Politicians need to be more religiously literate and speak more carefully about the links between religion and security, according to a Conservative MP this week.
John Glen, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Global Uncertainties, said that narratives linking religion and security were too often “disappointingly” simplistic, and added: “We need intelligent analysis that does justice to the realities.”
Mr Glen, who is an Anglican, was speaking at the launch of the Religion, Security and Global Uncertainties Report, published by the Open University and the Research Councils’ Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.
Other speakers at the event expressed concern that the Government’s downgrading of Religious Education could leave children with such poor understanding of different faiths that it would put itself at odds with a requirement in the 2014 Counter-Terrorism bill to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”.
Dr Jenny Taylor, of Lapido Media, which launched the report, said one journalist “was ordered to leave out the word ‘Christian’ when reporting from northern Iraq” – where Islamic State (IS) jihadists have systematically emptied territories of non-Muslims.
She also quoted Iranian-born Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University, who said that Muslims do not accept the moral authority the secular West continued to claim after distancing itself from Christianity. She added: “This explains some of the appeal of the [IS] caliphate to bored suburban [Muslim] youth.”
The report criticised Western coverage that viewed situations through a purely socio-economic lens and discounted stories’ religious elements. A video accompanying the report mentioned the massacre at Maspero in Egypt, in which it was wrongly reported that the Christians on whom government forces opened fire were armed.
A conclusion of the report was that the West needed to better understand its religious minorities and the role religion plays in the rest of the world. The report warned that religious ignorance was a cause of both Islamophobia and, increasingly, Christianophobia.
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