Who was St George? This St George’s day, can our patriotism be reimagined by a richer understanding of the saint behind England’s flag? 23/04/2026
On St George’s Day, England marks the feast of its patron saint: a third–century Christian martyr, Roman soldier, and legendary dragonslayer whose red cross has become one of the most recognisable national symbols in the country. Yet in modern Britain, St George is no longer a straightforward figure of shared celebration. His flag now sits at the centre of heated disputes about identity, immigration, and the place of Christianity in public life.
Over the past year or so, the red–and–white Cross of St George and the Union Jack of which it is a part have become an increasingly visible and contested presence in the public space: hanging from windows, fluttering from lampposts, graffitied on countless walls, and sometimes waved outside hotels housing asylum seekers. For some, these displays express perfectly legitimate pride in nation and tradition. For others, they provoke unease, appearing bound up with exclusion, hostility, or a hardening of cultural boundaries.
This tension points to a deeper question about love of country itself. Patriotism can be a powerful and necessary civic force. However, there are clear dangers associated with its anxious and defensive forms. Without a positive shared vision of ‘us’, patriotism easily mutates into ‘us versus them’. It becomes a nervous love of country, one that is afraid of losing its identity and is suspicious of outsiders. When the only people flying England’s flag do so in anger, it becomes a tool of grievance rather than belonging.
It is no accident that these arguments now overlap with wider concerns about Christian nationalism. Over the past year, Theos has begun sustained research into the ways in which Christian language, symbols, and history are being drawn into contemporary national politics. As my colleague Nick Spencer has shown, such appeals can take very different forms: sometimes instrumentalising Christianity as an identity marker to exclude others, and sometimes drawing more deeply on Christian traditions that emphasise humility, hospitality, moral limits, and a shared civic life.
St George’s Day forces us to decide which of these traditions we are invoking.
If the Cross of St George is to mean something more than resentment or retreat, it must be rerooted in a richer understanding of the saint behind the flag. As Nick Spencer has put it elsewhere, we may need to ‘recapture the flag’ and redirect its symbolism towards something lifegiving. On this day of all days, that work can only begin by asking who St George was, and why England came to claim him in the first place.
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Paradoxically, England’s patron saint was not English at all. But that is perhaps the point. St George was a third–century Roman Christian soldier from Cappadocia (modern–day Turkey) whose mother was from the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. He was martyred for his faith by Emperor Diocletian. His story travelled across the Mediterranean and Europe, and by the medieval period, he had become one of the most venerated military saints in Christianity. By the late 13th century, Edward I had adopted the red–on–white St George’s Cross for his armies, and it swiftly became England’s national flag on battlefields and ships.
England embraced St George as a Christian ideal: a saintly hero who was believed to defend all who called upon him. To medieval Christians, he was a protector of the vulnerable. He was celebrated as a ‘martyr–warrior’, a soldier of faith who stood up to evil and fought for goodness. It was these universal Christian qualities – courage, sacrifice and defence of the weak – that formed the basis of his appeal.
Crucially, English devotion to St George transcended the mediaeval world’s many social barriers. His Mediterranean ethnic background was irrelevant and, unlike earlier patron saints tied to particular regions of England or royal dynasties, he became a unifying figure for a people who were often divided by class and conflict. Contemporary chroniclers recounted how both nobles and peasants prayed to him, and even warring factions adopted his banner. St George stood for England itself. His red cross flag became a rallying standard that allowed the English to imagine themselves as one people – a national community bound by loyalty and shared meaning rather than blood.
St George was so devout a Christian that he died for his faith. It is difficult to imagine that the generations of English people who invoked his protection would recognise their saint in the hard–edged nativism now sometimes associated with his flag. The Englishness St George represents can only be a capacious identity of shared belonging. To invoke St George today should therefore still mean welcoming the stranger, defending the vulnerable in our midst, and forging one people out of many.
This vision is badly needed in modern Britain. Latest census data highlight the cost of our failure to nurture a shared national identity. Almost three in four people born outside the EU and four in five people born in the EU who arrived in the UK since 2011 do not identify as British and do not feel an affinity with any nation of the UK. In other words, a majority of newcomers do not feel that this is their country.
How might we close that gap? Policies and practical support are certainly part of the answer. But so too is patriotism in the best sense: a confident cultural welcome that invites newcomers to participate in English and British life and to learn the moral grammar that has historically underpinned it. The invitation to join a common culture and a shared public language – one robust enough to be learnt, inhabited, and eventually claimed as one’s own.
As quiet leaders in integration, Theos research has found, churches have an important role to play in making this vision tangible. When a new refugee hotel opens or families are resettled, churches often become hubs of welcome, hosting language classes, meals, and drop–in sessions. They also offer something less measurable but just as vital: friendship and a listening ear. Through shared activities, meals, and sometimes worship, strangers become neighbours. In these spaces, refugees begin to identify not only with their local community, but with England (or indeed Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Britain) itself.
The patriotism of St George’s England is not about guarding a fictitious national purity. It is about sharing the traditions of English life with others. It means helping newcomers celebrate St George’s Day as a story of shared identity. It means passing on the stories of England – from the Magna Carta to the NHS, from Shakespeare to the Premier League – so that new residents can adopt these stories as their own and find room for their own stories within them. It means flying the Cross of St George from the church tower not to mark fenced–off territory, but to signal sanctuary, as the Bishop of Leicester recently argued.
On St George’s Day, then, we are not simply remembering a saint from our past but rehearsing a question about England’s future. St George – the soldier, martyr, victory–bearer, and legendary dragonslayer from faraway lands who nevertheless became a hero to the English – reminds us that Englishness need not be defined by narrow ancestry. At its best, it has been an evolving project centred on shared values, moral obligations, and mutual loyalty.
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