I begin this review with a declaration of interest. Roger Scruton and I are rather alike. When very young, we watched our present queen's coronation on small black-and-white televisions, our first experience of the medium. We are both church organists, both distrust confident religious dogma and clerical pretensions, both love the Church of England in a grumpy fashion, and we have both been known to cultivate a fogeyish image on occasion.
Because of these congruities, I find Scruton's latest book, a paean to Anglicanism, deeply irritating and unsatisfactory. It attempts to disarm criticism by styling itself "a personal history"; but that's no substitute for real history. Instead of history, it provides a catalogue of Victorian cliches and misrepresentations, from "the church of the catacombs" through to an Anglo-Saxon church proudly independent of Rome to a Thomas Cranmer influenced by John Calvin, and beyond. A similar historical farrago of half-truths and wishful thinking helped convert TS Eliot to high church Anglicanism in the 1920s, so there's one brownie point for it, but as an account of the English past, it won't wash. Over four decades of teaching undergraduates, I have been fortunate rarely to read an essay on church history this bad: it's Sellar and Yeatman without the jokes. This is a common problem with philosophers. I will not weary the reader by cataloguing howlers and solecisms, but would be pleased to furnish a list to Prof Scruton, should he so desire.
A fundamental problem is that he persistently refers to "the Anglican church" throughout his account of its history since 1533, with a further implication that even before that, Anglicanism had always been sitting in the cupboard under the stairs, waiting for the pope to go away. Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory in 597 to establish Roman authority in the old imperial provinces of Britannia, would have been puzzled to learn that his mission had created such a body.
A millennium after Augustine, during the 16th-century reformation, we still couldn't talk about "Anglicanism" – only about the Church of England. Anglicanism really didn't take shape until some determined reconstruction in 1660-62. Previously, it was a "reformed" Protestant church of the European reformation – "reformed", technically, because it wasn't Lutheran – and it looked much to the reformed church in Zurich, a city that doesn't get a mention in Scruton's account, though Geneva does, excessively. The Tudor C of E lacked qualities Scruton admires: tolerance and an embrace of the "middle way". Its bishops ordered images and stained glass to be smashed, a regrettable vandalism that Scruton attributes to some vaguely characterised fanatical thugs called "Puritans". Tudor and Stuart England executed more Roman Catholics than any other Protestant church in Europe, and burned Anabaptists too, besides later dispatching quite a few Scottish Covenanters. The English church was not a "middle way" between the pope and Protestantism, because, as its leaders would brutally have made clear to Scruton, you can't have a middle way between the Antichrist and truth.
There was one big difference, nevertheless, between this reformed church and others in the Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland, Geneva and Hungary: it kept cathedrals, with virtually all their medieval institutions, especially choirs and organs, and a regular daily round of solemnly performed services to which Archbishop Cranmer's Prayer Book accidentally lent itself. The cathedrals and their continuing life threw a spanner in the works of English reformed Protestantism, directly confronting many of its cherished beliefs. Members of the church who logically enough objected to this anomaly were given that abusive label "Puritans", and in the end, their fury led to the beheading of Charles I in 1649, having already prompted the abolition of cathedrals and their bishops. Killing a king was a step too far, and so the English upper classes meekly acquiesced to bringing back crown and mitre in 1660. This restored church constructed a new myth of itself as a middle way of moderation, which was a facade for a great deal more persecution, until it realised reluctantly that it would never enjoy a monopoly on English Protestantism, and would have to tolerate competitors.
Only then, and only gradually, did the C of E really become the nuanced, slightly apologetic institution that Scruton, with justice, admires. It has evolved into a church of irreconcilable paradox, where, particularly after the 19th-century Oxford movement, people kneel at the altar rail next to each other and believe completely contradictory things about the bread and wine they are receiving. This profound clash renders trivial the present disagreements in the Anglican communion about sexuality. That seems to me one of the most hopeful things about Anglicanism: it is an arena for paradox. No false claims of clerical authority or spurious logical consistency will ever make its understanding of religion into a neat range of solutions. Yet it has a firm grip on the past: it sees that Christianity is a religion of stories, layer on layer, right back to Christ's apostles. On that, Scruton and I would probably agree, even if we drew different conclusions from such propositions. We would both commend its established status, though for different reasons. Mine include the observation that interestingly many English Muslim, Hindu and Jewish leaders approve of the Anglican establishment, though I can quite understand why other English Christians don't. Roman Catholics and Free Church people alike might appreciate the spoof letterhead I was once sent: "The Church of England: Loving Jesus with a Slight Air of Superiority Since 597." That rather embodies Scruton's account of "Anglican" history.
All this may seem like breaking a butterfly on a wheel, and it has to be said that lurking behind Scruton's "597 and All That" there is a delicate essay on belief in the modern world that says sensible things about the nature of sacrifice. Scruton provides a rather moving and perhaps unintentionally revealing memoir of his youthful struggle towards Anglicanism. When he genuinely knows about something, other rewards appear: some enjoyably sensitive pages on the feel of a country church, church architecture generally, and some mostly accurate discussion of church music. The why-oh-why Daily Mailery is mostly postponed to the brief conclusion, and we do not encounter that chimera of rightwing journalism "political correctness" until late on.
But it would be nice if Scruton knew more about the Church of England for which he has such affection. He seems to take seriously the Anglican ordinariate, an expensive damp squib created by Pope Benedict XVI to attract conservative Anglicans, so far with very little success, and his knowledge of the Episcopal church (the Anglican church of the US) seems confined to the sniping from small splinter groups that have left it – the Tea Party at prayer. Above all, the great puzzle of this book is that it hardly mentions the cathedrals, which are the great success story of the modern established church, their congregations growing and their fabrics better cared for than ever before. Perhaps a bit more church-crawling is called for?
• Diarmaid MacCulloch's Silence: A Christian History is published by Allen Lane.
