The Anglican Catholic Church (ACC) has defrocked Calvin Robinson, an English priest serving in Michigan, after he emulated Elon Musk’s Nazi salute at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington DC. As Rolling Stone reports:
In a statement released Wednesday, the leadership of the ACC wrote that “were made aware of a post made on X showing the end of a speech made by Calvin Robinson at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, DC. In it, he closed his comments with a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.”
The ACC pulled no punches in its statement, and it would seem that Robinson’s activism has been the subject of past discussion:
“While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition,” the ACC wrote. “Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.”
The church, which Robinson had only been a member of since 2024, added: “This is not just an administrative matter […] we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators.”
As one might expect, Robinson tried to play the “just joking” card, as we see in the Independent:
On Thursday, Robinson reduced his actions to a “joke” that was poorly taken by “hysterical liberals”.
“My attempt at dry wit, in that typical British way, was not a joke at the expense of WWII, nor an admission of my membership in the Nationalist Socialist Party,” he tweeted.
“Whether a silly old cleric like me makes a poor joke is irrelevant. Do not be swayed and distracted by the enemy whispering in your ears. Focus on the light. All human life is sacred. Imago Dei.”
(By the way, this “silly old cleric” is all of 39 years old.)
Public controversy is nothing new for Robinson; he’s been described as “Britain’s conspiracy theory cleric”, and he’s definitely far-right in his politics:
Robinson become a firm fixture in the UK’s far-right movement and bills himself online as a lead spokesperson for the right-wing populist party UKIP, which was formerly led by Trump loyalist and Reform U.K. leader, Nigel Farage.
Robinson, who describes his background as “half Afro-Caribbean and half English”, previously derided the Black Lives Matter movement as “clearly a con”.
Robinson was also active in supporting Brexit, promoting Islamophobia, and denigrating Black Lives Matter. Of course, he also tried his hand at the media game, as Wikipedia tells us:
Robinson worked for talkRADIO and as a television presenter on GB News from late 2022, fronting a show called "Calvin's Common Sense Crusade". In November 2022, he "appeared on the channel to amplify the false conspiracy theory that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine was using war as a front for a private money-laundering operation involving the bankrupt FTX crypto platform."
On 29 September 2023, Robinson was suspended from GB News after speaking out in favour of Dan Wootton, who had recently been suspended for misogynistic comments made on his show by Laurence Fox. Calvin Robinson's dismissal from GB News was announced on 4 October.
Completing his far-right bingo card, Robinson even has the grift game going; after being fired by GB News in 2023, Robinson set up a fundraising appeal for £30k to “keep a roof over his head” as a victim of “cancel culture”...while jetting off to Disney World for a “preaching trip.” A later fundraising appeal hasn’t done quite as well. One wonders whether the Wingnut Welfare Wagon will make another stop for Robinson.
It’s instructive to note that, as is often the case with folks on the Religious Right, Robinson doesn’t exactly operate within traditional denominational boundaries; in fact, he has hopscotched across four denominations in the last three years. After completing a 2-year course in theological studies in 2022, Robinson hoped to be ordained as a deacon in the Church of England; however, his application for a position in the Diocese of London was rejected. He then left the Anglican Communion entirely and entered the world of what is known as the Anglican Continuum, a loose network of conservative denominations that reject what they see as overly liberal changes in the Church of England and its affiliated denominations. Robinson first accepted an ordination as a deacon in the Free Church of England. After little more than a year in his position there, he left the FCE for the Nordic Catholic Church, a conservative group that had split from the Church of Norway when it began ordaining women. He was ordained as a priest in the NCC, but left his post after less than a year; moving to the US in September 2024, he joined the ACC and was assigned as Priest-in-Charge of St Paul's Anglican Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, only five months into his tenure with the ACC, he has been defrocked and stripped of his authority.
It will be interesting to see if Robinson attempts to “go it alone” in a nondenominational setting or find common cause with yet another conservative denomination. In any case, his defrocking and dismissal is an appropriate outcome for someone who thought that emulating Elon Musk was a smart move for a priest…
