A White and Christian People? How God Made the English

The English are suffering an identity crisis.

Just look at the national flag.

It's there for big sporting events...

..it flies from the top of church towers.

But there are others with their own ideas about Englishness

who also use it.

Keep the fight up for our country.

This ancient flag and its people face some hard choices.

At a time when society, religion and politics are increasingly diverse,

in a nation of many faiths and none,

what's it mean to be English?

In this series, I've been looking at English identity,

at the idea that the English are somehow superior,

specially chosen by God to play a big part on the world stage...

Because after all, the English knew that they were God's chosen people

just like ancient Israel, only better.

..and at the idea that the faith of the English

created a specially tolerant people.

You can't imagine this happening in England can you?

In my final programme, I'll be examining

an even more basic and difficult debate.

One point of view is that Englishness has an ethnic core.

True Englishmen and women take their roots

from the people of the Dark Ages - the Anglo-Saxons.

And until recently it also seemed obvious

that to be truly English was to be Christian,

and maybe not just any Christian but Church Of England.

Some people still find such settled images compelling.

You might just dismiss them without discussion.

Look around at the sheer variety of ethnic faces

that make up the English today.

But I want to ask a deeper question.

Was this EVER true?

In this series, I've been arguing that God made the English.

But did he also make them white and Christian?

What it means to be English

is something that arouses strong emotion.

Like the outburst of fury

directed at Manchester Cathedral's Canon Theologian.

For three months, we received a regular flow

of e-mails, letters, telephone messages...

What did they say?

I have been told that I am a very evil man, a traitor,

that I should resign, that I should disappear...

It was all because the canon blessed

a 12ft model of England's patron saint.

But this is not your stereotype white crusader, sword in hand.

This Saint George is black.

What this figure does is to challenge some basic notions

about English identity, about the racial and cultural traits

we call someone's "ethnic roots".

For some, Saint George is a powerful symbol

of what it means to be ethnically English.

He's an icon of patriotic self-confidence.

But the history of Saint George is complicated

and it can tell us a great deal

about what it really means to be English.

You might not expect me to go to Israel to start my search,

but according to local tradition, this town of al-Ludd -

which the Israelis now call Lod - was the home of the English saint.

The story of George is that he was a soldier in the Roman army,

but when the Emperor, Diocletian, began persecuting Christians,

George objected.

He was imprisoned for his defiance and eventually killed.

This church is on the spot where he's said to be buried.

So it's in a Middle-Eastern crypt that you'll find the English saint.

And straightaway you see what we all remember about Saint George -

the soldier-saint -

and that's what appealed to Kings of England from the 13th century.

Soon the royal spin doctors were making him the symbol of the nation.

They gave George a make-over. Out went the Roman armour

and instead he donned the chain-mail and tabard of an English crusader.

But that's not how he's remembered here.

He's very much a Middle-Eastern saint.

Well, Father, tell me a little about the place of Saint George in Lod.

Here, Saint George is widely venerated

among the Christian community.

The members of our congregation dedicate their children

by dressing them up in costume

which is similar to Saint George's clothes.

They also name their children after Saint George

and that's why we've got a lot of grown-ups and kids today

that are called George or Julius.

Julius is also the parallel to Saint George.

What do you think about the idea

that the English want Saint George to be English?

He's considered to be a local saint in many, many communities.

The same thing happens in Greece as well -

the Greeks think he is a Greek saint

or the Russians think that he's a Russian saint

and also the Palestinians think that he's a Palestinian saint.

Uh, I know that in England,

Saint George is considered to be from England, but, no, he isn't.

I mean, he might be venerated in the Western church,

but he's not from England.

So, on any reckoning,

Saint George is ethnically Mediterranean or Middle-Eastern.

For the people in this town, he's an Arab.

But perhaps the most surprising thing of all

is that he's not just a hero for Christians here.

He's also admired by Muslims.

Maha is a Muslim.

Her family traditionally joined with their Christian neighbours

to celebrate Saint George.

They would light candles

and even pray to the Christian saint for help.

Christian and Muslim used to live in al-Ludd as one family.

My mother and my grandmother

took olive oil as a gift for church

and Saint George and ask him to help them.

So Saint George is a symbol of unity

between different communities for you?

Yes, yes he is.

