The American Christian right has infiltrated the UK. We are on the road to Gilead, but it's not too late to change course

Imagine a Britain where abortion is illegal again. Where same sex marriage is overturned and gay parents who didn’t give birth to their babies have their names removed from their birth certificates. A country where even women’s right to vote is in question. Is this the road we’re on? While these things would have been implausible just a few years ago, these are the discussions that are now on the table, because of the rise of so-called “Christian” nationalism.

Ten years ago, as 2015 came to a close, feminism was exciting and even mainstream - from bookshop window displays featuring Caitlin Moran, Fleabag on prime time TV, 16 year old Malala Yousafzai winning the Nobel Prize to thirty-five of Billy Cosby’s accusers teaming up for a magazine cover. And even more thrilling to me, this had meant that conversations were happening in the pub.

I knew I really wanted to be part of it, so I started a podcast, The Guilty Feminist with the aim of building feminist muscle and learning alongside my audience. The show was a success and it felt good to be part of a wider movement. Women were in the streets shouting with hope and collective power. 

However, more recently I started to feel drained and burned out. Gloria Steinem says “a movement has to be moving somewhere” and I no longer knew where we were heading. I didn’t want to sit in rooms saying the same thing to people who already agreed with me while, just outside the door, the empire was striking back and we were losing the battle against abuses of power. I worried we just didn’t have the kind of strategic influence and political heft that would help us win the war, and that we weren’t doing anything about it. 

So I wrote a book, published earlier this year, called Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have – in which I explored the constant bickering on the left, along with the widening canyon between left and right. While researching what was behind some of these schisms I became aware of the rise of American Christian nationalism in Europe and the UK. I interviewed Neil Datta, the executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, who’s an expert on this, and he explained that when same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK and France, conservative Christian anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion groups in the US went into overdrive, and hired lawyers and political scientists to learn how to draft laws and bills to fight progressive movements in the UK and continental Europe. 

Since 2013, anti-abortion groups have slowly and quietly expanded in the UK. Datta explains: “They style themselves as NGOs, thinktanks and, in some cases, political parties, but when you scratch the surface, you see religious connections in almost all of them.” We have been looking across the pond in sympathy with Americans who had lost their right to abortions at a federal level, due to the overturning of Roe v Wade, but we have not appreciated that the same forces are working under our feet. 

Amnesty International UK has conducted analysis which “maps the nature and finances of 65 anti-rights groups operating across the UK, including anti-abortion organisations, groups promoting so-called ‘conversion therapy’, UK branches of powerful US-based organisations, and ultra-conservative Christian groups, with many groups emerging since 2015. Three-quarters are registered either as a charity or a company.” Just 32 of these groups spent £106m between 2019 and 2023. Their aims are to undermine our freedoms, restrict our access to healthcare and remove our hard-won rights. 

I felt galvanised by this and a lot of the symptoms of burnout and exhaustion fell away. It was now extremely clear to me that, as a feminist, I had an immediate and urgent task: would start a grassroots movement and call it ‘The Road to Gilead’. 

I’ve called it that because I think it’s what we’re on. Gilead, as you no doubt know, is a reference to the dystopian future envisioned by the writer Margaret Atwood. In her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (which, poetically, was written in the year 1984) she portrays a world where Black and brown people of all genders are rounded up and put in work camps, fertile white women are forced into reproduction and LGBTQ+ people are tortured and erased – all set in a place that once was the US, but is now called Gilead. We are now seeing a political climate that feels like a step towards that vision. 

To be clear, the US is not yet totalitarian. I don’t want to be alarmist. As Atwood said herself in a recent interview: “If the States were a full totalitarianism we would not be filming The Testaments [the new Handmaid’s Tale television sequel] at all. We’d be in jail, in exile, or dead.” 

However, we are seeing immigrants being rounded up and put into camps without due process. There is now a threat to same-sex marriage. Trans people are being drummed out of the military and described as “a domestic terror threat.” We are witnessing women bleeding out in hospitals in some states, while doctors are frightened to practise life-saving abortions for fear of losing their licence or even going to prison. And we are watching the rise of pronatalism, with “tradwives” acting as Christian nationalist influencers, in many cases telling young women to forgo an education, enjoy being financially dependent on their husbands and have as many babies as possible. (We should note that, recently, pregnant women have miscarried in immigration detention centres, as a result of medical negligence. This indicates that it’s not so much that all foetuses matter, but that all white foetuses matter.)

