Should Christians Celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III?
Or do Christians have a mandate to speak up against corrupt powers?
Canada’s 150th anniversary was a wonderful memory for me and my wife. Michelle and I road-tripped to Ottawa, where we stayed with a dear aunt and uncle. On July 1st, 2007, we got up early and drove to downtown Ottawa, parking on the Quebec side of the river and walking back across the Portage Bridge.
It was a fabulous day, minus the three-hour line to get onto Parliament Hill. We ate poutine and beaver tails (Canadians are weird), watched my ex-girlfriend’s musician husband perform on center stage, and enjoyed the banging fireworks.
We also got to meet the now-King Charles III.
I had long been an admirer of Charles-the-person. Like his mother, he’d spent an awful lot of his life fundraising for charity, leveraging his shiny name to generate billions in funds by acting as the patron of more than 400 charities around the world. (It has since come to light that he is a rent-a-royal, having accepted money from Saudi tycoons, Russian oligarchs, arms dealers, and even Osama bin Laden.)
I still like that he hates modern architecture for the eyesore that it is. He once called a proposed steel-and-glass addition to a gorgeous stone museum, “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”
He was due to open a new hall at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, so I asked a security guard where, exactly, Charlie and Cammy would be exiting the building. Michelle and I positioned ourselves at a chokepoint corner where he’d have no choice but to meet and greet us.
And meet him we did. Camila came first, as grumpy and aloof as ever, her handshake reminiscent of nothing except the skeleton of a dead fish.
Charlie, on the other hand, was ebullient and warm, and shaking his hand was like squeezing a beefy tomahawk steak. But I suppose one’s hand grows as thick as a baseball mitt after a lifetime of shaking hands for a living.
We chatted briefly, shared a laugh, and went on our way.
Now that he’s crowned himself King, I can now put another notch in my belt — I’ve now met a king and a pope.
Obey “the king” or the King of Kings?
The people of God were never supposed to be ruled by the kingdoms of men.
The Bible makes this truth blatantly clear in 1 Samuel 8:
“Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
God’s plan: For humans to live under his rule and reign.
Man’s plan: Play God.
Accordingly, Christians have a long and storied tradition of obeying and disobeying earthly kings, depending on how obedient or disobedient those kings are to the King of Kings.
We obey the human law insofar as the human law conforms to the law of Christ.
Indeed, the Bible is chock full of stories of civil disobedience when the law of the land didn’t align with the law of God:
- Daniel refused to stop praying to God despite the law of King Darius.
- Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow to King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image.
- Esther ignored the law and approached King Xerxes without permission.
- Elijah annihilated Queen Jezebel’s personal prophets.
- Rahab lied to the king of Jericho and illegally hid Israelite spies.
- God blessed the Hebrew midwives for refusing to obey the Egyptian Pharoah’s command to murder Jewish babies.
- Moses broke the Pharoah’s law by escaping with millions of his slaves.
- The Jewish people refused to obey King Saul’s command to kill his son Jonathan.
- Jesus defied the Jewish high priest and was put to death for it.
- Peter escaped from prison at least once.
- John and Peter refused to stop preaching the gospel despite being forbidden to do so by the Jewish authorities.
- Paul was accused of breaking the law of Caesar by proclaiming Jesus was the true king.
Moreover, people of faith throughout history have constantly spoken out against corrupt kings and evil rulers:
- Elijah and Micaiah spoke out against King Ahab.
- Obadiah spoke out against Queen Jezebel.
- Samuel spoke out against King Saul.
- Nathan spoke out against King David.
- Jeremiah spoke out against King Jehoiakim.
- Jehu spoke out against King Joram.
- Jehoiada spoke out against Queen Athaliah (and assassinated her.)
- Daniel spoke out against King Nebuchadnezzar.
- Mordecai spoke out against King Xerxes.
- Isaiah spoke out against King Ahaz.
- John the Baptist spoke out against King Herod Antipas.
- Stephen spoke out against the Jewish Sanhedrin.
- Paul spoke out against Governor Felix and Governor Festus.
- James spoke out against King Herod Agrippa I.
- John spoke out against Emperor Domitian.
The early church fathers weren’t silent on civil disobedience either. Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Cyprian, Athanasius, Augustine, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Jerome all spoke out against evil emperors and conceded it was often required of Christians to disobey governments when governments disobeyed God. For speaking the truth, many of these godly heroes were exiled or murdered.
The same goes for those like Bonhoeffer who spoke out against the Nazis, and for Christians today who speak out against Muslim dictators, North Korean tyrants, Russian thugs, and the evils of the CIA.
The Apostle Peter’s defense sums up where the Christian’s allegiance must lie:
“Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge; for we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard… We must obey God rather than men.”
