British Anglican Deacon: Culture War Is ‘A Fight for the Very Soul of This Nation’

Calvin Robinson speaks to NTD's "British Thought Leaders" programme. NTD

The so-called culture war is “a fight for the very soul of this nation,” according to British broadcaster and Anglican deacon Calvin Robinson.

Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme, The GB News show host said he gets correspondence “on a daily basis” of people that are either being “cancelled,” or “receiving a lot of intolerance because of their views.”

“Every week we have something to talk about. I’m never stuck for topics of conversation,” he said, referring to his weekly show “Calvin’s Common Sense Crusade.”

“And that’s a problem,” he said. “I should reach a point where I’m like, okay there’s nothing to say today, we’re in a good place. I wish I could do that but I can’t.”

Mr. Robinson said this “intolerance” of ideas is “growing” and he believes it will “become persecution.”

Mr. Robinson, of British and Afro-Caribbean descent, was a teacher, columnist, and political commentator. He had also run three unsuccessful election campaigns before becoming a trainee vicar in 2020.

But the Church of England rejected his application to become a deacon last year. Emails he obtained through a subject access request revealed senior clergies had exchanged concerns over his social media comments that were described as “libertarian anti-woke, anti-identity politics, Covid-skeptical etc,” including his rejection of the idea that Britain is “institutional racist.”

He has since joined the breakaway conservative Global Anglican Future Conference.

Mr. Robinson criticised the church for having “buckled under pressure” and embracing identity politics, or so-called wokism, saying it has become “more afraid of the world and it is of God.”

“I think it’s because it has been captured by the Marxists,” he told NTD.

“Gender theory, queer theory, critical race theory, you name it, all of it. We can branch under the bracket of wokeness. But it is essentially Neo-Marxism, which is the work of the enemy. It’s unChristian, it’s anti-Christian. And it’s trying to destroy our very way of life,” he said.

Mr. Robinson said the obsession with identities is making people into “narcissists,” and everything else falls apart around it.

He also argued the Christian faith is treated differently in Britain because “there’s an old-fashioned patronizing form of racism going on in the metropolitan liberal elites.”

While many religions share similar views on certain things such as sex and gender, Mr. Robinson said the liberal elite would “tolerate Islam, Hinduism, Judaism sometimes, [and] Sikhism” while demanding Christians to be more “tolerant and inclusive and diverse.”

“So they have lower expectations of these foreign religious beliefs,” he said, adding that it’s a “very narrow worldview” that he believes is falling apart.

Robinson: I Don’t Believe in Multiculturalism

Mr. Robinson said he doesn’t believe multiculturalism can work, or the idea that all cultures are equal.

“There are ways that other cultures are better than ours, but there are certainly ways that ours are better than others,” he said, “in this country we don’t throw people off the roofs for being homosexual and we wouldn’t stone a woman to death for showing her face.”

“These are things that we would consider serious, and we we have to live and die by these rules,” he said.

Mr. Robinson said he believes there has to be a “predominant culture” in a society. And to welcome people from other cultures, “we have to have something to welcome them into, and in Britain, we have a British culture, we should celebrate that culture.”

He said society can’t be culturally neutral because “natural abhors a vacuum,” and “wokism' is not an adequate replacement for Christianity.

“If we take Christianity out, something else will replace it. At the moment it seems to be wokism, but it changes too rapidly, but it cannot sustain itself. You know, what they believe one day is different to what they believe the next day, and people they supported one day get cancelled the next day. So it’s not sustainable in the long term,” he said.

“Perhaps Islam will fill that void left behind by Christianity, but we have to make a choice as a society: Who do we want to be? What does it mean to be British? Is it important to us that we’re a Christian nation? ”

“I think it is, because it’s what our nation was built upon. It’s ... the principles that built our nation. But if we don’t want to be a Christian nation anymore, and we have to decide what kind of nation we want to be,” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe a country can “just be anything for anyone.”