Christopher Hitchens — the late polemicist and, along with Richard Dawkins, the most famous of the so-called “new atheists” — will never be remembered as a stout Christian apologist. However, in 2010, he managed to sum up the sorry state of the Church of England in one brilliantly incontestable lede:
“This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII.”
No matter how many double Johnnie Walker Blacks on the rocks Hitchens had consumed before he penned that open, or no matter how facile he was on most other matters religious, he wasn’t wrong on this occasion. The Church of England — an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church that developed not due to serious doctrinal differences but because Henry VIII desired a divorce — has taken on, in modern times, a more loosy-goosey approach to theology.
In the same essay in which Hitchens opened with that inimitable shot across the royal family bow, Hitchens expressed concern — in his own way — that then-Prince Charles might not be up to maintaining the vestigial advantages of the national faith. (He was a bit more blunt than that; the piece was titled “Charles, Prince of Piffle,” and he lamented that, as king, “the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.”)
The piece wasn’t just a long insult-fest, however, as he turned his attention to a speech Charles made at Oxford just a week prior:
Discussing one of his favorite topics, the “environment,” he announced that the main problem arose from a “deep, inner crisis of the soul” and that the “de-souling” of humanity probably went back as far as Galileo. In his view, materialism and consumerism represented an imbalance, “where mechanistic thinking is so predominant,” and which “goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion.” He described the scientific worldview as an affront to all the world’s “sacred traditions.” Then for the climax:
“As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — She has become an it — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.” …
None of this might matter very much, until you notice the venue at which Charles delivered his farrago of nonsense. It was unleashed upon an audience at the Center for Islamic Studies at Oxford University, an institution of which he is the patron. Nor is this his only foray into Islamophilia. Together with the Saudi royal family, he supported the mosque in North London that acted as host and incubator to Richard “Shoe Bomber” Reid, the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri, and several other unsavory customers.
Well, that’s disconcerting. But thankfully, Charles is king now and head of the Church of England, which means he’s done away with all that, to use Hitchens’ phraseology, piffle.
If the roles were reversed, would a Muslim leader say this about Christians on their holiest day of the year?
Or not.
In his remarks on Maundy Thursday — part of Holy Week, in case you’re late in coming to this whole religion thing — King Charles III made sure to mention Muslims as part of the resurrection of the Christian Savior. I’m sure he does the same thing with Jesus at Eid.
“On Maundy Thursday, Jesus knelt and washed the feet of many of those who would abandon Him. His humble action was a token of His love that knew no bounds or boundaries and is central to Christian belief,” the statement read.
“The love He showed when he walked the Earth reflected the Jewish ethic of caring for the stranger and those in need, a deep human instinct echoed in Islam and other religious traditions, and in the hearts of all who seek the good of others,” it continued.
“The abiding message of Easter is that God so loved the world — the whole world — that He sent His son to live among us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others in a love that proved stronger than death.
“There are three virtues that the world still needs — faith, hope and love. ‘And the greatest of these is love,’” the statement continued. “It is with these timeless truths in my mind, and my heart, that I wish you all a blessed and peaceful Easter.”
Now, there are various interpretations of Maundy Thursday, ranging from the sign of humility from the Savior to the symbolic nature of our dirty feet representing our sins. The Lord is all-seeing, but there’s about 600 years between Maundy Thursday and the revelations from Allah to Muhammad in the Islamic faith. Beyond that, there’s the fact that the two faiths — and especially the holiday which one faith is celebrating this season — are mutually exclusive.
And this is the problem with Charles III — or, at least, the most pressing one. I do not mean to be alarmist, and Hitchens certainly viewed the Islamic faith as a unique cancer upon modernity when he wrote the piece, but he noted in the same column where this kind of witless ecumenicism would lead:
Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The “vacuum” will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.
In other words: The dimly pleasant progressives of modern Europe, which fall over themselves to insist all cultures are the same, will be overtaken by wolfish power-mongers, who have little respect for the strictures of their own inherited religion, much less England’s weak, inherited faith. Fifteen years on from that oracular column, the prince of piffle still doesn’t get it.
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