Monarchy, Religion and the State: Civil Religion in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the Commonwealth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Often before I review or purchase a book, I first take a look at the index not only to see how useful and convenient searching the contents of the volume may be but also to check on the thoroughness of research and scholarship. With only a two-page index, Monarchy, Religion and the State got off to a less-than-inspiring start. That said, this is a well-researched and comprehensive overview of the intricate and sometimes convoluted marriage among the monarchy, religion, and the state in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the other Commonwealth countries. Upon reading Norman Bonney's book, it may come as a surprise to many Americans to learn of the intertwined relationship of religion and the state in the United Kingdom because of the attempt to separate church and state in the United States. However, the effort to separate church and state in the United States does not preclude the mixing of religion and politics. Unlike the United Kingdom, there is no official religion in the United States, no “Defender of the Faith,” and little sign of politically religious ceremony other than the left hand placed upon the Bible during a presidential inauguration and the utterance of “So help me God” at the conclusion of the swearing in process. There is, of course, the annual White House Prayer Breakfast, or a photo-op of the First Family entering or leaving a house of worship, or “In God We Trust” inscribed here and there, and the mention of God when civil religion seems necessary to comfort listeners, or to confirm the speaker's reverence or sincerity at the conclusion of a speech, among others. However, these examples are nothing like Bonney's comprehensive account of religious rituals, oaths, and ceremonies surrounding Britain's monarch, particularly the coronation, which should give the reader pause to consider the consequences of such a system of government, especially when compared with that of the United States. This alone is worth the price of the book.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".