The pressures to change the Coronation oath
by Gavin Ashenden, Christian Today:
The oath King Charles takes could affect not only the character of the relationship between Church and State, but also precipitate the pressures towards disestablishing the state church, which raises the question of who owns its resources.
The pressure to change the oath comes initially from secular sources who want to introduce two contemporary values. The first is in recognition of the secular sense that all truth is relative, and the second follows on from it, which is the imposition of the idea of equality. In this case, all religions are equal.
The problem is that the monarchy and its oaths are based on the values of previous generations which believed passionately that not only was Christianity exclusively true, but for reasons that were as politically cogent as they were spiritually important, that Protestantism was the truest form of Christianity.
Secular relativism wants to confront this – and it’s the new philosophical creed for today’s secular world. Several generations have been steeped/educated/brainwashed into it and the whole media is passionately committed to it. The trope goes: all religions are equal, aren’t they? All values are relative. No one way to ‘god’ is better than any other, none is any truer.
The proposal is that the Coronation oath becomes one more mechanism to write this into the fabric of the beliefs that define our society and our social contract. The Coronation oath is, after all, one of the expressions of our social contract.
But it causes two problems. They may possibly be able to be contained, or they may have the effect of knocking down a whole line of interlocking dominoes.
The first problem is for the Church of England as the Established Church in terms of what it stood for. The problem for a state church is that it faces a perpetual dilemma in having a dual allegiance. Jesus taught that a person cannot serve two masters, when faced with God and mammon. But a state church is set up to serve two masters – the king of heaven and the king of the state. This can be managed if the state is in line with the faith. At that point both kings are aligned, and in theory to serve one may be to serve the other.
But what happens when the state changes its values and position? A wary and alert state church would realise that evangelising the society around it would be essential not only because Jesus had commanded it, but also because if society lost its alignment to the Christian faith the state church would be placed in the deeply uncomfortable position of having to choose between the two allegiances.
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