Do it with conviction
I’ve found myself defending my respect for the faith of men like Descartes, Pascal, Newton and - most importantly - St. Francis of Assisi. The rosary i picked up from Assisi along with the Assisi rock i use as a paperweight out of reverence for someone who believed in something, something good, so strongly he psychosomatically gave himself the stigmata. Atheism undermines any such conviction really.
Linda Cooley in Britons: forging the nation, 1707-1837 (Pimlico, 2003) outlines the development of a distinctly British identity during the course of the early modern period and discusses the extent to which French Catholicism and Anglican Protestantism were defined in apposition to each other. I’ve been having difficulty explain the appeal of monarchy to my republican (little “r”!) friends. They see the inheritance and issue and i point out what the British do when they don’t think the monarch represents them properly:
In 1688, and again in 1714, the strict rules of dynastic succession were ostentatiously broken so that the evil-which was how most Britons regarded it-of a Roman Catholic monarch could be avoided. In the first case, the openly Catholic James II and his male heir were coerced by force of arms into fleeing to France, so that the crown could pass to his elder, Protestant daughter, Mary, and in reality to her Dutch, Calvinist husband, William of Orange. And when Anne, Mary’s sister and successor as queen, failed to keep any of her huge and sickly brood of children alive, a Parliament dominated by Tory country gentlemen passed the Act of Settlement in 1701 confirming that anyone who was Catholic or married to a Catholic was ‘forever uncapable to inherit, possess, or enjoy the crown and government of this realm’, a law that still stands. To make sure of obtaining a Protestant successor, Parliament had to sweep away considerations of hereditary right not just once but many times over. It passed over more than fifty individuals who were closer as blood relations to Queen Anne but ineligible because of their Catholic faith, in order to arrive at the man who eventually became king in 1714, George Lewis of Hanover, a German with only a smattering of the English language, a plain, middle-aged, uncharismatic man, with no great appeal except the essential one. He was Lutheran, not Catholic” (46).
