The Greatest National Story Ever Told

God is an Englishman

In 1932 a curious but significant legal case came before the House of Lords. Donoghue v Stevenson arose after a woman called May Donoghue ordered a ginger beer at a café in Lanarkshire, only to realise after drinking it that the bottle contained a decomposing snail. She subsequently fell ill.

Donoghue sued the manufacturer, Stevenson, and in a landmark ruling that paved the way for modern negligence law, the country’s highest court declared that the company had a duty of care to anyone who might drink from one of their bottles.

In making his judgment, Lord Atkin used the passage of the Good Samaritan as his legal argument: love thy neighbour. He was especially influenced by the Golden Rule, the principle articulated in St Matthew’s Gospel as ‘Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you’. Lord Atkin’s grandson recalled how he would talk about legal and moral principles at Sunday lunch after church, clearly having thought about the sermon.

This case is cited by Bijan Omrani in his recently published book God is An Englishman, ‘as one of the first studied by students at English law schools’ and yet, he writes ‘few tutors allude to the influence of Christianity on the ruling. Lord Atkin’s findings are instead presented as a matter of pure reasoning and precedent. The idea that Christianity, despite its place in English life and history, had played, or may play, a fundamental role in developing the laws of England and its guiding principle is one that would likely make many contemporary judges and barristers uncomfortable.’

As an example, in 2011 Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson voiced the opinion that ‘the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity in whatever form’. Perhaps it’s the case now now, but historically almost nothing could be further from the truth, and the amnesia is perhaps relevant to understanding why confidence in the law, and in British intuitions more generally, is undergoing a crisis.

In a similar vein, my son has recently been learning about human rights at school, and the classroom material explains about the 1998 Human Rights Act, and the background literature mentions Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights as origin stories. But where do they come from? Why should humans have ‘rights?’ We tend to assume that our laws came about through reason, or that this is just the obvious way to order society, or perhaps there is some force called ‘progress’ pushing us towards higher levels of personal freedom.

The opposing argument is that these things are in fact downstream of Christianity, something now largely forgotten, either deliberately or just through English absent-mindedness about the past. This is the subject of Omrani’s book: it is, as he alludes to in the introduction, an extension of Tom Holland Thought applied to our country in particular. Perhaps the Christian roots of England might seem obvious to some, except that the historical amnesia is so extensive that it needs to be written, and Omrani does a splendid job.

The author is a classics scholar with a wide range of interests, from central Asia to ancient Rome, as well as some legal training. He also has a deep cultural immersion in Anglicanism, and in one poignant passage he describes a childhood memory of holding the family bible in his hand at his grandparent’s home in Yorkshire (the other side of his family is Persian). It is a world, a tradition and a culture in deep retreat, and these occasional forays into his own upbringing lends the book a slightly Arnoldian sense of mourning.

A group of angels on their way to putting an England flag on a lamp post

England begins with the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, led by two dominant tribes, the Angles and Saxons, who between them established a dozen kingdoms which by 597AD had been slimmed down to around seven.

That was the year when Pope Gregory sent St Augustine to convert the English, after earlier noting the presence of blond-haired pagan boys in Rome’s slave market. This mission had a profound impact on our history, bringing England into Italy’s cultural orbit, but it also helped establish the very idea of an English people. Although Procopius had spoken of the people of the island being called the Angiloi, the earliest reference to England comes with Bede, a monk living in Northumbria in the early eighth century.

Curiously, Omrani notes that in early sections of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede refers to ‘Saxons’ and then ‘Saxons, or Angles’. After Gregory enters the narrative he calls them collectively Angles, Angelcynn - the English people. It is very tempting to speculate to what extent our home came to become England rather than Saxony because of Gregory’s love of punning - Non Angli, sed angeli. When, centuries later, Athelstan united the kingdom after his great military victory at Brunanburh, a chronicler recorded how he had perfecta Saxonia – made England whole.

As every sharp-elbowed parent knows, where there are Catholics, there are high-performing schools, and one of the immediate effects of Augustine’s mission was the establishment of several places of learning, some of which still function. Higher education followed in due course, with the country’s first university evolving out of a settlement of clerical scholars by the Thames; in 1214 King John granted formal legal privileges to Oxford after an incident in which three students had been lynched by townspeople (violence was a feature of university life in the medieval period).

The written word also meant the establishment of law codes, and the very first law in England, under the Christian convent King Ethelbert of Kent, concerns protection of church property. Alfred the Great, who laid the foundations of an English state, was an intensely religious man and his Doom book was heavily influenced by Biblical ideas.

His grandson Athelstan was also the first to make provision for the poor a function of the state, because that is what Jesus commanded; even Canute, who after a robust youthful policy of blinding and mutilating, became very religious (so the story of the tide), and ordered that: ‘We forbid the practice of condemning Christian people to death for very trivial offences. On the contrary, merciful punishments shall be determined upon for the public good’.

