Essex County Council has announced it will start full council meetings with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

It is one of at least three county councils to introduce prayers since Reform UK took control. Derbyshire County Council added them as a standing agenda item last year, and Kent County Council voted to include Lord’s Prayer recitations at meetings last month.

With Reform having an outright majority in 24 councils and being the largest party in eight more, we will probably see more councils decide to make this regressive move, despite protestations from other parties. Kent councillors from across the political spectrum – Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems, and Greens – argued the prayers would be exclusionary, alienating, a waste of the council’s time, and “performative virtue-signalling”. Essex councillors expressed similar sentiments.

Why are Reform rolling out this divisive policy across the councils they control? Their justification is the same everywhere: “We are a Christian country”. This, coupled with the decision to start singing the national anthem in Kent and Essex, reveals the motivation behind the push for prayers: a Christian nationalist agenda.

The rise of Christian nationalism has accompanied the rise of Reform over the past few years. Its most prominent public expression could be seen at the ‘Unite the Kingdom‘ march last month, where large wooden crucifixes and banners with bible verses accompanied Union Jacks and St George’s crosses. English Defence Lead founder Tommy Robinson, who organised the march, posted the Lord’s Prayer on social media before the event.

The message is simple: you can’t be British without being Christian.

Although Reform leader Nigel Farage has attempted to distance himself from Robinson and his ilk, his flirting with Christian nationalism is drawing him ever further right. Last month he published a video saying he was “completely” on side with evangelical pastor Stephen Claydon, after Claydon was challenged by his local council for preaching on the street that gay people are an “abomination”. Farage repeated the ‘we are a Christian country’ mantra.

But Claydon’s bigotry isn’t limited to preaching fundamentalist views about gay people. Our investigations revealed Claydon has also accused Muslims of trying to “eradicate the native population” by “outbreeding” white people, said women should submit to their husbands, and claimed feminism is “the work of the devil”.

Reform isn’t the only party pandering to Christian nationalists. Kemi Badenoch has recently been pushing the “Christian country” narrative, not least in posting about her meeting with archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally this month. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer told Christian faith leaders at a Downing Street Easter reception he would build a “proper partnership” with Mullally, saying government and faith should not be “two separate things operating in separate spheres”.

Christian nationalism is fuelled by several sources, not least funding from right wing groups overseas. But one factor which cannot be overlooked is increased religious extremism – most notably, Islamist extremism. With successive governments failing to prevent the radicalisation of British teenagers and acts of Islamist violence against British citizens – including children – those already mistrustful of migration and diversity have leapt on Christian nationalism as a solution. If you can’t beat religious extremism, you may as well join it.

But far from being the solution, Christian nationalism exacerbates the problem. It further increases polarisation and sectarianism, and just makes it easier for other religious tribalists to gain ground.

To take the example of Christian council prayers, the same law introduced in 2015 to protect this practice (overturning an NSS court victory ruling that councils had no statutory powers to hold prayers) also enables prayers of other religions to be held. At Birmingham City Council last month, Islamic prayers were said in Arabic with English translations during a mayoral ceremony. This prompted a letter to the mayor calling for English only to be used in meetings. The letter said Birmingham is a “diverse city made up of many different faiths and backgrounds” and “official council meetings should remain inclusive and accessible to all residents regardless of religion or culture”.

Those quotes could have been from us at the National Secular Society. But in fact the letter came from…Reform UK.

If Reform UK genuinely believed that council meetings should be inclusive and accessible regardless of religion, it would oppose all council prayers, not just Islamic ones. Its position exposes the inconsistency of defending Christian privilege while objecting when the same accommodation is extended to other faiths.

Those who try to use Christian identity politics to gain votes should note the public at large are not keen. Recent research by Christian thinktank Theos found over 80% of Brits disagree that Christianity makes one “truly British”, or that people who don’t hold Christian values “do not belong in Britain”. Over 60% oppose the idea of declaring Britain a “Christian country”.

The findings echo both our recent research with More In Common, which found the British public thinks the relationship between Church and state is “outdated and in need of reform”, not to mention the census data which shows Christians are a minority in the UK.

Playing Christian identity politics may provide short term gratification to disaffected segments of the population who have genuine concerns about the rise of Islamism and the challenges immigration can pose to community cohesion – as well as a minority who have embraced the white ethnonationalism of Tommy Robinson.

But this will not outweigh the long term damage of pitting religious groups against each other and erasing the principles of fairness, equality, inclusion and pluralism in favour of Christian supremacism and further mixing of religion and state.

As Reform’s reaction to the Birmingham prayers reveals, a secularist approach which acknowledges the UK’s diversity and guarantees equal treatment for everyone – with strict red lines in place to ensure no religion or belief is elevated over another – is the best means we have to preserve the values of tolerance, freedom and fairness we prize as a nation.