This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Circling around a Gloucestershire valley on a spring afternoon I recently came face to face with a tall stone pillar on the horizon. From across the ridge, it appeared at the highest point on the landscape, standing proud over the River Severn.
It was a monument dedicated to William Tyndale — the 16th century Protestant Reformer who first translated the Bible into English. Tyndale was, understandably, given a memorial of such proportions to mark the paramount contribution he made to his country: he brought scripture into the hands of the people, inspiring congregations and renewing the nation’s faith.
But what made Tyndale especially remarkable was his rendering of the Bible into a distinct, poetic vernacular. It is thanks to him that we have such idioms as “the apple of my eye” and “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, at once capturing the solemnity of scripture and the playfulness of the English idiolect in a style that would influence Shakespeare and George Herbert.
More than that, Tyndale’s retelling of biblical parables spoke directly to his native village of Stinchcombe, where his monument stands, dyed with references to the Cotswolds clothmaking industry and local folk customs. Tyndale at once evoked the particular spirit of rural England whilst weaving it into those teachings which were ancient and universal.
It is figures such as Tyndale that Bijan Omrani explores in his new book, figures who define the unique genius of English Christianity. Although that identity has almost completely faded from our cultural memory, God is an Englishman demonstrates how deeply Christianity has shaped our national life, from our literature, art and architecture through to our very sense of place and time.
This is not, of course, the first project of its kind; Omrani cites Tom Holland’s Dominion as a prime inspiration. But this book is original both in the depth and breadth of its survey across the land. From the Isle of Thanet, where Pope Gregory’s missionaries first arrived on these shores, and the monasteries on the River Tyne, to cathedral schools in Hereford and medieval mystics in East Anglia, almost every region is covered within 300 pages.
The result is a detailed, evocative picture of a nation defined by faith. Until very recently, Omrani argues, this ubiquity was taken for granted: it is only over the last two generations that we have reached such a stage of cultural amnesia that most schoolchildren cannot recognise the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark to be from the Bible.
The purpose of Omrani’s book is not so much to uncover anything new but rather, at a time when it is desperately needed, to reassert things which were once self-evident. Omrani offers an edifying account of how every single aspect of English national life owes itself, in full or in part, to Christianity.
One area into which he gives especially fascinating insight is law. Himself a barrister, Omrani traces the origins of English jurisprudence to the Catholic Canon Law tradition. The famous “you do not have to say anything”, he reveals, comes from the biblical injunction that convicts should confess their sins to God in silence before confessing to anyone else.
Likewise, the rule that judges cannot initiate prosecutions without an accuser, or go looking for evidence themselves, comes from the story in St John’s Gospel where Jesus disperses a group of men gathered to kill an adulterous woman on the basis of rumours. The very notion that individuals and businesses should pay compensation for personal injury and professional negligence derives from the parable of the Good Samaritan and the second commandment to love thy neighbour. “Whatsoever is not consonant to the law of God in Scripture,” once declared Lord Keble, “is not the laws of England.”
Education is another area in which we are deeply indebted to our Christian heritage. Before the arrival of monks, learning and culture in England had been almost completely neglected. Yet with the founding of the first monasteries came the creation of libraries which imported thousands of tomes on language, history and theology. It was from the extension of these monastic schools to the laity that England got grammar schools, and the tradition of teaching logic, mathematics and science.
As well as revealing the Christian origins of the modern education system, Omrani also dispels the myth that medieval religion was ever a hindrance to scientific discovery. Clergy were, in fact, at the forefront of technical innovation: whilst the Abbot of St Alban’s invented the first astronomical clock, the Bishop of Lincoln produced influential works on the nature of light and colour.
God is an Englishman ties together two narrative threads. The first is continuity: the idea that English Christianity, far from marking a radical break with the past, served to refine and perfect its indigenous culture. Parish churches, for example, were often built on the shrines of pre-Christian cults, providing continuity between the new faith and the pagan past.
Likewise, Christianity did not impose a wholly new political structure on England, but gave a moral foundation to its existing one: whereas before, kingship had been bestowed upon the most wealthy, Christianity transformed the monarch into a figure of wisdom and virtue who was accountable to divine power. As such, Omrani explains, the “hollow” model of Anglo-Saxon kingship became imbued with spiritual significance.
A new Christian leadership is needed, confident in its theology and moral authority
The second is the profound sense of unity and social cohesion which Christianity provided. There is perhaps no better example than the transformation of scattered pagan shrines into the unified ecclesiastical body that is the parish system. As early as the 8th century, St Bede had described the gens anglorum as a distinct people bound together by faith, against the common claim that national identity is an inherently modern construct.
The sense of local and national belonging brought by Christianity only increased over the centuries through the shared ritual of churchgoing and the development of an English liturgical tradition, which provided the collective means for the expression of joy and sorrow.
It was precisely this sense of unity and community solidarity, Omrani argues, which powered the welfare efforts of the 18th and 19th centuries. Without Christianity, charities devoted to the protection of orphans, the sick and the poor may never have come into existence.
A reminder of this history, he asserts, “demonstrates how, in the achievements wrought by England through Christian inspiration — the best of its culture, laws, the abolition of the slave trade, the countless acts of self-sacrifice and charity inspired by the Christian conviction of the dignity of every person — there may be cause for pride rather than unwitting shame in the idea of Englishness”. Christianity is not something to be censored out of our history, but celebrated.
Omrani’s message could not have come at a better time. Not only is the Church of England in desperate need of renewal if it is to survive — on average, 56 parish churches are closing each year — but, as we await the appointment of the next Archbishop of Canterbury, now is the critical moment to do so. The past 20 years of Anglican leadership have seen a denial of the Church’s own history and a reluctance to assert its moral teachings, save for when they can be appropriated to the secular orthodoxy.
The rich history that Omrani relates even goes untold in the Church’s own schools, with Christianity presented as just one belief system amongst many. Instead, the Church seems to promulgate only the worst of its past, committing £100 million to “reparative justice” for its highly tenuous links to the slave trade whilst forgetting its own major role in abolition.
Following Justin Welby’s resignation, the public legitimacy of the Church is in crisis. A new kind of Christian leadership is needed: one which no longer apologises for itself but is confident in its theology and moral authority. At this decisive moment, the story that God is an Englishman tells should renew our faith in English Christianity, reminding us of its paramount position in national life. It is a legacy we must protect and treasure — before it is too late.
