“Can we still have an ethos if we don’t have an ethnos?” This question is unlikely to preoccupy many Jacobin readers, but it’s at the top of James Orr’s mind. Orr, a Cambridge don who’s become the policy chief of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, recently asked this on a podcast with Danny Kruger, an MP who defected from the Conservatives to join the party in September 2025. Both new additions to the far right have been vocal about their concern with the fragmentation of British society. But they have a solution: Christianity, and a lot of it. And not just as a matter of private belief. Amid the turncoats now decked out in Reform UK turquoise, an argument’s been gaining currency that Christianity ought to serve as the foundation of a new national order.

The parallels with the United States are plain enough, and many have noticed them. Christian nationalism, once an item discussed on fringe websites and muttered in lengthy podcasts, has moved to the core of the Trumpist right. And as Orr and Kruger are keen to show, their British fellow travelers have not been idle listeners. Ties across the Atlantic are as personal as they are ideological. Orr’s oft-reported relationship with J. D. Vance — who describes the British philosopher-cum–policy strategist as his “British Sherpa” — is an outward sign of an inner truth: there’s a conscious effort to transpose what’s going on in the US to Britain.

“By their fruits shall ye know them.” But in Britain, the harvest will be limited. Christian nationalism relies, in the United States, on the near-absolute separation of church and state, where denominational competition allows for confessional triumphalism to be tethered to claims of national greatness. The British marketplace of faith doesn’t behave the same way. The mingling of crown and creed has pressed religion into the service of the state, not the nation. Whatever story can be told about it will be closer to a monograph of applied social science than to a collective, providentialist bildungsroman.