Queen Elizabeth II’s former chaplain issued a warning that King Charles III’s multifaith and multiculturalism threatens to be the end of his own house and the end of the British monarchy as a whole.
Gavin Ashenden, who served as chaplain to the queen from 2008 to 2017, spoke to British outlet GB News on Sunday, saying, “I think that if this slow movement into multiculturalism and multifaith goes on, we’ll lose the monarchy, because in the end, I don’t think it will be true to itself.”
Ashenden’s comments came after the king’s first royal Christmas message since he assumed the throne following the death of the queen in September.
“The problem is that it’s a bit like watching a wonderful ship that’s hulled beneath the waterline slowly sink, and at some point what you want to do is to stop it sinking and make sure that it floats,” Ashenden said. “And I don’t think the monarchy can float if it becomes a multicultural, multifaith monarchy.”
Ashenden acknowledged that King Charles III did “exceptionally well” with his first Christmas address, but said that British subjects have still been seeing “a very slow, gradual shift from being a Christian monarchy to a multifaith one.”
“The problem is that you’re either defender of the faith or you’re not,” Ashenden said in reference to the oath of the British monarch, promising to defend the Protestant religion. The British monarch also serves as the supreme governor of the Church of England.
“There’s so much about Christianity that is just directly responsible for our way of life in our culture,” said Ashenden, warning that Christians in the U.K. are increasingly marginalized.
Ashenden quit his chaplaincy position in 2017 after he condemned recitations of the Quran during an Epiphany service at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. He commented on how Christianity is increasingly being pushed out of the public square because of its exclusive claims amid a “serious competition for power.”
“So, the problem that we’re having at the moment is that Christianity is under assault,” Ashenden said. “Now the question is, what does a Christian king do about that? Does a Christian king save Christianity? Does he become defender of the faith, which is what his title really is? Or, as Charles has done with a sleight-of-hand, say, ‘No, I’m … defender of all faiths, which means I don’t have to defend Christianity.'”
“If you don’t defend Christianity today, we’ll lose it from this country,” Ashenden added, mentioning a recent case of a Christian woman who was arrested for praying silently outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham.
“The problem we face is a serious conflict of values, and there can’t be a solution by just saying, ‘Do you know what? All the values are the same, let’s pretend everything is nice,'” the former chaplain said. “I don’t think nice will cut it.”
Ashenden ultimately left the Church of England and became a Roman Catholic, and penned a recent op-ed in the Catholic Herald warning that Christianity in the U.K. “is buckling under the relentless daily assault that an increasingly hostile secularism is directing towards it.”
Ashenden predicted in the article that if King Charles III refuses to stand up for the historic faith of his nation, he will have “sown the seeds of destruction of the House of Windsor.”
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