Omrani God is an Englishman

Christianity and the Creation of England
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-307-5
Verlag: Forum
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

'Allows us to understand the profound, and often profoundly beneficial, impact of Christianity' Anthony Seldon 'Superb ... Lively and erudite' The Telegraph 'Tremendous ... The arguments are truly profound' The Spectator 'A finely judged and beautifully written account' Peter Frankopan Christianity in England is in decline. Congregations are dwindling and ever fewer young people believe. Should we merely shrug our shoulders and accept this as inevitable and even healthy, or is something important being lost? Bijan Omrani argues that this decline is the most momentous change to occur in English history. He shows how a religion that has been part of our national story for over 1700 years was instrumental in the creation and development of the English nation, its codes of law and morality, and its structures of government and kingship. He demonstrates its profound cultural impact, in areas ranging from architecture and literature to our very landscape and the structure of our everyday life and language. Its influence, he contends, has been enormous, largely benign, and shouldn't be lightly abandoned. Ending with a rousing call to retain Christianity, rightly understood, as a way of dealing with both the eternal questions of the human condition, as well as the malaises of modernity, this is an erudite and tender tribute to our Christian history and heritage.

Bijan Omrani's previous books and research have looked at questions of religious history and cultural identity from Ancient Rome and Greece to Afghanistan and the Silk Road. An Oxford-educated barrister, he has taught Classics at Eton College and Westminster School, is a former editor of the Asian Affairs Journal, and is currently a research fellow at the University of Exeter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Omrani, Bijan

Leseproben

2

Teach Me Thy Laws

One could start the story of the deep relationship between Christianity and English law back in the time of Aethelbert and the Anglo-Saxons, but an easier place to begin is in the twentieth century, with a strange tale of some ginger beer and a dead snail.

On a Sunday evening in August 1928 a Glasgow shop assistant, May Donoghue, took a tram to the western suburb of Paisley to see a friend. It was, no doubt, a welcome excursion. Her life, at that time, had been difficult. That year, she had separated from her husband, and had earlier lost her daughter, Mabel, at the age of just 11 days. She was living in a poor tenement with her young son; thus, the prospect of a few hours away from her cares was almost certain to be pleasing.

Mrs Donoghue went with her friend along the cobbled streets to the Wellmeadow Cafe, not far from the Thomas Coates Memorial Church. It was nearly 9 p.m. when they arrived. Her friend ordered a Scotsman’s ice-cream float for Mrs Donoghue, and a pear and ice for herself. The ice-cream float would have been a refreshing treat at the end of a warm day – a scoop of ice cream floating in a bowl of ginger beer. The cafe’s proprietor, an Italian migrant called Francis Minchella, brought the ice cream in a tumbler and the ginger beer in a dark bottle to their table. He poured some of the beer into the tumbler, and Mrs Donoghue fell on the concoction with relish. After a moment, she poured the rest of the ginger beer into her tumbler. But immediately her pleasure in the languid evening turned to horror. Out of the bottle, from the dregs of the beer, came the decayed remains of a snail.

It was an unpleasant end to the day. Mrs Donoghue suffered not only acute distress at finding herself inadvertently consuming the fragments of a decomposing gastropod, but also lingering gastric problems from the material she had ingested. Her illness required not only treatment from her doctor, but also a stay in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.1

Should Mrs Donoghue be compensated for her injury and distress? And if so, how? Who was responsible? The beer bottle had been brown and opaque; she could not have known that the snail was inside, nor could Mr Minchella. The person obviously responsible was the manufacturer, a man called David Stevenson, who ran a ginger beer and lemonade production plant in Glen Lane, less than a mile from the cafe.

And that is who was sued. The plant was, according to legal papers presented at the trial, a place where ‘snails and the slimy trails of snails were frequently found’.

Despite what might have appeared an open-and-shut case, there was a serious legal problem. As the law stood, it would have been impossible for Mrs Donoghue to sue Mr Stevenson. For a start, there was no contract between them; therefore, she could not sue him for breach of contract on the grounds that he had supplied defective goods. In fact, the contract was between her friend and Mr Minchella, for the sale of the ginger beer, but her friend could not sue because she herself had not suffered any loss. Mrs Donoghue would therefore have to sue Mr Stevenson for negligence; however, the circumstances in which negligence claims could be brought stretched only to when there were already contractual relationships between the parties, or where the defendant had behaved fraudulently, or had been making something dangerous. This did not include ginger beer. The law at that time held that manufacturers had no general duty of care to consumers further down the line who might be harmed by their defective products. Thus, Mr Stevenson might allow all manner of snails to infest his beer with impunity.

