The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
Why don't the English take themselves seriously?
What is England's founding myth? Does anyone get excited about 1066? Which English nationalism on the march, people are getting nervous. Why do the English get queasy about flying the flag. And why do we keep making a joke of it? James Cary, Stand-Up Theologian, talks to Rhys Laverty about all of the above, and the even more awkward idea about being a Christian country. Can open. Worms everywhere! Enjoy! And comment. Why not join the podcast's new and experimental Facebook Group?
Clips from the show: Fry and Laurie & That Australian stand up: James Donald Forbes McCann
Rhys Laverty writes about God is an Englishman for First Things.
Rhys on how the English don’t take themselves seriously (because of the English Civil War) at The New Albion blog.
Interested in Englishness? Follow Cary’s Almanac:
Music
SPEAKER_06:Welcome back to the Stand Up Theologian podcast with me, James Carey. I am the Stand Up Theologian. Today we're wondering what is England's founding myth? The blood, the noise, the endless poetry. Whether we are in fact a Christian country.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the Pope may be French, but Jesus is English. You're on.
SPEAKER_06:And why we find patriotism quite so funny. Is that healthy?
SPEAKER_05:You have to enjoy good old English
SPEAKER_06:strawberries
SPEAKER_05:and cream. Oh, English, yes, yes. Watch out for those German strawberries. Yes, not the same. No, not the same thing at all. No, English strawberries and cream.
SPEAKER_06:Because not every nation feels quite the same way about their own country.
SPEAKER_04:You go to the Rose Bowl and there's a fighter jet going overhead and people go, this is America! America! It's like, yes! No one else is getting the military involved in collegiate sport.
SPEAKER_06:Somehow at the start, though, we talk about only fools and horses. This
SPEAKER_02:time
SPEAKER_06:next
SPEAKER_02:year,
SPEAKER_06:we'll be millionaires. Strap in. Here we go.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
SPEAKER_06:My guest is Rhys Laverty, writer, blogger at The New Albion, editor, and I'm just going to say it, policy wonk. He's also, I've podcast with him before, he just seems to have read every book that I feel like I should have read. Rhys has actually read it. Anyway, welcome to the podcast, Rhys. If you
SPEAKER_03:feel that way about me, the list of people I feel that way about is as long as my arm. So, you know, between us, we've basically read no books. That's right.
SPEAKER_06:And we all get that feeling when you listen to recordings of Christopher Hitchens talking, you think, Oh my goodness, that guy read every single book he could get his hands on from the age of about seven and it really showed. But anyway, today we're thinking about Christianity and the foundation of England, 597 and all that, at a time when the nation of England has having, let's say, an identity crisis because of perhaps a lack of a unifying narrative. But we're going to start with the comedy angle since this is the Stand Up Theologian podcast and situation comedy and sketch comedy. I think has often had a unifying effect on this nation. I think comedy has a weirdly prominent place in the life of the English and the British, particularly since the war. TV and radio, The Goons, It's That Man Again, I think was a wartime show, Hancock's Half Hour, and then of course TV culminating in Morecambe and Wise, Christmas Special, famously watched by almost 30 million people in a time when the UK population was under 60 million. There were three or four TV channels. You had a counterculture and alternative comedy and stuff, but you also had sitcoms like Only Fools and Horses, To the Man of Bourne. Did you know this, Rhys, that the viewing figures of the To the Manor Born special, where they got married, had almost as many viewers as the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana at the time. So anyway, those names may mean nothing to you because you're a little younger than me, but Rhys, you're just about old enough to remember a time when there was a bit of a monoculture. What were you watching as a kid that made you think, oh, everybody's watching this? A fun fact,
SPEAKER_03:at the age of, I think, nine, maybe ten, I did a presentation at school about Only Fools and Horses. Did you? Yeah. Because at a certain point, I need to brush up on it, but at a certain point, that would have been my mastermind topic.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And I've got various bits of autographs to Fools and Horses. So certainly watching that.
SPEAKER_06:It's a really interesting show. I mean, there are two things there. One is, it's funny how you look back and realise, oh, I was really interested in that. And now I sort of know why. I was really interested in an English Civil War story, which I plan to write a book about next year. And only now does it make sense why I was interested. But Fools and Horses, the other thing is how it tracks kind of the British psyche, particularly the rise of Thatcherism and how he wants to become a yuppie and that kind of thing. It is very much a portrait of a nation, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it is now. The first episode came out in 1981 and it is now this bizarre Thatcherite cave study.
SPEAKER_02:That is where our future lies, Rodney. Secondaire motors. This time next year, we'll be millionaires.
SPEAKER_03:You think about what is Peckham like now. If you go and see the Edinburgh's Musical, there's a kind of staged bit in that where Trigger has inherited his grandma's crystal ball and looks into the future, and then you hear these people from Peckham in 2024, 2025, telling you what it's like now, then it's basically like drill wrap and artisanal bakeries. Because, obviously, you know, all the kind of white East End Cockneys have been exiled to Essex and whatnot. And actually, yeah, while you enjoy it in reasons you only appreciate later, I am the middle-class child of a working-class family and, you know, working-class kind of white English people adopt Fools and Horses as a, you know, sort of cultural text of theirs. And it's this weird feedback loop where loads of Del Boy's kind of phrases are actually things David Jason made up to sound like Cockney rhyming slang and whatnot, but then that actually became copy of Army Slang. And so I think I sensed it was a sort of my people kind of thing. And actually, oddly, whenever I've moved hats, as I then unpack my stuff, I've put Fools and Horses on as a kind of homely sort of, you know, homing beach and comfort blanket thing. So certainly Fools and Horses, and then all, you know, I didn't matter boarders in Lacuna, actually, in my classic sitcom education, but all that kind of stuff, Walter Towers, Dad's Army 2 on his porridge. I guess every nation has comedy in the same way that every nation is like, oh, for us, food is a big thing. Well, literally every culture can say that. Maybe we have a particular kind of style or place for it in the UK. But it speaks to something that people sometimes call the bus stop test, where a kind of measure of like cultural cohesion is, could you share a joke with everyone at the bus stop?
