‘BAD RELIGION’: Effort to Cancel This Defender of the British Empire Reveals the Left’s ‘Repressive’ Ideology

Lord Nigel Biggar had the audacity to defend the British empire, and the Left’s cancel culture against him revealed a “repressive” desire to silence “anyone who disagrees” with its narrative.

“I’ve noticed it’s not just that we have points of view that disagree with me on colonialism or race or gender or whatever—that’s acceptable in a liberal society,” Biggar tells The Daily Signal. “It’s not sufficient for people to express the fact they disagree with me. They want to shut me down. So, there’s a repressive element to these progressive ideologies.”

Biggar, an Anglican priest who taught at Oxford University and led a project examining colonialism, recalled how students loudly protested his project. While he did not insist that everything the British Empire did was morally justified, he dismantled much of the anti-colonialist narrative that presents the empire as an unmitigated evil. When he wrote the book that would become “Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning,” his first publisher canceled the contract under pressure, delaying the book’s release.

Biggar, a member of the House of Lords, said the book sold more than 60,000 copies, embarrassing the publisher who caved to pressure. He plans to publish another book on the subject of cancel culture.

“I think this is a quasi-religious movement,” he says.

“I am myself a religious believer. I’m a Christian. I’m a priest. So I’m not against religious belief, but there is bad religion,” Biggar explains. “And this is religion where you mistake yourself for God, and you think you have all truth on your side. You forget that you’re a sinner, you have all the truth, you have all the justice, and anyone who disagrees with you belongs to the devil, and your job is to shut them up by whatever means without any scruple.”

“And that is really, really bad religion,” he adds.

“In the same sense, it’s godless religion,” Biggar notes. “I think one of the advantages of believing in God is that you’re less inclined to mistake yourself for one.”

The author notes that the Left’s ideology has some things going for it. “It’s morally serious, it believes in justice, it thinks it’s championing the poor and oppressed and the victimized—thinks it’s doing that—and I approve of that, but the thing is that the champions will not suffer any criticism,” he says.

Biggar recalls his involvement with the Free Speech Union, a British organization with branches in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Switzerland that advocates for free speech, academic freedom, the freedom of the press, and more. He notes how the union draws attention to instances of cancel culture and shames institutions that seek to silence people when they dissent from the Left’s narrative.

He expresses hope that cancel culture can ultimately be defeated.

“I do think our societies at the moment have a problem with the free expression, particularly, of conservative views or non-progressive views,” Biggar explains. Yet “my view is that the problem comprises the noisy aggression of a zealous, illiberal minority plus the intimidated, perhaps indifferent acquiescence of a majority, that the ideologues are a minority, actually, but because the majority are either intimidated or don’t care enough, what is in fact the view of a minority dominates.”

While this seems like bad news, “the good news is if the acquiescent majority can be persuaded of the importance of what’s at stake here to rouse themselves, and if an environment can be created where it’s not too costly to risk contradicting the illiberal zealots, the landscape would change instantly.”

Biggar insists “we are involved in a culture war, and it’s important that … liberal people win, because otherwise we don’t have a culture where we can challenge false dominant ideologies.”

He also addresses anti-Christian bias, the dominant cultural assumptions that Christians are stupid, backward, and evil.

“I rejoice in the happy accident that this point in my life as a public Christian, I find myself fighting the corner for reason and tolerance,” Biggar says.

He notes that Christianity enables humility about his own moral perfection and his own ability to see the truth—important checks on the kind of hubris that drives the Left to silence its critics.

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