The Queen, a still small voice of calm unifying the church she has led for 70 years

Feb 4, 2022 by Jill

by Catherine Pepinster, Religion Media Centre:

The Queen always spends 6 February quietly and almost always on her Sandringham estate in Norfolk. She will do so again this year. Many may think this is a time of celebration, the date she acceded to the throne; but for her it matters more as the anniversary of her father’s death.

Accession Day this year is one for the history books: never before has a monarch reigned in Britain for 70 years. The seven decades of her reign have seen change and often turmoil. The Queen, in contrast, has been a beacon of stability and constancy, not least in her Christian faith.

And while the monarchy has been the go-to institution for a sense of permanence, the Church of England, of which she is head, has not. The ancient village church has a nostalgic hold on many a heart, and cathedrals attract plenty of tourists and are decently filled with worshippers. But statistics show that the Church of England is in sharp decline. The British population has grown more secular and more religiously diverse through the Queen’s reign.

Yet Elizabeth II’s role remains shaped by Anglicanism, particularly her roles as defender of the faith and as supreme governor of the Church of England. That title is down to her namesake, Elizabeth I. After the break with the Roman Catholic Church caused by the divorce of her parents, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Henry put himself in charge of the church with the 1534 Act of Supremacy, declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England. The first Elizabeth amended the title to supreme governor in 1559.

Since then, all monarchs have called themselves supreme governor, as well as retained the title of fidei defensor, defender of the faith, given to Henry VIII before the Reformation by the Roman Catholic Church.

But not all monarchs have taken religion as seriously as Elizabeth II. Because so few of us remember a time before the Second Elizabethan Age, few realise what a particularly religious queen we have. We think it the norm. But this queen takes her faith especially seriously. She made this plain in 2016 when she wrote in the foreword to the Bible Society’s booklet The Servant Queen and the King She Serves to mark her 90th birthday: “I have — and remain — very grateful to you for your prayers and to God for His steadfast love. I have indeed seen His faithfulness.”

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