Debating the Church of England

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Tuesday July 29th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Earlier this month, a conservative member of British Parliament delivered a powerful speech before the House of Commons to a nearly empty chamber. While his colleagues may have missed the speech in person, the video has been viewed nearly 4 million times on X. Some are saying it could become the spark for a “Christian counter-revolution” in the United Kingdom.

BROWN: In the speech he briefly outlines the history of Christianity in the UK—specifically the importance of the Church of England and calls the nation to return to its roots. As we end today’s program, here are a few highlights from the address, edited to fit the available time. Here now is Member of Parliament Danny Kruger from July 17th, 2025:

DANNY KRUGER: The Church is a chaplain to the nation, and through the parish system, in which every square inch of England has its local church and its local priest, we are all members—we all belong.

And so when I speak of the Church of England today, I am not speaking about the internal politics of the Anglican sect; I speak of the common creed of our country, the official religion of the English and the British nation, and the institution—older than the monarchy, and much older than Parliament—which made this country. It is no surprise that both the Church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided, internally confused and badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance, and is literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended. The country itself reflects that—unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within. It is at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally.

Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children—of nine-month-old babies—and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. We gave our consent to the greatest crime: the killing of the weak and most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin.

In the reaction to these votes, and all around us in reaction to the state of the country and the world, something else is happening. 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.

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—a secular space. Indeed, the idea of a secular space is a Christian concept that is meaningful only in a Christian world.

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 —this country—worshipped 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—“no hell below us, above us only sky.” That idea was wrong.

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. And there are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected, and one is Islam. But 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 “woke” does justice to its seriousness. It is a combination of ancient paganism, and Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power—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.

Now 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—it is him or nothing—and 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.

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 Puritans in the 17th century, the Evangelicals in the 19th century all brought this country back from the edge—from idolatry, error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about—and they each in their generation restored this country to itself.

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—the old chapel that became the wellspring of western democracy—and 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.

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