A friend recently arrived at his French country house to find the windows smashed and the television stolen. He accepted this as another sign of the crime-ridden society familiar back home. He did, however, mention it to the mayor at the fair held in the local village every Saturday. The mayor was shocked. The following day a young man arrived at the house, crestfallen, and said that his parents would repair the windows and restore the property. He was sorry. No police were involved.

That story is inconceivable in Britain. But it offers a backdrop to last week’s diatribe against modern society by the chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, at the Lambeth Conference, when he was the latest cleric to call down hellfire on modern society.

Sacks was in characteristic rabbinical default mode. Declaring that “within my soul are the tears of my ancestors”, he lamented to the 650 bishops that “almost all Britain’s social problems are caused by a loss of religion”. They include disintegration, depression, stress, eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse. With the addition of collapsing marriages, families and communities, “people feel vulnerable and alone”.

The rabbi restrained himself from tossing in genetically modified foods, global warming and timekeeping on Network Rail, the last a frequent subject of British prayerfulness.

Sacks is not the first to take this line. Earlier this year Gordon Brown adopted the mien of John Knox and declared the nation accursed by “shallowness”, especially Tory shallowness. Families had apparently disavowed their responsibilities. The young were jeering at their Asbos, rode the buses drunk and were drugged to their eyeballs, despite 10 years of Labour rule.

Not since John Major went “back to basics” with his call to revive something called Victorian values has the presumed link between spiritual and social conditions been so confidently asserted. The result has been specific policy shifts designed to “clamp down” on what is declared an increasingly “immoral” and hence criminalised society.

Brown duly felt that he had to appear tough on drugs by reclassifying cannabis as more harmful than it had been thought in 2004. There was no cause for this and it was opposed by the official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Equally in thrall to the power of gesture, Brown’s home secretary, Jacqui Smith, has had to confront the collapse of the centrepiece of her social policy, the antisocial behaviour order (Asbo). Asbos were either being disregarded or were leading to the imprisonment of young people for what would otherwise not be imprisonable offences, clearly a counterproductive effect.

The response of the home secretary was not to admit that Asbos have proved legalistic and inflexible. Rather than reform or abolish them, Smith is building ever more prisons and secure custody units, now crowded with young people whose lives are being ruined for ever for trivial if recalcitrant misbehaviour. So much for getting tough on the causes of crime.

All this is grist to the mill of religious fundamentalism – that is, religion not as a source of private consolation but as an active participant in drawing up and forcing norms on society. If society is going to the dogs, say the priests, then it must be because they and their message are neglected.

This cry is as old as that of Savonarola in Florence, of the mystics and millenarians to whom every misfortune, plague, war and famine was the result of a failure to pay due obeisance to mother church.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury implied in his Lambeth sermon last week, there is a limit to how much blame can be loaded onto God for the ills of man. Whatever the theological significance of this important concession, it has a commonsensical Anglican ring. It reflects the view of British governments that when things go right man is to be praised, but when they go wrong the Almighty has unaccountably taken paternity leave.

This brings us back to the rabbi and my French friend. In such classics of French history as Montaillou, the story of a medieval Cathar village, or Graham Robb’s superb new work, The Discovery of France, the role of the communal authority, initially that of the church, is near absolute. It laid down the law and was the source of guidance and leadership. Robb’s thesis is that until the 18th century “there was no such thing as France, nor even French provinces”. There was certainly no universal language. There were families, clans, tribes, dialects, communes, mayors, continuing in many inaccessible places even until the first world war.

These communities did not regard themselves as French, or even Breton or Provençal. They identified only with their village or town, much as did medieval English communities. People’s lives were ordained by those they knew, respected and, later, elected. Toa large extent that is still true in France today and in other European countries where such decentralisation persists. There is nothing old-fashioned about localism.

The current, peculiarly British, view is that “society” is in a state of disintegration when seen from above, largely as a result of government statistics. This view projects onto the home front the same apocalyptic gloom of the American neoconservative: that we face a cosmic threat from Muslim fanaticism. Thus even the chief rabbi equates what Al-Qaeda threatens abroad with what drunken louts threaten at home.

This is naive. Just sometimes Alexander Pope might be right, that apparent discord is “harmony, not understood”. Where the rabbi is right is in implying the danger of having no institutions of social control in Britain’s “atrophying” communities. The story of the French mayor and the broken windows could be repeated in Italy, Germany, Spain or most of America, but not in Britain. In Britain the centre and the centre alone demands, accepts and is held accountable for social responsibility.

The reason is not an absence of spirituality or religion but the stripping out from British communities of the human institutions which have guarded them from social atomism. They no longer have a potent mayor, a figure of authority, a framework for involving village or civic elders, merchants, teachers, parents and social workers.

The French mayor in my story clearly enjoyed status and authority by virtue of his election and his delegated power. He had tax money at his disposal. He controlled planning permissions and the barter that implied. His ear was to the ground. He was present at the fair. He could lean on the relevant parents.

In Britain, in such an incident, someone would have called the police and nothing would have happened. Had the miscreant ever been caught, probably after multiple offences, he would have experienced no restorative justice as in France. He would have come before the police, then a magistrate and, if he persisted, would have gone to prison and been destroyed for life. That is the British way. It is unnecessary, expensive and unproductive. But show me a politician who believes that the French way is better.

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