Most sacred kingship article one surveys is either ancient or has been formally renounced, as Japan's imperial descent from Amaterasu was in 1946. British coronation practice is the conspicuous exception: a rite descending in substance from an Old Testament model, still performed, in a state that is otherwise thoroughly secular in its everyday governance.
The anointing itself is the oldest layer. 1 Samuel 10 and 16 describe Samuel anointing Saul and then David with oil, and Christian coronation rites across Europe adopted the practice as a direct scriptural borrowing, treating the monarch as, in some sense, set apart the way the Israelite kings were. The English rite, administered by the Archbishop of Canterbury and centred on anointing with consecrated oil, has been performed with substantial continuity since the medieval period and was retained in full at the 2023 coronation of Charles III, including the anointing itself, which by long custom is screened from public view as the rite's most sacred moment.
That persistence is now argued over rather than simply accepted. Critics ask what religious anointing means as the constitutional act instituting the head of state of a religiously plural, largely non-practising society, and whether a rite drawn from a specific confession should retain that role at all. Defenders point to the 2023 service's own modest accommodations, including non-Christian faith leaders taking part for the first time, as evidence the form can adapt without being discarded. Both positions accept that the rite's religious content is doing real constitutional work, which is exactly what a purely ceremonial monarchy is often assumed not to require.