The persistence of faith

FaithAction have today summarised the speech made yesterday by Conservative Party Chairman Baroness Warsi about the importance of faith to life in Britain:

"Baroness Warsi opened her speech, to Anglican bishops in Oxford, by stating that Britain has ‘a big problem in the way we think about faith in our society as a whole’.

Baroness Warsi referred to media reports which said how 'Faith charities have been put off from applying for public funding by a barrage of bureaucracy’. There is an imbalance in the relationship between the state, faith and society, which is shown by a suspicion of faith by the ‘political elite’.

Baroness Warsi said that the Government needed to put this right and presented three approaches:

1. Understanding the current state of faith in Britain
2. Having a richer recognition of the Anglican and wider faith-based contribution to society
3. Draw the right conclusions for policy

Understanding the current state of faith in Britain

Know that the proportion of people in the world who adhere to the four biggest religions has actually increased in the past century with increased turnouts at religious ceremonies.

‘The fact is that our world is more religious than ever. Faith is here to stay!’

‘Deny it and you deny the ability of a high part of society to articulate where they have come from, what they are working for, and who they are.’

Understanding the Faith based contribution

There are almost 30,000 faith based charities in the UK

‘We have come to a deeper understanding about the contribution of these faith communities to our society. In other words, why they do the good things they do. Unless we understand what drives people of faith to contribute to society, we cannot hope to help them on their way’.

‘Very often, faith communities offer us innovations which the whole of society can learn from’.

Faith and the Big Society

‘Just imagine if the whole nation could give to charity at the same levels as people of faith already do. The question is how can government help to bring that about?’"

Over the summer I read The Persistence of Faith by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, and wrote a poem in response with the same title which echoes aspects of Baronness Warsi's speech:

The persistence of faith


“I remain convinced that, in many conflict zones throughout the world, if religion does not become part of the solution, it will be part of the problem. We have not yet learned what it is for religion to be a force for peace in our hyper-connected age.” Jonathan Sacks

On Dover beach Matthew Arnold heard
the melancholy, long withdrawing roar
of the retreating Sea of Faith.
A dead sea evaporated
by a lunar cycle of utopian visions and disastrous wars
revealing a place of disenchantment,
a dried-up Waste Land
devoid of meaning and cohesion
in which private piety was a song
played on a mental i-pod to while away
the idle hours at the end of history.

The returning flood-tide of religion –
a tsunami-like wave of fundamentalism –
overwhelmed sceptic and believer alike.
Driven full speed down the one-way street of secularism,
came the 4x4’s of the US Moral Majority,
the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the fall of Communism,
and the rise of tactical terror as weapon of choice
in religiously-defined cosmic struggles.
On the beach where Arnold mourned,
Richard Dawkins fulminated.
Where Europe doubted, the Majority World believed.

The timeless and timebound intersect
at a crossroads where the one-way streets
of secularism and fundamentalism do not meet.
The literalism inherent in the love of self or God
for self’s and God’s sake cannot interpret the signs
of past ideals in terms of present possibilities.
The voice of transcendent revelation calls
for love of others for the wholly other’s sake.
The fight for human flourishing is now within religion
calling forth a wave of compassion, not condemnation.
How long to hear this song? How soon is now? If not now, then when?

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U2 - 40.