Why Christianity is at the heart of the King’s coronation

When Charles is crowned King today, he will be following in a long tradition of Christian kingship. The existing coronation practice of the British monarchy can be traced back over a thousand years to the crowning of the first King of All England, Edgar, in Bath Abbey in 973 AD. Edgar’s coronation service – devised by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Dunstan – has been the template for every coronation since. Key elements include the oath made by the monarch to God and a service of Holy Communion (in earlier times, the Mass). Some critics object to the Christian and biblical basis of the coronation ceremony. The National Secular Society’s chief executive Stephen Evans said this week: 

‘This coronation may be fit for a king, but it’s certainly not fit for a modern democracy. An exclusively Anglican ceremony is a ludicrous way to inaugurate a head of state in one of the least religious countries on Earth’.

But unpicking the Christian character of the coronation risks undermining the whole event.

From the beginning, the coronation ceremony has been steeped in the Bible. This is seen, most obviously, in the fact that the monarch swears on the Bible and takes the coronation oath. 

In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II publicly vowed that she would ‘to the utmost of (her) power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel’. Key parts of the Order of Service are built around Old Testament ideas of kingship, law and justice. The anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’, for example, which derives from 1 Kings 1:34-35, goes back, in various musical arrangements, to the very first coronation in 973 AD.

The anthem ‘I was glad’, which is taken from Psalm 122, was sung, for the first time, at the coronation of Charles II in 1661. A version of it has been sung at every coronation since. The Psalm expresses the joy Israelite pilgrims felt, not only at being able to ‘go to the house of the Lord!’ (verse 1), but also their delight at being in the place where ‘thrones for judgement’ are located, as well as the ‘thrones of the house of David’ (verse 5). As with ‘Zadok the Priest’, the choice of anthems is intentional. Their longstanding use testify to a continuity in national desire to celebrate early Israelite forms of governance as the ideal for the British monarchy.

It would be wrong then to see this model for the British monarchy as a purely Mediaeval, or post-Reformation aspiration. The roots of this distinctively British – and, in earlier times, distinctively English – idea of Christian kingship may in fact be found in King Alfred (849 – 899 AD); the only monarch, in these isles, to be called ‘the Great’. His law-code (dated to the late 880s or early 890s), was the first and only codification of Old English law. It was based explicitly on the laws of Moses. Alfred’s style of kingship was strikingly different to then-contemporary Christian exemplars found on the continent.

What made Alfred unique – his biblicism, his invocation of Moses and his dependence on the book of Exodus – enabled him to shape an emerging English identity around the Bible, particularly the story of Israel. This did not come from nowhere. Alfred was influenced by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (written c. 731 AD), which developed the idea of the gens Anglorum as a chosen people. This, in turn, built on earlier iterations by Gildas (in De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, written sometime in the sixth century after the Romans left Britain) and Gregory the Great. Under Alfred, as at Sinai, the Angelcynn (or the English people) are constituted as a people and a nation around divine law. It was a deliberate, and provocative, choice on Alfred’s part to hitch his Wessex wagon to the star of Jerusalem. Over time, biblical ideas about kingship and national vocation took hold and developed, and became embedded in the coronation service. The Bible, and biblical law, are woven into the coronation ceremony precisely because they are woven into the fabric of our national history.

Although the biblical concept of kingship happens to be our heritage, the monarch’s legitimacy no longer depends, for many British people, on Christian oaths. But this does not mean we should ditch the religious element of the coronation ceremony. 

First, the coronation ceremony emphasises the monarch’s submission to the higher sovereignty of God. This is important. Seated in the Coronation Chair, the newly crowned monarch may read the inscription written above the High Altar of the Abbey: ‘The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ…’ (Revelation 11:15). The ceremony crowns a mortal monarch, but always keeps in sight the ‘King of kings and Lord of lords’ (Revelation 19:16). It relativises kingship itself and, in doing so, calls to account every human exercise of power. 

Second, the ceremony further orientates the monarchy and the government towards accountability by the public taking of an oath to God. Such a promise puts an enormous brake on personal ambition. By emphasising instead duty, courage, sacrifice, endurance, faithfulness and loyalty – all values embodied by the late Queen – the monarch’s oath also sets a standard for public life. This benchmark stands apart from the ebb and flow of partisan politics and potentially harmful ideologies.

Third, in addition to the upward responsibility to God, the ceremony also emphasises the monarch’s downward responsibilities to his or her subjects. When Queen Elizabeth II sent a message to her subjects, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of her Accession to the throne, she signed herself, simply: ‘Your Servant, Elizabeth R’. In doing so, she stood in a biblical tradition of servant monarchy that went all the way back to the Deuteronomic laws of the king (Deut. 17). This idea of servant kingship ran completely against ancient Near Eastern ideas of monarchy. It would, in time, be fully expressed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who, in His own words, ‘came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45).   

Finally, a thousand years of Christian, and biblical, coronation oaths have largely, if not fully, protected the Christian gospel and its free preaching and Christian worship throughout our history. This has, at different times, included freedom for other religions not seen in many countries across the world. On the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, and in a speech concerned with ‘the particular mission of Christianity and the general value of faith in this country,’ Queen Elizabeth II explained that: ‘(w)oven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society – more and more in active co-operation for the common good with those of other faiths.’ 

This was her own understanding of the oath she took 60 years earlier. It means that when a British monarch, standing in this tradition of Christian monarchy, swears an oath to God, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, it is good news for people of all faiths, as well as none. In this way, maintaining the internal integrity of a longstanding Christian ceremony, such as the coronation, can be seen as part of a broader argument for a tolerant and welcoming Christian-based polity. Such a ceremony provides a better foundation for constitutional values than a supposedly religiously-neutral liberal-democratic polity.

So the place of the Christian faith, and the Bible, in the coronation service, is far more than pageantry. The ceremony draws on key motifs in the history of biblical Israel, including the sovereignty of God, covenantal politics, limited government, separation of powers, federalism and civic virtue. It centres on a vow and the Bible is integral to everything that British monarchs swear to uphold. Whatever precise form the Coronation of King Charles III takes we can pray that, when the Crown is taken from the altar, and placed on his head, that he will feel the great weight of his responsibility to God and that he might yet be a Christian prince seeking God’s wisdom to rule. God save the King. 

Jonathan Patrick Burnside is professor of Biblical Law at the University of Bristol. He is the author of God, Justice and Society and is currently completing a book on the impact of biblical law on the history of political ideas, in England, from King Alfred to Karl Marx