What's the problem with the flag of St George?

What is England’s day if not St George’s Day? Who even is St George? Why don't the English celebrate it? Can we walk and talk around Hinton St George, a village in Somerset? Want to see the beautiful church? Here's the YouTube video:

https://youtu.be/clk4SIcFUWc

See also Cary's Almanac:

https://jamescary.substack.com/p/st-george-and-the-dragon-are-dead

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello and welcome to the Stand Up Theologian podcast. And this is a solo episode, and this is also a YouTube video. If you go to a link in the show notes, you'll be able to click and watch me have a wonder around Inton St. George. And we're talking about, say we I am talking about St. George and England and why we have a bit of a problem applying the flag on St. George's Day. And you know when St. George's Day is? As an Englishman, I had to check. That's astonishing, isn't it? What's going on now? So in this episode, I talked a bit about that. This is part of me trying to figure out how to do YouTube as well as this podcast. So this is a crossover episode. So yeah, hope you enjoy it. Go and have a look. Or stay here and have a listen. Here we go. It's not bad, is it? That is the church of St. George, and the reason I've come here is because next week at the time of recording is St George's Day in England, and St George is the patron saint of England. And I thought to myself, I should probably go to St George's Church. Where will I find a St George's Church? I know, in the village of Hinton St George. So here I am, and it's beautiful, isn't it? Absolutely stunning building. And I've been for a walk around, and uh on the video, I'll just put up some shots of that as you walk around the churchyard. And I guess on St George's Day, the St. George's flag will be hoisted from that flagpole at the top of the tower, and I don't think anybody in Hinton St. George is going to have much of a problem with that. This is a very traditional old village in Somerset, and this is the Church of St. George, so nobody's terribly worried about a St George's flag here in this village. But it's strange, isn't it? And this is something I want to talk about on this video and just think aloud about, and we're going to walk and talk. Obviously, I'll be the doing the walking and the talking. But I'm thinking aloud really, I'm trying to work out what it is that makes us so nervous about our own national flag and our own nation being England. I'm English, I'm also British, and we'll get onto that. But what is it that we don't even know when our Saints Day is? So it's the 23rd of April. Do you know what? I'm gonna check that. Isn't it mad? I don't know off the top of my head the National Day of England, which is the 23rd of April. I've had to check that. That's weird, isn't it? That's weird. What is that? England is a very fine, powerful, historic, proud, and yet humble. Maybe that's the problem. Or not a problem, maybe that's the virtue, maybe that's what we're living with. We're all of those things we're a proud nation. And yet we don't celebrate ourselves and we find it icky and uncomfortable. And as you know, although I describe myself as the stand-up theologian, I'm obsessed with history and always have been. And I did it for GCSE, and then I did it for A-level, and then although I I first applied to do history at university, I wanted to do history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, unsuccessful. I then went to Durham to study theology. And actually, in the end, I ended up doing a ton of history. My third year exams were mostly history. One of them was just a straight English history course, 1377 to 1547. I seem to remember. That's a long time ago now, that's the late 90s we're talking. So I'm really interested in history and I want to know what history teaches us. And I've just been reading history books again and again, history book after book after book after book, trying to figure out who are we? I'm really interested in England. That's when I want to talk about more on this YouTube channel and think about and think aloud. And I live in England, so I might as well show you where I am. I don't want to sit in um in my office making videos. I've got another YouTube channel for that, that's called the Situation Room. I've got a whiteboard and talk about sitcom. That's my kind of my day job, or at least it used to be. There's an existential crisis going on, isn't there? In England. English flags were going up last year. There's the Reform Party, there's the Restore Party. What are we restoring? What is the restoration? Of what? I think there are a couple of dates that are important that explain why we've got a problem. So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna go on a bit of a walk, a bit of a loop, and end up back at this church, and I'm just gonna give you I say my version, that implies that therefore it's entirely subjective. But again, I think this is a problem, isn't it? Your England and my England might be very different and say very different things and have a very different past, and there's obviously an extent to which that's true, but we're so now down the rabbit hole of individualism and whatever it means to me and whatever it means to you, that I mean England is a corporate is a corporate thing, isn't it? It's a body, it's a country, it's a nation, and it's something that we share. But if my version and your version are individualized and actually say everything about who we are and very little about what England is, then we're