Back in GCSE English Literature I remember learning about ‘The Devine Right of Kings’. As part of our study of Macbeth, we learned how this Tudors and Elizabethans believed that a king’s authority was bestowed directly by god, and how they thought god selected the monarch. I need hardly point out that, tomorrow, we will all get to see an anachronistic manifestation of that belief: tomorrow, we will watch the man we are now supposed to refer to as the King get crowded by people Archbishop Of Canterbury. Symbolically, the kings authority is granted to him not by the people, as it would be in a democracy, but by the church.

Of course I know it’s only symbolic: its just part of the pageantry which makes up the British cultural identity. Yet the semiotics of it all don’t sit comfortably with me. Long term readers will know what issues I have with organised religion: what we are going to see tomorrow simply plays into and reinforces the authority of the church, with the archbishop literally placing the crown onto the king’s head. Charles is effectively being granted his socio-cultural position by a man deriving his authority from a mythical creator being which he insists we all believe in. As with all religion, it’s a remnant  from an ancient belief system which we haven’t been allowed to outgrow because of its usefulness in controlling people, and keeping power in the hands of a privileged few. The charade which we all got to watch tomorrow might be being sold to us as a fantastic state occasion, but at the end of the day it is simply about reinforcing the authority of religion, real, figurative or somewhere in between. I don’t know whether anyone else has an issue with this, but I certainly do.