Now, this may surprise you,

but some people, English people, think that Saint George is English.

Mm-hmm. This is surprising me.

Actually this is the first time that I heard that,

but I think it's very natural behaviour

because human beings, if they love a holy symbol,

they want it to belong to them.

But, unfortunately, I have to tell them that he's from al-Ludd.

THEY LAUGH

After hearing all the noisy argument about Saint George in England,

I find it refreshing that here he can be seen

as a symbol of friendship between Muslims and Christians.

Saint George isn't the property of any one people.

He's the patron saint of England,

but he's the patron saint of Gozo in the Mediterranean,

the Republic of Georgia up in the Caucasus.

Saint George is a hero to all sorts of people.

His legend neatly sums up the muddle that is English identity.

Saint George is not who many people think he is.

And neither are the English.

So let's take a closer look at English ethnic identity.

One of the most persistent ideas about the English

is that they descend from northern Europeans

who made this island their home back in the so-called Dark Ages.

The Anglo-Saxons.

Take the strain...

Pull!

It's a potent idea. It shapes the thinking of nationalist parties

and many besides.

But how true is it?

The traditional story is that Englishness was brought by invaders

when the Roman Empire collapsed.

Germanic tribes swept into the country -

Angles, Saxons, Jutes.

They pushed out the previous peoples of these islands -

the original Britons - into what are now Wales and Scotland.

On that basis, the ancestors of the English would be the Anglo-Saxons.

And in the 21st century,

we now have the science to discover if that is true.

I'm taking a DNA test

to find out about the genetic make-up of my ancestors.

And I'm going to look at the results with a man who's used DNA

to trace the origins of the British.

Stephen Oppenheimer first explained how his research works.

There are two particular parts of our genome

which are very useful for this approach.

One of those parts is the Y chromosome which only males have

and is passed down the male line, and the other is mitochondrial DNA

which we all have, but it's passed down the female line.

So that's very neat. You've got two parts of our genome

which gives us the male line of descent

and the other gives us female line of descent.

Well, I've had a DNA test and what does that tell you about my origins?

Well, if we take the Y chromosome to start off with,

which you get from your father, it originates in northern Spain,

-in the Basque country...

-Ah.

-..during the Ice Age,

which was 18,000 years ago. And you can see...

This is actually a map showing the distribution

of the type that you have, and it's extremely common

along the Atlantic coast, in fact it's the commonest single type.

-And it arrives in Britain just under 10,000 years ago.

-Right.

Well, you've told me about one average strand.

-What about the other one?

-It's just as average.

-In fact, it's very similar in its pre-history.

-OK.

And, again, the distribution of this is very similar to your Y chromosome.

-Right.

-The origin is in Northern Spain in the Basque country

and it moves up the Atlantic coast into Britain.

It arrives, rather similarly to your Y chromosome,

just under 10,000 years ago.

-Well, so you're basically telling me I'm pretty average.

-Mr Average, yes.

But that's a very good illustration

that a lot of people will have that sort of picture.

Yes, and the picture is quite a surprising one.

We're starting in Northern Spain and we're up here.

What's going on here?

The ice starting melting about 15,000 years ago

and quite a few people moved up into northern Europe,

although it was still pretty cold,

from refuges along the north coast of the Mediterranean.

And, for western Europe, the main refuge was in the Basque country.

So this is nothing like the story

of Anglo-Saxon England and its invasion. It's much older.

Yes, and the Anglo-Saxon contribution, in my analysis,

is only 5% for the whole of England.

5% contribution of the Anglo-Saxons to the supposed English?

That's right. And the English are much closer

to the Welsh, the Irish, the Cornish and the Scottish

than they are to any other continental population

and this idea of the English coming in as a race -

well, the Anglo-Saxons coming in as a race -

really just doesn't hold up in the genetic view.

So according to genetic science,

the roots of the English are not Anglo-Saxon but Spanish.

And if that isn't surprising enough,

the English are also very close genetically

to the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots.

Before outrage sweeps the home nations,

let me say it's clear there's more to identity than genetics alone.

The English may owe little to the Anglo-Saxons genetically,

but don't they still owe a great deal culturally?

Isn't the English way of life and way of thinking

indebted to the people from Germany?

Here, archaeology can provide some answers.

