But Marshall’s efforts go well beyond support for religion in the U.K. His aims are clearly political. He has forged alliances with number of conservative politicians and launched an organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which draws in right-wing activists and personalities. He made an initial investment of £10 million into GB News, a conservative media outlet that frequently veers into right-wing culture war territory, and has subsequently invested millions more. He has also invested 18 million pounds in Ralston College, a tiny Savannah, Georgia–based liberal arts school with a robust online platform, whose chancellor is the right-wing culture warrior Jordan Peterson. In 2024, he purchased the conservative-leaning U.K. publication The Spectator for 100 million pounds. In doing so, he will play a pivotal role in shaping conservative politics in the U.K. for years to come.
For now, of course, people like Marshall are swimming against the U.K. tide. Most American-style culture wars remain unpopular in the British Isles. I still find it difficult to imagine a movement to end abortion or same-sex marriage erupting here and taking aim at democratic institutions. Most British people were stunned when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. One friend, a Tory Brexiteer, asked me in genuine confusion, “Why would anyone want to ban abortion?”
But, when I consider that the U.S. religious right has found willing U.K. partners and is carefully laying the groundwork, I consider the possibility that I’m making too many assumptions. I wander in my memory back to my childhood in 1970s Boston, and it occurs to me that Americans then might have had equal difficulty imagining what has become of our national politics today.
At that time, abortion was thought to be of concern mainly to a subset of Catholics, and it didn’t divide along partisan lines. In 1972 the popular television show Maude, executive-produced by the late Norman Lear, featured two segments in which the lead character faced an unintended pregnancy and chose abortion. Lear later remarked that this storyline generated no controversy when it first aired.
Many conservative Protestants and their institutions, including the Southern Baptist Convention, had welcomed the Supreme Court ruling that for half a century secured the right of American women to reproductive freedom. Even after the religious right succeeded in convincing conservatives that all evil came down to abortion, the issue was initially thought to be a social one, to be resolved by democratic means within the existing institutions.
Few people at the time would have imagined that antiabortion activism would become an indispensable tool for mobilizing large groups of people to join in an assault on democracy itself. The recent developments in the U.K., I realize, are like a window on the American past. This is how things must have looked before the antidemocratic reaction really took hold.
Copyright © Katherine Stewart, 2025. From Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart, published by Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. Edited for length and clarity.