Religion and Belief: British Public Life

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my interests in the register: I am a former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I am also a former chair of the Chapel Street Schools trust and a current chair of Chapel Street Community Fund, a community interest company. I am also a practising Anglican, but just a lowly back-bencher; I have no responsibility at all for anything the church may do.

I add my thanks to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for giving us the chance to debate this issue. I also pay tribute to his work in this area, and his scholarship, for which I have been very grateful over the years. His speech was a wonderful opening to the debate. I was interested to hear about the work of the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life. I commend the Woolf Institute for its interest, and I wish all the commissioners well in their deliberations. I hope we will have the opportunity to debate their findings in this House when they emerge in due course.

I shall try to address some of the areas of challenge that the noble and right reverend Lord set out for us as I go along, but it will be a challenge in itself to respond to the extraordinary range of speeches that we have heard. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, who observed that it is interesting that we are debating this issue at all. Fifty years ago, the idea that in 2014 Parliament would still be discussing the importance of religion and belief in public life would have seemed improbable at best. Then, it was assumed that by now religion would have withdrawn quietly from the public stage, and certainly from any involvement with the state. Believers would have dwindled in number and any religion that remained would be essentially a personal and private activity.

I remember that in 1968 the acclaimed sociologist Peter Berger said that by the 21st century,

“religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture”.

Thirty years later, he said that,

“the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false: The world today, with some exceptions ... is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever”.

Futurology is a difficult game, and one should not laugh. I am still waiting for my personal jetpack, as promised in the “Tomorrow’s World” of my childhood, and it has yet to materialise. So I understand and I sympathise with Peter Berger. It is a real lesson to all of us that if we think that today is a lesson in what tomorrow will look like, that is simply a challenge to our own concerns and our inability to look into the future.

If secularisation is no longer the certain shape of the future, that leaves some significant questions about the role of religion and belief in our public life, including how we respond to the growing importance of identity as a marker—a point made by my noble friends Lord Haskel and Lord Parekh, as well as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. I do not have answers to all these questions, but they are incredibly important. I shall be very interested in the degree to which the Minister can help us along and the commission can lead us in the future. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, for highlighting the key issue of ignorance of religion as one of the drivers of our inability to know how to respond to the new importance of religion in our public life. I hope we can come back to discuss that again.

So what should be our attitude to the role of religion in public life? I think that we should start by honouring our heritage. Earlier this year, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury noted that our systems of ethics and justice, the protection of the poor, and most of how we look at society have been shaped by, and founded on, Christianity. As he pointed out, however, that view was shared by other faith groups. He quoted Farooq Murad of the Muslim Council of Britain, who said:

“No one can deny that Britain remains largely a Christian country”.

It is important to recognise that heritage.

The role that the established church still plays has been highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. But of course, the relationship between religion and public life has altered a lot over time. The most reverend Primate himself acknowledged that, in terms of regular churchgoing, this is not a Christian country as it used to be not that many years ago—but, as he put it,

“the language of what we are, what we care for and how we act is earthed in Christianity, and would remain so for many years even if the number of believers dropped out of sight (which they won’t, in my opinion)”.

So I hope we can all accept that the Christian religion has played a formative role in the development of our life and identity as a country. That is not, of course, to say that acceptance of the dominant British values presupposes an acceptance of the beliefs and practices that helped to form them. I will be interested to see the Minister’s reaction to the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that a new Magna Carta for the future might be a way to take this debate forward.

The history of Christianity in Britain also underpins some of our public institutions and services, particularly the history of schools—a subject that has been raised by a number of noble Lords. I shall have to contain myself here, because, as I should also declare, I am doing my PhD, incredibly slowly, on church and state through the medium of church schools. The result is that I probably know more about the history of church schools than is strictly socially acceptable, so I shall try to stop myself going on too much about the subject.

I first went into that area because I wanted to know why we had all these faith schools in our state education system. Then, of course, I discovered, as one so often does, that it was the other way round. Britain entered the 19th century with no mass education at all, and a couple of voluntary bodies created a very large number of schools. The National Society, which set out to create a church school in every parish, set up 12,000 schools in 40 years, many of which are still going nowadays. They were paid for by individual subscriptions. So essentially, the basis of our mass education was set up by the churches and the state system grew around that. That organic process that underlies so much of British life is something we need to recognise and understand to make decisions about going forward.

