When heritage excludes the holy: the National Trust, St Cuthbert’s Cave, and the quiet discrimination against Christians
The decision by the National Trust to block a Catholic filmmaker from recording at St Cuthbert’s Cave in Northumberland is not an isolated bureaucratic misstep. It exposes a deeper problem inside Britain’s largest heritage charity: a drift away from its founding purpose, a growing hostility to the country’s Christian roots, and an internal culture increasingly shaped by ideology rather than stewardship.
At stake is far more than one documentary. The Trust’s handling of this case raises serious questions about discrimination, about its statutory duties as a charity, and about who now controls the narrative of Britain’s Christian past.
St Cuthbert’s Cave and the ban on “religious affiliation”
In June 2025, Catholic filmmaker Christian Holden, whose work often covers Christian themes, sought permission to include St Cuthbert’s Cave in a documentary tracing the historic Way of St Cuthbert from Melrose Abbey to Lindisfarne. The film was to follow a university professor and his students along the 62-mile pilgrimage route, treating the landscape as both cultural and spiritual heritage rather than a piece of religious propaganda.¹
The cave, near Belford in Northumberland, is traditionally associated with St Cuthbert’s relics in the late ninth century, when monks bore his body from Lindisfarne to safety during the Viking incursions. It is precisely the sort of place the National Trust was created to preserve: a site where landscape, faith, and history meet.
Yet when Holden approached the Trust’s Film Office, he was refused. The key sentence in the email has since become infamous: the Trust would not host the filming “due to its religious affiliation.”²
No allegation of likely damage, no concern about disruption, no conflict with other bookings. The decisive factor was simply that the project was “religious”. The Trust also drew attention to the explicitly Catholic content of Holden’s website, implying that his Christian identity was itself part of the problem.³
After media coverage and a formal complaint by Voice for Justice UK, the National Trust issued a carefully worded statement insisting that it has no formal policy against religious filming and that each request should be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The organisation said it was reviewing “what has happened in this case” and emphasised that it cares for many chapels and churches, some still used for worship.⁴
But this response did not address the core issue. If there is no religious-filming policy, why was Holden told his filming was banned “due to its religious affiliation”? If each case is judged individually, why did staff feel confident asserting that the Trust was not bound by equality legislation in making that refusal?⁵
From the outside, the picture is of an instinctive corporate reaction: projects comfortably aligned with the current cultural zeitgeist are welcomed; explicitly Christian projects are seen as undesirable, even risky.
A charitable duty and a legal problem
Under the Equality Act 2010, “religion or belief” is a protected characteristic. A body that offers access or services to the public may not discriminate against persons or projects on that ground, particularly where it exercises control over a site of unique cultural and religious significance.⁶
Voice for Justice UK argues that refusing access “due to religious affiliation” is, on its face, discriminatory. Their complaint notes that the documentary was not an evangelistic rally, but a serious exploration of a historic pilgrimage route with broad cultural interest. The only difference between Holden and countless tourists with smartphones is that he was honest enough to ask permission – and honest enough to say that he is Catholic.⁷
The Trust’s status as a charity adds further weight. Founded in the 1890s to preserve “places of historic interest or natural beauty” for the benefit of the nation “for ever, for everyone”, its charitable objects now sit within a statutory and regulatory framework.⁸
A heritage body that takes public and Lottery money, enjoys tax advantages, and claims to care for the historic Christian fabric of Britain cannot credibly operate an unwritten veto on Christian projects at Christian sites. Nor can it sustain the fiction that preventing a respectful documentary at St Cuthbert’s Cave somehow promotes “inclusion” and “wellbeing”.
Patterns of partiality: agendas welcome, Christianity suspect
The controversy over St Cuthbert’s Cave follows a series of contentious decisions that suggest a consistent internal bias. The National Trust has repeatedly embraced fashionable ideological campaigns while treating traditional Christian expression as a problem to be managed.
