Nick Spencer unpacks preliminary findings from our research on Christian Nationalism. Is it as widespread as we think? 15/05/2026
Headlines
– These are preliminary and tentative findings outlining the size of Christian nationalism in the UK.
– 17% of adults in UK agree that you need to be Christian to be truly British, and just under half of them (8%) strongly agree with this statement.
– Being Christian is considered to be the most important factor (from a list of 12) for being British by only 1% of the population.
– 16% of people in UK agree that people who do not hold Christian values do not belong in Britain, with under half of them (7%) strongly agreeing with this statement.
– Other data, while not measuring this kind of strict Christian nationalism, give a sense of public opinion concerning a looser, but still close, formal relationship between Christianity and Britishness.
– Four in ten people (41%) agree that “the law in Britain should be based on Christian values”, and four in ten people (40%) agree that “religious education in Britain should prioritise the teaching of Christianity ahead of other faiths”, with about half in each case (e.g. c. 20%) agreeing strongly.
– Slightly fewer (37%) think that “the government should formally state that Britain is a Christian country”, although slightly more (22%) strongly agree with that statement.
– Finally, less than a third of people (26%) agree that “it is important for the political leader of my country to be a Christian”, and only 14% strongly agree with that statement.
Introduction: taking care with numbers
This essay is intended to give a preliminary overview of the size and shape of “Christian nationalism” in the UK.
In order to measure “Christian nationalism”, you need to be able to define it. However, as this Theos essay on what Christian Nationalism is pointed out, this is not straightforward. Christian nationalism (we’ll drop the scare quote now) is a slippery term, with lots of different definitions flying around.
Many of those are highly pejorative, with ‘Christian nationalist’ being intended as much an insult as it is a description. The result is that very few who might legitimately fall into this category willingly use or own the description.
If this weren’t challenging enough, there is a risk of self–fulfilling circularity in defining the term. If you can’t ask someone whether they are a Christian nationalist, you need to define it another way. But if you define a Christian nationalist as someone who holds x, y, and z views, it should be no surprise that when you measure what Christian nationalists believe/ want, you discover that they believe/ want x, y, and z.
This can also be away of distorting, usually by exaggerating, the number of Christian nationalists in a country. To take an example of this: if you define a Christian nationalist, as is sometimes done in America, as someone who agrees that “the federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces”, then you shouldn’t be surprised to find out that Christian nationalists hold this view. It does not follow, however, that anyone who holds this view is therefore a Christian nationalist. Unless we are careful to make this distinction, there is a danger of reading the number of those who favour religious symbols in public spaces as indicating the number of Christian nationalists, thereby inflating the size of the Christian nationalist constituency.
These caveats need to be born in mind when we come to measuring Christian nationalism, and Theos’ on–going work in this area will address these concerns by forms of statistical analysis (more of which anon). In the meantime, we wanted to release initial findings from our on–going work in this area. Accordingly, this essay draws on findings (a) from a new quantitative research study into Christian nationalism that we have commissioned from the market research company RED C and (b) from existing research on this topic from a variety of polling companies and social science studies.
This numerical work takes its cue from the definition of Christian nationalism, described in the Theos explainer, as being about co–terminosity. Christian nationalism is best understood as seeing those two terms – “Christianity” and “the nation” – as somehow coterminous or co–dependent. According to this reasoning, ‘Christianity’ and ‘the nation’ have more or less the same social/ cultural/ moral/ demographic boundaries. In effect, the quickest way of getting a sense of whether someone is a Christian nationalist is to ask them whether they think it is essential/ important to be Christian in order to belong to the nation.
There are various ways of ascertaining this (our survey approaches the point from a number of directions), and a few of these are used below. What is important is to try and keep this question distinct from others factors that are sometimes confused with it, such as whether someone thinks the nation is a Christian country (which is a sociological, cultural or constitutional question), whether someone thinks the nation has always been a Christian country (a historical question), or whether someone thinks the nation should be a Christian country (an ideological or theological question).
The key question is whether you think you need to be Christian to be truly British. What does the research say about this?
How widespread is Christian Nationalism in Britain?
Theos/ RED C research
We asked a nationally representative sample of UK adults whether they agreed with the statement “To be truly British you should… be a Christian”. The results are given in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1: How far do you agree that “To be truly British you should… be a Christian”
Source: Theos/ RED C. Sample 1765 UK adults
A clear majority of UK adults disagreed with the idea that you needed to be Christian in order to be truly British, and a clear plurality strongly disagreed with it. On the other side, 17% of people in UK claimed that you do need to be Christian to be truly British, and just under half of those strongly agreed with this.
