Response to Dom Muir's article

About the deepest, broadest and most profound article you've written Dom!  Only just read it... love some of the phrases you've used that just stood out as annointed... 'a reordering of loves'... 'A Christian nation is one where the state knows it is not God'.

(What even is 'the state'?! We used to be a kingdom/Empire... the 'state' is a marxist invention)

I love what you said was it last week about the gospel announcing a new Kingdom, a new King, hence the threat to Caesar, and yes I realised most of us have unciously reduced the gospel to a personal choice... like whether you have sugar in your tea or not, as opposed to the foundational paradigm of the entire nation.

Bring it on!  Jarrod Cooper is touring currently promoting his book '500', about how it's 500 years since the Reformation, a period which was an 'era', and we are now in his words entering a new era of 'Kingdom Come', and its only writing this I realise how completely his message chimes with yours - that the gospel is Kingdom business, not individual business.  Let's face it, Starmer is trying to take us into an era of communism, so we're definitely at a cross roads.  The tide has been in his favour, because post war the UK became essentially marxist, and cultural marxism eroded our christian values.  Have you ever read 'The Road to Serfdom' by economist Friedrich Hayek?  It's all in there - whereas communism in many countries happens via violent revolution, to conquer the might of the west they could't achieve violent revolution so they went for the soft underbelly of culture.  It was the soviet bureau Commintern in Moscow (Communism International) that invented the term 'Political Correctness', aka Cultural Marxism, originally 'Cultural Terrorism', whereby they ripped out the Judaeo-Christian foundations that underpinned Christendom in the west - marriage, the family, law and order etc - the Frankfurt school of communists came up with all of this, building on the work of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin etc, Gramsci was one of them and they knew they had to complete what became known as Gramsci's march through the Institutions - marriage, family, education, government, health, military etc - to replace Judaeo Christian values with Marxist ideology.

Our schools and universities became soaked in Marxism, brainwashing several post war generations in Marxist values of wealth redistribution by the state (not personal charity as per Christianity), in a system driven by envy, pitting the many against the few.  Margaret Thatcher was a bulwark against this with her economic liberal ideas, freeing up markets from state control and pushing ideas of meritocracy, and her ideas were like defibrilators reviving the corpse of the British economy ravaged by socialism in the 70's, breaking the power of the unions under Arthur Scargill who worked closely with Moscow - if you want to bring down your enemies, sponsor some chairs at universities and preach communism, a race to the bottom.  This is why Jordan Peterson's doctrines about personal virtue and responsibility and aspiring to be the best version of yourself have been so popular with younger generations who've been starved of these ideas.  They've also been starved of the gospel - a friend of mine, a retired teacher and church warden of a few small rural churches is seeing a revival among 15 year old girls attending one of his churches in numbers - they all just decided they wanted to go to church, and along they traipsed!  They started to lay on special services for them - and Martin is a spirit filled guy who used to run the youth of the biggest charismatic church in Derby where my ex wife and I were worship leaders for 6 years.  And where 15 year old girls go, 15 year old boys follow...!  It's quite amazing what's happened... part of the 'quiet revival' that's going on!  The silent majority in this nation are silently returning to church in numbers... same as happened in Iran, and China under anti christ governments... Christmas is passed but I'm tempted to sing 'How silently, how silently..... a wondrous thing is happening in the UK!!

Dom's article:

Both Ronald Reagan and more recently Donald Trump were made famous for their slogan, “Make America Great Again”. In some sense, to be “great” is an obvious direction to go in. No one should have a motivation to be bad or to be mediocre. Great is a positive thing. Now, what different people or politicians or sociologists or psychologists or even philosophers mean by great is certainly up for grabs. I would submit that true greatness is found in Jesus Christ, in the Kingdom of God – righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17). When I posit in my book title, The Battle for Britain, I am plainly declaring that we are in a spiritual battle for the soul of Britain, that we are, as His Church, boldly and unapologetically battling to make Britain Christian again. I will go a step further: God wants to make Britain, indeed every nation, Christian. This is the mission of God, the blood-purchased inheritance of His Son (Psalm 2:8), even the Great Commission of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Matthew 28:18-20)

These are weighty claims, and they deserve to be handled slowly and carefully.

