Danish Film & Kulturkampf on Faith

This evening I watched a Danish costume drama film that seemed to champion the ongoing kulturkampf against Christian faith in public life. A Royal Affair tells the story of an 18th century weak willed and possibly mentally ill cuckolded Danish king, Christian VII, who’s manipulated into dramatically progressive political reforms by his shrewd German doctor and the Queen, who’s the doctor’s lover.

The adulterers are drawn together by their shared sophisticated devotion to Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau, the inspiration for their radical overhaul of Danish feudalism. The doctor is the son of a German pastor but has no use for religion, preferring brothels, at least until he meets the Queen.

Denmark’s corrupt old regime is in cahoots with the church and vice versa. The brave doctor and the English born Queen, who is sister to King George III, overthrow the old order by their dictates, even drawing admiration from Voltaire himself. But eventually their revolutionary fervor and open adultery, which conceived a child, prompts the nation to restore the old order. The doctor is executed, the Queen exiled. Dark days return to Denmark, captive to “faith and suspicion.” Interesting that “faith” is a pejorative word in this film.

The doctor often hisses against “priests,” referring to Denmark’s established Lutheran Church. And the old Dowager Queen, in her plot against the doctor, threatens the palace’s uncooperative maids with purgatory, which Lutheranism doctrinally rejects.

Liberty is at odds with religion, the film instructs, and the church must be relegated to inconsequential sidelines. Voltaire and Rousseau point the way to self empowerment, as exemplified by the adulterous lovers and their ambitiously progressive agenda.

Maybe this morality play against religion is de rigeur among secular Europeans, but it is of course shared by a growing number of American secular elites, who see Christianity obstructing their utopia of social justice and free love.

The Danish doctor’s politics echo the blood thirsty French Revolution, which he presaged by 20 years, but whose ultimate inspiration he shared. Many of the reforms he instituted were laudable, and in fact rooted in Christian ethics. But like the French, the doctor in his contempt for religion had no limits on ambition, and his experiment ended disastrously.

Maybe his lover, the Danish Queen, could have told him how Christianity had helped to secure some measure of liberty in her native Britain. The American Revolution, just a few years away, of course successfully instituted a stable republic by heeding instead of warring against Christian faith. America’s Founders knew faith in God was constraint against tyranny.

A Royal Affair presents the Danish Hollywood version of secularism’s hostility to religion and its false understanding of history as a liberating struggle for freedom against faith and transcendent authority. The social justice it seeks is actually impossible without the ethics provided uniquely by religion. And its demands for self empowerment don’t end with liberty but instead with blood baths and dictatorship. A good corrective to this highly entertaining but distressingly politically correct Danish film fantasy would be viewing old movie versions of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities or The Scarlet Pimpernel, which portray anti-religious revolution with gory reality.