Once upon a time in British history, the title ‘Defender of the Faith‘ was something a British monarch carried proudly. The title goes back centuries and, in one of those ironic twists of fate, was awarded to the very king who later split from the church and the faith he was lauded for defending from the door-hammering, paper-hanging threat posed by one Martin Luther.
Henry VIII kept the title, though, through a later act of Parliament.
This title dates back to the reign of Henry VIII, before the break with Rome. In 1521, Pope Leo X issued a bull (or charter) granting Henry the title – Fidei Defensor in Latin – in recognition of the theological treatise Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (or ‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’) which he authored, possibly working with Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey.
The title Fidei Defensor – or Fidei Defensatrix for queens – has been bestowed occasionally on other monarchs by the papacy, notably James IV and James V of Scotland.
In 1546, following the break from Rome, Parliament passed an act bestowing the title upon Henry and it has been used by subsequent English and then British monarchs.
For centuries to come, that ‘faith’ has always meant the very Christian Church of England and all that entails.
…The Church of England is known as the “Established Church”, meaning that it is established by law and has a unique relationship with the state, forged in the settlement developed in the time of Elizabeth I and subsequent reigns intended to calm the upheavals of the Reformation period.
At the coronation King Charles III, like every monarch since George I, takes a special oath to maintain “the settlement of the Church of England and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established”. He also undertook a separate oath at his Accession to uphold the security of the Church of Scotland.
During her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Queen Elizabeth spoke of how being the defender of the Anglican faith meant being the defender of the right for all religions – or no religion -to be practised freely and in peace. Because the values inherent in the Church of England helped build ‘a better society’ for everyone.
…Here at Lambeth Palace we should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life. The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.
It certainly provides an identity and spiritual dimension for its own many adherents. But also, gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely. Woven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society – more and more in active co-operation for the common good with those of other faiths.
Her son, now King Charles III, said the correct words upon his coronation…
…In his first address to the nation on his accession to the throne, His Majesty the King said: “The role and the duties of Monarchy also remain, as does the Sovereign’s particular relationship and responsibility towards the Church of England – the Church in which my own faith is so deeply rooted.
…but, quite frankly, has always been a little suspect in the eyes of his subjects.
Charles sincerely despises being born in this century. He’s a bit of a throwback character, who would have been a much more comfortable monarch in the mid-1800s or turn of the century.
Alas. Here he is now, poor fellow. King and all that.
He’s also well known for his fascination with Islam, and it’s convenient he’s insulated from its nastier side. Charles believes all the problems are simply a matter of cultural misunderstanding.
When he ascended the throne in 2022, there were any number of articles heaving sighs of relief from Muslims across the British world that, at last, an Islamophile was on the throne.
Why King Charles’s support for Islam is important for Muslims and the world
A British ‘defender of all faiths.’
While King Charles’s accession to the throne means there are many issues he’ll no longer speak freely on, he’s already made his views towards Islam and Muslim people clear.
“The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity,” said the then-prince in a 2010 speech about Islam and the environment at Oxford University.
He had a fascination with Islam, attempting to learn Arabic so he could read the Quran, as revealed in the book Charles At Seventy: Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams.
As a Patron of the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies, the King spoke in 1993 about building connections between the Islamic and Western worlds.
“I believe wholeheartedly that the links between these two worlds matter more today than ever before, because the degree of misunderstanding between the Islamic and Western worlds remains dangerously high,” he said.
When this was written almost four years ago, there were already telltale signs that the burgeoning Muslim population in Britain was not integrating successfully.
…The reign of King Charles comes at a time when research, released this year, showed Muslims were the second “least liked” group in the UK after Romani and Irish travellers.
The survey by the University of Birmingham said nearly 26 per cent of British people felt negatively towards Muslims.
Yet, this was couched in terms meant to portray it as a failure to accept Muslims on the part of native British. Not to remotely suggest the arriving Muslims were doing anything to make themselves unlikable.
…Zara Mohammed, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said the monarchy had an important role to play in challenging negative narratives, by offering a message of unity and inclusion.
“We also hope the King will build upon his own legacy as Prince of Wales, acting upon his desire to be a defender of faith, and continuing to champion the right of faith groups to practice … freely in Britain,” Ms Mohammed said.
If anything, the distrust and resentment have only grown, perhaps exponentially, in the intervening years, as entire neighbourhoods became no-go zones for native British and sections of cities became virtually unrecognisable as English, all while Charles pottered around his castles.
In July of 2025, Spiked was moved to comment on how detached the British monarch was from his subjects, who were being subjected to a violent death cult takeover while he somnolently went about his privileged life, basking in the romantic fiction he’d concocted around Islam.
The Islamophilia of King Charles
…The presence of the UK’s sovereign at an Islamic studies institute was hardly a surprise, however. And not just because he is the centre’s patron. Charles, it is fair to say, is an unabashed Islamophile. He may have claimed some three decades ago that, as king, he intended to be the defender of faith – rather than the defender of the faith as his official role has it – but there is definitely one faith that he prefers above all others. And it’s not that of the Church of England.
