Conflicts and Violence: Religion

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am always conscious, when we are discussing the role of religion in politics, that as a small boy I knew that British values were Protestant values and that Catholics were in many ways disloyal and following an alien religion. I did not know any Catholics, but I knew that from reading Charles Kingsley, GA Henty and others. That, I have slowly learnt, was a tribal view, past which I have got except when meeting extremely right-wing American Roman Catholics.

We all know that religion is part of identity and values. It is a way of saying, “I am part of the main group and you are part of a heretical or dissident minority”. Passionately felt, it provides a sense of values but also a real way of distinguishing between those you accept and those you do not. The problem with central Africa is that there is a line between Muslims and Christians, between black populations and Arab populations, between pastoralists and farmers and between a whole host of different things. The rising population has made the competition between pastoralists, farmers and others far more acute, as we see in Darfur at least as much as in the Central African Republic, and as we see in northern Nigeria.

Yes, you know that someone is Muslim because he is a Fulani but you also know that the Fulani are pastoralists and you are much more settled. That is part of the problem that we all have. For people whose understanding of religion is often relatively shallow, we know that it provides a sense of, “I know who I am and I hate you, even though I haven’t met you before”. We have to get beyond that if we possibly can. The answer is clearly to do something about population growth and to help these societies going so rapidly through the transition from traditional society to contact with the modern world with all the reactions against that which lead to fundamentalism in their interpretation of religion. Fundamentalism, after all, was a term invented in the United States by Christians who wanted to insist on traditional Christianity against this dreadful urban, modern, moderate world. As we help them, there is great deal that our Government can do. I want to come back to that in a minute.

Leadership within religions is extremely important. The Pope’s visit was extraordinarily important. I only wish that we had clear leadership within the Sunni Muslim world because the absence of leadership there is one of the big problems that we all face at the moment and which the Saudi Government and others need to think rather more about. The sense that different paths to God are possible, and that the different religions that have followed Abraham have something in common in their understanding of God, is the sort of thing that we absolutely have to say to each other, just as we have now learnt to say to each other that Protestants and Catholics actually worship the same God. We did not entirely understand that a couple of generations ago.

We also need to work on the rights of women. These are fundamental to any move away from traditional society. Patriarchy and abuse of religious values go very closely together and have done in a number of institutionalised churches that we had better not name. Population limitation—as far as possible—education, economic development and reduction of inequality all matter, as do open societies and open media. I ask the Government: how far is this an element in their foreign policy as well as in their domestic policy?

The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, with whom I thoroughly enjoyed working in government, did some very useful work on this. She spoke in Istanbul, in the Grand Mosque in Muscat and elsewhere about the need for mutual understanding between different religions and different societies. I regret, in a sense, that we do not have as coherent a Muslim in government now as we had when she was there. To what extent do the Government think that this continuing dialogue between different communities, different ethnic groups and different religions—of course, these labels all overlap—is still a priority?