Snow Drifts on Remembrance

Remembrance Sunday should not be dominated by religion

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/06/remembrance-sunday-lack-of-secular-presence

Although the two are not necessarily distinct, it would be true to say that, as a breed, ‘TV historians’ have a mixed reputation among their academic colleagues. Among the former, the tendency towards the dumbing-down of complex issues can prove too great to resist. Cue Dan Snow, now the poster boy of the National Secular Society, with his argument in The Guardian on 6 November that ‘Remembrance Sunday should not be dominated by religion’. Whatever the pros and cons of Snow’s case against the Church of England’s leading role at the Cenotaph, and the need to incorporate non-believers, there is little doubt about the accuracy of what he adduces in order to imply that state ceremonial at the Cenotaph was originally ‘secular’. First, he gets his dates wrong. King George V was nowhere near the (temporary) Cenotaph at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1919, and nor was there any unveiling. Second, when its permanent successor was actually unveiled, on 11 November 1920, this was one of the elaborate ceremonies surrounding the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. And, despite debate about the design of the Cenotaph, the proceedings were in no way ‘secular’. Immediately prior to the unveiling at the stroke of 11, the assembled crowds sang ‘O God, our Help in Ages Past’, and the Archbishop of Canterbury (that well-known secular functionary) led them in saying the Lord’s Prayer- which, according to The Times, ‘the King and all his subjects repeated with uncovered heads’. All of this can be swiftly established by consulting contemporary evidence, a fundamental task of any historian, one might think. But not, it seems, if you’re ‘TV historian’ Dan Snow, and your mission at the centenary of the First World War is to purge a national act of Remembrance -on the Christian Sabbath, no less- of what you wrongly perceive and portray as its alien religious accretions.

Dr Mike Snape