christianities at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University. He has written widely on public and political theology.

Dr Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at the think tank Theos and the author of a number of books, most recently (with Hannah Waite), Playing God: Science, Religion and the Future of Humanity (SPCK, 2024).

Dr Hannah M. Strømmen is Senior Lecturer in Bible, Politics and Culture at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University. Her work focuses on receptions of the Bible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Chris Wilson, MA, is a theological educator working with refugee communities in Ethiopia and a part-time PhD student at the University of Aberdeen with Trinity College Bristol. His research interests focus on constructive theological responses to the challenges facing churches in Northern Ireland and other conflict-affected contexts.

Foreword

by David Gushee

It is distressing to learn that a Christian (or ‘Christianist’) far-right movement is brewing in many parts of Europe. Having watched it develop in the USA, especially over the nine years of our lamentable era of Donald Trump, I cannot wish anything similar on any other country. But, alas, this movement is transnational – or, to be more precise, even more transnational than I had known before reading the excellent contributions collected here, and the fine work to which they are all responding.

What should we call this movement – Christian or Christianist? The latter term, used by William Allchorn in Chapter 8 of this volume, is one that I myself have used in an article or two over these last years. It has the appeal of separating something like real, true or normative Christianity from a toxic variant deploying the rhetoric of Christianity but utterly alien to it.

But who has the authority to decide what is real, true or normative Christianity? Such a judgement is beyond the purview of sociologists and historians, not that they always remember this. No, considered in theological/biblical terms, this is a judgement that belongs ultimately to God, to whom all will render an account on the last day. But between now and then it is a judgement that belongs to the Church itself. That begs the question, what is the Church, and who speaks authoritatively for it?

Anyone who has studied the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, mentioned several times in this volume and highly relevant to its considerations, knows that these were precisely the questions he was asking, and answering with uncompromising radicalism, during the German Church struggle of the Nazi years. His answer was clear – the real, true only Evangelical Church of Germany was the Confessing Church, not the nazified Reich Church. For Bonhoeffer, the authority to make this declaration was established by the ecclesial synods of Barmen and Dahlem. Nazified Christianity was no Christianity at all, but a toxic, illegitimate variant. The way the true Church knew this was by testing Reich Church policies, practices and doctrinal developments against scripture, the historic Protestant confessions and the declarations of Barmen and Dahlem. This was not a matter of opinion or one on which toleration of conflicting ‘perspectives’ was possible.

That settles it. Right? Well, no. Bonhoeffer’s position, though vindicated by history, was (of course) rejected by many distinguished bishops, scholars and church leaders who ended up on the Reich Church side – and also by a neutral group occupying a middle position. Bonhoeffer’s view was not even universally shared in the Confessing Church, especially as that Church weakened in the late 1930s. It was not fully embraced by the ecumenical movement of which Bonhoeffer had been a participant for several years. Not even Bonhoeffer could overcome divisions at every level of Protestant church life in Germany, despite his valiant efforts.

Thus the question remains – when some part of the Church goes fascist, is this a Christian phenomenon, or a toxic, obviously sub-Christian variant better described as something like ‘Christianism’?

The chapters in this volume are motivated by concern about the rise of a populist, xenophobic, Islamophobic far right in Europe that, in some cases, claims Christian theological grounding and deploys the symbolic repertoire of Christianity. I share the writers’ concern related to the exact same development in the USA. In my capacity as a Christian pastor and ethicist whose vocation is to offer statements about real, true and normative Christianity, I have also regularly declared that what I have called authoritarian reactionary Christianity (others use different names) is a toxic sub-Christian variant that must be rejected, even anathematized, by Christian communities, leaders and people everywhere.

But I also recognize, as Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel do in their book The Claim to Christianity (2020) and repeatedly in their chapters here, that at a descriptive or phenomenological level many far-right Christians genuinely believe that their politics is well grounded in the authoritative sources of Christian faith, notably scripture. Even if some of us critics might view such claims as specious, these far-right Christians are not persuaded. This is a fact.

Moreover, Strømmen and Schmiedel, and some other authors here, recognize that just about every noxious claim made by the Christian far right has some kind of historical precedent. Thus the term ‘Crusader Christianity’, with its obvious historical rootage, is more than apropos. This means that as a matter both of fact and of history Christians cannot simply attribute far-right excesses to a perverse, bizarre Christianism. The sources lie deeper than that, most often within the Christian tradition itself.

