The Queen’s Jubilee is quite something in that it is a celebration towards which even people who don’t care for the monarchy can join, because it’s for the Queen as an individual as much as the institution she embodies.
Anyone who has lived in a family where the grandparent is very old can testify to the presence of someone who embodies the values and speaks the language of a time that has passed, and is passing. In the case of the Queen, the values and the language are those of a Christian. It is in this respect that she is very different from most of her subjects in Britain, if not elsewhere.

As Catherine Pepinster, who writes elsewhere in this paper about the links between the British monarchy and the Catholic Church, points out in her new book, Defenders of the Faith, the Queen’s religious beliefs are an aspect of her life which is fundamental to her yet ignored by those who write and talk about her. It is an amusing exercise to compare her actual addresses to the Commonwealth each Christmas, in which she goes out of her way to talk about Jesus of Nazareth, and the version that’s summarised by the BBC, which resolutely removes any reference to religion.