Nick Spencer responds to Reform UK’s proposed law which would prevent disused churches from becoming mosques. 05/03/2026

When Zia Yusuf, the Reform Party’s Home Affairs spokesman, recently announced that his party would change the planning law to prevent churches from becoming mosques, he was no doubt aware he was entering into a dense theological debate that went back centuries.

In 1633, two young scamps, Nicholas Lucas and William Mattock, devised a great game of “tossing a ball against the wall in a narrow place between two windows” of the chapel of Williton in Somerset. Predictably, the windows were broken. Repeatedly. “The people whose seats in church were near them suffered from ‘the drift in of foul weather’.” The insolence and the expense enraged local inhabitants but the boys “flatly refused” to stop. Eventually, faced with punishment, they took a brave – if somewhat facetious – stand, denied they had done any damage to the church, and asked the villagers, ‘Where is the church ? [Surely] the church is where the congregation is assembled?”

Greater theological minds than Lucas and Mattock have grappled with this question. Over a millennium earlier, the recently converted Augustine of Hippo witnessed thousands come to faith under the not–so–gentle encouragement of the Emperor Theodosius I, as the empire was formally Christianised at the end of the fourth century. Augustine was, at first, exultant. He soon became disaffected, however, as he saw the same people who filled the churches “on the festivals of Jerusalem, fill the theatres for the festivities of Babylon”. He became disillusioned with the idea that any institution could be Christian. “What is Rome but the Romans?” he asked later. “A city consists of its citizens, not its walls.”

The reason why minds as great as Augustine, Lucas and Mattock’s have found this matter so debateable over the years is that it emerged from a tension inherent in Christianity. Place is important in the scriptures, to put it mildly. There are well over a thousand place names mentioned in the Old Testament and above 200 in the New. Sometimes reading the Bible can feel like reading a gazetteer, except for the fact that some of these places are not merely place names. Jerusalem overflows with meaning. It is presence, home, joy, refuge, hope, transcendence, destiny. The religion that emerged in these places is embodied, located, rooted, named.

And yet, Christ subverts so much of this in his life and mission. Not only is his life peripatetic, with nowhere to lay his head, but he firmly relocates the hope of Temple and Jerusalem onto himself, onto his body. “A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”

This tension between place and person runs through the New Testament letters. Paul and a few other apostolic megastars travelled a lot, but the churches he founded did not, and much of his time was spent advising them on how to make their new faith real in the places they lived. The Church is indeed where the congregation is assembled, around the word and body of Christ, as Lucas and Mattock so heroically insisted. But it is assembled in a place.

All this orients me towards the Lucas and Mattock school of theology when it comes to our presenting issue. We should, I guess, mention that this is really a non–story. As The Times has shown, the actual number of churches becoming mosques is minimal, vastly outnumbered by the numbers that have become wine bars, bingo halls, carpet warehouses, and rubble. When the Reform party loudly proclaims that it is finally taking a stand on this issue, you don’t need to be a Guardian columnist to know what’s going on.

But even if this doesn’t really merit as much attention as it’s getting, it is an interesting topic in as far as it picks up on so many of the themes – Islamisation, secularisation, immigration, Christian nationalism – that swirl around the witches’ cauldron of the culture wars. Seeing hundreds of Muslim worshippers praying in a space that was once full of Christians – well, maybe not full: many of these churches were rarely full even in the first place – is powerfully symbolic. I would personally much rather they were being used for their initial purpose.

But would I prefer them to be used as mosques than wine bars, bingo halls and carpet warehouses? Actually, yes. I can believe the Qur’an is not a true revelation, and that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, while still appreciating Islamic practices of veneration, respect, and community that I believe are fundamentally good for human beings. I don’t buy much carpet these days, and prefer pubs to wine bars, but I hope I don’t disrespect them by saying that neither has ever really lifted my soul.

So, would I ban the conversion of disused churches to mosques, or indeed bingo halls? Of course not. Because ultimately, I agree with our ball–playing Somerset miscreants. And although I love (many) churches for their capacity to life the spirit, for the way in which they preserve an exquisite palimpsest of national history – for being serious houses “in whose blent air all our compulsions meet,” – I do ultimately believe that the church is people not the place, and that “where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

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