How God Made The English

bnt

This was on BBC last night, and is repeated 12:50am early Wednesday morning. A history of the role religion played in shaping English history and culture.

Don't be put off by the ironic title - to start with, the presenter is very critical of the notion that the English are a "chosen people", and is more interested in explaining how the idea took root and persisted because it was useful to kings and clergy alike, regardless of its fictional origins. It can be traced directly back to the Venerable Bede, who basically invented the idea, interpreting the Bible in his own way. Which wouldn't have gone very far, had King Alfred not needed something to unify the English against the Vikings.

Then King Henry VIII threatened to sweep all that away in the Protestant Reformation, except that - amazingly - his clergy were able to find "evidence" that Christianity in England owed nothing to Rome, so history could be re-written to describe how Jesus' followers, including Joseph of Arimathea, went to England in the early days, bypassing all that other stuff. (The "popular" version of the story is the one sung every year at the Last Night of the Proms: Jerusalem.)

Henry VIII did a lot more to shape the supremacist English Christian attitudes that persist to this day. Ireland is not mentioned in the program, but we know what happened there, and that was but one early chapter in the story of the British Empire. The program goes on to talk about the role of the Royal Navy as "God's Policemen", something that does gloss over history a little ...

Isn't it great when you can rewrite history to suit your own purposes, as Henry VIII did?
1. Cherry-pick the bits that take your fancy;
2. Fill in the blanks with fiction;
3. Profit!

recedite

I thought the Jews were God's "chosen people"....
at least until the Nazis showed up in their flashy uniforms.
And then of course the American's; He couldn't resist their chewing gum and silk stockings.

marty1985

...I thought the Irish were the chosen ones.

Here 'Catholic' was defined not just in terms of belief but in terms of race, the collective identity given primacy over personal conviction - The Irish Catholic identity. Patrick's biographer Muirchu wrote about the Irish as a nation and a chosen race, and to some the impact on Europe by Irish monks and the spread of our brand of Catholicism in the nineteenth century to America, Australia etc, the Irish missionaries to India and Africa etc, confirmed the notion of being a nation apart, an elect nation. The notion of this being the centre of a spiritual empire, in contrast to Britain's worldly one, was not uncommon. Just as bnt says about England, it was useful to us, regardless of it's fictional origins.

We were God's chosen ones, materially weak, spiritually strong, spread throughout the world but never losing our identity, always loyal to The Faith Of Our Fathers. Just like the Jews, we had an identification of race and faith. You were born a Catholic as you were born a Jew. Irish Catholics were assured of their identity no matter where in the world they were.

Of course, this isn't unique to Ireland. Other countries have similar notions, but it's always pretty much a bad thing with dubious theological value.

It undermines the need for personal conviction, creates a collectivist consciousness, unthinking conformity, a fear of foreign influences, fear of independent thinkers.

Honest Christians would say there is only one chosen people, but the idea of superseding the Jews is common in a lot of areas of the Christian religion.

marty1985

Just as an addition to the above, I was reading into some Irish history that is related to the point I was making earlier about the Irish being a chosen people, a race apart.

Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), which some regard as the greatest piece of propaganda ever produced in Ireland, was compiled in the 11th century, based on oral traditions going back several centuries. Purporting to be a literal and accurate account of the history of the Irish, Lebor Gabála Érenn was an attempt to provide the Irish with a written history comparable to that of the Israelites in the Old Testament.

My previous post was related to modern ideas of Irish Catholicism which developed in contrast to British Protestantism, but I thought it might be of interest to some to share how this might go back even further, to Medieval times and further back.

According to this account, Ireland was successively inhabited by five blood-related groups. The first to come was Cessair, a granddaughter of Noah, who advised her to flee to the Western edge of the world to escape the impending flood. She came with three men and forty-nine other women. One of the men died before the flood - the first man to be buried in Irish soil. Only one of the group survived the flood, Cessair's husband Fintan.

300 hundred years later, another group led by Partholon (another descendent of Noah) arrived, but again all except one died, this time due to plague. They are buried in an area southwest of Dublin, in a place which is still called Tallaght (which means "plague grave").

The third invasion was led by Nemed (his great-grandfather was a brother of Partholon), a Greek ruler, but they were oppressed by evil spirits known as the Formoiri, and were forced back to Greece. There, they made boats out of their bags, and became known as Fir Bolg (bag men), then returned successfully. Their five leaders became kings of the five provinces of Ireland.

The Tuatha De Danann are descendents of Nemed, and they come to Ireland after learning the art of pagan magic and druidry. They defeat the Fir Bolg and the Formoiri. Incidentally, when they kill Balor of the Evil Eye, the king of the Formoiri, he fell face first into the ground, and his deadly eye beam burned a hole in the ground, which filled with water, and over time became a lake. This lake is Loch na Sul in Sligo ("Lake of the Eye").

The last conquest is achieved by the Gaels. Fenius, a descendent of Noah, was at the Tower of Babel and created the Irish language. A further descendent of his, saw Ireland from a tower in Spain and soon after sons of Mil, the Spanish king, led a successful invasion.

Amazingly, this confabulated pseudohistory (which to be fair probably has some historical basis) was believed for centuries. It was accepted as an accurate history of Ireland up to the 17th century. If this could be so, the idea of Irish Catholics considering themselves God's Chosen People doesn't seem surprising to me.