A Challenge to the Church from Tommy Robinson on International Men’s Day

Men are looking for a costly gospel, and they’re not finding it in church.

While many are celebrating the so-called “quiet revival,” another movement is emerging that the more established churches seem to want to either ignore or condemn. Some call it the “messy” or “dirty” revival. It was visible at the recent “Unite the Kingdom” march led by Tommy Robinson. And it appears to be a turn to some form of Christianity, especially amongst men.

To take this moment seriously, I’ve been listening to Robinson directly. Many people have strong opinions about him, but few in my circle seem to have actually heard him. I understand the instinct to recoil from perceptions of “someone like this,” yet if we want to understand what is going on in our nation, we will need to take a more serious approach to the opportunities that seem to be opening up for discipleship. And that includes listening, not to seek agreement but to take responsibility.

One interview with broadcaster Jonathan Sacerdoti, has Robinson speaking about a masculine Christianity, and it seemed appropriate to explore this on International Men’s Day:

He describes discovering a pastor while he was in prison who lived a normal life, who could speak plainly, who understood sacrifice, who was “normal.” He compares that man to the imams who visited prisoners, whom he describes in a similar vein as “street level,” relatable, present. He describes a hunger for a faith that is strong, not soft; demanding, not comfortable. He says he loves black churches and American gospel preachers because they preach with conviction and authority: “I’d follow him.” There’s one particular section that I want to share here. His words reveal with uncomfortably clarity how poorly Christ has been revealed by the church:

“I think that masculine Christianity is coming back. Not a weak pathetic Christianity — Christianity isn’t weak. It’s never been, wouldn’t still be here if it was weak. But it’s become weak. The church have become weak. The church have become dissolute, disaffected from the community.
And if you look at the figures, which has been real interesting to see, young men are finding church. And I think that the reason Jews are doing it, and Christians are doing it, is because when you’re at risk — when you realise your culture, identity is at risk — you look for a belonging, a belief, and people are finding it in Christianity.”

…

“But I do believe that there is a Christian revival happening, and I think that there is a masculine form of Christianity that’s going to rise, and it’s going to be detached from the church.”

We should not interpret Robinson here as a theologian, or as a mature Christian. Indeed, he’s not claiming to be that himself. But it would be arrogant and dangerous to ignore that there is something prophetic, not because he speaks truthfully about Christ, but because he reveals something true about the church. And whether we like the messenger or not, his words, which connect with a massive portion of the country, should trouble the church. The question is: why are men hungry for a confident Christianity hearing a clearer call from fringe Christian teachers who are, ostensibly, outside the church, than inside it?

The question, then, is not about Robinson himself but about the crowd, the movement, the spiritual longing emerging outside the established churches, even if it is driven by a cultural dislocation. Here I find Maurice Glasman’s recent reflection during the Q&A of an event organised by Together for the Common Good on the “Unite the Kingdom” march instructive. He has directed this warning consistently to politicians, especially the Labour Party, but has applied it more recently with equal force to the Church.

“I distinguish between the crowd and the stage… They are our people.”

We respond instinctively to the stage, whether that’s to personality, slogans, or the uncomfortable company they keep. We recoil from the optics, and so we retreat. But Glasman warns that we are meant to contend for the crowd, not abandon it. And specifically this crowd. The “dirty revival,” if one wants to call it that, is only “dirty” because it begins among people who have not yet been discipled. And that should sound familiar. Jesus did not begin with the respectable or the well-formed. He began with those outside the synagogue’s comfort: tax collectors, fishermen, zealots, men with rough edges and rough reputations. Revival has always started at the margins (Romans 3), among people who do not yet know how to speak, think, or worship “correctly.” Indeed, a church that waits for purity before engagement will never engage at all. Glasman goes on:

“The people who were there are the people we have to contest the leadership of, and it’s our tradition’s failure that the stage was so disgusting. We’ve got to contest that. That’s why I was going about ‘Christ is King’ because we’ve got a vision of what that means that isn’t being presented to them.”

Glasman goes further:

“I won’t vacate that space no matter how ‘below the line’ it is or (if) the Guardian objects because that space is the fundamental brokering of the new era. If we surrender that space, it’s beyond tragic what is going to come. You can’t contest that space without hearing what people are saying, which is rage.”

Here is where I see the pastoral and theological challenge that is presented by both Glasman and Robinson. The church has surrendered the space where men are wrestling with identity, belonging, sacrifice, and purpose. We have often reduced discipleship to niceness, risk-avoidance, performative inclusion, management strategies and therapeutic language. It’s become what William Booth of The Salvation Army warned against - the rise of what he called the ‘comfortable classes’ those educated and respectable enough to be insulated from costly conviction. He went so far as to call them the ‘dangerous’ classes.

Robinson’s words about “masculine Christianity” are provocative. They should be unsettling. They might well be distorted and looking to Christianity as an answer to merely nationalist and cultural questions. But they point to something the British churches must reckon with. I don’t believe that men are looking for a violent gospel, or a nationalist gospel, or a swaggering gospel. They are looking for a costly gospel that demands something of them, forms them, disciplines them, and sends them out with purpose.

That purpose, in the gospel, is not a tribal banner for one people against another. Of course, in the Kingdom, it is not the dominant or the loud who prevail, but the widow, the orphan, and the poor who are lifted up. This is where we must be clear that the church is not called to mimic the strongman or baptise grievance. Nor is it called to sanitise the Gospel into a toothless therapy that offends no one and gets subsumed by secular ideologies. Instead it is a called to proclaim a crucified King, whose strength is displayed in wounds, whose victory is won through self-giving love, whose authority is received only by those who lay their lives down.

The church can condemn the movement on the stage, writing letters and making policies that widen the divide between “us” and “them,” or it can contest the true meaning of the crowd’s hunger and meet it with the costly way of Christ. And if we do not disciple men into cruciform courage, someone else will disciple them into its counterfeit. The question, on International Men’s Day, then, is why it is not us?

Men are looking for a costly gospel. The church must decide whether it will offer one.

1. How can we be ‘salt’ if we fear the places that most need ‘seasoning’?
2. How can we condemn a crowd we have never tried to disciple?
3. If we refuse to form men into strength, who will shape their strength instead?