The political Bible, part 7: nationhood

From early efforts to unite warring tribes onwards, Britain's sense of shared identity has been shaped by the Bible
SNP Leader Alex Salmond
The SNP's victory in May 2011 elections raised the question of British national identity. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The stunning victory of the Scottish National party in elections earlier this year brought the question of national identity to the very centre of the political stage. What exactly is it that holds us together?

So long have the British – let alone the English – taken the answer to this question for granted that we are liable to forget quite how much a nation needs ideas of collective identity to flourish. The lack of one does not result in social chaos, but does, to borrow Jonathan Sacks's useful analogy, turn the nation into an hotel, in which isolated individuals, families and interest groups subsist, rather than a home in which a people lives and pursues common goals.

The unpalatable fact for any public figure who seeks today to articulate some shared sense of identity – and most do – is that in Britain this has always been tied closely to Christianity and specifically to the Bible.

When Pope Gregory sent his missionaries to the English people in 597, the English people did not exist. Conceiving of them as a single unit and sending his clerics to them all was a momentous move on Gregory's part, causing one recent historian to remark provocatively that "the English owe their existence as a people, or at least the recognition of it, to the papacy".

It was a slow process catalysed by the Venerable Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People used biblical motifs to form a national narrative, and subsequently by King Alfred. Beset by heathen armies from over the sea – the Old Testament parallel was only too obvious to many at the time – Alfred embarked on a reform of the ecclesiastical, educational and moral life of the people, much of which centred on a conscious turning to the Bible.

Most notably, he issued a seminal law code. This integrated earlier codes from other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and placed them firmly within the bigger Christian story. Disordered and full of contradictions as it was, the code was deeply symbolic, beginning with the Ten Commandments, 66 verses of Mosaic law, the Golden Rule (Matthew 7.12) and the apostolic letter from Acts 15, before setting out 120 chapters, 120 being the age at which Moses died, the number of believers in the earliest church and standing for law in the number symbolism of early medieval biblical exegetes. In essence, Alfred worked to forge the identity of the English as a Christian people that was defending itself against a violent, irreligious menace.

It was a similar, if less dramatic, story 900 years later when Protestantism helped forge a common identity following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 and the Act of Union in 1707. The fact that the nation had, seemingly miraculously, managed to avoid civil war and a Catholic succession, did not change the fact that England was still a divided nation. There was a pressing need to forge a meaningful political identity, which was redoubled after 1707.

This was done predominantly through Protestantism, with the nation again placing itself within the stream of salvation history in a way that was usually smug and sometimes simply heretical. It wasn't only that they compared their enemies to the Egyptians or Assyrians (standard fare for the time), or that they instituted the presentation of the Bible to the monarch at his/her coronation (an enduring innovation) but, rather, that they identified Britain baldly with God's own people.

Isaac Watts, for example, published a translation of psalms in 1719 in which he rendered Israel as "Great Britain". In the words of another recent historian, Linda Colley: "Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible."

Such posturing presents us with the advantages and drawbacks of using religion as a foundation for national identity. Religion has the capacity to unite large groups of people and create a common sense of purpose that groups which share a political infrastructure often badly need. But in the process it can not only exclude, it can also mute or corrupt the religion itself. Not without reason were the decades following the Glorious Revolution characterised by a notoriously lax and self-satisfied Christianity.

It is, of course, a fallacy to claim that just because our national life has been profoundly moulded by biblical Christianity, it should always be so. Indeed, given the religious state of the nation it would also be highly inadvisable. But the alternative view – that we can forge a meaningful identity without recourse to some foundational values or, worse, that we don't need any such identity to flourish as a nation – is no less erroneous.