This excavation of an Anglo-Saxon village

is providing useful insights into the beginnings of Englishness.

We'll do this one you've just done and then we'll work our way back.

Neil Faulkner is leading the dig.

Well, this chap is a warrior,

which we know from the battle injuries that he has suffered.

If you look at this leg bone you can see that it's broken,

almost certainly from a kick or the blow of a weapon.

He seems to have a very serious wound on this shoulder

as if part of it has been sheared away, and if he's not already dying,

what would unquestionably have finished him off

would be this sword slash across the skull.

Well, he sounds like a classic Anglo-Saxon warrior then?

Well, he's Anglo-Saxon in the sense

that he's been integrated into Anglo-Saxon society

but that's not quite the same as saying

that his ancestors are from Germany.

Oh, so he's British? So, how does that work?

Well, I think he probably is British.

I mean, what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us

is that they were coming over in really quite small numbers of people,

two or three long boats.

And you can get about 30, 40, 50 people into a longboat.

Well, that means it's actually quite a small number of warriors

who are coming in, in the 5th century AD.

So most of the people that we think of as Anglo-Saxon

are actually British people who've been integrated

into Anglo-Saxon society.

The Anglo-Saxons did not colonize England in huge numbers.

There never was a mass invasion.

Out on the dig, they're discovering how it was probably more about

winning the hearts and minds of local people.

They've uncovered the mead hall where the lord, or thane,

lived alongside the villagers.

So, if you imagine that we're standing on the line of the boundary

stretching in each direction on either side of us,

in that direction, we imagine, is the Grand Hall.

Immediately outside - and it's immediately outside - is the village.

Right, and what impresses me is just how close...

I mean, the villagers could shout at their lord across here.

Yes, that's absolutely right

and very different from the social structure of the Roman villa estate,

where the villa is in one place and the village might be a mile away.

Here you've got an integration between the elite

and the ordinary villagers.

Well, it is a nice picture. I mean, call me an old romantic,

but I'm seeing the villagers

occasionally going to the mead hall and socialising?

I think that's exactly how it worked, yes.

Every free man would be part of this lord's entourage

and they would be forging a new society in the mead hall.

I think I can put a word on this new thing and it's Englishness.

We're looking at the origins of England, aren't we?

Yes, I think that's absolutely right.

There's a Germanic culture, or a culture that has its roots

in a Germanic past, that's being invested with new meaning

by the native population, so it's actually Englishness, in a sense,

which is being forged in these mead halls.

The beginnings of Englishness are in a blending of cultures.

The original Britons who lived in these isles

and the small band of guys with big swords

who came to join them from abroad.

And very quickly, English identity became messier

and even harder to distil.

Because the Anglo-Saxons were only the first

of wave upon wave of foreigners who left a profound mark

on what it means to be English.

And there's one small place that neatly sums it all up.

This room was built by Anglo-Saxons in the 8th century.

Here they buried kings

from one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms - Mercia.

It's a sort of Midlands mini-Westminster Abbey,

and within a few decades,

pilgrims were pouring into this crypt, hungry for miracles.

Hot on the heels of the Anglo-Saxons

came a new band of warriors in the 9th century.

There's evidence for them here, too.

It was discovered under the vicarage lawn.

What they found here was a huge mass grave

of at least 250 Vikings from Scandinavia,

and in all the heap of bones, only one man was older than 45.

They had found the war-dead of the Viking army.

And what the Vikings had done was pile all their dead comrades

of the grave of one of those Christian Mercian Kings,

just to make a point.

The Vikings were here to stay.

And the Vikings were by no means the last wave of foreigners

to come and stir up English identity.

The Normans came next.

Repton School is built on the footprint

of a 12th century Norman Priory of Augustinian Canons.

Look at this. This is the base of a great arch

which would come up like this, and this is the entrance

to the canons' chapter house, their assembly hall.

I love these great Norman arches.

In this one Derbyshire town, it's possible to trace

the diverse ingredients of English ethnicity.

They may all have been white,

but each wave of immigrants offered something different.

From great architecture to local accents,

common law to place names,

the English absorbed them all,

layer upon layer of rich diversity, creating a new cultural identity.

Just like a fine old English lasagne or Chicken Tikka Masala.

