Butler-Gallie restores Christianity to its central place in western history | Conservative Home

Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity by Fergus Butler-Gallie

Fergus Butler-Gallie’s preferred speed is the canter, often rising to a gallop, seldom if ever slowing to a walk.

He is in a tearing hurry and does not seem to worry about falling off his not particularly high horse. Stylistic perfection does not interest him. He has 2,000 years, and many thousands of miles, to cover.

His approach has its advantages. As Vicar of Charlbury, in Oxfordshire, he might be expected to adopt a more limited frame of reference.

Instead he takes the world as his parish. His book is supposedly about 12 churches, starting with the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and continuing through St Peter’s, Rome; Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; Canterbury Cathedral; the Pantocrator Monastery on Mount Athos; the great rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; the Templo de Las Américas in the Dominican Republic; the Kirishitan Hokora or Christian Shrine at Mount Yasumandake in Japan; the First Meeting House in Salem, Massachusetts; Christ Church, Zanzibar; the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; and Canaanland in Ota, Nigeria.

But really he wants to tell us the story of Christianity, restore it to its central place in western history, illuminate it with every kind of amusing detail, and indicate what it might teach us about such topics as faith, money, empire, the nation state, slavery, persecution and sex. Nobody should buy this book for use as an architectural guide.

For although Butler-Gallie makes some penetrating observations about the various buildings in his book, for most of the time he uses them as metaphors for the “beautiful paradoxes” of Christianity, and as pegs for other topics.

Everyone, he remarks, goes to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, “because there is something very innately human about wanting to see where something began”. The Empress Helena – mother of the Emperor Constantine, who in the early fourth century made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire – was “the first seriously important visitor”.

A later Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, visited in at the end of the 19th century: “he insisted on riding to the church from Jerusalem in the heat of the day whilst wearing plate armour and a metal helmet, surmounted by an eagle”. In that phrase we find the wretched man’s inability to adapt his tradition to modern times.

Gemma Collins, a British reality TV star, is among more recent visitors: “I’ve got tears running down my face.” Butler-Gallie can never resist a reality TV star. He loves vulgarity and incongruity.

He was not able to get to Bethlehem himself, so troubled has the little town been in recent years, but he looks from afar at this “mad, confusing warren of a building”, and writes of the tiny chapel where Jesus is believed to have been born:

“In the midst of chaos, beauty; in the midst of death, life; and in the midst of the human, the Divine.”

Again and again, Butler-Gallie insists on “the messiness of Christianity”. He does not attempt to remove its contradictions, or to whitewash the fearful crimes which have been committed in its name.

This messy account of a messy faith is perhaps more approachable than a hard, immaculate statement of doctrine would be. Butler-Gallie touches on some of the attempts all over the world to found a New Jerusalem, as at Lalibela in Ethiopia.

He gives us William Blake’s words, sung for the last century to Sir Hubert Parry’s tune, composed in 1916:

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Tell we have built Jerusalem

in England’s green and pleasant land.  

Butler-Gallie mentions in passing a “radical Englishwoman, the daughter of a preacher”, who “strode on stage” to the strains of Jerusalem, and was described by Archbishop Robert Runcie as “not my kind of girl”.

In 1992, the preacher’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher, told a conference of political candidates: “You cannot build Jerusalem in Brussels.”

One of the themes of Butler-Gallie’s book is the relationship of power to faith. He relates how the Church was first persecuted by the Roman Empire: Nero had Christians covered in pitch and tar, and used as human torches to light the way to dinner.

Christianity then became the official religion of the empire, and in due course had to cope, as a supranational organisation, with the empire’s collapse, and the rise of nation states.

The nation states demanded the Church’s endorsement. Let faith hallow politics. Butler-Gallie does not start to preach politics. He sketches the history of the last two millennia as a Christian story, full of contradictions rather than solutions.

But his book prompts the thought that we still yearn to be told by some higher authority that we are in the right. Here is one reason for the bitterness of the arguments about Brexit (a word which mercifully does not appear in this book).

Some look to British institutions for approval, while others look to supranational authorities. We see a latter-day war of religion, each side so convinced it is in the right, or at least so determined to suppress its doubts, it cannot feel the slightest sympathy for the other side, and tries instead to excommunicate its adversaries.

We suffer from a politics suffused by feelings which might be described as religious. Each new politician is hailed by the faithful as saviour, then crucified when he or she fails within an implausibly short period of time to build heaven on earth.

Butler-Gallie touches only fleetingly on the decline of Christianity in the British Isles.  He remarks on the collapse within a few years of Roman Catholic observance by the young in the Republic of Ireland, after the exposure of horrific child abuse.

And he recounts a conversation in which Michael Gove describes the closure of Aberdeen’s mother church, St Nicholas, as “a tragedy”.

But one of the book’s strengths is that it does not read the Church’s present weakness back into the past. Many modern writers have no idea how to portray even quite recent historical figures for whom religion was a motive, let alone someone like Thomas Becket.

Butler-Gallie recounts Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral, blood and brains spurting from the top of the Archbishop’s head, soon after which people who had obtained his clothes, or his blood and brains, “diluted with water to make what was held to be a healing remedy, sort of like the world’s most horrible version of orange squash”, found they started to experience miraculous cures.

Another of the book’s merits is that it does not exaggerate the Church’s past strength. Here is a subject shot through with paradox. Strength is made perfect in weakness. Jesus is born in a stable and dies on the cross yet wins millions of followers.

These are mysteries which Butler-Gallie does not, thank heavens, pretend to be able to explain, but which he brings before us with an Anglican mixture of learning and jokes, reverence and irreverence. He enjoys travelling, and when he comes home the boiler is broken.

Over the last decade the atmosphere has changed. I do not think a book like this would have been published ten years ago. Butler-Gallie is at once more cosmopolitan and more parochial, more devout and more flippant than any recent writer who springs to mind.