Three books of 2025 and renewing Anglican cultural presence
Fergus Butler-Gallie's Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity is an excellent reflection on place within Christianity. Church buildings, particular locations, national identity: the theological significance of each is considered. The book, then, provides a most welcome and necessary alternative to those voices who would suggest that none of these actually matter for Christian faith.
But the thing is that as soon as a person encounters God in a place, it becomes a somewhere. Christians call these 'somewheres' churches.
God in Christ, we might say, makes Anywhere to be Somewhere. To be more precise, God in Christ makes every Anywhere to be Somewhere. This, the book suggests, is the significance of the Incarnation occurring in the provincial backwater of Bethlehem:
Bethlehem, therefore, is a code. A deliberate cipher for a non-place. It could be Rotterdam or anywhere, Liverpool perhaps, but certainly not Rome ... This is at the heart of what Bethlehem has come to mean. The contrast of its smallness and troubled history with the hope and magnitude of the message imparted there has shaped Christianity in ways beyond all telling ... the power of Bethlehem is that it opens up the potential for any place, however unlikely, to become holy.
This also addresses the place of national identity. In its discussion of Bete Golgotha, Lalibela, Ethiopia, the book points to how the relationship between Christianity and country can be entirely normal, ordinary and, yes, good:
Christianity's relationship with nation in the lives of ordinary people across the world is merely another continuation of a natural meeting of two things which matter to most people in working out who they are - what they believe and where they live. We return once more to those ordinary people we encountered at the Bete Golgotha, people for whom it was a place of both national pride and religious devotion.
As Fergus has said elsewhere, "Re-expressing a coherent and convincing theology of place - local and national - is one of the most critical tasks for the Church at the moment". And that is why this wonderful book matters. It expresses why 'For the Parish' (both the idea and the campaign) matter: in "run-of-the-mill" parishes churches "what goes on there is anything but ordinary". It is such ordinary parish churches that best express "that strange and beautiful unity of the human and the Divine that is Christianity".
Closely related to this is Bijan Omrani's God Is An Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England. It is a book which provides the reasons for a generous Anglican confidence in Christianity's cultural presence, and the significance of that cultural presence for the Church's mission:
The treasure of England is a spiritual tradition, proclaimed in a matrix of culture, which, if offered with confidence and approaches with an open-minded patience, has the power to assuage and nourish those longings of the spirit so clearly present but which the demands of this age desire us to disregard.
This place of Christian faith in "a matrix of culture" should shape the mission of the Church of England, offering an attractive vision of human flourishing rooted in Christ:
An objective survey of English history cannot deny the fundamental role played by Christianity in the development of national institutions, culture and identity. Christianity conjured forth the very idea of nationhood, and shaped its notions of kingship, law and the rule of law, education, literature, language, art, music and time.
Instead of a proper confidence in this matrix and mission, however, contemporary Anglicanism recoils in liberal bourgeois disdain:
I recently asked an Anglican priest if they thought Christianity had anything to contribute to an understanding of English national identity. The reply was no more than pursed lips, a furrowed brow and embarrassed silence.
Such disdain for a cultural heritage shaped by and rooted in Christianity is matched by a disdain for "the traditional forms of the Church", particularly demonstrated in those theologies of the 1960s, which radically undermined the Church of England's mission and witness, after a post-1945 "considerable rally" in church attendance, alongside a welfare state understood as "a vision for a society based on Christian principles":
The conventional liturgy, language, music, rituals, structures of authority, and the old ideas of the parish and congregation were increasingly treated with suspicion and disdain. The subsequent attempts to make the customs of the Church contemporary and relevant may have been done with the theological intention of signalling that all of society was holy and to appeal to the widest possible spectrum of people, but the long-term result was to erode the distinctive identity and culture of the Church, and make it appear to be more secular. With the loss of such distinction, and the relentless questioning of the value of the Church's traditions, it became difficult for many to think there was any merit in membership of such an uncertain and seemingly evanescent institution.
