by Rowan Williams, Telegraph
Bijan Omrani’s superb book, God is an Englishman, argues that we take our national faith for granted – and that the youth suffer as a result
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.
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.
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.