SPEAKER_06:Okay. Yeah, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_03:Because comedy is such a kind of constellation of unspoken things, mutual understanding. I was trying to get this, my six-year-old, you know, which is at the age where she thinks she's telling a joke, but it's not a joke. It's just like a statement. But you can sort of understand a joke when you explain it. It's like double meanings. What kind of stories do snakes like? Long tails. Why is that funny? Because tails means tails and tails means tails. She cracked up because we drove into the little car park the other day and it said, just a little further. She found that very funny. Oh, good. Yeah. So, you know, comedy and successful mass media comedy kind of arises at a certain time when you have mass media capable of reaching large numbers of people, like say 30 million people for the Walkman Wives Christmas special, but enough kind of cultural cohesion for everyone to get it and everyone to buy into it. And you could see comparable stuff in the States, like Cheers and stuff, you know, it'd be that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, one sitcom that really stood out from my teens, which I think pertains to our story of the day, because I'm very interested in what our national myth currently is and maybe what it should be. And when I was about 14, that was the Blackadder Goes Forth year. We were learning about war poetry and they still learn about war poetry at school. It doesn't mean that I'm not sick of this damn war.
SPEAKER_05:The blood, the noise, the endless poetry. Is that really what you think, Flashard? Of course it's not what I think. Now get out that door before I to redecorate that wall in an interesting new colour called Hint of Brain. Excellent. Well, that's clear. Let's get back to that lovely war then. What? What? What?
SPEAKER_06:Black Alley Goes Forth comes out and I remember watching it. I remember watching that last episode which is a real icon of modern comedy and culture where they go over the top and it kind of reinforces any suspicions we might have had that World War I was a pointless, senseless, absurd war that we essentially lost.
SPEAKER_05:A war that would be a dump site simpler if we just stayed in England and shot 50,000 of our men a week?
SPEAKER_06:No. It was sort of a politically unavoidable war that came at an unfortunate time, technologically speaking, that we won. In fact, there was a book called The Forgotten Victory about World War I, which is, here's how we won. Remember, we won. Here's how we won World War I, by learning fast and having a rolling barrage. And in the end, it was a clash. who never stood a chance, but it was a defensive war. You can get into all the technicals of it. It kind of felt like there was a bit of a cultural moment where we in the 90s, I guess, more about 1990, were acknowledging that we were not the power that we once were, even though the people in 1918 did not see the war as we see it now. But that fascination with World War I, I think, has been replaced now with World War II, which is now also nearly out of living memory and can now be reinterpreted in any way that you like. So you can adapt that story. And so that's why I think our modern version of that is Dunkirk, which is this dominant founding myth of a nation of modern Britain, which is decline. We got out of it. Or it could be the Battle of Britain. If you're being a bit more front foot, you could say D-Day. And I WhatsAppped you this yesterday and said, To me, Dunkirk seems to be where we are as a nation. And you said, oh, I'm not sure about that. So tell me your reaction to that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, between Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, in D-Day, I think there's too many Americans involved in D-Day. Okay, it's compromised. We've all seen the same private rides many times to kind of feel a deep sense of British ownership. And the beaches were called the Overheart and things like that. But out of D-Day, out of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk, I'd have chosen the Battle of Britain because I think it's Churchill. It's the small nation against the world. It's us holding out before the Americans come in, the finest hour. There's a sense in which World War II as a whole, it replaces the empire in our sort of national self-understanding rather than having this great empire that spans the globe, even though people still debate on how much the average British citizen really thought about and felt about the empire when we still have one. It's replaced by World War II as this finest hour. Yeah, that becomes the myth. And, you know, a point about, okay, around the early, the 90s, as sort of a blackout, as fourth comes out, we're reckoning with our decline. I mean, it's a sort of cycle of, you know, a decade on, decade off, reckoning with that decline throughout the post-war period. Like Dominic Sandbrook's, you know, kind of latter half of the 20th century history books are very good on this, you know, is one about the first half of the Thatcher administration, who dares wins, which is the SAS slogan, which he opens with the Iranian siege of the embassy where the SAS went in and, you know, absolutely dominated and everything. I mean, brilliant. And it was a sort of reviving moment for, you know, declining this Britain. And it's just been this, yeah, the Falklands. Yeah. Again, the SAS raid at the Falklands really saved Thatcher from what was after you know, a fairly shaky first step. But we just have this cycle. Britain's done for 10 years. Oh, the 70s are terrible. Oh, but then the 80s come around. Oh, there's a crash of the 90s. And, you know, so this cycle repeats itself. And so, yeah, if we did have a modern kind of founding myth, I would think it's probably... The Battle of Britain, I would think, is just the most emblematic of World War II in general, maybe. But I think that's being replaced in some ways, you know, as a sort of forcible attempt to replace it with kind of making the Windrush... the new founding myth, which is 1948, the Windrush comes in and we're kind of, the narrative around it is that it's, we called and they came and the kind of post-imperial dynamic becomes, oh, we need the citizens of the empire to come and help us rebuild. But, you know, we'll get into, I guess, you know, fact and myth and legend as we go on, but that's
SPEAKER_06:just a very, it's a very spurious story because... These are very small numbers, aren't they, though? That's the thing, isn't it? Compared to what we're currently experiencing, these are really, this is thousands, not even tens of thousands, really, or it's sort of tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands. And it's for a very specific period of time, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, there's like 400 people who weren't invited over on visas or anything, but were able to, you know, people, former kind of subjects of the empire were able to claim citizenship via a nationality act that was passed after the war, but was never intestipated, you know, kind of that it would lead to mass mass migration from the former colonies. But when Russia came over, they were warned and there were a lot of PR campaigns to this effect in the Caribbean to say, actually, there's not enough work in Britain. There's a labor surplus and people were leaving the country to go and find work elsewhere. And we're told it's this sort of...
