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Whose morality?

Tuesday, 23rd October 2007

James has already hinted at his reservations about Jonathan Sacks's article on morality and multiculturalism, but I thought I'd read the Chief Rabbi's essay one more time to see if it made much more sense to me. It still doesn't. Perhaps I'm particularly slow-witted today (I still haven't shaken off the bug I picked up a week or more ago) but I really don't see how the decision to decriminalize suicide was "the beginning of the end of England as a Christian country". Would we be a more Christian country if we still had anti-gay laws on the books, as he seems to suggest?

I wasn't much more enlightened when I read the accompanying interview. That wasn't the thought of Alice Miles and Helen Rumbelow. They simply asked a straightforward question about whether faith schools are compatible with integration. No wonder they sounded frustrated:

Much of talking to Dr Sacks is like this: tantalisingly provocative ideas wrapped in layers of obfuscation, then swaddled in an erudite sweep of references.