Nick Griffin: “Be of Good Cheer for Christ Our Lord is Risen”

“After the General Election, all BNP leaflets will carry a Christian Cross”

Edmund Standing notes BNP leader Nick Griffin’s “Special Easter Message”, in which Griffin announces the party’s new emphasis on Christianity. Griffin writes that:

After the General Election, all BNP leaflets will carry a Christian Cross to demonstrate our commitment to maintaining and preserving our Christian heritage as a nation. Politically correct scoundrels like Rowen Williams will cry fowl but we have nothing to be ashamed of as we are the defenders of Britain’s Christian heritage, just like our Crusader ancestors in the Middle Ages.

…The darkest hour is just before the dawn, but be of good cheer for Christ Our Lord is risen!

Griffin explains that he has come to this realisation following a debate with George Hargreaves of the Christian Party:

A special event that happened recently has changed my outlook on our struggle and the situation facing our sacred country. That event was the peaceful, sensible, mature debate with the Christian Party leader George Hargreaves and a large number of Christian Party members. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire debate which was noticeably absent of the usual hysterical fanaticism of the liberal-left.

It made me think long and hard about a new dimension of our struggle: our Christian religion, culture and traditions. In the past too much emphasis has been placed on the ethnic aspect of our present national dilemma, whilst the longest running feature of our identity has been overlooked: the fact that our country has been held together and guided for millennia by our common, ancient religion: Christianity.

And before you misunderstand me, I do not mean the gut-wrenching politically correct quasi-Marxist nonsense spewing forth from the treacherous leaders of the modern Anglican Church. I mean the traditional, upright, decent and honest Christianity that defended Europe from Islamic conquest, the Christianity of the Crusades and the Christianity of our forefathers…

Griffin’s debate with Hargreaves was broadcast on Genesis TV (an extension of Howard and Lesley Conder’s Revelation TV, which was profiled by the Guardian in 2007), and can be found on YouTube. Both Hargreaves and Griffin took questions from Tim Vince and the audience; according to a report on Christian Today:

The two were debating the motion: “That the election of any BNP MP or leader of a Local Authority will be detrimental to Black and ethnic minority Christians in particular and the wider church in general in Britain.”

Mr Griffin revealed that his understanding of Christian heritage was one of “national pride and history”, rather than a personal and corporate dedication to Jesus Christ. When asked about his own relationship with God, he stated his relationship was not so much with Jesus, but rather with an ideal of what the Anglican church as the ‘state church’ should be.

When asked if the BNP would allow black churches to purchase building in certain areas of London, Mr Griffin made it clear that any church composed primarily of ethnic groups would be disallowed in historically white majority areas, and forced to conduct their worship in areas deemed suitable by a white political leadership.

Griffin got some claps for describing Anglican leaders as “wolves in sheeps’ clothing”, but he also praised Archbishop of York John Sentamu, and the former Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali. An endorsment of Nazir-Ali is not much of surprise (although it is sure to be unwelcome): Nazir-Ali has suggested that a return to Christian values should be promoted as a matter of national heritage (I blogged this here), and he is controversial for raising the spectre of “no-go” areas for non-Muslims in British cities, without providing any specific examples. However, Sentamu has been vociferous in his criticism of the BNP, and he has been mocked in turn as a Ugandan “spear-thrower” by Griffin’s deputy Simon Darby. Griffin also attacked “an aggressive leftist secularism”.

The BNP’s turn to Christianity has actually been going on for some time – one of the party’s high-profile activists is the Reverend Robert West (whom I have blogged a number of times), and a couple of other “Revs” have been BNP members. Griffin also gave us an “Easter message” last year – that too was a call for British Christians to revive their Crusader past in order to oppose Muslims (although that time he didn’t feel any need to mention of the Resurrection).

However, Edmund has been quick to point out the humbug of this; Griffin is actually known for being irreligious, and for declaring that

The idea of an anthropomorphic God in the sky who happens to take a particular interest in us has never struck me as remotely realistic.

Meanwhile, the BNP’s Legal Director Lee Barnes is an avowed Odinist, with an explicitly anti-Christian perspective:

Christianity is a semitic religion, it is creature of the deserts of the Middle East not the forests of the Northern Europe and its symbol the cross is an instrument of torture not of living redemption.