SPEAKER_06:They really were. I remember I spoke to my dad and I was really surprised to learn that, you know, you have these conversations with your parents. When you reach a different age, you then ask them different questions. And actually, I think my dad revealed that he looked at moving to Canada so he was born in 44 so in the in the about early 1960s there was a real desperation for people to move to Canada it was a great place to farm because my dad was a dairy farmer and came from a farming family and so the idea an awful lot of people did they moved to Canada they moved to Australia they moved to New Zealand the other thing that's significant here is the fact that the people who came from the Caribbean were Christians there wasn't really the huge cultural difference that there might have been had they been from a completely different country outside of the colonial Commonwealth, however you want to say. This is the Christian West. Their skin colour was obviously very different and there were cultural differences, but there was Christianity and cricket, if I might add, which is no small thing. The role of cricket in kind of combining an awful lot of English-speaking people together is not small. But there was already some kind of shared philosophy, if not religion, that I think is probably overlooked, isn't it? Because we look at the difference because it's physical and we can document the obvious racism of people who found it very uncomfortable. But we miss that Christian piece, I think, don't we?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, certainly, yeah. The mores and the assumptions and the general kind of social code of conduct that would have come with that and made those what at the time compared to now were very low levels of immigration, though still high enough to get a lot of people very, very riled at the time. Parliament didn't want the Windrush to land here. It was trying to find ways of diverting it to land in East Africa or somewhere. But yeah, a totally different ballgame to what we have had now, especially in just the last several years with immigration taking off quite as spectacularly as it has you know the boris johnson and what we now call the boris wave of um yeah hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people from you know nations very culturally uh distant from
SPEAKER_06:yeah
SPEAKER_03:from from us um and it's entirely possible that we could have you know in the same way that the wind rush has been totally reinvented and the circumstances surrounding it totally um kind of fabricated now the stories often told we could see the same thing in about 50 years of all the sort of post kind of boris wave uh yeah oh you during covid you called and we came because you know you're Your economy was in the toilet and we came and rebuilt the
SPEAKER_06:country. Yeah. But all of these stories, I guess, because people would argue if you want to retell the Windrush story to suit your own narrative, you can legitimately claim, I'm only doing what the English have done for centuries, which is retell the King Arthur story, the Robin Hood story, neither of whom sort of we have any hard evidence for them living a life that can be documented. Not that that makes sense. makes it intrinsically more helpful as a story or whatever. But there's Magna Carta, obviously, is a document, but you've got Henry V, Drake and the Spanish Armada. You've got Nelson and Trafalgar. You've got King Alfred and the Cakes and all those sorts of things. All of these are ripe to be retold in a way that suits the narrative. I think particularly the Robin Hood one feels like that's quite an enduring one, particularly because it feels very anti-authoritarian and very English in the sense of this is a people who don't, and this is a thing that's often forgotten. Somebody said the other day, I said, why do they not, why do people want to cross the channel? Because France is a brilliant country. France is a really great country. There's so much to like about France. It's like, oh, because you don't need an identity card in England. You don't need papers. And we think, oh, you know, we think, oh, it's because they speak English or they've got family here, which is probably also true. But the lack of of paperwork which we take for granted and I will oppose identity cards to my last dying breath no doubt about that I'm not having it but and it's sort of creeping in in every single thing digitally I think it's almost unavoidable but I think I'm gonna maybe have to go down with that ship but the story of like Alfred and the cakes Alfred the great king who unites England Wessex whatever against the Vikings is told off for burning We love those stories, don't we? We love this sense of, I mean, that does seem to be at the heart of a certain amount of Englishness, doesn't it? In terms of our national culture, but we retell all of those stories to essentially be, this is Englishness. And we kind of, to what extent are we superimposing that on the historical reality, should such a reality even exist?