The Apostle Paul taught us to submit to the governing authorities as long as they do not violate God’s will, and if/when they do, to be ready and willing to face their wrath. Ideally, Paul hopes that wicked rulers would just be nice enough to leave us alone:
“First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity” — 1 Timothy 2
We surrender to Caesar what is Caesar’s (money and power) and to God what is God’s (our life, love, hope, and eternal allegiance.)
And we never stop speaking the truth about evil powers.
All kings are illegitimate kings
“Do not put your trust in princes; there is no help for you there.” — Psalm 146:3
Imagine if Hitler won World War II.
Picture the map of Western Europe if a handful of nations — France, Belgium, Austria, Hungary, The Netherlands, etc. — had permanently fallen to the Third Reich.
Think of all that war, murder, rape, pillage, slavery, and theft.
Now fast-forward a thousand years.
Hitler’s descendants are still living in castles and palaces. They’re still raking the public for hundreds of millions of dollars each year. They still play an active role in “democratic” politics. And thanks to an unbelievably powerful media machine, they’ve somehow convinced the nation that they’re the good guys.
The only difference now is that the Hitlers have changed their last name, adopted a posh accent, dressed in tailored clothes and fancy hats, and sent their kids to elite schools like Eton and Oxford to learn some high-class manners.
If that story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the story of the Germanic family that currently occupies Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace and a dozen other castles and palaces.
It’s the Windsor family story — originally the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family — and this weekend, the citizens of a “democracy” called the United Kingdom will be forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to celebrate the coronation of an unelected head of state, a position that their very own ancestors would see exactly as we now see Hitler.
The reality is that Charles Windsor heads one of the most violent crime families in human history, and it’s time for that family to pay reparations.
The Windsor family profited from war and genocide
Charles III is the most recent in a long line of regents to rule the British Isles and is the beneficiary of war-lording on a scale never seen before in human history.
Just take a read through the wars and rebellions of George I.
Or George II.
Or Anne.
Or James II.
Or Charles I.
Or the witch hunts of James VI.
Or World War I, which started as a fight between three royal cousins.
These brief overviews connote the wholesale slaughter — the outright murder — of tens of millions of husbands, brothers, sons, and friends, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of raped and murdered women and children.
For what?
So one elite family could maintain a monopoly on violence, and amass all the riches, castles, and power that come with brutalizing others for nearly 1,000 years.
Charles III actively opposes democracy
The Windsor family, and every other king who has ever ruled the British Isles, has been vehemently opposed to democracy. To this day, they seek to protect their special privileges, their unearned wealth, and their undemocratic positions of power.
In fact, the family uses a mechanism called King’s Consent to twist or straight-up block any law they don’t like, vetting more than 1,000 laws to date. It’s completely anti-constitutional and has been used by Charles to block his hard-working tenant-serfs from being able to buy the homes they’re already paying for.
Charles III even has the gall to insist he owns the House of Commons.
The Windsor family still profits from government corruption
The Windsor family’s finances are a quagmire of moral mess.
Here’s how Charles III makes most of his money:
- He controls a $20+ billion slush fund called the Crown Estate — which is actually owned by the nation — which was assembled through rank injustice over the past two-and-a-half centuries. The Crown Estate is a massive rent-seeking operation that contributes nothing to society — he literally thinks he owns all the dolphins and swans and seabed and foreshore of the UK — while monopolizing 287,000 acres and extracting $340+ million in profits from the contributor class each year.
- These unearned profits are given to the government.
- In return, the government pays him nearly $100 million per year.
In other words: Charles III openly bribes politicians to let him cling to his lofty position and keep a cut of vast amounts of wealth that legally belong to the British people.
It’s an arrangement seen nowhere else in the world, and it’s one of the most anti-democratic, anti-meritocratic, anti-commons financial arrangements in any Western nation.
The Windsor family profited from slavery
The United Kingdom grew wealthy not because of its vast landholdings or its rich natural resources or its superior work ethic, but because it once dominated a global collection of colonies that were so large that “the sun never set on the British Empire.”
Not only did the UK enslave millions of men, women, and children in Africa, America, and the Caribbean, but they also dominated the Indian subcontinent for nearly a century. In that time, they not only looted the nation of resources like some of the biggest diamonds in history for the Windsor family crowns, but they starved 10+ million people to death. Charles III has never acknowledged his family’s involvement in the Black slave trade.
And then there is the third form of slavery overseen by the Windsor ancestors, an insidious slavery well-glossed-over in Commonwealth textbooks simply by giving it another name:
Serfdom.
The harsh reality is that the United Kingdom has been, for most of its history, a gigantic slave plantation where serfs did the back-breaking work of transforming a rugged island into one of the most beautiful places on Earth, all for the profit of inbred kings and their vampirical aristocracy.
And to this day, the people of Great Britain struggle under the weight of an enormous extractor class, comprised of non-contributing monarchs, aristocrats, London City banksters, House of Lordsmen, and financialized land-lorders.