The medieval Church’s role in creating our legal system is hard to exaggerate. The concept of felonies, still used in American law although abandoned in England in the 1960s, arose in the 12^th century based on the idea that some crimes caused offence to God, so were serious enough to warrant the attention of the state. Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, was probably the most significant figure in the creation of Magna Carta, perhaps the first to suggest the idea and instrumental as a negotiator and peacemaker between the king and barons. The right to silence, the Fifth Amendment in the US, comes from Canon Law and St John Chrysostom, who wrote that ‘no one should be compelled to betray themselves’.

In the 17^th century Edward Coke, perhaps the most influential legal theorist in English history, and the originator of judicial review, made the argument that King James couldn’t be the final arbiter of common law. When he wrote that ‘the King is under no man, save God and the law, for the law makes the King’ he was quoting the medieval jurist Henry de Bracton, who had said ‘that as a vicar of God the king ought to be under the law is clearly shown by the example of Jesus Christ.’

Perhaps the most important way in which scripture formed English life was its influence on freedom of conscience, the bedrock of modern liberalism. Back in 1612, the Baptist lawyer and theologian Thomas Helwys wrote that the king’s power extended ‘to all the goods and bodies of their servants’ but not their spirits, and therefore all religions should be tolerated: ‘Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it appertynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.’

Two years later, Leonard Busher wrote a tract called Religious Peace; or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience in which he argued that king and Parliament ‘permit all sorts of Christians; yea, Jews, Turks, and pagans, so long as they are peaceable, and no malefactors’.

As unprecedented as these ideas were, and radical - a 1644 tract by Roger Williams making a similar argument had been burned by Parliament - they were hard to argue against when based on the Bible. They recalled Christ’s refusal to call fire down on Samaritan village, or the Parable of Wheat in Matthew’s Gospel suggesting that only the Lord could judge the godly and ungodly. As John Milton put it, ‘the whole Protestant church allows no supreme judge to rule in matters of religion, but the Scriptures themselves, which necessarily infers liberty of conscience.’

These ideas were most popularised by John Locke, whose arguments especially influenced Thomas Jefferson in his establishment of religious toleration in Virginia and then the United States, yet he didn’t draw them out of thin air; Locke wrote that ‘question of liberty of conscience… has for so some years been so much bandied amongst us.’

Omrani writes that ‘The general equality of mankind, the capacity of governments to be removed by society should they fail in their duties to those societies, the need for civil authorities to restrain themselves from involvement in matters of conscience or religious worship unless they should threaten domestic order – had all been articulated decades beforehand in the debates generated by the translation of the Bible into English.’

The Reformation helped to give us rights, while taking away our rites. England has gone through two periods of cultural whitewashing, both coincidentally in the reigns of an Elizabeth. One result of this was the erosion of the traditional calendar, although some traditions took long to die and remnants survive in odds ways such as the tax year starting on April 5.

There is much to lament in that lost world, although there was one unquestionable cultural upside to the Reformation. With the disappearance of ‘parish church choirs, complex polyphony and Latin liturgy’, churchgoers began to spontaneously do something that would shape English life for centuries. In September 1559, London diarist Henry Machyn was the first to observe this new trend, noting that ‘the nuw morning prayer at sant Antholyns… begyne to rynge at v in the morning; men and women all do syng, and boys.’

The English hymn was born, and the following year John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, wrote that ‘as soon as’ the people ‘had once commenced singing publicly in only one little church in London, immediately not only the churches in the neighbourhood, but also distant towns, began to vie with one another in the same practice.’ This proved so popular that a book, The Whole Book of Psalms Collected into English Metre, went through 700 editions between 1562 and the end of the 17^th century.

‘Over this time,’ Omrani writes, these hymns ‘were one of the fundamental shared English cultural experiences.’ They ‘offered a musical emancipation to the English’ and ‘where once they remained silent, they now had liberty to sing.’ He quotes music historian Andrew Gant, who said that Victorian hymn writers did for the English ‘what opera did for the Italians’. It’s also notable how hymns formed the background sound to that other English religion, football, with so many chants originating with this popular form of music.

But they’re not singing anymore, and this is another dying tradition: the author describes being outside Exeter Cathedral when King Charles’s accession to the throne was proclaimed, and the crowd being asked to sing ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’: ‘I belted the hymn out as if I were back in my school chapel. No one else in the crowd seemed to sing at all. My daughter looked at me quizzically.’

The role of Christian groups in the creation of civil society is largely forgotten. Most of our major charities were founded by Evangelicals, but now seem embarrassed about it: the NSPCC website mentions their founder, a vicar, but nothing else; Barnardo’s makes no mention at all. Most major charities are now overtly progressive, the successor faith (or heresy) of Christianity which still proclaims that the last shall be first, or as they might phrase it, ‘the most vulnerable members of society’. They are often repulsed by their judgemental ancestor faith, although they still carry its sense of universal mission and vehement moralising. Many will be unaware that the ‘welfare state’, a term coined by Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, built on earlier Christian foundations.