SPEAKER_03:The biggest rupture in English national life is still probably the we're going to all conquest isn't it
SPEAKER_06:you
SPEAKER_03:know where we were but fully conquered
SPEAKER_06:yeah
SPEAKER_03:and that was a kind of hugely traumatic process for the english people levels of change you kind of can't imagine land redistribution um totally new elite imported normans tried to be a bit more conciliatory early on but that just kind of threw that policy out yeah and just changed things whole hog and much of the ruling class had been killed at the back of the paintings anyway how did we come to kind of incorporate the Norman conquest into our sense of Englishness. Well, there's a sense of which, you know, within actually a few hundred years, the English had kind of recolonized Norman elite anyway.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Because they became more culturally English. English became far more spoken. Again, the kind of tensions with the Norman, the kings in France meant they had to kind of divest themselves of their claims to the Northern lands. This is the hundred years war. This is, you know, it takes us up to the Tudors. But it was kind of from below the English sort of incorporated that in as a people. But even to this day, castles, yes, but no one thrills at the idea of the Normans, I don't think. No, it's interesting, isn't it? And when you look at the Battle of Hastings, this is like both sides of my heritage at war with each other. Although, people still say, are all the kind of posh families in England descended from the Normans? Are all the plants just descended from you know, all the sort of Anglo-Saxons. Oddly, no one thrills, I think, on either side, actually, in that battle. Like maybe, you know, more trad people will be like, yeah, come on, Harold, you shouldn't have, you know, fallen for Norman fate. Even
SPEAKER_06:though he was half Viking, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. Related to Canute, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, we've got this, we assume that the Saxons fighting the Normans were essentially successors to Alfred the Great. And actually, this huge mix, and the more, because I've been reading a lot of Anglo-Saxon history, partly to get the church stuff into my head. And no matter how many books I read, how many podcasts I listen to, I am simply unable to retain all of the information about Anglo-Saxon kings and this continual war between kingdoms and tribes and King Inna and the King of Mercia and then the King of this and there were, it's just, it sways around. And I think what 1066 gives us us, which we... It's weird how the Battle of Hastings is not on my list of national story myths, is it? It's Robin Hood, Magna Carta, Henry V, Agincourt, whatever. 1066 and all that is a key date, but we don't quite know why or how, but what it... Well, it's year zero, isn't it? It's year zero, because I think what it then does do is England is now England and will basically be that for a thousand years. And so this idea where people say... is, well, we're a nation of immigrants. It's like, yes, a thousand years ago, but actually the population of England and its ethnicity has been pretty static for a thousand years, which is extremely unusual, globally speaking. And this thing has emerged, which is Englishness. Probably people listening to this already feel uncomfortable discussing because it feels like the English, the English, the English are best. We have written a national song
SPEAKER_05:for England, a sort of English backlash song, you know. Go home, Scott sort of song. Down with Welsh power. We don't have black power, we have white power, but that's a detergent. We hope that all true-born English men and women in our audience will join in the chorus, and if you don't have the good fortune to be true-born, or English, or a man, or a woman, then I hope you will join in as a mark of ordinary, decent respect. Always remember, if it hadn't been for the English, you'd all be Spanish. I calculated to offend practically everybody this song. The English, the
SPEAKER_06:English, the English are best. I wouldn't give tuppence for all the rest. So this idea we're a nation of immigrants, it is true, but 1066 kind of ended that. And though we had this Norman elite, the Saxon population kind of remained and grew, but there was no other great ethnic invasion to speak of, is there?
SPEAKER_03:No, I mean, yeah, so again, nation of immigrants, rather depends what you mean by that, you know, we have the native Britons, the Romans leave and the Roman Empire falls and then gradually by a mixture of both just direct invasion and kind of being invited in to help the Romano-Britons, you know, protect themselves with mercenary stuff, we become kind of hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and and Brits. And then no sooner is England a kind of coherent entity, King Alfred in the 800s is the kind of starting point for that, his grandson Athelstan in the 900s is first real king of English. It will be, I think, 1100 years this September since his coronation. But no sooner is that basically set out than we colonize the Normans. And so none of that is what any of us today would regard as like migration, not really. Some of the English actors coming in and then the Vikings, some of them are kind of, you know, it's a conquest as are the Normans. A hostile takeover. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, after that, it's very, very peaceful. And so, you know, are we going to do the same thing with our sort of current levels of transition happening with mass migration as we have done in the past? I just, I think maybe it's important to acknowledge that the kind of change we're living through as a country now is actually just not a kind of change we've ever lived through before. So incorporating irresistible changes at the level of the elite, which is what happens in the Norm Conquest, is what happens with the Tudors, is what happens, you know, who are sort of Welsh, with a slightly spurious claim to the throne. But the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which is, you know, which will say a real assertion of the people's parliamentary sovereignty, which brings in a legitimate... person to the throne, deposing a monarch who it was right to be deposed. But you know, there's also a kind of highfalutin stuff on there. The level of churn among the plebs, as you and I, which I'm now living through, is actually pretty unprecedented in the argument since the time that the Anglo-Saxons first came over. Even that was then a very different story. So can we incorporate all of this into our national myth? Well, it's a very top-down attempt to do so. We're going to find out. It has been since the New Labour days and the Windrush scandal, which was the first time I'd ever heard of the Windrush in my entire life in 2018, a supposedly momentous occasion. Are we going to incorporate that into our national myth? I don't know. I don't know if we've been through quite such a comparable situation.