In 2017, volunteers at Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk were told they would be moved to back-room roles if they declined to wear rainbow lanyards and badges as part of a sexual-identity campaign. Only after widespread criticism and a wave of cancelled memberships did the Trust retreat and make participation optional – a belated admission that coercing volunteers into political symbolism was indefensible.⁹
The Trust has promoted heavily framed reinterpretations of properties through the narrow lens of identity politics, sometimes relying on speculative or tenuous connections while neglecting the basic story of the Christian civilisation that shaped the very buildings it now manages. Its controversial interim report on links between National Trust properties and colonialism and slavery was widely criticised for poor methodology, use of unqualified authors, and a one-sided narrative that damaged reputations without delivering balanced history.¹⁰
Yet in this same period the Trust has, for example, issued internal “inclusivity and wellbeing” materials that sidelined Christmas while highlighting non-Christian religious festivals – a choice that speaks volumes about the religious instincts of those driving its internal agenda.¹¹
Against that background, the refusal to allow a discreet Christian documentary at a Christian site does not look like an isolated error. It looks like the logical outcome of a corporate culture in which Christianity is seen, at best, as an awkward relic and, at worst, as a threat to the new ideological orthodoxy.
Not just “culture wars”: failure at the core task
Critics of the Trust are often dismissed as cranks engaging in “culture wars”. But some of the sharpest criticism has come from serious researchers and former insiders who are concerned first and foremost about conservation, governance, and mission.
In 2025, researcher Zewditu Gebreyohanes – a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, deputy editor of History Reclaimed, and former director of Restore Trust – published a detailed report assessing the Trust’s recent direction. Her conclusion was stark: money was increasingly treated not as a means to the end of heritage conservation, but as an end in itself, while political and ideological initiatives distracted from core statutory purposes.¹²
Gebreyohanes and others highlight serious concerns about “managed decline” at properties such as Sherborne Brook and Barrington Court, where lakes have silted up and historic fabric has deteriorated, even as the organisation trumpets fashionable campaigns and secures grants tied to contemporary policy agendas rather than to long-term conservation.¹³
Volunteer numbers, once around 65,000, have fallen dramatically in recent years, with many long-standing volunteers alienated by central directives, politicised programming, and imposed symbolism. At the same time, membership and admission prices have risen significantly, entry-level hospitality has become more expensive even as quality falls, and senior salaries at the top of the organisation have continued to climb.¹⁴
In other words, the Trust is not merely politicised; it is failing on its own terms. The attention lavished on ideological messaging comes alongside a visible weakening of its basic stewardship of the buildings and landscapes entrusted to its care.
Democracy hollowed out: Quick Vote and the silencing of dissent
A second report by Gebreyohanes, National Distrust: The end of democracy in the National Trust, charts how the Trust’s internal governance has been re-engineered to insulate the current leadership from member challenge. The introduction of “Quick Vote” – a one-click option that automatically casts a member’s ballot for the board’s preferred candidates and against inconvenient resolutions – has transformed once-competitive AGMs into rubber-stamping exercises.¹⁵
At a recent AGM, a members’ resolution calling for the abolition of Quick Vote was defeated only because tens of thousands of Quick Votes were cast against it; among members who actually read the papers and voted individually, the resolution enjoyed a substantial majority.¹⁶
Former National Trust chairman Sir William Proby has publicly endorsed Gebreyohanes’ criticism, calling Quick Vote “an extreme form of proxy voting” that makes the election process undemocratic. Constitutional scholar Professor Vernon Bogdanor and former Supreme Court justice Lord Sumption have expressed similar concerns, warning that the Trust’s AGM has been reduced to a controlled plebiscite.¹⁷
This matters directly for cases like St Cuthbert’s Cave. When concerned members, volunteers, and donors find decisions like Holden’s exclusion unacceptable, they discover that the internal democratic mechanisms through which they might correct those decisions have been deliberately weakened.
A heritage charity that marginalises Christian history, sidelines its own grassroots, and prevents meaningful member oversight is no longer behaving as a national institution. It is behaving as a private ideological project that happens to enjoy charitable status and control over significant pieces of Christian patrimony.
