If Britain Is To Have A Christian Future

Rakib Ehsan writes:

As a social conservative, one of the more interesting – if not satisfying – sights of the recent World Cup was seeing opposition players battle it out on the pitch, and praying together afterwards.

Following England’s thrilling 6-4 victory against France in the third-place play-off last week, a group of players huddled together in prayer. There were seven players in total, and all of them were black and of African heritage.

One of them was England and Manchester City centre-half Marc Guéhi, who was born on the Ivory Coast before migrating to England with his family. Guéhi’s religious background is well documented. He is the son of a pastor and was raised in a strictly ‘God First’ household. He also made national headlines in 2024 after writing ‘Jesus Loves You’ on his rainbow-themed captain’s armband, which captains were required to wear during the Premier League’s LGBTQ+ campaign. The devout Christian declared that the message was about ‘truth and love and inclusivity’.

Guéhi is not the only England international who publicly expresses his devotion to Christianity. Arsenal midfielder Eberechi Eze has become known for making a cross with his two index fingers as a goal celebration. His fellow Nigerian-origin clubmate, Bukayo Saka, speaks confidently in public about his Christian faith, saying that reading the Bible every night allowed him to know that God ‘has his back’ when he steps on the pitch. Noni Madueke – the England winger who is also at Arsenal and of Nigerian origin – has said that Christianity is a source of team unity and mental resilience in the dressing room of the Premier League champions.

England’s ‘Bible Bros’ of African heritage embody the changing face of Christianity in modern Britain. In the last England and Wales Census in 2021, the number of residents across the two home nations who considered themselves to be Christian plummeted to under half for the first time in its history – 46 per cent. In 2001, it was 72 per cent – meaning Christian identification in England and Wales had dropped by 26 percentage points in just two decades. While some figures on the British political right have – quite ridiculously – blamed this on large-scale migration, the reality is very different.

The truth is that the consistently downward trajectory in Christian devotion in the UK has been driven by the rapid secularisation of white Britons. The rise of a rampant secular individualism – spurred on by the 1960s social-liberal revolution and 1980s free-market fundamentalism – has weakened commitment to Christianity within the UK’s ethnic majority. To blame migrants for the decline of Christian religious observance is bizarre.

Indeed, in places such as my hometown of Luton, once deserted churches are coming back to life due to God-fearing migrants from African Commonwealth nations such as Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. While much of the public appears to be generally at ease with churches trying to keep themselves alive by hosting disco raves and crazy golf, I suspect most African Christians do not take kindly to it.

An emergent ethno-religious nativism has found a home in Restore Britain. It appears to think that being white and Christian are one and the same thing, and that simply by banishing immigrants, the UK will become a predominantly Christian nation again. But this is clearly delusional. The truth is that some of the fiercest defenders of Christian faith in the UK are not remotely part of the indigenous population – and one could even argue that some of the strongest forms of anti-Christian contempt exist within hyper-liberal elements of the native majority.

If Britain is to have a Christian future, it won’t be because of ethno-nationalists. It will be because of people like Marc Guéhi and England’s Bible Bros.