Jews, Muslims and Sikhs get the coronation role as the king extends his hand

LONDON – Rabbi Nikki Lys will not be watching the coronation of King Charles III. He will do something he considers more important: pray for the King on the Jewish Sabbath.

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

Lees, the rabbi of Highgate Synagogue in north London, said British Jews appreciated Charles’ pledge to promote coexistence between all faiths and his record of supporting a multifaith society during his long apprenticeship as heir to the throne.

“When he says he wants to be an apologist for religions, he 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 practice our religion,” Lees told the Associated Press. “But to know that King Charles acts this way and speaks this way is very comforting.”

As religion fuels tensions around the world – from Hindu nationalists in India to Jewish settlers in the West Bank and fundamentalist Christians in the US – Charles tries to bridge the differences between the religious groups that make up Britain’s increasingly diverse 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, supreme ruler of the Church of England, faces a country very different from the one that celebrated his mother’s coronation in 1953.

Seventy years ago, more than 80% of England’s population was Christian, and the mass exodus that would change the face of the nation was just beginning. That number has now fallen to less than half, with 37% saying they have no religion, 6.5% saying they are Muslim and 1.7% Hindu, according to the latest census figures. The change has been most noticeable in London, where more than a quarter of the population has a non-Christian religion.

Charles recognized this change long before he took the throne the previous September.

Back in the 1990s, Charles suggested that he would like to be known as “Defender of the Faith”, a small but highly symbolic change from the King’s traditional title of “Defender of the Faith”, meaning Christianity. It is an important distinction for a man who believed in the healing power of yoga and once called Islam “one of the greatest treasures of accumulated spiritual wisdom and knowledge available to mankind.”

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

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

“It led me to understand that the Sovereign has an additional duty—less formally recognized but less assiduous. Of a duty to protect diversity in our country, including by protecting the space of faith itself and its practice through the religions, cultures, traditions, and beliefs to which our hearts are directed and our minds as individuals.”

This is not an easy task in a country where religious and cultural differences are sometimes exacerbated.

Just last summer, young Muslims and Hindus clashed in Leicester. The opposition Labor Party has struggled to rid itself of antisemitism, and the government’s counter-terrorism strategy has been criticized for its focus on Muslims. Then there are the sectarian differences that still separate Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

Such tensions underscore the urgent need for Britain to have a head of state who works personally to promote inclusivity, said Farhan Nezami, director of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies.

Charles has been a patron of the center for 30 years, lending his stature to Nizami’s efforts to build an academic center for the study of all aspects of the Islamic world, including history, science, and literature, as well as religion. During those years, the center went from a nondescript wooden structure to a complex with its own library, conference facilities, and a mosque complete with a dome and minaret.

“It is very important to have a king who is constantly committed to (totalitarianism),” Nezami said. “It is very important in modern times, with all the mobility, with the difference and diversity that exists, that the president of this country should bring the people together, by example and by action.”

These actions are sometimes small. But it resonates with people like Balwinder Shukra, who saw the king a few months ago when he officially opened his Guru Nanak Gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, in Luton, an ethnically diverse city of about 300,000 north of London.

Shukra, 65, stopped to pat the flatbreads known as chapatis for the communal meal the gurdwara serves to all comers, straightened her floral shawl, and admired Charles’ decision to sit on the floor with other members of the congregation.

Referring to the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, Shukra said that “all people are equal”. She added that it “didn’t matter” if you were king.

Some British newspapers suggested that Charles’ desire to include other religions in the coronation met resistance from the English Church, and a conservative religious commentator recently warned that the multi-religious ceremony could weaken the “royal roots” of the monarchy.

But George Gross, who studies the link between religion and property, dismisses these concerns.

The coronation of kings is a tradition that goes back to the ancient Egyptians and Romans, so there is nothing intrinsically Christian about it, said Gross, a visiting scholar at King’s College London. In addition, all of the central religious elements of the service will be conducted by the clergy of the Church of England.

Representatives of other faiths were already present at other major public events in Britain, such as Memorial Day services.

He said, “These things are not uncommon in contemporary settings, so I think of it another way: if there were no other actors, it would look very strange.”

Charles’ commitment to a multi-faith society is also emblematic of the progress being made in ending the rift in Christian traditions that began in 1534, when Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and declared himself Head of the Church of England.

Cardinal Vincent Nicholls, the most senior Catholic cleric in England, said that this division led to hundreds of years of tensions between Catholics and Anglicans, which finally abated under the Queen. Nicholls will be at the abbey when Charles is crowned on Saturday.

“I get a lot of privileges,” he said cheerfully. “But this will be one of the greatest part, I think, in the king’s coronation.”