Social cohesion and the erasure of Christian memory
In her recent commentary, Gebreyohanes has also warned of the broader social consequences of this ideological shift. A National Trust that constantly reframes Britain’s story in terms of guilt and grievance – while sidelining the Christian beliefs, institutions, and practices that shaped the country’s architecture, law, art, and landscape – does not foster unity. It undermines social cohesion, teaching visitors to see their own heritage as something to be ashamed of rather than something to receive, scrutinise, and, where necessary, reform.¹⁸
The paradox is obvious. An organisation that claims to champion “inclusion” increasingly excludes the very faith that gave birth to the buildings, chapels, abbeys, and holy sites in its custody. A body that speaks of “wellbeing” appears indifferent to the spiritual meaning that makes these places more than just picturesque backdrops for secular recreation.
To refuse a Catholic filmmaker the opportunity to record a serious documentary about St Cuthbert at St Cuthbert’s Cave is therefore not a minor misjudgement. It is a symbolic act of amnesia – a decision that says, in effect, that Christianity may be tolerated in stone and storyboards, but not as a living faith allowed to speak in its own voice.
What should happen next
Several practical steps now seem necessary.
First, the National Trust should publicly acknowledge that refusing filming “due to religious affiliation” was wrong in principle and potentially unlawful. An apology to Christian Holden, with an explicit clarification that Christian projects will be treated on the same basis as any other, would be a minimal beginning.
Second, the Trust should publish clear, legally compliant guidance on filming and access at sites of religious significance. That guidance should confirm that Christian organisations will not be excluded simply for being Christian and that heritage sites will not be placed behind a secular cordon sanitaire.
Third, given the wider evidence of mission drift and internal democratic manipulation, there is now a strong case for the Charity Commission and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to examine whether the Trust is fulfilling its charitable objects and respecting the principles of charity governance. Reports such as A shell of its former self and National Distrust have already called for precisely such scrutiny.¹⁹
Finally, Christians and other citizens concerned about the erosion of Britain’s Christian memory should not simply walk away. Memberships, letters to MPs, questions at AGMs, and support for groups such as Restore Trust and Voice for Justice UK all send a clear signal: the National Trust does not own England’s saints, churches, and Christian landscapes; it holds them in trust for the nation, and the nation is still, in history and in law, profoundly marked by the Christian faith.
If the Trust refuses to learn that lesson, then the real question is no longer whether Christians can film at St Cuthbert’s Cave. It is whether the National Trust remains fit to be custodian of the Christian heritage on which its own existence depends.
- Premier Christian News, “National Trust blocks Catholic man from filming saint’s cave”, 25 November 2025.
- Voice for Justice UK, complaint text quoting the National Trust Film Office email to Christian Holden, 2025.
- Catholic Herald, report on the St Cuthbert’s Cave filming refusal, November 2025.
- National Trust statement as reported in Catholic and Christian press, November 2025.
- “Cancelling Cuthbert”, New English Review, December 2025.
- Equality Act 2010, especially provisions on protected characteristics and services to the public.
- Voice for Justice UK, formal letter of complaint regarding St Cuthbert’s Cave, 2025.
- Zewditu Gebreyohanes, Is the National Trust being mismanaged?, Prosperity Institute, 2025.
- National press coverage of the Felbrigg Hall rainbow-lanyard controversy, August 2017.
- Gebreyohanes, Is the National Trust being mismanaged?, analysis of the slavery and colonialism report.
- Catholic and conservative commentary on National Trust “inclusivity” materials that sidelined Christmas, 2023–25.
- Gebreyohanes, Is the National Trust being mismanaged?, executive summary and conclusions.
- Ibid., sections on conservation failures and “managed decline” at Sherborne Brook and Barrington Court.
- Ibid., together with National Trust annual reports and commentary on volunteer numbers and senior pay.
- Zewditu Gebreyohanes, National Distrust: The end of democracy in the National Trust, Prosperity Institute, 2024.
- Restore Trust briefing on AGM voting patterns and the effect of Quick Vote, 2024.
- Public comments by Sir William Proby, Lord Sumption, and Professor Vernon Bogdanor responding to National Distrust, 2024.
- Media interviews and essays by Zewditu Gebreyohanes on heritage, identity, and social cohesion, 2024–25.
- Gebreyohanes, Is the National Trust being mismanaged? and National Distrust, together with related commentary calling for Charity Commission scrutiny.
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