If You Want to Condemn Fascism Don’t Use Fascism as a Word for Something We Need

I have stated everything that needs to be said in the title because I think this is a point that should be seen as clearly as possible and expressed with the utmost force.

I particularly want

• The Guardian
• Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart
• Rowan Williams, Justin Welby, Sarah Mullaly
• Timothy Synder, Jason Stanley and any other theorist of contemporary fascism

to notice this argument.

It all started with Brexit ‘n’ Trump. Fascism is coming. We are in the 1930s. Trump is Hitler. Farage is Mosley. Tommy Robinson is a member of the Blackshorts. “Fascism is back,” says Rosan Smits in a book I list below (and which Amazon hilariously calls This is Fascism Brilliant Alastair Campbell). Fascism is back. “This time not with swastikas, Nazi flags and deadly bureaucracy, but Make America Great Again caps, Right-wing extremist memes and a fist raised in triumph.”

And this sort of drivel is still heard now.

Everyone keeps writing about fascism. And they are making a mess of it. Here is a list.

• Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017), which claimed that Trump would change America from “a naïve and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy”;
• Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2018);
• Paul Mason, How To Stop Fascism (2021);
• Alberto Spektorowski, Intellectual Post-Fascism (2025);
• Rosan Smits, This is Fascism (2026);
• Slavoj Zizek, Liberal Fascisms (2026);
• Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism (coming out in 2027).

Everyone is being too stupid or too clever. The too-stupid people say ‘Trump is fascist’, while the clever people say ‘Yes but he is a fascist because he is a liberal, ha, ha, ha’, or some other similarly fatuous paradox which is designed to demonstrate that the only remaining alternative, once one has abandoned any hope of being a liberal because that means one is also a fascist, is to become a communist (i.e., may I suggest, a hypocritical, er, fascist).

The only truth of, the sum of all wisdom on, fascism is that anyone can be fascist. This is because of the likelihood that someone else will eventually call you a fascist.

If you have any characteristics at all, you are probably a fascist.

The only way to be a coherent and complete antifascist is to have no characteristics.

This brings me to the Church of England.

The Church of England is full of fools and, worse, tools. Tools of the Established Secular State Church: which, incidentally, is a Church that was born out of Newspapers, Comte’s Religion of Humanity, the Fabian Society, Bertrand Russell and BBC, as watered down by people since the 1960s whose names I fortunately cannot recall. The problem is that the actual Church of England is partly still the Church of England, in certain holes and corners – e.g. Edward Norman’s grave (although he opted out for the Roman Catholic Church quite some time ago), the Irreverend podcast and in the writings of the occasional illiberal clergymen and churchgoers who are let into the Spectator – but is mostly, and by institution, part of but not all of this second church, the Established Secular State Church, which also includes, of course, Stonewall, Hope Not Hate, Just Stop Oil as well as ordinary nice and harmless NHS scrubs and crocs-wearers.

The problem is contemporary Christianity.

Contemporary Christianity has no dogmatics, no apologetics, nothing. It has a habit of ritual and a vague creed of love. Maurice Cowling spoke of “creedless Christianity”: Christianity without beliefs. Well, modern Christianity is without beliefs: it is without Christian beliefs. But modern Christianity is full of other beliefs: such as the state is bad, war is bad, oppression is bad, order is probably bad, the church was bad but is trying to be good. Mostly it is a thin wash of secular egalitarian and rectifarian politics with a heavy dose of anywhereism, or, if you prefer, globalism. It twitches in alarming manner about slavery and extreme climate events, and ignores truth, justice or law.

They say: ‘Good Samaritan? Aye, very good Samaritan; and, while we are on the subject, Good Somalian, Good Sudanese, Good Afghan!’

Disagree and you are a fascist.

So listen to this.

From the Guardian.

Alexander the Great undid the Gordion knot by cutting it.

Alexander the Less shall undo the Guardian knot by cutting it too.

Fascism is on the rise in the UK, a Church of England bishop has warned, condemning the “twisted theology” of the self-described “Christian patriots” who demonstrated at ports on the south coast last weekend.

The masked, black-clad, anti-migrant agitators – led by Daniel ‘Danny Tommo’ Thomas, a former bodyguard of the far-Right influencer Tommy Robinson – were heard chanting: “Christ is King.”

Oh dear. Illegal immigrants enter the country. “Christian patriots” try to oppose them. Well, how embarrassing for the Church of England. So what the Church does is it tries to insert a wedge between “Christian” and “patriot”, and it does this by distinguishing, very firmly, ‘Christian’, which is over here, and ‘fascist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘patriot’, ‘anyone wearing a St George cross’, ‘that strange man in prayer’ and ‘who is that reading the Bible?’ over there.

