Carlisle could stand as proud as any in an audition for the privilege of being the nation’s capital. It played a vital role in the health and wealth of the nation long before some of our more illustrious counterparts were any more than a glint in the Industrial Revolution’s eye. An ancient settlement that later became the largest Roman camp on the Wall, my home city is no stranger to prominence in the socio-political drama of these islands.

Indeed, Carlisle has due heritage: Parliament has been held here before, on at least two occasions. The Great Seal of state was held at Lanercost Priory while Edward I journeyed north to pick a fight with the Scots; alas he could not finish the job, perishing on the windy marshes to the west of Carlisle, giving the city the honour of hosting the coronation of Edward II.

Of course, Edward was here for the same reason as generations before him, and generations after: Carlisle played a key strategic role in the affairs of the entire North. William Rufus seized the city in 1092 to finally extend his father’s Conquest to the north-North. He built a castle on the ancient Roman fort, which was later to become the residence of King David I of the Scots (“Prince of the Cumbrians”), who chose Carlisle as his favoured residence, passing away in the private chapel of the Keep in 1153.

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Of course, if you’re Cumbrian, then you’re Cumbrian, and thus slightly different from just English, or Scottish, or even Welsh, but containing hearty dollops of all three (and Irish too – but more of that later). Geographically and historically, Carlisle was part of a Celtic kingdom locked in a tug of war between later Scottish and English overlords. Carlisle’s two dragons on its coat of arms references its Brythonic roots, and wander the Cumbrian countryside map in hand and you’ll soon find more than just the odd clue to its Welsh heritage in its place names and dialect.

Throw in William Wallace (‘wylisc’), a Strathclyder (so Welsh really), and the buried bones of Robert de Brus, father of… yes, you guessed it, and finish off with the centuries old tug of war over Carlisle – at one moment part of Scotland, at another part of England – and Carlisle begins to show itself as a particularly lively theatre of British cosmopolitanism.

It doesn’t stop there. We’re also claiming St Patrick, Old King Cole (Coel Hen – enriching childhoods with memorable ditties from time immemorial), as well as the setting to any firm history that does exist around King Arthur (this is not even controversial), all of whom if not directly from Carlisle are certainly from its hinterland. St Cuthbert visited Carlisle regularly – it had been granted to the diocese of Lindisfarne by Ecgfrith – and St Ninian set out from Carlisle to convert the Picts, while St Mungo – whose legend still shapes the arms of the city of Glasgow – was a Stratchclyder who more than left his mark on field and marsh around Carlisle.

Indeed, one might even make a case that the first steps of the inexorable journey toward a unified Isles took place not far from Carlisle, as Athelstan sought to bring to heel the Northumbrians, the Welsh, the Scots and the Vikings in a little village of henge and earthwork, called Eamont, just outside Penrith.

Carlisle has earned its place at the top table in the gathering places of these lands. Of course, the historical may not convince everyone, so for the doubters let us turn to the practical. Geographically, Carlisle sits at the very nexus of the Isles – it is more or less equidistant between our northernmost reaches and the south coast, a gateway city straddling the old roads north to Glasgow, north-east to Edinburgh, the Wall road east to Newcastle, West to the coalfields and old ports (and nuclear plant) of Maryport and Workington and Whitehaven, and of course south down the ancient A6 to what we might call Down There.

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And remember that Carlisle is the biggest city in England – though admittedly 98% of its land use is rural (most certainly an upgrade from the cramped living of central London). Add to that Carlisle’s long and historic status as a nationally important hub for rail and freight – at one point with a seven rail companies serving its station, second only to London – as well as its long established cultural and historical links with Ireland through constant waves of immigration and trade (Cleator Moor, on the west coast of the county, is affectionately known as “Little Ireland”), and you come to realise that Cumbria has been a lynchpin of UK culture and cohesion for centuries.

Ah, I hear you cry, but could you accommodate the refined tastes of the metropolitan classes that would no doubt descend on Carlisle should we be raised to just prominence? Well, we had the first ever pillar box, we are the home of McVities and make more custard creams than you thought imaginable (that’s the meetings sorted).

Carlisle is also the home of Linton Tweeds, suppliers to Chanel, thus satiating the sartorital demands of the sophisticariat, while we also have the two oldest prizes in horse racing, dating to the 16th century, horses being a key export and cultural signifier of these lands for nigh on 2,000 years. Walter Scott was married here while William Paley – scourge of every A-level philosophy student, and Richard Dawkins – was archdeacon and is buried here, at our cathedral.

One struggles to imagine what more any soul could need.

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There is a serious point to be made too. If there is any case to be made for moving the capital, however temporarily, then it is to break the monopolistic dominance of London on the political and cultural capital of the UK, to renew the democratic covenant with those beyond the M25. Illustrious rivals – Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool – might all have a strong claim for a relocated Parliament, though the politically disruptive pulses flowing through society now are more parochial than that. It is the steely cries of our neglected towns, our isolated regions, our down-at-heel coastal areas, our struggling countryside that is ripping up the status quo. Decamping to another metropolis, particularly a place with a broadly similar sociocultural outlook, would do little more than replicate the problem.

