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My countrymen here in the United States have been unduly excited about a certain royal baby born this week, the great-grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, who was herself the daughter of George VI , the son of George V , the son of Edward VII , the son of Queen Victoria, the daughter of Prince Edward , the son of George III, against whom our nation violently rebelled starting in April of 1775. Fawning over the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the monarch from whom we forcibly estranged ourselves doesn’t strike me as particularly patriotic, as an American, but then perhaps others take the view that such grudges shouldn’t be held for more than a couple of centuries or so.
If you ask my firstborn what makes royal blood so important, he’ll give you an unconventional but reasonably accurate answer, “Their grandfathers killed the most people.” Granted, you usually have to go back quite further than just two generations, but if you go back far enough you will generally find a highly effective warlord at the start of any given royal or noble line. The House of Windsor, to take one particularly relevant example, is actually the British branch of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, founded by Ernst Anton Karl Ludwig, who made his bones fighting in the Napoleonic wars. Don’t even get me started on the House of Stewart.
Bragging about an ancestor’s prowess with the sword and shield isn’t generally becoming, though, and various royal families need a better reason to justify their existence than the fact that their distant ancestors excelled at conquest. Thus was born the concept of the divine right of kings, the idea that there is an invisible man in the sky who personally smiles upon the reign of the current monarch, whomever that might be. The British monarch is recognized as ruling “by the Grace of God” by fifteen nations, and as “Defender of the Faith” in the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.
Since monarchy and theocracy have been entwined from time immemorial unto this day, it should come as no great surprise that the man who penned the Declaration of Independence against George III also penned the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which would later serve as a model for church/state separation when the U.S. Consitution was being put to paper. (It is less well known that these are the only writings which he had memorialized on his gravestone.) Which brings me, finally, to my point here. It is not merely questionable to fawn over this specific royal child as an American, but as a freethinker. There is a reason why the Bible uses monarchistic language favorably throughout, from Genesis 14:18 to Revelation 21:24, quite often as metaphor for divine lordship. The authors are taking advantage of the human propensity to follow a strongman, a tribal chieftan, a lord, a king, and hijacking that unfortunate human tendency for theological purposes. Godship is nothing more than Lordship written as large as we can conceive, across the whole of the heavens. It is no concidence that the same familiar gestures of humilty are trained into courtiers and parishoners alike, and it is well past time that we humans make the choice to get off our knees.
