Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England

"I thought this was a balance between the left wing view of religion — which is Pullman’s — and Scruton’s, which is the right wing. Also, it explains how someone who, in my opinion, does not believe in the articles of faith does believe in religion as a community builder. I think that’s what’s left for a lot of people. You become part of a religion for its values of community rather than for transubstantiation or resurrection. Scruton shows, with this book — which Diarmaid MacCulloch has criticized for its inaccuracies, but I don’t think the inaccuracies matter — what it means for an intelligent conservative to still believe in God, and why it makes sense to. He says the English have been formed by the Church of England, and they know, in their hearts, that faith is in large part a human invention. The book is a wonderful celebration of the culture that was fostered and created by the Church of England — and it takes you through its architecture, the literature it has created, and the music that it has created in its hymns. He feels that that is what is so wonderful about an establishment church. Despite its venality — perhaps because of its venality, and its inter-weavedness with the state — it creates a sense of a community, with a shared history and shared meanings. Like a good Tory conservative he is a nostalgic. He believes the Church of England created something that we’re now losing, which is a joint set of values. He says that when you go into a parish church, there are monuments to the local gentry, to the ordinary men of the parish who died in the wars, and it takes you back to the Anglo Saxons, to the iconoclasts of the 17th century or the 19th century Gothic Revival. It takes you through the whole of English history and makes you feel a part of it. But now that community of shared values has gone. I don’t know if in fact it ever existed. It was fine for the local gentry to feel they were being celebrated and shared a history, but whether the ordinary men who died in the wars, whether their families would have felt they were also part of this whole, I just don’t know. He says the Church of England is the 17th century compromise, this magnificent compromise between Catholics and Protestants. It created and fostered this lukewarm and embarrassed relationship with God, that the English had. He says that we’re as embarrassed talking about religion as we are at talking about sex. That’s probably right. It obviously didn’t work that well — as a lot of Christians went off to America — but that’s his vision of what a church can do. It’s still how he sees a church working in society. Yes, Roger captures that terribly well. And funnily enough, even as celebrated a neo-atheist as Christopher Hitchens, admitted exactly the same feelings. You can’t help but being moved by the smell of it, the feel of it and the dust of it, and the past, when you go into a parish church. The same with Philip Larkin, that fabulous poem, Church Going , where an atheist goes into a local parish church and just feels this sense of meaning… That’s a good point. I was just thinking of Italy. When you go into a church there do you feel that? I think that’s a difference, perhaps, between the established church and the non-established churches. The established church is so much a part of the state, that inevitably it is part of the nation, of nation-building, in a way that perhaps non-established churches aren’t. Roger Scruton is also quite good at talking about the banality of the church as it’s portrayed in Jane Austen and Trollope. These people who went into the church because they were in the unfortunate situation of being the third son rather than the first. They had to do something, so they went into the church — and they’re fat and greedy and slightly stupid… But he’s very affectionate about it, and of course that’s the nature of an established church, it is going to be venal. But it is part of life and it does create a nation."