The reader will be left to wrestle with such matters in the pages that follow. I suggest that the paradoxical tension between these two types of claims – theological-ethical-normative claims emerging from leaders and people within a living Church that is accountable to its Lord for its actions today, and descriptive/historical claims from scholars and journalists about what is going on in far-right circles claiming Christian grounding – must be maintained.

Meanwhile, I commend the authors for tackling a movement that, in my own normative view from within the Church, deeply discredits contemporary Christian witness and reverses crucial lessons learned over many centuries of Christian history. The problem is global. I urge Christians – and others – to close study of the chapters that follow.

Introduction

HELEN PAYNTER

In 2014, members of the British political organization Britain First invaded mosques across the UK with army-issued Bibles.¹ The intruders called it a ‘Christian crusade’. The following year, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) published a ‘Christian Manifesto’ in preparation for the 2015 general election, with the title ‘Valuing our Christian Heritage’. More recently, Britian First released a film of themselves invading so-called ‘migrant hotels’ to hassle the residents there.² The threat posed by such ideologies is very real; as a 2022 parliamentary research briefing shows, recorded hate crimes in England and Wales are increasing year on year.³ A recent poll by the group Hope Not Hate found that 45 per cent of Black and Asian minority ethnic Britons had either experienced or witnessed racial abuse over the last 12 months, and 40 per cent had experienced or witnessed racial violence (Hope Not Hate, 2021).

In 2008, the British National Party (BNP) membership list was leaked online, revealing that it included individuals listed as priests in the Church of England. The General Synod of the Church of England subsequently voted overwhelmingly in favour of banning clergy from being members of the BNP (Peace, 2016, p. 107). Nor is this the only bold stance that has been taken against far-right movements. In the lead-up to the European elections in 2009, then Archbishops Rowan Williams and John Sentamu advised people against voting for the BNP: ‘Christians have been deeply disturbed by the conscious adoption by the BNP of the language of our faith … to foster fear.’⁴ The BNP responded to the critiques with a poster featuring a picture of Jesus, citing John 15.20, KJV: ‘If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you’ (Peace, 2016, p. 107).

However, in recent years less public opposition has been offered to hard-right rhetoric from official church sources. In the meantime, far-right incidents continue to increase (Hope Not Hate, 2023).

Sadly, this trend is not isolated to the UK. In fact, it is far more developed among a number of our near neighbours. For example, at the time of writing, the Netherlands has just held a general election where the anti-Islam, anti-EU populist politician Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid) have commanded more votes than any other party.⁵ In Hungary, the Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has built a platform upon repelling the threat from an amoral, rootless cosmopolitan elite, which poses an existential threat to Christian Europe, particularly through the movement of peoples. In his own (translated) words:

Europe and Hungary stand at the epicentre of a civilizational struggle. We are confronted with a mass population movement which is an imminent danger to the order and way of life that we have known throughout our lives up until now … Europe is now under invasion.⁶

Hungarians are an endangered species … I think there are many people who would like to see the end of Christian Europe, and they believe that if they replace its cultural subsoil, if they bring in millions of people from new ethnic groups which are not rooted in Christian culture, then they will transform Europe according to their conception, and this will make the continent a better place. We utterly reject this.⁷

Under Orbán’s government, Hungary has experienced a substantial and concerning wind-back in its democratic freedoms (Gushee, 2023, p. 139).

An equally concerning rise in hard-right politics is also clearly visible if we turn our attention to the West rather than the East. The invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January 2020 was the violent expression of a movement with deep historical roots in racism, especially in the American South. Under Donald Trump, attitudes that had been semi-concealed were brought into the open and given full expression, centring around Making America Great Again, building a wall to keep out migrants from Latin America, conspiracism, white supremacism and gun rights. This movement has been enthusiastically embraced by white American evangelicals, who have bought into the narrative of American exceptionalism (America as God’s chosen nation); the restoration of ‘biblical values’ by revoking LGBTQ rights and restricting or banning abortion; and gun ownership as a Christian duty (Vegter and Kelley, 2020). (It should be noted that the self-identification as ‘evangelical’ is starting to become more of a political designator than a religious one (Gorski and Perry, 2022, p. 107)).

While hard-right expressions in the UK have not currently reached the level seen in the USA and some other parts of Europe, their evident potential to provoke violence and destabilize democracy should evoke deep concern. And since, as we will discuss below, certain elements of these ideologies appear to invoke certain Christian theological themes, this should exercise the Church.

