Can the spiritual element of the coronation survive?

Almost as soon as Charles III acceded to the throne last September, we began to hear whispers and speculation about what exactly his coronation would look like. Many of these stories were alarming to traditionally-minded people. The King wants a slimmed-down ceremony, with less flummery and fewer fancy costumes, insisted those ever-available knowledgeable insiders. Others fretted about his long-ago musing that he would like to be Defender of Faith, not Defender of The Faith (an important definite article, that). A few months ago, it was reported that the coronation procession would feature NHS key workers and representatives of the ‘Windrush generation’, those two mythic cornerstones of the implied national refounding in the years after the second world war. Only last week came the revelation that the procession would follow a much shorter route than that taken by Elizabeth II in 1953, a mile and a half compared to five miles.