Old Compton Street in Soho, the vibrant heart of London’s LGBTQ+ community, is no stranger to eye-catching events. However, the sight of a large group of religious activists marching in military precision through its rainbow-adorned shopfronts was truly remarkable.

Clad in black tracksuits reminiscent of Oswald Mosley, complete with gold-emblazoned logos, about 100 members of The King’s Army caused a traffic standstill as they loudly chanted “Jesus Saves!” The group captured the event in a 44-second video, aptly titled “King’s Army Shuts Down London’s Soho Sex District,” which was uploaded to their YouTube channel.

While it might seem like a scene straight out of a dystopian TV series, experts are concerned that this may indicate a move towards the aggressive strategies and religious fervor often seen in the ‘Christian nationalist’ movement in the United States.

The King’s Army, with its bold rhetoric and branded merchandise, carries a distinctly American influence.

Leading the group is Scott McNamara, a 49-year-old Briton who recorded the march on a rainy October evening.

Interestingly, McNamara’s background, as uncovered by The Mail on Sunday, includes a diverse array of experiences. His past brushes with showbiz, interactions with Liverpool’s underworld, and a family history he describes as full of “brawlers, alcoholics, and womanizers” add layers to his persona.

McNamara sees himself in the vanguard of a growing movement seeking to entrench Christianity in the UK and his flamboyant – some might say aggressive – style seems to be taking hold with some of the public.

There has been enough activity across London to make ordinary citizens sit up and take notice. Aside from Old Compton Street, large numbers of The King’s Army members have converged on Kilburn, Oxford Circus and Buckingham Palace for shows of strength over the past 12 months.

King’s Army leader Scott McNamara, 49, an affable-sounding Briton who filmed the footage on a rainy Friday night in October

Its homepage shows dozens of uniformed members standing to attention at the gates of Buckingham Palace

There is no mistaking the military air on The King’s Army website. Its homepage shows dozens of uniformed members standing to attention at the gates of Buckingham Palace. 

The group’s leadership structure lists McNamara as ‘field marshal’ with a supporting cast that includes a ‘chief of staff’ in Florida and various members of ‘colonel’ and ‘major’ rank in other parts of North America as well as in the UK, Germany and South Africa.

There is a similar bellicose feel on the group’s Facebook page, where there are references to the need for ‘a radical army to beat a radical enemy’.

McNamara denies the Old Compton Street stunt was deliberately provocative.

The street has been a gathering point for the gay community since the 1970s and among its best-known venues is the Admiral Duncan pub where three people, including a 27-year-old woman pregnant with her first child, were killed in a 1999 nail bomb attack by neo-Nazi David Copeland.

‘Some people were saying we were targeting the LGBT community. But it was nothing like that at all,’ McNamara told the magazine Premier Christianity. He added: ‘It wasn’t that we thought, ‘Right, there’s gay people, let’s target them’. Not in any way. That was definitely misconstrued.’

Yet there were dissenting voices among the overwhelmingly supportive messages on McNamara’s personal Facebook page.

‘Very sinister and we really don’t need this,’ said one person. Another commented: ‘What a bunch of weirdos.’

Critics have also pointed to the Soho footage being shared by Turning Point UK – an offshoot of a Right-wing US organisation set up by political campaigner Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last year – as an indicator of the growing influence of Christian nationalism on Britain’s political culture.

Widely associated with President Donald Trump’s support base in the US, broad Christian nationalist views espouse traditionally conservative standpoints on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Critics have also pointed to the Soho footage being shared by Turning Point UK

Large numbers of The King’s Army members have converged on Kilburn, Oxford Circus and Buckingham Palace for shows of strength over the past 12 months

The King’s Army website shows images of people walking in various parts of London together

This is happening against the backdrop of Far-Right activist Tommy Robinson staging a carol service in London recently in a supposed bid to ‘put the Christ back into Christmas’.

Robinson said he used to ‘hate the church’ but had changed his mind after reading the Bible in prison after being jailed for contempt of court. Prominent Church of England cleric the Reverend Giles Fraser described the scenes of The King’s Army in Soho as ‘shocking’.

He said: ‘They look like paramilitaries. Religion and paramilitary uniforms just shouldn’t go together. It’s a terrible thing.

‘And the way they conscript military language – and, yes, I know there’s Onward, Christian Soldiers and all of that – would disturb people.’ Mr Fraser, a panellist on Radio 4’s Moral Maze and a contributor to the station’s Thought For The Day, added: ‘I find it wildly inappropriate that they take a message of love and turn it into some sort of paramilitary thing, hectoring people on the streets.’

Humanists UK’s director of public affairs and policy Richy Thompson said: ‘It is deeply concerning that we essentially have a bunch of people in uniform marching through London’s LGBT capital in a way that must have been extremely intimidating for anyone who was there.’

So who is the group’s leader Scott McNamara? The Coventry-born evangelist grew up in Liverpool in what he has since described as ‘an Irish Catholic culture’ with a ‘kind of hypocrisy around it’, where people ‘go to Mass and then everyone goes to the bar and gets drunk’.

When his parents James and Sheila separated, Scott and his brother Shane were raised by Sheila. According to McNamara, Shane, who is three years older, ‘went crazy’ following their father’s departure, started behaving ‘like a wild animal’ and ended up in a juvenile detention centre.

But amid all their family upheaval, Sheila found God. By the early Nineties, 15-year-old Scott felt the pull of religion as well – but he also had his eye on becoming a pop star.

