The death of the Queen and the passing of Christendom
Why the whole of British society has been blessed by the Queen's faith, and how monarchy points us onwards and upwards to redeemed power and authority
Where were you when the Queen died?
It’s one of those historical moments like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 attacks that will have engraved itself on the memories of those who lived through it.
I was sitting at home at the dinner table, having sausages and mash with my pregnant wife and two daughters. A notification came through on the BBC News app. Queen Elizabeth II had died.
I told my wife. She burst into tears. She hadn’t registered the growing concerns about the Queen’s health reported over the course of the day, and it came as a shock.
I was grief-stricken, but calm. I had seen the news earlier in the afternoon that the Royal Family was heading to Balmoral to see the Queen, who was ‘under medical supervision’. I had realised that she was probably not long for our world and shed tears of my own at that point. Here’s what I tweeted at 4:10pm:
We explained to our girls, aged 3 and 5, that the Queen had died. We told them that because the Queen had got so old, her body had stopped working – but because she loves Jesus, she had now gone to be with him. As it happens, I’d taken the girls blackberrying in a local graveyard just a few days ago, and had talked with them then about how we die and our bodies get buried in the ground, planted until the day that Jesus returns and brings them back to life.
I shepherded us through to the living room to turn on the TV news to watch as a family. I had a frustrating moment of trying to get up the BBC News livestream to work - possibly it was straining under the weight of demand. (We ‘cut the cord’ on conventional TV a couple of years ago and rely on our Apple TV box for streaming everything.)
My 5-year-old took it in solemnly. She reflected that we all die, but there are always new people, and that one day maybe the four of us would be dead while the new baby growing in Mummy’s tummy would still be alive. Our 3-year-old bounced around, kicking my back and pin balling around the room, trying to drag attention back onto her rather than the unfolding news or our attempts to explain it.
The passing of the Queen was one of those events that I knew abstractly must one day happen, but it was still a shock when the moment came.
I was surprised at my own reaction – I hadn’t expected to shed tears. But tears came anyway.
I used to be a reluctant royalist. As an undergraduate, I wrote an opinion piece for my university’s student newspaper arguing that ‘The monarchy is useless – but we shouldn’t get rid of it’. I made the case that the monarchy was a historical vestige, offensive to contemporary ideals of equality and democracy, but that I didn’t trust politicians to muck around with reinventing the constitution of the United Kingdom. Our compromise between past and present represented by a constitutional monarchy tied to parliamentary democracy wasn’t ideal, but it basically worked: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I think that there are many modern Britons who would share that ambivalence about the monarchy.
But since then I have developed a greater appreciation both for the Queen herself, and for the monarchy as an institution. Her calming, stable presence was a reassurance through the years, especially times of crisis like the Covid pandemic.
For me as a Christian, her faith and willingness to talk about it was a wonderful, gentle witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It may be true, as our new Prime Minister Liz Truss said in her speech, that the Queen is the rock on which modern Britain was built. But the rock on which the Queen rested was Jesus Christ.
The passing of Christendom
The British monarch is to this day the head of the Church of England, and King Charles III will step into this role – long live the King.
This establishment of religion might seem outdated and offensive to many, especially to those from the United States with the strict separation of church and state, or to atheists and secularists keen to purge the superstitions of the past from our society.
But what the Queen’s faith has shown is that it’s possible to acknowledge the key place that Christianity has – or at least had – in British society, to recognise in the very constitution of the country the reality of God and the lordship of Christ, while at the same time being tolerant, pluralist and hospitable to people of all beliefs. This is Christendom, a Christianised political order, at its best.
The spiritual blessing of the Queen’s faith on the country – not just for Christians but for people of all beliefs – must not be underestimated. It underpins the stabilising presence that she was able to bring to the nation. Although the history of Christendom is a complex one with a mixed legacy, the Queen’s faith shows a very bright side to it. Her passing symbolises the end of almost a millennium and a half of British Christendom, and the shift to a post-Christian Britain.
Although Christianity remains the established religion of the United Kingdom, with the ascent of King Charles III, we have a monarch who is less concerned to be ‘the defender of the faith’, of Christianity specifically, as much as ‘the defender of faith’ generically. The forces of secularisation have advanced rapidly over the Queen’s lifetime. The Queen’s death doesn’t make Britain post-Christian, but is representative of this broad shift, as well as an accelerant of it.
Many people, including many Christians, would celebrate the end of Christendom, seeing it as an unholy alliance of religious and political power, or perhaps as the corruption of the church by politics as it sought coercive control. But I think that’s an inaccurate picture, and I’m inclined to agree with Jake Meador in seeing it as a great loss:
The theologian Oliver O’Donovan explores the question of Christendom in his excellent book The Desire of the Nations, which unpacks the thorny issues of political theology.
O’Donovan sets out the ‘extraordinary missionary triumphalism’ that birthed the church, the conviction that:
Christ had gone up on high; he had lead captivity captive, and given gifts to men. So the nations and rulers of the world were confronted with the rule of God, triumphantly present in a community that owned no other rule.