Evangelicals in particular played a huge part in gentling the English condition, campaigning against rampant alcoholism and boorish aristocratic behaviour such as duelling. The effects were pronounced, and the author quotes the words of social historian Harold Perkin, 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’.

The story culminates with the second Elizabethan Reformation and the rapid retreat of faith: between 1954 and 1984 Church of England membership fell by 35 per cent, and by 1995 it was 60 per cent lower than at the start of century, in a far larger population.

Yet people continue to believe in something, and he cites a 2022 Theos survey which found that one in seven people believed in the ‘supernatural power of ancestors’. Between 1987 and 1999, religious belief dropped by 20 per cent but people undergoing a ‘spiritual experiences’ apparently rose by 60 per cent. I never know what people mean by this, and always feel quite sceptical, but for many there is clearly a void.

This void is perhaps most felt by the authorities, who sense a lack of direction and national purpose and try to fill it with a set of beliefs and social norms called ‘British Values’. Schoolchildren are inducted into these values, Omrani notes, by studying things like health and safety regulations, informed of their rights as citizens without any understanding of where they come from: ‘We are given no more than a handful of tentative ideas, but there is no courage to offer any story behind them’.

Most gloomily, Omrani notes that the British Values that supposedly define us are actually dying. When the late Queen addressed this theme in 2002, she spoke of service, fairness and tolerance. He points out that tolerance for opposing viewpoints has drastically shrunk, so that a 2022 survey by the Higher Education Policy Institution found that close to 40 per cent of students supported no-platforming controversial speakers, sacking academics who caused offence, and banning books they didn’t like, representing a huge generational change. Volunteering declined by about 50 per cent in just a decade, from 2012 to 2022 (although lockdown must have exaggerated this, and hopefully not for good). As for democratic values and national identity, a July 2024 Royal Holloway survey found that more than half of young people were unsatisfied with democracy; only 45 per cent felt pride in being English.

Every society, and every system, must have some overarching morality, and if it’s not Anglican Christianity, it’s something else. The author cites the example of one judge, ruling over Article 9 of European Charter of Human Rights in the 1990s, who voiced the opinion that the law took an ‘essentially neutral view of religious beliefs’ and had to maintain a ‘benevolent tolerance of cultural and religious diversity.’ But can it actually be ‘neutral’?

Three decades on, and public faith in the justice system has never been lower, driven in part by a sense that judges do not in fact have a neutral view but favour certain beliefs, and certain groups, over others. Far more so than in the days of Lord Atkin, judges and people seem to have fundamentally different ideas of morality; our beleaguered Prime Minister faces such intense hostility in part because he is an embodiment of that judicial morality, blindly following the rulings of courts but lacking any cultural hinterland.

Among her tributes to the new Britain she ruled, the late Queen also spoke of ‘the consolidation of our richly multicultural and multifaith society’, and this is perhaps the core British Value now under the most strain. It is the very fiction of neutrality, Omrani argues, which makes this new aspect of English life so much harder to negotiate.

When I was at primary school, my mother recalled, the ILEA types in charge decided that they would drop the Nativity Play because it was inappropriate in such a multicultural institution. They relented after parental protests, the strongest objections coming from Islamic families who were utterly baffled by the decision. Like many Muslim immigrants, they felt more comfortable as minorities in a Christian society than one without any religion; Christianity was an old rival and adversary, but also a brother-faith. They also, more simply, enjoyed the festivities.

In recent years there has been a concerted, if inconsistent, effort to downplay Christianity and its festivals, although much of it has gone from misreporting to myth – ‘Winterval’, the most famous example, was just a wheeze to get Brummies to use a shopping centre. This kulturkampf is waged by secular progressives who often use the presence of minorities as an excuse, the result being tabloid headlines about Christmas being BANNED to avoid offending Muslims, when Muslims are rarely offended and often not even consulted.

As Labour MP Shahid Malik said around the time of one such well-meaning farce: ‘Many fellow Muslims will be horrified the liberal PC brigade want Christmas cancelled to avoid offending us. We actually relish this time of year.’ This sentiment was echoed by the Muslim Council of Britain.

Christianity is intelligible to newcomers from different religions; the moral norms that replaced it, and which themselves change repeatedly with every new storm, are not even intelligible to many of us. That is at the core of the integration tragedy, that the path from migrant to minority to membership relies on a clear pathway, with norms, moral certainties and a relationship with the majority religion. That is how it’s always worked in multicultural societies, and British Values just aren’t going to cut it.

What it comes down to, Omrani writes, is the story of us: ‘It is an unusual thing for a nation, a tribe, a collective, a city state not to possess and adhere to some sort of generally received foundation story – a narrative which accounts for the origin of the entity, and which gives some sense of its identity, character and purpose.’ Without the Christianity that runs through that narrative arc, the story of us makes no sense at all.