Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, 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.

But the new series, which will air on MGM Plus, pretends that Christianity

was an alien religion to England in the late 1100s. Part of the plot is that the villainous

Normans attempted to force Christianity down the throats of the noble pagan Anglo-Saxons. That, of course,

is nonsense, though the Normans were not the nicest people, forcing Christianity on the Saxons

was certainly not on their agenda. The Saxons were already Christians and had been for quite a long

time. According to legend, Joseph of Amorthea brought Christianity to what's now England in the

first century. And even if that is just legend, there's evidence of believers there as early as the

second century. It's likely that

merchants brought the faith to what's now England well before Constantine. By the time

the Romans left in the 400s, Britain was basically Christian. St. Patrick, after all, was in

fact British, not Irish. Starting in the 5th century, Anglo-Saxon tribes overran southern and

eastern Britain, calling it Angleland and naming the days of the weeks after their gods.

Celtic Christian culture was suppressed, though it remained on the fringes in Ireland and in Scotland.

At the end of the 6th century, missionaries reintroduced Christianity, some from Europe, others from Celtic areas to the north and west. By the end of the

7th century, the Anglo-Saxons were basically Christian. Beowulf was one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon

books, and it has Christian elements. Christian saints, like the venerable Bede, Boniface, and Alcoigne of

York, all 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

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