Who are we? We are what the English Bible has made us

Spectator, The, Dec 16, 2006 by Liddle, Rod

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. And which, through its commitment to individual interpretation, has tended to be rather open to those who disagree with its constantly shifting tenets.

Just recently my colleague Charles Moore carried out a swift, ad-hoc audit of some of those things which might disappear were we to decide that Christianity had outlived its usefulness in Britain; looking around him in the central lobby at the House of Commons, he counted 17 direct references to Christ 'in as many seconds'; to expunge Christianity from British life, he continued, one would also have to rename most of our capital's railway stations, tear down our national flag (and the Royal Standard) and melt down our coinage, rename our Oxbridge colleges, change our public holidays.

And of course, he is right. But luckily, the defenestration of a Christian God simply cannot happen, because far more important than the flags and the coins of the realm and what have you, Protestant Christianity is the very essence of what it is to be British: it gave us our language, our national identity and, with both of these things, a template for how we think and reason. You cannot easily uproot all that.

The influence of Protestant Christianity upon our language and thus literature is impossible to overstate. When the Gloucestershire scholar William Tyndale went up to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1510 the English language -- in so far as one could ascribe to it a homogenous existence -- was held in such contempt that it was banned from the college altogether, excepting feast days. As a result of Tyndale's translation of the New Testament in 1534, it became a national language, complete and concise, with a sense of cadence and rhythm, of direct purpose, which has endured to this day. Without William Tyndale it is doubtful that there would have been a William Shakespeare -- doubtful that there would have been an England.

In 1510 England was an authoritarian outpost of the Catholic Church -- a country where, uniquely, it was illegal to read the Bible in the national language. Instead, commoners were dependent on the Church for their religious succour -- which naturally invested the Church with enormous power. Hence, therefore, the Church's disinclination to allow the Bible into the grubby paws of ploughmen and, indeed, 'lowly women'. Control the language and you control the people. Tyndale, of course, rejected all that; the people must be able to read the Bible for themselves, otherwise they could not be saved. For Tyndale -- as for Wycliffe before him -- it was a purely theological opposition which nonetheless had immediate social and political repercussions. His translation of the Bible -- the King James Bible is regarded as being 90 per cent the work of Tyndale -- passed power downwards from the priests and bishops to the people, both by the mere fact of its existence and in the language it used.

Tyndale, returned, ad fontes, to the scripture through Erasmus's 1516 rendition of a Greek Bible (with Latin translation). You can argue which was the more revolutionary: Tyndale's contentious use as a translator of such terms as congregation (rather than church) or love (rather than charity, from the Greek agape) which so infuriated Thomas More and threatened the Catholic Church -- or the fact that his facility with this low-born lingua franca, English, was so acute and attuned to the common man that it became, almost immediately, respectable and later ubiquitous. It is not simply Tyndale's knack of coining the memorable phrase -- although that was, in itself, remarkable: he gave the English language, among a ream of phrases, 'daily bread', 'you cannot serve God and Mammon', 'Let there be light', 'There were shepherds abiding in their fields'. It was the simplicity and directness of the language, the eschewing of Latin- or French-derived terminology, a Bible written in words of usually one and at most two syllables; the template for what we know as 'good plain English'. Scroll forward 400 years and George Orwell's essay 'Politics and the English Language' seems scarcely more than a plea to return to the language of William Tyndale, where words are beautifully precise creatures designed to elucidate, describe and explain rather than to obfuscate. Short words, short sentences: 'Axe and it shal be given to you.