in a right old state, aren't we? And what that means is when we feel Englishness as being threatened, which is clearly what's going on at the moment, which you know that's probably a separate conversation for another video. What you need to do is to define who we are. We don't want this thing, let's say, because that's not us. Well, who who's us? What are we? What do we stand for? How do we decide what we stand for? Who decided it? When was it decided? Are we still okay with that? Um, that a thousand years ago this happened, or even longer ago, this other thing happened. So this is a circuitous YouTube video that I'm making. And I'm gonna think about this and tell you what I think, and through telling you what I think I might discover what I actually think, and hopefully you'll find that helpful. So that's the idea. Here I am at St. George's Church in Hinton St. George. There's a nice pub down the road named after the landowner uh of this area, or at least was for hundreds of years. I think I went there for my wedding anniversary a few years ago and had a nice meal. But uh yeah, let's go for a bit of a walk. So let's talk about St. George. Who even is he? And this is a thing that kind of gives fuel to the division and the divisiveness over Saint George because of course he wasn't English, and isn't it ridiculous to have a patron saint of your country who isn't from your country? And either, therefore, it's ridiculous to cling on to a non-English saint as the patron saint, or that inherently displays the idiocy of any form of nationalism or patriotism, because what even is a nation, it doesn't really matter. And I don't think either of those things are particularly helpful. So St. George obviously is a uh George is a slightly mystical figure. We have a few records of him. Uh he's out somewhere in Eastern Europe, and he is also the pension saint of other countries, uh, including Georgia, which is named after him, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, where Stalin was from. Uh, he is uh Georgian, and so therefore, it's easy to say, well, this is just some old myth and superstition, and St. George is of no interest or value, he just represents something, and he killed a dragon. I mean, how ridiculous! Because obviously there are no such things as dragons. Alright, sure about that? I'm not. So that's another one for another video. Do one about dragons. There was a dragon not far from here near the city of Wells, and it was killed by the bishop uh in the 14th century. Um, well, yeah, I'll make a video about that. So George is seen as is a bit of a lightning rod, so no wonder he ends up on the top of flags of church spires. But it sends it seems like he's sort of meaningless. But of course, anything that's existed for that long, his name, what he stands for, whatever, has meaning. And the interesting thing is that St. George ends up becoming um the sort of patron saint, partly through the chivalry and knights uh of Kings of King Edward in the 13th, 14th century, Order of the Garter tournaments uh for England and St. George as we fight against the French in the Hundred Years' War. George gets kind of embedded into things. So Windsor Castle, the chapel, the royal chapel there, is St. George's. And so therefore, uh a whole load of stuff is kind of built in around, he's becomes a bit of a load-bearing saint, and therefore he cannot be dispensed with when the theology of the nation changes. So does that this idea that George is not English, ignore him, or therefore anyone clinging on to him is some petty little Englander who has no idea that he's a dragon slayer, and of course, dragons aren't real, therefore, nation isn't real, all these kinds of things. Very lazy thinking uh on both sides, really, because also to cling on to George is this embodiment of England without having any sense of what England actually is, you know, and there are people who want to go back and restore England. Well, to what? And to when? Because I think the problem is that people want to go back to, I don't know, the 1950s, and here's the problem with the 1950s: they gave birth to the 2020s, and I don't think we like the 2020s, do we? So going back doesn't really help you, you're just pushing yourself back up the slippery slope for you to slip back down again, and you know, your grandchildren will end up uh being very cross, and hence people are very angry about boomers uh for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. And so this is a really strange time. St. George is very divisive, and so what are we going back to? I think we need to talk a little bit about history, and we'll cover some really key dates and think there are two that are really important. Um, and the first is the Reformation. Let's say 1534, which is the Act of Supremacy, but you could argue essentially it's 1529, it doesn't matter. Late 1520s, early 1530s, and we all know about the Reformation because the only history that exists is Tudor history, and the only Tudor history is the history of Henry the Eighth, and the only thing we're interested in in Henry the Eighth is his wives, and mostly Anne Boleyn, and mostly James Seymour. Um, and so that does seem to be a very well-established narrative. But I think what happens at the Reformation is really, really important. So um we'll get there in a minute, I promise. So I'm just gonna walk, and wow, look at that tree over there. That is a stunning, stunning tree that is still alive, it just hasn't got any flowers on it yet. We're halfway through April, seems a bit late to me. There's a whole