King Charles, Easter and Ramadan: What the Monarchy Signals to Christians Today

I first reflected on this issue after seeing a social media post that captured a growing unease among many Christians.

One post on X (formerly Twitter) from the Hearts of Oak account put it this way:

“Buckingham Palace confirms King Charles will not issue Easter message this year (but he did give a Ramadan message!).”

Link to GB News Article

love this country, and I value the shared institutions that have shaped it, including the constitutional monarchy we still hold in common with the United Kingdom.

Yet that post, and the news behind it, left me reflecting deeply on where we are as a culture and what it means for Christians who take their faith seriously. Reports indicate that King Charles III will not be issuing a formal Easter message this year.

While such messages are not delivered every year in the way Christmas broadcasts are, the absence of one, alongside visible and consistent recognition of other faiths, including recent Ramadan greetings, can feel striking to many Christians.

Having come to faith in Christ later in life, I have come to see how deeply the historic Christian settlement shaped our institutions, including the Crown. That perspective has been tested in recent years.

Moments like this do not stand alone, but form part of a wider sense, shared by many, that the cultural confidence of historic Christianity is fading.

As Australians, this matters to us as well. The King remains our head of state under the same Crown. The symbolic signals sent from London travel across the Commonwealth.

At the same time, it is also true that the monarch’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England is largely symbolic in the modern era, and expectations of explicitly Christian leadership have evolved. The demographic story adds further context.

In the UK, Christian identification has fallen below 50 percent. In Australia, recent census data shows a similar trajectory: Christians at around 44 percent, “no religion” approaching 40 percent, and other faiths, including Islam, growing, particularly in certain communities. In parts of England, these changes are especially visible. Local authority areas such as Tower Hamlets, Blackburn with Darwen, Newham, Luton, Redbridge, Bradford, and Birmingham have Muslim populations ranging from roughly 30 to 40 percent.

In some neighbourhoods, wards, or schools, Islam is the largest single religious affiliation, though “no religion” is often comparable or larger overall. These patterns reflect post-war migration, family reunification, and historically higher birth rates in some communities, concentrated in particular cities rather than across the country as a whole.

Many Christians are becoming uneasy about these demographic shifts, not out of prejudice, but based on the clear doctrinal teachings found in classical Islamic scriptures regarding the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslim lands, the establishment of Islamic rule, and the requirement for non-Muslims to pay a special tax (jizya) while living in a subordinate status.

These teachings historically shaped the rapid expansions of Islamic empires across the Middle East, North Africa, and into parts of Europe. While the great majority of Muslims in Western countries today live peacefully and do not appear to endorse militant interpretations, the texts themselves remain part of the foundational sources of the faith and continue to be cited by some Islamist movements.

For Christians, however, statistics are not the final word. Many understand Scripture to teach that cultural support for the faith may decline, and that believers are called to remain faithful regardless of the prevailing climate. The New Testament does not promise that any society will remain culturally Christian.

In the West today, pressure on traditional Christian convictions is often cultural rather than violent, for now, but it is still felt. This can include marginalisation in public discourse, tensions around conscience in professional settings, and ongoing debates about life, marriage, family, and identity. These pressures arise from multiple directions, including secular cultural shifts and broader religious and demographic change.

At the same time, the digital environment is becoming an increasingly important part of this landscape. Major platforms like YouTube, Meta, and Google shape what people see through algorithms, moderation policies, and monetisation rules. Revelations following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk—often referred to as the “Twitter Files”, showed that platforms have tools to limit the visibility of certain content, sometimes in opaque and inconsistent ways, and at times in response to external pressures. While the full extent and direction of any bias remain debated, these disclosures have raised legitimate questions about how digital gatekeepers shape public conversation.

None of this is cause for despair. If anything, it clarifies the moment we are living in. The Christian hope has never rested on the permanence of institutions, whether political or cultural. It rests in the person of Jesus Christ.

That conviction is part of why I launched FCP Australia, to speak at the intersection of faith, culture, and public life from a Christian conscience, and to engage thoughtfully with the changes unfolding around us. It may become harder in time for voices like this to be heard, but that has often been the pattern throughout history.

The King’s decision this Easter, whatever its intent, is best understood as a small part of a much larger shift. The deeper question is not what any one institution does, but how Christians will respond.

We do not need a monarch’s Easter message to know that the resurrection is true. We already have the empty tomb.

What we do need is the courage to live faithfully in the time we have been given: to speak truth with love, to raise our families with clarity and conviction, and to seek the good of our neighbours while holding fast to the gospel.

The trajectory of institutional Christianity in the West may be uncertain. But the Church is not the West. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Our hope is not in parliaments, palaces, or public opinion.

It is in the risen King.

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever". (Hebrews 13:8)