Is a Christian King Prepared To Rule a Post-Christian Britain?

Britain’s King Charles III is receiving praise for his “momentous” commitment to diversity after both a Ramadan meal and an “LGBT+ History Month” lecture were held at Windsor Castle this year—although not, of course, at the same time. The House of Windsor has become a microcosm of the United Kingdom, slowly being squeezed between the pincers of LGBT sexual revolutionaries and an exploding Muslim population (Muhammad recently became the most popular name in England for the first time). 

In the July 29th annual report of the Royal Collection Trust, which oversees the royal palaces, the Trust boasted that “inclusion and diversity was a key priority this year,” and that an Open Iftar—the meal breaking the fast during Ramadan—was held in Windsor Castle for the first time in its 1,000 year history. The March event, spearheaded by the Ramadan Tent Project and featuring 350 guests in St. George’s Hall, included two reciters from the Maidenhead Mosque giving the Islamic call to prayer from the hall’s balcony. RCT director Tim Knox emphasized that the event had taken place “with the King’s permission.”

In February the trust hosted an online lecture titled “Queer Art and Artists in the Royal Collection” for “LGBT+ History Month,” featuring Leonardo Da Vinci, Sappho, Chevalier D’Eon, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo, and others. Alice de Quidt, assistant curator of Prints and Drawings, emphasized that “diverse forms of love and identity have always existed.” The King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace hosted another LGBT event the previous October, “exploring some of the Queer figures represented within the Royal Collection.” 

King Charles has begun to make a habit of genuflecting to the LGBT movement, which wields such cultural power that every June across the UK the Union Jack is pulled down and the LGBT flag put up in its place. On July 5, the Royal Family’s official X account released a video of the Coldstream Guards playing Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” widely recognized as a queer anthem, with the hashtag #Pride2025. The unprecedented endorsement of London Pride, an annual carnival of a million people, was seen as by the LGBT movement as a significant move from the monarch. Queen Elizabeth never recognized “Pride” Month.

The king, of course, is trapped within the contradiction of being the head of a Christian institution in a post-Christian country, roiled for the past half-century by the twin scourges of the sexual revolution and mass migration. The current cultural power—the LGBT movement—is on a collision course with the rising cultural power. In 2024, the mayors of Oldham, Luton, London, Blackburn, and Oxford were all Muslim. For the time being, this inevitable collision is being studiously ignored, and only occasionally explodes into the open when Muslim parents clash with LGBT educators about the indoctrination in UK schools. More often than not, the Muslims win.

Even as King Charles attempts a ludicrous and desperate syncretism to salvage some form of unity in his fractured kingdom, he is reportedly struggling with the growing Culture of Death metastasizing in the vacuum once occupied by English Christianity. According to the Daily Mail on August 7:

Sources report that the King is having ‘a dark night of the soul’ at the prospect of two pieces of legislation he may soon have to sign into law. First is decriminalising abortion, second is a bill legalising assisted dying. It seems that the Royal Family will have to be excluded from the legislation—or else there will need to be a reform of the treason laws. The 1351 Treason Act, still in force, makes it an offence to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the monarch. It is also treasonous to ‘interrupt’ the line of succession. Abortion and euthanasia also pose problems for His Majesty as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which opposes both bills.

The monarchy was the symbolic heart of the nation; now, it increasingly reflects the contradictions of our chaotic age. On one night in Windsor Castle, deconstructionist academics can celebrate “queerness”; on another, the Islamic call to prayer echoes through St. George’s Hall, constructed by King Edward III in 1353 and 1354 to host the banquets of the Order of the Garter, founded as an order of Christian chivalry. The monarchy is inextricably intertwined with English Christianity; the king’s coronation featured, along with “Zadok the Priest” and the sacred anointing, a Hindu prime minister reading from Colossians. 

In his much-lauded God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England, published in April, Bijan Omrami illustrates how English kingship and law are inseparable from Christianity, and how written law “implied the unification of a people under such a code, with the kings responsible before God for their conduct and morality.” This, I suspect, is at the heart of King Charles’s reported “dark night of the soul.” The first part of the book deals with “What England Owes Christianity” (nearly everything); the second details “What Christianity Can Still Give.” Lord Andrew Roberts noted that Omrami is dealing with the fundamental question: “Are we prepared for a post-Christian Britain?”

Prepared or not, it is here, and Omrami presents the only solution. It is not Ramadan at Windsor Castle, or a deliberate, revisionist queering of England’s past; it is to once again declare that history-shaping statement that began both the order of service at the coronation of King Charles III: “Christ is risen!” The 1960s represented a profound rupture with the United Kingdom as it had been for over 1,000 years. What comes next will be, in part, determined by whether that rupture becomes permanent.