The Decline of Sacral Kingship

Imagine Rishi Sunak has a quantum AI supercomputer. Elon Musk installed it in the basement of No. 10 during the AI Summit last year. And imagine this isn’t just any AI supercomputer: it’s Multivac, Deep Thought and Hex rolled into one. All Sunak has do it is ask it any question about the future, and it will tell him the best way of achieving it.

One day, feeling conscientious, he goes down to the basement and asks it how he can bring about peace in the Middle East.

There’s some whirring…and then a bit more whirring…and then some more whirring. The little hourglass icon turns round and round. After about five minutes it spits out the answer.

Sunak looks at it. It’s…well, it’s a complicated plan. But the upshot of it is that he’s got to go to the Middle East and let himself get captured and tortured by Hamas.

“Oh,” says Sunak. “I thought you were just going to tell me to bomb something, or maybe convene an international peace conference. Isn’t there another way?”

The AI whirrs again, but the answer is the same. What’s more, this time it’s gone into more detail: not only does he have to get captured and tortured, but he has to do it in the most humiliating way possible, such that the global news media will be criticising his perceived incompetence at letting himself get captured for days.

“Hang on a minute,” he says. “This sounds like a job for David Cameron. Why else did I put him in the Lords and make him Foreign Secretary? Or how about that nice Mr Tony Blair? He always wanted to be the Special Envoy to the Middle East, didn’t he?”

No can do, answers the AI. Only the capture of someone as important as the British Prime Minister will catalyse the international pressure needed to bring about peace deal that sticks.

“Oh, it’s about importance, is it? Well then, surely we need to send Joe Biden. We could tell him he was going to Gambia, and then pop him on a plane to Gaza; job done.”

That won’t work either, the AI tells him. For convoluted and implausible reasons, only seeing the Prime Minister of Britain, as the former administrator of the Mandate, in captivity will have the necessary impact on Netanyahu and the other right-wingers in his Cabinet to bring about peace.

“And you’re sure this is going to work?” he asks. The AI prints out long columns of mathematical reasons, along with some displays of what the region’s expected to look like in 2050 if he goes ahead with it. It’s not perfect - there’ll still be some communal tensions - but it looks a lot more like Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement than the current situation. And after three days of captivity, it assures him, the SAS will track him down and rescue him. He’ll always have the memories, of course, but he can go back to his millions, and to his family, and to being Prime Minister.

Sunak thinks about it for a bit longer. He looks at the plan; he looks at the 2050 scenarios. And then, being a good man, he does it.

Doing a Good Thing

Rishi Sunak doesn’t have a supercomputing AI in the basement of No. 10¹. But if he did, and if it did give him the choice described above, it would be pretty universally regarded as the Morally Right Thing to do it.

Now, we might be a bit surprised if Sunak followed through with it, but that’s just because we have a low opinion of politicians. If it was someone who claimed to a position of moral authority - the Pope, say, or the Dalai Lama, or the Secretary-General of the United Nations - then we’d think they should definitely do it. Their moral authority would be shot to pieces if they had such an opportunity and turned it down. If you’re given the chance to bring about peace in the Middle East for the price of a few days of torture, of course you should take it.

Now, whether or not one would actually do it is the big question. It’s a larger version of the classic scenario we’ve all asked ourselves: if you were with your friends, or your family, or some strangers, and suddenly only you could step forward to take the bullet, or to hold up the burning roof, so that you died and saved their lives - would you actually do it? We question if, when push came to shove, we’d have the courage do the right thing. But we don’t question what the right thing is. That’s obvious.

When Sydney Carton gives his life for Charles Darnay in The Tale of Two Cities, he describes it as ‘A far, far, better thing that I do than I have ever done before’. And that’s to save one life. More people than we can count in history have given their lives for others - often for strangers - and usually with far less surety that their sacrifice would make a difference than in the scenario above.

