Far from bringing any sense of national cohesion, St George’s Day this year seems to have set politicians and commentators at loggerheads more than ever. It is not just the row that followed the Church moving the saint’s day this year to the following week because of its clash with Easter celebrations. It is also that the day has highlighted how little people agree about how to define Englishness itself.
The Labour establishment likes to proclaim an inclusive idea of Englishness. Speaking at a St George’s Day reception at Downing Street, Keir Starmer hailed the country’s ‘wonder and diversity’ while lambasting ‘those who want to divide this nation’, particularly those who rioted after the Stockport killings.
Likewise, in a St George’s Day message the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, called England ‘a tapestry… of different cultures, faiths, histories and ideas’. For him, the heart of Englishness is – like St George against the dragon – standing up ‘for what we believe in even when it’s not easy’. At the present moment, he continued, the dragons to slay are ‘populism and prejudice’.
Beyond this, both refer to abstract values: decency, honour, fairness, democracy, a love of queueing. They also evoke the enjoyment of various cultural artefacts: football before anything for Starmer, along with Pimm’s, English sparkling wine and Tracey Emin; for Khan, fish and chips, Sunday roast, Wimbledon and Ada Lovelace.
Yet, they offer no story to bind together these disparate notions. Starmer referred to ‘all our nation has been through over generations’, but the idea that he feels any great affection for English history is belied by his recent removal of the portraits of Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh and Gladstone from No 10.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the idea of Englishness is clear. It is an exclusive club, an ethnic idea tied to blood and descent. Based on this, the podcaster Konstantin Kisin recently asserted that Rishi Sunak, despite his education at Winchester and Oxford and his pride in Yorkshire, could not be English as he was a ‘brown Hindu’ (although he could be British as a citizen). Suella Braverman, although born and educated in England, said she did not feel English because of her Indian descent. And when Frank Bruno Tweeted on St George’s Day that he was ‘proud of being an Englishman’, a host of trolls attacked him for claiming such an identity.
Both approaches are a mess. The Labour accounts of English identity are an inchoate cultural hotchpotch. Yet the idea that ethnic descent can define Englishness without any reference to culture strains credulity. Do we comfortably accept the full Englishness of a person of English descent who rejects every item on Starmer and Khan’s list of English characteristics, from love of Shakespeare to Sunday roasts? Hitler’s alleged lover Unity Mitford and the recently-deceased Rosa Dugdale, the debutante turned IRA fighter who called Britain a ‘filthy enemy’, both boasted ancient English aristocratic pedigrees – are they better exemplars of Englishness than Frank Bruno, who has expressed his deep love for England, although of Jamaican and Dominican descent?
There has been one thing missing throughout this debate which could help us to deal with this perplexity: a discussion of the role of Christianity in English national identity.
This has been something which few have been willing to consider. For the Left, it disturbs modern notions of inclusivity, and for the Right, ideas of ethnic primacy. Anyone might object that with the 2021 census showing that fewer than half of English people identify themselves as Christians, it is now irrelevant as a marker of identity. And indeed, many Christians themselves might object to mixing faith with national identity. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek… for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,’ as St Paul says.
Yet anyone who wants to get to grips with the question of English identity cannot ignore Christianity. Take the very existence of England as a unified nation state. It was not something that came into existence spontaneously. It emerged as a vision of early Christian scholars such as the Northumbrian monk the Venerable Bede (673-735). From the biblical model of Israel as one people under a single king answerable to God for their welfare and conduct, Bede and his fellows conjured up the same aspiration for unity on these shores. Later generations of West Saxon Kings, Alfred and Aethelstan, put Bede’s vision into practice, tying together many small fiefdoms into one of medieval Europe’s first centralised states.
Even the name of ‘England’ has a Christian origin. This land was populated by Angles, Saxons and Jutes according to Bede, but England (based on ‘Angles’) became the preferred name thanks to a story recorded by Bede. When the sixth-century Pope Gregory heard that slaves he saw in a market in Rome were ‘Angles’ he quickly replied ‘not Angles but Angels!’ It might have been a bad pun, but Bede and his contemporaries saw it as providential, marking the moment when Gregory was inspired to send missionaries here in 597 to re-Christianise it after the fall of the Roman Empire.
What about ideas of English character? First, that the English are law-abiding and given to fair play. Again, when Bede spoke about what good kings should be, basing his ideas on biblical examples, he insisted that even though they ‘rule over the people’, they are also ‘ruled and subject to divine laws’. The refrain that the king was under ‘God and the law’ appears throughout English history. It inspired Archbishop Stephen Langton, one of the framers of the 1215 Magna Carta, who saw it as a biblical-style covenant making the rights and duties of the king and people clear. It was also quoted by the famous Chief Justice Coke against King James I in 1608, when he wanted to rule like an absolute monarch: ‘the King is under no man, save God and the law, for the law makes the king… for where will and not law doth sway, there is no king.’ It is a direct line from this statement to the modern principle that the government must not act unlawfully.
England also likes to stick up for the underdog, and help the underprivileged. It is a nation given to charity. Again, this is owed to Christianity. The evangelical revival of the 18th century following John Wesley put the idea of human dignity – because, according to the Bible, humans are made in the image of God – at the heart of public thinking. Motivated by this, politicians and volunteers worked tirelessly at every cause from the abolition of slavery, ending child labour, cruelty, homelessness, sexual exploitation, endemic alcoholism, and improving the care of orphans, the aged, nursing mothers, the disabled and prisoners. Many great charities, such as Barnardos and the NSPCC, were founded during this time by evangelical pioneers.
What of tolerance and independent-mindedness? The publication of English translations of the Bible in the 16th century, leading to the scriptures being ‘jangled in every alehouse and tavern’ as Henry VIII complained, generated a new environment where ideas not just about religion, but politics and society could be widely discussed. The new notion that people should develop religious ideas from scripture according to their conscience rather than at the direction of authority led to calls from the beginning of the 17th century for not just all sects of Christians to be permitted, but even ‘Jews, Turks, and pagans, so long as they are peaceable, and no malefactors’, in the words of a 1614 tract. This is decades before John Locke published his ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’ in 1689.
Everywhere one turns in English culture, Christianity has left its mark. Not just Shakespeare, but the English language itself owes a vast debt to the biblical translators. Scores of common phrases come from scripture: ‘fight the good fight’, ‘pour out one’s heart’, ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. It has shaped our calendar and festivals (not least Saints’ Days). In music, Christianity gives us ancient plainsong, the renaissance polyphony of Tallis and Byrd and the universal tradition of hymn-singing. In art, we have the cathedrals, thousands of parish churches and paintings from the Book of Kells to Stanley Spencer. In cuisine, we even have the Easter egg and hot-cross bun.
For Bede, arguably the inventor of Englishness, Christian belief in the context of local circumstances, rather than ethnicity, was necessary for belonging. It made it possible for him to incorporate both the Celts and Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek cleric from Asia Minor who became an early Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the Saxons and Angles into the English realm. Now, while religious belief can no longer be a test of national or ethnic belonging, a simple reacquaintance with the knowledge of Christianity, regardless of belief, could help everyone in England make sense of the different strands of their culture, institutions and character, and even act as part of the elusive national story which binds us together.
Bijan Omrani’s new book, ‘God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England’, is published by Forum Press
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