Latest news with #BijanOmrani
Spectator
4 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Is God an Englishman?
Bijan Omrani joins Damian Thompson to talk about his new book God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England. They discuss the spiritual and cultural debt the country owes to Christianity. The central question of Bijan's book is 'does it matter that Christianity is dying in England?'. The faith has historically played a disproportionate role in many areas of English life that we take for granted now – for example, by shaping both charity and the welfare state. Yet this is influence is often ignored as congregations shrink and the UK slides into secularism. But are there unexpected grounds for hope? The publication of God is an Englishman has coincided with a modest but surprising revival of traditional worship among Millennials and members of Generation Z. Is there, as the book puts it, a 'weariness of the young' with what secular society is offering them?' And could we see the eventual flourishing of a smaller but purer English Christianity? Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
Telegraph
10-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
England was forged by Christianity – but we're giving it up
The only major problem with God is an Englishman, a lively and erudite book by the historian Bijan Omrani, is its title. It suggests something very different from the book's actual argument. Rather than pointing to how a specific religious tradition is inextricably bound up with English identity, the title echoes a far more problematic idea of the unique religious status or destiny of the English people, a myth of the centrality of 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 'authentic' Christian civilisation – an English messianism or exceptionalism that is every bit as dangerous as its parallel manifestations in the self-images of contemporary Russia or the United States. What Omrani is saying, in fact, is simply that an enormous amount of what we take for granted about the culture of England is what it is because of the Christian Church. The same would be true of France, Romania or Ethiopia; but to grant this is in no way to minimise the necessity of spelling it out for our own context. Omrani gives us far more than a paean to – or, sadly, an elegy for – little country churches, evensong, and loveably eccentric parsons. He sets out right at the start the central and essential role of the Western Catholic Church in shaping the laws of England: insisting, in the medieval and early modern eras, that monarchical power must be accountable, that redress for injury and injustice should be available to all, that contracts should be universally and impartially enforceable. Omrani notes, too, that the laws governing the death penalty allowed for the suspension of the sentence were a convicted criminal to become insane; the principle was that punishment should have what legal theorists call a 'communicative' dimension – that it should be intelligible to the person being punished. All these things Omrani rightly traces to distinctively Christian concerns about the dignity of the person, which mandated a penal system that took seriously the criminal's point of view and state of mind as well as the victim's fate. The same concern for maximising the importance of conscious and intelligent agency appears in the Church's investment in education at every level. Omrani follows the numerous recent scholars who have exploded the myth of an intellectual Dark Age that was overturned by the Renaissance and/or Enlightenment; he instead celebrates the substantive contributions to mathematics, astronomy and physics made by mediaeval ecclesiastics (including one future Archbishop of Canterbury who managed to anticipate Galileo on the calculation of acceleration). Visual and verbal arts are saturated with Christian reference, the landscape is decisively moulded by the Church's activities, and so is the calendar. More deeply still, Omrani argues, we must forget the modern cliché that Western Christianity in general, and British in particular, is shallow in its spirituality. He reminds us of the genuinely extraordinary flowering of writing about contemplation in 14th-century England, where, within barely 80 years, at least five major classics-to-be of 'mystical' and reflective literature appeared, written in the vernacular and thus accessible to a lay audience. Few other countries in the period can rival this record of productivity in a local language – though Germany and the Low Countries provide stiff competition – and masterpieces of spiritual insight such as The Cloud of Unknowing and the visions of Julian of Norwich have, after some neglect in the wake of the Reformation, enjoyed a steady growth in popularity over the last century. Omrani helps us to see how the development of the classical English hymn, from the late 18th century onwards, creates a very distinctive English musical style and taste; until recently, a fairly continuous tradition of shared worship in state schools guaranteed that this body of popular music constituted a powerful strand in common culture, learned, half-remembered, parodied, enjoyed even by ageing unbelievers. As he notes with regret, this legacy has largely disappeared as hymnody has been replaced by contemporary religious songs more specifically aimed at children and adolescents – creating the unfortunate impression that religious celebration is juvenile or even infantile. Most clergy will ruefully observe that when engaged couples or bereaved families are asked to select hymns for a wedding or a funeral, the only pieces they know will be songs from their primary schools. But the record of the churches and of individual priests and ministers in defending the vulnerable and engaging the decision-making processes of the nation is a decidedly grown-up affair. Campaigns for the abolition of slavery in the 18th century and the limitation of child labour in the 19th – to take only the most dramatically widespread and successful instances – were fuelled not by 'enlightened' liberal sceptics but by toughly dogmatic Christians with an unshakeable conviction of God-given human dignity and the imperative of compassion. Modern historians have, reasonably enough, encouraged us not to idealise these campaigns, and not to ignore the blind spots of the campaigners; but, as Omrani points out, without the angry pity and unquenchable commitment to human solidarity that characterised the evangelical faith of that age, no improvements would have happened. In the final section of God is an Englishman, Omrani attempts to understand what happened to the common culture he has lovingly outlined. He sees the 1960s as a key moment, the decade in which a perfect storm of social changes rapidly destroyed the thick fabric of voluntary association that had prevailed for the preceding century or so. A 'crisis of association', he calls it: people volunteer less, join fewer clubs and societies (including political parties), and shy away from long-term membership of sports teams or community groups. In other words – and this is a point worth stressing – the absence of a younger generation from the Church is less a sign of principled unbelief than a symptom of this wider reluctance to join things, to 'sign up'. But against this background, the door remains open to the rich resources Omrani has described. Loneliness, disorientation around personal and collective identity, the erosion of imaginative space – they all weigh heavily on our society. We would be insane not to point people to where nourishment can be found. Omrani is not a religious evangelist. He is, though, much more than a 'cultural Christian', weaponising an angry nostalgia in the service of political resentment. He wants us to look and listen hard to the actual contours and rhythms of the Christian vision of humanity as England has received it over the centuries, and to ask what we might urgently need of that vision, not so much so that we can be better Englishmen or Englishwomen, but so that we can be better human beings, better singers, scientists and social activists. The point – and the paradox – is that this Christian Englishness may be the best antidote to the sad standoffs between triumphalist exceptionalism on the one hand, and the historical illiteracy of a flat, abstract utopian universalism on the other.
