Authors: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett
A new Robin Hood adaptation for TV is more fanciful than the older Disney cartoon version that featured talking animals. At least that one got the history right. The new series, which will air on MGM+, pretends that Christianity was an alien religion to England in the late 1100s. Part of the plot is that villainous Normans attempted to force Christianity down the throats of noble, pagan Anglo-Saxons.
This is nonsense. Though the Normans were not the nicest people, forcing Christianity on the Saxons was not on their agenda. The Saxons were already Christians and had been for a long time.
According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea brought Christianity to what is now England in the first century. Even if that is just legend, there is evidence of believers in Britannia in the second century. It’s likely that merchants brought the Faith there well before Constantine. By the time the Romans left in the 400s, Britain was Christian. St. Patrick, after all, was British, not Irish.
Starting in the fifth century, Anglo-Saxon tribes overran southern and eastern Britain, calling it Angle-land and naming the days of the week after their gods, Tiw, Woden, and Thor. Celtic Christian culture was suppressed, though it remained on the fringes in Ireland and Scotland. At the end of the sixth century, missionaries reintroduced Christianity, some from Europe and others from the Celtic areas to the north and west.
By the end of the seventh century, the Anglo-Saxons were thoroughly Christian. Beowulf, one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon books, has Christian elements. Christian saints like the Venerable Bede, Boniface, and Alcuin of York worked as Christian missionaries and scholars long before the Normans.
In fact, they’d been Christian longer than the Normans were. Normans is a contraction of “Northman,” as in the Vikings. They became Christian in the tenth century, just a few decades before they came to England. By the time Robin Hood supposedly lived in the late twelfth century, the Saxons had been Christians for nearly 600 years, more than twice as long as America has been a country.
Given this history, why was the show written this way? Certainly, those responsible for the script must know it is full of easily disprovable falsehoods. So, why do it?
The reversal of history in popular culture is not due to a dispute among historians. Rather, it is a symptom of the Critical Theory mood that has captured the West. According to the intersectional hierarchy, Christianity is an oppressive religion that was imposed by force wherever it spread. It is because of the same framework that Islam is often portrayed as being indigenous to places in which it post-dates Christianity by centuries.
Despite the fabricated history of the new Robin Hood, the British Isles enjoys one of the richest histories of Christian thought, work, and devotion in the world. Divorced from that history, as Rod Dreher’s Substack has recently documented, British culture is turning into a nightmare. Konstantin Kisin recently noted how, in a single year, 400 people were arrested for social media posts in Russia. In that same year, 3,300 were arrested for the same “crime” in Britain. Last year, that number spiked to nearly 10,000. Protestors are allowed to march for approved causes, but prolifers and gender realists get jail time. And most recently, the British government moved ahead with plans to scrap juries from all but the most extreme trials.
As a member of Parliament argued to a mostly empty room just a few months ago:
[T]o repudiate Christianity is not only to sever ourselves from our past, but to cut off the source of all the things we value now and that we need in the future, such as freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and human rights.
It remains to be seen whether Britain’s future will be that of a nation severed from its roots, or that of a nation renewed. It will depend on the path chosen by those in the present, including how they remember their past and what they do with the Faith at the center of it.