THE KEY challenge facing the world “is the role of religion in the public square”, former British prime minister Tony Blair has said. “Is it a force for good or a force for ill? A force for healing or for conflict? A force of reaction or a force for progress?” he asked.
"How these questions are answered will, in many ways, determine the spirit and the events of the 21st century." Mr Blair was writing in the current edition of the UK Catholic Tabletmagazine.
He continued: “We are, understandably, preoccupied with the threat posed to us by violent religious extremism.” But the issue was wider. Even where there was not extremism expressed in violence, “there can be extremism expressed in the idea that a person’s identity is to be found not merely in their religious faith, but in their faith as a means of excluding the other person who does not share it”.
He was “not saying that it is extreme to believe your religious faith is the only true faith. Most people of faith do that. It doesn’t stop them respecting those of a different faith or indeed of no faith.”
Faith was problematic when it became “a way of denigrating those who do not share it as somehow lesser human beings. Faith is then a means of exclusion. God in this connection becomes not universal but partisan, faith not a means of reaching out in friendship but a means of creating or defining enemies.”
The Northern Ireland peace process had taught him “that the tightest of bonds can be loosened over time. Under the right circumstances, courageous and far-sighted individuals can transcend exclusive identities to bring about the unthinkable.”
When it came to religious identities, “intrareligious dialogue is no less important than interreligious dialogue – often a necessary counterpart – and equally difficult, because of real differences”.
Rapid globalisation and revolution in communications made this more difficult. On one hand, “the boundaries of religious faiths are becoming more permeable, and their content more eclectic”, but on the other hand, “they are hardening into a stridently defensive or threateningly aggressive rejection of difference, with hatred and fear as the inevitable consequence”.
In the public square “religion has a right to be heard but not dictated”.
However, in his experience “politics today is inclined to treat religion as something that ought to be a private individual matter. . . a voice of conscience, not of counsel and profound insight.”
The Victorian era “saw an extraordinarily robust vitality in this respect with the building up of . . . religious organisations as safety nets for the poor”. The post second World War boom suggested such organisations had become “superfluous”, yet faith-motivated groups emerged to serve the marginalised.
It seemed to Mr Blair we were moving into a period when interfaith action will come into its own. In that complex context Pope Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritatewas "a powerful call . . . that resonates both ecumenically and with the deepest moral sentiments of the different world religions".