Ignorant officials sidelining religion, warns Archbishop of Canterbury

A generation of local bureaucrats has attempted to sideline religion from public life out of simple ignorance of British history, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned.

The Archbishop was speaking during a debate in the House of Lords

Dr Rowan Williams said that the tendency to treat faith as a “problem” stemmed from a “plain lack of historical and cultural awareness”.

He said that the influence of the teachings of Christianity and Judaism in particular had helped shape a distinctly British brand of tolerance, democracy and rule of law.

But some government bodies had been reluctant to work with faith groups because of a “failure of understanding” about this, he said.

The Archbishop was speaking during a debate in the House of Lords, tabled by the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, on the role of faith in Britain ahead of the Diamond Jubilee.

Lord Sacks told the House that the Queen’s influence had ensured that relations between different religions in Britain were among the best in the world.

He said that she had “guided and sustained this nation through one of its most challenging transitions, into a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faith society”.

The Archbishop has spoken in the past about religious groups being treated as an “exotic tolerated minority” and criticised attempts to ban Nativity plays or carol-singing out of misplaced sensitivity to other faiths.

He told the Lords: “Usually through no fault of their own, a generation of administrators and local officials has grown up with little or no sense of how our political and legal history in this country has become what it is as a direct result of a long conversation with the Jewish and Christian intellectual world, with the ethics and the theology of the human responsibility characteristic of that world.”

He said this ignorance led to a “dangerous assumption” that there is no need to speak up for Britain's current “political and legal settlement”.

“But if we are to sustain our legacy of dignity before the law, participative government, and hospitality towards minorities, we had better be aware of just how and why our ancestors developed such a political ethic and what depth of thought and imagination is needed to keep it alive.

“This failure of understanding is, of course, one of the things that lies behind the reluctance in recent years to develop effective partnership between statutory bodies and faith groups in the work of social regeneration.”

But he said there were positive signs for the future with government now working more closely with faith groups.

But Baroness Flather, Britain’s first female Asian peer, who has campaigned against Islamic Sharia courts, insisted that “not everything in the garden is rosy.”

She underlined her admiration for the Queen but added: “I wonder whether she knows what is happening to women.

“I would say to all people here from faith communities that they should remember that none of the faiths has ever supported women.”

Lord Singh, director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, disagreed but added: “We still seem to see our different religions as mutually exclusive, while in reality we share common values that are centred on responsible living.

“The challenge for us in this Jubilee year is to work with others in secular society to bring these values to the fore, and to change an obsession with the culture of “me and mine” to one of greater responsibility and active concern for others.”