I promised myself that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference would be my last encounter with the organised far right for a while. Then I remembered that one of Britain’s oldest far-right religious organisations meets only a few yards from my house.
For years the British-Israel World Federation held meetings in Durham. Today it meets in a community centre at Framwellgate Moor.
On the surface it looks harmless enough: Bible study, lectures on ancient history and a congregation whose average age would not alarm the local bowls club. If these are God’s chosen people he didn’t bless them with good health judging by the neckbraces and assorted orthoses on show.
But ideas should never be judged by the size of the room they are discussed in.
British Israelism emerged during the late nineteenth century and flourished during the height of the British Empire. Its central claim is extraordinary: that the peoples of Britain and north-western Europe are the true descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and therefore God’s chosen people.
Under this interpretation, the Bible becomes not a Middle Eastern story but, in effect, a European one. Modern Jews remain connected to biblical Israel, but many British Israelite writers argued they had become ethnically mixed, while Anglo-Saxon peoples preserved the true covenant.
In the early years they had an office in central London, next to Buckingham Palace and the patronage of the Duchess of Athlone. Today their world headquarters are in Bishop Auckland and the President of the BIF lives round the corner from me. He has never hidden his far right views; he walks around with them on a large placard, and appeared in the leaked BNP membership list. Their trustees include a number of Ulster Unionist politicians. One of their most profound beliefs is that Britain had to leave the EU to realise it’s sacred religious destiny as god’s chosen people
Yet it proved remarkably influential.
One of the movement’s early figures, Reuben H. Sawyer, went on to lead the Oregon Ku Klux Klan and helped shape what later became the Christian Identity movement in the United States. Christian Identity took British Israelism in an even more extreme direction. Instead of merely claiming that Anglo-Saxons were descendants of Israel, it declared that only white Europeans were God’s chosen people, while racial mixing violated divine law.
These ideas spread through parts of the American white nationalist movement, influencing extremist organisations and prison gangs over subsequent decades. Many of the themes now found within parts of American Christian nationalism—divine national destiny, racial hierarchy, suspicion of liberal democracy and hostility towards pluralism—grew from the intellectual traditions of British Israelism.
Which is why this obscure organisation in County Durham matters. Ideas that begin on the fringe sometimes travel remarkable distances.
Those ideas did not remain in America.
Through online media, evangelical networks and activists such as Tommy Robinson, elements of American Christian nationalism have begun flowing back into British politics. Crosses have become increasingly visible at nationalist demonstrations. Biblical language is used to justify political arguments that would once have been presented in purely secular terms. Far right events now attract a small number of people in clerical garb, albeit from weird churches:
At the violent protests after Henry Nowak’s murderer was sentenced dog collars mixed with nazi salutes.
This does not mean that most Christians, conservatives or even critics of immigration subscribe to these beliefs. They plainly do not. Nor does it mean that everyone attending nationalist demonstrations has ever heard of British Israelism. Ideas rarely spread in neat, identifiable packages. They evolve, fragment and reappear in different forms.
What fascinated me was seeing one of their points of origin still quietly meeting in a community hall in County Durham.
There is one final irony.
The version of Christianity promoted by British Israelism is obsessed with racial purity and European identity. The reality of modern Christianity points in the opposite direction.
The centre of gravity of global Anglicanism has shifted decisively towards Africa, Asia and the Global South. Many churches in Britain that were shrinking for decades have found new congregations through immigration. Some of the liveliest Anglican worship in Britain today comes from communities whose existence British Israelite theology struggles even to explain.
Reality has moved on. The mythology hasn’t.
That, perhaps, is why ideas like British Israelism survive. Not because they explain the modern world, but because they offer believers something emotionally more satisfying than history ever can: a story in which they were chosen all along.
https://www.britishisrael.co.uk
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/British_National_Party_membership_and_contacts_list,_reference