The Instrumentalisation of Faith and the Illusion of Cultural Christianity
The Context: From Political Prop to Civilisational Cure
In the current British political moment, amid intensifying anxiety over identity, social fragmentation, and the erosion of civic trust, there has been a conspicuous revival of Christian language in public discourse. Political leaders, commentators, and cultural critics now speak with increasing frequency of Britain’s “Christian roots,” its “Christian values,” and the need to recover a moral framework capable of sustaining national life. This renewed appeal to Christianity is presented not merely as historical observation, but as civilisational prescription.
Yet this revival of language coincides with a parallel critique. In recent commentary within the Daily Express, JJ Anisiobi argues that politicians often invoke Christianity not as a binding moral authority, but as a rhetorical instrument—an identity marker deployed to confer legitimacy, stabilise public sentiment, or signal continuity with the past.¹ Christianity, in this account, is not lived but leveraged; not believed but brandished.
These two developments—critique and recovery—must be understood together. For they do not cancel each other out; rather, they expose a deeper incoherence at the heart of contemporary British discourse on religion.
From Legitimate Critique to Ideological Evasion
The charge of instrumentalisation is not new, nor is it unfounded. The history of Christendom itself bears witness to the recurrent temptation to appropriate the language of faith while evading its demands. Political authority has often sought the sanction of religion without submitting to its discipline. The invocation of Christianity as moral ornament rather than moral law is a well-established pattern.
Yet the contemporary deployment of this critique frequently exceeds its proper scope. What begins as a legitimate objection to hypocrisy is transformed into a broader suspicion of Christianity’s presence in public life. The problem is no longer that Christianity is misused, but that it is used at all. Faith, it is implied, belongs properly to the private sphere; its appearance in political discourse is inherently suspect.
Such a conclusion does not follow. It confuses abuse with essence. The misuse of a principle does not invalidate its rightful application. To argue otherwise is to engage in a category error—one that conveniently removes Christianity from the field of serious political consideration while leaving other, no less normative frameworks intact.
This is not neutrality; it is displacement. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, modern liberal societies often present themselves as procedurally neutral while in fact operating upon inherited moral assumptions whose origins they no longer acknowledge.² The attempt to exclude Christianity from public reasoning does not eliminate moral claims; it merely obscures their source.
The Asymmetry of Secular Critique
This dynamic is further revealed in the asymmetrical treatment of belief systems within public discourse. Christianity is interrogated for its influence, its language scrutinised, its claims relativised. Yet other ideological frameworks—no less moral, no less prescriptive—are permitted to shape law and policy without equivalent examination.
The result is not a level playing field, but a selective secularism in which Christianity alone is deemed inappropriate as a public authority. Such a position is historically untenable and philosophically incoherent. Every political order rests upon a conception of the good; every legal system embodies moral judgments.³ The question is not whether such judgments exist, but whether they are true and on what authority they rest.
The Deeper Problem: Christianity as Cultural Residue
If the critique of instrumentalisation resonates, it is because it identifies a genuine condition within contemporary Britain: the reduction of Christianity to cultural residue. Over the course of several generations, the forms of Christianity have been preserved while their substance has been progressively abandoned. Churches remain; liturgies continue; national ceremonies retain their religious character. Yet belief—understood as assent to revealed truth—has declined markedly.⁴
This condition has produced what may be termed a secularised Christendom: a society that retains the outward architecture of Christianity while no longer inhabiting its inner reality. The language of faith persists, but its meaning has thinned. Concepts such as sin, grace, salvation, and judgment have been displaced by a moral vocabulary of vague affirmation and subjective authenticity.
It is precisely this hollowed-out Christianity that proves most susceptible to political appropriation. Detached from doctrine, it becomes infinitely adaptable. It can be invoked to support almost any programme, precisely because it no longer asserts any determinate claim.
The Crisis Within the Churches Themselves
This reduction cannot be attributed solely to external cultural pressures. It has been facilitated—at times accelerated—by the internal condition of the mainstream Christian denominations. Across much of British ecclesial life, there has been a discernible shift from doctrinal clarity to pastoral ambiguity, from proclamation to accommodation, from conversion to affirmation.⁵
The result is a paradox: institutions that retain the name and structure of Christianity while increasingly reflecting the assumptions of the surrounding secular culture. In such a context, the call to “return to Christianity” risks collapsing into little more than a return to attendance, affiliation, or outward practice—what might be termed practical Christianity—without any corresponding recovery of belief.
This is insufficient. A Church that has itself become secularised in outlook cannot serve as the agent of renewal simply by increasing participation in its existing forms. If the content of belief has been diluted, the multiplication of its expressions does not restore its substance.
Even within the Catholic Church—whose doctrinal claims remain formally intact—there is widespread concern that elements of the hierarchy have adopted modes of discourse and pastoral priorities that reflect the contemporary zeitgeist more than the perennial magisterium.⁶ Where this occurs, the distinction between the Church and the world becomes obscured, and the call to conversion is softened into a language of accompaniment devoid of moral urgency.
