Abstract
Roger Scruton,
Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England
, Atlantic Books: London, 2012; 208 pp.: 9781848871984, £20.00 (hbk), 9781848871991, £8.99 (pbk)
Roger Scruton's engagement with the Church of England has been, and continues to be, an interesting journey. In Gentle Regrets (2005) he describes his appreciation of his local parish church as if surprised, caught unawares, that it still has life. He writes movingly of hearing there the Jubilate Deo, Psalm 100, sung to traditional Anglican chant, of its reminder to us that our lives should be rounded with joy and thankfulness, not resentment at rights unfulfilled. The loss of religion is the loss of loss, he writes, memorably; and, with a poetic poignancy, he remarks that once we came before the presence of God with a song, now we come before his absence with a sigh (Gentle Regrets, p. 234). When I first read this intriguing and thoughtful contemporary philosopher, I was won over by his perception that a sense of gift helps in the search for a meaningful life, and his writing on how the Christian religion enables us to face loss without succumbing to a banal superficiality, where all is fun and pleasure in a hellish denial of the reality of loss and death. So I fell upon his Our Church with anticipation that he would continue his reflections on the importance of the Church of England with the same personal insight and commendation. How disappointed I was.
Scruton succumbs to an uncharacteristic sentiment in Our Church. He is right that the Church of England has a key role to play in the national identity, that it is declining, and a good way to commend it to a new generation is through personal testimony. So this is a book about what the Church of England ‘has meant to me, and a tribute to its peaceful and creative presence in our national life’ (p. 1). The trouble is his telling of its history is so personal that it is full of infelicities and short cuts which simply leave the reader irritated. His love of traditional liturgy shines through, but leads him – and this is my greatest argument – to fail to see that traditions develop and grow in a symbiotic relationship with society. He celebrates the way the Church of England has framed, and continues to frame culture, and asserts that adopting ‘alternative services’ was ‘like describing EastEnders as an “alternative” to Shakespeare, or Lady Gaga as an “alternative” to Bach’ (p. 171); and when he gets on to sexuality and gender, and assumes that the ‘traditional Christian position’ is his own, I groan at his lack of nuanced understanding of how the Church of England develops and changes through time, in response to modernity. The Church of England and the Anglican Communion face enormous challenges, and a re-engagement with tradition is important, but not like this.