Queen Margrethe's 40th anniversary as monarch

Her Christian faith is her deepest inspiration

On 14 January 2012 Margrethe II celebrates 40 years as Queen of Denmark. The Danish accession tradition had been altered by law to allow her to inherit the throne of her father, Frederik IX. In an essay published in late November this year the literary editor of the newspaper Berlingske Tidende, Jes Andersen, portrays Queen Margrethe II as a committed Christian. For her royal motto she chose: "God’s help, the people’s love, Denmark’s strength." 

 

As head of the Danish Lutheran Church she must by law be a Lutheran, but on the Queen’s own admission it was not until her father’s death that she took her Christian faith seriously. At that vulnerable point she felt not only her father’s presence and the people’s support but also a religious wave that she has likened to being carried into shore on a surfboard, an experience she once attempted in South America. 

 

"Don’t put sugar in the gospel!"
In the early 1980s Queen Margrethe met regularly with leading Danish theologians to discuss church history, rituals, dogma, myth and poetry: "They gave me a deeper foundation, and they were so witty! There was so much humour in them!" As indeed there is in the Queen herself. Her rare comments on her faith have included a couple of bon mots: "To be a Christian you don’t have to unscrew your head, nor do you have to screw it on particularly well." Her well-known distaste for sentimentality was once summarised as: "Don’t put sugar in the gospel."

 

At a practical level Queen Margrethe has employed her artistic talents to design new chasubles, and bishops’ capes, and in some cases to help with the embroidery. The recipients have been four cathedrals and a number of churches, including Ammassalik/Tasiilaq church in Greenland, for which the chasuble was designed by the Queen and sewn and embroidered by her sister, Princess Benedikte. 

 

On going to church
Queen Margrethe goes regularly to church, but which church she is loath to announce beforehand, for she likes to feel free to come and go, albeit with her discreet bodyguard. As she told another biographer in 1989, "You go to church because you want to; sometimes it’s the bare bones, sometimes it’s a banquet, but the ‘everyday’ Sunday is part of it all … I go because I like listening to the readings and singing the hymns. Little by little you find churches where you like the preaching and where there’s a red thread running through the service. But I also go to services that are not much to write home about and where perhaps you think: ‘That’s not the way I see it’, or, ‘Why on earth sing that hymn after that reading?’  But then you are surprised positively when a new hymn suddenly turns up that makes you think, ‘I must remember that, those are brilliant lyrics.’"

By Edward Broadbridge

Photo from the Queen's 70th birthday in 2010
 

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