‘Putting Christ Back into Christmas’. A Discussion. # 218. 16/12/2025.

Out of Many, One People.

Welcome. Last week’s blog was meant to be the last until January 13^th, but the Tommy Robinson’s ‘Putting Christ back into Christmas’ carol service was a too controversial an event for a blog focussed on issues of church and race to overlook. So here is my take on it.

‘Putting Christ Back into Christmas’. A Discussion.

There were no real winners from last Saturday’s Carol Service in central London. Only about 1,000 turned up, less than 1% of September’s Unite the Kingdom demonstration, so Robinson is clearly not leading a wave of earnest Christian nationalists. ‘I thought we’d be talking about the invasion of the country. But it’s all been about Christianity’ was the accurate but disappointed verdict of one attender. Certainly, if Robinson thought that professing faith and promoting a carol service was a crafty way to take forward his political project then the lame attendance suggests he misjudged badly. Stand Up To Racism organised a counter demonstration, but there was really nothing in the event for them to get their teeth into and protest. The service did seem to genuinely live up to its claim that ‘This event is not about politics, immigration or other groups. It is about Jesus Christ, fully and completely’. If anti-racists had sought to disrupt that then J D Vance would have instantly pummelled them for civilisational erasure. For both Robinson and the anti-racists the subdued event was a 0-0 draw, when both needed something spectacular to take their political case forward.

However there was one clear loser from the carol service - the Church of England. It marked one more step in its doleful journey away from the white working-class. One more failure to connect. Robinson’s professed conversion to Christianity and his mounting a Carol Service to express it surely ought to have elicited an at least partly positive response from church leaders, instead we saw bishops majoring on negativity and fear. No one, as far as I am aware, bothered to make personal contact with Robinson. Their responses abandoned much that the Church of England claims to stand for:

* A church which professes tolerance responded judgementally, wrongly forseeing a white nationalist jamboree.

* A church which advocates listening made no attempt to hear the white working-class grievances that the service expressed.

* A church which seeks to be generously inclusive implied to many believers that we don’t wish to include them.

* A church which prides itself on being a ‘bridge church’ jumped decisively onto the progressive side of an imagined culture war event.

* A church which advocates unity adopted a polarised stance.

* A church which argues for humility and penitence came across as aloofly self-righteous.

* A church which is for all the nation came across as guilelessly unaware of how much it reflects the outlook of the liberal middle class.

The smallness of the Church’s response is illustrated in their promoting the slogan ‘Christ has always been at the heart of Christmas’ in response to Robinson’s strap-line ‘Putting Christ back into Christmas’. Robinson was hardly being original. It is the sort of thing we have been saying for decades as a protest against the commercialisation of Christmas obscuring the central event of the Saviour’s birth. You don’t need to be Wittgenstein to realise that Robinson’s and the Church’s assertions are both true, depending on the shape of the argument being made. By setting one up against the other the Church was merely bickering.

I first heard of ‘Putting Christ back into Christmas’ at the Evangelical Alliance’s One People Commission’s excellent celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the South Asian Forum. I was struck by the positive response with which Christians from backgrounds in other world faiths saw this as something to engage with positively, not to be fearful about or coldly reprove.

Given Robinson’s history his initiative could not be unthinkingly welcomed with open arms, but the intriguing move from a surprising quarter to put the birth of Jesus centre stage required thoughtful exploration and engagement, showing a subtlety with which a missional church should respond to all cultural challenges.

The three following often advocated responses are a guide to how we might respond to the Robinson phenomena:

Affirm. There is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. But not in the Church of England over Tommy Robinson. Certainly, there is much about Robinson that we should deeply disapprove of, just like the large crowd of tax collectors and sinners sitting at table with Jesus and his disciples (Lk 5:27-32). Those tax collectors did real damage. But I like the phrase used by Jason Clark of the London Centre for Spiritual Direction (republished on Ian Paul’s Psephizo blog 15/12/2025) writing on ‘Who Owns Jesus? Tommy Robinson and The Dirty Revival’. Revivals have always been dirty, never hygenic, with people queuing up in orderly lines for the Bishop to lay hands on them. There will always be elements that a watching world can (justifiably) mock or disapprove of. But when Paul encountered those who ‘proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely’, what mattered was that ‘Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice’ (Phil 1:15-18).