rhyme, isn't there, about oaks, uh birch and oak in for a soak. Can't remember whichever one my wife was telling me about this the other day, can't quite remember. Anyway, Reformation is key. That's our first of the two dates I'll mention. And uh, how do we get there? Uh I'll look at that in a second. Okay. It looks like doesn't it, like that is the way to go. But the footpath is actually down here. That's the problem with having a walk around England with footpaths. We've got footpaths, isn't that amazing? Uh, is because of the Ordnance Survey uh maps. And um I've got the app and it's brilliant. Isn't that incredible? The Ordnance Survey, what's the word ordinance from? Ordnance is artillery fire, isn't it? It's weapons, and so you need to know the topography of the land in order to uh fire projectiles and get your bearings right and get your angles right. And so, therefore, we have accurate maps of this country in case we're invaded. And of course, we're not invaded, not really, just once in 1066, but actually, maybe we were invaded before that by something that actually had far more impact, and that is the invasion of 597, which is the invasion of Christianity. Now, here I am in the West Country. Oh, that there's the uh there's the style, it's gonna sit here for a minute. So, the um here I am in the West Country near Glastonbury, and of course some would say that Christianity came over here with uh Joseph of Arimathea, perhaps even Jesus himself. No, but a Joseph of Arimathea is perfectly believable, doesn't require a miracle to believe that somebody from that part of the world uh who knew Jesus came to England and spread the gospel. It's possible. I I'm not sure it's true, but it doesn't really matter. The reality is that Christianity was already here by 597. In fact, it was already in Kent by 597 because the Queen of Kent was a Christian and she had a chapel of her own as part of the marriage deal, a Christian chapel, marrying a pagan king. And so when uh Augusta and his monks turned up in 597, having been sent by the Pope, she said uh, oh hello, you're here. Well done. Uh so it wasn't really a huge, momentous moment in quite the same way that it might appear to be. And actually, the Romans became Christians, more or less, and the Romans were here till 410 before they left. And so actually, the first Christian martyr is a former Roman soldier called St. Alban. Alban, would would he be a contender for our patron saint if he wanted an Englishman? Except, of course, it wasn't an Englishman, he was a Roman soldier, wasn't he? And that's what the church does, it kind of brings you this international dimension right from the outset, which is always going to happen. And the problem with a lot of the nationalist debate and restoring Britain and that kind of thing is it has the church embedded in it from its very, very core, and the church, you know, and I'm an Anglican, I believe in a national church, I believe in the Church of England, I am, you know, I'm up to my neck and all that stuff. The moment you remove active faith, and by faith I don't just mean being in favour of the church, but following Jesus, uh, which is something that a lot of people don't want to do. I do want to do it, and I understand why they don't, because it's hard. Again, one for another video. So the church is embedded right from the start, and we become, to some extent, a Christian nation, because we get the um 597 and the establishment of Roman Christianity, the synod of Whitby in the 7th century decides we're gonna go with the Roman dating of Easter, and so suddenly we've got Roman Christianity, and along with that comes Benedictine monasteries and Benedictine Christianity, monastic Christianity, and we've got in our heads maybe 15th century monasteries, which are these big, great, big uh complexes of religious buildings and all that kind of stuff, and they became that obviously, but by that point they were hundreds of years old, if not a thousand years old. There was a huge monastic movement in the 8th century in England in the 9th century. By the 10th century, even to the 11th, people were worried that the monastic movement had come and gone, and it had another second wind, it had a third wind, in fact. And so Christianity is, I'm afraid, part of our story. And so St. George represents a form of Christian uh nationalism, he represents a form of Christian identity, and who else kills a dragon in the Bible? St. Michael, Michael the Archangel, he throws down the dragon, he kills a dragon in the book of Revelation, and some would argue that Michael is essentially Jesus, and I'm I'm not sure about which way to come down on that. That's again one for another video. But St. Michael was a big deal, particularly in the 14th century, which is why there are so many churches to St. Michael in the UK, in England in particular, because he was in some ways associated with St. George. So you do have some St. George's churches, but it's interesting, isn't it? There weren't there aren't that many in my home county of Somerset. I didn't go back to the church in which I was baptised, which is St George's, in Beckington, in North Somerset, because it's just a bit far. So I came here to Hinton St. George, and the church is now over there somewhere. And uh I'm reflecting on England becoming Christian. Now, of course, we were Christian, we were Western, we were Roman Christians, because that was the only game in town in Western Europe, and there's a whole Eastern Europe, Eastern Orthodox thing from that year 1000 onwards, which I don't know