This question was asked as part of a wider question which offered other options for being truly British, i.e. “To be truly British you should…
– be white
– contribute economically
– respect the authority of parliament
– have been born here
– be able to speak English
– share national customs and traditions
– be committed to democracy and freedom of speech
– defend the country when people criticise it
– obey the law
– be proud of Britain
– live here
At first, respondents were allowed to tick as many options as they wanted, but then they were asked “which ONE of these factors is MOST important for being truly British?”. When asked this, only 1% of respondents said it was being Christian.
As noted, there are other ways of approaching this question which are less direct and arguably less clearly focused on the ‘coterminosity’ of Christianity and nation, but which are worth noting.
We asked people how far they agreed with the statement “People who do not hold Christian values do not belong in Britain”. The results (Fig. 2) were very similar to the question of whether you needed to be Christian to be “truly British”.
Fig. 2: How far do you agree that “People who do not hold Christian values do not belong in Britain”
Source: Theos/ RED C. Sample 1765 UK adults
Once again, a majority of people disagreed with this statement, and a plurality (and nearly a majority) strongly disagreed with it. Around a sixth of the population agreed with it, roughly split between those who agreed with is strongly and those who agreed with it slightly.
There are other, still looser, measures of the perceived/desired relationship between Christianity and the nation, which are worth mentioning. For example, we also asked people how far they agreed that “it is important for the political leader of my country to be a Christian”, or that “the government should formally state that Britain is a Christian country”, or that “the law in Britain should be based on Christian values”, or that “religious education in Britain should prioritise the teaching of Christianity ahead of other faiths”. It is worth underlining the point made in the introduction that, relevant and interesting as these factors are, they are not direct measure of Christian nationalism, and should not be treated as such. It is also worth mentioning – the perennial challenge with quantitative research – that it is impossible to know exactly what someone means when they dis/agree with a statement like “the government should formally state that Britain is a Christian country” (how? in what forum?), or that “the law in Britain should be based on Christian values” (which values? how explicitly?).
Such caveats noted, these statements given breadth and colour to the core data described above. The results can be seem in Figure 3.
Fig. 3: Agreement on the perceived/ desired relationship between Christianity and Britain
Source: Theos/ RED C. Sample 1765 UK adults
Four in ten people agree that “the law in Britain should be based on Christian values” and that “religious education in Britain should prioritise the teaching of Christianity ahead of other faiths”, with about half in each case agreeing strongly. Slightly fewer (37%) think that “the government should formally state that Britain is a Christian country”, although slightly more (22%) strongly agree with that statement. Finally, less than a third of people (26%) agree that “it is important for the political leader of my country to be a Christian”, and only 14% strongly agree with that statement.
Arguably, these statements measure not the desire for a tightly coterminous relationship between Christianity and Britain, but rather a slightly looser but nonetheless identifiably close relationship between the two. That being so, it is not a surprise to see that a larger number, if never actually a majority of people, agree with these statements.
How does this compare with existing research?
Although Christiain nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon in the UK, there have been some polls and studies conducted over the last ten or so years that cover a similar territory.
In 2012, an Ipsos MORI survey for Channel 4 reported that while 56% of adults said that they thought Britain is a Christian country, and 61% said that it should be, only 4% believed that not being a Christian stopped people from being fully British.[i]
A decade or so later, in 2024, British Social Attitudes published its 41st report which contained a chapter on National Identity, drawing on survey data from the previous year.[ii] This explored what it meant to be British today, looking at certain “civic attributes” such as “to respect British political institutions and laws”, “to have British citizenship”, “to feel British”, and certain “ethnic” ones, such as “to have been born in Britain”, “to have British ancestry”, and “to be a Christian.” This study reported that the proportion of Britons who believed that it is very or fairly important to be a Christian in order to be ‘truly British’ was 19%.
The following year, the US–based Pew Research Center studied attitudes to “the importance of language, customs and traditions, birthplace, and religion as components of national identity.”[iii] Their survey covered 23 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, the Asia–Pacific region, sub–Saharan Africa and Latin America, among which was the UK. “Being a member of the country’s predominant religion” was one of the factors tested. This found that 12% of the population considered being Christian “very important” for being British and 17% considered it “somewhat important”. These are higher numbers than that reported for the Ipsos MORI/ Channel 4 survey, but the question is softer, Pew asking about importance, Ipsos MORI about whether, in effect, it was essential.
To these studies, we can add three more from 2025. In 2025, Pew returned to the subject of nationalism from a specifically religious point of view, looking at levels of “Religious Nationalism Around the World”.[iv] This was measured according to people’s responses to four questions, one of which was “how important is belonging to the historically predominant religion [i.e. Christianity in the UK] to being truly part of your national identity?” Pew found that 10% of Britons thought it was very important and 12% considered it somewhat important.
It is worth noting that the other three questions Pew asked in this survey were:
– How important is it to you for your national leader to share your religious beliefs?
– How much influence do you think the historically predominant religion’s sacred text [the Bible] should have on the laws of your country?
