Britain has a habit of adopting America's political traits, be they presidential-style primaries or televised debates. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it seems the British quietly admire American politics - or, at least, some forms of American politics.

America's theo-political landscape, specifically the development and influence of the religious right between the late 1970s and mid- to late-2000s, is not only not admired in Britain - frankly, it is despised. The religious right is, in effect, held up as some hideously concrete example of why Christianity and politics shouldn't mix. The British may have adopted a great deal from American culture in the post-war period, but they have not - thank God - adopted this.

And yet one of the narratives about British religious and political life that has been gaining traction over the last few years is that Britain is indeed cultivating an American-style religious right. The story, carefully hedged about with questions and innuendos, has appeared in most major publications and even on television. In 2008, a prime-time Channel Four documentary announced:

"Tonight [we] explore how fundamentalist Christians are trying to transform society ... Drawing inspiration from the Religious Right in America, Britain's hard-line Christians are mounting fierce campaigns around a range of issues ... Christian fundamentalists could just be beginning to exercise their power."

Other attempts to draw this trans-Atlantic connection have been somewhat subtler, but still a bit ham-fisted. A 2011 article on abortion in the Guardian quoted Lisa Hallgarten, director of the charity Education for Choice, warning that "resurgent pressure from the religious right risked changing the environment in which the debate around abortion was taking place." Similar pieces have appeared in The Independent, the Independent on Sunday , The Observer , the New Statesman , The Times and the Daily Telegraph .

And yet, among those few who do claim that Britain has a religious right of some sort, the assumption is that it is the result of some American political contagion. But is this really the case? In attempting to answer this question, it is worth being clear about the issue. It is not whether there are Christians (or any religious people) on the right of the political spectrum - there obviously are, just as there are Christians on the left and atheists on both sides. Nor is it whether there are organising bodies through which the right-wing religious campaign and lobby - again, everyone recognises that there are, just as there are organisations for left-wing Christians (the Christian Socialist Movement), left wing atheists (Labour Humanists) and liberal atheists (Humanist and Secular Liberal Democrats). None of this is controversial or event suspect. A free democratic society not only permits citizens to vote, organise, campaign, lobby and stand for what they believe is right. It needs them to do so.

What is in question is the fear, fanned by so many media commentators, that there is an American-style religious right emerging in the UK. The phrase "religious right" is a very precise thing, rather than some loose shorthand for right-wing political activity by religious people. It denotes a theo-political culture that developed in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

While there is good reason to believe that the religious right is well and truly past its prime, a bogeyman doesn't need to be in good health to be a bogeyman. This particular bogeyman is (or was), specifically, a large-scale, co-ordinated movement of reasonably well-funded religious groups (predominantly Christian) which have a clear and narrow set of policy aims that they understand as "Christian" and which they seek to deliver through the vehicle of the Republican Party. Each of these elements is significant:

size, funding and organisation are important because otherwise few people would judge the religious right to be as influential as it apparently is/ was;

religious identity is important because it signifies a movement whose logic is purportedly Christian and therefore, in some ways, exclusive;

a clear and limited set of policy aims - pro-life, anti-gay rights, pro-Israel, pro-military intervention, pro-religious freedom, anti-evolution and anti-big government - is important because most of these are judged as litmus issues: vote the wrong way on them and your soundness is questionable;

finally, affiliation to a particular political party is important, indeed essential, because what distinguishes the American-style religious right from many other religious movements is not simply that it is politically activist, but that its activism has become wedded to a particular political programme.

Clear differences

On the surface of it, those commentators who have written about an emergent British religious right are on to something. There is good evidence of greater co-ordination among Christian groups with a strong socially-conservative commitment, particularly relating to sexuality, marriage, family and religious freedom, about which they are vocal and often willing to resort to legal action.

Organisations most often accused of being part of a nascent religious right - such as Christian Concern, the Christian Legal Centre, or Christian Institute - either did not exist ten years ago or were smaller and had a much lower profile. Over the last decade, they have backed numerous high-profile legal cases and captured a disproportionate number of headlines. Research conducted for our report on the subject suggest that the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday ran no less than forty-five stories which quoted Andrea Minichiello Williams, Chief Executive of Christian Concern, while the two Telegraph titles ran at least thirty stories with a comment from her. By comparison, during the same period, the CEO of Christian NGO Tearfund was mentioned only once in both the Telegraph and Mail titles, while the Director of the Evangelical Alliance was quoted around ten times by the Telegraph papers and five by the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

While all of these figures were much smaller than articles by, about or quoting the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, there has clearly been a shift, in profile at least, in the theo-political landscape. Given the subject of many of the interventions - religious freedom, family life, homosexuality, marriage and, to a slightly lesser extent, euthanasia and abortion - it is easy to see why commentators might be tempted to take the obvious category of "religious right" from the shelf.