much about and we're not going to get into. And it's a it's thousands of miles away, and we're not gonna get fussed about that. There are, of course, crusades and that kind of stuff as well, which has a part, and so the Knights of Chivalry overlaps with the Crusades. And I'm and I'm jumping back forwards here, and I'm sorry about that, but that's the problem, isn't it? Your island story, the nation's story, has all of these bits, and people don't really know what order they're in. So Christianity comes in 597. Well, it was already here. Maybe it came under with Columbo, Columba, and all those uh early saints and St. Patrick and St. David, and um but maybe it was already here because of the Romans, maybe it was already here because of Joseph Maramathea. I mean, it doesn't really matter. But King Alfred, he was not Saint Alfred, he's King Alfred, establishes some form of England, and now Athelstan, partly through Tom Holland, is getting a lot of traction as the first Christian English king. And it's interesting that we defined our Englishness against the Vikings, and the way we defeated the Vikings was not with the sword, because they were really good with swords, they were really violent, um, and they worshipped uh demons. They thought, well, that's what the gods were. So they we how were they conquered? With Christianity, they became Christians, not just in this country, but then in Denmark, in Norway, in Sweden, the Viking kings became Christian kings, and so again, that gets folded in, and so you could say, Well, we're a nation of immigrants, and uh St. George is just a foreign person. Well, yeah, he is because of the netwide network of church and how that works internationally, because all Christians will be gathered around the throne of the Lamb from every Every nation. But by um Athelstan, and then you know there were more Viking shenanigans, and um Canute uh was a Viking, and although he was also a Christian, and it feels like it settles down under Edward the Confessor, and then of course we all know what happens is 1066, and that is the Norman invasion. By that stage, the Anglo-Saxon culture, and of course the Angles and the Saxons had come from outside of England, but we were a relatively settled people, and actually, although William the Conqueror conquered England, eventually England conquers the Normans, and the Saxons, the Anglo-Saxons uh remain. And therefore, the Anglo-Saxons are a relatively settled bunch of people for an extremely long time. We're not really mass-invaded for hundreds of years, and so we're gonna get to the Reformation, and we like to talk about Englishness and Magna Carta and those sorts of things, and what is it to be a true-born Englishman? And Magna Carta is a very important but very specific document about freedom, but it actually is also about fishing rights and and lots of other things too, and was immediately ignored by King John and then reasserted. But the fact is, again, what was it at the time and what it has become known to embody are two kind of different things, aren't they? We're gonna get back to the Reformation. So by by the 1530s, England has defined itself as a Roman Christian nation, and then we leave the European Union known as Christendom, or known as the Church of Rome, and set up as a nation, at which point we are a Protestant nation. Protestant. That's interesting, isn't it? Protest. It's now about what we're against. We're against Rome, we're against France, because it's a Roman power, we're against Spain, because they're also a Roman power, and we spend the next few hundred years being against France and Spain, and rather lacking Protestant allies, because Germany is not one nation, it's a series of principalities and states and city-states, so there's no real power base there. So England is kind of protesting alone. So we've gotten to the Reformation where it's a really key time and we're about to flourish in this sort of static Elizabethan age, but we're flourishing in Protestantism, which is struggling to find its feet. But eventually, you know, we've got King Edward, uh Henry's son, who establishes a sort of radical Protestantism, and then Mary introduces uh radical Roman Catholicism again. Uh they both die, and we're left with this Elizabethan settlement about which I wrote essays in the last exam I've ever sat in my life, my five finals. It was about the Elizabethan settlement, which I was not at the time interested in, but now realizing how incredibly important it is. So we've got to the Reformation, we've left, but we're now we're against, and we're struggling to assert, therefore, who are we? Who are we? And that will take us to our next date, and I'm gonna keep moving. It's a lovely sunny day, isn't it? You can hear the birds, and uh, I'm gonna sort of do a loop and we're gonna end up back at St. George's Church Hinton, by which time I might have thought what I now think about St. George and where this has gotten to us. Okay, I'm gonna keep moving. Here we go. So, where have we got to? I think I'm making this point that to separate Englishness and nation from Christianity is impossible, and that is what we're being invited to do, and the whole debate is not really about Englishness and restoring England and going back to what we were, it's not really credible from either side, really, because what would a Christian nation look like? Well, it looked very different from what we've become, and frankly, to what we have been. There's no one period in history where I think everything was as it should be in England. I mean, even 