The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is updating its training programme on religions to ensure its staff are better equipped to recognise religious persecution.
The new materials are being written by academics at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion, at the University of Birmingham. A government spokesperson said last month that the Cadbury Centre is “consulting with a wide range of external stakeholders, including those that work specifically on Christian persecution” in response to a parliamentary question brought by DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson.
The materials are being devised in response to a recommendation in the Bishop of Truro’s 2019 independent review of FCO support for persecuted Christians.
Recommendation 11 of 22 calls for “general and contextual training in religious literacy and belief dynamics”, using an existing but underused “FoRB [Freedom of Religion or Belief] toolkit”, and “mandatory religious diversity and literacy e-training” for all staff. The government has repeatedly pledged to implement all the rec- ommendations, and its special envoy on FoRB, Fiona Bruce MP, said in a webinar last week it has fulfilled, or is fulfilling, 18 of them.
The new materials respond to the calls for two strata of religious literacy training in the recommendation. Mrs Bruce added: “We will shortly be launching a training unit on Religion for International Engagement, targeted within the FCDO for officials in relevant posts, and accessible further across government departments.” The work is ongoing, with further modules to be added in due course.
The Cadbury Centre said: “Our team on this project is led by Professor Francis Davis (director of policy at the centre) and is drawing on our interdisciplinary skills and global reach.”
While it did not comment on the contents of the course, academics at the centre have previously expressed reservations about the way they believe anglophone governments focus religious literacy training on creeds, and prefer to look at religious communities in terms of politics, anthropology and their social contribution. Professor Davis has previously written about the wide-ranging ways in which religious communities around the world have transformed social relations and public policy, with a focus on the democratising impact of African Catholic bishops and the economic contributions made by Catholic religious orders, as well as the transformative philanthropy of Jews and Muslims.
The various stakeholders in the project include the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), and Humanists UK. ACN said that it had supplied the academics with case studies of Christian persecution.
There are concerns that the new course should not be seen as a single solution to the government’s understanding of religion but as part of ongoing learning about the way faith can shape behaviour.
Previous training courses in reli- gious literacy have been written by the London School of Economics and the Woolf Institute in Cambridge. In 2017, a former government adviser and practising Anglican, Major General Tim Cross, now retired, criticised the materials for giving only an intellectual understanding of the role of religion in geopolitics. The new training materials are not being made public. The Tablet contacted the FCDO for comment but received no reply.
Courses in religious literacy were introduced for senior officials at the then-FCO after an embarrassing internal memo was leaked ahead of Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain in 2010. The memo contained suggestions for the papal itinerary that included opening an abortion ward and launching papal-branded condoms.