Totem and Taboo: Religious Features of the British Public Support for Monarchy

Abstract

As Christopher Hitchens remarked in his book about the British monarchy, the cult of theWindsor family, with its periodic rituals and the fetishizing of the most senior royals resembles a secularreligion. The British monarchy is surrounded by secrecy, as many actions of the sovereign and seniorroyals, including those having a public or political impact are not transparent, nor are most recordsfrom the royal archives available to the public or to historians. This paper will first examine the reli-gious features of the public support for the British monarchy. Then, it will ad-vance a hypothetical explanation of the enduring nature of this institutionthrough its mysterious/religious nature. It will also consider the fact that inrecent decades the image of the Windsor family has been harmed by numerousscandals related to adultery, divorce, sexual abuseand even racism. Notwithstanding this ignomin-ious behavior, the royal mystique has been pre-served with the aid of a press that seems profitablyinterested in rousing public devotion to themonarch and in demonizing scapegoats. The pro-establishment media, including the tabloids thatcombine the sacred with the profane, is thus simi-lar to a secular clergy. Republican dissenters whoadvocate the abolition of monarchy play the roleof heretics. They are often persecuted, arrestedand derided. There is also the “religiously indif-ferent” population that is uninterested in the Royal Family. British “public re-ligion” is thus a peculiar kind of pre-modern cult that strangely survived theEnlightenment and the challenges of liberal democracy. Such values are pro-moted within civil society especially by the British pressure group Republic,whose campaign for changing the form of government has gained more visi-bility and support in recent years.