Rebuilding Saxon Christianity For The Modern World Go back to contents	One of the main aims of Anglo Saxon Anglicans is to foster a renewal of folkish Saxon Christianity that embodies traditional values of honour and loyalty and which is deeply rooted in ancient folklore and tradition. Saxon Christianity emerged in medieval times out of a fusion between the new Christian faith and the older pre-Christian heroic culture. It was in many respects very different to the Christianity of our modern churches which emphasise a passive Christ and an extreme liberal social agenda. The Saxon Christ was a heroic figure who bravely battled evil and who eagerly strode up to the cross to meet His doom. The tradition of Chivalry was a direct product of this synthesis and offers a very different way of viewing the world. In short, Saxon Christianity provides the basis for a solid world accepting faith with wholesome, traditional values and a healthy respect for our Anglo Saxon English folk.
We should be under no illusion that medieval Saxon Christianity was perfect or that it offers, unaltered, the ideal Christianity for our modern world. Medieval Christianity had much going for it, but it also had many faults which are best left out of any modern reconstruction. Chief of these, is the over-emphasis on sin and the tortures awaiting the sinner in hell. Following this, there was an extreme anti-woman element to it, to the point that the Church hotly debated whether women had souls or not. This led to terrible persecution of women and the witch trials of the later medieval period. Another negative aspect of medieval Christianity was superstition often born out of ignorance and the veneration of objects such as the relics of saints. Whilst some of these superstitions were probably carried over from the old Pagan religion, another fault of the medieval Church was an almost blanket rejection of almost everything associated with that culture, resulting in a dysfunctional rejection of nature, the natural world and of any attempts to honour it or the spirits our ancestors believed inhabited it. Celtic Christianity did a much better job in this respect! And so, whilst Saxon Christianity certainly offers the basis for a healthy, modern folkish Christian faith, our aim should be to produce something better and more suited to our modern day needs and culture than the medieval version. The world has moved on and we have a much better understanding of both Christianity and the ancient heroic culture than did our ancestors. The following principles are therefore put forward as the basis for restoring a modern Saxon Christianity: · World accepting – the world is essentially good, but not perfect. · Active – our purpose is to help make the world a better place through our own actions; to fight evil and to oppose those who would harm us and our folk. · Chivalric – to be guided by the moral principles set out in the old Chivalric Codes; loyalty, honour and trust in Our Lord. · Folkish – rooted in the people and culture of the Anglo Saxon English; those alive now, those gone before us and those yet to come. · Reverence for the natural world - the earth, sky, water and our native lands.