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We need to talk about King Charles and specifically this: is the British monarch basically a traitor? Dr Gavin Ashenden is a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, and he says he may be. The king is attempting to change the job description of the British monarch from “defender of the faith” to the more inclusive “protector of the space for faith within the multi-faith nation”, and you can see why someone who regularly appears on GB News to lament the “woke takeover” of the church and who suggests that Islam is inherently and uniquely violent would object to this. And then some.
“While the monarch cannot technically be a traitor, we might take refuge in grammar and find that the verb carries our feelings even if the noun cannot,” spluttered Ashenden. “Parliament and the oath it presented to the king as a condition of being crowned are betrayed; the Church of England is betrayed. The constitution is betrayed; Anglicans are specifically betrayed. And Christians in general will legitimately feel abandoned at the very least. Some of them too will feel betrayed.”
And it’s not just him on the smelling salts. “Christianity, not some multi-faith mishmash, is the bedrock of our nation’s laws and culture,” said Ciarán Kelly, director of the Christian Institute. “This latest move seems designed to convey the message that Christianity is just one religion among many, and that all are equally valid. They are not.”
But there are at least half a dozen problems with all this carping.
We are assuming the king wrote the offending line in the latest edition of the annual sovereign grant report. He could have, though he’s a busy man: palaces to run, tax to pay, spider letters to write.
But if he is a bit of a traitor, he has been at it for a while. The artist formerly known as Prince Charles first said that, as king, he would prefer to be the defender of faith in general rather than the faith in particular in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby back in 1994. Conservative Christians similarly lost their minds back then. “There is no place for Charles imposing his woolly religious beliefs or disbeliefs on the United Kingdom,” fumed the grand secretary of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland. Even the more liberal Archbishop of York, John Habgood, warned that this could “cause the British constitution to unravel”. Spoiler: it won’t.
One person who didn’t seem unduly bothered by what Charles said was his late mother, who articulated very much the same position in a speech she gave at Lambeth Palace a few years later. She explained that the role of the Church of England “is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions”, but rather to “create an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely”. Given that Ashenden was one of her chaplains at the time, I wonder whether he ever called her a traitor (or challenged her on the perfidy of “woke” theology)?
In fact, this multi-faith approach that so upsets the crusties is itself a product of the Protestant reformation. Before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, countries happily enforced the only version of the Christian faith that there was: Catholicism. But once there was competition – between the Coke of Rome and the Pepsi of Protestantism, as it were – they had to choose which brand to back. In Germany, they made the (in my opinion, very wise) decision to let the ruler of each region follow their own conscience.
Fast forward 250 years and the concept of the separation of church and state became enshrined in the US constitution, and, in practice, Britain has long functioned as a secular state too, religious coronation services notwithstanding.
For some, we have reached the end of (Christian) civilisation as we know it, but to me, it is obviously right and just. To extend my soft drink analogy: there are no longer just two colas on the market; we also have Sprite and Fanta, Dr Pepper and Tango (other brands are available) and, of course, there are those who eschew all kinds of fizzy pop – and they should be free to do so. So, in the same spirit of generosity and tolerance that the Germans displayed in the 16th century, we need to create a society in which people of all faiths and none can live together in the 21st century. This, it seems to me, is precisely what the king, like the queen before him, is attempting to do. So, as far as I’m concerned, he’s no traitor, he’s 100% faithful. It’s the critics I worry about.
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