That being said, the comparison is misleading for at least four reasons:

The most obvious reason is the size and relative significance of the religious community in Britain. The British Christian constituency is considerably smaller than that in the United States. It is also less self-consciously religious, at least in political terms. When asked by the Pew Forum in 2008 which factor most influenced their political decision making, 27% of weekly worshippers in the United States cited their faith. The 2008 British Social Attitudes survey revealed that only 9% of British people with a religious affiliation said religion was "very important" in making decisions on political issues. Not only does the UK have a much smaller religious constituency than the United States, but within that religious constituency a smaller proportion of believers see faith as a direct influence on their political behaviour. Whatever else is developing in Britain, it is not the behemoth that emerged in late-1970s America.

There is the issue of access to political power. It was often said that during the height of the religious right's power, the Oval Office was left on the latch for prominent evangelical leaders. That is clearly an exaggeration. In reality, while Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush courted them, George H.W. Bush was far from enthusiastic, and they spent much of the 90s in political opposition. Be this as it may, the religious right in the United States was always capable of packing a powerful political punch. By contrast, those organisations accused of being part of an emerging British religious right are quite some way from the halls of power. Of all the organisations we spoke to as part of our research, only the Conservative Christian Fellowship (CCF) has close and active links within Westminster, and even then the organisation is careful to operate as a fellowship rather than a lobbying organisation. Moreover, when we interviewed CCF's Director, Colin Bloom, he reacted strongly against the idea that evangelicals, let alone Christians, should necessarily support the right-wing party:

"That's neither the British way, nor the Christian way. It would be completely wrong of me to say, 'You cannot be a Christian if you vote Labour'. I would never say that ... Am I glad that people like Stephen Timms, Gavin Shuker, Jim Dobbin and David Lammy are in the Labour Party? Yes I am ... in the same way we've got David Burrowes, Claire Perry, Gary Streeter, Fiona Bruce and loads of other Christian Conservatives."

By contrast, those organisations that have adopted an agenda (and a tone) similar to that of the religious right may be able to capture headlines but struggle to get near political power It was notable, for instance, that the big political scoop in the Channel Four documentary mentioned above was a clip of Andrea Williams lobbying Nadine Dorries and Lord Tebbit, neither of whom, it is fair to say, are particularly big political beasts.

Just as the would-be religious right in Britain has no significant political access, so the comparable right-wing party in Britain is nowhere near as wedded to these socially-conservative issues as is the Republican Party in the United States. Indeed, it is a Conservative-led coalition that is driving through the legislation for same-sex marriage, which has become such a powerful rallying point for those supposedly belonging to the UK religious right.

While there are obvious differences of issues and emphases between the supposed religious right on either side of the Atlantic (for instance, Israel, evolution and military intervention are not issues in the UK in the way they have been in the United States), undoubtedly the most important difference is their respective attitudes toward government. Small government is an article of faith among Republicans, as central to the religious right as abortion. In the UK, by contrast, British Christians (by which I mean active and churchgoing, as opposed to merely nominal ones) are disproportionately left-of-centre when it comes to economic issues.

In early 2012, the think tank Demos produced a report entitled Faithful Citizens , which concluded that British people of faith are "more likely to hold progressive political values on a number of important political and economic questions at the heart of twenty-first-century policy." The annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey confirms something of this. According to BSA 2009, 43% of frequent religious observers either agree or strongly agree with the statement, "government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well off." This was in contrast to 38% of those who said they had no religion and 36% of the general population.

Similarly, when asked whether they thought it was "the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes," 67% the "religious and frequent attendance" group agreed, compared to 62% of the "no religion" group. Other examples could be chosen, such as the 58% of frequent religious observers who agreed that "the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain's proudest achievements," compared to 33% of the non-religious.

Whatever the precise statistics, it seems that those who would most naturally form the core of any UK religious right - committed believers - would not naturally share its economic views. In other words, any putative UK religious right is unlikely to be particularly right.

What might the future hold?

These four reasons - size, power, party and economic position - serve as almost insurmountable obstacles to the formation of any British religious right.

But prophecy is a mug's game. No one outlining the theo-political landscape in America in 1960, when Kennedy found himself vigorously denying he would govern from Rome if he won the election, could have imagined that, twenty years later, a partnership between once-hostile evangelicals and Catholics would help take a Republican President into the Whitehouse, and keep one there for twenty of the next twenty-eight years.

Similarly, no one today can confidently say that Britain will never develop its own religious right. If, speaking hypothetically, the Coalition 4 Marriage remains intact after this particular political battle over same-sex marriage has been fought and then morphs into another, broader, "values based" coalition which begins to win seats (metaphorically or literally) in the House of Commons, talk of a British religious right may well be warranted - although, even then, such a British religious right would likely look so different from the American model that it would call into question whether "religious right" is the correct epithet.

Until such time, those who think and write about this issue would do well to avoid the phrase "religious right," if only because it risks goading into existence the very thing they claim to want to avoid.

Nick Spencer is the Research Director of the think-tank Theos, and was one of the researchers involved in producing the recent report, Is there a "Religious Right" emerging in Britain?