JW Portcullis House Presentation – 6 January 2015 Thank you everyone for coming today - I hope not only that this event will prove both stimulating for ourselves but also that it will lead to significant future actions. I am especially grateful to John Glen and Dai Havard for their sponsorship, which has enabled us to meet here in Portcullis House, to Jenny Taylor and Lapido Media for their collaboration, and to Gavin Moorhead and Taj Bilkhu for all their practical assistance. Time presses though, so I want to move quickly into the substance of my presentation, which is intended to present the report Gavin and I have written and compiled and to highlight and comment on some of its key conclusions and recommendations. You all have a copy of the Executive Summary in your conference packs, and there are also plenty of copies of the full report around the room, which you are most welcome to take with you, free of charge. Slide 3 I would summarize the purpose of the report as being to bring nuanced understanding of ‘religion’ into closer dialogue with discussion of ‘security’ and local, national and international ‘community’. You’ll notice that these three key concepts, religion, security are all in inverted commas, and before I talk about our conclusions and recommendations, I’d like first to show you a short film that unpicks these a little: 2 minute film This film captures the flavour of some of our discussions last year, involving both academics and practitioners. We went on to explore the issues in a bit more depth, including the implications for policy, education and media. 6 minute film These films can be accessed through our website (www.open.ac.uk/religion- global-uncertainties) and I hope they offer an engaging way in to some of the issues explored in more depth in our written report.
Slide 4 To set our recommendations in context I’d first like to say a word about how we have got to this point. My project has been funded by the Research Councils UK Global Uncertainties programme, which has recently been renamed and rebranded as the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research. There are two elements to it, as well as the Leadership element which has generated the ‘Religion, Security and Global Uncertainties’ report, which we are promoting at this and other public events, we have been doing more detailed research around the theme of martyrdom in its various and contested meanings over the last century. The Leadership strand of the project was designed to give added value and focus to the work of other researchers funded by the Global Uncertainties programme. Hence we began by interviewing a cross section of them, together with some other researchers working on related issues. We then presented an initial working paper to roundtable discussions with a wider group of stakeholders, here at Westminster and in Belfast, and held a two-day symposium early in 2014. The final report draws both on short papers presented to the symposium and on the earlier interviews. Slide 5 -6 There are ten key conclusions and recommendations in the report, but in the limited time I have available this afternoon, I am going to highlight five of them, numbers 1, 2, 3, 7 and 8. Jenny Taylor’s presentation will focus centrally on recommendation 9 and I hope we can keep the remaining recommendations in the frame in our subsequent discussions. Slide 7 Conclusion 1 Religious literacy and a wider vocabulary are needed by all. Precisely because mainstream Western society is predominantly secular, a positive effort needs to be made to enable those who do not have a religious faith to have a better understanding both of the significant minorities in the West itself who have a religious commitment and of the continuing – and arguably - growing, influence of religion in much of the rest of world. While
popular attention tends to focus on Islamic resurgence, it is important to empahasize that Christianity too has seen substantial growth in recent decades, notably in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover in a religiously diverse globalized world, there is also a pressing need for religious people themselves to understand other traditions, and indeed to understand varieties of secularity and non-belief. Ignorance, we would suggest, is a key root of Islamophobia, and the growing phenomenon of what has been called Christianophobia among both Muslims and secularists. In the long run we should be looking to schools to address this issue, although the current tendency to run down Religious Education as a subject at a time when it is needed more than ever is hardly encouraging. We would argue that it is in fact significantly at odds with the statutory duty being imposed on schools along with other ‘specified authorities’ by the Counter- Terrorism and Security Bill 2014 ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. But if better understanding is to be fostered among the adult population, the media have a crucial role to play. While it may sometimes be hard to resist the temptation to go for the eye-catching headline that stereotypes a particular religious group, there needs to be a greater readiness to look beneath the surface and to seek to educate readers, listeners and viewers. Religious groups themselves also need to take responsibility for public education, being more open to a public that does not in general want to be converted, but is prepared to be better informed. All this matters because a negative dynamic in which religious people are feared because they are not understood and themselves feel threatened and embattled by an uncomprehending society is a climate in which insecurity and consequent extremist ideas and actions can fester. It is also a climate in which even people of good will, with the best of intentions, are liable to misunderstand each other because of divergent underlying assumptions. We also want to argue for a broad understanding of the term ‘security’. Security professionals are understandably preoccupied with identifying and combating immediate threats, but measures that – however inadvertently – alienate whole
communities risk being counterproductive in the long term, thus fostering insecurity. In particular for those whose sense of personal security and identity is rooted in a strong religious commitment a sense that that religious identity is being challenged can lead to a destabilising sense of insecurity. Slide 8 Conclusion 2 Religion plays an ambivalent role when it comes to threatening or promoting security. Hence it is crucial to understand the specific context. For example, the hardline evangelical Protestantism promoted by the late Ian Paisley for much of his life was undeniably a factor in prolonging the conflict in Northern Ireland, but that religious tradition has also generated significant resources for reconciliation, especially through the work of the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland. The political and military activities of Islamist movements in the Middle East, such as Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, need to be seen alongside their grassroots activities in social welfare, improving conditions in local communities. Popular religious movements in Africa sometimes appear to threaten the security of failing or weak states, but they may well have gathered momentum precisely because of the insecurity people experience due to the limitations of the state. It is also important to understand the specific teachings of various religious traditions, and the differences between them. Our underlying point is that we should not label any religious tradition or sub-tradition as inherently threatening or indeed stabilizing but rather seek carefully to understand the particular situation in question. We recognize that this may appear something of a counsel of perfection for political leaders responding to a fast evolving crisis or for journalists with a pressing copy deadline, but we would still urge that efforts are made to avoid inadvertent stereotyping pending more detailed enquiry. And in some cases – such as the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 – one does feel that more efforts in advance to understand specific religious dynamics would have been helpful, to say the least.
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