Here’s a thought for the day: what kind of Christian am I, and what kind of Christian is Tommy Robinson? It needs addressing, and so it’s good, given the far-righter’s recent religiously contentious pronouncements – and ahead of his planned carol service this weekend – that my church is addressing it. That’s not to say the matter is simple.

Scroll back. When I told someone from the Pentecostal church, which I had attended in my 20s, that I was going to be ordained in the Church of England, she very graciously conceded that while, on the whole, it was a “dead church”, there might be one or two “real Christians” within it. More disturbingly, a senior Anglican cleric of the evangelical persuasion recently said something similar to me – and I was unclear whether he regarded me as being one of the chosen few.

But as a theological liberal, I’m always uncomfortable with the notion that any human being can decide who’s in and who’s out. Jesus was very clear that none of us is in a position to judge each other, so I’m generally loth to pronounce anyone “not a real Christian”. And then along comes Robinson …

I’d been aware of Robinson’s existence for several years. As someone who suffered at the hands – and the boots – of far-right thugs in the 80s, for the crime of being brown-skinned, I found it laughable when he first started claiming to be a Christian. Clearly, he could no more name his favourite Bible verse than could President Donald Trump – who, famously, attempted to wriggle out of answering that question by saying that he didn’t want to “get into specifics”. And it seemed obvious that all Robinson’s rhetoric about this being a Christian country was simply code for “white” and specifically “not Muslim”.

However, more recently, he is said to........

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