This tweet sums it up nicely:
The Windsor family profited from theft
It is not a stretch to say that literally every single one of Charles III’s monarch ancestors stole land, houses, and wealth to enrich the royal coffers, much of it still sits in the various and sundry castles and palaces built by slaves/serfs and maintained by servants, vassals, and employees.
Perhaps no one robbed so widely and thoroughly as Charles III’s ancestor Henry VIII. This one despot is responsible for a huge amount of Charles III’s current wealth, including Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace, St James’s Palace, and a colossal amount of land, art, and gold.
How did Henry VIII amass all these riches? Did he work hard, contribute real value to the commons, and skip avocado toast in order to save prudently?
Absolutely not.
The tyrant robbed the nation blind, sacking nearly 1,000 Christian monasteries over a five-year period, creating 14,000 refugees and killing hundreds of Christian clergy. He then auctioned off their lands, churches, abbeys, and buildings to the local elites in exchange for hard cash so he could go sack other innocents. In total, the lands he stole from Christians are now worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.
In other words, much of the basis of Charles III’s wealth comes from hanging and beheading nuns and castrating and disemboweling unarmed monks while they were still alive.
The Windsor family still profits from economic exploitation
The work-shy Windsors do one thing, full-time: Rake money off the working class.
Case in point: They hiring new house cleaners and they’re not even paying living wages. Charles III’s mother once applied for a poverty grant to heat Buckingham Palace. The Windsor family’s entire business model is based on rent-seeking, a horrible practice that even pro-capitalist folks like Adam Smith saw as a pox on humanity.
Take, for instance, the family’s control of the two hundred islands off the coast of Cornwall. Charles III’s family has dominated the Isles of Scilly for more than 600 years, so that today they own “most of the land and nearly a third of the residential buildings on the islands.”
In other words, thousands of people are stuck as permanent renters under crushing rents with no sense of ownership because a Windsor ancestor robbed or killed someone in the past. Rather than retaining wealth, productive contributors are forced to hand over their hard-earned money to a family that does nothing but extract from others.
And this is just one property. As prince, Charles III controlled more than 135,000 acres, entire cities, farms, estates, neighborhoods, cottages, and houses, all raking tax-free cash into a perpetual trust for private gain with zero inheritance taxes. He sadly also milked millions of dollars from poor people who died without a will.
Now Charles III has his own billion-dollar trust scheme that rakes tens of millions of dollars off the working class every year, and includes over 45,000 acres, a gigantic mineral portfolio, a dozen castles, and over 300 houses. It’s utter rent-seeking madness — a 700-year monopoly that sets the standard for all the rent-seeking extractors across the nation.
The Windsor family still profits from tax havens
Charles III uses tax havens.
Prince Andrew uses tax havens.
Harry and Meghan set up 11 companies in a tax haven.
And there’s a reason why Elizabeth II was called Britain’s welfare queen — the depths to which the Windsors are willing to rent-seek and stash the cash offshore runs very deep, indeed.
The Paradise Papers revealed that the gold-throne-owning Elizabeth II had a £10 million offshore stake in furniture rental company BrightHouse, a company known for making the poor pay a poverty premium — up to three times the cash price — just to have a table and some chairs.
And now it all belongs to her son.
The family of faith
What is the Windsor family, exactly?
It is a once-murderous, enslaving, thieving former crime family — one of the biggest in history — now turned nice and polite but still practicing industrial-scale economic exploitation as full-time rent-seekers, whose entire source of income is the extraction of rents, interest, and grift, with the help of national-level bribes. They are leading members of the British extractor class that mines the exhausted contributor class for evermore wealth. (But boy, do they do it with style.)
Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that the Windsors claim to be a Christian family.
In fact, Charles III is the head of the Anglican Church, a denomination that is rotten to its core, created by Henry VIII so he could murder his wives and practice rampant adultery.
But has the Windsor family never read the Bible?
Matthew 6:24
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
Isaiah 5:8–9
“Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing: “Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants.”
Matthew 19:21
“If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
Luke 6:20–25:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.”
The Bible forbids interest and land-lording for profit, Christ insists his followers must give up their power over others, and Jesus talks more about money than heaven and hell combined. He is always against the oppressor and he always sides with the poor.
Obviously, the truth of each person’s faith is between them and God, but the Bible does say “by their fruits you will know them.”
What is the fruit of the Windsor family?
- They steal from the nation’s beleaguered coffers.
- They rob the poor on a daily basis.
- They hoard obscene wealth in the face of crushing poverty.
- They wield centuries of unearned privilege to maintain power over others.
To use the King’s English: In the same way one doesn’t become a Big Mac by stepping into a McDonald’s, it isn’t enough to say one is a Chr!stian if one does not act like the person upon which Chr!stianity was founded.
