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Christians in the Middle East

My Lords, I am deeply grateful for a debate that in both variety and quality has not disappointed expectations. Despite that variety, a number of unifying factors have emerged in the discussion, some of which have already been enumerated by the Minister. Not the least among those was the admiration widely expressed for the work of Canon Andrew White in Baghdad, and I am happy to associate myself with that admiration. Wider points have emerged, and I shall touch on one or two. The definition of religious liberty, we have been reminded, is not always a simple matter. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter pointed out that we are speaking not simply of the liberty to worship but a liberty of conscience—a mental liberty. That includes asking some difficult questions about the rights of conversion, which many noble Lords have raised in their contributions today. I was delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, quote the late Lord Acton on the test of liberty being the treatment of minorities. It was the same Lord Acton who observed that a coherent doctrine of religious liberty was at the foundation of all serious talk about political liberties. We have a number of issues there worth taking up and holding in our minds. We have also been reminded by a number of noble Lords about the significance of education and adequate communication in this field. Points have been made about the poisonous effect of certain kinds of school textbook, for example. I wonder whether that is something which we might not think about more practically as we move forward. Mention has been made of the British Council. Mention might also be made of educational partnerships of different kinds which exist between educational institutions here and in the region. I ask what possibility there is of using those partnerships to challenge some of the most unhelpful and destructive tendencies among educational circles in the region that we have been discussing. Your Lordships will be interested to know, I am sure, that in the conversations that have been held regularly between the Church of England and the Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem, the issue of school textbooks has been raised repeatedly as affecting all the communities involved in the region. In addition to our thinking about religious and political liberty, I add as a necessary corollary some serious thinking about how we stimulate the best in education across the region as it moves forward. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, for his remarks about what I would call the need to address human problems in a three-dimensional way—that three-dimensionality including, inevitably, the dimension of faith. ““God is back”” is indeed rather a strange slogan. Those of us who profess a faith will of course believe that he has never been away, not even in Europe in recent years. However, the point made is a significant one. We are in an age where, in the north Atlantic culture, it is easy and fashionable to suppose that, somehow, the religious account of human life is thinner or narrower than others. The opposite, of course, is what I believe to be true, as do many other Members of your Lordships’ House. Whether or not that is something that you believe, it is quite clearly an impossibility to take a realistic approach to human issues by cutting out that enormous area of human motivation and inspiration which is represented by religion. That is, perhaps, also why a proper understanding of religious liberty is indeed at the foundation of a proper, full and robust account of political liberties more widely. That may be a justification for moving on, in conclusion, to what is, in a sense, a slightly more personal observation; I hope that your Lordships will indulge me here. I spoke in my introductory remarks about the way in which the decline or threatened absence of Christianity in the communities and nations of the Middle East would impoverish those nations— would impoverish the future possibilities even for majority Islamic states and societies. Such a disappearance would also impoverish us as a civilisation, and us a church; I speak for myself here. Like some of my right reverend brethren here, I have some experience of what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, referred to as the spiritual depths of the communities that we were speaking about. It is now over 30 years since I made my first visit to one of the Coptic monasteries in Wadi Al Natrun, between Cairo and Alexandria, an experience which remains with me to this day as a formative time. I have been privileged in recent years to revisit some of those communities, always with enormous profit and enormous challenge. To lose the contemplative, reflective and imaginative spirit represented in those monasteries and the communities that support and sustain them would be for us to lose great depth from our Christian identity. If our Christian identity in the West becomes thinner and duller, so does our political and cultural identity overall. I cannot sit down without paying that particular personal debt to one community in the Middle East, but I believe that the debt is not just mine but ours—a debt we ought to discharge by the kind of serious, sustained, generous and careful discussion which your Lordships’ House has given to this subject today. Thank you. Motion agreed.