The Catchphrases We Inherit Without Thinking
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(OPINION) New catchphrases turn up in what we read and hear that we soon find ourselves using, more or less heedlessly.
Catchphrases like “white privilege,” “re-wilding,” “non-binary” and “Islamophobic.” We may begin a bit puzzled, but before long they are part of our everyday lexicon. We neither question their origin, nor reflect on their integrity.
Whether we realize it or not (and usually we don’t), these expressions begin life as someone’s bright idea. “Islamophobia” for instance was dreamed up by American Palestinian academic and anti-Western activist Edward Said in a 1981 book called “Covering Islam,” along the lines of antisemitic. It was a way of weaponizing a sense of victimhood. Now, in the U.K., there are government policies to address it.
Once we start using this lexicon, we have been successfully “groomed” into a new discourse we might not quite “get” — but which we begin to accept as normal.
No, I’m not a signed up conspiracy theorist, and yes, language evolution is part of the dynamic of a lively society whose moods and modes it carries. But is that all it is?
I have graduated from years of “advocacy journalism” where I learned some of what are decidedly the dark arts of democratic compliance. I used “discourse analysis” as my PhD methodology to study the secularization of government over a five-year period in the 1980s and learned a bit about how language is power.
I was once in and out of parliament as part of one lobbying campaign or another, working with journalists, getting my stories into the press, persuading influential people to publish reports, putting on events and blitzing social media.
The fact we’ve all heard and been changed a bit or a lot by Black Lives Matter, the transgender movement, re-wilding, the cashless society, climate change and much more, is testimony to the success of the originators and campaigners behind these ideas. And the fact you may have heard of “religious literacy” is also testament to the success of a lobbying campaign by Christians to improve reportage after the 7/7 London train bombings. Before this, the U.K.’s Home Secretary David Blunkett, was equating “far right evangelical Christians” with “extremists in the Islamic faith.”
Every single aspect of our lives in fact is now subject to more or less benign manipulation to some extent, by one group or another, more assiduously, and insidiously than ever before.
What you may not know is it all began with evangelical Christians. The Clapham Sect’s anti-slavery movement, with their powerful “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” rhetoric, was hugely successful. Wilberforce, Clarkson and the others generated slogans, produced merchandise, stomped the speaker trail around the country and harangued parliament until they got the law changed. Wilberforce died of exhaustion.
This was the birth of the PR phenomenon. And its success is testimony to the imaginativeness and resolve of this small platoon of like-minded reformers. Their methods soon caught on. The women’s suffrage movement took it much further, often resorting to violence, smashing windows and torching properties.
Where I live now in Felixstowe, the 70-bedroom landmark Bath Hotel was burned to the ground by suffragettes in 1914 drawing attention to their cause. It was never rebuilt. There was even one spectacular act of suicide in front of the king’s own horse on Derby Day, to change the mind of the government and the electorate about votes for women.
So evangelicals of all people should be wide-awake to the existence of what starts legitimately as persuasion, which is after all the basis of our parliamentary system, but which can readily become social engineering. The brain-washing impact of unremitting media messaging is profound. But Christians are not to be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2). We are to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10: 5). If it does not stand that test, we must do something about it in our own lives.
I was alarmed during a Zoom prayer hour recently when someone who had volunteered to lead the opening devotion prayed “against Christian nationalists in Britain.” I had been aware for a while that this epithet had been imported from America. The U.S. has a very different constitution from ours here in U.K., with a radical separation between church and state that is alien to the British religious settlement. The term is used there against any Christian argument in favor of faith in public life. But in Britain it has become a left-wing term of abuse. This brother lumped “Christian nationalists, Telegraph readers, Nigel Farage and fascists” all in one sentence of withering condemnation.
Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University, rumbled its use early on. He gave a paper on it to the College of Bishops of the Church of England in January 2025, saying, “The term quickly came to function primarily as a mode of labelling and stigmatization.”
More profoundly, he said it quickly assumes that progressive secularisation is the norm and anything obstructing that process is “Christian nationalism.”
Bretherton also told the bishops: “The term Christian nationalism is not a theological one. I strongly counsel never using it if you are teaching the faithful or talking on behalf of the Church in the context of public witness.”
As American culture dominates the world’s digital lives, re-engineering everything from the way we spell, to the language we use, and now the way we “do God,” we would do well to heed Paul, renewing our minds in Christ, and not falling prey to every passing media trope.
Dr. Jenny M .Taylor is a career journalist and Associate Fellow in Media, Communication and Journalism at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge. She founded Lapido Media after the 7/7 Tube bombings, to work with mainstream journalists on religious literacy. Her book Saving Journalism: The Rise, Demise and Survival of the News is published by Pippa Rann Books. You can read more about her here.