What I think Arun Arora, the Bishop of Kirkstall (the man who is quoted by the Guardian condemning patriots), fails to recognise is that what he is saying is that it is not Christian to defend England.

This is surely a disastrous thing for a Bishop in the Church of England to say.

He has forgotten his vocation.

No doubt part of his vocation is to preach the Gospel of Christ.

But the other part of his vocation is to preach that Gospel to the Church that is England: the ecclesia Anglicana, i.e., the English.

And he is messing up the second part of his vocation if he says it is not Christian to defend England.

By “England” I mean, and we should all mean, a territory, a language, a history and, though it may shame some to say it, a people.

There is a standard Establishment line, used by politicians for a few decades at least, which supposes that anyone who wants to defend ‘the English’ is the cause of division.

It is the oddest of all twists that the Black Prince/Henry V/Marlborough/Nelson/Churchill stuff is now taken to be divisive.

Arora trots out absolute codswallop like this. We have taken, he says, “the first steps on the journey to open fascist nationalism that takes pride in conflict, hostility and division”. “The biggest threat to England’s fabric today is to be found in the tidal wave of nationalism that threatens to destroy the foundations of community, to devastate social cohesion and threaten any sense of unity within this United Kingdom.”

He is as confused as Sadiq Khan. (For an old piece on Khan’s confusion, see here, and for a more general one on ‘Fascism for Dummies’, see here.)

I saw that in the Daily Telegraph Sarah Mullaly was saying sensible things about the sort of murder that is called assisted dying. But on everything else she is a wet. A wet nurse, one might say. She said: “I think we’re all becoming aware that we have created a society where people feel that it is acceptable to intimidate others.” I hardly know where to begin with that. She should read a book. Robert Tombs’s The English, say. Or, dare I suggest it, the Bible.

Then the Bishop for Racial Justice (what? what?), Rosemarie Mallett, said that “racial justice is needed more than ever”. I suppose she would say that. The church, she explains, “offer[s] a theological vision of belonging that lives out Jesus’s call to welcome the stranger”. Well, that is woeful English, for a start.

And Jesus never said ‘Welcome strangers’. He was not running a hotel by Lake Galilee.

His Gospel was for the Judaeans.

And he brought a sword.

And were not Crusaders fighting for the Cross? That is the explanation of their name. Think of Charles Martel. Think of Richard the Lionheart. And think of the many who fought for England.

We can be cynical about this. David Starkey is cynical when he says that the Church of England is a Shinto by which the English worship themselves. He is half wrong, but half right. It is this, but it is also not-this. It is both. The religion is a chastisement against pride, but also a guidance for pride. And the Bible itself is written in two languages: one is war, the other is peace: or, if one prefers, one is justice, the other is mercy. And the entire problem with our modern Christianity, heavily infected by the beliefs of a secular Establishment, is that it thinks Christianity should be all peace and mercy and no war or justice. But God is a jealous God.

Look. Bishops, Archbishops. You represent England. You represent the Church of England. You do not represent an abstract church with an abstract gospel. You are meant to be the English nation at prayer: and when we pray we are meant to pray according to the Nicene Creed. This creed is Roman, Imperial. And this is because, even though the church is, in Gospel terms, the simple community of Jesus, it necessarily become a worldly entity: an institution within which we could be pilgrims on this earth, and sometimes an institution that took over states and empires, thus allowing us to be pilgrims guided and protected by an establishment.

I have written, ‘If You Want To Condemn Fascism, Don’t Use Fascism As A Word For Something We Need.’ Specifically, we need to defend this country, this people, this language, this history. And the state and church are meant to be here to defend these. So what is going on if the state and church are dedicated to their destruction? If these small-shelled withdrawing-proboscis Episcopalians are calling the defence of church-and-state “fascism” then they are going to persuade a lot of us to call ourselves “fascist”. Is that what they want? For we need the thing they condemn. We need a bit of blood and bowel in this country.

I admire the principle behind the protests, and object to the principles summoned in order to condemn both that principle and the protests.

If by ‘fascist’ we mean ‘intolerant of opposition, morally self-certain, willing to display the apparatus of force in service of simplifying political processes, a bit strutting and cocksure and goosestepping’, then the United Kingdom might need a bit of that, especially if it has the right content. The right content is contentious. We can argue about it. Scepticism and all that. But let’s say that if it has the Bible and Shakespeare running in it, it cannot be far wrong. Perhaps we have to be fascist in defence of what needs to be defended, and if the Church of England prioritises a reluctance to be ‘fascist’ over everything else, including England and God’s Truth, then, as Bernard Williams said of mediocre philosophers, they are simply “in the way”.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.