By the Archbishop of Selsey
A warning misunderstood
As Britain prepares to mark Remembrance Sunday, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has once again stepped into the public square with an appeal that is at once sincere and symptomatic. Together with several Anglican bishops, he issued a statement condemning what he called the rise of “Christian nationalism” in the United Kingdom.¹
The clergy’s declaration, published in The Catholic Herald, denounced the alleged “misuse of Christian symbols to exclude or stigmatise others.” Bishop Anderson Jeremiah of Edmonton insisted that such actions “betray the heart of the Gospel,” while Bishop Rosemary Mallett of Southwark added that “we must reject any narrative that says the Cross is a symbol of exclusion.”²
Williams himself declared: “It is more than time to challenge the story that every migrant approaching our shores is an unfriendly alien with unintelligible and hostile values. Christian culture, rightly understood, is based simply on the recognition that we share common human needs and that we are given strength and generosity in Christ’s Spirit.”³
The language is eloquent, the tone charitable, yet beneath it lies the enduring confusion that has haunted Anglicanism since its birth — a confusion between revelation and sentiment, between the Church as divinely constituted society and as social conscience for the modern state.
The liberal inversion of the Cross
Williams’ appeal is not without truth: the Cross must never become an emblem of hatred or a tribal totem. But he proceeds as though these are the only two possibilities — either the Cross is sentimental philanthropy, or it is political idolatry. He cannot imagine the third and only true alternative: the Cross as the throne of the world’s Redeemer, before whom all nations must bow.
The danger of false universalism lies in severing compassion from conversion. For the Incarnation does not merely affirm humanity’s shared needs; it redeems humanity from sin. The Christian does not embrace the stranger because all religions teach kindness, but because Christ commands us to love as He has loved — a love that presupposes truth. Without truth, compassion becomes indulgence, and mercy without justice is mere sentimentality.
Thus the Cross ceases to be the key to salvation and becomes an empty metaphor of moral approval. A Christ who demands nothing, who never judges nor calls to repentance, cannot save. He becomes the patron of progressive causes, not the Redeemer of souls.
Christendom and the nation under God
This misreading of the Gospel’s universality manifests most clearly in how modern churchmen misunderstand the concept of Christian nationhood. The Catholic tradition does not equate the faith with nationalism — indeed, it is the only religion that transcends ethnicity and language by divine constitution — yet it insists that the political order itself must acknowledge the moral authority of Christ.
This principle, solemnly reaffirmed by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King as a counter-revolutionary act against the secularisation of nations.⁴ The Pontiff warned that when states deny Christ’s sovereignty, “discord and enmities arise, because they have cast away the yoke of our Lord.”⁵
To be patriotic, therefore, is not to idolise one’s nation, but to seek its sanctification. The Catholic loves his homeland as part of the created order, subject to divine law, not as an end in itself. This is why St. Thomas Aquinas classed patriotism under the virtue of piety — it is honour paid to those through whom we receive temporal goods, second only to those through whom we receive eternal ones.⁶
By contrast, the Anglican position, oscillating between civic religion and moral philosophy, lacks any coherent theology of nationhood. Its ecclesial imagination is tied to the English state, yet its moral sympathies belong to cosmopolitan liberalism. Hence it condemns “Christian nationalism” without offering a vision of Christian order.
A Remembrance emptied of remembrance
It is particularly revealing that this denunciation was timed for Remembrance Sunday — the day Britain recalls her war dead, whose graves bear not political slogans but the Cross. Those young men did not die for an ideology of universal tolerance; they died for a civilisation shaped by the Cross and for the moral inheritance that Williams now calls oppressive.
Their sacrifice, sanctified by chaplains and priests in muddy fields, was not rooted in a hatred of the foreigner, but in a love of home, faith, and justice. The very “common humanity” Williams invokes was defended by those who knew that civilisation without Christ collapses into barbarism. To forget that is to forget why the Cross stands upon our cenotaphs.
The modern misuse of ‘Christian nationalism’
The term itself has become a rhetorical weapon. Like “far-right” or “extremist,” it is deployed less to clarify than to condemn. Any attempt to restore Christian moral order, to defend natural law, or to preserve the family and national identity shaped by the Gospel is caricatured as “Christian nationalism.”
In truth, what many decry under that label is not nationalism but Christendom — the social embodiment of faith in public life. The Church’s mission is not confined to the sacristy; it extends to every aspect of human order. “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to Me,” says the Lord (Matthew 28:18). To exclude Him from governance, education, or culture is to enthrone chaos.
Two errors to reject
The Catholic must therefore avoid two opposing heresies. The first is the neo-pagan nationalism that substitutes blood and soil for baptism and creed. The second is the liberal humanitarianism that reduces faith to empathy and the Church to an NGO.
Against both, the Cross proclaims that every nation finds its dignity in submission to Christ. “He must reign,” wrote St. Paul, “until He has put all His enemies under His feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). This reign is not merely spiritual but moral, social, and visible in the institutions and laws that reflect divine order.
The call to restoration
In our day, to proclaim the Kingship of Christ is to invite misunderstanding. It is to affirm that governments, schools, parliaments, and even churches must conform to the law of God. Yet this is precisely the task of Christians who love their nation rightly. Only a people that honours Christ as Lord can preserve liberty without licence and unity without tyranny.
Let us, therefore, resist both the politicisation of faith and its privatisation. The flag must never replace the Cross — but neither must the Cross be hidden out of fear of offending the world. The true synthesis is found not in nationalism but in sanctification: a people, culture, and law transformed by grace.
That is the meaning of Remembrance Sunday for Christians: not nostalgia for empire, nor guilt over history, but thanksgiving for those who died that Christian civilisation might live — and a renewal of the vow that Christ, not Caesar, shall reign.
¹ The Catholic Herald, “Rowan Williams and Anglican clergy speak out against Christian nationalism ahead of Remembrance Sunday,” 7 Nov 2025.
² Ibid., statements by Bp Anderson Jeremiah and Bp Rosemary Mallett.
³ Ibid., Rowan Williams quoted in full.
⁴ Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), nn. 11–12.
⁵ Ibid., n. 24.
⁶ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.101, a.1.
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