The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship has become a forum for Christian nationalism in London
The west has fallen. We need bigger families, closed borders and, most importantly, a return to “Judeo-Christian” values – or so says the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an increasingly prominent conservative conference that held its annual “global summit” in London in June.
The nearly 200 speakers at this year’s gathering at the Olympia in Kensington included former prime minister Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Trump administration officials, US anti-abortion activists and representatives from the far-right political party Alternative for Germany. There’s a reason some people call ARC “the anti-woke Davos”.
It is more than just a grab bag of the populist and radical right. There’s always a couple of self-styled “secular liberals”, but faith is seldom far from the stage. Miriam Cates, the evangelical former Conservative MP turned GB News presenter, is a regular. So too is US Christian commentator Rod Dreher and a host of Catholic speakers. The biggest news story out of the three-day event was politician Kate Forbes claiming that her Christian views cost her the leadership of the Scottish National Party.
In a few short years, ARC has become a crucial space for networking and building connections. What would once have been dismissed as, in the immortal words of David Cameron, the preserve of “fruitcakes and loonies” is now a diary date for the British right.
Key to this is Paul Marshall, the hedge fund tycoon who owns the Spectator and Unherd and has ploughed tens of millions into the dyspeptic television channel GB News. A regular attendee at the influential Holy Trinity Brompton church in west London, Marshall has donated at least £3 million to ARC through his personal philanthropy. Marshall co-owns GB News with ARC’s other shareholder, investment firm Legatum, a vehicle of the Dubai-based financier Christopher Chandler.
Marshall and Chandler’s money has been followed by others. Reform UK donors Ben Delo, a crypto investor who pleaded guilty to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act before being pardoned by Trump, and JCB scion Lord Anthony Bamford have both allegedly funded ARC. American cash has flowed, too, most notably from donors with close ties to the White House and US fossil fuel interests.
What all this money has supported is a transatlantic forum for Christian nationalism. Not all of the 40 or so British parliamentarians who attended ARC would subscribe to calls for “civilisational renewal”, but, as Trump’s onetime adviser Steve Bannon liked to say, “politics is downstream of culture”.
ARC attests to a wider cultural shift on Britain’s radical right. Farage, in his earlier political incarnation, rarely evoked God. Now he talks about defending “Judeo-Christian” principles and has an adviser, James Orr, who is plugged into the very top of the US Christian right. British voters have shown little interest in a religious culture war, but the networks – and the money – that want to recreate such battles on these shores are worth paying close attention to.
