(RNS) — As JD Vance and his family vacation in England’s quaint Cotswolds, the vice president spared a little of his downtime on Tuesday (Aug. 12) for Robert Jenrick, a high-ranking Conservative politician in the running to head the Tory party. The two men were reportedly introduced by James Orr, a professor at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge who hosted Vance and his wife, Usha, in the couple’s 2024 U.K. visit. Vance has referred to Orr as his “British sherpa.”

Vance’s visit and Orr’s introduction were more than social calls. The professor and the vice president are both key figures in a collective of intellectuals, activists and funders who are bringing a new wave of American-style culture-war illiberalism to the U.K., chiefly under the banner of the Reform Party.

The two men, who have been in close contact since at least 2019, share an ideology often referred to as “national conservatism,” and both are also acolytes of the tech investor and visionary Peter Thiel.

Both also have a religious conversion at the core of their public personae: Vance to Catholicism, and Orr, a former corporate lawyer, to Christianity, in 2003 by his own account, and particularly to the evangelical movement within the Church of England. Orr’s interest in religion, he said, “probably would’ve disappeared quite quickly had I not been welcomed into an extraordinary church in London, Holy Trinity Brompton,” referring to the multisite Anglican church that is a center of British evangelicalism.

“I think the warmth of the welcome of that church family was so intense and so real for me, that I just couldn’t deny that I’d stumbled on the truth … on a deep truth about the human condition and about the reality of the divine. And I suppose you could then say my journey ever since in philosophy has been … well, a way of making sense of that to those who have not had that experience,” he explained.

In recent years Orr has shifted into distinctly political territory, making frequent appearances on the U.K.’s right-wing media channel, GB News, where he offers comment on immigration and Britain’s national character, calling diversity a “debilitating weakness.”

His rising prominence on the “post-liberal right,” as Vance calls it, has earned Orr positions at a number of conservative think tanks. He is the U.K. chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organization led by Yoram Hazony that convened the National Conservatism Conference, which hosts conferences around the world since its founding in 2019-2020, and has links to both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, where Project 2025, the conservative GOP agenda for the second Trump administration, was born.

Orr was close friends with the late Sir Roger Scruton, who aimed at religious nationalist forms of governance, and he has worked with the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. Orr sits on the board of Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which introduces a range of conservative thinkers to its well-heeled audiences and whose gatherings have been helmed by Jordan Peterson.

Orr’s role is distinct because the history of the U.K. religious system is distinct. Upper-class evangelicalism diverges in some ways from low-church traditions such as those of Baptists and Presbyterians, and from American-style evangelicalism. Orr has been very much a part of that upper-class network. These days, however, he appears to be working to bridge the gap, bringing the high evangelical culture in line with the low. At times it makes for jarring contrasts.

In interviews, Orr has said that Christianity is about “thinking about others,” not oneself, “and the advantage of Christianity, I think, is that it crystallizes that in all of its teaching.” His social media presence, on the other hand, appears to be dominated by two principal concerns: protecting the free speech rights of individuals often associated with racism, race science and eugenics; and attacking immigration policies in the U.K., as well as immigrant communities.

While he has claimed, rather sensibly, that “we need an immigration policy that works for Britain,” his relentless focus on migration and migrant crime — while ignoring other causes of Britain’s ills, including fraudulent COVID-19 loans and contracts linked to the Conservative Party and a cost-of-living crisis arguably exacerbated by Brexit— seems intended to rouse a form of nationalist scapegoating. In response to an anti-migrant protest in late July, Orr tweeted, “close the hotels, deport the illegals, protect the English.”

Running through much of Orr’s social media presence is a persecution narrative — specifically, persecution of conservative Christians at the hands of a malignant liberal elite. This story of grievance is his greatest tie to America’s culture warriors. Earlier this year Vance attacked the U.K. for allegedly suppressing “freedom of speech” and putting the “basic liberties of religious Britons in the crosshairs,” and he recently quipped the U.K. is “maybe” the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon.”

Orr, who defended Vance’s critique as “brilliant,” also mimics the vice president’s interest in free speech when it comes from conservative speakers and conservative religionists. Orr serves as an adviser at the Free Speech Union, which has promoted the idea that a liberal elite has captured Britain’s educational and cultural institutions and is bent on using its massive power to suppress conservative ideas.

Speaking on BBC Politics Live in May, Orr claimed that “a lot more people have got into trouble for free speech offenses in the U.K. than in Putin’s Russia” — a country where democracy advocates and journalists have been murdered and imprisoned.

This remarkably selective vision of “free speech” is a staple of Orr’s activism at Cambridge. In 2019, alongside Douglas Hedley, a colleague on the Faculty of Divinity, Orr put forth Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s name for a fellowship. When Peterson’s invitation was rescinded after a review showed that Peterson’s past statements were incompatible with the university’s principles on inclusion, Peterson and his supporters accused the university of persecution, and “cancel culture” run amok. (Peterson was eventually granted a platform at the university.)

Orr has also sought to draw other controversial figures into his circle at Cambridge. He appears to have close alliances with Charles Murray, author of the infamous book “The Bell Curve”; Christian right propagandist Dennis Prager, of PragerU; and other reactionary activists associated with race science. According to reporting in the Byline Times, Thiel Capital’s chief of staff, Charles Vaughan, has played a vital role in cultivating this illiberal network of academics.

Like Vance, Orr has boosted the profile of the nativist, anti-democratic Hungarian regime. At this summer’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Esztergom, Hungary, Orr accused the U.K. of adopting a “naive” and “dangerous” approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He accused those sympathetic with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s independence of having a “peculiar psychological condition” called “Ukraine brain,” and praised Hungary, which has systematically blocked and delayed sanctions of Russian oligarchs and EU military aid packages.

“I salute the Hungarian approach to this from the very beginning,” Orr said. “It’s taken exceptional courage, diplomatic skill and caution and prescience to navigate this issue over the last three years.”

What is most curious about Orr’s manifest antipathy to liberalism, multiculturalism and what Peterson has called “female totalitarianism” is that it stands in stark contrast with the program at Holy Trinity Brompton, which attracts a strikingly diverse congregation and recently appointed its first female associate vicar.

When I attended a recent Sunday morning service in August, the congregation reflected a remarkably diverse mix of Black, Asian, South Asian and white people; the latter group appeared to be in the minority. After about 25 minutes of music from a worship band whose racial makeup reflected the diversity of the congregation, Pastor Katherine Chow led the congregation in prayer, then introduced a visiting speaker, Annie Ellis, who delivered an uplifting sermon.

The warmth of this church family appeared to have little to do with the nativist demagoguery of Orr’s political circle. However, if Orr and his allies Vance and Thiel have their way, politics in Britain may soon reflect the illiberalism taking hold on our side of the Atlantic.

(Katherine Stewart writes about the intersection of faith and politics. Her latest book is “Money, Lies and God.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)