In the heart of most English towns and villages is a hole. It is filled by a deserted meadow littered with incised stones and a large building, often gloomy, locked and unused except by a tiny fraternity of citizens for a couple of hours a week. Nowadays, most young people have little idea what it is for and many shudder when they pass it.

The English parish church has become the ghost in the machine of local Britain. It must be the ripest plum for a property-hungry government to pick, offering the parochial equivalent of the dissolution of the monasteries. I can hear the Treasury protesting that there are plenty of places for Christian worship, so why waste space on 20,000 underused properties?

Roy Strong, a former director of the V&A, is an Old High Romantic. When Augustine landed in Kent he would have told him to go away as the Celts were perfectly happy. He deplores the Lollards, the Reformation, Puritans, Methodists and all modernisers. In his new book, he sheds copious tears at the loss of smells, bells, relics and icons. His heroes are Pope Innocent III, Bloody Mary, the Catholic recusants and Victorian Anglo-Catholics. Nobody reading this book can doubt his point of departure. But where does he arrive?

My point of departure could hardly be more different. As an atheist of nonconformist sympathies I love churches for what I can see and read in them. I find plain wrong much of what Strong says of Anglican history. His assumption that Protestantism and its iconoclasm had no domestic roots and was deeply unpopular is not true. Strong takes much of his account of the Reformation from The Stripping of the Altars, the Catholic historian Eamon Duffy’s passionately one-sided attack on it. Hardly a page does not have Strong joining Duffy in asserting that the people of Britain were miserable and angry at being deprived of their images and ritual.

This does not explain why the Reformation took such a firm hold of the English imagination and why constant attempts to revive Roman Catholicism conspicuously failed. I could more plausibly argue that most Britons had, by the late-15th century, come to regard the Roman church as an alien, corrupt and reactionary agent of intellectual oppression, awash in magic and superstition. They could not wait to see the back of it.

British monarchs lurched back towards Rome three times after the Reformation, under Mary I, Charles I and James II, and each time it was rejected. Nor is it fair to claim, as does Strong, that Elizabeth I’s desperate efforts to steer a middle way between tradition and dissent was a bid to make the church “an arm of the state whose aim was obedience and submission”. The dynamic of the Reformation was that Catholicism claimed a power over the British state that Britons would not accept. Mary’s burnings were not a quaint popular ritual. They were religious terrorism.

The manner in which Britain dismantled the autocracy of Roman religion was not the tragedy portrayed by Strong, but an expression of the nation’s political genius. The Georgian parish church, as Strong shows, may have embodied a class-bound nation in every box pew, tithe and monument, but it was still a community institution. It did not send the rich disappearing into private chapels and the Huguenots to death or exile. Anglicanism was always the Grand Compromise, readopting some of Catholicism’s rituals as it borrowed the preaching of the Puritans and the hymn singing of Methodists.

At this point, I find my way and Strong’s starting to converge. While the fragmentation of the postReformation church was inevitable, it denied communities the social cohesion so noticeable in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. The church vestry had been the source of discipline, education, health and welfare. As Strong points out, public administration was allied to an emotional identity and to an institution that sat literally at the heart of every village.

These vestries became corrupt and inefficient, giving way to democratic local government in the 19th century, but something was lost in the process. Strong seems unsure whether or how this cohesion can be recaptured, but it is indeed sad that communities have so overwhelmingly abandoned the one local institution that embodies their past. Since it is unthinkable to destroy the 10,000 medieval churches extant in England, it is madness now to leave them to rot.

Parish churches will never be fully reused by the Church of England and something must be done to reengage public affection for them. Strong is right in concluding that this often means “adaptation not conservation”. New uses must be found for those parts of parish churches no longer needed for worship. Often in the Middle Ages they were places of congregation, litigation, education and trade, as well as of peace and meditation. There is no shortage of such purposes today.

Change will require Anglicans to stop regarding parish churches as private chapels. (How often have I been told that a church is “not open to the public”?) Equally, local taxpayers should accept a modest obligation to support them. It does not require Christian belief to wonder at the artistry to which Strong’s sensitive eye draws attention. Parish churches are the memory of local Britain but they are also an incomparable resource. For all Strong’s eloquence, they are too important to be left to the church.

A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH COUNTRY CHURCH by Roy Strong
Cape £16.99 pp272
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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