The late Queen Elizabeth II was warned against “unthinking people” seeking to remove “ageless ideals” in an age of rapid change during her first-ever televised Christmas message in 1957.
The Queen was just two years into what would turn out to be one of the most prolonged reigns in British history. Her first Christmas message broadcast on TV, that has drawn numerous curious eyes since her lengthy reign is at an end, is prophetic from the perspective of 2022.
“It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you. A successor to the Kings and Queens of history; someone whose face may be familiar in newspapers and films but who never really touches your personal lives. But now at least for a few minutes I welcome you to the peace of my own home,” said the monarch who, far from being a distant figure to her people would come to be considered an inspiration and source of stability for generations of British subjects.
“That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old,” the Queen continued.
“But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery,” she warned, adding that such people “would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”
Her warning was probably influenced by the government of then-prime minister Harold Macmillan, but her statements were also a testimony to her Christian convictions that remained unchanging throughout every Christmas broadcast she made from the 1950s until now.
It is bittersweet for a lot of British conservatives because Christianity is in Britain is on the decline because the traditional Church of England embraces Black Lives Matter, anti-“whiteness”, and gender-based ideology and the moral deliberation of people in public has been diminished to a sarcastic remark.
