Why Monarchy Matters

Symon Hill

The Year of Jubilee was originally a radical celebration of liberation, equality and justice. So why, wonders Symon Hill, are today’s Christians seemingly content to glorify an elite and undemocratic institution?

The year was 1661. The country was in economic turmoil. Monarchy had been restored after 11 years of a republic. Charles II had already broken his promises of religious liberty. As protests spread, a group of activists occupied St Paul’s Cathedral. They declared their opposition to Charles II and announced the reign of ‘King Jesus’.

As government forces cracked down, dozens were killed in two days of fighting. The protests were violently suppressed. Seventeen radicals were executed for high treason. More than 4,000 Anabaptists, Quakers and Fifth Monarchists were rounded up and imprisoned. Many died in jail.

As the government raided private houses and announced new restrictions on worship, the Quakers issued a statement distancing themselves from the violence. Unlike the Fifth Monarchists, they believed that God would never lead them to fight ‘with outward weapons’. But they shared the Fifth Monarchists’ support for King Jesus. ‘As for the kingdoms of this world,’ they said, ‘We cannot covet them, much less can we fight for them’. They hoped that they would be replaced by the kingdom ‘of the Lord and of his Christ’1. For politically progressive Christians in the 17th century, support for King Jesus meant opposition to the kings of this world. ‘No king but Jesus!’ shouted a good many parliamentary soldiers as they marched into battle. They were not the only ones. A century before, the Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer told an aristocrat that he had no right to be ‘a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his dear blood’2. But the tradition goes back much further: to the days when early Christians were persecuted for refusing to recognise Caesar as Lord. Only Christ is Lord, they said.

CELEBRATE OR LIBERATE?
As the celebrations of royal jubilee got underway at the beginning of this year, support for King Jesus did not seem to be much in evidence. The Church of England asked us all to sign a ‘thank you’ letter to Elizabeth Windsor. The Methodists’ Cliff College encouraged churches to celebrate the jubilee. British Quakers were hit by internal controversy after their national committee agreed to submit a ‘loyal address’ to the monarch.

There was little reference to the original, biblical meaning of ‘jubilee’ – a festival in which debts were cancelled, slaves were liberated and justice increased. And there was worryingly little debate in Christian circles on the ethical and theological implications of celebrating the reign of an earthly monarch.

A hereditary head of state is fundamentally undemocratic. It is often argued that this unfairness doesn’t really matter because the monarch has no power. This overlooks the very real influence exercised by the royal family. Last year, it was revealed that ministers had effectively sought Charles Windsor’s permission to pass 12 government bills over six years3. There can be little doubt that he would continue to involve himself in politics after becoming king.

WHOSE PREROGATIVE?
Furthermore, there is the Royal Prerogative. This is a power that is generally transferred to the Prime Minister. It allows him or her to do all manner of things in the name of the crown that should be the business of Parliament, such as declaring war and signing treaties.

At the heart of debates over monarchy is a fundamental question: ‘What sort of society do we really want to be?’. A country in which some address others as ‘my lord’ and ‘your majesty’ sends a clear message of contempt for equality and human dignity. The monarchy stands at the pinnacle of a host of other injustices – a corrupt honours systems, an unaccountable House of Lords, an unfairly established Church of England and armed forces premised on the assumption that violence is the final answer. MPs and soldiers swear allegiance not to the country’s people but to the monarch.

This is why monarchy matters. It is not a quaint relic of a bygone era. Celebrations of monarchy – with their pomp, titles and hierarchy – glorify inequality before one word has been spoken about power or economics.
Royalists often argue that the monarch is ‘above politics’. This gives the impression that politics is something dirty and that being above it is the best option. But politics is about more than politicians and elections. Politics is about people, about us, about our everyday concerns and how we – or someone else – use power to address those concerns. Who do we trust? Do we trust ourselves and each other to work together and run our society? Or, when push comes to shove, do we fall back on trusting in mythical blue blood?