Now, when someone with no connection or obligation to those they’re saving makes such a sacrifice, we see that as particularly praiseworthy. In the scenario above, we’d admire Sunak. We’d make gushing news reports about him, and might give him the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t have to do it; he could have just carried on being Prime Minister of the UK. He’d have put himself through a lot for some people who, strictly speaking, he didn’t owe anything to.

But here’s the thing: we wouldn’t swear an oath of undying allegiance to him. We wouldn’t delay the General Election. We wouldn’t see that his actions gave him any additional authority over us². And if he tried to argue that he should be made Global President³ or any such like, he’d be roundly ignored. His adulation for the deed would last just as long as he didn’t try to capitalise on it.

And if he tried to argue that his high status, wealth and power meant that those three days of torture somehow counted more than the life of a single Palestinian or Israeli child, he’d be slapped down so hard the rebound would take him into orbit.

The Decline of Sacral Kingship

I can’t help feeling that the decline of sacral kingship has made the job of Christian preachers and apologists incomparably harder.

An awful lot of Biblical imagery about God relies on analogies with kingship. God is described as a king; we have the kingdom of heaven; Jesus told parables about kings. We can assume this was done because it was a metaphor that all of the listeners of the time could immediately understand: the king was powerful, mighty, set out the law, was owed fealty, his life was in every way more special than that of his subjects. And God was like a king - but more so.

The trouble is, almost no-one things about kings that way these days. Even the most ardent monarchist doesn’t think that King Charles deserves unconditional loyalty, is of somehow a different order to the rest of us, or that his life is literally worth far more than those of others. Democracy and egalitarianism is set too deeply within bones and blood.

Sure, some of it we can get. The king is powerful, sure. And there’s a trace of the more sacral elements that remain: as we read The Lord of the Rings, we understand that Aragorn’s return will restore Gondor not just because he is brave, or wise, or just - but because he is The King. The hands of the king are the hands of a healer: the king is special.

But in the Middle Ages, people believed that the touch of a king could cure scrofula. They thought that it was right, just and proper that a nobleman should receive a different - a lighter - punishment for many crimes than a peasant. In many places in antiquity they believed the king was a literal god - and even though the Jews didn’t believe this, the king was still the Lord’s annointed. A king was set apart.

And so we get parables such as Matthew 22, where we’re nodding along until the king gets angry and burns the entire city of those who’ve transgressed against him. Or arguments such that because any sin is high treason against the king (God), it deserves to be punished with death. Or apologetics which rest on the fact that the king enjoys a command over his subjects that is essentially that which a master enjoys over slaves.

This culminates with the ultimate example of Christ’s death on the cross. I’ve heard many times a preacher exhorting the congregation to appreciate how amazingly wonderful it is that the king of the universe should die on the cross for mere humans. How incredible that he should humble himself and suffer so.

Well, it might be amazing - for the recipient. It may be grace. And it would certainly be good news. But morally superlative? Really? Three days of suffering to save the world? How could a being that claims both perfect goodness and to love humanity do anything otherwise? Whilst our opening Sunak scenario was fiction, there are countless human beings, of every nation, colour and creed, in every age of history, who have willing sacrificed far more to achieve far less.

I think that for many Christians who have grown up hearing these comparisons, they’ve become normalised. Of course it makes sense for it to be that way; it’s what they’ve heard week after week since childhood. It’s both right and good; the natural order of the world. But to those who don’t share that fair, the arguments can often appear bizarre, rather a bit like a proof that’s missed the critical penultimate step. One’s left with the unsatisfactory practice of multiplying infinites. Of course, one can follow the argument intellectually - but the emotional resonance is jarring.

As a final note, I should say, of course, that none of the above proves anything one way or the other of the central truth of the Christian claim. That does not rest on whether humanity retains the same systems of government across 3000 years.

But God being a King means a whole lot less in 21st century Britain than it did in 1st century Judaea.

1. Unless he’s running a Claudius Gambit.

2. The fact we voted out Churchill in 1945 is perhaps the ultimate proof of this.

3. Or ‘World King’, as his predecessor but one would call it.