Omrani convincingly sets out the alternative to such clerical cultured despisers of a Christian culture and national Church - a recovery of the gift of Christian culture, recognising it as the cultural embodiment of the gathering up of all things in Christ:
The means of integration, of the wholeness offered in the way of the Christian spiritual path, is presented to us not just in the raw and unmediated texts of scripture, but it is to be found given 'A local habitation and a name' in the generations and centuries of English culture and artistic creativity inspired by this message which, even though we are ever more estranged from it, lies close to hand and ready to inspire in its turn.
Mindful that, as Anglican churches across North Atlantic societies have abandoned their historic vocation as national churches, so they have increasingly lost their cultural presence and resonance, God Is An Englishman is a clarion call to Anglicans and Episcopalians to rediscover that historic vocation and what it is to represent and celebrate the Christian vision having 'A local habitation and a name'.
The Church of England features significantly in George Owers' The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain. The book's persuasive thesis, that "We still live, in some important respects, in the world shaped by the battle between Whigs and Tories" between the Exclusion crisis and the Accession of George I, raises important questions for the Church of England and Anglicanism in those societies shaped by the Whig v. Tory struggle of those years.
The book concludes with the question, "we are all still, in our hearts of hearts, either Whig of Tory. Which are you?" It would be very difficult indeed not to notice that the answer for the contemporary Church of England is, quite obviously, Whig. Aligned with progressive Whiggish opinion, the Church of England's disdain for cultural Toryism is constantly on display in episcopal statements. We must note, of course, that this "may not easily fit into modern party political distinctions": a Blue Labour supporter, or the average Red Wall voter, would be much more of a cultural Tory than, say, former Conservative Chancellor George Obsorne. The consequence of this is that the identity and concerns of cultural Tories - a considerable proportion of the country - are, at best, alien to the national Church.
How might The Rage of Party be understood as containing a lesson for contemporary Anglicanism? Perhaps, above all, by implying the need for a renewal of a popular Anglican Toryism, as seen in those "High Church lower clergy" who stood against "the Low Church, Whiggish bishops". "Deep Tory instincts" both identified with the Church of England and were supported by parish clergy. As Trollope would say over a century later, "No man was so surely a Tory as a country rector" - or, as George Owers puts it, "the black-coated clerical troops of High Toryism".
Amongst them, during these tumultuous decades, was Francis Atterbury, appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1713, who provided a robust ecclesiastical Tory response to the Low Church Whig views of Benjamin Hoadly, views which, Atterbury declared, "reduce everything to its first Chaos and Confusion". There was also Jonathan Swift, a highly effective Tory propagandist, whose The Conduct of the Allies (1711) was "furiously read - and variously lauded or cursed, according to whether it purchaser was a pacific Tory or a bellicose Whig".
The book ends with what appears to be complete Tory defeat with the Hanoverian accession. The facts of life, however, turned out to be Tory. Not only did the Whig ascendancy under Walpole deliver the "peace and lower taxes" which the Tories had sought, it also retained a "still fundamentally Anglican religious and political order", fearful that any attempt to reform this would light "the touchpaper of popular pro-Church sentiment". The roots of popular cultural Toryism ran deep. And they continue to do so, as seen when latter day Whigs remove the marks of the Christian identity of national and communal life, provoking outrage and hostility.
Herein lies the lesson of The Rage of Party for contemporary Anglicanism: rediscover Anglican Toryism and let it flourish in an ecclesiastical context, no less than does Anglican Whiggery. Both are needed if Anglican churches are to speak to societies and cultures shaped by the Tory v. Whig rivalry.
Perhaps the wisest thing Church of England bishops could do over the festive season, after preaching robust sermons on the truth of the Incarnation on Christmas Day, is to read these three books. Thankful for such Anglican scholarship and - crucially - the ability to give popular, attractive expression to historically significant Anglican themes, it just might lead to an understanding of why the predictably progressive public witness of Anglicanism is rather miserably failing to address a culture seeking greater depth, meaning, and roots. These three books, in their different but complementary ways, are signposts to a renewed Anglican cultural presence, found in a theology of place, in cultural embodiment, and in a politico-cultural tradition which historically had a significant voice in Anglicanism. It is both fitting and promising that three Anglican authors are pointing to a retrieval of these traditions.
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