The Trump administration’s human rights report has always been political, but this year it’s practically scripture for the US religious right. Britain, we are told, is “backsliding on human rights” because of safe access zones outside abortion clinics and restrictions on online speech after the Southport attack. There’s no outrage about Palestine. No critique of allies like Israel or El Salvador. Just a sanctimonious defence of the “right” to harass women at health clinic doors and a free pass for Trump’s friends.
This isn’t about principle. It’s about projection. JD Vance, Trump’s vice-president and chief ideologue of the new right, has been laying the groundwork for this for months. In February, he used the Munich Security Conference to claim Britain’s “religious liberties” were under threat, citing the conviction of a former serviceman for silently praying outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic. To the religious right, that man is a martyr; to anyone who’s seen what women endure from clinic pickets, he’s part of an intimidation machine.
Vance’s politics are steeped in this movement. A blend of nationalist grievance and biblical literalism, imported wholesale from America’s culture-war playbook. In their telling, “conscience rights” are the new frontline: a holy shield for rolling back reproductive rights, undermining LGBTQ+ equality, and pushing religion deeper into public life. It’s the same play they have run in the US with bans, “heartbeat bills”, and court-stacking. Only now it’s being exported to Britain, dressed up as concern for “basic liberties”.
The report’s omissions are as telling as its accusations. Government corruption? LGBTQ+ rights? Workers’ protections? Stripped back or buried. But it finds time to lament that the police can stop a man from staging a prayer vigil where women seek healthcare. That’s not human rights advocacy; it’s theocratic politics in the language of liberty.
While Vance holidays in the Cotswolds, schmoozing with Robert Jenrick and Chris Philp at some stately home, the State Department runs his talking points as if they were gospel truth. The religious right has learned that if you frame your fight as “freedom of conscience”, you can import your agenda anywhere, and have it echoed back by the very governments you’re targeting.
This is not about Britain’s supposed “backslide”. It’s about the advance of a transatlantic religious nationalism that uses human rights reports as battering rams, battering at the separation of church and state until nothing is left but the pulpit and the whip.