SPEAKER_06:And again, there's the difference now. The Windrush was Christian. Again, mass levels of migration today are not Christian. Going back to 1066, the Normans were Roman Christians, as were, broadly speaking, the Anglo-Saxons. I believe the Bishop of London in 1066 was already Norman. And so there was already a huge amount of crossover because the church was already pretty powerful. And you have an already international network of Benedictine monasteries that reported directly to the And so you already have essentially an agreed moral framework and divine agreement on the identity of God and how it looks. And there were still fringes of Celtic Christianity, which didn't quite fit. But overall, I would say the fact that the church was already an international organisation really mitigated an awful lot of the potential change that there would be. Whereas, of course, now there is no consensus on that, even within the indigenous population who used to be Christians. So I was just thinking back to 1066 and all that. One of the things that's funny, so-called, is the implicit mockery of something being a good thing. So this was a good thing and this was a bad thing. This was a good king. This was a bad king. And the idea that you could apply any kind of moral preference to history was seen as rather comic, preachy, inherently ridiculous. And again, it's one of those things whereby if you just laugh and laugh and laugh at something for decades, please don't be surprised when it isn't taken seriously. And so I think there's that kind of decadence that we can have a good old laugh at our Christian heritage and our moralism. And I think 1066 and all that feels like it's having a go at Victorian moralism in particular, which in a way is already kind of hollowed out of true, what I would say, true reformed Christianity. And so they're sort of having a go at the R.J. Unstead, this sceptered isle view of history, of good kings and bad kings. Our island story. Our island story. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Which is actually cracking history. And we used it in our home education of our kids. Yeah, likewise. Because it does get you through the main events that do define us as a nation. And so it just feels to me like patriotism is inherently ridiculous and funny. Yeah. Although we always try to have our cake and eat it because I was thinking that the wildly successful Rest Is History podcast does a very good job of being patriotic with a tongue in its cheek, but also slightly meaning it and giving you permission to be patriotic, but not take yourself too seriously. I don't know. It feels like we're constantly stuck trying to be patriotic, but also having to slightly laugh at it. And I think if you just keep doing that, I think, again, has that contributed to our current crisis, do you think?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, because, as you say, if something is continually an object of satire, and that kind of moves beyond a playful, loving luxury, and actually just replaces the thing it's mocking wholesale, then you have a problem. You mentioned the counterculture of the 80s. In comedy, let's say, you've got the young ones, and, Richard! Which is a very old reference, if no one's ever watched the young ones, probably. The very... that it would take too long to explain. It's kind of proving my point that it's parasitic upon a certain culture. And often, to be honest, actually, Friar Norrie is probably a better example of this, of two kind of, are they Oxford or Cambridge? Oxford. So they're Cambridge. They're both Cambridge. Cambridge Book Lights, you know, these sort of posh shows, they have this sketch that I do still find funny, the creamy old English sketch where they're these two cricket commentators listing very
SPEAKER_05:English things. Oh! Oh, I say, look, there's a bus. Oh, yes, look, there's a beautiful old English... What is that? Is that number 29? It's a 29 bus, yes. Beautiful English 29 bus. Yes, what a marvellous scene. Grass, sun, bus, marvellous. Yes. Yes, that bus is making its way now along the Garboldisham Road. Garboldisham, beautiful village name. Oh, an absolutely delightful village, yes. Garboldisham, what a lovely name. Oh, lovely name. Lovely English name, yes. Hello, hello, there's some people getting off the bus. Oh. Oh, look out! You'll have to enjoy good old English strawberries and cream. Oh, English, yes, yes. Watch out for those German strawberries. Yes, not the same. No, not the same thing at all. No, English strawberries and cream. 29 bus going down the Garboldisham Road. What? Cream. Garboldisham. Crowds. The South Downs. Ovaltine. Cream. Heaps of cream. Cream and lawnmowers. Oh, summer holidays in creamy Cromer. Volting over a stile in a country lane. Catching sticklebacks
SPEAKER_03:in an old tin can.
SPEAKER_05:With
SPEAKER_03:an affection, but then if you do that ad infinitum, you end up with a sort of liberal elite, you know, torpedoing a culture 40 years later and no one really cares about anything. I think it comes from a... My working theory is it's a deeply English inability to take things seriously or sort of refusal to take things seriously that is a kind of hangover of the English Civil War.
SPEAKER_06:Oh, okay. Now you're talking my language. Go on. intense religious convictions
SPEAKER_03:over, yes, a number of very legitimate, serious things. And I think, ultimately, I'm not a roundhead, but I ultimately agree with Cromwell's judgment that it was a great necessity to depose, if not necessarily execute, Charles I, but not to abolish the monarchy. But, you know, those differences which rent the country asunder and as a percentage kill more of the population in the First World War.
SPEAKER_06:Wow. That's a key stat. I'm using that in my book that's coming up. I'm pretty sure that's correct. Yeah,
SPEAKER_03:no, I've heard it before, yeah. The sort of cultural settlement that allowed England to persist after that was, okay, we're just not going to take anything very seriously anymore. You know, we'll be, yes, we'll be a prayer book Anglican country, but, you know, we won't take that too seriously. Yes, we'll have the king, but he's going to, you know, not be able to do quite as much as he used to be able to do, or, you know, definitely not as much as Charles I tried to do, which historically weren't things the king was meant to do anyway. And so that disposition is kind of settled in. That then, kind of plays into, there's this, the very self-selecting thing, the self-selecting roundheads, where do they go? They go off to the New World, obviously. And so the people left behind are sort of dispositionally people who are not that, as earnest. And when you're talking about the space of patriotism, there is something about explicit displays of kind of patriotism, almost for its own sake, that strikes the English as very vulgar, very American, with all this sort of, you know, flag-flying, Operation Raise the Pellets stuff in the news at the minute. And I think it's, you know, largely to the good. There's some idiots who've co-opted it and, you know, hurling racial abuse at a Muslim woman with a headscarf, which is totally baffling. They deserve to be... It's unchristianized for that in whatever way, but thoroughly unchristian. But, you know, America, I think...
