WHAT does it mean to be English? Does it simply mean being born in this green and pleasant land?

Does it mean being able to trace your bloodline back to the Angles before the Normans arrived in 1066? In his sermon last week, Britain's first black archbishop offered an answer and also posed a daunting question: "For me, the vital issue facing the Church in England and the nation, is the loss of this country's long tradition of Christian wisdom which brought to birth the English nation. Having shed an empire and lost a missionary zeal, has this great nation... also lost a noble vision for the future?"

Unfortunately, Archbishop John Sentamu is not alone in offering a definition of what it means to be English. For some on the extreme right, the echoes of Aryan superiority is alive and kicking on the nationalist fringe, where being English simply means being white. Thankfully this kind of dunderheaded reasoning has been consigned to the political graveyard, but its capacity for wreaking havoc when people act under its influence can still be seen, most recently in the death of Anthony Walker: young, English, black and murdered in a Liverpool park with an axe buried in his head.

But if being English cannot be defined by what you look like what does it mean? For centuries past, being English could be compared to being a football fan. Being English was like being a Liverpool fan in the 80s. Being English meant winning. Winning empires, revolutions, wars and world cups, being English was about being on the winning side. Yet just as in football it's not until your team begins to lose, until you're no longer top dog, that you have to start asking questions about your club, what it believes in and where it is going. There is also the question for every fan of a once glorious team: where did it all go wrong?

This is where the analogy begins to break down. For the nation of England it hasn't gone wrong, it just got different. Being English does not have a static definition. There are no boxes which you can tick to get the flag of St George as a seal of approval. Rather, Englishness has a fluid meaning and changes with every person born of a great nation that has shaped the world. In our economy, Indian food is now a bigger industry than steel and mining combined. Our football team has had a black captain and our cricket team an Asian one.

So what is our noble vision of the English future to be? Is it a vision which embraces an asylum seeker, fleeing from persecution, and rejoices when he is enthroned as Archbishop? Or is it a vision which is found lying in a park, alongside the cold body of a teenage boy, murdered for the colour of his skin? Each of us needs to choose which way of being English we want for our own sakes and the future of those to come.