Why the BNP is inimical to the Gospel -May 9, 2006
By Giles Fraser

Over the past few months there has been growing evidence of a developing alliance between the British National party and fundamentalist Christians. Superficially, it is a marriage made in heaven (or should that be hell?) - both are rightwing extremists with a love of publicity and a hatred for progressive Britain.

What’s interesting is that their passionate liaison has ended in tears. It’s a failed love affair that will encourage those who fear the emergence in this country of the alliances between rightwing Christians and rightwing secularists that are commonly forged on the other side of the Atlantic

It all started amicably enough. “We are a secular political party,” said BNP spokesman Phil Edwards. “But people are worried at the political correctness of the Church of England and the Islamification of Britain.” In response to these twin evils, BNP members helped to set up the so-called “Christian Council of Britain”.

“The BNP were approached by a group of disaffected ladies and gentlemen who felt their traditional Christian views were not being represented by the liberal-left spokesmen in the Anglican church,” they explained.

Following this conversion experience, the BNP even found someone with ‘reverend’ before his name to theologise party policy. “The mixing of races challenges the glory of God,” said the Rev Bob West.

Last month, the organisation MediaWatchWatch started spotting the same faces that appear at BNP rallies regularly appearing at protests over Jerry Springer - the Opera. Local BNP leader Graham Green said: “We are totally opposed to this theatre production, and our members have been helping to hand out pro-Christian leaflets.”

But the BNP hadn’t quite thought through their new association. For fundamentalist Christians from organisations like Christian Voice are committed to the literal truth of Genesis: that all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve. Because of this, the human race is of “one blood” (Acts 17: 26).

Despite all their talk of supporting “traditional Christians” - an increasingly transparent euphemism for fundamentalists - the idea that all human beings share a common parentage was a tradition too far for the BNP. Racists have always found it easier to warp the theory of evolution, arguing, as Edwards recently did, “that white people are more highly evolved than blacks”.

Within weeks of setting up the Christian Council of Britain – denounced both by Ekklesia and by the official ecumenical body, Churches Together in Britain and Ireland – the ‘alliance’ was in tatters.

“If you don’t believe in Darwinian evolution then you are even dafter than you appear,” the BNP told the national director of Christian Voice, Stephen Green. The love affair was over.

For the BNP, Christian is just another word for white, just as Islamic has become another word for Asian. Now that the religious hatred bill has been watered down, groups like the BNP are free to use religious affiliation as code for race, translating illegal incitement to racial hatred into legal incitement to religious hatred.

Here, then, is the incentive for the BNP to establish a church group or cosy up to Christian fundamentalists.

But what is so utterly ridiculous about the BNP’s desire to defend “Christian culture” is that the vast majority of Christians in the world are not white. The average Anglican, for instance is a black woman living in Africa. Moreover, if Jesus were ever to walk this green and pleasant land, the BNP would be committed to his repatriation.

Even their great love of St George is a joke: George was either Turkish or Palestinian, and his legend migrated to this country from the Middle East.

What is fascinating about the ill-fated attempt of the BNP to combine with Christian Voice (who have since strongly attacked the BNP on their website) is that it demonstrates how deeply resistant Christianity is to all forms of racism.

It has not always been apparent that this was the case. After all, Christianity had a hand in slavery and apartheid. But Christianity also played a decisive role in the dismantling of both. For every bigot wanting to exploit Christianity in the service of racist ideology, there is a Wilberforce or a Tutu reminding Christians of what’s in the Bible.

“In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” says St Paul. Racial categories and nationality are deemed of no importance for those whose identity is primarily found in Christ. It’s an expression of a basic truth of monotheism: God is the God of all.

In church, we are all brothers and sisters. This is why churches are some of the most important points of racial integration in our society.

Some years ago I was a priest on a tough council estate in Walsall. It was classic recruiting territory for National Front thugs. And it was undoubtedly these same thugs that put bricks through the stained-glass windows after the church invited a black gospel choir to come and sing.

Rarely have I been as proud of churchgoers as I was of those wonderful old dears who would shuffle along to mass, clutching their Bibles, in open defiance of the skinheads.

In recent weeks the Methodist church has set up a useful website called Countering Political Extremism in which the views of the major churches have been compiled. It’s one of the few theological points upon which all churches agree: you cannot be a Christian and a racist.

The United Reformed Church is the most specific: “Any form of support for organisations such as the BNP is incompatible with Christian discipleship.”