According to reports, Communities Secretary John Denham has been calling on faith groups to nail the lie that the BNP is a "Christian party". In fact, he’s joining a crusade against the far right that has been underway for quite a while. In February Anglican clergy were barred from joining the BNP and in July the MethodistChurch passed a motion at its annual conference banning all its members from the Party. On the issue of Nick Griffin’s controversial appearance on Question Time, most voices have been ‘anti-platform’, as they have been in the past with church-organised election hustings.
This is not to say that the antipathy of the churches has in any way successfully prevented the BNP from seeking to engage religious symbols and language in an effort to win support from amongst the Christian community. They have put to use three particular tropes: the ‘Christian nation’ under threat, the growth of an assertive Muslim presence, and the rise of ‘political correctness’. There are enough people within the Christian community who identify strongly with these themes for the BNP – or at least individuals associated closely with it – to set up a faith-based group, the ‘Christian Council of Britain’, the name of which presumably consciously mirrors the Muslim Council of Britain.
Existing public institutions and networks – political parties, the military, anti-fascist organisations, and faith groups – seem to have only a limited set of tools to employ in their struggle against the BNP. These are essentially protest, on the part of the anti-fascists, and polemic: both were seen at the BBC before and during the filming of Question Time. Neither seems to be particularly effective.
The furore over the Question Time debate has focused renewed attention on the question of the motivation of the 6% of the voting public who supported the BNP in the European elections. It doesn’t take a genius to realise why BNP rhetoric is marked with a heightened and very negative communitarianism. Its most important political strategy is to feed, and then feed on, the fear and frustration that results when communities feel embattled, under-represented, left behind, isolated. These may include Christians with a ‘Christian-nation’ view faced with an increasingly plural society, or deprived white communities who project their lack of opportunity, jobs and access to public services onto immigrant and minority communities and the liberal political elite who favour them to ‘indigenous’ Britons.
For the BNP, it doesn’t really matter whether or not these fears are well founded – some of their recent electoral successes have been in communities that are marked by ethnic homogeneity and parochialism rather than diversity – though they all suffer from a degree of deprivation. What is important is that there is a sense of discontent onto which they can latch. Into that economic, social and spiritual malaise, the BNP throws the concept of ‘them and us’, and trusts in human nature and our propensity to look to the well being of those closest to us to do the rest.
Right or wrong, no one should feel a sense of satisfaction about the nature of the Question Time debate. It will have done nothing to persuade those who have voted BNP in the past, or may do so in the future, to change their minds. Such is their sense of isolation and victimhood that the ill-tempered verbal lynching of someone with whom they have already begun to identify, by politicians whose reputation is seriously tarnished, is likely to harden existing support.
Unhelpfully, religious themes lurked under the surface of the debate. Muslims should accept that “
In this territory, ideas matter. The theological reason why the churches have opposed the BNP is that the Christian tradition aspires to a uniquely broad view of the community. In the Christian story, ethnic and national markers are relativised. This represented a substantial break from the Jewish cultural context and, in fact, a substantial break from the default human view.
The Christian nation position on which the BNP trades is theologically incoherent because it divides the Christian community on national and ethnic lines. This view of extended community, when put into visible practice, promises a powerful antidote to the isolationism and fear on which the BNP feeds. The church should be careful not to think it has done its job by speaking out against the BNP. It needs to be the community which vitiates it.
Paul Bickley is senior researcher at Theos.
