Nearly all of the social problems facing Britain stem from a loss of religion, the Chief Rabbi told Anglican bishops on Monday. Loss of religion resulted in social disintegration. It also led to people suffering from depression, stress, eating disorders and alcohol and drug abuse, Sir Jonathan Sacks told 650 bishops and their spouses in Canterbury.
Sir Jonathan, the first Chief Rabbi to address the Lambeth Conference, said that a society that lost its religion lost “graciousness”.
“Relationships break down. Marriage grows weak. Families become fragile. Communities atrophy. And the result is that people feel vulnerable and alone.”
He continued: “That is where we are.” He said that mankind was “living through one of the most fateful ages of change since homo sapiens first set foot on Earth”.
Globalisation and the new information technologies were fragmenting the world “into ever smaller sects of the like-minded”.
However, faster and faster flows of information were forcing people together as never before.
The Lambeth conference is attempting to find a way to prevent a split in the worldwide Anglican Communion over such issues as biblical authority and the place of homosexuals in society.
One proposal set to be discussed this week is a new Anglican “covenant”, a unity statement designed to bind provinces together in shared doctrine.
Sir Jonathan said that “covenants of faith are splitting apart”, and called on Christians to unite with other religions in working to solve the world’s problems.
Too often, he said, religion showed a divided face to the world: “Conflict - between faiths, and sometimes within faiths.”
Sir Jonathan said that the “global covenant” created by globalisation was itself in danger. “The sanctity of human life is being desecrated by terror. The integrity of creation is threatened by environmental catastrophe. Respect for diversity is imperilled by what one writer has called the clash of civilisations,” he said.
Referring to the long history of Christian anti-semitism that underpinned centuries of persecution of the Jewish people, he said, “for a thousand years, between the First Crusade and the Holocaust, the word ‘Christian’ struck fear into Jewish hearts.”
While Sir Jonathan said that the past could not be rewritten, he believed it could be “redeemed”. Today, more than 60 years after an Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, met a Chief Rabbi, J. H. Hertz, to found the Council of Christians and Jews, the two faith groups could meet as “beloved friends”.
That friendship now had to be extended more widely, to Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians and Baha’is.
Sir Jonathan said: “Because though we do not share a faith, we surely share a fate. Religions should not fight each other but work together to face the challenges of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental disaster.”
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