LONDON – Rabbi Nicky Liss will attend the coronation of King Charles III. not watch. He will do what he believes is more important: pray for the monarch on the Jewish Sabbath.
On Saturday he will join rabbis across the UK to read a prayer in English and Hebrew thanking the new king in the name of “the one God who made us all”.
Liss, the rabbi of North London’s Highgate Synagogue, said British Jews valued Charles’ promise to promote the coexistence of all faiths and his record of supporting a multi-religious society during his long apprenticeship as heir to the throne.
“When he says he wants to be a defender of the faith, he means the world, because our history has not always been so simple and we have not always lived freely; We were unable to practice our religion,” Liss told The Associated Press. “But to know that King Charles acts and speaks like this is immensely reassuring.”
At a time when religion is fueling tensions around the world – from Hindu nationalists in India to Jewish settlers in the West Bank to fundamentalist Christians in the United States – Charles seeks to bridge the divides between faith groups that make up the increasingly diverse British… make up society.
Achieving this goal is critical to the new king’s efforts to show that the monarchy, a 1,000-year-old institution with Christian roots, can still represent the people of modern, multicultural Britain.
But Charles, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, faces a very different country from the one that reverently celebrated his mother’s coronation in 1953.
70 years ago more than 80% of the people of England were Christians and the mass migration that would change the face of the nation was just beginning. That number has now fallen below half, with 37% reporting no religion, 6.5% self-identifying as Muslim and 1.7% as Hindu, according to the latest census figures. The change is even more pronounced in London, where more than a quarter of the population belongs to a non-Christian faith.
Charles recognized this change long before he became king last September.
As early as the 1990s, Charles proposed being known as “Defender of the Faith,” a small but highly symbolic change to the monarch’s traditional title as “Defender of the Faith,” meaning Christianity. It is an important award for a man who believes in the healing power of yoga and who once called Islam “one of the greatest treasures of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to mankind”.
The King’s commitment to diversity will be evident at his coronation, when religious leaders representing the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh traditions will play an active role in the ceremonies for the first time.
“I’ve always seen Britain as a ‘community of communities,'” Charles told religious leaders in September.
“That led me to understand that the sovereign has an additional duty – to be exonerated less officially, but no less scrupulously. There is a duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space of faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds lead us as individuals.”
Not an easy task in a country where religious and cultural differences sometimes boil over.
Just last summer, there were clashes between Muslim and Hindu youths in the city of Leicester. The main opposition party, Labor, is struggling to rid itself of anti-Semitism and the government’s anti-terrorist strategy has been criticized for focusing on Muslims. Then there are the sectarian differences that still separate Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
Such tensions underscore the critical need for Britain to have a head of state who is personally committed to promoting inclusivity, said Farhan Nizami, director of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies.
Charles has been a patron of the center for 30 years and gave credit to Nizami’s efforts to build an academic center for the study of all facets of the Islamic world, including history, science and literature, and religion. During these years, the center grew from a nondescript wooden structure into a complex with its own library, conference facilities and a domed mosque with a minaret.
“It’s very important that we have a king who has consistently championed[inclusiveness],” Nizami said. “It is so relevant in modern times, with all the mobility, with the differences and diversity that exists, that the head of this state should bring people together through example and action.”
These actions are sometimes small. But they are finding favor with the likes of Balwinder Shukra, who saw the king a few months ago officially opening Guru Nanak Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, in Luton, an ethnically diverse city of nearly 300,000 north of London.
Shukra, 65, paused as she dabbed flatbreads, known as chapatis, for the communal meal the gurdwara serves to all arrivals, adjusted her floral shawl and expressed her admiration for Charles’ decision, along with other members of the community on the floor to sit.
Referring to Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, Shukra said that “all men are equal”. It “doesn’t matter” if you’re king, she added.
Some British newspapers have suggested that Charles’ desire to include other faiths in the coronation met with opposition from the Church of England, and a conservative religious commentator recently warned that a multi-religious ceremony could weaken the monarchy’s “royal roots”.
But George Gross, who studies the link between religion and monarchy, dismissed these concerns.
The coronation of monarchs is a tradition that stretches back to ancient Egyptians and Romans, so there’s nothing really Christian about it, said Gross, a visiting scholar at King’s College London. In addition, all the central religious elements of the service are conducted by Church of England clergy.
Representatives of other faiths have attended other major public events in the UK, such as Remembrance Day services.
“These things are not uncommon in more contemporary settings,” he said. “So I see it differently: if there were no other representatives, it would seem very strange.”
Charles’ commitment to a multi-religious society is also symbolic of the progress made in bridging a rupture in Christian tradition that began in 1534 when Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church and proclaimed himself head of the Church of England .
That division created centuries-long tensions between Catholics and Anglicans that eventually faded during the Queen’s reign, said Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the senior Catholic minister in England. Nichols will be at the Abbey when Charles is crowned on Saturday.
“I get a lot of privileges,” he said cheerfully. “But I think this will be one of the biggest to come at the monarch’s coronation.”