…The icons of death are what the West once worshipped – Moses, Christ, saints, popes etc etc

Now all these icons of death must be replaced by a living, organic religion which allows our people to reconnect once more with nature, the earth and the divine unfolding of the spiritual within the material and within Man.

Further, Griffin’s claim that turn to Christianity replaces an emphasis on “the ethnic aspect of our present national dilemma” is not quite the case: Rev West’s Christianity specifically denounces “the mixing of races”.

In last summer’s European elections, Hargreaves tried to persuade voters that he was the only candidate who could defeat the BNP, and – as I blogged here – his Christian Party recently entered the “Alliance for Democracy”, alongside the English Democrats and some other fringe-right parties. Griffin is doubtless aware that these parties offer a less toxic alternative to the BNP for nationalist-minded voters, and and he has adapted his rhetoric accordingly. This site has more on the BNP’s actual views.

15 Responses

  1. Please see this YouTube interview with Griffin and his wife. Griffin is an atheist, not a Christian.

    http://www.youtube.com/user/dominiccarman67?feature=mhw4#p/u/1/vEk74oGYxGQ

    ‘Totally unreligious’ Nick Griffin went on television on Monday March 22nd 2010 and repeatedly lied through his teeth about being a Christian and having faith. Griffin delivered a nauseating religious sermon, worthy of an American evangelist, about ”we do believe that nations were ordained by God and that nations are there at the end of times’ He does not believe a word of it. The man is, as his wife says ‘totally unreligious’ – and therefore a shocking hypocrite – as shown in the first two clips from Dominic Carman interviews:

    1) Nick Griffin says: ‘ The idea of an anthropomorphic God in the sky who happens to take a particular interest in us has never struck me as remotely realistic.’

    2) Mrs Nick Griffin, when asked is her husband religious? says forcefully: ‘HE’S TOTALLY UNRELIGIOUS.’

    GRIFFIN THEN GOES ON TO SAY ‘I’M AN ANGLICAN… I’M A CHRISTIAN WITHOUT A HOME.’

  2. Richard, I assume that Lee Barnes is an Odinist, not Odanist. You must be getting confused with Onanist, which, as we know, all members of the BNP are!

  3. I’d love to see the reactions of the BNP’s Aryan Heathens to this. Is anybody bringing the popcorn?
    (Nitpick: Most Odinists are actually against the BNP)

  4. Excellent post. First class.

  5. Yet more total hypocrisy from the so-called BNP! If the BNP was really pro-Christian and pro-British then they would be supporting the West’s War against [Islamic] Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as advocating Western intervention to remove the Iranian nuclear threat. Instead the BNP’s leader, someone called Griffin, used his maiden speech in the European Parliament to support the evil Ahmadinejad regime in Iran, rather than supporting the well-being of the White Christians who elected him in the North-West of England!

  6. So in taking sides with the Crusaders, does Nick honour such gallant crusader as Reynauld of Chatillon? Or what about crusaders who, as attested to by both Christian and Muslim crusaders, engaged in cannibalism (at Ma’arat al-Numan)?

  7. […] Wie Barth berichtet, traf BNP-Häuptling Nick Griffin anlässlich einer Fernsehdiskussion auf Genesis TV […]

  8. One of the reasons the BNP like religion in general is that its a legally possible way of calling out a prticular racial group without having to use race words.

    Lots of fundamentalist christians are very close to supporting the BNP. many of their issues are very close to things the BNP promotes:

    1. Brirish Israelism – The idea that Britain is specially treated by God.
    2. Authorised Version of the Bible Only camp – God retained his word specially for English speaking people (meaning white people).
    3. Anti Europe position – Europe (of course) being the whore of babylon.

    It doesnt take much to swing someone from those sort of beliefs into support of the BNP. Griffin and co have learned that from the TV debate and are going to maximise on it.

  9. […] I blogged on some other BNP ecclesiastics here, and on Nick Griffin’s decision to emphasise Christianity as “new dimension of our struggle” here. […]

  10. @ Gordon:

    true … and both BNP and fundamentalists also share the same authoritarian personality structure which results in a deep hostility against the “other”

  11. “Politically correct scoundrels like Rowen Williams will cry fowl”…i suppose it’s me being pedantic about the spelling, but is Griffin suggesting that Williams will start making bird noises?

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