When people hear the phrase “make the nation Christian again”, many in the West immediately assume power, coercion, culture wars, or nostalgia. That assumption itself reveals how thin our imagination has become. Christianity is often reduced to private belief, church attendance, or moral positions, rather than understood as a comprehensive world and life view; a way of seeing reality and ordering life together. What has been taken for granted is that Christianity is not merely a personal faith, but a total vision of truth, meaning, power, justice, love, hope and eternity.

In the classical Christian imagination, Christianity is not simply a religion among others. It is a claim about reality itself: who God is, why Jesus Christ came, died and was raised, who the human person is, what power is for, what justice means, what time is for, what money is for, how the natural and supernatural worlds relate, what moral accountability is, what happens when each of us die, and what hope looks like. To call a people “Christian” was never to claim that everyone was morally upright or personally converted. It was to say that the shared moral horizon, symbols, calendar, institutions, and limits of power were shaped by the confession that Jesus Christ is Lord.

That confession relativises all other authorities. It places kings, markets, technologies, and nations themselves under judgement. A Christian nation, in its fullest sense, is therefore not one that uses Christianity to strengthen itself, but one that allows Christianity to weaken its idols and serve Jesus Christ as Lord. This confession is woven into our national monarch’s vows and so is embedded within our constitution, culture, and politics. At his coronation, King Charles III declared, in his Coronation Oath, that he would “maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel”, and he swore to “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England”, thereby pledging himself to protect the preaching of the gospel in this land. He also publicly stated, “I come not to be served but to serve”, consciously framing his kingship under the authority and pattern of Christ himself. This alone already places it in tension with both modern nationalism and modern secularism. The Battle for Britain is about making the royal profession of faith, the word of God and the Kingdom of God come alive again in our land – to the glory of God.

“Again” does not mean returning to a golden age. There never was one. The UK’s Christian past contains both deep holiness and deep injustice, often intertwined. That said, the Victorian era makes a serious and viable claim to being our closest approximation to a golden age, not because it was without sin, but because Christian conviction openly shaped public life. It was marked by moral confidence rooted in the gospel, sweeping social reform driven by Christian conscience, the abolitionist movement, the expansion of education, the development of hospitals and welfare, and a broadly shared belief that the nation was accountable to God. Christianity did not merely exist alongside society; it furnished the moral imagination that animated law, philanthropy, work, family life, and civic responsibility.

“Again” therefore means recovering truths that were once socially assumed and are now functionally denied, even by Christians. Truths such as: that truth is absolute, not relative, grounded in God rather than human reason, a conviction lost in the Enlightenment and now in need of recovery; that human beings are not self-created but received; that freedom is not the highest good; it is a gift meant to lead us toward the good; that power exists to serve rather than to dominate; that the strong owe protection to the weak; that life has meaning beyond productivity and consumption; and that history is moving toward judgement and redemption, not endless progress.

To make the nation Christian again, in its fullest sense, would not begin with slogans or legislation. It would begin with a slow reordering of loves. It begins with prayer and repentance in the Church. It begins with preaching not a truncated gospel but the gospel of the Kingdom in its fullest sense. Winning souls for heaven, plundering hell, is paramount. Jesus Christ is Saviour, but He is also King of Kings and Lord, and Lord of all or not Lord at all. The evangelical Church has forgotten that. How does that play out? King Jesus wants it all. There is no sacred, secular divide. All things were created by Him and for Him, and He wants all of life back, not just individual hearts. Secularism requires the Church to sit quietly in its corner of private faith and to bow to its lordship. Whereas the Kingdom of God openly and boldly declares another Ruler, turning the whole world upside down (Acts 17:5-7).

