Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group founded four decades ago to defend believers in the U.S. who say they are being persecuted, has gone on the offensive in England, where it is backing populist right-wing leader Nigel Farage and hopes to install a MAGA-style government there.
ADF has been quietly working with Farage and his Reform UK party for two years, connecting him with Trump officials, persuading U.S. Vice President JD Vance to condemn UK speech laws Farage opposes, and orchestrating Farage’s Sept. 3 appearance before the U.S. Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson previously worked as an attorney for ADF.
ADF “has taken its playbook to Britain and has rapidly established itself as a power broker between the country’s rising populist movement and President Trump’s Washington,” reported The New York Times last week.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Deputy Leader Richard Tice (R), talk to the media outside the Bank of England after meeting Governor Andrew Bailey on September 25 in London, England. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
Some Farage supporters wear red baseball caps reading: “Make Britain Great Again.”
Like Trump, Farage has a history of broken marriages, doesn’t attend church and is a longtime supporter of abortion rights. But his opposition to immigration and the European Union helped smooth over any spiritual or theological deficits.
Prior to leading the Reform UK party, he led the Brexit Party, which helped Britain exit the EU.
After working with ADF and other U.S. groups, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, Farage is now speaking publicly about “Judeo-Christian values” and curbing abortion — a subject he has not previously mentioned during 31 years in public life, The Times said.
A spokesman for ADF International told The Times the group was “non-politically partisan” and had sought to work with other UK parties. But UK’s liberal Labor Party said it had no contact with ADF.
Unlike in the U.S., where ADF is well known and publicly celebrates its string of Supreme Court victories, ADF has been maintaining a low profile in England, where support for access to abortion has strong support.
Populists are targeting England’s speech laws that prohibit some of the kinds of vitriolic rhetoric that goes unpunished in the U.S. England also has “buffer zone” laws prohibiting protests outside abortion clinics.
ADF, Farage and Vance have attacked the speech and buffer zone laws, claiming the UK has a free speech crisis. ADF says the UK is suffering from a “tsunami of censorship.” As BNG reported, ADF has made similar claims about the U.S., where it battles a “censorship industrial complex.”
ADF, Farage and Vance have attacked speech and buffer zone laws, claiming the UK has a free speech crisis.
In 2024, ADF said its goal in the U.S. was to “reshape America into a Christian nation.” ADF has played a key role in crafting and defending laws in two dozen states that prohibit transgender medical treatments.
The Times article was reported by a political reporter in the UK and U.S. religion reporter Elizabeth Dias. The two reporters shared a conversation about their research and the differences between the UK and the U.S.
“Britain has a lot of influence in Europe, so it’s a good target,” Dias said. “It’s also part of a trans-Atlantic alliance that is growing during Trump’s second term.”
ADF was born out of a 1993 conference call with Religious Right leaders organized by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. The group was founded in January 1994 and got its original funding from the conservative leader’s ministries but doesn’t need that help any more.
In 2024, ADF reported revenue of $112 million, some of which it uses to support its international efforts. In the past, ADF has promoted anti-gay laws that criminalize homosexual behavior in African nations.
Dobson explained his motivation for founding ADF in a 1994 Focus broadcast: “At least 10 years ago I began screaming about the fact that the ACLU raised $25 million a year to aggressively pursue their interests, and that means an attack on religious liberty frequently. Whereas there’s no Christian response to that. We haven’t been able to mount any kind of legal response that would have anywhere near that impact.”
Dobson said American Christians needed the ADF because “there are attorneys, thousands of them, who drive to work in Washington, D.C., every day, with no other purpose, or at least the primary objective, of expunging from public life, every vestige of Christian thought and behavior.”
Although most of Europe, including the UK, is statistically more secular than the United States, the move is to try out some of ADF’s most successful techniques from the U.S. and see if they can sway the UK in a more conservative — and ostensibly religious — direction.
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