Just for once, the Archbishop gets it right

This blog is no great fan of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury but today's report in the Telegraph shows that he is for once absolutely spot on when he says many Labour government ministers see faith as eccentric and foreign.

Now let's be clear where I am coming from. I'm a lifelong Labour Party member and have served as an elected representative on the local council and the European Parliament. Williams's experience correspondents very much with my own. I'd go a little further and say that were it not for the need to court the support of ethnic minorities and therefore respect their beliefs, much of the Labour Party would be militantly anti-clerical.

Williams says:

Dr Rowan Williams said ministers were wrong to think that Christian beliefs were no longer relevant in modern Britain and he criticised Labour for looking at religious faith as a “problem” rather than valuing the contribution it made to society.

The Archbishop also suggested that the “political class” was too remote from the concerns of most people, who still had God in their “bloodstream”. In his only interview in the run-up to Christmas, he called on ministers to be more willing to talk about their own beliefs.

Dr Williams told The Daily Telegraph: “The trouble with a lot of Government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it’s an eccentricity, it’s practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities.

“The effect is to de-normalise faith, to intensify the perception that faith is not part of our bloodstream. And, you know, in great swaths of the country that’s how it is.”