What is an ‘other’ faith?

I was listening to an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning about faith schools. One of the teacher unions is holding a debate about whether or not the government should fund faith schools or not. Canon John Hall, the Church of England’s chief education officer, very reasonably pointed out that the Church of England founded the educational system in England, long before the government was in any way interested in providing education for the masses. The question for discussion was whether faiths should be allowed to continue to provide education in the 21st century.

Now, that is an important question and one I may return to in a later blog (no promises, though). But what prompted this post was the use by Canon Hall of the phrase ‘other faiths’. It is now conventional to refer to Britain as a ‘multi-cultural, multi-faith society’, and there is some truth in this, although the reality and the aspiration are not without their problems.

OK, now to the nub of my irritation. If Britain is a multi-faith society, how come we still have ‘other’ faiths? I accept that Christianity has been the dominant religion in Britain for a very long time. The Church of England is still the ‘established’ church in England. (Now, that’s something else to write about - but later.) But if we live in a genuinely multi-faith society then the great faiths should, I hope, have parity of esteem. (As a Bah?’? I believe that all the great faiths come from one Divine Source.) So the locution should not be ‘Christianity and other faiths’, but something like ‘all faiths’ or ‘the faiths’.

I hasten to add two things:

1. I fully acknowledge that there are all sorts of conceptual and political problems packed into the phrase ‘multi-faith Britain’.

2. Some of my best friends are Anglicans. The Church of England plays an important role in fielding the ring for inter-faith dialogue and multi-faith collaboration.

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