Jonathan Sacks on religion, politics and the civil war that Islam needs

Jonathan Sacks has an impressive track record for predicting the age we are in. In his 1990 Reith Lectures, ‘The Persistence of Faith’, the then chief rabbi pushed back against the dominant idea that religion was going to disappear. In the early 2000s, he predicted a century of conflict within Islam. And he was one of the first religious leaders and thinkers not only to critique multi-culturalism (‘the spanner in the works for tolerance’) but to try to think of a path beyond it.

We recently talked over some of this at his house in London, where he lives during gaps in a busy teaching schedule that also takes him to New York. ‘I realised religion is going to come back and it is not going to come back as a post-enlightenment,-thinly–sliced-cucumber-sandwiches vicarage tea party.’ What was the giveaway? ‘De-secularisation.’ It was a phenomenon he noticed first as a rabbi.

People were returning to synagogue or church because they wanted their children to attend a faith school. Not because they believed, but because ‘faith schools have a very strong ethos and they think that that strong ethos will give the kids the kind of virtues they need.’

This, in Sacks’s view, points to a flaw at the heart of the atheist worldview. Faced with the question ‘How do we raise our children?’ — perhaps the most serious question we must ask — non-believers began to flunk the answer. And Sacks reckons that this failure indicates a wider relativistic vacuum in our society.

‘Clearly people are searching for something,’ he says. ‘There is definitely a search for spirituality. Yet spirituality per se is not going to get us where we need to be because spirituality is what happens when religion goes bowling alone.