Why Are European Monarchs Turning Their Backs On Christianity?

Europe’s monarchs used to speak of Christmas as custodians of a civilisation. Decades ago, their season allocutions were full of Christian feeling, as well as patriotic love; it is no surprise, then, that their speeches formed a central part of national life at Christmas, with families calibrating dinners and celebrations so they could be sitting reverently in front of the telly by the time the monarch was ready for the much-anticipated speech. Parents and children would listen in awed silence—such was the respect that monarchy inspired in Europeans of just a few decades ago, in days that were no less turbulent, frenetic, and technology-obsessed than our own. 

Much has changed since then. Europe’s kings and queens now increasingly speak as regional managers of a post-national NGO, taking Frederick the Great’s concept of the sovereign as “the first citizen of the state” to its decidedly materialistic, empty, and unsatisfactory—if, perhaps, predictable—paroxysm. The recent Christmas messages of King Charles III of Britain, King Felipe VI of Spain, and King Philippe of the Belgians weren’t revealing for what they said; they were revealing for what they left conspicuously unsaid. Christianity—the very Christ the King who, with His crown of thorns, shaped the crowns of gold of earthly monarchs, legitimised their thrones, sanctified their offices, and is the whole centre and point of Christmas—was reduced to a footnote or omitted altogether.

In all three cases, the language used was safely anodyne, with the pretence of neutrality and self-enforced aloofness broken only for a series of not-so-subtly political condemnations needlessly dragged into that most special of nights. Felipe, speaking without a Nativity scene in sight, cleansed of any hint of Christian symbolism, attacked “extremism”, with little doubt as to what “extremists” he had in mind—with Santiago Abascal’s VOX polling at near-record numbers and a heavy Socialist defeat in Extremadura putting the political longevity of disgraced Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez into serious doubt, the king’s speechwriters can hardly be commended for their discretion. 

Charles III’s own speech was no less regrettable. The king is a great man: intellectually voracious, his cultural curiosity and stereotypically British bloody-mindedness have made him embrace profoundly admirable causes, from ecosystem conservation to the revival of classical and vernacular architecture in his country and across the world. It is, therefore, particularly unfortunate that a monarch of such powerful small-c conservative instinct, who is so naturally drawn to the conservation of Britain’s rivers and churches, woods and towns, seems so uninterested in the conservation of Britain’s own autochthonous people. Far from the intelligent, reasoned discourse Charles has so often offered about so many other subjects, his Christmas speech seemed more like a mish-mash of boomer platitudes on “the great diversity of our communities” from which Britain is supposed to get its strength or making the day that celebrates the birth of Christ about “meeting people of different faiths.” 

One could have swapped the speakers for a UN Secretary-General or a corporate CEO and scarcely noticed the difference. Transcendence was replaced by therapeutic moralism; Christianity ignored and subverted, told not to exist except as an excuse for its own migration-induced annulation. Hollowed out and repackaged as a festival of vague benevolence, Christmas, as presented in these speeches, wasn’t Christmas at all—it was abusively repurposed as a civic feast, dedicated to celebrating a worldview that has come closer than anything in the past, from Atilla’s knights to the galleys of the Ottoman Sultan, to the final and irreversible destruction of European Christendom. 

This is hardly what Christian monarchy is about. For St. Thomas Aquinas, political authority was natural, indeed, but kingship was about more than earthly administration. The monarch had a moral and supernatural role: to orient the polity toward the good, to embody virtue, to rule not merely by law, but by example. The king was not a neutral referee among competing lifestyles; he was a living symbol of order—an image of divine governance. 

Kingly power was always seen as divine in essence: not only because sovereigns ruled “by the grace of God”, but because theirs was a holy function. That is why they took office in a Sacre in which they were anointed; why some mediaeval kings, like Portugal’s, were crowned with a baculum similar to that of a bishop, and why others, like those of Sicily, used a mitre; why, as Marc Bloch explored in Les Rois thaumaturges, the sovereigns of France and England were believed to hold supernatural powers and the ability to cure illness with touch; why, as Ernst Kantorowicz argues in The King’s Two Bodies, princes were “Rex et Sacerdos”. Monarchy has always been all about religion: when one strips it of this specific charisma and vertical dimension, little that is worthwhile remains. In a way, this remains true today. And, as Europe’s youth rediscovers its roots and shows a renewed thirst for tradition and identity, it might even be getting truer.

The modern European monarch has attempted an impossible balancing act: to retain the mystique, continuity, and reverence of a pre-democratic institution while fully and obediently internalising the egalitarian, relativistic assumptions of late-stage liberalism. But Christianity is not incidental to Europe’s crowns; it is constitutive of them. The coronation rites, the oaths, the regalia, the moral expectations placed upon the sovereign—all are unintelligible without Christianity. The European idea of monarchy is Christian at its core and cannot exist without its Christian root. By abandoning what Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria famously told Teddy Roosevelt was the job of the monarch—the protection of his peoples from their politicians—and recasting themselves as mere public employees, subject to the demands and narratives of the incumbent oikophobic regimes, Europe’s sovereigns are destroying the very foundation of their role. They’re leaving themselves without a raison d’être.

Can monarchy survive the betrayal of its Christian roots? Not more than a river can flow without a source. By allying powers that scarcely tolerate monarchy, seeing it as an unbearable residue of Europe’s past, and hostilising those sectors of society most prone to treasuring it, the continent’s remaining royal families are doing themselves no favours. With the Church of England cringely wokeified, the aristocracy impoverished and silenced, and the House of Lords now effectively abolished, the last remnant of ancient Britain left for the radicals to topple, other than the British people itself, is the Crown. The same goes for Spain’s Sánchez. He has already profaned the tombs of Franco, José António, and Queipo de Llano; through his purges of Spanish memory, he has given the Left the historical and symbolic victory it was denied in the Civil War. But the thing about the Left is that it never grows tired of revolution. It always wants more—and, by accepting to survive only on the Establishment’s terms, it is the monarchy itself that is next on the menu.