What's inter-faith for?

I have always been, without thinking about it too hard, a supporter of inter-faith institutions and proposals. I believe in the value and interest of every religion and the importance of sharing that wisdom between all believers, particularly when it can promote peace, cooperation and friendship. At its root I hope it would reflect at a more widespread level my own experience of friendship with Muslims, Jews and Sikhs, something which has stimulated my own faith, and my fascination with other religions, more than any other encounters.

However, attending a presentation at the Cambridge University Divinity Faculty on 25 July 2011 was my first real engagement with an institutional inter-faith event. It was an odd evening, the talks, given by Jewish and Christian academics, and a Muslim student, were more negative than I had expected, focusing on necessity, pragmatism and conflict as much as on theology. The talk was intended not to find common ground between faiths but to find independent reasons within each religion for engaging in interfaith, a sensible approach surely but one which seeks to remind us how far some religions are from one another. Occasionally the talks were provocative, especially when considering the most grievous points of conflict, serving to make me wonder whether the Israel/Palestine issue, for example, is essentially impossible to overcome. One questioner at the end of the talks proposed one Islamic view on Judaism which he claimed was too fundamental to ignore, the Muslim student handled this aggressive point brilliantly but it left a sour taste in the mouth. Does inter-faith, speaking pragmatically, require some taboos in order to work? Marriage counselling presumably only works because the two sides have, at some point, been in love, they just need to recapture a sense of this original emotion, which is why discussion works; the same is not obviously true of religion. The study of comparative religion, in my opinion the most fascinating subject of them all, perhaps requires independence from engagement between individuals with chips on their shoulders.

My final surprise was that the discussion left relatively little room for individuals or friendship - there was some talk of love, agape, courage, 'eye to eye' and so on, but it was communities, religious texts, doctrine, prophesy and politics that absorbed the speakers' attention. After the talk I spoke to a priest from Leicester who told me that 'all you need for inter-faith work to happen is a few key players from either side to lead it'. When I suggested it was friendships between individual members of each group which really counted, his friend, also a priest, told me this was inter-faith too, as if a natural relationship between a Jew and a Christian could never be other than the meeting of religious representatives across a great religious divide. Maybe 'inter-faith' benefits from a fuzzy definition that allows academics and leaders to compare different scriptures in university settings while grouping this activity with hypothetical relationships between real religious believers, but I worry that it emphasises difference by its very name, excludes normal social activity and threatens to descend into an activity carried out by and for academics, priests and religious leaders. To use a cliche - can a top down structure deliver bottom up results?

Blue Labour

There's been a lot of talk recently of Blue Labour, Maurice Glasman's 'traditionalist' proposal for future Labour Party policy. It is an interesting idea, one now widely discredited in light of Glasman's recent remarks about immigration. This is a shame, not just for the sake of pluralism and discussion but because it did offer a coherant alternative to technocratic New Labour capitalism, Conservative libertarianism and 'old' Labour social democracy. It also seemed to resolve a problem many of us on the left who have always believe in the importance and value of a large and active state have felt concerned about for the last fifteen years: how to provide meaningful and progressive public services when the political class is now drawn from such a limited pool, when the major political parties vary so little in leadership or ideas, and when the dominant ethos and discourse is so childish, empty and right wing.

The answer is not distantly related to Cameron's 'big society' - the use of mutuals, trade unions, faith groups, community groups, cooperatives, etc - traditional aspects of left wing policy making stretching back decades and predate the Labour Party. To use of a horrible cliche: 'grass roots' politics, where it is associations of people outside politics but supported by government, carrying out political activities. Labour's obsession with Westminster politics, with statist changes, with business, the EU and the major levers of state could be replaced by focus on domestice policy, providing or helping people to provide services in local areas. The key to this idea is not social conservatism, although Glasman did stir in a healthy dose of it largely as a vote winner, but embracing and supporting communities which include social conservatives, socialists who are also concerned about immigration say.

It would not of course take the politicians out of politics, unlike Cameron's proposals it would require funding, an active state run by left wing politicians who understood the importance of taxation for the provision of a healthy public leaf in Britain. But perhaps it would allow the flourishing of real communities, locally specific engagement, the mixing of human beings with their neighbours and a diversity in public life.