{"id":85939,"date":"2025-09-16T08:28:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T07:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=85939"},"modified":"2025-09-16T08:28:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T07:28:40","slug":"danny-kruger-christian-nationalism-and-the-threat-from-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/09\/16\/danny-kruger-christian-nationalism-and-the-threat-from-reform\/","title":{"rendered":"Danny Kruger, Christian nationalism and the threat from Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a long post. For those with limited time, I argue that Danny Kruger\u2019s defection to Reform comes with a manifesto for Christian nationalism attached.<\/p>\n

He claims England (and I stress, England) was consciously founded as a Christian nation, that secularism has failed, and that \u201cwoke\u201d must be destroyed.<\/p>\n

This is not history but myth-making designed to pit Christians against others and distract from economic collapse with culture wars.<\/p>\n

The agenda is clear: re-Christianise public life, rewrite education, roll back equality.<\/p>\n

The real choice we face is not between Christian nationalism and a \u201cgodless desert,\u201d but between exclusionary myths and a politics of pluralism, equality, and care.<\/p>\n

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Background<\/strong><\/p>\n

Danny Kruger MP quit the Tory frontbench yesterday and joined Reform<\/a>, where he has been in charge of preparing the party for government. He has not, of course, offered himself for re-election by his constituents wearing his new party colours.<\/p>\n

Kruger's politics<\/strong><\/p>\n

As John Crace, the Guardian political sketch writer, might have put it, Danny Kruger has only a vague relationship with reality, or even politics in the UK. Like most of the Reform leadership, he is also, of course, the product of an elite private school in the UK, so in touch with the people of his country is that party. But his true political agenda has to be understood, and a speech he made in parliament<\/a> in July, to an almost empty chamber, indicated just how bizarre his thinking is. I share the part on his philosophy here with no apologies for the length of the quotation:<\/p>\n

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There is a great hunger in society for a better way of living, and I want to use this opportunity to explain what that better way is and why we here in England have the means to follow it.<\/p>\n

The Jewish and Christian God is a God of nations. He is interested in people as individuals, but also as groups\u2014as communities not only of kinship but of common worship, with a common God. Uniquely among the nations of the world, this nation\u2014England, from which the United Kingdom grew\u2014was founded and created consciously on the basis of the Bible and the story of the Hebrew people. In that sense, England is the oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the west. The story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people to make the institutions and culture that have been uniquely stable and successful.<\/p>\n

The western model was forged and refined in England over a thousand years from the 9th to the 19th centuries. What is that model? It is simply this: that power should arrange itself for the benefit of all the people under it, and specifically for the poorest and weakest; that the law is there to protect the ordinary person against the abuse of power; and that every individual has equal dignity and freedom, including, crucially, the freedom of conscience, religion and belief, which makes space for other religions under the Christian shield\u2014a secular space. Indeed, the idea of a secular space is a Christian concept that is meaningful only in a Christian world. These are ideas that only make sense if one accepts that we have some intrinsic value\u2014a value that is given to us and is not of our own making or invention.<\/p>\n

Throughout the long years from the time of Alfred to the time of Victoria, it was assumed that a nation was a community of common worship and that our community \u2014this country\u2014worshipped the Christian God. Then, in the 20th century, another idea arose: that it was possible for a country to be neutral about God; that the public square was empty of any metaphysics; and that the route to freedom lay through the desert of materialism and individual reason\u2014\u201cno hell below us, above us only sky\u201d. That idea was wrong. The horrors of the 20th century attest to that, not least in the west, where we escaped totalitarianism but have suffered our own catastrophes of social breakdown, social injustice, loneliness and emptiness on a chronic scale.<\/p>\n

Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into. In abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected, and one is Islam. In a debate yesterday, I said how much I find myself in agreement with Muslim colleagues in Parliament on moral and social matters. But as I have been saying, this is a Christian country\u2014if it is a country at all\u2014and I cannot be indifferent to the extent of the growth of Islam in recent decades.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It is the other religion that worries me even more. This other religion is a hybrid of old and new ideas, and it does not have a proper name. I do not think that \u201cwoke\u201d does justice to its seriousness. It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations. It is explicitly and most passionately hostile to Christianity as the wellspring of the west. That religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life\u2014from schools and universities, and from businesses and public services. It needs to be sent back to the fringes of eccentricity, like the modern druids who invest Stonehenge in my constituency with a theology that is seen as mad but harmless because its followers are so few and no one serious takes them seriously.<\/p>\n

