God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England
Bijan Omrani
Unicorn Publishing
April, 2025
400 pages
ISBN 978-1800753068
Though still quite young, Bijan Omrani’s career as an educator and writer has taken him to various distinguished places, and his 2017 book, Caesar’s Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul, was critically acclaimed. God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England came out in April. The author opens with a stark statement: ‘Christianity is dying in England.’ While a recent study found that more British young people are turning to Catholicism and Pentecostalism, when one considers the statistical evidence overall, it is difficult to disagree with this assessment, particularly when it comes to the fate of the terminally ill Church of England. What has provoked the author to write this book is the lack of serious discussion about the societal consequences. ‘Many treat the end of Christian observance as an unremarkable inevitability in an age of technology, diversity and democratic emancipation. When the trend does receive attention, it is often seen as a good thing. Christianity, so say the commentators who discuss it, was a disaster,’ Omrani writes. The purpose of Omrani’s book is two-fold: firstly, to explain how Christianity shaped English life and culture in a positive sense; and secondly, to consider the role which Christianity should play in England’s national identity now and into the future. While Omrani’s focus is on England alone, he expresses the hope that his analysis will be of relevance when considering the situations of the smaller three nations in these islands, and it surely is. His examination of the formative role of Christianity is certainly illuminating and topically varied.
Politically, Omrani argues that the arrival of Christianity had a huge influence on the development of English statehood. When Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionaries to sixth century England, they received hospitality from Æthelbert, King of Kent, who granted them permission to preach. What Æthelbert received in turn, as a result of his interaction with the Pope and his Church, was all the more significant. As Omrani explains, Anglo-Saxon England was far from coherent. The various Germanic settlers had migrated to Britain in a piecemeal fashion amidst the wreckage of a collapsing Rome, and what emerged afterwards was a patchwork of communities which lacked any shared sense of loyalty. The blessings which Augustine of Canterbury could bestow upon Æthelbert were both spiritual and temporal. Roman Britain was gone, but Roman Catholic Britain could now emerge, a country in which the civil and religious realms were mutually reinforcing. Before Christian kingship was introduced as a concept, the author maintains, it ‘was not just that they had a “hollow crown”; there was simply no crown at all’. All of this helped to lay the groundwork for what was to come, and the noticeably religious character of England’s royal coronations harks back to this. Christianity gradually came to exert an ever greater influence upon England’s laws and customs, particularly the idea that everyone including the king was subject to divine law. Cardinal Stephen Langton drew inspiration from the treatment of kings in the Old Testament when drafting Magna Carta and its limits on the sovereign’s power. Though canon law and civil law evolved separately, the latter was strongly influenced by the former.
‘Indeed,’ he writes, ‘we are so indebted to Christian assumptions in our law and the moral foundations on which it is built that, although it may no longer be “operative” in the same sense that it was, it will always remain part of the law. If, as the contemporary judges have said, Christianity is no longer a part of English law, it still remains, to a great extent, its parent.’ Today the role of Christianity within public education is a political flashpoint in many countries. Omrani writes that the early Church devoted considerable resources to obtaining and maintaining large numbers of books, in spite of them being extremely expensive. This said something deeper about the degree to which the Church kept the fire of learning burning amidst Europe’s Dark Ages. Not only did it bequeath many schools and universities to the English people, it shaped what would become the secular education system itself, right down to the academic dress which is derived from a past in which students were regarded as clergy in minor orders. ‘[T]he Church’s rigid insistence on the preservation, development and propagation of book learning, grammar and ancient texts through a chaotic age in a hostile and fragmented continent was in itself an extraordinary and determined act of courage. The Church, and none other, saw the value in preserving literary culture and education when all around held it close to contempt,’ Omrani argues.
