Andrea Minichiello Williams

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Andrea Minichiello Williams is a barrister, co-founder of Christian Concern For Our Nation, and, through her role in the Lawyer's Christian Fellowship and Christian Legal Centre, the public face of Britain's more fundamentalist religious elements and their quixotic attempts to use the legal system to provide religious exemptions to laws on equality. Despite having enough education to be allowed into Britain's ancient legal professions, she is firmly in the young earth creationist camp, even though she's clever enough to know that admitting as much on camera makes you sound like a complete loon. She was featured in a Dispatches documentary which showed the close links she has with various members of the Conservative Party, especially Nadine Dorries. In the programme, Williams is seen to make a number of controversial statements, including claims that the Human Fertilisation bill was 'the work of the devil', that abortion should be illegal, homosexuality is sinful and the world is just 4,000 years old.

Williams' Christian Concern group has also organised events under the name "Wilberforce Academy", which has courted controversy as it has used the premises of Oxford University to preach against the "militant homosexual lobby".

Williams' actions, along with those of Stephen Green, prompted Joel Edwards of the Evangelical Alliance to criticise the "eccentric fringe" of British evangelical Christianity when he left the organisation in 2008.

In 2010, she was elected to the General Synod of the Church of England for five years. The elevation from 'eccentric fringe' to mainstream Anglicanism is complete.