To say that to be English

is to be genetically or culturally Anglo-Saxon alone

is just plain wrong.

But there is another deeply ingrained tradition

that to be English also means to be Christian.

And a particular kind of Christian at that.

It's beautifully put in that great 18th century novel,

Fielding's Tom Jones.

Tom's tutor is a wonderfully pompous Anglican clergyman, Parson Thwackum.

And in the course of an argument about religion,

Parson Thwackum majestically pronounces,

"When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion,

"And not only the Christian religion,

"but the Protestant religion,

"and not only the Protestant religion,

"but the Church Of England."

There you have it - to be truly English is to be Church Of England.

How true is that?

ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS

This is a tradition I know very well from the inside.

I grew up the son of a village parson.

I used to play the organ, paid for out of the war memorial fund.

The village chose to remember their dead, lost in two world wars,

through the institution at the heart of their community.

For hundreds of years, life was built around the parish church.

You came here each week for Sunday services.

You marked the passing seasons.

The Church provided the christening ritual

that marked your entry into the world,

this was where you'd come to get married,

and after it all, this would be your final resting place.

For most English people, their world was shaped

by one particular sort of Christianity -

an all-embracing Anglicanism.

But the truth is that even as a boy sitting on that organ stool,

I knew that the Church Of England didn't mean the same for everyone.

And actually, the seeds of division

were there right from the Church's earliest beginnings.

The English church was born in the 16th century

out of that revolution in Christianity

we call the Protestant Reformation.

It was set up to replace the monopoly of the Catholic church

with a Protestant monopoly,

but this village reveals that English Protestant Christianity

refused to fit into a single mould.

In 1600, Balsham was home

to a strange and colourful religious group called the Family Of Love.

Allegedly, they indulged in wife-swapping,

adultery and general excess.

Actually, they were much more shocking than that.

They were a mystical sect who believed

that they were not just children of God, but a part of God.

It's not surprising that the Familists

were officially condemned as heretics.

But they were not ones to stand up and get martyred.

Instead, they joined the established church

and used it for their own secret purposes.

I've something to show you down here.

Historian Chris Marsh has found highly coded evidence

of how they did this.

-It's a bit of performance, isn't it?

-Mm-hmm. It certainly is.

Right, it's a bell. So what's so special about it?

Well, three of the bells in this belfry date from 1609.

-They all have this date on.

-Oh, yeah. 1609, yep.

But where the other bells have inscriptions like,

"God save thy church," "God save the king,"

this one has a Latin inscription which translates as,

"I sound not for the souls of the dead but for the ears of the living."

And at one level, all that is saying

is that good Protestants in the early 17th century

no longer pray for the souls of the dead

as pre-reformation Catholics did,

but there's a particular twist.

-Two of the words are reversed.

-Reversed, how do you mean?

-Just written backwards.

-Oh, right.

Written backwards, so the word for souls, animabus, becomes subamina,

which is a meaningless word in Latin,

and the word for ears, auribus, becomes subirua.

-Souls and ears backwards.

-Souls and ears backwards,

and maybe what he's saying is that orthodoxy has got it all wrong.

It's the other way round.

You're all obsessed with externals, with churches,

and true faith is about what goes on in your soul.

And members of the Family Of Love were very, kind of, adept

at registering these little secret signals of their identity.

They must have smiled to themselves, mustn't they?

Every time this bell rings for an Anglican service...

I think so, yeah.

..it's actually ringing out their message to those who know.

But what's fascinating about the Familists in Balsham

is not only their sneaky subversion,

but that they sometimes dared to express

their heretical faith openly.

When one of their leaders died in that same year, 1609,

his followers took the brazen step

of appropriating a medieval priest's tomb to bury him.

They removed the bones of the priest who lay within,

They put a brick vault, 600 bricks, into the ground,

installed Thomas Lawrence and then replaced the stones on top,

which is an extraordinary gesture.

So I guess what they're saying is that their leader is as important

as all priests in this graveyard from the remote past.

I think that's exactly what the implication was,

and not surprisingly, it provoked a reaction

from some of the other church officers

who clearly felt that this time the members of the Family Of Love

had gone a step too far.

The squabble ended up in court

where the churchwarden exposed the Familists as heretics.

Surprisingly, they got away with it.

