Jews, Muslims, Sikhs get coronation role as king reaches out

LONDON (AP):

Rabbi Nicky Liss won’t be watching King Charles III’s coronation. He’ll be doing something he considers more important, praying for the monarch on the Jewish sabbath.

On Saturday, he will join rabbis across Britain in reading a prayer in English and Hebrew that gives thanks for the new king in the name of the “one God who created us all”.

Liss, the rabbi of Highgate Synagogue in north London, said British Jews appreciated Charles’ pledge to promote the co-existence of all faiths and his record of supporting a multi-faith society during his long apprenticeship as heir to the throne.

“When he says he wants to be a defender of faiths, that means the world because our history hasn’t always been so simple and we haven’t always lived freely; we haven’t been able to practise our religion,” Liss told The Associated Press (AP). “But knowing that King Charles acts this way and speaks this way is tremendously comforting.”

At a time when religion is fuelling tensions around the world, from Hindu nationalists in India to Jewish settlers in the West Bank and fundamentalist Christians in the United States, Charles is trying to bridge the differences between the faith groups that make up Britain’s increasingly diverse society.

Achieving that 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 than the one that adoringly celebrated his mother’s coronation in 1953.

Seventy years ago, more than 80 per cent of the people of England were Christian, and the mass migration that would change the face of the nation was just beginning. That figure has now dropped below half, with 37 per cent saying they have no religion, 6.5 per cent calling themselves Muslim and 1.7 per cent Hindu, according to the latest census figures. The change is even more pronounced in London, where more than a quarter of the population have a non-Christian faith.

Charles recognised that change long before he became king last September.

As far back as the 1990s, Charles suggested that he would like to be known as “the defender of faith”, a small but hugely symbolic change from the monarch’s traditional title of “defender of the faith”, meaning Christianity. It’s an important distinction for a man who believes in the healing power of yoga and once called Islam “one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity.”

The king’s commitment to diversity will be on display at his coronation, when religious leaders representing the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh traditions will for the first time play an active role in the ceremonies.

“I have always thought of Britain as a ‘community of communities,”’ Charles told faith leaders in September.

“That has led me to understand that the sovereign has an additional duty, less formally recognised, but to be no less diligently discharged. It is the duty to protect the diversity of our country, including by protecting the space for faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions and beliefs to which our hearts and minds direct us as individuals.”