Just happened to notice this while reading a little Terry Pratchett over lunch:
If you are a subject in a monarchy, you are ruled by the monarch. All the time. Waking or sleeping. Whatever you – or they – happen to be doing.
It’s part of the general conditions of the situation. The queen doesn’t actually have to come around to your actual house, hog the chair and the TV remote control, and issue commands about how one is parched and would enjoy a cup of tea. It all takes place automatically, like gravity. Except that, unlike gravity, it needs someone at the top. They don’t necessarily have to do a great deal. They just have to be there. They just have to be.
It does not speak well for the intellectual level of much Christian theology that an atheist humorist has a better grasp on the concept of sovereignty than many, perhaps even most, American Christians today.