The judge he was informed that the two were old,

that one was blind, one was deaf

and the case died, he just let it go.

So the Familists, they're heretics

and yet they're being defended by the courts of the Church Of England

against people who would think that THEY were the backbone

of the Church Of England. Isn't that weird?

It is weird, but within the church, within society at this time,

there is a sort of capacity for absorbing diversity

which most people might find really quite surprising.

OK, you might say the Family Of Love

was a tiny rogue sect, well outside the mainstream,

but in fact, by the mid 17th century there were hundreds

of small independent Protestant groups in England,

from Ranters and Diggers to Baptists and Unitarians.

Far from being a wholly Anglican nation,

the English were already a pretty mixed bunch.

And that plurality of religion was stretched even further

with an invitation to Protestant religious immigrants from overseas.

My mother's family was called Chappell.

And they were descended from French Protestants, known as Huguenots,

who suffered persecution in 17th century Catholic France.

They fled to Protestant England with the full blessing of the Church here.

They came with their own distinctive faith.

But their impact on English Society was much wider than that.

The Huguenots were literate, highly organized, motivated.

They brought their industriousness and commercial ability to this country.

The Bank of England may be the institution at the heart

of the English economy but we owe the fact it exists at all to Huguenots!

Well this is the list of subscribers who actually set up

the Bank of England in 1694.

And it starts with the King and Queen as you might expect,

but if you turn over the pages you start meeting Huguenots.

What have I got here?

"I Thomas Leheup of London esquire."

And then I have, Jean de la Parelle, also of London.

And at the top I have, "I Sir John Houblon of London, Knight

and Alderman" and he subscribes £10,000 which is actually

the same sum that the King and Queen gave!

This is a top man.

And he actually became the first Governor of the Bank of England.

And if ever you've had a few bob you'll have met Sir John,

because here he is on a £50 note.

Nice to see my ancestors doing so well.

But the reason the Huguenots who came here

went into banking, also commerce and manufacturing,

was because there were still limits to English religious plurality.

The traditional professions were closed to anyone who wasn't Anglican.

The Church of England was part and parcel of the Establishment.

But, it was never the whole story.

The true picture of what it meant to be English was getting complicated.

Now the authorities would have liked it to be simple,

nothing else than a loyal follower of the Church of England.

But there were more ways of being Christian,

more ways of being English, religious pluralism, in fact.

Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians.

All of them managed to hold on to their beliefs.

Yes, sometimes in secret, but they did it.

Towards the end of the 17th century the Established Church

had to start facing facts.

The first reality check was Parliament's Act of Toleration.

This law allowed Protestant dissenters to hold their own services

in the public eye without fear of prosecution.

Roman Catholics too would be granted concessions by the end of the 18th century.

But the myth that to be English was to be Anglican was finally

demolished in the 19th century.

The first census of church attendance in England and Wales

took place in 1851.

I've come to look at the results in the Parliamentary Archive.

The figures shocked a lot of people because

what they revealed was that in most large towns more people were going to

non-Church of England services than the Church of England.

Look here at an extreme example from Bradford.

Now here nearly three times as many people at non-Anglican services

as at the Church of England.

And if you took the Welsh figures they'd be even more extreme.

Now, the overall statistics which irons out the differences between town and country

or the regional variations, you get 520 out of every 1,000

church attendances are Anglican, that's 52%.

Which of course means that nearly as many people are not attending Church of England services.

With so many not going to the Established Church,

the idea that it was ever the only way to be English, just doesn't stand up.

The irony is that ringing out from Anglican church towers

is a sound which to my mind, rather charmingly captures the plural

nature of English Christianity.

In the centuries of medieval Catholicism, English bells

were simply rung out in a great random noise,

just as they were in every other part of Catholic Europe.

BELLS RINGING

But after the Reformation, Protestants developed

a uniquely English game for ringing bells.

It had very formal rules.

But its hallmark was change, re-invention, difference.

We start off by ringing what we call rounds,

which is ringing down the scale from the highest note down to the heaviest note,

and Jane's going to start us off with that.

Going... Gone.

BELLS RINGING

And from there we can then change the sequence or the order of the bells.

So for example we start by saying three to four,

bells three and four will swap over and from there we can change the order again, and again.

As long as you like.

As much as the neighbours will tolerate it!