1552's Book of Common Prayer, which is pretty pretty punchy in terms of being Protestant and um reformed, nobody really went for it because this is all new to people. Nobody really knew what this was. So there is no one date to point back to, and Christians really don't know how to talk about this stuff because Christians, particularly for the last 20 years, have spent a long time clinging on to respectability intellectually and trying to prove that God exists, whether God should be involved in ruling a nation is completely off the table, not even a credible discussion. Uh, so Christians are really decades behind this, but these are the questions that people are now asking. I don't think you can separate it, and the reason for that is so we've got the Reformation, we've left we've left Rome, 1588, the Spanish Armada. Because it's a swashbuckling tale of seafaring heroism and Sir Francis Drake and all those kinds of people, it's the beginning of the great royal naval story. It doesn't feel real, and yet it was an existential threat to England. The King of Spain wanted England to be Christian, and that meant being under the authority of the Pope, and therefore he was prepared to send hundreds of ships and an army under the Duke of Parma, who was in the Low Countries, waiting to cross in flat bottom barges, so I've been told. I mean, whether this is possible or not, I don't know. But it was believed, and it is a very defining moment of Englishness, 1588, in the Spanish Armada, except because it's so defined, it almost sort of doesn't really mean anything. We don't really take it credibly. We get, of course, the famous Tilbury speech from Queen Elizabeth, I may have the body of a weakened, feeble woman. But because this has been turned into comedy like Blackadder and Horrible Histories, it sort of undermines it. And of course, those things are completely devoid of genuine religious understanding. Horrible histories, really, really funny. Lots of great people involved with that. I like it very much. It doesn't have anything to say about religion. If anything, it thinks that religion is a bit silly and backward because it's mostly written historically by Gen Xers who've been brought up to believe that religion is something from the past. I think, personal opinion, hot take. So 1588, we're defining ourselves against Rome, against Europe, and we're becoming a Christian nation. England is defining itself. Then what happens? 1603, the Queen dies, King James VI of Scotland becomes the King of England, and that changes an awful lot, and that sets us on the trajectory, a hundred-year trajectory via a civil war, the execution of a monarch, a decade of rule without a king, the restoration of a king, the deposition of another king, the invitation of a Dutch king. Meanwhile, all the people who are really serious about their religion have got on a ship and gone to America. And so what is left? And so that's my uh key next date, really, is 1707 is the act of union, where England becomes Great Britain. Britain, of course, another ancient word that goes back ages to Brittany as well. Um, and so suddenly Great Britain is this thing with this navy, commerce, it's getting rich. So in the 18th century, uh which about which I know almost nothing, that's the one century I know nothing about, other than the fact that it seems like we stopped talking about religion because we had wars about that, we had a civil war about it, we start talking about Englishness and freedoms and liberty and rights, and we also start talking about money, and England starts to get rich and super rich, except England slightly disappears and becomes Britain, and so the St George's flag is consumed into the Union Jack, and therefore to fly a St George's flag now is sort of seen as a separatist and separating yourself away from Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland because for our American viewers Great Britain is not England and England is not Great Britain, and neither of those two are the United Kingdom. So England is a very large country with Wales to the west, which is a principality, and Scotland to the north, which was a separate sovereign country for centuries, for thousands of years, until 1603, where we shared a monarch, it was two kingdoms, and then we had an act of union in 1707 where we became had political union. Of course, there was a third kingdom as well, which is Ireland, and so England asserted its supremacy over Ireland, and the King of England was also crowned King of Ireland. I read a date about that somewhere, Henry VIII was crowned King of Ireland in this particular year. I just thought, huh, that's interesting. There's a whole load of stuff about Irish history about which I know virtually nothing. So, but what I can tell you is that until the end of the 19th century, the British Isles was essentially one country. Um, it was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and well, now it's Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So the United Kingdom is kingdoms united together, and England is part of that. It's the biggest, it's the most populous, it's got London in it, and it's because it's the dominant one, it therefore has to say sorry all the time, which is in keeping with the English character, I think. And so you can fly a St David's flag, that's fine. You can fly a flag a Saltyre, the St Andrews flag in Scotland, that's fine, and the Irish flag in St Patrick. But flying the English flag on St George's Day, what are you doing? What are you saying? Who are you? What is this? It's very