Now that everyone from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Russell Brand and Richard Dawkins is talking about the goods that past generations of Christians, moved by faith, have bequeathed to our civilisation, a book about what Christianity has given to English culture comes at a favourable time. Bijan Omrani’s learned and lucid God is an Englishman tells of the sometimes obvious, sometimes concealed, often forgotten Christian roots of everything from the fundamental principles of English criminal law to the poetry of John Donne, to English education, music and painting.
Omrani trained as a lawyer before becoming a writer and schoolmaster, and his second chapter, on law, gives us many facts that will be new to most readers. How many of us realised, for example, that the right not to incriminate oneself was imported into English secular law from canon law, where it had grown up from St John Chrysostom’s reading of a verse in Hebrews? Omrani reminds us that our sense of English identity, our high ideals of kingship, and even our respect for legislation were kindled by the Church.
Further chapters cover a range of ground with sensitivity: education and natural science, fine art, the English attitude to the landscape, spiritual writing, Bible translations and the development of the English language, music, poetry, nineteenth-century social reforms, and the role of parsons in social work, science and literature. All of this schoolmaster’s chapters bubble with his engaging love of the English canon – something all too rare in even the greatest schools today. Finally, in a shorter second section, Omrani considers what Christianity can still offer to English culture.
Omrani is an Anglican, and one strength of his work is that he does justice to Catholics and Protestants alike, being equally keen to tell us of the beauty of pre-Reformation church murals and the Evangelical-led campaign to abolish slavery, the education provided at monasteries and the moral seriousness of Victorians. He always seems to see the cynic over his shoulder, and is eager to defend all forms of Trinitarian Christian culture – for example, in his discussion of the education provided to children by parish priests in one medieval French diocese, he is quick to note that they were forbidden to demand fees for it.
Yet is it the cynic and the sceptic to whom the book is addressed? One feels that Omrani’s account of the biblical roots of the right to remain silent and of suppliers’ duty of care to their customers might soften them, but will a loving description of George Herbert’s contribution to English literary culture really convince them to book their tickets for the Great Return? Is that even what Omrani is trying to make them do? In his chapter on law he comes close to saying that an Englishman’s basic legal rights cannot survive a national repaganisation, but isn’t quite willing to come out with it: alarming contemporary proposals for jury-free trials and the steady erosion of ancient legal rights find no place in his book.
Nor, indeed, does Omrani mention the corruption of various formerly very Christian fields of practice, from natural science to medicine to civil administration. The short second part, on what Christianity can still offer us, also suffers from the same reticence: despite some incisive remarks on the emptiness of secular “British values” and human-rights discourse, Omrani is unwilling openly to talk about the need for evangelisation. Instead, he mostly reduces his discussion to one about what the Church of England can still offer, and falls back on very Anglican generalities about providing sources of meaning and tolerance and spaces for contemplation.
This all-too-Anglican lack of urgency is the one vice of Omrani’s otherwise informative and inspiring work. A particular source of frustration is that though he mentions the sexual revolution as one cause for the decline in churchgoing, he does not say that the churches that clearly reject it are the ones winning back the youth. One feels that Omrani still has the embers of Forever England gleaming in his eye, that place of Anthony Blanche’s “creamy English charm”, and of a Church that inherited some doctrinal certainties from before the Reformation, but which preferred to offer a cultured unzealous muddle on every question that arose thereafter, be it the nature of the Eucharist or the nature of marriage. In an age when parts of the Church of England now abet gross moral error and national self-implosion, this simply won’t do. Culture cannot save England without Truth.
Even so, Omrani’s book is important now, and of high quality. His sensitive and well-informed (if perhaps not ground-breaking) expositions form a work that is valuable above all as a perceptive introduction to traditional English culture. It deserves a wide readership among Christians and sceptics alike.