Welcome. Unanticipated circumstances prevented me from sending out a blog last Tuesday. But that gives the opportunity to send out this topical, though untypical as regards the topic, blog about today’s Coronation.
Reflections on the Coronation.
My attitude to the monarchy has tended to be pragmatic and secularised. That is, to adapt Churchill’s oft-quoted statement on democracy, it is not as bad as all the other alternatives. I believe in constitutional monarchy. The instant process of ‘The Queen is dead; long live the King’ provides a trouble-free succession. Would anyone really want a choice between either President Johnson or President Corbin? A monarchy rightly muffles the significance of political leaders. Mercifully, whatever their quality, they are not the focus of our national identity. As a result, I believe we invest less emotional commitment in them. Indeed, the disaster of Johnson’s premiership was created partly by his presenting himself as ‘the new Churchill’, a red-blooded patriot asserting our national independence, so that people identified with him too much – bizarrely, he came to be seen as ‘one of us’ standing there up front defending the nation. We know how that ended.
The fact that neither Starmer nor Sunak can make a credible claim to stand for the whole nation has helped restore sanity to public life. A nation with an hereditary monarch as its centre of allegiance allows us to be more ready to accept the weaknesses and limitations of politicians. The contrast with the United States, still tethered against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people to face a likely Trump v Biden re-match, is instructive. If the person who wins at the polls is the very focus of your national identity then you run close to the edge of putting too much of your heart into believing in them absolutely, or conversely believing them to be the source of everything wrong in your nation. The present vindictive polarisation of American politics suggests that they have indeed fallen over the edge. Whereas monarchy asserts national identity with a subdued elegance which undercuts the need for ranting nationalism.
A constitutional monarchy, then, facilitates the election of politicians in whom we neither put too much trust, nor do we excoriate them for having the limitations and failings that beset all humans. It ought to, and on the whole I think it has, led to a cooler political climate where reason has some chance of contesting against intense partisan feelings. It has allowed the emergence of leaders with distinct political programmes, such as Thatcher or Blair, who can also be criticised or repudiated without support or rejection being taken to be treachery to the nation. (In this respect, I think it was wrong to have a national memorial service at St Paul’s cathedral for Margaret Thatcher. Like all important politicians, she had a polarising impact. Rightly, not everyone could or should celebrate her life, therefore she ought not to have been given an accolade that distinguished her from, say, Harold Wilson or Edward Heath. By contrast, a national celebration of Churchill’s life was in order, not because he was a Prime Minister but because of his role in the war).
But, having given this lukewarm affirmation of the value of monarchy as a political structure, is that all? Is my emotional detachment from monarchy – to see it as a political choice, not that different from our taxation system – missing something? By that I have in mind not just the devotion that the monarchy inspires in many people, nor even less that on balance it is probably a profitable form of international soft power for Britain, but that more deeply that it aspires to resonate with faith in God and with spiritual authority?
The Old Testament was notoriously ambivalent about monarchy. On p 257 of my Bible I read ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes’ (Judges21:25). Surely, a monarch was needed. And yet on p 269 the Lord warns the people through Samuel of the grief that a monarch will bring into Israel (2 Samuel 8:4-18). The subsequent narrative depicts more often the evils of kings than their virtues, yet there is also a clear understanding that kingship carried out under God’s authority and as service to the people is a blessing from God. So that finally it is nothing less than the coming of God’s ‘kingship’ that Jesus calls us to pray for.
As with Israel, so too the British monarchy has a blemished history. It profited from the slave trade; it shared in appropriation from the colonies; it presided over enormous and growing differences between rich and poor in this country with very little godly outrage at such injustice. Over all these issues critics of monarchy are making important points. Yet nonetheless that people might be chosen and anointed by God to rule is part of the framework.
It is very significant how Christian this service has been set up to be. For several decades Charles’s stated intention to be ‘defender of faiths’, not ‘the faith’, whilst intellectually incoherent, had widespread popular resonance, given a society increasingly agnostic about the possibility of specific truth claims about the nature (if at all) of the divine. At one stage it seemed quite possible that any forthcoming coronation would have minimal Christian substance. Yet now it seems we will be getting an unquestionably and specifically Christian service, even whilst quite rightly making space for adherents of other faiths in the service.
Why has this happened? Most likely some thanks should be given to the low key but powerful negotiating capability of Archbishop Justin. More speculative, is asking how far the spirit of the late Queen dwells over this service. One wonderfully counter-cultural aspect of her monarchy was that as decade followed decade her outlook became more not less Christian. By her death she was widely recognised as someone who not only sincerely believed in Jesus Christ but saw her role of monarch as an expression of that faith. That, of course, had been implicit in her coronation - the anointing, the vows. But they have not always impacted previous monarchs so decisively.
So this Coronation sets up Charles to be a monarch after his mother’s heart and with his mother’s commitment to God. It will be interesting to see whether for a secularised society the service will have been seen as over-stepping the mark, the intrusion into national life of an unwelcome Christian emphasis. Or will it be experienced as so self-authenticating that agnostics will nonetheless recognise an awe, a mystery, even something supernatural about the service that moves it beyond the characteristics of the ordinary, flawed people involved to point to the reality of a God who is concerned that all people are governed well. At this point in time that is an exceptionally daring point to make publicly on the international stage.
For the British monarchy is distinctly odd in the modern world, but therefore it also raises important questions against modernity. King Charles is a given. Neither he nor we had any choice in the issue. It denies the modern idolatry of ‘choice’. This binds hard on those born into the prescribed paths of royalty, with no say in the matter, and amongst whom Prince Andrew and Prince Harry might fairly be seen as casualties. (Which is why I am unhappy about the widespread readiness to put in the boot against Andrew. He didn’t ask to live under the constraints as well as the benefits of royalty).
Yet it is this very absence of choice that gives monarchy its power. Any chosen head of state is inevitably a partial choice. Because King Charles’s role is unearned it therefore enables him to be a sort of everyman, who is equidistant from everyone. He has no special qualities that mark him out as deserving the role. Thus everyone can identify with him equally. Does this only work if, as the Coronation service will say, the monarch is divinely given, chosen by God. If he is not, then, whatever the advantages of constitutional monarchy, it is a strange historical relic. But if he really does rule ‘by the grace of God’ then the monarch is someone who we welcome and, yes, declare our allegiance to; and then get on living our lives as best we can, all recognising that - from an enormous diversity of social groups and ethnic backgrounds - living together as one nation is also a given that for most of us was not chosen but is also to be welcomed as the gift of a gracious God.