Jesus Christ was famously not choosy about the company he kept. Despised tax collectors, women of easy virtue, lepers: he would eat and drink and be merry with all of them. Famously, this did not make him popular with the religious authorities and purists of his day. The Pharisees asked Christ’s followers, on seeing him dining with some such undesirables: “Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?” Jesus had no respect for existing status distinctions or ideas of ritual purity, and it shocked them.

Who are the sinners and publicans of today? The liberal establishment of the Church of England would unambiguously answer that the most despised and lowly are the refugees languishing in migrant hotels — and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. However, it is also increasingly clear who, in the Church’s view, are the villains, the sneering Pharisees or baying crowds shouting “crucify him!”: the “far-Right” protestors who are behind this month’s “Unite the Kingdom” rallies.

A statement this week from the presidents of Churches Together in England condemned the rallies and stated that “the Cross and the Gospel of Christ must never be co-opted to support the messages that breed hostility towards others.” The statement referred to the fact that some of those rallies used Christian imagery to promote their anti-immigration message, and was signed by many Anglican bishops, leading Baptists, Methodists, and representatives of other denominations.

There’s no doubt that some of those involved with these marches were genuinely racist and “far-Right”. However, the tone and emphasis of such statements invariably point to condemnation not just of actual racists, but of broad swathes of provincial opinion that dissents from the shibboleths of the progressive elite. As a result, Christian leaders — and particularly the Church of England — are in danger of making very clear their distance from precisely the despised and low-status “hoi polloi” with whom Jesus was so keen to engage.

The vast majority of our political, state and cultural establishment — and that includes Anglican bishops — can barely hide their fear at best, and contempt at worst, for what they see as an undifferentiated mass of poorly educated bigots who populate much of the country outside of the big cities. The instinctive distaste of the Anglican leadership for the provincial working classes and lower middle classes, with their low-status opinions and “nativism”, is conveyed pretty clearly, even when their statements are carefully caveated with bromides about “legitimate debate”. And the provincial populists, the Red Wallers and nascent Reform UK voters, are not stupid. They sense that distaste very clearly.

Bishops and liberal Christian leaders would do well to remember that Christianity is the religion of illiterate fishermen and provincials as well as the religion of the Guardian readers who inhabit episcopal palaces and vicarages across the country. Many of Christ’s own followers believed that he would be a nationalist leader who would militarily redeem Israel from Roman rule right up until the Cross. If anyone looks like the Pharisees sneering at Christ for communing with low-status “deplorables”, it’s the bishops and other Christian leaders who signed this week’s statement.

Where Reform voters are not racists but simply people frightened by rapid and destabilising social change, Christian leaders should be listening to them and moderating their simplistic reading of the gospel and its applicability to a messy political reality with another Christian virtue: prudence. Where the protesters are actually racists, they should remember what Jesus said after the Pharisees condemned him for eating with “publicans and sinners”: “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.”