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Good morning. A good few people choked on their cornflakes on hearing that, at the coronation service on Saturday, all beholding the spectacle will be invited to pledge allegiance to the King. What is it that makes this invitation so troubling for some?
It’s partly because we’re not used to it. Americans pledge allegiance to a flag, in some cases every day. But people in this country aren’t accustomed to being asked to pledge allegiance to anything.
It’s partly also because it feels so medieval. Long ago a vassal knelt to give his joined hands to a lord, in return for a fiefdom. No one today wants to be anyone’s vassal.
The heart of a pledge is the notion of loyalty. To be loyal is to say, ‘I’m going to be on your side not just when you’re in the right and everyone admires you, but even when you’re in the wrong and everyone’s deserted you.’ That’s something we might say to very few people in our whole lives. It’s a big thing to suggest we might make a pledge towards someone most of us don’t personally know. It turns the coronation from a pageant we observe from afar into a profound declaration of personal commitment.
What makes people balk at being invited to make such a pledge is, I suspect, the degree to which this kind of loyalty swims against the stream of our culture. In feudal times, loyalty fitted the social system neatly: you deferentially supported your liege lord, because your lord protected you. No one was interested in your private opinions.
Today, loyalty sits much less comfortably when we so prize our right to make up our own minds. Anything that inhibits us from following what we personally believe to be right is counter-cultural. We admire the idea of loyalty, but we can quickly jettison it when in practice it requires of us something we feel infringes our own integrity or autonomy.
What’s really extraordinary about Saturday’s ceremony is not what we’re being invited to do, but what the King’s doing. It’s going to be awesome to watch a person pledging himself wholly to the well-being of nation and Commonwealth. He’s entrusting his future to people he doesn’t know amid events he can’t control. Exactly what we’re reluctant to do in return.
So whatever our view about being invited to pledge allegiance, Saturday’s a huge statement of faith. Faith in something beyond our own integrity and autonomy. Faith that our country is more than the sum of its parts. Faith that it deserves our loyalty. And faith that, beyond all earthly crowns and thrones, there is something, or as believers would say someone, worthy of our soul, our life, our all.