While older Christian leaders act as if they’re still in the 70’s, young Christians around the world are taking up the sign of the Cross.
PUBLISHED ON
October 2, 2025
Suddenly, crosses are everywhere on the streets of Great Britain. And the automatic main response of the Christian church in that country is to complain.
Apparently, the problem is that those carrying the crosses are the “wrong kind” of Christians: patriotic ones, who actually believe in Christianity and don’t want to hand the whole country over on a plate to Islam.
On Saturday, September 13, a very large anti-immigration rally, in which over 100,000 people marched, took place in London. The rally, called “Unite the Kingdom,” was organized by the prominent British anti-Islam campaigner Tommy Robinson. By pure coincidence, this happened to coincide with the weekend on which the annual Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross fell, on September 14, celebrating the occasion in the year 326 when the mother of Emperor Constantine, St. Helena, is said to have discovered the buried remains of the True Cross upon which Christ had been crucified.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Tommy himself is said to have recently converted to Christianity while serving a prison sentence, perceiving that the widespread lack of the traditional European religion across his homeland these days had created a spiritual and civilizational void into which Islam was gleefully flooding via uncontrolled mass immigration. Several other more explicitly Christian speakers at the rally, including Pastor Rikki Doolan and Dutch conservative Catholic campaigner Eva Vlaardingerbroek, had concluded similarly. Therefore, it made perfect logical sense that many attendees chose to crusade through the streets brandishing large wooden crosses or waving banners and flags with such items printed upon them. As the national flag of England is the red-and-white Cross of St. George, many attendees would have come along equipped with a kind of cross anyway.
Not all those acting like this were full-believing Christians themselves. Some were simply adopting the cross as a useful symbol to encapsulate the contemporary struggle against imported Islam and the pressing need for a second demographic Reconquista. Many cynics would say Tommy Robinson is much the same and that his prison-cell conversion is simply a useful piece of symbolic theater intended to rally his troops to the wider anti-immigration cause. Such opportunistic marchers would class themselves as being at least friends of Christianity, however, evidently feeling broadly well-disposed toward it and clearly perceiving its social and political utility in the face of mass invasion from infidel lands abroad. Many other marchers with the cross were completely sincere believers in Christ, though; there can be no disputing that.
Except, of course, the Christian Church in England did dispute precisely that. Because, sadly, large sections of the Christian Church in England are no longer remotely Christian at all.
Letter of Surrender
By the following weekend, September 20-21, a sternly-worded public letter had been organized and published by local bishops condemning the march as being “anti-Christian,” apparently on the main grounds that it was not actively pro-Islam. Signatories came from all wings of British Christianity, including the Church of England, Methodism, Evangelicalism, and various related bodies like the Bible Society (currently twinned with the Koran Society), the religious think tank Theos, and charities like the Catholic Caritas Social Action Network.
Numerous CofE bishops put their names to it, including one former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt. Revd. Dr. Rowan Williams, a man who had previously described the widespread future adoption of Islamic sharia law across the United Kingdom as being “unavoidable”—thanks largely to the self-defeating attitude of supposed “social leaders” and “defenders of the faith” like Dr. Williams himself.
What did the open letter say? Edited highlights—if they can be described so—would go like this:
We are deeply concerned about the co-opting of Christian symbols, [even by actual Christians?] particularly the cross, during Saturday’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Many individuals and communities [i.e., Muslims] felt anxious, unsettled and even threatened by aspects of the march…We respect the right to free speech, and to hold different views on issues such as immigration…However, this rally included racist, anti-Muslim and far-right elements. As Christians from different theological and political backgrounds, we stand together against the misuse of Christianity. The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other. Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger. Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable.
We are deeply concerned about the co-opting of Christian symbols, [even by actual Christians?] particularly the cross, during Saturday’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Many individuals and communities [i.e., Muslims] felt anxious, unsettled and even threatened by aspects of the march…We respect the right to free speech, and to hold different views on issues such as immigration…However, this rally included racist, anti-Muslim and far-right elements. As Christians from different theological and political backgrounds, we stand together against the misuse of Christianity. The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other. Jesus calls us to love both our neighbours and our enemies and to welcome the stranger. Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable.
