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Christopher Hitchens — the late polemicist and, along with Richard Dawkins, the most famous of the so-called “new atheists” — will never be remembered as a stout Christian apologist. However, in 2010, he managed to sum up the sorry state of the Church of England in one brilliantly incontestable lede:
“This is what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII.”
No matter how many double Johnnie Walker Blacks on the rocks Hitchens had consumed before he penned that open, or no matter how facile he was on most other matters religious, he wasn’t wrong on this occasion. The Church of England — an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church that developed not due to serious doctrinal differences but because Henry VIII desired a divorce — has taken on, in modern times, a more loosy-goosey approach to theology.
In the same essay in which Hitchens opened with that inimitable shot across the royal family bow, Hitchens expressed concern — in his own way — that then-Prince Charles might not be up to maintaining the vestigial advantages of the national faith. (He was a bit more blunt than that; the piece was titled “Charles, Prince of Piffle,” and he lamented that, as king, “the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a distinctly lowering one.”)
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