Should Christians (and everyone else) mourn the Queen’s passing?
The answer is “yes, and…”
The answer is unequivocally yes: The Bible says to mourn with those who mourn. (Romans 12:15)
The death of every single human being is a tragedy because it is one less image of God in this world.
Elizabeth was a daughter, granddaughter, niece, friend, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She will be personally mourned by hundreds of friends and family, and we should share in the sadness of their loss.
But there is also an “and.”
The Bible says not only to mourn with those who mourn but also to defend the weak and the fatherless and uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed. (Psalm 82:3.)
Indeed, it is a much stronger theme in Scripture and a far greater focus on Jesus’s teaching.
The hard truth is that Elizabeth the Queen was the head of a family whose obscene and sinful horde of wealth was derived from centuries of murder, rape, slavery, and genocide, and the family continues to engorge itself with billions of dollars each year from the untold suffering of thousands of human beings who God loves.
Monarchists and royalists will say that “this isn’t the right time” to talk about the Windsor family’s crimes against humanity, just as there never seems to be a right time to talk about gun control even after yet another shooter mows down a school full of children.
But as Christians, we are people of truth; people who do not turn a blind eye to injustice and oppression. It is easy to defend the rich and powerful, but as Christians, our overwhelming love for the poor must trump our love of money, fame, and spectacle.
The fact of reality is that Elizabeth the Queen’s wealth and position derived from her gilded place in a family of warlords who made Hitler look kind and gentle compared to their barbarity and cruelty — the only difference is that the Windsor ancestors actually managed to conquer Britain.
Today we will not go into details recounting all the crimes of the past for which the Windsor family must pay reparations — the profits amassed from war and genocide, the diamonds seized by slavery, or the castles built from industrial-scale theft of the church.
Let us focus solely on Elizabeth the Queen and the family she oversaw:
Opposing justice
During her lifetime, Elizabeth the Queen used a horrifying mechanism called Queen’s Consent to twist or straight-up block any law she didn’t like, vetting more than 1,000 democratic laws, ensuring Britain could not make improvements in the direction of justice if they would in any way cause a diminishment of her family’s wealth, power, and control.
Queen’s Consent is completely anti-constitutional and has been used by Elizabeth’s son to block his hard-working tenant-serfs from being able to buy the homes they’re already paying for.
Bribing corrupt officials
During her lifetime, Elizabeth the Queen controlled a $20+ billion slush fund called the Crown Estate — which was and is actually owned by the nation — but which was originally assembled by her family through rank injustice over the past two-and-a-half centuries. The Crown Estate is a massive rent-seeking usury operation that contributes nothing to society while monopolizing 287,000 acres and extracting $340+ million in profits from struggling Britons each year. These unearned profits are given to the government, and in return, the government paid her nearly $100 million per year.
In other words: During her lifetime, Elizabeth the Queen openly bribed politicians to let her cling to her lofty position and steal billions of dollars that belong to the British poor. It’s an arrangement seen nowhere else in the world, and it’s one of the most anti-democratic, anti-meritocratic, anti-commons financial arrangements in any Western nation.
Exploiting the poor and charging usury
The work-shy Windsors do one thing, full-time: Rake money off the working class. Case in point: They’re currently hiring a new house cleaner, and they’re not even paying living wages. Elizabeth once applied for a poverty grant to heat Buckingham Palace. The Windsor family’s entire business model is based on rent-seeking usury, a horrible practice that even pro-capitalist folks like Adam Smith saw as a pox on humanity.
Take, for instance, the family’s control of the two hundred islands off the coast of Cornwall. The family has dominated the Isles of Scilly for more than 600 years, so that today they own “most of the land and nearly a third of the residential buildings on the islands.”
In other words, thousands of people are stuck as permanent renters under crushing rents with no sense of ownership because a Windsor ancestor robbed or killed someone in the past. Rather than retaining wealth, productive contributors are forced to hand over their hard-earned money to a family that does nothing but extraction.
And this is just one property. The Queen’s son controls more than 135,000 acres, entire cities, farms, estates, neighborhoods, cottages, and houses, all raking tax-free cash into a perpetual trust for private gain with zero inheritance taxes.
The Queen herself had her own billion-dollar trust scheme that raked tens of millions of dollars off the working class every year, and included over 45,000 acres, a gigantic mineral portfolio, a dozen castles, and over 300 houses. It was utter rent-seeking madness — a 700-year monopoly that set the standard for all the other rent-seeking extractors across the nation.
Tax evasion
Prince Andrew uses tax havens.
Prince Charles uses tax havens.
Harry and Meghan set up 11 companies in tax haven.
And there’s a reason why Elizabeth was called Britain’s welfare queen — the depths to which the Windsors are willing stash the cash offshore runs very deep, indeed.
The Paradise Papers revealed that the gold-throne-owning Elizabeth had a £10 million offshore stake in furniture rental company BrightHouse, a company known for making the poor pay a poverty premium — up to three times the cash price — just to have a table and some chairs.
The family of faith
What is the Windsor family, exactly?
It is a once-murderous, enslaving, thieving former crime family — one of the biggest in history — now turned posh and polite but still practicing industrial-scale economic exploitation as full-time rent-seekers, whose entire source of income is the extraction of usury rents, interest, and grift, with the help of national-level bribes.
Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that the Windsors publicly claim to be a Christian family.
In fact, the Queen was the head of the Anglican Church, a denomination that is rotten to its core, created by Henry the VIII so he could murder his wives and practice rampant adultery.
But what does the Bible actually say?
Matthew 6:24
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
Isaiah 5:8–9
“Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land. The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing: “Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants.”
Isaiah 1:17
“Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”
Zechariah 7:9
“Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor.”
Matthew 19:21
“If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
Luke 6:20–25
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
There is no way around it: The Bible forbids interest and for-profit land-lording, Christ insists his followers must give up their power over others, and Jesus talks more about money than heaven and hell combined. He is always against the oppressor and he always sides with the poor.
Obviously, the truth of each person’s faith is between them and God, but the Bible does say “by their fruits you will know them.”
What is the fruit of the Windsor family that Elizabeth oversaw?
They stole from the nation’s beleaguered coffers.
They robbed the poor on a daily basis.
They hoarded obscene wealth in the face of crushing poverty.
They wielded centuries of unearned privilege to maintain power over others.
In the same way one doesn’t become a Big Mac by stepping into a McDonald’s, it isn’t enough to say one is a Christian if one acts in diametric opposition to the person upon which Christianity was founded.
Perhaps it’s a fruit of how poorly we translated the word pístis as “faith” instead of faithfulness in Bibles, as though faith is just a one-time payment not followed by a lifelong subscription. Sadly, historical Christendom has consistently taken the easy route, requiring a statement of faith instead of an embodiment of faithfulness. True faithfulness is not a statement of belief or a feeling whatsoever — it is a lifetime of radical sacrifice in order to love the weakest members of society.
The Windsors seem like “nice” people — I’ve met Prince Charles and he was the consummate gentleman — but mere politeness and a few manners do not cover over the active exploitation of the poor and contributor class.
And so, after surviving a number of assassination attempts, Elizabeth the Queen has now passed away.
We should mourn with those who mourn.
And that mourning should extend to the millions of people who have suffered and died under the House of Windsor, and who will continue to suffer until Zacchaeus-level reparations are paid and the monarchy is dissolved.
Jared Brock is a Christian author, documentarian, and Sunday school teacher. Join 25,000+ people who follow him on Medium and Twitter.