So, to sum up, it’s now anti-Christian, racist, and even “far-right” for a Christian to prefer Christianity over Islam anymore—and to favor to continue living in a Christian (or post-Christian, in England’s case) country than in an Islamic one. “The cross is the ultimate sign of sacrifice for the other,” the bishops’ letter explained; in a certain sense, maybe, but surely not in the sense of sacrificing Christianity itself in the name of the adoption and well-being of another religion entirely. By this logic, the ultimate fate of the Christian cross is to transform itself into little more than a subsidiary emblem of Islam itself, as with the syncretic heresy of “Chrislam” from G.K. Chesterton’s satirical 1914 novel The Flying Inn, about an imaginary (at least at the time) Church- and Establishment-enabled Islamic takeover of Great Britain.
Do note that final extraordinarily stupid sentence in the letter there, by the way: “Any co-opting or corrupting of the Christian faith to exclude others is unacceptable.” What, even to exclude Muslims? When’s the next time the bishops think they’ll see a Catholic imam?
Comedy of Terrors
From the point of view of trying to make Christianity more appealing to the average member of the British public, the open letter was not a very good idea. In the very same week it was released, the world’s leading Islamist terror organization, ISIS, also released their own rather less tolerant open letter calling for the specific targeting of Christians, Jews, and “their allies” all across Britain via bombings, shootings, stabbings and improvised vehicle-ramming attacks.
British newspapers were also filled that same week with the tale of Abdelrahmen Adnan Abouelela, an Egyptian Islamist and member of the radical Muslim Brotherhood organization, who was currently seeking asylum in the United Kingdom—on the grounds that he was wanted for planning terror plots to blow up infrastructure back in Egypt. He had to flee his homeland in order to avoid being “persecuted” (punished) there for his actions.
Following one act of illegal entry at the nation’s increasingly nonexistent border, Abouelela had subsequently gone out and committed another act of illegal entry of a different kind by raping a woman in a London park, something for which he received an eight-and-a-half-year sentence only a day or two prior to the bishops’ open letter being released. This was actually longer than the seven-year sentence he was facing for trying to blow up infrastructure back in Egypt, thus causing his asylum claim to no longer make any sense whatsoever, even on his own twisted terms. During the rapist’s sentencing, the presiding judge told him, “It’s clear to me you do not believe you have done anything wrong.” Raping drunken women, in the wonderful Islamic culture where Abouelela comes from, is just what such inferior beings clearly deserve.
This is precisely the kind of unworthy individual the Great British public are utterly sick of seeing have “charity” handed out toward in their unwanted name by professional do-gooders like those who signed the bishops’ letter of protest against the public use of crosses during the Tommy Robinson march. By effectively defending people like Abouelela without being quite so stupid as to specifically mention them by name, the religious leaders were more likely to repel people away from the Christian Church, not attract them toward it, as you may have thought would have been their natural desire.
Archbishop or Archenemy?
The Church of England is currently awaiting the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and an opinion poll released in the immediate aftermath of the bishops’ letter demonstrated that 28 percent of respondents want whoever ends up as the new CofE leader to spend less time talking about political topics like immigration, compared to only 17 percent who want him (or her—see below) to waste more breath doing so.
Fat chance of that. One of the leading candidates to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury is the current Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, who is herself…that’s right, a successful asylum seeker from the Islamic Republic of Iran (albeit a genuine, Christian one). In the past, no doubt helping curry favor with the other mainly left-wing clerics who will make up the Archbishopric’s likely electorate, Francis-Dehqani has gushed about her innate sympathy with “the real trauma that many asylum seekers have experienced” back in their oppressive Muslim homelands.
In and of itself, that may indeed be considered a kind of Christian charity. But when the asylum seekers become so numerous—and frequently so dubious—that they end up bringing both their homelands and their prior oppression over to the very lands like Britain they are seeking asylum in, then doesn’t that render the whole process completely senseless and futile? It would be like a puddle seeking asylum from water in the sea.
In hoc signo vinces (“In this sign, you will conquer”) Constantine once said, after seeing a miraculous vision of a cross before a successful battle. According to the contents of the bishops’ official national suicide letter, it’s now more like “In this sign, you will be conquered.”
Maybe the true best next Archbishop of Canterbury would be Tommy Robinson?
Steven Tucker is a U.K.-based writer whose work has appeared online and in print worldwide. His latest book, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, examines the similarities between the ideologically corrupted sciences of the Soviets and Nazis and the equally ideologically corrupted woke sciences of today. He formerly taught in an English Catholic high school.
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