It is nearly thirty years since John Betjeman died, and his Church of England, whose buildings, rites and pieties were so crucial to the timbre of his work, now seems as remote as the Sandemanians and Agapemonites whose twilight world so engaged him. It is a big mistake to see Betjeman as the laureate of middle-stump Anglicanism, splendid though he was at evoking it when he wanted to. His religion, and thus his poetic inspiration, actually draws on two very distinctive strands of inspiration that are now vestigial: baroque Anglo-Catholicism; and the insular Protestant piety of the proprietary chapels, the meeting houses and the hymn-singing working class. To call his Anglo-Catholicism baroque is not an architectural preference but a spiritual one. He is the only English religious poet for whom devotion to the Blessed Sacrament Reserved is so prominent a theme in his best poems (St Saviour's, Aberdeen Park; In Willesden Churchyard; A Lincolnshire Church; Felixstowe). The man who wrote: ‘There where the white light flickers … A wafer dipped in a wine-drop/ Is the presence the angels hail’ is not expressing the sort of piety envisaged by Lux Mundi and the 1928 Prayer Book. So too in metre, and in diction, and in tone, the bombazine world of evangelical Victorian piety blends with the larkiness of the music hall to create the authentic Betjeman ethos.

What does Kevin Gardner make of all this? For a start, the title does little to help us: the SPCK helpfully changes it for their paperback edition to Betjeman and the Anglican Imagination, but the book is made up of a disparate set of essays, without a unifying theme. When he comes to define Anglicanism, things are problematic. We are told ‘the denomination was clearly born in the historical moment of King Henry VIII's break with Rome in November 1534’. Moreover, this clear birth was of a denomination which believes ‘a doctrine of the incarnation, according to which God not only took on human form but remains incarnate in the created world, encounters with the divine are thus possible when one remains open to God's surprising if unlikely manifestations’. Is this quite what Bluff King Harry and Thomas Cranmer had in mind, let alone Good Queen Bess? This may be tendentious, but Gardner then amazes us by explaining that the reason why R.S. Thomas, despite promising credentials, will never count as an Anglican poet in the way Betjeman does is because ‘he was a priest in the Church in Wales, the Welsh branch of Anglicanism that enjoys the political privilege of establishment [sic] but endures the indignity of its minority status in a country wherein nonconformity (ie Protestant dissent) enjoys a paradoxical majority’. This is what Betjeman, who was after all a schoolmaster in the 1920s, might well have called a ‘howler’.

What about the poetry? First, Gardner does not really make much of a distinction between the thirty or so really good pieces and the rest. So we do not get ‘Old men who never cheated, never doubted, communicated monthly, sit and stare’, a wonderful succinct encapsulation of a certain sort of English Anglican piety from the Death of King George V, but we do have some grim doggerel about St Paul, in which the light of faith ‘sometimes goes completely out/ and leaves me plunging round in doubt’ (p. 81). And some of his detailed criticism of the poems seems far-fetched, even when portentously delivered. Like Bevis Hillier, I do not think that the flattened pattern in the grass made by the picnickers in An Archaeological Picnic is evidence that ‘the speaker's arousal inside the church heightens his sexual enjoyment of the beloved’ (p. 98); I do not think that ‘the strange starfish, hugely magnified/ … in the jeweled basin of a pool’, from Beside the Sea can be said to ‘plausibly suggest the birth of Christ and the public acknowledgement by the Magi of this promise of redemption’ (p. 141); and I do not think that King's College Chapel would have appeared as an ‘outrageous anachronism’ to a contemporary ‘continental observer familiar with St Peter's Basilica, begun in Rome a century earlier’ (p. 198).

The topic of this book is a worthwhile one. Betjeman's popularity as a poet in England was unrivalled in the twentieth century, and the importance of religious themes in his poetry demands the attention and respect of the critic. But we need to get the facts right first. Betjeman's Anglicanism was complex because it emerged from the rarified, ambiguous and beguiling tradition of 1920s Anglo-Catholicism, exotic and very much at odds with the public school muscular Christianity of his class. He also practised it in a very public way while dealing with excruciating bouts of depression, doubt and guilt. Much of the curious hinterland of British Protestantism, which is such an important part of his creativity also no longer exists, swept away by the ubiquitous gently charismatic evangelicalism that is the same from Seattle to Godalming. For much of his life John Betjeman worked to make people see that Victorian architecture was worthwhile and worth preserving, despite their prejudices. It is ironic that now we are all signed up to the heritage industry, it is his Anglicanism that begins to look as curious and odd and baffling as St Pancras Station did to the British Rail executives of the 1960s.