OXFORD — CITY OF SAINTS, SCHOLARS AND DREAMING SPIRES
By Andrew Atherstone
Day One. 128 pages. £10.00
ISBN 978-1-84625-115-3
Over the years, I have become increasingly wearied by the ‘Bible people bad, free-thinkers good’ mantra which dominates almost all popular presentations of England’s Christian history. The wild-eyed, Bible-spouting, hymn-singing figure of Abel Corbould in the BBC’s adaptation of Children of the New Forest, is for many people the authentic portrayal of Bible believing Christians.
In fact, it seems to me that the popular understanding of the history of Christianity in Britain is actually an elaborate collage of half-truths and myths roughly cobbled together to inoculate us against taking biblical Christianity seriously. ‘The Reformers executed the Catholics as heretics’, ‘Cromwell banned Christmas because he didn’t like people enjoying themselves’, ‘the Victorian evangelicals were obscurantists, blindly opposed to Darwin’. The way in which history has been rewritten in the popular imagination ranges from the sloppy to the sinister.
