It is time to catch up with the Rev Calvin Robinson. You remember him? The controversial priest with his own show on GB News who then got “cancelled”…?
In fact, the story was a little more complicated.
Calvin criticised his employer for suspending Dan Wootton for misogynistic comments on a GB News show fronted by provocative actor Laurence Fox. In the end, their shows all got cancelled—and Calvin went on to host a double-act YouTube show with Lozza Fox. They were, at last, free to speak their minds!
Around the same time, Calvin left the Church of England, which had declined to ordain him a minister. Calvin claimed he had once again been cancelled and joined something called the Free Church of England (FCE), with a parish in north-west London. But no sooner had he settled in there than, in October 2023, he abandoned the tiny FCE for the equally esoteric Nordic Catholic Church (NCC) (“We are Old Catholics from the Union of Scranton”).
Keeping up? I hope so, because it wasn’t long before Calvin jettisoned the NCC and moved to Michigan, US, to be priest in charge of an Anglican Catholic Church (ACC) in Grand Rapids. The NCC, based in Oslo, was not best pleased and denounced him with a formal reprimand and admonition. Or, as Calvin would put it, another cancellation.
By now, he was developing something of a martyr narrative, claiming to have been further cancelled by the Royal Academy of Dance and the Conservative party, among others.
In the middle of all this professional turmoil, Calvin tried to raise £1.5m to buy a 271-acre Scottish island to turn it into a religious retreat—“an opportunity to reclaim the land for Christendom”. This, too, was cancelled.
What happened next? This will come as a shock, I know, but Calvin has once again been cancelled. The ACC has revoked Calvin’s licence to be a minister. And then—wait for it—his US visa was revoked. Double cancel.
Calvin was visiting Israel at the time—“You know, out here, the Mohammedans are tolerated far too much,” he told Lozza—and pondered whether it was safe for him to return to England. Perhaps a leftist UK politician would have the police arrest him on a trumped-up charge? Or he might even be “killed by an intolerant Mohammedan”?
In the end, he bravely returned to the UK, sorted his visa problems and is safely back in the US, where he claims he has received invitations to Mar-a-Lago. Meanwhile, his chums have launched a crowdfunder to support “the most cancelled man alive”. The aim is to raise $350,000 to buy him a modest house in Grand Rapids, not far from the latest church to cancel him.
But was he actually cancelled?
What happened was that Calvin ended a talk at a pro-life rally at the end of January by imitating Elon Musk’s notorious Roman salute, which has been likened by some to the arm gestures beloved by such lovable figures as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini before they were themselves cancelled.
Calvin said it was “what we Britons call dry wit”. If so, the joke was lost on the big ecclesiastical cheeses at the ACC.
There followed a very public argument between Calvin and his episcopal superiors. The more Calvin protested to his 400,000-odd followers on X and Substack that he had been mistreated (he was being “doxxed, abused, hounded, smeared”), the more the ACC’s Archbishop Haverland held his ground.
Eventually, the archbishop’s patience seems to have run out, and two weeks ago he issued a very lengthy (3,000 words and counting), blow-by-blow account of his dealings with Calvin. It is quite the document.
It begins by reminding people that Calvin has been a bit of a church-hopper: four churches in as many years, none of which was in communion with each other; and that his wish to be a parish priest was in tension with his desire to be a culture warrior, politician and social media personality.
It claims he was warned about his behaviour on social media, and detailed a “stream of complaints” about his political activity. But then things, according to the archbishop, “took a significant turn for the worse”.
Haverland detailed how, in December, Calvin began posting about Judaism and “began to use certain rhetoric that was clearly and intentionally antisemitic”—both on X and on his own YouTube show. Haverland told Calvin’s bishop, Bishop Fodor, that “such incendiary activity had to stop”. Fodor reportedly passed on the warning to Calvin.
Calvin is said to have responded that he was not an antisemite, but when the “Elon Musk salute” occurred shortly afterwards, Haverland viewed it as an “utterly foolish and intemperate act by a priest”.
“Calvin Robinson is not a cheeky Oxford undergraduate,” he wrote. “At best, he is gravely intemperate and has poor judgement. At worst, he is toying with antisemitism and engages in the deeply uncharitable activity of trolling and political provocation.” In other words, the Elon Musk salute was the final straw.
Calvin responded by saying that he refused to refute a “cleverly orchestrated character assassination… I cannot and will not engage in a never-ending tit-for-tat. It is petty and unproductive.” He did not address the allegations that he had been “toying with antisemitism”. It would be uncontroversial to say he has long since gone beyond toying with hostility to Islam.
It’s worth reading the details of the Calvin Robinson story for a couple of reasons. The first is to question why he was ever given a show on GB News, regulated by Ofcom, and therefore obliged to adhere to certain standards of fairness and due impartiality. Why did Ofcom treat him and his fellow provocateurs so indulgently for so long? Why did GB News want him?
The second is that he—and fellow travellers—have so successfully exploited the language of “cancellation”. There is a similarity between the narrative that Calvin weaves and the rhetoric used by US vice president JD Vance in Munich, or by presidential buddy Musk on X almost any day of the week.
This narrative would have you believe that Calvin has been persecuted by a shadowy elite European wokerati because he is speaking unsayable truths. But there’s nothing woke about Archbishop Haverland or the other clerics who have despaired of Calvin’s repeated pattern of behaviour. Haverland believes sex is only moral within a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. He holds traditional views on homosexuality and abortion, and dislikes the idea of women priests. To lump Haverland in with a broad-brush trend of cancel culture just won’t wash.
Calvin Robinson seems destined to be a minor star in the strange coalition of evangelicals, libertarians, Broligarchs, free-speechers, weirdos, conspiracists and fantasists who are currently in the global ascendancy. If he has, indeed, ever been “cancelled”, it seems to me more likely that it is because he is a bit of a show-off, an oddball, a lost soul.
But his narrative of martyrdom is very much a story of our times.