A legitimate question was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, as well as by my noble friends Lord Warner and Lord Dubs and others: what is the ongoing role of faith schools now, in modern life, especially in the state sector? There is always a variety of interests to be balanced. How much does one want educational homogeneity or heterogeneity? How important is parental choice? What is the impact of faith schools on community cohesion? What are the limits of what can be taught in a school? If faith schools were all private, how might that affect cohesion and the state’s ability to regulate and inspect them, compared with what it does at the moment?

On that last point, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, made an interesting point, which I think it is worth quoting in full:

“If the choice appears to be between systematically secular schools in the public sector and explicitly sectarian schools privately resourced, the dangers should be obvious … Religious conviction becomes something fiercely guarded from the light of public discussion or scrutiny; the way in which it relates to other areas of life and thought can only be looked at in ways that are not publicly accountable”.

That is food for thought, but it also presupposes well run faith schools with high-quality social, moral, spiritual and cultural education. Will the Minister tell the House what steps the Government are taking to support the ongoing development of that? Labour remains supportive of the continuing presence of faith schools within our state system, but it is of course essential that they, like all schools, teach a broad and balanced curriculum and equip their students to live alongside students of all faiths and none in our society.

I will touch briefly on the role of religion in social action. Some noble Lords may have seen the report from Demos last year looking at the contribution that believers and faith-based organisations make to our national life. It found that religious people in the UK are more likely to volunteer locally, to be civically engaged and engaged in charity, which has been established before. But, interestingly, they were also more likely to have higher levels of trust in other people and institutions and to believe that they could influence decisions nationally and locally, which is curious. I stress at this point that some of my best friends are atheists and humanists; indeed, some of my most respected colleagues on the Benches behind me fall into those categories. They are shining examples of people who give selflessly and sacrifice themselves in both service and giving to the cause. I mention that not to privilege faith but to counter some of the fears that can be expressed that faith can cause people to look inwards, whereas the opposite can be true.

The report highlighted some interesting cases studies. My noble friend Lord Stone of Blackheath may be interested to know about the London Buddhist Centre. He may already know about Breathing Space, which uses mindfulness to tackle mental health problems and addiction. The Near Neighbours programme, run by the Church of England, is effective in bringing neighbours in diverse areas together to work for the common good. Birdwell’s conclusions in this pamphlet were interesting: faith provides a unique underpinning to the commitment and motivation required to provide services, particularly to some of the hardest to help; faith-based services can be particularly effective in some areas; and faith groups and institutions provide valuable and important permanent structures in the local community, which can be used to aid social problems.

There is real food for thought there for policymakers and service designers. We need to learn from the strength of faith-based work but recognise that there are risks, both to the state and to the groups, of drawing faith-based groups into delivery. In the past, the state has sometimes sought to bank the advantages and mitigate the risks by somehow trying to separate the activities from the faith community, and that simply does not work. The research shows that.

On community, if Britain is not secular, it is also clearly not solely a Christian country any more and the relations between the various communities are crucial. However, I see some encouraging signs here. I see increasing evidence of religious communities tending to facilitate community-wide dialogue of the kind that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham described. When I went with the riots panel to Birmingham in the wake of the 2011 riots, I was hugely impressed to see the group that he chairs bringing together people from right across the community—from different faith, ethnic and local groups—to work together to tackle their problems. We were all hugely impressed by what we saw there.

Another example would be community organising, which brings together the members of mainstream churches with other religions but also with trade unions, parent bodies, homeless charities and a wide range of organisations. London Citizens is the most notable example, but it was the experience of its members that brought together ideas such as the living wage, which have gone on to be so successful. However, one of the things that citizen organising taught us was to recognise that talking about difference is not necessarily a problem and ignoring it does not necessarily work. When it comes to religion, particularity is everything. It is by talking about our own individual experiences and differences that we get to understand one another and go on to make a difference. At a time when, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich reminded us, politicians are struggling so hard to engage with people, finding faith-based organisations and talking to a wide range of communities might give us a lesson that we can all learn.