The Nature of the Hard Right

So far we have used the term ‘hard right’ without doing more than gesture at its precise meaning. But before we move on, it might be helpful to add some content to the term.

Contributors to this book variously use the terms ‘far right’, ‘hard right’, ‘radical right’ and perhaps ‘extreme right’. Depending on their specific expertise in the area of political theory, these may or may not be used with high precision. In any case, there is no consensus on the definitions of these terms. For this reason we consider this imprecision to be a feature rather than a flaw, particularly since – as we shall discuss shortly – the book is concerned less with the specifics of the manifestation of hard-right ideology, but rather the Church’s resistance to it. None the less, some working definitions are in order here, if only to witness to the breadth of hard-right expressions under consideration.

In his book The Far Right Today, Cas Mudde defines the far right as ‘those on the right who are anti-system, defined here as hostile to liberal democracy’ (Mudde, 2019, p. 7). He then divides that into two sub-groups. The extreme right ‘rejects the essence of democracy, that is popular sovereignty and majority rule’ (p. 7). Classic examples of the extreme right include Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. By contrast, the radical right ‘accepts the essence of democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers’ (p. 7, emphasis original). This might be represented as in Figure 1.

It will readily be seen that hard-right ideologies do not occupy a single point on the political spectrum. In the UK, some groups, such as UKIP, position themselves with varying degrees of plausibility as ‘mainstream’ organizations. To quote Cas Mudde again:

Where does Britain’s Conservative Party stop and the United Kingdom Independence Party or Brexit Party begin? … The mainstreaming of the far right – in terms of ideology, politics, and organization – that characterizes the fourth wave [of radical right politics] has made the borders between the racial right and the mainstream right … more and more difficult to establish. (Mudde, 2019, p. 23)

Mudde’s words here were written before Boris Johnson (PM, July 2019–September 2022) and Liz Truss (PM, 6 September–20 October 2022) took the UK Conservative Party on a firmly hard-right, populist swerve. Since then a number of senior members of the Conservative government publicly expressed views that would formerly have been considered unacceptable in mainstream politics. This is an example of the shift of the ‘Overton window’, an idea coined by the US policy analyst Joseph Overton to describe the ways that a society’s acceptance of certain ideas may shift over time.⁸ The ‘window’ reflects which elements of public policy are imaginable, possible, desirable and accepted; elements that lie outside the window are unthinkable and unacceptable.⁹

Recent examples of the shift of the Overton window in the UK include, but are not limited to: Boris Johnson’s description of women wearing hijabs as ‘letterboxes’, and Suella Braverman’s use of language typical of antisemitic conspiracy theories.¹⁰ Such speech appeals to the more extreme individuals in or beyond the Conservative Party, yet also carries plausible deniability if an accusation of racism is made. This type of ‘softer’ presentation of hard-right politics is described in a briefing paper presented to the UK government by the research and campaign group Hope Not Hate:

When talking about the mainstreaming of the far right it is less a matter of traditional far-right politics, namely crude racism, anti-immigrant racism, antisemitism and vitriolic homophobia having become acceptable in British society; in fact, while there are still problems with these issues, they remain, for the most part, beyond the pale for the majority of people. The more extreme elements of the British far right that still campaign around these issues have no electoral success at all and attract tiny numbers. The elements of the far right currently growing and attracting supporters are those individuals and groups … that consciously eschew this sort of extremism and even claim to oppose it. Those who publicly limit their racism to Muslims, bemoan the supposed suppression of their rights and freedoms and claim to represent the oppressed ‘people’ versus a corrupt ‘elite’ echo the views of much larger sections of the British public and thus have found success in attracting larger numbers than at any time since the 1930s. (Mulhall, 2019)

Mudde’s classification above was based upon the extent to which each movement is a threat to democracy, which is related to but not coterminous with the content of its ideology. It is helpful to hold alongside this a definition more focused upon that content. Here I quote from James Crossley’s Chapter 7 in this volume:

I define ‘far right’ in general, popularly understood terms to cover known nationalist, anti-leftist, and anti-liberal movements ranging from those whose object of hate is typically Muslims and Islam (e.g. English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, For Britain) to those who are more fascistic and overtly racist (e.g. Patriotic Alternative, National Action, British National Party).

It will be clear by now that people with hard-right opinions are far from homogeneous. (And we have not even begun to