In this sense, Cumbria provides a unique microcosm for those who would seek it out – the post-industrial decline, the struggling coastal areas, the decimation of rural services, the creaking infrastructure. What better place to stand as proxy for a debate we really need to have?

There will be significant downsides of course, and it would take great sacrifice on our part, though I’m sure we would be willing to do so, for the national interest. The increased traffic, the extra noise, the pollution, the jump in house prices, the gentrification, the hipster cereal shops…

On second thoughts, maybe Jon Elledge had a point. Maybe keep it down south after all. Why not try Manchester instead?

I know, I know. Mea culpa.

Still, the response eventually came: “What’s that?”

Cue raised eyebrows, jaws dropping, coffee cups falling to the floor etc. Admittedly I exaggerate, but after some back and forth it soon became clear that this gentleman with whom we spoke – an articulate, intelligent, and respectable young man – had no idea what Ash Wednesday was.

Now of course, it might be that we elevate what is important to ourselves as that which ought to be important to everybody else, but surely one need not be religious to know about Ash Wednesday. Indeed, one need not be religious to care. There is a certain amount of cultural detail, of collective awareness, that we might just expect people to know, or more precisely to have been taught – in this case the marking of a liturgical season, but in another case a particular sculpture, a common idiom, a piece of literature, a score of music or a work of art. These things form the warp and weft of our culture, comprising the framework for which any account of being ‘educated’ can be built. Would we not just expect most informed adults to know of certain things? The Sistine Chapel? Shakespeare? Beethoven? Lent?

More and more teachers have decided that the answer to these questions is: yes. There is a burgeoning interest in the work of E D Hirsh and the concept of ‘cultural literacy’ – the idea that a good education includes an awareness of the fruits of the culture in which we are being and have been formed. This is particularly pertinent for the most disadvantaged, for whom external conditions might not always provide the opportunity to engage with high culture, to have their minds, in the words of Peter Hitchens, “furnished with beauty”. With this comes a kind of social dislocation – an inability to engage with those things society has historically determined are worthy of engagement, or thrive within a society that does so.

The concept, however, is incomplete: for too long, the knowledge revolution has tended to proceed without due consideration given to the role of scripture as a core aspect of any meaningful account of cultural literacy. In short, those with a secular outlook too often assume cultural literacy can be pursued as an entirely secular affair. They might include important religious works of art or sculpture, but they attend to them as artefacts rather than testimony, and are rather more circumspect about the scriptural knowledge that would add new levels of understanding to their gaze.

Such neglect represents a tragic loss. In the words of Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, a secularised education and loss of scriptural understanding is worrying, since:

“There is a rich visual language tradition, a rich symbolic language in literature, which we find increasingly difficult to understand if we are not attuned to allegory, if we are not familiar with the great themes of classical antiquity and the Bible. If we are not aware of the background, then our experience is impoverished.”

Some will bray against this. Shaped by a culture which assumes the secular to be neutral, and society to be secular, there is an instinctive resistance to anything that smacks of imposing the presumed dictates of the religious. But is this to render oneself a philistine for the sake of proclaiming oneself impartial? Even from within the confines of a secularised account of society and culture, the case for increased scriptural literacy can be made. In the words of historian Tom Holland, “How can one understand Western literature, history & art without it?”

This is not to say that scriptural literacy has worth only in cultural-utilitarian terms, and if the argument presented here is one of social usefulness that is only for expediency. A detailed immersion in scripture might well help us better understand the intellectual architecture of the world around us, but it goes further than just this: it offers a means to engage at the deepest level with our own selves, something for which, if the recent explosion of interest in Jordan Peterson’s lectures on the Bible is anything to go by, there is clearly an appetite. In other words, the Bible not only contains the key code for a greater engagement with our culture (Peterson has called it the ‘foundational document of Western civilisation’), but also those depths and complexities of the human experience which contemporary secular society, in all its material accomplishment, tends to leave untouched.

But perhaps this is too contentious a realm, best left to the serendipities of the age. For now, maybe it is better to stick to the immediate claim – that cultural literacy requires scriptural literacy, and a knowledge of how its words and wisdom shaped our art, our laws, our literature, our music, our history, our language, our philosophy, our civic realm, indeed our very notion of ourselves.

To deny our children this is to deny them a stake in the aesthetic, ethical and literary landscape into which they are born, and that remains their rightful inheritance. Without this, our children have merely a technical connection to their past, an intellectual and social rupture which only loosens the connection to the present, a cultural listlessness that provides few navigation points for a generation trying to work out its own accounts of the good, the true and the beautiful.

Because in a society increasingly in the throes social and ethical ennui, in which an ever increasing number are driven to the darkest corners to look find meaning and overcome its absence, so this disinheritance, this lack of cultural formation, benefits none.

From yesterday on UnHerd

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... the religious

By Giles Fraser