At recent Reform UK press conferences, two very distinctive heads can often be spotted in the front row: the near-white locks of Danny Kruger, the party’s head of policy, and the swept-back blond mane of James Orr, now a senior adviser to Nigel Farage.

As well as guiding the policy programme for what could be the UK’s next government, the pair have something else in common. Both are highly devout Christians who came to religion in adulthood, and have trenchant views on social issues such as abortion and the family.

Kruger, an MP who defected from the Conservatives in September, and Orr, who is a Cambridge academic, also sit on the advisory board of a rightwing thinktank called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, led by Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer who is strongly religious.

Another member is Paul Marshall, the hedge fund millionaire who owns GB News, as well as the rightwing Spectator magazine. Marshall is a devout Christian.

Religion, specifically Protestant evangelism, has in recent decades been one of the defining elements of US rightwing politics, with its adherents forming the bedrock of Donald Trump’s support. Is the UK starting to head down the same path?

There are some links. Orr is sufficiently close to JD Vance that he has hosted the US vice-president at his family home. Orr is also involved in the National Conservatism movement, which has connections to the US religious-populism world.

But any closer parallels soon fall down due to a simple matter of numbers. While polling shows that close to a quarter of US adults are evangelicals, the proportion for the UK is about a tenth of that at most.

There is another important factor to consider. While US evangelicals lean firmly to the right, with nearly three-quarters approving of Trump’s presidency, new polling by the UK’s Evangelical Alliance (EA) suggests that, for all the prominence of people such as Kruger and Marshall, the wider picture here is quite different.

A poll of nearly 1,500 evangelicals, shared with the Guardian, shows Labour in the lead with 26% support. Reform and the Liberal Democrats are level on 20%, with the Conservatives on 18% and the Greens 12%.

Other questions demonstrate support among evangelicals for more generous welfare payments, but also concerted alarm about plans to legalise assisted dying.

Danny Webster, the head of advocacy at the EA, says that while the UK’s evangelicals tend to have conservative views on social issues, they are also realistic about how these are often a minority view.

“Sometimes with evangelicals there can be a dissonance between opinions, especially on social issues, and how people vote,” he said. “For example, someone might have a strong opinion on abortion, but they don’t see voting as likely to lead to change. So the opinions on economic issues like poverty can win as social issues don’t have an outlet.”

Evangelism does exist in parliament, including cross-party prayer group meetings. But it is a phenomenon also of the left, with the likes of Kruger balanced out by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat former leader, and the Labour MP Rachael Maskell.

Maskell is very open about how faith shapes her politics, notably on issues such as poverty; she lost the party whip for a period due after rebelling on welfare and other issues.

Moral justice was “a big part” of Labour politics, Maskell argued. “It’s part of our roots, how we think about inequality in society, making sure we have a just system that serves the people, as well as a just immigration system that keeps our border safe but recognises the dignity of people coming to the UK,” she said.

There is, however, a different and newer side to religion in UK politics, one more closely modelled on American ideas of religious nationalism.

Tommy Robinson, the far-right agitator, has begun to present himself as explicitly Christian, although much of this is done as a contrast to Islam, the main religion he targets.

Similarly, Nick Tenconi, who leads the UK outpost of Turning Point, the rightwing student group set up by the murdered US activist Charlie Kirk, includes social media messaging about the country needing to “return to Christ” alongside anti-Islam and anti-migrant content.

In a dramatic manifestation of this, in October a Turning Point-allied Christian nationalist group called King’s Army marched in formation wearing branded black tracksuits through Soho, a location seemingly chosen as it is the centre of London’s LGBT community.

All this remains, however, fairly niche in UK politics. While critics sometimes portray Marshall as the wealthy incubator of US-style evangelism, friends insist he is little more than a devout Anglican who, as one put it, “is strongly opposed to Christian nationalism and any kind of politicisation of faith”.

Kruger is not averse to occasional off-piste rhetoric, for example using a speech to the National Conservatism conference in London to condemn what he said was a younger generation indoctrinated by “a mix of Marxism and narcissism and paganism, self-worship and nature-worship”.

But he still feels some way from the US culture. Webster from the EA said: “In the UK you do have some Christian nationalists, but when it comes to politics it tends to more often be a sort of Christian nostalgia, linked to our historic identity with the church that people feel may have been lost.”

One Christian MP on the right of politics noted that while the issue of assisted dying had helped bring together MPs with faith, any links beyond that felt limited.

“I certainly don’t get the sense of much of an evangelical lobby,” they said. “For me, my faith is more a foundation for what I already believe. And here, religion is not really a vote winner.”