The Virtue of Strange Service

Since Queen Elizabeth II’s death last month, I’ve seen countless takes and commentaries on her reign and on the British monarchy.

On the one hand, she was by all accounts extremely devoted to serving her country and the institution of the monarchy. Commentator David French discusses her lifetime of service, as well as the military service of Princes William, Harry, Andrew, and Philip, and concludes:

There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. As Andrew [Sullivan] notes, when Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she “was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.”…

Duty and honor without power—that’s the role of modern royalty… There is also immense meaning when a monarch lives the values their role demands. Queen Elizabeth lived with honor and did her duty, and in so doing she helped bind together a fractious people. She helped give them a sense of shared identity.

On the other hand, the monarchy - the idea that someone should, simply by accident of birth, be placed into that role for 70 years - is a strange institution, especially to Americans in our belief that all men are created equal. (We even fought a war to end the monarchy - although historian Eric Nelson argues that the early American revolutionaries saw themselves as rebelling against Parliament and weren’t necessarily against the monarchy.)

As part of her role, Elizabeth studiously avoided commenting on political positions. David French explains, “Britain’s constitutional monarchy separates the functions of the head of state and the head of government. The head of state is doing her job when she’s explicitly not political, when she instead conducts the formal affairs of the state and embodies (as well as any human can) certain core national values.” British theologian Alastair Roberts writes, “In resisting entanglement in political conflict and refraining from participation in public political debate, the monarch guards their true character and influence. They stand for something that greatly exceeds political conflicts and party interests, even highly charged ones.”

On the other hand, there are plenty of important political and national issues that may deserve people’s attention. At what threshold does someone with influence decide that something is worth addressing? If the argument is that, in order to preserve your influence for some future need, you must avoid using your influence to address a current need, at what point does that become self-defeating?

Queen Elizabeth was loved by millions of people; the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in queue, sometimes for twenty-four hours or more, in order to pay their respects after her death was a powerful illustration of this. However, the British monarchy and Queen Elizabeth are a reminder and representation of Britain’s history of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery for many others - for example, blacks and Desi who are still dealing with the aftereffects of the slave trade and colonization.

Queen Elizabeth supported numerous charities and helped raise over £1.4 billion for them. On the other hand, she had a personal fortune of roughly $500 million, simply by virtue of her birth, which she was able to pass on tax-free to Prince Charles - in addition to the significant assets of the monarchy itself.

Queen Elizabeth was a devout Christian; in 2000, she said, “For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.” N.T. Wright speaks warmly of her love for and service to Jesus. As “Defender of the Faith” and head of the Church of England in a secular, post-Christian country, she no doubt had an influence for God in her country. On the other hand, as an American Christian, I’m firmly in favor of the separation of church and state: I believe that political power can too easily corrupt the church, and I believe that God gives us free will and we should therefore avoid coercing or compelling others, and there’s an argument that the establishment of religion has contributed to Europe being a post-Christian continent (by allowing Christian churches there to become complacent in government support rather than striving to innovate and reach out).

What do we make of all of that?

If nothing else, Elizabeth’s birth into the royal family reminds me that the American approach of egalitarianism and free individual choice is a relative novelty. Jesus tells a parable which one person might have ten times the gifting of another. Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist were set aside from birth; Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, and others were given huge responsibilities with little say in the matter. The obvious counterargument here is that these people were directly and explicitly chosen by God. Elizabeth, in our understanding, was not (except in the general Romans 13 sense of all human authorities existing under God’s control). For whatever reason, though - whether differences in God’s designs and God-given talents, inequalities from human competition and sin, or the vagaries of a centuries-old British institution - the differences persist, often in spite of people’s efforts to address them, and what you do with your own gifts and powers is often more important than comparing where you stand relative to someone else (Jn 21:22).

It occurred to me, though, that a more direct Biblical reference may be the Rechabites of Jeremiah 35. During the last days of the nation of Judah, when the Israelites were practicing empty formalistic public worship of the Lord, mixed with private syncretism and idolatry, Jeremiah fruitlessly tried to warn his fellow Israelites of God’s coming judgment. In a strange story partway through his book, Jeremiah sent a message to the Rechabites, apparently a small ethnic group descended from Moses’ father-in-law who lived among the Israelites, to invite them to the temple. There, he offered them some wine. They refused, explaining,

“We do not drink wine because our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us not to. He told us, ‘You and your children must never drink wine. Do not build houses. Do not plant crops. Do not plant a vineyard or own one. Live in tents all your lives. If you do these things you will live a long time in the land that you wander about on.’ We and our wives and our sons and daughters have obeyed everything our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us.”

In response, Jeremiah blessed the Rechabites (Jer. 35:18-19) and contrasted their behavior with the Israelites’:

‘I, the Lord, say: “You must learn a lesson from this about obeying what I say. Jonadab son of Rechab ordered his descendants not to drink wine. His orders have been carried out. To this day his descendants have drunk no wine because they have obeyed what their ancestor commanded them. But I have spoken to you over and over again, but you have not obeyed me.“’

The point isn’t that Jonadab’s restrictions were from God or were, in and of themselves, automatically good. The point is that the Rechabites, out of a desire to honor their ancestor and out of a belief that a simple nomadic lifestyle was worth practicing, faithfully obeyed. As a result, their faithfulness to human instruction, given by one person centuries ago, presented a powerful rebuke to the Israelites repeated unfaithfulness to God’s commandments, delivered repeatedly through Moses and the prophets.

I’ve seen a lot of the takes since Queen Elizabeth’s death, but my opinion on the British monarchy isn’t worth much. On this side of the pond, it doesn’t really affect me, and I can’t change anything. But I can appreciate her faithful service to her country (even if it did come in the form of a strange, anachronistic, human-made institution), and I can appreciate her faithful service to Christ.