Identity Politics at the King’s Coronation
by Carl R Trueman, First Things:
Adult immigrants often feel that they are homeless. Not homeless in the literal sense of the word, of course, but homeless in a cultural manner. The problem is easy to state: Your adopted country can never truly be home because you have internalized the intuitions of your homeland by the time you emigrate and you will always feel something of an outsider; but your homeland changes in your absence so that it ceases to be the place that you remember and that made you the person you are. In short, you end up not really belonging anywhere.
My old country is now a foreign country to the one in which I grew up. This became strikingly clear to me last week, when it was announced that the king’s coronation celebrations in May would feature an LGBTQ+ choir. To be clear, it is not the make-up of the choir that makes the most striking statement about how Britain has changed from the country I knew. More significant is the fact that the monarch is taking account of identity politics at his coronation. Indeed, I would suggest that in making this move, he renders the monarchy redundant and makes a better case for republicanism than any contemporary British republican, whether of the left or the right. It is precisely in this quest for relevance that the monarch gives proof of his determination to be irrelevant.
Growing up, I never thought much about the institution of the monarchy. My class resentment was reserved for the public schoolboys (what the British call students at elite private schools) who were born with the advantages I lacked. The monarchy seemed an anachronism but appeared benign enough. The queen, after all, was not a competitor for a coveted place at Cambridge University. Yet over the years I came to respect both the queen and the institution she embodied. Compared to the mediocrities and the mountebanks that republics routinely elected as their heads of state—ambitious, greedy, sleazy, and of recent years foul-mouthed and crude—she was the epitome of grace and reserve. I could point my children to her and say, “That is the behavior and demeanor to which you should aspire when you grow up.” This is something I have never been able to say, for example, about any American or French president of recent memory. And the institution itself, often decried because it was not democratic, had this to commend it: Unlike politicians seeking election, it had no need to take account of public opinion or of the latest political causes. In a paradoxical way, the monarch could represent the nation precisely because the monarchy was not representative. The queen stayed out of politics and was thus able to function as a reminder that the nation had an identity that transcended the particularities of party politics and of class.
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