Perhaps it’s a fruit of how poorly we translated the word pístis as “faith” instead of faithfulness in Bibles, as though faith is just a one-time payment not followed by a lifelong subscription. Sadly, historical Christendom has consistently taken the easy route, requiring a statement of faith instead of an embodiment of faithfulness. True faithfulness is not a statement of belief or a feeling whatsoever — it is a lifetime of radical sacrifice in order to love the weakest members of society.
The Windsors seem like nice people — I’ve met Prince Charles and he was the consummate gentleman — but mere politeness and a few manners do not cover over the active exploitation of the poor and contributor class.
The end of tyranny
How would one go about ending the corruption of the House of Windsor?
Clearly, by abolishing the monarchy and making them pay Zacchaeus-style reparations to the British people:
- All the castles will become museums and hotels that are open to the public, the profits of which will be given to children’s charities.
- All 775 rooms of Buckingham and all their hundreds of houses will be used to welcome in Ukrainian refugees.
- All the endowments and duchies and hundreds of thousands of acres of land will help build affordable housing for Britain’s 300,000 homeless people — 3X more per capita than in America.
- All the gold and jewels will be sent back to Africa and India, or they can remain on display in museums, with the ownership and profits being sent back to the nations from whence the goods were stolen.
- Instead of a net loss of $430+ million per year for British taxpayers, the country could use the savings to feed the nation’s poorest children instead of its greediest family.
Britain could then do the same thing with the aristocracy, evicting all the dukes and earls from their unearned slave-paid-for mansions, wresting back control of half of the entire British land mass that they currently hoard, and nearly all of central London.
Britain could then eliminate knighthoods, evict every Lord out of the anti-democratic House of Lords, and do away with titles entirely.
Perhaps Britain could even become a real democracy, the first one on planet Earth.
And what would become of the Windsor family?
They could try joining the contributor class and doing an honest day’s work for the first time in their lives.
Or they could fundraise on the strength of their family name and earn a living as leaders of charitable foundations.
So long as they stay out of politics, stop rent-seeking, and stop profiting from centuries of rape, pillage, and murder, it doesn’t really matter what they do.
Why do they deserve their wealth?
Why do they deserve their unearned political power?
Why can’t ever Briton have a slush fund that avoids inheritance tax?
Why do they deserve to be rescued from a nuke attack with yachts, ferries, and bunkers while the people who actually built the UK perish?
Ironically, Britons recently celebrated the Queen’s platinum jubilee, not realizing that a jubilee is when debts are erased and land is returned to its original owners, to ensure fairness and equality in a nation. But clearly, the Windsor family has zero interest in celebrating a true jubilee.
Charles III seems like a nice-hearted person, and so I wish him well, ideally as a private citizen of a real democracy. The great and royal commoners of Britannia deserve nothing less for the nation that they alone have built.
Long live Charlie, the normal everyday human being.
My prayer for King Charles III
Lord, Your Word is clear that it was never Your will for Your people to be ruled by earthly kings.
In our sin and disobedience, You allowed us to choose human kings instead of you.
Lord, we pray 1 Samuel 8:7. We repent of our sin of rejecting You as our king.
Lord, we pray Mark 7 and Colossians 2. Help us never to be people of earthly man-made tradition, but people of Your eternal God-given truth.
Lord, because the United Kingdom is mired in deep crisis and corruption, we seek to live in obedience to 1 Timothy 2:2 by praying for kings and all those in authority.
We pray for the 274,000 homeless people in the United Kingdom.
We pray for the 231,000 refugees in the United Kingdom, along with the 437,000 Ukrainians and Hong Kongers who have sought refuge on these shores.
We pray for the 89,000 prisoners in the United Kingdom.
We pray for the 1.8 million single parents in the United Kingdom.
We pray for the 4.2 million children in poverty in the United Kingdom.
Lord, we pray Proverbs 21:1, that You will turn the king’s heart like a hand in a stream of water.
Lord, we pray Proverbs 8:15, that he and his rulers will enact just laws.
Lord, we pray Romans 13:1. Help us to remember that there is no authority except that which God allows.
Lord, we pray 1 Peter 2:13 and Titus 3:1. Help us to submit and be subject to human rules and institutions in so far as they are obedient to Your Word.
Lord, we pray Acts 5:29, that we will always obey God above man.
Lord, we pray Romans 14:11. Remind Charles that he, like the rest of us, will have to give an account of himself to God. Remind him that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to You.
Lord, we pray Luke 22:25, that we as Christians would not be deluded into believing that those who lord it over the people are benefactors.
Lord, we pray 1 Timothy 6:15. We declare that You are the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.
Lord, we pray Isaiah 9:6. We welcome You as our Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, whose government will have no end.
Lord, we pray Revelation 11:15, and rejoice that the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.
Amen.
