We have been told that
“The King will ‘protect the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation’,”
in a new definition of his official role.
Buckingham Palace has just unveiled a significant revision to the King’s official role, with the newly released Sovereign Grant Report 2025/26 describing His Majesty as the protector of faith across Britain’s diverse religious landscape.
What appears to be an adjustment of his coronation oaths, is in fact a betrayal of his office, of his Christian faith, and that of his subjects
Martyrs
To be a follower of Christ means to acknowledge Him as the unique presence of God, bearing in His own body the destiny of the world.
At every stage in human history, kings, emperors and others have claimed this for themselves.
The early Church was forged in the white heat of the competition between the hubristic ambitions of rulers and the recognition that Jesus was the Way, the Truth and the Life exclusively.
The moments in Christian history when this crystallises are among the most poignant and powerful.
One example is the martyrdom of Polycarp in AD 160.
The latest Roman emperor had claimed to be god. All his subjects had to worship him by burning a grain of incense in recognition of his claims.They contradicted those of Christ. A centurion tried to persuade Polycarp simply to offer a few grains of incense to the Emperor, telling him that it was not his job—he had not become a Roman soldier to kill old men. But Polycarp refused, recognising the significance of the act and its incompatibility with his witness and devotion to Jesus.
They burned him alive.
The history of Christian martyrdom is filled with Polycarps. The early Christians were sent to the lions because they refused to compromise on their allegiance to Jesus as uniquely God amongst us—God from God, Light from Light.
Assaults on the Faith
Our own culture has brought two assaults against the authority of Jesus and the revelation of the Gospels in the last few centuries.
The first is to deny that there is a God at all, that there are no gods of any kind.
The second is to suggest that there are many gods and that they are all equal; you can adopt any one of them, or any combination of them, that you like.
The first is an absolute disposition; the second a relativist one.
But both are equally dangerous and inimical to Christ, to what He taught, and to those who follow Him.
The twentieth century in particular was aggressively dogmatic in its refusal to recognise the existence of any metaphysical reality beyond what could be measured. This was always politically convenient, replacing transcendent authority with the power of the state, or with whatever dominant pragmatic or philosophical agency happened to hold power.
At the end of the twentieth century, the spiritual and metaphysical need of humanity to make sense of the world and feed its spiritual hunger broke through the surface of the concrete of empirical atheism, but it did so in a new climate of relativism.
There was no absolute standard by which truth could be negotiated, and so, as so often, the unique claims of Jesus were downgraded to be just one way, one spirituality, one religion amongst many.
This, of course, is not just a position. It is a repudiation of the primacy of God, replacing Him with a different god, which is humanity itself.