He had started writing songs, formed a boy band at school and was eventually invited to do a showcase gig for Simon Cowell at London’s Nomis Studios, which had previously hosted Queen, The Who and the Spice Girls.

The group’s leadership structure lists McNamara as ‘field marshal’ with a supporting cast that includes a ‘chief of staff’ in Florida

Although vast riches failed to materialise, some success followed. McNamara shared a stage with acts such as Westlife and Backstreet Boys, as well as being featured in teen magazines and making several TV appearances. By his late teens, he was regularly ‘handed wads of cash’ for gigs all over Britain, he told worshippers in The King’s Army footage seen by The Mail on Sunday.

But his drinking was becoming a problem and by the age of 24, McNamara was also – in his words – a ‘full-blown cocaine addict’. He was ‘mixing with gangsters’ in a social circle that included people linked to Merseyside drugs baron Curtis Warren, the first crime boss to appear on The Sunday Times Rich List and previously named Interpol’s ‘Target One’.

He said: ‘I tasted pretty much everything this world had to offer me. I had the beautiful women, sex all night, the best drugs, I partied in Vegas, I had a little taste of fame… I did all these things, but I was so sick of sin.’

Around this time, McNamara had a religious awakening after he and a friend almost overdosed while bingeing on £500 of high-grade cocaine.

Months later, he attended a Christian conference during the 2001 New Year celebrations and underwent what he described as ‘a road to Damascus experience’ and was ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’.

He abandoned his dissolute lifestyle and started studying at London Bible College – since renamed London School of Theology – where he met his wife-to-be Jaye, a fellow student originally from Northern Ireland.

The couple, who have four children aged ten to 18, celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary in September, although the marriage was rocked in the early days as McNamara started drinking again.

As his addiction worsened and now with a six-month-old daughter to think about, Jaye announced she could no longer live with him.

At this point, McNamara later admitted, he ended up ‘really hitting the self-destruct button’ and – using cocaine again – put himself ‘back in the gutter’.

He eventually clawed his way back to sobriety and reunited with his wife, who was living with their daughter in Derry.

Embarrassed about his behaviour in the town during the split, he was initially reluctant to settle there – but was ultimately persuaded to do so and, shortly afterwards, started preaching on its streets.

Scott McNamara has been given a wealth of titles within the organisation 

By 2014 he was serving as the first full-time evangelist for Causeway Coast Vineyard, a congregation founded in Derry by six people in 1999 which now claims hundreds of followers

By 2014 he was serving as the first full-time evangelist for Causeway Coast Vineyard, a congregation founded in Derry by six people in 1999 which now claims hundreds of followers.

It was during this period that the enterprising McNamara and his wife set up Jesus At The Door (JAD), described as a ‘colourful, cutting-edge, spirit-led approach to evangelism that equips everyday believers to win everyday people’.

JAD has spawned a minor industry that includes merchandise such as T-shirts (£22.50), keyrings (£3.75) and magnets (£3.75).

There is also a £12 book written by McNamara called Jesus At The Door: Evangelism Made Easy, which promises to train ‘even the shyest believers to experience the thrill of bringing the lost to Jesus’.

Next came America, where the McNamaras initially spent more than two years in Washington state developing Jesus At The Door.

After McNamara was invited to work for Christ for All Nations – an evangelical organisation set up in 1974 by German-American missionary Reinhard Bonnke – they moved to Florida in 2021.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that money received in donations by Jesus At The Door has exploded in recent years.

Figures from the US Internal Revenue Service show that the 2021 total of £73,580 more than doubled to £177,000 the next year, while the 2023 figure was up sharply again to £313,000.

But JAD’s outgoings have been substantial as well. The files show £46,600 spent on ‘occupancy’ costs in 2023 and just over £6,000 on travel. Another £124,000 went on ‘outside services’, covering payments to contractors and activities in foreign countries.

JAD is registered at a 3,400sq ft home – which has five bedrooms and three bathrooms – in Winter Garden, 14 miles west of Orlando. The rented property overlooks Lake Speer and is estimated to be worth more than £540,000.

Somewhere along the way McNamara moved towards a far more gung-ho style of proselytising with The King’s Army, which was registered earlier this year at the same Florida address.

In an interview with Premier Christianity magazine in November, McNamara said the new direction came about after he ‘had a word from the Holy Spirit’.

He added: ‘The Lord showed me that he was going to raise up an army for the end times to push back darkness.

‘He actually told me to call it The King’s Army.’

He continued: ‘The Lord showed me that the gospel is one of our weapons in this spiritual war. But the weapon is only as good as the hands holding it.

‘You could put the weapon in the hands of a civilian but they won’t be able to win a war.’

In a statement to The Mail on Sunday, The King’s Army said the Old Compton Street display was ‘not dissimilar to other events we have done across London’.

The statement insisted: ‘Our sole intent was – and always is – to share the love of Jesus.

‘It’s not about protest or confrontation but about inviting people into a relationship with Jesus, encountering the freedom, forgiveness and grace we’ve experienced ourselves.

‘We see no greater emergency than the soul of a man or woman who, without awareness and acceptance of the salvation offered only through the atoning cross of Christ, faces an eternity of separation from God and suffering in hell as a result of sin.’

From that, it seems clear that The King’s Army have no plans to call off their combative marches through our streets.

And their mission will presumably continue as long as there are people, as McNamara describes them, ‘who are lost and bound by sin and Satan’.

Additional reporting: Daniel Bates in New York