Charles’s near Orientalist fascination with Islam is not a new story. There were even rumours in the mid-1990s, circulated by the grand mufti of Cyprus no less, that the then prince had secretly converted to Islam during a trip to Turkey (which beats getting your teeth done). The palace promptly dismissed the rumours as ‘nonsense’, but their very existence was a testament to the extent to which Charles was cleaving ever closer to Islam.
…Like Guénon, Charles has consistently drawn on Islam to attack Western society. He did so most famously in his 1993 lecture, ‘Islam and the West‘, delivered at the very same Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies he attended last week. Charles spoke of understanding why Muslim societies reject ‘materialism’ and ‘consumerism’. He said that while we may think that ‘television, fast-food and the electronic gadgets of our everyday lives… are a modernising, self-evidently good, influence… The fact is that our form of materialism can be offensive to devout Muslims – and I do not just mean the extremists among them.’
Charles was not making a case for mere cultural relativism, different strokes for different folks. He was actively championing the Islamic worldview as superior to that of the post-Enlightenment West. It ‘can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost’, he said. ‘Western civilisation has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitative in defiance of our environmental responsibilities’, he continued, before claiming that ‘we can relearn from Islam’ a ‘wider, deeper, more careful understanding of our world’.
Time and again over the past few decades, Charles has returned to this theme, pitching Islam as a corrective to the modern world. In a 1996 speech, subtitled ‘Building Bridges Between Islam and the West’, he said that Islam could ‘help us in the West to rethink, and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his environment’. And in another speech delivered at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, this time in 2010, he said Islam possesses ‘one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity’. This, he said, had been obscured by a drive towards ‘Western materialism’. For Charles, then, secular, materialistic Western society is the problem and Islam is the solution.
While Charles has wielded Islam as a cudgel to attack the inhabitants of the modern West – for being too free, for refusing to bow down before ‘sacred’ nature and no doubt before the king, too – he has also defended Islamic societies from criticism. In his 1993 lecture, he described objections to Islamic societies’ sometimes less-than-liberal attitudes towards women as a ‘Western prejudice’. More strikingly, he has consistently minimised the threat of Islamism. In the same 1993 lecture, he claimed that the Western public’s fear of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was little more than bigotry – a bigotry born of conflating isolated examples of violent Islamic extremism with a broader religious ‘revivalism’, fuelled by ‘the realisation that Western technology and material things are insufficient, and that a deeper meaning to life lies elsewhere in the essence of Islamic belief’.
The current King of England, as Prince of Wales, defended the rioters in Paris over the murdered staff members at Charlie Hebdo and refused to condemn the fatwah that led to a maniac carving Salman Rushdie’s eyeball out.
…This, then, is Britain’s king. A figure whose deep rejection of the social, political and material gains of modernity has apparently driven him towards Islam – or at least his Traditionalist-inflected version of it. So immersed is he in his reactionary, religious dreams that he now struggles to recognise the threat of Islamist terror even when it is literally exploding on our streets.
For the past couple of days, King Charles III has hosted the president and first lady of Nigeria.
The visit itself wasn’t an issue. The king has caused some serious heartburn over his words at the state dinner last night. Or rather, a combination of what Charles said and what he didn’t.
The King opened the speech with the Arabic phrase ‘Ramadan Mubarak’
King Charles acknowledged a Muslim leader’s “sacrifice” during Ramadan in Wednesday’s State Banquet speech.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu is currently in the United Kingdom for a high-profile two-day state visit, marking the first such visit by a Nigerian leader in 37 years.
The visit is intended to transform a historic colonial relationship into a modern economic partnership, with a focus on strengthening business links and financial services.
WHUT
Oh, it got worse.
…During his speech, King Charles said: “We are most grateful to you for travelling during this holy month which, I acknowledge, is no small sacrifice, and so it is my particular pleasure to wish you, Mr President, peace, blessings, and an abundance of joy. Ramadan Mubarak!”
Elsewhere in the speech, the King touched on the conflict between Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria.
He said: “This afternoon, in another part of the Castle, Mr President, you and I witnessed one such example of how we are learning from one another when we met leaders of the Christian and Muslim communities.
“The gathering was a deeply meaningful symbol of what Nigeria has long shown: that people of different faiths can, do, and must live alongside one another, in peace, in harmony and in shared purpose.
NIGERIA HAS LONG SHOWN PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT FAITHS CAN…LIVE ALONGSIDE ONE ANOTHER, IN PEACE, IN HARMONY AND IN SHARED PURPOSE
What Nigeria is Charles talking about?
What?! How is it possible that King Charles does not know that Christians are being routinely r*ped and slaughtered in Nigeria? @KensingtonRoyal. This is shocking. Of what faith is the King keeper, exactly?
