Native language itself can be seen by minority groups as their unique ‘possession.’ In their attempts to guard what they treasure so much (their language and culture) they become snobbish, rude, rejecting or even openly hostile and violent towards ‘outsiders.’
This has been shown to be true in many cases. It is regrettable, but it is not the whole story. It is not the only possibility for preserving an endangered language and culture and it is more likely to bring that language and culture further harm.
The 'Dragon Family' at Varga.
Christianity - Native Culture or Colonising Influence?
In the context of globalism, which offers an optimistic potential for unity, but which in reality more often neuters genuine culture and imposes a sterile uniformity, nationalism can seem backward, ignorant and myopic. This got me thinking again about the tensions and polarities between the specific, unique and local, and the national and global – even the relation between the finite and the infinite.The Christian tradition – although some non-Christian people may wish to call it an exclusive community, and some Christians may unapologetically wish to claim that it is an exclusive community – offers a possible answer.
St. David, Patron Saint of Wales, window at St. Non's chapel.
In Wales, the nationalist movement until very recently has been inextricable from Christianity. Cultural giants like Saunders Lewis, D.J. Williams, R.S. Thomas and Waldo Williams have been inspired by their personal faith as much as by their love of the language and traditions of the Welsh nation as a whole.
Memorial commemorating the 'burning of the bombing school' by Saunders Lewis, D.J. Williams and Lewis Valentine - an act that was arguably as much religiously-motivated as it was political.
Inspiration vs. Oppression.
In Wales, Christianity is part of the language and tradition, regardless of who and how many might now like to ignore the fact or suddenly discard it. It was a key ingredient of the civilization which worked to preserve language and culture in the face of barbarian invasion and assimilation from the east.
St. David teaching St. Finian, window at Clonard church.
Christianity, for the ancient Britons, was a unifying hope against the despair induced by encroaching barbarism and the arriving Germanic tribes. It humanised the Britons throughout that dark period of terror and brutality, and caused a flowering of culture throughout the Celtic nations as a whole.
The result was a proto-renaissance in the form of the Celtic Church. The monasteries of the Celtic Church lost their influence, output, and ability to inspire, however, prior to and under the harsh reign of the Normans.
Monasteries and churches were later ransacked through the process of Protestantism. Henry VIII’s Act of Union brought the first explicit attempts to Anglicise Wales. The Christian religion was used as an apparatus of the state in order to bring about cultural and linguistic unity, but this back-fired under Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, who allowed a Welsh translation of the bible.
Memorial to William Morgan and Edmund Prys, translators of the bible into Welsh, at St. John's College, Cambridge.
"Y Gwir Yn Erbin Byd."
The religion that has at times oppressed the Welsh has therefore also been a constant support to Welsh identity and a continued source of inspiration for the Welsh as a people. It remained so roughly until the end of the 20th Century. In the face of globalism, where world religions like Christianity are collapsing as effective metanarratives, besieged by pluralism, must religion now be pulled, like an aggravating splinter, from the entire discourse on minority language and culture?
In the case of Wales, can Welsh identity only be authentically discovered independently of ‘God’ through a more sophisticated atheism, or by shedding the ‘outside influence’ of Christianity altogether? Should the Welsh revert to some neo-pagan revision of Druidism?
Crowned Bard with Arch Druid, Ebw Vale Eisteddfod, 1958.
Or, would a rejection of Christianity create a false Welsh-ness? Surely some cultural hybridity is possible and inevitable, just as Welsh culture has always been influenced by outside ideas, just as the Welsh language, as a living language, is influenced by other outside languages, and just as Welsh ethnicity continues to be enriched by influences from outside the gene pool.
An easy way to answer to the accusation of fascism is to point out that every nation that ever existed was never anything but an aggregate of various ingredients. England is itself an even clearer case of this, and yet having had an imperial agenda (imposing its language and culture onto other nations outside of itself by force) it is perhaps more guilty of something akin to fascism than Wales ever was.
Having arrived at a more universal stage in the history of human kind as a whole, Christianity has shrunk from ‘catholicity’ to individuality: it is a unique world religion which can now only exist amongst a new paradigm or ‘set’ of fellow world religions (Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism etc.).
Psalter World Map, 1265.
In the same way, Wales can longer remain a space beyond and defined by English borders ('here be dragons,' haha). It is now indisputably a nation within the context of the British Isles, the Celtic League, Europe, and the world.
Does Christianity have anything relevant left to say about that? I’ll explore this question further in my next post.