Robinson’s conversion could be a political gambit though the substance of his carol service appeared to me to reflect a flame of faith. But it is not ours to judge. When Iranian asylum seekers have claimed conversion to Christianity we have rightly preferred the risks of naïve acceptance rather than the over-confidence of suspicion (see blog # 147 ‘Asylum Seekers and Muslim Converts’).

Confront. We are right to find the mud on Robinson’s hands unacceptable. We are right to empathise with the feelings of insecurity and rejection that he causes people in immigrant communities to feel. But how much better it would be to confront him as a brother in Christ rather than a despised intruder on the Christian landscape. When his pre-service email called Sadiq Khan ‘an extremist who is transforming London, our city, into a Sharia zone’, and ‘a coloniser and unwelcome guest’ then it is right that his fellow Christians rebuke him for his dishonest slander. Robinson, as a public figure now proclaiming to be a follower of Jesus, thereby makes himself accountable to both Jesus and the Scriptures and to the worldwide Christian community. An initial warm welcome, such as that Barnabas showed to the very questionable Saul of Tarsus, might open up a dialogue with Robinson from a wider circle than his currently very peripheral circle of ministerial supporters.

As he goes on Robinson will have to confront the dissonance between the tone and the substance of his rhetoric about immigration and the teaching of the Old and New Testaments. It could be that the cost of following Jesus will cause him to lapse from faith rather than persevere, but in making that journey of connecting scripture and politics he will need the support of wise and gracious believers not the cold disapproval of bishops.

Transform. God is gracious and powerful. He takes the messiness of our lives and transforms them for his glory. Robinson is right that patriotism is necessary for any society to cohere and function harmoniously. But that society is now irrevocably ethnically diverse. God’s purpose is for that diversity to be both celebrated and melded into a unity of heart and spirit. There is a rightful national pride in the progress we have made towards that unity over the past eighty years. But there should also be sorrow for the ways we have hindered it. In the past Robinson’s form of white nationalism has been the enemy of a united society. Racism against migrants from the Caribbean has left a long-standing legacy in the alienation of black people today. The isolation and, in places, militancy of Muslims has been intensified by the experience of rejection in the wider society. Robinson’s vision for patriotic unity will only emerge if he works for integration. A journey into the ethnically vary variegated Christianity of modern Britain will inevitably cause him to rub shoulders with Christians whose families have been through the struggles of migration. (It already happened with the inclusion of Based and Bougie in the service). Such mixing will happen through welcome not exclusion.

That inter-ethnic journey would also strengthen not undermine the convictions he has. Does he want more respect and valuing of the elderly? Is he opposed to euthanasia, abortion and pornography? It is in minority ethnic Britain, not least amongst Muslims, that he will encounter such cherished values. The spread of ‘immigrant optimism’ and faith (in part responsible for Arsenal’s pre-eminence in English and European football) is a cordial that the whole nation requires if he really wants to make Britain great again.

Quite possibly my argument that church leaders should make a warm and positive response to Robinson’s conversion and carol service will prove to be naïve and ill-founded. But for me faith in Jesus opens up the readiness for God to do the unexpected, to call new things into being (Rom 4:17) to bring good out of evil, to work in ways that confound the wisdom of men. Otherwise, there would never be a church.

Meanwhile, let the last word be with Mark Gilmore from Belfast, an attendee at the carol service, quoted in The Independent: ‘I think everyone comes to the Cross with mixed motivations. Nobody comes with clean hands – we’ve all got mixed motivations. But the key thing is to see there is an answer for everyone in this. I see this not as something incredibly problematic, but as an incredible source of hope. I think there are people here who will be challenged to love for the first time’.