By Hilary White
LONDON, June 10,2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The British government, under control of the Labour party for ten years, unfairly favours minority religions and pays only “lip service” to Christianity, effectively discriminating against the nation’s majority religion, says a new report. The report, entitled “Moral, But No Compass,” was issued by the Church of England this weekend, and slams the Labour government under Tony Blair and later Gordon Brown for ignoring the role and contributions of Christianity in England.
“Moral, But No Compass” accuses Labour of having refused to acknowledge the breakdown of civil order in society and having excluded religious voices. “We were told that while capacity studies had been undertaken by Government with regard to British Islam, similar studies had not been carried out for any of the UK’s largest faith communities,” the report says.
“If what we were told is correct, the churches simply do not register on the policy-making radar in serious terms.”
It states, “We encountered on the part of the Government a significant lack of understanding, or interest in, the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere.” The government, it said, “consciously decided to focus…almost exclusively on minority religions”.
The study was commissioned by the Church and written by academics from the Von Hügel Institute at Cambridge University. The report is openly critical of Labour, with its title seen as a direct dig at Gordon Brown’s recent claims to a “moral compass” in his speeches. It recommends the creation of a government minister for religion, social cohesion and voluntary action and slammed the government for secularising many voluntary and welfare out-reach services that have traditionally and successfully been run by churches.
The report said, “The Government has focused so intensely on minority faiths that it has failed to develop a coherent evidence base for the largest religious body in the UK, the Christian church.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, himself a Blair appointee, in a joint statement issued together with the Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, said the report “reveals a depressing level of misunderstanding of the scale and quality of contribution faith-based organisations make to the civil and civic life of our nation – our common good”.
“This is particularly true in relation to the contribution of the Church of England, and its membership, on which the report focuses.”
Analysts have said that the report is a clear signal of support from the Church of England to the recently resurgent Tory party. The Daily Telegraph editorialized today: “It has taken more than 20 years, since the publication of Faith in the City fuelled Thatcherite assumptions that the Church was a last redoubt of British Marxism, for it to produce a work of social analysis that can be welcomed by the Conservative Party.”
Shortly after the report accused the Labour government of “religious illiteracy”, Hazel Blears, the Labour Communities Secretary, inadvertently cemented the Church’s point when she said this weekend on national radio that she found it a source of joy that “we live in a secular democracy”, despite the fact that Britain has a constitutionally established Christian identity with the Queen as the head of the Church, while the majority of the British consider themselves Christians.
Blears complained, “This is an unfair attack on the Government. We engage with the Church of England on a regular basis as we do with all other faiths”.
Blears said she considered it to be “common sense” for Muslims to attract more attention from government as young Muslims are becoming radicalised. Blears went on to repeat the phrase several times, such that one commenter said it was “as though it was a sound-bite embedded in her by a spin doctor, like a sub-cutaneous chip”.
The report comes from the Church of England as the leaders of the Worldwide Anglican Communion prepare to meet in Lambeth next month to salvage their church from a growing schism caused largely by the demands of the homosexualist movement for acceptance of homosexual ministers. The report also follows comments by Rochester bishop Michael Nazir-Ali who said the breakdown of Britain’s civil society was a result of the radical changes in society caused by the leftist “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.
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