It won’t be any surprise to those who read me here to know that I was unlikely to be impressed by the content of the King’s speech.
We have known for some time that the King is committed to interfaith relativism and to using the language of multiculturalism. The anxiety for so many is that this aids a project to reconfigure a post-Christian identity: allowing the monarchy to remain in place, but detached from its roots. It has become an ally of those disguising the truth about the project of social revisionism that has advanced so far in recent decades.
The King’s multiculturalism consists of a number of elements, all of which pose as being Christian, but are less than Christian.
The most obvious is the celebration of the “Nice”, and the idea that essentially all religions are really the same and are joined together by a common universal spirituality.
This is of course tragically and problematically not true.
At the heart of this new project is the destruction of Christian national culture, or what is left of it, and its replacement by an internationalist multiculturalism.
I was trying to think of an analogy that might serve as an example of what is being done to us.
I had a picture in my mind of a manager of a cinema asked to stand on the stage before an audience of its patrons and offer a few well-meaning compliments about the programme they had come to see, while all the time, at the back of the theatre, there was a fire raging which was about to sweep through the building in a few minutes.
But he confined himself to a few pleasant remarks about the virtues of the film and said nothing about the fire.
What is not said is sometimes more important than what is said.
What the Speech Did Not Say
The speech contains serious misrepresentations about Christianity.
What were these misrepresentations, and why are they so serious?
We might first agree on a few principles that define the issues we are talking about.
It has always been clear that the Church must either convert the surrounding culture or be converted by it.
Saint Augustine, in The City of God, points out resolutely:
“Do not live according to the custom of this world, but according to the commandments of God. For the world proposes its own standards, but the City of God by another law.”
(City of God 19.17)
St. Athanasius, bishop of what was once Christian Alexandria (but is now Islamic North Africa), takes it further when he reminds the Church:
“The Word of God was not conformed to the times, but the times were healed by the Word.”
If we don’t heal the times by the Word, we will be poisoned by their untruth.
Joseph Ratzinger, in an address to the Roman Curia in December 2005, said with crystal clarity:
“The Church does not grow by adapting to the world, but by offering the world something better than itself.”
Instead of offering Jesus and the faith of the Church as a salve for both soul and society, what King Charles did was to provide instead an unmitigated diet of multicultural relativism and multi-faith digest.
Pilgrimage Without Repentance
The speech was an exercise in choosing certain elements of the faith consistent with the feast of Christ’s birth, and repackaging them to act as vehicles of different ideological, theological and political content, while disguising their original meaning and context.
He began by talking about his meeting with the Pope and suggested that the meeting was defined by celebrating together the Jubilee theme Pilgrims of Hope.
“Pilgrimage” was used euphemistically and given a different meaning from the one it was designed to convey as part of Catholic spirituality.
For the King it became a means of “learning lessons from the past”. But the real lessons of the past were swept under the carpet.
The irony of this cannot be lost on Catholics today.
Leaving aside the lessons of British history and the significant rupture the Protestant Reformation inflicted on the Church of the West, there are the lessons of European history.
If we are to learn lessons from the past, might not one of them be that Islam was only stopped in the West of Europe by the determination of Charles Martel, and only stopped in the East of Europe by the courage of Christendom at Lepanto?
What lessons might the Crusades hold for us?
It was precisely because the emergence of militaristic Islam threatened pilgrims from Europe as they made their way to Jerusalem in the Christian Middle East that the Crusades became the last line of defence against the expansion and invasion of Christian lands by Muslims dedicated to conquering Christian territory.
Speech, Silence, and False Unity
Is there any role for the King to hold his government to account for overseeing unstoppable illegal immigration that appears to favour just one faith?
What are the lessons of the Second World War? They are, among others, that democracy may require the costliest of sacrifices to defend and maintain it.
But there was no recognition that under this government we are losing our right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. We appear to be losing freedom of thought. There are jokes that cannot be made because they represent “wrong-think.”
The Second World War was commemorated by the King not as a determined resistance to antisemitic fascism, but as an exemplar of “the way communities come together to face challenges.”
This is secularism.
This is Rousseau.
This is the anthropology of the Left.
This is the notion that there is no Fall, but that human civilisation can be improved simply by the cooperation of people who are essentially good.
And this is secular utopianism King Charles described as:
“a timeless message for us all, emerging from the courage shown in the Second World War.”
Rather like an infant school headteacher, he lamented hearing of division both at home and abroad. But he didn’t name the division, or the source of the division, or the consequences of the division. There was just the implication that we must try harder to be nice.
But the sources of division — the neo-Marxist totalitarianism emerging on one side and the aggressive Islamic expansionism emerging on the other — were left unnamed.
Does the refusal to name them hide them?
When “Common Values” Are Not Common
In Australia just this week there were protests against multiculturalism which is destroying freedom of speech.
Chris Minns, the Premier of New South Wales, sparked controversy by comparing the vulnerability of free speech in Australia to the protection that America receives through the First Amendment.
He warned Australians that “free speech will have to go to preserve multiculturalism.”
His exact words were that:
“Australia can’t have the same free speech protections as the United States, because in a multicultural society the priority is keeping communities together, and that requires restrictions on what can be said publicly.”
He was, of course, talking about what lay behind the assassination of the murdered Australians in the Bondi Beach attack on December 14.
But the faiths are not the same.
Twice in his speech the King talked about the similarities of the faiths:
“To this day, in times of uncertainty, these ways of living are treasured by all the great faiths.”
And again:
“As I meet people of different faiths, I find it encouraging how much we have in common.”
What he describes as a shared longing for peace and a deep respect for all life is in fact the opposite of the case.
Bondi Beach was not that.
The two terrorists convicted at Preston Crown Court on 23 December 2025 for planning a mass-casualty shooting attack in Greater Manchester targeting the Jewish community were not that. Their intention to use automatic rifles and other firearms to kill as many Jewish people as possible at a public event before continuing to other locations was not that.
A Gospel Replaced by Niceness
If his Islamic sympathies were euphemistically misleading, so too was his understanding of what Jesus came for.
He was good enough to mention a few details about Christmas, but he got the narrative wrong. Jesus’ birth was described as “a pilgrimage with a purpose, heralded by angels” so that there should be “peace on earth.”
This, of course, is not what Jesus came for.
Jesus came to get us to heaven, and warned that the earth was a place of conflict because it was being influenced by “the prince of this world.”
Jesus warned that he had come to bring a sword and division, precisely because his role was to judge as well as to save, and to expose the hearts of people for what they were — rather than to paper over anger, rebellion, hatred, violence and murder with the cosmetic pretence of niceness.
What Remains to Be Done
It is tragic that an opportunity to talk about the beauty, truth and goodness of the Christian Gospel is instead used for different purposes.
The scale of the tragedy becomes more acute each year as we watch the relentless dilution of Christian culture alongside the diminution of democracy and free speech.
Without free speech we cannot tell the truth about what is being done to the West.
Without free speech we cannot reach across the boundaries of the destruction of our culture to encourage each other to stand against it.
Without free speech we cannot tell the truth about Jesus, and about those cultural enemies who are determined to evacuate Christianity and the Christian message of all that is most Christian.
We can however, at least express our regret that our monarch has misjudged the needs of his people and the damage to the culture that his monarchy rests on — and take responsibility for speaking about it, writing about it, and living it ourselves.
