The death of Queen Elizabeth II and the growing cult of disenchantment

I was supposed to be in England for a conference and other work-related events this week, but twenty-four hours before we were set to fly, Queen Elizabeth II died. For a variety of good reasons, the trip was postponed. But, I admit, I was disappointed. It would have been my first time back in England since my three-year sojourn there came to an end in the early 2000s, an exciting time in the U.K. that included the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, as well as the grand, affecting spectacles that followed the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother in close succession.

With Queen Elizabeth II’s death, much more has changed besides my travel plans and the look of British currency. After seventy years on the throne, bridging the divide between an earlier age and the modern world, Her Majesty went to her reward peacefully at Balmoral Castle on September 8. During her reign, she appointed fifteen Prime Ministers, met five Popes, presided over the dissolution of the world’s most expansive empire. She was a wife and mother of four children, a grandmotherly standard-bearer for a rightly ordered society at home and abroad.

The Queen was a steward of rich traditions and a symbol of unity, knowing that no authority she held (however constitutionally limited these days) was worth anything unless she bent the knee herself. The king of kings (and queens) was her Lord.

The Queen’s long, faithful life – and, more importantly, her long reign – should remind us how rare and precious are the gifts of longevity and stability. Accordingly, it should sadden us to realize how little we appreciate such treasures when they are gone. Reflecting on the significance of the Queen’s death, I have been remembering so clearly how I felt when my paternal grandfather died just a few days short of his 104th birthday in 2014. My Gramps had long enjoyed a role in our family as something of a king. He was involved in countless decisions in my life, and where he was ignorant or absent, I always wondered whether he would approve if he knew my plans or actions. He scared me a bit, and he inspired me a lot. Although I loved my grandfather dearly, during the last few years of his life, I began imagining the world after he finally died, and in fact, I admit I strangely looked forward to it. “The old order changeth, yielding way to new,” wrote Tennyson.

When the end finally came for my grandfather, however, I felt ashamed of myself for secretly thinking it would be better for him to shuffle off to Heaven sooner rather than later. He could not go on forever, but how wonderful it would have been for my children to know him just a little longer, benefiting from his long experience. After all, how many people raised in our globalist technocracy get to spend time with someone who travelled to church in a horse-drawn wagon in the rural Midwest in 1915? How many people around us can contextualize any of our modern woes with anecdotes from the sacrifices of World War II, let alone the Great Depression? When Gramps died, I was determined not to let the best things he represented and the lessons he had learned die with him.

Queen Elizabeth was, undoubtedly, happy to never have to see her own children and grandchildren take shelter from bombs as she did as a young woman. But her experience of having endured both the hardships and the simple pleasures of a slightly younger world ought not to be left with her body in the tomb. King Charles III has waited almost his entire life to become king, and now the crown is finally his (God save him!). Like the entire Baby Boomer generation in the West, King Charles has enjoyed the spoils of his ancestors’ sacrifices, like no group in history.

And as even casual observers of the Royal Family know, Charles’ service to his country has included countless charitable activities, but he has also come across to the world as selfish in ways his mother never did. The depiction of him in the hit Netflix series The Crown may be a bit of a caricature, but it leaves the viewer with a familiar-enough portrait of a man whose generation has set itself back over the years with more than a few own-goals.

As Prince of Wales, Charles may have embodied the Oscar Wilde quip, “The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork,” but he is not alone among the elites of recent times. Something about the world is different now than it used to be.

My worry now with the British monarchy, as with the hierarchy of the Church, is not that all the old-fashioned trappings and arcane rituals will suddenly seem irrelevant to modern people unless a truly admirable leader happens to be in charge. Rather, the risk grows every day that the monarchy will go the way of all institutions, whose trust has been eroded by too much — not too little —  orientation to the world’s latest fads, movements, and obsessions. With Elizabeth on the throne, a razor-thin line of trust remained taut, connecting our increasingly self-absorbed and self-constructed age with a nobler template for life beyond the utilitarian ethics of paychecks and calories and computer code.

With her gone, I wonder: Will we continue to allow the kind of other-worldly pageantry in the future that we expect to see at the Queen’s funeral, or is her death the moment when the cult of disenchantment fully takes over?

When I get back to England, sooner or later, I will pay my respects to Queen Elizabeth II. I do not wish to idealize her out of proportion, but I suspect she may be the last of something special – not perfect, but precious. The world without her is a strange novelty, and we can only hope to do our part to steward the values by which she, my grandparents, and so many of their generation attempted to live and lead. It won’t be easy, but no one ever said it would be, least of all her late Majesty.

Maybe it begins with bending the knee where Elizabeth always did, at the throne of Christ’s grace.