The King's Speech

Enough with the codswollop

This morning I read King Charles’s Christmas message to the people of the United Kingdom. It was not great. Mrs. Watson, who hails from the English town of Tunbridge Wells, would likely use a word like “poppycock” or “codswollop” or “balderdash” to describe it.

Parts of it were fine. He spoke of the pain of violent conflict across the globe and the value of those organizations that have set out to bring humanitarian relief. He spoke of the hope Christ gives to those who suffer. He even spoke of God’s saving work in Christ: “As the famous Christmas Carol, ‘Once In Royal David’s City’ reminds us, ‘Our Saviour holy’ ‘came down to Earth from Heaven’, lived among ‘the poor and mean and lowly’ and transformed the lives of those he met, through God’s ‘redeeming love’.” All good stuff.

But then things take a decidedly incoherent turn. “That is the heart of the Nativity Story and we can hear its beat in the belief of all the great faiths in the love and mercy of God in times of joy and of suffering, calling us to bring light where there is darkness.”

And just like that, Bob’s your uncle and the whole thing’s gone pear-shaped.

The Savior did come down to earth from heaven. He lived among the poor and lowly, and transformed the lives of those he met through God’s redeeming love. Yes, that is the heart of the gospel. No argument here. But this is a particularly Christian set of claims. I do not hear “its beat” throughout all the “great faiths.” I do not hear it because it isn’t there. It is in the Christian message, and only in the Christian message.

He then goes into more talk about helping others. I am decidedly for helping others. All good. Next there is talk about diversity and listening, and then back to a specifically Christian theme: the Magnificat. “Again, listening is a recurrent theme of the Nativity story. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, listened to the Angel who revealed to her a different future full of hope for all people. The message of the Angels to the shepherds – that there should be peace on Earth – in fact echoes through all faiths and philosophies.”

All faiths and philosophies? No, Your Highness. The message of peace does not echo through all faiths and philosophies. A quick perusal of different faiths and philosophies would make this clear. I suppose if we understand “peace” to mean “the absence of violent conflict” then one could say that a number of faiths and philosophies prefer peace to the alternative. The peace the angels proclaim is not simply the absence of conflict, however, but peace rooted in the will of God that spreads out among people who live in keeping with that will. We have peace—true peace—not simply when we avoid killing one another, but when the will of God and the will of people come into alignment and the values of God’s kingdom shape decisively life among the nations. The values of the kingdom, moreover, are rooted in the traditions of Israel and expressed in their fullness in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Mary, moreover, was not just listening. She was obeying. “Let it be with me according to your word,” she said to the angel Gabriel. She didn’t weigh the pros and cons of Gabriel’s words and input these into a spreadsheet. She didn’t perform a SWOT analysis. She heard God’s messenger standing before her, speaking to her about the child who would uniquely bring salvation to the world, and she said, “Yes.” She would be the bearer of the incarnate God who would renew all creation.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the King. After all, he has two jobs that stand in tension with one another. On the one hand, he is the monarch of an increasingly pluralistic kingdom. On the other hand, he is the titular head of the Church of England, which, in the first of its Thirty-nine Articles states, “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” The pluralism of a liberal state and the particularity of the Anglican faith make for strange bedfellows. Charles tried to thread the needle years ago by suggesting he would be the “Defender of Faith,” rather than “Defender of the Faith.” What a difference a definite article makes.

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

These tensions are exacerbated by the decline of Christianity in the UK. According to a 2017 article, about 17% of the population of the UK are now Anglican and 8 % are Roman Catholic, though the latter number is skewed by the fact that 40% of the Northern Irish are Catholic. Another 17% of people in the UK identify with some other Christian tradition.

The number of Muslims, on the other hand, is quite small but growing exponentially.

The percentage of the population identifying as Muslim in the United Kingdom is 5%. The majority of these followers live in England and Wales, where they make up 3% of the population. They make up only .8% of the population in Scotland and in Northern Ireland fewer than 2,000 people practice Islam. Although these numbers are small, they grew 10 times faster than the population between 2001 and 2009 (emphasis mine).

Remember, this article was written in 2017. According to the 2021 UK census, Muslims make up 6.5% of the population. By contrast, the percentage of people identifying as Christians dropped from 59.3% to 46.2%.

As the census reports, however, “‘No religion’ was the second most common response, increasing by 12.0 percentage points to 37.2% (22.2 million) from 25.2% (14.1 million) in 2011.” In other words, the “nones” are rising in the UK, just as they have in the US.

The reasons for the decline of Christianity across the Western world are complex. In A Secular Age Charles Taylor spends 800 pages exploring this topic. It would be very interesting to know how the loss of particularity among Christians has contributed to the decline of Western Christianity. Many Christians have come to believe their truth claims are simply a matter of perspective. We see truth one way, and Muslims another, and Hindus another, and there is no way to adjudicate between them. We’re all grabbing onto different parts of the elephant, heading up the same mountain by different paths, etc., etc. From this perspective, Christianity is simply one variety of a larger universal truth apprehended in part by all religions but grasped with unique clarity by none.

One implication of this perspective is that the faith we proclaim is primarily a matter of upbringing and personal taste. The evangelistic mandate is the equivalent of trying to convince our friends to root for our favorite football team. There’s nothing really at stake, so why risk offending people? Why risk anything at all if nothing is really at stake?

But such a perspective is illusory. A great deal is at stake.

I have spent time in the Islamic world. I have spent time in the Hindu and Buddhist worlds. They are vastly different from a world shaped by Christian values and virtues. Yes, even though we most often do not recognize it, our Western virtues have grown up in the fertile soil of Christian thought. Historian Tom Holland has made this abundantly clear. Even those who suggest that Christianity is unjust because it is intolerant or bigoted draw upon values—such as justice, tolerance, and acceptance—that are shaped profoundly by Christian thought. The particularity of Christianity matters. Our specific claims about the nature of God, the incarnation, the teachings of Christ, his saving work on the cross, and the resurrection of the dead should shape the way we think, speak, and act. Other religious systems, with other metaphysical claims and ethical principles, would shape us in different ways.

The message of Christian faith is that the God of all creation became one of us out of love. In the vast scope of the universe you and I amount to a microscopically small collection of bits of stardust, and yet God sees us. He even loves us. He knows the number of hairs on your head. After all, we bear his image—a truth that surpasses our understanding in its significance. We are unique among the rest of creation. And when he became flesh, he came not as a worldly king, but as an artisan worker in a small town in a backwater province on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. He loved and wept and suffered. His perfection was such that, when he confronted the reality of human sin, the result was his death. When he died, he mystically took upon himself everything we humans have ever done and ever will do in rebellion against him. He suffered the consequence of sin—death—though he did not sin. He thus broke the stranglehold of sin over human life. After three days, he rose bodily from the dead in demonstration of his victory over death. We can live differently now. We can choose life. We can love in ways we did not know were possible. And we can live forever in the presence of the one who loved us enough to become one of us.

That particular narrative matters. If it is true, it is the most important thing we could ever know. And I believe it is true. I stake my life on it. Our story of salvation is true. It is not one story among others. It is a true story. There is no comparable story. And everyone needs to hear it. You don’t have to be a king or queen to defend the faith. You just have to tell the truth.