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God Is an Englishman
by Bijan Omrani
Forum Books, 402 pages, £25.00
In the second chapter of God Is An Englishman, Bijan Omrani recounts a story that began in Paisley (a town just to the west of Glasgow) in August 1928, at the end of a warm day. A shop assistant named May Donoghue met a friend at a café and was served a “Scotsman’s ice-cream float”—a scoop of ice cream floating in a tumbler of ginger beer. This ought to have been refreshing, except that the ginger beer had come in a bottle that contained the remains of a dead snail. Donoghue ended up in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and the manufacturer of the ginger beer was sued for negligence. The suit made it all the way to the House of Lords.
On 26th May 1932, the Australian-born judge Lord Atkin of Aberdovey delivered his determination of the case in a speech that has become famous, at least among British lawyers:
The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbour?” receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be—persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.
With these words Lord Atkins established a general duty of care that has come to govern almost every relationship and interaction between Britons. His reasoning was founded, not on previous court cases, but on the New Testament, and specifically the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), which begins when a lawyer challenges Jesus to explain what he should do to inherit eternal life.
Lord Atkin lived in a world that now seems quaint, remote, and even foreign to us. In his eyes, Christian teachings were not merely an inspiration for the common law in England; they were the law’s very basis. Things have changed since his day. In 2011, the judges Sir James Munby and Sir Jack Beatson asserted, “The laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form. . . . The aphorism that ‘Christianity is part of the common law of England’ is mere rhetoric.”
In the opening pages of God Is An Englishman, Omrani paints a bleak picture of the Church of England as it currently exists. It seems undeniable that Christianity is fading in the British Isles. Yet Omrani’s book is not merely a defense of the church, or an elegy for what has been lost: It is an attempt to embody all that is finest, wisest, and most virtuous in English culture in a society where the very notion of national pride or love of one’s own heritage is seen as suspicious, déclassé, and/or somehow to be associated with Adolf Hitler. God Is An Englishman demonstrates how Christianity is at the very heart of what it means to be English.
Despite his name, Omrani has deep roots in English culture: one great-grandfather who was a Yorkshireman who carried a silver-headed cane when he went after church to court the woman who would become his wife. Omrani expertly weaves together evocative details like this to remind us of why the culture that was created by English Christianity continues to inspire deep respect and affection—unlike the ugly, vicious, self-hating, technocratic death-cult culture that has replaced it throughout much of the British Isles since the end of the Second World War. True Englishness, Omrani reminds us, is fundamentally Christian.
God Is An Englishman begins in AD 597, when Pope Saint Gregory the Great sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury to the realms of Aethelbert, King of Kent, to convert the English. Aethelbert was not a king in the sense in which we understand the term: He was a local strongman, whose rule relied on a combination of personal charisma and the capacity for violence. He was the first of the Anglo-Saxon warlords to become a Christian. The missionaries from Rome gave him more than a faith; they taught him about the kings in the Bible, and showed him how piety could win him glory in this life as well as the next one. Omrani demonstrates just how pivotal Aethelbert’s conversion was, not just for Church history, but the history of England itself.
In the first section of his book, Omrani shows how Christian worship and doctrine shaped law, education, art, architecture, music, literature, philanthropy, and everything that we celebrate as quintessentially English. His survey is impressionistic, yet admirably balanced. Although his sympathies seem to be resolutely High Church, he never hesitates to acknowledge Calvinist, Puritan, and Evangelical contributions to English national culture. Of course he is an aesthete, and prefers talking about poetry and hymns to the finer points of Christian doctrine and theology. Even so, he recognizes that the temperance movement, the abolition of slavery, and initiatives like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children are just as much a part of Anglican culture as Charles Wesley’s hymns or the spires of Gothic cathedrals.
Omrani’s deep affinity for the Middle Ages is palpable when he talks about the rediscovery in a local church of a fresco that was covered up by whitewash 500 years ago. Most of us have little taste for arguing about doctrine, and prefer to access the divine through the experience of beauty; Omrani must be correct that the destruction of ancient sacred art during the English Reformation was painful and traumatic even for many Christians who sympathized intellectually with the iconoclasts. Yet he maintains a truly Protestant devotion to Holy Scripture, and a keen appreciation for what successive Bible translations did, not only for English literature, but the nation’s now-threatened traditions of free speech.
Omrani writes with special feeling about the English mystical tradition that all but vanished from Anglican spirituality over the course of the 20th century. He seems to feel a kinship with the 17th-century divine George Herbert, who turned his back on a promising worldly career to spend his life as a parish priest in an obscure (though picturesque) little village. Of course we remember Herbert as the author of the greatest Christian lyric poems in English literature. His simplicity and modesty are the secret to his grandeur: He devoted all his talent and energy to glorifying God.
In the second part of God Is An Englishman, Omrani describes the decline of the Church of England since the 1960s, and suggests possibilities for Anglican renewal. Can Christianity really be revived in the British Isles, or is it doomed to go the way of the mainline Protestant denominations in America and the Catholic Church in Ireland, Belgium, and Quebec? Omrani’s diagnosis of the problem certainly seems unobjectionable in the eyes of those who don’t believe in God: After the Second World War, a series of radical social changes on an unprecedented scale erupted all at once. The Church of England found itself without power, influence, or authority, whilst its leaders proved wholly ineffective at responding to the new world in which they found themselves.
Omrani’s depiction of the Church of England’s decline may be fruitfully compared to the work of the late Gary North, a staunch Calvinist whose views may be described as almost picturesquely reactionary. (He believed that adulterers ought to be publicly stoned to death.) His 1,000-page history Crossed Fingers: How The Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics 1996) hammers home its fundamental thesis with admirable consistency: the Presbyterian Church committed institutional suicide through compromising on basic doctrinal issues. Perhaps there are parallels here with what has happened to the Anglicans.
Might God Is An Englishman be too polite to propose an effective solution for the Church of England’s loss of stature? After all, Omrani declines to mention how the institutional church might have been weakened by Resolution 15 of the Church’s Seventh Lambeth Conference in 1930, which offered qualified public support for artificial contraception, or by the 1992 vote in the General Synod of the Church that enabled the ordination of women. But to bring up contentious issues like this would be ungentlemanly. Omrani has the good manners—and diplomatic cunning—to sidestep such controversies.
Instead of calling openly for prayer and a renewed sense of Christian mission, Omrani gently points out the most attractive byways of the Anglican tradition, inviting readers to investigate them further. He seems quietly confident that those who follow his lead will go down the path he did until their hearts are fully converted. As a tactic for evangelizing the intellectually curious and aesthetically sensitive, this is so exquisitely Jesuitical as to seem positively un-English. Yet it just might work. Anglicans should pray that it does. So should the rest of us.