Under such conditions, the problem is not merely absence of practice, but attenuation of truth.
The Contemporary Call to “Return”
Against this backdrop, the current calls for a “return to Christianity” must be evaluated with greater precision. While often well-intentioned, they frequently operate within the very framework that produced the present crisis. Christianity is invoked as heritage, as identity, as a source of values—but without any corresponding insistence on belief, conversion, or doctrinal fidelity.
This is not a return, but a rebranding.
To appeal to Christianity as the foundation of national cohesion while omitting its demands is to perpetuate the illusion that culture can be sustained independently of conviction. It is to treat Christianity as a civilisational asset rather than a revealed truth.
The Philosophical Diagnosis
Modern conservative thinkers have recognised the instability of such a position. Roger Scruton warned that the moral and aesthetic inheritance of a civilisation cannot be maintained once its religious foundations are eroded; the forms may endure for a time, but they gradually lose their authority and coherence.⁷ Similarly, Thomas Sowell has emphasised the limits of rationalist reconstruction, arguing that social orders severed from their inherited traditions tend to be replaced by more fragile and ideologically driven systems.⁸
Empirical data in the British context reinforces this diagnosis. Longitudinal surveys consistently demonstrate a sustained decline in religious belief and practice, accompanied by increasing uncertainty regarding moral and national identity.⁹ The erosion of Christianity has not produced a stable secular consensus, but a contested and fragmented moral landscape.
The Theological Reality: Conversion or Collapse
The classical Christian tradition offers a more penetrating analysis. From St Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the earthly city to St Thomas Aquinas’s account of law as an ordinance of reason ordered to the common good, the consistent teaching is that political order cannot be rightly constituted apart from truth.¹⁰
Yet this truth is not self-sustaining at the level of culture alone. It must be received, believed, and lived. Christianity does not merely propose values; it judges them. It does not merely affirm identity; it demands repentance. It does not merely preserve a civilisation; it calls it to conversion.
This is the missing principle in contemporary discourse.
A nation cannot recover Christianity by invoking its past. Nor can it do so by increasing attendance at institutions that have themselves absorbed secular assumptions. It can only do so by recovering belief—by returning to the truth claims of the faith and conforming life to them.
Without this, what is invoked is no longer Christianity in its proper sense, but a cultural residue bearing its name.
Conclusion: Beyond Instrumentalisation to Renewal
The present revival of Christian language in British public life is, in one sense, a recognition of loss. It acknowledges that something essential has been eroded—that the moral and spiritual foundations of the nation cannot be indefinitely neglected without consequence. In this respect, it is a sign not of strength, but of awareness.
Yet awareness alone is insufficient. If the recovery of Christianity is pursued merely at the level of rhetoric—if it is reduced to heritage, identity, or cultural memory—it will fail. Indeed, it will deepen the crisis by reinforcing the illusion that the benefits of Christianity can be retained without its truth being believed.
The critique of instrumentalisation must therefore be extended, not abandoned. It is not enough to say that Christianity should not be used as a political prop. It must also be said that Christianity cannot be restored as a cultural artefact. Both positions, in different ways, empty the faith of its substance.
Nor is it sufficient to call for a return to churchgoing, to institutional affiliation, or to the outward forms of religion. A secularised Church cannot renew a secularised society merely by increasing participation in its existing patterns. Where the content has been diluted, the form cannot compensate.
What is required is something more radical, and therefore more difficult: conversion.
A Christianity that is merely practised will conform itself to the age. A Christianity that is believed will judge it.
This entails a cost. It requires the reintroduction of moral seriousness into public life, the recovery of doctrinal clarity within the Churches, and the willingness to affirm truths that stand in tension with prevailing assumptions. It demands that those who invoke Christianity—whether in politics or in ecclesial life—submit themselves to its authority rather than reshape it to their purposes.
Without this, the current discourse will remain trapped in a cycle of invocation and disillusionment—Christianity called upon in moments of crisis, only to be set aside when its demands become inconvenient.
The deeper reality is this: a civilisation cannot be renewed by symbols, nor by sentiment, nor by structures emptied of belief. It must be renewed by truth.
What is merely remembered cannot save. What is merely invoked cannot endure. What is merely practised cannot transform.
Only what is believed—and lived—can restore what has been lost.
¹ JJ Anisiobi, “Politicians must stop using Christianity as a prop,” Daily Express, 2026.
² Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 1–5.
³ John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 23–48.
⁴ Grace Davie, Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp. 1–20.
⁵ Linda Woodhead, The Rise of “No Religion” in Britain (Journal of the British Academy, 2016), pp. 245–261.
⁶ Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis (1990); ongoing theological critiques of contemporary pastoral approaches in episcopal conferences.
⁷ Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 23–35.
⁸ Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (New York: Basic Books, 2007), pp. 3–30; Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2010), pp. 1–25.
⁹ National Centre for Social Research, British Social Attitudes Survey; YouGov religion datasets, 2020–2025.
¹⁰ St Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIX.17–19; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, qq. 90–97.
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