SPEAKER_05:You
SPEAKER_04:guys are thrilled about America. I like that you can abbreviate it into one... Just one sentence. which I found out is this is America it's a full set because it sounds like it's just short for America but it's short for this is America which you shout a lot I mean you go to the Rose Bowl and there's a fighter jet going overhead and people go this is America America it's like yes no one else is getting the military involved in collegiate sport that is just you guys But they say that everywhere. Like, you go to England and they go, For them it's a question. It's a sad question. We say it in Australia. We say, this is Australia. We say it at Vietnamese people on the bus. This is Australia. You better speak Australian if you're in Australia. And that's not racist because it's our culture. Taking it away from us would be the racist.
SPEAKER_03:Anyway. Yeah, they should be waiting to know. flag as much as possible because they're a very young country and you just got to kind of keep waving the flag until like there's enough like history attached to the flag yeah that you don't necessarily need to do it quite as enthusiastically whereas i think brits our sort of record spoke for itself um spoke for itself and so the needs to go just and kind of fly flags a kind of per se was a bit needless yes you probably used to have more union jets and austin children's crossovers and some tires and wells dragons up and the red hand of ulster up that we used to was to play anyway and ulster up if you could go across the Irish Sea. But there was a sense of security. You didn't need to go do kind of patriotism for its own sake.
SPEAKER_06:Our history is all around us. And in the middle of every single village in England is a church that was built probably originally in the 9th or 10th century, rebuilt in the 12th or 13th century, and has essentially stood there for the last 800 years. And your great, great, great, great, great grandparents were married there. They were married. They were buried there and it's there as are the castles and the cathedrals and all of our history is all around us because it hasn't all been completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe, really, or even the Civil War, which did blow up a few castles. The dissolution of the actual destruction of the monasteries, I think, constantly pains me because it just seems so culturally unnecessary. But I guess what they understood was you have to destroy the building. building and the memory of it if you want to get rid of it. And therefore, I guess that's why utopians and, you know, Marxists, they need a year nought, wipe it all clean, start again. There is no history. You know, 1984's insistence of rewriting the past and claiming that the way things were, it's always, we've always said that. It's always said that. And, you know, Winston Smith's job.
SPEAKER_03:We have always been at war with the monasteries.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah. And Winston Smith's job is to change the past of what the newspapers said so that they reflect what we say that they've always said, which is an incredible, literally Orwellian insight into human nature and how culture works. Just interrupting this conversation with some usual parish notices. I've got three. The first is the usual one. I'm touring the UK with my show, God, the Bible and everything in 60 minutes. And if you would like me to come to a church near you, then get in touch via my website and we can make that happen. jamescary.co.uk. Have a look there and also see where else I am playing this year and next year. It would be great to meet you at a gig. Why don't you try and help me as well? Help support this podcast by making that happen. The second thing is that if you enjoy this discussion about nation and Englishness and all those different kinds of things, then you might enjoy my almanac called Carrie's Almanac. That is a regular weekly blog I do about the Church of England and England and Saint's Days and all that kind of stuff. And you might really enjoy that. There's a link in the show notes to that. And finally, here's an experiment. I've started a Facebook group. Yes, I know Facebook is dead, but actually I quite like Facebook because all of the vile bitterness is on Twitter or X and so Facebook's quite a happy place for me so if you want to chat about any of the episodes and stuff that's raised by this podcast why not head on over to Facebook there's a link in the show notes because it's a private group I think I've tried to work out the settings so hopefully it is a place where we can speak freely and understand one another we'll give that a go see what happens link in the show notes if you want to find out more about that okay right back to the podcast here we go Which takes us on to, there's a book that you've been reading recently. called uh god is an englishman and i was really interested by the title of that and actually i went to an uh a chat with the author that was done locally and there was an interesting question asked about it because i think some people were slightly uncomfortable with the idea that when he says god is an englishman he's he's only slightly joking obviously god is not an english man uh jesus was not english even though it's a very funny joke i think in the in a knight's tale
SPEAKER_00:himself It's French! Well, the Pope may be French, but Jesus is English. You're on.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, you mentioned that in our email correspondence before this. Why is that book, do you think, important at the moment?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, yes, this is God as an Englishman, Christianity and the Creation of England by Bijan Omrani.
SPEAKER_05:Oh, lovely name. Lovely English name.
