Fidei Defensor

The present title derives, not from its conferral on Henry VIII by the Pope, but from its conferral by Parliament on Henry's son, Edward VI. Not that it has ever been peculiarly British or English; various monarchs have used it in various times and places, and Popes have conferred it on a number of people, so that, for example, Catherine of Aragon was a Defender of the Faith in her own right.

Some Commonwealth Realms retain it, and several have done so in the past, abolishing it only in abolishing the monarchy itself. Perhaps most strikingly, it was retained throughout the existence of the Irish Free State.

If and when the Paramount Chief of the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji is once again Queen there, then this title should certainly be included as a formal reassertion of the Christian character of the place by the indigenous Melanesians, most of whom are Methodists, as the society in which Hindus and Muslims have chosen to settle and are welcome to make a contribution, but which in its fundamentals they must as accept as it is. No wonder that most people also wish to retain it here.

Defence against what? Most obviously Islam. And defence of what? The status of the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith was a key reason why even Tony Blair was unable to legislate for the extension of legal marriage to same-sex couples. In that capacity, the Queen simply could not have signed such a Bill into law.

But would not Islam be a very secure barrier indeed to such a change? Yes, but this is a very secure barrier against both of them. As Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith, the Queen could no more sign into law a Bill legalising polygamy, or otherwise giving effect to Sharia, than she could sign into law a Bill legalising marriage between persons of the same sex.

Whereas the Queen's status in relation to the Church of England obviously applies only in England, Her Majesty's status as Defender of the Faith applies throughout the United Kingdom under the Royal Titles Act, being engraved on the coinage used from Shetland to Scilly and from Londonderry to Lowestoft, regardless of the banknotes. Had this country ever joined the euro, then, with the Queen's head, it would doubtless have been retained on the side indicating national origin.

In the Netherlands, telling also a monarchy, tellingly also a sort of United Kingdom, and tellingly also marked by roughly even but regionally concentrated populations of Catholics and Protestants, the recent move against cannabis in Amsterdam indicates the resurgence of the culture defined by the coexistence of the British, German and Benelux sort of Catholicism with (leaving aside historic confessional, organisational and liturgical differences) the British, German, Dutch and Scandinavian sort of Protestantism.

A country expected to be marked by the clash between militant Islam and the extreme secular libertarianism of figures such as Geert Wilders and the late Pim Fortuyn has instead begun the fightback of the mainstream population against one. That will undoubtedly, and very soon, turn out to be the fightback of the mainstream population against both. The Dutch monarchy will be pivotal to this, if apparently reactive to trends within the wider society and polity. Whereas the British monarchy can and should be proactive in leading its society and polity in that direction, since the British monarch is the Defender of the Faith.

The title is also retained in Canada, which now has both Sharia courts and same-sex "marriages". For, perhaps as a sort of riposte to the usual, though not the historically accurate, understanding of the American First Amendment, the Queen is held, as the Latin will bear but the history, the philosophy and the theology will not, to "Defender of Faith" in general, whatever that is, but which American judges sometimes hold to be protected by "the second religion clause" while Establishment, understood in the widest possible terms, is held to be prohibited by "the first religion clause".

One lives in hope that any reaction against what Canada is becoming or has become will lead to a recognition of the Defender of the Faith as embodying all that is common to the Presbyterianism, the Wesleyan Methodism, the Catholicism, and the Evangelical and Tractarian Anglicanism that founded, and which remain active in the lives of, several colleges of the University of Toronto. The present state of affairs is the most terrible shame, because Canada has so very much to offer to the witness of the true meaning of the title, a witness not least against many features of the United States.

"With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order."

So says the Archbishop of Canterbury as he hands the Sword of State to the monarch.

Shaftesbury and Wilberforce used the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full. Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme. But not in the House of Lords. Long may it remain.

As in most European countries, and as in anywhere having the British monarch at the Head, our State is in and of itself an institutional expression of Christianity, whether or not there is an Established Church. Therefore, our Welfare State and other social democratic measures, as in those other countries, are in and of themselves expression of Christian charity and of the Biblical, Patristic, Medieval, Catholic and classically Protestant understandings of society as an organic whole.

American critics of the Welfare State as secular and secularising are not only rather ahistorical in their own terms and somewhat out of touch with the profound Christianity of rural, working-class and black America. They are also captive to the theory of the constitutional separation of Church and State, which has nothing to do with Britain any more than with, say, Germany with her church taxes and her Kirchentag, or Italy with her Crucifixes in the courtroom and the classroom. The solution is not to remove the expressions of Christian charity and of the Christian concepts of organic society from the American civic order, but to remove the American civic order's formal repudiation of their basis.

Perhaps the Pope might name, at any given time, a Defender of the Faith in the life of the United States? It seems a shame that the Episcopal Church in its protracted heyday never took to naming a suitably exalted layman as such. The bearers of that office might have played an admirable role in preventing the descent, alike of the Episcopalians and of the rest of what was once accurately called mainline American Protestantism, as of the Republican Party with which that mainline, and perhaps especially the Episcopal Church, was so very bound up in the days when either was worth bothering with very much at all.