Almost all of Britain’s social problems are caused by a loss of religion, the Chief Rabbi told Anglican bishops last night.

Societies without religion disintegrated and people succumbed to depression, stress, eating disorders and alcohol and drug abuse, Sir Jonathan Sacks told 650 bishops and their spouses in Canterbury.

Sir Jonathan, the first Chief Rabbi to address the Lambeth Conference, said that a society that lost its religion lost “graciousness”. “Relationships break down. Marriage grows weak. Families become fragile. Communities atrophy. And the result is that people feel vulnerable and alone.”

He continued: “That is where we are.” He said that mankind was “living through one of the most fateful ages of change since Homo sapiens first set foot on Earth”.

Globalisation and the new information technologies were fragmenting the world “into ever smaller sects of the like-minded”. At the same time, the fast flow of information was forcing people together as never before.

The conference is struggling to find a way to prevent the fragmentation of the worldwide Anglican Communion over such issues as biblical authority and the place of gay people in society.

One solution to be debated this week is the new Anglican “covenant”, a unity statement designed to bind provinces together in shared doctrine.

Sir Jonathan said that “covenants of faith are splitting apart”, and called on Christians to walk united with members of other religions in working to solve the world’s problems.

Too often, he said, religion showed a divided face to the world: “Conflict – between faiths, and sometimes within faiths.”

Sir Jonathan said that globalisation had created a “global covenant” but that it was itself in danger.

“The sanctity of human life is being desecrated by terror. The integrity of creation is threatened by environmental catastrophe. Respect for diversity is imperilled by what one writer has called the clash of civilisations.”

He also referred to the long history of Christian antiSemitism that underpinned centuries of persecution of the Jewish people. He said: “Friends, I stand before you as a Jew, which means not as an individual, but as a representative of my people. And as I prepared this lecture, within my soul were the tears of my ancestors. We may have forgotten this but, for a thousand years, between the First Crusade and the Holocaust, the word ‘Christian’ struck fear into Jewish hearts.”

He said he could not have stood “in openness” before a gathering of so many Christian bishops without mentioning this “book of Jewish tears”.

Sir Jonathan said: “Think only of the words the Jewish encounter with Christianity added to the vocabulary of human pain: blood libel, book burnings, disputations, forced conversions, inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom.”

The past could not be rewritten but it could be “redeemed”, he said. Today, more than 60 years after an Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, met a Chief Rabbi, J. H. Hertz, to found the Council of Christians and Jews, the two faith groups could meet as “beloved friends”. That friendship now had to be extended more widely, to Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians and Baha’is.

Sir Jonathan said: “Because though we do not share a faith, we surely share a fate. Religions should not fight each other but work together to face the challenges of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental disaster.”