The first in short series of blogs marking the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, by Tom Andrew, author of Theos' latest report, The Church and the Charter.
It’s hardly revolutionary to claim that Britain’s legal and political history has been distinctly shaped by Christian ideals and beliefs. After all, institutionalised Christianity has, in one form or another, been a dominant force throughout much of European history.
In this secular age, however, it’s all too easy to construe the influence of Christian faith in a negative light. Christianity is charged with all the nasty bits of legal and political history – with the drowning of witches, the burning of heretics and the divine right of kings to butcher their subjects. Against the dark influence of an apparently tyrannical church, the gradual growth of the forces of secularism is invariably held up as a light at the end of the tunnel of history.
All too rarely is a link drawn between the ideals and precepts of Christian theology, and the aspects of legal and political history which we hold most dear. Wilberforce might be commended for his Christian faith, but rarely is the end of the slave trade portrayed as the triumph of a deeply Christian regard for human dignity. The concept of inalienable human rights might be understood as concordant with the Christian regard for individual human value, but rarely are the two seen as somehow concomitant. There is a pervasive sense that all the things we have done really well, have no inherent link to institutional Christianity, let alone Christian theology.
As we approach its 800th anniversary on June 15th, there is perhaps no piece of our legal history which we hold dearer than the Magna Carta. For years now, politicians have been bloating their speeches with appeals to “The Great Charter of the Liberties of England” as the foundation of our national identity. Regaling against prisoner-voting rights at the Conservative Party Conference, David Cameron was quick to remind Strasbourg-based judges that Britain didn’t need lectures on human rights interpretation because “this is the country that wrote the Magna Carta”. Several years earlier, in his speech to the UK Parliament, Barack Obama heralded the English as those “who first spelled out the rights and liberties of man in the Magna Carta.” In our national consciousness, the Magna Carta is what Lord Denning once called “the greatest constitutional document of all time – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”
What the Magna Carta is not, at least in popular perception, is particularly Christian. Amongst the assorted celebrations and lectures that have been commissioned to celebrate its 800th anniversary, very little attention has been given to the role of Christian faith in laying the foundations from which Magna Carta sprung. When David Starkey fronted an hour-long special on the history of the Magna Carta back in January, virtually no air-time was given to the influence of the Church.
This is a mistake on two counts. Firstly, the Magna Carta is the product of a deeply convoluted historical process, in which relationships between King John, Pope Innocent III, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, played a highly influential part. King John’s war with the barons might have been the spark that ignited the Magna Carta negotiations, but it was the historically fractious relationship between the English monarch and the English Church – going back through generations – that had laid down much of the kindling. The new Archbishop of Canterbury in particular, heralded by many as a ‘new Becket’ to challenge the authority of the King, played a crucial role in not only the negotiation and formation of the Magna Carta, but also its eventual survival down through generations, as new reserach has recently confirmed.
Second, and more important than this practical contribution of the Church, is the conceptual contribution of Christian theology to the principles which underpin the Magna Carta. In Theos’ new essay, The Church and the Charter: Christianity and the Forgotten Roots of the Magna Carta, I have explored how three of these key principles – the regard for due process, the legitimation of arbitration in the king’s affairs, and the extension of rights language to “all free men” – have their roots in the medieval theology of the 12th Century. It was because of Christian theological concerns that public authorities began to pay greater attention to the importance of developing a correct legal process by which the guilty could be convicted. It was developments in theological thinking about the nature of authority that allowed for a greater emphasis on the limitations of monarchical sovereignty. And it was a renewed theological focus on the equality of the individual before God, that opened the door to what was at the time a deeply radical extension of rights language to those not occupying the top strata of feudal society.
All of this is deeply significant. It’s very easy for us in the West to imagine that the social situation we find ourselves in, with all the attendant rights and liberties we attribute to each individual, has a sort of inevitability or ‘naturalness’ about it. But this is a fiction. As Larry Siedentop points out in his excellent book Inventing the Individual, there is nothing universal about the valuation of the individual, let alone every individual. We find ourselves in this position of valuing the rights of the individual, whether that be the right to a fair trial, the right to own property, or the right to be free from excessive state-intrusion, because specific forces shaped the evolution of European ideals. And a key one of those forces was Christian thought.
Whatever terrible things it may have done in its time, the Christian Church has been responsible, directly and indirectly, for many of the ideas and achievements that we, as a country, are most proud of. And all of us, whether religious or secular, should celebrate that fact. If we try to airbrush it out of history, we will lose an essential aspect of our national identity.
Tom Andrew is the author of The Church and the Charter: Christianity and the Forgotten Roots of the Magna Carta
Theos's reportThe Church and the Charter: Christianity and the Forgotten Roots of the Magna Carta is available here
