For the first time since the end of World War II, camera footage from the Queen’s Birthday celebrations finally told the truth of the consequences of taking God’s name in vain.
I’m not a religious person. There’s not much more I can say about it aside from that. But I do know a bit about religion. I also caught a few shots of the birthday celebrations over the weekend and noticed that the majestic horses were pulling an empty royal carriage. The people lining the streets were cheering at the hollow emptiness as it rolled by and the whole thing felt bizarre.
It’s not often you get to witness such a vivid historical metaphor. In all honesty, the British Royal Family has become little more than a tourist attraction. I don’t know if the Queen realises she has been playing dress-up all her life, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she still thinks her lineage matters in some executive way. But it doesn’t and hasn’t for a long time.
Reportedly, the Queen was in poor health and couldn’t attend her birthday celebrations. She did manage to make a quick appearance on the final day, but that was about it.
It is a bit ironic that an optimist might describe the entire UK as being in ‘poor health’ too. But while optimists are nice folk, they are generally wrong. People who act like everything will be OK are a luxury form of human who can exist only because someone else is figuring things out for them. The fact is, the metaphorical carriage of the UK has been empty since at least 1914.
What the British establishment did in the early years of the 20th century wasn’t so different from how it acted in centuries prior. It wasn’t that Britain went to war or how it fought that ruined the country, but the way it convinced its people to fight in WWI. This is what led to that empty carriage.
At the time, the monarchy, the state and the church were all the same things. Today, the Queen still holds the title of Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This goes back to 1521 when Henry VIII was given the title by Pope Leo X for writing the “Declaration of the Seven Sacraments Against Martin Luther”, defending Catholicism again the Protestants.
But Henry’s Catholic fervour waned when the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry Lady Anne Boleyn. In a fit of royal rage, Henry founded the Anglican Church as an alternative and stole the extensive lands and vast wealth owned by the Catholic Church in England.
At some point, Henry likely whispered to himself that “God wills it.” He felt his actions were ordained by the Almighty, which is also what he told the British public. But while stealing and succumbing to one’s passions are generally forgivable, there is no escaping the temporal consequences of claiming your own selfish desires are ordained by God. Lies always end up killing the thing you’re trying to save.
The Bible says not to take God’s name in vain. Although it’s not the first commandment, it does come in at number two for a good reason. No other sin will split and splinter a community faster than when a priest masks his own desires with the claim of “deus vult”. Murder, usury, covetousness, adultery, theft. These are the result of an abuse of power, not the cause.
Maybe such a society can survive for a while after priests and monarchs lie to the people. Perhaps the institutions can withstand erosion by small drips. But no rock can endure a waterfall of corruption, which is exactly what the 20th century was.
In the early years of the last century, Anglican churches prominently displayed on their walls the Ten Commandments in two columns, one on either side of the chancel arch, with “Thou shalt not kill” at the top of the right-hand column. However, they also had to reconcile Thomas Aquinas’ “Just War” doctrine. In the final paragraph of Article 37 of the church’s Thirty Nine Articles of Religion, the clergy squared that circle by saying: “It is lawful for Christian men at the commandment of the Magistrate to wear weapons and serve in the wars.”
Saying it was lawful for a Christian man to wear weapons did not mean he had a duty to do so. Indeed, the correct definition of the word “meek” (as in, “Blessed are the meek,” from the Sermon on the Mount) is of a man who knows how to use his weapons but chooses not to.
Yet by the time World War I began, the Church of England, the monarchy and Whitehall together realised that Article 37 offered them a loophole to do what their international banking masters were pressuring them to do. Almost to a man, the Anglican clergy told millions of young British men that it was their duty to “God and Country” to sign up to fight the war on the Continent.
The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, even supported the war as a “great crusade” while other men of the cloth saw it as a battle between “Christ and Odin”. Unsurprisingly, the Church was more concerned about venereal disease spreading among British troops from their use of prostitutes than it was about the factory-level slaughter of those same men.
World War I had only a tiny bit to do with “geopolitics” (which is just a post-modern American term for “imperial governance”). On one level, the British grand strategy is to never allow a single nation to dominate Europe since that would threaten the British Isles. Yet it wasn’t God who sent those young men to war, it was the international banks which owned the churches.
This was only made possible because millions of British men were told God wanted them to fight. Those who returned from the war carried a suspicion about the true motivations driving their leaders. Yet due to their deep loyalty, honour and faith, those veterans chose to keep up a pretence of respecting British righteousness for the rest of their lives despite having seen the ugly truth.
Intellectuals today like to say it is modernism that makes it difficult to believe in religion as if the combustion engine and the telegraph suddenly revealed the falsity of the God hypothesis. But that analysis only shows the incapacity of anyone in 2022 to comprehend the utter horror of the First World War.
It really was the suicide of the West. Modernism is just the name we give to this civilisational husk.
In 2020, UK statistics showed only a quarter of Britons (27%) said they believed in a God, while over half (55%) did not belong to any religion. These are the children of the children of the children of the men who were told by clergy that “God wills it” before bending over to pick up broken bits of their friends after an artillery barrage on a poppy field in France.
Tell me which is more likely: that atheism is rising because people don’t believe in God, or that atheism has more to do with the collapse of trust in the church, and by extension, the monarchy and state? If those post-war kids grew up without fathers – and God is the model of a father – what did you expect those children to think about God?
The same lies are being told in New Zealand. At every war memorial across the country, God is still invoked as the reason to respect the First and Second World Wars. The veterans of those wars rarely spoke about their feelings, so all we have are the trauma-infused words of those fatherless children. And no artist writes about war quite like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, whose father was killed in Italy. Here’s his song
The Post War Dream:
Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified?
Was it for this that Daddy died?
Was it you? Was it me?
Did I watch too much TV?
Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?
If it wasn't for the Nips
Being so good at building ships
The yards would still be open on the Clyde
And it can't be much fun for them
Beneath the rising sun
With all their kids committing suicide
What have we done, Maggie, what have we done?
What have we done to England?
Given the way most of the churches responded to the Covid-19 restrictions, are you really surprised when people say they’re not religious today? They don’t hate God; they hate the church. And why shouldn’t they hate the church? This is why the atheist doesn’t necessarily go to hell: he might be speaking the truth about the mistake of associating God with the church, the Queen and the state.
I don’t know what will happen when Queen Elizabeth II passes away. But the institution she symbolically represents – the church, monarchy and state – has been dead for a long while. When you fool people into doing evil in God’s name, they will figure it out eventually. Does an institution that lied its own children into death deserve to exist? Most Britons shrug their shoulders at that question, and apathy is far more damaging than hatred to the longevity of an official institution.
World Wars I and II destroyed Christianity in England and it will never return. Can you now understand why the children of the fathers who were blown up for nothing want to wipe the earth of any hint of that religion? Why should they want to keep the statues or hold onto the literature of their “betters” who made such a mess of the future?
And don’t think science will get away with the same mistake of taking God’s name in vain. After Covid-19, a lot of kids will grow up knowing the science priests lied to them too. Atheism after religion was traumatic. But what will atheism after science look like? I guess we’ll find out.
Should we shout, should we scream
“What happened to the post-war dream?”
Oh, Maggie, Maggie, what did we do?