Bijan Omrani

Whoever dreamt up the title of this scholarly and far-ranging book clearly meant it to be provocative and the potential reader should not be deterred by it. Bijan Omrani trained as a barrister, taught Classics at Eton and Westminster and is a research fellow at the University of Exeter. He has spoken at the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, where I bought and enjoyed his Caesar's Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul (2017). Here, in God Is An Englishman, he brings his learning and wit to bear on the vital question of what our country stands to lose in its rejection of the Christian faith. The book, an extended thesis rather than a straight history, is in two unequal parts. The first (after a short introduction), 'What England owes Christianity', takes up four-fifths of the book. The second, ' What Christianity still can give ', forms the last fifth. Moderate in length (350 pages of text), elevated in tone (with the occasional impish sally) and comprehensive in scope (from AD 597 to the present day), it argues that English monarchy, law, education, art, architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, language, landscape, calendar, Sundays, spirituality and morality would all have been fundamentally different without their Christian origins. His central contention is that ‘Christianity has made the most fundamental contributions to the emergence, development and flourishing of England as a nation’, and that ‘in spite of the profound changes of the twentieth century, it still has an essential part to play in national life’.

Examples abound of the educating and civilising effect of Christianity. Sherborne’s own Aldhelm, often called ‘the first man of letters’, urged on his pupils the necessity of broad secular learning to enhance their spiritual understanding of the Bible. The eighth-century historian Bede introduced the reading public to the ‘AD’ system of dating: ‘the new calendar signified that England was not a distant island: it was connected to Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and to the purposes of heaven’. Tyndale’s Bible of 1534 reflects Tyndale’s own Gloucestershire roots in its homely style and pithy phrases, and radically changed the English language, as well as providing 80% of the material for the King James Bible of 1611. John Locke, ‘the first secular philosopher’, freely admits that his influential ideas on liberty of conscience had their origins and underpinning in the Bible’s translation into English decades earlier. The author’s thesis could have been strengthened still further with reference to the effect of the Wesleyan revival both in protecting England from violent revolutionary ideas spreading from France at the end of the eighteenth century and in rescuing the Church of England from its low state around 1800; also to the work of the Tractarians in slums and areas of social deprivation.

The Victorian Age is generally condemned for producing generations of prudes and hypocrites – yet its solid achievements deserve to be celebrated. Many charities existing today that were founded on Christian principles, such as Barnado’s, cravenly omit any reference to their religious origin. The evangelicals of the nineteenth century were responsible in large measure not only for the emancipation of slaves but also for widespread alleviation of poverty, based on their scriptural belief in the dignity of each individual as made in the image of God. So too today, charitable giving by churchgoers, 12,000 churches involved in food banks, provision of night shelters for the homeless, an atmosphere of community and fellowship, together with an emphasis on universal human rights, continue to be examples of ‘the presence of Christianity in the public realm’.

Our culture has undergone a massive paradigm shift since the 1960s which will not be reversed by simply rehearsing the glories of the past. Nor is there much to be gained by a tentative spirituality where 'something out there’ is invoked in inarticulate terms and everyone does their own thing, with the Christian faith as one alternative amongst many. We are experiencing ‘the loss of a shared cultural language which affirmed the idea of spirituality and made it a part of normal life to share it’. So what does this book offer as the way forward? The author confesses his inability to ‘persuade anyone of the truth of the Christian faith, nor can I cause anyone, like John Wesley or the evangelicals, to be born again’. Yet ‘the incarnate Christ crosses every spiritual frontier’. ‘The figure of Christ crucified’, wistfully invoked in George Herbert’s Whither, O whither art thou fled, my Lord, my Love? or in John Donne's Batter my heart, three-personed God, ‘transcends the barriers between the human and the divine, the transitory and the eternal’. ‘Such fundamental longings [of the human spirit] have not been assuaged by an abundance of technology, wealth or affluence, or the connectivity of social media, as passingly pleasing as they are.’ ‘The message of integration, of the wholeness offered in the way of the Christian spiritual path, ... lies close at hand and ready to inspire in its turn’.

Omrani unfolds a coherent and fair-minded survey of the richness and power of English Christianity, a spiritual tradition which, despite some eccentricity, several wrong turnings and many culpable failures, contradicts its negative image widely propagated today. This book deserves to be on every thinking person’s book table and to be revisited time and again. It’s authoritative, hard-hitting, attractively argued and (for this reader at least) quietly inspirational.