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defence, has even shared a montage of Christian nationalist pastors declaring that the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote, should be overturned and that each household should have one vote instead. Naturally they recommend, that according to their god’s loving arrangement, the man should be the head of the household and so that vote would be his, after consultation with his wife. Hegseth endorsed the montage with the motto, “All of Christ for all of life,” which is the official slogan of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches - a network of around 130 congregations across the USA, the latest set up strategically in Washington DC. Hegseth attended their first service.

All of this has emboldened the forces of Christian nationalism in the UK. Reporters Jane Bradley and Elizabeth Dias recently broke a story for the New York Times about definitive links between Nigel Farage and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group who were instrumental in overturning Roe v Wade. 

Farage has also announced the appointment of a Cambridge University professor, James Orr, as a senior adviser. Orr is against abortion for any reason at all, even the worst case scenarios. He is close to the heart of Trump’s government and has apparently declared JD Vance to be “the future of Maga”, as well as saying that if Reform wins the election, Nigel Farage would have to do “very unpopular things”. 

Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “This appointment confirms what we've always known: Reform UK is just a British franchise of Donald Trump’s Maga movement. By appointing Orr, Farage is clearly trying to import the same divisive and dangerous ideas that underpin the Trump administration.” 

It seems very much that if Farage wins, as many say he could, we will become the unofficial 51st state. He is already promising to adopt the American model of Doge (the Department of Government Efficiency), an entity which is stripping ordinary Americans of ordinary things in an increasingly unfair world. Obviously they will be keen to bring in a version of the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as they run on an anti-immigration platform. And while Farage has always claimed to be pro-choice, he’s now saying the UK’s abortion term limit is “utterly ludicrous” and that equal marriage was “wrong”. It seems likely that our way of life will be very different if Reform end up in government. 

We have time to turn this around. We are still a very secular nation and I truly believe if the people of this country did not want to be ruled by Europe, they damn sure won’t want to be ruled by the kind of American Christian nationalists we’ve seen in the White House lately, with their hands in the air speaking in tongues. 

This is not an attack on faith or faith communities. This is a resistance to the weaponising of faith with the aim of abusing power. In fact, I have started on ‘The Road to Gilead’ with six live Guilty Feminist podcasts and one of my interviewees is Rev Lucy Winkett, the rector of St James’s church, Piccadilly. Winkett was among the many church leaders who signed an open letter condemning the Tommy Robinson march for “co-opting and corrupting” the cross. 

I will also interview leaders of human rights organisations and LGBTQ+ advocates, including TV showrunner and national treasure Russell T Davies (Dr Who, Queer as Folk, It’s a Sin). We need to talk about the Christian nationalist group known as the King’s Army targeting Soho to intimidate the gay community. We want to talk about what Russell knows about building empathy through story, and engaging and inspiring an audience. 

For too long, progressive people have tried to scold others into acquiescing rather than draw people into a place of understanding and empathy. We have to get more persuasive. Most of all, we need to find ways of reigniting those who’ve given up on democracy. There’s a reason why Coca-Cola does not advertise by saying “f**k you if you drink Pepsi.” It’s not appealing. We need to be at least as interested as capitalists selling sugar-water in sharing our big ideas, for which the world is truly thirsty. 

To that end, I want to hold Open Space events where progressive people can find connection, share ideas and build grassroots projects together. Our first one will be on 17 January 2026 and people can express their interest by emailing [email protected] 

Ten years on, almost to the day, I again feel at the beginning, not knowing and ready to learn with my audience. The truth is, we might not win the fight against Christian nationalist values in our government and their policies - and if we don’t we will need an incredibly organised, committed community of like-minded souls to deal with the fallout. So this work will not have been wasted.

But we have time before the next election and I truly believe we can win. It’s not going to be easy but it’s absolutely possible – if we come together in coalitions, cut the sniping and griping, and set our minds to the importance of our task. So much is at stake that we now simply have to galvanise and get to work. There’s no time for pettiness or stalling. We need to turn this around and get on the road heading far away from Gilead.

Deborah Frances-White is a writer, comedian and Amnesty Ambassador, best known for The Guilty Feminist podcast. Her latest book ‘Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have’ is published by Virago