suspicious. And I think therefore 1707 is a key year because that is the moment when we England was swallowed up. And although it may have dominated the United Kingdom, it ceased to be England in quite a particular way, and so people get very confused between Englishness and Britishness. Um there's no such thing as United Kingdomness. That's that's not a thing. And so England didn't exactly disappear, but it got very, very confused. And we see this, therefore, in um the works of I listening to uh big rest is history thing about Dr. Johnson, and he says patriotism is the last what's it, the last bastion of the scoundrel. And he loved England, and he was quite rude about Scotland, but what he didn't like was the co-opting of patriotism as a way of justifying any kind of behaviour for liberty or I get to do what I want or that kind of thing. He didn't like that. That's interesting, isn't it? I think we're seeing a bit of that at the moment. It's good to be suspicious of demagogues, and John Wilkes apparently was the demagogue of the time that Dr. Johnson did not much care for. And then uh GK Chesterton, I think, is probably more helpful in the late 19th, early 20th century, was writing about this sort of thing. He didn't write about it a lot, I don't think, but he didn't sort of felt like it's kind of infused in everything he writes. But he talks about patriotism as love of country, not because it's better, but because it's yours. In the same way that you say you've got the best mum, you don't mean that she is literally the most superior, competent, loving of all mothers in the world. What you really mean is she's my mum. And I don't think we're able to distinguish or we're allowed to distinguish between what it means. So if you wave a flag, really interesting, at the last night of the proms that I watched over last summer, there were as many European Union flags as Union Jacks, and I think there are a few St. George's flags. That's weird, isn't it? I think that's weird. I mean, it was on the BBC, so you know, what do you expect? Uh the BBC is sort of a fundamentally globalist internationalist thing, which I think to some extent it's always been, but actually it's become more so in the last 20 or 30 years. Because previously, explain this to my kids who are now teenagers, the BBC was quite an affectionate organization called Art, we used to call it Auntie Beb. That was a thing, and uh now it's seen as another institution in the culture war by a lot of people who don't really listen to it or believe what it says, and that's interesting, isn't it? Again, it's a bit of a worry, there's this breakdown in trust, and therefore that shows its head on the flying of an English flag. Who are you? What do you mean by that? I think I know what you mean by that. Except the person flagging it, I don't think they know what they mean by that either, but they're reaching for something, they're reaching for an Englishness that they would like to define them, which is elusive, and they've not really been allowed to talk about or celebrate. And so now it's sort of coming out in various ways, in ways that people don't like, in ways that seem ugly and threatening. And lots of the respectable people are worried about it, and lots of Christians are worried about it because suddenly you've got people we're not used to walking in to churches expecting some kind of confidence in England, especially in the church. I think we are the Church of England. What are you what are you doing? And there was I came across someone recently who was walked into the Church of England because the Church of England embodies English values in a way that they like. And it's like, well, yeah, because we started over a thousand years ago and we brought embodiment to all of these virtues. I think I can see the church from here, so I'm gonna head back towards it and try to make sense of all this. Um, it's been terribly helpful though. Um, but yeah, I think I'm gonna keep on moving. Here we go. It's funny, isn't it? I'm showing off England. Anyone can watch this video from anywhere in the world, and yeah, I like England, I'm proud of it. I've been writing a blog for a couple of years called Carrie's Almanac, which I blog about the Saints' Days and the seasons through the Christian calendar, and I only really write about England, and again that feels like a provocative thing, but England's where I'm from, I'm English. I think all of my ancestors for hundreds of years are English and great, and I think England is beautiful. I I'm kind of showing it off, aren't I? Because I want you to see it. Now, is it because I think England's the best country? Well, in one sense, yeah, I because I like it, it's my favourite because I'm from here. Now, do I appreciate other countries? Yeah, sure. Um, do I want to go to them? Not very often. I don't find um international travel particularly fun. It's all the hurry up and wait, I can't really bear it. So it's a bit muddy here. And so it's interesting, isn't it? It's affection, it's preference, it's home, it's not an absolute, and yet earlier I was saying that well, how do you get to define Englishness? What's your Englishness and my Englishness? We need some kind of corporate sense, and I think that's what it is, it's what Chesterton talks about. It's corporate affection, it's corporate love for the same thing. I think by the end of our life, the Queen managed that. The Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II, was loved, and her platinum jubilee and then her funeral gave us a moment where we all as a