I'll show you what we mean.

Gone.

BELLS RINGING

Two to four.

BELLS RINGING

Then we swap bells two and four over.

That's changed the order.

Two to three.

BELLS RINGING

That swaps bells two and three over.

Four to two.

You can go on ringing the changes for hours trust me, the maths does work!

Three to two.

And for nearly 500 years,

all of English Christianity has been like this.

A continuous re-invention of something much older.

You can see it in the nation's plethora of Chapels

and Meeting Houses.

And every new group changed the Church of England, forcing it

bit-by-bit to become a broader church, embracing difference.

But one key battle remained before it could truly call itself a broad church.

This time the struggle for religious plurality reached right

to the gates of the church, in every sense.

The outcome would set the tone for the future of English identity.

CHOIR SINGING

The fight centred on the all-important question of death.

150 years ago, in most corners of this country,

you could only get to heaven with the blessing of the Church of England.

If you were not an Anglican you might not be able to bury

your loved ones in the way you wanted.

That implied that you weren't as English as the Anglicans.

And this was precisely the situation facing one family

who'd turned their backs on the Church of England.

Well, here we are, the churchyard gate at Akenham.

So, Nicholas, tell me a bit about religious life

in Akenham in the 19th century.

Akenham, I think, in the 19th century was a somewhat unusual village.

There were very few Anglicans, if any,

the two major landowners were both Congregationalists,

they went to chapel in Ipswich and took their labourers with them

on a Sunday morning, on carts.

So there were hardly any services in the church at all.

And what was the row here?

This particular row was over the burial of a baby -

a two year old child -

who was, in fact, not a Congregationalist but a Baptist.

Oh, a Baptist. So, much worse than being a Congregationalist

because he wouldn't have been baptised at all.

Baptists don't baptise until you're of an age of discretion

to take it on yourself, so, no, at two years old he wasn't baptised.

So what would that mean in terms of a funeral?

It meant that he was entitled to burial in the churchyard

as a parishioner, but no service could be read over the child at all.

This all made for a cold way to mark the passing of a child.

The family felt passionately

that their right to a proper ceremony was being denied.

So they decided to defy the parish's Anglican clergyman,

Father George Drury.

The boy came in his coffin from the direction of the village.

At the same time, the two main landowners

together with one of the Congregational ministers from Ipswich

came across the field behind us to meet them here to conduct a service,

which they were going to do in the field.

And this is the thing that upset Drury.

He said, "No, I want to bury the boy, THEN you can have your service."

They were quite determined to have the service before.

What a mess at a child's funeral!

It was outrageous. I mean, they came to blows, almost.

Whether one of them actually hit the other is a matter of opinion.

Father Drury was so outraged by the open challenge

that he locked the churchyard gate and walked off.

The funeral party was left to push their way through the hedge

and bury the child themselves in the allotted spot -

on the north, unfavoured side of the church.

Look at the inscription below - "Suffer little children,

"forbid them not to come unto me"

-Now, that's pretty pointed, isn't it?

-It's very pointed, I think,

after what went on here. "For such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

It's a rotten story, but really, Father Drury

was within his rights, wasn't he, legally?

He was. He maybe overstepped the mark by trying to interrupt the service

that was going on in the lane, which was legal, if unusual.

But if he had had his way, the child would have been put in the grave,

Drury would have thrown in a handful of soil

and just walked off. No prayers, no nothing,

because as far as he was concerned, the child was not a Christian.

Even so, it's not good publicity for the Church Of England, is it?

It's not at all, no. It got itself into all the local papers.

There was a very, very detailed account of it

within a couple of days taking the place to pieces.

There was some strong language in the local press,

particularly on the letters page. Here's Mr John Skeet of Rushmere

on the subject of the burial legislation.

"Vile, monstrous law!

"Foul blot and stain on fair England's statute book!

"Will Englishmen continue coolly to allow such a vile abomination?"

Well, Drury himself came in for some hard words

and he actually sued a local newspaper proprietor

and he won his case, but only with token damages

and now the whole thing had become a national scandal.

This is what the Standard had to say about it -

"The unhappy differences, religious and political,

"which together constitute what is commonly known

"as the Burial Question, have never led to a scandal

"more painful and revolting."

Public opinion was on the side of the non-conformists.

