Paul Marshall and the capture of Christianity
How the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite
When institutions hollow out, they present an opportunity for the money men. Football clubs are bought up by chancers, newspapers are taken over by oligarchs, and vicars fall over themselves at the sight of an open chequebook.
That the Church of England is facing the same fate is due to a number of causes, some of which have been discussed ad infinitum elsewhere. But one reason for the Church’s decline is its treatment of women. Though historically led by a small caste of gentleman leaders, it was the work of women that kept the church going. Behind the imagery of Father, Son, Judge, King and Lord was an army of largely middle-class laywomen. And then, gradually, they drifted away. As Professor Linda Woodhead and the journalist Andrew Brown write in That Was the Church That Was, which documents the decline of churchgoing in England and the takeover of parts of the church by elite evangelicals, “as women’s equality gained ground, the Church’s unthinking sexism and traditional exhortation to ‘honour and obey’ was becoming distinctly unpalatable to most of the population. Older generations of women remained in the pews, but their daughters abandoned them for alternative secular and spiritual options.”
The religious aspect of Paul Marshall’s public life is, in some ways, the most interesting. Marshall, the hedge fund billionaire and media investor, has centred many of his interventions on Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), a charismatic Evangelical church that combines a modern presentation with a highly traditional theology. I have an essay on him in the latest edition of Byline Times — Sir Paul Marshall and the rise of elite evangelical nationalism. Byline subscribers can read it here (£):
At the heart of Marshall’s political vision is a spiritual diagnosis: he believes that liberalism has “lost its moorings,” that the Enlightenment has corrupted society, and that only a revival of Christian values - as interpreted by a narrow and authoritarian strain of elite evangelicalism - can save Britain from moral collapse.
Nowhere is Marshall’s mission clearer than in his involvement with HTB and the wider evangelical networks orbiting the Church of England. HTB, located in one of London’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, has become the beating heart of elite evangelical Anglicanism.
HTB presents itself as sleek and modern, its services built around charismatic preaching and contemporary worship. Yet the vision it promotes is deeply hierarchical: traditional family structures, male leadership and a rigid moral code. Through its Church Revitalisation Trust (CRT), which Marshall funds, HTB has expanded its reach across Britain, planting churches and promoting an agenda that merges evangelical theology with authoritarian values.
If America’s evangelical right believes the United States is God’s chosen nation, Britain’s evangelical elite often appear to believe that they themselves were chosen to run the country - and that liberalism has allowed that authority to slip away.
It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and — perhaps most importantly of all — money.
During the research for the article I spoke with Professor Linda Woodhead, a leading sociologist of religion at King’s College, London. Woodhead makes a simple point, but an important one: the Church of England didn’t collapse overnight. It thinned out, losing its social base while retaining its institutional shell.
She also makes the point that when an institution loses confidence while retaining its symbolic power, it becomes open to capture, particularly by groups with the money and organisation to take advantage of that weakness.
The language used to describe this project is often revealing. Marshall and his allies like to talk about “Judeo-Christian values” — a political construction that helps form alliances and avoid accusations of antisemitism1.
“There’s no such thing as ‘Judeo-Christian’ really,” Woodhead told me. In practice, the term serves to build alliances — a convenient umbrella under which different strands of conservative thought can gather, while smoothing over the less convenient parts of their history.
The same pattern can be seen elsewhere. One of the more striking things Woodhead told me is that the relationship between religion and the culture war is often misunderstood.
“Christians on the right started the culture wars,” she said. “They ran it first, and then it got picked up more widely.”
What we are seeing now is not simply politics infecting religion. In many cases, it is religion — or a particular, highly organised version of it — that has set the terms.
As Woodhead also points out, English evangelicalism has long been shaped by elite networks. “In the post-war period,” she told me, “they had a very explicit programme — a long march through the institutions — putting their people into public schools, Westminster and the Church of England.”
And yet, for all this activity, the numbers remain small. HTB and its satellites are loud, but they are not large. “It’s not even a blip,” Woodhead said. “Church decline is the big story — and they haven’t changed that.”
Which is where the paradox lies. This is not a mass revival. It doesn’t need to be. What matters is not the number of believers, but where they are and what they control.
The Church of England, for its part, has helped create the conditions for this shift. “It has ceded the territory,” Woodhead told me. “It doesn’t speak about Englishness anymore… and that leaves space for others to move in and claim it.”
Into that space step figures like Marshall, armed not just with conviction but with capital to deploy in the culture war. The church is simply one more ideological battleground.
Right wingers used to cite political and economic theorists like Hayek and Friedman in support of their policies. Now it seemed they’re appealing to their idea of God’s wishes. That could be viewed as evidence that they’re struggling to produce any non-supernatural arguments.
This would be an effective strategy for Paul Marshall, James Orr, Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) &co. if they could draw on a popular British tradition of born-again Christianity of the kind that still exists in the the USA. But I don't think they can. There is no cross-shaped Brexit that I can see. Britain is becoming more and more secularised and multicultural. Insofar as there is a Christian revival, it's coming mostly from immigration, from Africa mainly (though it's surprising how many Indian Christians there are in Britain). These migrant Christians may often be socially and theologically conservative, but they are unlikely to be attracted to an ethnonationalist Anglo-British movement that proposes mass deportation of immigrants.
The evangelicals made rejection of homosexuality their shibboleth, but the public has become much more accepting of same sex relationships (less so of transgenderism, which is very different, whatever the LGBTQ+ activists may say) and churches where I live (Coventry) can often be seen putting out rainbow signs saying, sheepishly, 'Everyone is welcome here'. Then sex abuse scandals ripped through the movement, the implosion of the Jesus Army (very prominent in street evangelism in the Midlands) followed by the John Smith scandal that brought down Justin Welby.