16: Bonnie Prince Charles

If you listen carefully, you can hear the old “Christian” world cracking and splintering into a thousand little pieces. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, there seems little hope of it ever being put back together again.

My American readers can be forgiven for treating the latest Prince Charles scandals as little more than a further minor hiccup in the colorful saga of the British Royal family soap opera. However, as the Prince of Wales and Lady Camilla Parker Bowles, like “commoners,” sneak into a registry office in the Town Hall of Windsor, just down the road from the pubs and burger bars, to formalize their long–term adulterous relationship, something of great import will occur.

If the monarchy is losing all credibility, so is the established Church of England. Anglicanism is rent asunder by controversy &mdash over female bishops, divorce and, of course, homosexual bishops. For many years significant churchmen have rejected the authority of the Bible, and even the God of the Bible, such that the Church now cannot speak with a clear voice in these times of spiritual and moral confusion. People are doing what they think is right in their own eyes, and Christianity, as a social structure, is fast becoming a spent force, with nothing to say. Little wonder ecclesiastical observers and church historians say “Britain is showing the world how religion as we known it can die,” or, “we are one generation from extinction.” Will it happen?

Contemporary sociologists speak of “the subjectivist turn of modern Western culture.” They show that “the turn” is a turning away from life as “established roles” and “given orders of things” to states of consciousness, to the importance of the inner self as the norm of behavior and to the high priority of “subjective wellbeing.” Of these kinds of people, Charles will be a most appropriate King–and more so than you think!

Some years ago I was sent a book on Prince Charles, with the shocking title: Prince Charles: The Sustainable Prince: Who Will Rule the New World Order? I dismissed it as another hot–house conspiracy theory, though I did note the documentation showing how, as a young man, Charles rejected Christianity and was deeply influenced by the South African “New Age” thinker, Laurens van der Post. Charles went on to study Buddhism and Hinduism and has made public speeches about our inseparable spiritual connection with Nature. However, I dismissed it as without much importance.The recent sociological study above describes the “nose–dive decline” of the Church in Britain since the Sixties. It shows that right now in Great Britain only 23% believe in a personal God; 44% [like Prince Charles] believe in “some sort of spirit or life force.” How appropriate that Charles would be the monarch who oversees and indeed brings about, by his behavior, the formal deconstruction of traditional British Christianity.We are not surprised, I hear you say. That is godless Europe. But not so fast! These British sociologists state that there is more evidence for the spiritual revolution in the USA than in Britain.” On the one hand, church attendance in the USA has fallen from 40% in the 60s to 22–24% today; on the other hand, in 2003, for instance, there were 15 million yoga practitioners, and 35.3 million Americans who said they intended to take it up in the near future.

In North America, we might smile at British Establishment Christianity, but many here are incensed when the Ten Commandments, crosses or other Christian symbols are removed from government property–which is happening all the time. In different but parallel ways, however, on both sides of the Pond, we are witnessing the end of a time when most people have simply assumed that Christianity provided the deep structure for civic society.

Here is a soap we need watch very seriously, because the latest Royal escapade likely will sound the death–knell of Western sociological Christianity everywhere.