They had challenged the privilege of the established church

and now there were calls to change the law.

But the church was not going to back down without a fight.

There was, actually, a very great head of steam

among the Anglican clergy about this.

15,000 of them, that's 75%,

signed a petition against any change in the burial laws

because they felt that non-conformists

were trying to hijack their churchyards.

But it was no good. In 1880 the Burial Law Reform Act was passed.

From now on, non-conformists could choose who buried them.

I think the Akenham affair

tells us a lot about the established church in England.

It hated seeing its position challenged.

Every concession was given as grudgingly as you can get.

But despite itself, the church, time and again, gave in.

It's almost become part of its DNA, slowly and untidily

to pave the way for more and more degrees of pluralism.

What I hope to have shown you is that the measure of Englishness

is not about how Anglo-Saxon you are.

English heritage is, in fact, much more diverse,

embracing gifts from the original British -

or Spaniards, if you prefer - the Scandinavians, the French.

And while in nearly all western Europe,

established churches enforced a religious monopoly,

the church in England never came close.

From Catholics to Baptists, Huguenots and Familists -

all would be accepted as English.

So, to answer a big question, Englishness is a broad church.

And yet right up to the middle of the 20th century,

some still clung to a facade of Englishness

that was anything but diverse.

What happened in the second half of the century would change all that.

FESTIVE DRUMMING

SINGING AND CHANTING

Hindu worshippers gather for Ganesh Chaturthi -

the birthday of Lord Ganesh.

It's a joyful, ten-day festival,

and at the end of it, Hindus from across the north of England

head for one place.

DRUMMING AND SINGING

Lord Ganesh must be immersed in flowing water

and so, for this day, the River Mersey is affectionately renamed

the Ganges of the North.

This exuberant Hindu festival

is one of many new expressions of Englishness.

Since the end of the British Empire thousands of immigrants -

non-white and non-Christian - have come to Britain.

They've made this country

and specially England where most have settled,

more varied than ever.

I'm coming here today to thank Lord Ganesh

for helping me with my GCSE results.

I've been really successful and I'd just like to thank God again.

It means a lot to me. It's such a joyous occasion

for the whole family - for the whole community -

to get together, and this just tops it off!

CHEERING

Even though history shows us that to be English is to be diverse,

the wealth of new cultures in 21st-century England

is posing a challenge.

This plural society is at a crossroads.

The English have become so diverse

that they're confused about who they are.

They're facing an identity crisis.

I think part of the reason may be the English approach

to multiculturalism, which has allowed separate communities

to develop in isolation from one another.

There's no shared identity.

If you don't have one system of values for everyone to buy into,

then you create a void, and into that void

rush all sorts of passionate opinions like air into a vacuum -

hot air, in fact.

So in England we have Islamism, Christian fundamentalism,

nationalist political parties.

Extremists are a tiny minority,

but the effect of their actions is massive.

I've watched one possible response to that threat emerging in England.

You might call it "secular liberalism".

The idea is that you confine religion to the private sphere

and you don't promote any alternative values

beyond the general notion of liberty and tolerance.

In a multi-cultural society,

you can see why this resolute rejection of public religion

might seem a good thing.

But there's an underlying problem

for a nation which must tolerate all views.

How does a liberal society resist extremism,

if it's only ultimate value is toleration?

Is it actually entitled to resist extremism?

It's a big dilemma.

So how might we get round it?

I believe the answer lies in the opposite direction to secularism.

If you try to keep religion entirely private,

you ignore the lessons of the past.

No secular society, despite its best efforts,

has ever managed to squash deeply held faith.

What it needs to do is find ways

of coming to terms with religious diversity.

And one institution has already managed that.

It's the Church Of England.

How many times have I heard the C of E being sneered at for being woolly or irrelevant?

Well, history has taught the Church how to compromise

and live with opposing points of view.

I see the Church of England as an icon of English plurality and its best symbol

is its quiver full of cathedrals, like this one here in Leicester.

This ancient building is on the frontline

of this very contemporary struggle between extremism and tolerance.

In 2010, the English Defence League,

which says it's opposed to Islamic extremism, came to Leicester.

# Send her victorious... #

In response, all the city's faith communities came together,

along with civic leaders.

They held a multi-faith vigil in the cathedral.

