Hannah Rich introduces her report exploring the response of local churches to the riots of summer 2024. How can our country and communities heal? 02/11/2024

It is now almost four months, or 120 days, since the most extensive outbreak of riots for a decade swept across England, sparked by the murder of three young girls in Southport. Put another way, that’s 120 daily news cycles that we have moved through since then, the pace of which makes the fractious heat of late July and early August seem like a dim memory on a snowy day in November.  

Our new report Disunited Kingdom? explores the response and contribution of local churches in areas affected by the riots, both immediately and over the longer term in rebuilding communities. In September 2024, we interviewed 16 church leaders in 11 different places across England where there was significant rioting, including locations where hotels and mosques were attacked.  

We found that churches were well–placed to respond in several ways. Firstly, they were able to leverage their strong community networks to work with other faith and activism groups locally. Through these, church leaders were often pre–emptively aware of the coming riots and thus able to offer solidarity and support to mosques and other local targets of violence. 

Secondly, they drew on their institutional relationships with local police and local government. Coupled with their connection to other faith groups, this meant churches were well positioned to share reliable information with their communities and vice versa. 

Thirdly, they maintained a trusted presence in the community, even when this was challenged or threatened by the riots themselves. Where the church could not fulfil its intuitive response of being a place of safety when the buildings were literally at the centre of the violence, communities still found ways of supporting vulnerable congregation members and making their presence felt.  

Lastly, churches used their convening power to draw the community together for vigils, prayer events and moments of much–needed reflection and contemplation in the aftermath of the riots. Several of the clergy stressed that, while finding the words to do so was not easy, they had felt it important to pray for the victims and perpetrators alike, because all are part of the community they serve, and all are loved by God.  

There are lessons to learn from these experiences, about the causes of the riots and what preventative measures might be developed going forward. From this, we offer policy recommendations on cohesion and resilience policy, community engagement, youth provision, education, community spaces, mediation and the longevity of funding structures. 

The report begins with a quote from Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize–winning novel Prophet Song: 

“What is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time… that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.” 

In order to heal, as communities and as a country, from the events of this summer, it is important that they do not too quickly become “but an echo passed into folklore”. If there is one message that came through in every interview with a church leader in this research, it was the hope that we do not rush to find easy solutions but rather engage in the deep listening needed to genuinely restore fractured lives and communities. Our hope is that this report will equip and encourage policymakers and churches alike to begin that process. 

You can read the full report here.

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