The UK has its first Catholic PM – but don’t expect a US-style religious culture war to follow

Trump administration has clashed with Vatican on social issues but Burnham’s faith is shaped by different principles

With the appointment of Britain’s first lifelong Roman Catholic prime minister, the faith is now in a prominent political position on both sides of the Atlantic.

But while Donald Trump’s administration, in particular the vice-president, JD Vance – a Catholic convert – has placed Catholicism at the heart of its culture wars and repeatedly clashed with the Vatican over the US’s hardline stance on social issues, Andy Burnham has been shaped by a British Catholic tradition with a different set of political priorities.

Hours before he arrived in Downing Street on Monday, Burnham visited The Passage, a Catholic-founded homelessness charity in Westminster. He later made ending rough sleeping his first pledge as prime minister.

Pope Leo, like Pope Francis before him, is frequently portrayed by the American Christian right as “woke” for defending migrants. When Burnham travelled to Rome as mayor of Greater Manchester in 2023, he presented Francis with a signed Manchester United shirt, and, after the pontiff’s death in 2025, praised his dedication to “equality and compassion for humanity”.

Hannah Rich, the director of Christians on the Left, a Labour affiliate, said: “The British church is not the American church, and British culture around Christianity isn’t the same as America.

“Those hot-potato [culture war] issues are not necessarily the things that drive people. That’s not to say Christians in this country don’t have strong opinions on those issues, in both directions. But they’re not as unifying a political force for the church in this country as they seem to be culturally and politically in America.”

Burnham has long joked that three institutions shaped him: Everton Football Club, the Catholic church and the Labour party.

The church and party have long been intertwined for him. When he was an altar boy in the 1980s, Liverpool’s archbishop, Derek Worlock, was one of Margaret Thatcher’s fiercest critics and urged Catholics to fight poverty and inequality. Worlock recorded messages on cassette tapes that were sent to every parish.

Prof Francis Davis, an expert on religion and public policy, said: “The young Andy Burnham was the boy on the altar who would have to press the button to turn the cassette on that was then played to the 800 people in the church.”

After Burnham became Labour MP for Leigh, he formed a close relationship with the Catholic Labour minister Paul Goggins. “Goggins would say: ‘Don’t get distracted by all the arguments about sexual morality. The key thing in Catholic social thought is putting the poor first,’” Davis said.

Mike Kane, the Labour MP who founded Catholics for Labour, said he saw the principles of Catholic social teaching, such as dignity and solidarity, reflected in Burnham’s style of politics. “He doesn’t actually claw his opponent’s eyes out,” he said. “I think his politics is ultimately very hopeful and optimistic.”

Nick Spencer, a senior fellow at the thinktank Theos, said he believed there were many reasons why we were seeing such different expressions of Christian politics in the UK and US.

“Culture war politics really thrives on a narrative of exclusion,” he said. “But its much harder to argue that you are being socially, culturally and politically marginalised as a Christian in this country. If you crown the head of state, if you have 26 bishops in the Lords, you are already quite close to the heart of power.”

In the US, he said, pastors were able to take their congregations in different political directions because the church landscape was much more fragmented.

So far, Catholic and other organised religious pressure on Burnham has come largely from groups on the left. Almost 40 senior Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders, coordinated by the charity HIAS+JCORE, have written to him urging him to rethink Britain’s asylum policy.

Dr David Ryall, the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK and a signatory to the letter, said there was a summer campaign defending the right to asylum. “It’s been amazing to see so many Catholic parishes, groups and families, driven by their faith, taking up this call with their local politicians and now with the new prime minister,” he said.

But Britain’s growing religious pluralism sits uneasily alongside the constitution. Prof Russell Sandberg, an expert in law and religion, said legislation still prevents practising Catholics and Jews from advising the crown on Church of England appointments.

“In practice, the role of the prime minister in appointing bishops has declined,” Sandberg said. “That said, even the presentation of one name by Burnham would breach the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.” Those responsibilities could be delegated to another minister, he added.

While rightwing Christian nationalist politics does not have the same influence in Britain as in the US, Sandberg said rightwing populists could, in government, “use and abuse the legal framework that favours Christianity to roll back the clock on our legal rights”.