Defending the Christian Character of England

God is an Englishman:
Christianity and the Creation of England
by bijan omrani
forum, 400 pages, £25 

A couple of years ago, I heard the historian David Starkey describe the Church of England as “English Shintoism—the English worshiping themselves.” He meant this as a compliment. Starkey triggered laughs all around, in a room full of political conservatives of every stripe. I sensed that many—perhaps most—chuckled in agreement with his agnostic appreciation for the national Church. For others, myself included, it was a black laughter, admiring a superb one-liner but lamenting the spiritual void contained within.

I don’t know if Bijan Omrani was in the room that day. But if his excellent new book God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England is anything to go by, he’d have strongly disagreed.

Like Starkey, Omrani contends that the history and character of England as we know them are inseparable from Christianity. He explicitly seeks to do for England what Tom Holland did for the whole Western world in Dominion. (Although he touches on Britain as a whole, Omrani limits himself to England, both out of respect for the varied histories of the U.K.’s constituent nations and in view of the increased political devolution since the 1990s and its impact on English national consciousness.) Where Omrani differs from Starkey—and from a growing number of spiritually indifferent yet institutionally loyal English conservatives—is that he maintains that Christianity has exerted its preeminent formative influence on English life over the past 1500 years not by turning the nation’s eyes inward, but by steadfastly pointing them upward.

The book consists of two parts, “What England Owes Christianity” and “What Christianity Still Can Give,” the former taking up two-thirds of the text. Omrani’s historical survey is not limited to those features of English history that seem most conspicuously Christian to us today, such as church buildings, hymns, or social action (though all these are given worthy treatment in their turn). He begins with two thrilling chapters on kingship and written law, two aspects of English life so fundamental as to be now invisible. When we do think of them, we imagine them to have simply emerged from the historical ether or as the products of some vague “progress.” Omrani prepares the reader to be disabused: “All of these assumptions have to be forgotten.” His prose evokes the truly alien feeling of pagan England and the revelatory shock of Christianity when Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory, first alighted on the Isle of Thanet in A.D. 597. Omrani illuminates how, in Christianity, Augustine managed to find something to offer King Aethelbert of Kent, a successful warlord and the proverbial “man who has everything.” Drawing on the historic prestige of the lost empire of Rome, the riches of the Old Testament, and the example of Christ, Augustine and the earliest missionaries provided the Anglo-Saxons with the rationale and resources to conceptualize kingship as a weighty, God-given office requiring humility and justice, capable of uniting warring tribes into a cohesively Christian gens Anglorum. It was also thanks to the missionaries that early England was able to develop written law codes, the sine qua non of English nationhood. The promulgation of written law “implied the unification of a people under such a code, with the kings responsible before God for their conduct and morality.”  

The subsequent topics in the first part of the book are mostly more discrete and conventional contributions to English history: education, architecture, music, poetry, politics, and more. Omrani integrates his history well, tracing for instance the overlooked continuity between Reformation poets and the Romantics. He breezes through everything with the confident balance of breadth and expertise that one looks for in quality works of popular history rooted in scholarship, with a well-trained eye for hilarious yet instructive historical gobbets. Did you know, for instance, that evangelicals invented coffee shops? The section on the eccentricities of English clergymen had my wife cackling as I read extracts aloud to her. Comparisons to the likes of Tom Holland and Bill Bryson are well-deserved.

While I would recommend Omrani’s book without hesitation, his treatment of the Reformation irked me a little. Omrani at one point refers to the “trauma” of the Reformation, alongside that of the English Civil War. This feels a lopsided term for how the English now see the Reformation, and even for how they saw it by the end of the sixteenth century, when Elizabethan England was a confident Protestant nation set self-consciously against its Catholic foes. Chapter 4 focuses on the history of religious art in England, with much lament over Reformation iconoclasm. Whatever one thinks of it, that iconoclasm and the resultant restrained aesthetic of most Anglican churches is now a part of Christianity’s formation of English identity, a fact Omrani doesn’t really acknowledge.

Furthermore, chapter 8, which outlines the English Reformation’s legacy of political liberty, contains two notable flaws. First, and somewhat pedantically: Omrani suggests that “the foundations were being laid for the divine right of kings” when Henry VIII argued that the fifth commandment (“Honor thy father and mother”) entailed obedience to the governing authorities. Yet this interpretation was novel neither to Henry nor even the Reformation. One can easily find it in Thomas Aquinas.

Second, Omrani fails to moderate his otherwise commendable account of Protestant political liberty with the English Reformation’s particular emphasis on conservatism and good order. One should never criticize an author for the book he didn’t write, but I was surprised that this chapter, and the book as a whole, made no mention of Richard Hooker. Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity not only provided the theological scaffolding for the Anglican theological tradition, but was foundational for all post-Reformation Anglophone political thought. Hooker bridged the gap between medieval scholasticism and early modern political thought with his work on natural law, and in a tumultuous time articulated the need for “orderly public judgment to prevail over private judgment” (to quote my friend Brad Littlejohn). This omission surprised me all the more since Omrani is based at the University of Exeter (where I was an undergrad): I imagine that he has enjoyed a Cornish pasty on a sunny day on the green of Exeter Cathedral, where there sits an imposing statue of Hooker, his Laws open upon his knee.

These criticisms aside, Omrani’s history is rich, lively, and coherent overall, as is the briefer second section on what Christianity still has to offer England. Blessedly, he articulates this without framing Christianity in terms of the bland Blairite “British values,” a term which Omrani repudiates. His account of Britain’s secularization rejects the idea of rationalism leading inevitably to godlessness, focusing more on “new technologies and concomitant new ideas about human psychology.” TV, the vinyl LP, pirate radio, and cars led to new forms of association, displacing the church’s prominence in the social lives of young people; meanwhile, psychoanalysts and educators championed self-expression and the welfare state ballooned. This is a shrewd analysis, although it could do with a dose of the “Great Man” theory of history. British secularization was the agenda of the political elite as much as anything, forged with cunning intent in the 1960s by the likes of Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins. 

Similarly, when discussing England today, Omrani talks about immigration as if it were an unstoppable natural force rather than a political choice, and could perhaps have said something about Christianity offering an alternative to the worrying growth of Islam. That aside, his commendation of Christianity’s ongoing social benefits is robust, and his final chapter makes clear that the faith’s greatest gift, one which the world cannot give, is the Gospel of Our Lord. His final paragraph, drawing on the poetic Anglican mystic Thomas Traherne, is in fact quite beautiful, rapturous even.

Defending the Christian character of England has long been a laughable enterprise, lampooned by the likes of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as sentimentality for some “creamy old England.” But with God is an Englishman, Omrani proves that it is no laughing matter. Providentially, the book has arrived at an opportune moment: There is much talk in the U.K. of a surprising “quiet revival” underway, with churchgoing seemingly on the rise and religion once again respectable among the intelligentsia. Perhaps, in a generation’s time, Omrani will sit down to pen a long-awaited follow-up—not about England’s Christian creation, but its recreation.