We can no longer pretend, as people did in the 20th century, that we can be neutral or indifferent to God or to the public square being a godless desert. The fact is that the strong gods are back, and we have to choose which god to worship. I suggest we worship the God who came in the weakest form, Jesus Christ. This God is a jealous god\u2014it is him or nothing\u2014and we have to own our Christian story, or repudiate it. Not to own it is to repudiate it, and to repudiate Christianity is not only to sever ourselves from our past, but to cut off the source of all the things we value now and that we need in the future, such as freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and human rights.<\/p>\n

Without the Christian God, in whose teaching these things have their source, these are inventions\u2014mere non-existent aspirations. To worship human rights is to worship fairies, but if we own our story and remember the real sources of our civilisation, we can have these things and make them real\u2014real freedom and tolerance and dignity, a culture of love and, crucially, a culture of humanity. We are in the age of the machine, and a great choice confronts us: whether to make machines in the image of fallen man, bent on exploitation and domination with mankind in its sights, or to make them what they properly are, the servants of mankind able to help us make a better world.<\/p>\n

To conclude, a wind is blowing, a storm is coming and when it hits we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand, but we have been here before. The reformers of the 11th and the 16th centuries, the\u00a0Puritans in the 17th century, the Evangelicals in the 19th century all brought this country back from the edge\u2014from idolatry, error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about\u2014and they each in their generation restored this country to itself.<\/p>\n

A new restoration is needed now, with a revival of the faith, a recovery of a Christian politics and a re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England all those centuries ago. This is a mission for the Church under its next leader, whoever that is; it is a mission for this place\u2014the old chapel that became the wellspring of western democracy\u2014and for us, its Members; and it is a mission for our whole country. It is the route to a prosperous modernity founded on respect for human dignity, responsibility for the created world and the worship of God.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me be blunt about what this is: it is a manifesto for Christian nationalism in England.<\/p>\n

Kruger claimed that England \u2014 not Britain as a whole, but specifically England \u2014 was consciously founded as a Christian nation.<\/p>\n

He went further and said that Christianity was not just one faith among others, but the very foundation of our laws, our freedoms, and our rights. From Alfred to Victoria, so his story went, this country flourished only because it worshipped the Christian God. The 20th century\u2019s great mistake, in Kruger's view, was to imagine that a nation could be neutral about God. Secularism, he claimed, had led only to emptiness, breakdown, loneliness, and moral decline.<\/p>\n

I suggest that this framing is no accident. It is a very obvious and deliberate attempt to recast national identity in religious terms. What Kruger presented as history was, in fact, myth-making. His tale was a profoundly sanitised account of a thousand years of English life, which carefully ignored both the brutality of religious conflict and the fact that modern rights had to be fought for, most often against the established church and its entrenched support for privilege, which in turn had required many of Christian faith to look elsewhere to worship.<\/p>\n

Kruger's view of the present is no more appealing. With secularism supposedly collapsing, the \u201cstrong gods\u201d were returning. Islam, he acknowledged, is growing, although under what he called a \u201cChristian shield.\u201d But the real enemy, in Kruger's opinion, is a hybrid of paganism, heresy, and modernism; what he inevitably derided as \u201cwoke.\u201d This, he claimed, must be destroyed and be driven out of schools, universities, businesses, and our public services until it is banished to the margins of eccentricity. Concern for others is, it would seem, in Kruger's opinion, the greatest threat to our society, because that is what woke means: it is an awareness of inequality and the resulting injustice flowing from it.<\/p>\n

Kruger's language is not, then, the language of tolerance or democracy. It is entirely about the rhetoric of exclusion. It pits Christians against non-Christians, England against the other nations of the UK, and the faithful against the secular majority. And it presents liberalism and pluralism as dangers, not achievements.<\/p>\n

Kruger's political intention is obvious. Rather than addressing the economic failures of recent governments, which he supported, he is seeking to shift the battlefield to culture and identity instead, where the far-right thinks they can mobilise fear and resentment. This is straight out of the Farage\/Reform\/Fascist playbook: distract from economic collapse with a culture war framed as an existential struggle.<\/p>\n

And if we take the words seriously, the policy implications are stark. Kruger seeks:<\/p>\n