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Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, as we now have 90 minutes for this Unstarred Question, noble Lords may speak for five minutes rather than the recommended two.
Lord Judd: My Lords, I am sure that the whole House will want to thank the right reverend Prelate for having chosen this subject tonight—an altogether fitting subject for the run-up to Christmas.
It has always struck me that there are two wonders of the creation. The first is its diversity and the second is its complexity. I believe that we must learn how to celebrate the first and recognise and enjoy the stimulus of the second. But against those wonders, the overriding challenges in the millennium ahead will be exclusion and the growing gap between rich and poor and the economic and political systems which emerge without ethical context.
On the second issue of absence of ethical context, I tremble at what is happening in Russia. I believe that the whole world has a responsibility for the course that Russia has taken. Russia seems to have embraced the cause of economic liberalism without having recognised that Adam Smith brought forward his ideas with a deep commitment to ethics and principle. An economic machine without such an ethical context can become a nightmare. All these issues are related to global terrorism and the necessity of winning hearts and minds.
I believe that enlightened religion can play an important part in providing an ethical context and in overcoming exclusion. The major faiths have much in common to share in that task: love; charity; social responsibility and commitment. Noble Lords will forgive me for drawing on my past experience, but I spent half my life working in humanitarian agencies. I have always been impressed by the degree to which humanitarian work of the principal faiths is in the front line where the going is toughest. I think of Islamic Aid, of Jewish Relief, of the Aga Khan Foundation, of Christian Aid and of CAFOD. I wonder whether it would be possible for those organisations to get together and run a common programme and some joint projects. That would be a wonderful challenge and model for the rest of the world.
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The right reverend Prelate—I nearly said my noble friend, which he is in many ways—has spoken about the challenges to Islam. I hope he will forgive me if I say as a Christian that we must face some of the challenges to Christianity. It is time that some of us who profess to be Christians spoke out in unqualified terms about how we see much that is being said and done in the name of Christianity as the antithesis of all that holds us to the Christian faith. What matters to me and to many other Christians is the context of love and openness and inclusion. This language of good and evil and exclusion is not what we believe our religion is about. We must put our own house firmly in order in that context.
Furthermore, in reflecting on the challenges and travails of the growing up of one's own family—one must face these issues in real terms—when considering truth the analogy of the mountain is a good one. Truth is a mountain whose summit has not yet been reached. Many of us hope that we are climbing that mountain and have chosen a route that suits us. But as we climb, we must remember that others are climbing at the same time on routes they have chosen and that their routes are every bit as valid and important as ours. Truth is somewhere there at the summit and we should all be striving to reach it.
Finally, for the past 10 years I have been privileged to be honorary president of the YMCA in England and I have learnt a great deal. When I took on the task, I was a little fearful that I was not evangelical by temperament. However, I discovered that in that organisation many deeply sincere evangelicals do not see their task as winning a battle for Christianity—winning souls for Christianity—but that their faith demands of them social engagement in the front line of the social challenges that face us. That is the essential message in my own religion to which we must all return with urgency.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate for initiating such an important debate. His Question asks Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to help enlightened religious attitudes. I do not believe that making a crime of incitement to religious hatred will be a step towards enlightened attitudes. I believe that it will threaten the open and free debate on which religious tolerance has long been built.
We in this country have seen not only the appalling rise of anti-Semitism, but also since 9/11 the vicious and appalling verbal attacks on the Islamic faith by extreme groups such as the BNP. But we should not forget that we are also seeing an attack on Christianity much more by the politically correct who seem to fail to understand the deep sense of national identity which is bound up with the Christian tradition in the United Kingdom.
I want briefly to describe an experience of tremendous light and hope in religious enlightenment and tolerance in an organisation of which I am most honoured to be a patron. It concerns a village in the
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heart of the Arab/Israeli conflict, in Israel itself, a village called Neve Shalom Wahat al-Salem—NSWaS, as we call it for short. It was founded by a Dominican as an oasis of peace, which is what its name in both Arabic and Hebrew means, in the very midst of the worst of the conflict around 1970.
In this village, 50 families, approximately half Jewish and half Arab, live together. They are all Israeli citizens. They are all working together and running the village together. Some 300 families are now on a waiting list to come and join them. There is neither political nor religious affiliation in the village. The fundamental principle is that each person should know their own religious and cultural identity and understand and respect that of others.
The village has no synagogue, church or mosque, but a House of Silence where each faith can conduct its own meditation and prayer. The Spiritual Centre, shared by all, conducts seminars to study religious texts and traditions. But for me the most inspiring part of the entire experience is the school, which runs from kindergarten through primary. The teaching and administration are shared equally by Jews and Arabs. The teaching is in both Hebrew and Arabic so that all the children attending—90 per cent of whom come from surrounding villages—become bilingual and therefore able to communicate freely and openly with each other.
The School for Peace, which is where Jewish and Arab high school students come to the village for an intensive three-day dialogue, has done pioneering work with young people and adults from the two communities, helping them to understand the roots of their conflict and, most importantly, the ways towards resolution, dialogue and peace.
One British visitor observing such an encounter from behind the one-way window in the newly built classroom describes her experience thus:
"The young people came in and sat in heavy silence. There was antagonism we felt. The teachers worked hard at getting them to talk. More silence. Then suddenly one young person broke it and the discussion flowed and warmed and continued throughout the day, so much so—they were all staying overnight—that at 2 a.m. these young people were roaring round the compound together shrieking with laughter and we sleepless older guests chalked this up to huge success".
The initiative that NSWaS has so successfully pioneered in Israel is an example of how enlightened religious attitudes can be fostered even in the most difficult of times and places. Most particularly, it shows that if the young are brought together and allowed to get to know each other as real people and as faces then all that antagonism and hostility can go and the more enlightened religious attitudes can be built.
I commend the initiative not only to the Government but more specifically to the Department for Education as the kind of programme which in very different circumstances we could well adopt in this country to bring about the enlightened religious attitudes we all seek.
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8.11 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, I should like to thank not only the right reverend Prelate but also the government Whips, for giving us a little more time, and echo his call that we should have a fuller debate on this extremely important issue. We cannot, after all, separate politics entirely from religion. We are learning that in the Middle East at present. We cannot separate society entirely from religion. The moral and ethical dimension in politics and in social relations are built on past religion. I am very conscious that my own party grew out of the nonconformist Churches and their deep commitment to individual liberty and to equality and to work both of those together.
We face at present the twin dangers of empty secularism and of fundamentalism—of those who worship on Sunday mornings at Ikea or Asda, and those who reject the modern world completely and with it the toleration and the open society that are part of the modern world. I agree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, that what we currently see in the United States—particularly in the pre-millennial dimensions of the Southern Baptists and the insistence that it is good versus evil and there is nowhere in between—is extremely dangerous. As Christians we should be saying very vigorously, as I assure you I do whenever I go to the United States, that that is not the sort of faith that we understand or with which we have any sympathy.
Let us also be aware that there is Jewish fundamentalism and Hindu fundamentalism as well as Muslim fundamentalism, which is a crabbed and intolerant version of Islam. Thankfully that is not the whole of Islam, no more than the Southern Baptist Convention or the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster are in the mainstream of Christianity, thank God. The theology of hatred, exclusion and fear is, of course, closely linked to the politics of fear from which the United States now suffers.
What do we want the Government to do? I believe we want the Government, in their teaching in the national syllabus, to impart much more of a sense of history and of comparative religions, to impart the sympathy of the different paths to God, and to impart our understanding of history in which the darker sides of the Christian past and some of the more glorious parts of the Muslim past are included.
I am rather fed up with meeting Christians who assume that Christians never slaughtered each other, who assume that we were never intolerant of each other and who seem to have forgotten that Christians used to insist that our women covered their heads. My mother never went out without putting on a headscarf. I do not believe she remembered that that was originally a religious custom. Now that we have all forgotten that, we attack our Muslim friends for being a couple of generations behind us. Muslim civilisation at its greatest period had a great deal to offer the world and at that time it was much more tolerant than most Christian civilisations were.
In June, I am due to give a paper to a conference— the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England and the Bishops' Conference of the Catholic Church—
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on "Just War". Listening to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester, it struck me that perhaps we should invite Jewish and Muslim contributions as they also have traditions of a just war with which it would be useful to compare.
The most important thing is to include Islam more clearly among British religions. On Friday evening, I had a very interesting conversation with a British Muslim who said, "I feel myself to be British and I am also a Muslim". He was talking about the need to have proper training for imams in British universities. I believe that the Government should certainly consider whether in our theological faculties in the major British universities we fully include Islam as one of the three religions that come from Abraham. There is nothing worse than that dreadful term "Judaeo-Christian" which excludes Islam and pretends that only two of the religions of the Book are worth having.
I have one final comment and a compliment. Fifty years ago I sang at the Coronation, a deeply Protestant ceremony in which the Moderator of the Church of Scotland was the only person who participated in the service who was not in the Church of England. Last year, I went to the 50th anniversary service at which the Cardinal Archbishop read a lesson with the Orthodox Archbishop standing behind him and under the transept sitting below them were representatives of the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Bahai and Zoroastrian faiths—I did not know we have an organised Zoroastrian faith in Britain—as part of a celebration of what it means to belong to British society, to the British community and to have a relationship with the British state. We need that and the Government should encourage it.
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