It would involve a Christian understanding of the human person. The UK has quietly shifted from a Christian anthropology (God-imagers created for relationship with Him), to a therapeutic (people are defined mainly by feelings, personal identity, and individual choice) and technological one (humans are seen as problems to solve, data to analyze, or engines of productivity). To be Christian again would mean publicly affirming that a person is more than desire, self-moulded identity, or whimsical choice; that human dignity is intrinsic, not earned; that bodies and limits matter (we are embodied souls and our bodies are sacred and not to be desecrated or chopped up); that dependence is not a failure; that children are gifts, not projects; and that old age, disability, and weakness are not indignities to be eliminated. This would reshape debates about life, death, medicine, education, and work, not as culture-war positions, but as questions of faithfulness to what a human being is.

It would also involve a Christian understanding of power and authority. In a Christian nation, authority is accountable to God. No institution is absolute, including the state. Law exists to restrain evil and protect the vulnerable, not to remake humanity. Leaders are servants who will answer to a higher judgement. National interest is morally limited. This cuts against authoritarianism and technocratic managerialism alike. A Christian nation is one where the state knows it is not God.

It would require a Christian moral ecology, not merely private ethics. Historically, morality was not treated as an individual lifestyle choice but as a shared moral world. Making the UK Christian again would involve recovering truthfulness as a public good, sexuality ordered toward covenant rather than consumption, economic life shaped by justice and restraint, work understood as vocation rather than mere income, and rest as sacred rather than inefficient. This challenges both market absolutism and expressive individualism.

It would also mean recovering a Christian understanding of time, memory, and hope. The Christian year once structured public life. Feast and fast taught people that life is not a flat, endless present. To be Christian again would mean remembering the dead with hope through belief in resurrection for the faithful, not denial; teaching history as moral memory, purposefully shaped by God’s sovereignty, not just data to be pulled apart according to the latest trendy ideological construct; resisting the cult of constant novelty; and living toward redemption, resurrection and Providence, not merely sustainability. Without this, a nation becomes risk-averse, trapped in anxiety, control and man-made utopias.

Crucially, none of this is possible without the Church itself being renewed. In a genuinely Christian nation, the Church does not exist to bless national projects. It exists to preach the whole counsel of God publicly, speak truth to power, care for the forgotten, and remind the nation of its limits and sins. Making Britain Christian again would require the Church to repent of seeking influence without holiness, trading prophecy for access, reducing the gospel to respectability or activism, and forgetting the poor, the (legal) migrant, the prisoner, the unborn, and the lonely. A nation cannot be Christian again if the Church does not fear God again.

What many in the West have taken for granted is the assumption that Christianity is safe when it is small, private, and optional. Historically, Christianity was dangerous precisely because it claimed everything, while forcing nothing. It reshaped cultures not by forcing outcomes, but by discipling people, not by safe neutrality, but by bold salt and light, not by watching on, but by sending in.

To battle for Britain, in this sense, is not to seize control of the nation, but to re-centre Christ as the measure of truth, righteousness, and power. Not as a mere mascot for national identity, but as Lord of all reality. That vision is far more radical than both secular liberalism and shallow Christian nationalism imagine.

It is not nostalgia. It is not domination. It is not manipulation. It is conversion, integrated discipleship, and re-ordering at the deepest level of culture and soul.

This is not the language of secular culture war. It is the language of spiritual warfare and holistic, agape love. Not against people, but against false gods, false visions of the human person, false accounts of freedom, and false ideas of greatness. Because true greatness is not national supremacy. It is Christlikeness. And true victory is not control of the state. It is the transformation of hearts, communities, and moral imagination under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

* King Charles III changed into a simple plain white linen shirt and the Colobium Sindonis (a sleeveless white garment) for the anointing ceremony during his coronation, where upon he also kissed The Bible. This change of clothing was part of his Christian vow, symbolizing purity, humility, and being set apart for service to God and his people.