8. Before Secularization
8. Before Secularization
In the days before secularization set in—that is, roughly, the early years of this century (later than in France, earlier than in India or Italy)—it used to be affirmed without hesitation that Britain was a Christian country. Certain features of British society could be adduced in support of this claim, features bound up in each case with the Protestant Christianity professed and taught by the two national churches, the Church of England (including at that time Wales), and the Church of Scotland. The main features of this kind were as follows.
1. A Sense of National Identity and Destiny Under God.
England had acquired a sense of national religious identity long before the Reformation, through united resistance to the financial and jurisdictionary claims of the Papacy.
During the hundred years which began with the martyring of Protestants under Mary and closed with the setting up of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, there came to be superimposed on the sense of being all together against the Pope a further positive feeling that the Protestant English were a people chosen, like Israel, to enjoy and spread a unique blessedness.4 England was called to be a model of godliness and a means of good to all nations. This conviction took permanent hold of English minds and found expression two centuries later in the imperial era under Victoria, when it was firmly believed that only cultural and spiritual good could come to any community through being annexed as a British dominion, so that imperial expansion was in truth Britain's service to the world. Similarly, both world wars were widely felt in Britain to be crusades for God against evil. When the jibe is heard, as it still sometimes is, that to the English God is an Englishman, this is part at least of what lies behind it.
2. A Sense of Unity Between Nation and Church.
In both England and Scotland the national church was felt to be the nation itself at prayer. This was what the church's established status primarily signified. In England particularly, a certain love-hate relationship between people and church was noticeable at various times after the Restoration. The clergy were often despised for timeserving and money-grabbing, and for inertia, incompetence, and insensitiveness to need; yet the Church of England as such, and the Prayer Book in particular, were held in deep and respectful affection. Both sides of the border people seem to have felt very widely that because they belonged to the nation the well-being of the national church was their concern, even if they rarely or never attended it and had indeed nonconformist attachments. Thus, it was not widely thought incongruous before the twentieth century for Parliament to settle Church affairs, nor did most men take offense at the part played by non-Anglicans in the Parliamentary debates on the revised Prayer Book of 1927-28. The national churches were felt to focus the nation's religious identity in a way that went deeper than any divisions between those churches and their dissenting daughters.
3. Respect for the Conscience and Rights of Individuals.
This principle, enshrined in the English common law which grew up in and after feudal times to guard the rights of those who were not lords or landowners against the claims of those who were, was always felt to have Christian sanction; and similar sanctions prompted and undergirded the establishing of toleration, representative government and constitutional monarchy, and the outlawing of arbitrary courts like Star Chamber, in the seventeenth century. The ultimate reason (so it was maintained) why the law must respect individual rights, liberties and conscientious convictions was that all men were made in the image of God, to live to God and one day to answer to God, and they must not be treated as if their dignity and destiny was less than this. As in Old Testament Israel, so in England, the maintaining of a judicial code which both in legislation and in procedure honored God by honoring his image in man was accepted as a national religious duty.
4. The Christian Basis of the State.
"State" means the sum total of legislative, judicial and executive functions whereby a politically autonomous community orders its life. Before the Reformation it was taken for granted that the rulers of those nations that were part of Christendom would govern in a way consonant with Christian faith and moral ideals, and this was maintained in England after the Reformation without a break, even if the principle was sometimes more honored in the breach than in the observance. The Reformation insistence that magistrates held their power directly from God deepened the sense that government was a stewardship and a form of service to God and man. The Reformers also held explicitly that part of the state's task was to recognize and confirm the distinct authority of the Church in its own sphere, just as the Church must do with the authority of the state, and this concept of partnership whereby Church and state back each other up was maintained by most up until this century.
6. Recognition That Public Decency Is a Divine Requirement.
This is a safeguard for purity of heart and a sign of respect for God's image in each other. License of all sorts has of course existed in every age, but public opinion has in the past been strong against it, so that for the most part it has had to keep under cover. There has never yet been a phrase in ordinary English use corresponding to la dolce vita.
Such were the main features of “Christian" Britain. If they sound rather old-fashioned when set out like this, that itself is an indication that in recent years British society has changed. We now proceed to consider, first, what caused this change and, second, what it has involved.