ANOTHER KING
It is on these questions of trust and loyalty that Christians should have most to say. We are called to place our ultimate trust in God. This is not easy, but few Christians would deny that it should be our aim. Kings who claimed to rule by ‘divine right’ knew that they could not demand total loyalty from any Christian if they did not equate their power with God’s.

Royal coronations in Britain have traditionally used the language of divine right and employed some carefully chosen passages from the Old Testament. The scriptures are distinctly ambivalent about monarchy. When the Israelites asked Samuel for a king ‘like other nations’, God said, ‘They have rejected me from being king over them’. Eventually, God allowed Samuel to give them a king, but only after he had warned them of the nature of monarchy. He said that a king ‘will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen… and to reap his harvests and to make his implements of war’4.

Admittedly, the Old Testament is mixed on the subject. There are other passages that are more positive about kings. It is in the New Testament that we find a very different message. The Gospels show Jesus treating all people with love, even as he challenges them, with no distinction for their social status. This was subversive in a deeply hierarchical society overshadowed by the figure of Caesar.

As the New Testament scholar Justin Meggitt puts it: ‘The development of ideas about Christ could not have occurred independently of the influence of ideas about the Roman emperor’5. According to John, the chief priests told Pilate that Jesus cannot be their king because ‘we have no king but the emperor’6. Luke reported that Christians in Thessalonica were accused of ‘acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus’7.

Jesus told Pilate that his kingdom is ‘not from here’8 or ‘not of this world’9. This does not mean it has no political significance. Separation of religion and politics is a modern idea that would have been incomprehensible in the first century. The Greek word translated ‘world’ is ‘kosmos’, which can refer to the Earth, the universe or a way of doing things. Walter Wink translated it as ‘system’10. Jesus was telling Pilate that he was proclaiming a different sort of kingdom to the violent and hierarchical systems usually associated with kingship.

RENDER UNTO GOD
What about Jesus’ own comments on the emperor? His opponents tried to catch him out by asking whether they should pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus challenged them to produce a coin. The Roman coins described Caesar as ‘son of God’. Jesus exposed the hypocrisy of those who were prepared to use Caesar’s money, and benefit from his rule, while claiming not to worship him.
He told them to ‘give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s’11. It is not credible to argue that he meant they should pay the tax. Such an answer would not have ‘amazed’ them.

Jesus was challenging his listeners to think about what really belonged to God and to Caesar. In effect, he was posing a choice between the two. As Ched Myers puts it, Jesus invited his listeners ‘to act according to their allegiances, stated clearly as opposites’12.

As jubilee celebrations continue, are we prepared to declare that love and community, guided by God, give far greater cause for celebration than the values of inequality, lavish wealth and armed force glorified by earthly monarchy? Can we renounce the divided loyalty that comes with ascribing titles such as ‘lord’, ‘king’ and ‘queen’ to someone other than God? Can we hear Christ’s challenge as he looked at an idolatrous coin and endeavour to render no loyalty to Caesar, and everything to God?

In New Testament times, as in the 17th century, belief in King Jesus posed a direct challenge to human authority and to the world’s kings and queens. It still does.

Symon Hill

NOTES
1 Quoted in Quaker Faith and Practice: The book of Christian discipline of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain (Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995).
2 Cited by Andrew Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution: The political theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley (SPCK, 1997).
3 Robert Booth, ‘Prince Charles has been offered a veto over twelve government bills since 2005’, Guardian website, 30 October 2011.
4 1 Samuel 8, 4-22 (NRSV).
5 Justin Meggitt, ‘Taking the Emperor’s Clothes Seriously: The New Testament and the Roman Emperor’ in The Quest for Wisdom: Essays in honour of Philip Budd, edited by Christine E. Joynes (Orchard Academic, 2002).
6 John 19, 15 (NRSV).
7 Acts 17, 7 (NRSV).
8 John 18, 36 (NRSV).
9 John 18, 36 (AV).
10 Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Augsburg Fortress, 1992).
11 Mark 12, 17 (NRSV).
12 Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A political reading of Mark’s story of Jesus (Orbis Books, 1988).