I find it very satisfying to see a cathedral reclaiming the role

for which they were intended - to be a mother-Church for their area.

But there's another thing about cathedrals.

They are an image of something very precious that the Church of England has to offer.

A sense of a strong, national framework that has survived

everything that history could throw at it.

In towns and villages across England, the Church still has an unparalleled presence.

Because there is an established church,

every square foot of English soil remains in an Anglican parish.

For centuries, this umbrella organisation has been

learning how to offer very different communities

up and down the nation a set of shared core values -

a public moral consciousness that goes beyond denomination or creed.

Today in our hugely varied and sometimes badly divided communities,

there's a real need for a local arbiter that can act

on behalf of people of different faiths and none,

which communities can unite around irrespective of their faith.

The Church of England is uniquely placed to meet that need.

But can it?

I've come to talk to the head of the Church

about how it has been trying -

sometimes only to get its fingers badly burned.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams,

sparked a huge row with comments which seemed to support

the introduction of Islamic Sharia law into British law.

The row was a complete distraction from the far more important issues

which the Archbishop was tackling.

In his comments on Sharia law,

I think Rowan Williams was trying to address the problems

of contemporary England and getting us to talk about them.

That is what the Church of England has done for centuries,

and what it should go on doing.

I was very interested by the kerfuffle around your comments on Sharia law.

-And it's not so much...

-So was I!

..it's not so much what you said and what...

the things people said back,

but the fact that there could be such a fuss about such comments.

What's your feeling about that, looking back on it?

I think there was quite a strong feeling that the archbishop

of the established church ought to be defending

the established church against other religions,

whereas I think I was working on the assumption that part of my job

as archbishop in the established church was to ask how the society

as a whole can be hospitable towards the minorities within it,

that that's the role of brokering, the role of drawing people into a conversation.

So I think there was quite a mismatch of expectation there.

And actually, in a rather odd way,

the idea that the archbishop ought to be speaking in defence

of the established church against others is not one that many

within the established church would recognise,

partly because of the sort of experience they have at the grass roots

in the communities of Birmingham or Leicester or Bradford, whatever.

I'm thinking of secularists who would say

the Church of England has no place, it has no role now.

So what would happen if you subtracted the Church of England

from the equation, from society now, what difference would it make?

I think it would make a difference at two levels at least.

One of those levels is the purely personal or pastoral level.

There would be no obvious place to go to, let's say,

to commemorate the victims of the 7/7 bombings, no obvious place

to go locally when people have been through a trauma.

At the broader level, the higher level,

I think what would be missed is some sense that the religious perspective

in the broadest sense of all is a proper part of public discussion.

It's not there to dominate, it's not there to give all the answers,

but it's there recognising that here is a hugely important

dimension of human experience, which if you don't

factor into public discussion will as it were go underground

and become more bigoted, more introverted, more problematic.

Bring it into the public discussion and actually everybody wins.

The Archbishop sees his role as a broker of all religious

points of view in society, rather than as a defender of one church.

He doesn't want the religious voice to dominate

but he does want it to be heard.

He thinks it's essential to bringing people together in a plural society.

And he believes that his church is ideally positioned to take the lead.

It is in fact the kind of work in which the Church of England is constantly engaged.

Recognising that in our complex societies there are many

different beliefs, values and moral systems and that's why

it's such a privilege and a joy that people of different faiths

and backgrounds can all come together in this cathedral today.

This is an idea that goes against the prevailing wisdom of secularism.

And yet the evidence of this series is that it might just work.

For what I've found is that religion,

and what it means to be English, are closely intertwined.

The Church created the sense that the English are somehow

destined to play a big role on the world stage.

Behind that sense lurks the belief that God is on the side of England.

The fact that the English have finally become a tolerant nation

indifferent to difference has been borne out of their religious past.

A messy, tangled history to be sure, but religious nevertheless.

After all that, after all the muddled history, the ups

and downs, the bads and the goods, the shameful and the creditable,

we have a result which really might have something to teach the world.

To be English is to be diverse - to be a broad church.

And that's because there is a broad church at the heart of the nation.

We need to stand up to those who claim to own the past

just so they can misuse it for their own intolerant purposes.

Let's reclaim that past

and then we will discover what it is to be English.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd