How “multi” is our multi-faith society?

According to this report in the Sunday Telegraph,

The Church of England has launched an astonishing attack on the Government’s drive to turn Britain into a multi-faith society.

In a wide-ranging condemnation of policy, it says that the attempt to make minority “faith” communities more integrated has backfired, leaving society “more separated than ever before”. The criticisms are made in a confidential Church document, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph, that challenges the “widespread description” of Britain as a multi-faith society and even calls for the term “multi-faith” to be reconsidered.

The report, written by Guy Wilkinson, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s inter-faith adviser, and an eminently sensible man, says that

… the Church of England has been sidelined. Instead, “preferential” treatment has been afforded to the Muslim community despite the fact that it makes up only three per cent of the population. Britain remains overwhelmingly a Christian country at heart and moves to label it as a multi-faith society suggest a hidden agenda, it says.

Furthermore, according to the Sunday Telegraph:

The report lists a number of moves made by the Government since the London bombings in July last year to win favour with Muslim communities. These include “using public funds” to fly Muslim scholars to Britain, shelving legislation on forced marriage and encouraging financial arrangements to comply with Islamic requirements. These efforts have undermined its interfaith agenda and produced no “noticeable positive impact on community cohesion”, the Church document says.

“Indeed, one might argue that disaffection and separation is now greater than ever, with Muslim communities withdrawing further into a sense of victimhood, and other faith communities seriously concerned that the Government has given signals that appear to encourage the notion of a privileged relationship with sections of the Muslim community.”

The Church of England and Jack Straw are voicing concerns that I know have been bubbling away below the surface of inter-faith relations in the UK for some time, even before the London bombings in July last year. I sit in many inter-faith meetings and I frequently talk to people from different faiths. Up to now, no one has been prepared to surface these concerns in meetings, but they have been expressed to me privately by people from a range of faiths. There’s a sense of grievance about the the privileges the government is perceived as giving to the Muslim community, when other faiths have also needs and also have things to offer to wider society.

And it’s not just members of faith communities who are saying this. Around a year ago an official from the Cohesion and Faiths Unit (at that time still within the Home Office) admitted to me in a private meeting that the Home Office’s attention had swung entirely to the Muslim community following the London bombings of 7/7. He claimed that the pendulum had subsequently swung back and that the Home Office realized that the other faith communities also had claims on their attention. But there’s no doubt that the government panicked at the discovery that the UK had its very own home-grown Islamic terrorists and was looking for ways to appease the Muslim community. It was at that point that the penny dropped that the ideology of multi-culturalism had failed.

The Church of England’s paper claims that the what the government is doing to try to integrate Muslims is doomed to fail.

“In relation to faith, there has been a divided, almost schizophrenic approach,” the briefing paper says. The Government was misguided in “scapegoating the Muslim community as the source of the problem at the same time as believing that they should be uniquely responsible for solutions”. It goes on: “The contribution of the Church of England in particular and of Christianity in general to the underlying culture remains very substantial.”

The 2001 census showed that 72 per cent of Britons describe themselves as Christian. “It could certainly be argued that there is an agenda behind a claim that a five per cent adherence to ‘other faiths’ makes for a multi-faith society,” says the document.

Religion is an intractable matter for governments to deal with. Religious fanaticism is impossible for governments to eradicate on their own. In April 2002, the Universal House of Justice, the world governing council of the Baha’i community wrote a powerful letter to the world’s religious leaders. The letter’s closing paragraph makes this resounding statement:

With every day that passes, danger grows that the rising fires of religious prejudice will ignite a worldwide conflagration the consequences of which are unthinkable. Such a danger civil government, unaided, cannot overcome. Nor should we delude ourselves that appeals for mutual tolerance can alone hope to extinguish animosities that claim to possess Divine sanction.

The responsibility lies inescapably with religious leaders. As the Universal House of Justice concludes:

The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. Whatever justification exists for exercising influence in matters of conscience lies in serving the well-being of humankind. At this greatest turning point in the history of civilization, the demands of such service could not be more clear. ?The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable?, Baha??u?lla?h urges, ?unless and until its unity is firmly established.?

So no amount of privileging by government of any faith community is going to solve the devastating problems caused by religious extremism.

Technorati Tags: Church of England, multi-faith, Muslim, Christian, Islam