This would inevitably result in the yielding of pagan empire, conquered by the preaching of the truth and blood of the martyrs:
We distinguish two frontiers within the Gentile mission: the church addressed society and it addressed rulers. Its success with the first was the basis of its great confidence in confronting the second. The logic of this distinction is given in the very idea of God’s rule in Christ. Society and rulers have different destinies: the former is to be transformed, shaped in conformity to God’s purpose; the latter are to disappear, renouncing their sovereignty in the face of his. The distinction must, then, be reflected in our systematic thinking about the political content of the Gospel. Political theology must have something to say about society and something to say about rule, and the two must be coordinated. And the best order might, perhaps, be the missionary order: society first, government after. The truth in that order is that Christ has conquered the rulers from below, by drawing their subjects out from under their authority. (p. 193)
In other words, Jesus is exalted as king. But Christendom didn’t come about in the first instance by Christians seizing political power as a coercive instrument for mission (though forced conversions do blight the record of European Christendom from time to time, to our great shame), but as the fruit of society being won over by the gospel.
O’Donovan again:
Christendom is response to mission, and as such a sign that God has blessed it. It is constituted not by the church’s seizing alien power, but by alien powers becoming attentive to the church. (p. 193)
Christians today often say that the church should be a prophetic minority, rather than trying to cling on to the privileges of the Christendom era. I think that’s true enough of our moment. But as Christians we should desire and pray that society listens to the Gospel, so that perhaps we may no longer be a minority, and that we have to once again grapple with the question of what does it mean for rulers to rule well as Christians seeking to be obedient to the Gospel.
This shouldn’t lead us to any kind of theocracy, because faith is a matter of the heart, not of outward conformity – there must be freedom of belief and hospitality for different religions and philosophies, not despite the logic of Christianity, but because of it. In fact, I believe a Biblically faithful Christendom offers a better basis for freedom and diversity of belief than the unstable tolerance of modern liberalism, which we already see rapidly collapsing.
So to no longer have a Christian Queen ruling over a Christian country is a real loss, not just for the sake of Christians, but for the common good of our country and people of all beliefs within it. The death of Queen Elizabeth II is a marker on a long journey of national spiritual decline, and to be grieved for that as well as for the loss of the Queen herself as a person.
Signposts to redeemed authority
One of the other benefits of monarchy that I have come to appreciate is that it points beyond itself to the monarchy of God. As imperfect as human authority and kingship is, it can help train us to reverence and bow to the perfect authority of God.
Our culture’s suspicion of authority is not without good reason in a fallen world. In the last few years, a steady stream of scandals in the church has painfully brought home to me the reality of how power can be abused by Christians and church leaders – from the sexual exploitation of Ravi Zacharias, bullying leadership of Mark Driscoll, to John Smyth and the abuse carried out in connection with the Iwerne Christian camps. We are very aware that, as Lord Acton put it, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
There is much that is good in Western civilization’s emphasis on freedom, however inconsistent our society has been and is in upholding that value. Culturally this emphasis has roots in Christianity’s emphasis on the value of each human person, and on the importance of personal faith and conscience.
But what we see today is runaway individualism, where the full and free expression of the autonomous self and its desires is elevated to a supreme good. This thoroughgoing suspicion of authority and radical individualism creates difficulties for the Christian faith.
The Bible teaches God’s good authority, and the rightness of submitting to his perfect, life-giving and self-giving rule. But today even Christians can struggle to see God’s authority as good news, preferring to see him as a best friend while downplaying his lordship and kingship.
For non-Christians, the claim of God’s authority over our lives squarely and directly challenges the cultural values of autonomy and freedom. The late Christopher Hitchens viewed the idea of God with horror as a “celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea”. When Philip Pullman named the pseudo-God who is the villain of the His Dark Materials trilogy, he called him simply “The Authority” – uh oh!
We have such deeply ingrained reactions to freedom and to authority because of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginaries” we are part of. Our imaginations don’t operate individualistically, but as part of the community of stories, values and experiences that we find ourselves part of. The message we get in a thousand different ways in hundreds of different songs and movies and cartoons is believe in yourself – find your own path, rather than being bound by authority or tradition.
As C S Lewis said about the monarchy and our egalitarian impulses:
Monarchy can easily be “debunked” but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch.
Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
As Christians, we need to navigate a careful balance when it comes to authority, power and hierarchy. We need to properly acknowledge the dangers that power poses for fallen human beings, while at the same time calling people to submit to God’s good authority. But also, I believe that the Bible affirms the underlying goodness of hierarchy, authority and submission, and calls us to redeem them, following Christ’s pattern of sacrificial love and servant leadership of those he has authority over.
For this, we need not just theoretical understanding of the goodness of authority, but imaginative renewal. Some of that can come from story, of course, from the way The Lord of the Rings makes our hearts soar with the return of the king as Aragorn takes his rightful throne, or from Aslan’s kingly power and goodness, or from the strength and goodness of King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table.
But there’s something particularly potent about having a real monarch, to weave the story of kingship and queenship into the fabric of our social and political life and imaginations. The Kings and Queens of this age can, when they rule well, help lift our imaginations to the splendour of power exercised rightly, with wisdom and discretion.
A constitutional monarchy with representative government is perhaps the best of both worlds – checks and balances on power to limit its misuse on the one hand, but on the other hand, the powerful symbolism of King or Queen as a signpost to deeper realities about God and about our deepest natures.
The humble service of Queen Elizabeth II points us onwards and upwards to the redemption of power that is perfected in the kingship of Jesus.
Other notes
The Rings of Power episode 3 is very good! The show is finding its footing. Story is gathering momentum, Numenor is well realised, and there were fewer clunks and bumps in the script. The importance given to the tree in Arondir’s subplot seemed particularly Tolkienian. I’ll wait until the end of the series before doing an analysis of how it works as a whole.
I’ve got an article written on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Pete Dray and Matt Lillicrap’s Reality and Other Stories, exploring the seven basic plots and nature of reality, that will be published on the IVP blog soon, though on hold for now due to recent events.