nation stopped. And that's what I've been thinking about. We don't stop for the 23rd of April, do we? We don't stop and remember or give thanks for England, and I think that's partly because we don't know what it is. They can do that in Wales or Scotland because they have defined themselves against Englishness to some point, and the English, I think, used to define themselves against Catholicism, and so in the prayer book, uh for over a hundred years, the best part of 200 years, I think, the gunpowder plot was remembered on the 5th of November. It was in the prayer book to remember it, as was the execution of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II, they were all to be commemorated, and so these were kind of civic but religious corporate events that we had to celebrate together. That's interesting, isn't it? At least it is to me. I can't remember how I go on to that. Oh yeah. What do we stop for? What's the only thing that will make grown-ups tell kids shut up, stand still, pay attention? November the 11th. Remembrance day. That's the day when the nation stops and the nation remembers. What are we remembering? We're remembering the war. We're remembering sacrifice. For what? Well, for our way of life and for freedom. Okay, where do we do that? It tends to be in church. That's good. There is hope. And as we'll see in a moment, there is a war memorial at St. George's Hinton, as there is in every single church, pretty much all over England, there'll be a memorial erected by relatives who were devastated that young men mostly some young women died fighting for our country. Well, which country? England, um, United Kingdom, the Empire. Haven't even gotten on to that. There's a whole load of mixed feelings about that. Of course, who went out into the Empire as much as anyone? Scots did better way of life out all over the world. So, yeah, it's the war memorial, and that's why I did a podcast, I'll put a link below, uh, with a guy called um Reese, my friend Reese, and we talked about what is our founding nation's myth. And could be the Battle of Britain, it could be Dunkirk. I don't think it's D-Day. That's too offensive. We're defensive. Battle of Britain, the nation was saved. The reality of that is much more complicated. The Navy had it covered. I don't think we were ever going to be invaded by Germany, but it probably felt like it. It must have really felt like it. England had fallen a long way from being this great global empire. It's often said that England stands alone. And yes, but England isn't just England, is it? It's Great Britain and it's the Empire, it's all the possessions, it's New Zealand, it's Australia, it's Canada, it's India. And uh so yeah. We're very confused, aren't we? I guess I'm very confused, and I'm trying to make sense of it. Right, we really will be back at the church in a minute. Here we go. So there it is behind me. That's the war memorial, and at the top, of course, there's Jesus who is the embodiment of sacrifice. Christianity is absolutely embedded in our nation's story, so even in the secular 20th century into the 21st, we cannot imagine a world without the sacred, and we've embedded that. So, our national day, there isn't one for England, it's Remembrance Sunday, where we remember. Not just also now the English who died, the British who died, the Commonwealth people who died, but everyone who died, including the enemy who died. Now again, that's a good instinct, isn't it? Jesus says, love your enemies. And so that's good, isn't it? But we've lost something because we don't think about England. And there are tens of millions of English people who don't know who they are. They don't know what they're for, they don't know where they've come from, and crucially, I don't think they know where they're going. And I don't think governments have done a very good job of giving them a sense of where they're going. And of course, whenever somebody does set a clear direction, that is then highly contested, but that's okay. Parliament have done that. That's where you have the argument, that's where you have the debate. But the problem is we're not interested in that debate in Parliament. We're not interested in hearing the ideas about England from our elected representatives. We'd rather hear pundits talk about it on podcasts. Look, I've got a podcast and I'm talking about it. But what else am I doing? I'm chair of a group called FOMAG, the Friends of Mightford Action Group, and we're trying to bring sanity to the planning process so that huge developers can't just build, build, build identical houses that are just cookie-cutter all over England. That doesn't seem right. So I'm doing something about that. I'm a member of the General Synod of the Church of England. I represent the Diocese of Bath and Wells, and I will re-stand for the next quinquennium, that's the five-year period, and I hope to serve in that way. So I guess we don't have a day, but maybe it's just worth thinking. How can I serve England if you're English? How can I serve my country? What can I do? How can I help? How can I get to know my neighbour? How can I just be a good neighbour? Jesus says, love your enemies and love your neighbour. This country was founded by Jesus. I don't think personally, I don't think he came to Glastonbury. But the gospel got here and it's made us who we are. So hopefully that's a positive message when everyone's freaking out when the St. George's flag is hoisted all over the nation on St. George's Day. Thanks for listening. Speak to you next time. Is this how it ends? Yep.