We hear a lot about Christian nationalism in the United States, but in the United States we rarely hear what is going on in other similar countries who share history, language, and legal traditions with the United States.
In this short entry, I seek to broaden our view of Christian nationalism and its threat—or lack thereof—to democracy by analyzing its presence in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. These three democracies closely align with the United States and share news feeds. However, their experiences are distinct from the United States. Should America learn something from these other democracies?
The term Christian nationalism does not refer to how a Christian votes, lobbies, or runs for office. Being a Christian and caring for your country and its politics does not make you a Christian nationalist.
Christian nationalism refers to the act of fusing national identity with the Christian religion such that the nation, by definition, is Christian. Christian nationalists will say that Christianity deserves a special place in public life and that drifting from this principle threatens the nation itself. Nick Spencer of the British think tank Theos reduces the definition even further: Christian nationalists hold that you have to be Christian in order to be truly British (or American, Canadian, Australian, etc.).
One important point to keep in mind is that while the movement has become more visible, this does not mean it is growing larger. Exaggerated media coverage tends to create a deceptive but shared interpretation of growth even though, on the ground, the numbers have not changed.
On September 13, 2025, the Metropolitan Police counted about 110,000 people at the “Unite the Kingdom” march in London organized by activist Tommy Robinson (whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). Many marchers carried wooden crosses. Ordained ministers spoke from the stage, and a worship band played. Other church leaders pushed back. The presidents of Churches Together in England (CTE) said that some at the rally had used symbols and words of the faith to support views that actually opposed the Christian message of unconditional love for every human being.[1] Cardinal Vincent Nichols of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference supported the CTE stance.
On October 11, 2026, Theos, a Christian think tank, published a detailed new poll. Its pollster, RED C, questioned 1,765 adults across the United Kingdom (UK) between April 7 and 27, 2026. The researchers sorted respondents into five groups. The group that comes closest to Christian nationalism, which Theos calls “Identity Integrationists,” accounts for 11 percent of UK adults. They regard Christianity as fundamental to Britishness and seek to defend it from what they see as threatening outside influences. Within that group
Theos also indicated that 82 percent of those 11 percent agree with the Great Replacement theory claim that the white population of Europe is being deliberately replaced by migrants from Muslim countries.
The experience in the UK is the reverse of the American pattern. In the United States, the frequency of churchgoing correlates positively with support for Christian nationalism. In the UK, most people do not attend church, and most nationalist groups are outside the church. In every group where the comparison can be made, nominal Christians sympathize slightly more with merging Christianity and Britishness than practicing Christians do. Theos concludes that in the British context, when it comes to Christian nationalism, culture matters more than belief.
Canada shares television, church networks, and political slogans with the United States, so American influence is easy to spot. Still, Canada remains distinctly different.
One main difference is the pool of believers. A March 2025 survey by the Angus Reid Institute and the think tank Cardus Institute questioned five thousand Canadians and five thousand Americans. Eighteen percent of Canadians were counted as “religiously committed,” compared with 37 percent of Americans. While that statistic measures devotion, not nationalism, it suggests that the potential for a strong presence of Christian nationalism in Canada is lower than in America.
In Canada, Christian nationalism exists mostly outside party politics. During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the Canadian scholar Christine Mitchell wrote in The Conversation that at the convoy she spotted a supporter waving a banner bearing a biblical promise to heal the land. When the Bible decides what society allows, she argued, that is the definition of Christian nationalism. Still, she was describing a faction of the convoy, not the whole protest.
Christian nationalism also appears in provincial conflicts. Canadian commentators link Christian conservative activism to Alberta’s battles over parental rights, education, and policies affecting transgender youth. Conservative groups, in the Alberta example, are largely led by Dutch immigrants who have invoked parental rights to secure public funding for private schools as far back as the 1960s. Again, being a Christian conservative is not the same as being a Christian nationalist, but in the Canadian context, some overlap can be found here.
Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Carleton University, calls evangelicals and social conservatives a marginal force in Canadian politics, even within the Conservative Party. No major national political party embraces the idea of Christian nationalism. In his view, the Canadian parliamentary system gives party leaders firm top-down control, which means that the Christian nationalist movement has largely fought defensive battles. Canadian evangelicals are as morally conservative as American ones, but as a study in the Canadian Journal of Sociology concludes, Canadians understand the link between religious morality and national identity differently. Canadians do not tend to merge the two together.
Canada is a patchwork: a protest here, a provincial policy there. It is not American Christian nationalism with a northern accent.
Australia shows that the Christian right and Christian nationalism are not the same thing.
Researchers describe the Australian Christian right as a loose yet connected network of church leaders, lobby groups, politicians, and media. It gained notoriety under Prime Minister John Howard, who treated the Australian Christian Lobby as a legitimate voice for Christianity as a whole. Today, Christian nationalism is present through candidate forums, scorecards that grade parties on their Christian values, and election campaigns.
The 2025 federal election provided a messy example. The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, formerly the Exclusive Brethren, is a separatist church whose members typically do not vote. In April 2025, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the church had sent hundreds of members to polling booths in marginal seats to campaign for the right of center Coalition party (officially known as the Liberal-National Party). Newspapers later reported that the church paid far-right influencers to intimidate Labor Party campaigners.
At a parliamentary hearing on August 21, 2026, Plymouth Brethren Church leaders denied paying anyone to disrupt the election or directing its members to harass candidates. The Christian Coalition called the inquiry a witch hunt. Whatever the eventual outcome of this inquiry, the episode still concerns a religious group’s political influence. It is not a concern about the question or claim that Australia is a Christian nation.
The nationalist element emerges only when campaigns cast Australia’s authentic identity as Judeo-Christian, link national decline to secularism, or treat Christianity as the necessary foundation of civilization. Elenie Poulos, a Uniting Church minister who studies the movement, notes that Christian nationalism remains a marginal voice in Australia, but this has not stopped the movement from promoting the idea that Christians are a privileged group within Australian society.[2]
In a 2021 analysis, David Smith of the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney found that the phrase “Christian nation” was fading from Australian life. It appeared in print media thirty-five times in 2016 and eight times in 2020, and nearly half of those uses came from people rejecting the claim. Of 15,500 submissions to the federal Religious Freedom Review, only four asserted that Australia is a Christian nation. When Australians do call their nation Christian, Smith found, they usually mean heritage, holidays, and census numbers, not divine election or a sacred covenant.
Australia, then, has an organized Christian right with real reach and a thin tradition of Christian nationhood, but, despite the network on the Christian right, the appeal of Christian nationalism is overall weak.
My attempt has been to throw a broader light on Christian nationalism and to show that its presence in other democracies takes diverse, often less threatening, forms. This makes it hard to tell whether Christian nationalism is a sincere threat to democracy because the coverage it receives in traditional and social media often amplifies its presence in a way that is disproportionate to its reality.
Looking at democratic nations outside the United States indicates that the movement, though present, is not nearly as pervasive as it appears to be inside the United States. Nevertheless, the movement should not be underestimated. When a religion like Christianity, and within Christianity when a movement like Christian nationalism, gains the political power to define who counts as a citizen, then democracy as such has died.
[1] See “God’s overwhelming and unconditional love for every single human being” – CTE
[2] See “Understanding the Unique Minority Threat of Australian Christian Nationalism”
The views expressed are the author's reflections and do not constitute endorsement of any political candidate or political party.
Thumbnail Image: Photo by Cody Otto on Unsplash
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