— Fuzzy Slippers (@fuzislippers) March 19, 2026
Surely it’s not this one?
In Nigeria, Islamists like Boko Haram have slaughtered over 100,000 Christians and burned 18,000 churches since 2009.
This is a systematic, documented campaign of ethnic and religious cleansing.
Why is the world silent about this? Is it because the victims are Christian and… pic.twitter.com/3Xa5ZwsxUd
— Yossi BenYakar (@YossiBenYakar) October 30, 2025
What a jug-earred buffoon.
This literal breach of faith from one dubbed with the ancient title of defender of such was a bridge too far for one still very traditional Anglican bishop.
He composed a letter to his sovereign that I will excerpt here. It’s a cri de coeur for a return to faith – the faith that built England, that built the very society that now is allowing the destruction of it.
It’s so respectful and so sad.
As a Bishop, I cannot stay silent. I have today drafted and sent an open letter to His Majesty King Charles III, the text of which reads as follows:
To:
His Majesty, Charles III,
King of the United Kingdom and the Realms,
Supreme Governor of the Church of England,
Bearer of the…— Bishop Ceirion H. Dewar FSHC (@BishopDewar) March 17, 2026
Your Majesty,
I write to you neither as a politician nor as a commentator, but as one of your loyal subjects who, as a bishop of Christ’s Church, cannot remain silent while the Christian foundations of this kingdom are steadily dismantled.
Sir, there are moments in the life of a nation when silence becomes a form of betrayal. If I refused to speak to Your Majesty now, this would be such a moment.
For more than a thousand years the Crown of this realm has stood in solemn covenant with the Christian faith.
The laws of this land were shaped by it.
The liberties of our people were nurtured by it.
The conscience of our civilisation was formed by it.
From the abbeys of medieval England to the parish churches of our villages, from the preaching of the Reformers to the missionary zeal that carried the Gospel to the ends of the earth, the Christian faith has not merely influenced Britain — it has defined her.
Yet today that inheritance is being quietly but deliberately eroded. Across the institutions of this nation there is a growing hostility toward the faith that built them.
Christian belief is mocked in the public square. Christian morality is dismissed as intolerance. Christian institutions are pressured to surrender doctrine in order to conform to the ideology of the age.
Within the very Church that bears the name of England, voices have arisen that appear more eager to mirror the spirit of the age than to proclaim the eternal truth of the Gospel.
Meanwhile, beyond the walls of our churches, powerful political movements openly speak of removing Christianity from its historic place within the life of this nation.
What would once have been whispered is now proclaimed openly: that Britain must become a post-Christian state.
It is in this context that I write to you, Your Majesty. For the British Crown does not stand apart from this crisis.
The Sovereign of this realm bears a title that is not merely historic but sacred in its origin and meaning: Defender of the Faith. Those words are not decorative. They are a charge.
They speak of a monarch whose duty is not merely to preside over the ceremonies of the Church, but to stand as a guardian of the Christian inheritance of the nation.
Yet many among your subjects now ask, with increasing anxiety: “Who will defend that inheritance today?”
They see a nation drifting from its foundations. And they ask whether the Crown will remain silent while that inheritance is dismantled.
Your Majesty, may I be so bold as to observe that your coronation oath was not a poetic formality. It was a solemn vow made before Almighty God to maintain and preserve the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law.
Those words bind the conscience of the sovereign. They remind the Crown that its authority is not merely constitutional but moral. The monarch is not merely a symbol of national continuity, but a custodian of the spiritual inheritance that shaped this realm.
History records moments when kings and emperors were confronted by the Church and reminded that their authority was accountable before God. In the fourth century Ambrose of Milan stood before the Emperor Theodosius I and reminded him that even the ruler of an empire must bow before the moral law of Christ.
That tradition of prophetic witness has never disappeared. Nor should it. For when rulers forget the foundations upon which their authority rests, the Church must speak — not with hostility, but with holy clarity.
And so, I write to say this, Your Majesty: The Christian character of this nation is under profound and accelerating assault…
THEY ASK WHETHER THE CROWN WILL REMAIN SILENT WHILE THAT INHERITANCE IS DISMANTLED
My heart weeps for the bishop, because this king is not up to the righteous challenge.
It’s so sad.
It’s Charles. It’s Starmer. It’s Sadiq Khan. It’s Labour. It’s Tories.
It’s everyone who rolled over and did nothing for fear of causing offense as their rightful heritage was being torn from their hands and from under their feet.
Defend what?
What’s left worth saving?
Does anyone even remember what being ‘English’ means?
Someone had best decide quickly.
And when you do, Britain, as your countryman Douglas Murray said:
Wow.
Douglas Murray. A single minute.
Give yourself a single minute to listen to this.
This man is something else 👏🏽 pic.twitter.com/HRLUAfokCH
— Kosher (@koshercockney) March 18, 2026
CHOOSE LIFE
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