A Christian vision for being English
by Martin Davie:
In an article entitled ‘Courageous and compassionate. In search of the English’ which was published in the Daily Telegraph on 7 August, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, sets out what he calls ‘an expansive vision of what it means to be English as part of the UK.’
His vision for the future is for a ‘a more developed and strengthened regional government within England’ and for English identity to be understood in terms of being part of ‘a courageous and compassionate community of communities, serving the common good, and delighting in our diversity across these islands.’
There have been a lot of reactions to this article, but none that I yet have seen have noted its exclusively secular tone, something that one might think rather surprising in an article by an Archbishop. What I mean by saying that its tone is secular is that there is no mention of God, or how the existence of human beings is related to God. As numerous commentators have pointed out, one of the striking things about Western culture is that it increasingly lacking in any kind of reference to God and the Archbishop’s article reflects this trend.
A striking example is of this is the Archbishop’s summary of the Christian vision ‘which is the bedrock of our cultural, ethical and political life.’ According to the Archbishop this vision, as taught by Jesus, is about ‘loving your neighbour as yourself.’ The problem with this summary of the Christian vision is that it is misleading because it truncates Jesus’ teaching by leaving out Jesus’ reference to loving God.
In Matthew’s Gospel the full account of what Jesus said runs as follows:
See also:
A ‘Church for England’, but whose understanding of Englishness? by Archbishop Cranmer
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