SPEAKER_03:As you can guess from his name, yes. It's not of historically English heritage, although I've had the pleasure of reading Bijan briefly since since I reviewed this book in First Things. Go and look that up online. There will be a link in the show notes to that. Okay. And as you chat, you can see he seems as English as the South Downs and the Strongman's Group. But it's a very good book. I was critical of it to some extent in my review in some of his handling of the Reformation and missing out the Richard Hooker in particular. Very formative figure for history of the Church of England and therefore England in general and conservative politics because Hooker was the sort of conservative kind of justifier of the Elizabethan religious supplement arguing against the Puritans who wanted to tear it all down in short. And so I think Bajan's book is overall fantastic because it makes a very concrete case for the Christian origins of England in surprising but very concrete ways. So the The very idea of England as a nation, going from boring Anglo-Saxon fiefdoms, really, more kingdoms in effect, to what the venerable Bede calls the Gens Angolorum. This English people, what is it that brings them together over time? It is the fact they are Christian people. They've got the uppers on them by the fact that they've got pagan Vikings kind of swarming over and wanting to go toe-to-toe with them. But the very idea of what a king is, actually, as someone who's meant to be, yes, powerful, yes, a strong man in some ways, but actually just and pious and humble in his way is entirely down to the influence of Christianity.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, we're in Tom Holland's territory at that point, aren't we? Or if I may say, Glenn Scrivener territory, former guest on this podcast, who writes essentially a more convincing book about how these are virtues that are Christian and do not exist in pre-Christian culture. The idea of a king being humble not really a thing until Jesus
SPEAKER_03:yeah yeah exactly the idea of written law is obviously something you know drawn yes from the Romans as well so you know so 597 and all that that's the title of this episode is the uninitiated when Augustine of Canterbury arrives in Kent sent to re-Christianise England by Pope Gregory and meets King Ethelbert of Kent whose wife Bertha was a Christian maybe actually Ethelbert himself was already a Christian, but we assume he wasn't. And the baptism of Ethelbert is in fact a huge fresco up in the chamber of the House of Lords. Wow. We want some, you know, more evidence to the Christian origins of England. Clearly, people in the past thought that the baptism of King Ethelbert of Kent was a significant part of the national story to be included in the House of Lords. So the idea of a written law, partly a Roman thing, Augustine comes over, this sort of mystical sort of, you know, history of this forgotten Roman Empire that the English sort of vaguely know about, but also the Mosaic law and things like that. Miller, another thing, his literary culture, all this stuff is only part of England, only part of our nation because of the influence of Christianity. And I guess that's not merely coincidental, but it's kind of part of the internal logic of this faith that's evangelise the country.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. I mean, it is really hard to argue against it. You think, well, it's there. Look, there's a fresco there. So in the recent speech by Danny Kruger about essentially calling the nation back to Christianity to say it doesn't work without it. It is the operating system of this country as Christianity. We are standing in what was St Stephen's Chapel and this is unavoidable. Part of me is really glad that when he gave that speech, the chamber was empty because I would have found anyone heckling that unbelievably difficult. I would have found that so mortally painful for someone to say, well, rubbish, shame. It's like, no. Yeah,
SPEAKER_03:some eye-rolling scold
SPEAKER_06:on Labour
SPEAKER_03:bitches.
SPEAKER_06:This is documentarily sound foundation for this is who we are. Now, the fact that we don't functionally believe it anymore, well, that's a different question, really. But you you can tell that people squirm at that kind of talk. And whenever they talk about Christian nationalism makes people very queasy, even Christians. And I say, well, if you are a Christian and you believe in the nation state, then I don't know what kind of nationalism would you prefer? Would you prefer non-Christian nationalism? I don't see that as preferable. That's called totalitarianism, isn't it? So what's so great about non-Christian nationalism, but that in itself is probably already going to send some light dinging off in either the Home Office or Lambeth Palace. I don't know. I was interested that there was a question, though, that the author had at this event. And somebody said, essentially, they didn't really want to just teach English history because it feels very narrow and very narrow-minded. And the author didn't give, in my view, a particularly good response to that. And I thought to myself, oh, I know what I would have said to that. I would have said, essentially, our nation's history has already been profoundly shaped by cultures, not least the Angles and the Saxons, who were not originally from this land, but also Jews, I'm thinking Jesus and the Apostles, a North African bishop in Augustine of Hippo, Romans, Celts, Normans, a German called Martin Luther and a Frenchman called John Calvin, which culminates, thanks to Cranmer, in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, which becomes the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, more or less. and is then said out loud by people in this country every Sunday for 500 years. You think, well, that's going to have an impact, isn't it? But also, this is a blend of a whole load of stuff that's kind of been maturing in a barrel for 500 years. But the idea that this is just a monoculture that comes from nowhere and only comes from England, it's like, no, no, we're already a synthesis. And isn't it great that that's what the church gives you? The church gives you people from from every nation that's where we're headed we're headed towards something that has I think a nation component tribes and nations and things Jesus said go and make disciples of all nations he didn't say go and make disciples of people and dissolve nations I don't quite know how that would have gone but so it feels like we get very queasy about the celebration of this culture and therefore we ridicule it and use comedy to kind of distance it or or hide the fact that we're in favour of it. I don't know. Do you think there's anything in that?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think part of what you articulated is that the ghost in the machine of the English has been Christianity since anything you can kind of reasonably call English existed. And Christianity, by its very nature, is transnational and is every tribe and tongue. There's a difference between the church and and the state and we're now into sort of you know areas of political theology where everyone is free to agree or disagree but I think I'd be cautious of you know that question I don't want to only teach English history it's too narrow there is a strength in acknowledging the global nature of the Christian faith and the fact that it instantiates itself in unique ways everywhere and English is is one of the problems, one of the reasons I'd be a Protestant, and one of the reasons I think that the Roman Church fell afoul is that it tries to impose this uniformity across different cultures that don't take, or only take under immense amounts of enforcement. I'd be cautious of kind of ceding the terms of the argument, and I'm not saying you're doing this, but saying Leonie apologetic for being kind of narrowly teaching and prioritising English history But it's also a bit African and a bit French. Right. As if what's good about it is the extent to which it isn't English.
