Freedom of Religion and Conscience

Lord Bishop of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[The Lord Bishop of Guildford]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their strategy for promoting freedom of religion and conscience internationally as a fundamental human right and as a source of stability for all countries.

[The Lord Bishop of Guildford]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to address this important Question to Her Majesty’s Government. First, I will say how delighted I am that the Minister will be responding, as I am aware that today she presided over a major conference at Lancaster House with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on precisely this topic, which has only just concluded.

At the outset I stress that my Question is what it says on the label: it is about freedom of religion and conscience. It is not about creating an opportunity to make a partisan appeal for Christians alone, nor even for religious believers alone. The word “conscience” is intentional. Noble Lords may recall Cardinal Newman’s remarks to the Duke of Norfolk at the time of the debate on papal infallibility. He said, “I shall drink to the Pope if you please—still, to conscience first”.

Precisely because conscience and truth go together, it must be right that there is more concern about freedom of religion than there has been for some time. This debate is topical because of a considerable increase in the encroachments upon religious freedom all over the world. Many sources could be cited. Objectively, I draw particular attention to the United States State Department’s annual report of 2011 from its Office of International Religious Freedom. This records a rising tide of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world and pressures on many religious groups: the Baha’i and Sufi Muslims in Iran, Coptic Christians in Egypt, Ahmadis in Indonesia and Pakistan, and Muslims in a range of countries, including Europe. I emphasise that that is not an exhaustive list.

My diocese of Guildford is linked with a number of dioceses in Nigeria, where we have seen a tragic increase in sectarian violence, triggered initially by questions of political power after the presidential election, but now unequivocally having a definite religious complexion with the militant group Boko Haram attacking government offices, bombing churches and threatening to kill Christians in the north and any Muslims who oppose it. On Saturday, the Emir of Kano was attacked: his driver and two armed guards were killed, though the Emir survived.

There has also been a recent and well-documented study on increasing pressure on Christians throughout the world entitled, interestingly enough, Christianophobia, by Rupert Shortt. My point, however, is not to indulge in a tit-for-tat debate about who is persecuted most but to emphasise that no one should be discriminated against on grounds of religion or conscience, for the sake of the stability of societies and their common good in a multicultural and multifaith world. Towards this goal, it is essential that religious communities speak out on behalf of others and not only their own adherents. Also, faith communities should not be slow in condemning behaviour within their own communities which is discriminatory to others.

I sadly recognise that no religious communities have a perfect track record in this regard. Even this House, with another place and the Church of England no less, does not have a clear historical conscience as regards religious toleration. Look back beyond the 19th century, for example, to the Act of Uniformity. Although it returned the Book of Common Prayer to the Church of England and the nation in 1662, it was also the instrument of the expulsion of many ministers and people who could not accept it. Nor was Catholic emancipation so strongly supported from these very Episcopal Benches in the beginning of the 19th century; nor were Methodists much welcomed as partners in the Gospel. I am aware of religious glass houses—the Crusades, the wars of religion, the martyrs of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

At the same time, there have been very sharp and terrible secular attacks on religious freedom from time to time, and not only as long ago as the French Revolution or the French anti-clerical laws at the beginning of the 20th century. Think of anti-clerical Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s; Nazi Germany and the Confessing Church; the Stalinist Soviet Union and eastern Europe in relation to the Orthodox Church; the Roman Catholic Church, and other churches too. Think also of Marxist China and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. These regimes, of extreme Left or Right, with their materialistic, political and economic ideologies, had no room for either political conscientious objection or faith communities, or for churches as alternative loyalties to the authority of a monolithic and deified state. Millions of people died under these regimes.

The question is: how do we make more effective the excellent work done by a number of individuals and NGOs already researching and publicising breaches of religious freedom, so that all—and not only one faith or conscientious group—might enjoy this acknowledged right?

The European Union is developing guidelines on freedom of religion or belief but, like many things in relation to the EU, greater transparency would be welcome. The Minister may be able to tell your Lordships’ House of any developments since the recent statement of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, on promoting human rights. The Organisation on Security and Co-operation in Europe is currently reconstituting its council of advisers on freedom of religion or belief. As reconstituted, it will need to address the problem holistically rather than through episodic interventions for particular campaigns which would relapse into the apparent partisanship of which I have already spoken.

On the European Court of Human Rights, Members of your Lordships’ House will, of course, have been pondering on the recent judgments from Strasbourg. I discern two things. Religious belief is not simply a “residual” or even marginalised human right only to be considered when no other rights come into play. It can, on the contrary, have precedence over another right, such as the corporate image of a company. I am thinking here of the Coptic Christian, Ms Nadia Eweida, her modest cross and British Airways. In the other three cases the balance was held to be different—health and safety, for example, in the case of the hospital ward or surgical theatre. My point here is that a balance of rights and recognition of context is indicative of religious freedom as a real and not only a nominal human right. Nor is religious freedom ultimately in opposition to other rights, such as freedom of expression, non-discrimination, women’s rights and gay rights.

At the global level, does the Minister agree that there is a need to continue to support the United Nations rapporteur in moving beyond the issues of defamation or incitement, important as those issues are? For 45 years the aspiration of drafting a convention on the freedom of religion or belief has been on ice. Surely now its time has come.

Before concluding I wish to welcome and encourage further what I know is already going on in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s human rights and democracy programme. Clearly, Her Majesty’s Government now take religious freedom seriously. Developments at Wilton Park, leading to the establishment of a human rights advisory panel, and the discussion group at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge are to be welcomed, as are practical advances such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s tool-kit on religious freedom. I am also aware that the Minister is in the process of looking again at religious freedom issues in United Kingdom foreign policy.

In a Written Answer to a Question I raised, the Minister helpfully spoke of using the excellent expertise and experience of the United Kingdom in interfaith dialogue and co-operation. The Church of England is in the middle of all that and I strongly encourage such partnership. The Foreign Secretary has an important advisory group on human rights, but should there not also be some group, under the Minister, on religious freedom to work with the Foreign Secretary’s group— not, I hasten to add, a group of disparate partisan representatives but a group which could work, as I have suggested, holistically? I hope that this short debate tonight will stimulate such questions and encourage their exploration and development.

In conclusion, I ought very briefly to address the question that some will ask—not many, perhaps, in your Lordships’ House, but outside. How can a bishop of the established church address freedom when the church has not always been its champion? This is not the time or place for a theological exposition of how freedom is a genuinely basic ingredient of the three monotheistic faiths and others and so I simply offer two brief testimonies. The noble Lord, Lord Sacks, the outgoing Chief Rabbi, has described religion as,

“part of the ecology of freedom”.

He backed that contention up with a powerful argument about what happens when religion as a key contributor to civil society is absent.

Secondly, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, until recently my archbishop, has more than once drawn attention to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor speaks to Jesus, who has returned to Seville during the Inquisition after the burning of heretics. The inquisitor has imprisoned Jesus and castigates him for the freedom he brings to the earth—so unsuited, says the Grand Inquisitor, to the masses. Jesus says nothing, but in the end kisses the inquisitor’s aged lips and goes away. Dostoevsky’s parable gets the relation between true faith and freedom right.