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Human Rights: Religious Belief

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, in opening the debate, gave a long list of examples of religious persecution, discrimination and disadvantage, and the list could have been a great deal longer. I was talking to an Israeli diplomat this morning, who reminded me that part of the reason for the rise of Avigdor Lieberman’s party is that there is no such institution as civil marriage in Israel. You can have a Muslim marriage or a Jewish marriage, but if you want to have a civil marriage you must leave Israel and come back with a certificate from another country. Many of us will remember the battle in Greece only a few years ago about whether you could not have an ID card which listed your religion. We ourselves have a history of discrimination that is not so ancient. Not so long ago, I attended the wedding, in northern Denmark, between a Dane and an Italian, one of whom was one of my former students. The fuss we had over the potential presence of a Roman Catholic priest in a Lutheran church at the beginning of the 21st century showed that there are still many shadows of the past, even in our supposedly tolerant European society. We recognise that we are not talking simply about discrimination by one religion against another, but discrimination by the orthodox against those whom they regard as heretics within each faith; against Ahmadiyya, Alevis and Shias within Islam and against particular forms of Protestantism or Catholicism in different countries. The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, emphasised the importance of religious dissent. That is what we should be hanging on to. We support the principle of dissent, religious and political, and I hope we all accept that religious freedom does not exist alone in a society. British history shows that religious freedom is only possible in a political system and a society in which wider freedoms of thought and of expression, political expression in particular, are allowed. I declare an interest as an Anglican brought up in the middle of the Church of England, much influenced by Bishop John Robinson, John Habgood and others, with doubting Thomas as my favourite saint and that wonderful expression from the Epistles: "““For now we see as through a glass darkly””." I assumed naively as a child that the Anglican principle was that we could none of us be entirely sure what God thought on anything so we had better not insist on laying down the rule too tightly towards others. I have since discovered that there are plenty of people in the Anglican Church who still want to lay down the law on others and who use quite ancient prejudices against women in the chancel, for example, to express their reactionary views through religion. I was interested and slightly shocked to read William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal two or three years ago and the extent to which it was an aggressive Anglican attempt to convert the Muslims of Delhi that did a great deal to provoke the Indian mutiny in reaction to Christian intolerant evangelism. What should our response be? As a Liberal Christian, I naturally emphasise tolerance and acceptance of dialogue within our shared condition of human uncertainty. We should preach tolerance, practise tolerance, expect tolerance from others and oppose fundamentalism in all religions including our own. We should also recognise how often religion has been used and is still used as a cover for other aims—racial, tribal and political. The Chinese Communist Party has this desperate fear of any autonomous communities, of all forms of free thinking, which thus leads to the persecution, not just of Catholics, Baptists and Buddhists, but also of the Falun Gong—anything which sets up as an autonomous group within the state. Population pressures in Africa, Indonesia and elsewhere also foment what appears to be religious conflict. That is partly what is happening in Nigeria, where the doubling and trebling of populations leads to people choosing which out-group they fight against. Sadly, that has been true in central Africa and there is clearly also an element of it in Sudan. In Indonesia, where there has been Christian violence against Muslims, that has partly been local Christians against Muslim immigrants being settled in their islands. The fundamentalism of the Vatican on the issue of population growth has not helped in this regard. I regard the coalition between the Vatican and fundamentalist Muslim countries at the last UN population conference as one of the more shameful aspects of organised Christian religion that we have seen in recent years and I worry that there is some tendency in the Vatican at present to a retreat towards what can only be described as Christian fundamentalism. I agree with my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno that political and religious persecution go together, but hatred of outsiders, the persecution of scapegoat minorities, the extent to which we choose to define how everyone else should believe—the ““we”” being those in power—is clearly something against which we all have to fight. I know this is an extremely sensitive issue at present but there are those such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands who express as religious motivation what seems to many of us to be racial hatred. If, for a couple of months, I were to pick bits out of the Bible—the Book of Revelations and the Old Testament together—to demonstrate that Christianity is an intolerant religion, I could probably make a 17-minute film which would be fairly persuasive. We can pick and choose but, if we are to promote tolerance, we have to behave responsibly within our own traditions of religion. I oppose the singling out of religion from other forms of persecution of belief, whether political or secular, and I mistrust the motivation of the Bush Administration, which set up a separate department on religious discrimination within the State Department. I do not support such a proposal. Having spent some years in the United States as a young man, I am conscious of the anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic groups of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States and indeed of the anti-rationalist and the anti-modernist groups of Protestant fundamentalism. I rejoice that that sort of reactionary fundamentalism now appears to be on the decline again within much of the United States. For similar reasons, I question the appointment of a British special envoy. It is, of course, a paradox in the United States, a state which is secular according to its constitution, that such a strongly religious dimension of its foreign policy should have been pursued by the last Republican Administration, whereas Britain, with the established Church, has recently been a good deal more secular. I celebrate our more mature acceptance in this country. We are a nation of religious diversity and of political tolerance. We talk now about Britain's churches and Britain’s faiths. As a boy, I sang at the Coronation in 1953, which was an extensively and exclusively Protestant affair. The only non-Church of England priest to take part in the service was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland. Fifty years later, at the anniversary service, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster read the first lesson and I could see the Orthodox Archbishop standing beside him, alongside a representative of the Salvation Army. Under the lantern, listening to them, were representatives of what the service programme called ““Britain’s other faiths””: Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Baha’i, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Jain. If noble Lords ask me to define the main tenets of the Jain faith, I am not sure I could do that very well. The British task is to defend and to promote freedom of belief throughout the world, of political and religious belief and of dissent in all its forms.