Watching the House of Lord and the Commons sing “God Save the King” in Westminster Hall, and to see King Charles’ face melt for a second, contoured by the emergence of the powerful emotions that his mother’s death and his accession to the throne thrust to the surface, is to catch a span of history compressed into a moment.

Who, of good mind and generous spirit, could not wish him well? He has waited so long for destiny to draw him into the place it prepared him, and the drama of accession is only modified by the grief in the death that brought him there.

Monarchy is hard to explain to those who have little sense of history of the blood shed in the struggle between tyrants and people, politics and piety, ambition and anarchy.

Jordan Peterson has been using his public platform to teach an unlearned public how important monarchy is in the prevention of presidents.  Presidents are power hungry, politically precocious and truly divisive. Being political creatures they represent the winning group against the losing one. Monarchs, by either the accident of history, or the design of God, or both fused together depending on the angle of observation, have the capacity to unite their people in their collective belonging to the nation, which is bigger than family or party or faction. 

And like so many things in life, if we don’t do things well, they will be done anyway, and badly.

CS Lewis wrote:-

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.” 

(C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns.)

Celebrity culture is something that we both deride and revere. We deride it as vacuous and self-serving, and yet our society consumes it voraciously, and as Lewis warned, poisons itself with the superficiality and irrelevance of it. But it appeals because, for a moment, the celebrities have such mass attention and the power of influence that goes with it.

When we look back at the example Queen Elizabeth set in terms of the Christian values she lived by, we see something a mass influence composed of entirely different values. 

She exemplified selflessness, the discipline of duty, the importance of the other, the joy of service, the values of forgiveness and patience. 

As King Charles III succeeds to the throne, he steps into the gap that she left, and reinvigorates the monarchy in its position as a guardian of value in our society and culture. It acts as a buffer to and diffuser of both celebrity culture and political power, and to some extent as antidotes to them.

But can the monarchy survive in giving us a hereditary Christian head of state? There is no guarantee that it will.

There was a shattering moment following the death of Diana, when a very odd form of mass hysteria grasped the nation, and for a moment the Queen, Charles and the Royal family were in danger of becoming enemies of the state. They were certainly enemies of the ‘state of mind’ of a large proportion of the population, who were demented with grief at the death of their archetypal heroine.

It was only the swift and decisive actions of the Queen which defused some of the rage and allowed the dangerous moment to pass. 

In looking back to the unexpected crisis we are reminded of Harold MacMillan’s words when he was asked what he feared most in government. His reply: “Events dear boy, events.”

We do not know what problematic events lie in the mists of future history  before our new King, Charles the 3rd.

As well as events, we might add the vortex of political (and spiritual) currents.

But the monarchy embodies values that have become increasingly different or even opposite to those that the swift and powerful progressive tide of culture have imposed on us recently; and particularly the DIE agenda.

In the last few years, Diversity, Inclusion and Equality have been launched like a public re-education programme though all the institutions of our state.

At every point of friction with the culture it sets out to replace, it chooses Christians and the Church as its first target. Diversity does not include Christians, neither does inclusivity or equality.

The monarchy may find itself facing disapprobation if only because in the West it is essentially a Christian concept. It provides a symbolic, psychological and spiritual restraint on the raw ambitions of politicians, and does so by making itself accountable to God, his Church and Christian values.

But Christian values are under sustained assault. And the King and his office are inextricably linked with the Faith, not only because one of the King’s primary titles is ‘Defender of the Faith.’

He may find increasingly his office and his person in the spiritual and political firing line in the intensifying culture wars.

It is after all hard to think of an institution that is less acceptable to the ‘DIE’ progressive culture. Monarchy is confined to a single hereditary line. It could not be less diverse. 

It excludes anyone not born into the royal family, and excludes everyone in that family who is not the monarch or their heir. 

It repudiates any equality and instead,embodies hierarchy, with the monarch at the top of the pyramid of privilege and everyone else  carefully gradated below.

Both King Charles and Prince William have tried to gain social credits by demonstrating their Green credentials whenever they could, but that may not be enough to protect the monarchy from the malign eye of the Cultural Marxism that turns its wrath on everything and everyone that resists its demands.

The title Defender of the Faith has had a controversial past already and may yet prove to have a controversial future. As an honour it was bestowed on Henry 8th by Pope Leo 10th in 1521 for his defence of the seven sacraments against Luther’s heretical apologetics. But on declaring independence from Rome it was stripped from him on his excommunication. Piqued by this, it was restored by a rather bullish English Parliament in 1543 a Defender of the Protestant faith instead.

Whether or not the prominence of bearing this acclamation from a Protestant assembly was meant to rub the papacy’s nose in its own assumed self-importance, it became a historic formality. But in these controversial days faith is being seriously contested. The title Defender of the Faith may be the echo of a  Protestant jibe from the Sixteenth century, but what would happen if the school teacher recently jailed in Northern Ireland for the contempt of a court order prohibiting him for teaching for his refusal to have his speech coerced appealed to the King- from one defender of the faith to another? What if the increasing numbers of Christians barred from public office of employment because of their belief in Christian marriage raised a clamour of appeal to the new King? And the clamour grew? Constitutionally Charles might have to resist it, but in so doing would evacuate the monarch’s fresh vows of some part of their meaning and authenticity.

As Islam and secularism both demand a deeper de-Christianisation of local as well as national affairs, at what point does a monarchy that tried to be all things to all people betray its own identity and coherence?

Much of this may proceed by slow but incremental change, interrupted by the chaos of crisis. But if the new Carolingian monarchy is to survive whatever pressures and challenges are brought against it, it will be better served by becoming as it did under the late Queen,  more deeply Christian. Dilution and formalism will not be sufficient aids to our prayers, that ‘God save the King.’ 

The post Why Kings are better than Presidents appeared first on Catholic Herald.