The Golden Spoon

The new king's official title is:

Charles III, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

The last phrase, Defender of the Faith, sounds quaint, but it is steeped in history.

Though the English dispensed with the divine right of kings when they deposed Charles I in 1649, they haven’t done away with the ideas of divinity, right and kingship. Consecrated, this mild-mannered constitutional monarch emerged from the abbey as one of the world’s few priest-kings. Charles is the head of the state and its church. He symbolically fuses the secular and spiritual, like the pharaohs of Egypt, the despots of Assyria and his late mother.

...Though Charles swore to serve his people, an anointed monarch’s first duty is to God. Charles is the fidei defensor—defender of the faith—in this case the Anglican confession.

The golden coronation spoon is 800-1000 years old

A world-wide audience viewed the coronation, but Charles' anointment as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England was hidden from the cameras:

Behind a hand-woven screen in Westminster Abbey, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, took up the oldest item in the coronation regalia—a golden spoon—and anointed the king’s hands, chest and head with holy oil...

The crowning was the style, but the Christian rite was the symbolic content. Anointing with chrism reaches back to the prophet Samuel’s anointing of Saul as the first king of ancient Israel, and further back, to the origins of political and religious authority in the kingdoms of the early Bronze Age.

The American founders gave great consideration to how the government they were creating would differ from England's. One obvious change is the omission of the monarchy. The second difference is the prohibition of an "establishment of religion," aka a "wall of separation" between "church and state." The union of the two most powerful institutions in Great Britain, according to American observers at the time, made errors impossible to rectify.

Over two centuries later the passions have subsided. The British monarchy is now largely ceremonial, and the Anglican church is but a shadow of its former self ("UK Church membership has declined from 10.6 million in 1930 to 5.5 Million in 2010, or as a percentage of the population; from about 30% to 11.2%.")

We can admire without reservation the relics of power, like the golden spoon, knowing that their power has dissipated.