This seemed an outrage to Mrs Donoghue and her determined solicitor, Walter Leechman. Together, they pursued her claim for £500 compensation all the way to the UK’s highest court (then the House of Lords) in London. Mrs Donoghue’s barristers worked for free, and to protect herself from the costs of the case she declared before the House that: ‘I am very poor… and am not worth in all the world the sum of Five Pounds.’2 Regardless of her financial circumstances, some of the generation’s foremost legal minds were involved in the case, including the Solicitor General for Scotland, and other King’s Counsel who would go on to become leading judges. Mrs Donoghue’s representatives argued that manufacturers who marketed products must be liable for any defects that could not be checked by the ultimate consumers before use. Mr Stevenson’s defence argued that there was no relationship in law between the manufacturer and the ultimate consumer that would make the manufacturer liable.

Finally, in May 1932, nearly four years after the appearance of the unfortunate snail, Lord Atkin of Aberdovey rose in the splendour of the upper chamber to deliver his determination of the case. His speech marked a fundamental change in the law which is the basis of a host of protections enjoyed by everyone in the UK to this day:

The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer’s question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be – persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.3

Lord Atkin’s speech established in law a general duty of care in almost any relationship, and in almost any circumstance. Not just when there might be a snail in a bottle, but also if a doctor harms a patient through a careless diagnosis, or when a dangerous production line causes injury to a worker, or even when a lawyer impoverishes a client through misguided legal advice. Direct physical contact was no longer necessary. It became a question of whether there was a fault that created an injury or loss. Lord Atkin thus laid the foundation for the modern approach to compensation for personal injury, product liability and professional negligence.

Though Lord Atkin drew from scattered remarks by judges in earlier cases to show a precedent for his approach, the overriding influence on his judgment was not legal precedent but Christianity. The passage he had in mind was the story of the Good Samaritan. In Luke’s Gospel (10.25–37), a lawyer asks Christ what he should do to inherit eternal life. Christ replies by asking the lawyer what the law said. The lawyer responds by quoting the ‘Golden Maxim’: to love God and ‘thy neighbour as thyself’. When Christ approves of this answer, the lawyer then asks: ‘And who is my neighbour?’, a question that prompts Christ to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan. Lord Atkin relied on this passage to derive an imperative not to injure one’s neighbour, but also to widen the idea in English law of who, in these circumstances, might be considered one’s neighbour.

Lord Atkin’s reference to the Good Samaritan was not a one-off rhetorical trope. His reasoning about the case had been profoundly influenced by the text of the gospel.4 Two months before his speech in the House of Lords he had delivered a lecture at King’s College London on the idea of neighbourliness in law, where he again repeated the Golden Maxim: ‘I doubt whether the whole of the law of tort could not be comprised in the Golden Maxim to do unto your neighbour as you would that he should do unto you.’5

Lord Atkin’s grandson, the Member of Parliament Toby Low, also recalled that, in the summer of 1931, as Lord Atkin carved the joint at lunch on Sundays, he would talk to the family about the snail-in-the-bottle case. The idea of ‘who is my neighbour?’, said Low, ‘was an easily understandable theme immediately after church’.6

The snail-in-the-bottle case, , is one of the first studied by students at English law schools; however, few tutors allude to the influence of Christianity on the ruling. Lord Atkin’s findings are instead presented as a matter of pure reasoning and precedent. The idea that Christianity, despite its place in English life and history, has played, or may play, a fundamental role in developing the laws of England and its guiding principles is one that would likely make many contemporary judges and barristers uncomfortable. Indeed, in a 2011 judgment, Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson put it bluntly: ‘the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form’.7

This statement would have deeply surprised not only Lord Atkin, but also his predecessors such as Lord Blackstone, who in the eighteenth century wrote the leading treatise on the Common Law with the statement that ‘the Christian religion… is a part of the law of the land’.8 His contemporary the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, agreed, using exactly the same words as Blackstone.9 In 1729 Chief Justice Raymond stated that ‘Christianity in general is parcel of the common law of England’,10 repeating the dictum of the Chief Justice Lord Hale, in 1676, that ‘Christianity is parcel of the laws of England’.11 In 1651, another judge, Lord Keble, expressed the same proposition as strongly as he could:

Whatsoever is not consonant to the law of God in Scripture, or to right reason, which is maintained in Scripture, whatsoever is in England, be it acts of Parliament, customs, or any judicial acts of the Court, it is not the laws of England, but the error of the party which did...