‘This used to be God’s country, but not anymore – and thank God for that’
A History of Scotland (BBC)
Thus, with a sound bite to make Alan Partridge shout 'Back of the net!', BBC Scotland’s Neil Oliver ended his assessment of the Scottish Covenanters. Oliver took the utterly predictable and increasingly, it seems, BBC mandated line of telling us what an awful bigoted bunch religious people are. The Covenanters, we were told, were a ruthless power-hungry mob intent on turning Scotland into the kind of fundamentalist state that would have made the Taliban blush.
What is particularly depressing is the ‘a-historical’ nature of such programmes. That is, they seem (wilfully) ignorant of any historical perspective. Thus people and events can only be evaluated through the lense of twenty-first century liberal eyes. So the Covenanters were ‘extreme’ in their religious beliefs – but who wasn’t in the 17th Century? The Covenanters ideal was a nation converted to Presbyterian Christianity – as if the Catholic Church or the Episcopal Church would have been less zealous for their own faiths. Neil Oliver might like to think, had he lived in 1638, that he would have stood ‘above’ such squabbles but he would just have reflected the worldview of whatever 'extreme' sect he belonged to (as he clearly does in his own time).
Like Neil Oliver, I’m not a trained historian (although my wife has a first class MA in History & agrees with me if that counts?) but it seems to me that you primarily need to judge historical figures and events in their historical context. Thus the extent that something was positive or negative needs to be seen in the social & political climate of that time. For example, the Magna Carta would hardly seem a radical charter for human rights today - but it most cerainly was in 1215 (something that historans like Simon Schama seem to grasp). Therefore in the context of the 17th century the desire of the Covenanters to resist state controlled religion (whatever their other shortcomings) is surely something to celebrate rather than discredit. But one wonders, if Neil Oliver is not so much interested in the 17th century as pushing a twenty-first century secularist agenda.
Thus, with a sound bite to make Alan Partridge shout 'Back of the net!', BBC Scotland’s Neil Oliver ended his assessment of the Scottish Covenanters. Oliver took the utterly predictable and increasingly, it seems, BBC mandated line of telling us what an awful bigoted bunch religious people are. The Covenanters, we were told, were a ruthless power-hungry mob intent on turning Scotland into the kind of fundamentalist state that would have made the Taliban blush.
What is particularly depressing is the ‘a-historical’ nature of such programmes. That is, they seem (wilfully) ignorant of any historical perspective. Thus people and events can only be evaluated through the lense of twenty-first century liberal eyes. So the Covenanters were ‘extreme’ in their religious beliefs – but who wasn’t in the 17th Century? The Covenanters ideal was a nation converted to Presbyterian Christianity – as if the Catholic Church or the Episcopal Church would have been less zealous for their own faiths. Neil Oliver might like to think, had he lived in 1638, that he would have stood ‘above’ such squabbles but he would just have reflected the worldview of whatever 'extreme' sect he belonged to (as he clearly does in his own time).
Like Neil Oliver, I’m not a trained historian (although my wife has a first class MA in History & agrees with me if that counts?) but it seems to me that you primarily need to judge historical figures and events in their historical context. Thus the extent that something was positive or negative needs to be seen in the social & political climate of that time. For example, the Magna Carta would hardly seem a radical charter for human rights today - but it most cerainly was in 1215 (something that historans like Simon Schama seem to grasp). Therefore in the context of the 17th century the desire of the Covenanters to resist state controlled religion (whatever their other shortcomings) is surely something to celebrate rather than discredit. But one wonders, if Neil Oliver is not so much interested in the 17th century as pushing a twenty-first century secularist agenda.