SPEAKER_06:Okay. Yes. I completely see that there's a case for saying I'm not budging an inch from this. But the thing is, if it's Christian, it isn't uniquely English because Christian is itself bigger than any nation. So nations themselves have to be discipled. And I think it's really helpful what you said about how there is a cultural instantiation to that indifferent which particularly reveals itself, and I would say this, in comedy and in culture. And there are ways in which we write about things. And there is an Englishness in that kind of self-deprecation, which I'm sure other cultures find endearing, weird. Leaders of other countries do not do self-deprecation in a way that English leaders have to. They absolutely have to. And Donald Trump particularly drives people complacent mad because he doesn't do that. He kind of acts like a king and that I'm incredible and you're really lucky to have me and I'm going to save the country and only I can do this. I mean, that really should make people queasy, Anglo-Saxons queasy, because there's something really off with it. I mean, I find it kind of funny and I think he's still partly joking, but maybe it's just because I'm English. I have to think that. I don't know. I'd
SPEAKER_03:like to think maybe he's becoming more introspective about his immortal soul trunk because he has that quote of him the other day talking about, you know, he wants a peace deal in Ukraine. He says, I want to get into heaven, you know. Right here, I'm not doing well. I'm right at the bottom of the totem pole. Yeah. Theological considerations, I'm sure, to be had on that. Yeah, it's funny on the deprecation of leaders. Also recently read Robert Toon's expert book, The English Without History, which is a doorstopper, but very worth reading for an overview of the English and their history. There's a passage in that where he disputes the idea that overmighty monarchs are the vice of English history. Actually, it's the opposite. It's undermighty monarchs who are the vice of English history. It's ones who will not assert themselves, certainly in the Middle Ages, the kings with the most disastrous reigns. Richard II, for instance, and Edward II are ones who did not assert themselves. They assert themselves in sort of indulgent ways.
SPEAKER_06:Well, they didn't assert themselves and then they kind of had to lash out and suddenly assert themselves in a way that's just like, well, if you've been like, I mean, Charles I is another example of really misjudging when to double down and when not to. And he sort of, he did every single thing at the wrong time. You know, he was conciliatory when he should have dug his heels in and he dug his heels in when he should have given ground. And it's, he was very badly advised, I would
SPEAKER_03:like to say. With the Tom Holland thesis of, you know, kind of Christianity upending the values of the world, which is very true in many ways, but it can, and I think Tom would, because he's not himself a believer, would say, yeah, this is just an internal contradiction and we're living in the legacy of this contradiction and it works itself out in different ways. Who knows where it will end? Maybe it's still doing itself. Maybe it's still doing that to itself. As if there is you know an ultimate contradiction between the kind of you know heavenly christian calling of uh you know the cross is foolishness for the world and and his weakness and the world is about you know apparent wisdom and apparent strength as if that is always actually going to kind of contradict what it means to be a good ruler right um and you're sort of screwed basically if you yeah is man and happens to be the king whereas i think a rich kind of thing develops in english kingship that no you can be a thoroughly just incredibly firm monarch who brings the sword down knows how to quell public unrest knows the hard things to be done not this specific example but knows when you need to go like scorched earth on the monasteries let's say for the good of everyone in that very hard decision to make but can also be personally pious and kind of display appropriate levels of kind of public humility I think I think people wouldn't think that's impossible for, let's say, a father to do. Yes, you're getting it wrong, but I don't think people think there's any inherent contradiction between being a firm parent and also kind of a humble Christian parent. And then if kings are the father of the nation, which basically everybody would have said in, you know, political thought, Christian theology until five minutes ago, then, you know, A40 or I, how much more so for the king? He can be both of those things. There's not an inherent contradiction though in an imperfect world the two will always be. Yeah,
SPEAKER_06:interesting. And as you were talking, I was trying to think, okay, so which is that Christian king? Which is the best one? Which is that? And I thought, I tell you what, Elizabeth I takes some beating, which isn't I really, because she's obviously the queen. But is it like Deborah-like? She shames the kings by actually being a very humble, but just, she kind of stayed the course, did all the things. She sacrificed her own virginity, as it were, to the nation. but there's a sense in which she was the king that England really needed and maybe her femininity made the men act up into better leaders and she was actually pretty well advised by Cecil and Walsingham and people like that so that's a note of hope on which we should probably wrap up the podcast because you've been very generous with your time music Thanks so much for this. I will put a link in the show notes to your, I'm sure, excellent, which I didn't know about, first things review of that book. But there are other things that people could look at, including your blog, The New Albion. It lies somewhat dormant at the minute. Right. But there's a back catalogue of things that are...
SPEAKER_03:Back catalogue of thoughts on Christianity and politics and English, British cultural life. Yeah. The thing about cultural and not taking things too seriously as a sort of post-Civil War thing, there's a piece I wrote a couple of years back now that about that. It's that comment. It took your interest.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Well, I will find it and put a link to it in the show notes. And anyway, Rhys Loverty, thanks very much for being on the Stand Up Theologian podcast.
SPEAKER_03:James Caron. Thank
SPEAKER_06:you
SPEAKER_05:for having me. It's not that you're wicked or naturally bad. It's knowing you're foreign that's driving you mad. All the English are all that a nation should be. And the finale of the English is Donald, Michael, Donald, and me.