Simon Jenkins

Nostalgic nationalist piety

Roger Scruton’s vision of a tolerant, age-old Anglicanism — church bells echoing over the countryside, calling the faithful to prayer — doesn’t ring true to <em>Simon Jenkins</em>

Parish churches are the sentinels of England’s past. They soar over every town and village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede primacy to the mosque. But the Church of England guards our rituals and speaks for our communities. The English still want their local spokesmen to be vicars not mayors.

Roger Scruton should have been a bishop. He would have gone to the top, and spared Anglicans their present agony over whom to send to Canterbury. Archbishop Scruton would have gathered up the church’s shattered canticles, creeds and conflicts and marched them to death or glory with learning and charm. This book is an elegant manifesto. It should have been a job application.

Scruton claims to address his biography of Anglicanism to believers and non-believers alike. Since the latter includes me, and since we were both born into Nonconformist scepticism, I was intrigued to see how our paths could agree on so much yet diverge so widely on religion. The initial answer appears to be that Scruton played hooky from Baptist Sunday school by sneaking round the corner not, like most of us youngsters, to the nearest smoking shed but to his parish church. While we found a humanist optimism, he seems to have found a godly pessimism.

Scruton’s Church of England emerged from the middle ages an insular version of the Protestant reformation. Since Henry II, English kings argued with popes over the demarcation between church and state. Tyndale and Wyclif had forged an English proto-reformation before the messy and drawn out breach under Henry VIII. To Scruton, Henry’s apostasy was not the theological opportunism of a royal sex drive. It was conceived of a sacred compromise, a God-sent amalgam of state triumphant and church holy, of poetry and prose, of Calvin and Cranmer.

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