There is a question that nobody invoking Britain’s Christian heritage ever seems willing to answer directly. It is not a complicated question and it is not a trap. It is simply this: better by what measure? And if the honest answer is that we are not really talking about measurable outcomes at all, but about authority, then the authority is what needs examining.
When Reform UK promises a patriotic curriculum grounded in Christian heritage, or when Restore Britain declares this a Christian country as something to be restored rather than debated, they are making an implicit claim about the past. The claim is that something of value has been lost. That the period of maximum Christian cultural authority in these islands represented something worth recovering. This is not a theological claim. It is a historical one. And history, unlike theology, can actually be checked.
So let us start not with the medieval church, not with the Crusades or the Inquisition, which a careful apologist can always dismiss as distant aberrations.
Let us start with November 2024.
In that month, the independent Makin Review was published by the Church of England into the handling of abuse carried out by John Smyth, a barrister embedded at the heart of the conservative evangelical network. The review concluded that Smyth was arguably the most prolific serial abuser associated with the Church of England, having subjected more than a hundred boys and young men to what the reviewer described as traumatic physical, sexual, psychological, and spiritual attacks over four decades. The abuse was an open secret within the conservative evangelical network from at least 1982. The police were not informed for over thirty years. Smyth was quietly moved abroad. He died under investigation, having never been charged.
The review did not merely find institutional negligence. It found a cover-up. And it found theological beliefs woven through the logic of that cover-up. One deceased cleric, David Fletcher, who was aware of the abuse in the 1980s, was recorded in the review as having said: “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.”
That sentence is worth sitting with.
Fletcher was not protecting a bureaucracy. He was not calculating reputational risk in the way a corporate communications team might. He was making a theological judgment: that the work of God was a value high enough to place above the safety of children. The silence was framed as moral duty, expressed in the only language that gave it that weight. The psychological analysis commissioned as part of the review, by Dr Elly Hanson, concluded that the beliefs and values of the conservative evangelical community in which Smyth operated were critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims, how the abuse continued for so long, and how he evaded justice, including through a focus on personal sinfulness that produced in his victims a default sense of guilt, defectiveness, submission, and indebtedness to God.
None of this means religious institutions possess a monopoly on concealment. They do not. Secular institutions protect themselves from scandal with depressing regularity. The BBC, sports governing bodies, political parties, and local authorities have all demonstrated the same institutional reflex. The question is not whether religious institutions are uniquely capable of cover-up. They are not. The question is what specifically religious authority contributes when concealment is already the institutional instinct. What theology added here was a moral and spiritual framework that made silence appear virtuous, obedience appear holy, and institutional protection appear righteous. Every institution develops self-protective instincts. What made this distinct was not merely concealment, but concealment sacralised.
It transformed a cover-up into a calling.
This is the most recent chapter of the heritage now being proposed for restoration. The Archbishop of Canterbury resigned over it in November 2024. The Church commissioned an independent review into its own handling of the abuse, and the General Synod, faced with calls for fully independent safeguarding oversight, voted instead for enhanced oversight that stopped short of complete independence. The logic at work is familiar: an institution claiming sacred authority will resist becoming fully answerable to external scrutiny. It found itself catastrophically wanting, and responded by retaining control of the process by which it would be held to account.
Now consider the response available to the more sophisticated defender of Christian heritage, because it will come. They will say: the values are not the institution. Compassion, community, care for the weak: these things are real and worth preserving regardless of institutional failure. The Church failed its own standards. That is a reason to reform the institution, not to abandon the values.
This argument sounds reasonable until you press it.
Name one of those values that requires the theological claim to function. Show the mechanism by which compassion depends on the resurrection being true. Identify the doctrine without which care for the vulnerable becomes impossible. If you can demonstrate that, you have an argument worth having. If you cannot, then what you are defending is a set of ordinary human goods dressed in borrowed clothes.
Once you separate the values from the theology, theology loses its monopoly claim over them. Compassion stands on its own. So does solidarity, honesty, and the protection of the weak. None of these require a divine guarantee. They require only that we take seriously the fact that other people suffer. That is a human capacity, not a Christian one.
The things worth keeping from the Christian tradition do not need Christianity to survive. But the things most specifically enabled by Christian institutional authority, the deference that cannot be questioned, the silence that becomes sacred, the protection of reputation framed as the protection of God’s work, were sustained and moralised by precisely that theological framework. Remove the framework in which institutional reputation is the reputation of the divine, and David Fletcher has no argument for his silence. He is simply a man who knew about the abuse of children and said nothing. Without the theology, that is all he is. With it, he was, in his own mind, protecting something holy.
So when a politician tells you that Britain’s Christian heritage is worth restoring, you are entitled to ask which part. The compassion that functions perfectly well without the theology, or the authority that gave a man the moral vocabulary to place the work of God above the safety of a hundred children?
Call the nostalgia what it is. It is a feeling, and feelings are not arguments. Defend it on those terms if you want to. But the moment you attach it to a claim about institutional authority, you have left the territory of sentiment and entered the territory of evidence.
The Church of England answered.
