Top Tweets for #Ge2017

🚨 “Judeo-Christian Values” as a Political Dog Whistle. Back in 2016, Matt Goodwin merely analysed the radical right’s shift to a “Judeo-Christian defence narrative”. Most people ignored him. Today, he endorses, amplifies, and monetises it. He went native, and radicalised himself. On both sides of the Atlantic, well-funded international movements like the NatCons and ARC (the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the initiative of billionaire Evangelical Christian owner of Reform UK’s propaganda channel, GB News, Paul Marshall) have, for several years, been promoting Christian, or sometimes “Judeo-Christian”, values. Reform UK’s dangerous Senior Policy Adviser, James Orr, the theologian friend of JD Vance, and now joined in Reform by the increasingly extreme Old Etonian Evangelical Christian Danny Kruger, has been a prime mover in these groups. They promote the natalist social conservatism of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the writings of Jordan Peterson (who is the face of Marshall’s ARC). For the likes of Kruger and Orr, this is bigger than immigration. It’s a broader crusade: a true Culture War between Christian values and the new “religion” of liberal, secular individualism, which they blame for the atomisation of society, falling birth rates, the use of abortion, the pornification of sex, and the erosion of Britain’s cultural values and social glue. Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson, Suella Braverman, Miriam Cates, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, as well as Douglas Murray, have all publicly invoked “Judeo-Christian” values or heritage, or “Christian heritage/values”, in political, cultural, or identity-related contexts. Infamously in his 2023 NatCon speech, Murray casually used “mucked up twice in a century” to describe Germany's actions in the two World Wars, trivialising the scale and deliberate horror of the Holocaust and Nazi genocide, framing them as mere blunders or mistakes rather than ideologically driven atrocities that killed millions. Farage has, since at least 2014, frequently used “Judeo-Christian values” or “Judeo-Christian principles” in everything from interviews with Sean Hannity on Fox News (2014), to CPAC conferences in the US (2022 and 2023), to tweets just days ago in light of opposition to public Muslim prayers in the UK. In 2025, Farage told Jordan Peterson: “What underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture.” One of the least outwardly Christian people in Britain, Reform UK MP Lee Anderson, aligns with and echoes the party’s emphasis on “Judeo-Christian heritage” and the promotion of Christianity. He recently agreed with Farage that the UK should go further in celebrating its “Judeo-Christian heritage”, stating that people feel “threatened” by changes and that the country should affirm its Christian identity. Despite her non-Christian Buddhist affiliations, Reform UK MP Suella Braverman (former Home Secretary) frequently and explicitly references “Christian values”, saying: “Reform is the last chance to reclaim and reassert our country’s Christian heritage.” Another Evangelical Christian and former Tory MP, GB News presenter Miriam Cates, bases her views on a “Judeo-Christian worldview”. She has said: “My beliefs are based on a Judeo-Christian worldview” and “I believe in the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilisation.” Cates has even gone so far as to say: “Liberal individualism has proven to be completely powerless to resist the cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.” Yet another former Tory MP, also a GB News presenter and, like Danny Kruger, an Old Etonian, Jacob Rees-Mogg has, since 2013, emphasised a “muscular defence” of Judeo-Christian heritage. This is all deeply concerning. In Britain, we have a separation of church and state, balanced with legal protection of all faiths, for good reason: to ensure equality among citizens of diverse beliefs, prevent undue religious influence on democratic decisions, avoid favouritism toward one faith in a multicultural society, and safeguard genuine freedom of religion or belief for everyone without coercion, discrimination, or the risk of state-backed dogma overriding rational governance. This arrangement has evolved historically to reflect a pluralistic democratic nation where no single religion dominates public life, promoting inclusivity, tolerance, and protection against the historical dangers of religious persecution or sectarian conflict that once plagued Europe. As Robert Shrimsley, UK chief political commentator and executive editor of the Financial Times, said in February: “The question is how far an ambitious political party dares to allow overt religiosity into its policymaking in an increasingly secular society. While Reform frets about immigration and Islam, the true threat to Christianity in Britain is atheism. Churches would, in fact, be even emptier but for the influx of African evangelical Christians.” British women should be particularly concerned. We have all seen what has happened in the US in recent years, and it is increasingly obvious that Reform UK is far more closely aligned with, and supported by, #MAGA than with our European neighbours. Reform and GB News increasingly look like a vehicle for pushing a regressive, patriarchal agenda to return women to traditional domestic roles, including moves to reopen settled social policies, notably abortion. Farage himself has already said the current limit of 24 weeks is “ludicrous”, though it would remain a free-vote issue. Reform would deny it seeks to restore old gender roles, but in his book, Kruger writes disapprovingly of universities coaxing school-leavers away from their families to be schooled in liberal values and “cleansed of their provincial mores”. As Shrimsley warns, the temptation is not to take all this sufficiently seriously, to believe that liberal secularism and understated Christianity will keep a lid on efforts to unwind years of modernity, liberalism, progress, and individualism; to keep saying “the UK is not the US”. But in the UK’s current fragmented electoral politics, a third of voters could easily be enough to win the next general election: in #GE2024, Labour won a landslide parliamentary majority with the support of just 20% of the total registered electorate. Reform UK have been polling in the mid-to-high 20s for several months. Britain’s political evangelicals have found a credible vehicle from which to push Christian ideas. In a country where fewer than half of the population identify as Christian, and fewer than 5% of citizens attend church weekly, the radical right has been consistently underestimated in Britain and the West. In my article below, I give a short history of the phrase “Judeo-Christian”.