What is English Christianity?

Peter Ackroyd’s newest book considers the impact Chris­­­t­ian­ity has had on the character of English culture—and vice-versa. Ackroyd is a revered novelist, critic, biographer, and historian whose past work has often concerned itself with important figures in England’s ecclesiastical history. His biography of St. Thomas More, for example, is particularly highly regarded. But this is the first time Ackroyd has turned his full attention to religion as such.

The English Soul is motivated by Ackroyd’s conviction that “Christianity has been the anchoring and defining doctrine of England” and “has been the reflection, perhaps the embodiment, of the English soul.” While he acknowledges the proliferation of other faiths (and secular worldviews) in the British Isles, nevertheless he believes that there has been a special relationship historically between the development of a distinctively English sensibility and a particularly English form of Christianity. To prove the point, he leads the reader across more than a millennium of history through capsule biographies of important Christian preachers, activists, and intellectuals (as well as, somewhat inexplicably given the omission of other faiths, a few influential atheists such as Richard Dawkins).

Ackroyd’s protagonists, ranging from Bede and Julian of Norwich to Charles Spurgeon and C. S. Lewis, are almost without exception canonical figures. Moreover, almost every vessel of the English soul described in the book is a writer of some distinction, whose texts transmitted their ideas about God and humanity down through generations. There is little sense in Ackroyd’s pages that the heart of English Christianity may be found in the illiterate or the undistinguished rather than the brilliant and the bold. Nevertheless, The English Soul succeeds in demonstrating the immense literary and spiritual riches of the Christian tradition in England as embodied in its leading artists and thinkers.