The English Bible has made us

There is an interesting debate doing the rounds at the moment: should we allow faith schools in Britain? The debate has been occasioned by our tortuous and interminable wrangling with all things Islamic; it has suddenly occurred to us that allowing children to be inculcated into an ideology which may be antithetical to our national culture is a dangerous and divisive thing. And during the course of filming a two-hour documentary for Channel 4 about the translation of the Bible into English, I was struck by the strange, almost perverse nature of this debate. It seems to be polarised: you are either for faith schools or you are against them. It is almost a given that if you oppose Muslim faith schools, you must, with even-handedness, oppose Church of England faith schools. Needless to say, there is no similar debate in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan; there, of course, they feel no instinctive compulsion to level the religious playing field. Each of those nations, no matter how recently they may have been conjured up by the sweep of a foreign pen, is wholly aware that its national culture is drawn from Islam. The same is true, to a less rigorous degree, in the more devoutly Roman Catholic countries.

And so two apparently paradoxical thoughts occur; firstly, that Britain is a Christian country, that almost every area of public life is rooted in Christian teachings and that this history of ours cannot simply be swept away or disavowed, as some would seem to hope. And secondly, that this British even-handedness towards competing religions is quintessentially Christian and, crucially, English Protestant. By this I do not mean the screeching Protestantism of the likes of Ian Paisley, but Protestantism in its more literal meaning — a creed which sprang from the common people, which was forced to demand tolerance for its own adherents.