When considering the Church’s artistic and architectural contribution to English life, the author rightly points out that the iconoclastic Protestantism of the sixteenth century has left only ‘fragments’ of what existed before the Tudor assault. … And yet the great medieval cathedrals remain along with many other parish churches; had England not abandoned Catholicism, it is possible that its cultural output could have rivalled (or at least come close to) Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain or France. Omrani’s assessment of the role of Christianity in driving massive social reforms in the nineteenth century is particularly striking. While the Evangelical William Wilbeforce’s anti-slavery crusade is widely known, much less is known about the degree to which ostensibly secular charities created in that time period were in fact founded and run by Christians motivated by their faith. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), for example, was established by Benjamin Waugh, who saw his work as being an effort to help deprived children to recover their God-given dignity. This work by churches, by Sunday schools and by the various charities founded by Christians had a transformational impact on English society, and Omrani quotes another historian who wrote that ‘between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical.’ In his acknowledgement of the debate over the desirability of Victorian morality, Omrani comes down on the side of the Christian reformers, while inadvertently providing much food for thought for an Irish reader seeking a comparative case study.
Here in Ireland, Victorian morality tends to be interlinked with the rise of the post-Famine Church, the Synod of Thurles in 1850 and all that came with that. In the chronically imbalanced narrative which has been force-fed to Irish Catholics over the last half century, no consideration is given to the need for a sterner moral culture in nineteenth century Ireland. The priests and religious of that era may well have been too strict, but in their condemnations of faction fighting, drunkenness, out-of-wedlock births and pre-Christian superstitions – and in their insistence on orderliness, clean-living and education – they did the future State much service. The author’s analysis is insightful throughout, including when it comes to his critique of the standard secularisation thesis. Citing statistical evidence, he shows that the decline in religious practice in England has been non-linear in nature, with an upsurge in churchgoing recorded after the Second World War. He is also correct to place the recent decline in religious practice in the broader context of the ‘crisis of association’ and growth of individualism which is occurring across the Western world.
For anyone seeking to learn about Christianity’s role in English history, this book is extremely valuable. Even if secularism is destined to be predominant within that society in the coming decades, Omrani’s central argument about the need for Christianity to ‘form a grand part of any overarching narrative of English national identity’ is compelling, although he could perhaps have devoted more space to explaining how this may work in practice. For all the emptiness of England’s churches, the fact that a successful historian would write such a book is both encouraging and telling. There are still many in that country’s intellectual class who are willing to admit their ‘Debt to a Dying God,’ as Omrani provocatively titles his introductory chapter. Its publication is not that much of an aberration either. In 2016, an editorial in Britain’s main left-wing newspaper The Guardian identified Christianity as the source of today’s notions of human rights, and expressed concern about what was going to happen ‘in an entirely post-Christian environment where the collective memory slips from the old moorings inherited from Christian ethics.’ Would The Irish Times editorialise in this manner? Would a mainstream Irish historian write a book like this? Of course not. What is most striking about all this is that the influence of Catholicism on Irish national identity is much more significant than the influence of Christianity in English national identity. The Irish people’s adherence to the same faith remained constant for 1,600 years, and was the key factor which ensured that Ireland – unlike Scotland and Wales – was never fully brought under England’s thumb. Ireland’s historical connection to Europe in the period after the Roman empire was a missionary one – Pope Gregory the Great never needed to send priests to re-evangelise Ireland – and the same can be said of our connection to Africa and the developing world in the twentieth century. Wherever Irish people have settled in the Anglosphere, they have established Catholic churches and Catholic schools. Politically, legally, culturally, socially, institutionally: across every metric which Omrani examines, the Ireland of today is built on Catholic foundations. The refusal to acknowledge this, let alone cherish it, is robbing the Irish people of a key component of their sense of themselves as a unique people in this strange and fast-moving world. In the long-run, no nation can survive when they have been so thoroughly cut off from their own roots, and the cracks in Ireland’s society are going to become more severe in the coming years. This house built on sand will not stand for long.
Omrani’s most poignant example of England’s Christian culture relates to how a desperate people sometimes try to hold on to what has been taken from them. When describing how the Protestant reformers stamped out prayers for the souls of the deceased, he writes of how people in the Catholic stronghold of Lancashire and elsewhere sought to find a new way of honouring departed souls. Instead of praying in the established religion’s newly-bare churches, families would assemble at midnight in fields, where a bundle of hay would be lit and held aloft to represent lost loved ones. Prayers would be said until the fires went out, and this practice survived up until the nineteenth century, with the meeting places being known as ‘Purgatory Field.’ In his own way, Bijan Omrani is contributing to the same process of remembering with this outstanding book.
About the Author: James Bradshaw
James Bradshaw writes on topics including history, culture, film and literature.