Today, King Charles III will deliver his first throne speech in Canada, a gesture that, as the Prime Minister emphasized, “underscores the sovereignty” of the Crown. There will be pageantry: glimmering jewels, oaths recited in ritual cadence, and the quiet solemnity of kneeling before the throne. To many, such gestures may appear archaic and superficial—relics of another age, perhaps even indulgent flourishes of a constitutional monarchy whose authority is largely symbolic. Nevertheless, these acts endure. They are not mere theater. They are symbols that echo across time, inviting us, if only momentarily, to recall the gravity that once accompanied public authority. These rites are not hollow. They are posture rendered meaningful. In an era dominated by acceleration, procedural governance, and technocrats, the throne speech appears almost anachronistic: a public moment in which power is not improvised or informal but carefully staged. It reminds the nation that political authority is never merely functional. It must also be formed ritually, ethically, and symbolically.
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor speaks of the “cross-pressures” of the 20th-century world, the tension between the longing for transcendence and the flattening forces of secular self-sufficiency. In such a world, the act of kneeling can appear jarring. Its endurance suggests something more ancient still murmurs in the political imagination: legitimacy is not merely assumed but bestowed through fidelity to an international order—one in which the question of sovereignty remains central.
This insight is not unique to monarchy. In The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides presents submission not as passivity but as the culmination of rational striving, a turning of the intellect toward the divine, honed by solitude and contemplation. “The perfected man,” he writes, “will direct all his thoughts to God alone.” In this tradition, submission is not the abdication of self but its elevation: a soul refined for understanding and governance.
Catholic theology offers a kindred vision. In the Eucharist, the faithful kneel not in resignation but in recognition that to partake in the mystery of Christ is to assent to a sovereign order beyond the self, one that binds time, community, and conscience in a sacrament of shared responsibility. In both traditions, submission is formative. It forges the interior conditions under which justice becomes possible. By contrast, Peter Berger, in The Sacred Canopy, offered a more skeptical account. For him, religion is a symbolic shield stretched over existential chaos—a structure of transcendence imposed upon a fundamentally contingent, unpredictable world. In his reading of Job and Calvinist theodicy, submission appears less as moral transformation than as existential defeat: the bowed head of the creature before an inscrutable, often indifferent God. However, this account misses the generative force of submission. It overlooks how religious traditions have not merely pacified fear but cultivated the habits of moral imagination and the architecture of political order.
Canada is not a confessional state and the monarchy exercises no executive power. Yet its rituals persist because they gesture toward something the liberal state cannot generate: a shared moral center of gravity. In an age of administrative drift and civic exhaustion, the throne speech offers a rare moment of national orientation. It reminds us that governance is not only a matter of policy but of posture, of how a society positions itself before the sacred and prepares its leaders to carry the weight of responsibility. Sovereignty has returned to the center of Canadian political life under Prime Minister Mark Carney, particularly as President Donald Trump resumes office in the United States with renewed talk of tariffs and even annexation threats. These remarks have reignited longstanding concerns about Canada’s sovereignty within a North American context often dominated by U.S. interests. In this climate, Carney inviting King Charles to deliver the throne speech is not a nostalgic gesture but a calculated affirmation of constitutional continuity and national identity. While populist movements often treat sovereignty as absolute power, the throne speech offers a counterpoint: more than ceremony, it becomes a form of soft power. Perhaps Canada, like its prime minister, could learn to wield inherited meaning not as ornament, but as strength.
The Canadian philosopher George Grant once warned that modern politics risks becoming a technological enterprise: concerned with management, not meaning; with process, not truth. In such a system, tradition becomes decorative, and governance loses its moral architecture. Yet, in moments like the throne speech, we glimpse a different register: authority is not created ex nihilo but handed down, ritually acknowledged, and received with reverence.
We are unlikely to witness the return of divine kingship in liberal democracies, nor should we wish it. But we would do well to recall what those older gestures signified: that the capacity to govern is inseparable from the willingness to submit: not to coercion or command, but to a moral order beyond the self, not to a ruler, but to the responsibility of rule itself. In this way, ceremonial acts like the throne speech exercise soft power as a cultural force that shapes how authority is perceived and internalized. Peter Berger warned of anomie—a condition in which the individual, stripped of shared symbolic worlds, faces chaos without interpretive shelter. Rituals such as these are among the last remaining bulwarks against that disintegration. This is not a call to restore royal power. It is a recognition that the quiet weight of tradition can anchor political life in memory. In this older sense, soft power is not about projecting influence abroad, but about preserving coherence at home. To kneel, in this sense, is not to shrink. It is to be shaped.
The enduring challenge of liberal democracy is not merely how to distribute power but how to prepare those who hold it. That cannot be achieved by procedural reform alone. It requires character, memory, and a renewed language of limits. And yes, there are moments when only a gesture beyond design will suffice, one that reminds us why order matters at all.
Before we can govern, we must kneel.
