British Christianity

Britain, a nation that historically hasn’t been shy about its disdain for Middle Easterners, and one that spent a good chunk of its past treating Jews as either a problem to expel or a people to pity at arm’s length, clings resolutely to a religion that emerged from the dusty hills of Judea. The contradiction is as staggering as it is unexamined. The average British Christian – when not lamenting the decline of “traditional British values” – rarely stops to consider that the very foundation of their faith was laid by a bunch of Semitic prophets wandering about in robes, preaching in Aramaic and Hebrew.

But, of course, Christianity was Europeanised long ago, scrubbed clean of its inconveniently foreign origins. The Romans, who had a knack for cultural appropriation, spread it across their empire, and soon enough, it was absorbed into the medieval fabric of Britain – woven into the stone of its cathedrals, the music of its hymns, and the pageantry of its royalty. By the time the British started looking down their noses at Middle Easterners, Christianity had been sufficiently anglicised to the point where few even thought to question its origins. Jesus? Blonde and blue-eyed, obviously. The Last Supper? Probably held in an English parish hall with lukewarm tea and a slightly dry Victoria sponge.

And so, with remarkable selectivity, the British made Christianity their own while maintaining an uneasy relationship with its source material. Jews, for centuries, were tolerated at best, scapegoated at worst – victims of expulsion, blood libels, and institutionalised prejudice. Even the 19th and early 20th century British fascination with Zionism was driven less by altruism and more by a desire to move Jews somewhere else – preferably far, far away. That these same Christians believed in a Messiah who was, inconveniently, Jewish himself was something best ignored. Meanwhile, for centuries, the English waged wars and crusades over the ownership of Jerusalem, convinced that their claim to the holy city was somehow more legitimate than those who had lived there for millennia.

But the inconsistency doesn’t stop there. In modern times, Britain has taken a sceptical view of Middle Eastern immigrants, treating them as cultural threats while continuing to worship a man from that very region. The same people who fume about “foreign influences” in British society will sing carols in December about a Middle Eastern baby born in a stable and raised under Roman occupation. The same voices that grumble about “Sharia law” will extol the virtues of the Ten Commandments, seemingly unaware that both emerged from the same ancient legal traditions.

The sheer irony of it all is that Christianity, at its core, is no more British than hummus or falafel. But nationalism doesn’t operate on logic – it’s an exercise in selective memory, in scrubbing history of its inconvenient truths while elevating whatever fits the narrative. Christianity, despite its origins, became British simply because it felt British. And that, more than anything else, explains why the British cling to it so fervently, even as they turn their noses up at the very people who birthed it.

Another irony is the protests about mosques being built in their locale by a certain faction of the electorate, the very same section that never attends a church event unless it's a wedding or a funeral.