This weekend I spent two hours as a panellist on the BBC World Service Weekend programme, a magazine show which is heard by millions of people across the globe. We covered an extraordinary range of seemingly unrelated geopolitical stories, but I was struck again by how much the theme of religious freedom, and indeed the difficulties of dealing with difference, came up repeatedly.
In Burma, Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is again in the spotlight, with her opposition party The National League for Democracy expected to make gains. She’s come under fire, however for refusing to engage with the plight of the minority Rohingya Muslims who are effectively stateless and have no vote in the elections. The Rohinghya came to national prominence last year when many of them fled in boats from Buddhist nationalist violence. Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence is probably pragmatic (the quickest way to lose Buddhist votes is to show support for Muslims) but deeply worrying.
The Turkish elections, originally ran in June, saw a new diversity of parliamentarians, including some from religious minorities. However, the failure of coalition talks has led to an acrimonious second election campaign which this week saw the monolithically Muslim, and increasingly authoritarian AKP, again take power, raising anxieties for minorities.
The Syrian refugee crisis continues to deepen, and questions have been raised about whether persecuted Christians are being treated fairly.
And in Bangladesh another secular blogger has been hacked to death.
There was no sense in which this programme intended for freedom of religion (or indeed non-religion) to be a theme. These were just the big stories of the week on the world stage. They prove again, as if it was necessary, that global leaders who think religion has gone away are ill-prepared to lead in the 21st century. Ben Ryan has written eloquently on this as part of the Churchill Leadership Programme. Religious identities are deep identities, and as the driving political ideologies of the 20th century fade and wither, increasingly salient ones.
Religious freedom is an uncomfortable freedom. As Baroness O’Neill, chair of the Equality of Human Rights commission laid out in her recent Theos Annual Lecture, there is often a temptation to subsume the freedom under others, freedom of association say, or freedom of speech. This “temptation to tidiness” is understandable, but she thinks, fundamentally misguided. Religious freedom is messy, and makes no sense to those who don’t need it. But it is, as Giles Fraser put recently in Thought for the Day, the “canary in the cage” of an open society. And for those many countries struggling, often bloodily, towards democracy, it’s nothing less than essential.
Elizabeth Oldfield is Director of Theos
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Image by Kalandrakas from wikipedia.org available in the public domain