– When the sacred text conflicts with the will of the people, which should have more influence on the laws of your country?
The results for the UK were as follows.
Table 1: Importance of Christianity to the nation, from Pew research (2025)
Pew went on to say that for their report “we define “religious nationalists” as people who identify with the historically predominant religion [i.e. Christian in the UK] and take a strongly religious position on all four of these questions”, on which basis only 1% of Britons classified as ‘religious nationalists’. [p. 8] This is obviously a very demanding set of criteria.
Also in 2025, More in Common asked a UK sample if religion was important to whether someone was English. Just over one in ten (11%) of said that it was.[v]
Finally in 2025, the 2025 Ipsos Populism Report asked respondents in 31 countries a battery of questions, among which was how important they thought being part of the religious majority in their country was for being “truly” from that country. When it came to Britain, a quarter (25%) said it was.[vi]
Most recently, a small survey conducted by Premier Christian News in May 2026 (260 adult Christians) reported that 23% of respondents said they identify as Christian nationalists, while 25% described the movement as “godly”.[vii] That said, 93% said they were happy living in a country where neighbours are of different faiths and cultures, including Muslims, Sikhs and others.
Is Christian nationalism in the UK growing or declining?
Because most research in this area is recent (and one–off), it is hard to get a clear idea of the longitudinal trends. Trying to do so via comparing discrete studies is problematic because, however similar questions and surveys are, there are usually small but important differences in wording that render any comparison between them problematic.
The one set of studies that might give some indication of this is the British Social Attitudes survey which has been measuring how “important” people think it is to be Christian in order to be British since the 1990s. BSA found that the proportion of Britons believing that it is very or fairly important to be a Christian in order to be ‘truly British’ has declined from 32% in 1995, to 31% in 2003, to 24% in 2013, and to 19% in 2023.
This would suggest that Christian nationalism has become less of an issue over the last thirty years, which would run counter to the current concerns about a spike in Christian nationalist sentiment recently. However, there are reasons why we might treat these data line with some caution.
Firstly, it only runs to 2023, and the recent interest and apparent rise in Christian nationalism post–dates that. Second, it measures the perceived importance of being a Christian to be British, which is a comparatively weak measure of the phenomenon (and certainly weaker than statements around needing to be Christian in order to be truly British). In that respect, therefore, the BSA data may be measuring something closer to perceived salience of Christianity to Britishness, which has been falling since the 1990s, rather than the slightly different and somewhat harder phenomenon of Christian nationalism itself.
Conclusion
As noted at the outset, Christian nationalism is a slippery term, vulnerable to different definitions and therefore to different assessments of its extent. This essay has looked at initial findings from new Theos/ RED C research into Christian nationalism across Europe, alongside existing studies that explore the same topic.
Although all conclusions must be tentative at this stage, the data here studied suggest that Christian nationalism, being a complex social, cultural, political and religious phenomenon, does not manifest itself as – and is not best understand simply by means of – an “in–or–out” measure. Rather, it is better understood by means of a series of different, and perhaps concentric, groupings.
In this way, there is a tiny group of people for whom being Christian is the single most important factor for being British (Theos/ RED C) or who think it is “very important” that their national leader shares their Chrisitan beliefs, and that the Bible should have a preeminent influence on British laws, and that when the Bible conflicts with the will of the people, the former should have the greater influence, and that being Christian is “very important” to being truly British (Pew, 2025). This is probably no more than 1% of the population.
Then are people who hold recognisably Christian nationalist views, but without the same intensity. They agree that “to be truly British you should… be a Christian” (Theos/ RED C, 2026) or that “people who do not hold Christian values do not belong in Britain” (Theos/ RED C, 2026). They might have agreed (in 2012) that “not being a Christian stops people from being fully British” (Ipsos MORI/ Channel 4, 2012). They might say that it was fairly (or, more likely, very) important to be a Christian in order to be ‘truly British’ (BSA 41, 2024), or that being Christian is “very important” for being British (Pew 2025). They would say that when the Bible conflicts with the will of the people, it is important that the former should have the greater influence on the laws of the country. This group is somewhere between 7 and 15% of the population.
Finally, there are those who want a looser but still strong and formal connection between the nation and Christianity, without seeing the two identities as essentially linked. They agree, for example, that “it is important for the political leader of my country to be a Christian”, or that “the government should formally state that Britain is a Christian country”, or that “the law in Britain should be based on Christian values”, or that “religious education in Britain should prioritise the teaching of Christianity ahead of other faiths”, but they would not go as far as to say it is necessary to be Christian to be British (Theos/ RED C, 2026). This group is somewhere between 15 and 25% of the population.
It is important to stress that these are initial and very approximate categorisations, which will be refined, supplemented (and no doubt) corrected by our on–going analysis of the data.
Research Methodology
More details on the methodology, panel integrity and data quality of this research can be found here.
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